The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! Before I begin my remarks today, please allow me to say a few words by way of introduction. What I will be saying today can be fully justified scientifically. And I will try again and again to establish a relationship with science by showing that anthroposophy is in no way opposed to the justified results and conscientious research methods of the present day. But I have already allowed myself to make the relevant remarks, at least in outline, in the lecture that I was allowed to give here in the same place a few months ago. And since I can assume that a large number of the esteemed audience who were present that day are here again today, a repetition of what was said then could well seem superfluous to them. And so I will leave out what I said then about the relationship between anthroposophy and science.

Dear attendees! When we speak of the spiritual world, fundamental questions and riddles arise for the human soul, questions and riddles that are not merely theoretical, but are connected with the inner peace and joyfulness, with the whole inner destiny of the human soul, and with the ability and efficiency of the human being in life. But the nature of these difficulties that arise for the human being in relation to the spiritual world is not always considered in the right way. That a human being has a spiritual entity to claim for himself cannot really give rise to any mystery or doubt. For man knows in every moment of his waking existence that precisely that in which he feels himself in his true human dignity and in his true human nature is what he describes as his spirit. He is concerned about such riddles that arise in this direction. He is concerned, after all, with the fate of this spirit, which actually constitutes his being. Whether this spirit is something that belongs to the ephemeral, whether we can ascribe a duration to it, whether it is what emerges from material existence like a bubble, whether it is what gives meaning and value to the material. So that is essentially what it is about, not the spirit as such. Even the materialists will not deny the spirit, but only regard it as a result of the material processes of the world.

If a person feels the urge to explore the nature of the spirit, not only for the sake of science but also for the happiness of everyday life, it is because, in the face of this fate, the soul — one might say — from unconscious depths, which are actually only raised into consciousness by a scientific world view, because uncomfortable, worrying moods continually arise from them. And these are connected with a vast number of experiences that flash through our soul. I could mention many of these experiences that cause a person to worry about the spirit, but I will only give two examples, two that are precisely those that a person does not always realize, that do not always enter a person's consciousness. But it is precisely such worries that dwell in the subconscious depths, giving rise to moods and states of mind, bringing happiness or sorrow to the soul, and which intrude into everything that makes a person capable or incapable in life. When we define them, we often describe something that the simple, naive mind does not bring to consciousness, but which is rooted all the more deeply in the soul and is connected with the whole life of feeling and sensation. And from this realm I would like to give two examples.

The first is the feeling that arises at the moment when a person passes from the waking state into the sleeping state, which actually occurs every day in a person's life. The inner spiritual activity in which the human being finds his true being fades away. It becomes completely unconscious, and the human being enters the indefinite. Even if one does not always feel it, there is something in this experience that could be called the powerlessness of ordinary spiritual life. There is something in the world existence that we enter through the state of sleep and that takes away from us the state in which we recognize our human dignity and our human worth, that takes away our spiritual life. This powerlessness in the face of the spirit is the one thing that, more or less, half or wholly unconsciously underlies the riddle questions about the spiritual being.

And on the other hand, it is that which can arise when a person awakens in the morning, perhaps through the transition of the dream state, which he can only see as a sum of chaotic experiences in relation to the reality of waking life, then immersed in his physical being, serving his bodily senses, his organs. But then the human being notices — I would say — the other pole of that which raises questions about the nature of the spirit within him. He notices that, in relation to what he is as a spiritual being, he is claimed in his bodily presence. He lives in the senses, in the nervous system, in the limbs. But if we ask ourselves the simplest question: how do we move the hand, the arm? In our ordinary consciousness, we cannot account for what flows from the intention to carry out the action down into the body, what works and weaves in this bodily existence, so that ultimately raising and lowering the arm comes about. It is as if what we call our spiritual life were plunging into darkness.

Thus, on the one hand, we see the sense of powerlessness of the spiritual life and, on the other, the descent into an undefined darkness that lies within us. And when a person, through experiencing something like this, brings to mind all the soul moods and dispositions that arise from it, then the question somehow urges itself upon him: Yes, what is the truth about this spiritual life? Is there another spiritual life in which this, which seems so powerless and dark to me, is somehow rooted, that guarantees its continued existence? But then two opinions, two enemies of thought and feeling, are placed between man and this spiritual world, which fill man with illusions about the spiritual world and which feed on something in him, in the mood and state of his soul.

The first is superstition. The person who wants to come to an awareness of his connection to a spiritual world does indeed strive inward, seeking, not through his knowledge but out of his will, to surrender to all kinds of illusions, all kinds of clouds to his judgment, things that are supposed to tell him something about the spiritual world. I need only hint at these things for you to feel what sources of illusion lie in what we call the various forms of human superstition. But let us see how the superstitious person must fare in the world.

What he conjures up within himself and what is supposed to visualize his relationship to the spiritual world collides with external reality at every turn. Let us look at the processes and things around us. If we approach them according to their laws, we find that something else is true than what we believe from superstitious ideas. This leads to a certain disorientation. We stagger through life instead of feeling connected to our spirituality, to the real laws of the world. And we also become unfit because we cannot find the strength within ourselves to adapt to the laws of the outside world. A superstitious person must ultimately become an unfit person for themselves and their environment. Now, it is precisely those who, because of a certain will or a certain situation in life, must refuse to deal with the whole scientific life of the present day who fall prey to superstition. Those, then, who are little touched by the significant insights of scientific life, easily fall prey to the disorientation and unfitness in life that I have just described.

Those who truly enter into this scientific life, who conscientiously penetrate with the scientific methods what the senses, what experiment and observation can offer, are exposed to another pole of mental experience. Such people then feel how they must shape the intellect so that it may find its way unclouded and unmolested through all kinds of illusions into the realm of true reality. But then they feel further: with this intellect, which is so well suited for the realm of the [sensual] world, one cannot ascend into the supersensible world. And precisely those who take the scientific life seriously are then thrown into doubt. And these doubts, when they take hold of the serious mind, the serious soul, they descend from the intellect, in which they are initially rooted, deep into the life of feeling and emotion. And it is precisely through anthroposophical research that we recognize how intimately our emotional life is connected with the states of suffering and joy in our physicality. So that in the end what descends from the intellect into the mind as doubt extends into the bodily existence. So that a person — one may use this radical expression in this case — is thrown by doubt into a certain mental wasting disease, then into physical weakness and unfitness. Through doubt, too, he ultimately becomes unfit for life, for himself and for his fellow human beings.

Because these things affect modern man so deeply, those personalities who take the spiritual life seriously seek the most diverse means of information in order to gain a relationship with the spiritual world after all. We see how precisely these latter natures now turn to that which, because of its vagueness and lack of certainty, can never actually form the basis of real knowledge. They turn to the pathology of human nature. Because they doubt what the healthy soul and healthy body can produce in terms of knowledge about the supersensible world, they turn to the abnormal human nature and believe that, in what they can find in deviation from what normal knowledge produces, normal knowledge, can be found that points to things and processes in another world than this one, in which man also feels just as little at home and where he cannot want that the spiritual could sink into indefinite darkness. And so especially doubters from the fields of science often turn today to mediumistic phenomena; they turn to the sick human nature, out of which come all kinds of visions, all kinds of inner views, which are nothing more than hallucinations after all. For we can see, if we look impartially at the facts in this area, how the medium, who in terms of his normal life of cognition is cut off from the environment, how he, out of a morbid physicality (for a healthy nature produces a healthy capacity for knowledge), has all kinds of inner experiences, which he then communicates. It is never possible to examine these experiences with the same accuracy with which, for example, one examines those of a dream. In the case of knowledge, it is important that what is experienced from somewhere can be examined by the healthy human understanding of everyday reality. We can do this with dreams, but not in the same way with mediumistic revelations, because we do not see through them, because they do not live within ourselves. Nor can it be tested in terms of knowledge what arises from a diseased nature as visions and hallucinations. We will always find that something is wrong somewhere when visionary or hallucinatory phenomena arise from the soul life. And one can say: it is only a continuation of the despair at healthy normal knowledge in the face of the supersensible, which expresses itself in such seeking.

On the other hand, there are many natures in the present day that have not yet emerged from what education, from what we are born into, gives, but there are already a good number of natures today that, by despairing of other ways of entering the spiritual world, they now come to what I might say the most naive minds seek out to satisfy their spiritual needs. There it is, time-honored, the result of a development from ancient times up to our own, there it is. One can quite certainly feel how such confessions, and they extend into our present-day philosophy, how they really reveal something of a spiritual world. But one can actually, since they are simply there as results, since they are preserved by tradition and approach man in a certain finished form, yet give nothing but what in the present day is called belief as opposed to actual knowledge.

Those who lack the courage to penetrate to knowledge seek to justify their belief through all possible conceptual constructions. But those who approach the event with deeper insights of the soul and follow it from period to period, who not only follow the external facts of history but also follow the inner life of the soul of humanity in historical life, they find that everything that occurs today in traditions, in worldviews that exist as creeds or as philosophies, to which one then devotes oneself with a certain faith, they all lead back to old forms of knowledge, not to old forms of faith.

Dear attendees, I will certainly not be one of those who recommend such old forms of striving for knowledge for the present day. However, in order to be able to communicate how man, by nature and essence, can come to a knowledge of another world, it is necessary to discuss the way in which man in earlier epochs of humanity and how that which has been revealed as the result of such earlier paths of knowledge, how that, without our having any clarity today about what these paths of knowledge were, how that was then communicated to the course of development of mankind, how it is still there today. People would be amazed if they realized with complete historical accuracy how even the most self-evident philosophies only contain the results of those that are present on the basis of earlier knowledge.

I would like to highlight two examples of the way in which such insights were arrived at in very, very ancient times. I could also cite others, but I will choose two characteristic ones. The results of these paths of knowledge, which can no longer be ours, still live on today in tradition. Many, indeed millions of people, devote themselves to them without knowing it. For that which lives in all creeds and in all world views has once been sought by individuals on their paths of knowledge. In particular, the first path of knowledge that I will indicate is not really characterized correctly at present. For it actually characterizes only that which has remained in the ancient oriental world as old traditions, but which has remained defective and decadent, of that which was a fully justified striving for knowledge.

The first thing I would like to characterize is what is usually known as the so-called yoga path of oriental spiritual seekers. Through this yoga path – without people necessarily knowing it – which is said to deliver the results that many people devote themselves to, what was it that they strove for? This will become clear to us once we have summarized its most important characteristics. One process that the yoga scholar particularly turned to was breathing that was different from ordinary breathing.

Of course, I know, dear audience, that breathing techniques in particular can be quite detrimental to people today. But what is harmful to human nature today can be traced back to forms of paths to knowledge that were once perfectly justified in older, more primitive forms of human nature and that were really paths into the spiritual world from the essence of the human spirit at that time. The yoga scholar tried to bring into a different rhythm what otherwise takes place unconsciously in the human being, what only becomes conscious in pathological states or otherwise in some abnormal cases, what thus essentially takes place unconsciously in the healthy person. He tried to inhale, hold his breath and exhale again in a different way than in ordinary life. What did he hope to achieve in this way? He sought to bring the one element of the human soul life to a knowledge of other worlds than the ordinary ones, the element of thinking. And the yoga scholar noticed that through this abnormal breathing, his thought process was brought into a completely different orientation. Into which orientation? We can make this clear by referring to the physiology of today. When we breathe in, the respiratory current is driven through the spinal canal into the brain. This is an unconscious process for modern man. But that does not make it any less true that through the processes that take place in the body and that are the exterior for the soul-spiritual processes of life, not only everything for which the brain is the tool is drawn through them, but also that which is the refined rhythm of breathing. As we think about the world, the subtle current that arises from breathing vibrates and flows and undulates and weaves continuously in our brain and in our nervous system. By breathing in an abnormal way, the yoga scholar became aware of what remains unconscious in the breathing process during normal breathing. And he was able to follow what now flows into the brain from the breathing process,

And what came about as a result was that thinking became different. In ancient times, thinking was very much alive for humanity. In ancient times, it was the case for humanity that people did not, as we today justifiably see pure colors everywhere through outer eyes and hear pure tones through outer ears, the ancient man saw everywhere that which arose in his soul as a soul-spiritual. In the cloud, in the thunder and lightning, in the spring, in the plant, in the stone, everywhere man saw, except for the sounds that the ear gave, except for the colors that the eye supplied, and so on, everywhere man in older times saw a spiritual-soul. People today say: These were fantasies. They were not figments of the imagination, just as we perceive the blush through our eyes, so the ancients perceived what was spiritual and soulful in wave and wind, in lightning and thunder, in plants, stones and animals, in springs and streams, in sun and moon. This thinking, which was the common property of humanity in those ancient times, was of course also the thinking of the yoga scholar. But by sending the consuming breath through this thinking, this thinking became something else for him. Through the thinking that he developed as a result, he perceived a different world than through his ordinary thinking. He perceived the world that gave him, above all, the certainty of his own being.

And when we read today the wonderfully poetic descriptions given in the Bhagavad Gita, for example, about the nature and workings of the human self, they were gained through the fact that the yoga scholarship pulls itself together into a thinking that was acquired through the self-regulated breathing process. Above all, the old man, by seeing the spiritual in all things and processes of the external world, did not have his inner spiritual. Through the yoga process, he became aware of his spiritual self. And that which often resounds from ancient times, which was only changed on the outside, lives on in worldviews and creeds. And many philosophers and religious believers do not know how what they say about the human soul and the self in connection with the eternal has developed over time from ancient times, when it was the result of the training of ancient yogis. But it can be realized that these are inner exercises that were intended to lead the way up to this way of knowing in the supersensible worlds, so that one should get to know one's relationship to a different world than the one that otherwise surrounds us. On the one hand, in the direction of thinking, this was such a path of knowledge.

Another older path of knowledge was the one that is still recommended today in many cases, which is less harmful than the yoga path when applied to today's nature, but which cannot bring real knowledge today. The yoga path is inappropriate for today's human being. Because by performing a certain breathing process, one makes the organism different from what it otherwise is. The organism becomes fine and sensitive. The lightest breaths of life weave themselves into it, so that the person becomes extremely sensitive to the hard, robust outside world. The yogi therefore likes to withdraw from this. In the old days, when people sought higher knowledge from those who withdrew from life, this was possible. That does not apply to our lives today. Our modern life has come to the point where anyone who wants to give people knowledge should be fully immersed in life. We will say of the one who wants to withdraw into a hermit's life: You cannot reveal anything to us. Only when you live life with us and yet come to certain insights, then we can follow your paths of knowledge. Therefore, we need different paths of knowledge for the modern person than the old ones were. And one such older path of knowledge was that of asceticism. In turn, what was practiced as asceticism in ancient times as a legitimate path had been corrupted, and what can be read and learned about this asceticism today in many cases is not what an ancient humanity once used in its legitimate way to seek knowledge, which in many cases lives on much more than that of the yogis in today's worldviews. So what is this asceticism based on? It is based on a lowering, a relaxation of our physical body. And it was the experience of those who underwent such asceticism when they tuned down their bodily functions, when everything ran more smoothly than in ordinary life, what takes place in the physical body, so that they were filled with the experience of inner strength. The will became purely spiritual as the outer physical existence was tuned down. And such ascetics said to themselves: Yes, those bodily functions are actually nothing more than an obstacle to penetrating into the spiritual worlds. For the ordinary outer world, our body is indeed the right tool. We can only live spiritually and mentally in a world between birth and death if we can devote ourselves to what the external environment triggers in our senses in a purely physical and physiological way. Only when we can use our body normally can we truly live with the outer world. But precisely because this body, according to both the cognitive and the will side, is so well suited for the waking life between birth and death, it proves to be unsuitable for allowing people to experience inner soulfulness in its purity. Therefore, such ascetics sought to tune down the physical, so that the spiritual-soul within them would arise. And they felt bliss when it arose. And in this bliss they felt that which was otherwise incorporated in powerlessness, united with a spirit that never sinks into powerlessness, into darkness. They felt united with the spirituality of the cosmos.

If we tuned our body down, we would become unfit for the outer world. What we humans need to do today, in an age when we are surrounded by magnificent external culture, we could not do. We would become unfit if we wanted to devote ourselves to such asceticism in the old sense. Therefore, for the modern human being, the inner practice must proceed as I have described in principle in the last lecture and as you will find described in detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my “Occult Science” and in other of my writings. There I showed and in these writings I show how the modern human being practices purely in soul and spirit, not by doing breathing exercises with reference to the physical, not by tuning down the physical body but by doing exercises that are to be done purely inwardly, intimately, exercises that consist of concentration and meditation of thought, that consist of the person not devoting himself to another breathing process, but to another way of thinking. This is the difference between the old yoga method and the exercises you will find described in the books mentioned, the exercises that do not turn a person into a hermit and do not degrade his physical body. The old yoga scholar relied on breathing processes that , but which the modern human being must try by concentrating on certain trains of thought, by overcoming abstract thinking, which is otherwise everywhere in ordinary life and in ordinary science, and by doing so, entering into inner mobility.

I would like to say that our exercises are aimed at achieving the opposite of what the ancient yoga scholar wanted to achieve. He had the naive belief, shared by the rest of humanity, that the peculiarity of the time was that his thinking was inwardly alive and that he wanted to calm it. He sought the abstractness of thinking that we already have today, simply because human nature has developed further, and from which we want to escape today in order to gain knowledge of other worlds. It is remarkable that in ancient times, with all one's might, one strove for what we already have today, and that today, by turning directly to thinking, we are taking this thinking in different directions than it is in ordinary life and in ordinary science. That we inwardly enliven today's abstract thinking, which we increasingly perceive as dead thinking, so that we pass from abstract, dead thought to inwardly living thought. That is the secret of today's practice: to enliven the abstract, dead thought that is present in us in ordinary life and in ordinary science. In this way we achieve the goal today of looking into other worlds in our knowledge.

What happens in the process leads us to the characteristics of certain subtle processes. But one must decide to delve into such subtleties. If one does not want to do this, one cannot really understand the path of knowledge into higher worlds. By practicing such exercises – as I said, I will not describe them further today – a person first notices how his thinking gradually comes to life. And I will hint at what that comes to by means of an example that is appropriate for today's culture.

Suppose we look, as one is accustomed to doing if one has had a scientific education, at a - let's say - higher animal. We make ourselves clear, precisely through our abstract thinking, which is the inner conditions of life and relationships, which are the formal designs, in this higher animal. We make all this clear to ourselves as far as it is possible for today's science to gain a correct idea, so that we can visualize the essence of the animal inwardly. What we visualize in this way, we are then accustomed to relating, for example, to the formative development and inner physical essence of the human being. We then visualize how the internal organs are formed, how they function in the human being, and how the external form is developed. We then compare what we can establish about the human being, which we develop into natural laws, with what we gain about the animal. And by comparing the two, we come to form a certain idea, whether in a more or less materialistic or spiritual sense, about the relationship between humans and higher animals.

But now we ask ourselves something else, something that one actually only learns to ask when one devotes oneself to such exercises, which relate purely to thinking and bring thinking to life. Then one asks oneself: Yes, when one turns to the higher animal world with one's ordinary abstract thinking and realizes what one can realize about it, is one then able to ascend from one's idea of the animal to the idea of the human being? Can we, with our inward liveliness, do with the idea what we can do outwardly with the transformation of form that we observe in the outside world, and then compare in its various aspects and relate to one another through logical abstractions? Can we, with our inward liveliness, do with the idea what we can do with the idea of the animal to arrive at the idea of the human being? Does one thus live through in abstract thinking what is presupposed in us out there in nature, as forces of growth and of formation? No, one does not. But if [he] devotes himself to the newer, purely soul-based yoga, if he arrives at bringing this thinking of the human being to life in such a way that, by gains the idea by which he inwardly visualizes this process, then he comes with this idea, in which it is transformed in the way the outer process is to be transformed, over to the very different nature. Then he submerges himself with this living concept into things, while otherwise, if one has only abstract thinking, one stands and does not submerge into them. And so, through this modern system of exercises in relation to thinking, the human being is inwardly completely transformed. His thinking becomes inwardly something completely different and enables him to truly immerse himself in the world to which he belongs, but to immerse himself with that which he inwardly experiences spiritually. And by immersing himself, he becomes certain of this: that which lives in me as a spiritual being, which may appear to be immersed in darkness and powerlessness, is nevertheless grounded in a spiritual world. For by immersing himself in living thought, he makes himself one with the spiritual of the world, he lives together with the eternal, spiritual foundation of existence, and in this way man gets to know his eternal nature in terms of thought.

But then, my dear audience, the doubts really begin. The path is initially like that on one side. However, one should not think that those who seek their path of knowledge in this modern sense will initially live in pure bliss by entering into a completely different state of mind than that of ordinary consciousness. What is at issue here can be gauged from the well-founded objections that can be raised from all sides against it – and I want to say quite categorically – that can be raised with a certain right, the objections that proceed from the fact that one points to a philosophy like that of Schelling or one like that of Oken: ingenious, powerful, ingenious world conceptions, emerging from a kind of living thinking. But if we enter into both with an unprejudiced human sense, in the way that Schelling or Oken formed their thoughts about individual facts, then, in a more imaginative way, these changed so that they fit into something else, so that they can submerge from being into becoming, there is only mere thinking, a mere dwelling in inner imagery. Nothing guarantees existence, reality. This is precisely what one must reproach such thinkers with: although they set thinking in motion, they cannot give it a character whereby it guarantees its reality in the immediate cognitive life of the human being. And here we may point out that whatever in anthroposophical form seeks to penetrate into the supersensible world, can do so whenever a human being endeavors to follow the path of knowledge in the right way by means of the exercises described here. He then comes to such living thoughts. He develops them by using them to try to grasp the world by immersing himself inwardly in it. But just when he has such a living thought in a particular case and wants to grasp something in all seriousness with it, then inwardly he really experiences what can be called the deepest inner soul pain, the deepest inner soul suffering. Such a thought, which can be transformed inwardly, is not without pain, is not without suffering in the soul. That is why anyone who has acquired even a little knowledge will never tell you anything other than this: Yes, what I have experienced externally as happiness, as pleasure, as satisfaction in life, for that I am quite grateful to my destiny; but what I have acquired as a little knowledge, I basically owe to the suffering that life has brought me, most of all to mental suffering. And these mental sufferings, which came over me by themselves, so to speak, also brought me the certainty that the reality of a living thought can only be experienced by inwardly living through its effect, its truth, in suffering and pain, and that real knowledge of the spiritual world cannot be attained without inner tragedy.

This could also be seen through a somewhat unbiased, more subtle way of looking at things. What about our sensory approach? Well, my dear audience, when we indulge in sensory perception, a subtle change first occurs in our sensory organ; even in the wonderfully constructed eye, small changes occur. Today, because we are no longer aware of what early man perceived – these small changes as pain – we are so organized that we experience them with a certain matter-of-fact painlessness, because we are not in them with the whole person. But what the enlivened thought brings about makes us, as a whole human being, aware that the physical human being is permeated by the spiritual. This practice makes us a sense organ, and we must gain the ability to perceive the spiritual world that we acquire through this sense organ by first going through and overcoming pain and suffering. And by overcoming it, not only does the healthy physical body remain, but the soul in us is now able to look directly into the spiritual world. But then, through this seeing, which is conveyed to us by becoming a pure sensory organ after going through the pain, what presents itself to us in this way connects with what presents itself to moving thought. One acquires a consciousness of reality about the spiritual world through the sense organs interacting with animated thinking, just as we otherwise acquire a consciousness of reality about the world of colors and sounds. But in this way, my dear audience, the modern human being also gains the ability to see into another world. In this way, he has a spiritual reality before the eye of his soul, so to speak, as a whole human being becomes the eye of the soul and, in addition to the sensual reality, the spiritual reality lies around him. For example, the human being, as he is physically formed, also appears before our soul in a different way when we have the living thought. He lives in images. And when we look at a person, what is standing there before us as an outer human form — even what is standing there as an outer human form — shows us something that is connected with the purely spiritual soul. We look, so to speak, at a spiritual soul form, just as we look with the physical eye at the bodily form. And by looking at this spiritual-soul aspect, we connect with the physical body what I call, without hesitation — even if it may cause offence — an auric aspect of human nature. We see an auric aspect; we see a spirit-soul organism. And this spirit-soul organism shows through its own nature, just as the physical organism shows when we have an adult human being before us, that it was once a small child. What we see as the auric human being points back to what we were as pure spiritual-soul beings in a spiritual-soul world before we descended into the physical world and united with that which had been prepared in the mother's body for union with the pure spiritual soul from this physical world. And not only are we pointed in this general way to that which we ourselves were when we had prepared ourselves for it, we are also pointed to in a concrete way to what the person was at that time. We gradually get to know the human being as a spiritual-soul being in the spiritual-soul world in the same way that we get to know the physical human being through our eyes and intellect. However, we have to rise to a certain level of contemplation, which consists of saying to ourselves: Yes, we look at the external world that surrounds us with all the abilities that we have in our normal life between birth and death. We see everything around us in the stars, in the clouds, in the realms of nature; but we look least into ourselves. For we know, if we are unbiased, that what we see within us is basically only a pictorial representation of what we experience in the outside world.

Between birth and death, the human being is organized around the external world. An incredible abundance of content is revealed to the human being as he turns his eyes and other senses out into this environment, from the stars to the smallest worm. But the one who is unbiased enough can intuitively see that what he carries within him is formed in an even more wonderful way. Yes, the outer world may be gloriously formed, and through science we may reveal great and powerful laws from it. If we can look into it, not through anatomy, not through what is revealed to external science, which leads to the glories of the outer world, but through inner faculties, then we will say to ourselves at every moment: That which lies within human nature reveals much more than the cosmic outer world. It differs only in external space, but not in abundance. We can only guess at this human interiority in our ordinary consciousness, but it is truly a microcosm, a small world, and however magnificent the external world may be, here within the human being it appears even more magnificent. But between birth and death we only grasp this intuitively. For when we use our senses and will, we descend into darkness. We do not see what builds up our lungs; we do not convince ourselves that what builds up our lungs is greater and more powerful. We look into our heart, but cannot convince ourselves that the inner organization of the heart is a much more powerful one than what we encounter as an organization when we seek out the relationships between the earth and the sun. We can only guess at all this. With the tools of science, however, we cannot look inside. But if we look into the world with supersensible vision — into the world in which we lived as spiritual beings before our birth, or, let us say, conception — then we find that, while here between birth and death the cosmos is our external world, to which we direct our deeds, our spiritual self before conception — the human inner being — is our external world.

We look at this human interior because we have to immerse ourselves actively in it. For example, we have to prepare for the transformation that takes place so wonderfully in the child as the brain develops. We look at what we make of ourselves out of the soul and spirit before we descend into the physical world. We not only see the human inner world, which appears dark to us between birth and death; it is not only our knowledge, it is not only what we admire when we let our sympathy and antipathy play; it is also what we have turned our actions towards before birth or conception. The human being's will nature aims at what he is then able to make of his inner organization. And, ladies and gentlemen, however unconsciously this may take place in ordinary life, it must be achieved. And what the human being experiences in the purely spiritual world through knowledge and activity is what is then, albeit unconsciously, carried out in this physical life on earth. And that is one side of the auric human being.

The other side of the auric man comes before our contemplation when we do not bring the outer form before our eyes, but that which lives in the human being's will impulses, in the human being's deeds. There we indeed learn to look at the world differently, namely at the world of human beings. One says to oneself: What people do appears to one as the world of colors appears to a blind person who has been successfully operated on. He gets to know a completely new world by opening up an external sense. In this way, a sense is opened up for us by transforming ourselves into a sensory organ as a whole human being. With this, however, we look differently at what people experience. Above all, we get to know ourselves with this sense organ, not like the ascetic who downgrades his outer physicality so as to have no obstacle for the spiritual, who caused suffering in order to come to the spiritual through the suffering of the physical; we come to the spiritual through the suffering in the soul. But through this we get to know in ourselves what is spiritual-soul in this earthly life. We learn to recognize what prepares itself as spiritual-soul and, in turn, strives out of the physical as the second auric when we go through the gate of death. We thus become acquainted with our life after death by becoming sensory organs ourselves. We become acquainted with that which passes through the gate of death as the eternal soul nature of man. We become acquainted with the forces that strive within us towards the spiritual world, towards the spiritual in the cosmos, just as we strove with our deeds and our vision before birth.

But we become aware of something else. We learn to recognize, for example, that when one person meets another, the two paths of life converge. Something develops that is of decisive importance for the fate of both. The two go from there together on their path through life. This is usually called coincidence. But if one learns — I would like to say, like the blind man, when he is operated on, learns to see colors —, if one learns to know what a person does in his life with the sense organs that he forms out of himself as a whole human being, then, from early childhood on, one follows what he does, out of sympathies and antipathies — out of sympathies and antipathies that are replaced by others. What becomes his life path always strives out of us, so we can draw the line as if planned to what has become his destiny. We see: what shapes his life comes from within him. We understand more precisely what older people, who have become wise through age, said without bias. Goethe's friend Knebel once said: “When you look back through life, life seems to be thoroughly planned, and you feel drawn to the individual decisive points as if they had emerged from a previously laid out plan for life.” Thus one can see into one's own life and recognize how it is shaped by actions arising out of likes and dislikes, out of instincts and desires. From there, the path leads to the contemplation of the thread of destiny through repeated earthly lives. We learn to recognize how what springs up in sympathies and antipathies goes back to earlier earth lives. It can only be hinted at how, in this way, by becoming completely a sense organ, one gradually gains a view of the repeated earth lives through which the thread of fate runs. One sees into the eternal spiritual through the higher sense.

Now is the time when, in a very modern way, man can find his way to those other worlds with which his soul must feel connected after all, how he can find this path for real knowledge, without becoming alienated from life but by fully engaging with it. Now he can delve into what he acquires in this way as a knower, so that he stimulates his whole being. Now what knowledge is connects with inner religious devotion, now that man finds the way in a modern way, knowledge can in turn lead to religion, now knowledge can lead to true, genuine devotion. Man reaches this goal of knowledge by a path that is full of the inner way. Before that, one had to tune down the body. Now one leaves the body as it is, so that it remains suitable for the outer life, so that one can have the trust of other people. But in the soul, by making the soul work all the harder, one nevertheless undergoes suffering; one produces suffering in an inner way, which used to be produced in an external way. And now, if such anthroposophy, as it is meant here, is understood, it can be understood that the individual can be understood if one listens to him without prejudice. Today, in a sense, every single person can follow certain rules to pave their own way into the spiritual world. But it is not necessary, for one can grasp through one's own common sense what the spiritual researcher can reveal through his vision, and understand it. Just as little as one needs to be a painter to judge the beauty of a picture, so little does one need to be a spiritual researcher oneself to find the truth of what the spiritual researcher says. For through his higher vision, this spiritual researcher is also only led into the higher worlds. He must also recognize the reality of these worlds through his common sense. Just as one checks by means of common sense that a dream does not correspond to external reality, so one must recognize, by means of a more advanced logic, the truth and reality of what the spiritual researcher fathoms in spiritual worlds, in order to fathom the true relationship of human beings to these spiritual worlds in such a way that there is no feeling of powerlessness or darkness. But at the same time, something else arises that we need very much in the present. In the present time, we are completely immersed in a flood of ideas and thoughts. Science and many other aspects of life give us these ideas and thoughts, but these ideas and thoughts are abstract and, in the sense in which they were mentioned today, dead. At most, we have thoughts of the spirit, ideas of the spirit, but the spirit does not live among us. This is what we, as modern people, must confess when we look back at past ages. Certainly, we cannot wish that they would arise again. Many things must appear quite unappealing to us that people once considered right for their way of life. And in terms of this way of life, today's people have an enormous number of hopes and illusions. But if we do not want to bring back the old days, we have to say: they lived in the spirit; for they immersed themselves in the spirit. They did not devote themselves to abstract thoughts. This spiritual life has become life for people, not just thoughts about spirituality. Today we only have thoughts about spirituality. We will again have spiritual liveliness among us. We need this, by developing thoughts about the spiritual, developing them in such a way that the concrete, the living spiritual moves into ourselves, so that we are penetrated to the innermost being not only by thoughts but by the spirit, so that we also know: spiritual beings live around us, with us, in our life of will, in our thoughts. We need the spirit not only in the form of thoughts, we need the living spirit everywhere in our midst. We must know, in turn, that we can conjure up the experience of the thought, of the living will, not just the abstract, but the concrete spiritual. If we know that the spiritual lives in us as a thought, that it lives with us as a companion, can inspire us, can fill us with enthusiasm, can open up our true human existence and human dignity, then, with such a human relationship to the world, elevated into the supersensible, into the spiritual, we can find paths that lead us to demands that are being made today with deep longing and deep tragedy and also with many illusions. But we must seek the spirit as a companion in our endeavors in the present and the future by spiritualizing our thoughts and by bringing dead thoughts to life. That, and nothing else, is the aim of anthroposophical research into the world, of the anthroposophical paths that are supposed to lead from the physical world into the spiritual world for the sake of inner blessing, for a true experience of the all-encompassing reality that is not only physical but also spiritual. And it is only in spiritual reality that man can find the satisfaction for those riddles that I mentioned at the beginning of today's lecture.

Dear attendees! The remarks that I will be presenting here today require a certain premise if they are to appear justified in the present – I would like to say – in our scientific age. This premise is the examination of what must currently be recognized as scientifically possible. I took the liberty of discussing in my last lecture, which I had the honor of giving here a few months ago, what needs to be said in this regard, what Anthroposophy asserts about its relationship to the scientific world view of the present day, how it is not in opposition to it at all, but fully recognizes its significance, and how it, in turn, goes further than this science. And since I may well assume that a large part of today's honored audience was also present at the time, it seems to me neither possible nor necessary to repeat what was said then. I will simply take it for granted and build on it what Anthroposophy now has to say through its research, through its knowledge of the relationship between man and the spiritual world.

When we speak as human beings of the difficulties we face when enigmatic questions arise about the spiritual world, when we speak of such difficulties, these difficulties cannot relate to the existence of a spiritual world as such, to which the human being feels connected in his earthly existence. For man needs only to reflect on himself, and he lives in a spiritual world. Through his spirit, he is cognitively related to the things around him, to the actions he performs himself. And even the most ardent materialist does not deny this relationship of man to the spiritual world, insofar as man is always aware of his spirit in the waking state. The difficulty only begins when man looks at the nature of this spirit, in that he can actually see his human dignity, his true human value, only through it. Man must indeed say to himself: I have the spirit. As I said, even the worst materialist does not deny that. At most, he believes that what man experiences as spirit within himself is a product, a creature of material existence. And precisely because man feels himself to be a spirit, because he senses his value and dignity in this spiritual realm, he must ask: What is this essence of the spirit, how is it grounded perhaps in an all-encompassing spiritual world that does not belong to the transitory, but which is permanent in the face of the transitory? With this, I would like to point out to you, dear listeners, the inner soul difficulties that man feels himself confronted with every day and every hour when he looks at the essence of his own spirituality. These difficulties, people do not always bring them to their full awareness in the full sense of the word. But they live in the depths of the soul, whether one explores them or not, they live in these depths of the soul, flow up into the conscious soul existence, make up the happiness and suffering of the innermost human being, make up the innermost destiny of the human being, form the soul mood and soul condition. In this way, the human being finds his way into the world and becomes useful to his fellow human beings and the world to the extent that he can educate himself, even if unconsciously and naively, about the nature of the spirit. And from many subsoils, the riddle questions in this regard arise, and I could cite many things that live in the soul consciously or more or less unconsciously.

I would like to highlight two examples from all that is present in the soul, two examples that perhaps do not even belong to the most common ones, but which can show precisely what corners of his soul life a person encounters when he wants to educate himself about the spirit. Every day, when we pass from the waking state to the sleeping state, we see how our inner spiritual activity, our inner spiritual activity, how that paralyzes itself, dawns down into an indefinite darkness, how the time of sleep occurs, in relation to which we cannot say what it actually is with our inner spiritual-soul activity and activity. Then we feel – one may well say – the powerlessness of that which is our spirituality. We live in this spirituality from waking up to falling asleep; we actually feel truly human when we live in this spirituality, but we see it fade away, dim, and are powerless in the face of this everyday disappears from us, from that which is truly human in us, and without us always feeling it – as I said – from the unconscious experience of this powerlessness comes that which gives us insecurity about the nature and destiny of our mind. And that is one side.

The other is, I would say, the polar opposite. We experience it again more or less unconsciously — unconsciously in most people — when we pass from the sleeping state to the waking state, at most with the transition through more or less chaotic dreams, but we know from healthy reason that they have only an illusory value compared to what we call in ordinary life the reality of existence. With this transition through the dream life, we take possession of our physical body with our spiritual self. When we wake up, we grasp our senses, how the outside world is reflected in our senses in its colors, sounds, and so on, and we experience this inwardly. We inwardly experience how we grasp our willpower and thereby become active human beings. However, as I already hinted at in the last lecture from a different point of view, what darkness are we actually looking down into when we have only a simple willpower, when we decide to raise our arm and move our hand? We have this thought, and then we see how this thought is carried out in the movement of the hand, in the raised arm. But how the thought flows down into the organism, what complicated processes are involved before the hand is moved, all this disappears from our consciousness. When we wake up, we take hold of our body with our spirit, but what this spirit experiences down there is shrouded in complete darkness even during the waking state, so that in this waking state, too, we have only an indeterminate relationship to our spirituality and its relation to the outer world – to the outer world that we ourselves are through our body – which presents us with a mystery. On the one hand, we feel the powerlessness of the spirit; on the other hand, we feel it sinking into our own inner darkness when we wake up. From such experiences, man forms the riddle questions about the nature of spirituality, and then two opponents of the soul life stand before this spiritual world, to which man strives with his knowledge, with his will, two enemies, one of whom clouds this spiritual world for him, the other threatens to take it from him. One enemy strikes precisely those who, even in our present existence, still live more or less naively in the face of our scientific worldviews, accepting many traditional ideas into their worldview without examination, often as the worst illusions about the supersensible, about the spiritual, because they feel that they cannot truly live in mental health without such ideas about the spiritual. Then they give themselves over to that which comes from the one enemy of the soul life: superstition. All kinds of soul-forms stream out of the human life of will and place themselves before the human spirit, wanting to tell it what underlies the external world as spiritual reality. Those who have not become acquainted with the scientific conscientiousness and methodology of the present time very easily succumb to such ideas, but they also experience a sad consequence of superstition in the human soul. If we understand the world in such a way that we accept what flows into our consciousness through our will as decisive for the supersensible, then we go to recognize the outer world. We find obstacles at every turn when trying to orient ourselves in the external world. We believe that this or that must apply in the sense world because we accept it through our superstition. External nature does not confirm what we assume in our superstitious experience at every turn. This leads us to a certain reorientation towards this external world. The world appears to us differently than we imagine it. We become unsure of ourselves, and because we become unsure of ourselves, we lose the ability to develop strong impulses for our actions. We become unfit for our own actions, we become unfit for interaction with other people.

That, dear attendees, is the one enemy that arises in the human soul when faced with the riddles of the spiritual world. The other enemy appears primarily to those souls who enter into the modern way of scientific life. They learn to recognize how to develop their thinking in a conscientious, methodical, one might say exact, way in order to follow sense phenomena to their external laws and to permeate them with ideas through which they become understandable. But it is very often the case, especially when one is conscientiously immersed in the external world in this way, that one notices how our thinking becomes, I might say, thin through this scientific path, how it only gradually becomes appropriate to what the sensory world is, and how, in its thinness, it cannot find its way up from the sensory to the supersensible realm, precisely because of its conscientiousness. And then precisely those who enter deeply into the scientific sphere are assailed by doubt, the other enemy of the human soul life. Doubt is certainly something that is connected with the development and education of the intellect. But when doubt presents itself to the human intellect, then it sinks down into the soul, it sinks down into the mind. Those who, on the basis of the deeper insights that anthroposophy can provide, now recognize the connection between the life of the soul and the physical experience of the human being, know how what takes place in the soul pours into the body and how that which — one must put it this way — rushes from doubt into the , how it first causes a certain wasting disease of the soul life in the person, how this wasting disease can weaken us — I would say — to the marrow, to the limbs, to the muscles, that we can become unfit for our soul, for our spiritual and for our physical activity precisely because of doubt. Precisely because this is experienced by modern man from one side or the other, perhaps the worst doubters feel particularly compelled to seek information about the spiritual, about the supersensible, to which they do not want to turn out of traditional belief, like the first type of person, who surrender to superstition. Since they want to turn to the supersensible realm through knowledge, scientific minds are led to study the abnormal spiritual life, the spiritual life of attuned people, mediums, people who have all kinds of hallucinations. It is seen that something else is going on in the abnormal life than in the normal human life of knowledge and will, and it is believed that something can be drawn from this abnormal life, which comes from mediumship or from visions, about human abilities and their connection with another world into the realm of ordinary consciousness.

Those who are familiar with anthroposophy know that all these outlets are from the pathological realm, from a diseased soul life. The soul life of a medium is diseased because their physical life must be attuned down at the moment when they are acting as a medium. This detuning makes it impossible for the person acting as a medium to grasp what his soul is directly experiencing. It is impossible to verify — even for an external observer, who may have a sound mind when observing the medium — it is impossible to realize what kind of relationship the person, the medium, has to another world if one is not immersed in this experience. The medium is, after all, singled out and, with his healthy human understanding, distracted from what he is experiencing in his mediumistic states. Whenever a person has hallucinations, we can always show how these have their roots in a diseased area of the human body and how what arises in the soul as other experiences can only be there because of this diseased part of the human organization. Thus we have no possibility of finding the transition we are seeking from the healthy human soul life to a knowledge of the supersensible, of the spiritual realm. For wherever we turn to the sick soul life, we lack control at every step. And so most of our contemporaries feel compelled to cling to time-honored, traditional ideas when it comes to the supersensible, to the spiritual, to that which has developed from earlier epochs of humanity into our time as the content of creeds and worldviews.

One then tends towards these world-view contents, which go right into our philosophies – people do not even realize how this is the case even in the philosophies that are considered to be unprejudiced by some great thinkers, but they are not – one holds, as they say, with the belief in that which they cannot achieve with knowledge, with insight. And today we have already come so far as to construct all kinds of artificial concepts to justify faith as something that must stand independently in the face of knowledge, in the face of knowledge, which is only supposed to be directed towards our sensual or the like, while faith alone may be directed towards the supersensible. But this supersensible realm is taken from what has been handed down traditionally and has an effect on people with the strength with which it often does so today, through its venerable age. But if we look impartially at what people believe and what they hold in terms of worldviews that have been handed down historically, we can trace this in real history — not just in the history that is recognized today, but in a history that is steeped in psychology and the study of the soul. There one sees that what one wants to believe today, what one accepts as an idea in its effect on the world of feeling, that in older epochs of humanity this was once entirely derived from insights that the individual human being gained out of his need for knowledge, on paths that were to lead him into the supersensible. Everything that is justified as religious belief today can in fact be traced back to ancient knowledge.

At some point, an individual or that person's community found their way, through special inner spiritual paths, into the supersensible world, received ideas from this supersensible world, grasped them with their ordinary consciousness and passed them on to their fellow human beings. Their fellow human beings recognized that through such paths of knowledge one could discover something about the supersensible world. Such earlier paths of knowledge may be primitive compared to what is needed today for us humans in such paths of knowledge. But it is not acceptable for the truly unbiased person to overlook the fact that one cannot help but notice how the beliefs of today go back to such old paths of knowledge, whose source of knowledge has only been forgotten. And if you explore them, sometimes through external history, through some kind of document, then you feel disturbed because you no longer devote yourself to such sources of knowledge; you say: That is good for an earlier civilization and culture. Yes, but – my dear audience – today we believe what comes from these sources of knowledge, we have only somehow changed it in terms, but its true content goes back to such sources.

My dear attendees, anthroposophy, as I understand it, offers people a path of knowledge into the supersensible world, and we will have more to say about this anthroposophical path of knowledge, as it is appropriate for today's people. But we will be able to communicate more easily today if we look at older paths of knowledge, which I mentioned in my last lecture, and the results of which are available to the naive and often also to the learned person today when it comes to the supersensible.

I would like to characterize two of the old paths of knowledge here before you. There is also the possibility of characterizing countless other such paths of knowledge, but I want to pick out two because they are particularly characteristic, and because to a large extent people have forgotten how much of what people today take in as beliefs comes precisely from these sources.

I would like to mention first – as I said, just so that we are all on the same page, not because I would like to recommend such a path of knowledge to anyone, but because it is by understanding the old that we can ascend to the knowledge of the new – I would like to mention first the path that is well known, the path that was taken in ancient India to gain knowledge of a different world from the one that usually surrounds people.

I would first like to characterize what is called the ancient yoga system of knowledge, which was once sacred in the Orient but has now degenerated. The yoga system of knowledge leads, I would say, to its kind of erudition, to its kind of knowledge of another world. What were the essential elements of this yoga system? I would like to mention the characteristic that is questionable today when it is practiced – at the time it was not questionable, but the way it is practiced today is questionable – because it is no longer appropriate for today's human nature, because human nature has changed since the times when the yoga practice was performed. What could be done in ancient times without harming human nature, and was done in ancient times, say, by the Indians, cannot be done today, especially by Westerners, without harming their body and mind. But let us agree on this. The essential and purely essential thing, among other things, in the practice of yoga is a modified breathing in addition to the ordinary everyday breathing of a person.

How does this everyday breathing process take place? More or less unconsciously. Only when we are somehow affected by illness do we become aware of our breathing. Otherwise, inhaling, holding our breath, and exhaling take place to a great extent unconsciously. And it is precisely on this unconsciousness of inhaling, holding our breath, and exhaling that the unbiased matter-of-factness of our life is based. Those who believed in ancient Orient that they could become yoga scholars trained for certain periods of time to regulate their breathing differently than nature itself regulates human breathing. They created a different rhythm for inhaling, holding and exhaling. What did they achieve by doing this? He achieved the ability to breathe more or less consciously, while otherwise breathing unconsciously, to experience breathing as a fully conscious process. This happens to me when I breathe in, this happens to me throughout my entire organism during the flow of inhalation, this happens to me during the retention of breath, this during exhalation. In particular, the yogi focused his attention on what now resulted from this altered breathing process, raised into consciousness, for his thinking. For his thinking, what resulted then? Well, we can characterize it physiologically in the modern sense, what happened there. That which unconsciously takes place in the breathing process, what is it in relation to the human head organization, to the thought organization? We breathe in, the respiratory impulse goes into our organism, works up through the spinal cord channel to our brain, to the tool of our thinking, which performs a certain activity out of the nerve-sense life, so that something flows through this activity from the respiratory current. In reality, we are not only dealing with the activity of our nervous sensory life in our thought life, but this nervous sensory life is permeated and permeated by the rhythmic life of the respiratory current. But we know nothing of this. The yogi, who aspired to higher knowledge, brought himself to consciousness of this permeation of the physical part of his thought activity with the respiratory current. What did he attain there? We can only grasp what he attained there by comparing what the yogi experienced in his consciousness with regard to thinking, when we compare that with what his whole environment, the rest of humanity, experienced.

Yes, my dear audience, in the course of historical development, humanity has changed more than we realize today in terms of the life of the soul. What today, I might say, makes up our whole consciousness was quite different in ancient times. Today we see the external world by absorbing the colors through the sense of our eyes in a, I might say, pure way; we hear the external world through the sense of the ear, absorbing the sounds in a certain purity, and it is the same with the other sensations. It was not like that in ancient times. We misunderstand the senses of early humanity if we say that they fantasized their way into the world, as animism would have it. It was not like that. Early humans naturally experienced what was in the outer world as a living spiritual soul striving up within them. And by looking at lightning and thunder, at the hurrying clouds, at the streaming wind, springs, plants and animals, they saw everything that surrounded people in the outer world. They saw not only a colorful, warm, cold or otherwise sensually shaped world, as we do today. No, they saw a world in which every spring was permeated by the spiritual soul, in every breath of wind that played around them, in the stars, in the sun and moon they felt how the spiritual soul expressed itself. It was just as natural for people to see this spiritual soul as it is natural for us to see colors and hear sounds. That was the usual experience of the people around the yogi. The yogi, however, wanted to experience a different world than the one they usually experienced. That is why he undertook the exercises I have just described. And by driving the conscious flow of breath through his thinking through these exercises, I would say, he made something completely different out of his thinking.

Indeed, the person who immersed himself in this way, seeing a spiritual soul in every spring, in every breath of wind, in everything that is nature, did not have the strong ego, the strong self-confidence that the present man has. strong sense of self that the present-day man has. He could not feel the strong spiritual element in his own self. In a sense, his being merged with the outer world, which was a spiritual element for him, just as his inner being was a spiritual element for him. When the yogi, breathing in this way, transformed his thinking, then his experience was that he attained an insight similar to our own, but by this path of knowledge; he made his thinking strong, he led it into the abstract. In this way he perceived the spirituality of his own self. And he felt this self rooted in another world, in a world that is eternal.

And all the wonderful things that were said in older times about the spiritual world were said from the experience that man, in the way described, came to the self, to the I, that he felt his I as his eternal spirituality connected to the universal spirituality of the world. And if you read the most beautiful chapters in the wonderful poetry of the Bhagavad Gita, you will read how it is described in such a wonderful way how man comes to his self and to the experience of the spiritual world, and you will feel transported to the special spiritual path of those ancient times. Much of what has been revealed to man in this way about the human self, about human spirituality and its relationship to world spirituality, lives in many of today's traditional creeds, in today's traditional world views, and even in the philosophies that one believes one can approach without prejudice. People do not realize how much of what they have adopted in their belief in authority comes from the experiences of the ancient yogi.

Those who today want to educate themselves about the meaning of today's yoga systems usually come to something wrong and believe that by applying such a method they can still achieve something special today. This is not the case. People will harm themselves, both mentally and physically, if they want to resurrect on their path of knowledge that which was appropriate for an ancient humanity. But even with regard to that which is necessary for today's human being to attain higher knowledge — and which we want to discuss later, also in order to communicate about it — such a characteristic of old, no longer useful paths of knowledge cannot serve us. I would like to say that, on the other hand, the opposite reveals itself to us as an example when we look at an older path of knowledge, the one that was walked in asceticism, a path of knowledge that we can no longer walk today.

We cannot have the yoga path. We cannot follow the yoga path because the person who lives in his breathing in the way described, and then lives in the thinking that is permeated by breathing, becomes so highly sensitive that he can no longer endure the robust external world to any great extent. Because of this sensitivity, he must withdraw from the outer world, he must surrender to a certain solitude, even hermitage. But it was precisely in the views of the ancients that they sought wisdom about higher worlds precisely from those who did not experience as they did, but who isolated themselves, so to speak, in the corner, in order to strive in this solitude into the higher world, in order to explore that which is supersensible in human nature, in order to be able to proclaim it to others. Today, the healthy person cannot relate to human natures that seek solitude and hermitage in this way. Modern life makes such tough demands that we have to find our way into it in its liveliness, and the modern person can only have trust in the one who does not need to withdraw from life, but who places himself in life as much as anyone else. Therefore, we cannot use the yoga path. It would not inspire trust in those who understand themselves within modern cultural development.

The same applies to the old ascetic path. What does the ascetic do in the old sense of the word? He downgrades his bodily functions, he paralyzes them to a certain extent. His physical organism should be less active in those periods when he should be open to higher knowledge than he would be if he were to devote himself externally to a robust life. Through this attunement of bodily functions, the person striving for a higher life experiences and realizes that, yes, for the life we lead outwardly, this body we carry is suitable and appropriate, and we may not really wish for a different body, and so there is no need for the bodily functions to be slowed down. But if we want to look into the spiritual world, then this body, which is constituted for the sensual world, is an obstacle. If we degrade it, make it less active than it is in ordinary life, then we remove the obstacle and the supersensible world flows into our consciousness. This is simply what the ancients experienced: the body is an obstacle to the knowledge of higher worlds. On the other hand, it was the case that by attuning the physical body to pain and suffering in order to come into contact with the spiritual world, the ascetic entered into an inner experience that took him away from the robust outer world into solitude, into hermitage. From there he was able to explore many things that then sank deep into the human soul when the soul wanted to know: How am I connected to the spiritual worlds, how do I find the happiness of my mind?

But then again, the people who could say such things — and this goes right back to our present-day religious beliefs and world views, without people being aware of it —, then again the people had to tune down the functions of their physicality in relation to the robust outer life, they had to develop a hypersensitivity to this life, to loneliness, to hermitage. The old path of asceticism, which has also been corrupted today, is not suitable for modern man. Through such asceticism, man first of all makes himself alien to reality, in which we must fully place ourselves today, but he also makes himself unfit for his actions, he makes himself unfit for working for the benefit of his fellow human beings. But we can still look at the two paths by which people once struggled to gain an insight into the supersensible worlds.

How a person today can raise themselves in the supersensible world, my dear listeners, is something that I described in my last lecture here, at least in principle. You can find it described in full detail in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science” and in other books of mine. But there you will see that today's man can no longer follow the path of, say, a reorganization of his breathing, the path of conscious breathing, in order to change his thought life in the sense that ordinary views of man become the wonderful world view of the Bhagavad Gita. I would say that for his path of knowledge, for his path of thought, man started from something that was still entirely appropriate for those ancient times, something that was intimately connected with his bodily functions.

All that I described to you in the previous lecture, and what I describe in my books, are processes that are not carried out in breathing, that are not carried out in this way in the body, but that are carried out in the life of thought itself, in the inner life of the soul, through a special training in meditation, through a special training in the concentration of thought, in contemplation. Today's exercises, which are intended to lead to the higher world, are done through practices that are carried out in the regulation of thinking itself. The ancient Indian yogi regulated his breathing; we regulate our ordinary thinking directly, we bring a different rhythm, a different inner lawfulness into meditation and concentration in thinking. We do not approach a transformation of our thinking indirectly through breathing, we go straight to the thinking. Of course, I cannot repeat all the exercises that you can read about in the books mentioned, “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and “Occult Science”; I can only hint at the principles in this way.

But what do we achieve by doing such exercises, which address human thoughts so intimately? Through them we come to see through what we have today as our ordinary thinking, through birth and upbringing, in its abstractness, in its deadness, if I may express it so. We arrive at essentially enlivening thinking, whereas the ancient Indian yogi — I might say — started from a certain liveliness of thinking, from which he went away to abstract thinking, to the thinking that we have as a matter of course in life. There he experienced the self. Now, we have this self through birth and upbringing; we have to, by grasping thinking, not breathing, enliven this thinking. But in doing so, we come to perceive ordinary thinking precisely as the abstract, as the dead, and to move on to a living thinking through inner exercises.

This is the significant transformation that the modern seeker of knowledge who wants to penetrate into the higher worlds, into the world of the spiritual, must undergo. This is the method that the modern seeker of knowledge must go through, which leads from abstract, from inanimate, from dead thinking to inwardly living thinking.

And now I would like to give you a characterization of modern forms of consciousness, where we arrive when we acquire this living thinking. I will point out something that is close to every person today. If we have any connection at all with today's worldviews, we realize how a so-called higher animal is constituted, how its functions, its bodily processes work. We form an inner image of this higher animal in our thoughts. In doing so, we visualize the nature of this animal. But then we may turn to the human being. We form an inner picture of the human being again, using all the material that science provides us with today. Later it will be even more complete, but in principle no different, as long as thinking is applied only in the abstract, as it is today in the study of natural laws — we form an image of the human being, of the structure of the bones, the structure of the muscles, the structure of the other organs, of the interweaving and interflowing of the inner bodily processes. Then we compare this picture with the picture we have of higher animals and we find a certain relationship. Depending on whether we think more or less materialistically, we imagine that man then emerges physically from the higher animal. If we think more idealistically or spiritually, we imagine this relationship differently. But we look at it by forming the idea of the higher animal on the one hand and the idea of man on the other and comparing them, we form something through this comparison, which is then to become our world view of our environment. But now let us ask ourselves a question that may interest us. What is the difference between thinking, with which one compares the concept of the higher animal with the concept of man, as one can outwardly compare a higher animal with a lower animal, the lower animal with a plant. Let us ask ourselves the question: What is the difference between this dead abstract thinking and that living thinking that one acquires through the modern exercises of knowledge for the supersensible world?

If we form an idea with our ordinary thinking about the higher animal, about its inner structure, about its processes, about the intermingling of its life processes, then, I would say, we have inwardly visualized the being of this higher animal through a thought. But the thought lives, and this thought changes inwardly, if it lives, without us having to look at it. It forms the thought of the human being out of itself, it undergoes this metamorphosis inwardly. With dead thinking, we can only form the thought of the higher animal, then go over with our thinking to the human being, to the human being whom we experience outwardly, find human thought, but with animal thought we never come to human thought. Simply by allowing the thought to come to life in us, through which the human thought then arises from the animal thought, we arrive at a different, a spiritual relationship to the world.

I would like to illustrate it in the following way. Consider a magnetic needle. You can point it in many different directions. Only one direction is the excellent one, the direction that points from the magnetic north pole to the magnetic south pole. This one line is the excellent one. Wherever you point the magnetic needle, you do not have such an excellent direction. By its own natural law, this magnetic needle belongs in the north-south direction. Thus, through the living thought, the whole space is differentiated. In living thinking, we do not have the space of indifferent juxtaposition, the calculative space, but we experience the space in which something else becomes the vertical line that goes from the earth to the stars; the horizontal line that is the tangent of the ground on which we stand. Space is experienced inwardly by the living thought.

Then we turn to the higher animal, we find its backbone line horizontal, and where this line goes into the vertical, are the exceptions that show that what I say is right. We see the vertical direction in the human being, we feel that this line is different from the one the animal maintains with its backbone, and we feel this line, in which the human being now places himself, and many other things that we have to change when we move from animal thought to human thought. We feel that a different being is emerging, and by seizing the animal thought, we have to keep the form flexible and know: if we enter into a different spatial direction, we come to a different being. We allow one thought to arise from the other in our inner experience.

Consider, my dear audience, how alive our soul life becomes, how spiritualized our soul life becomes, while we juxtapose one with the other with the dead abstract thought, how we stand before the world, how we now become similar to the interweaving, the growth and becoming of external things with our inner experience, how we immerse ourselves in the outer world, no longer merely standing beside it.

This is the first step for modern man. To bring abstract, dead thinking to life, and in so doing, to live in the spirituality of the world. But all of you – my dear audience – can raise a significant objection as I describe this living thinking. You can object that there have been all kinds of thinkers, natural philosophers Oken, Schelling, who have had such living thinking in a certain sense; they have known how to grasp the thought of an external object in a certain imaginative way and have understood how to transform it in order to find something that then coincides with another thing of its own accord. And modern humanity has indeed recognized how much fantasy there is in Schelling and Oken precisely because of this thinking. But there is something that anthroposophy must add to what the most recent ancient times did not have. When such thinkers as those mentioned describe what actually takes place in their spiritual life, one does not find what anthroposophical research and experience must point to.

The person who, as I have described it, forms thoughts about the things of the external world, who is himself alive, cannot take a step with this living thought without feeling pain inwardly, in a certain way suffering. And now, when this living thought is felt as suffering, as pain – not initially in the physical sense, for it can only be transmitted in that direction – now something begins that can be felt as reality. Anyone who comes to realize that higher knowledge in the modern sense can only be attained by going through suffering and pain will always tell you something about their ordinary life as well: they will say, “What I have experienced as happiness, as joy, as good fortune, I am grateful to my destiny for. What I have had in the way of suffering, pain, disappointment and privation in my ordinary life, I owe to the little knowledge that I have gained. And the fact that I have gained such knowledge through the ordinary pains and disappointments that life has given me means that I have undergone preliminary training for that which must be experienced when the living thought, as living spirituality, fills the soul, is therefore also alive in the soul, and therefore also drives the soul to suffering and pain.

What is achieved by this? Through this our whole human nature becomes an organ of perception – the expression sounds paradoxical – but now not an organ of perception that, like the eye and ear, perceives the outer world, but it becomes an organ of perception that spiritually perceives itself within and also looks into the spiritual world, into the world to which the living thought gives its thought-content, and now truly experiences this living world. One can understand why we have to go through pain and suffering. It is now the case – esteemed attendees – that even in such a perfect structure as the eye, some processes, changes take place due to the light acting on it. These changes that take place, if we had a fine sense for it, we would have a sensation of pain, and this sensation of pain would only change into the sensation of color. And in the earliest times of human development, this was what man had. Sensory perception arose out of pain, man became robust against it, became neutral, today he experiences the sensory perception directly; that which underlies the pain withdraws from perception. But if we are to live our way up into the spiritual world, we must force our way through suffering and pain, and only when we have overcome these, when we have turned suffering, pain to our advantage, can we glimpse into the spiritual world, which is opened up to us on the one hand through the living thought. And then, after we have transformed our whole organism into a sense organ by bringing thought to life and overcoming the suffering, we see ourselves, as a modern human being, facing the spiritual world with understanding, with science.

We can now seek spiritual knowledge for ourselves, and we do not need to withdraw from life into a hermitage. We can immerse ourselves in life, our outer physicality does not lead us to asceticism, our outer physicality remains as it is, and can therefore robustly face the external world and fulfill all the demands that today's life places on modern people. In this way we can create an understanding of the spiritual world by remaining in this world, in which modern man must one day remain. But when we create such insights, then man certainly approaches us in a different way than he approaches us when we merely look at him with our sensory eyes. Usually we perceive only the external physicality of this human form. But the person who has struggled to the mobile, living thoughts does not just see this outer, sensual human form; he sees something spiritual and soul-like in this human form, an auric, a spiritual and soul-like aura. The word “aura” is to be understood only in this sense, not in any superstitious sense. One beholds the auric in which the human form is embedded, but one does not only recognize in this aura that which stands externally in front of one, but one looks at that which the person already was in his spiritual-soul before he descended from a spiritual-soul world. One gets to know the person through their auric being, which reveals itself through the kind of contemplation that I have characterized as a spiritual-soul being, and one learns to look back into the spiritual-soul world, into one's preexistence, into the life that one had before one entered one's earthly life. And one does not just learn in such abstractness that the person truly lived in a spiritual-soul world before his birth, one also gets to know the concrete of this spiritual-soul human being, that is, our self, as we get to know the outer world through sensory perception.

I can characterize this in the following way. While we are here between birth and death, we look out into the outer world, we look up into the cosmos, admire the stars, admire the glory of the sun and moon; we look at the kingdoms of nature, we see more and more of the wonderful laws that live in all of this through our science. But by looking out there and looking back at ourselves in an unbiased way, at what is within us, we have to say to ourselves: Dark is what the human being sees between birth and death in the ordinary consciousness when he looks into his inner being. We have to say: what lives in there as our organism – certainly, some of it, but only in its deadness, shows anatomy, physiology – but anthroposophy shows that the human being has a world in there in a completely different sense than ordinary science shows us. When we really get to know what is inside us, we will say to ourselves: Yes, the air we breathe and its inner laws are wonderful, but what goes on in our own lungs as laws is more wonderful than this air circle with all its secrets. The sun is wonderful out there with all the effects that emanate from it, which express themselves in light and warmth, but more wonderful than the light, than the currents of warmth, more wonderful than all that is what lives inside the human organism, in the structure of our heart. And so, when we look at the human interior in terms of the bodily organization, we can say to ourselves: great and powerful is the world of external knowledge; greater and more powerful is that which lives in us as a microcosm.

That, my dear audience, is something that one learns to recognize more and more. You can see this from my “Secret Science” and from other of my books. But what is shrouded for the ordinary consciousness between birth and death today ceases to be shrouded when we look at the spiritual and soul nature of the human being before he descended into the physical world. What was man's world while he was a spiritual being in a spiritual world? Not the external world of space, which we otherwise survey, but precisely this human inner world. What is human inner being for the earth is the outer world for our spiritual being.

Just as we have the sun, moon and stars, the three kingdoms of nature around us here, so we have the secrets of the lungs and heart in front of us in the spiritual world, from which we descended. We have the human interior as an external world before us, and there we acquire the ability that is exercised by us human beings to integrate with this physical body. We see the inner laws as an outer world before we descend from the pre-existent life into earthly life; this is the outer world of the spiritual and soul that we experience before conception. And only when we enter the physical body does the outer world appear around us, and the world of the human inner self disappears. What is revealed to us by the one aura is out there.

The other aura that we acquire reveals to us what lives in human actions. Here in the physical world, we look at these actions with our ordinary human consciousness, we see how this or that action is done from childhood on, we see an encounter between people, we see how this encounter shapes the destiny for the whole of the following life, how these people now form a community; as one often says, this appears out of the ordinary consciousness, as a coincidence.

If we acquire the consciousness that leads to the auric, which I have characterized, then it is like the world is for the blind person who has undergone an operation. He used to be unable to perceive colors or lights, but now he can perceive them. Previously, what a person undertook as steps in their life was seen as a matter of chance. But now, after the spiritual eye has been opened, we look at the first steps that a child takes, at the endless sympathies and antipathies, and see how the child develops its life steps more and more. Sympathies and antipathies that arise in him guide the child in the following steps, which become decisive in human life, and we realize how the goal was already present in the sympathies and antipathies that were present in the first childlike steps. In other words, we look at the shaping of human destiny, and in a completely natural, elementary way we become aware when our spiritual eye is opened – just as we realize when we look at an adult that they were a child – we can know that this destiny, which course of life, that people's lives on earth are lived through in repetitions, that the whole of life is cause and effect of other lives between death and a new birth, and that what is fateful carries over from one life to the next.

One might think that this sense of destiny takes away our freedom as human beings. But we do not impair our freedom any more than we impair our freedom by building a house this year and wanting to move into it the next. We only become free by creating such foundations for our lives. Nor do we take away our freedom by building a house for ourselves in this life for the next.

So, my dear attendees, the spiritual world, the relationship of the human being to this spiritual world, is revealed by anthroposophy reopening the paths by which individual people can ascend into the spiritual world and proclaim the results to their fellow human beings. We need a method that can be trusted in the same way as the natural sciences are trusted. In the books mentioned above, I have described how everyone can become a spiritual researcher to a certain extent, and how people can develop such views of the supersensible and spiritual that give them their true value and true human dignity. But people do not necessarily have to become spiritual researchers. Just as one does not need to become an astronomer in order to include astronomical findings in one's knowledge, or a botanist in order to include the necessary botanical findings in one's education, one also does not need to become a spiritual scientist in order to include the findings of spiritual science.

I would like to use another comparison that I have used often, I believe here as well. A person who wants to judge a painted picture in terms of beauty and artistic value does not need to be a painter himself. Man's organization is directed towards truth and beauty. Even someone who is not a spiritual researcher and whose mind is not oriented towards illusions and error can test what the spiritual researcher says with his common sense. And even the spiritual researcher must first test what is revealed to him through his own common sense, just as the other person must do, because the higher vision provides him with a higher world, but not its reality. Just as we first test the dream through common sense, so we must first test the reality of what we see in higher worlds through our common sense. The one who acquires exact clairvoyance — not the old mystical clairvoyance — the one who acquires this modern clairvoyance, finds his way into the spiritual world by means of paths that are entirely appropriate for today's human being, and what he explores there can be thoroughly examined with common sense in the manner indicated.

But what does our civilization gain from this, ladies and gentlemen? Well, what is gained is not unimportant. What is gained can certainly be used. Do we have spirituality today? We have thoughts about the spirit and we live in these thoughts and ideas. But if we look back to older times, it was different. Yes, my dear audience, it was different. We do not want to conjure up old times again, nor do we want to overestimate them. We know that humanity must always move forward; we do not want to bring up in a reactionary way what belongs to a bygone era. But when we look at the ancient epochs from which many unconscious beliefs have come down to us, we see that in those ancient times there were insights through which the spirit was grasped not only in thoughts, but through which the spirit entered the whole human being in a living way. One can say of a person of those times, not only: He has thoughts about the spirit, he has ideas about the spirit, but through his thoughts and ideas the living spirit moves into the human being. Such epochs have existed, and such epochs have actually given the right power and the right impulses for the development of humanity, where it was known that the spirit lives among us, the divinity lives among us. Only then did spiritual knowledge deepen into true religious devotion. If such times can arise again, not in the old form but in the modern form, then the human being acquires a true religious inwardness, an appropriate piety, through deepening their knowledge of anthroposophy. But through this, the modern being gains the knowledge that a time will come when not only, as is the case today, thoughts and ideas live in dryness, but also in the spirituality. Spirituality will move through the living thought. And through the suffering-overcoming conception of reality, the living thought, the living reality, the spirit itself in its liveliness will move into the human being. We must long for such a time because we need it, in which we say to ourselves again: Not only do we exist in the world, we as human beings with our outwardly random actions, but because we human beings ourselves are spiritual , we recognize our relationship to the eternal spirit, we recognize how other spiritual beings are at work beside us, a spiritual world, just like the sensual one, how the spirits not only live in our thoughts, but how they are our fellow travelers in earthly life.

That – dear attendees – when we perceive the spiritual world as the world of our fellow creatures, not as mere abstract theoretical thoughts, then we enter the world that today's humanity, and even more so the humanity of the near future, needs , in order to become more life-affirming, to achieve inner devotion, to achieve fruitful insights, to achieve actions, to achieve impulses for activity, which today's humanity longs for – longs for more than it usually believes.

Today we look into our social life, we see how people long for new impulses to come. But we also see what impulses of doom are indulging themselves. There must be something wrong, and that is what is wrong, that we have lost the living spirit. It is only with this living spirit, which does not merely enter into our scientific, abstract thoughts but permeates our entire human being, that we will solve the great difficult social questions of the present, as far as they can be solved in any age.

Anthroposophy, which is so often rejected, seeks to be nothing other than the spiritual activity, the spiritual life that leads people to recognize and actively embrace this living spirituality, this spiritual co-creation, so that mankind, imbued with this knowledge, with a will, with enthusiasm that comes from this spiritual life, can fully grasp the present and live into the future, as is necessary for the further welfare and development of humanity. Much of this is already sensed by humanity today, but it lives in the unconscious depths of human souls. Anthroposophy seeks to advance to a full understanding of what humanity needs for its inner realization and for its social goals in the present and especially in the future.

Dear attendees, The remarks I am to make to you this evening can only claim validity today, in the age of the spirit of science, if they are preceded by a certain examination of anthroposophy, as it is meant here, and of this spirit of science itself. It must be shown that today it is impossible to speak of knowledge of the spirit without justifying the methods of the corresponding spiritual research in the face of this spirit of science.

That this justification is possible, that the anthroposophy I am referring to here is not in any opposition to this modern spirit of science at all, but that it is only a kind of continuation of it, I have taken the liberty of explaining in that lecture which I gave here a few months ago in the same place. So if I wanted to give this justification again today, it would mean a repetition for a very large audience. I will therefore assume that which is present as such a support. I will therefore refer, but only in this regard, to the lecture from earlier, but of course in such a way that today's lecture should also be understandable in itself.

Now, when a person focuses his attention on what he calls spiritual life, namely on his relationship to the spiritual world, certain difficulties arise in the soul. But one cannot say that these difficulties arise in relation to the existence of a spiritual life in man himself. For man is well aware that he always has such a spiritual life in his waking state. He is in relation to the outer world through his spiritual life, as a cognizant and active human being. He finds his human worth and dignity included in this spiritual life, which is, after all, his experience, his adventure. And even the most ardent materialist will perhaps say: This spiritual life that appears to you arises only from material processes, from material occurrences, but he will not be able to deny the spiritual life as such. And one may say: The difficulties that arise as riddle questions in the human soul with regard to the spiritual world are based precisely on the fact that man is aware of his spirit, that he must seek his value and dignity in this spirit, and must therefore ask about the nature of this spirit: Is it something temporary, something that disappears? Is it something that is grounded only in material life? Is it something that is connected to some external spiritual world and represents something permanent in the face of a transitory existence? Precisely because man has a spiritual life, because he feels himself to be a spiritual being, he must ask about the nature of this spirituality.

Now there is much that emerges from the depths of the soul for some people who are particularly concerned with these things, fully consciously, but for most people as a general feeling, more or less unconsciously, and ultimately comes together in the enigmatic question: What is the essence of the spirit, and what is the relationship of man to a possible spiritual world? I could cite many things to you that show this question arises from the depths of the soul.

Two examples that are perhaps even neglected in other areas of human life, that rarely come to the full consciousness of the human being, but that have all the more effect in the spheres of feeling of the soul life, that are transmitted to the feeling, that cause a certain uncertainty about the nature of spiritual life. As I said, they are perhaps consciously placed before the soul by very few people, but they determine the happiness and suffering of the innermost soul being. They determine our everyday frame of mind, whether we go through life courageously or dejectedly, whether we are fit for life or unfit for our own life or the lives of our fellow human beings. All this depends on how these feelings creep into our soul life and lead to the enigmatic questions characterized.

First of all, there is something that we experience, as I said, more or less unconsciously, every day of our existence between birth and death, when we pass from the waking state to the state of sleep. Every time we feel how that which stirs, what lives and moves from waking to falling asleep as our experience, our inner spirituality, how it fades down into an indeterminate state, how we have to switch off our consciousness, how we have completely faded down our spiritual life, so to speak, in the time from falling asleep to waking up. And when we then bring this unconsciously experienced life in the human soul to consciousness, we have to say: in it, the human being feels the powerlessness of his spiritual life, the powerlessness of his inner activity, of his inner activity, in which he seeks his own human value and human existence. It fades away every day when he falls asleep. Then most people ask, perhaps only in their hearts, but they do ask: Is it the case that this life of the soul fades and leaves people powerless? Is it so that it has dimmed down when the human being passes through the gate of death, so that the human being can no longer catch up with it, as he does every morning? That is one example of how the characterized riddle is formed.

The other example is, one could say, the opposite pole. When we wake up, we may first pass through the indeterminate, chaotic, illusory dream life, which we know to be illusory in the face of external reality when we are of sound mind. Perhaps we pass through this semi-spiritual being until we fully awaken. But then the spiritual takes possession of the body, of the physical body of the human being. We initially dive into the world of our sense organs. What our eyes transmit to us from the world of colors, what our ears transmit to us from the world of sounds, what our sense organs transmit to us, we experience as physical experiences of the effect of the outside world on us. We experience it with our soul life. We experience how we take possession of our limbs, how we become active with the help of our body. We feel immersed in our corporeality, our physicality, our spiritual being. It works, it weaves at this physicality.

But I have already indicated in the last lecture here the way in which we are unconscious of this submergence into physical corporeality. Let us just take the submergence into our elements of will. We have the thought. Let us take the simple action of raising our arm and moving our hand. First we have the thought, the idea; but how this idea descends into our physicality, what complicated process takes place down there before we raise our arm and move our hand, we know nothing about this in our ordinary consciousness. So we have to say: While we feel the powerlessness of the spiritual life when falling asleep, when waking up, that is, when we descend into physical corporeality, we feel how the spiritual flows down as if into an inner darkness, in which it is then enclosed. So that we can say: if we lose the spirit when it no longer works through the body, it then becomes unconscious; but it withdraws from us even more when it flows into our corporeality and works through our corporeality.

These are all examples of how man enters into an uncertain realm when he wants to educate himself about the nature of the spiritual. Now, because he is led into such an uncertain area, man places himself before the spiritual world to which he seeks a relationship precisely because of the better part of his human feeling and willing and thinking. He places himself before this spiritual world precisely the two most significant enemies of human soul life. One of these enemies is the one to whom many people fall prey today who, whether through their will or their circumstances, cannot join the conscientious, serious methods of scientific life that do not make the demands of this science their own. They often place before their soul, out of their own will, that which we then encompass with the word “superstition”.

This superstition is the one enemy of the human soul. Because man must constantly seek a relationship between himself and the spiritual world, he seeks to conjure up from within, through the will, that which he cannot attain from without through knowledge. But if it has no basis, if it lives as superstition in the human soul, in the way a person imagines his relationship to the spiritual world, then he must see how he comes up against all sorts of obstacles wherever he goes in life. Things have their own laws, the things and facts of life, of nature and of human existence. They take a certain course if you approach this life with superstitious ideas. These ideas do not prove true everywhere. You end up in a state of disorientation and insecurity, also in relation to knowledge. You often imagine in your soul that a spiritual being should work through external phenomena in a certain way. You see that it does not work. You become insecure and weak in yourself. Or else the person who surrenders to such impulses, which are not grounded in the objective external world, has no drive for his actions from them; they give him nothing for his will. Therefore, he not only becomes insecure but also incapable, unable to intervene in life. He cannot place himself in the midst of his fellow human beings, co-operating with them, as does the one who does not place illusory conceptions between his soul and life.

If this is the one enemy that stands before the soul of those who do not engage with scientific results, then the other enemy often enters into the soul life of those who are engaged in science. Anyone who is familiar with today's serious and conscientious scientific methods, by which our thinking seeks to follow the external world through experiment and observation to its laws, learns to recognize how this thinking is tamed – one might say – how all arbitrariness is taken from it, how it is adapted to what appears in the external world as law. But, one might say: in this way, thinking also becomes thin and abstract. It becomes estranged from the human being himself. It then becomes only appropriate to the [conditions of] the outer sense world. And one soon realizes: then no way out of the sensory world into the supersensible world opens up for this thinking, which is so wonderfully suited for comprehending the outer natural phenomena.

And then something very often befalls the scientific man of today, and that is doubt, doubt about the supersensible world, precisely because of the certainty he has acquired in his intellectual pursuit of the sensory world. Doubt also arises in the mind. But when it arises there, it arises with all the seriousness of the human soul, then it sinks into the mind, into the emotional life. And this is precisely what the devotee of anthroposophical science can recognize through this science: how the soul and the life of feeling are intimately connected with the healthy or diseased conditions of the bodily life as well; how what lives in an inharmonious, torn or even in a harmonic, happy soul is reflected in the healthy or diseased bodily life. And it may be said that, to put it bluntly, when doubt infects a person with a mental consumption, this mental consumption also affects the bodily conditions. He becomes weak in relation to his physical life. His nervous system becomes defective. He is unable to withstand the struggles of life. He, too, becomes incapable of helping himself and incapable of working with others.

Thus one can see, especially in superstition and doubt, how man, on the one hand, must always strive, out of deeply justified feelings, towards the spiritual world, to which he must feel he belongs. But how certain difficulties arise in the life of the soul, and how, precisely, strong enemies of this life of the soul place themselves between the spiritual world — which one can initially only assume hypothetically — and between the actual spiritual man. That is why even the serious scientific minds of the present day have turned to abnormal mental life, because they despair of the normal mental life that the grandeur of the sensory world transmits to them, but which, in their view, is quite incapable of transmitting to them what the spiritual world is. So they turn away from normal mental life and turn to all kinds of abnormal mental life. Today one finds enlightened minds in the field of natural science who look to mediumship, who look at some visions or hallucinatory states of abnormal life in order to gain clues in this way to answer the question: Does man have any relationship at all to a spiritual environment other than that which is revealed to his senses? One does indeed come across many things, but one should be quite clear about one thing: what one can learn, for example, through a medium, is after all learned by this medium himself through a tuned-down consciousness, through interrupted sensory contact with the outside world. One must, so to speak, turn to the medium for a morbid, abnormal-seeming physicality. It is the same when we turn to visionary experience.

Wherever you look, if you approach the research with sufficient impartiality, you can say that wherever something visionary occurs in the soul, there is a pathological organization. And how is it possible to exercise control over that which arises from the sick person, which is perhaps extraordinarily interesting in some respects, how is it possible to exercise control over that which arises from an imperfect consciousness that is not as highly developed as sense consciousness? How is it possible to gain a critical result about how much the experiences gained in this way are worth?

Anthroposophy therefore does not address any kind of morbid soul life. It firmly rejects having anything to do with mediumship, hallucinations, visions; it is based entirely on healthy soul and bodily life. She tries to find out what exercises the soul can do to further develop the powers of knowledge that are initially present in normal consciousness, so that we are able to see the spiritual world through supersensible organs in the same way that we perceive colors through our physical eyes. If you review what I have said in my various books “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science” and other books about such exercises, you will find that these exercises fall into two parts: firstly, preparatory exercises that a person undertakes to strengthen themselves inwardly, physically and mentally. They are thoroughly suited to lead a person to a healthy physical and mental life. These preparatory exercises are today even appreciated by many opponents of anthroposophy, I dare not say in their value only, but in an outspoken way. But then one does not want to turn to the further exercises, which are supposed to develop dormant powers of cognition in the soul. But how man in this way, as a man who absolutely reckons with the whole enlightened spirit of the present, and yet seeks the way into the spiritual worlds by trying to recognize how man wins such a power of cognition by which he ascend into the spiritual worlds, can be understood more easily by taking up what was attempted in older times to gain knowledge of the supersensible world.

We see today that people who have a strong inner need to feel at least a sense of the spiritual world, who despair of direct knowledge, of a science of the spiritual world, they turn, whether they are learned or unlearned, to the time-honored conceptions that have developed in the course of human history and that are given as traditional creeds or world views. Many philosophies themselves are based on such time-honored conceptions, without the people who believe in them being able to guess it. But today one very often has the feeling that one must accept by faith what is given in such ideas, which have a venerable age, about the supersensible world; one cannot seek such knowledge about the supersensible world as one seeks in our exact science about the sensual world. And one succumbs to all kinds of illusions in the attempt to justify faith in its independent nature vis-à-vis knowledge, when one tries to prove that faith must be a different way of discovering the spiritual, in keeping with human nature, than that which presents itself as knowledge, as science.

Now, anyone who does not use the often rather superficial methods of today's historical science, but rather a certain eye for the spiritual experience of the human being, for that which has taken place in the spiritual experience of human beings over centuries and millennia, with an eye for how this spiritual life has changed from epoch to epoch, anyone who, with such can look with such impartiality at what certain people in more primitive times, than our own, perhaps in very ancient times, sought as paths to knowledge, will come to the conclusion that everything that lives in beliefs and worldviews today, and is often only accepted as historical, as traditional, that it goes back to ancient insights. Yes, everything that people today accept as beliefs once developed in such a way that individual people detached themselves from the general consciousness of people, as scientists do today, and that they sought such knowledge of the supersensible out of the powers of their own soul life. What they then revealed to themselves through such paths of knowledge about the supersensible, about the spiritual, they handed down to their fellow human beings, and this knowledge has then flowed through history to the present day, living in our creeds, in our world views and philosophies. Only, often, people do not seek the sources from which it emerged.

Now, the paths of knowledge of ancient times might seem irrelevant to people today, who have to search in completely different ways. Nevertheless, I will characterize at least two older paths of knowledge, the results of which still live on today in our worldviews. We could characterize many such paths of knowledge. I will pick out two, not to recommend them to anyone for the purpose of attaining higher spiritual knowledge, because they were quite appropriate for an older time, but are no longer so today, as we shall see later. So, not to recommend these things, but to characterize them for the purpose of gaining our understanding of the new, of anthroposophy, through the old knowledge. New paths must be taken today so that people can, through their changed soul life and soul constitution, again attain knowledge of spiritual life and their own spiritual origin.

In ancient times there was one such path of knowledge, which the ancient Indian yoga scholar went through, if I may use the expression. Especially with regard to the characterized qualities, one only gets corrupted ideas today when studying how this path of yoga is sought in oriental countries today. And many of those who, out of desperation, seek ways to find their way into spiritual worlds by resorting to old methods pay the price by damaging their physical and mental lives. For what the human being can practice today, even what is often written about these old ways into the spiritual world, is thoroughly corrupted. But if we look back to the older times of human development, we come to such primitive paths of knowledge that were valid in those days, and on which we can communicate with each other through the modern paths.

What is this yoga path based on? It is based on the yogi taking the breathing, I could give many such details of the yoga path, but I only want to emphasize the breathing process, that the yogi takes the ordinary breathing, which was unconscious, and elevates it to conscious inner activity. How does the ordinary consciousness perceive breathing? It happens in such a way that we inhale, hold our breath, exhale, in a certain rhythmic sequence. At most, we pay attention to this breathing process in pathological conditions. In ordinary, healthy life, this breathing process happens more or less unconsciously. Only scientifically do we have to characterize it, so to speak.

Now, the peculiar thing about the ancient spiritual path of knowledge of the yoga scholars is that they introduced a different rhythm for certain times when they did their exercises in order to gain knowledge of a higher world, that they inhaled, held their breath and exhaled in a different rhythm. What was the effect of this? First of all, it made the yogi fully aware of the breathing process, so that he consciously experienced what one otherwise does not consciously experience. Just as one otherwise experiences inner well-being, inner joy, inner suffering and pain, so the yogi experienced his breathing process, which he had changed at will in accordance with the natural breathing processes. But what happened as a result? What did he gain in terms of knowledge?

From a physiological point of view, we can initially place this before our soul. When we breathe, the breath goes into our physical body, through our spinal canal and up into the brain. The brain is permeated and undulated by the breaths and the rhythm of breathing. As I said, the ordinary act of breathing is unconscious, as is the ordinary soul life. It is always the case that, within our skin, we not only have the physical processes that belong to the nervous organism and that convey thinking, the world of thoughts, to us, but these nervous processes are also permeated by the rhythm of breathing. It is, for example, tremendously interesting to follow what I have at least hinted at in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Mysteries of the Soul), how, in listening to music, the rhythm of breathing merges with what is experienced as a nerve-sense process emanating from the human organs of hearing. But not only in musical perception; in all mental life, the nervous-sensory process is permeated by the respiratory process in its rhythm. That which the human being does not notice in ordinary life was perceived by the old scholar, the yogi. He sensed inwardly how the altered breath permeated his skin, how the respiratory rhythm sank into his thought life. What insights could be gained through this? We can realize this if we put ourselves in the place of the soul life that existed in the people of those ancient times, in which there were yogi scholars who stood out from the general soul being with their special soul being.

It was not like today. Humanity has changed in its soul nature through the centuries and millennia. From today's external science, one cannot even guess how much man's inner soul life and his relationship to the outer world have changed in the course of human history. In those ancient times when yoga originated, people did not perceive the pure colors that we see in the external world, or the pure tones that we perceive when we listen to the external world or have other sensory perceptions. It is only in the course of human development that we have come to see the pure sensual world around us, as we are accustomed to today. But in older times, it was not fantastic for older humanity, as animism today believes, but elementary and natural, that one not only saw the pure colors by looking into the outside world and heard the pure tones by listening to the outside world, but that a spiritual-soul arose in the soul when one looked at the outside world. A spiritual-soul perception was seen in every source, in lightning and thunder, in the drifting clouds, in the whistling wind. They not only saw colors, they not only heard sounds, but, because of their complete conformity with nature, they also perceived a spiritual soul element in everything, just as they perceived color through their senses. In this respect, human beings were not as independent as we have become today. The human soul has also changed in this regard. The inner degree of self-awareness, of awareness of independence, which we today take for granted, did not exist for this older humanity. Man grew by immersing his spiritual soul in lightning and thunder, in clouds and wind, in plants and animals; he grew together with the outside world and felt, to a certain extent, at one with it. The one who became a yoga scholar and practiced in this way, as I have indicated, first achieved, by driving the breathing rhythm into this inner-living thinking, he first achieved what we today take for granted, one might almost say, what we are born with; the yoga scholar entered into abstract thinking, into pure thinking. But through this he came to truly feel the self, the I. He had to acquire the sense of self, the self-awareness that is innate in us, that arises in us in a self-evident way through our education. And the results of this yoga knowledge are expressed in wonderful literature and in wonderful poetic art. The one who ascended into the spiritual world in this way through yoga felt himself as a human being, he felt his spirituality, he felt that he was a living, real spirit. By withdrawing what he otherwise imparted to things in life in terms of spirituality, he felt the reality of his own spiritual self. Therefore we see in such a wonderful poem as the Bhagavad Gita is, how all the delight, all the inner amazement, all the inner feeling of greatness, is described, which these people had, who in this way approached their own spirit through their increased self-awareness, which they had cultivated in this way. In those ancient times, people tried to go on a path of knowledge into the spiritual world. And much of what the yoga scholars have passed on to their fellow human beings has been passed down through the epochs of history; it still lives today as certain sentences, conceptions, ideas about the self of the human being. The religious conceptions adhere to it. The philosophers take it up. They do not know that this was once sought and found by people on a certain path of knowledge.

But we modern people cannot walk this path. This path involves something very peculiar. The one who tries to penetrate into the spiritual world in this way becomes extraordinarily sensitive inwardly. His inner life becomes so active and spiritualized that he must withdraw to a certain extent from the robust outer life and its demands. That is why such spiritual seekers, as I have described them, became lonely people. But in older times people had confidence in such lonely people. That was the peculiarity of that older culture, that one said to oneself: in order to come to real wisdom about the spiritual world, one must withdraw from life, become a lonely person, a hermit. These hermits must be asked if one wants to know something about the spiritual destiny of the human soul. And so one had confidence in the lonely, the hermits.

Today, however, our culture does not encourage this. Today, our culture encourages something different: people today are oriented towards activity. Today, a person must only consider himself capable if he can engage in active life, even if he gains his insights only in a way that is appropriate for participating in life. Today people would not be able to trust someone who has to separate himself from the rest of life in order to gain knowledge. That is why I have characterized these old ways in contrast to the new one, which I will then describe for the sake of understanding. But, as I said, the old path cannot lead to anything equivalent to what an ancient civilization has achieved through the path of yoga, even if this civilization only experienced this way of living in the spiritual worlds in a few hermit specimens of their race.

And now I would like to mention a second path, which has also been taken many times and whose results still live on in our worldviews, our philosophies, our other beliefs, without our being clear about the sources. But this path is already closer to modern man, although it cannot be taken in the same way as it was in ancient times. It is the path of asceticism.

What did the ascetic seek? He tuned down, paralyzed the physical functions of his body. His bodily life had to become calmer than usual. His life had to become one that did not intervene in the external world with all its strength. It even had to become one that inflicted suffering and pain on itself, that carried out asceticism in this way. Such a person came to very specific conclusions, very specific experiences. These experiences should not be misunderstood. One should not believe that by describing these experiences, the view is to be justified that our body, as it exists in a healthy state, is not suitable for our life between birth and death. Yes, just as we carry our healthy body with us, without ascetic weakening, it is suitable precisely for the fully valid life between birth and death. But those who devoted themselves to asceticism in ancient times realized that, however suitable the human body is for the external physical and sensory life, the more it is subdued and paralyzed, the more suitable it becomes for grasping and experiencing the spiritual world. Therefore, through asceticism one can experience the spiritual world. Again, a path that we cannot follow today, again a path that makes us unfit for the outer world. If we weaken our physicality, we also weaken our soul life. We cannot be efficient enough for ourselves; nor can we work for the benefit of our fellow human beings. Therefore, asceticism cannot be our path. But it is extremely important for our understanding that we become aware of the fact that the human body in its healthy state is a kind of obstacle to living oneself into the spiritual world. If this obstacle is removed or weakened, then the human being can live into the will nature of the spirit that underlies the world.

In describing these two paths into the spiritual worlds, I have also had to emphasize that they cannot be ours. Those of you who remember the exercises I described in my last lecture here will have noticed that I have described different exercises. I do not want to repeat them today; you can read about the rest in the various books. However, I would like to quickly characterize a certain aspect of how these exercises work. We do not turn to the breathing process when seeking the path to the spiritual worlds in an anthroposophical way. We approach our thinking, our thought life, directly, not indirectly through breathing. We bring other thought processes into thinking itself, so to speak. In a sense, we leave behind what is particularly useful for all abstract thinking today and celebrates such triumphs. We leave this abstract thinking. We devote ourselves to a meditative life, to a certain resting on images and ideas, in a way we do not otherwise do when we remain in abstract thought. We devote ourselves to a certain inner concentration. In other words, we devote ourselves to a practicing of the life of thought, just as the ancient Indian devoted himself to a practicing of the life of breathing. He allowed breathing to indirectly transform this thinking. We turn directly to the thought. We bring more rhythm into our thinking, whereas in ordinary consciousness we have more logic in it. We gradually attain what I can characterize as the vitalization of thinking.

Yes, we turn directly to thinking with our soul exercises, and we arrive at the thought that the thoughts we otherwise have appear to us more or less dead in their abstractness compared to living thinking. While the ancient Indian yogi was guiding the living thinking, which he and his whole world had in ordinary life, to the abstract thinking that can grasp the self, we in turn start from what we have as self, as abstract thinking in the self, and fully consciously bring this thinking to life, so that we arrive at what I would like to call exact clairvoyance. I beg you not to misunderstand the expression, it is only a term. This exact clairvoyance, which is attained through thought processes, has nothing to do with the vague mystical ideas of ancient times or even of the present. Just as modern astronomy developed from ancient astrology, just as modern chemistry developed from ancient alchemy, just as these sciences have moved more towards the material and have overcome astrology and alchemy, so too, to characterize this, modern exact clairvoyance, as it develops from anthroposoph , leads from the older, more materialistic clairvoyance — since Indian clairvoyance is materialistic —, so modern clairvoyance, by turning first to purely spiritual-soul processes on the side of thinking, leads from the more materialism of older times into the spiritual.

I would like to describe to you how modern thinking, how this living thinking, this exact clairvoyance, leads deeper and deeper into the world, so that within the sensory we can ultimately perceive the supersensory, the spiritual. In doing so, I must come to certain subtle aspects of the human soul life, but if one wants to find real paths to the spiritual world, truthful paths to the spiritual world, one must already engage in soul subtleties.

Let us assume, for example, how the modern human being visualizes a higher animal. He tries to get to know it as far as science is able to do today – but science has ideals to be able to do this better and better, but it will not reach something that I want to characterize right away – with today's abstract thinking we can visualize how the bones, the muscles, the internal organs of an animal are formed, how the individual life processes flow into one another. In short, we can visualize the form and inner life of the higher animal in our abstract thinking, which we are now developing methodically in research in a fully justified way. Then we look at the human being. We do the same with the human being. Again, we visualize how its bone system, its muscle system is formed, how the life processes flow into one another and compose the whole human being as an organization. Then we compare the two. We find that one is, so to speak, a transformation of the other. Depending on our way of thinking and our disposition, we will either say that this human form has developed from the animal form over time, and we will become more materialistic. With more or less justification, we will then become Darwinians. Or, if we are more spiritual or idealistic, we will look for a different context. But such a context arises when we compare the higher animal with the human being itself.

We can do this with the kind of thinking that is abstract and that appears as dead thinking to the mind that has come to exact clairvoyance of living thinking; the kind of thinking through which we can only stand beside external things, through which we can make an inner mental image of every external thing and every external process and compare them in an external way.

With living thinking, as I mean it and as it can be developed in man in the characterized way, we can now also make an inner image of a higher animal. But the living thought is then able to transform itself inwardly, to grow, so that it passes over of itself into the thought of man, without our first having to compare. We arrive at forming a living thought about the animal, which we can then place next to the dead thought of the human being. We gain the living thought that transforms internally, that grows and from which the form of the human being is then formed internally in the soul. That is, after all, the peculiarity of our present-day science when it speaks of development, that it says that one being passes into the other, but that it cannot pass from the thought itself, which it can gain from the one being, to the thought of the other being in such a living way as is only the case with the living thought.

I must therefore draw attention to something that characterizes this vitalization of thought so that I may be better understood in these subtle matters. Let us imagine taking a magnetic needle, placing it in a certain direction, and then turning it this way and that. In all directions, it will behave differently than if we were to place it in just one direction, in the direction that forms the connecting line between the magnetic north pole and the magnetic south pole. This one line behaves differently to the magnetic needle than all the other directions. We see that we do not conceive of space as an indeterminate coexistence, as an indeterminate emptiness, for inanimate nature, for magnetism, but that we have to conceive of this space as being inwardly lived through, so that, for example, for the magnetic direction there is a special spatial direction to which, in a sense, this magnetic direction belongs. So we cannot conceive of space in an undifferentiated way, but rather in an inwardly differentiated, inwardly shaped way. To such a view of space comes living thinking.

We look at the animal. It has its main direction horizontally, which also continues into the direction of the head. Those animals that have an upright head posture are exceptions, which I cannot go into now. Otherwise, I could show that these exceptions confirm what needs to be said about the fact that the animal's organization is such because its backbone lies in a certain spatial direction parallel to the earth's surface, just as the magnetic needle has its calm existence by lying in the direction from the earth's north pole to the earth's south pole.

Now let us take the human being and go over to him with the thought that we form about the animal – with many others, but for example with the only one of this horizontal backbone line. We transform the animal image itself. We imagine the horizontal backbone line vertically. Now the human being is different in space; he acquires this vertical line of space. This is only one detail. One must embrace many things in order to experience how thought, by passing over, by simply passing over the phenomena, the inner experiences, much that is animal, is not merely transferred to the human being, but is inwardly and vitally transformed , by living from animal to human being, and not just by developing the thought in the human being itself, in this way one goes from the thought, which one has vividly developed in the animal, to the thought of the human being in an inwardly vivid way. What do you get out of it? You get out of it that you now have an inwardly living thinking that not only presents itself and compares the facts and things of the world, but that submerges into the things themselves. Our thought itself lives inwardly in the same way that growth lives in the animal, in the human being. We immerse ourselves in the spirituality of the world. But this is something that can very easily be opposed, and it is precisely the peculiar thing about anthroposophical spiritual science that one likes to bring these objections to one's soul. For what anthroposophy has to say about the world should be certain and exact. That is why I myself point out what they could point out when I speak of living thinking. I point out that we have, for example, in the wonderful spiritual life of an Oken and a Schelling, that these thinkers had lively thoughts, but in a certain respect only imaginative, lively thoughts, that they, so to speak, thoughts they developed from a fact, an entity, shaped them out; thoughts about other facts, other entities, thus making thinking alive, capable of growth, transforming, as the beings of the world themselves transform and are growing. But there is one thing we do not find in these thinkers that fully guarantees the reality of what is given by this living thinking. But anthroposophical science must point this out, because it is simply experienced, by coming to living thoughts, to this exact clairvoyance, in the way that the various books describe as anthroposophical science.

Yes, my dear attendees, if you really set about developing such a supersensible world view and the thoughts of an animal, of another being, of a process, and inwardly experiencing the thoughts themselves, metamorphosing them – a process that Goethe already strove for, and he also already came a long way to a certain degree, anthroposophy continues to develop Goetheanism —, if one continues to develop this further, one notices very soon: something connects with this living thinking in the inner soul life, which very much authenticates reality. With each such step, in which we allow the thought to arise from the other thought in a living way, suffering and pain are laid upon the inner soul life. And it is absolutely necessary for anyone who truly wants to achieve an exact clairvoyance to go through pain and suffering. The living thought does not penetrate in the same way as the thought “I want to move my arm, move my hand”, that is, without me feeling it. The living thought permeates all human existence down to the physical. But the experience remains in the soul. It is an experience of suffering, and this suffering, this pain must be overcome. Only then does that arise in man which now fully guarantees supersensible knowledge. But the one who has truly acquired such knowledge, you can ask him what he thinks about his life's destiny. He will always tell you: My joys, the things I feel with relish in life, what I experience as happiness, I gratefully accept from fate. My insights, the things that really enlighten me about the innermost structure and nature of the human being, I owe, even in ordinary life, to my sufferings, my pains, by overcoming them and transforming them into knowledge.

Thus, for someone who is prudent in this way, even the ordinary pain of life prepares them for the suffering that they must experience through the influence of living thought on their entire human existence. But they must overcome this suffering, this pain. As a result, they now become, if I may use the paradoxical expression, a sense organ as a whole human being. Just as we have otherwise buried the individual sensory organs in our organism, and perceive the sensory world through them, so we become a sensory organ as a whole human being when we overcome the painful experience associated with the living thought. You can see this if you consider the following.

Take the wonderfully formed eye. Among other processes, something arises that acts like destruction when we see colors through the effects of light. If we were to experience the subtle processes that take place in a person when perceiving light, they would also appear in us as a quiet pain. However, we are so robustly organized in the present stage of human development that we simply do not perceive what is a quiet pain at the bottom of our sensory life. This is overcome and sensory perception is felt neutrally. In this way, the supersensible knower also struggles through pain and suffering to become a sense organ. The expression sounds paradoxical, but it is justified because with this sense organ, which we become as a whole human being, we perceive a spiritual world around us, just as we perceive the physical world with ordinary sense organs. In this way, the human being becomes a sensory organ, an explorer of the spiritual world. In this way, what he elevates through suffering and pain by overcoming them unites within him with what is living thought.

When this life, this connection between living thought and overcome suffering and pain, comes to life in us, then we see in a different way — let us say, to highlight one example, the most important example — we see in a different way the person standing before us as a physical figure than we did before. We look at him in such a way that our outer eyes see the physical configuration of the space, see the colors through which the person reveals himself in the physical world. We see everything that is revealed externally in the human being between birth and death, we see it through our senses and through the mind, which understands the language of the other, which can summarize in conformity to law what the senses see. But when one has struggled to the realization that I mean, then one sees the physical-sensory of man embedded in a soul-spiritual form, in an auric structure, in a human aura, which now represents the spiritual-soul of man. This spiritual-soul aura, which now reveals to us the real spiritual-soul in man, is not attained through all kinds of fantasies. It is attained today, too, on serious paths of knowledge, on those serious paths of knowledge that awaken the thought to liveliness, that bring the contemplation of the real to assurance by overcoming suffering and pain, to spiritual sensitivity of mind, if I may use this paradoxical expression. And when we see the spiritual soul of the human being before us, the auric, then we do not only see the present human being. Then we look back at how the human being was spiritually and soulfully before he descended from a spiritual and soul world in which he lived before this earthly existence and connected with what had been prepared in the mother's body to become a physical human being. Just as we look at a person today, how he grows, and how we know when a person is an adult, that this adulthood leads back to childhood, so we see in what we reveal in the human being today as the human aura, going back and seeing it currently going back. The child does not exist alongside the adult human being. The spiritual soul in which the human being lived in the spiritual soul world before descending, stands before us in vitality. It stands before us in such a way that we cannot only speak of it in an abstract way, but in such a concrete way that I can characterize this view for you in the following way.

When we are here on earth, we look out into the external world, we see the wonderful starry sky above, we see the clouds passing by, the realms of nature, we look out of our sense organs, out of our eyes, we perceive the external world through our sense organs. But we do not perceive what lives within the human being in the same way. I have already hinted at this today and last time, how little we really understand this. We can look at the outside world. What lives within us, we can visualize it through anatomy and physiology, but there we do not look at the living human being, but at the human being who has become dead.

Anthroposophy teaches us about what lives inside the human being – I would even say inside the human skin itself, as the physical embodiment of the human being. The air circle that extends around the earth is wonderfully certain when we follow it with everything that happens in it. Even if today's meteorology can only explore a little of it, we have a wonderful law in this air circle. Basically, all life on earth is grounded in it. We look into wonderful secrets when we see through the laws of the air circle. But what we can reveal, what lives in the human lungs, is much more wonderful. If the air circle is large and the lungs are small, size is not important. Here, inside the human being, an organ lives, if we know its laws, it is more magnificent and powerful than that of the air circle. And if we look at the sun, the source of light and warmth: everything that comes from the sun, everything that affects the living beings on earth, and everything else that is in space, is wonderfully powerful. But if we look into the human heart, it is smaller than what we see outside in gigantic size, but it is more wonderfully designed and carries a more powerful law within itself.

And so there lives in the inner being of man a microcosm, a small world compared to the great world, here between birth and death. We see the cosmos, we do not see this inner lawfulness. Our spiritual soul, as it was before it descended to physical life on earth, did not see as we see the cosmic outer world through our eyes, but it saw the inner being of man, that was its world. And it prepared itself to now unconsciously rule this inner being of the human being between birth and death in this earthly existence. We now look with a different understanding at the indeterminately formed brain of the child and how it develops plastically. This is shaped out of what our soul looked at before it descended. It sees the human being within. It sees the world that is given to him in the human interior. And because our spiritual soul lives in us between birth and death, and therefore does not see this interior because it lives in it, but sees the outside world because it does not live in it, the spiritual soul sees the interior of the human being as its world before birth.

This is initially one side of the extraterrestrial existence of man. The other refers to what human action is, what human behavior is. We look at it in a more or less external way through our senses and our mind. We find how man lives from childhood to later years. We then find how a stroke of fate comes about, how one person finds another. People find each other, they exchange their inner experiences, so to speak. This exchange becomes decisive for the rest of their lives on earth and perhaps for much further afield. This is how it appears on the surface. You see it, so to speak, higher knowledge shows this as the blind see color, one sees it in its true essence. And as the blind are operated on and live into the world of color and see something completely new in it, so he whose spiritual eyes are opened in the way described today sees something completely new in what man accomplishes in his deeds. He observes how the child takes its first steps in life, how sympathy and antipathy arise, how the child grows up, how sympathy and antipathy develop, and how the human being, by continually living in sympathy and antipathy, is led to the blows of fate. Then one no longer speaks of the fact that people only found each other by chance. Then one becomes aware of the deep wisdom that lies in something like what Goethe's friend Knebel said out of mature experience. He said, addressing Goethe with this age-ripe wisdom: When you look back on your life as a human being and survey what has happened to you since childhood. It is as if we had progressed in a well-planned manner from our first childlike step and had selected through inner longing what we had come to last.

It turns out for exact clairvoyance that the child is guided and driven from the first step by sympathy and antipathy, that in fact an inner longing lives unconsciously for the ordinary consciousness, that we lead ourselves to the blow of fate that is decisive for life. By broadening this, as we look at an adult and look back at his childhood, we look back at what is revealed through the auric in man, and we see the passage of the entire human destiny through repeated earthly lives.

We become aware that just as our development as an adult is dependent on our development in childhood, so what we build for ourselves as fate is the result of a previous life on earth. And in connection with this, it becomes clear to us, especially when we become completely one with our sense organ in the way described, that we can also know how we can live when we no longer have the body, when we pass through the gate of death and discard the body. We learn to see without the body. The essence of this spiritual sense of meaning consists precisely in the fact that we see as a spirit in the spiritual world. Therefore, we learn to recognize what we will be like when we have discarded our physical body. And just as we can describe in concrete terms how we look into the inner being of a person before birth, we also learn to recognize how something develops in us that passes through the gate of death and enters the spiritual world again in order to continue life without the body.

Here we are at the point where genuine modern knowledge, which still seems quite fantastic to most people today, but which is just as precisely founded, where modern knowledge connects with religious, pious-religious life in the same way that ancient knowledge developed into religious life. If we start from such insights, which appear to be purely scientific, we arrive at the deepest experiences, at the fulfillment of the deepest longings of the human soul.

If we can suggest how something of the soul and spirit detaches itself from the physical by returning the body to the earth as a corpse, then we also become aware of how something else detaches itself from physical existence. We see how people form friendships, how they are attached to one another in love, how spiritual and soul bonds extend from heart to heart in the family. We see how this human life creates bridges and bonds from person to person. By being able to look into the spiritual world, we also really gradually learn to see how the soul detaches itself in death – however strange it may sound to people today, it can be spoken of as a truly accurate insight – we learn to look into the spiritual world in such a way that what is physical about all the bonds of friendship and love ties, in family ties, in all that has become dear to us in our life together with our fellow human beings, we learn to look at what is physical about it and at what is spiritual about it, and we learn to look at how the soul detaches itself in death, how human souls find each other again. The hand that we have extended to another, the warmth of which was the expression of what is experienced from soul to soul, the beating of the heart in joy when we feel togetherness in friendship and love, these physical accompanying facts die with our physical body. That which has been lived in you as spiritual and soul, as spiritual and soul together in friendship and love, escapes from the earthly existence, as the spiritual and soul escapes from the physical earthly body.

We do not arrive at this certainty only through religious belief, but through sure paths of knowledge, that those who were together in spirit here on earth will be reunited in spiritual companionship. We learn to recognize that what is lived out in earthly life is but the image of a spiritual vision. If we value and hold dear, we also learn to recognize how this valuing and cherishing of earthly life is only the basis for a further experience that follows when the earthly must be relinquished and the spiritual wrests itself from the earthly. And a religious feeling, a religious experience, a true piety then arises out of a truly earnestly striven-for realization. But this will give something to modern life, which, as I believe, every unbiased person must admit, already lives in the longings of many souls today, and also lives in the souls of those who do not admit it, yes, who, when one speaks of it, perhaps turn away unwillingly and as opponents; it also lives in them. For in all that is preserved for men today from ancient times of spiritual ideas, there is already something that makes him uncertain. In all that he believes in, he finds something uncertain. He longs again for knowledge of the spiritual.

One may say: What does all this concern those who do not experience it themselves? Yes, first of all, in my book 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds' and other books, I have described what needs to be done, and today anyone who has the necessary patience and energy can enter into the spiritual world to a certain extent. You can enter and check whether what I have described today is fantasy or reality. But even if you cannot do it yourself, you can still, for the benefit of today's culture and for the good of social life today and in the future, convince yourself through common sense, without being an anthroposophical spiritual researcher, of the truth of supersensible experience, which today, however, individual people must strive for just as individual people only become astronomers, just as individual people only become natural scientists. But it will be possible to gain trust, as in the old days people gained trust in hermits, in those who can justify themselves by speaking about the supersensible worlds. Just as one need not be a painter to recognize the beauty of a picture through healthy human understanding, so one need not be a spiritual researcher, but only have a straightforward, unbiased human understanding, unhampered by prejudice, to see through healthy human understanding what the anthroposophical spiritual researcher reveals to the world as the results of the spiritual path of knowledge. Today, people can let the results of spiritual science approach them with a healthy understanding of the human being, just as one lets the results of astronomy or chemistry approach, without being an astronomer or chemist oneself.

However, the spiritual researcher today must not withdraw from life. He must place himself in the midst of life. For one can only have trust in someone in whom one sees: intervenes in life and intervenes in life in the same way as other people. Today, life must prove itself in life, and anyone who has something to say about life must also put themselves into life with all their might. That is why today we need different methods of knowledge of the higher worlds from those I have described comparatively, in order to lead to understanding, as those of the older times.

But what do we gain from the fact that such knowledge of the supersensible world is spreading again? Today, if we are not immersed in the most blind materialism, we also have concepts and ideas of a spiritual world. We have them, but we are aware that we have ideas, concepts, images of the spiritual world that are dead. If we look back to older times, we do not want to conjure them up, because humanity must progress. What was experienced in social and other respects in ancient epochs cannot be more appealing to us; as free human beings, we must go beyond them. But when we look back, we must admit to ourselves as unbiased observers of history: Where the ideas originated, to which so many still cling today, there were not only abstract thoughts and ideas present, there people knew, by turning to the spiritual in thinking, feeling and willing, that the spiritual itself descended into human nature; it is a fellow-member of the world in which we live. Not only thoughts, ideas of the spiritual, these people have had according to their consciousness, but the gods, the spirits themselves walked among them. Such knowledge, such knowledge, we need again. We have beautiful, great thoughts about the spiritual, but they are thoughts of a spiritual that is alien to man, that he only visualizes in abstract thoughts.

Anthroposophy, in turn, seeks to introduce the spiritual element itself into these thoughts, so that the human being in turn becomes aware, as he was aware in the best epochs of religious creativity: not only are thoughts in the human being from the spirit, but the spirit itself walks around with us. Just as we human beings live here on earth in a physical body and carry a spiritual and soul element within us, an immortal element that escapes the physical in the way we have described today, so we walk here among the invisible beings of the spiritual world. We are here as human beings, and in turn we become aware of the spiritual world as a living entity. Such an awareness that the spiritual world is our living companion, that we are not dependent on abstract, powerless thoughts from the spirit, has a different effect. This spiritual world has a different effect on us. It transforms our knowledge into something that in turn fills us with religious, artistic, and fully human content, so that we can fully engage with all of life on earth, and indeed with all of life in the world. We get a sense of what we, as temporal human beings, mean for eternal existence. But we also receive impulses for action that are stronger and more powerful than those that are mere ideas.

And this is something that can also be observed today in social life, that people no longer carry a living spirituality within them, and therefore, when they speak of social life, they sink down into instincts and drives. In the East, we see terribly how people, because they have lost a living spirituality, develop a destructive social life that also hangs over Europe like a threatening specter. It must be conquered. But it can only be conquered if people become aware of the living spirituality that can be taken up into thought and into the will and with which man can live as with something living and not with something dead, cognizing for himself, but also as a social being among social beings, with whom he can establish, as with spiritual impulses that are given to him from the spiritual world of which he is aware, that which the serious souls hope and long for as ascending forces of our culture; our culture, which has so many forces of decline within it, but which must be defeated. What can work as a rising force in our time, what can flourish for us from the spirit that we take up in a living way, that is what the earnest souls long for and hope for today, what humanity needs in order to be able to live in the present in the right way, in order to live out of this present into the complicated future of humanity.

For the present and the future, for the progress of our culture, which we must strive for with all our might, we need the living spirit. Anthroposophy does not want to be something fantastic, but, even if it is perhaps still weak today, it wants to be a path to the living spirit. It wants to fathom the relationship between man and this living spirit, so that man may find what he needs at this moment to find the rising forces in the face of the declining forces for the present and especially for the future of humanity.

Dear attendees! For many years I have had the privilege of speaking here in this place about anthroposophical spiritual science, its essence and significance for the present spiritual life of humanity. Since I last had the opportunity to do so, the School of Spiritual Science courses have taken place at the Goetheanum in Dornach in September and October of this year. These School of Spiritual Science courses were also intended to demonstrate in practical terms the task that the anthroposophical spiritual science in question seeks to fulfill in relation to the other sciences and to practical life. About thirty personalities from the various branches of science, artistic creation, and also practical life, industrial and commercial life, contributed to this; through them it should be shown how spiritual science can have a fruitful effect not only on the individual branches of science and on artistic creation, but also, and above all, on practical life. Spiritual science should not be limited to theoretical discussions and sentimental descriptions, but should show how it has the means to do precisely that which, in many respects, cannot be done by other sides in the present and in the near future, but which can be undertaken by spiritual science.

Those who are more familiar with the course of intellectual life in the present day know that the opinion and feeling is widespread throughout the individual branches of science that the individual sciences are coming up against certain limits that it is impossible for them to cross. Often it is even thought that it is impossible for humans to go beyond such limits.

But on the other hand, there is also practical life in relation to science. Science should and wants to intervene in practical life. And anyone who is involved in the life of science will not be able to deny that the limits that the various sciences find themselves up against — I need only draw attention to medicine —, that these limits can be settled by philosophical-theoretical arguments that are intended to justify these boundaries, but rather that life often demands human action precisely where science is confronted with such boundaries. The fact that it is indeed possible, through the special method of spiritual science, to enter precisely those areas that modern science points to as boundaries, should be shown on the one hand in the Dornach School of Spiritual Science. It should be shown, not by individual personalities who are merely familiar with spiritual science, but precisely by all people, by personalities who have thoroughly mastered their individual subject just as others have and who are immersed in it, who are the only ones who are able to show how this subject can be stimulated and fertilized by spiritual science. It was also of very special importance that personalities in practical life showed that this special way of thinking, which is based on reality, on full, total reality, to which the spiritual forces of the world certainly belong, that this way of looking at things is capable of accomplishing in practical life what has often had to remain unaccomplished in modern times, and which has indeed been outwardly documented as unaccomplished by the social and other necessities of life in our present time.

Of course, at this point we cannot yet say how successful this anthroposophical spiritual science has been in demonstrating its legitimacy in the spiritual life of the present day through such practical measures. On the other hand, however, it can be said that despite the attacks, of which you have been informed in the preparatory remarks, that despite these attacks, it has been recognized in recent times, even by serious parties, that what is believed by many is not true at all, that one has to deal with anthroposophy [as] with the activity of some obscure sect or the like.

I would like to give just one example to show you how, despite all the opposition, which is not always well-intentioned and, above all, not always well-meaning; how, despite all the opposition, spiritual science is slowly coming to what it must come to, at least to recognition of its earnest striving and its open eye for the cultural needs of the present.

I would like to cite just this one example. The opposing writings are gradually growing into books, and a book has been published in recent weeks called “Modern Theosophy”. For a reason that is, of course, strange, the author states that he is concerned with nothing but spiritual science. He says in the following remarks: Wherever the talk is of theosophy and theosophists, this is always the mode of expression that is more familiar than the expressions anthroposophy and anthroposophists.

Now, one cannot say – and this is addressed to those present – that the author of this writing, Kurt Leese, who has a licentiate in theology, is appreciative of anthroposophy. On the contrary, the whole book is written as a refutation. Nor can it be said that the author of the book understands an enormous amount about anthroposophy. But what he presents on the very first page and repeats many times in the book is something that shows that even from the position of an opponent, it is gradually no longer possible to deny the seriousness of anthroposophy's intentions. Here is what an opponent says:

“If Theosophy were only the random ideas of a small sect fishing in troubled waters, it would not be worth the effort to pay it any attention.”

And then he says that one is dealing with something that shows the foundations of a comprehensively designed world view, powerfully interwoven with an ethical spirit. The fact that this ethical spirit remains even if one negates everything else in anthroposophy is something that the author of this book openly admits:

"Its most active contemporary promoter, Rudolf Steiner, with the tools of great reading and undeniable acumen, has compiled a great wealth of religious-historical, scientific and philosophical material in detail, in order to lay the foundations of a comprehensively designed world view, powerfully imbued with an ethical spirit.

Nevertheless – and now I come to the positive part of my argument – this opponent, who strives to be objective, wants to look for the reasons for refuting anthroposophy from within anthroposophy itself. He wants to take up what the anthroposophist says and prove contradictions and the like, namely, to demonstrate an unscientific character. But at one point he betrays himself in a very strange way. He says, at a particularly characteristic point, that Anthroposophy has an inflammatory effect and is “ill-tempered”.

Such feats of tricky distinctions, which from the outset are in the service of an ideational preconceived scheme, make reading Steiner's writings not only difficult, where multiple misunderstandings of the uninitiated could occasionally occur, but also annoying and unpleasant.

So not only challenging logical judgment, challenging scientific judgment, but challenging feelings and emotions, that is how one views anthroposophy! And why is this so? This is certainly connected with the very special way in which anthroposophy, precisely because it wants to be as scientific as any other science, relates to the paths of knowledge of mankind.

Anthroposophy – of course, as I have said here very often – Anthroposophy would certainly not be taken seriously if it were somehow foolishly dismissive of the great, the significant achievements of the scientific method in modern times. Nor would it be taken seriously if it were to behave in some dilettantish way towards the spirit, the whole inner attitude of scientific research. It starts out from an acknowledgement of modern scientific endeavor. It does this by seeking to deepen its understanding of the scientific method, but at the same time it seeks a path from the comprehension of the external sense world into the comprehension of the spiritual world. And she would like to answer the questions that matter, the questions about the path of knowledge, in such a way that the spiritual realm is given its due, just as the sensory realm is given its due through scientific research. In doing so, she sees herself compelled — not by the scientific method as it is commonly practiced, in which one believes one is limited if one only works in the sensory world — she feels compelled by this scientific method, as it is commonly practiced, not to stop. It devotes itself more to the education, the inner discipline of research than to scientific methods, and for this reason cannot accept what is often dogmatically stated today as to the necessity of remaining in the world of sense and in the world of appearances through understanding.

And from this point of view, spiritual science seems provocative, as this critic says, and “unpleasant”. For on the whole, today's man is not inclined to accept any method of knowledge that does not arise from the ordinary characteristics of human nature, that one has in the world, that one has been educated to, or that follow from the course of ordinary life. The great and most wonderful achievements of modern natural science are based on the fact that one remains at a certain point of view of sense observation, of experiment and of combining through the intellect, that one carries out this kind of research further and further, conscientiously, but that one wants to remain with the point of view that one has once adopted in this way.

Spiritual science, as it is meant here, cannot remain at this point of view, but it must, it feels compelled, precisely because of the strict scientific education that the spiritual scientist has to undergo. It feels compelled – not only to knowledge applied in natural science, to expand it, to make it more precise through all kinds of aids — but she feels compelled to develop a completely different kind of knowledge in the soul, a different way of knowing than the one used in natural science today. She therefore feels compelled to continue the work of the scientist into the spiritual realm, so that the development of this spiritual scientific method can be characterized more as a natural outgrowth of the scientific method than as a mere extension of it. And so one arrives at what has been expressed by me from the most diverse points of view over the years.

One comes to the conclusion that in the life of the human soul there are certain forces that are hidden, just as they are hidden from ordinary perception and from ordinary scientific perception, just as those soul forces that only emerge after five or ten years are hidden in a ten-year-old child. What must be borne in mind is a real growth of the human being, a sprouting forth of that which is not yet there in the tenth year but continues into the fifteenth or twentieth year. And this is discovered by the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here, that even if one has developed to the point of having the methods by which one can conduct scientific research in the most conscientious way, it is still possible – so that it can be compared with a real growth of the human being – to soul forces, that it is possible to extract soul forces from the human soul, which the world can now not only see, I would like to say, more precisely with a microscope or more closely with a telescope, but which see the world quite differently, namely spiritually and soulfully, in contrast to the merely sensory view.

And it is not attempted – esteemed attendees – to somehow explore the spiritual through external measures or external experiments. How could one recognize the supernatural through laboratory experiments! That is what those who are inclined towards spiritualism want, that is what those people who gather around Schrenck-Notzing or others want. The anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here takes precisely this view, that what can be observed externally through measures that are modeled on the external scientific experiment - however astonishing they may be - that by world in some way, be it by deepening or refining it, or by allowing it to work more into the etheric in some way —, that by remaining in the sensory world, one can by no means gain knowledge of the supersensible world. But modern man often finds this unacceptable, that he should now do something with his soul forces, that he should develop these soul forces himself before he can research in the spiritual world.

It is, however, necessary to develop a certain intellectual modesty, which consists in saying to oneself: the powers that are so well suited for the sensory world, such as those applied by modern science, cannot be used to enter the spiritual world. Man must first awaken his own supersensible when he wants to explore the supersensible in the external environment, to which he belongs as a spiritual-soul being just as he belongs to the physical world through his sense of being, when he wants to explore this spiritual-soul entity in the environment.

It is certainly not everyone's cup of tea, dear attendees, to become a spiritual researcher; but if one does not want to become a spiritual researcher, it is nevertheless not acceptable to say that spiritual science is idle because it opens up a field that only those who, in a certain sense, develop their soul powers can see into.

Modern humanity as a whole does not follow the path into the scientific method itself; but modern life is permeated by the ideas that we bring into it through science. We are simply compelled by common sense to accept what radiates from the natural sciences, to incorporate it into life, and to apply it in other ways to the human condition. Just as the researcher in the laboratories carries out his experiments, which then go out into the world, so too will there be a new spiritual research. But humanity in general wants to be able to relate to the results of spiritual research in the same way as it can relate to those of natural science, without having to face the reproach that something has been accepted on mere faith or on authority.

What is indicated as this special inner, intimate soul method is to be sought in a straightforward development of human soul forces that already exist in ordinary life and in ordinary science. I would like to say that it comes to mind that there must be something like this when one brings to mind the actual meaning of knowledge in modern scientific life.

I am certainly no Kantian, dear attendees. Everything that arises for me from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is basically anti-Kantian. But I may refer to one of Kant's sayings here, because what lies in this saying has basically been verified by the whole of more recent scientific development, insofar as this whole more recent scientific development really strives to be knowledge of the world, comprehensible knowledge of the world. There is Kant's dictum: In every science, there is actually only as much real science to be found as there is mathematics present in it.

Now, my dear attendees, this is not something that we need merely believe about Kant; rather, we see it as true everywhere in the scientific development of modern times, especially in the development that most clearly and most directly leads to a world view, in the physical sciences. Mathematical thinking is applied, experiments are carried out, and not only observed, but the observations are permeated with mathematics. What does that actually mean?

Yes, it means that one only has the feeling of bringing intellectual light into what can be observed in the external world when one has verified the observations in a mathematical way. And how is that? Yes, it is because one comprehends mathematical insights through oneself, and does not become acquainted with mathematical insights through external observation. The one who once knows through inner contemplation that the three angles of a triangle are 180°, who can grasp this for himself through his own contemplation, in ordinary Euclidean geometry, he knows it. He knows it clearly through his own intuition, even if millions of people were to contradict him, he knows it. He can affirm it as a truth for his inner contemplation. It is therefore the inner work of contemplation through which one comes to mathematical truths, through which one, so to speak, inwardly experiences mathematical truths. And external observation becomes scientific in that one carries what one has observed inwardly into these external observations and connects it with them.

Especially when one has experienced this urge of the modern scientific direction in oneself through mathematics, that is, through an inwardly clear, light-filled pursuit of certain ideas in order to arrive at scientific paths that also satisfy the human need for knowledge, then one is pushed further. And then something else arises. I would say that it arises from the depths of life. From the depths of our soul, all kinds of needs for knowledge arise in the face of the great riddles of existence.

At first, in a very vague way, the human being wants to know something about what his or her essential core is. He wants to know something, or at least, one can say, he assumes that there is something to know about that which lies beyond birth and death. He also assumes that, however dark his path may be with regard to what he calls his fate, there may be a path of knowledge that allows him to somehow see through the seemingly so confused threads of human destiny. In the very act of experiencing such surging up from the soul, the human being will, I would say, become more and more aware through inner soul practice of how he is prompted when he wants to observe his inner soul , this thinking, feeling and willing that is in him, when he wants to observe it in a similar transparent way to how he already manages to a certain extent today to penetrate the outer world with mathematical concepts. And from what one experiences there as a driving force for knowledge, the spiritual researcher starts from there, he comes to the conclusion that one can further develop certain soul powers than are present in ordinary life, that one can further develop certain soul powers that are absolutely necessary for a healthy human existence in ordinary life.

Now, one of these ordinary soul abilities, without whose normal functioning we cannot be mentally healthy, is the ability to remember. My dear attendees! We all know this ability to remember; but we also know how necessary it is for a healthy, normal soul life. We know of pathological cases in which the thread of memory is interrupted up to the point of childhood, which is the furthest we can remember in life, where we cannot look back at the life we have gone through since our birth. When a person's thread of memory, his stream of memory, is interrupted in this way, then he feels, as it were, hollowed out inside. His soul life is not healthy and he cannot find his way healthily into the outer life, neither into social life nor into natural life. So the ability to remember is something that is, so to speak, absolutely intertwined with normal human life. Memory is connected to what we experience through our senses, what we go through in our interaction with the outer world. How does this memory present itself to us?

We can summon it quite well in our being if we do so through an image. In a sense, our life lies behind us at every moment like an indeterminate stream. But we live in our soul in such a way that from this state indefinite currents can emerge, the images of individual experiences, that we can bring up these images through more or less arbitrary inner actions, that they also come to us involuntarily and the like. It is as if a stream of our being were there and from this stream these images of our memory could emerge like waves.

Those who do not think with prejudice but truly from the spirit of modern science know how closely this ability to remember is connected with the human body, with the physical nature of the human being. We can, we need only point to what physiology and biology can tell us in this regard: how the ability to remember is somehow connected with the destruction of the body. And we will see how all this points to the fact that a truly inwardly healthy body is necessary for the human being to have the ability to remember in a healthy state.

This ability to remember is such that, in the right way, I would say the vividness of the external sensory perceptions that we experience in our connection with the external world, that this vividness of external sensory perception must [fade] in a certain way. We may recall the images of our experiences only in a faded state, and we must recall these images in such a way that we can participate with our will in an appropriate manner in this recall. These images must emerge in our inner soul life in a pale and somewhat arbitrary manner. And it is well known that when these images of memory emerge with a certain vividness and intensity, and when the human will, when the structure of the ego, must recede before these images, when a person cannot firmly persist in his ego in the face of these images, then hallucinations, visions, everything arises through which the human being is actually deeper in his body than he is connected when he is in the ordinary life of perception and memory.

This must be assumed in order to avoid misunderstanding spiritual science, especially with regard to its method, that spiritual science is quite clear about it in the moment when what is called a vision, what is called a hallucination, what you can call more intense images of fantasy, that in that moment the person is not freer from his physical life, but that he is more dependent on the physical life through some pathological condition than he is in ordinary external existence. The belief that spiritual science has anything to do with such pathological conditions of the soul must be fought against. On the contrary, it emphasizes more sharply than the external life that those who believe that one can look into the spiritual world by indulging in such abnormal soul phenomena, caused only by pathological bodily conditions, as they are, for example, those that occur in mediumship, that occur as hallucinations, as visions and the like, are quite on the wrong track.

What the spiritual researcher does as an inner activity of the soul is much more – my dear audience – than that. This is brought into a state of mind that is entirely modeled on the way this soul proceeds when it devotes itself to mathematical thinking. Just as mathematical thinking is completely permeated by the ego, which is constantly in control of itself. And just as every transition is made in such a way that one is, as it were, everywhere inside and knows how one thing passes into another, so too must the spiritual researcher's method in the inner life of the soul proceed in such a state of mind. Starting from the ability to remember, he draws on the most important quality of this ability to remember. It consists in the fact that memory makes permanent that which we otherwise experience only in the moment. What we have experienced in the moment remains with us for our lifetime. But how does it remain permanent for us?

If we take what I have already said, the dependence of normal human mental life on the body, then we have to realize that we maintain our memory normally when it is based on our body helping us to have this ability to remember. It is based on the fact that we do not have to work with just our soul when we want to remember. We know, after all, that what later comes up as a memory has descended into the indeterminate depths of bodily life. And again, it also comes up from the indeterminate depths of life. These depths, so to speak, pass on to our bodily life what is brought about in us through sensory impressions and through the intellectual processing of these impressions. We then bring it up again by lifting that which is experienced bodily in the time between the bodily life and the memory, by lifting it up into the imagination. We thus borrow our ideas, by becoming memories, the clear perception, to which we devote ourselves in mathematical thinking.

The spiritual researcher nevertheless ties in with precisely this lasting of the ideas in the memory. And that then leads him to what I have called the appropriate meditation in my writings, especially in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my “Occult Science: An Outline”. There it shows itself, I have characterized it many times, and you will find it discussed in more detail in the books mentioned. You bring into your consciousness an individual set of ideas or a complex of ideas and hand over — as I said — so that any reminiscences that emerge from the subconscious do not enter what you are to do only through human will, just as you do mathematical connecting and analyzing through human will. So you place certain ideas, which you have guessed or somehow obtained, at the center of your consciousness for a long time – and with the same completely clear, mathematically clear day consciousness – such ideas that you, so to speak, perform the activity, perform it mentally: to rest on ideas, as can otherwise only be achieved with the help of the physical body.

And then we see that this resting on certain ideas does indeed have a success. Then we see that we become aware of forces resting within our soul that have nothing to do with the physical body, that do not at all lead into the realm of hallucination or vision, that remain entirely within the realm in which the soul moves when it develops mathematics. But it is also an inner development of ideas, it is a spiritual experience of ideas. It is only necessary to bring other ideas than mathematical ones to the center of the soul's life, then a different ability than that of mathematical thinking will develop.

And one should not imagine that this is particularly easy and comfortable. Such exercises must be continued for years by those who want to become genuine spiritual researchers. But then it also turns out that forces were previously latent in the soul, hidden, which are now brought out. He then feels he has certain powers. Above all, the soul's ability to perceive, to perceive spiritually and mentally, is added to the ability to perceive sensually and intellectually that he had before. The human being becomes capable, as it were, of developing in real terms from within what Goethe more symbolically called the 'eye of the mind' and the 'ear of the mind'. The human being becomes capable of seeing differently than before, and above all, he first sees his own soul life differently.

I have pointed out that we have experienced this soul life since birth in an initially indeterminate stream, which we actually only have in mind in a very vague way, and from which the memory images then emerge. But it must be added that we ourselves are actually this stream. Just try to apply the “know thyself” correctly. You will see that in ordinary life you are actually nothing other than this stream, this stream that is so indeterminate, but from which all kinds of things we have experienced can emerge again and again. One is the Self. But one ceases to be the Self in a certain sense when one meditates in the way I have just indicated. I just called meditation this resting on certain ideas, although in practice it is necessary to develop the previously hidden soul powers within the human being. And the first success of this is that what we are otherwise always immersed in, what we are otherwise always, the context of our memories – because otherwise, in our ordinary state of consciousness, we are basically nothing but the stream of our memories – that this becomes more objective for us, that it becomes something external for us, that we learn to look at it.

That we have thus lifted ourselves out of it in full mathematical clarity and that we look at it. That is the first experience we have. In a certain moment of our consciousness, as a result of meditation, we have our life in front of us like a memory tableau, at least almost back to birth, like a unified whole, like a totality, like a panorama. It is not exactly what we have before us as memory images, but what we have before us is actually our inner self, inasmuch as we experience what existence has made of us, as in a totality. I would like to say that the whole stream, which we are otherwise ourselves, lies before us. We have lifted ourselves out of this stream.

This is the first experience that we have of ourselves in time, in the duration of the overview, that we actually do not merely remain in the moment through practical inner soul-making, but that we overview life as such.

But we learn something else through this as well. By making our soul life objective in this way, we learn to educate ourselves about processes that we actually go through every day, that we also observe externally, but that we certainly cannot observe from within in everyday life. This is the process of falling asleep, the process of waking up in ordinary life. One would indeed succumb to a bitter contradiction if one wanted to believe that what the soul contains dies every time one falls asleep and is reborn every time one wakes up. This soul content is there from falling asleep to waking up. But since in ordinary life a person can only have consciousness through the interaction of his soul with his body, but in the state of sleep the soul has detached itself from the body, so from falling asleep to waking up, within the ordinary consciousness, the person cannot know anything about himself.

But by having ascended to such a realization, as I have just characterized it, by having one's life as a continuous presence beside one, one can also enlighten oneself about the process of falling asleep and waking up. Because the human being is, by moving out of his ordinary experience, by learning to look at himself, he is in the same state – he learns to recognize that he is in the same state from direct experience, that he is in the state – in which he is otherwise, unconsciously, when he is between falling asleep and waking up. In this way, one learns to recognize the process of falling asleep and waking up. In this way, one learns to recognize that one knows: Now you have placed yourself in a state where you can see your life. But this is only a brief state of realization. Then you go back to ordinary life. So you have the state of the soul outside of ordinary experience and the ordinary state in which you are otherwise, where you are within your experiences. This re-entry into the state of ordinary life is exactly the same as waking up. And going out of oneself is learned by direct observation; going out and objectivizing of life is exactly the same as, when seen inwardly, falling asleep. So you learn to look at these two processes inwardly. But through that you get the elements to look at something else.

However, then there must be a certain expansion of what I have mentioned. I have said that today I can only point out – my dear audience – how the spiritual researcher puts certain ideas at the center of his consciousness. But he must actually attach very special importance to not just being able to rest with his consciousness on such ideas, but he must also be able to arbitrarily — and that must happen through completely different exercises, you can read about them in the books mentioned — he must be able to arbitrarily suppress these ideas again, to embrace them with his consciousness. He must thus inwardly become master — if I may repeatedly use the expression — over these ideas, which are essentially like pictures, viewed pictures, colored viewed pictures. No matter how people laugh at what Goethe called and what I also described in my “Theosophy” as “viewing images in the imagination,” what Goethe called “sensual-supersensory viewing.” Just as one can speak of a colored looking, just as one can speak of a colored looking towards the outside world, so one can speak of a colored looking at the inner images. It arises from the fact that something becomes objective. And the soul life becomes objective, as I have described it, through meditation.

But the person must also be able to remove all of this again. As you know, he is not capable of this in the case of a pathological state of mind. With mathematical clarity, the person must move in this bringing up of the ideas and in this removing of the ideas again. In that the human being, in this way, swings back and forth in his consciousness between ideas that he brings into his consciousness at will and then removes again, he practices a kind of systole and diastole, a kind of exhaling and inhaling. The spiritual-soul inner mobility comes about through this.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the method of entering the spiritual worlds that is entirely appropriate for our age. It is appropriate to enter the spiritual worlds consciously. In the old days, when people instinctively plunged into the spiritual worlds, especially through the Oriental method, they tried to consciously elevate the breathing process, thus also trying to perform an inner activity by striving to inwardly oversee the breathing process, and then to see in the breathing process that which is present as the inner being of the human being. This process does not lead people into the spiritual world in an appropriate way in the present time. Those who want to bring it back, to bring back old institutions, are actually acting against the development of humanity. Today it is appropriate for humanity to replace this method of physical breathing with a different systole and diastole – with that which I have just characterized as a sitting down of the images brought about by the will and then again arbitrarily bringing these images out of consciousness.

On the one hand, by coming to imagination and thereby describing the reverse path – and by moving further and further away from what I have described here as a conscious back and forth in meditative life – man then learns to recognize how to expand what one grasps elementarily in inhaling and exhaling. And one gets to know this as a soul process that is essentially based on a kind of longing for the body after being outside of the body for a period of time. And you learn to recognize what you experience with your soul from birth to death, how that brings the soul into the inner state in which you feel compelled to devote yourself to an [antipathy] towards life again for a while.

You then expand these ideas, but not through philosophical speculation, but by expanding your inner capacity for knowledge. And in this way one arrives at — just as one otherwise advances from a simpler species to a more complicated one — one arrives at inwardly beholding, from the inward beholding comprehension of [awakening], the complicated process that is present when the permanent part of a person, through birth or conception from the spiritual world into the physical body, when it develops the greater desire not only to return to the existing body as in waking up, but to embody itself in a new body, having been in the spiritual world for a while, having now embodied itself again.

And one learns to recognize from falling asleep, by getting to know the moment of dying in an embodiment, one learns to recognize: Through the gate of death, the soul that outlasts the course of a person's life goes to continue living in the spiritual world. One does not learn through a logical or elementary force, for example, but by falling asleep and waking up, the processes of being born and dying, or by becoming familiar with these processes in nature, but rather by moving from element to element of inner experience with mathematical clarity.

But this, dear attendees, is how one arrives at the second stage of a higher consciousness, which I have always called – please don't take offense at the term, it is just a terminology that one has to use – inspiration – through which one looks back at the lasting in ordinary physical life as at a flowing panorama. Through inner contemplation and spiritual science, it is possible to grasp the eternal in the human being. And it is possible to grasp this eternal in man. It is possible for man to recognize his connection with the supersensible-eternal just as man recognizes his connection with the sense world when he awakens the consciousness in himself through which man beholds his connection in the physical world.

These things, they certainly enter into present consciousness, my dear audience, in the same way as the Copernican worldview, for example, once entered, contradicting everything that came before, the Copernican worldview or similar. But even if what I have just mentioned still seems paradoxical to so many people today, we must remember that the Copernican worldview also seemed quite paradoxical to people at the time of its emergence.

And then, my dear audience, you also learn how to develop another human soul power, that of memory, which is trained in a way that I have just described. One learns not only to recognize this, but also another human soul power, which now also leads into ordinary normal life, only, I would say, leads into it, nevertheless, its origin is a physical one, in a more moral way into the higher life. One learns to recognize how this soul power is capable of a different development than that which it has in ordinary life. One learns to recognize how love can become a power of knowledge.

I am well aware, esteemed attendees, of how contradiction must arise from today's world view when one says: Love will be made into a power of knowledge. After all, love is seen as subjective, as that which must be excluded from all science. Nevertheless, anyone who experiences such things in their soul, as I have described to you, by developing into a spiritual researcher, knows that what develops in ordinary life as love is a human ability that is connected with the human being, and that this love cannot only be experienced by the human being when he is confronted with some beloved external object, but that it can also be experienced inwardly by the human being as a general human characteristic. It can be heightened spiritually, and I might say quite intimately, by developing that which one also applies in ordinary life. Precisely when we extend the ability to remember, to concentrate on any single content of consciousness, any object, just as in the past one repeatedly and repeatedly raised images arbitrarily in duration [by concentrating on the object, initially arbitrarily], by being in a certain interaction with the external world. By developing our will into concentration, we learn to recognize how that which otherwise expresses itself through the physical body of man as love can be grasped by the soul, how it can be detached from the body by the soul, just as in the ability characterized earlier.

But through this – my dear attendees – by learning to recognize how a person is inwardly constituted as a loving being, which otherwise only ignites in interaction with external beings, by absorbing these inner qualities, this inner impulsivity of the human being into the soul — the individual exercises for this you can also find in the books mentioned —, in this way one arrives at what I characterized earlier, this being born and dying as a physical waking up and falling asleep, not only to look at this inwardly, but also to see through it inwardly. But through this, human life is moved into a completely different sphere.

Let us take a look at this human life as it touches us by fate. We face this human life, meet hundreds and hundreds of people. In a place where life has brought us, something ignites in this or that being that brings us into a meaningful connection with fate. The one who only looks at life with an ordinary consciousness speaks of coincidence, speaks of the one that has just happened to him from the inexplicable depths of life. But the one who has brought the soul forces, which are otherwise hidden, out of his soul to the degree that I have characterized it so far, he certainly sees how, in the subconscious depths, not illuminated by ideas for the ordinary consciousness, but in the subconscious depths, in man, there rests that which is akin to desire, which drives one in life.

When you have prepared yourself to survey your life like a panorama, when you have become aware of the permanent, the eternal, that goes through birth and death, when you have developed the abilities to can see this, then – my dear attendees – then these abilities, when they are still warmed by a special training of the ability to love, then abilities in life develop in such a way that we learn how we have shaped our lives, in order to bring it – let us say – in individual cases, to the point where we have been affected by this or that stroke of fate.

We learn to recognize how life is connected in relation to what otherwise lies in the subconscious. And from there, the realization goes, how what now underlies this fateful connection of life points to repeated earthly lives. How that which we can follow with the developed soul powers, in the course of our destiny, warmed by the power of knowledge of the ability to love, how that brings us the awareness that we have gone through many earth lives and will still go through many earth lives. And that between the lives on earth there are always stays in the purely spiritual-soul world, in which the soul experiences what is conceptual from previous lives on earth, that which we have raised up into thinking above all, how this is transformed into an inner soul metamorphosis, into desire, which then pushes towards a new life on earth. This new life on earth is shaped in this way. What is the fateful connection of life becomes transparent.

Now, my dear attendees, I have only been able to sketch out the results that spiritual science, which is based on scientific education but which also develops this scientific education further, comes to. That this spiritual science is not a theory, not a collection of mere thoughts and ideas, is obvious when one considers its value for human life. At the same time, however, one must point out what this spiritual science can be, especially for people of the present and the near future and for humanity in various times.

It is very remarkable how the critic I spoke to you about earlier, who only speaks from the consciousness of the present and criticizes spiritual science to no end, nevertheless recognizes the value of which I spoke to you earlier, how this man speaks of the evaluation of life. This man is full of ideas about what he imagines to be the scientific nature of the present. He wants to evaluate spiritual science, but he has hardly got to know it, he has read everything that has been published, he claims. But then he can ask the following question:

What is all the talk of service [of knowledge, of the riddles of life and their solutions, what is all the momentum if, despite all the momentum, it leads to primeval depths and remoteness, if the theosophist]

— as I said, he means anthroposophist —

[cannot say] why it is better to be an I than a non-I.

Now, my dear attendees, imagine a person who states: What is all this talk about spiritual worlds for, if one cannot come to know why it is better to be a 'I than a non-I'? The answer to this question cannot be given theoretically. And the science that the man is talking about can actually only satisfy theorists. What does the science that the man is talking about actually have to say about everything? As I said, it is precisely from the humanities that the full value of the modern scientific method for the external sense practice should be fully recognized. It would certainly be foolish not to recognize what the X-ray method, what microscopy, what the telescope and numerous other [methods and instruments] have achieved in recent times for the knowledge of the external sense world. And it would be foolish, and above all amateurish, not to recognize the value of scientifically conscientious methods for disciplining the human capacity for knowledge. But everything that works in external experimentation, in external observation and in the mathematical processing of external observations, is basically only something that works on the human intellect. And however paradoxical it may sound, anyone who does not go through these things, I would even say not just professionally but in their whole way of life, comes to ask themselves: What can the ordinary scientific method, when it develops a world view, give us about human life? One sees it in such results. People with such a method then ask: Why is it more valuable to be “I than not-I”? Why not live as an unconscious [atom] in the universe? Why live as a conscious I?

Spiritual science, by looking more deeply, must say: What is it that gives you life, the science that has indeed achieved such great triumphs for the inner life of the soul? Does this science give us more than knowledge of the digestive processes, of the nutritional content of food for hunger? It gives us the intellectual, it gives us what can be described. It also provides clues as to how what is done instinctively can be done rationally in a certain way. But science as such can say how hunger should be satisfied, what is in the foods that satisfy hunger. But it could never satisfy hunger itself with its descriptions.

We must, however, translate this from the physical into the spiritual-soul realm. And here it must be said that spiritual-scientific knowledge, even if it has to be expressed in ideas and concepts, can be grasped by immersing oneself in these concepts and in what spiritual researchers are able to say about them from the spiritual worlds. By learning to recognize the enduring, the eternal, and the repeated earthly lives in the physical life of a person, the eternal, repeated earth-lives, the connection with destiny and thus also a world picture in connection, as it is presented in my “Occult Science in Outline”, in a spiritual-scientific way. He who lives into all this does not bring forth concepts that merely describe something about the human being, as the various scientific concepts do. Rather, they bring forth real images that, when experienced, have the power to affect the whole human being, to take hold of the feelings and will impulses of this whole human being and, so to speak, are simply soul food, spiritual-soul food — it is not just spoken of the thing — and which therefore also work into the spiritual-soul. So that the I does not have to answer the question theoretically, why it would be better to be an 'I than a non-I', but by giving itself to what radiates out of this spiritual science with all the warmth, with all the light of the spiritual, it does not merely have the possibility of giving a description from outside, but it lives in the concept the essence of the matter itself. The concepts are only the bearers of the matter itself.

This is the peculiar thing that is not at all seen in spiritual scientific literature, that it is spoken differently, not just words about something, but that the words are rooted in real experience, they are the carriers of the living experience. And that, indeed, anyone who listens carefully, if they have an ear for it, can feel all of this in the words, that they are not just descriptions of spiritual and mental processes, but these spiritual and mental processes themselves.

This, ladies and gentlemen, shows us that this spiritual science can indeed be of use in our practical lives. And it has indeed already tried to find practical application in a wide variety of fields, as I mentioned at the beginning. It has done so in a particularly important area. We have founded the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart. It is based entirely on the idea of those schools that will one day be there when the threefold social order, as I have described it in my “Key Points of the Social Question” and as I have also presented it here and repeatedly presented it in Bern, will become a fact.

This Waldorf School is a truly independent school. That is to say, it is governed by its own teaching body, which is a direct consequence of the loophole in the Württemberg education laws. The teachers are completely sovereign as a teaching body. The school is administered by the teachers. And the administration of the school itself is just as much a consequence of the pedagogical-didactic impulses as what is taught is a consequence of the pedagogical-didactic impulses.

Of course, there is no longer time to describe to you in detail the principles of this Waldorf school. I will just say that an attempt was made not to found a school based on a particular worldview. Catholic priests teach Catholic religious education there, and Protestant priests teach Protestant religious education there. Those children who, through their own will or that of their parents, do not have such a religion, are instructed in a free religious education. But it is not at all intended to impose any kind of world view on the children. The Waldorf School is not a school of world view! What is to prevail from the roots of anthroposophical spiritual science is merely the art of pedagogy and didactics, the way in which one teaches. Anthroposophy does not want to be a theory; anthroposophy wants to be transferred into the practical handling of life. It has already proven itself in this way, although of course after one year one cannot say anything special, and especially in the pedagogical-didactic art of the Waldorf school.

I would like to mention just one thing from the end of the previous school year and the beginning of this school year. At the end of the last school year, we saw how it affects children when they are given the kind of report cards that we gave them at the Waldorf School, which was founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart and established by me. There are sometimes classes at the Waldorf School with fifty children, or even more than fifty children in the last school year. Nevertheless, it was possible to depart from the usual way in which teachers assess their pupils. All these patterns of 'sufficient', 'almost sufficient', 'halfway, almost satisfactory' and so on and so forth, you can't find your way around at all, you don't know how to grade it, where to take it from. All these things were left out in the Waldorf school. Each child was described individually, how they had been received at the school, how they had behaved, so that the teacher could see from the report what the child had gone through in that one school year. And each child was given a saying that was individually tailored to their soul life. Despite the fifty pupils in each class, the way in which the teachers practised the art of pedagogy and didactics, based on the spirit of the anthroposophical worldview, meant that they were able to formulate a life verse, a life force verse, for each individual child, which was included in the report card and which the child would visualize in his or her soul. And we have seen – for we seek the art of education in a living psychology, in a living study of the soul – how it affected the child, in that it allowed him to see himself in the mirror, so to speak. And if I may mention something else: when the children came back from their vacations, it was really the case that they came back with a different state of mind than children are usually seen to have after vacations in schools. They longed to go back to school.

And there is something else I want to tell you. Every time I came to this school for an inspection – esteemed attendees – I did not fail to ask a question very systematically, again and again, among other things: Do you love your teachers? And one can distinguish, my dear attendees, whether something comes wholeheartedly from the human soul or whether it is just some conventional answer. When this “Yes!” resounded directly and fundamentally from the soul, then one could see how what had been attempted as a pedagogical-didactic art from anthroposophical spiritual science had indeed found validity.

We are not yet allowed to work unhindered in many areas of life. But where it is possible, it must also be done in such a way that, on the one hand, what can be brought from spiritual science, as it is meant here, and, on the other hand, what corresponds to the needs, longings and hardships of our time in the true sense of the word, is brought together. In this context, it is also important to point out how numerous personalities in history who devote themselves to artistic creation instinctively seek new paths.

Such a new artistic path, but now not at all out of some theory, not out of ideas, for example through symbolism or straw-like allegory, but through living feeling, such a path was also sought in Dornach itself through the construction of the Goetheanum. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, was not in a position to simply take a master builder and say: Build me a building here in such and such a style, and there we will practice spiritual science in this building. No, my dear audience, spiritual science is something that life works because it is life. And so spiritual science, as it is meant here, as I said, cannot be allegorized, cannot be symbolized, but by looking at the human being at the same time, by working on the whole human being, it can stimulate the forces of artistic creation and the forces of artistic enjoyment. In this way it can also point the way for the future in the same way as it points the way for the new needs of the present in intellectual life, and can increasingly point the way for the future in artistic matters.

We need not only – my dear audience – see how the artistic has developed in the course of human development, how this artistic, which in the course of human development has indeed come to light in such peaks as in Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, how this artistic presupposes, in that it has always been drawn from the supersensible, how it presupposes that the sensory, the outwardly sensory, really strives towards what one wants to experience in the idealized. And this idealization is what basically characterized the artistic epoch that artistic personalities in particular feel is over and that new paths must be sought in relation to it. When one stands before the Sistine Madonna, one is confronted with something that is thoroughly material. But at the same time, one is confronted with something in relation to which one must say: the artist experienced it in such a way that the spiritual emerged directly from the material. He rose up out of the material into the spiritual; he idealized the material.

Now we are entering a stage of human development in which, in the spiritual life, in the life of knowledge, we must really look — as I have indicated — at the spiritual as such, so that the spiritual can be seen directly. We are thus also faced with the path that is artistically most appropriate for humanity in the present and near future. If an old art idealized, a new art must realize.

Spiritual beholding also longs for realization, just as sensual beholding longs for idealization. And just as one does not arrive at a truthful or dominant artistic creation by only having artistic spirit through idealization, so too does one not arrive at an allegorical or symbolic artistic creation by realizing what has been spiritually beheld. Those who, I might say, theoretically defame what can be seen in Dornach find all kinds of symbols and allegories, but they see them themselves. There is not a single symbol or allegory in the whole of the Dornach building, the Goetheanum. What can be found there has been seen in the spiritual world and realized out of the spiritual world. The architectural and sculptural elements of the building are there as a result of what was seen in the spiritual world and realized in the material world. What was seen spiritually is not shaped into ideas or concepts, but is actually seen. It is seen in full, living concreteness. And it is only incorporated into the material in a living way. It is seen in full concreteness.

This shows, dear attendees, how spiritual science can indeed also have a fruitful effect on artistic creation and enjoyment. And by leading people through its results to a life together with the spirit from which they themselves come, and towards which they seek their path out of the sensual world, which they hope for after death, out of which they know they are born if they only look at existence correctly; by Spiritual science brings man together precisely with regard to that which wants to develop most clearly, brightly, and luminously in him through the life of imagination, which otherwise remains only in abstractions that are foreign to life. It deepens in man that feeling which is the actual religious feeling. And that should be seen in the right light. One should not strive to block the path of this spiritual science based on denominations. For one can show by the example of Christianity itself what spiritual science can be for religious feeling, for the whole religious life.

What then does Christianity depend on, my dear audience? Christianity depends on the Mystery of Golgotha being understood in the right way. If one does not understand how, through the Mystery of Golgotha, something we call the Christ united with earthly life from extraterrestrial worlds, if one does not understand that there is something in the Mystery of Golgotha that cannot be exhausted by observation from the sense world, but must be grasped through spiritual contemplation, then one cannot do justice to the Mystery of Golgotha. That is why even the most modern theology has come to omit from the Mystery of Golgotha that which can only be grasped spiritually, and to speak only – in a sense naturalistically – of the simple man from Nazareth. Modern theology speaks of a man, however outstanding he may be, who at most had the consciousness of God within him. While spiritual science will bring back the Christian consciousness to grasp the mystery of Golgotha as a supersensible event in itself, as an event through which not only a man stands in the course of human development, who developed the consciousness of God a certain way, but who was the bearer of an entity that came from extraterrestrial worlds at a certain point in the development of the earth in order to henceforth, renewing human life, continue to exist with this human life.

The Christ event, in turn, is grasped by spiritual science as an impact from the extraterrestrial, from the spiritual-supernatural into earthly life. And the whole of earthly development is understood in such a way that it is a preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha, a leaning towards the Mystery of Golgotha of everything that has gone before, and a streaming forth of the impulse of this Mystery of Golgotha through the events that follow.

But one also learns to understand the difference between the event of Golgotha, which stands for itself and can be grasped by everyone according to their abilities, and what is taught about this mystery of Golgotha in any given time.

The first Christian centuries took their concepts from the Oriental world view and made the mystery of Golgotha vivid and explainable from these concepts. Then, gradually, another world emerged in the spiritual life of Western humanity. The natural sciences arose. The human spirit has become accustomed to other ways of understanding. We see today how these ways of understanding have also taken hold of theology in the nineteenth century, where it has tried to become progressive, how they have made of the Christ-Jesus being the “simple man from Nazareth”. And however much power may be brought to bear against what comes from this side, this battle will not be won unless the mystery of Golgotha is again grasped from the spiritual-scientific side, unless it can be said anew from the spirit how an extraterrestrial spirit entered into earthly life through the man Jesus of Nazareth. The explanation must be a new one in relation to human progress; it must become a new experience.

Spiritual science does not want to found a new religion, it only wants to fuel consciousness in accordance with the knowledge of modern times. It wants to show that which once gave meaning to the development of the earth in the light that this humanity needs for the culture of the present and future. Thus spiritual science, as I can show from this Christian example, can deepen a person's religious life. It can give him that which, according to modern consciousness, cannot be given to him in any other way; it can give him that.

Oh, he is timid towards Christianity who believes that through spiritual science, Christianity can be destroyed. No, on the contrary, only he looks at Christianity in the right way who has the courage to confess that, as with the physical, so the spiritual discoveries are also made. What is the Christian impulse cannot thereby appear in some lesser, weaker light, but in an ever stronger and stronger light. He would prove to be truly Christian who, out of a deep yearning, would accept the affirmations that, precisely from spiritual science, can lead to the realization of the mystery of Golgotha.

But it seems that humanity in the present truly needs religious deepening, my dear audience. For we are indeed experiencing strange things today. And I would like to mention one more example to conclude.

In Dornach, at an outstanding location in the Goetheanum, an installation is to be created that is directly related to the Mystery of Golgotha. A nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group is to be installed. We have been working on this sculpture for several years. At the center of this sculpture stands a figure of Christ. It is finished at the top in the head and chest parts, but still a block of wood below. The head is thoroughly idealized. Those who have seen it will certainly testify that I said: From a spiritual-scientific perspective, this image of Christ arises in me, as he walked in Palestine. I do not impose it on anyone, but it is developed out of humanity, when one projects into a human being that which one projects when one seeks the soul in the whole human being, not only in individual human physiognomic features in the face, but seeks the soul in the whole human countenance. But things are said and seen without knowing what is actually being done in Dornach.

Now, among the many writings by opponents, there is a very remarkable one. In it you will find the following sentence – I won't detain you long – you will find the following sentence:

Anthroposophy starts with the human being and its goal is the ideal human being. This and God are apparently one and the same. A nine-and-a-half-meter-high... with animal features at the bottom is currently being built in Dornach.

Now, dear attendees, I have told you about people who were there and know what has been worked on this group so far. Anyone who wants to see something like this in a wooden figure, which has an idealized human head at the top and is just a block of wood at the bottom, not yet finished, and which sees Luciferic features at the top and animal features at the bottom, reminds me of the anecdote that is often mentioned about how you can tell in the evening whether you are sober or drunk. You put a top hat on the bed. If you can see it clearly, you are still sober; if you see two of them, you are drunk.

Now, dear readers, anyone who, when looking at the woodcarving group in Dornach, sees a human being with 'Luciferian features' at the top and 'bestial characteristics' at the bottom, should not, in his drunkenness, complain about the fantasies or illusions of the anthroposophists! For anyone who is truly devoted to anthroposophy will certainly not be taken in by the same illusion, the same fantasy, which are also objective untruths. But this is how someone works with the truth — my dear audience — who can write on the title page the capital <«D> in front of his name, who is a doctor of theology.

Yes, my dear audience, we need a deepening, a refinement of religious consciousness. Those who are appointed guardians treat the truth in this way. From this it can be seen that we need a deepening of the sense of truth. After all, what is the science of a person who has only enough scientific conscientiousness to present an objective untruth of this kind in a single case in just such a way?

Now, my dear audience, as I said, it requires precisely this internalization of the human being, which will also be connected with a refinement of religious feeling, with a deepening of religious feeling. Spiritual science will be able to radiate its impulses into the most diverse branches of life. It wants to be completely practical, but it also does not want to go beyond scientific education. It wants to be scientifically grounded in that it arises out of the attitude, out of methodical conscientiousness, as only some mathematical method, combined with external observation, can arise out of the human soul in full scientificness.

Now, in conclusion, just a few personal words. When it is pointed out today, as it has been by Christian luminaries, for example, that this anthroposophical spiritual science in Dornach is not addressed to scholars but to educated laypeople, then one thing may be said. To a certain extent, this is still its fate today. I myself – if I may make a personal comment – began in the 1880s to develop something that is entirely in line with the whole direction of anthroposophical spiritual science, although it is only present in the elements, and although it was only later developed into details. What was then the guiding force is already contained in it. I was not always as much of a heretic as I am today. I was not always treated as badly by the sciences as I am today by the sciences, or from the point of view of religious denominations, but those writings that I wrote about Goethe at the time have already become known to a certain extent.

People just think that I have become a fool and a fantasist since that time, since it has become clear to me that what flowed out of that time should flow into the well-founded anthroposophical spiritual science. But what I actually often called for in my Goethe writings, and was not achieved even then, such as “Goethe's World View”, “Truth and Science”, “Philosophy of Freedom”, namely contained in my “Introductions to Goethe's Scientific Writings”, whoever assumes this, will see that for me it was not just about Goethe having this or that world view, but about standing up for this world view itself, asserting it, bringing it to its right and also developing it further.

The aim was not to develop a Goetheanism that died with the year 1832 and is merely historical, but to show the living Goetheanism as it has remained capable of development up to the present day. That Goethe's ideas were to some extent met, some have admitted. But that is also what is done out of habit in our time. People liked to boast: Yes, Goethe, Kant and so on had this or that idea. But to stand up for an idea with the full power of one's personality and help it to victory is not what lives in the thinking habit, especially not in the mental habits of the present. And so I must say that although I have been proved right in many respects in the explanation of Goethe's world view, I wanted something else: to advocate what can arise from it as spiritual science, as anthroposophical spiritual science, through the further development of Goethe's world view.

And what I wrote at the time was written entirely in the forms of science. I also spoke in this way; on the contrary, it was found to be too remote from ordinary life. At that time, those who were involved in science would have had the opportunity to address the matter. They did not take this opportunity. Therefore, it became necessary to address the educated lay public and speak to the heart and intellect of the educated lay public. Because, my dear attendees, that which is to be incorporated as truth into the development of humanity must be incorporated into it. Therefore, spiritual science must not be reproached, as is often done by its critics today, for not initially presenting itself to science as such – which it has now sufficiently done in Dornach, by the way – but in a true way, for that is what it has done. And it only approached the educated lay public when scholarship did not want to. But something like that has to happen! Why? Well, anyone who is imbued with the impulse, with the truth impulse of spiritual science, who knows the needs of our time, who knows the longings of our time, or at least believes he knows them, will have to say to himself: the truth must go out into the world, and if it does not succeed in penetrating the world through the one path, which might perhaps be the outwardly correct one, then other paths must be sought. If scholars do not want to, they may want to, when spiritual science takes hold in the hearts of educated laymen out of a natural, elementary sense of truth, and then forces those who have lagged behind it, even if they are scholars, to follow suit. Truth must come into the world. And if it does not come through one way, then the other must be sought.

Dear attendees! When the Goetheanum in Dornach, before its actual completion, organized autumn courses on the various sciences and on various branches of human life last fall, the aim was not to focus exclusively on spiritual science as such in these courses, but to let the individual sciences express themselves in such a way that what they themselves could experience as a fertilization through spiritual science would have to come to light. For this reason, it was considered important that experts from the individual scientific fields were able to express themselves at this event, that they were heard, and that personalities from practical life, from commerce, industry and so on, were also heard, in other words, from thoroughly practical life. The idea was that those people who are either directly involved in science or those who have experienced the hardships and challenges of life and at the same time have truly penetrated into that which is to emerge as spiritual science at the Goetheanum in Dornach, should be able to discuss the experiences they have with the introduction of spiritual science into their particular field. But it has also been used to highlight what is supposed to be the actual origin of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science represented by the Goetheanum. What is to be represented here is not something that even remotely has the intention, say, of founding some new religion. Nor is it about wanting to set up some kind of sectarian movement, but the starting point of spiritual science is taken entirely from the scientific life of modern times and especially of the present.

I would like to express myself through a comparison, as what is to be represented as Anthroposophy from Dornach is particularly related to the scientific life of modern times and the present. If I make such a comparison, it is only to explain something. Please do not think – I hardly need to mention this – that with this comparison, spiritual science itself is to be compared with the world-historical event that I am citing. That could be left to some cheap quip or the like. But I would like to point out to you – just to explain something – the views with which the discoverers of America set out, these discoverers of America who found the courage to sail across the ocean that had not yet been crossed. They believed they were arriving in India, reaching India from the other side, so to speak, hence the term West India and so on. So what did they predict? They predicted that by venturing out across the ocean, they would reach something familiar.

This is also how I would like to try to go further and further within modern science, as it has developed over the last three to four centuries. You are well aware that serious, conscientious researchers strive for this ever-advancing progress of science, and that extraordinarily conscientious researchers, it should be recognized, then speak of the fact that one must come to the insurmountable limits of human knowledge. But on the other hand, when one comes to these limits, all kinds of assumptions are made about the atomic and molecular world, and so on and so forth. One assumes, when working methodically in the laboratory, when doing research in the clinic, when trying to fathom the secrets of the world at the astronomical observatory, that somehow, through the sea of the scientific method, one must arrive at something that is either an insurmountable limit or something similar to what is already known. Just as Columbus more or less predicted that he would have to find something already known, so it is also assumed in science that one must find something already known. After all, molecules and atoms are nothing more than, I would say, penetrating into the smallest, into that which one also sees with ordinary eyes, making sense.

But this experience of the scientist seems perfectly understandable to someone who is immersed in scientific life, understandable because when you work further and further with modern methods, you don't actually arrive at a solution to important life and human riddles, as you might expect. If you believe that, you are indulging in an illusion. On the contrary, anyone who approaches science with an open mind, or rather, I should say, who conducts methodical research, especially if they not only pursue the natural sciences, but also want to transfer the scientific method to history, to the so-called humanities, will find that no solutions arise, but that the number of puzzles instead increases. You only really learn to recognize how mysterious the world around us is when you get to know it through the methods of modern science. But there is one thing we have to acknowledge when we reflect on ourselves in our research: What is it that we apply, regardless of whether we are conducting research in the laboratory or in the astronomical observatory or in the clinic? Well, my dear audience, however much some people, I would say through a radical materialism, may be mistaken about this, it is nevertheless not even a very high truth, but rather a trivial one, that if one wants to do scientific research, one must apply spirit, that in some way the spirit must be active in man.

And now it is a matter of combining these words, the spirit must be active in man when he researches externally, in the sensual-scientific, with these words, some real, scientific meaning. You cannot do this any differently than by researching what this spirit is. You cannot find it in the external world. You have to apply it to the knowledge of the external world, you have to get the spirit out of yourself. If we want to express ourselves at all about what science is, we speak of the spirit all the time. But we also have to be able to come to it through some particular way of knowing: What is this spirit actually? And by now trying to make the journey, I would like to say through the sea of modern science, one finally discovers that one does not arrive at something known, but that one arrives precisely at that which is previously in consciousness when one utters the word “spirit” or by saying, “The spirit searches,” one does not arrive at something known, but one arrives at that unknown and actually experiences something similar to what Columbus experienced when he discovered America between Europe and India.

On the journey to the world's mysteries, one actually experiences what the spirit is. Only, in a sense, science has lost it. And this is shown, I would say quite bitterly, in life that this science has lost it. This newer natural science recognizes the spirit only in thoughts, in ideas, in abstractions. And this view has been adopted by millions and millions of people, who call everything that arises through the spirit in life - morality, religion, science, law, and so on - an ideology, that is, something that would only arise as smoke from what is either sensual truth, or what some material production processes are, or the like. But this is what one discovers, not through any kind of belief, but through a real scientific observation within anthroposophical spiritual science, what the spirit is as a real being, what the spirit is as a living being, like what one observes through the outer senses in all its liveliness.

Now, my dear audience, to arrive at this view, one needs a certain starting point. And I would like to call this starting point: “intellectual modesty”. First of all, a moral quality is necessary, albeit an intimate moral quality, if one wants to find the right starting point for the spiritual science meant here.

To characterize this starting point in intellectual modesty, I would like to choose the following comparison. Imagine a five-year-old child is given a volume of Goethean poetry. What will he do with the volume of Goethean poetry? He would perhaps tear it up or play with it in some way, but in any case he would not do what the volume of Goethean poetry is actually there for, which one can do when one is in a different state than the one in which the child will be when he is ten or fifteen years older. He will do something different with the volume of Goethean poetry than he would at five years of age. What is the reason for this? The reason for this is none other than that the child's soul has developed in the meantime, developed from within. The child is now capable, because it has developed those qualities that it did not have at five years of age, of discovering something that was already there in the volume of poetry when the child was five years old. He was just the same externally in the eyes of the child as he might be when the child is twenty years old. But because something has taken place within the child, because something has been brought out of the child's inner being, purely because of this, the child treats everything it now does with the volume of Goethean lyric poetry quite differently.

Nowadays, especially in science, but also in life in general, we take the view that we develop those qualities in people that are, let us say, inherited, that can be acquired through ordinary education, and then we are usually ready for today's life and for scientific life. This is the point of departure, especially in scientific life. One regards oneself as more or less complete in a certain way, in terms of one's ordinary inherited qualities and one's education, and one looks at the world, so to speak, from this completed point of view. One combines what the mind and the senses provide and, without going deeper, one might say that one only considers what is missing in the area one wants to explore. One expands, one also expands by perhaps arming the eye with a telescope or microscope or [spectroscope] or X-ray machine. But in this way one attains nothing more than, I would like to say, even if indirectly, by means of the spectroscope or the X-ray apparatus or the telescope, one sees the same thing that one otherwise has before the senses and the other senses. But what one needs to have for spiritual science is intellectual modesty. That means that at some point in life one must simply say to oneself: Man can develop abilities from the age of five to the age of twenty. In a sense, he draws out of his inner being what is latent in him. And only because he has drawn something out of his inner being does the world now look different to him. If one merely describes the external senses: It is no longer there, but it is now more present for him because he has brought abilities and qualities out of the depths of his soul. So one says to oneself: There could be other abilities in this soul, abilities that do not come through the ordinary inherited qualities in their natural development and through ordinary education, but that perhaps only come through taking the soul life intimately inwardly — albeit with the appropriate modesty, because it is only a sensualization —, deeply inwardly, and that one brings it beyond the point of view that can otherwise be obtained in life and in ordinary science.

This is what must naturally take as its starting point the intellectual modesty just characterized, the view that there may still lie in the soul something as yet undeveloped, but which can still be developed. From this point of view, what is anthroposophically oriented spiritual science? From this point of view, it really seeks to shape out of the soul that which is latent in the soul. The methods it uses for this cannot really be compared with any external measures. They are methods that are intimately applied to the inner life of the soul itself. But one should not think that what comes about through the development of intimate inner soul abilities is somehow easier than research in the laboratory or clinic or astronomical observatory. Rather, what I am now briefly indicating to you in principle requires years and years of inner, serious and dedicated soul work. This dedicated soul work is not appreciated by some people who know little about the subject. And so they believe that what is said in the field of spiritual science is something fantastic, plucked out of the blue. But that is not the case at all.

What I am now going to mention very briefly, you will find more fully described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Of course I cannot give all the details here, but I would like to suggest in principle that the matter at hand when researching the spiritual worlds, as meant in anthroposophy, is not at all something that has been miraculously brought forth or the like, but that it is only a continuation, a further development of the ordinary human soul abilities. Please excuse me, therefore, if I explain in a somewhat elementary way how one can move from the ordinary soul abilities to those through which, in science, one can look deeper into the reasons for existence than is the case with the ordinary external senses and with the combining mind.

You are all familiar with two human abilities. If I speak to you about a development in the first ability, perhaps not so many people will take offense at it, because they will at least admit that what comes about through such an ability can still be called science. But when I speak to you about the development of the second ability, then, of course, the objections will increase, which is quite understandable. The objections, ladies and gentlemen, are well known. Then, in particular, the scientific people will initially rebel against something like this, but only as long as the full transformation of the corresponding abilities is not envisaged.

The two abilities – there are, of course, many others, but these are the two main abilities that I want to characterize – these two abilities of the human soul, which, so to speak, have to be taken up at the point where they are in ordinary life and from there have to be further developed, just as the mental abilities of a five-year-old child have to be further developed. These two abilities are, on the one hand, the human ability to remember and, on the other hand, what we call love in our ordinary and social lives. The ability to remember and the ability to love – we apply them in science at least as aids. Memory and love play an enormous role in our ordinary and social lives. However, both abilities can be developed further than they are in the ordinary life of the human soul.

As you know, the ability to remember is what brings coherence into our lives. Initially, we have this ability to remember in such a way that we can conjure up an event that we may have experienced many years ago at a certain later point in our lives. At that time, we were fully immersed in this event with our whole being. At that time we touched, so to speak, that which was the cause of a certain experience in the external world. At that time our senses were exposed to this experience. In later periods of life, perhaps through an external cause, perhaps through an inner cause or something similar, we evoke in the soul itself in the form of an image that which was once an experience. And if we have healthy soul powers, we know quite precisely, simply inwardly through what is formed in the life contexts for our soul existence, whether we are imagining some kind of fantasy, whether we are merely thinking up something or whether what arises in our soul is only the image, so to speak, the imagination of what we have experienced in the outer sense world.

Those who have studied the significance of the ability to remember for the human soul in more depth know that our self is never truly healthy if something is wrong with this memory – going back to the point in time to which we can usually remember going back in the first years of life. If there is a period of life that cannot be reached in memory, where the thread of life is interrupted, something will show up that disturbs the self so much that the self, the center of the human soul, cannot feel healthy. And you also know how morbid conditions can intervene in the ego and how, through the rupture of memory, quite terrible mental illnesses can arise. There are people – you will have heard of them, my dear audience – who got on a train somewhere and rode it to some point. Then they got off. They only found their way again later. They have completely severed the thread of life. And afterwards? They cannot remember what they have been through. This thread of memory is what holds our ego together.

What is actually the basis for remembering any event? Yes, by going through the experiences, they are, so to speak, in front of us in the moment. We can relive what we experience in them inwardly over and over again. And what we have done over and over again can be inwardly revived in our soul as an image. I do not need to dwell today on what actually takes place in the human being's inner life; you can find that in my works on spiritual science literature. The fact of the matter is that we can bring forth images of experiences we have had, and that in this way the experience becomes a lasting one in our soul. You see, we have to hold on to this quality of permanence and, I would say, learn to experiment with it, just as one experiments with external things in a chemical laboratory. We must actually learn to think about these inner things in the same way that we have acquired skills in science, in modern science, whose merits should not be overshadowed by spiritual science. Just as we set out to do certain things in modern science, so we come to a different conclusion about what we can only observe in nature. Just as one goes from observing nature to conducting experiments and thereby arriving at certain things that could not be inferred from observation itself, but are only inferred from this artificially arranged observation of the experiment, so too can certain human soul abilities not be developed if one does not, so to speak, resort to inner work on the soul abilities themselves.

What is characteristic of memory images is duration, and that is what one absorbs. One forms easily comprehensible images, images that cannot be mixtures, that cannot emerge from some subconscious, that would be the complicated images. No, one forms easily comprehensible images, the individual components of which one can see quite well. You put them into your consciousness, just as you would otherwise put a memory into it. You now dwell on such images for a long time. But don't think that it is enough to do this twice. Such exercises must be continued for years, just as one must research serious science for years. Because one must gradually bring up the abilities that lie in the depths of the soul and can thus animate such ideas and sustain them in this way.

And in addition to this, a certain training must also be undertaken, I would like to say, of inner life experiences. Because, my dear attendees, you will have heard that there are all kinds of mystics and the like who are now also striving for inner vision. What is meant here as anthroposophical spiritual science is by no means such nebulous mysticism. Quite the opposite! The one who works in this way on the inner life of his soul sets himself a very conscious ideal in this work. He also sets himself the ideal in this work that one can also acquire in a science, but only if one really devotes oneself to this science with full clarity and independence, with inner freedom.

This is the methodology that Goethe had in his research: although he was not actually a mathematician, he wanted to conduct research in the field of nature in such a way that he could give an account of his method to any strict mathematician. This is also how the humanities scholar does it. In mathematics, one works with transparent concepts. One does not describe the Pythagorean theorem in nebulous mysticism; one has everything one needs to see in order to arrive at this Pythagorean theorem. Those concepts that one constantly works with must be presented to the soul with such inner clarity and light. I call this resting on such ideas “meditation”, and I ask you not to imagine anything else by this meditation but firstly: this resting on easily comprehensible ideas that cannot have anything nebulous about them. They will have less nebulousness the more you acquire the ability, through a certain inner soul experience, to recognize such nebulousness and subconsciousness as soon as it arises.

Modern science has also dealt a great deal with this subconscious, which rises up from the depths of the soul and then lives in us. We do not really know its cause, but it belongs to the life of the soul. It is precisely about these things that anyone who wants to become a true spiritual scientist must first know.

Let me give you an example that you can also find in ordinary literature. A professor of zoology is walking down the street. He passes a bookstore, looks into the shop window and sees a book about lower animals. The title of the book is something about the lower animals. And you see, it happens to the good professor – just imagine: a professor of zoology! It happens to him, just by looking at this book title – it's a very serious book title about earthworms or something like that – that he has to start laughing. So, a professor of zoology who has to laugh at a perhaps very serious book title! He can't believe it himself. So he decides to tell himself: I'll maybe close my eyes to try to figure out why it has to happen to me that I laugh at this serious book title. He closes his eyes. And lo and behold, by not seeing, he hears better. And he hears a melody in the distance, played by a barrel organ grinder. And now he remembers: decades ago, he had danced his first dance to this same melody, which the barrel organ grinder is now playing. What he had experienced back then had not crossed his mind since, but had been lying dormant in his subconscious. But now, as he looks at a book title, he hears and does not hear – as if in an intermediate state between hearing and not hearing – and the melody brings it back to his memory. And he has to smile, as he laughed when he had his dancer in front of him and he danced his first dance to the same melody.

You see, by becoming acquainted with something like this — and there is an enormous amount of such things in human life —, one experiences how many so-called reminiscences can be found in the soul, and how easily illusions and fantasies can arise when one gives oneself over to some kind of imagination. That is why some mystics are like that. They believe that by constantly emphasizing, they look into the soul and find all kinds of things in it, which they then often characterize with lofty words that they think they find in the soul. But what one has once absorbed in this way in the soul does not always have to come up in the same way. It can also change. And when someone talks about all kinds of great opportunities and experiences that he claims to have had himself, it may just be the transformed tones of the melody of the barrel organ that he heard decades ago. Please excuse this comparison, but I hope I am being understood.

So what is actually present in the soul, what the possibilities of limitation are, must first be thoroughly and clearly understood by anyone who wants to be a spiritual researcher. He must have these experiences. Only then will he be able to feel correctly. I would now like to characterize it from my use of words, if these words are not misunderstood.

This inner experimentation, this resting on clear ideas, which cannot be reminiscences, of which one knows that only what is present in consciousness is effective, ultimately brings up certain powers from the depths of the soul, which develop through such practice in the same way as muscular strength develops when one works physically. The soul powers develop and one attains a faculty that goes far beyond mere remembering. Mere remembering brings experiences to mind in the form of images that we have gone through in this physical life. But what one now develops as a soul ability through a further development of the ability to remember, that teaches one so well that the human being, as he stands there in the world, is indeed born out of the whole of nature and the universe. It teaches us that everything that is spread out in the world and everything that has ever been spread out in this time, in this world that surrounds us and in which we ourselves are, that all this is in some developmental context with the human being.

It is certainly never my intention to resurrect any old ideas, but one can use expressions – even if one is easily misunderstood by those who want to misunderstand – but one can use old expressions to describe something that one has directly observed.

For example, it is an old idea that the human being is a small world, that is, a microcosm. This means that everything that exists in the world in some way is also present in the human being in its own way. It is interesting that the most recent researchers have repeatedly pointed out that when we look at our machines in terms of their principle, we are actually looking at nothing other than transformed human sensory organs or other human organs. You can prove in almost every machine how it is formed in principle, how something is in the human being. That which is observed externally can, when truly observed internally, come to full consciousness.

When this developed capacity for memory occurs, one brings forth, so to speak, something different from the human soul in terms of effects than one can bring forth from this soul through the ordinary capacity for memory, which conjures up images of what we have experienced before the soul. Through the faculty of memory of which I have just spoken, through the developed faculty of memory, what comes to the soul is in fact what is unknown to the soul itself, what precisely represents the connection of the human being with the whole environment, with the great world, with the macrocosm. And what also comes to the soul is what actually forms this physical body inwardly, because it is nothing other than the instrument of the soul. We need only look.

And when we have a sense of what is at work in the human being, I would say of inner plastic power, even after birth – one need only look with the necessary devotion and with the necessary seriousness and impartiality at the developing child, how it develops from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, how its movements become more and more articulated, how the marvelous happens, it is something marvelous for the one who looks at it impartially – that speech develops. When one sees an unknown person's work at first – but as if from a plastic-engraving principle – in the child at first, one continues to research. And that which works in man from within, which has already worked before he was born or conceived, which shapes his physical existence out of the spiritual world, that is what now shoots into our soul just as in later years a memory of experiences that we have gone through.

The spiritual researcher, ladies and gentlemen, cannot, like a spiritualist, present to your external sensory perception what he has researched. He can only hint at how, through the development of the soul from a point of intellectual modesty, through the ever-increasing unfolding of such powers as memory, one comes to see what initially passes through life as a great unknown.

One simply looks at things with this inner consciousness, with which one otherwise only looks into one's physical life through the ability to remember. Just as images of a mathematical nature arise before the soul, but these have no existence, so when the soul works from its inner being and does not work out something empty or fantastic, but something in which it recognizes reality when the image is there, and the soul works this out of itself and recognizes reality as in ordinary memory, where she also knows, you are not imagining anything, there is something in this image that is connected to reality – then you know that through this further developed ability to remember, you also have images in your soul that are connected to realities, that are built up in your soul in exactly the same way as the images, let's say, of geometry, but which, as I said, lack existence, while one now plunges into an inner, soul-like experience, which, however, through its own essence, indicates how it is connected with existence, and with spiritual existence, from which man is born just as he is born from physical existence, how it is connected with spiritual existence. It is truly not a fantasy, but rather, through the same efforts, whereby one gradually comes to understand the mathematical structures in their secret relationships, through efforts - but which go much further - to develop such inner abilities that, to a certain extent, give a world tableau, an internally constructed world tableau that provides world knowledge.

This is simply a fact that one arrives at by starting from intellectual modesty. And one must simply deny the human being the ability to develop if one does not want to admit at first that something like this is possible. The rest then depends only on whether one really tries. Everyone is free to try things out. Others prove that they are leading people to the microscope, and it is said that this is not based on blind faith, because everyone can see for themselves.

It is no different with spiritual science; it just has to demand different things. Everyone can see for themselves what spiritual science claims. But just as one must really look into the microscope in physical science, so in spiritual science one must actually go through that which the spiritual researcher shows must be developed if one wants to look into the spiritual worlds. Then one does not merely acquire a belief from the spiritual worlds, but one actually acquires real knowledge, an insight into the spiritual worlds. Then one beholds that which one can call the eternal aspect of human nature, for one does not just see that which is produced in life, which stands before our sensory eyes as a human body, but one sees the producing spiritual-soul aspect, that which forms this human body, but also that which, at the same time, takes care of the breakdown of this physical aspect in the moment when the physical is formed. Because, however, my dear audience, one also sees that! From such starting points, one actually penetrates certain secrets of our brain structure quite differently than with external anatomy or physiology.

Above all, through inner observation, one gets to know how thinking, how imagining, is connected with the structure of our brain, with our nervous system. Materialists believe that the ordinary growth process that otherwise builds our body also continues in the brain, and that such an organic process of building, which, for example, underlies our growth or our nutrition, also underlies our brain when we think. This can only be believed as long as one fantasizes about these things. This can no longer be the case when one looks at these things inwardly. Then you know that the brain must be well nourished. But why? Because it is constantly destroying itself. And it is this process of destruction, not the process of building, that is connected to what we call thinking and imagining. We could not think if the brain were constantly growing, constantly feeding and building.

What the building process is – you can observe it when you observe twilight or sleep states, where the growth processes become too strong. That which is growth, that which is building processes, leads to unconsciousness, not to conscious ideas. Conscious imagining occurs precisely in the breakdown of the brain, in the breakdown of the nerves. And that which is the building of the nerves is precisely the retroactive process. This in turn forms the nerves, it forms them out of the organic process. But if thought is to take place, if something of the soul is to develop in a person, then the brain must degrade. In a sense, the brain must first make room for the soul to unfold. If one understands this process, then one can never arrive at the view that the brain thinks. The brain only thinks to the extent that it destroys itself as a brain.

The brain thinks just as little as one can say – let me express myself with a comparison: someone walks along a muddy road, or a car drives along a muddy road, and the footsteps or wheel tracks that one steps or drives into the ground become visible. Now someone comes along and says: There are all kinds of shapes in the ground, so I have to assume that below the ground there are forces at work that shape forms, footsteps. Anyone looking for these forces in the ground will, of course, search in vain. They must assume that something completely different is involved, something that has nothing to do with the ground, except that the ground must be there, because otherwise one would sink into the abyss. The ground must be there, but it is only the foundation. However, what causes the forms in the ground is something that has nothing to do with the ground. In the same way, thinking and imagining have nothing to do with the brain other than the brain provides the physical substrate on which the soul-spiritual develops, making its impressions. No wonder when the physiologist or anatomist comes and says: Yes, everything that takes place in the soul can also be seen in the brain. You see it, but the soul is what does it in the first place, the soul is expressed there. And it needs the brain for nothing other than to provide a kind of resistance, just as I need the ground when I cross the street. This is expressed by a comparison.

But what can really be seen through spiritual science, as one sees, I would like to say the emergence of man out of the spirit through the developed ability to remember, I cannot go into it further now, as I said the methods are described in “How to Know Higher Worlds.” — one comes to say to oneself: Basically, one begins to die by being born, because this process of degradation is constantly there. And what happens at death is nothing more than that the body, which can no longer be created, is torn away from the spiritual soul. This spiritual-mental now seeks out other worlds. One learns to recognize the passing through of the spiritual-mental, of the eternal in human nature, through the fragile body, by watching the process of dying itself in thinking, I would say from hour to hour, by constantly dying in the small things, I would say, when we think. So everything that one finds in life appears in such a way that one sees it in its true form through spiritual science.

I must first describe [this] to you – my dear audience – in very elementary terms, because this is the only way we can communicate. In every science, one must start from the first principles. I would just like to mention in parenthesis that I have said that what is developed memory is a tableau, comparable to the mathematical tableau, that it calls up before our soul, but that this tableau introduces us to the [spiritual-soul life] from which we are formed.

The names are not important – my dear attendees – what you can perceive there must also have a name. In my books, I have called this the “Akasha Chronicle” because it actually has something to do with chronicling. Just as memory itself has something to do with chronicling, so that which leads us out of it has, like memory, only into ordinary life, into the life of the world. Therefore, I would say, if we simply call the spiritual 'ether' or 'akasha', we can speak of an 'ether chronicle' or an 'akasha chronicle'. These words do not have any kind of mystical meaning. Nor is there any kind of mystical meaning to these words, any more than there is any mystical meaning to the whole of geometry. It can certainly be compared to the totality of geometry, which, however, does not apply to time but to space. Therefore, geometry cannot be called a chronicle. But this can certainly be understood that way. The things meant here must not be taken out of context, but only considered in context. If you look at them in this way, you will find that they actually mean something quite different from what may appear to you if you tear them out of context. Nowhere is it a matter of nebulous mysticism, but everywhere of emerging from the sources of the soul's existence, which can be followed piece by piece, and in such a way that the individual pieces stand before the soul with mathematical clarity.

The second faculty of the soul – honored attendees – that needs to be cultivated so that one does not merely have images, because all that I have described to you so far are basically only images. One knows, as with memory images, that they are about life, but one does not have life. You know full well that you do not live in a fantastic world. You have imaginations, imaginations of reality, but you do not stand in this reality. In order to live in this reality, in order to have this direct experience of the spiritual-real, it is necessary to experience the power that is otherwise only bound to our human organization, which, by confronting us in life, always equips us with a good deal of egoism, so that we develop this ability further and further, so that we can indeed gradually come to look at things in such a way that we can completely forget ourselves, can completely immerse ourselves in each individual thing, and in each individual being. It is necessary to develop this ability more and more.

This training is based on a very simple thing: human attention, in that I take an interest and turn my attention to some thing or process. I can pay attention to what I am actually doing inwardly by turning my attention away from other things and turning it to a new being. I have to become aware of how this attention works. And by training this ability, which in turn takes years of training, I grasp inwardly, as it were, the capacity of attention. I transform it into the power to devote myself to a thing, to become completely absorbed in a thing or process. In short, what one otherwise experiences only as an abstract ability to pay attention can be increased to become devoted love.

By developing this love more and more, one comes close to what I described in my “Philosophy of Freedom” as early as 1893, showing that only the person who truly has this love can be free, whereby he also does not carry out his actions out of his capacity for desire, but out of loving immersion in the things of the world. He finds that something has to happen. He is completely indifferent to what his desire is. From objectivity, he realizes that something has to happen. This development of the ability to see that something has to happen leads, on the one hand, to real human freedom and, on the other hand, to the power of love.

And then, when you have developed this ability, my dear audience, you can not only receive such images that arise within and depict a reality, but you can also remove these images from your consciousness at will. Just as in physical matters one must have the ability to look at a thing and then look away, otherwise one would not have a healthy soul life, so one must develop the ability, when one has inner vision, to have the images and then not to have them. One must become completely inwardly master of having these images. And by being able to alternate between the things that live in the soul and the completely empty state of the soul, by learning this alternation in the soul, one also learns to have an image and then to let the image disappear in the soul. Then one lives on. The image is gone, but one has the experience of the inner reality of things. One experiences the spiritual. You experience it through the power you have acquired, through the development of love. Just as you learn the spiritual anew through the development of your ability to love, so you learn to experience the spiritual through the increase, through the ever-increasing increase of the power of love.

I know how much is opposed to the scientist when he is to regard the ability to love itself as a power of knowledge. The scientist demands that what is to apply objectively in the scientific should only be attainable to the exclusion of love. But in doing so, he reaches the limits of knowledge. These limits of knowledge arise from the fact that one does not enter into the inner workings of things with one's soul, but stops and fantasizes all kinds of things, all kinds of molecules and atoms. If you experience through the increased power of love what comes to you from the surface of things, and then you experience what you can have in images through the increased ability to remember, then you know where images come from in the [increased] depths of existence. For one can compare what one sees in the picture with that into which one then submerges with the experience. And one practices, so to speak, if I want to use these expressions so simply, being constantly in being, as one otherwise inhales and exhales. That is what really leads one into the spiritual world, what allows one to get to know what actually underlies the human being.

Now, my dear attendees, what develops in this way in man as certain abilities to look into the spiritual world can now be applied in every single science. It is not at all that what happens in the laboratory, in the observatory and so on, or in the clinic, is despised. But now one learns to look at it in such a way that one can observe every detail at the same time as that which reveals itself as spiritual. And one does not fantasize, as the German natural philosophers did, for example, but one researches just as objectively as one searches with one's eyes objectively, as one combines with the outer mind objectively — although one can certainly err. But in the inner vision, those things simply come before the soul's eye that otherwise cannot appear at all, just as little as what is in Goethe's book of poetry can appear before the soul of a five-year-old child. And so, in all the individual sciences, one arrives precisely at that which these individual sciences are currently lacking. This is not just something that can be spoken about only in abstract generalities. In this way, light can be brought into the science that is closest to human life, into medical science, for example. And we are now in the process of setting up such institutions in individual places, which deal with the science of therapy in a spiritual scientific sense. It is primarily a matter of deepening scientific life. That is what it is about in Dornach, not to meddle with the sphere of any religion, not to engage in anything sectarian, but to engage in serious science, as this science allows itself to be engaged with by deepened powers of cognition, which are just as deepened as I have stated.

I myself experienced that epoch, esteemed attendees, that epoch of science, in a formerly most important medical faculty, where the capacities were just piling up – Oppolzer, [Rokitansky] and so on. I myself experienced how that remarkable therapeutic direction emerged, which was then called medical nihilism. This medical nihilism no longer prevails to the same extent as it did when I was young – a long time ago – but what emerged back then as medical nihilism denied medicine at the time the ability to move from the pathological examination of the clinical picture to the healing process, to therapy. They did not want to find a bridge between pathology and real therapy. And this cannot be found if one proceeds with mere external natural science. One can explain this in a very popular way, why it cannot be found.

Is this not the case, the healthy human organism undergoes certain processes that we call natural processes. And we can say: Let us look at the healthy person in terms of his physical nature. We perceive natural processes. But is the sick person, what takes place in the illness, not just as much a natural process? Do we not have a natural process in the healthy and in the sick person? Do we have two natures? How does one natural process relate to the other? If we speak of causality in the one natural process, we must also speak of causality in the other.

Spiritual science shows us that whatever enters the world spiritually always gives rise to the opposite natural process. The natural process of human growth is initially a constructive one. The process that must occur for the spiritual to simply intervene is a destructive one. We do indeed get to know processes from different directions when we immerse ourselves in spiritual science. We learn to look inside this remarkable structure that is the human organism and we get to know that there are indeed two opposing processes. And we then learn to recognize the human being in his connection with the rest of nature, learn to recognize how the rest of nature works on the human being. And from all this, the spiritual view of the world then arises that there is a connection between certain healing processes or substances and what happens in the human being, who is connected to the whole world. One can say: one can indeed come to a real healing art through spiritual science. I am giving this as an example, I could just as easily have mentioned another science. That is what matters.

You learn to recognize, especially when you are immersed in this modern scientific life – and truly experienced, level-headed scientists already admit this today – that science today does not offer solutions to riddles, but on the contrary, piles up riddles more and more. The further you research with the microscope, you research all the more riddles in the small, but you research just as few real riddles with the telescope. These riddles can, however, be solved to a certain extent by calculation.

But it is necessary not to assume that we will find something known, but to be open to finding that unknown, as America was between Europe and India at that time, that unknown that the mind finds as its own essence when it reflects on itself. We apply the mind in the individual sciences. Even a materialist must do this. The spiritual researcher is only trying to understand himself. He applies the spirit, seeks to discover what this spirit is, and actually comes to realize that this spirit is not connected with the anabolic processes – with which it would have to be connected if the materialistic view were correct – but that the spirit is connected with the catabolic processes, that the spirit presents precisely that as fact, which directly runs counter to the material process, breaks it down, undermines it. These are the significant experiences that are made in spiritual science, for example.

This is how it is with spiritual science. The other science basically works on the human mind, only in such a way that the human being can develop what intelligence is. Now, many people are already saying, especially in the field of contemporary education, that what has emerged from more recent scientific life as school education actually trains the intellect too much and not the mind. It does not want to take hold of the will, not the whole person. But to ensure that this is the case, one does not just have to declaim that it should be so, that the mind should be formed again. Rather, just as the more recent period has ultimately formed the outer science, one also needs a spiritual science that does not just speak to the intellect, but that could take hold of the whole person.

This can also be seen from the fact that we have recently been able to introduce this spiritual science into existence as an element in individual areas. One of these attempts is our Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt, initially for the children of his factory. But since then it has already doubled in size! Pupils have flocked to this school from all walks of life and from all sides. This school is not a school of world view; it is only a slander when it is said that it is. It is not about grafting anthroposophical world view or some new religion into children. When this school was founded, I myself agreed to run the school. It was established from the very beginning that the religious education to be given to the children – to Catholic children by the Catholic priest and to Protestant children by the Protestant pastor – should be given by the children's respective religious teachers. We completely refrain from any kind of world view in this school. Only those children whose parents belong to no confession or the like, who therefore do not want to send their children to any religious education, should be free to attend religious education that we can provide ourselves. Otherwise, these children would have no religious education at all if it were not given to them. But those who want a particular religious education, based on the life they have grown up in, will receive such instruction from their religious teacher.

This should prove to you that we, while not standing on anthroposophical ground, do not want to found a new religion or somehow graft a world view onto people. Rather, what should guide us, for example, is this: Anyone who has a science like anthroposophical spiritual science has something that seizes the whole person, that makes him skillful, that above all makes his soul skillful, that makes him a judge of character, also a judge of children, a judge of the developing human being, the child. [And that is why we have brought it about in the Waldorf school that we only work through the method, through the didactics, through the art of education, which can be developed out of anthroposophy, in the way we teach, and that is what matters, not the inculcation of some religious creed that is somehow supposed to be new compared to the others. We take great care to ensure that the child is treated in the way that is appropriate to him or her, which is only possible if we really take into account the totality of the soul and spirit, and I would say every year, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, in its particular abilities.

Now, my dear attendees, in this school, precisely because the teachers are imbued with spiritual science and bring this atmosphere into the classroom, there is, I might say, an atmosphere of love. Of course, people may not take it particularly deeply when I say something like that. But every time I come to Stuttgart to audit this school, I ask the children in each class and in the assembly hall: Dear children, do you also love your teachers? You can tell by the way the children behave and the way their eyes light up whether they really mean it or not. And that is something that always gives one great joy, that something has happened after all, that such a didactics has been formed out of anthroposophy: when the children respond with their whole being, with a “yes” that comes from the whole soul, that has not been rehearsed.

Dear attendees! When we handed out the school reports after the first school year, there was nothing in them of the usual. Otherwise, they say: “satisfactory”, ‘almost satisfactory’, ‘less than satisfactory’, ‘almost satisfactory’ and so on. Rather, for each child, despite the fact that some classes are quite large, there was something in it that was or is entirely appropriate to the child's individuality, so that the children repeatedly pick up these reports and, I would like to say, repeatedly see themselves reflected in them. Again and again they read what the teacher gives them as a force of life, so a single saying or the like, not something out of a scheme that tends to be, I would say, “less satisfactory” and the like. It is, of course, a bit radically expressed, but it can be done if you enter the class with some knowledge of children, even in large classes, so that the individuality of the child comes into its own.

This is an example of how anthroposophy can become an integral part of life, that is, it can be applied in human life. And after all, schooling and teaching are a very important part of human life. [But now, this is only one part, the part that has been brought to us by the more intellectual education of recent times.

Let us look – esteemed attendees – at what has become great. Certainly, anyone who wants to deepen science into a spiritual science will not underestimate the great triumphs and the importance of modern science – on the contrary! In speaking to you here, I fully recognize the importance of modern science for our external lives. But on the other hand, they only educate the head, they only educate that which arises from the head in social life. And so, in modern times, we have developed what we know as the great, significant technology that surrounds us everywhere out of this scientific approach. But in this modern age, in which technology has developed to such an extent that it has become an external-mechanical technology in the entire world economy, in all world traffic, at the same time it has grown into all of modern life, what we call the social question.

It must be said that modern science has indeed come to terms with the external mechanism, with that which can be composed of external natural forces, that which can serve human life. But we see this in the chaos that has emerged to the present day, and which has led to millions of people being shot dead and beaten to cripples in recent years. We see that modern science, as soon as it wants to be active in social life in any way, fails. It can't help. It goes as far as the machine, as far as the mechanism, it can go that far with what it borrows from nature. But just as the machine has been introduced between the account book in the office and the cash book and what is produced in production, and an intimate connection has been formed, no such intimate connection has been formed in recent times between those who were leading personalities in the course of the last [decades] and those who are in the outer work. Man has found his way to the machine, but he has not found his way to the human being.

We will only find our way to the human being through a humanly deepened science that grasps the human being as deeply as the spiritual science meant here, because that will also be a life-oriented science for social life. [That which is based on it — as a conception, as a theoretical view —, only destroys the human organism, the transfer to the outer world, it becomes destruction.] Today you only need to see how people are creating something so devastating in Eastern Europe today, that it would almost have to lead to the downfall of civilization, if it lasts as it is in Russia. How these people, who are doing this, are acting in good faith and believe that in Marxism and the like they are only extending modern science to social life. But it becomes the death of social life. It must be a different science, a science that does not arise from the human mind alone, but from the human being as a whole. It is a science that does not arise merely from a contemplation of the physical world and from there forms its methods, but that is drawn from the human-spiritual being itself, as spiritual science is. If one studies this spiritual science, if one attempts to build up, as I have attempted — however contestable it may be in detail — in these two books, 'The Core Points of the Social Question' or 'In Implementation of the Threefold Social Organism', if one attempts to arrive at a social view from this spiritual science, then it is a thoroughly constructive one. This then proves itself in social thinking, which can truly lead the human being to the human being, as a life-giving treasure.

And so I could cite many examples to you — such as this in general, as well as the school system in particular — where this spiritual science proves to be a vital asset. It is absolutely necessary that, in order to cope in social life, we first and foremost deepen our understanding of the human being, help him to see the spiritual and soul life within him.

If we begin by characterizing spiritual science in these elementary terms, we have the goal towards which it strives. We can only assess its details if we enter into its interrelationships. I could go on talking for hours, but I just want to say one more thing today in conclusion. Just as it was thought centuries ago that Copernicanism, by coming into the world, would endanger religion, would endanger Christianity, so it is also believed today that spiritual science, as it is seeking to enter the world today through the Goetheanum in a more intensive way, would endanger religion, would endanger Christianity.

Dear attendees! When I am confronted with something like this, I always remember what a friend of mine did many years ago. I was very close friends with Professor Müllner, who at the time was a professor of Christian philosophy at the Vienna Faculty of Theology. When he took up his year as rector, he spoke about Galileo in his inaugural speech as rector of the university. And this Professor Müllner – he died a long time ago – spoke in such a way that his last spoken word was that he died as a loyal son of his church. And yet, what did he say when he gave his rectorate speech about Galileo? He said: Today, within Christianity, when we look at the things of this world with a truly open mind, we view Galileo's ideas differently than the Church did during Galileo's lifetime.

The Church today must realize that no new scientific discovery can in any way detract from the deep human forces of Christianity. On the contrary, the Church today must look at these things in such a way that it says to itself: Through every new scientific discovery, the glories of divine spiritual life become visible and evident to humanity only to a higher degree. This is what Professor Müllner said at the time – I cannot quote it to you in full today – this professor of Christian theology, the Catholic Christian at the Vienna Catholic Theological Faculty, who before his death spoke the word that he wanted to die as a loyal son of his church. It was still the pontificate of Leo XIII. Today, we look down on the grave of Galileo differently than his contemporaries in Rome at the time looked up at Galileo.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, when Professor Laurenz Müllner spoke in this way, he knew that he was using these words not to endanger Christianity, which he himself represented, but to create an even firmer foundation for Christianity from a scientific point of view. This is how a Christian priest spoke. I often have to remind myself of that. I also had many private conversations with him and with other theologians who were frequent visitors to his house.

Dear attendees! I will not talk about the relationship between anthroposophy and Christianity today, but I would like to say just one thing in conclusion: that one can follow the development of Christianity through philology, one can follow the development of Christianity through history. One can also follow the development of Christianity through anthroposophical spiritual science, and one comes thereby to certain truths about Christianity, which one can find only through this spiritual science. But the truths about Christianity that one comes across in this way are truly not suitable to endanger Christianity in any way. And anyone who believes that Christianity as such could be endangered by any new cognitive truths, whether in the physical or spiritual realm, I would like to believe that he does not have a high enough opinion of Christianity. The one who has a high opinion of Christianity and the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha, when he recognizes what Christianity is in the spiritual-scientific sense, says to himself: Christianity and the Mystery of Golgotha have given the development of the earth its true meaning.

I have often said that it is only a comparison, and that nothing is to be said about the inhabitants of any other worlds. If any inhabitant of Mars were to descend, he would see much of our world – it is my innermost conviction, which I have acquired precisely through spiritual science – much that would be incomprehensible to him. But if he were to see what has come down to us as Leonardo's painting 'The Last Supper' – Christ among his apostles – if he were to see only that which is there (he needs nothing more than this painting), then he would say to himself: 'I have come upon a strange plan. What is depicted by this image points to those deeds within earthly life that are not mere earthly facts, but are a fact of the whole world, and without which all life on earth would have no meaning; the meaning of the earth lies in this fact. This is something one learns to recognize more and more, precisely by immersing oneself spiritually in Christianity and in the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Truly, one must have too low an opinion of Christianity to believe that it could be endangered in any way by a new discovery. Truly – even if it is not written in the Bible – just as Christianity was not endangered by the discovery of America, so too neither can any physical or spiritual truth, be it the Galilean truth or the repeated lives on earth, which I have not spoken about today but But you can follow from the literature as being in the straight line starting from what I have spoken today, just as little can one endanger Christianity in any way if Christianity remains in its inner truth, and may millions and millions of physical or spiritual insights still go through the world. On the contrary, through all these realizations, the Christian truth is deepened and more accurately recognized, and more thoroughly introduced to the human souls, when these truths are really taken out of the Spirit of Truth itself.

But, my dear audience, the different times need such views on all the things of the world, arising out of their spiritual needs, as they arise out of the age. Therefore, I may tell it again and again: I once spoke on the subject of “Bible and Wisdom” in a southern German city that is no longer in southern Germany today. There were also two Catholic theologians at this lecture. It was precisely in this lecture not just something that they could somehow dispute. They came to me and said: “Well, what you said - we could indeed subscribe to it, but the way you say it, we cannot admit it. Because it is not for all people, it is for some prepared people. But we speak for all people.” At the time, I could only say: Reverend, it goes without saying that you think you speak for all people. That corresponds to the natural feeling that we must have as human beings. But through that which is spiritual science, one gradually works one's way through to a different point of view. One comes away from oneself. You no longer believe that you can shape things the way you want to shape them within your environment. You learn to look at what time demands, what objective facts demand. And now I ask you what the objective facts demand, how you treat it. It remains the case that you believe you speak for all people, but that does not decide anything. The only thing that matters is whether all people still go to your sermons. And you see, you cannot answer “yes” there. Among those who do not go to church, there are also those who seek the path elsewhere. I am not speaking to those who go to church with you, but to those who also want to find the path to Christianity and who do not go to you. This is clear from the facts. But the fact that we have religious education in the Waldorf School given to the children by the respective pastors under the given circumstances, and that we have set up religious education only for those who would otherwise have no religious education, proves that this is not something that detracts from religion. So we are not harming anyone [by doing what is desired under the circumstances, but on the contrary, we are imparting something to the 'dissident children' that can lead them to a genuine religious experience] while they would otherwise hear nothing of a religious nature in the best years of their development.

All this might lead one to point out that this Goetheanum and this spiritual science is not just some fantastic product of human willfulness, but something that as a scientific grasp of the spiritual in an age that would otherwise remain unbelieving, at least where science would have to remain at the mere external grasp of things, while people want to develop further. Because if the present chaos wants to bring civilization more and more into decadence, then out of the circumstances of the time itself that great teaching will come, which basically wants to be followed by this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. And the truth will prevail, no matter how many obstacles are put in its way. In the short term, the aims of spiritual science can be suppressed, perhaps even destroyed for a time, but the truth has paths that can be found through everything. And that these paths can be followed if the methods by which the spirit is seen are honestly and sincerely sought, one can decide for one's conviction in a certain way.

For anyone who really gets involved, not just with their heads but with all their senses, and who engages with everything human, with the individual human being, with the individual life, will always come to the point where they have to say to themselves: science must not just remain on the surface, it must also progress as science, as knowledge, to the spirit. Because

For an upward development, people need what is being sought there – they need the spirit! And without the spirit, humanity will not progress. Spiritual science does not pursue an abstract spirit with ideas and fantasies, but the living spirit, which is to enter into the souls in a living way. And let it be said once again: humanity, if it wants to progress, needs the spirit. Therefore, we must ask for the spirit.

Discussion and Closing Words

Ulrich [Dikenmann]: Dear speaker, dear attendees! Dr. Steiner has made an effort this evening to make anthroposophy more accessible to us and to inspire confidence in us. And we are very grateful for the additions that have been presented to us this evening compared to the lecture that would have been given eight days ago. I would now like to ask a question about what Dr. Steiner has presented and which perhaps can be touched on a little more from his side.

Dr. Steiner spoke of two different ways of attaining higher knowledge, of spiritual experiences, which perhaps many of us are only superficially familiar with. He spoke of a deepened ability to remember that yields results for spiritual science, and he spoke of love. I now see a gap in that there is something about these two methods that we should still be enlightened about before we can have deeper trust in the matter. As far as I remember from his books, it can be read there that before the goal in these spiritual results, light phenomena appear before the eye of those who deal with anthroposophical science – it could also have been color phenomena, I do not remember exactly – at a certain level of spiritual science. I would now be grateful if Dr. Steiner would tell us a little more about this.

Because, you see, dear attendees, when we or our younger friends turn to anthroposophy, we may have to allow ourselves to be guided by empirical, in-depth psychology. What else is the nature of spiritual science if someone, after a long period of self-reflection, begins to experience such light phenomena? Is this what he is experiencing, ecstasy, or is it something like a spiritual presentiment, which still lies in the realm in which we can examine scientifically, in which logic and understanding and reason are applied?

Secondly, we have learned from Dr. Steiner's remarks that those who aspire to the highest levels must surrender themselves to a spiritual leader to a great extent, that they cannot draw entirely from themselves. From my point of view as a Protestant theologian, this seems to me to be a somewhat serious matter. For, as is well known, there are always two dangers associated with excessive devotion to a personality. Either the person who surrenders too much to his leader becomes spiritually dependent and lethargic, and he is no longer sure what his own conviction is or what has been placed more in his soul, placed in his soul by suggestive means. And on the other hand, the person who enjoys the extensive trust of a second person is subject to a powerful temptation that only highly developed, highly spiritual personalities can resist: namely, the temptation to be pleased with the power he has gained over the other person, and then easily exert too much influence over him in all things. This is not meant to imply that I have any mistrust of the lecturer, who has spoken so excellently to us, in this regard. But it has been proven throughout world history, even if one only surveys it in a certain way, as I survey it, that there is a certain danger here, which we must be careful of and to which we must be attentive when we want to encourage one or the other of our acquaintances to take an interest in spiritual science. Incidentally, I am pleased to note that what Dr. Steiner said this evening about his religious views has been very beneficial for me personally.

Roman Boos: Dr. Steiner has the final word, if there are no further questions?

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! Of course, I would have been very happy to take any questions. I am particularly pleased about the two questions that have been put to me today, and I am very pleased to have the opportunity to address them to you this evening.

It is necessary that what lives in the soul when one has progressed to what I have characterized today as seeing, that if one wants to express it, it must be named in some way, and that one has very different words, a certain terminology. If you follow my writings, some of which have already appeared in very large print runs, you will see, if you follow the individual print runs, how I have endeavored from print run to print run – or at least always over several print runs – to formulate the sentences sentences in such a way that what needs to be said about such a subject, which, after all, is not easy to put into words, is said with a certain clarity and distinctness.

We must not forget that our language, especially as it has developed among civilized peoples today, is to a large extent already something extraordinarily conventional and that, above all, it has incorporated the meaning that has entered the world view through the materialism of the last few centuries. Therefore, today, when using words, it is extremely difficult to strip these words of their materialistic meaning and to give something that is meant spiritually the appropriate meaning. Nevertheless, I have tried again and again, and especially in the fundamental books you will find a struggle for expression. By this I do not mean to say that in the last editions this struggle has everywhere led to an ideal — of course not! But now, the special characteristic that I have given of what one sees, by using [to characterize the color perceptions] – isn't it true that I am saying that one is dealing with imaginations; these imaginations are completely different from what one can have in the sensory world. Now I would like to choose the following approach so that we can understand each other.

If you study Goethe's Theory of Colors – perhaps some of you, esteemed attendees, know that for forty years I have been endeavoring to present the significance of Goethe's Theory of Colors in relation to today's physics. Well, in Goethe's Theory of Colors you will find an extraordinarily significant chapter at the end about the sensual-moral effect of colors. This chapter will perhaps meet with the least opposition from physicists and, when read, it is an extraordinarily stimulating read. What is written here can also be found elsewhere; but so wonderfully beautifully compiled, it can actually only be found in Goethe.

What do we find there, in the characterization of external colors? We also find the emotional experience of color mentioned. We find the experience that one has, for example, with yellow, this peculiar aggressiveness of yellow, the excitement of yellow, similar to red. We then find the balancing of green, the devotion of violet. We have these soul experiences when we let the sensual colors affect us. If you ever visit Dornach, you will see that an attempt has been made there in the Goetheanum to paint entirely from color, to create the picture from the color. In particular, you will find this in the small dome, for example, where an attempt has been made to shape what then leads to the transformation of the picture entirely from the color experience.

Now, on the one hand we have the sensory experience of color, and on the other hand we have the inward spiritual experience, which, however, quite clearly belongs to the experience of color. If we are fully human, we cannot have the sensory experience of color without having the corresponding spiritual experience. This is what Goethe described in his theory of colors.

When one enters the spiritual world, one has experiences that are truly not ecstatic — just as little as the life in geometric representations is an ecstasy. If one were not fully aware that one is in one's psychological state exactly as one is when mathematically imagining, then one would not be on the right path. So, one experiences something that is completely in line with the pattern of mathematical experience in the soul, but one experiences a real spiritual world. And by experiencing this real spiritual world, one does not initially experience colors, but rather those experiences that we inwardly experience in the sensual colors. Of course, one must now have developed to the point where one pays attention to these experiences.

You see, a certain presence of mind is required for spiritual experience. So, one must have this inner experience, which is otherwise experienced with color. The best way to characterize this experience is to remember the color, to really have the color in front of you. Just as one has, let us say, the triangular experience by drawing the triangle inwardly, so one has that which one experiences inwardly best when it is before one, not by drawing a geometric figure, but by painting a colored picture. This colored image is then as adequate to the spiritual experience as, let us say, drawing a triangle with its 180° and angles is identical to the triangular experience, while you have to know that it is a kind of sensualization, then, if you express it in Goethean terms, it is also a supersensory-sensory representation of what is actually experienced.

This, of course, points to subtle experiences, so that one should not draw them out roughly, but one should really go into them. But then one will find that a real thing has indeed appeared by describing it in colors. I have tried to develop this very precisely in the last editions of my basic books. You can't help but describe what you experience in just such a way; otherwise you would become even more materialistic if you described it, and would describe it too symbolically.

But in this way, one describes by actually covering that which is an inner experience through the experience of color. One is always aware of this – that one proceeds in a certain way, as in the presentation of the mathematical – and there is nothing of ecstasy in any way.

I am extremely grateful to the previous speaker for touching on this question. Because I have had to experience it, that I have been told from many sides: what is experienced in the imaginations is repressed ideas, repressed nervous forces, which then come up and represent something fantastic, unhealthy. You see, if someone wanted to maintain such an assertion, at most the proof would have to be provided that the person who speaks of such things cannot, just as the other person who accuses him of such things, speak in a strictly scientific sense. If one has not lost one's scientific sense on the one hand, but is firmly grounded in the scientific sense, and then consistently goes out to something else, then such an accusation cannot be made.

Nor can the objection be raised that it is merely a matter of suggestion. I have already indicated today how it essentially belongs to the schooling of the spirit that one can, I might say, enter into all the special processes of the subconscious life of the soul, so that one can compensate for and exclude every source of error that presents itself. You will see, when you read my book 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds', how I have tried to describe all the precautionary measures that need to be taken into account.

Now, I have often been asked: How can one easily distinguish suggestions from non-suggestions, from the truth? For example, it can happen in life that someone only has to think of lemonade and they taste lemonade in their mouth. I readily admit this, since these things are well known. But—and this is addressed to those of you who are present—anyone who is an epistemologist knows that a real experience can only be determined through life. Only through life and the context of life can we determine whether anything we imagine corresponds to reality — but it is only from the context of life that we can be certain [of it]. It is the same in relation to the higher worlds; there too, we can only determine it from the context of the whole. If one wants to go from the suggestion of the taste of lemonade to the totality of the experience, then the comparison no longer applies. One must now say: It is nice to have the taste of lemonade in one's mouth through suggestion, but the question arises as to whether anyone has quenched their thirst with such an image of lemonade. You cannot claim that. There you have the transition to the totality of phenomena. And that is what must always be borne in mind: reality cannot be decided by remaining with the partial phenomenon, but the phenomena of life always have something that signifies their transition to totality.

I would like to draw attention to something that may seem rather remote, but which can be very usefully applied to the sensitization of the matter. You see, if you have a salt crystal, a salt cube, it is in a sense a closed reality. It can exist for a certain period of time, a very, very long time on earth, as a salt cube in front of you. Take a rosebud. A rosebud is not really a reality as we see it, because it can only be conceived as a reality in connection with the totality of the rose bush, the roots and so on. Realities have very different degrees, different meanings. If we do not go into this, we will not arrive at clear, luminous concepts.

And so it is also necessary, in the face of such descriptions as those given by the esteemed gentleman who spoke before me, to bear in mind that the totality of the experience is taken as a basis. Then one will already notice how such color appearances are meant. One does not lose the connection with ordinary consciousness at all, does not go over into foolishness, but the opposite is the case for the paths that are chosen to get into anthroposophy. This lies precisely on the opposite path to the pathological; they lead precisely away from the pathological, they make the human being inwardly consolidated. Therefore, they can not only make drawings, especially in mathematical forms, but also see certain drawings in colors, that is, have a supersensible experience. I don't know if that satisfies you.

Regarding the second question, I would like to say: You are absolutely right in both directions, but I must emphasize that wherever I have the opportunity to talk about these things, you will find that I myself have pointed out that these two dangers can indeed arise, but that they must also be recognized and avoided in genuine spiritual research. If you do not avoid them, you cannot achieve what spiritual research is supposed to achieve. They are avoided precisely when you are aware of them, when you know that such dangers can be present. And if you also have a sense of responsibility, you will certainly try to avoid them.

Regarding the so-called student, I have to say that in spiritual research, what can be described as the relationship between the student and the teacher is basically nothing more than the transfer, only to a different area, of the same relationship that also exists when someone learns something from someone else. It is true that the guidance for spiritual training reaches somewhat more intimately into human life, but, you see, there is a corrective, I would say. It is actually not at all correct that there are no dangers for the student in the outer life in current science.

Just think about how little students are actually immune from blind faith in authority, and especially from that which is initially there as a constraint but which, over the years, becomes something that is very strongly inculcated – [the compulsion to say what is] and so on. There are also dangers for the independent development of the student or listener, which can be described in the same way as those that are present in those who want to advance in spiritual science.

But in addition, there is a corrective, especially when one strikes more intimate chords of the human soul with spiritual science, I would like to say, by wanting to learn something. In this way, an extraordinary sensitivity for independence also develops, especially when one awakens the soul's abilities. And experience shows that such a sense of authority, as it sometimes exists in external science – such swearing by the words of the master, such going away with the notebook and swearing by what one has written in the notebook after hearing it – does not take place in a truly responsible handling of the method of spiritual training.

A sensitivity given by experience shows one – especially when one has to deal with something that deeply intervenes in the soul life of the human being – that the urge for freedom is thereby definitely increased. And in any case, in my experience, those who come into consideration as serious spiritual students soon even move on to accepting something not in good faith, but only after sometimes very extensive examination; so that one can say that it is precisely the sense of freedom that awakens to a particular degree.

Now, of course, there is the other side, where I absolutely have to agree with the esteemed previous speaker that there is a very real danger for the person who is to take on such a role – let us just say that they have to advise someone based on their own experience, because it is almost impossible to do otherwise – and say: you will be able to develop your memory or your love through this or that. Then a temptation can approach the teacher – we know that this temptation can approach. And if I may tell you my own conviction in this regard – my dear audience: when you are in the middle of what spiritual research is about, there is actually nothing more repugnant than what could somehow be called personal adoration or the like. Even though the people who want to slander you keep pointing to such stuff. That is not at all what it is really like; it is actually something that you fundamentally find very repulsive. If you are even a little advanced on the path – which spiritual science indicates – then the truth cannot escape you. The truth cannot escape one that to the same extent as one exercises an unauthorized power, one loses the ability to recognize. That is just the way it is, that is an objective fact, and one recognizes it when one walks the path in spiritual science, through direct experiential knowledge.

Isn't it true that the path to spiritual science is a subtle one, one that must be kept alive through constant inner experience of the soul? To the same extent that one now practices things that correspond to the capacity for desire, that correspond to vanity or the sense of power, to that same extent one obscures precisely those forces that want to spread. Just think, it takes an enormous amount of work to develop what I have called the ability to love. It is the greatest unkindness that one can fall into when one develops feelings of power. I don't know if I am being given a context from your side in this way, but it is true that the feeling of power actually obscures the real feeling of love.

And so there are opportunities everywhere to see clearly how to reject such temptations. And yet, although it is absolutely right that this temptation can approach me, I would say, countless times, the one who has some kind of guidance to give also knows that succumbing to it – this temptation – is what can bring him down the most. For it can only be explained by vanity, by a hunger for power. But these are things that lead away from the paths one must follow if one really wants to achieve something.

I do believe that the distinguished gentleman who spoke before me was also referring to these things in his remarks, based on his own profound experience. Such things have occurred, of course, and will continue to occur, naturally. But there is no reason for this – my dear attendees – to refrain from the path of development just because there are dangers lurking somewhere; rather, if there are dangers lurking somewhere, this can be a reason to avoid the dangers if one recognizes the necessity of the matter in a healthy way. Is that perhaps a sufficient answer to the question that has been asked? If it is not, then I would be happy to elaborate further.

Now, esteemed attendees, since no other questions have been asked, I have nothing special to add on this matter. I would just like to point out very briefly that the spiritual science as it is meant here does not want to be a religion.

The question has been raised: It may explain the position of anthroposophy in relation to denominations if you tell us what you teach children of non-denominational parents in religious education.

You see, my dear audience, my opinion is this – but in the sense that I have gained it entirely from spiritual science – that something as intimate as religious education can only be taught within the framework of that which fills one's soul completely. This refers to religious education for children of non-denominational parents or those who are expected to be regarded as non-denominational at school. In this intimate area, therefore, only that which one carries in one's soul, that one is completely filled with, can come into question. And that is what is taught. And what it is about is that the anthroposophical direction that I follow is, in the first place, actually a method, a path, a living life. And that is why it can have an effect on all the individual sciences, and why it can also have an effect on the art of education, and indeed on art itself, as the artistic conception of the Dornach building shows. But ultimately, what is being researched is the living spirit, and that can only lead to a deepening of religious life.

Now, we are of course dependent on imponderables to a great extent, and I prefer to make things clear by means of concrete details rather than speaking in abstract generalities. You see, we try to show the children the way to the Christ in such a way that this way leads out of the rest of human life. However much it is claimed by some denominational sides – or rather by representatives of certain sides – it is not true that anthroposophy wants anything other than to show the way to the Christ in this religious field in its own way, to those who need to find him in this way.

You can certainly be a follower of anthroposophy and want nothing more than a deepening of the sciences, biology, psychology and so on. You don't need to establish any kind of relationship between anthroposophy and religion. But there are a great many people here today who, on the basis of anthroposophy, of spiritual science, are seeking a religious deepening in the same way that people, on the basis of materialism, have sought a religious deepening, albeit perhaps an older religion, as, for example, David Friedrich Strauß, the author of 'Der alte und der neue Glaube' and the like. Not true, as at that time a number of such people tried and sought a kind of materialistic religion, so one finds a truly spiritual religion and also the way to Christ - among many others - on the way to spiritual science. In addition to medicine, psychology, philosophy, biology and so on, which one can deepen, one also acquires, I might say, a certain knowledge of those peculiar paths that must be followed.

Let us assume that we first need to teach children the concept of the immortality of the soul. We try to do this – as I said, I am talking about an example, it could easily be explained differently – but let us assume that we try to teach the child through an image. We point to the butterfly pupa. The butterfly emerges. We then try to show how the soul of a human being also leaves the body at death and enters a [different] world, albeit now in the invisible, and so on. You can think up something like that. But if you just make it up, you will notice – you need pedagogical experience to do so, but if you have it, you will notice: if you have just thought up this point of view – I am so clever and the child is so stupid, I have to bring it to the child, then in reality you are not teaching it to the child. You teach it to the brain, to word recognition, but not to the heart. You only teach the heart what you can believe in yourself; then you teach it, I might say with joy, if there really is something real in it, if you can say to yourself, 'Yes, I have a correspondence there; I believe in it.' That is precisely what is formed in our spiritual science, but not in a nebulous, hazy way. For that is something that is rejected by spiritual science, as it is meant here.

It is again a slander when we are accused of phantasms. What we seek is not an abstract spiritual reality, but a concrete spirituality is contained in the details. And so, for those who recognize the spirit in nature, this process of the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis is the same at a lower level as what is death with the immortal soul of man at a higher level, a reality. It is not I who makes the picture, but the phenomena of the world themselves make the picture. And when I stand in them and judge the phenomena of the world in such a way that nature becomes, as it were, for me the living vision of what I can bring forth from the whole world as the understanding of the divine essence, then I am also able to teach it to the child. For then not only, I might say, the ordinary relations to the child are formed. There are imponderables, forces that work from person to person. And it is these imponderable forces that lie within, that make it possible to teach another person only that in which one can believe with all one's strength. And the basic truths that present themselves to us, the awareness of religious truths on the path that can be taken through spiritual science, that is what makes religious education possible, where it is necessary to give to the child.

We have put a great deal of effort into finding a method for teaching religion. And I have to say that it is actually something that works very well. And I have been able to emphasize again and again at the various school celebrations what seems to me to be a truth now, that in our Waldorf School the Christian spirit is not only present in the religion lessons, but it is there when you enter the school or leave class. It is present in everything, without one always saying “Lord, Lord” or constantly pointing to that which somehow is religiosity with words. That which is the religious spirit is something quite different, when the rest flows into objectivity.

That is what underlies it. And when I say that our paths lead to Christ, then perhaps despite all the hostility that comes from various sides, I may also recall a Bible verse that is truly important to me not only because it has been handed down, but because it is daily proving to be true and has certainly become a valuable Bible verse. This is the one that is put into the Savior's mouth:

I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

Thus He is not only present during the time of His life on earth, but He is always present. And if one is willing, one can always experience what the living Christ wants among people. This living understanding of Christ is especially important – this ever-present Christ – which, of course, does not exclude the Mystery of Golgotha as an historical event from us. And in order to avoid misunderstandings, I emphasize that it is understood as a supersensible event and that it has even been possible to lead Protestant clergymen, who were dissatisfied with the existing presentation, which has become quite rationalistic – the journal literature already shows this today – back to a real, supersensible understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, precisely through anthroposophy.

All this shows you that our religious education is looking for a method that brings it into connection with all other aspects of the world, with all other human activity and with human life in general, and on the other hand, that the matter does not lead away from Christianity.

And you see, dear ladies and gentlemen, we do not force anyone from any religious community or any other community, but we have nevertheless managed to have Jewish children sitting in our Waldorf School who listen to the knowledge of Christianity with complete inner soul and with truly religious fervor, without this being anything extraordinary.

Education can be such that, for example, the following occurred with us at the Waldorf School, but it was not a merit of the Waldorf School, the boy had already done that before he came to the Waldorf School. A Jewish boy who was later sent to the Waldorf School received Jewish religious education before the school was established. When he came to our school and heard what goes on here, he compared it with the way religion is approached in his parents' home. And he simply ran away, just walked out the door and went into the other class where free Christian religious education was being taught, and stayed inside. So if the claim is that Christianity is not being cultivated, that is not true. Although we have to say: we are not a sect, we do not compete with any religious community; our sources lie first and foremost in science, as I have explained today. So it would be a completely unjustified accusation to claim that Christianity is not being cultivated.

And if you look at real life, you will see how far we have already been able to go in the most diverse fields using the anthroposophical method of understanding the world. It will become clear to you how unfounded what is already being said against anthroposophy in a somewhat indefinable way from some quarters is. But that is not what is worthy of discussion in the first place. Rather, it is important to know that this spiritual science does not want to remain in the sphere of mere theoretical development, in the sphere of mere theoretical knowledge, because that is ultimately something that alienates people from the world and keeps them far removed from it. Rather, it seeks to penetrate the sphere of the will, into all of human life, and is therefore far removed from any nebulous mysticism, any mysticism that seeks to withdraw from life.

There are, of course, people who, in complete good faith, believe that this world is too bad after all, that one must withdraw into another, mystical world. I have met many such people; they were quite good people, but they were not the kind of people that today's difficult times need. Today's world needs people who not only believe in the spirit in knowledge and abstract theories, but today's difficult times need people who absorb this spirit in such a way that they can carry it into matter and into life themselves.

Dear attendees! We have experienced it – and the deeper connections show it to a deeper understanding – these things have led us into disaster. We have experienced it that people were religious on the one hand according to their own view, and then they had nothing from religion in their external actions during the whole week, except that in the bookkeeping in the ledger it still says on the first page: “With God”. I don't know if that is true or not. But in any case, something has occurred that I would call a kind of double way of life: on the one hand, one can be a follower of any confession, and on the other hand, nothing can be brought into one's life from that confession. Likewise, there are already a great many scientists today who pursue their science in such a way that they handle it on the one hand, and then they grasp life quite differently on the other. They make two things out of these things that should actually be one. But we must come to a unified life, not just a conception of life, but a way of life.

That is what is striven for through anthroposophical spiritual science: not just to recognize the spirit in abstract, mystical contemplation and immersion, and believe that one has the spirit when one withdraws from the external life but to absorb the spirit into the soul in such a way that one can then carry it into matter, into external matter, and thus deepen the external life. The human being must not only work as a knower of the spiritual order of the world, but as a realizer of the spiritual order of the world. And that is the basis of the impulse of spiritual science:

is based: not just to recognize the spirit in abstract ideas and to be able to speak of it, but to take this spirit so fully within oneself that one is able not only to carry it in concepts, but to carry it in one's mind and will, so that one oneself belongs to those powers in the world that actualize the spirit, that one can become a servant for the realization of the spirit in the world order.

Dear attendees,

Of the many visitors to the Goetheanum in Dornach, which can be reached from Basel by conventional means of transport in less than an hour, many ask: What are the tasks of this Goetheanum? What goals does it want to serve? Well, ladies and gentlemen, if one had to speak of these goals and tasks of the Goetheanum without any connection to the great, serious tasks of our time, it would hardly be worthwhile to speak about them in public. But this Goetheanum in Dornach does want to be connected in its tasks with the great tasks of humanity in the present day. And it is this connection that I would like to speak about today, at least in a few words.

Those who not only see the Goetheanum from the outside, but get to know the way of life there a little, will be able to notice that two human activities, which otherwise occur quite separately in life, are thoroughly connected there, and perhaps the external signature of this Goetheanum initially experiences its characteristics through this.

We organized courses for the School of Spiritual Science last fall. I already mentioned them in my previous lecture. During these courses, representatives of the most diverse specialized sciences expressed themselves about the ways in which their individual specialized sciences could be enriched by what could be brought into them from the spiritual science cultivated at the Goetheanum. So science has been cultivated there, but science in the sense of spiritual science. Besides that, however, one can see how artistic natures and artistic people have been working on this Goetheanum for years, and the whole building has come about in its present, not yet completed forms through these artistic people. And one could see how this fall, the individual scientists and also personalities from practical life spoke from one spirit, which was absolutely the same as that from which the artistic people have given this building its forms, its images and so on for years. That is what makes this building, the Goetheanum in Dornach, so unique: everything that has been artistically worked on is inspired by the same spirit as everything that is to be scientifically achieved there. This unified spirit of science and art is what characterizes the Goetheanum in the first place.

But there is a third element, too, that unites with this. All those who have spoken there about the most diverse scientific questions, as well as about the most diverse branches of practical life, and all those who have been working artistically for years and now, they are deeply imbued in their minds with the fact that what they speak, what they work, what they somehow accomplish is in some way connected with the great tasks of the human being. Everything that is to be thought on a large scale, and everything that is to be achieved in detail, may well be said to have a kind of religious spirit. Not some obscure sectarian movement, as the detractors of the Dornach building say, is what drives its essence, but what is being driven, it is driven out of a serious scientific spirit, but in such a way that this serious scientific spirit can become so alive at the same time that it can express itself artistically. And that which expresses itself scientifically and artistically from two completely different sides carries, at the same time, not in a sectarian sense, not even in some limited confessional sense, but in the very general human sense, a kind of religious devotion, a kind of religious veneration for the thing to which one devotes oneself.

But we can go even deeper, my dear audience, and we can hear this unity of work in Dornach. We can see how, admittedly, in other forms, in other ways, science is spoken in a way that is different from that which is otherwise the case in our educational institutions. And the scientific language is spoken in such a way that, for example, the individual sciences enter into a dialogue with each other, mutually illuminating and clarifying each other, so that the narrow-minded spirit of specialization and of specialized science recedes before what is to be striven for by all the individual sciences together as the general human. Speaking scientifically, I would like to say it is spoken from a different tone.

And if you then walk around the building, if you look at the building inside, at the painting and the sculpture, and ask yourself: in what style was this building erected? Then you won't get the usual answer. When you usually walk into an educational institution, you hear this or that science presented from its particular, specialized point of view. You then look at the building. You ask: in which style was it built? You get the answer: in the Renaissance style, in the antique style, in the Gothic style and the like. You cannot get such an answer in relation to the architectural style of the Goetheanum in Dornach. The only answer that can be given is that the Goetheanum in Dornach was built in the same style in all its individual forms, and that this is reflected in the work being done there in the various sciences. The same spirit from which scientific life springs is the same spirit that is embodied in the forms. Dornach has its own architectural style, and everything that meets the visitor when he enters the building through the portal on one side, looks around at the forms that surround him, and then listens to the word that is to reveal to him what science is being practised here, is one.

This unity – esteemed attendees – is what characterizes Dornach. And with that, this Goetheanum in Dornach certainly presents itself as a contradiction, but I believe that the world will gradually realize that it is a beneficial contradiction to the disunity of our present life, this life, from which the individual activities and the individual ways of thinking and looking at things come from the most diverse angles, mutually feuding and certainly not growing together into a harmonious unity. For it is precisely this that is so disastrous in our time, that the individual activities that arise from the most diverse [specialized areas] of our lives cannot somehow come together to form a harmonious whole. When you look at things this way, it may initially seem as if this Goetheanum in Dornach should, so to speak, be a kind of model for the way in which the individual activities of life should work together harmoniously. However, my dear audience, it does not want to be just a kind of model, it wants to be a place, this Goetheanum, in which and from which work is done in such a way that this harmony can also enter into the tasks of our time and that a rising life can arise from the declining life that threatens us.

To understand this, however, we need to take a closer look at the way in which modern civilization has developed over the last three to four centuries. The two most significant characteristics of this civilization – I have often emphasized them in lectures that I have been privileged to give here at the same place, and today I want to emphasize them again from a certain point of view – these two most significant characteristics are that, for three to four hundred years, a scientific life, especially a natural scientific life, has emerged in the development of humanity, which has become dominant for the broadest circles in relation to feeling, willing, and in relation to way of thinking. One should not deceive oneself about this! Of course, many people today are firmly attached to old confessional traditions or the like with their views and also act out of impulses that arise from these traditional confessions. But more and more has spread, especially in the course of the nineteenth century and in the first two decades of this twentieth century, that which has flowed from the authority of modern scientific life.

What man thinks today about the structure of the world, about what lives and moves in the various kingdoms of nature, and finally about himself, is expressed by what he regards as the authoritative science. And within certain denominations, they have endeavored to strictly separate so-called belief from science because they wanted to save something for the soul that goes beyond the acceptance of this science. But because they did not dare to extract anything from this science itself that could also say something about the eternal in the soul, about the higher meaning, about the supersensible meaning of human life, they wanted to found, so to speak, a place in the soul to which science has no access, from which they did not want to elicit that which speaks about the highest matters of the soul. They wanted to secure the place of faith so that they could at least assume something about this eternal aspect of the soul, this supersensible aspect of the human being, which science is not allowed to assume or which science describes as something beyond its limits.

But this is not intended to say the slightest thing against the tremendous progress of this science in recent centuries. For — my dear audience — spiritual science, as it is represented here, does not dare to use any kind of superstitious grounds to bring anything against science as such, but it recognizes in the fullest sense of the word what this scientific development of the last centuries has brought. It appreciates what has been achieved by science through observation of the external world in connection with experimentation and in connection with the combining intellect. And the spiritual science meant here should not be confused with all the dilettantism that arises from mystical or other backgrounds, which also want to satisfy human souls, which only oppose science because they have never come into any kind of contact with it. The spiritual science represented here fully takes into account — even if it miscalculates in some respects — it fully takes into account the progress of modern science, and it absolutely wants to follow a path that yields to nothing in terms of the strictness of the method, the conscientiousness of the way of thinking of modern science.

But, my dear attendees, anyone who engages with this modern science in all its various fields, and with all that it has brought, will ultimately come to a very specific conclusion – a conclusion that is no less significant because it, in a sense, justifies skepticism.

You see, esteemed attendees, I myself have been met with much hostility for the reason that, before I turned to what I had to say on the basis of anthroposophical knowledge, I tried to express myself in purely scientific works in a wide variety of fields. I did this because I believe that today a higher world view should not offer itself to the world at all without first justifying itself by having looked around in the most diverse scientific fields. But when one delves into these various scientific fields, one says to oneself: Nevertheless, we have not only developed the external methods of observation in a conscientious way, not only advanced the combining mind and the art of experimentation, but have also come to everything that the armed senses provide us through the telescope, through the microscope, through the X-ray apparatus, through the spectral apparatus and so on, and so on – even though we have developed all this, indeed precisely because we have developed all this, the riddles of life and the world have not diminished for us, but increased. And anyone who approaches this scientific development of recent times with an open mind knows that, basically, with every glance through the telescope, through the microscope, with every result of the X-ray apparatus or the spectroscope, it is not actually solutions to what we call the riddles of life and humanity, but new questions and ever new riddles, and that with each such result, the human soul must increasingly ask for something that can at least to some extent provide the solution to such riddles. Thus, it is not really solutions that have presented themselves to the triumphs of modern science, but new life puzzles and new questions have arisen, and those who engage in the scientific life of the present with an open mind are particularly confronted with these to a greater extent. This is on the one hand, in terms of the stream of knowledge; the development on this side has brought us a sum of new riddles, new questions. But we can also look around us on the other side and find what the last centuries have brought, if we look at it impartially, in a special light. It is fair to say that what science has given us has also shown us practical results. It has brought us our modern technology, and we may say: Most of what surrounds us today at every turn in life, all that technology has brought us in such significant advances, all of it is a result of the last few centuries and it is basically derived from the results of modern science. Technology has become part of life, and life has become highly dependent on technology. In a sense, can we not also say that, just as scientific development has presented us with puzzles and questions on the other side, so too does modern technological progress present us with puzzles and questions in relation to technology?

We are basically in the middle of these puzzles and questions, because when we look at the great advances in technology, we have to say to ourselves: Yes, they are there, and people also live in a life that is dominated by this technology. But this technology has not yet found its way to the people, otherwise we would not have today, among us, something that is so burning — my dear audience —, which in the broadest sense is called the social question. People have learned to adjust their machines. But what has been brought to us by the machines is not the solution to the questions of life in the fullest sense of the word. Instead, the greatest question of life flows out of it: How should this human life be shaped in social terms so that people, who have to work – as they once worked without machines – now have to work with modern technology, so that these people come together in full understanding in social life? Just as questions and puzzles of knowledge have been posed for us by the development of modern science, so modern technology, which has emerged from this scientific development, has posed the great question for us: How should life be organized so that people can find the possibility of a dignified existence within a life permeated by technology? So one could say: Both the theoretical and practical questions of life have actually emerged from modern civilization. And today we are not in the position of having fully developed solutions, neither theoretical and intuitive solutions nor practical solutions, but we are faced everywhere with questions, with puzzles that pile up, that make demands on people that can no longer be ignored.

This, ladies and gentlemen, must be felt in all its vibrancy if we are to do justice to the tasks that the Goetheanum in Dornach presents. For one can say: Those who are connected with the founding and expansion of this Goetheanum are precisely those people who feel this burning on the one hand of knowledge, on the other hand of the life questions in modern times, and who want to contribute what is possible for people to such life tasks as they present themselves can be tackled.

On the one hand, we see how people offer simplistic solutions: a person like Haeckel, in his “World Riddles”, offered simplistic solutions, while all he had to offer was a pile of new riddles. And people who believe that they are grounded in practical life also believe that, for example, the relations of production bring forth human life relationships. We keep hearing it emphasized from the Social Democratic program that it is the relations of production that have created life, that have created the form of life.

Now, my dear attendees, precisely when we look at the issue of modern technology, we can see that the production conditions that have been created by this modern technology have not brought about the form of life that goes with them. If they had brought it about, we would not have a social question.

In view of this, we must ask: what then actually characterizes this modern life? After all, it depends on the human being finding a way to relate to life that is informed by what he or she can understand, feel, want, and do as a human being. It is easy to say that today it is a matter of economic issues, that people must rise above the question of bread above all.

Now, my dear audience, there is no way to get beyond this bread issue other than by utilizing what the earth offers man in the right way for humanity and putting it into circulation. But what has to be done to achieve this cannot be done otherwise than through what man can feel, do and want, and with which man can place himself in the world. Basically, it is the world view, it is the inner spiritual ability of the human being that alone can provide a remedy even in the very most extreme economic questions. Therefore, we must look to that which can inwardly spiritualize the soul of the human being, which can drive the human being to a fruitful will, to that which can underlie a human understanding if we want to take a proper look at the great questions of the present, at the tasks of our time. Here one must say: that which is striven for at the Goetheanum in Dornach, and which to a certain extent is visible in the work being done outside, may perhaps inspire some people to reflect on the position of the human being in the course of human development.

I said earlier – esteemed attendees – that in Dornach one can see how scientific questions are discussed in a spirit that is at the same time the same spirit in which artistic natures have worked at the Goetheanum itself in terms of its external architecture, sculpture, and pictorial art. And I said that there is not only a certain unity between what is being done scientifically out there and what is being created artistically, but that there is also a certain religious mood that runs through both the scientific and the artistic work. Those who really immerse themselves in this Goetheanum in Dornach will find that there is a certain unity between three human modes of revelation of the inner being of this human being - between science, religion and art. Of course, I am not talking about — and I would like to emphasize this — the founding of a new religion in Dornach. That is not at all what it is about. Rather, it is solely about the fact that what is created in science and art is at the same time imbued with a religious spirit.

My dear attendees! This modern civilization, which I have just characterized in other ways, is characterized by the fact that science, religion and art have increasingly fallen apart in it. It is the peculiarity of the modern mind that it wants to cultivate science for a completely different reason than that which is the content of religious life, and in turn, it wants nothing to do with the unity of science and art. Those views have basically faded away, of which Goethe still had some – the Goetheanum takes its name from him, perhaps for precisely the reasons I have just mentioned – faded away is that was still in Goethe's views, that science should be cultivated on the one hand by pursuing that which lies in the current of truth, but that art should also be created out of the same spirit.

It is well known that Goethe was also interested in science throughout his life. He studied in detail how plants develop their various forms and how animals are organically created through metamorphosis; he was involved in other sciences. In all of this, he had an artistic eye. He conceived of the artistic in such a way that, by grasping with the soul that which he can also penetrate scientifically, he then shapes it inwardly, so that that which he, on the one hand, makes his own without form, scientifically, takes shape within him, so that he can create the work of art from it. Goethe thought [of an intimate relationship] between the truth that should prevail in science and the truth that should prevail in art. These things have almost completely faded away today, and that is precisely because modern civilization is absolutely intent on regarding science, religion and art as three different fields that arise from different foundations of human life and that actually have nothing to do with each other.

This was not the case at the starting point of human development. From what we have today, it is extremely difficult for us to recognize this starting point. At the starting point of human development, it was the case that people had a special, different kind of knowledge — not the kind of knowledge that is particularly valued today, which only applies to external natural things and observes these external natural things with the armed human senses — that they combined with the ordinary human mind. No, at the starting point of human knowledge was the ability to combine everything that the eyes observe and that can be combined by the mind with a certain spiritual vision of things, a seeing through of the external world, so that, along with what the senses perceive and what the mind can combine, the inner spiritual entities, the inner essence of things, can also be revealed to the mind's eye.

And [in] that which man at the starting point of his development, and still for centuries to come – to which we can look back as not really that far back – into that knowledge which man acquired, was so imbued with spiritual substance that he perceived this spiritual substance, which came to him from science itself, at the same time as the divine-spiritual in nature, in everything, everything. He did not know a science for itself and something that was to be given to him spiritually through faith, but he knew a science that at the same time provided the observation of external nature and also that which underlies his natural things and his whole life as a spiritual being. In what science gave him, he knew the divine at the same time, so that science for him became at the same time the revealer of that which he could worship from the innermost part of his mind. That which his reason grasped appeared to his soul in such a way that he could worship it religiously at the same time. If we go back to those places that were both places of learning and places of worship in ancient times – to the mystery schools – we find that what was revealed there through science was at the same time the message of what permeates the world divinely. So that what the word of science expressed gave at the same time what human worship of the gods recalled.

And one can go further. That which was offered in this regard, on the one hand, as knowledge, and, on the other hand, as something that also engaged the human emotional life, so that man could satisfy his need to worship his divine through what he was allowed to know, was given to him in such a way that it was not abstract and passive, giving him mere head knowledge, so to speak, only allowing himself to be thought of, but it was given in such a way that it was full of life, that it intervened in his life in the same way as, say, external circumstances intervene in his life, some friendship, some other circumstances that permeate the whole person. Our present knowledge can leave us so cold that we go to laboratories to do research; when we are outside, we no longer occupy ourselves. Life is something separate from this research. Or we sit down at the table and pursue some kind of science. We pursue it as long as we sit at the table. Then life takes place outside.

But this life takes up the whole person. This life demands more than just mental effort. We have to throw ourselves into it with our whole personality. Concepts that can only be experienced in the laboratory today, that can only be experienced at the reading table and so on, concepts that only occupy the head, that only occupy reason and understanding, did not exist in the old places of learning. There were concepts that, like living forces, took hold of the whole person, like life itself, so that everything that was technology, and above all art, emerged from these ideas at the same time. One had acquired ideas through knowledge, through which one satisfied one's need for knowledge. At the same time, there was something in these ideas to which the mind and the feelings could surrender in adoration. The will was permeated by that which came to one, so that the will could pour it into external matter, that it could create technique in ordinary life, art in the elevated life. And in the cultic acts, there was nothing else to be done at the places of worship except to create something artistic and technical, full of life, out of that which was the content of knowledge and religion. Human knowledge, human feeling of reverence for the divine in the world, human creativity, they were one. Humanity could not have developed further into the forms of civilization into which it necessarily had to develop if life had remained uncomprehended. It is an enrichment of life that what was, so to speak, an undifferentiated unity at the starting point of humanity - and even in times like those that underlay older Greek civilization - has developed. It was absolutely necessary for humanity to go beyond these uncomprehended contents of civilization, to particularly develop a scientific field, a religious field, and an artistic field. But what has emerged as a result, ladies and gentlemen?

We have gradually acquired a religious field that we, as I said, want to save from the onslaughts of modern science, which are accepted by all people and are being accepted more and more by those who have not yet accepted them today. More and more, the longing has arisen to establish, alongside these demands and onslaughts of modern science, a field of faith in which science should not have a say, in which one should enlighten oneself about the most intimate, innermost, and most sacred matters of the human soul. And suddenly we have science, which does not want to say anything because it claims that it cannot say anything about the eternal, about the supersensible of the human soul, and faith, which certainly wants to say something, wants to reveal something reveal about this eternal, about this supersensible of the human soul, but which shrinks from giving that which it accepts any such significance as external science gives to its statements. One can define, one can somehow characterize such a separation. But in the long run one cannot live under such a separation, for the believing mind must feel constrained in the long run when science appears on the one hand and expounds its judgment with its claim to certainty over a certain field, and when the truth of faith wants to assert itself as a special way to the truth, which is precisely to provide information about the most important thing for the human soul.

Today we still do not see clearly in this area, and that is why we keep trying to justify this separation of science and faith. But humanity suffers from it. And what it suffers from this side often takes place in the subconscious. But it does not emerge in its original form into human life. As a result, the human being's own intellectual development is also restricted; he is driven to make judgments that are not sufficiently secure in life; he becomes jaded in his judgment. And if we ask today: Why do we so often find mere routine in practical life where clear insight and a realistic sense are needed? Why have we brought ourselves into such terrible, catastrophic times in practical life, in economic life? Then we have to say: Yes, that is where something comes into play that human judgment is unable to do. We just don't see the connection with something else.

For those who see the big picture, the fact that we have not developed such foresight in our external economic and practical lives, that our judgments in other words have become so short-sighted in this practical life that they have brought us social chaos, stems from the fact that we have by limiting our scientific judgment to that which can only be observed externally and combined with the intellect, and blunting this judgment when it comes to the most important matters of the soul, to the supersensible, the eternal part of the soul. The fact that we are brought up in school in such a way that we are not allowed to apply what we have been scientifically educated in to the understanding of the soul forms such a judgment in us that we then also have short-circuited thoughts when we are supposed to think economically, and this results in catastrophes.

And so we live today in the terrible tragedy that theorists, that representatives of religious denominations repeatedly and repeatedly declaim that the truths of faith must be kept separate from scientific truths, that this plays into our pedagogy, into our didactics. It must be recognized – and I address this to those present – that this is breeding the human shortsightedness that, I would say, subconsciously impacts practical judgment, the same shortsightedness that then also led us into the chaos of economic life. We must recognize these inner connections, for it is man himself who is decisive for life, not external economic conditions, not external institutions, but man alone is decisive for the external life. If a person is educated in the wrong direction in one area of practical life, it is the same in other areas. And if, on the one hand, a person is driven to a dullness of judgment, this dullness of judgment will be especially evident in practical areas where he is supposed to be insightful, where he is supposed to see through the world.

And again, my dear audience, the artistic at the starting point of humanity, I have just tried to characterize it, it was the case that man grasped the supersensible with the sensual at the same time, and that he gave the sensual forms from his grasp of the supersensible in art their character. Thus art revealed itself from the same source from which science and religion originated. Goethe sensed something of this connection when he spoke his remarkable, meaningful words:

He who possesses science and art, also has religion.
He who possesses neither, may have religion.

But such views and feelings have actually completely disappeared today, and that is why we have arrived at a situation in art where, on the one hand, we have fallen into pure naturalism, making imitation of nature the only thing we strive for. And since in more recent times people have grown tired of this imitation, since they finally realized that with this imitation of nature, with this mere naturalism, basically nothing can be offered that in any way surpasses nature - because after all when someone is merely naturalistic, one must say that one still prefers to look at nature rather than at what he merely wants to imitate, because as far as nature goes, one cannot go in art if one merely wants to imitate. Once this had been recognized, people now sought - and this is quite understandable and even justified from a certain point of view - people now sought from within, in expressionism and in all kinds of other currents, they sought to capture in color and form that which is not in nature but which the human being can experience in his or her inner being, somehow in color and form. This is a quest that is, once again, something that represents a task for our time, also in the artistic fields.

So we see that, to a certain extent, art, too, has gone astray by separating itself from the other areas of human spiritual striving. But this differentiation had to occur – I said it before – otherwise human civilization would not have been able to progress. But today we are again living in a time when that which has separated from each other is having such an effect in the separation that, as man lets it affect him, this man begins to tear himself apart. We gradually came to live as a human race in a science that teaches us about the outer world in a wonderful way, but which, as we penetrate into it, alienates us from precisely that which we need if we want to be enlightened about our own soul. And we have come to a religious life that, I would say, had to create its own realm of truth because it did not dare to summon science itself to penetrate the transcendental through the same means it uses to penetrate the sensual. And art turned to nature or turns to all kinds of random human experiences in Impressionism, Expressionism, Naturalism and so on, and so on, in order to have its independent position. But then one surrenders to this art.

One must, so to speak, split and cleave that which is a unity in man: thinking, feeling and willing. That which lives externally, by acting on man, divides man. Today we have definitely reached a point in human development where man has lost himself in such a way that the various most important, essential branches of knowledge of his activity - the scientific, the religious and the artistic branches - have diverged to such an extent that he is no longer able to hold them together.

Do you see, dear attendees, this is what someone must feel who, on the one hand, has an unbiased mind to see through the right tendencies of the civilization of our time, and on the other hand, has a heart and an understanding for what is missing in our time in practical, economic, spiritual, educational and training terms, and what has brought us to the brink of disaster. Anyone who has a real heart for the hardship and misery of our time, and on the other hand can look impartially at how human souls are divided, will see a connection between the two, because they see that what has taken on catastrophic forms in life today stems from the fact that people are divided within and do not know how to place themselves in life.

Spiritual science, as one of the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach, faces this. This spiritual science speaks of it - and I have often presented the details in these lectures here. Today I would like to refer to these lectures and only point them out, but you can also find them in my writings “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in my “Occult Science” and so on, explained in detail. This spiritual science, as it is to be cultivated in Dornach, as it is to be gradually incorporated into civilization through the Goetheanum, it speaks of the fact that there is not only such knowledge as that which adheres to external sensory observation, to the arming of the external senses - telescope, microscope and so on, and to the combining mind, but that man bears within himself abilities which are latent, hidden, in ordinary life, in ordinary science, which can be brought down by the means which I have indicated in the writings mentioned and presented here in the earlier [lectures]. This spiritual science speaks of how ordinary, objective, external knowledge can work its way through to a higher knowledge: imagination, inspiration, intuition in the deeper sense. This spiritual science speaks of various levels of knowledge that in turn lead into the supersensible, that carry knowledge itself up into the supersensible realm.

And if one develops such methods of knowledge in this way, my dear audience, then one acquires a special position in relation to modern science. Above all, this modern scientific approach has truly come a long way in the most diverse fields! Let us just think – we could also examine another field here, but let us just think of what has emerged in more recent times as the theory of evolution. We need not think of extreme materialistic Darwinism, only of the theory of development as it has been established in recent times, and how it has been conscientiously and methodically developed for the most diverse spheres. We will say: in relation to all that could be achieved, great things have been achieved. In relation to form and essence, we can indeed survey the ever more perfect from the less perfect, and we can say: at the top of this series stands the human being. We can see a connection between the human being and the other beings. We can, by surveying something like this, remain entirely in the realm of external, objective knowledge.

But, dear ladies and gentlemen, in this way the human being is not understood. This is, I would say, only one particular aspect of what I said earlier. The human being is not understood by applying the methods of modern science to nature and to the human being, as we have been accustomed to doing until today. Something else is needed for that. But if we work our way up from this ordinary knowledge, as it is cultivated today, to what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science calls the imagination, where what is otherwise only grasped in the abstract is transformed into a pictorial concept, but a pictorial concept that is neither a dream nor a fantasy, but which carries within it the certainty that one is dealing with the image of a spiritual, not a physical reality - if one has developed oneself to this imagination, to this conception of the image through the supersensible powers of knowledge, as I have described them in my book ” How to Know Higher Worlds?», then one sees, while standing cognizantly before the human being, already presented in his form: one cannot comprehend him with the means of today's science; one must let thinking pass over into quite different inner soul experiences if one wants to comprehend the human being.

One can say that a human being has so-and-so many bones, and can compare these with the number of bones of higher animals; one can count the muscles, can look at the shape of the heart, can do all this with the means of ordinary science; but then there comes a point where this ordinary science leads nowhere, where it is transformed merely inwardly in the soul life , where one must try to grasp that in the human being which can only be grasped through imagination, where one must look at the human being – even just at his form when he stands before us – and say to oneself: Yes, the human being has just as many bones as the higher animals, but these bones are raised out of certain forms, they are given other forms. One can examine the metabolism of the higher animals, and one can then look at the metabolism of the human being. If you look at it with imaginative knowledge, you will find it to be set apart, you will find that the human being has been placed in the world differently if you look at the whole thing spiritually from the point of view of imaginative knowledge.

But what happens there? What happens there is nothing less than that what is otherwise abstract intellectual and observational knowledge gradually transforms into artistic perception. Now, my dear audience, no matter how much you rail against this artistic understanding of the human being when you have gone through the whole series of animals with the means of ordinary science, you can say: Art is not something that science understands. Certainly, someone can find the most beautiful logical reasons to prove that art has nothing to do with science. Let him do so, and he will be proved right with regard to everything that he logically invents and arrives at. All those who say: 'Science, as we understand it, must not be influenced by any artistic grasp of reality' will be proved right.

But there is something else to consider, dear attendees. If reality is such that it does not yield to this kind of knowledge, if reality is such that it can only be approached through artistic comprehension, through the transition of abstract concepts into imaginative-artistic forms, then no matter how long man may debate that art has nothing to do with science, then he must admit that with his science he remains outside of reality and that if he wants to enter into this reality, he must transform this science into an artistic understanding of reality. But that is where anthroposophically oriented spiritual science leads to. Reality does not arise from those abstractions and scientific methods, not even from those who work with telescopes and microscopes, who work with X-ray machines and with spectral analysis; reality does not arise from this external nature, but only when the concepts that have been acquired in science are transformed into art at the highest level. Then one also sees the human form artistically. And it is this artistic understanding, this artistic comprehension that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science leads to.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, this is one of the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach. We do not negate what is achieved in the laboratories, in the physics institutes, in the clinic, or in the astronomical observatory. On the contrary, we want to establish such institutions, permeated by our spiritual science, so that the methods of spiritual science can be brought into them. That is what is available in the form of the Goetheanum, the central building, in Dornach. Such institutions must be affiliated to it, precisely in order that the methodology which allows spirit to be recognized from the experiments and from observation may be carried into the laboratory, into the physics institute; at the same time, that which, for example, bridges the gap between pathology and therapy in the field of medicine, where in therapy we have to take the remedies from the greater world, the macrocosm, and apply them to the human being, the microcosm.

That is what makes the Dornach method, through its strict scientific nature, lead to the artistic, by showing that when we develop the develops the powers of his soul, rises from ordinary knowledge and the science of ordinary life to imagination, one rises at the same time to where science, by remaining strictly scientific, enters into artistic comprehension. In turn, we return to what Goethe sensed in the past. In a modern sense, what was at the starting point of human development, and what had to differentiate and separate for a while in human development so that civilization could advance, but which would now shatter the human being if he did not find union again, is developed.

But we do not have to somehow glue the artistic to the scientific on the outside; symbolism or allegory is quite foreign to us, but we want to shape reality itself. We want to be scientific, much stricter than one is accustomed to in our educational institutions today. But precisely because we have the scientific method and not only want to conceive of its end, but also want to experience it, what scientific life is flows into an artistic grasp so that full reality can be grasped. And that is why we can also grasp from the spirit itself in what we outwardly present in artistic forms.

This is the aspect of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that creates the bridge between science and art, the bridge that once existed, the bridge that must be found again and that will be fruitful for all individual scientific fields, but which at the same time will lead to our soul being so stimulated by what we work on from the most diverse scientific fields soul will be so stimulated that our ideas will not remain dry, empty, abstract, pedantic, philistine ideas, but will become life in our soul, both science and art, not as an allegorical, straw-like art, but as an art that brings into this outer, sensual reality a sensual image of the supersensible, of the spiritual world.

And, dear attendees, that is how it is with inspiration. It is the next stage after imagination, as you can follow in the books mentioned. There, the spiritual that permeates the world reveals itself in the human being, not only that the images fill him as in imagination, but the spiritual itself penetrates.

He who wants to deny this spiritual aspect stands in relation to the world in a higher sense than he who wanted to claim that man does not live on the inhaled air, which he in turn wanted to release into the outside world. In this moment, man is inwardly that which was just outside of him. He processes this air inwardly; he releases it again. Just as one cannot claim that this air comes from an organism, but it is that which connects him with the whole great world, so it is with the spiritual. Man experiences something spiritual within himself. But this spiritual is such that it is related to all the rest of the world's spirituality. There is a continuous inhaling and exhaling of the spiritual in man. I can only hint at this here. It is that which becomes conscious in man when he rises to the method of knowledge of inspiration. He then experiences within himself that which is otherwise experienced as the spiritual spread throughout the whole world; it is that which he experiences in the air that is in him and is processed in him [and] the air that is outside of him. But by experiencing this inspiration, he experiences the spirituality of the world. He permeates himself within with that which, as divine-spiritual, permeates the world. What the soul is can only be grasped if it is understood as part of the spirituality of the whole world. Therefore, only inspiration can reveal to us the essence of the human soul. Just as we rise from mere outer knowledge, from mere knowledge to the artistic grasp of full reality through imagination, so we can only rise to grasp the soul through inspiration. And this inspiration is at the same time that which imbues the soul with the living knowledge it contains of its eternal character, of its eternal essence, of its supersensible essence. We do not need a special field of truth for this belief, but rather the elevation of the field of knowledge itself to inspired knowledge, which reflects the essence of our soul.

In tomorrow's lecture, I will have to speak in more detail about this relationship between the soul-spiritual, the immortal in the soul, in connection with the so-called inner nature of nature, following on from what we have discussed today. For now, I will only say that what the soul must experience as its most important thing must be taken precisely from what, in earlier times, was also a matter of religious conviction. But because today humanity has educated itself in such a way that it can only believe in a certain amount of scientific knowledge, this scientific knowledge itself must be elevated to the religious.

Thus, arising from inner knowledge itself, we have an artistic element and a religious element at the same time. This is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is intended to make clear to humanity. The building of the Goetheanum in Dornach is intended to be a living testimony to this, because this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to convey the living spirit, not the dead, abstract spirit. That is why he gives artists the opportunity to create artistic forms out of the same spirit in their own building, and that is why, because he conveys the living spirit, not an abstract spirit, he gives the whole work a religious mood. He gives that which existed at the starting point of human development as a unity, as a scientific-religious-artistic unity.

This is what the human mind needs today if it is to play an active and active role in social life. From what one acquires for one's activity, for the inner mood of the human soul, there can then arise that which also provides an external, practical judgment. Therefore, one does not shy away from basing it on what lives in Dornach — which initially could not live naturally other than by forming the Dornach Goetheanum itself into a unity — that this that carries this out, founds something like the 'Futurum', which wants to bring the same way of judging, the same way of thinking, into practical life, in order to bring this realistic way of thinking into practical life.

Dear attendees! This Goetheanum is not just a single structure, erected to serve a quirk, to have something that is the same in its external style as what is thought, practiced and researched within, but this Goetheanum is a unified concept the reason that what underlies its origin is oriented towards that unity, towards which humanity must strive today out of its tasks of the time, because it strives towards what humanity needs in the broadest sphere of life for the recovery of social reality. The Goetheanum in Dornach is designed in this way because the way of thinking on which it is based is intended to reach into that which, through its fissures, through its lack of unity, has led to the catastrophes of the present. The Goetheanum does not want to be just a model; the Goetheanum wants to be the place where one can acquire, cognitively, artistically, creatively, religiously, emotionally, that which one needs today in order to engage with the great tasks of the time, including social tasks.

Once again it must be said: social life demands of man not only that other institutions be created. We can create as many other institutions as we like that seem paradisiacal to us; if man remains an anti-social being, if the social does not well up from the depths of his soul, then no possible social order can arise. It is man himself who is to become a social being. Then the institutions will also find each other when the human being is inwardly inspired by social impulses in the right way.

This is what we want to live in Dornach, this is what we want to give to the Goetheanum in Dornach as its tasks, not what the detractors say or what those claim who say that some obscure sect has founded some kind of home on the Dornach hill. Dornach is not based on that, but on honest observation and heartfelt compassion for the great tasks of the time, living into the great tasks of the time, both in those that are given to human knowledge, in that precisely with the great progress of science, new puzzles are given to us, that with the progress of technology, new tasks for life are given to us. Therefore, my dear audience, because one has a heart and mind for this task of knowledge, for these riddles of knowledge, for these tasks of life, riddles of life, one is connected if one really understands what is to be done with the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach. For if one looks at the matter in the right light, then one should at least strive to be able to answer the question: What are the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach? They are the tasks that are the tasks, the great tasks of modern knowledge and modern life.

Dear attendees,

Anthroposophy, which I have been privileged to represent here for many years now, is initially met with disbelief for a very specific reason: because its particular modes of knowledge not only require it to speak about different things than one is accustomed to hearing in scientific circles today, but also to speak in a different way, to have a different mode of expression. This, however, my dear ladies and gentlemen, does not only lead to the essence of anthroposophy in an external, formal way, but, as the considerations of this evening for a particular case would like to show, leads deep into the whole essence of the anthroposophical world view.

The ideas and concepts in which Anthroposophy expresses what it gains in a certain way through so-called supersensible knowledge have, in contrast to the concepts that one is accustomed to in scientific life today, something, one may say, more vividly. Without abandoning its scientific basis, it stands out in a certain way from that which is only bound to the outer world of facts that can be perceived by the senses and reached by the intellect. From this outer world of facts, anthroposophy turns to another world of facts, and from this other world of facts it must not only proclaim something other than what the senses are able to see, but it must also speak in a different way.

This can be seen particularly clearly in the fact that most intensely characterizes human earthly destiny: the fact of death. For human hopes of being able to transcend one's own nature through death are connected with the fact of death; the problem of immortality is connected with the problem of death. And talking about the problem of immortality today is considered unscientific.

Now, my dear audience, when we consider such a fundamental question, such a fundamental riddle of life, we must draw attention to the way in which the way of thinking is expressed in the most diverse ways across the different regions of the earth. I would like to say: we here, within the German world of Central Europe, are precisely wedged between the West and the East with such questions. And I would like to point out, just by way of introduction, the Western way of thinking and the Eastern way of thinking, and then show how it may be incumbent on the German mind, precisely by avoiding the one-sidedness of the West and the East, to arrive at a higher level of knowledge in this field.

If we look across to the West, we encounter above all a thinker who has also profoundly influenced Central and Eastern European thought for almost a century, a thinker who has had more influence on Central European scientific concepts in particular than is usually realized. He is Herbert Spencer. He looks at human life, and it is most interesting to take his view of life where he applies it to the problem of education. He asks: What must be the real goal of human education? And he comes to say – as I said, I will only mention this in the introduction, not explain it – he comes to say that the real goal of education must be to make proper parents and educators out of all people. Now, what he presents as the goal of education may be of little interest to us today, but the reason why he recognizes this goal of education as his own is. He says: human development reaches a certain conclusion at the moment when a person becomes capable of reproduction, when a person thus enters into sexual maturity. And if the power to produce one's own kind is the highest that a person can achieve in the course of their life, then the highest goal of education must also be to educate and teach these descendants in the appropriate way. And it is clear from the context as a whole, rather than from this single assertion, that this Western thinker actually sees a sure cognitive insight into the human being only by pursuing natural processes to their peak, to the point of producing the same; that he regards, so to speak, everything that man has to strive for most significantly after he has reached sexual maturity, that he regards all so-called intellectual development only as a kind of superstructure, only as a kind of appendage, one might almost say, to the secure natural foundation of human development.

Now it is extremely interesting to contrast this Western thinker with an Eastern thinker: Vladimir Soloviev, the most significant Russian thinker of the most recent period, who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century and whose most important works thus extend well into the present day. From a completely different spirit, from completely different psychological backgrounds, we hear this Eastern thinker speak; in that – one might say – although he expresses himself entirely in Western and Central European thought forms, the whole of the Orient still resonates emotionally and sentimentally, which everywhere nuances what he has to say in a warm, deeply intimate way.

Solowjow now also speaks about the human course of life. And he says: Man must have two goals in life. One goal can only be the striving for perfection through ever further and further advancement in the knowledge of the truth, but the other must be to live in that which gives man immortality. One might say that Solowjow speaks not from abstract concepts but from the full human experience when he says that life, which would only perfect itself in truth, would be meaningless if it were not accompanied by immortality immortality, because without immortality the striving for truth, for perfection in truth, would be senseless, a simple dying down, a passing away of the being; the striving for truth would be senseless. And an immortality without the striving for truth would be equally senseless; life would be a world deception if the striving for truth were not accompanied by the fact of immortality. And it is precisely against this background that Solowjow speaks out sharply against what Herbert Spencer sets as the goal of human development, not mentioning Spencer on this occasion, but discussing it himself. He says: Let us just assume that this development of humanity would consist solely of individual generations producing further generations, thus the same always producing the same; a rolling wheel of this kind would be the most senseless thing imaginable.

Now, my dear audience, if we go deeper into the basis of these two completely opposing views, we find a very different way of living in the soul life. In the work of Herbert Spencer, one finds a thorough familiarity with the concepts that have emerged as scientific concepts in the development of humanity over the past few centuries, and one finds his view that truth and knowledge can only be attained with such concepts. We find that Solowjow expresses himself entirely in the same conceptual worlds as the Western thinker, but at the same time we find that he speaks from something in man that does not dissolve into these concepts, that only makes use of these concepts as if they were a language. And one has the feeling that old times of human cultural development, old times of human thinking are coming to life in a religiously colored world view in Vladimir Solovyov, the thinker of the East, and that something deeper in human nature is speaking than that which can be expressed in the external, sensory and intellectual representations.

But while we find, I might say, strictly reasoned logic in Spencer, and while one moves in the element of a certain certainty of concepts and ideas when pondering him, in Solovyov we find something is at work that cannot be grasped with the same certainty; in his work one finds something that seeks to renew the leap beyond the conceptual world of the old thinkers, the old visionaries. And in modern times, when discussing the deepest riddles of human existence, one feels caught between these two worlds. But perhaps one may say: It is the destiny of Central Europe to observe the two one-sidedness in the way of development and to seek a way that goes beyond both, which then leads into a real supersensible world, in which the problem of death on the one hand, that of immortality on the other, can really come before the human soul in a satisfying way. This path, ladies and gentlemen, is what anthroposophical research is trying to take.

Anthroposophical research can neither remain within the Western conceptual world nor in that world which, I would say, only makes external use of concepts like a language, but which draws from a more or less mystical darkness that characterizes the Oriental essence. On the one hand, the anthroposophical method of research must avoid losing itself in this mystical darkness; on the other hand, it must try to overcome that which always wants to keep the human being, who only lives in concepts, within the sensory world. This can be shown particularly clearly if we first consider, outwardly, that which intrudes into human life as the most intense destiny, if we consider death, in order to then ascend in the realization of the grasp of death to the grasp of immortality.

Death confronts us within nature itself, to which man belongs with one side of his being, as the great riddle of existence. And if we could link it, on the one hand, to what Herbert Spencer presents as the goal of the human life cycle – the generation of the same – and, on the other hand, to what Vladimir Solovjov addresses to immortality, not as a non-logical but as a purely human appeal Vladimir Solovjow addresses to immortality, then one would give human knowledge only that conclusion, which makes it from a mere factor dominating the external world to one that can now also carry the internal of man with certainty and with a firm hold through life.

Let us look, then, my dear audience, at how death manifests itself in the natural existence of man; and let me be clear: today I will speak only about human death, not about the types of death that we can observe in the animal world and even down to the plant world. Within the human world, how does death confront us? It draws together in a certain sense into a single moment – precisely at the moment of the conclusion of life – and that is what makes it so mysterious. We live our lives, we enjoy this life of ours, we make use of it in the outer realm of humanity and the world, and we do not immediately become aware of death in this experience of existence, but only as a riddle about a fact, that this life, as we live it every day, simply comes to an end.

When we now place this single fact of life before our soul, what do we actually find there? Man leaves behind from his life in the physical world that which we call a corpse. The substances and the forces in this corpse are in a certain connection; when the human being has become a physical corpse, they are in such a connection that they cannot remain in it, and they must emerge from it , and this must happen through the same forces, through the same natural laws that we find all over the world externally with our senses and with our intellect, into which we are placed in a sensory way. It must be said that, in a certain sense, the human material and energetic context is taken over by that world when death occurs, from which we actually draw our knowledge from birth to death, insofar as it is knowledge of the senses and mind.

And what does this external world actually do to the human corpse? It dissolves the human corpse, destroys its form, and in other words, it causes it to pass from the individual existence in which it was enclosed from birth to death into a general physical world existence. We look at this physical world existence, and must initially call it “the conclusion of life”. We must admit, when we follow the processes that the human corpse undergoes from the onset of death until it is completely dissolved in the course of the world, that these are processes that are completely unlike those that - albeit initially unknown to human knowledge - clearly take place until death. For as soon as death occurs, as soon as the external forces of the world take over the human corpse, its components, its forces, take different paths, initially for the outer sense existence, than they did between birth and death.

Between birth and death they are held together by something, whether this something is conceived as this or that, or perhaps even denied, and everything that is present is pushed into a mere different context during life, as that which is after death, but this context must at least be called a different one. And so, on the one hand, the human physical body after death, absorbed by the general forces of nature; on the other hand, this same human body, removed from general dissolution, renewing itself again and again from birth to death, maintaining its individual form. The contrast, the polar contrast, is initially a great one, and the question must be asked: How can knowledge come to terms with this polar contrast?

Well, my dear audience, it will never come to terms with it unless it appeals to that which anthroposophical research wants to introduce into scientific life, that which I have tried to characterize in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds » as a path that leads beyond mere sensory and intellectual knowledge, in that the human being becomes aware of certain deeper powers of knowledge present in the human soul, which are simply not applied by ordinary consciousness. These powers are always present in the human soul. Ordinary consciousness leaves them lying in the unconscious; the higher path of knowledge brings them up through meditation and concentration. The seeker devotes himself to certain exercises, intimate soul exercises, through which he strengthens thinking, feeling and willing, thereby evoking more intense experiences in the soul for this soul life than are ordinary experiences. But in this way he also rises above what ordinary knowledge can achieve.

Today I cannot go into a description of this particular path, which I have given here several times. It will be touched on in my lecture next Tuesday here in Stuttgart. Today I just want to point out that this path consists of the soul forces that every person has at the bottom of their soul being raised through meditation, through concentration of the soul life, and being applied to the world.

And what happens as a result? As a result, dear attendees, a third state of consciousness is added to the two in which a person alternates in ordinary life. The two states of consciousness that I have in mind are the one that we have from morning till evening, which encompasses our ordinary mental life and also encompasses everything that external science regards as accessible – it is precisely the state of waking; the other state of consciousness cannot really even be called a state of consciousness in the proper sense – it is the state of sleep. But out of this state emerges the strange life of human dreaming – that human dreaming that is perhaps accepted in a superstitious way by one person, marveled at by another, regarded by a third as something mysterious and unknown , but which draws the attention of very many people to the fact that perhaps the directing of the soul's gaze precisely to this emergence of dream waves from the deep ocean depths of the human soul life could have a special importance for the knowledge of the whole of life. Of course, anthroposophy has nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of dream-related superstition. However, if it does not draw any knowledge from the dream life – that is quite beyond it – it must at least point to something deeply enigmatic and vitally important in the dream world. It must say the following to justify itself.

Is not that to which ordinary knowledge surrenders also something turned away from life when we surrender to life in the usual robust way, when we live our existence in the world only by exerting our physical bodies from morning till night? What we call knowledge, even in ordinary life, cannot come about through this. The finer concepts, the more intimate connections with the world that are sought through knowledge, depend – initially in a formal way – on the external, robust way of life. In a sense, one has to retreat to a place of existence in knowledge that lies apart from the external life. And yet, one must admit that through that which one intimately explores in this remote place, by observing, experimenting, and thereby going beyond the ordinary course of existence with observation and experiment, that precisely through this light comes into life; that light comes into life from something that withdraws from life. Could it not also be the case that the mysterious world of dreams is initially meaningless for the external, robust life, but that it is precisely in its remoteness, and in a remoteness in a higher sense than ordinary knowledge, that it points to the essence of life?

And indeed, this dream world, that which resonates and vibrates from the time we spend between falling asleep and waking up into the waking consciousness, contains something that can indeed be further developed. And this further development happens precisely through the higher knowledge of the human being, through the attainment of a third state of consciousness. Through the intensification of thinking, feeling and willing, something is achieved that is, on the one hand, similar to the world of sleep, out of which dreaming arises, and, on the other hand, is completely opposed to it. When we say we fall asleep, we let the dream sound from the world of sleep; so we have to say: in the world of supersensible consciousness, into which anthroposophical research wants to penetrate, there is not a falling asleep, but on the contrary a higher awakening. There is an experience in a world that is similar to and yet very different from the world of dreams; similar in that it ceases when we submerge into the full physical life with the dream world, which, after all, flits past us in moments, say, of waking up, and immediately gives way to the life that permeates the thoughts imbued with will. The life in consciousness that is attained in the manner indicated can and must likewise cease when it submerges into ordinary human corporeality. Just as the dream fades away, so the higher consciousness ceases when it submerges into corporeality. This waking up, this higher state of consciousness, if I may use the much-debated term, hovers, I would like to say, in a lightness just like that of the dream world – but on the other hand it is opposed to it because it is interspersed with certain thoughts in just as strict a sense as waking daytime cognition.

Thus, anthroposophical research consists in an advance to a knowledge that is experienced with a lightness like a dream, but at the same time it is experienced with a firmness that is only possible if it is logical in the context of knowledge. But one thing is the case with both. When one becomes conscious of the complete context with one's corporeality from one or the other area of consciousness, then one or the other occurs in such a form that the dream is extinguished by the waking day life, can at most remain as a memory, but as a memory it integrates itself into the waking day life , but the content of higher knowledge is not erased, but stands alongside ordinary daytime cognition, but stands in such a way that it clearly stands out from it, so that the person can then experience his own existence as if he had two personalities, one can control the other, can illuminate what he has in ordinary consciousness in the waking state from morning to evening, with the higher knowledge that he has attained, which in turn he can control through his ordinary logical thinking, in order to experience how it relates to what can be experienced in the sensory world. This higher knowledge places us in a purely soul-spiritual experience, one that is full of content and inner reality. Just as in the ordinary life of the senses one can distinguish between something merely fancifully imagined and reality itself in life, just as one can distinguish between the mere idea of a hot iron and the real hot iron that one touches through life itself, so one can distinguish between something merely fancifully imagined and what is really seen in higher knowledge, what is directly experienced.

But this reality confronts man in such a way that it constitutes the complete opposite of what confronts us in natural death. In natural death, as we have seen, the human body is taken up by the general, natural laws of the world, which dissolve it, take away its form, and allow it to merge into their general existence. In higher knowledge, the soul life becomes more powerful, permeates itself with purely soul-spiritual reality, and comprehends itself in purely soul-spiritual reality. But it does not flow out into the general laws of nature as the human body does after death. It does not flow out into the general laws of nature, and this soul-spiritual experience does not flow into any general laws of the world either.

In this soul-spiritual experience, we become acquainted with something that must be said to be different from what we otherwise experience between birth and death in our waking daily life; it is something viewed from within that is as different from this waking daily life as the dead corpse is different from the living human body that we carry within us between birth and death. We look at something from the outside in the human corpse, which allows us to approach the mystery of death in the realm of nature; we look at something that is different in its innermost being from what we carry within us between birth and death in the same organism. And in higher knowledge we behold something — spiritually, inwardly — that is just as different from all that we experience inwardly, spiritually, through our human organism, which in death becomes the corpse. One would like to say: On the one hand, the dead corpse has separated from life for our external view; for our inner view, that which can be seen as a spiritual-soul reality in higher knowledge has separated from the same experience before our soul's gaze.

My dear attendees! In this confrontation with death staring at us from nature, when we look at it, I would say, in the form in which it presents itself to us, when we follow the fate of the human corpse after death, in the confrontation of this fact of death and that which knowledge — when the human being brings the soul forces that exist subconsciously, one could also say superconsciously, into his soul life —, in this juxtaposition lies that from which, in a certain sense, the most important problems of human life arise, even before anthroposophical research. It is an inward consolidation, an inward strengthening of oneself in that which one grasps as one's own spiritual-soul life. One feels as if one has been returned to one's innermost being, one feels completely within oneself by grasping oneself in this one's spiritual-soul reality, apart from the life between birth and death.

And a special shade of the idea that he gets from this view arises for him when he contrasts this idea with the idea of natural death. But then, when man has experienced through higher knowledge this reality consolidated in himself, this strengthened spiritual-soul life, and then immersed again in the physical body, that is, as I have mentioned, the consciousness that gives higher knowledge and the consciousness that is bound to the body, which accompanies us during physical life between birth and death, from waking up to falling asleep.

When these two are juxtaposed, when one penetrates the human being in his ordinary physical existence with what he appears to be, when he beholds his true, higher existence, then – my dear audience – one encounters the riddle of death for the second time, and one encounters it in a way that is not presented in ordinary life and ordinary science. Then one plunges back into the physical organization with that which first emerged from the tool of the body, from the entire physical organization; and one experiences this physical organization in a different way than in ordinary life. One experiences now what it means that we indeed carry within us during our physical life that which falls away from us at death as a corpse, which must move according to completely different physical laws after death than during physical life. And one actually sees that this moment of death stands out as a separate event in human life. You now feel in recognition: You carry within you all the time that which you see in a dead person in physical relationship with the destructive forces before you; you always carry these destructive forces within you. This is a significant realization, my dear audience!

One submerges oneself with one's soul-spiritual existence, which one has glimpsed through higher knowledge, into the physical body and only now does one find out how one actually carries the powers of death within oneself continuously; and how these powers of death are now continually overcome by the life forces, how a continuous struggle takes place in the human organism, the struggle that takes place between the powers of death and the life forces. Only now do we begin to feel what it actually means when waking and sleeping alternate in ordinary life. We feel that the whole human being in sleep leaves the physical body just as the human being with higher knowledge, which I have described, leaves this physical body. But one also feels how, in the ordinary life between birth and death, man relies on the use of his physical body to exercise his logical powers and his powers of thought. For when he is not in his physical body during sleep, he at most brings it to a confused, chaotic dream life, which must immediately vanish when man submerges into the physical body. But through higher knowledge one also learns to see what is continuously at work in the human body, which counteracts the dissolving forces that are in us from birth to death. One learns to recognize that this counteraction is most intense precisely from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. And one learns to recognize how the waking life with its thoughts is connected to that which manifests itself separately with the corpse. One learns to recognize how one actually always carries within oneself the forces that are active in the corpse as the forces of dying. And through higher knowledge one learns that we initially carry those thoughts through which we permeate and order our existence in ordinary life, and that we actually handle it in the right way, that we cannot carry these thoughts up into higher knowledge. Into this higher knowledge, into this higher reality, we carry, my dear audience, only a part of our emotional and volitional life from our ordinary daily life, and in a higher world we acquire new thoughts. The sphere of thought that is bound to the physical body and one sees: is bound to that in the physical body which is always in us, which are the dying forces, this sphere of thought is grasped with higher knowledge. One also realizes that one had to strengthen thinking, feeling and willing in order to carry the thoughts that our physical body carries in our ordinary life, in order to carry the self.

For this reason, my dear audience, the whole inner soul life and the whole inner spiritual life must be strengthened and strengthened for the sake of higher knowledge. What we can leave to the forces of the body in our ordinary life, we must carry and accomplish ourselves in the spiritual-soul realm in higher knowledge. And we experience this personal contribution. We experience thoughts that are not bound to the outer, physical body, that are world thoughts. We do not experience natural laws, we experience world thoughts! Through higher knowledge, we experience the way in which what is outer world revelation is created and formed out of world thought. And what the ordinary world of thought is, and what the world of thought is that one only enters with higher knowledge, is revealed to this higher consciousness. One now learns to recognize the intimate connection between the forces of dying and death in human nature and the forces that actually express themselves in our thinking, in our ordinary imagination, from the moment we wake until we fall asleep.

We are in a dull state of consciousness that only reaches as far as dreams, which are only brightened up by higher knowledge and thus also become transparent. This state of consciousness also only reaches as far as the world of images in dreams, which is not permeated by thoughts. In order to have thoughts in ordinary consciousness, one must descend into the physical organism, which carries the forces of dying and of death within itself. And if we did not have these dying and these death forces, we would not have a self-contained world of thoughts in ordinary consciousness between birth and death.

We are now learning how the human being must, as it were, harden himself to a physical organization that wrests itself from him, that works in the same way as the physical forces work in death, which can only be overcome by the human being being permeated by his soul and spirit. One learns to recognize these powers of dying and death through the fact that, with higher knowledge, one has a world of thoughts that does not descend into these powers of dying and death. And so spiritual life is placed alongside natural death for this higher knowledge, and so man learns to recognize how precisely the powers of thought – those powers that connect our inner life with the world of the senses, that convey the external world – how these powers of thought are bound to the dissolving, to the dying powers of the human organism. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a significant insight, for it allows us to see the riddle of death in a new light. We see that we have not only the essence of death before us when it appears to us as the final enigmatic link, as the conclusion of physical life, but we perceive death as it continuously works between birth and death in the human being, and we perceive its intimate connection with the ordinary life of thought. But with that – my dear audience – the essence of this thought life also becomes clear to us.

It is precisely because what we carry in our soul in terms of feeling and will must, so to speak, combine with the dying forces in order to be permeated by the world of thought that we need for our ordinary life, our soul life takes on the character that it has developed to its highest flowering in the present age, of which it is most eminently and rightly proud.

Let us try to imagine what this world of thought, which we now know to be bound to the forces of dying and of death in man, is capable of. It is capable of penetrating into what is also outwardly dead nature, and in this respect, more recent knowledge has celebrated its great, justified triumphs. It has spread more and more over the field of dead, inorganic, inanimate nature; it wants to see through this dead, this inanimate nature in such a way that one day — this is its ideal — it will be able to see the emergence of the living within the dead, like a combination of the forces that work within the dead. Today, in a certain respect, it is believed that we are on the way to such an understanding of the organic from the inorganic. But even if such an ideal of scientific knowledge, which is entirely justified in its field, could be fulfilled, we will only recognize that which is dead in the living. Allow me to express this in the following way, ladies and gentlemen.

When I look at a plant, I see a living thing, in which substances revolve and forces are at work. Within that which I have before my eyes in this living thing, the same forces and laws are at work that I explore in physics and chemistry; there is a physicality, a chemistry within it. This physicality, this chemistry, is present within the living thing in a different way than outside of it, but it is only within this living thing that it is inanimate. And it may be possible to see through the particular way in which this non-living manifests itself in the living, but one still remains only with the non-living. And one remains with the non-living even when one studies it up to the point of understanding the human being. The human being carries within himself the forces, the mode of action of dead matter. But precisely because he carries these forces of dead material within him, this means that he always has death and dying within him. Through higher knowledge, one gains insight into the fact that the human being thinks in the ordinary consciousness by carrying this inanimate, this inorganic, this continually equipping him with dying forces. It is significant to see through the fact that man must see that which he recognizes as his highest in physical life as being bound to that which is constantly detaching itself from life, that is, that man can think, that he is constantly detaching the forces of the dead from life.

And that is why it also happens that at the same moment that the life processes increase in the ordinary physical life – let us say in fever or abnormal, morbid conditions – that then the human consciousness also turns into the morbid; that a person can only have a healthy consciousness when the life forces, the effervescent, warm life forces, are kept in check by the forces of death. Thoughts, as we have them in ordinary life, are placed in the powers of mind and will that are bound to the living; they are placed in these by the fact that the powers of death are placed in human life. The conscious powers of thought of physical life are bound to death and dying, are inwardly connected, most intimately, with these powers of death and dying.

And so, through such contemplation, what we encounter in the external knowledge of the inanimate, the inorganic, is put into perspective. If we become acquainted with the world of ideas and concepts in all its human aspects, as it appears in its highest development between birth and death in physical life, then we perceive it as something that is given in its nature, in its essence, to the inanimate, and is also given to external, dead nature. And one discovers the great law of human existence: because in us the powers of thought and knowledge are connected with the powers of death, we can therefore only know the inorganic, the inanimate, in the ordinary way. But when higher spiritual knowledge, such as anthroposophical research strives for, enters into this life, then ordinary thoughts are, as it were, raised into a higher sphere, just as that which is continually dying and decaying in man, that which is a continually active corpse with the destructive forces that dissolve its form, is raised into life. And we have – my dear audience – a self-living process before us in the transition from ordinary knowledge to anthroposophical knowledge.

We recognize the ideas, the concepts of ordinary knowledge as bound to death; we recognize that which anthroposophical knowledge strives for as that which resurrects the ordinary, dead, inanimate concepts and ideas to life. We recognize not only a formal process of knowledge, we recognize a vitalization of our soul life; we recognize a direct presentation of that which has nothing to do with birth and death, which really goes beyond birth and death because it does not partake of the forces of death and dying. We recognize the immortal part of the human being and learn to distinguish it from that which is continually bound to death. In this way, as in higher knowledge, I would say that spiritual life arises from natural death, not just a spiritual, formal knowledge. That is why, my dear audience, this anthroposophical knowledge initially seems strange to people. It is usually taken as a mere continuation of ordinary knowledge. It is that in the full sense of the word, but it is a continuation in such a way that the character, the whole nature of this ordinary knowledge is also changed, that we experience something like a birth of a living being within the thoughts and ideas that are otherwise only useful for the inanimate, within those thoughts that I have called world thoughts. In today's meditation, we are confronted with that into which the human being is first absorbed when he separates as a spiritual soul from his life between birth and death. When his physical self separates through natural death, his body is absorbed into the general natural forces and his form is destroyed. When the spiritual soul is absorbed into the world that the higher knowledge already reaches in a cognitively alive way, then the human being is consolidated. Then the human being is not dissolved into the rest of the world; then he enters the spiritual world with his full individuality – yes, [this higher individuality is strengthened, intensified] – he enters the spiritual world with this world.

In this way, by developing the powers of human consciousness, anthroposophical knowledge seeks to approach the problem of immortality. And you see, my dear audience: for this anthroposophical knowledge, it is important to approach this problem of immortality not just by philosophizing about the immortal, but by researching: Where in the human being is the immortal to be found? It can be found through higher knowledge, when one reaches that which, by returning to the body, objectively beholds death in its perpetual activity in us and therefore knows what alone can succumb to death.

Only that which is already continually in the bosom of this death can succumb to it. By seeing through the continuous dying, the actual moment of death is recognized only as a kind of summary of that which is always there. And while we are constantly saving our life, I might say, from death, by always overcoming the forces of death in the physical life, but overcoming them by the fact that within us there is always that which is only seen by higher knowledge, so in physical death, by this the spiritual soul in us, precisely in physical death, that which in its individual addenda, in its individual elements, must be overcome from moment to moment of life, is overcome – completely overcome, I might say – in physical death. We overcome natural death in every moment through our spiritual life, which has nothing to do with death. And when one acquires such knowledge of the overcoming of mortality through immortality, then the riddle of death also presents itself to the human soul in precisely that renewed form, which I took the liberty of describing to you this evening, my dear audience.

And therein lie the reasons why anthroposophy must not only speak about other things, but also differently than ordinary science. It must derive its concepts and ideas, which are, after all, about spiritual worlds, from what we have in our ordinary minds as concepts and ideas and which can only be applied to the dead because they come from death and dying. And therefore only those can enter into this world of thought that carry the will within themselves to pass over from dead concepts to living concepts; that carry the will within themselves to shape the activity of the soul in such a way that they grasp that which must be grasped in life, and not just grasp in a comfortable way that which can only be grasped in death. Today, we largely form our physiology, our anthropology, by observing human beings after death and then constructing life out of death. Anthroposophy attempts to enliven that in the human being that is bound to death and thus to bring the inner soul world itself, as living spirituality, up to a higher level of knowledge.

You certainly do not have to become a researcher in this field yourself — I have taken the liberty of mentioning this here a few times — to penetrate the justification of the anthroposophical world. Those who become researchers have the spiritual world directly before them, as I have been describing it here for years. They then describe it from what arises for them when they translate what they see into the form of human thought. But in describing it, they appeal not only to their own seeing, but also to the inner human liveliness. And because every human being has this inner life, just as they have their own dying process, they can gradually, even if they do not become researchers in the field of spiritual science and anthroposophy, acquire an understanding of what researchers bring out of the spiritual world. The publication of such writings as my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' indicates how anyone can at least get started on their own research into the spiritual world. But it also indicates that such books are primarily written as they are so that everyone can, so to speak, receive the spiritual researcher's justification for what he actually does. But that which comes before humanity as ideas, as concepts, can be grasped by common sense. For this common sense is that which can rise to living thoughts just as it can remain with dead thoughts. And this understanding is not mere belief, not mere emotional understanding, but it is an understanding that arises out of the free nature of the human being, which simply connects what is in it of world existence with what can be proclaimed through research out of this world existence.

It must always be emphasized that anthroposophy is, so to speak, handed over to the world so that it can be tested by ordinary, healthy human understanding. If one practices this, allows it to be lived out in a comprehensive, not a one-sided way, then one will see how one relates to anthroposophy differently than one still often believes today. We can then look at concepts such as those of Herbert Spencer, which only remain within physical life, as I described in my introduction. On the other hand, we can look at concepts such as those of Vladimir Soloviev, which arise out of the fullness of human life. We shall see in the case of Herbert Spencer why he has to stop at physical life, because everything he expresses comes from a way of thinking that is bound up with the forces of dying and of death. And we shall see in the case of Soloviev that although he uses concepts that are common in the West and that to a great extent contain the conceptual form associated with dying and death, But in the case of Solowjow, we shall see how these concepts remain external to him, but how he dreams up what he actually wants to say out of a mystical darkness and a mystical depth, and thus becomes one-sided on the other side as well.

We will see in anthroposophy how it does not simply take what is dead in the Western world and use it as a means of expression, but how it brings what is dead to life itself, how it leads from the mortal to the immortal by awakening what is dead to life.

It seems to me, honored attendees, that Central Europe, with the special preconditions for its thinking, feeling and willing — these great upswings that have come to light in Goethe and those who, so to speak, can be described as being within Goetheanism — the task of avoiding both one-sidedness by continuing in the direction of these endeavors and in fact of elevating our scientific conceptual world, which fetters us to the earth and can only truly say something about natural death, to a spiritual life that has something to say about immortality.

Many will object: this science, which you describe as anthroposophy, is, as it were, suspended in mid-air; one is not standing on the firm ground of fact. My dear ladies and gentlemen! I have tried to show you today how anthroposophy can only be properly understood if it is considered in the context of the whole process of world evolution and the place of human beings in this process. If we look at what is around us here on earth, we have to say of everything: it needs a foundation on which it stands. If we were to hold an earthly object in the air, it would fall down. That which surrounds us in our immediate environment needs a foundation; that which surrounds us in our immediate knowledge of the life between birth and death, the facts of the external sense world and the combining intellect, needs to have such a foundation in order to exist spiritually. At the same moment when we look out from earthly life into the life of the world, it would be foolish to say that the earth needs a foundation on which it rests in order to exist in the world.

In the world of space, we have already become accustomed to the fact that one cosmic body freely maintains the balance of the other through the forces that unfold such a foundation. As science rises from the mortal to the immortal, it must realize that it must take the same path in the spiritual-soul realm as that which confronts us in the mortal. For knowledge, it needs a basis. That which confronts us in the world of the immortal in the various fields must support itself. And until we are able to grasp this image, we will not understand how anthroposophical spiritual science relates to external science, which it does not deny but fully recognizes. But spiritual science must not only research different things from ordinary science, it must also research differently and speak differently.

That was what I wanted to present to your soul through today's contemplation, based on the essence of this spiritual science, and what I would now like to summarize in a few words, saying: a more intimate contemplation of the position of anthroposophy and the world brings us to a very special view of the relationship between natural death and spiritual life. But we can only gain such an insight if we fulfill what Anthroposophy basically calls out to us from the deeper nature of the world itself, by saying: Human being, if you want to recognize that which lives immortal in the spirit, first enliven your own world of knowledge. If you want to grasp life in the spirit, first enliven your knowledge within you. Understand what it means when it is said not in dead but in living concepts. Rise up from that which, as dead matter, needs a support, to that which, as spiritual, moves freely in the spiritual, in the spiritual worlds, which is not bound to that which lives and weaves in the transitory, which lives in itself and which can be grasped can be grasped by man when he presents the great, significant antitheses before his soul: natural death in itself, the spiritual life that he can grasp when he frees himself from that which is bound to the transitory in earthly life!

Dear attendees! Today's lecture makes no other claim than to be merely an introduction to the considerations that I will be discussing in the next few days, considerations about the relationship between anthroposophy and the various fields of science and life.

One of the most significant facts of recent intellectual life is undoubtedly the coexistence, collaboration and thinking together of Goethe and Schiller, especially in the very early days of their friendship in the last decade of the eighteenth century. And it is extraordinarily significant that during this time, when two of the greatest geniuses of humanity found each other intimately, a burning intellectual question between these personalities was, so to speak, discussed and considered on all sides. Both Goethe and Schiller were artists at heart. But during the period in question, they were deeply concerned with the relationship between art and knowledge, as revealed in scientific observation, on the one hand, and, although somewhat less clearly, the relationship between art and religious feeling and perception in humans, on the other. And if one lets the keynote sink in, which resounds through all Goethe's and Schiller's discussions of the mutual relationship between knowledge, art and religion, then one comes to say: Above all, for these two minds, this question was one of the following: How do the powers of knowledge, art and religion work together in the human being to lead the human being to live out and express his full, harmonious human nature for himself and for the world?

Anyone who enters into this lively treatment of the question will no doubt be most deeply impressed by what has come to light in Schiller's examination of this question in his, unfortunately far too little appreciated, “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” and by what Goethe added to Schiller's reflection in his “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”, which forms the conclusion of the “Conversations of the German People”.

On the one hand, Schiller saw the scientific consideration, to which he was led in a certain sense by what his external position had to become at the time, by his professorship in Jena, and also by the fact that he wanted to enlighten himself about the philosophical foundations of art from Kantian philosophy. But every such question took on a character that led to the general human, to the more comprehensive question: What is the actual essence of man, what contributes most to this essence of man within the development of culture and the mind? And so the question became: How does man attain the possibility of coming onto the path of his destiny, out of knowledge, out of science, out of artistic striving? This question became a burning one for Schiller. He posed this question in the essay he wrote on the aesthetic education of the human race. At this time, Schiller often said to himself that there was something unsatisfactory about scientific observation when one wants to strive for the highest, purest development of the human being. Schiller made some remarkable statements in this regard. For example, when he received a piece of Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister” and read it with the utmost interest, he wrote to Goethe about his feelings about the artistic treatment on Goethe's part in this work, beginning with the sentence: “The artist is, after all, the only true human being, and the best philosopher is, after all, only a caricature next to him.”

What did Schiller mean by such a radical statement? He meant that by engaging in artistic creation or immersing himself in works of art in an appreciative, artistic way, man feels his full humanity to be inwardly active and inwardly alive, and that what he experiences in true works of art is something quite unsatisfactory compared to what he can experience in scientific knowledge. It was out of such feelings that Schiller arrived at the peculiar solution which he gives to this question in his Letters on Aesthetics. He said to himself something like the following: When we, as human beings, are most closely in touch with the highest things here on earth, when we are devoted to the contemplation of the world of ideas, which after all is the goal of all scientific endeavor, then we feel the necessity to be logical; we dare not deviate from the laws of reason, which, as it were, takes possession of our spirit and our soul and prescribes the paths for us. We are not truly free inwardly when we engage in this kind of cognitive activity, and in our inner freedom we can only truly live out our humanity.

In this cognitive activity, Schiller sees, as it were, the one pole of human activity; he sees the other pole in man's surrender to the natural necessity of his own being, to his instincts, his drives, to his capacity for desire, which in ordinary life emerges from his lower organism and his drives. It is out of these impulses that man acts, it is on these that he initially bases his life. But one is surrendered to the natural necessity of one's own being when one is surrendered to one's drives and instincts; one follows, so to speak, one's drives and instincts as much as outer nature follows its natural conditions; one is not free. Between these two states, surrender to the necessity of reason and surrender to the necessity of nature, Schiller seeks that “middle state” in which the human being can find himself, and which he calls the aesthetic state, that state in which man is as an artist or as an artistic enjoyer. How does Schiller now describe this middle state from his experience of art?

He says: When we enjoy a work of art as human beings, we do not feel the rigid, strict rational necessity that must guide us in our understanding, but nor do we feel the mere desire that lives in our urges and instincts; for when we work our way up to the free enjoyment of the beautiful, we must not get stuck in what only our sensual urges give us. The spiritless sensual impulses can never rise to the real understanding of the work of art. But in giving ourselves to the artistic, we do not live in an abstract, spiritually withdrawn, unsensual way, as is the case with scientific knowledge when it advances to the level of ideas; we live, because what appears sensually is also is the artistic, in that middle state of devotion to a sensual thing, but we live in devotion to a sensual thing in such a way that at the same time our own sensual nature is laid aside, that we are not devoted to its necessity, that we have spiritualized it, ensouled it. We have descended from the rigid necessity of reason into sensuality, which is appropriate and congenial to us in the artistic; we have torn ourselves away from the rigid necessity of reason; but on the other hand we have also torn ourselves away from the oppressive necessity of nature. In this intermediate state, we are truly free human beings. When we create art, for example, we do not follow methodical rules like those we have to observe in science; we surrender to the free play of what rules in our own soul. The inner free lawfulness, which at the same time appeals to our sympathy and antipathy, guides us as we create art. We are in a free state of mind.

It is from this background that Schiller dares to speak out so radically in these aesthetic letters. In this activity, which is governed by the senses and yet is spiritual, as spiritual as the necessity of reason without surrendering to this necessity of reason, and as sensual as only life in sensuality can be without losing itself to the necessity of nature, Schiller's gaze is drawn to the free play of the child, who does not yet know a necessity of knowledge, but who has also not yet immersed himself so deeply in his sensuality, as he indulges in his free play, unfolding from his sympathy and antipathy. It was in this mood that Schiller coined the radical sentence: Man is only fully human when he plays, and he only plays in the true sense of the word when he is fully human.

What Schiller expressed here belongs to a higher level of spiritual development. Here the German spirit was trying, so to speak, to enlighten itself about humanity from an extraordinarily high point of view. The German spirit was trying to grasp the whole inner essence of the artistic by asking: What can art be in order to bring man as high as possible in his development through the artistic essence?

Schiller was faced with this question. It was no less pressing for Goethe. Goethe followed with interest all the thoughts and ideas that Schiller developed, as it were, through the question: How is man made free through the content of his spiritual life? But Goethe, by nature, could not get used to the more abstract trains of thought in Schiller's aesthetic letters. For Goethe, who was an artist in a completely different, in a broader sense, than Schiller, the question was not as simple as it was for Schiller. Goethe said to himself: Schiller sees three forces at work in man: the necessity of reason, the necessity of nature, and in between the aesthetic state; from their mutual relationship, he wants to recognize the free human soul in a spiritual way. But it's not that simple, Goethe said to himself. Because this human soul is something endlessly complicated; you can't see through it by just piling up three such abstract forces, no matter how ingeniously you philosophize about it. Goethe couldn't just follow Schiller's philosophy. For him, the answer to the same question took the form of an image, that powerful image with the most diverse sub-images that we encounter in his “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”. I will now pass over all the other figures contained in this fairy tale and describe the actual situation, how the soul wants to reach its goals, its freedom, its experience of its true nature, by different paths.

The paths that the individual characters – there are about twenty of them – take in Goethe's fairy tale are all paths of the soul, not intended allegorically or symbolically, but in the way that Goethe had to speak of these paths of the soul. Anyone who sees allegories or symbols in something like this “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” has not yet penetrated into the real, genuine spiritual life, as it prevails in Goethe, for example. If someone says: In these figures I see only allegorical or symbolic representations of states of mind or the like, then he has no idea how rich Goethe's experiences were on the individual soul paths, and how Goethe could not express what he wanted to reveal about the paths of the soul in any other way than in images that are ambiguous but also promising. But I would just like to point out the target figures: all the different personalities in this fairy tale ultimately move towards the temple of the four kings, towards the temple of the golden king, the silver king, the bronze king and the king who is composed of these three substances in an irregular manner. And we see how Goethe wants to lead the entire plot towards the goal of a certain relationship emerging with the golden king, the silver king and the bronze king, who, in a sense, by acting on another person in the fairy tale – on the beautiful lily – the essence of the world onto the deepest human; and as these three mighty personalities radiate the innermost essence of the world onto humanity, we see how the fourth king, who is chaotically mixed from the substances of the other three, collapses into himself.

If one tries to express in somewhat abstract words what Goethe felt at this encounter between the fair lily and the four kings, one must say: He wanted to show how the human soul, if it wants to come to true humanity, must ultimately arrive at a certain relationship to what the golden king represents: the cognitive, that which leads man to wisdom; how he must arrive at the silver king, who gives man that which is beauty, that which is artistic; and how he must arrive at that which is represented in the brazen king, at the good, at real pious deeds. Thus, for Goethe, man ultimately arrives at knowledge as it lives in science, at the beautiful as it lives in art, and at the good as it exists in the religious. But in that Goethe portrays how, separately, each of the three kings radiates this threefold world-being of wisdom, beauty, and goodness upon man, while at the same time man comes to comes to his true humanity, as that which previously influenced him – the mixed king, who is chaotically mixed together from the three substances – collapses and no longer has any existence. Goethe wants to show how true humanity can only be achieved through a very specific relationship between wisdom, beauty and goodness, or – as one could also say – between science, art and religion, in that these three revelations of the world have an effect on man.

What Goethe means by this should not really be expressed in abstract sentences, because it represents, one might say, the whole sum of Goethean experience in relation to wisdom or science, to art or beauty, to religion as it manifests itself in the kindness of human beings. Goethe had to attempt to depict in individual images what Schiller presented more in abstract, philosophical ideas. That alone is significant. It is significant for the reason that, out of his entire epoch with its characteristic intellectual life, Goethe – like Schiller – came to the question: How must science, art and religion fit into human life? And he found no way to express this other than in a fairy-tale-like way at first. Nevertheless, one can see that for him it was a burning question, just as it was for Schiller. Schiller saw in the merely cognizant a caricature of the true human being. But ever since he had come to a real, awakened consciousness of humanity, Goethe actually always strove to seek the foundations of the artistic essence and artistic creation and the significance of this artistic essence and creation for humanity in the nature of the world itself. And one arrives, I would say, at extraordinarily intense ideas and feelings in the indicated area when one follows how Goethe intensively studies Spinoza's philosophy with Herder, how he reads Spinoza's “Ethics” with Herder, how he wants to gain ideas from this ethics about how divine necessity, in its conformity to law, rules and weaves through the world. In a sense, God in the workings of the world – that is what Goethe wants to bring to life in himself by studying Spinoza. But basically he remains unsatisfied. And how he remains unsatisfied can be seen from the extraordinarily characteristic statements to his friends in the letters he wrote to his Weimar friends from his Italian journey. There, in Italy, he felt that he was in an element that suddenly began to satisfy him when confronted with works of art that gave him an idea of the artistic nature of the Greeks. We read in the letters that he wrote back to Weimar the words: Now, in the face of these Italian works of art, I am getting a feeling for Greek art; I have the suspicion that the Greeks, in creating their works of art, proceeded according to the same laws by which nature itself proceeds, and which I am on the trail of. Goethe believed he recognized: the eternal, iron laws of nature that he wanted to feel from Spinoza's philosophy, but could not find there, but which he felt from his own studies of nature and which he was then able to trace into his art in order to feel science and art in a unity. He could only feel this unity where he believed he was looking at the essence of Greek art. He believed that the Greeks had come to understand the essence of natural necessity, and that they had elevated this understanding and essence in their works of art, but in such a way that the same thing lives in these works of art – but in a transformed form – that otherwise only lives within nature. By feeling this, by feeling the necessity of artistic creation in what he now imagined to be Greek art, Goethe came to the shattering utterance, which he now wrote to his Weimar friends, standing before the works of art that he was able to see at the time: “There is necessity, there is God!”

We can see the path that Goethe took: he sought out necessity, divine conformity to law in the nature of the world, from the philosophy of Spinoza in order to gain knowledge; he stood in front of the works of art that he regarded as the most perfect, and he sensed from them what he strove for with all the fibres of his soul. It was in the presence of these works of art that he experienced what he felt to be a sense of the divine. But we also see from this that Goethe could not simply understand art as a mere optional addition to life, but that he strove to recognize how art is deeply rooted in the roots of the world in its forms. And perhaps a particularly characteristic saying of Goethe's, which, I would like to say, leads very deeply into what Goethe experienced and felt in this area. He once objected to speaking of the “idea of truth”, the “idea of good”, the “idea of beauty”. You can read about this in his “Sayings in Prose”. He said: There is only one idea, and it lives in nothing other than in the perceived all-embracing spirituality, as the form in which it can appear to man. He says of this idea that it can express itself as truth, as beauty, as goodness. In a sense, Goethe wanted to have established in the roots of the world, in the nature of the world, that which he shaped artistically; he wanted what the artist created to have its source not only in free human arbitrariness, but at the same time, as a free artist, the human being should stand within the nature of the world. And so it was that not only the question of true humanity developed for him through the question of art, but also the other question: How does the essence of the world prevail in man when he is truly an artist? How do the laws of the world continue to work in the creative, free artistic human being?

I have only mentioned this because it shows how, in the case of Goethe and Schiller, the full depth of the question of the harmonization of science, art and religion in the nature of man himself emerges in the spiritual life of modern times. I believe that anyone who approaches the minds of Goethe and Schiller with both an open mind and heartfelt devotion must feel this question, the question of the harmonization of science, art and religion. For these two outstanding geniuses of humanity considered it one of the most important questions in their lives to fathom how the world essence is a unified one, what relationship man gains to this world essence when he is cognitively active, when he is artistically active and when he is religiously active. Now, I would like to say that the deepest inspiration for a correct, intensely deep approach to this question can be drawn from Goethe and Schiller. But it cannot be denied that we, in an epoch that is so long after Goethe and Schiller, must also freely confront what they raised as a significant human question. And so it was precisely from a deeper, from a truly — I may say it without being immodest — devoted study of Goethe and Schiller that the human question appeared to me as the question of freedom at the time when I set about writing my 'Philosophy of Freedom'. It could not make sense to me that man is a truly free being only by living in the artistic. What Schiller asserted is certainly the case: that in the cognitive observation of the world of rational necessity, one must, so to speak, follow a spiritual compulsion. But something else is at hand: when one follows this rational necessity, when one devotes oneself to scientific observation in this sense, then one lives in what one experiences of nature, of the world in general, and even if it is the ideas of the laws of nature, in ideas.

One lives with it in images, and one feels that one cannot really fathom anything in nature unless one allows free inner human activity to prevail, and that even if the necessity of nature forces us, it cannot force us to act, but that we must freely take up the activity. One feels the pictorial nature of what nature and the world always are, and then, in knowing, one feels one's own free human nature in a very special way. This is what I wanted to present in my Philosophy of Freedom. When one advances to the real impulses of moral action, and when these impulses of moral action become pure thinking, then man lives again, prompted to action by images. We feel the pictorial nature in our cognition, and when we bring our morality to the same pictorial nature, then we feel ourselves in freedom. This is also what actually made man free in the age in which science emerged in the modern sense.

Only life in that which does not actually immerse itself in nature, and therefore also has its limits in relation to nature, only life in the realm of thought, in the realm of images, frees the human being from the necessities into which he is placed as a natural being, and only then could scientific activity have the possibility of full inner freedom when it really brought people to inner pictorial experience. One cannot be unfree in the face of images. One can be pushed or shoved into action by some other force, physically, emotionally or intellectually. Imagine whether you can be prompted to do anything by a mere image — compare mental images with linguistic images — they are powerless and impotent. And so our images are powerless and impotent in a moral sense. But if we start from mere images, then we are free human beings in moral action. It must therefore be said that man is a truly free being not only in the aesthetic state, but also when he elevates his morality to such heights that he can rule, when he devotes himself to a truly free cognitive activity.

Thus it becomes necessary to seek the inner harmonization of knowledge, art and religion in a new way in the post-Goethean age. And anthroposophy, which does not want to be just any old theoretical, abstracted world view, but which wants to be a spiritual content that has an effect on the whole, on the full human being, because it and flows from the whole, complete human being, anthroposophy must, above all, seek to relate what it can give to knowledge, to artistic creation, and to religious experience. I would like to say that this does not lead to some kind of artificiality of the anthroposophical path, but rather that this anthroposophical path naturally leads to it, and by standing on anthroposophical ground, one can be fully in harmony with the particular way of posing questions in this field, as it arose with Schiller and oethe.

Dear attendees, I have to draw on something that is indeed one of the elements of anthroposophical research, but which I would like to sketch at least in a few lines to show how anthroposophy comes to a harmonization of knowledge, art and religion in a very natural way, and not through some contrived invention.

If one wants to characterize how anthroposophy proceeds, it is of course always necessary to point out how the forces of knowledge that lie dormant in the soul, and are not active in the ordinary life of man and in ordinary science, must be developed through certain intimate soul exercises. And the importance of such soul exercises for human life must also be spoken of in the most varied ways. At this point I would merely like to suggest that these soul exercises consist of meditation and concentration, but in a completely different way than they were once practiced in the Orient. In such meditations and concentrations, where the cultivation of thoughts is undertaken in a very special way, thoughts become more alive and more intense. Through through special exercises, one comes to live, not in mere shadowy thoughts, as in ordinary science, but in such strengthened thoughts, to live as one otherwise only lives in outer sense experience, where one is given over to sense experiences with one's eyes and ears. The essence of meditation is that one is given over to the life of ideas in an intense way, as one never otherwise lives in mere thinking. In this way thoughts come to life. One feels how one gradually frees oneself from the physical conditions of thinking and, as it were, learns to think free of the body. Thinking becomes, without becoming pathological, inwardly fuller, more intense. One arrives at images. What I have called in my writings imaginative cognition occurs. Through this one arrives at the first significant results of the anthroposophical world view.

When one has strengthened one's thinking in this way for a while, so that it has become more intense and alive and no longer needs the body for support, then one no longer experiences one's thoughts as a mere tableau of memories, but rather as an overview of the workings of forces within us that are in us because we are human beings on earth. In our contemplation, we have a tableau before us in which we see how our thought life has become intense and has become related to what works in us as growth forces, what itself works in us as forces of metabolism. We learn to recognize that, in addition to our physical body, which is already in space, there is a time body, a body of formative forces within us, which permeates our physical body and is in perpetual motion. We see through this body of formative forces in a single tableau. And by so elevating ourselves to get to know the first supersensible aspect of the human being in this body of formative forces, we get to know a thinking that is much more alive than ordinary, abstract thinking, so that we also come to experience all those realities where the thoughts of time overflow into organic growth. One sees into the workings of a spiritual body that has permeated us since our birth. By rising up to it, one comes to look very particularly clearly at that epoch in our human development which otherwise always lies outside our consciousness. In ordinary life we remember our earlier childhood back to a certain point. Before this point, up to birth, there is a time that is about as dark to us as the experiences of the soul in the state of sleep.

A kind of sleep state manifests itself to us, looking backwards from the point from which we remember, to birth, in this period of our life. This epoch of our earthly life begins to shine forth in its essence before imaginative knowledge, before this looking into the spiritual world. I would like to say that, alongside what is experienced as knowledge, a spiritual body, a body of formative forces, rules in us. Alongside this, one gets the great, powerful, moving impression of what has ruled in us since we entered the physical world at birth. At that time, the forces that shape our brain so plastically out of the wisdom of the world, so that it can become a tool of wisdom, were most intensely at work; the brain's formative forces shaped the rest of the organism. By elevating ourselves to an understanding of the body of formative forces, we experience what has ruled and woven in the very earliest years of childhood, and how everything that once works in human life, even if it weakens for other epochs, will appear again later. Thus, what is effective in the first years of childhood is most particularly, most intensely effective in shaping the human being during these years; it is also effective later, but then only quietly, while in the first years of childhood it is powerfully, mightily effective. And we learn to look at the forces that prevail in the first years of childhood, when the human being has just overcome infancy and still particularly needs the care of the outer world; we learn to look at how he, emerging from the first earthly dreaming, forming the physical human organism; we learn to look at something that now makes the impression on us that it is artistically greater, more sublime than anything we can develop in the world in terms of art. And by looking at it, we learn to recognize what the essence of artistic imagination and artistic enjoyment actually consists of. Only now do we begin to understand the real connection between later human life and earlier life, to recognize it in artistic creation and artistic enjoyment.

When we look directly at a work by a creative genius, we see that this genius has absorbed more from this first childhood period into later life than any non-artistic person. Likewise, a person who is particularly good at artistic enjoyment has more of these powers radiating into his life than an abstract person, a dullard. Without wishing to be in any way sophisticated, we learn to apply a biblical saying in the following way: Unless you learn to recognize the importance of the first childlike state, you cannot enter the realm of artistic experience. — It simply pours itself into artistic life with its special organic powers. That is why art is felt to be such an invigorating element in the whole human being, because art brings to life in us what was the strongest life at the starting point of our earthly existence.

So I would like to say: the primal forces of artistic activity in man arise quite naturally when we in anthroposophy — purely cognitively — ascend to the first supersensible, to the formative forces body of the human being, to imaginative knowledge. And if we then want to ascend to the next level of knowledge, we must indeed develop it in the following way. We develop the first, imaginative stage by repeatedly placing certain ideas at the center of our thinking in a meditative state of concentration, thereby awakening our powers of thought. However, we must also develop the opposite activity. We must learn to withdraw from our consciousness those images to which we have first directed all our attention, so that they become fixed in our consciousness to a certain extent, and then to create a completely empty consciousness. This creation of an empty consciousness is the second important step on the way to supersensible knowledge.

When we have developed this empty consciousness to such an extent that we know while awake: we have nothing in our consciousness now, neither of external impressions nor of internal memories, we have made the consciousness completely empty, then a spiritual world, hitherto unknown to us, penetrates into this consciousness; we thus make acquaintance with a spiritual world, as we make acquaintance with the ordinary world through our outer senses and through ordinary consciousness. Inspired knowledge then enters and with it the second result of anthroposophical research. We can now also suppress the whole formative forces body, everything that particularly organizes that from which we can ultimately gain an artistic sense, we can suppress it and create an empty consciousness in relation to the formative forces body. But then we have the essence of our spiritual soul before our soul eye, as it was before we descended from a spiritual-soul world into the earthly world through birth or, let us say, through conception with this spiritual soul from a spiritual-soul world, before we took on flesh and blood through our parents. We are now learning to recognize the eternity of the human soul – on the one hand, on the side of the unborn.

But we also learn, when we turn our feelings and perceptions to what arises for us as an insight into the spiritual and eternal being, to recognize now how this human soul lived in a purely spiritual and divine environment before its earthly existence, how, as it were, divine powers radiated through it in its existence, like natural forces in earthly existence. Just as the substances and forces that we absorb in our earthly existence give rise to those forces that in turn live in our organism, so the divine-spiritual rays of light live in our spiritual-soul existence before we penetrate into earthly life. There we are permeated by divine forces, just as we are permeated by natural forces here in physical earthly life.

We can certainly stop at mere anthroposophical spiritual science; then we come to the body of formative forces. But we can also turn our feelings, our heart life, to what the knowledge of this body of formative forces gives us; then we encounter the liveliness of the full human scope of what permeates us in the first years of our existence like a dream-like, like a sleeping life, but what works in the formation of our physical body. Likewise, we can remain purely cognitively and scientifically in the contemplation of the spiritual soul within us, as it was permeated by divine spiritual forces before our earthly existence. But we can turn to this being itself and turn our feelings to it; then we learn to recognize what this soul experienced inwardly at that time. It experienced the urge to embrace earthly existence with the divine spiritual forces that surrounded it.

The reason why the soul has immersed itself in the earthly body is to connect with the physical through the divine spiritual. This reason is none other than that which lives in the shadowy afterimage of earthly existence in religious feeling and religious piety. If we have religious piety, we may not concern ourselves with what this soul-like nature is before it has descended into earthly life. These are the powers of feeling and perception towards which the soul soul strove to live the soul-life into earthly existence, that is, when it strove for physical embodiment; but when we think of these powers in the lingering image of the earth, they live themselves out in religious life. Just as art is a radiance of the forces of the first child life into later life, so religious life is an echo of what the soul went through before descending into physical life.

And so we find that if we stop at the level of knowledge and rise to the idea there, as long as we dwell in mere earthly life, where we have to use our organism for knowledge, we find only knowledge, alongside which stands art, which can at most be considered aesthetically, and alongside which stands religion, which can be considered theologically. But with physical science we do not arrive at a living transition into artistic feeling or religious experience. When we rise to anthroposophical knowledge, we have thoroughly true scientific knowledge, but this rises to imagination. Imagination can remain thoroughly scientific. By remaining so, it does not become artistic. Therefore, no one needs to fear that by creating art they will fall back into allegory and symbolism if they are imbued with anthroposophy; they would do so if they merely stopped at ideas.

But anthroposophy is not like other sciences in that it stops at mere ideas; it continues to penetrate, feeling its way from the contemplation of the body of formative forces to the experience of the laws of that which first shaped us in our earliest childhood and continues to influence our lives, and through which we feel so stimulated in our imagination. This is not to say anything against the elementary nature of imaginative creation; but imagination can be stimulated by advancing in the manner described to epochs of life that would otherwise elude external observation. And by advancing further to the experience of the soul before its descent into earthly existence, one comes to sense what lives here on earth in the afterimage of religious life and experience, when we live in such a way that our life through what God is in us is at the same time something willed by God, so that the mood of doing what is willed by God is the echo of what was an important deed willed by God when God Himself still worked in the soul as a spiritual deed before the soul descended into earthly life.

If we consider the whole of human life with the eternal nature of the human soul, we find that there is a natural transition from science to art, to religion. For that which appears in knowledge appears in art and in religion if we follow it only to the corresponding human spheres. I would like to say that Anthroposophy cannot help but stimulate the human being artistically when it takes hold of him in his capacity for feeling and emotion. And Anthroposophy cannot help but, when it takes hold of the human being in his or her life of will, allow that person to feel an echo of how, in some way, they have committed themselves to the divine world-shaper in their earthly existence, and to do what is willed by God. Then the will is stimulated to religious experience.

Dear attendees! In the ancient mysteries, what later divided into three for the sake of humanity's enrichment, emanated from a unity. In the ancient mysteries, in the wisdom schools of gray antiquity, which are hardly known to external history but which anthroposophy is getting to know, science was so imbued with spirit that, in relation to the human soul, this spirit-imbued striving was also beauty. What a person recognized, he incorporated into matter; he made his wisdom creative and artistic. And by feeling what he learned in his liveliness as the world-ruling divine-wise, the mystery school student offered his act of worship to the divine, so to speak, having re-created sacred art into a cult. Science, art and religion were one. Man could not remain in this unity. For the sake of human wealth, the threefold division into art, science and religion had to arise: into scientific certainty, artistic taste and religious belief.

Today, however, we have once again reached a point where the inner harmonization of science, art and religion has become a question for the most outstanding minds. We have seen this in Goethe and Schiller. Today we must again strive to bring together that which has come to us in outward differentiation. Anthroposophy does not want to contribute to the chaotic mixing of religion, science and art, after they have historically differentiated – and this has its justification; it would thereby fall prey to the fourth king in Goethe's fairy tale. It seeks to develop wisdom, the gift of the golden king, beauty, the gift of the silver king, virtue and religion, the gift of the brazen king, in an ideal separation; then they can radiate together into the human being. When the human being directs his attention to the whole human being, then what lives in him as the whole of life, and which is particularly expressed in the first years of childhood, becomes the source of nourishment and also of the fertilization of art. But what the soul has experienced before descending to earth becomes the source of fertilization of religious life.

Without any chaotic mixing of these three areas, anthroposophy in particular can lead people in a completely natural way to science, art and religion, to truth, beauty and goodness, by allowing each to exist in its own nature, but still allowing it to have an effect on people in such a way that in human experience, what is found as truth may encounter the beautiful, the artistic – and respond to it as directly related, as another expression of the nature of the world – and in turn encounter the good, the religious, and also respond to it as another expression of the nature of the world. Goethe, although not yet standing on the standpoint of Anthroposophy, felt this very strongly. “He who possesses science and art also has religion; he who possesses neither, let him have religion!” — thus spoke Goethe; and thus, in essence, must Anthroposophical spiritual science speak again today, in the world being, forming three interlocking organized links: religion, art and science. And man finds his true humanity only by allowing the essence of each of these world revelations to permeate his soul, while maintaining his full individuality. But in him they find each other in full inner harmonization when he becomes a whole human being through it. And in this harmonization of science, art and religion, man can find his full humanity, his development worthy of a human being through all levels of existence of his being.

Dear attendees! With its scientific character, anthroposophy is not doing well with our contemporaries. The scientists find that this anthroposophy does not have the character of what they call science; and in turn, the people of faith, those who, from a religious point of view, advocate a way for people to find paths to the spiritual world, criticize precisely this scientific character of anthroposophy. Scientists are accustomed to taking what is accessible to sense observation , what can be investigated by experiment, to take it in, to combine it rationally, and then to ascend to certain laws that underlie the natural phenomena that are perceptible to the senses.

Anyone who has familiarized themselves with the investigations in this field with the kind of scientific conscientiousness and serious inner discipline that underlie our newer science has often absorbed the opinion that exact, real, scientific only possible when it relies on external sense perception and on what the intellect can fathom with the judgments it makes about sense perception and with the conclusions it draws from them. This kind of research has a certain certainty, I would even say a certain ground in that which cannot be denied in its existence, because it proves itself in this existence independently of the human being and announces itself to him out of this existence. One may, as is the case with many physiologically or even psychologically minded personalities of modern times, believe that what the senses directly perceive, what is the content of human perception, is conditioned by the peculiarity of the senses, and thus has a certain subjective character. But they are certain that even if what is perceived directly has a subjective character, for external observation there still underlies something objective for the human being, which presents itself to this observation and provides a firm foundation for research. Therefore, such personalities, who are, as it were, schooled in the exact investigation of external natural phenomena, feel insecure at the moment when this field of external sensory phenomena is left behind and they ascend to other fields. They believe that the inner certainty that is guaranteed by observation and experiment and by the mind that is bound to them, ceases the moment one leaves the soil of this sensory world. This is the source of such judgments as that made by du Bois-Reymond in his classic speech “On the Limits of Knowledge of Nature”, that science ends where the supersensible begins. Anyone approaching anthroposophy with this attitude will naturally have to deny its scientific character, and basically it is only this psychological background that rebels in the widest circles today when the scientific character of anthroposophy is mentioned.

On the other hand, there are people of faith. They often do not dispute that Anthroposophy presents what it has to say about the supersensible worlds in the form of ideas and concepts, and also in the form of connections between ideas and concepts that are thoroughly scientific in character, or at least endeavor to emulate the scientific character. But they dispute Anthroposophy's legitimacy precisely because it strives for this scientific character. For they say: Whatever can reveal itself to man from the supersensible worlds must reveal itself to him in the most intimate experiences of his soul; man must, above all things, tend towards what he feels from the supersensible with feeling and inclination of will, and this supersensible must bear a certain mysterious character. It is precisely when one stands before the mystery with one's soul fervently and religiously attuned, before that which does not yield to the transparent idea, to the clear concept, that one can develop within oneself that elevation, that selfless devotion, which is necessary for the human being in relation to the supersensible world.

And so it is that precisely such personalities are of the opinion that anthroposophy, because it wants to bring the supersensible into the comprehensible element of human consciousness, thereby distorts the religious feeling of the human being, their pious devotion. What relates to the religious must – so it is said – bear an irrational character. One even says that religion must have a kind of paradoxical character, that it must not be confined to what is scientifically called the comprehensible.

Anthroposophy is now confronted with these two views. It is quite understandable that, compared to the usual schools of thought of our time, all of which can be more or less categorized into one of the two categories described, the scientific character of anthroposophy is incomprehensible and difficult to understand. For anthroposophy seeks to arrive at the supersensible in a scientific way, by paths other than those usually recognized in science, and it seeks to follow this path into the supersensible with courage — until the goal is reached where this supersensible subtle world yields to human ideas in exactly the same way as external nature yields to human ideas for natural science, and it becomes difficult for anthroposophy to justify its scientific character in the face of the often rigid tendency of the spiritual currents of our time. Now, in order to characterize this scientific character in today's debate from certain points of view, it will be necessary to address the methodology of anthroposophy from a certain point of view.

This anthroposophy feels most at home at its starting point when it can fully stand where our time of scientific thinking and scientific research has led. Dilettantism and laymanship in relation to natural science may perhaps be touched on enthusiastically by anthroposophy; but they will not be able to find the deepest inner satisfaction in it, because anthroposophy will seem to them to work far too much in the sense of scientific thinking. But it must be said that anthroposophy begins where today's recognized science ends. Today's recognized science starts from the externally given, rises from this given to the ideas called natural laws of this given. If we then live within these ideas, so to speak connecting the ideas we have gained from nature with our soul life, then we have an inner view of nature, and this inner view satisfies us because we can clearly survey the transition from one idea to another, because inwardly, so to speak, in the whole field of our natural ideas, we have clearly before us what presents itself to us externally in the details of sensory observation and experiment. And when this natural science has arrived at this experience of natural ideas, then it feels at its end. Anthroposophy, however, seeks to begin precisely at this point. It takes up what has entered into the soul as natural ideas, and looks at the state of mind of the person who has united such natural ideas with his soul. It looks at the way in which the human being has applied his own activity, has brought his soul and spirit into action while exploring nature, how he has arrived at his ideas of nature; it looks at the activity that the human being has carried out during the research, and it then seeks to develop this activity further. In a sense, it seeks to make the beginning with an inner soul development, using what natural science has arrived at as its end. This now seems to lead entirely into the subjective.

Yes, by further developing the ideas gained, by seeking an inner soul life as a continuation of what has been applied in relation to external nature, one believes that one can get into the purely subjective, into the purely personal, for which only assertions of a subjective character may be made.

Now, dear readers, for the first steps in this direction, this is undoubtedly the case. But anyone who follows the details of these inner soul exercises for the further development of human soul abilities in my writings “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science: An Outline”, and so on, will find that this subjective approach is only a transitional stage and that in the end, beyond the subjective, one arrives at an objective, an objective that is indeed inwardly experienced subjectively – like the ideas of nature – but which, in its certainty, in its validity, is as independent of human subjectivity subjectivity, as are, after all, the mathematico-geometric judgments that are worked out subjectively, albeit only formally. These judgments, however, are independent of human subjectivity in their truth character, despite being worked out subjectively. Only through the path taken by anthroposophical research does one not enter into a merely formal realm, as in mathematics, but into a realm in which human spiritual content is created that relates to realities. When we draw a triangle in mathematics and examine its laws, it is initially only an inward subjective experience, and we must then apply it outwardly to something that can be perceived by the senses so that we can speak of objectivity. The anthroposophical method leads to certain insights, just as in mathematics, but at the same time they lead to insights that have their meaning and validity in the truly spiritually existing world. This becomes clear when one describes – from a certain point of view, I can do this today – the methods that the anthroposophical researcher applies to his or her own inner soul life in order to enter the supersensible world. I say: from a certain point of view, I can undertake this, because this anthroposophical path of research is a very complicated one, it has to involve many details of inner soul practice, and with regard to these details, I must refer you to the books mentioned.

But now, with regard to today's topic, which is supposed to deal with the scientific character of anthroposophy, I would like to start from a kind of historical perspective, because from this the scientific character of what is currently trying to incorporate anthroposophy into human civilization will perhaps be most apparent. When we speak today of the methods by which anthroposophy seeks to penetrate the supersensible worlds, many of our contemporaries are reminded of methods that are similar to them, or which they perhaps even consider to be the same as anthroposophy.

Just in the last few weeks, I have had to talk about anthroposophical methods in a wide variety of cities, and again and again I heard the judgment: Europe is not suitable for pointing people to the ancient Asian yoga cult, to the ancient yoga system, where one is to prepare the soul through inner soul exercises in order to see something other than what it is able to see without these exercises in ordinary life and in ordinary science. But people who judge in this way do not realize that there is a radical difference between what I describe as the anthroposophical methods and what was present — albeit going back to a distant gray antiquity — in oriental wisdom schools and oriental spiritual currents as soul exercises for arriving at another world in the manner of those spiritual currents, other than the one ordinary life presents. If we point out what these schools of thought wanted to give to man, we immediately notice that the ancient spiritual and soul character of man in the East was quite different from that of present-day Europeans.

If we are unprejudiced, we must take seriously the idea that we are seeking a progression in human development from one metamorphosis of the soul life to another. Anyone who believes that the human soul was essentially the same in all cultural periods, or at most different in certain primitive, wild tribes, is making a huge mistake. Anyone who is able to immerse themselves in the way in which, for example, the ancient Vedas or other ancient documents of earlier times sought to convey wisdom to the world will find that this way of imparting wisdom relied on a very different receptivity in the human being, in a very different state of mind, and perhaps only anthroposophical research is in a position to provide information about how the human being has changed in this respect in the course of his development. If we immerse ourselves in the ideas that have taken on poetic forms in the Vedas, for example, we find that there is an enormous difference between the way in which the Vedas were absorbed into the soul life and the way in which we feel today that they are appropriate to our soul state. We feel the need today to have strictly defined, sharply contoured ideas, ideas that have a recognizably logical character, that are transparent, that appeal not directly to the feelings but only indirectly. These are only isolated character traits that I can give. But anyone who compares the wisdom handed down to mankind in the Vedas, for example, with what we today call our pursuit of science and wisdom, will find a huge difference. What is the reason for this difference?

Now, what is usually called psychology today is not very capable of entering into the inner workings of the human soul, which is so mobile and carries so many individual, characteristic, essential traits. That is why today we find little that actually resembles the wisdom handed down to us in the Vedas. But some clarity can be gained if we do not compare the content of the Vedas with our sharply contoured, intellectualized concepts, but rather if we consider the following fact.

We imagine a human soul that is in the process of transitioning from a state of sleep to a state of wakefulness. We imagine it is imbued with the content of a dream. This dream content can take on wondrous and beautiful forms, can reveal an inner drama, can have a pictorial character that carries a thoroughly poetic mood. Certainly, this dream content cannot be directly compared with the wonderful wisdom of the Vedas. But there is something to it when Plato senses the poetic reliving of the world's secrets by the human soul as something dream-like. If we follow the soul as it emerges from the state of sleep and has these dream images before it during the transition to the waking state, we follow its path further: the dream images gradually paralyze, the person takes possession of his physical nature, especially of his will nature; because only when he has taken possession of his full will nature does everything dream-like disappear. Then he is able to make use of his senses through his corporeality; then he is aware of his connection with the physical world around him, then he is able to grasp the difference between the world of dreams and the world of reality.

What, then, is actually the essential thing in this transition from the state of sleep to the waking state? We can observe how, as it were, the dream fades more and more as the daytime perceptions emerge; the daytime perceptions dispel the dreamlike. But no one can be in any doubt that it is a real experience of the soul to which we surrender in our dreams, and that that part of us which later takes possession of our physical body lives in these dream images. The dream images escape it by submerging into physicality. With a more refined psychology than is available to our contemporaries, one can follow what I am hinting at here in great detail. Then one will find out how the soul actually emerges from a state that we will leave undefined for the time being, through the dream state, how it is in a state in the dream state of not quite having its body. At the same moment that it has its body, it is no longer dreaming. When anthroposophical research is applied to these facts, the following emerges. Anthroposophical research, as it must be understood today and as it takes account of contemporary civilization, initially aims to develop the human thought life so that thoughts become stronger and more intense than they are in ordinary science and ordinary life. This strengthening of thoughts is achieved through meditation and concentration. One devotes oneself to a particular content of thought, applying all the strength of the soul to it. In this way, the soul strengthens itself in the same way that a muscle strengthens itself when it is used in work. The whole mental life changes. One gradually feels that one no longer lives in abstract, pale thoughts, which can only be stimulated by the external world, but that one lives in thoughts themselves, as in an element that is as lively as otherwise only the experience of the external sense world; and by developing the power of thought further and further, one finally becomes free from one's physical organization in one's thinking. One develops an inner soul activity that, to a certain extent, takes place outside the body. Only now do you begin to realize what it means to have an inner soul activity. At first, through these exercises, they take place in mere thinking. But thinking is independent of all corporeality; one can bring it to such thinking independent of all corporeality. But then, when one has brought it to such inner vividness in thinking, one can distinguish between what occurs in waking life and what is present for the person from falling asleep to waking up in the state of sleep. For now we know through direct observation that when a person is awake and thinking, he must make use of the body for the activity of his thinking. For waking, ordinary thinking, the body is the foundation. The thinking that is peculiar to us in ordinary consciousness cannot, so to speak, illuminate itself to such an extent that it becomes truly conscious through its own power; the body must be its helper. Thought must be thought in the body, so that the thinking that we use in science and in our ordinary lives today is simply thinking with the help of the body. In this respect, anthroposophical research in particular makes people more materialistic than they would otherwise be with regard to ordinary thinking.

But you also learn to recognize something else, namely, the inner state of mind in which you are when you devote yourself to body-free thinking, which has arisen through meditation and concentration, when you have a thinking experience in the soul freed from the body, and you can now compare what you experience with what the state of sleep is like. One now learns to recognize that, with regard to one's body, one is just as independent during the strengthened independent life of thought as one is otherwise independent in sleep; only in sleep, in the independent soul that has left the body, the weakest prevails, which can only with the help of the body inwardly enlighten itself in such a way that it comes to consciousness. Therefore, thinking remains unconscious during sleep; we descend into unconsciousness during sleep. We enter into a very similar state of freedom from the body after meditation and concentration. But now the thinking has become so strong that unconsciousness does not occur, but rather a fullness of consciousness, so that one lives in a state that is radically different from the state of sleep, namely in a soul life independent of the body. Now one gets to know the character of human sleep. One now knows that the human soul leaves the body when it falls asleep, but that in the present state of human development it has only those thoughts that can be inwardly illuminated with the help of the body to the point of awareness; and by has consciously risen to such a state of soul, which is free of the body and is filled with content, one now learns to compare this state with that in which the authors of the Vedas were.

These authors of the Vedas could not make use of the kind of thinking that we have in our present-day civilization, and we are led back to a state of mind from older stages of human development, when man simply did not feel it to be his natural state to convey the secrets of the world through the body in sharply contoured thoughts, but where he could, through a certain instinct, externalize his thoughts, even if they could unfold outside the body. We look back to conditions, not as we have them today, but to dreamlike, dull, but still to conditions in which people developed the most important thing they developed in their soul life, namely the view of the world, outside of their body. One gets a picture of how the development of humanity in relation to the state of the soul was from older times to the present day. It can be said that the last remnants of an earlier state were still present until the middle of the Middle Ages, even until the dawn of modern times. It was only in the age of Galileo and Copernicus, which taught people to see the world in sharp, mathematically modeled terms, that this age progressed to an experience of the soul in thinking through the body ; whereas up to this age one still notices how the last remnants of a soul state free of the body are present in a form of knowledge free of the body, and the further back one goes in older times, the more one finds such knowledge free of the body. This could only express itself in soul formations similar to dreams. In a sense, people passed from the body-free state to the state where they use the body and develop what corresponds to their insight into the spiritual world.

We have to look back to such times if we want to understand what is communicated to us in older literature about the wisdom of the world. We must not criticize this wisdom of the world directly with our conceptual worlds; then we destroy it and cannot recognize it in its truth. But if we can transport ourselves back to these older times, and to that through which these older people wanted to go beyond their ordinary perception, then much will become understandable to us. For these people, it was not our science that was everyday, but rather what they saw in their images, in their instinctive imaginations. They did not need to achieve this through special exercises first. For them, the task of further development had to consist of something different than for us. If we now let ourselves in for this realization with what has been handed down to us, and especially look at the yoga exercises of the Orient, we must say: All these yoga exercises aimed at achieving a way of knowing that goes beyond the body in a body-free state, a way of knowing that uses the body as a tool.

This may sound strange, and yet, to an unbiased observer, it is how it presents itself! The goal of the older humanity was precisely to achieve something that is given to us in everyday life. They did not have the sharply contoured thinking that we apply with such triumph in science; they sought to achieve it through their exercises. Yes, even if you engage in the systematically well-performed yoga breathing exercises, where the personalities devoted to them do not perform the breathing process in the usual way, but in an abnormal but still lawful way, we see that they were designed to enable you to grasp the human body with what you were in a body-free state of mind. One might say: What is given to us as a gift is what these people strove for through their yoga exercises; we see everywhere how they endeavor to think in such a way that the body becomes the tool of thought. Thus, for anyone who fully understands the facts, the ancient yoga exercises that have been preserved to this day have the effect of making them see: These people strove for the state of mind that is, so to speak, partly innate and partly acquired through our upbringing since childhood.

Now, of course, the question may arise: But such a student of yoga has, through his yoga exercises, explored the secrets of the world for his own perception, has settled into wonderful worlds; but when one hears what they describe as the revelations they have heard, one soon gets the idea: what they have experienced is indeed very different from what we can strive for today with our abstract, blown-off thoughts. But here is an important psychological fact that must be considered. What can offer man the highest in a certain relationship in his relationship to the world arises precisely from practice, from striving, from inner work, not from the finished state. The yoga students had to conquer themselves with inner soul conquests to see what is given to us as a finished product, and only during this struggle and through this struggle do we become attuned to the deeper secrets of the world. If what is achieved is innate or acquired, it is taken for granted and presented as the self-evident in the environment; one no longer lives into the secrets of the world, one simply sees through the world according to one's organization in the environment. Therefore, for us, who are on the horizon that the yoga students first had to reach, the contemplation of the deeper secrets of the world, which the yoga students contemplated, has ceased. And today we feel the necessity to continue the practice, to continue it at a different level, to take the starting point where the yoga students left off.

The beginning of the yoga training is dreamlike, instinctively pictorial; but it is precisely to what we today feel is the actual spirit of science that the yoga student sought to develop. Today, because the spirit of science is now the natural state of civilization, we have to start from this state in our soul constitution and develop it further. We can therefore say: the yoga student has developed to our way of thinking, we have to develop further from our way of thinking. The yoga student designed all his exercises to incorporate thinking into his soul activity. Today, when I describe exercises to be practiced for the purpose of attaining higher knowledge, I do say that these exercises must be directed towards strengthening the thinking, elevating it – not just to unconscious imagination, which belongs to antiquity, but to conscious freedom from the body. We must become free from physicality again, whereas the yoga student strove to enter into it; so in a sense we are going in the opposite direction.

But then I must describe this path further, how these exercises must strive to develop a liveliness of soul such as we otherwise have in the experience of external sense perceptions. In our sensory perceptions, we are to a certain extent independent of our physicality. The senses are integrated into our physicality. However, we become relatively independent of our sensory perceptions; it is only in our thinking that we fully take in what is revealed to us from the outside world. Only when we develop further from this thinking, which the yoga student first strove for, does it now become important to suppress this thinking itself at a certain stage and to bring about a state that is similar to sensory perception, which does not merge into thought, but which, so to speak, leaves thought behind in the physical body. The essence of our exercises undertaken for the purpose of anthroposophical research is this: to overcome thinking in turn, to rise to a state that gives the person an experience, so to speak, in a second personality, but in such a way that this second personality now has the intense, the strengthened, the pictorialized thinking, and that the ordinary personality with common sense, with healthy thinking bound to the physical body, remains behind, fully aware.

Thus anyone who, in today's world, seeks to gain direct experience of supersensible knowledge must strive to achieve this twofold division of their personality. Anthroposophy is not to be confused with any kind of pathological condition. In hallucinations and visions, the personality is lost in the hallucinations and in the world of visions; in anthroposophical research, the personality remains and the ordinary, body-bound thinking continues to live. Those personalities who enter the higher worlds live in them with their developed, metamorphosed thinking. Thus the anthroposophical researcher is always in a position to follow up with his ordinary personality what he sees in the higher worlds, and to do so in a strictly critical way.

This training is now an absolute prerequisite for the anthroposophical path of research; and what is in the human personality by virtue of this training, the scientific character of the state of mind, is by no means abandoned. This scientific personality stands there, criticizes, controls - and even narrates - from its scientific concepts that which the other aspect of the personality, the one that has entered the supersensible world, beholds. But then we must say: on the one hand there is the outer sense perception; natural science turns to it, it seeks the laws of nature, it seeks to relive inwardly in the natural ideas, which have the laws of nature as their content, that which appears outwardly to the senses. The anthroposophical researcher finds himself in the state of soul that arises from this. By forming the ideas of nature in nature, we are scientifically satisfied by the character that this world of ideas bears. This scientific conviction is an inner experience! It is not the external world, nature, that tells us what is scientific, but our own methodology. When we give these ideas a content from sense perception with our ordinary thinking, we give them a supersensible content with the higher gaze of our strengthened thinking. There is no other content of thought, no other logic, no other scientific method that prevails in ordinary natural science and that prevails in what is seen supersensibly by the anthroposophical researcher and handed over to the scientific soul disposition for description.

That is the inner connection. The Yoga Training has sought the spirit of science as its ultimate goal. We have trained it in the age of Galileo and Copernicus in the outer world of nature, we are leading it further to conscious inner vision, but we do not deny it. We examine what is seen in the higher sense in the supersensible world, exactly in the same way, through the same ideas, as we examine what can be fathomed through the eyes, ears and other senses in outer experiment. In its development, humanity has striven for science. What science has become has become a human state of soul. This state of soul is cultivated by working one's way up into the supersensible world through anthroposophy.

But developing thoughts is only one part of what is striven for in anthroposophical schooling. In the previous lecture on “The Harmonization of Science, Art and Religion”, I already indicated that by strengthening our thoughts through meditation and concentration, we come to an intuitive perception of the soul and spirit of the human being as it was in a spiritual and soul world before birth or conception. One can rise to the eternal part of the human soul in its prenatal existence by developing the thoughts that are present in ordinary science. But if anthroposophical research is to be complete, exercises of the will must be added to this development of thought. Again, I cannot describe in detail what must be undertaken as exercises of the will for the purpose of anthroposophical research; I must refer to the books already mentioned, but I can again say something in principle.

To train the will, it is above all necessary that we raise the will, insofar as it extends into thinking, to a higher level than it is in ordinary life. A good exercise for this is what I call “reverse imagining”, for example when we look back on our daily life in the evening, preferably in images, so that a different force has to be developed than is contained in the thoughts. When we review our daily life backwards in such a way, allowing it to pass before our mind's eye in great detail, for example when we go down a staircase, we would imagine it in such a way that we start from the bottom step and work our way up to the top; not lose one's whole day to it, but it can be done in a short time if it is practiced correctly; if we get used to thinking about the course of ordinary events, then we have to exert the will to imagine events differently than they usually happen. We can also feel a melody backwards in this way or imagine a drama backwards. In doing so, we develop the will to a greater strength than is usual. We can now help ourselves in such exercises by doing other will exercises. In ordinary life, we proceed – if we consider longer periods of time, we can point out – from metamorphosis to metamorphosis; but it is the circumstances to which we surrender and which then make others out of us. But if you take your own development into your own hands, for example, if you try to break bad habits, if you try to unlearn something that may take years, and make this striving a characteristic of your nature by by taking it up into the will, one tries to take his development into his own hands according to a strictly outlined goal. The will is thereby strengthened, and one attains something in relation to supersensible seeing in a different direction than in the direction of thought. I want to express that through a comparison.

Take the human eye. Because it is transparent and does not bring its own materiality into play, we are able to see through the eye. The moment it brings its own materiality into play through a disease of the eyes, we can no longer see. The eye must be selflessly integrated into the human organism if it is to serve the purpose of seeing. Now I do not want to claim that the human organism is diseased in ordinary life; but for supersensible vision it is just as unsuitable as a strong-sighted eye is for ordinary vision. Through the exercises of the will our organism becomes, as it were, spiritually transparent. Normally the body is spiritually opaque; we carry it with us, we live with our will in its materiality. Through the exercises of the will, it becomes transparent in soul and spirit; it becomes, as it were, a sense organ. Through it, we learn to see spiritually and soulfully, as we see physically through the transparent eye. When we look through our body that has become transparent, we stand – as if through our physical, sensory eye in a physical outer world – in a spiritual world. We have progressed from imagination to inspiration and to the actual experience of being in a spiritual and soul world. We learn to be in the spiritual and soul world with our soul in the same way as we are in the physical world with our organization.

It turns out that we now experience something in the image that we would otherwise experience in death: in death, the body is shed, while the soul and spirit live on. That this is a truth is expressed in the image for this body-free will, that is, for the standing within the spiritual world, in the same way that what applies to our sensory environment is expressed only through a thought. We thus arrive at the other side of human immortality; we add to being unborn, being immortal. The anthroposophical researcher thus ascends to a real vision of immortality.

But when one comes to this vision, one also learns to evaluate other soul states of ordinary life in the right way in a more refined psychology. What is present in the waking state as facts of the soul's life can be recognized through strengthened thinking. That is why I gave the example of the soul waking up through the dream world into the waking state and linked it to the strengthening of strengthened thinking. But when we now do exercises of the will, thereby entering into the spiritual world and also being able to gain an image of our soul after death when we have left the body, then we also get to know the moment of falling asleep more precisely for our ordinary life. At first, we experience falling asleep in such a way that the sharply defined ideas that permeate our soul during waking hours gradually become darker and darker. But now we know that when we pass through the gate of sleep, our consciousness is not killed, but only paralyzed; and by experiencing that we now also live in a strengthened will, we can now also consider the states in which the soul is when it enters the spiritual world after falling asleep. There we experience how the soul becomes more and more immersed in an overall feeling for the world, and when falling asleep, what is seized in a very special way is what is opposed to the pictorial character of dreaming. When we wake up, the soul is more inclined to express in dream images what it has experienced during sleep; when we fall asleep, however, we also enter into a kind of dream, which dampens down our daytime perceptions, but we move towards a general experience of the magnitude of the world. When waking up, thoughts are more likely to be grasped in the form of images, whereas when falling asleep, feelings and especially the devotional will are more likely to be grasped. In short, one now learns to recognize, to recognize psychologically, the transition of the soul as it experiences it when falling asleep, from the experience of one's own self to being devoted to the world in feeling and will.

One learns to recognize what paralyzes thoughts, what dampens them, but on the other hand also what allows the other soul powers to merge into the world, which, when experienced in a kind of state of consciousness while awake – and it can be experienced – represents the state in which the pious soul is, that pious soul that does not want to have its inner soul state clothed in thoughts and ideas, that wants precisely the ideas and thoughts to be subdued in order to give feeling and emotion to the totality, to the majesty of the world, to the divine that permeates the world. In short, through anthroposophical research one gets to know both the state where the human being strives towards thoughts and the state where he strives away from thoughts, and one learns to see through both states at a higher level. One learns to recognize that the human being lives in such a way that he first moves out of the universe to use his body, and then moves back towards the universe when he leaves his body again. The states that are then taken over into consciousness are the states of everyday knowledge and everyday piety; but these states are raised to a higher level in supersensible contemplation, which is achieved through anthroposophical schooling.

Thus it can be said that the scientific character of the soul is not taken away by entering the supersensible worlds through anthroposophical schooling, for what one has gained as a scientific conviction, as the state of mind that goes with it, is carried up when one tries to fathom what the said second personality sees in the supersensible world. On the other hand, however, what the soul selflessly wants to submit to, what it wants to immerse itself in, is woven into the ideas. This does not lose its majesty at all, this does not lose the character of its holiness at all, by being brought out of the mystery and brought to intimate inner vision, by which it makes us look up to it with devotion, with reverence. The way in which anthroposophy brings the mystery into the soul, where it can be grasped, does not take away its sacred character. And so anthroposophy seeks to maintain a scientific approach to knowledge, not only in relation to the objects of ordinary experience, but also to maintain a scientific approach to knowledge of the supersensible. Just as nothing is taken from nature when we know it in the right way, through devotion to its beauty and to its majestic peculiarities, so nothing is taken from what is supersensible when it is brought down into direct human experience in its true form, not in an abstract form.

Thus it is that one cannot convince oneself of the scientific character of anthroposophy through a cursory definition or through cursory logical discussions of the criteria of scientificity, but rather by living oneself into into the course of anthroposophical research. The person who reflects on it must convince himself that here there is real scientificity, and one that certainly does not prevent the supersensible from taking on a religious character again. And so one would like to say: Anthroposophy has the courage to proceed with scientific exactness, with a scientific attitude and scientific method where the ground of the outer sensuality no longer exists. Anyone who objects, saying that there is no ground at all there, is like someone who would say the following: Just as a stone is attracted to the earth and falls until it can rest on it when we live on earth, so all things on earth are attracted to it and must ultimately rest on the earth's surface. This is true as long as we move within the orbit of the [earth] planet. But the moment we ascend from the conditions on our earth to those in our planetary system, we are dealing with something different; there the planets support each other, and they do not need any special ground as a base. Anyone who wanted to say that there must be a special world ground so that the planets do not fall into the depths would be saying something foolish. So it is here too. If we apply the same exactitude of the outer science to the anthroposophical field of research, we find that the two mutually support each other. The totality of supersensible science, the totality of anthroposophy, arises from the mutual support of the individual truths.

Thus, Anthroposophy has the courage to further develop science from the sensory to the supersensory, and it ensures that the scientific character is not lost. But it is not so timid that it believes that mystery must necessarily prevail over what the supersensible world is, so that man may retain his piety. No! Anthroposophy has the courage to affirm that the greatness of something does not only have its greatness for man because it is unknown to him, but it proves its greatness even when it is known; and through the familiarity with what religious content is, religion must not be thought of as diminished.

Thus anthroposophy seeks to justify itself in the face of the two accusations I characterized at the beginning of today's reflection. For it seeks to penetrate into the supersensible world with full respect for science, and it also seeks to develop the courage to bring down the supersensible into the human heart. And this supersensible is great enough to fill the human heart in such a way that this heart can still develop in true devotion even when the secret is revealed!

Dear attendees!

When speaking about the relationship between anthroposophy and human life, it must be pointed out again and again how, on the one hand, this school of thought arrives at its results and how, on the other hand, these results can be absorbed by the human being. Anthroposophy only arrives at its results, however, when the anthroposophical researcher has first undergone intimate inner soul exercises, soul exercises that enable him to move with his soul forces independently of the conditions of the physical body, so that he can truly enter into that state which must be described as 'experiencing the soul outside the human body'. But when, after such preparations by the anthroposophical researcher, the content of the higher worlds has been glimpsed to this or that degree and results are available, then every human being, even the simplest human mind, can grasp these results with common sense and also appropriate them. And today I would like to speak about what Anthroposophy can become for the individual through this appropriation of the meaning of life, which the individual can acquire for himself through the appropriation of anthroposophical insights with the help of common sense.

What the anthroposophical researcher himself has, by penetrating into the supersensible worlds, needs no mention from me. For those who have even just begun to tread the path that leads to these worlds need no further convincing of what they gain from beholding them. But we must go somewhat further than this meditation on the path to the supersensible worlds if we are to understand what a person who appropriates the results with common sense actually gains.

There are essentially three stages of inner soul-searching by which the anthroposophical researcher reaches his goals, and today I will only briefly mention what has already been discussed in the previous lectures I have given here in the last few days. The first stage of these soul exercises consists in strengthening the power of thinking through a certain practice, making it more intense than it is in ordinary life and in ordinary science. Through this strengthening of the power of thinking, the human being then arrives at what I call imaginative thinking, imaginative imagining. One goes beyond the pallor, the abstractness of ordinary thoughts; one arrives at thoughts that are transformed into images, but in which one is just as vividly immersed [with the soul] as one is otherwise immersed in the experience of an external sensory perception. Through such exercises one attains a certain inner mobility of thought and through all this one's thinking is liberated from the physical corporeality of the human being, to which otherwise ordinary thinking is thoroughly bound. When the spiritual researcher has completed these exercises to the degree necessary for his particular disposition, he comes to survey his past life since birth as in a comprehensive tableau.

But this overview is an entirely active inner activity; it is not mere remembering either. This overview is a remembering of that which has been working and strengthening in our organism since our birth. The thoughts have become more intense and more pictorial; in this way they have at the same time become something different from the ordinary abstract thoughts that we carry in our soul. We have connected with thoughts that are indeed forces, and the same forces that our brain, when we are still a very young child, shapes and permeates and empowers until we are a fully grown human being. Thus, we first experience the forces of life in this empowered thinking. Through this, we see ourselves in our inner becoming here as an earthly human being since our birth.

Once you have managed to have the inner image of your earthly life before you in this comprehensive imagination, you can move on to the second stage of the exercises for anthroposophical research, which brings you to what I call inspired knowledge. One must absolutely disregard what these expressions traditionally carry with them; one must not think of anything superstitious or the like when doing so, but only of what I myself characterize here.

This second stage of supersensible knowledge is not attained by strengthening the thinking, but by treating the already strengthened thinking in such a way that one removes from consciousness those ideas that are present in consciousness through the strengthened thinking, and thereby acquires what can be called empty consciousness. If you are able to find yourself in this empty consciousness in your state of mind, which now allows nothing to enter from the external sense world or from the memories that are usually in you, then it is precisely by having first strengthened your thinking and then , to the perception of a real spiritual world, both in our present surroundings and, in particular, to the perception of the spiritual world to which the human soul belonged in its eternal essence before it descended from the spiritual world through birth or conception to take on a physical body here. Within the empty consciousness, one arrives at a real vision of that which is not present in the ordinary consciousness and which may therefore be called the object of an inspired realization, because it flows into our soul from initially unknown worlds, which is thus truly inspired by that which is so accessible to us from the supersensible worlds.

Once we have come to know the immortality of the human soul in this way, we can also come to know the other side of this human immortality by continuing the exercises from the thinking exercises to the will exercises. Again, one would say: on the one hand, the eternity of the human soul expresses itself as unbornness, and on the other hand, in the beyond of death, as immortality. But the further continuation to the third stage of supersensible knowledge then arises from exercises of will.

One trains the will in such a way that it strengthens itself. I have already mentioned that this is achieved by detaching the will itself from the thread of external events, for example, by looking back at the end of the day at the course of one's daily life, by feeling a melody backwards, by imagining a drama backwards [going back from the last scene of the last act to the first scene of the first act] and so on, thus in the opposite direction to the external course. If one tries to control and develop the will in this way, as one sets out to do individually in the way I have described in my books “Occult Science: An Outline of Esoteric Science” or “How to Know Higher Worlds”, and if one succeeds in this way in tearing the will away from its usual course and physical conditions, then one, as a spiritual researcher, enters into a real spiritual world. One gets the picture of death, of the soul leaving the physical body when a person passes through the gate of death; one gets the cognitive picture of the eternal part of the human soul after death.

[My dear audience], these are three stages through which man works his way up into the supersensible world. What he has to say about these supersensible worlds after going through these stages of knowledge can be followed with the ordinary human mind, provided one is unbiased enough. However, it is the case that this human mind must now, of course, take a certain different attitude, I would say, in that it must become somewhat flexible if it is to follow what anthroposophy has to say. So, for example, this common sense must behave in different ways depending on whether it is following what the spiritual researcher has to say from imaginative knowledge or what he has to say from inspired knowledge or from the third level of knowledge that I mentioned and that I call intuitive knowledge. It is really the case that someone who follows the results of spiritual science only through their common sense feels compelled to look differently at what is gained through imagination, differently at what is gained through inspiration, differently at what is gained through intuition.

If we get to know the supersensible world of human existence through imagination, we get to know through inspiration what the human being has gone through before birth or conception. By extending inspiration to intuition, we get to know what the human soul goes through after death. But once you have come to know these two worlds, what man comes to know in the physical world as supersensible and what he comes to know as the supersensible world before birth and after death, then you also have an overview of the relationship between these two worlds and you now come to know something even higher. What presents itself to intuitive knowledge is something still higher, in relation to both the sense and supersensible worlds. One comes to the realization of repeated earthly lives, which certainly once had a beginning and will have an end; but for the intermediate situation of the human soul, it is the case that the person once goes through a life between birth and death and then an existence in a supersensible world between death and a new birth, and that this is repeated by the individual human beings at the most diverse levels. By pursuing what is brought out of the supersensible world in this threefold way with the ordinary human mind, that which can be gained from anthroposophy as the purpose of life develops precisely in this pursuit.

Dear attendees, anthroposophy does not give trivial rules for life, it does not give trivial comfort for this or that situation in life or the like, but it points to what the human being accomplishes by struggling to understand it. And in what one goes through in coming to this understanding through one's own inner work lies what one can work out for oneself as the purpose in life that comes from anthroposophy. Anthroposophy does not impose a specific content on the human being, but rather points to an inner work and may promise only this inner work, that it is able to give the human being a purpose in life, an inner support and inner security through this work.

Let us take the first step: a person tries to use their common sense to work their way through everything that the spiritual researcher has to say from imaginative knowledge, for example about the forces that organize the human being as an organism and work within the human being. Anyone who tries to reflect on what the spiritual researcher has discovered will find that in the process of reworking the material, their thinking itself becomes more inwardly powerful and inwardly active than it is in ordinary life and in ordinary science. Ordinary life and ordinary science do not need this inner activity either, and that is precisely what holds back a great many people from anthroposophy, especially in our time. Today, people are accustomed to passively accepting everything that the outside world presents to them; they actually want to receive everything that comes to them, even in the form of knowledge, only passively, to enjoy it, so to speak. But anthroposophy, by its very nature, must make a different demand on the human being. Man cannot just passively surrender himself in thinking and imagining in order to understand; he must, by virtue of his inner nature, make his thoughts more powerful by setting about to gather the thinking power that reigns within him, to set it in motion and, in a moving thought, to follow what the spiritual researcher sees. But as a result, some people feel repelled by anthroposophy in the presence of it. They do not want to develop this inner strength in their soul; they want everything to be given to them, while they can remain passive. But it is precisely by demanding this kind of understanding that anthroposophy develops in the human soul that which leads to a certain independence of personality.

This, [my dear audience], is probably one of the first life experiences that a person has when he wants to get to know the world through anthroposophy. His personality becomes inwardly more independent, it is, as it were, inwardly condensed in such thinking - which he must practice - and thus he is given the opportunity to behave differently in life to many things than is often the case today.

[Dear attendees], one need only look a little impartially at life to see how passively people today are devoted to life, and especially to spiritual life. If you go to a party meeting today, for example, you can experience all kinds of interesting psychological phenomena. You can see how the audience does not counter the speaker with any inner independence of their own, but rather absorbs what is presented to them as if by suggestion. Catchwords would not have such power, phrases would not play such a role, if people could confront what is offered to them in this way with greater inner independence. And here it is precisely what one can get from anthroposophy: that one's own judgment is strengthened, made denser, that one's full personality is confronted with what comes from the outside world. That is an achievement for life in the first instance.

But what we get from this thinking, with which we pursue imaginative knowledge, goes much deeper into the destinies of human life. If we follow with common sense what the spiritual researcher says about the human being's inner organizing power, when he speaks of what a person thinks and what is more than thinking, what is a sum of inner living forces — we must then adapt this thinking to the inner work that the spiritual researcher himself develops. If he wants to bring his own ideas and thoughts, which are his means of expression, to people from the depths of his soul, he must speak in different thoughts from those borrowed from the external world of the senses. This stimulates the human being to unfold his active life forces; [by contemplating the spiritual researcher, the human being] appeals to his life forces, to his vitality. This causes the human being to bring his thinking down into his life, to bring life into it, so that a certain [freshness, an inner] confidence and strength comes into his thinking. The thinking undergoes a complete transformation, it becomes more powerful internally through the study of anthroposophy. If one continues this for a long time, this invigoration of thinking becomes apparent in what one achieves for one's organism.

[Dearly beloved attendees], there is a great difference in the way — this is just one example to characterize what a person gets from such a study of anthroposophy —, such as remedies that are absolutely correct remedies for certain diseases, acting on one or another human individuality. One can find remedies for these or those illnesses from the best medical methods and will still see that this or that organization remains dull in the face of a completely correct remedy. But by appealing to the deeper forces of his organization, by discerningly following what the spiritual researcher has to say, he calls upon healing powers in his organism. For what I recently called the body of formative forces, which we can see in a large tableau at a certain stage of higher knowledge, contains healing powers. It is not necessary that this strengthened thinking should work as a healing force from the outset; it can do so, but it will only really do so in the rarest of cases. However, anyone who has awakened their thinking through the inner freshness of their thinking power enables themselves to be affected by healing remedies in a more favorable way than someone who has not awakened their thinking power in this way. In this way we can bring about the possibility of being receptive to certain healing powers to which we would otherwise be insensitive. Many more examples could be cited of how directly such an understanding of the human being, which has been strengthened and refreshed in the way described, affects the human organism. We must say without reservation: precisely what is attained in relation to imaginative knowledge not only makes the human being stronger in relation to his thinking than he would otherwise be, but at the same time it invigorates him in relation to his physical being.

Anyone who has approached anthroposophy in this way will also soon notice that thinking becomes something that, like a current permeating it, fills their body more and more, so that they feel something going into their limbs; they become more skillful, actually simply in terms of the physical tasks they perform. People will discover how, by actually doing what I have described, they become much more skilled at the ordinary tasks of life, whatever their occupation. Anthroposophical work offers an extraordinary amount for our practical lives; in this respect, it already provides a purpose in life.

[Dear attendees], if we look at the second stage, which is reached in inspired knowledge, thinking feels stimulated again in a different way when we reflect on what the spiritual researcher in inspired knowledge from the supersensible world about the nature of this supersensible world, whether it underlies the nature that surrounds us or whether it is the supersensible world in which we ourselves are before birth or after death. Then thinking feels so stimulated [in a different way] that certain feelings are awakened in the person, feelings that are refreshed and become powerful. These feelings do not become so fresh and so powerful under any other influence than through the thinking pursuit of what has been explored through inspiration. Above all, you will see that [by training your mind in this way] you are able to penetrate nature with a completely different sense than you were able to before. I would like to say: Whereas before, when you looked at a plant, for example, you saw with your eyes its green leaves, its colorful petals and, to a certain extent, what the flower reflects of the sun, afterwards you penetrate, as it were, into the secrets of the plant itself. You feel, as it were, the sunlight absorbed by the plant pulsating within the plant. One gradually identifies with how the plant grows out of the germ, how leaf comes to leaf, how it drives out the flower; one's soul life goes hand in hand with the inner becoming of the plant itself and thus with every single [natural process]. It is something like a submerging into nature, like developing an elementary sense of nature. The peculiarity of the anthroposophical science that is meant here is that it does not produce a world-unrelated mysticism, but brings people closer to reality, gives them a sense of nature through which they can gradually deepen their understanding of the beauty and grandeur of nature, so that they can grow together again with nature and ultimately feel at one with it.

I am not saying, [dear attendees], that all these things cannot also be present to a certain extent through certain original, elementary, human predispositions. But what I am saying is that even for those who, through their innate abilities, have such qualities to a high degree, these can still be increased by pursuing the results of anthroposophical inspiration. Whether one has little or much of a sense of nature, one can still increase what one has in this way.

And another thing also comes about through the intellectual pursuit of inspired knowledge: one learns to empathize with one's fellow human beings in a different way. If, through the mental reliving of the imagination, one comes to possess one's own independent personality, then through the reliving of inspiration one comes into the inner life of nature, but also, to a certain extent, into the inner life of other people – again something that should be particularly considered in the present.

Let us look at how people today often pass each other by without understanding, or let us see how few people there are today who can really listen to others. Being able to listen to others is part of understanding people. How often do we see today that when someone speaks, if the other person has only a louder voice than the other, they interrupt and say what they want to say, what they know, even though social life could be very different if people were to approach each other with understanding. But [my dear audience], the person who follows the inspired insights with their thinking gradually realizes that what they experience with other people is basically something that belongs to the deepest part of their own soul. Here we have already reached a point where anthroposophy must go into its more precise results in order to be able to present certain things that are present in life in their correct relationships.

In our [sensory and] emotional life, we as human beings reveal what we experience in the outside world, which is the result of impressions from the outside world. But not all of these impressions directly form the content of our feelings, of our entire mind during our waking day-to-day life. Those who are able to study the nightly dream life with its inner drama more closely than is usually the case will already get an inkling of what anthroposophy can then raise to complete certainty: namely, that in the depths of our emotional life sits that which is the result of our intimate relationships [with the people] we come together with in life. Just as our dreams reveal in the most diverse ways what we might not even consider during the day, to which we are not attached with intense feeling, as it appears in the image, so the circumstances in which we find ourselves in our social interactions with people penetrate much deeper into our mental life than the things of which we are aware in our daily lives. There are relationships between people that penetrate deeply into the emotional life. We stand between people and talk to each other because we are involved in life, perhaps always only superficially, but there are many things that play between people at a deeper level. (Even for those who are not spiritual researchers, the dream life reveals many things.

Everything we experience [from person to person] forms the basis of our emotional life, our entire system of feelings. And some of the disharmony that arises from the depths of this emotional life, which arises in such a way that we feel permeated by an inner pain, an inner deprivation or disappointment, often stems from the fact that that relationships have been formed between people [that we have not brought to consciousness], which sit deep down in the mind, plague us and are just waiting for us to fully bring them into consciousness in order to place them in the right way in relation to our own soul life. Sometimes the solution to the mystery of our own mental life is that we know how to bring our experiences into consciousness in the right way.

If we now follow the results of inspired knowledge in our thinking, we acquire a sense of how to listen carefully to other people, for example, but in a broader sense, we also acquire an understanding of our fellow human beings, and it is precisely through this that we develop a social sense in the deeper sense. We develop that in us which makes us particularly suited to find our way into the social order of mankind for our own satisfaction and for the benefit of other people, insofar as this benefit can come from us. A person's life becomes most rich when he influences all good and evil in man by having trained his thinking in the comprehension of inspirational truths. World and human knowledge through this sense of nature and understanding of man is acquired by trying to penetrate the results of inspired knowledge. Again, it is the case here that anthroposophy does not make people unworldly, but rather brings them close to life and to people.

We experience many things in our time that are called social demands. But what is social feeling and perception is — [the unbiased can see it] — less developed in our time. But this is something that our time urgently needs to develop, and in this respect anthroposophy can and may fulfill a kind of task for the time by bringing people closer to each other in the way I have indicated. It is fair to say that it is precisely anthroposophy that can serve through understanding what I have described, through understanding the other person, through genuine, powerful love of neighbor. [And how is all this achieved, ladies and gentlemen? It is achieved by man acquiring a very specific internalized sense of truth by pursuing the inspired truths in the manner indicated.]

In our ordinary lives, we have – if I may call it that – a logical sense of truth. Through our conclusions [and judgments], we come to find one thing to be right and another to be wrong; this has a certain logical character. If we then apply this logical character to the inspired truths, our whole understanding of the world becomes internalized. Our sense of truth itself becomes different. We begin to feel that which proves to be right in the context of the world as something healthy. [This is a great achievement, my dear audience, when we no longer perceive a judgment, a conclusion, merely as logically correct, but truly perceive that which is right as something that heals, preserves and strengthens the soul so that we have a sympathy in looking at what is true]; when error presents itself to us in such a way that we perceive it as something that makes the soul sick, weakens it, and inwardly as an antipathy. As a result, something arises in the soul at a higher level that can be called a “psychic-instinctive life”, something that, precisely because it is instinctive, can guide us safely through life.

We know that animals have a certain security through instinct [in relation to physical life]; they avoid what is harmful to them as food and choose what is beneficial to them. Of course, we cannot compare the life of the soul with the life of physical instinct; but when we see something similar occurring in human life at a higher level [because it occurs at a higher level in the soul], we have to speak of a psychic-instinctive. [One comes to live in the world in such a way that one feels instinctively secure about truth and error, like a color, as an animal feels through its instinct about its food and poisons. It is precisely through this that this soul instinct enters our human organism through the contemplation of inspired truths. It is precisely through this that we enrich our purpose in life quite substantially.

Man gains something, [as inner support], such as life security, by being able to acquire this instinctiveness at a higher level. And precisely because we acquire the ability to perceive something as healthy conclusion or to perceive it as something pathological or destructive, precisely because of this, we are able to develop a sense of nature and understanding of people.

If I may mention another [dear audience], we come deeper into the results of anthroposophy. What is needed above all as preparation to receive the revelations of the supersensible worlds with one's developed knowledge is a certain quick apprehension, a certain presence of mind. I have described how to develop this in the writings “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science: An Outline”. Why do you need presence of mind? Well, at the moment when the real spiritual world appears before you, you are no longer dealing with the same conditions of space and time as before; rather, it is necessary to grasp a spiritual reality at the same moment it appears. For if one is not sufficiently quick-witted to grasp it at the very moment it appears, it is already gone; one cannot grasp it at all. It is a basic requirement for the anthroposophical spiritual researcher to acquire a certain presence of mind for his research. What he gains through inspiration and grasps with presence of mind still has something of the way the thing was found clinging to it when he reflects on it. For when a person reflects on it, he stimulates in himself the qualities that led to the discovery of something like this. (It is therefore a training of presence of mind to follow the inspired truths, if they really are such, in thought.) But in doing so, we make ourselves more capable of dealing with life. For how much some people suffer today when they cannot come to a decision about this or that in life that requires them to make a decision! Becoming decisive is what can be gained particularly from thinking about the inspired truths. And this presence of mind is further enhanced when one becomes consciously aware of how one can now grasp in an instant many things that previously required long chains of thought to understand, because one perceives them directly as healthy truth or as a disease-causing, destructive error, as directly as one otherwise has a taste, smell or tactile experience. It is absolutely the case that one develops the same kind of aliveness in relation to truth and error within oneself as one otherwise has in relation to external sensory perception, but that one develops this aliveness as the experience of a higher, supersensible realm.

[Now, dear attendees], the spiritual researcher then goes on to explore what presents itself to him through intuitive knowledge by further developing and strengthening his will so that this will becomes independent of the physical body and the person is able to place himself in the external spiritual world. He is then able to be in the external spiritual world with his soul and spirit just as he is in the physical world with the help of his senses. But this standing within the external spiritual world is basically nothing other than an experience of one of the noblest human impulses on a higher level of life: it is an experience in love. It is also an experience in freedom, for man becomes unfree only by becoming dependent on his physical body, as I explained in detail in the early 1890s in The Philosophy of Freedom.

, as I explained in detail in the early 1890s in The Philosophy of Freedom. The moment a person rises to have impulses that he grasps through moral intuition, he becomes a free personality [in a moral sense]. But he can also become a free personality in relation to his whole position in relation to the environment, namely to the spiritual, supersensible basis of this environment, to the supersensible basis of his own human being, when this supersensible basis presents itself in the experience before birth and after death and also in the experience of repeated earth lives.

What is contained in an external spiritual world, and also in an external spiritual world of facts, is love on a higher level, the love that, even in the sense world, frees man in a certain sense from what would otherwise be imposed on him by his physicality through his urges and instincts. Karl Julius Schröer once gave a beautiful definition of love, which he explained in more detail in his book about Goethe, saying, “Love is the only passion of man that is free of selfishness.” It cannot be said that love is free of selfishness in its lower stages; but it must be said that as love develops to ever higher and higher stages, allowing itself to be more and more imbued with soul and permeated by spirit, it will make the essence of the human being, in which he merges with his own essence into the other being and submerges with his own essence into the other, more and more free of selfishness. And precisely by making this love a real power of knowledge in intuitive insight, it will also awaken love in this sense in man, in accordance with the intuitive truths that are contemplated.

Dear attendees, I know very well how the present shrinks from speaking of love as a power of knowledge; nor is it at all about ordinary love as a power of knowledge. But when love is elevated through such [serious soul-will exercises] into the experience and experience of the spiritual world, then love becomes a power of knowledge; then, precisely through this loving engagement with spiritual beings and spiritual facts, one attains real objectivity, the penetration of the object in its true form into human knowledge and thereby also into the human overall experience. It is precisely in this development of intuitive knowledge and also in the intellectual pursuit of the results of this intuitive knowledge that one notices how man comes to the experience of his self and also what hinders him from experiencing his self.

For, [my dear audience], anyone who looks into his own heart without prejudice will very well realize how little his own self actually stands before his soul. More or less, what we call our self in ordinary life is only a summary of what is reflected from the outside world as if in a single point. But what the real I, the real self is, is not at all vivid to ordinary consciousness; and if we were to live in such a way that our ordinary consciousness were not interrupted again and again by sleep, we would not experience the human I at all for ordinary consciousness. If we were able to go back to an experience of things in an uninterrupted, uninterrupted course of our consciousness since birth, we would still only find a sum of external images of experience in it, but not the human ego. We become aware of the ego precisely because we withdraw again and again from external experience into a state of sleep – even if we do not develop consciousness in the process. [It is exactly the same when we look back and remember our life.] We actually only ever see what we have experienced during the day, and we always have to see it interrupted [by sleep] during the night. What presents itself through this interruption is, in a person's life, a sum of dark spots in the brightly lit space of memory. If it were not for these dark spots, we would have no resistance to the light that arises from them. We would only experience the outside world, not ourselves!

But the one who ascends through intuitive knowledge to the contemplation of repeated earthly lives, only then gets a view of the true self of man, which goes through repeated earthly lives and can only be recognized in this going through repeated earthly lives. Anyone who has gone through this, as the spiritual researcher has to express himself about the nature of his research into repeated lives on earth, gets a vivid idea of the self of the human being. But he also gets a vivid idea of what knowledge in love is: merging with the external object of the spiritual world. And he gets an insight into the fact that we can only really experience our true self when we become selfless. And love in particular, when it is described in its higher stages as the “only passion that is free of selfishness,” it is at the same time that which allows us to experience the power of our own self in our experience of the external world, in our devotion to the external world.

This is a profound mystery of human nature: that one only experiences one's self when one experiences the outside world, embraces the outside world in love and is able to penetrate [into the secrets of the outside world with love] so that one can immerse oneself in it with one's entire being. This underlies many sayings, such as Goethe's: He first acquires his true self who first loses it in order to gain it. Only when we live ourselves into the world do we thereby live ourselves into our true self; whereas our ordinary self is only [thereby ours] in that it is based on physical corporeality and thereby diverts us from our true self. But by training himself in such a way of thinking about the results of intuitive knowledge, the human being comes to not only think, feel or sense his self, but to bring into a certain [context] that which is most important to him for the earth – that is the human will.

How do we actually stand in relation to the will for ordinary consciousness? When we are awake, we are really only fully awake in our mental life; our feelings are in a state towards our ordinary consciousness that is otherwise like dreams, except that they occur in our soul life differently than dreams; but what will is, has sunk so deeply into the subconscious that it is experienced like the states from falling asleep to waking up. Let us just realize what happens when we carry out the simplest volition, for example when we raise our arm and hand. First we have an idea: the intention to raise our hand and so on. Then what is mysteriously hidden in this intention penetrates down into the depths of the organism, and we know just as little about what is going on down there as we do about what is going on with us from falling asleep to waking up – until we then find ourselves waking up. We also find ourselves again when we look at the raised hand or arm from the outside after the executed volition. [Thus we find the volitional content of our thought.]

In a sense, every single act of the will is a falling asleep and a waking up and an intermediate state of being absorbed in sleep. By developing in oneself the strengthening of willpower and the liberation from the physical body, the whole will becomes like a transparent, holistic sensory organ. Just as we have physical organs, for example our eyes, and through them see the physical world, so at a different level the human being sees into the spiritual world through his or her entire spiritual organization, and thereby also into the essence of his or her will. When a spiritual researcher describes the nature of the will or the nature of the human ego, they must clothe this description in such thought forms that anyone who follows these thoughts with a healthy understanding of human nature will receive something of the reflection of how the will must be spoken of in this particular way, how the human ego is connected to the will [this deeper aspect of human nature]. This human ego is basically as deep down in human nature as the will itself; it must be brought up. But a reflection of this bringing up passes over to him who reflects on the intuitive knowledge of the ego. In this way he develops energy of action in himself, in this way he strengthens his will.

While the reflection of imaginative insights elevates the personality and can make it independent, while the reflection of inspired insights ignites the human mind in the most diverse ways, leading to an understanding of nature and of true human understanding and to an experience of the healthy and the sick in truth and error, the reliving of intuitive knowledge educates the human will. Those who educate themselves in this way will soon notice how their will becomes more active and how they truly begin to love what their destiny imposes on them in the outside world. We learn to fit into our destiny, we become strong in relation to our will in an active and passive way towards life; we become strong also in bearing suffering and pain as well as in experiencing joy. We become strong – not by passing by the suffering and pain of life; no, but through what is aroused [in our mind in the healthy and sick soul life], we become more receptive to the joys and pains of life. We do become more sensitive to things and experiences, but by reliving intuitive insights, the will is strengthened so that we can go through life more uprightly and endure our destiny more surely in both suffering and joy.

And by developing the reliving of intuitive knowledge, we feel connected to the world in a way that itself represents a religious sense of the world, which represents what the deepest divine impulses in the world - through immersion in love in this world - are capable of achieving. The religious and artistic sense is kindled by this immersion in love in the world, to whatever extent it may be present. Those who adhere to anthroposophy in this respect will benefit themselves in terms of the further development of their artistic, [religious] and moral being if they adhere to what has just been indicated in anthroposophy.

So, [my dear attendees], anthroposophy, by wanting to speak of what can become the purpose of life through it, does not approach people with some abstract sermons or admonitions, but in such a way that it tells them: When people experience what can be explored in the spiritual worlds through it, he acquires inner strength for his thinking, which he makes alive, and for his feeling, which he makes more inward and more accessible to world phenomena. He also acquires further development for his will, which he makes stronger and at the same time more capable of suffering, but also more suitable for responding to the joys of life in the right way.

This is what anthroposophy has to say about the purpose of life that a person acquires by immersing themselves in anthroposophy and delving into it [a certainty in life that cannot be gained in any other way]. Anthroposophy has nothing ready to give to a person in this regard as their purpose in life, but only what they can work for themselves, but will possess all the more surely for it.

Life is something that philosophers view in a variety of ways: one views it pessimistically, another optimistically, and yet another more neutrally, and so on. But however one may feel about these various nuances, anyone who looks back on what he himself has been through in life will agree with the maxim: “Only those who have to conquer it daily deserve freedom and life!”

In every sense, life wants to be conquered by people every day. And that is good; because those personalities who would only passively grow into life would also have nothing of life for their own being, because what a person really possesses is what he has to conquer in life. If we remember the truth that only those who must conquer it daily deserve freedom and life, then we may add: Anthroposophy, for its part, wants to bring the means to man through which this daily conquest can be carried out by man!