The Michael Mystery by Rudolf Steiner

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This is the reading of the letters in collective works volume 26 titled the Miley mystery uh translated by E. Bowen Wedgwood and revised by George Adams and this is letter number one.

At the dawn of the Miley age until the 9th century after the mystery of Golgatha man's attitude toward his thoughts was different from later. He did not have the feeling that he himself was producing the thoughts that lived within his soul. He looked upon them as prompings instilled into him from a spiritual world. Even when he had thoughts about what he perceived with his senses, these thoughts were to him revelations of the divinity speaking to him out of the things of sense. Anyone who has spiritual vision understands this feeling. For when a spiritual reality imparts itself to the soul, one never has the feeling. There stands the spiritual perception. And oneself must construct the thoughts with which to comprehend this perception. But one sees the thought along with the perception given with and contained in it as objective as the perception itself.

With the 9th century, all such dates must of course be taken as giving about the middle of the time. The transition takes place quite gradually. There awoke in men's souls the light of personal individual intelligence. man began to have the feeling quote I construct my thoughts close quote and this construction of thoughts became so preeminent a feature of the soul's life that thinkers regarded the essence of the human soul as residing in this its intelligent behavior until then people had an imaginative conception of the soul they looked on her essential being as residing not in the construction of thoughts but in her participation in the intelligent spiritual substance of the world. People thought of the super sensible spirit beings as thinking and they work into man. They think into him too. And what thus lives in man as his part in the super sensible spiritual world? This they felt as soul. Directly one's views are carried higher into the spiritual world. One meets with concrete spiritual powers in the form of living beings. to that power from whom proceeded the thoughts of things they gave in old teachings the name of Micael. Keeping the name one may say that it was Mel from whom men once received their thoughts. Micael was regent of the cosmic intelligence. From the time of the 9th century on, men ceased to have a sense that their thoughts were inspired by Micaiah. Thoughts had fallen from Mica's dominion and sunk from the spiritual world into the individual souls of men. The development of thought life was carried on now by men in the human sphere.

At first people were uncertain what these thoughts were which they had. This uncertainty runs through the teachings of the scholastics. They were divided into two schools realists and nominalists. The realists with Thomas Aquinas and his circle at their head still felt the old connection between thought and thing as both belonging together. Accordingly, they looked on the thoughts as actual realities existing in the things. The thoughts of a man they viewed as a real something flowing from the things into his soul. The nominalists had a strong feeling of the fact that the soul makes her own thoughts. They felt thoughts as something purely subjective which exists in the soul and has nothing whatever to do with the things. In their opinion, thoughts were only the names men made for things. Prenthesis The Scholastics spoke of universals, not of thoughts. But this does not affect the general principle of their outlook since thoughts always bear a universal character in regard to the single things. closed parenthesis.

The realists wanted, one might say, to remain loyal to Micaiah. Even though the thoughts had fallen from his domain and into that of men, they yet wanted as thinkers to go on serving Micael as prince of intelligence in the cosmos. The nominalists in the unconscious part of their souls completed the falling away from Micael. They regarded not Miley but man as the owner of thoughts. Nominalism spread and gained increasing hold. And so it went on until the last third of the 19th century. Then came the age when those who can read the spiritual events taking place in the universe became aware that Micael had rejoined the stream of intellectual life. He is pursuing a new metamorphosis of his cosmic office. Before he sent the stream of thoughts from the outer spiritual world into the souls of men. Now since the last third of the 19th century, he seeks to dwell within the human souls where thoughts are being formed. Before the human beings who were spiritually akin to Micael watched him perform his works in spirit regions. Now they know that they must give him his home in their hearts. Now they dedicate to Micael their own thought informed thought sustained spiritual life. Now in free individual thought life they seek counsel from Micael as to their soul's right path. People who in their previous earth lives were familiar with thought in its inspired form who were servants that is of Micael felt themselves drawn to this voluntary communion with Micael when they returned to earth life at the close of the 19th century. They looked upon him who had been their old thought inspirer as their guide henceforth in the higher form of thinking. Those who have eyes for such things could not but be aware of the revolution that took place in respect to men's thought life during the last third of the 19th century. Before this man could only feel the thoughts arising and taking shape out of his own being. Ever since then he can rise above his own individual being. He can guide his mind into the realm of the spirit. And there Micael meets him. Micaiah who from of old is past master in all thought weaving. He frees the thoughts from the region of the head. He opens a free way for them to the heart. He sets free the springs of spiritual fervor from the hearts of men so that man may live in full souls devotion to all that he may learn in the light of thought. The age of Miley has dawned. Hearts are beginning to have thoughts. The springs of spiritual fervor no longer flow from the darkness only of mystical feeling, but from clear soul brightness, thought informed and thought sustained. To understand this is to receive mica into the heart. Thoughts which seek today to grasp the spirit must spring from hearts that throb for Micael, the fiery thought king of the universe. The end of letter number one.

Letter number two of the Mikey mystery by Rudolph Steiner entitled the human soul before the dawn of the mica age.

The rise of the mial age has succeeded in mankind's evolution to the predominance on the one hand of the intellectual form of thought construction and on the other of an external view of the world paramountly directed to the physical world in its outer sensible aspect. Thought construction is not in itself of its own character a development in the direction of materialism. What in earlier ages had come to man as though by inspiration the world of ideas became in the time that preceded the male age a property of the human soul. The soul no longer receives her ideas given to her in quotes from above out of the spiritual fullness of the cosmos. She fetches them forth actively out of the inner spiritual life of man himself. With this man becomes ripe for the first time to reflect upon his own individual spirit being. Previously he never penetrated to this depth in his own being. He saw in himself so to speak a drop separated out for the span of his earth life from the sea of cosmic spirit to reunite with it again after this earth life is over. This thought construction that takes place in man is a forward step in man's self-nowledge. Viewed in its super sensible aspect, the matter lies as follows. The spiritual powers whom we may call by the name of Mel ruled ideas in the spiritual cosmos. Man realized these ideas within him in as much as his own soul participated in the life of the micael world. This realization of the life of ideas has now become his own personal concern and this has brought about a temporary separation of man from the micael world. along with the inspired thoughts of earlier ages, man had received at the same time the spiritual substance of the world. Now that this inspiration has ceased and man begins of his own action to construct his thoughts, he has thrown back upon the perceptions of his senses to give these thoughts a substance so that man at first could do no otherwise than fill his newly acquired inner spiritual life with a material substance. He fell in quotes into the materialist view of things in that same age which carried his own inner spiritual being to a stage higher than those preceding it. This is a fact which may easily be misinterpreted. One may look only at the fall into materialism and deplore it accordingly. But whilst the views of this age were thus limited in outlook to the external physical world, there arose within the soul as a realization of the inner being a purified unalloyed and self- sustaining spirit life in the mind of man. In the micael age, this spirit life of the human mind must remain no longer an unconscious realization. It must become knowingly aware of its own peculiar character. This means that Micael in being must enter into the human soul. For a period, man has taken the matter of the natural world as a filling for his own spirit. He must once again fill it with the spirit substance of the cosmos out of his own creative mind. Thought construction lost itself for a while in the material of the cosmos. It must come to itself once more in the cosmic spirit into the cold and abstract world of thought may enter warmth and the living fullness of spirit's reality. This announces the dawn of the mica age.

Only in separation from the living thought reality of the world could there grow up in the human soul the consciousness of freedom. What came from the heights had again to be recovered from the depths. Therefore, the development of this consciousness of freedom is involved in its first beginnings with that science of the natural world which is directed solely to the world's external aspect. Whilst inwardly man was unconsciously developing his spirit to pure clarity of ideas, outwardly his senses were directed solely to a world of matter that left undisturbed the first tender shoots of what was dawning in his soul. But into these views of external materiality there may enter a new a living inner realization of the spirit in the world and therewith once more a spiritual view of it. The science of nature that has been acquired under the sign of materialism may receive a spiritual form of conception in the inner life of the soul. Mel who once spoke from above may be heard from within where he will make his new abode. In more imaginative language it may be thus expressed that sun life su n which through long ages man drew from without from the cosmos only will begin to shine within in the soul. Man will learn to speak of an inner son. He will know nonetheless well on this account that he is a being of the earth in his life between birth and death. But he will be conscious that his own being is sunguided on its earthly travels. He will learn to be aware in truth of a being that lives within him and that sheds a light which lights the life of earth but is not lit there. In the first dawn of the Micael age, it may still seem as though mankind were very far from all this, but quote in the spirit close quote, "It is not far. It is close at hand. It only needs to be seen." That man's ideas do not remain mere thinking only but turn in thought to seeing is a fact on which immeasurably much depends. The end of letter two.

The Mel mystery letters by Rudolph Steiner. This is letter number three entitled the pre-mayel itite way and the way of micael.

We shall fail to find the right light upon the new micael impulse now making its way into human evolution if we form that conception of the relation between the modern world of ideas and the world of nature which is common at the present day. The usual notion is this. Outside is the natural world with its things and processes. Inside are the ideas. The ideas represent concepts of the things of nature or else of the so-called laws of nature. The primary concern of thinkers is then to show how to construct those particular ideas which bear the requisite relation to the things of nature or from which the true laws of nature may be deduced. In all this they attach very little importance to the connection between these ideas and the man who has them. And yet the real gist of the matter remains unrecognized unless the question first be raised. What is man going through with the natural science ideas of modern times? An answer may be arrived at as follows. Man's feeling today is that ideas are evolved within him by the special activity of his soul. He has the feeling that he himself is the evolver of his ideas. Whereas his perceptions intrude upon him from without. This feeling is not one which man always had. In older times the contents of his ideas seemed to him not something manufactured by himself but received by way of suggestion from the super sensible world. It is a feeling that has passed through different stages and the stages depended upon the particular part of his being with which man realized what he today calls his ideas. Today is the age of the spiritual soul's evolution when the statement holds good without reservation which was made in the recent leading thoughts. The thoughts of man have their true seat in the etheric body. There however they are forces of real life and being. They imprint themselves upon the physical body and as such imprinted thoughts. They have the shadowy character in which the everyday consciousness knows them. One may go back into times when thoughts were realized directly with the eye capital. Then however they were not as now shadowy. They were not even merely living. They were endowed with soul and permeated with spirit. Which means that man did not think thoughts. He realized a direct perception of concrete spiritual beings. A form of consciousness such as this which looks above to a world of spiritual beings is everywhere to be found amongst the different peoples in their early ages. What remains of it preserved in history is termed today the mythcreating consciousness and no great value is attached to it for the understanding of the real world. And yet with this consciousness, man is in the midst of his own true world, the world of his origin. Whereas with the present-day consciousness, he withdraws himself from his own world. Man is spirit and man's world is the world of spiritual beings.

Then there comes a next stage where thought is no longer realized by the eye capital but by the astral body. There the direct spirituality is lost to the soul's perception. Thought appears as living and endowed with soul. In the first stage, the vision of concrete forms of spiritual being. Man feels no impellent need to bring what his vision shows him into any nearer relation with the world perceived by his senses. The world's sensible phenomena reveal themselves. It is true as being the deeds of that which is beheld by super sensible vision. But to construct a special science of what is directly spiritually visible to the mind's eye e is not a matter of urgent necessity. Moreover, the world of spirit beings shown by vision presents such a wealth that the attention is arrested by this above everything else. A change comes with the second stage of consciousness. The concrete spirit beings conceal themselves. Their reflected glory becomes apparent as ensold life. Men begin to bring the life of nature into relation with this life of souls. They search the things of nature and the processes of nature for the spirit beings at work there and for their spiritual deeds. In what later appeared as alchemy and the pursuits of the alchemists can be seen historically. the residue of this stage of consciousness. And as when thinking spirit beings in the first stage of consciousness, man was living completely in his own world of being. So even at this second stage, he is still quite close to himself and to his own first source. This however means that at both stages all possibility is excluded of man's coming in the true sense to any inner personal impulse for his actions. Spiritual being of a kind akin to himself acts in him. What he seems to be doing is the open manifestation of events enacted between spirit beings. What man does is the sensibly physical appearance of an actual divine spiritual process taking place behind it.

A third epoch in the evolution of consciousness brings thoughts to consciousness in the atheric body but still as living thoughts. The Greek civilization in the days of its greatness lived in this form of consciousness. The ancient Greek, when thinking, did not construct a thought with which he viewed the world as through a construction of his own, but he felt aroused within himself the stir of that same life, which outside too pulsed through the things and processes around him. Then for the first time there arose the longing for freedom of personal action. Not as yet actual freedom but the longing for it. In the human being who felt the stir of nature stirring within himself. There grew up a longing to separate his own life stir from the life stir that he saw going on in the outer world foreign to himself. But nevertheless, this life stir in the outer world was still felt as a last outcome of that real and active spirit world which is of the same kind with man. Not until thoughts took their print in the physical body and consciousness extended only to this physical imprint did the possibility of freedom first begin. This is the state of things as it was in the 15th century after Christ. In the world's evolution, the bearing which the ideas of the modern conception of nature may have upon nature herself is a matter of no moment. For these ideas did not assume their present form in order to supply a particular picture of the natural world, but in order to bring man to a particular stage of his evolution. When thoughts laid hold on the physical body, they lost from their immediate contents spirit, soul, and life. These were blotted out, and the abstract shadow that haunts the physical body alone remains. physical material things alone can be the objects of knowledge for such thoughts as these. For such thoughts themselves are only actual in man's physical material body. The reason why materialism arose is not that only material things and processes are to be seen in the outer world of nature. It is because man in his evolution had to go through a stage which brought him to a form of consciousness that is at first only capable of seeing material revelations. The one-sided development of this requirement in human evolution has resulted in the modern view of the natural world. Mel's mission is to convey to man's ether bodies those forces by which the thought shadows may again acquire life to these new enlivened shadows. Souls and spirits from the super sensible worlds above will incline themselves. And with these man unbound and free will be able to dwell even as he dwelt with them of old when he was merely the physical image of their workings.

Number one in the evolution of mankind consciousness comes down step by step along the ladder of thought development. There is a first stage of consciousness. Here man realizes thoughts in his eye capital as beings imbued with spirit, soul and life. Then comes a second stage where man realizes thoughts in his astral body. Here they appear rather as living and soul endowed images of the spirit beings. At a third stage, the thoughts are realized in man's ether body. Here they are only an inner life stir like the after echo of a life of soul. At the fourth stage, the present one, thoughts are realized by man in his physical body and represent dead shadows of the spirit. Leading thought number two. In proportion, as spirit, soul, and life recede from human thinking, man's own will comes to life. Freedom grows possible. Leading thought number three. It is Mielle's task to lead man back by the paths of will. Fither whence first he came. When on the paths of thought he descended from the realization of the super sensible world to the realization of the sensible world in his earthly consciousness. The end of letter number three.

This is a reading of the Mail mystery by Rudolfph Steiner. This is letter four entitled Mielle's task in the sphere of Aramman.

When man looks back over his own evolution and reviews in spirit the peculiar character which his spiritual life has assumed during the last five centuries, he cannot but recognize even in his ordinary consciousness, however dimly that in these five centuries he has come to a critical turning point in the whole earthly evolution of mankind. In the last letter, I pointed out this critical turn in evolution from one of its aspects. One may look back, namely into earlier ages of this evolution. Then we observe how a transformation took place in that soul force in man which today is employed as the force of intelligence. Thoughts now appear within the field of human consciousness, dead abstract thoughts. These thoughts are tied to the physical human body. Man must recognize them as his own progeny. When in days of yore, man turned his soul's gaze in the direction where now his own thoughts appear to him, he then beheld divine spirit beings. He saw his whole existence bound up with these beings in all that he was down to his physical body. He must confess himself the product of these beings. Not only their product in all that he was, but also in all that he did. Man had no will of his own. All that he did was a manifestation of the divine will. Step by step as described in the last letter, the stage has been reached of a personal will of man's own for which the time began about 500 years ago. The last stage, however, differs more marketkedly from all the preceding ones than these do from one another. As the thoughts pass over into the physical body, they lose their aliveness. They become dead, spiritually dead constructions. Previously, whilst pertaining to man, they were yet at the same time organs of the divine spirit beings to whom man himself pertained. They willed in man as living forms of being and hence man felt himself through them livingly bound to the spiritual world. With his dead thoughts, he feels himself released from the spiritual world. He feels himself planted down completely into the physical world. But hereby he is at the same time brought into the sphere of the arammonic mind. The armonic form of mind has no great power in those regions where the beings of the higher hierarchies keep man within their own immediate sphere, either by working within him themselves as in primeval times or as later by the brightness of their ends sold or living reflection. So long as the workings of super sensible beings continue in this way to enter into all the workings of man until that is about the 15th century AD. The powers of Aramman find within the field of human evolution only a faint echo, one might say of their strength. The picture drawn by the Persian worldview of the workings of Aramman is in no contradiction to the above statement. For what is meant in the Persian view of Aramman's workings is not something going on in the evolution of a human soul, but within the neighboring world that borders on man's soul world. From this neighboring world of spirit, the web of Aramman's weaving undoubtedly sent its threads across into the world of the human soul, but did not directly encroach upon it. Any such direct encroachment only became possible in the period that began some 500 years ago. Thus, man stands at the end of a stream of evolution in which his own human being has been built up by a form of divine spirit being which passes finally into the abstract intelligence personality of man and there so far as itself is concerned dies out. Man has not remained in those spheres where he had his own first source in the divine spirit being. What was thus accomplished 500 years ago for man's consciousness had already taken place on a broader scale throughout his general being at the time when the mystery of Golgatha entered upon its earthly manifestation. This was the time when human evolution began imperceptibly as yet for the consciousness of most people of that period to slide gradually down out of a world where Aramman has but little power into one where he has very much. It was in the 15th century that this downslide from one world stratum into another reached its final completion. Here in this world stratum, it becomes possible for Aramman to exert his influence upon man and with disastrous effects because in this stratum the divine influences congenital to man have died out. But there was no other possible way for man to arrive at the development of his free will, save by withdrawing to a sphere in which those divine spirit beings had no life who were involved with him from his origin. In the very essence of this human evolution, cosmically viewed, lies the mystery of the sun, su n. with the sun and all that man down to the important turning point in his evolution could see in the sun were involved the divine spiritual beings of his origin. These beings have detached themselves from the sun and left on it only their extinct remains so that what man now receives through the sun taken up into his bodily system is the power of dead thoughts only. But these divine beings have sent Christ from the sun to the earth. He for the salvation of mankind has united his own living being with the deadness of divine existence in the kingdom of Aramman. Mankind have thus the two-fold possibility which is the pledge of their freedom. Either to turn to Christ in that mind and spirit which was theirs subconsciously when they came down from the vision of super sensible life in the spirit until they could use intelligence. not to do this now in consciousness or else in their detachment from spirit life to seek to enjoy the sense of themselves and thereby fall a prey to the powers of Aramman and be carried in the armonic direction of evolution. Such is the situation of mankind since the beginning of the 15th century. It has been preparing for everything proceeds gradually in evolution ever since the time of the mystery of Goltha that greatest of all earthly events which is designed to save man from the destruction to which he is unavoidably exposed in order to become a free being. Now it is true to say what has been done by mankind in this situation hitherto has been achieved half unconsciously. In this half unconscious way it has led to what is good in a view of nature living in abstract ideas and also to many equally beneficent principles in the conduct of practical life. But the age has gone by when man could afford to pursue his existence unconsciously in the dangerous arammonic sphere. The scientific observer of the spiritual world is today obliged to rouse mankind's attention to the spiritual fact that Mikeyel has now succeeded to the guidance of human affairs. Whatever Miley performs is performed in such a way as to exert no influence from his part upon men. But they are free to follow him. And so in freedom with the Christ power to find their way out again from Aramman's sphere which they entered of necessity. Whoever honestly from the innermost core of his soul can feel himself one with anthroposophy is a true interpreter of this mel phenomenon. Anthroposophy is intended to be the message of this micael mission. Leading thoughts number one. Micael travels upward again over the paths which mankind traveled downward through the successive steps of the spirit's evolution to the exercise of intelligence. only by Micael. The will will be led up the track which was descended by wisdom until she came to intelligence, her final stage. Leading thought number two, from this point in the world's evolution, Micael merely shows his road so that mankind may walk on it in freedom. And this is what distinguishes this particular regency of Micels from the previous regencies of all other archangels. Indeed, from all those of Micael himself until now. These other regencies worked as active forces within man and did not merely show him their own workings so that man in those times could not be free in his. Leading thought number three. To recognize this is the task of man at this present day so that with his entire soul he may find his own right spiritual road during the age of Micael. The end of letter 4.

This is a reading of the Mail mystery by Rudolphph Steiner from CW26 collected works volume 26. This is letter five. entitled Miel's experiences in the fulfillment of his cosmic mission.

The progress of mankind may be traced from the stage of consciousness where man still felt himself part of a divine spiritual order down to the present one where he learns to feel himself an individuality detached from divine spiritual being and able to make use of his own thoughts. One may trace this from the point of view of mankind as was done in the previous letter. One may also however through super sensible vision sketch a picture of the experiences of Micaia and his company during the same tide of evolution. Describe that is the same series of facts from the point of view of Micaiah. This shall now be attempted. There is to begin with a very early age in which one can only really speak of what goes on amongst divine spiritual beings. It is one series of the actions of gods with which one has here to do. Gods perform what the impulses of their own individual natures suggest to them. They find their appropriate satisfaction in this activity. And how they are affected by it all is the sole matter in view. Only in one corner of the field of the god's doings may be seen something that looks like mankind. Mankind is a part in the god's activity. There is one spiritual being however who from the very first has turned his eyes upon mankind. This is Micael. He arranges so to speak the doings of the gods so that man can exist in a cosmic corner. And his mode of activity in doing this is analogous to that which displays itself later in man as intellect. Only that with him it is an active stream of force that flows throughout the cosmos introducing order of ideas and bringing cause to effect. In fact, in this force, Micael is at work. It is his office to administer the intellectuality of the cosmos. He desires further progress in his own field and there can be only one way of progress namely that the force which works as intelligence throughout the whole cosmos should hereafter be concentrated in the individuality of man. The consequence is that there comes a time in the world's evolution when the cosmos no longer lives by its present but by its past intelligence. Whilst the present intelligence is in the human stream of evolution, Michael wants to keep this intelligence that is growing up in mankind in continuous connection with the divine spiritual beings. To this however there is an obstacle. The whole line of evolution traveled through by the gods from the point where the intellectual force is set free from their cosmic working to where it becomes incorporated in man's nature lies open as a patent fact in the world. Supposing there to be any beings possessed of the faculty to see these facts, they could turn them to their own account. And such beings do actually exist, namely the armonic beings. Their whole form of being predisposes them to absorb into themselves any kind of intelligence that becomes detached from the gods. They are suited to assimilate into their own being the entire sum of intellectuality of every kind. Thereby they grow to be the greatest, the most comprehensive and the most penetrating intelligences in the whole cosmos. Micael can foresee how man, as he attains ever more and more to the private use of intelligence, must needs come into contact with these armonic beings, and may then be tempted into an alliance with them, and so fall their prey. Miley therefore puts the arammonic powers beneath his feet, drives them constantly down into deeper regions below the one where man is pursuing his development. Miley with his foot upon the dragon thrusting him into the abyss. Such is the stupendous picture as it lives within human consciousness of these deeds in the super sensible world.

Evolution moves onward. The intellectual force which at first lay wholly within the domain of divine spirituality now becomes so far detached as to give soul to the cosmos. What formerly had shot forth only as beams from the gods now shines as revealed glory of the godhead from the world of stars. Before the world was guided by the divine being itself. Now it is guided by the divine revelation which has come to be objective and behind which the divine being is passing through the next stage of its own evolutionary course. Here again my is regent of the cosmic intelligence in as much as this intelligence flows as an ordering stream of ideas through all the revelations of the cosmos. The third phase of evolution is a still further detachment of the cosmic intelligence from its original source. It is no longer the present order of ideas which now rules the star worlds as divine revelation. But the stars guide and group themselves in their courses in accordance with the order of ideas which was implanted in them in the past. Miley sees that which was under his sway in the cosmos, the intellectuality of the cosmos ever more and more taking its way to mankind on earth. And Miley sees too that the danger of mankind's falling into the snares of the arammanic powers is becoming ever greater for himself. He knows that he will always have Araman beneath his feet. But can he do the same for man? He sees the greatest of all events on earth take place out of that same realm of which Miley was himself the servant. The Christ being descends into the sphere of earth that he may be at hand when the power of intelligence shall have passed completely over to the human individual. For then will come the time when the urge will be strongest in man, holy, to give himself to that power, which in every particular and in consumate perfection has made itself the bearer of the intellectual force. But Christ will be at hand. Through his great sacrifice, he will live in the same sphere where Aramman dwells. Man will have the choice between Christ and Aramman. the world will be able in mankind's evolution to find the way of Christ. Such are Micael's experiences with his cosmic regency. In order to remain with that of which he was regent in the cosmos, he takes the road from the cosmos to mankind. He has been upon the road since the 8th century of Christianity, but only really entered upon his earthly office into which his cosmic office is transformed. In the last third of the 19th century, Micael has no power to compel men to anything. For the very fact that intelligence has passed completely into the domain of human individuality means of itself the end of all compulsion. But in the super sensible world that borders on the physical, Micael can perform before men in a majestic act of imaginative ritual for their imitation what he desires to do. There he may display himself in an aura of light in a spirit gesture in which is revealed all the glory and majesty of the past intelligence of the gods. There he may visibly demonstrate how this intelligence of the past is even now in its effects in the present truer and lovelier and more virtuous than all that in false delusive splendor proceeds in the immediate present-day intelligence from Aramman. There he may let men see how for him Aramman must always be the baser spirit underneath his feet. Those who can look into the super sensible world which lies next to the physical one see myel there even as he is here described and see what he and his company are trying to do for men. Such people see how in freedom man is to be guided by the picture of Micaiah in the sphere of Aramman away from Aramman to Christ. If through their own seeing these people can succeed in opening the hearts and minds of other men as well so that there may be a group of people who know how Mel is now dwelling amongst men. Then mankind will make a beginning towards celebrating the festival of Micael in its true reality. For in such festivals, human souls will waken to life within themselves the power of Micael. Then will Micael be working as an actual power amongst men. man will be free and yet in innermost communion with Christ as he journeys on his spiritual life way through the cosmos. Leading thoughts number one. To awake to a true consciousness of the mile influence in the spiritual complex of the world is to solve the problem of human freedom from its cosmic complexities so far as its solution is necessary for man upon earth. Leading thought number two, for freedom in quotes, is a fact of direct experience for every man who understands himself in the present period of human evolution. No one without denying a patent fact can venture to say, quote, "There is no freedom," close quote. Yet one may find a contradiction between the fact thus actually given and the processes of the cosmos. The ground of contradiction ceases in contemplation of Micael's mission in the cosmos. Leading thought number three. In my philosophy of freedom, the freedom of man's being in the present world age will be found demonstrated as an actual subject of inner consciousness. In the picture here given of the Miley mission may be found the cosmic arguments for this freedom's evolution. The end of letter five.

This is a reading of the Mail mystery by Rudolphph Steiner. This is letter number six entitled Mankind's Future and the Work of Mail.

How does man stand today at his present stage of evolution with regard to Micael and Micael's company? Man stands over against a world which once was wholly divine spiritual being, divine spiritual being of which he himself was a living part. The world therefore in those times when world and man belonged together was a world of divine spiritual being. In a following stage of evolutionary progress, this had ceased. The world was then the cosmic revelation of divine spirit. The divine spirit in its essential being hovered behind the revelation. Yet still it weaved and lived in this its revealed glory. A world of stars was there in their shining and their motion. divine spirit weaved and lived as revelation. One may say that in the place of a stars standing in those days or in the manner of its moving might directly be seen the action of divine spirit. In all that here went on the manner in which the divine spirit wrought within the cosmos. the life of man as he grew up in every way a product of divine spiritual action in the cosmos. In all of this, Miley was still in his own element unopposed. He was mediator in the relations of the divinity to man. Other times came. The star world ceased to be the immediate and present bearer of the divine spiritual action. Its life and motion was but the persistent continuation of the same form of action which had once worked within it. Divine spirit lived no longer in the cosmos as revelation but only as workings. A marked distinction had now taken place between the divine spiritual and the cosmic. They had become two. Miley from his own fundamental being remained with the divine spiritual. He endeavored also to keep man as close to it as possible and he continued to do so. It was his purpose to preserve man from living all too intensely in a world which was only the workings not the being and not the revelation of divine spirit. Miley accounts it a matter of deepest satisfaction that he has succeeded through man in keeping the star world still directly connected with the divine spiritual element and in the following manner. When man has accomplished his life between death and the new birth and is on his way down to take up a new existence upon earth, he himself endeavors as he comes down toward this new existence to establish a harmony between the course of the stars and his own earth lives. This harmony was a matter of course in times of yore since divine spirit was at work within the stars and man's life had its source in them. Today when the stars merely continue in their courses to carry on the divine spirit's workings, this harmony would not exist unless man sought for it. Man brings his own divine spiritual element that has been conserved from earlier times in him into relation with the stars in which the divine spiritual element only exists as after effect of an earlier time. Thus a divine element is introduced into man's relation with the world which corresponds to earlier times and yet appears in later ones. That this is so is the act of Micael. And this act gives him such deep satisfaction that a great part of his life element his life energy his radiant sunlike life will lives in this satisfaction.

Today however when he looks with a spirit's eye e at the earth he sees there another and essentially different state of things. Man during his life now in the physical sphere between birth and death has all round about him a world which is no longer directly even the workings of divine spirit but only something left behind from these workings. What one can only call the work wrought by divine spirit. This wrought work is in its forms altogether of a divinely spiritual kind. The divinity manifests itself to human perception in the forms in the natural processes of this wrought world. But divinity is no longer within it as a living presence. Nature is this divinely wrought work of the divinity and everywhere the molded likeness of the divine workings. In this sun brightly divine but not livingly divine world lies the life of man. But owing to Miley's work upon him, he has conserved as man his connection with the essential being of divine spirit. He lives as a godpervaded being in a non-Godpervaded world. Into this godvoided world, man will introduce what is in himself. What his own being has come to be in this age. Mankind will take its place in a world evolution and expand its own form there. The divine spirit being from which man first sprang spread abroad as man being throughout all the worlds will then have power to fill with light that cosmos which now exists only in the rot likeness of divine spirit. It will no longer be the same being which once was cosmos which will then shine forth in light through man. Divine spirit in its passage through mankind shall realize a quality of being which it had not brought to manifestation before. Against the progress of evolution in this direction, the armonic powers turn all their force. They do not want the divine spiritual powers of its origin to illumin the universe on its further course. Their aim is that the whole of the new cosmos should be lit by the cosmic intellectual light which they have absorbed into themselves and that man should live on henceforth in this intellectualized and armonized cosmos. In a life of this kind, man would lose the Christ. For Christ came into the world with an intellectuality which is in every way the same as it was when once it lived in the divine spirit. When divine spirit in being still in form the cosmos. If today we speak in such a manner that our thoughts can also be the Christs, then we set something against the armonic powers which will save us from falling into their snare. To understand the meaning of the Micael mission in the cosmos means the ability to speak like this. One must be able in these days to speak about the world of nature in the way demanded by the present stage of the spiritual soul's development. One must be able to make one's mind familiar with the purely scientific naturalistic mode of thought. But one must also learn to speak which means to feel about the world of nature too in a manner befitting the Christ. Not only about redemption from nature, not only about the soul and things divine, but about the cosmos. We must learn the Christ language. that our human link with our first divine spiritual origin may be so preserved that we may know how rightly to speak the Christ language about the cosmos. This is something to which we shall in the end attain if with inward sincerity of heart we learn to feel and ever more fully enter into all that Miael and Micael's company are amongst us in their mission in all that they perform. For to understand Miley means today to find the way to the logos as lived by Christ amongst men on earth. Anthroposophy sets due value upon all that the naturalistic form of scientific thought has learned to say about the world during the last 4 or 500 years. But anthroposophy has another language to speak besides this one about the being of man, the evolution of man, the growth of the cosmos. Anthroposophy would speak the Christ micael language. For

If both languages are spoken, then the continuity will remain unbroken, and evolution will not pass over to Aramman before finding again its first divine spiritual origin. The language of the natural sciences by itself alone is a manner of speech that befits the detachment of the intellectual force from the divine spirit of its origin. It may become the language of Aramman.

If Miley's mission be neglected, it will not do so if through the might of Miley's great example, the freed and detached intellect comes to itself once more in that cosmic intellectual power of the beginning which severed from man has become objective to him, but which lies at man's source. and appeared in its living essence in Christ within the realm of humankind after having left man for a while in order that he might unfold his freedom.

Leading thoughts number one, divine spirit manifests itself in various ways in the cosmos in the following stages.

Number one, in its own primal and essential being.

Number two, in the revelation of this being.

Number three, in its workings, when the being withdraws from the revelation.

Number four, in its wrought work, when in the universe, as this appears, no longer the divine itself, but only the forms of the divine are there.

Leading thought number two, man's present view of the natural world gives him no relation to the divine, but only to this finished work wrought by the divine. The effects communicated to the human soul by this view of the natural world are such that man may use them either to ally himself with the Christ powers or with the forces of Aramman.

Leading thought number three. Myle's whole aim and effort is that the pristine relation to the cosmos which has been conserved in man from the ages of the divine manifestation in being and revelation should by the free effect of Mielle's own example become incorporated in the further human and cosmic evolution. For then the present naturalistic view which tells only of the image or empty form of the divine will be able to pass over into a higher view of nature more befitting the spirit. This higher view of nature will have present existence in man but it will be a human after realization of the God's relation to the cosmos during the first two stages of cosmic evolution.

While giving ascent in this manner to the view of the natural world which belongs to the age of consciousness, age of the spiritual soul, anthroposophy supplements and completes this view by another the result of observation with the awakened eye e of the spirit.

The end of letter six. This is a reading of the Miley mystery by Rudolfph Steiner.

Letter number seven entitled Mielle Christ in man.

For anyone who has imbued his whole mind in all sincerity of feeling with the inner conception of Micael's being and Micael's acts, there will come also a right understanding of how man must treat a world which is neither one of divine being nor revelation nor workings, but is the rot work of the gods. To look at this world with knowledge is to have before one forms formations which everywhere tell with a plain voice of the divine, but in which the divine being in its own self-existence is not to be found if one be led away by no illusions. Nor must one look only at the knowledgeable aspect of the world. True, this reveals most plainly the configuration of the world which surrounds man today. But of more essential importance for everyday life is the feeling, willing and working in a world which may be felt in its formation to be divine, but in which no divine life can actually be experienced. To bring real ethical life into such a world as this requires those ethical impulses of which I gave an indication in my philosophy of freedom amidst this world of past works for the man of genuine feeling. Miley's being and Miley's present world of action may shed a shining light.

Myle does not enter the physical world in visible appearance. He remains with all his doings in a super sensible region, but one which is just on the borders of the physical world in the present evolutionary phase of the worlds. Thus no possibility can ever occur that any impressions made on men by Mielle's actual being should lead their views of nature into fantastic realms or tempt them to build their practical social and ethical life within a god wrought but not godactuated world on the pretense that any other impulses could be at work there save those of which man himself must be the ethical and spiritual agent.

Whether thinking or willing, men will always have to go into spiritual regions in order to find Micaiah. This will mean living spiritually as follows. The ways of knowledge and of life must be taken as they are and must be taken since the 15th century. But men will hold fast to Miley's revelation. They will let this revelation shine as a light into the thoughts which they receive from nature. They will carry it as warmth in their hearts when obliged to lead their lives in accordance with the divinely wrought world of finished works. They will not then have only in view the observation and living realization of this present world but another state of the world too which Micael gives them. one which is past, but which Miley by his being and his deeds transfers into the present.

Were it otherwise, were Micael to work so that he transferred his actions into that physical world which man at the present day must know and experience as such. Then man would learn from the world at the present day not what actually is in the world but what was. Wherever this happens the human soul is led by this illusory reading of the world out of its own reality that is fitted to it into a reality of another sort namely a luciferic one. The way which Micael takes to bring the past as an active force into present human life is a way that follows the right spiritual lines of cosmic progress and has in it nothing luciferic. It is important for the human soul to understand this and to keep before it a clear conception of the way in which in Micael's mission everything luciferic is avoided.

This attitude toward the light now dawning on the history of mankind toward the light of Micael means also finding the right road to the Christ. Micael will give the right orientation when it is a question of the world which lies all about man and calls on him to know and act in it. The way to Christ must be found within.

It is quite comprehensible at a time when the knowledge of nature has assumed the form given it by the last 500 years that the knowledge of the super sensible world should also have become such as mankind today make it in their lives. It is necessary that nature should be so learned and so lived that everything is emptied of its gods. And hence in the form he has thus given to his relations with nature, man fails any longer to find himself. That relation of himself to nature, which is the fitting one for the age, gives man, in as much as he is a super sensible being, nothing whatever as to his own nature and being. nor does this attitude, if it is all that he looks to, enable him to live ethically, in a way befitting his manhood. Hence, the tendency arises not to let this form of knowledge and of life enter into anything which has to do with man's super sensible being or indeed with a super sensible world at all. The latter is made into a field of knowledge set apart from that which is attainable by human powers of cognition. As against the field of what is knowable, another extracific or super scientific field is marked off for revelation by faith.

But in active contrast to all this is the pure spiritual efficacy of the Christ. Ever since the mystery of Goltha Christ can be reached by the human soul and the soul's relation to him has no need to remain a dim and vague mysticism of feeling. It can be a perfectly concrete relation, one to be realized with all the depth and clearness of the entire man. When this is so, then there flows into the human soul from her life together with the Christ the knowledge which the soul needs about her own super sensible being. The revelation of faith must then be so embraced that through it there runs unceasingly the stream of actual living Christ experience. The whole of life will thereby receive its christening. When in the Christ is recognized, he who gives to the human soul the understanding vision of her own super sensible being. Thus may stand side by side as realization of the inner life. Micael realization and Christ realization.

Through Micael, man will find his right way to the super sensible in respect to external nature. The naturalistic conception will then without suffering any falsification be able to take its place alongside a spiritually minded conception of the world and of man in so far as man is a creature of the world. through a right position to the Christ. That which otherwise could only be received by man as a traditional revelation by faith will be learned by actual experience in the soul's living intercourse with Christ. The inner world of the soul, the life of inner feeling and experience will then be realized as one illumined by the light of the spirit. The outer world of nature as a world sustained and carried by the spirit.

Were man to seek to obtain the clue to his own super sensible being except in the life of communion with Christ, it would lead him away from his own realm of reality and into Arammans. Christ bears within himself the impulses of the human future in the manner that is cosmically justifiable. to unite herself with him is for the human soul to receive into her the seeds of her own future as cosmically justified. Other beings that already present forms which cosmically will only be justifiable for man in the future are beings that belong to the arammonic sphere. The right form of union with Christ is at the same time the right form of safeguard against Aramman.

Those people who strictly insist on the revelations of faith being safeguarded against the intrusion of any influences from human powers of knowledge are actuated by the unconscious fear that if man once enters upon this path he will fall under armonic influences. This must be understood. But it should also be understood that it is in reality to the honor of Christ and to his true recognition when to Christ and to realization of life with him is ascribed the gracious inflow of the spirit into the soul of man. Thus my realization and Christ realization may stand in the future side by side.

So will man find his right way, the way of freedom between Lucifer, who leads him astray into illusions of thought and life, and Aramman who entices him into forms of the future which gratify his pride, but can nevertheless not be his as yet in the present. To fall victim to Lucifer's illusions means not to be willing to advance to the stage of freedom, but to stop short as God man at a too early stage in evolution. To fall victim to Aramman's enticements means not to be willing to wait until the right cosmic moment has come at a definite stage of humanity, but to want to take this stage before its time. Miley Christ will stand in the future as the sign at the head of the way along which man must travel in order to keep the right cosmic direction between the two powers of Lucifer and of Aramman and so arrive at his world destination.

Leading thoughts number one. Man journeys on his way through the cosmos in such a manner that his gazing backward into the bygone world may be falsified by the impulses of Lucifer and his thinking forward into the future may be cheated by the enticements of Aramman.

Leading thoughts number two, the right position toward Lucifer and his falsities will be found when man imbuss his whole mind in respect both to knowledge and to life with a sense of the being and the mission of Micael.

Leading thoughts number three. Thereby man safeguards himself also against Aramman and his lures. For [snorts] that spiritual path by which Miley directs man's mind into external nature leads him to a right position toward Aramman because he finds the right realization of life in communion with Christ.

The end of letter seven. This is a reading of the Miley mystery by Rudolph Steiner. You are listening to rudolphsteineraudio.com.

This is letter number eight entitled Micael's mission in the cosmic age of human freedom.

When one inwardly pursues the course of spiritual life down to Micael's workings at the present day, it becomes possible to obtain a light from spiritual science upon freedom in its cosmic character. This does not apply to my philosophy of freedom which is something that proceeds from the purely human powers of cognition themselves. If once they can enter upon the field of the spirit to arrive at the knowledge there arrived at requires so far no intercourse with beings of other worlds. But the philosophy of freedom makes one may say a good preparation for that other knowledge about freedom which may afterward be learned in spiritual intercourse with mica. And this is as follows.

If freedom is really to have life in human actions, that which is performed in freedom's light must be in no way dependent upon the human physical and etheric organization. A free performance can proceed from the I capital alone and the astral body must also be able to vibrate along with the free action of the eye so as to transmit it to the physical and ether bodies. This however is only one side of the matter. The other side is the one that becomes clear in connection with Mikey's mission. Namely, whatever a man realizes in freedom in his inward life must again have no sort of action upon his atheric nor physical body. Were it to do so, the man would inevitably be brought completely out of line with all that he has come to be during the different stages of his evolution under the influence of divine spiritual being and divine spiritual revelation. What man brings to realization in his inward life from all that is the wrought work only of divine spirit round about him must exert no influence on any but his spiritual part his eye. The only thing that may influence his physical and etheric organism is what comes through the evolutionary stream. not in his surroundings but in his own being itself as the continuation of what had its first beginnings in the being and revelation of divine spirit. But this element in the human being must on no account become involved in its workings with what lives in the element of freedom.

What alone makes this possible is that myel carries over from a very remote past in evolution. something which gives man a link with that divine spiritual reality which no longer intervenes in the present day in the physical and etheric structures. So that by this means there grows up in the micael mission the basis for an intercourse between man and the spiritual world which does not interfere in the workings of nature. It is elevating to watch how through micael man's being becomes lifted ever higher into the spiritual sphere. Whilst what is going on below unconscious and subconscious beneath the sphere of freedom becomes ever more deeply wedded to the world of matter.

Man will find his relation to worldbeing growing ever more incomprehensible as time goes on, unless he will consent to recognize his relation not merely with natural beings and natural processes, but also with things of another kind, such as the male mission. One's relations to the natural world are something that one learns to know as viewed from outside. Relations with the spiritual world proceed from something like an inner conversation with a reality of being to which one has opened access by one's readiness to view the world in a spiritual aspect.

For man therefore to carry the impulses of freedom into actual life, he must be in a position to hold aloof from his own being certain affections of nature that act upon his being from out of the cosmos and to keep them from affecting it. This holding aloof goes on then in the subconsciousness whilst in the consciousness those other forces are at work which represent the life of the eye in freedom. For the man's inward perception, there is this consciousness of creative freedom. For the spiritual beings connected with man from other world spheres, it is different. The being from the hierarchy of the angaloy whose work it is to conduct the man's identity from one earth life to another becomes at once visibly aware that this action of the human being in freedom means that the man is repelling cosmic forces which are seeking to continue his development. forces which are seeking to give the necessary physical support to his eye system as they did previous to the age of Micael.

Micael is a being from the hierarchy of the ark angaloy receives his impressions by aid of the beings from the angaloy hierarchy. He devotes himself to the task of conveying to man from the spiritual part of the cosmos in the manner described forces which can replace the suppressed forces of his natural existence. This he accomplishes by bringing all he does into most perfect unison with the mystery of Golgatha. The workings of the Christ in earthly evolution contain the forces which man needs when he works in freedom. In order to make good the suppressed impulses of nature, only man must then actually bring his soul into that inner intercourse of life with the Christ already spoken of in these descriptions of the male mission.

Man is conscious of being in the midst of a reality when he stands in the face of the physical sun and it gives him warmth and light. Even so, he must live before the face of the spiritual son, the Christ, who has united his life with the life of earth. And from this spiritual son, he must receive alive within his soul. What in the spiritual world corresponds to warmth and light. He will feel himself filled through and through with spiritual warmth when he realizes the life of the Christ within him. And feeling how this warmth flows through him, he will say, "This warmth dissolves my human being from bonds with the cosmos which must not hold it."

The divine spiritual being of your led me to regions where it needs must leave me in order that I might achieve my freedom. But in those regions it has given to me the Christ that from his forces I may receive as a free man what the divine spiritual being of your once gave to me by way of nature which in those days was also the way of the spirit to the divine source once I came this warmth leads me back once more and as this feeling arises in him man's sense of his life in and with The Christ will become one in inner soul warmth with his sense of real true manhood. Christ gives me my human being. This will be a dominant feeling breathing pulsing through all the soul. And if this feeling be once there, there will come to that other feeling where man feels himself by Christ lifted up above the life of earth and feels himself one with the stars that environ the earth and with all that may be read in this starry environment of the spiritual and divine.

So too will it be with the spiritual light. man can have the full feeling of himself in his own being as a man when he awakens to the consciousness of himself as a free individual. Nevertheless, this is accompanied with a certain darkness. The divine and spiritual of ancient days no longer shines. In the light which Christ brings to the eye of man, the ancient primal light is there once more. In such a life in community with Christ, the thought may arise, shedding bliss and brightness like the sun through the whole soul. The divine light of old is there in all its pristine glory. It shines though not with the light of nature. And man unites himself in the present with the spiritual cosmic light powers of the past that shone in the times before he was a free individual. In this light he can find the paths which will lead him a right as human being if he understandingly unites himself in soul with the myle mission.

In the spirit's warmth man will feel the impulse that can carry him on in such a way into his cosmic future that he can there remain true to the gifts given him by the divine spirit beings at his origin. Notwithstanding that he has since developed in bare worlds to a free individuality and in the spirit's light he will find the power which will lead him with open eyes and ever higher and broader consciousness to that world where he shall find himself again as free man in the company of the gods of his first origin.

To want to remain in the first original state of existence. To want to keep the original naive simplicity of divine goodness of the time when the gods ruled in man and to shrink from making use of his freedom. This leads man in the present day world where everything is disposed for the evolution of his freedom only in the end to Lucifer whose aim it is to see the present world repudiated to give himself over to the present state of existence to admit through all the worlds nothing save the rule of that natural law accessible to the present day intellect to which goodness is a neutral matter of the use of freedom in the intellect alone. This in the present day world where while freedom reigns in the upper regions, evolution must be carried further in the deeper regions of the soul, only leads man in the end to Aramman, whose aim it is to see the present world transformed entirely into a cosmos of intellectual being.

In regions such as this where man is able to feel that when he turns his eyes upon the outer world they fall spiritually upon Micael and when he turns them to the inner world of the soul they fall spiritually upon Christ. Here he will gather such security of soul and spirit as shall enable him to travel along that cosmic road on which without the loss of his first origin he shall find the true and right consummation of his future.

Leading thoughts number one. A free action can only be one in which no process of nature in or outside of man plays a part.

Leading thoughts number two. The polaric counterproposition is this. In all free action of human individuality, a process of nature in man is suppressed which in an unfree action would be there and would give the man's being the formation cosmically predestined for it.

Leading thoughts number three, this formation of his being which a man fails to receive by the natural road if in his life and being he follows the course of cosmic evolution through its present and future stages comes to him by a spiritual road through the union with Micael whereby he also finds the way to Christ.

The end of letter eight. You are listening to Rudolph Steiner audio.com.

This is a reading of the Myle Mystery by Rudolfph Steiner.

This is letter number nine entitled World Thoughts in Mael and World Thoughts in Aramman.

In contemplating the relation between Micael and Aramman, one is unavoidably led to the question, what position do these two spiritual powers occupy toward one another in the whole cosmic interreation? In as much as both of them are engaged in the evolution of the intellectual forces, exercised the power of the intellect throughout the cosmos in past times. He did so then as servant of the divine spiritual powers to whom he himself as well as man owes his origin. And [snorts] this original relation to the intellectual force, it is his will to maintain. When this intellectual force became detached from the divine spiritual powers to find its way into the mind of the human being, Micael determined forth with to place himself in a right position toward mankind so as to establish in man his own relation with the intellectual force. He purposed, however, to do this all as before, solely in accordance with the designs of the divine spiritual powers, and to continue to act as the servant of these powers, with whom he, like man, is united from his origin. It is his purpose, therefore, that in future the intellectual stream should flow through the hearts of men, yet still as the same force which it was when first it flowed forth from the divine spiritual powers in the beginning.

With Arman, it is very different. This being has long since detached himself from the evolutionary stream to which those divine spiritual powers belong of whom we are speaking. Already in a remote past he had set himself up beside them as an independent cosmic power. And now at the present time he stands spatially in the same world to which man belongs but enters into no combination of forces with the beings who belong by rights to this world. Only when the intellectual force becomes detached from the divine spiritual beings and passes over to the world of man. Aramman finds such an affinity to this intellectual force that he is able through it to unite himself after his own fashion with mankind. For what man receives at the present time is a gift from the cosmos. Aramman united with himself long ago in remote ages. Aramman were he to succeed in his intentions would make the intellect that mankind has received similar to his own.

Now Aramman acquired possession of the intellectual force at a time when he could not convert it into inward life. It remained in his being as a force that has nothing to do with the heart and soul. A chill and frosty soulless cosmic impulse is the intellectual power as it streams from Aramman. And the men who are overtaken by this impulse evolve chains of reasoning in which in merciless and heartless fashion the logic seems to speak for itself. In reality, it is Aramman who is speaking through it and which show no sign of any real inward connection of the man's heart and soul with what he is thinking and saying and doing.

Miley has never appropriated the power of intellect to himself. He administers it as a divine spiritual force feeling himself in union with the divine spiritual powers. And this intellectual force when Micael wields it shows itself to be as well capable of being made an expression of the heart and soul as of the head and mind. For Micael bears within him all the first forces of the gods of his origin and mens. And therefore nothing of chill frost nor soullessness is by him conveyed into the reasonings of the intellect. But he upholds these reasonings with heartfelt earnestness and warmth of soul. And herein too lies the reason why Miley's face and bearing are grave as he journeys through the cosmos. To be thus bound up in the inner life with the intelligence that is the world's substance means at the same time fulfilling the condition that one introduce into this intelligent substance nothing of arbitrary valition of subjective aims or desires. Else logical reasoning becomes the arbitrary choice of a single person instead of being the expression of the cosmos strictly to keep his own being an expression of worldbe whatever of private self may stir within to keep it within this micael regards as his more a special virtue. His mind is bent upon the great cosmic relations. This speaks in his countenance. His will shall go forth to men as a reflection of that which he discerns in the cosmos. This speaks in his bearing his gestures. Miley is in all things grave. For gravity in the face of any being is the reflection of the cosmos in this being. A smiling countenance is the expression of that which shines forth from the being itself into the world.

One of the imaginations of Miley is as follows. He reigns through the course of time bearing the light of the cosmos as living being of his being. Fashioning the warmth of the cosmos as revelation of his own being. He wends as one being like a world affirming himself in as much only as he affirms the world as though from all stations of the universe guiding forces to the earth below. And in contrast an imagination of Aramman. Aramman in his course from time would ring space around him is darkness into which he projects the rays of his own light. The more he achieves his ends, the keener grows the frost about him. He moves like a world contracted into one single being his own. Affirming himself only by negating the world, he moves as though he brought with him uncanny forces from the dark caverns of the earth.

When man pursues freedom, but with no leaning toward egoism, when freedom is to him pure love for the action he seeks to perform, then it is possible for him to draw near to Micael. If he seeks freedom in order to afford scope for his egoism, if freedom be to him the pride of feeling that in the action he gives expression to himself, then he is in imminent danger of falling into Aramman's domain. The imaginations above described shine forth from a man's love toward the action he performs. then it is Micael or else from self-love of his own person in the performance then it is Aramand when man is a free being feels himself near to Micael then he is on the way to convey the intellectual power into his in quotes whole man he thinks it is true with his head but his heart feels the light or dark of the thinking will pours man's inner being forth Earth in light. When thoughts flow through the will with force and purpose, man grows ever more man. As he grows to be an expression of the world, he finds himself not by seeking himself but by uniting himself to the world with will in love.

When man in the enjoyment of his freedom lets himself be seduced by Aramman, he becomes caught up into the intellectual process as into a spiritual automatism in which he is a bit of the machinery, no longer himself. All his thinking becomes an affair of the head and the head severs the thinking from the life of his own individual heart and individual will. and altogether blotss out his own individuality. In making himself an expression of his own separate self, the man becomes ever less and less the expression of his innermost characteristically human being. In seeking himself, he loses himself. He withdraws from the world from which he withholds his love. Man realizes himself in truth only when he loves the world.

From the picture here drawn, it is plain to see how Micael is men's guide to the Christ. With all the gravity of his being, his bearing, his actions, Micael goes through the world in love. He who follows Micael cherishes love in relations with the outer world. And love must unfold itself first in relations with the outer world, else it turns to self-love. But if there be this love as cherished in the male mind, the quote love for the other close quote will be reflected back into the personal self. The self will then love without loving itself. And on the paths of such love as this, Christ is to be found by the soul of man. He who follows Micael cherishes love in relations with the outer world and thereby finds that relation to the inner world of his own soul which brings him together with Christ.

The age now beginning to dawn requires that men's eyes should be turned to a world which lies as spiritual world on the very borders of the seemingly physical one and in which they may find things such as the Miley being and the Miley mission here described. For that world which man paints to himself as a picture of the natural world from the view he has of the seemingly physical one is not even that world in which he is immediately living but one that lies as far below the real world of man as the miley world lies above it. Only man does not notice that unconsciously when he sets out to paint his own world. It is really the picture of another which emerges. In the very painting of this picture, he has already begun to eliminate himself and to fall into spiritual automatism. Man can only save his manhood when over against this picture which he takes for a view of nature and where he himself is lost. He sets that other one which shows Micael as he rides on high. Micael leading the way to the Christ.

Leading thoughts. Number one, anything which is a working force in the world as for instance the world thoughts is not recognized in its true character and meaning for the world if one looks only at the force per se which is working. One must go further and distinguish the beings from whom the action of the force proceeds with the world thoughts. For instance, whether it is Micaiah or Aramman who brings them into the world and maintains them there.

Leading thoughts. Number two, the same thing which proceeding from one being may work healthfully and recreatively because of this particular being's relation to the world may have a baneful and destructive action when it proceeds from a different being. The world thoughts carry man on toward the future when he receives them from Micael. They lead him away from the future of his own welfare when Aramman can instill them into him.

Leading thoughts. Number three. By such reflections, one is led more and more to get beyond the view of an indefinite spiritual existence, some pantheistic sea of causation at the base of all things, and to pass on to a view more definite and concrete that rises to conceptions of the distinct spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies. For in truth, reality consists everywhere in forms of living being. Whatever in reality is not living being is action that takes place in the relations of being to being. And this action can only be understood when one has sight of the beings who are acting.

The end of letter number nine. You are listening to Rudolphsteineraudio.com.

This is a reading of the Mike Isle mystery by Rudolph Steiner.

This is letter number 10 entitled before the door of the spiritual world first contemplation how Miley prepares his earthly mission super sensibly by the conquest of Lucifer.

Miley's intervention in the evolution of the world and of mankind at the end of the 19th century appears in a remarkable illumination if we consider the history of spiritual life in the centuries that went before. In the early 15th century lies the moment from which the epoch of the spiritual soul first begins. Previous to this moment, a great change may be seen taking place in the spiritual life of mankind. One can trace how everywhere previously imaginations played through all men's outlook on the world. Particular persons, it is true, have before this, already arrived in their soul's life so far as bare concepts in quotes. But the general soul life of the majority of mankind goes on in a mutual intermingling of imaginations and of mental conceptions drawn from the purely physical world. It is so with their conceptions about processes of nature and also with their conceptions of events in history. What spiritual observation can discover in this direction is in every way confirmed by external testimony. A few instances may be mentioned here. The tales of historical events which had lived in the minds and mouths of men during the preceding centuries began to be written down just before the dawn of the new age of consciousness. And thus we have preserved from that period legends in quotes and such things which give a faithful portrayal of the manner in which men pictured history in quotes to themselves in the times before. A beautiful example is the tale of good Gerard preserved in a poem by Rudolph of M who lived in the first half of the 13th century. Good Gerard is a rich merchant of Cologne. He sets out on a trading expedition to Russia, Levonia, and Prussia to buy sables. Then he goes on to Damascus in Nineveh to procure silks and similar merchandise. On the homeward voyage, he is driven out of his course by a tempest. He is thrown upon a strange shore where he makes acquaintance with the man who is keeping prisoner certain English knights and also the bride of the English king. Gerard offers him everything that he has gained by trade upon his journey and receives the prisoners in return. He takes them on board his ship and sets out on his journey home. When the ships come to where the ways part, one way to Gerard's country and the other to England, Gerard dismisses the men prisoners and sends them on their way to their own country. The king's bride he keeps with him in the hope that her betrothed, King William, will come and fetch her as soon as he hears that she is free and where she is dwelling. The bride queen and the ladies of her company are treated by Gerard with all conceivable kindness. She lives as a well-loved daughter in the house of him who has redeemed her from captivity. A long, long time goes by without the kings appearing to fetch her at last in order to secure the future of his foster daughter. Gerard resolves to marry her to his own son, for it seems reasonable to believe that William is dead. The wedding feast is already in full train when an unknown pilgrim appears amongst them. It is William. He had been long wandering about seeking for his brethrothed bride. She's restored to him after Gerard's son has unselfishly resigned her. Both remain for a while still with Gerard, and then he fits out a ship to take them to England. Gerard is the first to be seen and welcomed in England by his former prisoners, all now attained to high dignities, and they at once want to choose him for their king. But he can tell them in reply that he's bringing them their own rightful king and queen. For they too had believed William to be dead and were about to choose another king to rule the country where everything had fallen into confusion during the long time that William had been on his wanderings. The merchant of Cologne rejects everything they offer him in the way of honors and riches and returns to Cologne to live again as the simple merchant that he was before. The story is couched in the form that the Saxon emperor Otto I journeys to Cologne to make the acquaintance of good Gerard. For the powerful emperor in much that he has done has not escaped the temptation of looking for an earthly reward. Through acquaintance with Gerard there is brought keenly home to him by example the untold good done by a plain man. the sacrifice of all the merchandise he had acquired in order to set prisoners free, the restoration of his son's bride to William, and then all that he performs in order to bring William back to England and so on without coveting any earthly reward whatever in return but looking for his reward from the hand of God alone. In the mouths of the people, the man goes by the name of the good Gerard. The emperor feels that he has received a powerful spur religiously and morally through acquaintance with a man so minded as Gerard.

This story of which I have here given the bare outline so as not merely to allude by name to something little known shows from one aspect very distinctly what was the constitution of men's souls in the age that preceded the dawning of the spiritual soul in human evolution. Anyone who lets the story as told by Rudolph of M's work within him can feel what a change has taken place in men's realization of the earthly world since the days when Emperor Otto lived in the 10th century. Looking then to the age of the spiritual soul, we may see how the world has grown, as it were, clear to the vision of men's souls in respect of their grasp of physical entities and physical processes. Gerard sails with his ships, so to speak, through a mist. He only knows each time what little bit of the world with which he has to do. In Cologne, one learns nothing of what is happening in England, and one must go for years in search of a man who is in Cologne. The life and possessions of such a person as the man on whose shore Gerard is cast on his homeward voyage first become known to one when fate carries one directly to the spot. Compared to the perspectuity of the world's circumstances today, that of those days is like the difference between gazing over a broad sunny landscape and groping in a dense mist with anything that today is accounted historic.

The tale of Good Gerard and the circumstances narrated in it have nothing whatever to do. But all the more do they show the general tone of feeling and the whole state of mind of the age. And this not the particular occurrences of the physical world is depicted in imaginations. The picture so drawn reflects man's feeling that he is not merely a being who in all his life and actions is simply a link in the chain of events in the physical world. He feels in his daily life on of earth the workings of spiritual super sensible beings. He feels connected with these in his own will. The tale of good Gerard shows how the twilight haze which preceded the age of the spiritual soul as regards the perspective of the physical world turned men's eyes to the beholding of the spiritual world. They did not see into the length and breadth of physical existence, but all the more they saw into the depths of spiritual existence. But as once it had been, when in their dim dreamlike clairvoyance, men had looked into the spiritual world, it was now no more.

In the age of which we are speaking, the imaginations were there, but the apprehension they met with in the human soul was one already strongly tending toward the intellectual form of thought. The result was that people no longer knew how the world which reveals itself in imaginations is related to the world of outer physical existence. and therefore to people who adhered with more penetration to the intellectual form of thought. The imaginations appeared to be free fictions with no actual reality. People no longer knew that through imaginations men look into a world in which they dwell with quite another part of their being than in the physical world. And so in the descriptions, both worlds are portrayed side by side and both from the style of the narration where such a character that one might well think that the spiritual events described had taken place alongside the physical ones as visibly as the physical events themselves. Moreover, in many of these stories, the physical events themselves were confounded together. Persons whose lives lay hundreds of years apart appear on the scene as contemporaries. Actual events are transferred to wrong places or wrong times. Facts of the physical world are looked at by the human soul in a way in which one can only look at things of the spirit for which time and space have another meaning than they have for physical things. The physical world is described in imaginations instead of in thoughts. And in return, the spiritual world is woven into the story as though one had to do not with a quite other form of existence but with a continuation of the physical facts. The history which holds solely to physical interpretations of everything thinks that the old imaginations from the east, from Greece, etc. were taken over and woven poetically into the historical material which interested people at the time. In the writings of Isidora of Seville, 7th century AD, there was indeed a regular collection of old stories and legendary motifs. But this is a surface view of the matter. It can have a value only for one who has no sense of that other form of human soul life which knows itself and its own external existence to be in direct touch with the spiritual world and feels impelled to express in imaginations what thus it knows. And if then instead of the narrator's own imagination, he uses one that has been handed down in history and which he has made his own by familiarity. This is not the essential feature. The essential feature is that the soul's whole orientation is toward the spiritual world so that the soul sees her own doings and all the proceedings of nature interwoven with this spiritual world.

There is however a certain confusion observable in the style of narrative in the period just before the dawn of the spiritual soul. In this confusion when viewed with spiritual understanding may be seen the action of the luciferic powers. The impulse which makes the soul adopt imaginations into her personal store of life experience corresponds less with the faculties that she possessed in primeval times through dreamlike clairvoyance and more with those already in existence in the 8th to the 14th centuries. These later faculties were already impelling the soul more toward a thinking interpretation of what was perceived through the senses. The soul is placed betw twixed the two betw twixed the old orientation where all turns upon the spiritual world and the physical world is only seen as in a mist and the new orientation where all turns upon physical proceedings and spiritual vision has grown dim. Into this unstable balance in the human soul is thrown the luciferic influence. The luciferic powers want to prevent man from coming to a complete orientation in the physical world. They want to keep him with his consciousness in spiritual regions that were suited to him in primeval times. They want to keep his dreamlike imaginative world vision from the influence of that pure thinking which is trained to the understanding of physical existence. They are able indeed in a wrong way to keep back his powers of vision from the physical world. But they are not able in

A right way to keep alive his power of realizing the old imaginations. And so they leave him musing in imaginations without being able quite to transport him in soul into those worlds where imaginations have real validity.

The effect of Lucifer's influence in the first beginning of the age of the spiritual soul is to transport man out of the physical world into the super sensible one that lies just on its borders. This may be seen clearly illustrated in the legend of Duke Nest which was one of the favorite stories of the Middle Ages and circulated far and wide.

Duke Nest comes into conflict with the emperor and the emperor makes war unjustly upon him to destroy him. To escape these impossible relations with the head of the empire, Duke Nest sees himself obliged to join the crusade which is on its way to the east. In the various adventures that now befall him before his journey reaches its end, physical things and spiritual things are interwoven in the legendary style above described.

The Duke, for instance, comes on his journey to a race of men with heads like cranes. He is cast with his vessels upon the "magnetic mountain" which attracts all ships by its magnetic power so that people who come into the neighborhood of the mountain cannot get away again but are bound to perish miserably. Duke Nest and his followers manage to escape by sewing themselves into skins and letting themselves be carried off by griffins who are used to come down and pray upon the people who have been cast on the magnetic mountain. They are carried to a mountaintop and there whilst the griffins are away they cut themselves out of the skins and so escape.

After further wanderings they come to a people whose ears are so long that they can wrap them round their whole body like a coat. And then to another race of people with such big feet that when it rains they lie down on the ground and spread their feet over them like umbrellas. They come to a race of dwarfs, a race of giants and so on. A great deal of this kind comes into the tale as part of Duke Nest's adventures upon his crusade.

This legend does not let one feel in the way one should wherever imaginations come in. That here the story is passing into a spiritual sphere telling in pictures of things that are going on in the astral world and have a connection with the wills and the fate of the people upon earth. It is the same with the fine story of Roland which celebrates Charlemagne's expedition against the heathens of Spain. Here it is even narrated in analogy with the Bible that in order to enable Charlemagne to reach a desired place, the sun stays its course so that this one day is as long as an ordinary two.

And in the saga of the nebulong, one can see how the form of the story preserved in northern countries has maintained the vision of the spiritual in much greater purity. Whereas in middle Europe, the imaginations have been brought very close to physical life. The form of the northern legend expresses clearly that the imaginations have reference to an astral world. In its mid European form, the neolongan deed, the imaginations glide over into the views of the physical world.

Those imaginations too, which come into the legend of Duke Nest, have in reality to do with experiences that are realized between the adventures on the physical plane in an astral world to which man as much belongs as to the physical one. All this examined with the IE of the spirit shows that the entrance into the age of consciousness means growing out of a phase of evolution in which the luciferic powers would be victorious over mankind if the spiritual soul with its intellectual power did not bring a new strain of evolution into man's being.

That tendency to take their whole orientation from the spiritual world by which men are confused and led astray finds its check in the spiritual soul. Men's gaze is drawn out into the physical world. All that takes place in this direction helps to withdraw mankind from the bewildering influence of Lucifer. In all this, Micael is already working from out of the spiritual world on man's behalf. From the region above the senses, he is preparing his work for later. He gives to mankind impulses which conserve the primeval relation to the divine spiritual world. Without this conservation assuming a luciferic character.

Then in the last third of the 19th century, Miley pushes forward and carries his action which from the 14th to the 19th century has gone on preparatorily from the super sensible region into the physical earth world itself. It was necessary for a while that mankind should pursue their spiritual evolution in the direction of freeing themselves from a relation to the spiritual world which was threatening to become impossible. Subsequently, this evolution turned again through Micael's mission into paths which bring human progress upon earth once more into a relation with the spiritual world in which man can find health and wholness.

So, Miley stands in his working between the world picture of Lucifer and the world understanding of Aramman. The world picture turns with Micael to wisdom of world revelation wherein world understanding discloses itself as divine world working. And in this world working lives the care of Christ for mankind which can thus disclose itself through Miley's world revelation to the human heart.

Leading thoughts number one. The dawn of the age of consciousness, age of the spiritual soul in the 15th century is preceded in the evening of the age of the intellectual or mind soul by an enhancement of the luciferic activity which lasts on for a while into the new period.

Leading thoughts. Number two, the aim of this luciferic activity is unrightfully to preserve old forms of mentally picturing the world and to keep man back from using the intellect to comprehend the physical life of the world and make himself familiar with it.

Leading thoughts number three. Miley unites himself with man's activity in order that the emancipated power of the intellect may abide by its divine spiritual parentage not in a luciferic but in a rightful way.

The end of letter 10. You are listening to rudolfsteiner audio.com. This is a reading of a part of collective works volume 26 by Rudolf Steiner entitled the myle mystery letters. This is letter 11. The second contemplation entitled before the door of the spiritual soul and the second contemplation subtitle is how the mle forces intervene in the early stage of the spiritual soul.

At the time during which the spiritual soul was making its way into man's evolution on earth, the beings of the spirit world nearest to earth life had difficulty in approaching mankind. Events on earth take place in a form which shows that quite peculiar conditions are needed in order to make the way possible from the spirit into the physical life of man. The very form they take shows, on the other hand, and often in a most illuminating manner, with what energy, where powers of the past are still active, and powers of the future beginning to act, one spiritual force strives against another spiritual force to find entry into mankind's earthly life.

There begins a war between France and England which lasts from 1339 to 1453 and for over a hundred years throws everything into confusion. This general confusion proceeding from a particular spiritual current unfavorable to man's development puts hindrances in the way of certain events which would have brought the spiritual soul much more rapidly into mankind had these hindrances not been there. Chaucer who died 1400 AD founded English literature. If one thinks of all that the founding of this literature has led to in spiritual consequences for Europe, one cannot but find it significant that such an event could not develop in freedom along its own lines, but must happen amid all the troubles of a war.

In addition comes the fact that already before this, namely in 1215 AD, that tendency of political thought had begun in England, which is to receive its right stamp from the spiritual soul. The further developments of this event too lie amid the embarrassments of war. We have here to do with a time when those spiritual powers who aim at developing man along the lines on which he was first designed by their superiors in the divine spiritual hierarchy come face to face with their adversaries on the other side. These adversaries are bent upon diverting man into other lines than those appointed him from the first. He would then be unable to employ the forces of his origin for his later evolution. His cosmic childhood would bear him no fruits. It would be a part of his being that ever more and more withered away. The result would be that man might fall a prey to the luciferic or the armonic powers and his own special and peculiar evolution would be taken from him. Had the adversaries of mankind been able not only to put hindrances in the way but to carry their efforts to complete success, the entrance of the spiritual soul might have been precluded.

An event which displays with remarkable brightness the intervention of spiritual agencies in earthly affairs is the part played by Jean Dark, the maid of Orleans, and her fate. 1412 to 1431. What she does has its impulses for herself deep down in the subconscious underlying grounds of her soul. She follows the blind prompings of the spiritual world. On earth reigns harassing confusion with the aim of preventing the age of consciousness from coming in. Miel must prepare the way from the spiritual world for his later mission. He can do so where he finds human souls to receive his impulses. The maid is one such soul. He works too, though it be only possible in a lesser degree and less obviously for external historic life through many other souls besides.

In events such as the war between England and France, he is matched against his opponent on the Arammonic side. The opposition that he meets with from the Luciferic adversary during this period was spoken of in the last contemplation. But this opponent may be seen quite peculiarly at work in the whole course of the events which followed the maid's appearance on the scene. All that there went on plainly shows that people were at a loss and no longer knew how to deal with such an intervention of the spiritual world in human affairs. An intervention which could well have been grasped by men's minds and taken up too into their wills during the earlier times when imaginative understanding still existed among them. The earlier attitude toward such interventions had become impossible since the intellectual or mind soul had ceased to be active. The attitude befitting the spiritual soul had not at that time yet been reached. Even today it is not yet achieved.

It came to pass, therefore, that the shaping of Europe at that time was carried out by the spiritual world, without men having any understanding of what was taking place, and without anything which they endeavored to do having any influence worth mentioning in the process. One only need draw a mental picture of what would have happened in the 15th century had there been no maid of Orleans to recognize at once the importance of this event in which the spiritual world was the ruling agent.

There are people indeed who try to explain such a phenomenon materialistically. With such people, what makes it impossible to come to any reasonable understanding is that they willfully twist round what is obviously spiritual and give it a materialistic aspect. It is plain to see from certain spiritual struggles also in which men's minds are engaged that mankind can no longer find their way without much difficulty to the realm of divine spirit, however intently they may seek it. These are difficulties which did not exist in the times when insight could still be procured through imaginations.

Rightly to appreciate what is here meant, one has only to look in a clear light at the persons who stand out as philosophic thinkers. A philosopher cannot be regarded solely with a view to the effect which he has upon his age and the number of people who have adopted his ideas. He is much rather the expression, the manifestation in person of his age. But the greater part of mankind carry within them unconsciously as a disposition of soul, as unconscious feelings and life promptings. The philosopher puts into his ideas. As the thermometer registers the temperature of its surroundings, so he registers the mental condition of his age. The philosophers are as little the cause of the psychology of their age as the thermometer is of the temperature of its surroundings.

With this as a premise, let us look at the philosopher Rene Descartes whose work lay in the time when the age of consciousness was already well begun. He lived from 1596 to 1650. The one slender support on which he rests his connection with the spiritual world is the inner realization. "I think, therefore I am" in the consciousness of self. The central "I" he tries to find reality and only so much of it as the consciousness soul, the spiritual soul can tell him. And on all other problems of the spirit, he seeks to gain light by the intellectual method by examining what guarantee the certainty of his own self-consciousness affords of the certainty of other things. He inquires in every case in respect of the truths historically transmitted to him. Are they as evident as this? "I think, therefore I am." If he can affirm this then he accepts them.

With such a form of thinking in the human mind is not the spirit expelled from every kind of view that bears any actual relation to the things of the world? The revelation of the spirit has retired to the one pinpoint of support in the consciousness of self. No other thing in the immediate form of its appearance reveals the spirit upon what lies outside the consciousness of self. No light of spirit revelation can be thrown save immediately by the intellect working in the spiritual soul. The man of this age pours forth, as it were, the still almost empty contents of his spiritual soul in intense longing toward the spiritual world. One thin ray of light travels thither. The beings of the spirit world on the immediate borders of the earthly one, and the souls of men upon earth find it hard to come together.

Mielle's super sensible preparations for his coming mission are only communicated under the greatest difficulties to the soul of man. We shall better comprehend the peculiar character of the tone of soul that finds its expression in Descartes if we compare this philosopher with Augustine who so far as external formulation employs the same point of support for his realization of the spiritual world as Descartes does. Only with Augustine, it is done out of the full imaginative force of the intellectual or mind soul. He lived from 354 to 430 AD. People find and rightly an affinity between Augustine and Descartes. Only the intellect of Augustine is the last remains of the cosmic one, whilst that of Descartes is the intellect that has already begun to make its entry into the individual human soul precisely by the road which the human mind has traveled in its searchings from Augustine to Descartes.

It may be seen how the cosmic character of the thought forces disappears and how the same thing reappears only in the soul of man. Yet at the same time it can be seen under what difficulties Micael and the soul of man are able so to meet together that Micael can direct in man what he once directed in the cosmos. The luciferic and the armonic forces are both busily at work to prevent their meeting. The luciferic forces would only allow those things to come to expansion in man which were his in his cosmic childhood. The armonic forces as their opponents but yet in cooperation with them want to develop those powers only which are acquired in the later ages of the world and to let the cosmic childhood wither away.

Under such circumstances of aggravated difficulty, the souls of men in Europe continued to digest those spiritual impulses which had made their way through the crusades in the form of old ideas and world conceptions from the east into the west. In these ideas, the forces of Micaiah lived with peculiar strength. These world conceptions were dominated by the cosmic intelligence of which Micael was by old spiritual heritage the region. How could these ideas and world conceptions be taken up by human souls? Since between these souls and the forces of the spiritual world, there lay a gulf. They fell amidst the first faint beginnings of the spiritual soul.

On the one hand, they met with hindrance presented by the still feeble development of the spiritual soul. They drowned the voice of the spiritual soul, lamed its force. And on the other hand, they no longer met with a consciousness that drew strength from imagination. The human soul could no longer unite with them in full insight. People took them either quite superficially or else superstitiously. This state of men's minds must be clearly perceived in order to understand those movements in thought which are associated on the one hand with the names of Wikliffe, Hus, etc., and with the designation Rosa on the other.

Leading thoughts number one. At the beginning of the age of consciousness, the human soul develops her intellectual forces only as yet to a very small extent. There arises a lack of connection between what the soul yearns for in her unconscious underlying depths and what can be given her by the forces from the region where Micael is.

Leading thoughts. Number two, this lack of connection affords the luciferic powers an enhanced possibility of detaining man within the forces of his cosmic childhood, so as to cause his further evolution to take place not along the paths of those divine spiritual powers with whom he was united from the first, but along the paths of Lucifer.

Leading thoughts number three, it further affords an enhanced possibility for the Arammonic powers to cut man off from the forces of his cosmic childhood and draw him over into their own realm for further evolution there.

Leading thoughts number four, both of these things failed to take place because the micael forces were nevertheless at work. But the spiritual evolution of mankind had to go on amidst the obstacles arising from these two possibilities and it thereby became what it has hitherto become.

That's the end of letter 11. You are listening to rudolfsteiner audio.com. This is a reading of a part of collected works volume 26, a book entitled the Mikeyle mystery letters by Rudolfph Steiner. This is letter 12 before the door of the spiritual world continuation of the second contemplation hindrances and helps to the male forces in the dawning age of the spiritual soul.

The incorporation of the spiritual soul also brought about a disturbance throughout the whole of Europe in men's inner relation toward the articles of religious faith and the ritual of worship. This disturbance announces itself unmistakably at the turn of the 11th to the 12th centuries by the sudden appearance on the scene of proofs of the existence of God in particular with Ansom of Canterbury. The existence of God was to be proved by arguments of reason. Such a desire could only arise when the old method of knowing God by direct realization through the soul's inherent forces was already passing away. What one knows by direct living experience one does not prove by logic.

The earlier method had been a direct perception by the soul of the life forms of the individual intelligences up to the highest godhead. The new method now became to work out intellectually a system of thoughts about the "first causes" of the universe. For the first method there had been the powers of Miley in the spiritual region immediately adjoining the earthly one. Powers which behind the thinking forces directed to the externals of sense equipped the soul with other faculties that could behold within the universe the life forms of intelligent being. The second method required that the soul's link with the mile powers should be first fully developed.

What happens in the field of religious worship is that far and wide from Wikliffe in England, 15th century, to Hus in Bohemia, over broad ranges of religious life amongst men. A doctrine so central as that of the sacrament of the communion begins to waver. In the sacrament of the communion, man could find individual human union with the spirit world which Christ had opened to him. For therein he could so unite himself with the being of the Christ that the fact of sensible union was at the same time a spiritual one.

The consciousness of the intellectual or mind soul was able to picture such a communion. For this soul still possessed ideas both of spirit and of matter which were closely akin to each other so that the one could be conceived passing over into the other, matter into spirit. But such ideas must not be intellectual ones of the kind that the man proves for the existence of God. They must be such as still have something of imagination in them. For here can be felt in matter, the active spirit at work within it, and in the spirit, the striving after matter. Ideas of such a kind have the cosmic force of Micaia behind them.

If we only consider how much it was of which the foundations were shaken in men's minds at that time, how much of all that was involved in their most sacred innermost life. There were persons in whom the very essence of the spiritual soul shot forth its brightest rays who by the constitution of their souls were united to the malle forces with a strength which for others would only come centuries later. Individualities such as Hus, Wikliffe, and others came on the scenes following Micael's voice in their hearts. They used the ripeness of their spiritual soul to soar to a comprehension of the profoundest mysteries of religion. The intellectual power now coming in with the spiritual soul must they felt be able to bring within the range of their ideas what in ancient times had been sought and reached through imagination.

In contrast to all this was the old historic position of the human soul as traditionally handed down which throughout large circles of mankind had lost all inner staying power. What is historically known as the disorders of the faith which occupied the great reforming councils in the age when the spiritual soul first began to be active is all involved with the life of those human souls who neither as yet felt the spiritual soul within them nor could any longer draw from the traditional life of the intellectual or mind soul anything to give them inner strength and security. Such historic currents of inner human life and feeling has come to light in the councils of constants and veil may really be said to show.

Above in the spirit world the downpouring of the cosmic intellectuality trying to find its way into man and below in the earthly region an intellectual or mind soul which is no longer suited to the times. Between the two hover the Miley forces, looking back to their past union with the divine spirit world, and looking down upon the world of man, once united by the same bond, but which has now passed unavoidably into a sphere where Miley must send his aid from the spirit, but with which he himself must enter into no inner union. In this struggle of Micael's necessary in cosmic evolution, yet signifying in the first instance a disturbance of the cosmic balance, are to be found the grounds of all that mankind had to go through at this period, even in respect of their most cherished and sacred truths.

We look deep into the peculiar characteristics of this age. If we fix our eyes on Cardinal Nicholas Cusanis, (see what is said about him in my title, Mysticism and Modern Thought). The personality of Croissantis is like a monument of his age. Everywhere. He seeks to give effect to such views as would rectify the abuses of the physical world, not by combating them in a high-flung spirit of fanaticism, but rather by endeavoring through sound human sense to guide what has gone wrong into the right track. Again, this is directly observable if one watches the way in which his influence was exerted at the council of Bale and in general amongst his ecclesiastical community.

If in this respect Kusanis shows himself all inclined toward the change coming into evolution with the development of the spiritual soul, one sees him on the other hand displaying views which bear shining witness to the forces of Micaia. He translates into his own times the good old ideas which once had guided the soul and mind of man to the evolution of faculties by which he could perceive the living forms of the intelligences in the cosmos in that age when Miley still was regent of cosmic intellectuality. The "learned ignorance" of which Kusana speaks is an active comprehension which lies above the passive perceptions directed to the world of sense. A comprehension which carries thought above and beyond intellectuality, the common form of knowing into a region where in unknowingness or ignorance but with the vision of living realization the spiritual is actually grasped.

So in this cardinal of Kuza we have a person who in his own soul life experiences the disturbance brought by Micaia into the cosmic balance and intuitively tries to do his utmost toward directing this disturbance to the welfare of mankind. In between all which thus came spiritually to the open surface there was something else which led a hidden life. There were here and there persons who had a sense and understanding for the position held by the Micael powers in the universe and who devoted themselves to so training the powers of their own souls that they could find conscious access to that spiritual region bordering on the earthly one in which Micael carries on his labors on man's behalf. They sought to qualify themselves for this spiritual enterprise by behaving externally in their daily calling and the general affairs of life in such a way that their ordinary existence was not distinguishable from that of other people. In this manner, by fulfilling their duties in the normal way in all love toward the things of earth, they were enabled to apply their inner man freely to the spiritual task above mentioned.

What they did in this direction was their own concern and that of those with whom they associated "in secret." In respect of what occurred on the physical plane, the world was not to immediate appearance in any way affected by these spiritual pursuits. And yet it all was necessary in order to bring human souls into the needful connection with Miley's world. There was no question here of secret societies in any bad sense. Nothing that haunts the dark because it shuns the light of day. It was a case of people coming together who in the actual coming together would convince themselves that every one of them had a fitting consciousness of the Micael mission. Those who are working together in this way do not then talk of their work before persons who from lack of understanding might only spoil the tasks on which they are engaged. These tasks as we have seen belong to spiritual streams which do not run within the borders of earthly life but in the neighboring spirit world although they send their impulses across into this earthly life.

The spiritual work to which illusion is here made is that of men who stand within the physical world but work in union with beings of the spirit world with beings who themselves do not enter the physical world do not incarnate in it. We here allude to what is referred to in the world at large in very little accordance with the facts as the Rosacruian. True Rosacruianism lies along the same line of action as that pursued by the Myle mission. It assisted on earth to prepare the spirit work of Micael which it was his will to prepare for a later age. What this made possible we can best estimate from the following considerations.

The difficulties, impossibilities indeed, which Miley meets with as already described in conveying his impulses to the souls of men are connected with the fact that he himself will not bring his own being into any sort of contact with the physical present of earth life. His will is to abide by the same interconnection of forces which existed for spirits of his kind and also for men in the past. Any contact with that element with which man being situated in present physical earth life of necessity comes in contact could only be felt by Micael as a defilement of his being.

Now in ordinary human life as we know what the soul realizes in her spiritual life works on from fence into her physical earth life. Conversely, the physical earth life reacts upon the other. A reaction which in particular finds its expression in a man's tone of mind and in his inclination toward some particular feature of earthly life. Some such interaction of the two things is more especially the case as a rule though not always with persons in public life. That is why with many of the reformers the obstacles to Miley's work were really very great. The Rosacruians overcame this side of the difficulty by carrying on their external life with its earthly duties quite apart from whatever they did in Mikail's work. When Micael came with his impulses to the soul of a Rosaian and met with what was there prepared for him, he in no way found himself exposed to the danger of coming upon earthly matter. For this was kept at a distance by the very thing which brought the Rosacrruian into union with Micaia, the specially prepared constitution of his soul. In this manner, Rosacrruian will and purpose made for Micael a road upon earth by which he could find the way to his own approaching earthly mission.

Leading thoughts number one. At the beginning of the age of the spiritual soul, the emancipated intellectual power in man begins to busy itself in examining the truths of religious faith and worship. Man's soul life is thereby inevitably thrown into uncertainty. Essential realities which men had formerly realized in the inner life of the soul, they now seek to prove logically. Contents of religious ritual which should be grasped in imaginations. They now try to grasp by logical deduction and even to determine the forms accordingly.

Leading thoughts number two. This is all connected with the fact that micael under all circumstances is resolved to avoid every contact with the present earth world on which man is obliged to set foot. But that nevertheless miel has to remain with the stream of cosmic intellectuality of which he was regent in the past and to conduct it further within man. Hereby there arises through the male forces necessarily for the progress of human evolution a disturbance of the cosmic equilibrium.

Leading thoughts number three, the difficulty of Micael's mission is lightened by certain persons, the genuine Rosacrushians who so arrange their external way of life on earth that it exerts no sort of influence upon the inner life of their souls. By this means they are able in their inner life to develop forces by which they can work with Micaia in the spiritual field without Miley's incurring the danger of becoming involved with the present doings of earth life which for him would be impossible.

The end of letter 12. You are listening to rudolfsteiner audio.com. This is a reading of part of collected works volume 26 entitled the Myle mystery and this is the third contemplation first of all it's letter 13 the third contemplation entitled before the door of the spiritual world's sorrow over the evolution of mankind before the time of his earthly regency with a further progress of the age of consciousness the possibility more and more ceases is of direct connection between Micael and the generality of humankind.

Into man's being enters in triumph the new humanized power of intellectuality and out of it vanish those imaginative conceptions of the mind which show man the living forms of the cosmic intelligence. For Miel, any possibility of approaching man does not begin until the last third of the 19th century. Before then, approach can only be attempted by such roads, as were those of the genuine Rosacruians.

Man looks with his fresh opening intellect at nature, and what he sees is a physical world, an ether world in which he himself is not. Through the great ideas of Copernicus and Galileo, he gains a picture of the external nonhuman world, but he loses the picture of himself. He looks at himself and he has no possibility of arriving at any insight as to what he is. In the depths of his being is awakened that which is ordained to be the bearer of his human intelligence. With this his "I" combines.

Man bears accordingly within him now a three-fold being. First in his spirit soul he bears within him manifested in physical etheric form. That being which at the very first in the Saturn and sun times and repeatedly ever since has given him a place in the realm of divine spirit. This is where man's being and Mielle's being can join company. Secondly, man bears within him his later physical and etheric being namely that which became his during the moon and earth times. All this is the work and workings of divine spirit. But divine spirit no longer lives in it with present being. It first becomes present again in living being when the Christ passes through the mystery of Gatha in that which works spiritually in man's physical and etheric body may be found the Christ. Thirdly, man has in him that part of his spirit and soul which during the moon and earth times has acquired a new form of being. In this part, Micaiah has remained active. Whereas in the part turned to the moon and earth, he has grown ever more inactive. In the former, it is he who has preserved to man's divine image. This Micael could do until the dawn of the age of consciousness. And then the entire spirit and soul element in man sank, so to speak, down into the physical and etheric in order to fetch forth the spiritual soul. Luminously there arose in man's consciousness all that his physical body and his ether body could tell him about the physical and etheric in nature. There sank from before his vision what astral body and eye could tell him about himself.

A time arises when amongst mankind there begins to stir a feeling that their insight no longer brings them to themselves. There begins a search after the knowledge of the human being. Men fail to satisfy their seeking by anything which the present can supply. They go back in history to earlier times. Humanism makes its appearance in the evolution of the human mind. Humanism becomes men's ideal object not because they possess the human being but because they have lost him. So long as they still possessed him the soul which animated the work of Erasmus of Rotterdam and others would have worn a very different color from anything that their humanism could give it.

In title Faust later on as rediscovered by Goethe is the figure of a man who has utterly lost the human being. Ever intenser becomes this search after man. For men have only two alternatives. Either completely to blunt themselves to the awakening inner sense of their own being or else to pursue this longing search for man. So that this search becomes an inherent element of their soul. Until the 19th century in the spiritual life of Europe, the best men in every field are engaged in the pursuit of every variety of idea historic, scientific, philosophic, mystic, all representing the endeavor in the intellectualized aspect of the world to discover man. Renaissance, spiritual new birth, humanism, all are rushing, storming indeed after spirituality in a direction where spirituality is not to be found. In the direction where it is to be sought. Impotence, illusion, be amazement, and everywhere through it all the male forces breaking through in art, in learning, into the life of man, only not as yet into the young rising forces of the spiritual soul. A tottering of all spiritual life.

Micael with all his forces reaching back in cosmic evolution in order to find strength to keep in balance the dragon under his feet. Under these powerful exertions of Micaia, there arise the great works of the Renaissance. Yet these are still a revival by Micael's power of the old life of the intellectual or mind soul. Not yet a working of the new soul forces. One can see Micael full of anxiety as to whether after all he will be in a position to keep the dragon permanently in check when he perceives how men are engaged in the one field only trying to obtain from the picture they have just obtained of nature a similar picture of man. Micael sees the way in which men are observing nature and trying out of what they call natural law to construct an image of man. He sees how they depicted in their minds. This peculiarity in some animal becomes perfected. That combination of organic functions becomes more nicely adjusted. And so there arises man. But before the spirit eye, IE of Micael, what arises is not man at all. What they think of as growing ever more perfected and more nicely adjusted is just a thought thing. No one can see it actually growing into fact because the actual facts are otherwise. And thus men live with such thoughts of man in unsubstantial pictures in illusions that have no being. They pursue an image of man. They think they possess it. But in truth there is nothing within their range of sight.

"The power of the spirit son shines upon their souls. Christ is at work, but as yet they cannot heed him. The power of the spiritual soul is strong in their bodies, but into their souls it still will not enter." So may one hear the inspiration which Micael utters in his dire anxiety. May not this force of illusion in men give the dragon so much power after all that it will be an impossibility for him for Micael himself to maintain the balance.

Other individuals again endeavor with more inwardly artistic power to find the union between nature and man grandly ring the words of Goethe when describing in a noble book the work of Winckelmann "when the powers of man's nature are at work in whole and healthful unison when he feels himself in the world as in one grand fair worshipful and worthy whole. When the well-being of harmonious attunement fills him with a pure and free delight, then would the universe, were it conscious of itself, shout with joy at the attainment of its goal and marvelously acclaim the crown of its own life and being."

The same impulse which inspired the mind of Lessing with flame of fire which ensold the worldwide vision of Herder rings through these words of Goethe and the whole of Goethe's own creative work is like a universal demonstration on all sides of this saying of his. Schiller in his letters on aesthetics has drawn the picture of an ideal man. One as it rings in the words of Goethe who bears the whole universe within himself and realizes it actually in social cooperation with other men. But where is this picture of a man drawn from? It shines like the morning sun over the spring earth. But it has entered into men's feelings from contemplations of ancient Greek man. Men cherished the picture with all the strong inner impulse of Micael, but they could find no form to give to this impulse except by turning their souls gaze back toward a bygone age.

Goethe went, as we know, through the severest conflicts with the spiritual soul when he tried inwardly to realize man. He sought for him in the philosophy of Spinoza. He thought that for the first time he really had a glimpse of him when on his Italian tour he had his first sight into Greek life and being. He hastened away from the spiritual soul striving forward in Spinoza to what in the end was but the dying embers of the intellectual or mind soul. Only that Goethe succeeds in bringing an endless amount of this latter into the spiritual soul in his all embracing view of nature.

Gravely Micael watches these endeavors too to find man. He sees something it is true that is to his own mind entering here into the evolution of the human spirit. It is that same man who once beheld the life forms of intelligent being in the times when Micael ruled from the cosmos without. Yet eventually if it be not grasped by the spiritualized power of the spiritual soul this too must end by falling from Micael's range of action into the dominion of Lucifer that Lucifer might gain the ascendancy and the rocking of the cosmic balance. This is the other dire anxiety in Micael's life.

The preparations for Micael's mission at the end of the 19th century roll on in cosmic tragedy. Beneath upon earth, there often reigns the profoundest satisfaction over man's picture of nature and its effective working. Whilst in the region where Micael is at work, there is nothing but tragedy over the obstacles which prevent the true picture of man from finding its way into life. There was a time when in the beams of the sun, in the flush of morning skies, in the sparkling of the stars, there lived the keen clear spirit love of Micael. The dominant note this love has now taken was one of sorrow aroused by gazing on mankind. Micael's position in the cosmos became one of tragic difficulty but one that was also urging toward a solution just at the period preceding his mission upon earth.

Men could maintain their power of intellect only in the domain of the body and there only in the domain of the senses. They accordingly admitted nothing into their range of mental vision except what their senses told them. Nature became a field of sense revelation. A revelation quite materially conceived. In nature and all her forms, men no longer saw the work of divine spirit, but something which has come into existence without spirit, and of which they nevertheless assert that the spiritual life which man leads is born of it. Of the spirit world, on the other hand, men would only accept so much as was still told of in the historic records. Any real seeing of the creative spirit in the past was as severely tabooed as was the seeing of the spirit in the present. All that now remained living in men's souls came from that region of the external present world into which Micael does not enter. Man was glad to be standing upon secure ground. He fancied the ground secure because he abstained from looking for any thoughts in nature in which he would at once have suspected the unreliability of a spontaneous fancy. But Micael was not glad. He was obliged to remain on the far side, aloof from men, and carry on the war in his own region against Lucifer and Aramman. Hence came the great and tragic difficulty for Lucifer can approach man all the more easily. The more Micael who is also the preserver of his past is obliged to keep away from him. And so a stormy contest was being waged on man's behalf in the spiritual world next to earth by Micael against Lucifer and Arman. Whilst man himself on earthly territory was busying his soul in opposition to the healing forces of his own evolution. All this applies, of course, to the spiritual life of Europe and America. For Asia, it would be necessary to speak differently.

Leading thoughts number one. In the very first period of the spiritual soul's evolution, man began to feel that the picture of mankind, of his own human being, which had hither too come of itself imaginatively, was now lost to him. Powerless to find it as yet in his spiritual soul, he seeks for it along the paths of natural science or of history. He would like to revive once more within him the old picture of humanity.

Leading thoughts number two. By this road, men do not come to the real fullness of the human being. They come only to empty illusions. But they do not see this. They look on these as things that give mankind substantiation and support.

Leading thoughts number three. And so Micael in the time preceding his earthly regency can only look with anxiety and sorrow upon mankind's evolution. For men condemn spiritual contemplation in any direction and thereby cut themselves off from everything that makes a bond with Mia.

The end of letter 13. You are listening to rudolfsteiner audio.com. This is a reading of a part of collected works volume 26 by Rudolf Steiner called the Miley mystery. This is letter 14 entitled a Christmas contemplation the mystery of the logos into our contemplation of the Miley mystery. They're shown like a ray of light the mystery of Golgotha.

This arose of itself from the fact that Micael is the power that guides man in the most helpful and wholesome way to the Christ. But Micael's mission is of a kind which repeats itself in rhythmic succession during the cosmic evolution of mankind. Its beneficent influence had been repeatedly exerted upon mankind on earth before the mystery of Golgotha. Then it was engaged in everything that the Christ power being then still outside the earth required to manifest in acts for the education of mankind to earthly life. Since the mystery of Golgotha, it serves in aid of that which must be accomplished by the Christ amongst men on earth. It appears in its repetitions, each time in an altered and advanced form, but in repetition. In contrast to this, the mystery of Golgotha is a unique all overreaching cosmic event that only takes place once in the course of mankind's whole cosmic evolution.

So soon as mankind has progressed to the development of the intellectual or mind soul, there comes for the first time into full force the ever constant danger of that occurring for which indeed the predispositions had been laid in the beginning of time, namely that the being of mankind would separate and fall away from divine spiritual being. And in the same measure as the human soul loses her fellowship with the life of the divine spiritual beings, there emerges round about her what today we call the world of nature. Man no longer sees his own living humanity in the divine and spiritual cosmos. He sees the

Lifeless work of divine spirit in the earthly world. He sees it at first not in the abstract form in which we see it today as sensibly physical beings and events held together by that abstract thread of ideas which we call natural law. He sees it as an ocean of divine spiritual being.

In all that he beholds, in the rise and wayne of life and the creatures of the animal world, in the growth and budding of the plants, in springing fountain and flowing stream, in the gatherings of wind and cloud, he sees the heaving and falling billows of this ocean of divine spiritual being. All these many shapes of life and doing round about him are to him the gestures, the acts are to him the language of the gods of that divine being which underlies the world of nature.

As at an earlier time man had watched the stations and the motions of the stars and seen therein the gestures the acts of the world divinities and read therein their words. So now the facts of nature became the verbal expression for the earth goddess. For the divinity at work in nature was pictured in woman's form. Remnants of this kind of mental picturing remained as an imaginative content of the intellectual or mind soul and occupied men's souls until late into the middle ages. Those in quotes who knew the in quotes savance talked of the acts of the goddess when they wanted to bring the quote processes of nature close quote to men's comprehension.

Only with the gradual ascendance of the spiritual soul did this view of a living inwardly soul-endowed nature grow incomprehensible to mankind. The whole manner of viewing such things during the age of the intellectual or mind soul recalls to mind the myth of Pphanie and the mystery on which it is founded. Praphanie, daughter of Demiter, is forced by the god of the underworld to accompany him down into his kingdom. This is finally settled in the form that she spends half of the year only in the underworld and dwells in the upper world during the other half. Grandly and powerfully does this myth still express the manner in which men once in ages long gone past had looked into the waxing waning life of the earthly world and read what was behind it.

All active impulses in the world proceeded in ancient times from the cosmic environment round about the earth. The earth herself was only just coming into being. She built up her life form amidst the cosmic evolution from the forces at work in her surroundings. The divine spirit beings of the cosmos were the active shapers of earth's being. And when the earth was far enough advanced to become a self-existing cosmic body, then divine spiritual being descended upon her from the universal cosmos and became earthly divinity. This was a cosmic fact perceived and recognized by the dreamlike clairvoyance of ancient man. Of this perceptive science, there has remained the myth of Pphanany.

But what also has remained is the manner in which deep into the middle ages men endeavored with their science to penetrate the secrets of nature. For they directed their gaze then not as later toward the impressions of the senses, that is toward what shows upon the surface of the earthly world, but rather toward those active forces that work up onto the surface from the earth's inner depths. And these forces of the deep, these quote powers of the underworld close quote, they saw acting in alternation with the action of the stars and the elemental forces of the earth's environment. There they see the plants growing in all their manifold forms, displaying themselves in their gay show of many colors. There through it all are at work the forces of sun, moon, and stars in conjunction with the forces of the earth's depths.

The foundation is laid by the minerals. Their whole form of being bears the character of earthly descent from world beings. The stony rock thrusts itself up from the underworld by the strength alone of earthly forces that once were heavenly ones. The animal world has not borrowed from earth the forces of the depths. It is brought into life solely by the world forces that work from roundabout out of the earth's surroundings. Its beginnings, its growth, its fresh-fledged life, its faculties of nourishment, its powers of motion. All these it owes to the forces that reign from the sun without upon the earth within. It propagates its kind under the influences of the moon forces which fall from without upon the earth. It makes its appearance in many shapes and kinds because of the stars which from their different positions and the wide universe work from without upon animal life and give it form.

But the animals are merely set down by the universe upon earth. Only with their dim, dull life of consciousness do they take any part in the earthly world. In their beginnings, their growth, in all that they are, so as to perceive and move about. They are no creatures of the earth. This grandly constructed idea of the making of the earth was once living amongst men. From what still remains of it, towering over into the Middle Ages, it is only possible to gain but a very faint notion of the grand lines of the structure. To arrive at a true notion of it, one must go back and see with the knowledge of vision into very ancient times. For even with the physically existent documents, what existed in the souls of men is perceptible to him alone. who can read them with the eye ei of the spirit.

Now man is not in a position to keep so far aloof from the earth as do the creatures of the animal world. To say this is to touch upon the mystery both of mankind and of animal kind. These mysteries are reflected in the animal worship of the ancient peoples, more especially of the Egyptians. They saw in the animals beings who are guests upon earth, in whom may be visibly beheld the being and doing of that other spiritual world which borders on the earthly one. And in the combination of a human with the animal form as represented in their images, they brought presently before them the figures of those intermediate beings of the elemental world who are on the road to humanity in the course of the world's evolution, but who never enter the earth region so that they may not become men. These intermediate elemental beings actually exist. The Egyptians were only reproducing what they saw when they made images of them.

Such beings, however, have not the full self-consciousness of man. To attain to this self-consciousness, it was necessary for man to set foot so thoroughly in the terrestrial world that he took up something of the earth's being into his own being. It was necessary for him to be exposed to the fact that in this earthly world he has before him the work wrought by those divine spiritual beings with whom he is associated but their wrought work only. And because it is only the rot work, the finished work detached from its origin, the luciferic and arammonic beings have access to it. The result is that man is under the necessity of making this finished work of the gods pervaded as it is by Lucifer and Aramman the place in which to lead a portion namely the earthly portion of his own existence. This is only possible without permanently breaking the tie between the human world and its divine spiritual origin.

So long as man has not yet reached the point of developing his intellectual or mind, soul, at this point there takes place in an a corruption of his physical, his aetheric and his astral bodies. The science of an earlier time recognized this corruption as something actually existent in the human being. It was known to be a necessary element in order that consciousness may progress in man to self-consciousness. In the science cultivated in those places which were dedicated to learning by Alexander the Great, there lived a form of Aristotilian teaching which rightly understood contains in it this element of corruption as a vital part of its psychological doctrine. Only that such ideas later on were no longer penetrated in their inner essence.

During the ages until the development of the intellectual or mind soul, man was nevertheless still so closely involved with the forces of his divinely spiritual origin that these forces were able from their places in the cosmos to hold in balance the powers of Lucifer and Aramman by which he was beset on earth. On the part of man himself, enough was done to help keep this balance. When in the ritual ceremonies of the mysteries, a picture was displayed of the divine spirit beings descent into the realm of Lucifer and Aramman and his triumphant resurrection. In the times preeding the mystery of Golgatha, we find accordingly in the religious rights of the different peoples pictorial representations of what then became in the mystery of Goltha itself a reality.

But when the intellectual or mind soul was evolved, nothing but the reality itself could any longer preserve man's being from separation from those divine spirit beings to whom he belongs into the intellectual or mind soul so organized as to draw its life whilst on earth from the earthly realm. The divine must enter even within this earthly realm in very reality of being. This was accomplished through the divine spiritual logos the Christ who for the sake of mankind united his cosmic destiny with the earth. Pphanany descended into the earthly realm to deliver the plant world from being condemned to form itself out of the earthly realm only. This is the descent of a divine spiritual being into earthly nature. Pphanany too has a kind of resurrection but yearly in rhythmic succession. Over against this event taking place as a cosmic process upon earth. There is the descent of the logos to save mankind. Praphanany comes down in order to bring the natural world into its original relation to the skies. What here takes place is based on rhythm. For nature's events proceed in rhythm. The logos came down into mankind. This happens but once during the evolution of mankind. For this evolution forms one part only of a gigantic world rhythm in which mankind before its life as man was something quite different from mankind and afterward will again be different. Whereas plant life repeats itself as such over and over again in short rhythms.

This is the light in which the mystery of Golgtha must be seen, and men henceforth have need so to see it now that the age of consciousness has begun. For even in the age of the intellectual or mind soul, there was already the danger of man losing his link, had not the mystery of Goltha intervened. In the age of the spiritual soul, a complete darkening of the spiritual world would come over man in his consciousness. If the spiritual soul could not gather sufficient strength to look back in insight to her divine spiritual origin. But if the soul can look back, then she finds in the world logos the being who can lead her back and she is filled through and through with a mighty image revealing what took place on Golgtha. And the beginning of this understanding is a loving comprehension of the world Christmas which every year is celebrated in remembrance for the spiritual soul that begins with the reception of cold intellectuality goes on to gather the needful strength when into this intellect the frostiest of all soul elements it pours true love. That warm love of which the stream flows most noboly and purely when it is turned toward the child Jesus who in the world's Christmas holy night appears on earth. Then man has opened his soul to the influence of the highest of all spiritual facts on earth which is also a physical fact. He has set out on the way that ends by receiving the Christ into himself.

In the world of nature, a true science we behold in pphanany or that being to whom men's eyes still turned in the early middle ages when they spoke of nature. the natural revelation of that primal and eternal divine spiritual power out of which the natural world arose and continuously arises as the groundwork of man's earthly existence. In the world of man, a true science will behold in Christ the human revelation of that primal and eternal logos who in the realm of the divine spiritual being with whom man is in his origin united works for the evolution of the spirit being of man to turn the human heart in love toward these great cosmic connections. This is the real celebration of that feast of remembrance which meets man every year when he gazes on the world's Christ mass, the holy night. When love such as this dwells in human hearts, it fires with its warmth the spiritual soul's cold element of light. were the spiritual soul condemned to remain unwarmed by such fire. Man could never attain to its transformation in the spirit. He would either perish in the cold of intellectual consciousness or would be condemned to remain in a form of spiritual life which never progresses to the evolution of the spiritual soul. He would then stop short with the evolution of the intellectual or mind soul. But the spiritual soul is not of its own being cold. It only appears so at the beginning of its evolution because at the beginning it can only display the light element that is in it and not as yet the world warmth from which it nevertheless proceeds. to feel Christmas and inwardly to keep it in this fashion can make present in the soul how the glory of the divine spirit beings who reveal their image in the star expanses is proclaimed before man and how the deliverance of man is accomplished in the fields of earth from those powers who would draw him away from his source and origin.

Leading thoughts number one, that form of activity which is introduced by the micael forces into the evolution of the world and man repeats itself rhythmically though each time in altered and progressive form both before and after the mystery of Gatha.

Leading thoughts number two, the mystery of Golgtha is the unique only once occurring greatest event in the course of human evolution. It is impossible here to speak of any rhythmic repetition. For although this human evolution is part of a gigantic world rhythm, yet it is only one single widely drawn out part of this gigantic rhythm. Before it became this single part, mankind was something else essentially other than mankind. Afterward, mankind will again be something else in the course of human evolution. Therefore, many Miley events take place, but only one event of Golgatha.

Leading thoughts number three. In a swift rhythmic repetition of a year's cycle, the process of nature is accomplished by that divine spirit being who descended into the depths of earth in order to carry the spirit into this natural process. This being represents the ensoling of the natural world with those primal and eternal forces which must continue to work in nature even as the Christ in his descent represents the ensoling of mankind with the primal and eternal logos whose work shall never cease its efficacy for mankind's salvation.

the end of letter 14. You are listening to rudolfsteineraudio.com. This is a reading of the Miley mystery by Rudolph Steiner, part of CW 26. This is letter 15 entitled Heavenly History, Mythological History, Earthly History, The Mystery of Goltha.

In the spatial cosmos there stand in opposition to one another world expanse and earth's center. In the world expanse strewn abroad as it were the stars. From the earth's center forces radiate forth in all directions to the world expanse. As man stands today in the world in the present cosmic age. The stars in their shining and the earth forces in their working can only appear to him collectively as the accomplished work of the divine spiritual beings with whom his link is in the inner man. But there was once an age of cosmic history when this shining of the stars and these earth forces were still a direct spiritual revelation of the divine spiritual beings. When man in his dim consciousness felt these divine spiritual beings actively at work within his own being.

Then came another age. The star heaven separated as a corporeal existence out of the divine spiritual tide of activity. There arose what may be called world spirit and world body. The world spirit is a multiplicity of divine spirit beings. They send their influences in the earlier age from the places of the stars upon the earth within. What there rained down in light from the regions of the world expanse. What radiated forth as forces from the earth's center was in actuality the intelligence and the will of those divine spirit beings who were shaping earth and earth's manhood.

In the later cosmic epoch after the evolution of Saturn and Sun, this intelligence and will of the divine spirit beings became ever more spiritually inward in its workings. What they had actively been present in, present with their very being, became now the world body and harmonious ordering of the stars in cosmic space. Looking back upon these things in spirit, comprehending them in a spiritual world conception, one may express it thus. Out of the original spirit body of the world creative beings there arose world spirit and world body. The world body marks in stellar order and stellar movement the way in which the gods were working long long ago in their intelligence and will for the present age of the cosmos. What once lived in the stars as freely moving, freely shaping divine intelligence and will is now set fast in them as fixed law. What shines therefore from out of the star worlds today to man upon earth within is not the immediate expression of divine will and divine intelligence, but a sign left stationary to mark what this divine will and intelligence were long ago. Even in the stars, in the marvelous star configuration of the heavens, waking wonder in the human soul, we may behold therefore a past manifestation, but not the present manifestation of the gods.

But what is thus past in quotes in the glory of the shining of the stars is present in quotes in the world of the spirit. And man lives with his own being in this present world spirit in the evolving forms of the world. We must look back upon an ancient epoch of cosmic history when world spirit and world body worked together as a unity. We must keep before our eyes the intermediate epoch during which they develop as a duality. And we must think forward into the future into the third epoch when the world spirit will once more absorb the world body into its sphere of action. For the ancient epoch, there could have been no calculating the constellations and the courses of the stars, for they were an expression of the free intelligence and the free will of divine spiritual beings. In the future, there will again be no calculating them. Calculation only has any meaning for the intermediate epoch of the cosmos.

This which is true of the constellations and the courses of the stars applies also to the action of the forces which radiate from the earth's center into the world expanse. What there springs forth quote from the depths close quote also becomes calculable. Everything tends from the earlier cosmic epoch toward the intermediate one. When the worlds of time and space become calculable, and when divine spirit in its manifestations as intelligence and will must be sought behind the calculable. This intermediate epoch alone affords the conditions under which mankind can progress from a dull dim consciousness to a clear free consciousness of self to free intelligence and free will of his own. There had to come the time when Capernicus and Kepler calculated the world body. for the cosmic forces that served to bring about this moment were necessary to the development of human self-consciousness. The disposition for this self-consciousness was laid in an older age. Then came the time when it was advanced so far as to be able to calculate the distant world expanses. History in quotes begins to be played out upon Earth. There would have been no history had not the world expanse with all its stars become set in fixed constellations and orbits.

In the course of history upon earth, we have a reproduction, though a quite transformed one, of what once on a time was heavenly history. The peoples of olden time continued to carry this heavenly history still in their consciousness and turned their eyes rather upon this than upon earthly history. In earthly history, there lives the intelligence and will of man. At first in connection with the cosmic divine will and divine intelligence and then independently in heavenly history. May there live the intelligence and will of the divine spirit beings connected with mankind. Looking back over the spiritual life of the various peoples, one finds in the far remote past such a consciousness amongst men of their being together and willing together with the divine spirit beings that their own human history is still a heavenly history. In his narration of first origins, man's tale is not of earthly proceedings but of cosmic. Indeed, even for his own times, the times in which he is presently concerned, that which goes on in his earthly surroundings seems to him so insignificant in comparison with what is going on in the cosmos that he disregards the former and only pays attention to the latter.

There was an age when the consciousness of mankind beheld the heavens history in mighty impressions in which the divine spirit beings themselves stood before man's soul. The divine beings spoke and man heard their speech in dreamlike inspiration. They revealed their forms and man beheld them in dreamlike imagination. This heavenly history which for a long while filled men's souls was followed by mythical history now for the most part regarded as old poetic fiction. This mythical history links together heavenly doings and earthly doings. Heroes in quotes for instance came upon the scene. Superhuman beings. These are beings who stand higher than men in their evolution. Men at a particular time, for instance, have only developed the different parts of man's being as far as the sensient soul. The hero, however, has already evolved what will one day take its place in man as spirit self. The hero cannot directly incarnate in a physical body under earthly conditions. But he can do so by going down into the physical body of a human being and thus enabling himself to work as a man amongst men. In the initiates of earlier ages, we have beings of this kind.

The actual fact with regard to all these things which occurred in the course of the world is not simply that mankind in the successive periods of history pictured things in one way or another in their own minds. What actually took place between the more spiritual incalculable world and the corporeal calculable one itself underwent a change. Only this much may be said. Long after the actual conditions had changed in the world, human consciousness in one or other of the peoples still clung to a view of the world in quotes which corresponded to a far earlier reality. At first it was so that human consciousness, which does not keep pace with the progress of cosmic events, still really saw the things of old. Then came a time when spiritual sight grew dim and the old things were only maintained by tradition. Thus in the Middle Ages, people still traditionally quote pictured in their minds close quote an intervention of the heavenly in the earthly world which was no longer seen since the power of pictorial vision no longer existed. Moreover, the evolution of the various peoples in the earthly sphere is such that they retain one or other view of the world with its corresponding picture for varying lengths of time. So that there are living alongside one another views of the world which by their essential character should be living after one another. The different views of the world however existing amongst the different peoples did not proceed only from this but also from the fact that these different peoples according to their dispositions saw different things. Thus the Egyptians saw that world in which there are beings who long ago stopped short on the road to human evolution and never became earthmen. And they saw man after his earth life and all that he had to do with beings of this kind. The Calaldian peoples saw rather how spiritual beings both good and evil from beyond the earthly sphere entered into earth life to influence its course to the ancient heavenly history properly speaking which extends over quite a long period of time. that then succeeds the mythological history which is shorter but still long in comparison to the subsequent period of history proper. As I described, men in their consciousness leave go but reluctantly of the old views in which gods and men are pictured as fellow actors in a common field.

Proper earthly history had long been in existence ever since the development of the intellectual or mind soul, whilst men were still thinking in the sense of what had been in former times. Only with the first opening flower of the spiritual soul did men begin to turn their eyes upon history in the proper sense. Now in the human spirit working in earthly history loosed from its tie with the divine spirit men have the possibility to realize within themselves free intelligence and free will. So the weaving of the world process in which man is interwoven moves on between the altogether calculable and the workings of free intelligence and free will. Under the joint action of both, the world process is manifested in every variety of shade betw twixed the two.

In his life, as he leads it between birth and death, man has ready laid for him in the calculable as a foundation the bodily groundwork upon which to unfold the free incalculable of his inner spiritual soul life. His life between death and a new birth is passed in the incalculable yet in such a way that in his inner life of soul and spirit the calculable is revealed to him in thought. Thereby out of this calculable he becomes the architect of his next earth life. In history, in quotes, the incalculable is played out on earth, an incalculable with which, however, the calculable is interwoven, if only in feeble measure.

Against this order established between calculable and incalculable by the divine spiritual beings who have been associated with man from the beginning of all things against their harmonizing of the cosmos through quote measure, number, and weight close quote stands the opposition of the luciferic and arammonic beings. Lucifer can combine with his own form of being as he has made it nothing calculable. His ideal is the cosmic unconditioned action of intelligence and will. This luciferic tendency is one fitly suited to the world's order in those fields where freedom should rightly rule events. And there Lucifer is justly the spiritual helper of mankind in their evolution. Without his aid, freedom would never make its way into man's spiritual and soul life, built as it is upon a calculable bodily basis. But Lucifer would like to extend this tendency to the whole cosmos. And here his activity becomes a war against that divine spiritual order to which man originally belongs.

Here Myiel intervenes with his own being. He stands in the incalculable but he dresses the balance between the incalculable and that calculable which he bears within him as a world thought received from his gods. The armonic powers stand otherwise in the world. They are the complete opposite of the divine spirit beings with whom man is originally connected. These latter are at the present day purely spiritual beings who bear within themselves perfectly free intelligence and perfectly free will, but who create in this their free intelligence and will a wise insight into the necessity of the calculable and unfree as a world thought from whose sheltering lap man may grow up into a free being. And with all the calculable, with this world thought of the cosmos, they are united in love. This love streams from them throughout all the universe. In complete opposition to all this is the grasping greed of the arammanic powers in which lives cold hate of everything expanding in freedom. Aramman's aim and endeavor in all that he pours forth into world space is to make a cosmic machine. His ideal is quote simply and solely close quote measure number and weight. He was called into the cosmos prepared for the service of human evolution because it was necessary that this his special department measure number and weight should be developed.

He who comprehends the world as everywhere spirit in body, he alone really comprehends it. This must be carried down into the world of nature with regard to the powers at work there such as the divine spiritual powers who work in love and the arammonic powers who work in hate in the natural universal warmth as it sets in with the spring and tends on into summer. We must behold the natural love of the divine spirit beings. In the freezing blasts of winter, we must recognize the workings of Aramman. In the height of midsummer, Lucifer mingles his power with the love, the warmth of nature. At Christmas tide, the divine spirit beings with whom man is from his origin united turn their power against the frozen hate of Aramman. And ever more and more toward the springtime, natural divine love is mildly at work, mitigating natural armonic hate. The yearly sign of this divine love, new manifested as it is year byear, is the time of remembrance. When we recall how with the Christ, the free element of God entered into the calculable element of earth. Christ works in perfect freedom within the calculable. In so doing, he renders harmless that which craves the calculable only, Arama and his forces. The unique event of Golgatha is the free cosmic act of love within Earth's history. It is to be comprehended too only by the love that man brings to its comprehension.

Leading thoughts. Number one, the cosmic process with which the evolution of mankind is interwoven and which reflects itself in human consciousness as history in the most comprehensive sense may be distinguished into a lengthy period of heavenly history, a shorter one of mythological history, and the comparatively short earthly history.

Leading thoughts. Number two, this cosmic process at the present time falls apart into the in quotes not to be calculated working of divine spirit beings who freely create in free intelligence and will and the calculable processes of the world body.

Leading thoughts. Number three to the calculable of the world body are opposed the luciferic powers to the creating in free intelligence and free will the armonic powers.

Leading thoughts. Number four the unique event of Golgatha is a free cosmic act which originates in world love and can only be comprehended by man's love.

the end of letter 15. You are listening to rudolphsteineraudio.com. This is a reading of part of collected workspan 26 entitled the micle mystery by rsteiner and this is letter 16 entitled what is seen on looking back into man's repeated earth lives when it is possible to look back with the suitable spiritual organs of knowledge into a man's previous earth lives observation shows a number of such earth lives in which the man was already a in quotes person. His exterior resembled that of the present day and he had an inner life that bore an individual stamp. Earth lives appear which show signs of the existence of the intellectual or mind soul but not yet of the spiritual soul. Others again in which only the sensient soul is as yet developed and so on. This was so in the ages of earthly history and had been so already for a long time before.

Pursuing the observation, however, one comes back to ages in which it was not yet so. There one finds man both in respect of inner life and outer habit. Still interwoven with the world of the divine spiritual beings. Man is there an earth man but not yet detached from divine spiritual being thinking and willing. In still earlier times a detached and separate man vanishes altogether from sight. There is nothing to be seen but divine spirit beings holding man within their lap. These three stages of his evolution man has gone through during his time on earth. The transition from the first to the second lies in the late Leamorian age, from the second to the third in the Atlantean age.

Just as in his present earth life, man carries everything that has entered his life as a memory within him. So too he carries within him as cosmic memory. Everything which he has gone through in the manner above described. What is the soul life on earth? It is the world of memories open every moment to take in new perceptions. In this interplay of memory and new experience, man lives his inward earthly life. But this inward earthly life could never come to expression if there were not still existing at the present time in man as a cosmic memory. those things that one sees when one looks back in spirit to the first stage of his growth to earth manhood when he was not yet detached from the divine spirit beings of what then went on in the world all that remains in living existence upon earth today is the process carried out in the human nerves and senses system in external nature all the forces which were active in those times have died out and are only to be seen in their dead forms. Thus, in the thought world of man, there is living as present revelation something which to have earthly existence must have as its basis what had been evolved in man before ever he attained to individual life on earth.

In the life between death and the new birth, man every time goes a new through this stage only that into the world of divine spirit beings who now again receive him even as once they bore him within themselves. He now carries his own full individual entity in the form it has acquired during his lives on earth. He is between death and a new birth in the present and at the same time in all the times through which he has traveled in recurring earth lives and recurring lives between death and new birth. It is otherwise with what lives in the human feeling world. This feeling world of man is connected with experiences which followed immediately after those in which man as such was not yet revealed. with those experiences, namely which man lived through as man indeed, but not yet detached from the divine spiritual being thinking willing. There would be no world of feeling for man to disclose at the present day. if the foundations from which it springs were not laid in his rhythmic system. In this rhythmic system, we possess the cosmic recollection of the second stage of man's evolution described above. Thus, in man's feeling world, there are working together his human soul life of the present and the after effects of an olden time.

In the life between death and new birth, the time of which we are here speaking with all that fills it is known to man as the bounds of his cosmos. What the starlet sky is to man in his physical life, the same part is played for him spiritually in his life between death and new birth by his existence between his complete union with the divine spirit world and his detachment from it. there shining at the in quotes worlds born readers aside born is B O U R N E worlds born end of aside he sees not the physical heavenly bodies but in the place of each star the collective group of divine spirit beings who are in reality the star and in connection with the will only not with feeling nor thought there lives on in man whatever those earth lives have to show which begin on observation to display signs of personal individuality. What comes from the cosmos and gives man his exterior form remains preserved in this exterior form as a cosmic recollection. This cosmic recollection lives on as forces in the human form. These are not directly the forces of the will but are that which gives in the human organization the groundwork for the will forces. This is a region of man's being which lies outside the world's born in his life between death and new birth. Man there conceives of it as of something that will again be part of his human existence in his new earth life.

in his nerves and senses system. Man is today still bound up with the cosmos in the same manner as he was when he showed only as a first life seed amid the divine spiritual being. In his rhythmic system, man still lives today in the cosmos as he lived when he already was man but not yet detached from divine spiritual being. in his metabolic and limb system, the basis for the development of will. Man's life is such that he has working on in this system the after effect of all that he has gone through in his personal individual earth lives ever since these began and also in the intervening lives between death and new birth. From the forces of earth, man has that alone which lends him the consciousness of self. The physical bodily basis too of this self-consciousness is an effect of the earth's action. Everything else in the human being is extraaterrestrial and cosmic in its origin. The astral body as conveyor of sensation and thought together with its etheric and physical basis. All the life stir of the ether body and even all that is working physically and chemically in the physical body. All this has its origin beyond the earth. Strange as it may seem, the physical and chemical action which takes place within man is not derived from the earth. That man develops this extraearly cosmic life within him is the work of the planets and the other stars. What he develops in him by their aid is carried by the sun su n and its forces to the earth. The human cosmic is by the sun transplanted to earthly territory. By virtue of the sun, man lives as heavenly being upon earth. That property only whereby man exceeds the limits of his human form. The capacity to bring forth his kind is a gift of the moon. Of course, these are not the only effects of the suns and the moon's action. Highly spiritual effects proceed from them. Also, when the sun about Christmas time begins to gain increasing power for the earth, this is its action in the physical earthly sphere exhibited rhythmically in the cycle of the year. It is an expression of the spirit in nature. The evolution of mankind is one unique part in a so to speak gigantic world year. In this world year, it is world Christmas or holy night. When the sun does not merely act on the earth through the spirit of nature, but when the soul of the sun, the Christ spirit, comes down from above into the earth. As in each single man, that which he realizes individually in his own life is connected with a cosmic memory, so will the yearly Christmas be felt in its truth by the human soul. If the cosmic and heavenly Christ event is thought of as working on continually conceived not merely as a human but as a cosmic recollection, not man alone at Christmas time celebrates in remembrance the descent of the Christ, but the cosmos also.

Leading thoughts number one. On looking back into a man's repeated earth lives, they may be distinguished into three different stages. First, a very early one in which man is not yet existent as an individual form of being, but as a life seed amid divine spiritual being. Looking back into this stage, one finds not as yet a man, but only divine spirit beings, the principalities or primeval powers, the archive.

Leading thoughts number two. Following on this comes a middle stage in which man is already discernible as an individual form of being but not yet detached from the thinking and willing and being of the divine spiritual world. He has not yet at that time his present personality which is involved with his appearance on earth as an entirely distinctive being detached from the divine spiritual world.

Leading thoughts number three, the third stage is the present one. Man realizes himself as he stands forth in his own human form detached from the divine spiritual world and he realizes the world as an environment over against which he takes his place as an individual personality. This stage began in Atlantan times

the end of letter 16. You are listening to rudolphsteineraudio.com. This is a reading of part of collected works volume 26 by Rudolph Steiner letters entitled the myle mystery. This is letter 17 entitled what is seen on looking back into man's previous lives between death and new birth. first part.

In the last contemplation, we followed the course of human life as a whole by directing the soul's observation to the series of successive earth lives. The other point of view, putting what the first reveals into a still clearer light will be to study the successive lives between death and new birth. Here again it will be observed that the content of these lives as it is in the present age only goes back to a certain point of time in the earth's evolution. The content of life between death and new birth in the present age is conditioned as we know by the fact that man carries that inward power of self-consciousness which he has acquired in earth life on with him through the gates of death. Man thereby holds his ground as an individuality even amongst those divine spiritual beings into whose midst he comes.

It was not so in a period that preceded this one. There man was not yet far advanced in the development of his self-consciousness. The power then acquired upon earth was not yet sufficient to carry his detachment from the divine spiritual world to the extent of an individual existence between death and a new birth. Although man was no longer within the divine spiritual beings themselves, he was still so much within their sphere of action that his willing was essentially their willing, not his. Before this period is another in which on looking back we do not meet with man at all such as he is in his present constitution of spirit and soul but with the world of divine spirit beings within whom is man still in an embriionic state. These beings are the primeval powers the archai. Moreover, when we trace back the life of one man, we meet not with one divine spirit being, but with all the beings belonging to that hierarchy.

In these divine spirit beings lives the will that man should be. And in the coming into being of every single man, the will of them all has a part. Through the conjoined labors of the whole choir of these beings runs a world aim and object, the naance of the human form. The man lives unformed as yet in the spirit world. It seems strange perhaps that even for one man alone the whole choir of divine spiritual beings should be working together. But so before them had worked the hierarchies of the exusi, dunamis, curiosities, thrones, cherubim, and saraphim throughout the moon, sun and saturn evolutions to bring man into being. What had before resulted a kind of preman on Saturn, sun and moon had no uniform shape. There were some premen of this kind with whom the organization tended more toward a limb system with others toward a breast system with others again more toward the head. These were real men. Nevertheless, they were only called premen here to distinguish them from the later stage in which all the systems are seen blended together in the human form. The differentiation in these premen goes even further. One might speak of heart men, lung men and so on.

The hierarchy of primeval powers regarded as their especial task to lead over into one common human form all these premen whose soul life corresponded also to their one-sided formation. They take man over from the hands of the exusi. In thought the exusi had already made out of the multifariousness of man a unity. But with them this unity was still an ideal form, a worldthought form. From this the archai shaped the ether form but in such a way that in this ethereal form were ready contained the forces for the future development of the physical form. A tremendous prospect opens up in contemplation of these facts. Man is of God's the ideal, of God's the end and aim. But the contemplation of this can be for man no source of arrogance or pride. For man can only count his own as coming from himself what he has made of himself self-consciously during his earth lives. And this expressed in cosmic proportions is but little compared with that substructure upon which his personal being rests which the gods have created out of the macrocosm that they are to be the microcosm that he is.

The divine spirit beings hold the balance one with another in the cosmos. The visible expression of their mutual balance is the form of the starry heavens. What they are altogether they willed to create as a single unity. Rightly to understand what it was that the hierarchy of Arai accomplished when inquire they created the human form. It must be remembered that a very great distance exists between this form and man's physical body. physical body in quotes is all that goes on by way of physical and chemical processes in the human being. With a man of the present age, all this goes on within the lines of the human form. But this human form itself is through and through a thing of spirit. Strange indeed and solemn with physical senses in the physical world to behold a spirit thing in man's form. To anyone who possesses spiritual sight, this human form appears in fact as a real imagination come down into the physical world. To see imaginations, one must go out of the physical into the neighboring spiritual world. And then one sees how similar the human form is to these imaginations. The emergence of this human form marks the first period in the retrospect when the human soul looks back over its lives between death and new birth. At the same time is revealed the depth of the relation which exists between man and the hierarchy of the archai. Even at this period, one can already speak of at least the intimation of a difference between earth life and life between death and new birth. The hierarchy of arai work rhythmically in alternating epochs at the making

of man's form. In doing so, they at one time direct the thoughts by which the will of each of them is directed more toward the cosmos outside the earth. Another time they gazed down upon the earth and the combined influence of what comes from the earth and what comes from the cosmos outside the earth gives shape to the human form which is thus an actual expression of man's being at the same time a terrestrial and an extraterrestrial cosmic being.

The human form here described as created by the hierarchy of the arai includes however not merely the exterior contours of the figure and the surface modeling as marked by the boundary of the skin but also all the lines of force involved in the man's carriage in the adjustment of his powers of movement to the conditions of earth and in his ability to make his body an organ of expression for the life within. in that man can assume an upright posture under earthly conditions of gravitation. That he can preserve his balance amidst them whilst moving freely. That he can release his arms and hands from the weight of gravitation and use them in freedom. All this and much else which lies inside but yet is form man owes to the creation of the arai hierarchy. It was all prepared by them beforehand in the life which even for this early period may be called life between death and a new birth. All was there being prepared in such a way that in the third period namely our present age man himself has the ability during his life between death and a new birth to take part in working out this form for his coming life on earth.

Leading thoughts number one the lies between death and new birth also show three periods. In the first period, man lives entirely within the hierarchy of the archai. By them, the preparations are laid for his future human form in the physical world.

Leading thoughts number two, the arkai thereby prepare the human being at the same time for the development later on of free self-consciousness. For free self-consciousness can only grow up in beings whose form thus created gives them the means to bring this self-consciousness from an inward impulse of the soul to outward expression.

Leading thoughts number three, thus it is seen how the first seeds of those properties and powers in man which come to light in our present age were predisposed long ago in past ages of the world. and how the microcosm grows out of the macrocosm.

The end of letter 17. You are listening to Rudolph Steiner audio.com. This is a reading of letters uh from collected works 26 by Rudolfph Steiner. The book is called the Myyle Mystery. This is letter 18 entitled What is Seen on Looking Back into Man's Previous Lives Between Death and New Birth Part Two.

In a second period, man passes from the domain of the archai into that of the archangels. With these, however, he is not bound up in such a bodily spiritual manner as he was with the archai. With the archangel hierarchy, his connection is a more spiritual one. It is nevertheless so intimate that one still could not speak at this period of man's being in any way detached from the spiritual world.

From the archangel hierarchy, man receives for his ether body. What in this body corresponds to the form in the physical body which he owes to the archive. Even as the physical body is adapted by its form to the earth to be the vehicle on earth for man's self-consciousness, so is the ether body adapted to the conditions of extra earthly cosmic forces. In the physical body lives the earth. In the ether body lives the star world.

All that man bears within him of inner forces. So that while being upon earth, he yet frees himself from the earth in posture, movement, and gesture. All this he owes to the creation of the archangels in his ether body. As the earth forces live by means of its formation in the physical body, so in the ether body there live those forces which from all sides from the circumference of the cosmos stream in toward the earth. The earth forces that live in the physically apparent formation of the body are such as make the form a comparatively fixed and final one. The outlines of the man remain with some subordinate changes fixed for his entire earth life. His aptitudes for movement harden into set habits and so on.

With the ether body, all is in continual motion, reflecting the changes in the constellations of the stars during human earth life. Even with such changes in the heavens as day and night, the ether body adapts its form accordingly, but also in accordance with the particular changes which take place between its own birth and death. The adaptation of the ether body in this manner to the heavenly forces is in no contradiction to what has been spoken of elsewhere as the gradual detachment of the starry heavens from the divine spirit powers. It is true that in very olden times there dwelt in the stars the living will of gods, the living intelligence of gods. Whereas in later times, all this passed over into the calculable. The gods no longer act directly upon man through what is now become their finished work. Man, however, gradually comes through his ether body into a relation of his own with the stars, just as through his physical body, he comes into a relation of his own with the gravity of Earth.

What man collects and fits into himself when he comes down out of the spirit world to be born upon earth, his ether body, which gathers into itself the cosmic forces from beyond the earth, was created by the archangel hierarchy during this second period. A very important thing which man acquires through this hierarchy is that he belongs to a group of people upon earth. Men are differentiated over the face of the earth. When one looks back into this second period, one does not find the differentiation of today into races and nations, but a somewhat other and more spiritual one, arising from the fact that upon various parts of the earth, the star influences fall in various constellations. In the relative distribution of land and water, in climate, in vegetation, etc., The starry heavens are living and acting upon earth. In so far as man has to adapt himself to these relations which are heavenly relations upon earth, the necessary adaptation belongs to his ether body and the formation thus given to it is the creation of the choir of ark angaloy.

This however is the very time during this second period when the luciferic and arammonic powers come into man's life and in a special way. It is necessary for them to come into it. Although at first sight it appears as though man would thereby be driven down below the level of his manhood. For man to develop the consciousness of self in earth life, he must become much more thoroughly detached from the divine spiritual world which gave him his origin then can be done by that world of itself. It takes place during the time when the archangels are at work upon him because his link with the spiritual world is then no longer such a strong one as it was during the time when the archai were at work. Lucifer and Aramman are more of a match for the more purely spiritual forces which proceed from the archangels than for the sturdier forces of the archai. The luciferic powers give the ether form in all its tendencies a much stronger inclination toward the star world than it would have if only those divine spirit powers were at work who were connected with man from his origin. And by the armonic powers, the form and configuration of the physical body becomes more deeply entangled with the weight of earth than would be the case if these powers were unable to exert an influence.

Hereby the seed is laid in man of future full self-consciousness and free will. For though the armonic powers detest free will, yet their effect upon man by carrying him away from his proper world of divine spirit is to implant the first seed of free will in him. The immediate result, however, is that in this second period, all that has been accomplished in man by the various hierarchies from the seraraphim to the ark angeloy is pressed more deeply into the physical and ether bodies than could have been done without the influence of the luciferic and arammonic powers. But for their influence, the action of the hierarchies would remain more in the astral body and the eye capital. Thus, the grouping of mankind which arises on earth is not that more spiritual one for which the archangels are striving. Impressed into the physical body, the spiritual forces are turned into their opposite. Instead of the more spiritual one comes the differentiation into races and nations. Were it not for the lucifhpheric and armonic influences, men would see themselves and one another upon earth, differentiated from the heavens above. The various groups would live one with another in the relation of beings who share in love a spiritual treasure, freely giving and freely taking each from each. In races and nations is seen the downdrag of earth manifested in man's body. In that other spiritual grouping, there would have been seen a reflected image of the divine spiritual world.

Yet along with all this, the first dispositions had to be laid in human evolution for the future full consciousness of self. This again meant that mitigated, it is true, but still with a certain distinctness of form, those original primeval differentiations of mankind were retained, which had existed when in ancient days man passed over from the hierarchy of the exusi to that of the archai. Man went through this stage of his evolution as through a cosmic school, alive to it all in a state between feeling and seeing. He had not as yet evolved any conscious knowledge that this was all an essential preparation for his own future self-consciousness. But the in quotes feeling vision at that period of the forces engaged in his evolution was nevertheless important for the engrafting of self-consciousness in the astral body and the eye capital.

In respect of man's thinking, what happened at that time was that the luciferic powers gave him a bent which inclined him still to remain immersed in the old forms of spiritual life. and not to adapt himself to its new forms. For Lucifer's endeavor is always to preserve for man the earlier forms of life. And so it came about in the development of man's thinking. Little by little in his life between death and new birth, man evolved and elaborated the faculty which in primeval times had endowed his inner life with thoughts. In those primeval times, this faculty had been able to behold the spiritual in things, though it was very like the way man now takes hold of the world in mere sense perception. For in those days, the physical wore the spiritual on its surface. Today, however, this thinking faculty conserved from the earlier age can only act like sense perception. The faculty to rise in the act of thought to the spirit gradually declined and died away and this became fully manifest when in the age of the spiritual soul the spiritual world became veiled for man in complete obscurity. So then it came about that in the 19th century the best of the natural scientists who could not become mere materialists said to themselves quote nothing remains for us but to explore that world alone which admits of being explored by the senses and in terms of measure number and weight. We have however no right to deny the existence of a spiritual world behind this sensible one. They were thus indicating that there might may be a world of light unknown to man where he is staring into darkness only.

As man's thought was put out of time and place by Lucifer, so by Aramman his will. This latter became endowed with a tendency to a kind of freedom to which it should only have attained later. Freedom of this sort is no real freedom but only the illusion of it. Mankind lived for a long while in this illusion of freedom. It gave men no possibility of evolving the true spiritual idea of freedom in their minds. They wavered to and fro between the various opinions that man is free or that he is caught in the meshes of hard and fast necessity. And when with the dawning age of consciousness the real freedom came, men failed to understand it. Because their understanding had been too long engaged with the illusion of freedom. Everything which had implanted itself in man's inner being during the evolution of his lives between death and new birth in this second stage was carried on by him as a cosmic memory into the third stage in which he is still living at the present time.

In this stage he holds a relation to the hierarchy of angaloy similar to that which he held in the second of the ark angaloy. Only the relation to the angaloy is one which enables him to attain to complete selfdependent individuality. For the angaloy, not now the whole choir, but one angalos for one man confine themselves toffecting a right connection between his lives between death and new birth and his earth lives. A fact here worthy of notice is that in the second stage of man's evolution during the lives between death and new birth the whole hierarchy of ark angaloy are at work for each single man. Later on the guidance of the various nations and tribes devolves upon this hierarchy and here for one nation there is one archangel as spirit of the nation. In the races of men, the primeval powers, the archive remain active. Here again, for one race, there is one being at work out of the hierarchy of the archive as spirit of that race. Thus, the man of the present age retains within him during the life also between death and new birth a cosmic memory of what he has learned from this life in its previous stages. And even where in the physical world spiritual guidance manifests itself in such a form as in races and nationalities, there too this cosmic memory is plainly present.

Leading thoughts number one. In a second period of evolution in the lives between death and new birth, man passes into the domain of the archangeloy. During this period, the seed of later self-consciousness is planted in the human soul. The predisposition for it having already been created in the first period in the shaping of the human form.

Leading thoughts number two, man during this second period is driven by the luciferic and arammonic influences deeper into the physical world than would have happened without their influence.

Leading thoughts number three. In the third period, man comes into the domain of the angaloy whose influence however is only exerted in the astral body and the eye. This period is the present. What took place in the first two periods lives on in human evolution and explains the fact that in the age of the spiritual soul during the 19th century, man is left staring into the spiritual world as into total darkness.

The end of letter 18. You are listening to rudolphsteineraudio.com. This is a reading of the Mikeyle mystery by Rudolfph Steiner a part of collected works volume 26 the letters collected together and this is letter number 19 entitled What is the Earth in Reality in the Macrocosm.

The successive stages in the growth of the cosmos and mankind have been regarded in these studies from the most various aspects. It has been seen that the forces of his being come to man from the extraterrestrial cosmos. All except those which give him his consciousness of self. These he has from the earth. This gives at once the significance of the earth world for man. To this now comes the question what significance has the earth world for the macrocosm? To arrive at an answer to this question, we must look back at the previous observations. The macrocosm is seen by the clairvoyant consciousness of the seer in ever greater fullness of life. The farther back his vision penetrates into the past. Its life in a remote past is such that at a certain point all calculability of its life manifestations ceases. From this fullness of life, man is gradually separated out. The macrocosm passes over more and more into the sphere of the calculable. Therewith, however, it slowly dies out in the same measure as man. The microcosm emerges as an independent being out of the macrocosm. The macrocosm dies. The cosmic present shows an extinct macrocosm. But in the process, not only man has arisen out of the macrocosm has arisen also the earth.

Man who draws from the earth the forces for his own self-consciousness is inwardly much too close to the earth to have a clear perception of its essential character and being. In all their active development of self-consciousness during the age of the spiritual soul, men have accustomed themselves to turn their attention to the size of the universe in space and to look upon the earth as a grain of dust of no significance in comparison with the physical spatial universe. It may therefore at first seem strange when spiritual observation of the facts discloses the true cosmic significance of this supposed in quotes grain of dust.

The substructure of the earth is the mineral world in which the other kingdoms of nature, the vegetable and animal worlds are as it were embedded. Through the whole run those living forces which manifest themselves during the course of the year in its successive phenomena. If we look at the vegetable world in autumn and winter, it manifests forces of physical decay and death. The consciousness of the seer recognizes in this form of manifestation the inner being of those forces which have brought about the decay of the macrocosm. In spring and summer the life of the plant world is a manifestation of growing sprouting forces. Claravoyan consciousness recognizes in this growing sprouting life not only the green bounty of the revolving year but a surplus. The surplus is one of young seed force. The plants bear within them more young seed force than they can use for the growth of leaves and flowers and fruit. This excess of young seed force can be perceived with spiritual sight streaming forth beyond the earth world into the macrocosm outside it. So too an excess of force streams from the mineral kingdom into the cosmos beyond the earth. It is the task of this excess of mineral force to carry the forces from the plants to their allotted places in the macrocosm. Under the influence of the mineral forces, the plant forces shape themselves into the new image of an ordered macrocosm. Again, there are forces which go forth from the animal world. These forces do not, however, act like the mineral and vegetable ones radiating outward from the earth, but in such a way that all that is carried out from the plant world by the mineral forces into the universe to take shape there is held together in a sphere, a globe, so as to present the aspect of a macrocosm rounded in on all sides and self-contained.

Such is the true character and being of earth as seen to spiritually perceptive consciousness. It stands as a source of new life in the midst of the dead and dying macrocosm as out of the little plant seed in space so small and insignificant. The large and perfect plant grows up again when the old one is dead and fallen. So out of that grain of dust, the earth, a new macrocosm will grow up while the old one dies and falls to pieces. A true view of the earth in its real character in being sees everywhere in it the springing life seed of a forthcoming world. Thereby alone can one arrive at an understanding of the natural world and its kingdoms by learning to recognize in them all this seedling life.

Man's earthly existence is carried on in the midst of this new upspring life. He has his part in the upspring of the new as well as in the life that is extinct and dead. From the dead he has his thinking forces. So long as in the past these thinking forces came from the still living macrocosm, they gave no basis for self-conscious man. They lived as forces of growth in man who had as yet no consciousness of self. The forces of thought must have no inherent life of their own if they are to afford a basis for man's free self-consciousness. They with the dead and dying macrocosm must remain dead shadows of what was living in an earlier cosmic age.

On the other hand, man has his part in the earth's new upspring life. From this he has his will forces. These are very life. But just because of this, man cannot partake in their real being with his self-consciousness. They send forth their beams in the interior of the human being, radiating into the thought shadows. With them mingles the stream of shadows and in this mingled stream where free human thought unfolds amid the new upspring life of earth. During the age of the spiritual soul, there grows to full free life in man, the consciousness of his human self. The past casting shadows, the future holding seeds of new reality meet in the being of man. and their meeting is the human life of the present.

That this is the case becomes clear at once to the consciousness of the seer when turning to that region of the spirit world which directly adjoins the physical and which is also the scene of Micael's labors. The life of the whole earthly world grows plain when underlying it all one recognizes the life seed of a new universe. Every plant in its variety, every stone appears in a new light to the human soul, which learns to perceive how every one of these forms of being through its special life, through its special shape, contributes to make the entire earth, the embryo seed of a new reviving macrocosm. Let anyone but once try to make the thought of these facts alive within himself and he will feel what such a thought can signify for the human heart and mind.

Leading thoughts number one. In the beginning of the age of the spiritual soul, men have accustomed themselves to direct their observation to the physical proportions of the universe in space and to regard primarily its bigness. In this respect, accordingly they speak of the earth as a grain of dust in the midst of this to physical appearance so gigantic universe.

Leading thoughts number two to the consciousness of the seer this grain of dust reveals itself as the first life seed of a newly arising macrocosm. Whilst the old macrocosm can be seen to have died out, it was necessary for it to die and become extinct in order that man might separate himself out from it in full self-consciousness.

Leading thoughts number three. In the present cosmic age, man takes part in the dead and dying macrocosm with his thinking forces which give him freedom. Whilst with his will forces whose real being is hid from him, he takes part in the young macrocosm that is springing up as earthborn seed into a new life.

The end of letter 19. You are listening to rudolphsteineraudio.com. This is a reading of the Mikeyle mystery by Rudolfph Steiner. Uh part of collected works volume 26. I will mention again the translator is E. Bowen Wedgwood uh revised by George Adams in this second edition. This is letter number 20 entitled Sleep and Waking in the Light of the Previous Observations.

Sleep and waking has been a theme frequently discussed in our anthroposophical studies and from various points of view. But with facts of life such as these, the understanding of them requires to be carried to a new depth every time. After studying a different aspect of the world, all that has been said about the earth as life's seed of a new rising macrocosm makes it possible now to bring a deepened understanding to our views of sleeping and waking.

In his waking state, man lives in the thought shadows cast by a dead and dying world and in will impulses into whose inner being he as little sees in ordinary consciousness as he sees what is going on in deep dreamless sleep. With the inflow of the subconscious will impulses into the thought shadows arises the free self-directed consciousness of the individual self. In this self-consciousness lives the I capital. Whilst man is in this state, awake to the life of the world around him, through all the feelings that inwardly arise in him, there run non-early cosmic impulses that reach from a far distant cosmic past into the present. He is not conscious of this. A being can be conscious of that alone in which it takes part through its own dying forces, not through the forces of growth which feed its life. Thus, man comes to self-realization through the loss from his mind's eye e of that which is the very basis of his own inner being. This however is precisely what enables him whilst in the waking state to feel himself utterly immersed in the thought shadows. No flicker of life disturbs the inner state of participation in the world of the dead and dying. This quote life amid the dead and dying close quote conceals however the essential characteristic of the earth world namely that it is the life seed of a new universe. Man in his waking state does not perceive the earth as the earth truly is. Her first beginnings of new cosmic life escape him. So man lives in that which the earth gives him as basis for his self-consciousness. He loses sight in his mind's eye of the true form of his own inner impulses during this age of self-conscious ego development and loses sight too of the true form of his surroundings. But it is just in this hovering above the stable reality of the world that man realizes the stable reality of his eye capital realizes himself as a self-conscious being. Above him is the non-early extraterrestrial cosmos. Beneath him in the earth region is a world whose real being remains concealed. Between the two, the free being of the eye becomes revealed, radiant in the fullness of perceptive knowledge and free will.

In sleep, it is otherwise. Here man lives in his astral body and eye amid the young seedlife of earth. The most intense quote will to life close quote is all about man during his dreamless sleep. Through his dreams also runs this stir of life, though not so strongly, but that the man can be aware of them in a sort of half-consciousness. And in this half-conscious dream panorama are seen the forces by whose means the human being is woven out of the cosmos. In the passing flash of the dream can be seen the astral power as it flows into the ether body and quickens the man to life. In the surging life and light of dreams, thought is living still. Only after awakening is thought hemmed in by those forces which bring about its death. Reduce it to a shadow. This connection between the dream picture and the waking thought is of great significance. Man thinks with the same forces as those which enable him to grow and to live. Only for man to become a thinker, these forces must be ever dying. Here is the point where true understanding may dawn upon the mind of why it is that man in his thinking grasps reality. He has in his thoughts the dead likeness of that by which he himself is formed and created out of a living life-giving reality. The dead likeness. But this dead likeness is the life work of the greatest of all painters the cosmos itself. From the likeness, the life indeed is gone. Were the life not gone, man's eye could not evolve. Nevertheless, this likeness contains the whole content of the universe in all its glory. So far as was possible at the time within the general lines of the book, I pointed out this inner relation between thinking and world reality long ago in my philosophy of freedom. It is indicated in the place where I speak of a bridge leading from the depths of the thinking eye to the depths of nature's reality.

The reason why sleep acts upon the ordinary consciousness as an extinguisher is because it leads into the teeming life of earth shooting and sprouting up into the new growing macrocosm. When the imaginative consciousness puts an end to this extinguishing action of sleep, the earth which then presents itself to the human soul is not one of sharp outlines in mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. It is rather a living process that the soul has then before her, a living process kindled in the earth and flaming out into the macrocosm. Thus, man has to raise himself with the reality of his own I am out of the world's reality in his waking state in order to arrive at free and independent self-consciousness. In his sleeping state, he unites himself once more with world reality. Such at the present cosmic moment is the rhythm of man's earthly life outside the inner being of the world. but with the conscious experience of his own being and within the inner being of the world. Whilst the consciousness of his own being is extinguished in the state between death and a new birth, the eye of man is living within the beings of the spirit world. There everything comes to consciousness that escaped consciousness during the waking life of earth. There the macrocosmic forces pass across the scene from all their fullness of life in the far distant past down to their dead and dying existence in the present. But the earthly forces too display themselves which are the life seed of the growing macrocosm that is to be. And man looks there into his sleeping states as during earth life he looks at the earth shining in the sunlight. Only because the macrocosm such as it is in the present has become a thing of the dead is it possible for the human being between death and new birth to lead a life which compared to the waking life on earth signifies a higher awakening. and awakening which enables man completely to master the forces of which but a transitory flicker is seen in dreams. These are forces filling the whole cosmos. They permeate everything. From them the human being draws the impulses with which on his descent to earth he fashions his own body. The masterpiece of the macrocosmic artist. What in dreams is but a brief sunab abandoned glimmer lives in the spirit world transfused with spiritual sunlight waiting until the beings of the higher hierarchies or man himself shall call it forth in creative work to the molding of new life and being

Leading thoughts number one in the waking state in order to gain living knowledge of himself in full and free self-consciousness man is obliged to forego the living knowledge of reality in its true form both in his own existence and in nature's. He lifts himself out of this sea of reality so that in his thought shadows he may make his own eye his own real experience.

Leading thoughts number two. In the sleeping state, man lives with the life of the earth around him. But this life extinguishes his consciousness of self.

Leading thoughts number three. In dreams there flickers up in half consciousness that forceful world reality of which man's being is woven and from which he fashions his body when he comes down out of the spirit world. In Earth life, this forceful world reality is reduced to death in shadow thoughts since only thus can it give the basis for self-conscious man.

The end of letter 20. You are listening to rudolfsteineraudio.com. This is a reading of the mikele mystery. The letters from collected works volume 26 by Rudolfph Steiner. This is letter 21 entitled Nosis and Anthroposophy.

At the time when the mystery of Goltha was consummated, Nosis was the form which thought took amongst that portion of mankind who at the time were able to understand with knowledge and not merely with dim feeling. This the greatest impulse in man's earthly evolution. To understand what was the peculiar disposition of soul in which the nosis lived within men, we must keep in sight that the age of this nosis was the age when the intellectual or mind soul was being developed. In this fact, we may also find the reason why the nosis vanished almost entirely out of human history. that it should thus have vanished is perhaps until the cause be understood one of the most amazing occurrences in the whole progress of mankind.

The development of the intellectual or mind soul was preceded by that of the sensient soul and this again by the development of the sensient body. So long as the facts of the world are being perceived through the sensient body, all man's knowledge lives in his senses, the world is seen, colored, heard, sounding, and so on. But in the colors, in the sounds, in the varying states of warmth, a whole world of spiritual beings is made known of a in quotes material substance presenting certain appearances of color, warmth, and so on. There is no question then talk of spiritual beings who reveal themselves through what the senses perceive. In this age there is as yet no special exercise of an understanding that exists in man alongside of and distinct from sense perception. Man either yields himself up with his whole human being to the outer world and then the gods reveal themselves to him through his senses or else he draws back from the outer world within his own soul life and then feels in his inner man a dull indistinct sense of life.

A notable change sets in when the sensient soul begins to develop. The revelation of the divine world through the senses begins to fade. In its place begins an outward perception of sense impressions, so to speak, God divested of colors, states of warmth and so on. Meanwhile, within the divine world reveals itself in spiritual form, in picture ideas of the mind. Man now perceives the world from two aspects. from without through the impressions of sense and from within through the spiritual impressions of the mind in the form of ideas. Man must next learn to have as distinct as clearly formed a perception of these inner spiritual impressions as he had before of the god informed impressions of the senses. So long as the reign of the sensient soul age lasts, he can do this. For out of his own inner being, the idea pictures rise up in full and vivid form. His mind is filled from within by a sense-free spirit content, which is a copy of the world content. If formerly the gods revealed themselves to him, robed in sense vestments, they now reveal themselves in spirit vestments. This was essentially the time when the nosis came into being and when it flourished. A wonderful living lore is there in which man knows himself a partaker when he unfolds his inner being in purity so that the divine content may be revealed within it. From the fourth down to the first millennium before the coming of the mystery of Goltha, this nosis was prevalent throughout the portion of mankind who had advanced farthest in the way of knowledge.

Then begins the age of the intellectual or mind soul. Now the world images of gods no longer rise up of themselves out of the inner man. Man himself must exert inward power in order to evoke them from his soul. The outer world with its sense impressions becomes a question. Man when he exerts the inward power and evokes the divine world images obtains answers. But the images are pale in comparison with their earlier form. It is this phase of the human soul which comes to such marvelous expression in ancient Greece. The Greek felt himself in the midst of the outer world which strikes the senses and he felt in the outer world the magic which could arouse his own inner power to the unfolding of world pictures. On philosophic ground, this phase of the human soul found its development in Platonism. But in the background behind all this was the world of the mysteries. here was faithfully treasured and preserved all that had come over as nosis from the age of the sensient soul. Human souls were trained to be its faithful treasurers. The intellectual or mind soul developed in the ordinary course of evolution. The sensient soul was quickened by special training. And so behind the ordinary religious and social life of the day there flourished more particularly in this age of the intellectual or mind soul a mystery life of a very richly developed form. Here the divine world images continued to have life in as much as they were made the spiritual content of cult and ritual. look into the inner side of these mysteries and one sees the world pictured in the most wonderful ceremonies and rituals. The human beings in whose inner life this had been awakened were those who were also able to penetrate the mystery of Golgatha at the time when it was consummated in its profound cosmic significance. But it was a mystery life which kept quite aloof from the external world and its affairs in order to cultivate the spirit picture world in purity. And it became ever harder for men's souls to call forth the pictures. Then in the highest places of the mysteries, spirit beings descended out of the spiritual cosmos to aid struggling men in their efforts after knowledge. So the impulses of the sensient soul age were continued and further developed under the influence of the gods themselves. There arose a nosis of the mysteries of which none but a very few had even the faintest conception. Alongside this mystery nosis was what men could take in with the intellectual or mind soul. This was the exoteric nosis of which fragments have come down to posterity. In the esoteric nosis of the mysteries, men became ever more incapable of rising to the development of the sensient soul. And so this esoteric wisdom passed over more and more into the care and cultivation of the gods alone. This is one of the deep secrets in the historic evolution of mankind. divine mysteries in quotes so to speak were at work in it from the first centuries of Christianity down into the middle ages. In these divine mysteries, the treasure which men could no longer preserve was preserved in earthly life by angelic beings. And so the nosis of the mysteries lived on whilst the exoteric nosis was being diligently exterminated. The world image content treasured in a spiritual way by spiritual beings, preserved in the nosis of the mysteries so long as it was needed for the advancement of mankind could not indeed be made accessible to the conscious understanding of men's souls. But the feeling content could be preserved so that at the right cosmic moment when men were fitly prepared, it might be given to them and bring them the warmth of soul with which the spiritual soul might later on and in a new way penetrate into the kingdom of the spirit. Thus, spirit beings built the bridge between the old world content and the new. There are indications to be found of this mystery of human evolution. The holy vessel of the grail, the cup of jasper used by Christ when he broke the bread in which Joseph of Arythea caught the blood which flowed from the pierced side of Jesus. The cup that is which held the mystery of Golgtha was taken, so legend says, into the custody of angels until the castle of the Grail had been built by Titel, and it could descend upon those human beings who were duly prepared to receive it. Spirit beings treasured the world images in which lived the mystery of Golgatha. And when the time was come, they sent down not indeed the imaginative content that was not possible, but the feeling content into the minds of men. It can be but a stimulus, this feeling legacy of an ancient knowledge implanted in the hearts of men. Yet it is a very powerful stimulus from which in our age out of the spiritual soul there may grow up by the light of Micael's agency a new and full understanding of the mystery of Golgatha. Anthroposophy is striving after this new understanding. From the description given, it is clear that anthroposophy cannot be a revival of the nosis, for this was the mode of knowledge of the sensient soul. Whereas anthroposophy has to draw a no less rich content of knowledge out of the spiritual soul and in a totally new way.

Leading thoughts number one, the nosis develops in its characteristic form in the age of the sensient soul. Fourth to first millennium before the incidence of the mystery of Golatha. The divine reveals itself in this age to man inwardly as a spiritual content of the mind. Whereas in the previous period, the age of the sensient body, it had revealed itself in and with the sense impressions of the outer world.

Leading thoughts number two, in the age of the intellectual or mind soul, the divine as spiritual content has faded from the inner life and can be realized but faintly. The nosis is preserved in sternly guarded mysteries. And when men can preserve it no longer because they are no longer able to requaken the sensient soul, spirit beings take charge of it and carry over into the middle ages not indeed the knowledge content but the feeling content of it. This is indicated in the legend of the holy grail. Meanwhile, the exoteric nosis which found its way into the intellectual or mind soul is being forcibly exterminated.

Leading thoughts number three. Anthroposophy cannot be a revival of the nosis for Nosis was connected with the development of the sensient soul. The work of anthroposophy is by the light of Miley's agency to evolve out of the spiritual soul a new form of understanding of Christ and the world. Nosis was the old form of knowledge preserved from earlier times. The one best able at the time when the mystery of Goltha took place to convey this mystery to men's understanding.

The end of letter number 21. You are listening to rudolfphsteineraudio.com. This is a reading of the mikele mystery by Rudolfph Steiner. Letters taken out of collected works volume 26. This is letter number 22 entitled Man's Freedom in the Mielle Age.

In the human faculty of remembrance, there lives the reproduction in personal form of a cosmic power which once worked at the formation of man's being as was described in the last few letters. The same cosmic power continues, however, to be active at the present time. It works as the force of growth, as lifegiving impulse behind the scenes of human life. Here it expands the greater part of its force. Only one little part is separated off to become a function of the spiritual soul. There it works as the power of memory or remembrance. One must look at this power of remembrance in the proper light.

When man today in the present age of cosmic evolution perceives through his senses, this perceiving is a momentary lighting up in consciousness of world images. The lighting up comes when the sense is directed upon the outer world. It illumines the field of consciousness and disappears when the sense ceases to be turned upon the outer world. But what here lights up in the human soul can have no duration. For unless man could dismiss it promptly from his consciousness, he would become merged in this content of his consciousness and lose himself. He would no longer be himself. Only for a brief time in the so-called after images which so much interested Gerta may this lighting up from a sense perception have life in the consciousness. Neither must this content of consciousness become set or harden into real existence. It must remain image. It must no more become real than the image in the looking glass can become real. With anything that ended by making itself a reality in his consciousness, man would no less lose himself than with something that of itself was permanent. Here again, he could no more be himself. Sen's perception of the outer world is then an inward painting of the human soul, a painting without paints, a painting in spirit waxing and spirit waning. As in nature the rainbow comes and goes again and leaves no trace behind. So to all sense perception comes and passes away without itself of its own nature leaving any memory behind.

But with every perception there is at the same time another process transacted between the human soul and the world outside. It is a process that goes on in the background in remoter parts of the soul's life. There where the forces of growth, the life impulses are at work. And in this part of the soul's life, not a transitory image merely, but a real and lasting reproduction is imprinted with each act of perception. This man can bear, for it is a real world content playing its part in man's existence. It can take place without his losing himself any more than he loses himself when without his own full consciousness he grows or is nourished by his food.

When man now calls up his memories from the inner depths, it is an internal perception of what was permanently left by this second process that accompanies the external perception. Again the soul paints but now she paints the past that is living in her own human inner being. And again with this painting no lasting reality must be formed within the consciousness but only an image that comes and goes. Such is the connection in the human soul between the forming of mental conceptions, mental images in the moment of perception and remembrance.

The forces of remembrance have however a constant tendency to become more than they can be if man is not to lose himself as a self-conscious being. For these forces of remembrance are remnants of the past in man's evolution and as such they fall under the dominion of Lucifer. It is Lucifer's endeavor to give substance in man to the impressions of the outer world and to condense them so that they may continue to shine on as lasting mental conceptions in his conscious life. This endeavor of Lucifer's would be crowned with success were it not resisted by the mile forces. These will not let what is painted in the mind's inner light harden into real existence, but keep it coming and going as a fleeting picture. The excess of power which thus streams up but through Lucifer out of the inner man will be changed in the Micael age into imagining power. For little by little, the power of spiritual imagination will make

Its way into the general intellectual consciousness of mankind. That quote present instant close quote consciousness, however, which man now possesses, will not be thereby burdened with any weight of lasting reality. It will continue to live in pictures that come and go.

But with his imaginations, man rears himself a loft into a higher spirit world. Even as with his remembrances he reaches inward into his own human being. Man does not retain the imaginations within himself. They are engraved in permanent cosmic existence and then he can reproduce them ever a fresh in the passing pictures of his mental life. That which is saved by Micael from becoming fixed and hardened in the inner life of man is in this way received by the spiritual world. All that man realizes of the power of conscious imagining is converted at the same time into world content. That this is possible is a result of the mystery of Gatha. The Christ power imprints man's imagination upon the cosmos. the Christ power which is united to the earth. So long as this power was not united to the earth but worked from without upon the earth as a sun power, all impulses of growth and life went into the inner man. Man was built up and maintained by them out of the cosmos. Since the Christ impulse has entered into the life of earth, man has given back once more to the cosmos in his self-conscious being. Man from being a world being has become an earth being. It lies in him to become a world being once more after having as earth being become himself.

In this fact, namely that man in his momentary acts of mental conception, in the forming of mental images, is living not in real existence, but only in a reflection of real existence. In a picture existence, lies the possibility of evolving freedom. All real existence in the consciousness has compelling power. Only pictures cannot compel. Anything that may take place through the impression made by a mere picture will be quite independent of the picture itself. Man becomes free when with his spiritual soul he lifts himself out of the realm of real existence and emerges in a nonexistent picture realm. The momentous question then arises. Does not man lose real existence when with one part of his being he lets go of it and hurls himself into a realm of non-existence. Here again is a point where we are faced by one of the great problems in the contemplation of the world.

What is experienced in consciousness in the act of mental conception in the forming of mental images originated in the cosmos. As regards the cosmos, man plunges into non-existence. He frees himself in the act of mental conception from all forces of the cosmos. He paints the cosmos being himself outside it. If this were all, then for one cosmic instant, a flash of freedom would light up in the human being. But at the same instant, human being itself would be dissolved. Whilst however in his mental conceptions, man finds freedom from the cosmos he is nevertheless in his non-conscious soul life grafted into the whole of his previous earth lives and lives between death and new birth. As conscious man, he is in picture existence while he maintains himself in spiritual reality with his unconscious part. Whilst in the I capital of the present moment, he awakens to freedom. His eye of the past holds him firm in real existence. In respect of real existence, man, when forming a mental conception, is wholly reliant upon what he has become in the course of his cosmic and earthly past. In human evolution, the path here points to that abyss of nothing over which man leaps in the moment of becoming a free being. Mielle's action and the Christ impulse make the leap possible.

Leading thoughts number one, in mental conception, man is living with his spiritual soul, not in real existence, but in picture existence, in non-existence. Thereby he is freed from experiencing a common life with the cosmos. Pictures do not compel. Only real existence compels. And if man nevertheless suits his actions to the pictures, it is done quite independently of the pictures. That is to say, in freedom from the world.

Leading thoughts. Number two. At the instant of any such act of mental conception, the only thing that links man to the real existence of the world is what he himself has grown to be from the past through his previous earth lives and lives between death and new birth.

Leading thoughts number three. This is a leap as regards the cosmos over non-existence. A leap which man is only enabled to achieve through the action of Micaiah and through the Christ impulse.

The end of letter number 22. You are listening to Rudolph Steiner audio.com. This is a reading of the Miley mystery by Rudolfph Steiner. Letters extracted from collected works volume 26.

Letter number 23 entitled, "Where is man as a thinking and remembering being"

In mental conception thinking and in the awakening of remembrances, man is in the sphere of the physical world. Yet wheresoever he may look in this physical world, nowhere with his senses will he find anything that could give him the powers of mental conception and of remembrance.

In the act of mental conception, the consciousness of self arises. Self-consciousness, as indicated in the preceding letters, is a possession that man has acquired by the powers of the earth world. But these are earthly powers of a kind that remain hid from the observation of the senses. What man thinks in earthly life is, it is true, only what comes to him by means of his senses. But the power to think it does not come to him from any of the things that he thus thinks. Where then is to be found this power which out of the realm of earth forms mental conception, thinking, and the images of memory. One finds it if the spirit's eye e be directed toward that which man brings with him from his previous earth lives. Ordinary consciousness knows nothing of this. It lives of itself unconscious in man. But it shows itself at once when man sets foot on earth after the spiritual state of existence to be related to those earthly forces which do not come within the sphere of sense observation and sense thinking.

It is not with his mental conceiving his thinking that man is in this sphere but with his willing which works itself out along the lines of his destiny. In view of the fact that the earth contains forces which lie outside the sphere of the senses, we may speak of the in quotes spiritual earth as opposite pole to the in quotes physical earth. The conclusion then is that man as a willing being lives in and with the spiritual earth, but that as a mentally conceiving or thinking being, although he is in the midst of the physical earth, he does not live with it. Man as a thinking being carries over forces from the spiritual world into the physical. But with these forces he remains a spirit being that only appears in the physical world but enters into no community with it. The only community entered into by mentally conceiving thinking man in the [snorts] course of his earthly existence is with the spiritual earth. And it is this community with the spiritual earth from which his individual self-consciousness grows. The origin of self-consciousness is due to spiritual processes which man undergoes in earthly life.

Comprehending in spiritual vision all that is here described. We have before us the human eye capital spiritually seen with the experiences of memory. We come into the region of the human astral body in remembering. It is not merely as in the act of mental conception or thinking the results of previous earth lives that send their stream into the eye of the present moment. It is the active forces of the spirit world to which man was subjected between death and a new birth which now stream into his inner life. These forces stream into the astral body. Here [snorts] again there is in the physical earth no direct field for the reception of this stream of forces. Man as a remembering being can as little unite himself in remembrance with the things and processes perceived by his senses as he can unite himself with them as a thinking being in the act of forming mental conceptions. He enters however as a remembering being into community with something which though not physical translates the physical into processes into proceedings namely with the rhythmic processes in nature and in human life. In nature there is a rhythmic alternation of day and night, a rhythmic succession of seasons and so on. In man the breathing and the circulation of the blood proceed rhythmically. So to the alternation of sleep and waking and so on. Rhythmic processes are nothing physical whether in nature or in man. They might be called semi-spiritual. The physical as a thing disappears in the rhythmic process. In his remembering, man with his inner being is translated into the rhythm which is both his and nature's. He is then living in his astral body.

The aim of the Indian yoga is to enter completely into the life of rhythm. It is an endeavor to get away from the field of mental conception of man's eye and in a process of living inner experience similar to the process of remembrance to see into that world which lies behind what can be known to the ordinary consciousness. The spiritual life of the west must not pursue knowledge by suppressing the eye. Rather, it must educate the eye to the perception of the spiritual. This cannot be done if one pursues a way from the sensible into the rhythmic world where all that one realizes in the rhythm is the passing over of the physical into a semi-spiritual. The better alternative is to seek that sphere of the spirit world which manifests itself in the rhythm. Two ways are therefore possible. First, the experiencing of the physical in the rhythmic realm where the physical passes into the semi-spiritual. This is an older road no longer to be taken today. Secondly, the experiencing of that spiritual world of which the world rhythm both in and outside of man is the special sphere even as the special sphere of man is the earth world with its physical beings and physical events. Now this is the spirit world to which belongs all that is being done in the present cosmic moment by Micaia. A spirit such as Micael by taking up his habitation in the rhythmic world brings what otherwise would lie in Lucifer's domain into the field of purely human evolution over which Lucifer has no influence. This all becomes plainly visible when man enters into imagination. For the soul in her imaginings lives in rhythm. And Miley's world is the world that manifests itself in rhythm with remembrance memory. We are already in this same world but not very deep. The ordinary consciousness knows nothing of its life. And when we enter imagination, then out of the rhythmic world there rises up first the world of subjective memories. This however passes over at once into the world of ideal forms whose life is in the ether, the archetypes created by the divine spiritual world for the physical. We experience the ether lighting up in cosmic pictures, bearing within it the creative process of the world and the forces of the sun weaving in this ether. Here they not only radiate out of the light. They conjure forth the cosmic archetypes. The sun is now revealed as the world painter, the cosmic artist. The sun is the cosmic counterpart of those impulses which in man paint the pictures of mental conception of thought.

Leading thoughts number one. Man as a thinking being lives within the sphere of the physical earth. But he enters into no community with this physical earth. His life is that of a being of mind and spirit open to the impressions of the physical world. But the forces for his thought come to him from the spiritual earth by the same route as that which leads him as the result of previous earth lives to the realization of his destiny in life.

Leading thoughts number two. What lies in the life of remembrance of memory is already in that world where in rhythm the physical becomes half-spiritual and where such spiritual events take place as are being enacted at the present cosmic moment by Micael.

Leading thoughts number three. For anyone who has learned rightly to know thinking and remembrance, it becomes understandable how man as an earth being lives within the sphere of earth, yet never becomes wholly immersed in this earth's sphere. As a being from beyond the earth, man is seeking through community with the spiritual earth to attain his own self-consciousness and therew with the fulfillment of his eye.

The end of letter 23. You are listening to rudolfphsteineraudio.com. This is a reading of the Miley mystery uh letters extracted from collected works 26 by Rudolfph Steiner.

Letter 24 entitled man in his macrocosmic being.

The cosmos reveals itself to man in the first instance from two sides, the earth and outside the earth, the universe of stars. To earth and her forces, man feels himself related. Life teaches him this relationship with great distinctness. Not in the same way does he feel himself in the present age related to the star world about him. This however only lasts so long as he remains unconscious of his ether body. To lay hold of the ether body in imaginations is to acquire the same feeling of kinship with the star universe as one has through the consciousness of the physical body with the earth. The forces which put the ether body into the world come from the circumference of the cosmos just as the forces of the physical body radiate from the central point of the earth. But along with the ether forces that rain down upon the earth from the circumference of the cosmos there come also those cosmic impulses which work in the astral body of man. The ether is like an ocean on whose waves from all sides out of farthest worlds the astral forces come sailing to the earth.

In the present cosmic age, however, it is only the mineral and the vegetable kingdoms that can come into direct relation with this astral life streaming in onto the earth upon the ways of the ether. not the animal kingdom nor the human kingdom. With the animal kingdom, spiritual observation shows that what is at work in the embryo is not the astral life at the present day flowing to the earth, but that which flowed into it long ago in the old moon age. With the vegetable kingdom, one can see how its manifold marvelous forms are being shaped by the astral influences as they separate themselves out of the ether and hover over the plant world. With the animal world, one can see how from out of the spirit sphere, astral forces of old times that were active long ago during the old moon age of evolution have been preserved and are now at work. They work as old preserved forces which remain at the present day altogether in the spirit world but do not come out into the ether world. This form of astral influence is moreover transmitted by the present moon forces which have themselves remained over from the previous stage of the earth. We have then in the animal kingdom the result of impulses which in the previous evolutionary stage of the earth manifested themselves externally as elements of nature. Whereas in the present cosmic age they have withdrawn into the spirit world which flows with active force through the earth.

Now it is seen by spiritual observation that for the permeation of the physical and ether bodies with the astral body in the animal kingdom. The forces that are of importance are solely these astral forces which have been preserved from an earlier time in the present life of earth. But that once the animal has his astral body, then the sun impulses begin to be active in it. The sun forces can give the animal nothing for his astral life. Nevertheless, when once this is in the animal, they are required to provide for growth, nutrition, etc.

With the kingdom of man, it is otherwise. This too receives its astral element in the first place from the old preserved moon forces. But the sun forces have in them astral impulses which remain ineffective for the animal kingdom, but which in the human astral continue to act in the same manner as the moon forces acted when man was first permeated with astrality. In the astral body of the animal can be seen the moon world. In the astral body of the human being can be seen the harmonious accord of the sun and moon worlds. It is this sunlike power in the human astral body which makes it possible for man to take up into himself the outward radiating spiritual force that is in the earth and use it for the development of his self-consciousness.

Whatever is astral flows from the circumference of the universe. It acts either as a stream flowing in at the present time or as one that flowed in in olden times and has been preserved. On the other hand, everything which has to do with giving shape to the eye capital as bearer of individual self-consciousness must radiate from a star center. The astral works from the circumference. Everything of the eye kind from a central point. The earth as a star from its center gives the impulse for the human eye. Every star from its center radiates forces by which the eye of some being or other is shaped. This shows the polarity between star center and cosmic circumference. The description shows at the same time that the animal kingdom lives on today as a product of earlier forces which once had to do with the evolution of the earth. It exists by drawing on the preserved store of old astral forces and must disappear when these are exhausted. In man, on the contrary, new astral forces come in that are drawn from the sun power. These make it possible for him to carry on his evolution into the future. It is not possible, as all this shows, to understand man in his own special form of being unless one recognizes his connection with the whole star life as clearly as his connection with the earth. Even what man receives from the earth for the development of his self-consciousness proceeds from the action of the spirit world within the earthly sphere. That the sun power can give man what he needs for his astral life is the result of influences that were active during the old sun age. It was then that the earth received the capacity to develop the eye impulses of mankind. It is the spiritual part which the earth has preserved within her from the old sun life and which is kept from dying out by the sun influences of the present day. The earth herself was once sun. Then she passed over into a spiritual form. In the present cosmic age, what is sun works from without. This sun influence from without is a spring of ever renewing youth to those spirit forces from an earlier age which are wearing old. At the same time as an active force of the present, this sun influence keeps what is of the past from falling into Lucifer's domain. For whatever continues to work on as an influence from the past without being taken up into the forces of the present falls a prey to Lucifer.

Man's feeling of his own intimate connection with the extraterrestrial cosmos may be said in this cosmic age to be so dulled that he is not aware of it in his consciousness. It is not only dulled, it is deafened by the feeling of his intimate connection with the sphere of earth. Because man's consciousness of his individual self must be learned in the sphere of earth, he begins the age of the spiritual soul by growing so closely involved with this earthly sphere that it exerts a much stronger influence over him than is compatible with the course which his soul life should rightly take. Man is, as it were, deafened, dazed by the impressions of the sense world. Overpowered by their clamor, he fails to call up the free active thinking that has life in itself. The whole time, from the middle of the 19th century on, was a period of being dazed and deafened by the loudness of the sense impressions. It has been the great illusion of this period that in it people took this overpowerful life of the senses to be the right one. A life of sense which was doing its best to blot out all life in the non-early extraterrestrial cosmos. Into this dazed condition, the Arammonic powers could come in and work their will. Lucifer was more held in check by the sun forces than Aramman. Aramman was in a position to arouse notably amongst the men of science the dangerous notion that ideas are only applicable to the impressions of the senses. Accordingly, it is just in these circles that anthroposophy meets with but little understanding. Faced with the results of spiritual science, they try to understand them with their ideas. But these ideas cannot comprehend the spiritual because their inherent living knowledge is deafened and overpowered by the armonized science of the senses. And so people take alarm and think they would be committing themselves to a blind belief in authority if they were to enter seriously upon the results obtained by the spiritual seer. Darker and darker grew the extraterrestrial cosmos for human consciousness in the second half of the 19th century. When man again grows able to realize the life of ideas within him, even when not supporting himself and them upon the world of sense, then to the eyes of the inquirer, an answering light will stream again from the cosmos beyond the realm of earth. And this is to make acquaintance with Micael in his kingdom. When a time comes when the festival of Micael in the autumn fall will be kept in truth and inwardness, then in the feelings of those that keep the festival. There will arise with innermost sincerity as light motif this strain and live in men's consciousness. In the fullness of ideas, the soul experiences spirit light. Even when the outward show of the senses lingers, but as memory in the mind of man, when with some such tone of mind as this, man can celebrate the Myle festival, after it he will be able worthily to enter again into the world of the senses, and Arman will be unable to harm him.

Leading thoughts number one. With the beginning of the age of consciousness, dullness came over man's feeling of his connection with the extraterrestrial cosmos. On the other hand, his feeling of connection with the earth through his life and sense impressions grew so strong, more especially with the men of science, as to amount to a dazed and benumbed condition.

Leading thoughts number two. In this condition, the working of the arammanic powers is peculiarly dangerous. Where man lives under the illusion that his overpowering life incense impressions is the right thing and a real step to forward in evolution.

Leading thoughts. Number three. Man must find the power to shed light through his world of ideas and to live in these ideas as in a world of light even when unsupported by the clamorous world of the senses. In this living inner realization of the self-dependent and in their self-dependence luminous world of ideas will awake the feeling of man's connection with the non-early outer cosmos. A foundation will thus be laid for festivals of Micael.

The end of letter 24. You are listening to rudolfphsteineraudio.com. This is a reading of the mle mystery uh the extracted letters from collected works volume 26 by Rudolfph Steiner.

This is letter 25 entitled man's sensing and thinking systems in their relation to the world.

When man in the study of his own human being begins by applying the imaginative mode of knowledge to himself, he strips off in contemplation his sense system. He becomes for his own self-contemplation a being without a sense system. He does not cease to have before his soul pictures such as were previously conveyed by the organs of sense, but he ceases to feel himself connected with the physical outer world by means of these organs. The pictures which he has before his soul of the physical world outside are not now conveyed by the sense organs. They are a direct proof of the fact that through and beyond the sensory connection, man has all the time another connection with the natural world around him. One that is not conveyed by the outer senses. It is his connection with the spirit which finds embodiment in the outer world of nature.

In contemplation of this kind, the physical world drops away from man. It is the earthly element that is falling off. Man feels this earthly element no more investing him. It might be supposed that therew with his consciousness of self would vanish. This would appear to follow from what was said in our previous studies where the consciousness of self was described as being a result of man's connection with the earth being. This is not however the case. What man has acquired through the earthly element still remains his even when after acquiring it he strips the earthly wrapping off him in the living experience of knowledge seen as described with spiritual imaginative vision. It is plain that man's sense system is not after all so very closely bound up with him. It is not really he who is living in this sense system but the world around him. The world has built itself with its own form of being into the sensory organism of man. To the man therefore who views it with imaginative vision. This sensory organism too is a piece of outer world. It is a piece of outer world which certainly lies more close to him than the natural world around but which is nevertheless outer world. It is distinguished from the rest of the outer world only by this that into the latter man can only enter with cognition through the medium of sense perception. Whereas into his sense organism he enters livingly in immediate acquaintance. The sense organism is outer world. But into all the recesses of this outer world, man stretches out his own being of soul and spirit, which he brings with him from the spirit world on entering earthly life. Except for the fact that man enters into his sense organism and fills it with his own soul and spirit, this organism is as much outer world as is the plant world spread out round about him. The I E belongs when all is said and done to the world, not to the man. Just as the rose which the man perceives belongs not to him but to the world.

In the age through which man has just passed in cosmic evolution, scientifically minded persons began to maintain the view that color, sound, heat impressions are not really in the world, but in man. The supposed red color is not, they say, a thing outside in the real world environment of man, but merely the effect produced in the man himself by an unknown something. The truth however is the direct opposite of this. It is not that the color together with the eye e is part of the human being but that the eye together with the color is part of the world. Man is not passively taking into himself all through his life on earth a current of impressions from his earthly surroundings, but rather he himself is growing out from birth to death into this world outside him. It is significant that at the end of the dark age, in quotes, when man stares out into the world without inwardly realizing so much as a dawning glimmer of the spirit's light, the true picture of man's relation to this world about him should be converted into the direct opposite of the truth.

When in imaginative knowledge man has divevested himself of that first environing world in which he lives with his sense organism, he becomes inwardly aware of another organism by which the thinking process is supported even as the perception of sensory images is supported by the sense organism. And now he is aware that as man he is connected by this thinking organism with his cosmic environment of stars. End quote. Even as he was hitherto aware of being connected through the sense organism with his earth environment. He recognizes himself as a cosmic being. No more are his thoughts mere shadow pictures. They are saturated with reality like the sense pictures of sensible perception. And if the disciple of knowledge rises higher, namely to inspiration, he becomes aware that he can again strip off this world on which the thinking organism rests. Just as before he stripped off the earthly one. He clearly perceives that with his thinking organism too. He belongs not to his own being but to the world. He perceives how world thoughts are working through his own thinking system within him. Once more he becomes aware that in his thinking he is not taking into himself mere images of the world but growing out with his own thinking organism into the world thinking both in respect of his sense organism and of his thinking system. Man is world. The world builds itself into him. Hence in his sense perception and in his thinking he is not he himself. Here he is worldinformed. And into this thinking organism, man stretches forth that part now of his being of soul and spirit, which belongs neither to the earth world, nor yet to the star world, but which is of a purely spiritual kind, and lives on from earth life to earth life within man. This form of the soul and spirit is only accessible to inspiration. So man goes out of his earthly and cosmic organism and stands before himself through his inspiration as a being of pure soul and spirit. In this his purely spiritual being, man meets with the ordering of his destiny or fate. With his sense organism, man lives in his physical body. With his thinking organism, in his ether body. After both these organisms have been laid aside in the living experience of knowledge, he is in his astral body.

Every time that man lays aside part of his acquired being, his soul becomes, it is true, poorer in content on one side. But at the same time, she becomes richer on the other. If with the laying aside of the physical body, the beauty of the plant world, as it shone upon the senses, now becomes faint and colorless, man has before his soul in place of it the whole world of elemental beings who live in the plant kingdom. Because this is so a man whose knowledge is really spiritual will not be given to any tone of aceticism toward what the senses can show him. Through all the inner experience of spiritual life, he still feels fully alive in him the need to behold over again through the senses what has been experienced in the life of the spirit. In the whole man striving after living knowledge of complete reality, the perceptions of the senses awaken a longing for their counterpart, the world of the elemental beings. So too, the contemplation of the elemental beings awakens a longing for what the sense perceptions have to give. In the totality of human life, spirit cries for sense and sense for spirit. Spiritual existence would be a void did it not bear in it the mindfulness of what was experienced in the life of sense perception. Since perception would be darkness were there not at work in it below consciousness at first yet ever shedding light the power of the spirit. Therefore when man shall have made himself ripe to realize along with his realization of nature's life the action therein of myel there will be no impoverishment in all that the life of nature gives to men's souls. but on the contrary a greater wealth. Nor will the feeling life be in any way inclined to withdraw from the life of the senses. Rather will there be a joyful readiness to welcome into the soul all the wonders of the sense world.

Leading thoughts number one. The human sense organism does not belong to the being of man but is built into it during earth life from the world without the seeing eye. Ee is spatially in man. Essentially it is in the world and man stretches forth his own essence his own being of soul and spirit into what the world is realizing in him through his senses. Man during earth life does not take in the physical surroundings into himself. He grows out with his being of soul and spirit into these surroundings.

Leading thoughts number two. It is similar with the thinking organism. Man grows out through his thinking organism into the life of the stars. He recognizes himself as star world. Man is living and weaving in the world thoughts when in the living realization of knowledge he has laid aside his sense organism.

Leading thoughts number three after both have been laid aside both earth world and star world. Man stands before himself as a being of soul and spirit. Here he is no longer world. Here he is in the truest sense man. To awaken to what he here experiences is self-nowledge, even as it is world knowledge to awaken to perception in the sense and thought organisms.

The end of letter number 25. You are listening to rudolphsteineraudio.com. This is a reading of the Mikeyle mystery uh the extracted letters from collected works volume 26 by Rudolfph Steiner.

This is letter 26 entitled memory and conscience.

In his sleeping state, man is given over to the cosmos. He carries over to the cosmos in sleep that which is his as the fruit of previous earth lives. When he comes down out of the world of soul and spirit into the earthly world, he withdraws this inner core of his human being from the cosmos whilst awake. In this rhythm of being given over to the cosmos and in turn withdrawn from the cosmos, life rolls on between birth and death. The withdrawal from the cosmos is at the same time an absorption of the man of soul and spirit by the nerves and senses organism to the physical and life processes which go on in this organism. The spirit and soul part of man is united during waking life. It combines with them in a homogeneous system of working. In this working system are included sense perception, the formation of memory pictures and the life of fancy. These functions are attached to the physical body. Mental conceptions, the life of thought in which man becomes conscious of what goes on half unconsciously in sense perception, fancy and memory. These are attached to the thinking organism. This thinking organism is also more peculiarly the region in which man comes to the consciousness of himself. The thinking system is a star system. Were it to lead its life purely as a star system from first to last, man would bear within him not a self-consciousness but a god consciousness. But the thinking system is a star system taken out of the starry cosmos and transplanted into the earthly course of events. In realizing the star world in the life of earth, man becomes a self-conscious being. Here then we find that region of inner human life where the divine spiritual world to which man belongs sets him free in order that he may become man in the fullest sense. But just below the thinking organism in the region where sense perception, fancy, memory, picturing are going on, there the divine spirit world is living in and with the life of man. The divine spirit world may be said to live in man's waking state in the evolution of memory. For the two other functions, sense perception and fancy are only modifications of this forming of inner memory pictures. In sense perception, we have the formation of the mind's memory contents. In the nent state, in fancies contents, we have lighting up in the soul. What lives on of these memory contents in the soul's inner life?

The sleeping state carries man's soul and spirit over into the cosmic existence. Here with all the functions of his astral body and I capital, he is immersed in the divine spiritual cosmos. He is not only outside the physical, he is also outside the world of stars. But he is within those divine spirit beings from whom his own existence draws its source. At the present moment of cosmic evolution, the manner in which these divine spirit beings work is to imprint the moral world content upon the astral body and the eye during the sleeping state. All world procedure in the sleeping man is real moral procedure. Nothing that could be said in the least to resemble the results of an action in external nature. This moral world procedure in its after effects is carried by man from his sleeping over into his waking state. The afterworkings remain in a state of sleep. For man wakes only in that life which is turned toward the field of thought. What is really going on within his willing sphere remains even in waking life veiled in the same dull darkness as is the whole of his soul life during sleep. But in this sleeping life of will, the divine spirit world continues to weave on in his waking state, man is morally as good or as bad as he can be according to how near he can come to the divine spiritual beings in his sleep. and he comes nearer to or remains further from them according as his previous earth lives have been in a moral direction. From the depths of the soul's waking being rises the echo of what the soul has been able to receive implanted into her during sleep in communion with the divine spiritual world. This voice ringing up from the depths is the voice of conscience. Thus, the very thing for which a materialist view of the world is most prone to find an explanation solely on the natural side shows itself for spiritual knowledge to lie on the moral side.

In memory, divine spiritual being works in the waking man directly. In conscience, the same divine spiritual being works in the waking man indirectly as an after effect. Memory is formed in the nerves and senses organism. Conscience is formed though as a process purely of the soul and spirit within the metabolic and limb organism. Between the two lies the rhythmic organism. This is developed in two directions so that each side is polar in relation to the other. As breathing rhythm, it is intimately associated with sense perception and with thinking. In lung breathing, the process is at its coursest. It becomes more delicate and as refined and sublimated breathing becomes sense perceiving and thinking. still quite close to breathing. Only a breathing through the sense organs, not through the lungs, is sense perception. Beginning then to be more remote from lung breathing and having for it support the thinking organism is the forming of mental conceptions, thinking as such. And already bordering on the other side upon the rhythm of the blood circulation beginning to be an inward breathing that combines with the metabolic and limb organism is the function which manifests itself in the play of fancy. This extends then as a soul function down into the sphere of the will even as the circulatory rhythm extends into the metabolic and limb organism. In the exercise of fancy, the thinking system approaches quite close to the willing system. It is a dipping down of the man into his waking sleep sphere of will. Accordingly, with men whose organization is of this kind, the contents of their soul world appears like waking dreams. In Gerta, there lived a human organization of this kind. That is why he says that Schiller must interpret his poetic dreams for him in Schiller himself. The other kind of organization was active. He lived on the strength of what he brought with him from his previous earth lives to a strenuous will. He was obliged to seek the fancy that should give it content. People whose disposition lies more toward the region of fancy, so that with them all conceptions of sensuality turn of themselves, so to speak, into pictures of fancy are the ones on whom the armonic powers reckon in their world plans. They think that with the assistance of people of this kind they will be able completely to cut off the evolution of mankind from its past and bring it into the direction they are wanting. People whose organization tends more toward the region of the will, but who out of inner love for an idealistic world conception vigorously convert their sense conceptions into forms of fancy are the ones on whom the luciferic powers reckon. By means of such human beings, the luciferic powers hope to maintain man's evolution altogether within the impulses of the past. They could then keep man from going down into the sphere where the armonic powers have to be conquered.

In their earthly life, men are placed between two polar opposites. Overhead, far and wide, spread the stars. Fence, rain, the forces which have to do with all that is regular and calculable in earth life. regular alternation of day and night, seasons of the year, world periods of lengthier duration. All this is the earthly reflection of processes originating amid the stars. The opposite pole radiates from the inside of the earth. The irregular has here its life. Wind and weather, thunder and lightning, earthquakes, volcanic outbursts reflect these inner earth events. Man is an image of this star and earth life. In his thinking system lives the order of the stars. In his limb and will system lives earth chaos. In the rhythmic system, man's own earthly being is realized in the free balance of the two.

Leading thoughts. Number one, man has received his spiritual and bodily organization from two sides. Firstly, [snorts] an organization from the physical and etheric cosmos. All that is radiating of divine spiritual being into this organization in the human being lives in him as the power of sense perception. The faculty of memory and the play of fancy.

Leading thoughts number two. Secondly, man receives his organization from his preceding earth lives. This organization is entirely one of soul and spirit and lives in man through the astral body and the eye. The life of divine spiritual beings which here finds its way into man's being works on and lights up in man as the voice of conscience and the like.

Leading thoughts number three. In his rhythmic organization, man is forever combining the divine spiritual impulses from both sides. In the inner living realization of this rhythm, the power of memory is carried into the life of will and the force of conscience into the life of ideas.

The end of letter number 26. You are listening to Rudolfphsteineraudio.com. This is a reading of the Miley mystery extracted letters from collected works volume 26 by Rudolfph Steiner.

This is letter 27 entitled the apparent extinction of the knowledge of the spirit in the new age.

Whoever would form a just estimate of anthroposophy and the relation it bears to the evolution of the spiritual soul must look ever and again at the particular constitution of mind among civilized humanity which began with the rise of the natural sciences and reached its culmination in the 19th century. Let him but place the peculiar character of this age before his soul's eye e and compare it with that of earlier ages. At all times during mankind's conscious evolution, knowledge was regarded as being that which brings man together with the world of spirit. Whatever a man was in relation to the spirit, that he ascribed to knowledge. In art, as in religion, knowledge lived.

A change came with the first dawning gleams of the age of consciousness. Knowledge now began no more to concern itself with a great part of human soul life. It was bent upon investigating the kind of relation which man develops toward external existence when he directs his senses and his reasoning mind on to the world of nature. But it refused any longer to concern itself with the relations which man develops toward the spirit world when he makes the same use of his inner faculties of perception as he does of his outer senses. Thus it came about of necessity that the spiritual life of man became linked not with the knowing of the present age but with the knowledge of past ages with tradition. A split came into man's soul life. It fell into two. Before him was nature knowledge on the one side, striving ever further and further a field, unfolding its powers in the actual and living present. On the other side was the inner life with its feeling experience of a relation to the spirit world that once in olden times had been fed from a corresponding fountain of knowledge. From this feeling experience there gradually faded away all understanding as to how in olden times the corresponding knowledge had come about. Men possessed the tradition but no longer the way by which the truths handed down by tradition had been known. They could only believe in the tradition.

Anyone who considered the spiritual situation with a perfectly calm and luminous mind about the middle of the 19th century could not but have said to himself, "Humanity has reached a point when the only knowledge which it still thinks itself capable of developing has nothing to do with the spirit. Whatever it is possible to know about the spirit, mankind in former times was able to discover. Today the capacity for such discovery has gone from the human soul in all its force and bearings. However, people did not place the situation thus clearly before the mind's eye. Ee they confine themselves to saying knowledge simply does not reach to the spiritual world. The spiritual world can only be an object of faith. It may shed some light on the matter if we look back into the times when Grecian wisdom was forced to yield place to the Christianized Roman world. When the last schools of Greek philosophy were closed by the Roman emperor, the last treasures too of ancient spiritual learning wandered away from the soil on which henceforth the European spirit developed its life and thought. They found connection with the academy of Gandhi Shapur in Asia. This was one of the places where owing to the deeds of Alexander, the tradition of the ancient learning had remained preserved in the east. In the form which Aristotle had been able to give it, this ancient learning was still living there. It was caught, however, in the tide of that eastern stream which one may call Arabism. Arabism is in one aspect of its character a premature development of the spiritual soul. Through a soul life working prematurely in the direction of the spiritual soul, Arabism afforded the opportunity for a spiritual wave to

Pour itself from Asia through this channel over Africa, Southern Europe, Western Europe, and so to fill certain members of European humanity with an intellectualism which ought only to have come later. Southern and Western Europe received in the seventh and eighth centuries spiritual impulses which should really not have come until the age of the spiritual soul. This spiritual wave could awaken the intellectual life in man but not that deeper level of experience by which the soul enters into the spiritual world. And so when man was exercising his faculties of knowledge in the 15th to 19th centuries, he could only go down to a depth of soul not deep enough for him to light upon the spiritual world. The Arabism by which European spiritual life was invaded kept human souls in their life of knowledge back from the spiritual world. Prematurely it brought into action that intellect which can only take hold of external nature. And this Arabism proved very powerful upon whomsoever it laid its grasp and inward and for the most part all unconscious arrogance began to take hold of this person's soul. He felt the power of intellectualism but did not feel the inability of the mere intellect to penetrate into reality. So he abandoned himself to that external reality which comes of its own accord to men and works upon their senses. He never thought of taking any step toward the spiritual reality.

This was the situation with which the spiritual life of the Middle Ages was faced. It had inherited the mighty traditions of the spirit world. But all its soul life was so steeped in intellectualism through one might say the covert influence of Arabism that knowledge found no access to the sources whence the inherited traditions after all drew their substance. Then forth from the early Middle Ages on, there was a constant struggle between what was instinctively felt in men's minds as a link with the spirit and the form which thought had assumed under Arabism. Men felt within them the world of ideas to their inner life. It was an immediate reality. But they could not find in their souls the power to experience within the ideas the living spirit. Thus arose the realist philosophy which felt a reality in the ideas but could not find this reality. This realist philosophy heard in the idea world the speech of the cosmic word but was not able to understand its language. The nominalist philosophy on the other hand contended that since the speech was not understandable, it was not there at all. For nominalism, the world of ideas was only a collection of formula in the human soul without root in any spiritual reality. What was here surging in these two opposing currents lived on into the 19th century. Nominalism became the scientific school of thought for the knowledge of the natural world. From external data of the sense world, it built up a grand conceptual structure. But it reduced to nothing all insight into the inner being of the world of ideas. Realism lived a dead existence. It knew of the reality of the world of ideas but could not attain to it in living and perceptive knowledge. Men will however attain to it when anthroposophy finds the way to a living experience of the spirit in the ideas. Side by side with the nominalism of the natural sciences must stand a realism truly advanced and developed bringing a way of knowledge which shows that the knowledge of spiritual things has not died out in mankind but can rise a new from new opened sources in the human soul and flow once more through human evolution.

Leading thoughts number one. Anyone who turns the eyes of his soul upon the course of human evolution in the age of natural science is met at first sight by a gloomy prospect. Splendid is the growth of man's knowledge in respect to all things of the external world. But there comes over him in return a peculiar form of consciousness as though a knowledge of the spiritual world had ceased to be possible at all.

Leading thoughts number two. It seems as though such knowledge could only have been possessed by men in olden times and as though with regard to the spiritual world people must simply remain content to accept the old traditions and make them an object of belief.

Leading thoughts number three. From the resulting uncertainty during the Middle Ages concerning man's relation to the spiritual world, there arose on the one hand a disbelief in the real spirit content of ideas represented by nominalism of which the modern scientific view of nature is a continuation. And on the other hand, as a knowledge of the reality of ideas, realism, which however can only find its fulfillment in anthroposophy.

The end of letter 27. You are listening to rudolphsteineraudio.com. This is a reading of the Miley mystery by Rudolfph Steiner. The letters extracted from collected works volume 26. This is letter number 28. Entitled historic upheavals at the dawn of the spiritual soul.

The downfall of the Roman Empire accompanied by the appearance on the scene of peoples moving on from the east. The so-called migration of the peoples is an historic phenomenon on which the eyes of man must be turned again and again in inquiry. For the present time still contains much that is after effect of those tremendous occurrences. But it is just here that an understanding of what happened is not possible through a mere external study of history. One must look into the souls of the human beings engaged in this migration and in the downfall of the Roman Empire.

Greece and Rome are at the flower of their civilization during the period when in mankind at large the intellectual or mind soul is developing. The Greeks and Romans are indeed the more especial bearers of this development. But the evolution of this stage of the soul amongst these peoples is not such as to have in it a living seed which could properly evolve out of itself the spiritual soul. Every treasure of the soul and spirit latent in the intellectual or mind soul is brought in living profusion to the light of day in the civilization of the Greeks and Romans. But to carry its life stream by its own innate power over into the spiritual soul that it cannot do. The stage of the spiritual soul naturally emerges in due course. Only it is as though this spiritual soul were not able to arise spontaneously out of the personality of the Greek or Roman, but rather as though it had to be implanted in him from without.

The state of union with and again of detachment from the divine spiritual beings so often spoken of in these letters takes place in the course of the ages with varying intensity. In old days, it was a power that intervened with very forcible effect in the evolution of human affairs. As it enters into the Greek and Roman life of the first centuries of Christianity, the power is a weaker one. Nevertheless, it is there. So long as he was developing to the full the intellectual or mind soul within him, the Greek or Roman experienced not consciously but with important effects for the soul, a feeling of detachment from the divine spiritual form of being an emancipation of his own human being. This came to an end in the first centuries of Christianity. The first blimmering dawn of the spiritual soul was felt as bringing union again with the divine spiritual world. Evolution wound back again from a greater independence of soul to a lesser.

The inner content of Christianity could not be taken up into the human spiritual soul because the spiritual soul itself was not yet able to be received into the human being. And so they felt this Christian content as something that came ready given to them from without from the spiritual outer world, not as something with which they grew together and became identified through their own inherent powers of knowledge. It was otherwise with the peoples now coming into history out of the northeast. They had passed through the stage of the intellectual or mind soul in a condition which in their case was felt as one of dependence on the spirit world. They first began to feel something of human independence when the nent powers of the spiritual soul dawned in their first Christian beginnings. Amongst these peoples, the spiritual soul made its appearance as something closely bound up with the very being of man. They felt themselves in the full joyous expansion of inward power when the spiritual soul was awakening to life within them. Into the first fresh life of the dawning spiritual soul amongst these peoples fell the inner content of Christianity. They felt it as something coming to life within their souls, not as something ready given from without. Such was the tone of mind in which these peoples came to the Roman Empire and all that this involved. Such was the Aryan mood as contrasted with the Aanasian. A profound contrast was here emerging in human history and evolution.

In the spiritual soul of the Greek and Roman, external to the man himself, the divine spirit being began its work, not completely uniting with the earthly life, but only raying in upon it. In the just dawning spiritual soul of the Franks, the Germanic tribes, etc., There was at work but as yet faintly so much of divine spirit as was able to unite itself with the human being. What happened next was that the form of Christian content which dwelt in the spiritual soul hovering over and outside of man spread abroad in life. Whilst that which was united with men's souls remains something that abodeed in the inner mind as an incentive, an impulse biding the time of its full development which can only come with the attainment of a certain stage in the spiritual soul's evolution.

The period from the first centuries of Christianity down to the age of the spiritual soul is a time when the dominant spiritual life of mankind is one which hovers above man. It is a spiritual content with which he cannot connect himself knowingly through the exercise of his own powers of mind. Accordingly he establishes an external connection. He explains this spiritual content and examines in thought the precise limits where the soul's powers fall short of uniting with it in clear knowledge. He draws a boundary line between the province over which his knowledge reaches and that where it does not reach. The result is a deliberate abstension from the employment of those soul powers which rise with knowledge into the world of spirit. And so at last there comes a time at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries when with the very powers that should be directed to spiritual realities men repudiate all spiritual reality and turn away from the spirit with their life of knowledge altogether. They begin to live in those soul powers only which are directed to things perceptible by the outer senses. Dull grew men's powers of knowledge, blunted to spiritual things in the 18th century more especially the thinkers lose the spiritual content to their ideas. In the idealist philosophy of the first half of the 19th century they represent the spirit void ideas themselves as the creative reality and content of the world. Thus ficta shelling Hegel or else they refer to a super sensible which fades away because the spirit is not in it. Thus Spencer John Stuart Mill and others ideas are dead when they do not seek the living spirit. The spiritual eye ee for the spiritual is in fact lost. A continuation of the old way of spirit knowledge is not possible. The soul's powers as the spiritual soul develops in them must strive through to their own newly generated union living and direct with the spirit world. This very striving is the essence and intention of anthroposophy.

In the spiritual life of the present age, it is precisely the leading people who are most at a loss to know the meaning of anthroposophy or what its object is. And in this way, large circles who follow these leaders are also kept aloof. The leaders live amid a content of soul and mind which has gradually lost the habit of using man's spiritual powers. With these people, it is as though one were to try and induce a man who is paralyzed to make use of his paralyzed organ. For it was paralysis that set in during the time from the 16th century to the second half of the 19th. paralysis of the higher powers of knowledge and men remained all unconscious of it. They regarded the one-sided application of their powers of knowledge to the sense world as an important step in human progress.

Leading thoughts number one, the Greeks and Romans are the peoples specially predisposed for the evolution of the intellectual or mind soul. They develop this stage of the soul to full completion. But they have not the living seed within themselves through which to pass on in direct line to the spiritual soul. Their soul life is completely merged in the intellectual or mind soul.

Leading thoughts number two. What comes instead during the time from the rise of Christianity to the age of evolving the spiritual soul is the reign above of a spirit world which does not unite with the human soul powers. These soul powers explain the spirit world but do not experience it.

Leading thoughts number three, the peoples moving down upon the Roman Empire from the northeast in the so-called migration of the peoples. Take hold of the intellectual or mind soul more in the life of feeling. Meanwhile, embedded in this feeling element, the spiritual soul is developing its powers in their souls. The inner life of these peoples is waiting for the time when a complete union of the human soul with the spiritual world will once more be possible.

The end of letter number 28. You are listening to rudolphsteineraudio.com. This is a reading of the Mikeyle mystery. The extracted letters from collected works volume 26 translated by Mrs. E Bowen Wedgwood and revised by George Adams. This is the last letter, letter 29 of the book entitled from nature to sub nature.

People talk of the philosophic age having been superseded about the middle of the 19th century and having given place to the age of natural science. They talked too as though this age of natural science were still in continuence at the present day. Although many at the same time lay stress on the return to certain philosophic tendencies of thought. This is all quite correct as regards the direction taken by the new age in its lines of knowledge but not in its lines of life. With his mental imagery, man is still living in nature. Even though he brings a mechanistic way of thinking into his understanding of nature, but with the life of his will, he is living in a machinery of technical processes to such an extent that this has long given an entirely new coloring to the age of natural science.

If one would understand human life, there are two sides from which one must begin by regarding it. From his previous earth lives, man brings with him the faculty of forming mental conceptions of the cosmic influences that act from out of the earth's environment and of those which are at work within the sphere of the earth itself. Through his senses, he perceives the cosmic element that is at work within the earthly realm. Through his thinking organism, he thinks the cosmic that acts upon the earth from the surrounding universe. Thus, he lives through his physical body, a life of perception, and through his ether body, a life of thought. What goes on in the astral body and in the eye capital is at work in more covert regions of the soul. It is at work, for instance, in a man's destiny or fate. One must not, however, look for it to begin with in the intricate complexities of human destiny, but rather in the simple elementary processes of life.

Man unites himself with definite earth forces by the fact of bringing his own body into bearing with the lines of these forces. He learns to stand and walk upright. He learns with his arms and hands to bring himself into poise with the balance of the earthly forces. Now these are not forces of a kind that work from without from the cosmos. They are merely earthly. In reality, nothing that man experiences in his inner life is an abstraction. He only does not perceive where the experience comes from. And so of his ideas about realities, he makes abstractions. Man talks about the laws of mechanics. He thinks he has deduced them by abstraction from the complex of natural phenomena. That is not however the case. But rather everything which a man realizes in his soul as a purely mechanical law is learned from direct inward experience of his own bearings in and toward the earth world in standing walking and so on. This however marks the mechanical as the purely earthly. For everything which exists in earthly form as laws of nature in color, sound and so forth is a gift from out of the cosmos. Only within the sphere of earth does all this realm of nature acquire engrafted into it the mechanical element. Even as man meets with this element in his own life and experience only within the earth's sphere.

By far the greater part of all that is at work through the agency of technical science in the civilization of today is not nature but sub nature. It is a world which is emancipating itself from nature downward. Observe how the oriental when in pursuit of the spirit seeks to disengage himself from those states of equilibrium which are due solely to the earth. He adopts for meditation a posture which brings him solely into the cosmic equilibrium. The earth is then no longer exerting an influence upon the disposition of his whole organism. This is not put forward for imitation, but only to make what was said more plain. Those who are acquainted with my writings know how the spiritual life of East and West differ in this respect.

Man needed this relation with the merely earthly for the evolution of his spiritual soul. But in more recent times there came the tendency everywhere in his own doings as well to give practical effect to this element with which as man he must needs make himself familiar. And as he penetrates into this merely earthly realm, he encounters the world of Aramman. He must learn to bring himself and his own human being into right relation with this Arammonic element. As yet, in the course hitherto taken by the technical age, he has not found the way to readjust his human relation rightly to this new civilization of Aramman. Man must find the strength, the inner faculty of knowledge and discernment for his human being not to be overwhelmed by Aramman. In the civilization of technics, subnature must be understood in this its character of under nature. It will only be so understood if man rises at least as high in spiritual knowledge to that super nature which lies outside the earthly sphere as he has descended in technical science below it into sub nature. The age needs a power of knowledge that rises above nature because it has inwardly to deal with an element which is dangerously at work within its life and which is one that has sunk below nature. Of course, what is here meant is not any sort of return to earlier states of civilization, but rather that man should find his way to bring the new conditions of civilization into right relation with himself and with the cosmos. As yet, there are but very few who have any feeling of the important spiritual tasks which man has here before him.

Take for instance electricity hailed at its discovery as the very soul of the natural world. Electricity must be recognized in its own peculiar power to lead down from nature to sub nature. Only man must not glide down with it. In the time when there was as yet no independent realm of technics apart from what may rightly be termed nature, man found the spirit in his contemplation of nature. Technics becoming detached from nature riveted man's eyes to the mechanistic and material world as the scientific one. Whence his knowledge must henceforth be derived. Now in this world of all the divine spiritual life connected with the first origins of human evolution nothing remains. The purely arammonic dominates this sphere. But in a science of the spirit the other sphere is created from which an arammonic element is altogether absent. It is precisely by taking into his mind that form of spiritual intelligence to which the arammonic powers have no access that man gains the strength to meet Aramman in the world to encounter him there.

Leading thoughts number one. In the age of natural science, beginning about the middle of the 19th century, there is in human civilization a gradual downslide of the occupations and activities of men, not only into the lowest regions of nature, but down below nature. Technical civilization becomes sub nature.

Fleeting thoughts number two. This makes it necessary for man in living inner experience to come to a spirit knowledge in which he rises as high above into supernature as he goes down below nature with his subnatural technical occupations. He thereby creates within him the power not to in quotes go under.

Leading thoughts number three, an earlier view of the natural world still contained within it the spirit with which human evolution is bound up in its first sources. Little by little, the spirit has vanished from man's picture of nature. The purely arammonic element has taken possession of the picture and has overflowed from fence into the technical civilization of today.

And that is the end of letter number 29 and the end of this book, the Micael mystery by Rudolfph Steiner.