68th Lecture on the Apocalypse of John (Documentation)

18. verse of the week: "If I can widen the soul so that it joins itself, receive world-germ words, I suspect that I must find strength to shape the soul worthily, to form itself into a spiritual garment." As in verse 17 of the week, it is recorded 1:1 how we can hear the word of the world when we are outside in summer with our consciousness, and perhaps begin to sense the soul, the spiritual, that is working outside. The other day there was the world word that speaks to us, and it was a question of taking up this world word in our own spiritual depths. That is to say, to become aware of the world word within. We receive it from outside as a gift, but it is something that enters our I as a force. This is the Christ-power that can work through our I. The 18th verse of the week deals precisely with the task that is at stake for us. To make the soul worthy, so that the soul becomes the garment of the spiritual, that is, of the I-power that works in us, with which and through which the Christ-I works, to make the soul the expression of this spiritual power and thereby to become creatively formative in the soul. This is more than purifying the soul.

We live in an earthly atmosphere that contains many dark forces. Of which very little has really been dissolved, because dissolution is not so simple. We must not only purify ourselves through rigorous exercises, but we must generate a creative spiritual force which on the one hand can generate soul forces out of nothingness, and on the other hand can also lead soul forces back into nothingness, disappear into complete dissolution, the spirit is that which creates out of nothingness, but can also lead back into nothingness, the point is, we can also only dissolve the negative forces that we ourselves brought about a long time ago, through the creative power of our I. This is the point. This concerns our individual personal karma. What we do not dissolve ourselves will not be dissolved. Even Christ cannot spare us our karma. Dissolving karma means leading the dark angle into nothingness. If we do that, all the new soul that we create in the process, that is the Spirit Self. The first creative thing that we can bring forth ourselves. Now, here, today. Some of those who have gone before us did so a little earlier. We have this ability ourselves. What damage has been done by our deeds in the etheric sphere or even in the physical world, above all in the spiritual side of the physical world, we ourselves can do nothing about, or only very little. "took upon himself the sins of the world".. But this must not be understood in such a way that he takes away our personal sins, dissolves them and we are thus rid of them, but everything that concerns our karma, that we must put in order ourselves. But all other effects in the ethereal and physical world, which have also led to great damage there, where our misdeeds were the starting point, he takes them upon himself. Because we are not yet able to do that ourselves. That is the grace that the Christ gives us.

It is good that he leaves this to us, because man is predisposed to freedom. Three whole cosms were necessary for man to develop freedom, to become a spiritual being that draws directly from the Creator. What the angels cannot do. Even the seraphim are in the vision of the Godhead, they receive the powers from there from outside. We receive them from our I within, that is the great thing. That is the trust that the divine world gives us. The gift of the possibility of freedom. Whether we really get it is up to us. We have to want it. We can say to ourselves: There is a source in my I, out of which I can be creatively active. Every stirring of the soul is something like that, if it arises anew and is not experienced in a routine way. In the encounter with another person, in the encounter with nature, an animal, a plant. Whenever I create a new mental sensation that does not yet exist in the world. Then that already leads the world development further. That means something for nature, for the plant. When we face a plant, an animal, another human being in this way. We do that, although we often don't know it. Today in the consciousness-soul age, it is important to become more and more aware of this. Our real I, of which we have so far only known the mirror image, leads us along the right path. The angelic being that accompanies us helps our real I to go this way. Our I must make the decision to walk the path.

The I lives most strongly in the deeds that we do. We live from the I, the ego also spits into it, but where something goes on, we are active from the I. We are aware of the greatness of this I. We are aware of the greatness of this I. We are still little aware of the greatness of this "I". That is what we have to learn now. Then, when we find the right word that helps another person, there is a strong spiritual power in the word that becomes effective, that reaches the other person so that it becomes an impulse for him. Help consists in stimulating self-help. To say: "Sit down, I see you can't do it, I'll do it all for you" is not real help! But a suggestion to do it oneself is a help, even if he/she does it ten times worse than I do. That's how he/she gets ahead. If it is connected with an authentic soul feeling. It is authentic when it is newly created out of the I. It has never existed before. It has never existed before. Small differences are essential. With rhythm, the soul lies in the small deviation; the moment it becomes a rigid beat, the music is dead. In everything we do, the soul is inside, in the handwriting, in every trace we leave in life. There is always an authentic part of the ego, of course there is always the ego.

The ego is the imprint of the I in the astral. Sometimes it becomes quite independent. With us, the question is always, who is stronger? I or I (ego). We all have a constant struggle, a struggle. But in the future we will become more and more aware of what is happening. And that we have this power.  We will gain trust in the power of the I, so that we can feel how the power of the Christ is present without restricting our freedom in any way. Where the Christ is active in our I to fulfil our will. And that is at the same time the divine will. You have to imagine what the divine has risked by allowing its will to be expressed through man.  The future of the world is determined by the will of human beings, through which the divine will works, but allows itself to be given direction by what human beings contribute to it. That is incredible. Meister Eckehart recognised this. This was not always so popular in the Church, because it was the programme that God sits at the top and commands and people have to follow, that is in the strict hierarchical organisation of the Church, in the past all creation was like that, that is why we have the hierarchies of angels, but now something new is beginning. Where the people at the bottom, the human beings, are beginning to take on the most important task. It is important that we become aware of what we are enabled to do, what we are trusted to do and what we should trust ourselves to do. We so often say we are so small, but we can! We are allowed! We should! Nowhere is submission envisaged, that is the Old Testament way. That was preparation. Because there was no other way before the death of the Christ on the cross. The Christ had to connect with the earth and the human I. This was only possible by incarnating himself. This was only possible by incarnating on earth and descending into the kingdom of death. Into the realm that is necessary for us to acquire freedom. The higher hierarchies have no access to the kingdom of death, to the kingdom of the adversaries. It has changed because Christ descended into the kingdom of death with the Mystery of Golgotha. Christ's descent into hell on Holy Saturday. From which then comes the resurrection. Through this it has become possible for all human I's to participate in the quality of freedom, and to cooperate in it, in the sense that they really give the direction. The course of further development is determined by us. The higher hierarchies are guided by our impulses and intentions. That is the great thing. You only read the Apocalypse in a Christian sense if that is what you see in it. One can also read it in a completely different way. But then it is a great misunderstanding, especially where the great trials come. There it is again, the "punishment" of God, God rebukes us for acting according to the right way again, No! It is about something else. We must first produce the right way. It doesn't even exist yet, because we are the ones who determine it. It is not a matter of avoiding evil and choosing good, but of dissolving evil and creating good out of nothing. There is nothing predetermined. Not the good, not the bad. We determine the path. That's why all these trials that are being described now, in the 16th chapter, the pouring out of the bowls of wrath, that sounds Old Testament, the people don't spur, that's why the punishment comes upon them. In the Old Testament it was like that.

In the New Testament it takes on a completely different meaning. Therefore, R. Steiner rightly says that what appears here in the descriptions as the wrath of God is in reality the love of God. The love of God that wants to make freedom possible for us. It does everything to enable us to become free beings. We are only at the beginning and still have a lot to do to become free on a larger scale. Freedom means that we have to free ourselves from all the fetters that we have put on ourselves in order to become free beings. It sounds paradoxical to put on shackles in order to become free. These shackles have helped us to free ourselves from the guidance from above. Where we were obedient servants of God or of the hierarchies, but were not free, simply took over and implemented the will that flows down from above. So that we can free ourselves from being mere recipients of orders, the divine world has done something ingenious, it has given us the kingdom of the adversaries, the trinity of adversaries, the Luciferic, the Ahrimanic and the Asuric adversaries, who come from the being Sorat, these three great adversary groupings were given to us so that we can get away from the guidance from above, and in some incarnation suddenly stand there, abandoned by all good spirits, lonely, but still not lonely, because placed on one's own ME. In the I the whole spiritual world is potentially contained, now from the centre, not from the outside, from the I the whole spiritual world can spring forth and it will do so more and more, and quite real, so that the future creation passes through these I's of men. But for that we had to break away, the hierarchies couldn't do that so directly, they couldn't simply cast people out, they first had to create the possibility that we could act evil, that was only possible through the influence of the adversaries. That's why the serpent in paradise, that's where this apparent disaster begins, which is actually a disaster, because the suffering of humanity and the suffering of creation begins with it, the price is a very high one, but it is necessary to pay so that man can become a free being.

Today is the time to speak openly about these things. And don't fall prey to the thought that something has gone wrong in creation, you have to be aware that a free being can only be there where it can create good or also evil out of its own I. Not only choose but also create. Not only choose but create. It can create out of nothing. So that we humans can create good out of nothing, or something that is beyond good and evil, because it is something that is greater than good and evil. Good and evil only came in through creation to give us freedom, for that to happen there had to be the division, for that to happen there had to be the adversaries, so the division is there, there are beings who do evil in the sense that they work against the impulses of the regular spiritual beings. In this sense they are evil. Working against the work of the hierarchies, the work of the higher hierarchies and also putting obstacles in our way. It is the case with us that we are seducible by these beings. But we can make up for that with something much greater, much higher, which will abolish the distinction between good and evil and bring forth something much brighter, much more powerful than has ever existed in the evolution of humanity. It's just a matter of becoming aware of this responsibility without becoming megalomaniac and getting the hubris that we're so great and we can do this now. We are only at the very beginning of this. We will make enough mistakes along the way. But we can bear the responsibility. Otherwise we deny our I. Then we don't have the will and we don't have the will to place ourselves on our I. In doing so, we reject the great divine gift in truth. Often in life we come to a point where we despair and say: I can't do it alone. But then we can always know that in our I is the Christ-power, which does not tell us what to do, but which always gives us the strength to persevere. So that out of our I we can overcome something that not only affects the soul, but affects the life forces, affects the physical, affects the physical in the world outside, so that we can really become active in the world, what we lack in strength in the physical, in the etheric, the Christ supports us in this.

We only have to have the confidence to want to create it in the spiritual. That is the important thing! Above all, to feel that one person can give suggestions to the other. In the way I say it and how I say it, which mood of the soul lies within, if it is a mood of the soul that I have creatively brought forth, in the intuitive knowledge of the other person, is created out of the intuitive knowledge of the soul of the other person, which is still mostly unconscious today, and therefore fits for his soul and can be a stimulus for his soul. In this way we can help each other indefinitely. The future will depend on it. With every impulse of help that we can give out of this free creative, out of this Christ-impulse that is connected with it, where freedom is inside, the Christ is inside, then we can give impulses out of that to every other human being. Theoretically at least, practically it will not always work that way.  That is, when we pass on the soul impulse to others, the right life force connects with it, perhaps something physical also connects with it. But above all, the life force, which is so important. Love is more than something soulful. It is also something spiritual. It is more, it is very real life force. Power that promotes life, that can make the sick healthy. No mumbo-jumbo, no miracle healing, but it is about healing impulses. Where love is inside, that is automatically inside, otherwise it wouldn't be love. Otherwise it would be a sympathetic feeling. But it needs more than a sympathetic feeling, it needs this etheric power that resonates, that flows with it, and Christ is connected with this power as a real healing power. We will one day be ready, not during our earthly development, but later, to be able to do this from within ourselves. But if we do not develop anything spiritually, then Christ's hands are also tied. If an impulse for help is not connected with a certain soul force, which we must produce ourselves, then the Christ can do nothing.

It is an expression of divine love that we do not fail to do this, and that we get rid of all the obstacles, all the negative forces that are still in our soul, which we have accumulated over many incarnations, that we have got rid of them all in the soul by the end of the earth's development. This outpouring of the 7 bowls of wrath, which are described in the Apocalypse, which bring with them the 7 plagues of the end times, there come trials upon humanity, for some more, for some less. These are trials that are experienced in the soul. With the outpouring of the 7 bowls of wrath, we are at the transition where the earth passes from its physically living state into the purely spiritual state, where the earth ceases to exist as a physical entity, as a living entity, and passes into a purely spiritual state, which, however, is something much higher than the spiritual state from which it arose in the beginning. The first chapter of the biblical story of creation, Genesis, in no way describes an external event, one can misunderstandably see it that way, because plants, sun, moon and stars are created, one then imagines that externally, but in truth it was the creation of a soul cosmos, externally nothing would have been there yet, nothing solid, nothing liquid, nothing air-like, not even warmth. Only as the soul cosmos, the astral world, the soul star world, from which then afterwards our outer visible cosmic star world arises, but that is the consequence, humanity, the earth, the plants and animals, also the minerals, all that is crystallised from the soul. It is difficult for us today to imagine this, but it was not so difficult for people in earlier times. It was a matter of course. Today we puzzle over it. How can the soul become an object of attack? In truth, everything that is solid, condensed, visible and tangible is spiritual, but behind it there is a creative spiritual that has brought it forth. Spiritual, mental, living, physical, they are only states of transformation of one and the same. The whole of creation has always functioned in such a way that something comes out of the highest purely spiritual, becomes a formed spiritual, becomes a creative thought, out of which something spiritual is created, a soul world, out of the soul world flows the living and condenses further into the warm, into the aeriform, into the liquid, finally into the solid. Only during our development on earth does it become solid.

The solid, the crystalline, the "sea of glass" did not yet exist in earlier stages of our earth's development.  This is something new, something special, which has become "clumsy" matter, which also did not exist before, but which at the same time opens up space, the crystalline is definitely something spatial, forms the empty space in which our spiritual can become creatively effective. Everything that is solid, that is crystalline, that appears to us here on earth as the hardest thing, is spiritually seen as nothing. An empty space. A space that is completely de-spiritualised. This is what allows the minerals to exist. This is the space that is prepared for us to become creatively active in. We now practise this purely externally by combining metals in the most diverse forms and producing our technical products; the confrontation with the dead solid material is the training field for this, the preparation for us to really creatively bring our spiritual into this empty space.

Then a different kind of technology will emerge than we have now, a technology that is completely connected with the human being, in a positive sense, so that there is a spiritual connection right into the material. Where the human spirit works directly into this "machine". It is created directly from our spiritual and reacts directly to our spiritual. Where, therefore, everything that we develop spiritually can also connect with it, etc. In every smallest crystalline element, we fill this empty space with our spirituality, animate it, with the new spiritual that we have created out of our I. And Christ supports us so that this is directly connected to our spiritual. And Christ supports us so that the living, the life force is also still there. Because we can't do that yet. We can be spiritually creative, we can develop ourselves further out of this spiritual-creative activity, that is a purely spiritual activity, that we become stronger, more creative. We create ourselves anew in every moment of our life. The great thing about the highest spiritual is that it is actually NOTHING.  If someone says they don't believe in the spiritual, then you can answer that you are quite right, it is NOTHING, it constantly creates itself anew and disappears again. One cannot make a statement about the highest spiritual, I can only recognise it by its deeds. I.e. we can always recognise our real I by our deeds. We recognise it least of all by the small reflection we have in ourselves when we think, am I a good person? Have I led a good life? Have I led a bad life? If I ponder and reflect, I won't come to much, I just have to look at what deeds I have done. Then I will see that some things were clumsy, some were mistakes, maybe even something bad, in the past anyway, we have made mistakes in any case. The excuse that I didn't want it that way doesn't count, if I had really wanted it, then it would have worked. For it is precisely in the will that our I-power lies. If our will fails, then it was not strong enough.

Flagellating ourselves over it doesn't help either, we just have to learn something from it. Or we can learn something. Then we will do better one day. This helps to develop our I further. In this way, our I is created anew with every moment, with every deed, and takes a step further. Sometimes there is also a step backwards. It is being active. Look at your deeds! Soberly. Look at your life! Where did you set a course that was not planned? Our little I always says I want to learn this, and that too, many things are nice, but unnecessary for spiritual development. We do a lot out of ego. But in the decisive moments we didn't foresee it, we just recognised an opportunity that presented itself, seized it, and from that our life took a different direction. Not immediately by 180 degrees. But it has undergone a course correction. Every person will find such points in their life. Where the course is set, usually through human encounters. You suddenly see the world with different eyes. That would be interesting, you say to yourself, I could do that and suddenly it's the main goal. At such switch points you can experience the activity of the real I at first hand. At the same time, look with great composure at the wrong turnings. That is also part of it. Every spiritual exercise also includes a life reflection, a review of one's own life, but R. Steiner says: always without regret! I was so stupid. That is self-pity, oh, I wish I had been a better person. But that is of no use. I can only try to recognise my mistakes and do better next time. That is the only thing. I can't resolve the past. Sometime I can resolve the karmic consequences. The important thing is not so much to repent, but to do better in the future.

The descriptions of the Apocalypse should help us in this. They are dramatic descriptions. They are spiritual experiences that we go through, but which are clothed in a sensual image, because otherwise it is impossible to communicate them. We have to be careful in interpreting the 7 plagues, the 7 trials, which are described there, not simply as punishment, but as something we want in order to overcome the imperfections we still have. All that is described are tasks that concern us even now, even though the outpouring of the bowls of wrath describes a point in time that signifies the earth's transition from the physical to the spiritual. One can simply read the Apocalypse chronologically from the beginning of the cultural epochs to the end of the earth. In this way one can read the historical arc.

But you can also read it in such a way that each of these descriptions gives us tasks on which we can already work on a small scale. In order to prepare ourselves for when they come our way on a large scale in the distant future, we will also be able to cope with them. To do this, we must first master them on a small scale, i.e. first of all in our soul. In the sense of the development of the spiritual self, that is, creatively producing soul out of nothing and bad soul that has been corrupted by us through the influence of the adversaries, the adversaries have made the way to this palatable to us, they themselves have not corrupted it, we have fallen for it, they are powerful entities and can exert powerful enticements on us. Everything that prevents the earth from passing into the pure spiritual state, we must have dissolved by then. Otherwise, a remnant remains that cannot pass over into this pure soul state. That would then be lost to future development. Only we can transform it.

So it's about consciously working on the spiritual. It is about becoming aware of what this soul is in its pure form. If I strip away everything sensual-physical from it? The physical is not our spiritual, it is a spiritual that is too hardened, if anything. What is matter? It is actually spiritual. It is condensed soul. Condensed means hardened. Hardened in egoism. Finally solidified into the physical. Life dies and solidifies in a solid crystalline state. Everything that is alive works in the liquid, in the flowing. In that which has solidified, become dead, life can no longer be active. However, all the real crystals that exist on earth are not completely dead, but there is a tiny remnant still inside that is open to the forces of life. Interestingly, this is because crystals are not perfectly built. Life cannot tolerate perfection. Perfection is the ultimate goal of the dead world. With precise order. An optimal state in which it remains. In life there is no such thing. Life is a striving for precision, a striving for perfection, but before it is reached it takes another turn and goes into an imperfection, from which a new striving arises for a higher perfection, which is also never reached. Life is the striving for perfection and a lack of it. This is important. Nature is not perfect either. It strives for perfection. That is part of the world of life. If it becomes absolutely perfect, then we would have the realm of the adversary. That would be the most terrible thing that could happen to us. Therefore, be careful with ideals. The mind designs these ideals. The moment it translates into the soul, into the life forces, it becomes less and less perfect! The ideal image that comes from the spiritual cannot be carried one hundred percent down into the physical into the outer creation, it loses, it must, otherwise it would not exist, because it would only be perfect if it remained purely spiritual, then it is perfection, but then there would be no creation, no development and in the spiritual also no consciousness. Not for us but also not for the spiritual beings, not even for the Godhead itself. That is one aspect of why creation exists at all. By becoming aware of itself, the Deity produces Creation, in the production of Creation it becomes aware of itself, through its deeds, just as we should learn, if we want to understand our real I, our spiritual centre, that we become aware of ourselves through our deeds. There we do in small things what the Deity does in large things. The hierarchies above us also become aware by the traces of their deeds. But these traces are always more imperfect than the original impulse of creation. It becomes more and more imperfect, but still it makes sense. Because by creating the spiritual, up into the spiritual, that is still the lesser effort, creating up into the living is already more strenuous, the greatest effort of all is creating up into the physical. There the imperfection is always greater, but the spiritual power expended in order to create into the physical is many times greater than when it is a question of creating into the purely spiritual; with us human beings, as far as the directly creative is concerned, we can only go as far as the spiritual, we can develop an impulse in the spiritual, out of that I can play my instrument, the soul is in there, but I can't conjure the instrument out of nothing, but the mood of the soul, the composition, the soul with which I play this composition, I can create that, the soul flows over into my life forces and out of the life forces I begin to make music. Then something of it lives inside. But we don't manage to bring forth life and the physical ourselves. For that we need the higher hierarchies. They do that for us. One day we will be able to do it ourselves. But that will take a long time, so long until the whole evolutionary chain, in which the earth is only in the middle, and another three cosmic states follow, that it will still take until we get there, until we can create the physical.

So the outer creation is imperfect. But we learn from it. We learn from our mistakes, but also from the mistakes that have happened because the spiritual is becoming denser and denser, which leads to a certain lack, to a one-sidedness. The pure spiritual is perfect. At the moment when it goes from the pure spiritual into the formed, shaped spiritual, it is already more imperfect, when it becomes something spiritual it is even more imperfect, when it becomes life force it is even more imperfect, physically most imperfect. Nevertheless, it makes sense. Precisely this imperfect physical, that is something most exciting, if we take the predicted in addition, this physical is spiritually a perfect empty space, that did not yet exist before our earth's development, it only comes into being during our earth's development, a completely spirit-free space, which can however be filled by the spiritual and quite essentially by our spiritual. It is also filled by the spiritual of the higher hierarchies. But that is actually only temporary. For the future, it is more and more a question of filling it with our spiritual. Through the buildings that we produce, the art that we produce, through every little deed, every writing that we do, if there is a right spiritual impulse, a spiritual that is created from this impulse, then we fill this empty space that the crystal world actually represents with this spiritual. That is the great task.

That is the task that the Rosicrucians in particular have set for themselves, the chymical marriage of Christian Rosenkreuz, because it is about a transformation, right into the material, right into the chemical. This does not mean the outer transformation, but how much of our spiritual and soul we can bring into it, that is the important thing. In the Apocalypse, in the outpouring of the bowls of wrath, it is basically described how we can develop these forces, how we can fill the world with our spiritual forces, with our soul forces created purely from the spiritual, and on the other hand, what old soul forces must be dissolved. For this we must put ourselves in a state where we can really experience the purely spiritual. Free from the senses, free from the forces of life, pure to perceive ourselves, our own soul and the soul that surrounds us in its purity. Then it is comparable to the state that comes with the end of the earth's evolution, when the earth as a whole passes into the soul/astral state, then there is nothing else. We can now do the preliminary exercise for this. How could it be to experience only the soulic of the world. To experience the soul cosmos and our soul microcosm, that is, our astral body, in its purity.

The weekly sayings of the soul calendar are a continuous exercise for this. That alone. Where we learn to resonate with our soul, with the soul that goes through a certain rhythm again and again in nature, a living rhythm, we have a soul in nature, but it is a living soul, an animated and enlivening soul, and we learn to recognise it with our soul. To bring our own soul into resonance with it, and from this soul that is there, intuitively/instinctively from the I to contribute something new soul.

When I stand outside in front of a flower and do not focus on the sensuality of the flower, but grasp its soul essence and at the same time grasp something that leads beyond it. I creatively develop something, an impulse that is now in my soul, but which takes what is imperfectly there in this flower one step further in my soul. Purely in inner experience. There is nothing to do externally except to look at the flower, to have a spiritual experience with it, to bring this experience to life in me, to live consciously in it and to continue to form it. By adding my sensations to it. I.e. Through the way we look at nature, we can on the one hand contribute to the further development of the soul world outside, which will later be expressed in the physically visible sphere of life, these are forces that contribute to my changing the plant world over time and transforming it, a great deal plays a role here when we have already passed over into the realm of death, into that realm of the soul where we ascend more and more into the cosmic world of the soul, and bring with us all that we have creatively brought forth in the soul, that which we have developed in the soul while contemplating this flower, that which we have developed in the new soul in the process, that now becomes creative power which works back from the cosmic soul onto the earth. This force makes something new out of the plants. This takes a long time, the progress is small. When we are in life between death and a new birth, we are at times working very powerfully on nature. On the change of nature. In this way we prepare ourselves as humanity as a whole for the conditions of our next incarnation. What the earth will look like then depends on that. It is therefore in no way foreseeable by us now. But we can shape it for the future and we can prepare for it now during our present life on earth, and then in the phase when we pass through death and descend to a new incarnation, the real soul force that comes from the cosmic - increased by the force that we have contributed - will have a downward effect on the earth and change it in the sense that we will then also find a suitable incarnation for ourselves and at the same time have brought progress for the animal kingdom, for the plant kingdom, for the mineral world.

In other words, we have the chance that nature participates in our development process, the nature that we ourselves are in a certain sense. We have stepped out of nature, but we have to be aware of it, but everything in nature is something we have put out of our being. What we have not yet been able to process, what would have been too difficult for our I to process, that is what we have put into interim storage, that is the world that surrounds us. But it all begins, also that which is created in the first chapter of Genesis, this Adam who comes forth, this Uradam, the Adam Kadmon, the cosmic human being. The whole cosmos, with the stars, the galaxies, everything that is out there, that is the human being. Or it used to be. That is the dross that we have put out of ourselves because it was still far too burdensome for us and could not have coped with it, certainly not when the adversaries are acting on us.

We have put many things out into an imperfect state. It is even more imperfect than it should have been if the path to freedom had not been made possible for us and we had not fallen prey to the adversaries. That is to say, everything that is wonderful in nature, that works and is great and close to perfection, for it actually comes from the Divine, the faults that are in the world of nature are often connected with the fact that they are the things that we have put out of ourselves. There are many more mistakes in it than were necessary. It was necessary so that we could come to freedom. When there is a certain imperfection anyway, when something descends from the spiritual into the physical, but we have added to ours and made it even worse. It was probably unavoidable.

But we now have the opportunity during the Earth's evolution to make up for much of it, even to make it better. So a new contribution is coming in through human beings, which would not have been possible in any other way than this way. It is also something different when the creative source itself is directly present in this created world, as we are as human beings. It is something different than when the divine source works from outside the created world. The supreme divine works in a certain way from outside. Very beautifully expressed in the medieval world view in Dante, there is this paradise world (Paradiso), that is more than the earthly paradise, that is the world of the planetary spheres, spiritually seen, beyond that the zodiac, the star world, beyond that there is the crystal sky, which has to do with the crystallisation forces, but also with our I-forces, because they come from there, or from just behind this crystal sky, then there is the Empyreum, the divine fire world (Phyr = lat. fire). This is beyond our sensually tangible world. Outside of it. From there, the divinity has worked creatively. In the Hebrew tradition, among the Kabbalists, there is a beautiful expression for this, they speak of the "Zimzum", the retreat of God, a space for creation. Then the creative works from the outside. A space is created in which the divine as such is no longer inside, but where, figuratively speaking, it works from the outside (where the spatio-temporal world ceases). Something where space and time lose their meaning, from there come the divine creative powers. Everything that is beyond space and time is inconceivable to our present-day imagination. To imagine means to clothe it in a sensual image. The same non-spatial and non-temporal and in this sense for us nothingness also lives in our ICH. Every human being works with it. Just as the Godhead does it from the outside, we do it from the inside. From the nothingness that is in us, but which is everything. Our I. This nothingness that creates itself into the I, sinks back into nothingness, into timelessness. It is a movement, it is the highest activity, an activity, but the term time does not fit it. But it is also not simply something rigid, something unchanging. Rather, it is simple: something comes out of nothing, leaves a slag behind, the spiritual itself goes back into nothing. In our case, this slag is the soul that we produce in the process. The I-activity goes beyond itself, creates something spiritual, and leaves it behind. The I itself is infinite movement, infinitely small without expansion, at the same time infinitely large, as Nicolaus of Cusa called it, the Coincidentia oppositoriumthe coincidence of opposites. The infinitely large and the infinitely small are the same infinity. The point is the same as the infinite circumference and belongs inseparably together. We can only try to get a feeling for it through such images. The infinitely large circle is at the same time a straight line, i.e. the curved and the stretched have become one.

This is possible in the infinite. These are the forces that we have inside our I. These are the forces that help us. These are the forces that help us to deal with the problems, with the shells of anger. Mentally it is a picture through the experiences that we go through when we work on these things. Experiences that are necessary for us to dissolve and get rid of old spiritual things, things that we have corrupted through the influence of the adversaries, to get rid of them and to create new things, then we will get through these trials. We can already work on it spiritually. It is the most beautiful thing we can do. Our I grows by doing it. If we want to avoid it, then our I will not develop further, then we would not make full use of our possibilities.

It is an image also for this going into this soul world. The images are clothed in outer events. The angels come with the 7 bowls of wrath. The first one begins to pour them out. "The first went and poured out his bowl upon the earth, and there grew upon the people who had the mark of the beast upon them, and who worshipped the image of the beast, an evil sore spreading mischief. The second poured out his bowl into the sea and it turned to blood as from a corpse, and all the living and animate beings in the sea perished."  This sea, it's not about the outer visible sea, water, often an imagination transformed into a sensual image for the soul world, for the moving, surging soul world, in the soul everything is in flow, in motion, unless the desire has become so strong that it becomes solid. Then it is a hardened soul, behind the material on which one can knock (Wolfgang knocks on the table), there is spiritual, soul, there is a living thing that has practically died. Wood is something that has died from the plant kingdom. But in fact the deadest stone has died out of the living. That is to say, the formation of the mineral world has been a dying process. It goes back a very long time into the past. If this dying process had not taken place, there would be no solid earth for us to walk on today. A dying process was necessary for that. For the sake of man - for the first time in the whole history of creation, which includes not only our creation on earth, but also three previous cosmic states. Great stages of development with stars and other things. There were stars, but they were all fluid entities. You can still see that the earth was formed from something liquid, otherwise it wouldn't have this drop shape. A sphere is the ideal drop shape in the actually weightless space outside. The fact that they become elongated here on Earth is only due to gravity. Drops are not yet crystals. There is still life in the drops. Only when it becomes crystalline does it become practically completely dead, in truth it is only almost completely dead because the crystals are not perfect. If the perfect crystal were to emerge, which is perfectly regular internally in the crystal lattice, even in the outwardly most beautiful crystal there are structural defects inside, if they did not exist, then this crystal would have to disintegrate into a thousand splinters at the slightest breath of air, it would be so brittle.

Why does something not break? If something is to break, then I have to apply a force to it, then something breaks. If it's soft like rubber, it doesn't break, it gives way and goes back. Is elastic. Something that is completely rigid cannot be elastic. The space for movement in the crystal arises from the fact that the crystal has empty spaces inside, has faults, it can avoid them. It can avoid the force. In this way, it is included in the life that vibrates around it. It vibrates with the life around it. Quietly. This is the case with all crystals that we find in nature. Yet the crystal is the closest thing to death. Something comes out of the spiritual, goes into the spiritual, into the living and dies into the solid physical. All matter is dead spirit. Almost whole, but not whole.

So water is an image for the mobile, for the spiritual, because the spiritual is usually very mobile, only there in the solid physical is the spiritual hardened to the maximum, not one hundred percent, because there are the faults, but almost completely hardened. Matter (table) is absolute desire power. Desire power hardened in itself. But it is not evil, we need the table, it is beneficial for our development, quite neutral. Therefore, the expression desire power is to be taken neutrally. But at the end of the world's development everything must be dissolved. We can now slowly give the first impulses for this hardening to dissolve. That is why the earth will pass over into the spiritual state, because through our spiritual activity we not only release the spiritual from this hardening, but dissolve it and bring forth a much more living spiritual instead. To the extent that we do this, the earth will inevitably change from a physical state into an initially more living state, into a pure life state and finally into a pure soul state.

It is we who do this. It is in our hands to what extent this will succeed, or how much of that which has hardened with desire, i.e. soul, has become matter, how much will elude this future development, remain as it is and then march into the adversary's kingdom. A world of its own forms, where people will also go along. But people can also be redeemed from this fate, or more precisely, they can free themselves from it, but they need our help to do so. Because in the next cosmic stage of development of our earth, these people who go along into the adversary's kingdom will have different and worse conditions than we have today. And worse conditions than the people who have gone along the regular path. They will then need this help from us. Encouragement to help themselves. They have to do it themselves. But we will have powerful forces to give powerful suggestions and we can above all make sure that these people have better conditions to catch up on what they have missed. But we cannot spare them their task.

We can keep some obstacles out of their way for a while, but then they have to dissolve them themselves when they have become strong enough to deal with them. We can delay certain tests of destiny that they might already have to go through now, but which are still too difficult for them. We are working more and more on this. R. Steiner says that the activity of the adversaries has led to a disorder in karma. Order in karma means that every human being is confronted with a test exactly when he is ripe for it. This was the case in the past. Only those tests of destiny come to you that you can cope with. That is still the case today, by and large. Coping does not mean that things will go on as comfortably as before.  It can be that many things change radically, I have to go through many things that are not easy, but where I realise in retrospect of life, through that I have moved on. I wouldn't want that to be missing from my life, as hard as it was. It has made me who I am today. Otherwise I would have remained a much smaller person, spiritually speaking. That has always worked well, that we get the tasks we can handle.

However, due to the influence of the adversaries, a certain disorder has come into the karma. This disorder is not so much that we are overburdened with the tests, they don't want to put us before tests that we fail at because our powers are not sufficient for them. The paradoxically much worse thing is that they give us tasks that we could do, that are difficult, painful, that they withhold from us. Distract us from them. This has become possible in the meantime. In order to go into the future, we have to dissolve our karma packets, the adversaries say: you don't have to! Go the other way. Leave that behind. What we leave behind is valuable building material for their world. It is highly tempting for human beings because it saves them suffering. But the suffering is an image of the amount of strength I need to straighten out what I have messed up in the past.

That is how these trials are to be read. So revive the corpse that causes the living to die. Also contribute to the spiritual in our environment. Help dissolve something negative. Create something positive out of nothing. We can do that every day. A little bit every day, that's a lot, especially if the whole of humanity does it.

"The third poured out his bowl into all the streams and fountains of water".It is interesting that in the second bowl it is the great surging astral sea, that is, the general astral world, now it becomes concrete, all the currents, all the water sources, every little fuzz must now be worked up, "and all the waters turned to blood, and I heard the angel of the waters cry, you carry the true essence within you, you who is and who was, you who are holy, therefore you bring up this judgment." Yes, it is the Christ, but where does he work?  In our I. We ourselves are working on this. We ourselves bring about this judgement. It is our will. And if it were not our will, the Christ would not do it. He does it to the extent that we want it. Even the Christ cannot take away our karma. We have to resolve that ourselves. We should be grateful for that. It is part of our freedom that we have had to go through the mistakes we have made in order to learn from them. Man only learns from his mistakes, and from them we learn more and more to become a free being that can create out of freedom. "They have shed the blood of the saints and prophets, and now you give them blood to drink, they have brought on themselves their fate, and I heard saying from the altar, yes Lord, divine Lord of the universe, to truth and to the being of good your judgement leads." This is at the same time a judgement that we pass on ourselves, but a judgement that we now bring it back into the right, into the right, that everything that has gone wrong is dissolved and the right, the right comes forth. We are involved in everything. We can set the direction. Only where there is a lack of strength that we hold the direction, that is given to us in strength by the spiritual entities connected with us. But the steering of the path must come from us.

Take this into your heart. It is a matter of building up an endless confidence in our I. Because in it the whole fullness of the power of Christ is available. We just have to really want it. There is no greater must than the must that comes from free will. If I want to do something out of free will, and yet do not do it, then I refute myself. At that moment the I shrinks. It shrinks where it could actually expand, where it could become more powerful in creation. There is no excuse for anyone. And no matter how small we are, no matter how many difficulties we have, no matter how weak we are, each of us has the powers. If we act out of the I, we immediately have a remedy against the adversaries bringing karma into disarray, so that we spare ourselves things that we should not spare ourselves because we thereby make ourselves smaller and smaller and grow more and more into the realm of the adversary. Everyone must decide in freedom where they want to go. The path into the realm of the adversary will sometimes be a very pleasant path. That is the way things are developing. The paradox of the Christian path is to seek out suffering even where one could easily spare oneself it, with the help of the adversaries.

In the past, karma worked so well, we were spared nothing, everything we did badly came back to us sooner or later. Today, this is no longer one hundred percent the case. Since the turn of the times, since then we have been able to go the way of our own strength, then it is connected with this that we, out of our real I, voluntarily take upon ourselves the suffering that is necessary to dissolve the evils of the past. Our real I wants this too. It is only a matter of teaching our little I, our ego, that there is no way around it and that it must not follow the adversaries. That is the difficult task we have there. In pre-Christian times, the Buddha was able to base his teachings on the way to be redeemed from suffering, but this is no longer possible today. Today, the path leads to the fulfilment of tasks. In truth, we also did this in pre-Christian times, as well as we could. However, it was not yet possible to work through the karma of the world, because we only stored our things away. This freed us, but it was not dissolved. That is why only a few people were able, at the expense of many others, to make this ascent into Nirvana, that is, to come into this creative realm of nothingness, into the highest spiritual realm, from which our I also originates. And there to become one with the divine I. But it has developed further. Now we must really want it here on earth and not leave it to the adversaries. Then we will have a wholesome development. That is, to consciously see the sufferings as a task. To consciously take on the tasks.

The future will be such that people will consciously work through their karma, their destiny, our real I knows it, we had the help that it also happens to us, it leads us there, and our guardian angel makes sure that we go there, but in the little I we usually don't know it, we say we didn't need that now. No! You needed it. Whereas not everything is fate. Not everything that happens to us is karmic. Even anticipations can happen. Then we have a karmic plus. Even if we die of an illness, we know over there that it was right, the way it happened. We can carry anything we want. I can carry my cross. Christ, by becoming man, exemplified this for us, in a very extreme form. We can also strengthen the trust in power in other people, the trust in our own I in which the whole spiritual world is potentially present and the Christ is available at all times.  In every single person. And who can give us the strength, in the etheric, in the physical, which we ourselves cannot yet muster, but which we need in order to work through our spiritual self. We can all do that if we want to! Have courage!