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which thou seest, arise and fade away again, pass
through birth and death; but the element of the
soul and spirit nature remains. Direct thy glance to
that! But in order that thou shouldst thyself
experience this psychic-spiritual element within
thee and around thee and feel it one with thyself,
thou must develop the slumbering forces in thy
soul, thou must yield thyself to Yoga, which
begins with devotional looking upwards to the
psychic-spiritual element of being, and which, by
the use of certain exercises, leads to the
development of these slumbering forces, so that
the pupil rises from one stage to another by means
of Yoga. Devotional reverence for the psychic-
spiritual is the other way which leads the soul
itself forwards; it leads to that which lives as unity
in the spiritual element behind the changing forms
which the Veda once upon a time announced
through grace and illumination, and which the soul
will again find through Yoga as that which is to be
looked for behind all the changing forms.
Therefore go thou, thus might a great teacher
have said to his pupil, go thou through the
knowledge of the Sankhya philosophy, of forms,
of the Gunas, through the study of the Sattva,
Rajas and Tamas, through the forms from the
highest down to the coarsest substance, go through
these, making use of thy reason, and admit that
there must be something permanent, something
that is uniting, and then wilt thou penetrate to the
Eternal. Thou canst also start in thy soul through
devotion; then thou wilt push on through Yoga
from stage to stage, and wilt reach the spiritual
which is at the base of all forms. Thou canst
approach the spiritual from two different sides; by
a thoughtful contemplation of the world, or by
Yoga; both will lead thee to that which the great
teacher of the Vedas describes as the Unitary
Atma-Brahma, that lives as well in the outer world
as in the inmost part of the soul, that which as
Unity is the basis of the world. Thou wilt attain to
that on the one hand by dwelling on the Sankhya
philosophy, and on the other by going through
Yoga in a devotional frame of mind.
Thus we look back upon those old times, in which,
so to speak, clairvoyant force was still united with
human nature through the blood, as I have shown
in my book, The Occult Significance of Blood. But
mankind gradually advanced in its evolution, from
that principle which was bound up in the blood to
that which consisted of the psychic-spiritual. In
order that the connection with the psychic-spiritual
should not be lost, which was so easily attained in
the old times of the blood-relationship of family
stock and peoples, new methods had to be found,
new ways of teaching, during the period of
transition from blood-relationship to that period in
which it no longer held sway. The sublime song of
the Bhagavad Gita leads us to this time of
transition. It relates how the descendants of the
royal brothers of the lines of Kuru and Pandu
fought together. On the one side we look up to a
time which was already past when the story of the
Gita begins, a time in which the Old-Indian
perception still existed and men still went on
living in accordance with that. We can perceive, so
to say, the one line which arose out of the old
times being carried over into the new, in the blind
King Dritarashtra of the house of Kuru; and we
see him in conversation with his chariot-driver. He
stands by the fighters of one side; on the other side
are those who are related to him by blood but who
are fighting because they are in a state of transition
from the old times to the new. These are the sons
of Pandu; and the charioteer tells his King (who is
characteristically described as blind, because it is
not the spiritual that shall descend from this root
but the physical), the charioteer relates to his blind
King what is happening over there among the sons
of Pandu, to whom is to pass all that is more of a
psychic and spiritual nature for the generations yet
to come. He relates how Arjuna, the representative
of the fighters, is instructed by the great Krishna,
the Teacher of mankind; he relates how Krishna
taught his pupil, Arjuna, about all that of which we
have just been speaking, of what man can attain if
he uses Sankhya and Yoga, if he develops thinking
and devotion in order to press on to that which the
great teachers of mankind of former days have
described in the Vedas. And we are told in glorious
language, as philosophical as it is poetical, of the
instructions given through Krishna, through the
Great Teacher of the humanity of the new ages
which have emerged from the blood-relationship.
Thus we find something else shining from those
old times across to our own. In that consideration
which is the basis of the pamphlet, The Occult
Significance of Blood, and many similar ones, I
have indicated how the evolution of mankind after
the time of blood-relationship took on other
differentiations, and how the striving of the soul
has thus become different too. In the sublime song
of the Bhagavad Gita we are led directly to this
transition; we are so led that we see by the
instructions given to Arjuna by Krishna, how man,
to whom no longer belongs the old clairvoyance
dependent upon the blood-relationship, must press
on to what is eternal. In this teaching we encounter
that which we have often spoken of as an
important transition in the evolution of mankind,
and the Sublime Song becomes to us an
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