The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It is not only desirable indeed in every area of thinking and life but also necessary to get to know the sources of error beside those of truth. Since one can only shelter from all obstacles which oppose the quest for truth by the knowledge of the sources of error. However, the knowledge of the sources of error is particularly necessary in the area of spiritual research because there the error lies in wait for you everywhere, so to speak. However, it is disguised in most cases so that you can hardly recognise it. In many cases it is in such a way that one can get to truth only on the paths of spiritual research if you can really defeat the error like an adversary.

I have explained the day before yesterday that the human being has no other means on the path of spiritual research than the human soul that can mediate between the human knowledge and the supersensible worlds. The usual science produces its outer instruments with which it observes its experiments. The spiritual researcher has as an instrument only what he can make of his soul, while he gets out soul forces, which are not necessary for the usual physical life and cognition, but are cognitive forces slumbering there, and enters with these cognitive forces into the supersensible world.

I have also shown that the soul—if it applies the characterised means to itself—advances first to the so-called Imaginative knowledge and how already there an error lies in wait for you against which the spiritual researcher must fight, namely the error to consider this imagery as something objective that exists outside of you in the world.

I have already said that any self-education of the spiritual researcher must tend to a strong willpower so that the pictures emerging in the soul are considered as nothing but reflections of own soul experiences. I have also said that one has to erase this Imaginative world from the soul, has to descend to unfathomable depths, and that only thereby the soul becomes able to feel the supersensible facts and beings objectively.

As a counter-image of the Imaginative knowledge, I have put the mediumship. Of course, it is not possible to repeat everything that I have said the day before yesterday; I want only to remember that I have drawn your attention to some doubtful aspects of mediumship. If I do not mention them today, you must not conclude that these doubtful aspects were not enough taken into consideration. I have already said what mediumship consists of. While with the Imaginative knowledge the inner vitality of the soul is strengthened, the consciousness is more strengthened than, otherwise, in the usual life, the ego; the usual consciousness of the medium is diminished, so that with the medium the usual thinking and feeling stop and an unconscious state takes place. Because the consciousness is expelled from the medium as it were. The forces that exist except the consciousness in the human nature are brought into the universal world being, and this world being with its spiritual subsoil and processes works immediately into the medium. The medium can thereby reveal itself, but not as an individuality, the interplaying forces and processes of the world reveal themselves. The medium becomes the revelator of the spiritual work and actions of beings of the world. Thus, the Imaginative knowledge with the strengthening of consciousness confronts mediumship where the consciousness is extinguished more or less.

Let us go first into the sources of error of mediumship. Those people who like to get knowledge by the revelations of media reject as a rule that the medium takes up some spiritual-scientific teachings, concepts, or ideas in its consciousness. That is, such researchers who want to recognise objective truth by mediumship do not like that the medium has learnt ideas of the spiritual world. From their viewpoint, they are right because the knowledge of spiritual science uses the consciousness strongly, and pushes its way into the human consciousness. Then it is difficult to blank out this consciousness of the medium, to quieten these strong forces really. Then one can experience that the medium instead of making known that which is independent of its own individuality reveals that only which has worked before as spiritual science. The investigators of this field are very much anxious as a rule to keep their media away from the influence of spiritual research.

A strong imagination of the medium is also not appropriate because it can describe various things in the world. Since every strong imagination works substantially on the individuality and pushes its way through if the consciousness is diminished. Thus, one may say, any active and creative content of the consciousness disturbs the manifestations of the medium. Yes, everybody knows who has experience in that field that people with strong imagination are just bad media. If a personality has taken up, for example, that which you can read in my Occult Science about the evolution of the planetary system, and can induce her/him to make manifestations, you will find out that that which the medium has learnt this way is mixed in her/his manifestations, while one can get, otherwise, the strangest results which are grotesque now and again. If one gets over the grotesque expression, it appears just with media of certain kind how cosmic connections of the evolution can be expressed. It is necessary for that who wants to investigate with the help of a medium above all to appropriate a certain experience to distinguish the subjective, individual consciousness contents of the medium from that which the medium cannot know and still manifests itself by it. Hence, for more trivial investigations one has to consider those manifestations of media in particular with which one knows for sure that the medium makes known something that he/she could not at all make known with her/his full consciousness.

I bring in things only which are exactly verified which everybody knows who has experience in this field, as one knows any scientific facts. If one receives a communication from a medium, for example, in a language which the medium has not learnt, then one knows that here something speaks through the medium that cannot be associated with the individuality; one knows that the medium unveils objective world contents.

Thus, everywhere we recognise the source of error by the peculiarity of the medium that the practical person has to avoid in this field. In particular, one has to consider this source of error if one deals with the observation of somnambulistic persons who make known something of the spiritual world by those methods, those manifestations to which they are enabled. There one will always find that something subjective is largely mixed in the manifestation. Someone who has experience in this area knows that a medium that is for example a Protestant receives her/his manifestations quite different from a medium that is a Catholic. One can experience that a Catholic medium whose emotional life is penetrated with Catholic views beholds certain beings in the spiritual world that appear, however, in such a way, as the person concerned imagines it, for instance, as an angel. What can be the case with such a Catholic medium will not be the case with the Protestant one. Hence, it is again urgently necessary, beside the observation of that which makes known itself by the medium to envisage the individuality of the medium exactly. Here we get to an area that can light up the sources of error to a great extent.

That who is a sceptic in this area or regards the whole story as folly will say, there you have it, there that makes known itself by such a person what he/she thinks, what he/she has in his/her consciousness.—Indeed, if one looks above all at that in its totality what the media unveil, then one will almost never escape the errors unscathed. However, the objective beholder of these things considers the contents of the manifestations less and less but it comes more into consideration that even such things can be experienced with diminished consciousness. The experience is considered.

If one appropriates the practice to ignore the contents of the manifestation and observes which processes happen in the human soul as results of this coherence of the human nature with the universal forces, then you realise why it is possible that once the manifestation is coloured Catholic and the other time Protestant. Since the experience of spiritual forces and beings matters that dress only in the described way. The error originates if one considers the sheaths as the essentials. You find truth if you can ignore the disguise and look at the fact that generally such a process takes place—no matter if and how the experience is coloured by the individuality. Since the experience is not an angel or anything else, but these are spiritual forces which you can behold only with careful investigations, but whose existence the medium can prove and express.

One cannot say easily where in the described area error stops and truth begins because really the one changes into the other. One has to characterise the matter rather in such a way that one takes a way where one approaches truth more and more if one acquires the practice to exclude the sources of error, so that probably someone who looks for truth in this area conscientiously can be very misunderstood in our present where one does not like such matters. One believes that that which he wants to tell as experiences is anyhow contestable. However, the conscientious researchers in this area, actually, do not at all mean that; they only mean the description of something that has appeared, and if they are conscientious, they themselves indicate where the sources of error are. However, it is sufficient to be able to show a path to attain knowledge of a spiritual world that is threatened by error, indeed, with every step you do. However, you can thrust aside the error, the further you advance. Hence, it is not a matter of answering the question: what is truth what is error?—but the matter is that there is a way to overcome the error gradually and get to the area of truth, so that truth is as it were like something that you approach as a distant aim. These are the essentials in this field.

Then it depends with the progress on this way whether one gets more and more to such experiments—if we like to call it so—in which the individual of the consciousness is extinguished, and that that which still remains intervenes only in the objective world processes. Thus, it is a question of decreasing the consciousness in mediumship. The more one succeeds in diminishing this consciousness and making the medium only an instrument for supersensible world processes taking place without her/him, the more one attains truth in this area. Besides, I have to call attention to one thing: if you are concerned with such a somnambulistic person who gets either by her/his nature at certain times or by certain, often rather doubtful means to such a state, you get principles of the supersensible world in their manifestations. Principles of the world express themselves; this comes strongly to light in the manifestations of the person concerned. Should beings of the supersensible world reveal themselves this way, they must take possession of the medium first, and one must have the possibility to look through the medium at the real beings that makes known itself. A trained view of such things belongs to it, which you can only acquire on one side by practice, on the other side by insight into that which spiritual science can give generally.

The Imaginative knowledge is the complete counter-image of that which I have just described. Today I tried to point sketchily to that which spiritual science has to say about mediumship, while I do not consider this, otherwise, as my task. However, that which I represent here should come from the counter-image of mediumship, from that which the human soul can explore which has made itself a tool by developing forces that are slumbering in it to behold into the Imaginative world. I have already spoken the day before yesterday, to what extent this Imaginative world is radically different from the pathological, fantastic world of hallucinations, visions, and delusions and so on. Now you may ask, do any errors ambush the esoteric also in this area like adversaries? Are there also sources of error?—This is absolutely the case. You can already receive, even before you enter into the supersensible world, an idea to what extent errors may generally originate if the soul is left to its own resources, as I have described it the day before yesterday, and takes the way into the spiritual worlds.

We have all possible worldviews or viewpoints in the usual world. There one has materialism, positivism, individualism, spiritualism and so on. Try only once to listen objectively to another person who feels pressured into alleging all logical and other reasons for materialism or spiritualism and so on by his whole education, by his whole life. Then you will convince yourself that it is never quite entitled, actually, to feel as an opponent of materialism or spiritualism and so on. You will realise that for all these viewpoints numerous reasonable arguments can be brought forward. You may mostly completely agree—if you are unbiased—with a representative of the concerning viewpoint. Even if you do not stand at all on the materialist viewpoint, you may say if you listen to a reasonable materialist: yes, nevertheless, it is well founded what he brings forward for his viewpoint. The uncomfortable begins where people are committed to any viewpoint unilaterally and attack and reject another viewpoint to the point of intolerability sometimes. It would be very well conceivable that somebody says who has experiences in this area: yes, I can be a materialist rather well, where materialism is entitled, and a spiritualist where spiritualism is entitled and so on. This possibility absolutely exists.

I wanted to give a sample in two talks that I have held here in last winter about the subjects: How Does One Disprove Theosophy? and How Does One Justify Theosophy?—a sample of how one can bring forward something positive for contrary standpoints. Reasonable people have always pointed to the fact that—considered unilaterally—no point of view shows the truth really. People, who get a feeling of this fact, often say, truth is between the contrary points of view in the middle.—However, this statement seems to someone who goes deeper into this matter in such a way, as if anybody said, if I have two chairs, I sit down not on the one or the other, but between them.—Goethe who had good experiences in this area said rightly, truth is not between two contrary opinions but there is the task in between which should lead us only to the facts.—As a rule, truth is to be found neither in the one nor in the other one-sidedness. This already becomes obvious if we have not yet entered into the supersensible world. This fact could work quite stupefying on someone who takes the knowledge seriously to whom knowledge is really a matter of life. Since you can describe everything unilaterally from a viewpoint and bring good reasons forward, and one can prove the same thing with maybe equally good reasons from the other side. This can lead in many cases to a kind of doubt about truth. However, it will not lead that who is strong enough to a doubt about truth but to an investigation about how the human being gets generally to a viewpoint.

If anybody is not committed only to materialism, but has saved so much freedom for himself to refrain from his approach and to exert some self-knowledge, then he can ask himself, how has my present life proceeded, actually? How have my habitual ways of thinking developed, what has induced me, for example, to follow more the material coherences? Thus, a follower of materialism may ask. The follower of a more spiritual view can also do that. There you already find in the usual life that one creates a subjective viewpoint. Thereby one gets to know the logical value of a viewpoint that one knows how one has got it how a certain life direction has induced one to think just in such a way. Not because one looks for truth in the middle between the different viewpoints, but because one recognises how this viewpoint has originated and why one judges in such a way, one becomes fair towards the other, and one gets around to acknowledging the value of the other viewpoint. The different viewpoints compensate each other if the followers of these different viewpoints practise self-knowledge.

Imagine once that some people of contrary viewpoints meet like in a board and quarrel about their different viewpoints. Somebody who has taken part in such a thing knows that, besides, normally nothing results. If people rise after hours-long discussion, everybody is normally still convinced fanatically of his viewpoint as before. If the attempt were done that such a board were quiet one hour and everybody checked during one hour only how he has got to his viewpoint, and if they started talking only then again, they would not start quarrelling. This possibility is imaginable. Since one would find understanding for the other viewpoint by self-knowledge, by investigation of the way which one has done to get to his viewpoint. Already in the usual life, it is obvious that self-knowledge is the way to approach truth gradually, and that then the truth positions itself in the middle that one, however, must not put his opinion between the contrary viewpoints.

This self-knowledge must take place to a much greater extent with that who wants to avoid the sources of error in the supersensible area. Here I have to say that the spiritual researcher can approach truth only if he begins to practise self-knowledge in the area of the supersensible in the extreme. He has enough opportunity if he does not surrender to that which appears as pictures in his soul at first, but if he can say to himself, you yourself are the pictures in your soul; even if they are maybe wonderful—this is no supersensible world; you yourself are all that, projected onto space.

Thus, the first step on the way to spiritual research already gives him the possibility of self-knowledge. Because you become acquainted with yourself this way, you learn only to eliminate yourself from that which can be then considered as objective. There is in the field of spiritual research no other way to avoid errors than to get to the full self-knowledge first, so that you can remove that which you yourself are from that which is left over. Here the spiritual researcher can recognise by a particular step, which he has to do, that he has advanced enough in self-knowledge. If this were not the case, one should not at all venture into the supersensible area. Since it is nothing as difficult for the human being as self-knowledge, because all interests, all inclinations, all sympathies that you have for yourself put themselves in the way and deceive us as it were while they lead us to believe that they are something real, whereas they are only reflections of our being.

One calls the step by which the spiritual researcher can know that he has the necessary self-knowledge “encounter with the guardian of the threshold.” What is this so-called guardian of the threshold? You can get an image of him only gradually. We suppose once that at a certain age we intensely look back at our development, at our favourite opinions, at everything that we have learnt, how we have felt up to now concerning sensory and extrasensory. Even if these things are very difficult—it is important to know that you have to put just such questions to yourself and to consider them as meditations beside the other exercises. This evokes the forces slumbering in the soul of which you can say that you get away by them as it were from your own being that you face yourself.

Single symptoms show this clearly in the Imaginative world at first. If you do such exercises of self-knowledge, you feel a certain change in the soul that is rather awkward at first. It consists of the fact that you grow tired of your own being in many respects. Someone is not yet a right spiritual researcher who has not strongly felt this weariness of the own being. Since strictly speaking you are everything that you have formed up to now as opinions, feelings and sensations, you hardly are something else in your consciousness. That all has now become something external to you. You are estranged from yourself. What you once regarded as your peculiarity becomes anything external to you; you feel empty, as nothing compared to that which you really are and which does no longer appear to you as something valuable as it used to be.

These feelings can be experienced so subtly that your soul life does not at all experience any danger if in so careful way the path is searched to the spiritual world, as I have described it in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?.

With somebody who wants to reach higher levels of spiritual knowledge the described sensations must strongly appear so that his soul is transformed quite considerably and he feels as if he has everything that he had in himself now beside himself, and, hence, feels as if he faces an abyss. What he had up to now appears to him as something that he should no longer use. If you have intensely done such an experience, you feel another experience emerging in the Imaginative knowledge very soon that consists of the fact that you become acquainted with yourself in a new way. You get to know that which you have released as your own being as it were from yourself with all possible, mostly unpleasant qualities. Besides pictures of beings appear, and now they become critics of that which you really are. You see yourself surrounded by nothing but pictures of other beings that stalk you that judge everything that is good or bad in you.

Briefly, you feel your being as it were allocated to other beings. It is really something that is well met with the picture of Dionysus whose being is split and divided. Any training as it is described in How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? aims at the fact that you know how to behave in the right way at the moment when the just described occurs when, so to speak, not the own individuality perceives, but when the world perceives and judges you. However, for this moment you have to be trained first, so that you are not shocked. The fact that the human being does not behold and that he lives, actually, in a glass house and everywhere world forces and beings are there that see through him until his most secret depths would interfere in the usual life everywhere. One denotes the fact that he does not behold them that he is protected against them the encounter with the guardian of the threshold that leads into the supersensible world.

In detailed way, I tried to represent that in my mystery drama The Guardian of the Threshold where I tried to turn the truth described more theoretically into action. Now you get to know when you have experienced this encounter with the guardian of the threshold that everywhere not only the error of knowledge but also the real error lies in wait for you and that you have to take care of yourself everywhere and find the right possibility to look at the things as they are in truth.

Because self-knowledge is difficult, the risk of a substantial error arises that the spiritual researcher does not reach the point where he can place himself, so to speak, beside himself. However, you cannot say, here is truth, here is error, but only that you can wend your way to truth. The more you are able to consider yourself as an objective being, the more you approach truth. While the consciousness of a medium has to be diminished, it has to be strengthened with the spiritual researcher just in such a way that he is not mistaken about himself and about what he has in himself. While entering the spiritual world you have to target the fact as sharply as possible that you face your concentrated own self. Thus, you eliminate everything personal from the supersensible percipience.

Let us assume that a person wends his esoteric way honestly and conscientiously, he can maybe get to a certain point, then he loses his courage or desire, and he does not go further. Of course, you can suppress everything that you have experienced up to now. The spiritual researcher is not always a spiritual researcher but only at certain moments. If he were always in such a soul state, he would appear like a crazy person. That who has already transformed his soul to a certain degree and gives up the thing again can experience that he now mixes that which he has recognised up to now in the spiritual world chaotically with that which the sensory world gives him. The things intermingle, and then you are confused. The ears hear, but also something supersensible interferes, and you are confused. This can happen of course only, if you do not take the instructions into consideration which I have given in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. Wrong application of the methods may appear in any science. That, however, who has got to a certain end of this way will experience the following:

He not only surveys the qualities of his mind, his prejudices et cetera and does not involve them in his objective knowledge, but also never mixes pictures of that which the senses perceive which the physical reason invents in the objective knowledge. Since he will not be able to eliminate his personality. Now here we can get to a kind of definition of error in the supersensible world. This error consists of the fact that one has insufficiently cast off the own subjectivity, and, therefore, always the own individuality intermingles in the pictures of objective reality. It is quite natural on one side if one often says that everybody portrays that somewhat different which the seer perceives, and, hence, one can count on nothing at all. One can concede such a fact, but stressing this is trivial, it is just a self-evident fact. It is natural that the ideal of the spiritual researcher can hardly completely attained and that, hence, everywhere in that which the spiritual researcher describes a subjective, individual element intermingles. He, who can compare, however, will find that if one does not only look at the pictures, but at the experiences they are more or less similar.

Concerning the moral qualities that are necessary for the seer one has to emphasise that he must be conscientious that he must practise all those qualities that I have already mentioned the day before yesterday. It is correct that one can look into the spiritual world, indeed, only by the described processes that, however, the research results of the spiritual world are to be transferred to the concepts of the physical reason. You have to search them in the supersensible world; you can understand them with common sense. It is true that someone who can think well can also properly judge that which he experiences in the spiritual world. Someone who is a fool in the sensory world and cannot think logically describes everything that he beholds wrong and caricatured. That also applies to the moral qualities of the person concerned. Somebody who wants to get with immoral attitude to the spiritual world will just get in the spiritual world to the disturbing and hampering things and beings and he recognises them distorted and caricatured because of his immoral attitude. However, someone who enters with moral attitude finds the beings of the spiritual world that show the things in their right mutual arrangement and weightiness.

Thus, the determinative of truth or error in spiritual research is not anything that you acquire to yourself as a seer only, but something that you have already acquired before in intellectual and moral respects. In particular, moral things are strongly involved in how one interprets the supersensible phenomena. Someone who is prejudiced in a certain belief who has sympathies and prejudices for the fact that something certain should be true, brings this disposition, this prejudice into the supersensible world; he interprets the phenomena after it. Everything that he fathomed and announced of the spiritual world can be an error because it is coloured with his subjective belief.

Here is the area where I have to point—after we have discussed the sources of error of spiritual research—to the sources of error by the dissemination of spiritual science. In a way, the dissemination of spiritual research resembles the dissemination of any other research. As for example not everybody can be a chemist, but everybody can accept and figure that out what the chemists have investigated in the laboratories about the substances, everybody can judge, even if he is not a spiritual researcher, what the spiritual researcher announces, namely not only up to a certain degree but to its full extent. In this respect, the things are similar; in other regard, they are dissimilar. They are dissimilar because chemistry, mathematics, or any other science is something that one can face cool and objectively if researchers announce it, even if with true thirst for knowledge.

This is not the case with spiritual research. Spiritual research touches the most intimate of our hearts, the big questions of life. As the researcher carries his prejudices, his belief, his sympathies and antipathies into the spiritual world and thereby distorts the things and beholds wrong, the audience, the confessors—let me use the term—meet the spiritual researcher with certain beliefs, certain sympathies, or antipathies. Something develops that does not lead to an objective judgement, but that is associated with all possible things which take effect from human being to human being. As strongly as the soul longs for experiencing something about these things, as the human soul is careless now and again to apply the unbiased reason to judge what the spiritual researcher brings forward, although it could be judged completely. Then belief often replaces an unbiased judgement because one likes that which the one or the other says maybe only because he brings it forward emphatically or because one finds him pleasant. The belief replaces the objective, conscientious verification; one accepts the things trusting in authority. The worst is if authority mania interposes itself between the spiritual researcher and his audience. Therefore, as with all things about which we have heard today that the spiritual researcher should follow them he keeps guard as it were beside his own self. The confessor, who listens to the spiritual researcher, should pay attention to his common sense and repeatedly carry out a kind of self-inspection to realise how much belief, prejudice, and sympathy intermingles in the facts that he accepts with the messages of the spiritual researcher.

Since in double respect accepting at mere belief causes big damage is a source of error just with the dissemination of spiritual science. The one is that the confessor does not develop healthy judgement what is the most necessary. Because common sense can be practised best of all if the results of spiritual research are thought through; you deprive yourself of the best opportunity if you accept these results at mere belief. The second one is: because the things are important which the spiritual researcher has to say, he may exercise an incorrect influence over his supporters—if the listener does not constantly keep his common sense in readiness—because one believes him because one takes up that prejudiced what one should check, actually. Thereby the spiritual researcher tries—instead of exercising an entitled influence, while he is convincing and the listeners realise what he says—, to persuade while he overpowers their common sense. Even if this ideal condition cannot yet be reached today, one has to say that if truth should prevail the confessors should make it to the spiritual researcher as difficult as possible to spread his truths and should impose the highest requirements on him if he expresses his knowledge in concepts and ideas of common sense. Then one counteracts what, unfortunately, is a fact and a forever returning source of error with the dissemination of spiritual truths that charlatanism and all possible similar mingles so easily with spiritual research. Unless just common sense is applied permanently, one does no longer know where conscientious spiritual research and where charlatanism and humbug is, and everything is thrown together.

Two oppose soul directions will throw charlatanism and conscientious spiritual research together. One soul direction is that of those who are prejudiced in authority mania, who make themselves confessors of spiritual science light-heartedly because of their sympathies and prejudices. They mingle everything and often accept the one as well as the other. There is for this kind of people who are oriented in such a way no other remedy than that there are conscientious spiritual researchers who position themselves conscientiously on the ground of truth. Only experience can teach us whether this is the case. The different people who may hardly differentiate charlatanism and conscientiousness and jumble everything up are those who do not at all want to go into the matter who judge about the matter cursorily with some concepts they have knocked together, and who—because they often succeed in uncovering fraud—not only label everything with this name, but lump everything together. The direction of the religious confessors often regards the biggest charlatanism as irrefutable highest truth, the other kind of human beings, the biased ones, the non-experts, even regards conscientious spiritual research as charlatanism and error sometimes, and one cannot bear a grudge against them because they do not better understand what they say.

Thus, it will be necessary above all, so that truth and not error can prevail with the dissemination of spiritual research, that in particular with the confessors of spiritual research critical reason, critical judgement, and common sense and not belief in authority develop. This belief in authority will already wither away if a knowledge spreads among those who like and need spiritual research, a knowledge that is not common, unfortunately, among the confessors of spiritual science that a seer is no higher animal because he can behold in the supersensible world. He does not differ from other human beings, just as little as a chemist, a botanist, a machinist, or a tailor. The possession of spiritual knowledge does not really determine the value of the human being but only that he can investigate this area and bring the acquired knowledge to his fellow men. Only his common sense determines the value of the human being, his power of judgement and his moral qualities. Just spiritual research could prove that intellectual and moral qualities of the human being already determine his value, before he enters into the spiritual world, and that if he is inferior there the results of his research will be inferior. It is exceptionally necessary to realise this. Even more than the opponents of spiritual science, its supporters should take stock of themselves in this field.

Thus, I tried today to describe not only the possibilities of error finding spiritual truth, but also the possibility of error with the dissemination of spiritual truths. I tried to evoke a sensation that conscientious spiritual research acknowledges that its opponents can often argue this or that rightly and that conscientious spiritual research can and has to argue in the same way because it is just important in this area to face the error to recognise the truth. For the confessors of spiritual science has that who wants to be conscientious, as a rule, only one consolation: truth has a strong power, and, even if error slips in because of the belief in authority, by the self-correction of truth those are cured who were supporters of this or that for a while at mere belief in authority. In most cases, such a cure takes place because one has to pay the price as it were to have had such a blind belief in authority. Often it just happened that because one did not observe the details sharply, but took one's word for it that then with a radical case it appears how little conscientiously one has gone forward. If then pain and disappointment are the more significant, the cure is just successful.

For those, however, who throw together spiritual research and charlatanism benevolently or malevolently, for those the today's consideration may offer another consolation that people can have always if they generally face truth. The truths of spiritual research if they appear as new are much more exposed to those destinies to which, however, also the other truths are exposed which appear gradually in the evolution of humanity. How, for example, did one accept the Copernican worldview! How did one treat Galilei! How did the whole world defend itself when Francesco Redi spread the truth that earthworms do not originate from river mud and other lifeless matter, but that any life arises from a living zygote! How academic organisations rose when the truth was pronounced that iron stones can fall from the air onto earth—the meteorites! How did people defend themselves against an apparently so unimportant thing like the post stamp. At that time, an authoritative person said, if really the correspondences increased to such an extent, the post-office buildings would no longer be sufficient! - I could bring in numerous other examples that truth when it entered into the world was regarded as paradoxical and was rejected.

The sight of these destinies of truth can give us the consolation and the confidence towards all those who reject spiritual science and throw it together with charlatanism, the consolation which one just had compared with truth generally in all ages and which one can dress in the words of someone who was often mistaken who tried, however, to look for truth. I am allowed to summarise just both talks that dealt with the interrelation of truth and error in spiritual research with words of the vigorous truth seeker Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) who said in his writing The Fundamentals of Moral (1839):

“During all centuries the poor truth had to blush about the fact that she was paradoxical, and, nevertheless, it is not her guilt. She cannot accept the figure of the sitting enthroned general error. There she looks up sighing to her tutelary deity, the time, that shows victory and fame to her, but her wing beats are so big and slow that the individual dies away in the meantime.”

Answer-to-Questions

Question: Some persons get a peculiar feeling sometimes, mostly after long straining thinking, as if they stood beside themselves, with a dreadful emptiness around themselves, and then the body appears as something very strange. Then one must only force himself to feel again as a body, as with E.T.A. Hoffmann. What is to be done there?

Rudolf Steiner: Above all, one has to consider that everything that appears of this kind in the world has different degrees. What I have described in the talk today shows only a more significant degree of the phenomena that can appear in weaker degrees always in the human being. The way to get away from the instrument of the body is just the way of meditation and concentration. If the interrogator says “mostly after long straining thinking”—meditation and concentration is a quite intensive degree of concentrated thinking, feeling, maybe also of willing. Hence, such phenomena are definitely possible which take place in an extraordinary measure with meditation and concentration if the single members of the human nature are in a looser balance—with every human being they are, by the way, in another balance. This was described, for example, belletristically very appropriately. Somebody errs who supposes that with a belletristic portrayal of such things always only imagination forms the basis. The serious artist describes, even if he takes unusual matters as objects, from experience. This applies to E.T.A. Hoffmann (Ernst Theodor Amadeus H., 1776-1822, jurist, poet, and composer) to a great extent. Many people would experience this if they had always observed themselves, but the degree of attention does not always reach the events, and thereby such facts remain often unnoticed. Strictly speaking, spiritual research is not something special, but only an increase of that which also appears in the usual life everywhere and always.

Question: In which regard is the knowledge of higher worlds worthwhile—apart from curiosity—, because it is dependent on common sense?

Rudolf Steiner: For someone who does not long for the answer of the higher questions of existence, spiritual science will be superfluous. However, to someone who longs for the answer of such questions one has to say: as well as the body hungers for food, the soul hungers for the answer of the big questions of life. As I have already said in the talk, you can probably take truth away from the soul, but not the hunger for truth. Its effects will become more prominent that at first the soul experiences all possible states of disorder, even of desperation that a matter of knowledge changes into a question of health. Here I only point to the close coherence of nervousness and indifference to spiritual truths. They are just a necessity of human nature.

You can learn from this question again, what I have already often touched, that people do not listen exactly enough to these things which can be presented so difficultly. If one had listened to that precisely which I have said in the talk, such a question would not have been put. One would have also heard, for example, that the value of the human being depends on the soul condition, on moral and intellectual qualities, and not on the contents of the truths, because one has to find them only by supersensible research. One will find the intellectual in the higher knowledge if one is intellectually minded and the moral if one is morally minded that you have to bring, however, your intellectual and moral abilities with you into the supersensible world.

Question: It is a fact that one can give the functions of the soul another direction by mental work. Where are guarantees, however, of the absolute validity of the immutability of our soul?

Rudolf Steiner: I have said twice in the talks that one cannot say, here truth stops and here error begins—that there is, however, the possibility of entering the ways to truth. Of course, it would be best if one could write all truths on a small piece of paper; one could put it into the vest pocket and look at it if necessary. However, truth is not this way. You have gradually to work your way upward. Is the question generally entitled to demand guarantees that anything is objectively valid?

Question: Is intellectual soul and mind soul the same in theosophy?

Rudolf Steiner: No, but these are two sides of one and the same being, so that one soul member is called intellectual soul once if it turns outwardly and judges the things, and the other time the same being is called mind soul if it experiences its own inside.

Question: Is there any particular moral of the spiritual researcher?

Rudolf Steiner: No other than the generally human moral which can be refined, however, as I have described it in How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. However, as morality does not have double-entry accounting in other ways as well, I have to say that also the spiritual researcher is not allowed to have double-entry moral accounting. However, as I have said, he must practise certain moral qualities more intimately.

Question: Does spiritual science have the right to reveal holy laws?

Rudolf Steiner: These are just the laws of nature.

This evening I would like to speak about important questions of life from the viewpoint of the so-called spiritual science, that is from a viewpoint which is not popular today and which has exceptionally many prejudices against itself. Nevertheless, I am allowed to say that often that which later became common property of humanity in this or that area was unpopular at any former time, and was exposed to prejudices. Hence, I want to go over to the object without further introduction.

Spiritual science is concerned with an enclosing area of worldview. However, if one surveys the contents of spiritual science, everything amounts to answering two questions of existence which do not arise in a separated area of science, but appear everywhere in life. These are such riddles of existence which not only stress the intellectual interest but the deepest human interest; one is not only curious of the solution of these questions, but one longs for their solution because inner peace, viability, but also pain, doubt, trouble are associated with it. We can summarise with two words what it concerns: human destiny and human immortality—or we could say, death.

The human destiny puts big serious questions at every turn. We realise that a human being enters into existence and worries and efforts surround him, so that he will have a more or less painful existence; or we realise that he shows low abilities and predispositions, so that he cannot become any valuable member of humanity. Against it, another human being enters into existence without guilt or merit, early surrounded by providing hands, so that an indeed happy existence will be his destiny. We realise that with him also early abilities appear which let him become a useful member of the society. Maybe you can reject these questions with your intellect and you do not allow approaching you. However, if our sensations speak in life if our wishes must deal with the living conditions, then all wishes and sensations emerge in the subconscious depths of life, which wake the anxious longing after answers to such questions. Perhaps you can feel not in the thirst for knowledge, but in the positive or negative approach to life how the soul urges to know something that is in the way that I have suggested.

The riddle of death approaches the human being particularly. What people know about immortality does often not look scientific. How much passion, how many prejudices are contained in this question. Fear of death or the wish to extend the existence is involved in the evaluation of the question and in the answer that most people want to give themselves. When natural sciences were about to emerge as a worldview, there were people who completely denied the possibility that the soul would exist after death, and one may say, among these deniers were many who often outranked those morally who accepted immortality. These persons said to themselves, we want to sacrifice what we have worked during our life to the public.—These persons regarded that as something morally higher than the selfish wish to carry on the compiled. One cannot deny that such persons are moral.

However, there is a viewpoint from which the question of immortality must be put even quite scientifically if one does not completely feel this scientificity today. If we practise self-knowledge a little, we recognise that that which the human being creates and which he becomes as a human being has a personal individual character. With some introspection, you may say, the best is so particular with every soul that we cannot give this best to any public. If the consciousness of our soul being were destroyed after death, the most valuable would be lost not only to us, but also to the world economy. Should it be true that the human being works hard for something that is most valuable to him on earth and is destroyed at a moment? - Such a thing does not happen in the universe. It happens that the forces that are highly strained are incorporated into the world economy. There the question becomes only scientific.

Thus, we have characterised both questions—the question of the human destiny and that of human immortality. Today spiritual science is unpopular because it is rather strange to the habitual ways of thinking. One is used to counting on the outer sensory observations and on the intellect that is bound to the brain. However, with these means one cannot cope with the real being of the human nature. Then the question arises, are there other cognitive possibilities? Spiritual science just wants to deliver to the general intellectual culture that there are special methods to attain such cognitive faculties. To get to know this we have to take a phenomenon as starting point that is related to death that not enough is taken into account because we do not use that as an opportunity to put questions to which we are used. That which appears more seldom or in such a way that it dismays us like death or destiny becomes a riddle. However, the everyday consciousness passes an important riddle, the riddle of sleep. We have to go through this riddle if we want to approach the question of death.

Every day we see our consciousness sinking into nothing during sleep. Let us take the fact of falling asleep completely apart from scientific hypotheses. The limbs stop doing their services, the soul feels maladjusted to the senses, to the inner life that is bound to the physical body; then the darkness of unconsciousness begins. There are many scientific views about that; we do not want to mention them today, although it would be very interesting which attempts one undertakes in our time. However, we want to do spiritual-scientific considerations.

At first, that which spiritual science has to say about sleep. From this hypothesis, the facts will arise as it were. Spiritual science states that it is illogical to assume that the whole day life with all its experiences sinks into nothing and is made new in the morning. The experiences must still exist somewhere. On the other hand, spiritual science has to join the view that one can discover nothing in himself as causes, why mental pictures should fulfil him as the whole wake day life contains them in itself. Spiritual science considers all that—the mental pictures, the memories et cetera of the wake day life—as a spiritual-mental reality which withdraws from the physical body and the etheric body during sleep and enters into the spiritual world, so that the human being is with his inner existence beyond the physical body. Then the human being is in the spiritual world and in the morning this spiritual-mental of the human being submerges again in the body, in the senses, in the brain et cetera. Thus, we have separated the human being during sleep as it were in a bodily being and a spiritual-mental being; both combine again after waking up.

The materialist monist will argue how someone can sin in such a way against the view of monism; you split the human being in two parts.—You can argue that the chemist commits the same sin if he separates water in hydrogen and oxygen; but there you cannot forbid it to him. In no other way, we speak in spiritual science of a duality of the human being. That who does not know the methods of chemistry to recognise the existence of hydrogen in the water could also state that the hydrogen does not exist. Thus, somebody can also state that that does not exist which leaves the body with sleep. It concerns that during sleep the spiritual-mental of the human being is not aware of itself. For the usual consciousness all that is not there if it has left the body. Everything depends on the fact that the human being can recognise that which has left the body as something real.

One reaches this with rules that the spiritual researcher has to apply to himself. He reaches this while he puts himself in a state that is similar to sleep, but it is different from it at the same time. The sign of sleep is that idleness of the senses, of the reason and, in the end, unconsciousness happens. Could another state also happen now? Yes. For this purpose, we assume what will prove true then; we assume, the human being gets really rid of his body, so that in sleep this supersensible being cannot experience itself in the usual state. If we could cause anything by which this soul still experienced itself, the movement of the limbs et cetera would be excluded, but consciousness would still exist. One causes this state by inner means, by meditation, concentration, or contemplation.

In the soul are forces that one only has to strengthen if complete consciousness should replace the unconsciousness of sleep. One attains this in such a way that the human being suppresses the movement of the limbs arbitrarily, makes them as quiet as the body is in sleep, then he excludes all outer impressions which divert his thoughts. He must artificially cause this state towards the outside world, and then he must exclude the thoughts of the usual life. If this empty consciousness occurs in the usual life, then the human being falls asleep. However, long, patient exercises enable the person concerned to keep [the consciousness] alive, and then it concerns that he moves any mental picture in the centre of his consciousness arbitrarily and fulfils his consciousness with it. The things of the outside world are not suitable for that; symbolic images are much better which we ourselves produce. Everybody may say, to have such mental pictures is a crazy thing. However, it matters what they cause in the soul.

Let us imagine, for example, two glasses, one is empty, the other contains some water. Now we imagine that we pour from the latter perpetually water into the first glass and thereby the latter does not become emptier but fuller and fuller. This is, actually, a quite crazy image. However, it does not matter here but that this image works allegorically for a deep secret: love. Love is something with which we cannot cope with human images. It is a secret. However, we can give one of its qualities by that which the soul gives: it becomes richer and richer. Love has the quality that we can express allegorically, and there we find this specific what one is used in another area.

Let us take a round medallion as another example. With it, all relations can be determined: that of radius, diameter, circumference, area et cetera, but you can do that just as well with a drawn circle. Since its regularities also apply to the medallion. Mathematics shows such symbols of regularities perpetually. The spiritual researcher does nothing else than that he applies this mathematical method to a higher area not only to thinking but also to life. We do not speculate about these symbols, but it matters that all our impulses are directed to them, and it concerns the power that we develop there. Whereas the human being normally takes his mind off things, we concentrate our soul life completely, even if only for a few minutes. You have to continue these things for years, then a particular result will arise: the human being feels now that that which sank, otherwise, into unconsciousness becomes active in him that it is something that was filled, otherwise, with nothing at all.

You have to open yourself to many such images. Then particular experiences appear as pictures, as “imaginations;” they shoot up before us, they face us. With it, you already attain something that you have to treat, however, with caution. Someone who stands on a materialist viewpoint will say rightly, now you have brought it just as far as those who have hallucinations and visions, which are of no value.—Indeed, there is a cliff. People who experience such visions will believe in them like in something real that is much more real than the things that they see with their eyes. There are people who invent the most logical system for their delusions to keep them. There is a term, which explains all that, it is the word “self-love.” Why does the human being believe in these images? Because of self-love; because he himself has developed them; because the person cannot help to identify himself with that which he is internal. A spiritual researcher has to bear this in mind. He has to have such strong will so that he says to himself, what I see is only a reflection of my being.

The spiritual researcher has to be so strong that he can remove this whole imagination by his will. If one has developed his soul until then where the contents of the soul appear as objects, then he has to be thrown back to nothing, and then one can say, one prepares himself to get spiritual percepts. It does not matter so much that you develop this or that vision, but that you develop the usually slumbering soul forces. In particular, a strong will belongs to it. The human being is familiarised at first with the whole power of self-love. This must be defeated. Here it concerns a heavy victory. You have to extinguish what you have conquered.

The way to self-knowledge makes the forces that one knows only as inner ones work with the power of a natural phenomenon. The soul forces work like natural elements. You face yourself as a kind of nature. Then a certain experience takes place that one calls the “encounter with the guardian of the threshold.” It may take place in various ways. I would like to give an example only, you feel something new that drives through you like a lightning or you feel as if your body is dissolved and still remains. You feel incapable to use your body. This is a very important moment. You have the feeling as if your hands are forged to your body and your brain is something over which you do not exercise power that works mentally as an obstacle. You must prepare yourself to endure this moment. This preparation consists of the fact that you strengthen your courage. You must experience this moment fearlessly.

Some other experiences are attached to it which let us recognise what it means to face the own body, the usual soul forces like things. You recognise the meaning and vincibility of self-love only now. Because for the usual experience this moment cannot be endured without appropriate preparation, one calls this experience the encounter with the guardian of the threshold because good spirits stand before it as it were and protect us against this experience.

It depends on such experiences that you develop certain strictly moral impulses. Thereby you acquire maturity to build spiritual-scientific knowledge only on a healthy soul. Compared with that which the spiritual researcher must experience before he approaches the spiritual world, the objection is childish that the spiritual researcher dedicates himself to any mania. He knows the experiences of mania, the visions completely. He knows how he has removed them from his soul. If he is able to erase the results of self-love, a new world appears before him completely objective; it is fulfilled with individual things and beings, as well as the outer physical world is fulfilled with individual things and beings.

Our time tends quite strongly to accept something supersensible, and one can notice how this trend becomes prominent. I want to point only to an outstanding fact. Charles William Eliot (1834-1926, American chemist), board of directors of the Harvard University in America, held a lecture in 1909 where he spoke about a kind of future religion which acknowledges the supersensible on scientific basis. He said, people have always acknowledged an absolute soul being which is not subject to outer physical laws.—We find such a tip with many scholars. However, such persons would like to stop at the tip. They say, there is soul, soul, and soul. Yes, this is exact the same way, as if one says about the most different plants and animals: this is nature, nature, and nature. However, if the spiritual researcher tells details of the spiritual world, these persons become awkward. It is not enough to point to the fact that there is spirit and soul. However, if one states that there are beings and events in the spiritual worlds, then these persons become awkward and say, these are pipe dreams. One cannot say that everything that emerges before the spiritual researcher is delusion. Since the spiritual researcher has taken part in the experiences which enable him to distinguish.

Nevertheless, in natural sciences it is exactly the same way; one has to experience these things. If a human being has never seen a whale fish, zoology cannot prove that there is a whale fish. With it, some objections disprove themselves. Schopenhauer characterised a part of his system with the fact that he said, the world is my idea.—With it, he stated that one cannot separate percepts from mental pictures. However, there is an easy, even if trivial rebuttal. If we imagine that we touch our skin with an iron piece of 900 degrees centigrade, we can imagine the pain probably in thoughts, but an only imagined hot iron does not cause ache as a real one does. There is a proof that is produced by life. The same applies to the spiritual life; it must be experienced to the end.

Somebody argued, with big thirst one can imagine the taste and the refreshing effect of a lemonade. Yes—but one cannot quench the thirst with this image. One is not allowed to use intellectual games. The spiritual researcher must have advanced so far that he can distinguish reality and speculative fiction, as one has to distinguish reality and mental picture in the physical world.

Thus, the human being enters into that world in which he is every night after he has left his physical body where he is also in the spiritual world, save that he has no inner activity. By the exercises, his soul and mind become so strong that it experiences itself and its environment.

Now you start understanding that something spiritual forms the basis of the human being. If you have experienced once how you can be separated from the body how you do not exercise power over this body and, nevertheless, your consciousness is maintained, you understand something else. You understand that this is something embryonic, nevertheless, that assists in the creation of the body. Then one looks quite scientifically at the human life in such a way as one sees a plant growing. If a [living being] were born with the roots of a plant and died after flowering, it would have no notion of the fact that the seed which develops in the blossom starts a process again and that you have to imagine the whole plant concentrated in the seed. If you have recognised the human inside, you understand the dictum of Goethe: in old age we become mystics.—The rich soul life is like the seed of the plant.

We look at a human being now who enters into existence at birth how his abilities develop, and we realise at his death that he has stored inner forces that he can no longer express with the body. Thus, the inside enters into the spiritual world at death; and if we see a human being born, we see him again coming out of the spiritual world and moving in the lines of heredity of father and mother. If we say, all qualities are inherited from father and mother, it is like the old natural sciences that believed that from mud even fish could originate. Only Francesco Redi said that life can come only from life.

The spiritual researcher knows the human spiritual core. If anyone states that everything comes from father and mother, one has to answer: this is an inexact observation. One has to say, that which comes from former embodiments enters and attracts what comes from father and mother to itself. All spiritual-mental goes back to a former spiritual-mental. That means, we get to the repeated lives on earth. We have already gone through many lives. All that has a beginning and an end. We bring with us what we have acquired as inner forces into this life, so that we also work on the construction of our body. One can observe that quite externally. One looks at the brain at birth and observes how it develops then plastically. There the individuality works its way out. In that we find ourselves if we become spiritual researchers, we have acquired that in this life.

Hence, the stupefying impression which a spiritual researcher receives because he can change nothing of that which comes from former lives. There the riddle of death and destiny faces us in special way. If we suffer in a present life, we have prepared it to ourselves in a former life. This could seem cruel. However, let us suppose once that anybody has to experience in the eighteenth year of his life that his father loses his property. Now he has to learn something, this is very disagreeable, and he can feel it as something extremely bad. However, at the age of fifty years he will judge quite different. Thus, the human being cannot always judge a misfortune correctly, as long as he experiences it. We have to say to ourselves, if we expose ourselves to distress and misery: it is at the same time a condition of development. It is only imaginary if one believes that this knowledge is cruel.

How does immortality face us now? Not like in many philosophies, that one considers an infinite time line and speculates how the human can last. No, we acquire something that concentrates in the human life internally; the soul life concentrates, we carry our spiritual core through the gate of death into the spiritual world; connected with the body our destiny leads it to the next life, and we use the next life again to enrich our inside. Nevertheless, overall, life is ascending. The entire human life consists of the life between birth and death and of that which remains between death and new birth. The whole immortality consists of that which life itself renders. We get to know life as the creator of a new life, as the plant, which has the guarantee in the seed that a new plant will originate. This is a scientific consideration.

Admittedly, it is comprehensible that many prejudices exist against it, but Francesco Redi also experienced that. One wanted to burn him to death. This is the destiny of truth. Today people are no longer burnt, but one refers to them as fools. The fashion changes, the being has remained. Later these “pipe dreams” are a given. Thus, it will happen with truth: something spiritual-mental can originate only from something spiritual-mental. Somebody who knows how it stands with the investigation of the spiritual world understands that these prejudices must arise. At first, people believe that natural sciences are in danger. The following example serves as explanation. We see a person; two others stand before him and ask, why does this person live?—The one says, he has a lung inside and air outside, hence, he lives; this is a scientific fact. You cannot argue anything against it. The other says, this is not the only reason. He fell into water fourteen days ago, and I have pulled him out—this is the reason why he lives.

Thus, spiritual science denies no observed scientific facts; it says nothing against the theories of heredity, as far as they do not disprove themselves. However, beside heredity the law of destiny exists.

Spiritual science completely acknowledges natural sciences. The misunderstanding consists only of the fact that natural sciences often cross their borders and want to establish a kind of spiritual science. Many people say, one has to comply with that which the eyes perceive; natural sciences can count only on it. Then one can ask whether Copernicus had new astronomical perception.

No, he rethought what one had thought earlier because of sense perception. Copernicus had the courage and the mental power to interpret the sense-perceptible anew. From it, there the new astronomy originated which did not come about by sense perception. Giordano Bruno broke through the sense perception, while he did not regard the sky as a border. As well as the blue vault of heaven originates from the limitations of the human intuitive faculty, the firmament of the soul life originates between birth and death. We stand spiritual-scientifically at the place of Giordano Bruno. Spiritual science breaks through the borders of birth and death. As Giordano Bruno broke through spaces, spiritual science breaks through times.

Galilei had a friend who was a follower of Aristotle and who had discerned something incorrectly from Aristotle that the nerves take the heart as starting point. He led him to a corpse and showed that the nerves take the brain as starting point. The friend said, yes, it seems so, but I read with Aristotle that it is different, and I believe him more.—Today people come and say, it sounds reasonable, but with Haeckel we read it different. Here Schopenhauer's sentence counts: truth always had to suffer from the fact that she appears paradoxical if she enters into existence, because she cannot sit down on the throne of the widespread error. Thus she looks up at her guardian angel, the time, whose wing beats are, however, so slow, that someone who has recognised the truth often dies in the meantime.

We have to understand that the objection is unjustified that only the spiritual researcher can know something about the spiritual world. To find the truth, one has to go through all that, but spiritual research relates to spiritual science like that which the painter has to learn to his picture. From the picture, we can recognise something. One can understand what the spiritual researcher has investigated if one only approaches what he has to say with common sense. Then these truths give us joy of life, they help us over helplessness and give us security.

One beholds into the spiritual worlds not because one has something of it, but because one has brought [the beheld] into ideas [and concepts] which every other human being can understand. The spiritual researcher does not have the results different from the reader or listener. Thus, we get answer not only to scientific questions but also to the riddles of life.

If we could develop the human education in such a way that from youth on the human beings grew up with these questions, in us something would develop like a predisposition, like a seed or core that offers the guarantee of future life. The vigour of life becomes stronger and stronger, and if the outer forces go to ruin, we feel the inner ones concentrating. The seed of the plant could not feel different compared with the wilted leaves as the spiritual that enters with its power through the gate of death. This and not only science gives answers to life. They console us in the heaviest situations. One has not to be a spiritual researcher for that. As one can taste food without being a chemist, not everybody has to be a spiritual researcher. There must be only some. This becomes a steady conviction in the soul so that one learns to treat the hostility against it as Goethe said to the deniers of movement in his Zahme Xenien III (collection of sayings). Goethe answered out of common sense. One cannot easily disprove this view philosophically.

Something hostile may happen;
Keep cool, remain silent;
And if they deny the movement,
Walk around them before their noses.

One can apply humour to opponents; however, one has not only to believe but also to know how it stands with truth. Thus, spiritual science will familiarise itself with life, thus, those who feel the inner strengthening of the soul and how it adapts itself in life feel something similar as Goethe felt towards the deniers of movement. Thus, we can summarise everything that has arisen from our today's consideration in a sensation towards the opponents of spiritual science:

Something hostile may happen;
Keep cool, remain serene;
And if they deny the spirit,
Do no longer ponder.
Yes, admit at last that they are right;
Since their mind is in poor condition.

Preliminary remark: There are no notes of the talk Truths of Spiritual Research held in Stuttgart the day before.

It is almost as important in the area of spiritual science to get clear about the ways of error as about those of truth because it is in this field in such a way that truths have not only to be searched as in the outer life, but that they have to be attained. Those inner fights of the soul by which the truths in spiritual-scientific area are to be attained lead us often through errors which lurk wherever you go and whose kind has to be recognised and whose significance must be overcome. One disproves errors in the outer life and science; in the area of spiritual life, one has to combat them as real powers that face us on our ways for truth. Therefore, I would like to complement the yesterday's talk about spiritual-scientific truths with the consideration of the sources of error. There one cannot say that this or that is an error of spiritual research, but there it concerns the question how the searching soul may become a slave of error.

I have pointed out not only yesterday but also repeatedly that the spiritual researcher has to make the instrument out of himself with which he penetrates into the spiritual worlds. The spiritual researcher has to develop spiritual organs. As we have physical organs as human beings of the usual life to perceive the outside world physically, we can appropriate spiritual organs by the things that we have discussed sketchily yesterday. With spiritual senses—the term is inconsistent—we enter into the spiritual world to be able to recognise its characteristics and secrets. We have further to acquire the possibility to gain them with full consciousness what one can experience with such spiritual organs. Now I have to point out, of course, although it seems superfluous to many people, repeatedly that you cannot compare these spiritual organs to the sensory organs. These are extrasensory organs. Even as the world, which you visit with them, is extrasensory, these organs are also purely spiritual-mental organs. The consciousness is higher than that of the usual life and science.

We can still come to an understanding with each other if we know the sources of error in the spiritual area. We want to take some sources of error as starting point comparatively in the sensory-physical area. In what way can we get to errors in the outer view of the sensory world? I would like to bring in a concrete example. If an eye is faulty, it may be that we see the things always wrong by this defect of the eye. I would like to quote a famous naturalist who has such a defect as an example. He tells how he always believed to see this or that figure clearly in the dusk. This is based only on a defect of his eyes. When he once turned the corner in a foreign city, his eyes deceived him and he believed that a person who approached him wanted to harm him. He took out his defensive weapon to drive the non-existing figure away.

Faulty organs cause faulty vision in the sensory world. Now we can say comparatively, in spiritual research, the faulty organs that we appropriate by self-development outlined yesterday cause faulty vision, errors in our view of the spiritual world.

In what way do we get to such faulty organs? There I have to stress from the start that that which the spiritual researcher gains to himself by self-development always depends on the starting point which his soul takes. Self-development is based on the fact that we develop the mental forces which we already have in the usual life to higher levels. Everything depends on the fact that we take a healthy soul life as starting point and then develop the spiritual organs. It is necessary to start from common sense and healthy faculty of judgement to get spiritual organs by the characterised development that delivers truths and not errors in our views of the spiritual world. In particular, any kind of infatuation and speculative fiction interferes the spiritual development. Since infatuation and speculative fiction, wrong or untrue judging of the things here in the sensory world stick to the further spiritual development in the soul in a way, and this causes at last that spiritual organs develop which do not properly work.

We stand there immediately before a point, which we have to discuss if the ground of spiritual research should be healthy. I have pointed out already yesterday from another side that the confessors of spiritual science commit a mistake if they consider a person who can tell things of the spiritual world as a special person from the start because he is a seer. One has to consider the seer's gift only as something that has developed as a special quality of the person concerned to behold into spiritual world—as well as one academically studies to become a botanist, a zoologist or a mathematician. The more the confessors of spiritual science are clear about the fact that a person is not somebody special because he is a seer, the better it is. We should not condition the value of a person on his seer's gift; he himself is not at all allowed to do this. The value of a human being also of a seer depends on the fact that he has a healthy faculty of judging already here in the physical world. This leads to spiritual organs if one applies the discussed methods to the soul development. Unhealthy human mind leads to a pathological view of spirit that shows the spiritual world in a wrong form. I have to emphasise that.

The second point that matters is that we can form a right, conscious judgement within the spiritual world that we can orient ourselves in the right way, so that we deceive ourselves neither by our organs nor by our consciousness.

Now something can happen with the spiritual researcher that you can compare with the condition if here in the sensory world the consciousness of the human being is dazed or paralyzed, so that the person concerned cannot orient himself properly in the physical world.

The spiritual researcher can do a similar experience if he does not take as right starting point that means a morally healthy soul condition. A weak moral attitude dazes the higher consciousness.

The seer is not a special human being because he has the seer's gift, but his human value must be judged as that of the other human beings, too—by his healthy faculty of judgement and moral attitude. Only these two things still are infinitely important in the area of spiritual research as in the usual life because they are the basic conditions to discover the truths and to avoid errors.

We can still give other sources of error or rather characterise the ways of error different. There it is the best if we start from the usual sensory consideration of the things again. We all know that there is a materialist view of the outside world. We have to get clear in our mind spiritual-scientifically, how this materialist attitude can appear in the usual physical world. Spiritual science acknowledges that behind everything, also behind the material existence, something spiritual works that the material existence is only the expression of spiritual forces working behind it. In the field where the material works, actually, the spirit is also effective.

How do human beings become still materialists? Why do they misjudge that—where matter appears—this matter is only the revelation of the spirit? If we recognise the spirit everywhere, we have also to look for the causes in the spirit, why human beings may become materialists. Indeed, these are spiritual reasons in the human soul, forces, which work from the spiritual world into this human soul that take the human being to a materialist attitude. Among those spiritual forces which spiritual research brings home to us, we find the so-called ahrimanic forces referring to the Persian spirit Ahriman. These are certain spiritual forces that have an effect on the human soul in such a way that they veil everything to him that does not appear in dense materiality. It is true what Goethe and all those say who understand these things really: the outer view of the senses does not err—the judgement errs if certain forces in the human souls beguile it. The material phenomena do not say to us that they are only matter. The human souls judge about that which is a manifestation of the spiritual that it is only matter. In these human souls certain forces work, which daze them in such a way that they cannot realise that the material is only the expression of the spirit. That which Goethe expressed corresponds to a real being in the human soul: the ahrimanic or Mephistophelian forces work in the soul; and if one discusses these things, one gets quite appropriately to the quotation that the materialist attitude is true evidence of those forces to the spiritual researcher that veil the spiritual to him. These Mephistophelian forces make the human beings shy away from the spiritual.

If we want to look into the soul what goes forward in it, so that it cannot find the spiritual in the material, we can ask ourselves, why does the human being become, actually, a materialist? There we have to realise that the human soul has not only that as its contents, which happens in the usual consciousness, but there are also concealed depths of the soul that there is a subconscious soul life. Since everything that can appear in the consciousness can submerge in unaware regions and works there. It would be a brainless prejudice if one believed that that which one does not know were not effective. A drastic example of a work [of the subconscious], which lives out quite different, is the following: Luther (Martin L, 1483-1546) said once, if I am rather angry, I can pray and preach best of all.—Every soul expert understands that. The forces that work in the soul can change in manifold way. Rage is simply a soul force; if it submerges in the depths of the soul, it can appear in the consciousness quite different. If we bring the rage into the subconscious soul regions, it can appear as something that looks like its opposite. Praying and preaching mostly do not look like a fit of anger; but Luther knew that he could pray and preach best of all, [if he was angry].

The same applies to many emotions. One cannot prove them in the usual sense, but they turn out to be by the observation of the soul. Someone who investigates the soul finds which ways the different soul forces follow how they change if they are in the consciousness and how different they are if they submerge in the lower regions of the soul life. There is a force, which everybody knows if it appears in the upper regions of the consciousness: the fear. It is related to hatred. We often hate that in the upper region of the soul what we fear; but we have already squeezed it into the sub-consciousness. Hatred and fear are very intimately related to each other. However, fear is also related to laziness. Indeed, for the soul expert the fact comes to light that laziness is appealed to maintain this or that, not to change this or that, from the fear of insecurity in which one gets if one acts different [than usual]. The human beings are attached to something established because they fear change. Laziness is fear in the usual consciousness that was squeezed into the sub-consciousness.

If you now penetrate into the spiritual region, you have such experiences as I have told them yesterday about which you can say that the human being loses ground that he faces nothing to gain something new. The soul sometimes feels that darkly in the sub-consciousness of which it does not become aware. This fear is only the fear of everything that you experience if you penetrate into the spiritual world. You do not become aware of this fear, but the materialistically minded person has it in his soul depths. For the psychologist turns out that one becomes a materialistically minded human being because one has fear of uncertainty into which you get if you submerge in the spiritual. If you investigate the soul, you have to characterise the materialist human being as chicken-hearted; but it is in such a way. This is nothing but the disguised fear of spiritual life by which this spiritual life is suppressed. Thus, that remains concealed to the soul which is effective behind it. The demons of fear, the ahrimanic spirits, rage in the soul of the materialistically minded human being. Thus, he is a living proof of the work of the spirit. The spirit itself that beguiles the materialist into being a materialist. There one is reminded of a quotation of the poet who is very true:

Simple folk never sense the devil's presence,
not even when his hands are on their throats.

(Faust I, verses 1281-1282)

However, for us that is only important here: what does that exposure to the demons of fear cause that daze the soul? To characterise this mood we have taken the starting point from the physical-sensory world where one becomes materialistically minded by this soul mood.

However, the same mood can be there with a person who goes through a spiritual development or has got by some special conditions to a kind of beholding into the spiritual world. The cited demons of fear work not only on the materialistically inclined souls, but also on that who can already behold into the spiritual world. Then they have another effect. However, the effect can be characterised again, while we compare the deep experiences that we have there to that which has faced us. As everything appears to the materialist in unsubtle-material compression, these demons work on the human being who is minded as the materialist that they allow him only to behold what is not spiritual, but is dense and appears spooky. The subtlety of the spiritual gets lost to him. He does not search at all the spiritual; it is too fugitive to him, too mysterious. He does not regard the spiritual as something spiritual; it must be so unsubtle, so compressed, that it is as it were only a material appearance transferred to the spiritual. He searches such visions that are not spiritual but spooky.

With it, I do not want to say that the impressions that appear in this density are not right. If they have been caused as I have characterised them yesterday here, they are true of course. However, one interprets them normally wrongly. Such a person regards these spooky things, which he faces from the spiritual world, as the only real. He looks for nothing but ghosts, rather than spirits. However, thereby he gets to spiritual phenomena, to facts of the spiritual world, but he judges them wrongly. Let us take an example. Such a seer can look back to his former earth-life with the methods about which I have already spoken here. If he looks back, pictures may appear to him, facts which show the appearance of his former life. However, in reality it is not in such a way. In reality, he does not behold that which he was in reality, but he beholds what has separated like sheaths from him. He beholds what he should not behold if he wants to see the true, advancing reality. Thus, for example, such a person beholds a kind of a ghostlike world instead of the real spiritual world. He perceives a reality [and regards it as] the objective reality of a dead person, but that which he perceives is not the objective reality, but that which the dead person has just cast off—while he does not behold the advancing reality. Since with such a mood the seer considers that as something shadowy in which he is not interested. This is just that mood which does not lead to the spirit but always beguiles into interpreting inaccurately what we behold. We believe to behold a living soul, but we regard that which is doomed to die as something developing.

Thus, we realise that in the spiritual area the question of error is somewhat different. The error in the usual world can mostly be disproved; in the spiritual world is that vitalising which we can visit, so that the spiritual world has a significance for us, and confuse it with that which is doomed to die, to the abnormal. The contrast is another in the spiritual area than in the outer area. The concepts “true” and “wrong” change for the spiritual world. The fact that we confuse truth with error in the physical-sensory world corresponds in the spiritual world to the fact that we confuse the life promoting with that which is doomed to die. Hence, the relations are quite different. One has to get into the habit of feeling quite different compared with this world, to develop quite new concepts and ideas. From it arises again how it really is with the error. It is already a fatal error, if one regards the concepts and ideas as sufficient for the spiritual area.

I would like to use another comparison that characterises an error very often appearing in this field. Let us assume once that we have to deal with that which was formed in a mine by the forces, which are active and effective within the earth. Let us assume that a gap originates up to the surface of the earth. The sunlight penetrates into this gap; it can light up everything that has formed down there in the darkness. We can feel it as wonderful and marvellous how the sunlight falls on everything that could not originate on the surface of the earth. What the sunlight creates on the surface of the earth cannot be created in the same way in the depths, and that which has formed in the depth can maybe appear as a feast for our eyes if the sunlight penetrates through a gap.

It is true what I have stated before: if the spiritual researcher brings that which he has beheld in the spiritual world in concepts of common sense and interprets it, everybody can understand these things. You can understand the spiritual world not only if you yourself are a spiritual researcher but with your healthy human mind. Only the spiritual researcher can investigate this area. However, if the representations of the extrasensory worlds are given in concepts and ideas, one just feels induced to compare such a representation with the sunlight that falls through the gap in the tunnel, and then the usual human beings understand them who cannot penetrate with the concepts of the sensory world into those regions of spiritual truth.

We have also to figure out that the soul itself has do the step into the spiritual world if from this spiritual world the facts and beings should become obvious. This is a cliff that certain spiritual forces work into the soul, which ... . [Gap in the transcript]

Another cliff is if that seizes the soul about which I have just said that it must be defeated. We have said to understand each other that any egoity of a medium must be extinguished, so that the medium can be integrated [in the world being]. The spiritual researcher, however, who consciously does research must also blank out his egoity consciously if he faces the spiritual world. However, if the human being is confronted at this point with himself like a foreign being and looks back, if he experiences all that, then he notices only how self-love works in the human being. If one speaks in such a way, someone can easily come and say, yes, there somebody talks to us about overcoming the self and the like; nevertheless, these are easy things.—Someone who speaks in such a way speaks only about what he knows as self-love.

The spiritual researcher gets to know something quite different from self-love; when he has parted with himself this self-love becomes something like an invincible power of nature. It turns out to be invincible in a certain case: where the spiritual researcher does not come so far to remove his complete self. If self-love is to be recognised really in such a way that now he overcomes and defeats it, something develops in the soul that one normally does not recognise correctly. There some self-love remains that lives so intimately, so subtly in this soul that the spiritual researcher himself interprets that which lives there in him in quite wrong way. Here a very peculiar phenomenon appears:

Because the spiritual researcher believes to have removed his self-love from himself, he says to himself, you have removed your self-love; what you find now in yourself is something else than you yourself.—He calls this the divine in himself. However, because he has not succeeded in removing the self-love completely, he becomes a wrong mystic. He looks into his inside and believes to recognise his divine self, however, he adores only that which has remained of his self-love. Many adored gods of the wrong mysticism, the mysticism on misleading paths, are only the adored own beings, the adored own selves. God's love of mystics is often only disguised self-love.

There one faces a fateful field of spiritual-scientific error. It is often quite difficult to distinguish where the mystic really attains objective knowledge of spirit and where he only reveres the rest of his self as something higher in himself.

We can find something in the usual sensory area by which we can come to an understanding with each other about what appears with the mystic who is on wrong tracks. There we only need to point to a certain scientific direction that appeared in particular in the middle of the nineteenth century. This scientific direction does not believe at all that it is materialist, because it speaks of ideas in history. Thus, many researchers would refuse to speak of folk souls or spirits of time as realities that there are generally beings that manifest themselves really. One considered it as more correct to speak about ideas in the course of history. This appeared especially absurd with the “life of Jesus research” in the last time. There a direction became prominent which stated that the historical Jesus did not at all exist; within the community, in the ecclesiastical development just the Christ idea appeared.—One took the view that this was a more distinguished view if one did not acknowledge Christ Jesus as reality but only the idea that developed in history.

How do such ideas appear to that who figures the things out? They appear to him, as if he wanted to state that an only painted painter could paint a picture; in the same way an idea could work in history. Only beings but not ideas and thoughts can work. The beings that appear embodied in any way as human beings can work but not ideas and thoughts; these vanish as mere shades if one ignores the being and the essential. As reality that vanishes for such human beings as mere shades of thought what should have spiritual reality for the human beings who have become mystics because of unrecognized, disguised self-love. It is something that cannot be at all beyond their souls, it is effective only in their souls. The result of it is that such souls cannot advance to spiritual beings that must be there independent from them. They can advance only up to that which they can bring in to their selves, which they can consume as it were spiritually.

If one wanted to use a rather unsubtle comparison, I could say, someone who wants to become a seer may be able to behold spiritual beings that are independent from him, as well as one can see physical beings with physical eyes. He must be able to see, for example, a piglet that is separated from him. However, we assume that he cannot see a piglet if it is alive, but only if it is killed and carved, and he can eat and enjoy it then. Such a mystic is a spiritual gourmet. The spiritual gourmet does not turn his view to objective beings, but to the spiritual world in general, he does not take in beings, but only spiritual substances which he absorbs, but he never attains anything that is an internally enriched self, rather only a hollow self, so that his self balloons up to a kind of spiritual universe. Just because he impregnates his self with that which fits into his self he blankets the way to real spiritual beings and truth to himself, and he beholds that which weaves and works only in himself. Therefore, the history of mysticism is so difficult to study because one has to distinguish those mystics who can really part with their selves and can behold something essential, and those mystics who, actually, confuse self-love with God's love and perceive what fulfils their selves. They live only on their selves.

On one side [the view of the spiritual] in unsubtle-material densification in a kind of ghostlike vision, and on the other side the mystic adoration of the self—these are two main ways of error in the spiritual field.

It is imperative that the soul thereby finds the paths of truth that it really puts outside that it considers that objectively, which the human being is. Hence, it is so necessary to start with spiritual research and with the study of spiritual science to get to truth and not to error concerning the things that can save us mostly from self-love.

If a spiritual researcher who wants to investigate the intimacies of life and strives at first to visit human beings who have recently died in the spiritual world, that is if a human being becomes a seeker of spirit out of altruism, he may very easily stray to the one or the other side. The interest should be directed to that which leads us into the big world which does not touch us very personally because we can then get easier free from our personality. While visiting any soul that has recently died we are exposed to all possible personal errors. If we investigate which changes the soul has experienced in the course of its development, we are easily inclined to look at the thing subjectively from our intentions.

In my Occult Science, I have tried to take the starting point of that in which not only the single but also all human beings are interested. Since that is the point if we become spiritual researchers and want to become freer and freer from error that we learn to recognise ourselves as a product of the whole world. As we recognise other beings and things as products of the whole world, we can also explain ourselves as human beings from the whole world, in particular, while we envisage our spiritual-mental being. Indeed, we are a microcosm in the macrocosm. We are an image of the big world, and we have to compare that which the human being has in his soul, in his spiritual being to the whole universe. However, we cannot do this, as long as we stick in ourselves. Not before we have really come out of ourselves if we have ourselves besides ourselves, as we are as human beings, we can compare that to the world which we now face as an object.

Whom does it surprise if spiritual science often appears as foolish fantasy to the people? In physics, for example, one forgives that one distinguishes seven colours, that one has seven tones and the eighth tone as the octave in the acoustics. However, one does not forgive the spiritual scientist that he understands the human nature as seven-membered and puts it down to seven worlds merging into each other. Still the same thinking finds seven colours, seven tones in the octave in physics, and seven members of the human nature in spiritual science. It is the same thought; the one is not more than the other is.

However, you can recognise the coherence of the human nature with the big world only if you face this human nature in such a way that you consider it as a whole. The human being is a spiritual-mental being. Our reason can consider only sensorily. To get to spiritual truths—not to spiritual errors—, you must be able to recognise the human being outside him as a product of the whole world. This is exceptionally important. You have to consider the effects of the world on the human being. As long as you look only at the effects on the own being, you do not get to truth—only to error. The human being must be outside his self and then consider himself in proportion to the world; he has to be detached from himself.

This is the first condition that the human being puts himself in the position that not everything that he has developed in himself is stuck in self-love. What does that mean? What develops us spiritual-mentally? We do certain exercises to develop the soul: meditation, concentration, and so on. Certain soul processes thereby arise in us. As long as we practise them in such a way that we even have the slightest sensation that we ourselves are that which develops there, we cannot defend ourselves from error.

This is the one side of the matter. The mystic overcomes that so hard because he loses himself in his own self, only in subtle way. That which goes forward in us to raise us to higher worlds must be a world process, not a single process. We have to recognise the human being except ourselves; we have to experience the world in ourselves. These two big secrets lead to the way of truth and avoid the errors. The second is to recognise the nature of the human being outside of us, not in us, not only to experience the world outside of us, but also to experience the world in us as an objective world.

Someone who takes these two guidelines to reach the spiritual world advances gradually so far, that he can attain the knowledge of truth as experience. If you own truth in the spiritual area, you yourself become that which you have recognised as truth because you think your way into those beings. We experience the world and we feel it then, while we experience it, like a torch that lights up the spiritual world to us. We feel it as an invigorating element that turns out to be fertile, while it leads us from step to step on our pilgrimage. We feel the world, while it arises in us and for us human beings as that which germinates, sprouts, and proves to be effective. If you can feel in such a way, you can be sure that you live in spiritual truth.

However, the error is cold; it darkens the spiritual truth. Errors are in the spiritual world forces, are beings, but extinguishing, darkening forces. The more we familiarise ourselves with the error, the more we can feel: if you want to use it for understanding the world, the more it darkens everything. You realise that everywhere life freezes due to a force of death that it begins to rot as it were if you approach it with error. The error turns out to be something real that destroys. We must defeat it; we must let forces grow—not only judgements - to disprove it, so that it escapes from us. Then we fight our way through to truth. Therefore, the quest for truth in the spiritual area is just fighting with the error, and, hence, it is important to know the ways of the errors. That is why I had to draw the same attention to the ways of error as to the ways of truth.

Perhaps I could cause a feeling with these two talks how real the soul's way is which can lead into the spiritual regions, which only someone can have who considers that unprejudiced which I have brought sketchily and which one can hard transfer on someone who faces the matter only with prejudices. However, you could still say to yourself after such considerations, there many people judge about these spiritual researchers, but you see from that which they say how much they know of it.—You can already find out whether the objections are justified or unjustified if you put the question: does the person concerned know anything generally about that which spiritual research intends? Does he know anything about the serious fights, about the overcoming and deliverance from the sufferings that one has to experience?—I wanted to evoke a feeling that these things may not be taken at all frivolously by those who only must familiarise themselves with that which the soul has to experience to get to the truths of spiritual research. Then, however, one can experience something peculiar: then those who approach the results of spiritual research seriously are no more opponents. Maybe in no other area than in that of spiritual research you can say rightly, opponents are strictly speaking only those who do not know the matter. On the field where one knows it are no more opponents. The opponents become appreciators if they get to know the matter. You can leave it to everybody to convince himself.

In this feeling we can summarise, maybe not so much what I have spoken the day before yesterday and today, but how I have tried to show the things. This time I have tried intentionally to show the things completely after the soul experience, how the soul, so to speak, is gradually led and what it experiences. Thereby you can maybe receive the sensation of the seriousness of spiritual research. You must have this sensation at first, then arises that in the spiritual-scientific area, more than in any other field, to which a Goethean sentence applies which he had deeply experienced.

“You cannot disprove a wrong doctrine because it is based on the conviction that the wrong is true. However, the opposite can, must and should be pronounced again and again.”

If this also happens concerning spiritual science, it will become a part of our spiritual culture, as it has to be. Even if errors assert themselves, truth will find its way everywhere in the world. We do not need to be anxious about truth. If we represent untruthfulness by a personal error, it will not be harmful; we are convinced of that. However, if we represent the truth, it will find the ways, so that it can settle in the development of humanity. Since the earthly evolution of humanity is designed in such a way, that humanity finds its development only in truth. In this consciousness, you can look at spiritual science, in particular if you consider truth and error with it.

The spiritual researcher just removes the errors while he recognises them—and the truth will be victorious because it has to be victorious with its power.

In the present, one does not speak about something popular and accepted if one speaks about spiritual science in the sense as it is meant here, and this is comprehensible. As a representative of spiritual science, one would be more surprised if this spiritual science met with universal approval than if it evokes opposition of most people everywhere. This is comprehensible because the strength of our time and of everything that has led to this strength is based by no means on the reasons on which spiritual science has to be based.

The triumphs of humanity are in that area which arises from natural sciences and their knowledge. As the single human being if he should completely devote himself to an activity has often to divert his attention from everything else and has to concentrate upon that which he should do, it is also with the genius of humanity. This genius of humanity had to devote himself, because of a historical necessity, to the outer sensory knowledge that is bound to the reason that depends on the brain. He had to devote himself completely to that worldview; he had to turn his attention completely to that. Therefore, it happened that from it habitual ways of thinking have gradually developed which are hostile to research results from the area of spiritual life.

One cannot only criticise this fact disparagingly; one has to understand it. One has to understand that it is comprehensible if considerations as those of today only cause disparaging remarks of those who are not closer to the thing, no matter from which side these remarks come. Spiritual science does not concern those areas with which the scientific knowledge deals in our time at first. Spiritual science differs from this scientific way of thinking not only by that which is considered, but it also differs especially by the whole way in which one considers. Just this way is quite unpleasant, actually, to our contemporaries.

Spiritual science completely acknowledges natural sciences. They have to deal with that which approaches the human being from without, and they have to look at his outside. They cannot penetrate into the inside of the things just because of their strength—for reasons which we get to know this evening. However, this is the task of spiritual science, because of its nature, to penetrate into the inside of the things. Once again, I would like to remember a Goethean word about knowledge which goes back again to the word of the great naturalist Haller (Albrecht von H., 1708-1777), one could say that, actually, with this Goethean word he leads from the outer view of nature to the inner one, the Goethean way of consideration. The naturalist Haller had said:

No created mind penetrates
Into the being of nature.
Blissful is that to whom she shows
Her appearance only!

and Goethe who was completely pervaded by the spiritual said against it:

I hear that repeatedly for sixty years,
I grumble about it, but covertly,
I say to myself thousand and thousand times:
She gives everything plenty and with pleasure;
Nature has neither kernel nor shell,
She is everything at the same time.
Examine yourself above all,
Whether you are kernel or shell.

Indeed, Goethe had the right to speak this way. However, one must say, at the same time he led from the outer view of nature to the view of spirit. If he says in this poem:

everywhere we are inside,

we can still say, we are only inside of nature if we can recognise the creative spirit behind the physical that she has in her core. Then we stand inside of nature. Then the question is only: how has one to imagine this penetration into the inside of nature in the spiritual-scientific sense?

With the cognitive way with which one looks at the things in the usual life and which one takes as a basis of the usual actions which are also valid in science one cannot penetrate into the spiritual inside of the things. Therefore, one has to say, this way of knowledge belongs to the outer view of nature.

For the consideration of the spirit self-education of the soul is inevitable to get another way of knowledge and a quite different state of soul or consciousness The soul has to make something different of itself than it is in the usual life and in the usual science if it wants to investigate the spiritual depths. Which development, which self-education has the soul to go through if it wants to appropriate those forces which do not exist in the usual life and with which one penetrates into the inside of the things?

To get to an understanding with each other I have to ask you to do a comparative consideration with me which is meant, however, by no means as a comparison, but which leads us really into the inside of our whole point of view, as it should be developed. We take a big change in nature as starting point that faces us yearly, the development of the plant in the course of the year, in the seasons. We know that without sunlight, without forces that flow from the outside towards the plants the earth could not produce them. We see the relationship of the earth to these cosmic world surroundings if we see the plant sprouting in the spring. In autumn, those forces withdraw which elicit the plants. We see these world forces kept away as it were from that part of the earth where winter is; then we see the earth left to its own resources.

Let us now assume that a human being is organised in such a way that at the beginning of the spring he is stunned with something and experiences a kind of sleeping state during the spring and the summer that he wakes up then in autumn and gets to know that only which autumn and winter offer. Let us assume that this may happen anyhow. Let us also assume that the earth is inhabited by such beings only that see the earth only in its lifeless state; they would only see the earth if it held the seeds of the plants; and that which is outside would remind at most in the perennial plants of the fact that there is also a spring, a summer. Such beings would believe that the earth is something else for the human being than it is. They would see its winter side only and would regard the earth as that which produces lifeless things. Imagine once how the view of the earth would be for such beings.

If we extended the view even further, we could say, such beings would walk around the earth to experience the winter on one half of the earth and then on the other half of the earth, so that they would never experience the summer. Then they did not need sleep. Then they would always look away from life. They would get to know the earth only in the state of death. We turn the view at that which would be hidden to such beings. Everything that reveals itself to the human being at summertime that makes the earth a source of living existence would be a concealed world to such beings.

Not concerning the earth, but concerning something else this phenomenon exists on earth about which I have here spoken, namely this phenomenon appears in the human being himself. However, the field of observation is not the earth but the human being. Self-knowledge of the human being for the usual life is in a way as the earth knowledge would be to a being as I have brought in now. Why?

If we consider the human being in his everyday life, this everyday life changes between a sleeping state and a waking one. We want to look at the human being how he represents himself in sleep. All his experiences that surge up and down in him from awakening to falling asleep, all desires, passions, ideals, feelings, and the like are quiet. We consider what is outwardly visible at the sleeping human being. What do we face there? A being that we can probably compare to a plant. We face a being that completely has the value of a plant. About such a being, we must say that it has its living in a similar way as the plant cover of the earth has it. As we can only understand the plant cover of the earth if it sprouts under the impression of the cosmic forces, we can also understand this sleeping human body only if we imagine it as the plant. If one wants to imagine that in the human being life sprouts, one normally takes a quite wrong viewpoint: one normally compares the wake life of the human being from morning up to the evening to the sprouting plant life from spring until autumn. However, this does not correspond to reality if one assumes that the human being merges into a kind of plant state when he falls asleep. That means that the spring comes when he falls asleep and that he goes into the summer, the longer he sleeps at night. If awakening is approaching, it is autumn in the human being, and from awakening up to falling asleep, so in the wake day life, we have wintertime in the human being.

Even natural sciences have got on to verify this. We have wintertime in the wake human being because the day life works destroying - as well as the winter must be restored for the earth—, and must be restored at night by everything that is sprouting life. As well as the winter works destructively across the earth, the wake day life works destructively in life, and at the soul summertime when the human being is in the plant state that is caused in him which is like the sprouting life of the plants on earth at summertime.

Hence, we can say, that which the human being unfolds in his wake state relates to his whole being in such a way as that which the cosmic world forces work on the earth during wintertime. From it, we can only understand our wake imagining life. It is as the life on earth at wintertime. It is the wake life of the soul wintertime. This is the real consideration of the human being.

Now we return to our first mental picture. The human being goes through a soul summertime, and when he enters into this time, he becomes unconscious—as well as a being that falls asleep in the spring would never see the plant growth and would face a concealed world in the summertime. As the cosmic forces do not intervene in the life on earth at winter, as they are not suitable in winter to draw what reveals itself in the plant growth, the winter forces of the human being, his thoughts, his sensations, and his conscious life are not able to make summertime in the human being.

The following question must be associated with this: is in this soul summertime of the human being anything concealed that one can compare with that which remains concealed to our hypothetical beings that cannot perceive the plant growth of the earth because of their sleeping state? This question can be answered only if it is possible to change that unconsciousness in which the human being lives in his soul summertime into consciousness. That means if it is possible to cause a state in him by which he can perceive in such a way that before him the soul summertime spreads out with all its beings. Is it able to do this?—Another question is: have we to assume rightly that if the human being makes himself aware of the soul summertime something reveals that can be compared not only with the plant cover, but also with that which can be rightly called a higher world? From the following consideration arises that we are allowed to assume such a thing.

If we consider the world, we find that the human being is placed in the different realms of nature. It is not at all haughty if the human being assumes that to his creation certain higher forces are necessary which one does not find in the other realms of nature. These creative or formative forces restore the human being at night after we have worn our forces during our day life. Indeed, we cannot realise from that which happens at night immediately what the formative forces of the human being are like. However, while we destroy human vitality during the day and restore it at night, nevertheless, we find the productive forces that only escape from our observation. Thus, we can suppose that these formative forces of the human being reveal themselves if we can consciously invade into the soul summertime. Someone has to invade into the soul summertime consciously who wants to become a spiritual researcher.

What are the mental pictures, ideas, and concepts to the spiritual researcher that he has in the wake state?—They are those inner beings of the human being that exist towards the soul summertime. It is no special comparison but reality: he has something in his soul summertime, when in him everything is blossoming, that relates in his being as the seed which rests in the bowels of the earth in winter to the fully developed plants of the summer. If we can call the developing winter seeds into life in ourselves, we do the same in reality what happens with the earth when it develops the seeds towards springtime.

That who consciously wants to penetrate into the soul summertime would have to unfold that which is like the earth lying fallow in the winter in the human being—thoughts, sensations, and feelings—, to a vivid existence, as in the spring and in summer the seeds of the plant cover of the earth develop. What appears as a demand can really happen. We can really consider, so to speak, our thoughts, as we experience them consciously, as the seeds outliving the soul winter, and we can do something to call these seeds into life. This happens by concentration, contemplation, and meditation.

At first the spiritual researcher takes the feelings and sensations as starting point which he has experienced in the usual life, so at the soul wintertime, and which show nothing of that into which they can evolve. The human being who wants to become a spiritual researcher must arouse this winter seeds of his soul to a more vigorous existence than they have in the usual life. This happens by meditation, concentration, and contemplation. One makes the particular discovery if one does not use concepts, sensations, and feelings so that they depict an outer existence only but that they live in our soul so that we live with our souls in them and are taken up in them completely.

We take a simple mental picture to develop the full power. It does not depend on the contents of this mental picture. While our thoughts wander from mental picture to mental picture in the usual everyday life, the spiritual researcher fully concentrates on one mental picture, on one sensation. He rests on it by a will impulse for some time. It is necessary for it to abstain from outer sensory impressions, also from that which we think, imagine, or remember, for example, worries and the like. With a strong will development, the human being has to advance so far to cause a state that is very similar to falling asleep, and, nevertheless, is quite different from it. In this condition, he does no longer use his limbs, allows the body to rest like in sleep, does not perceive with the senses, allows the mind to sleep, and manages with his own will to dedicate himself to this mental picture and to rest on it for a while, to experience it completely. Without asking what it signifies, one has to pay attention only to that which it causes in the soul, which it gives as power; one has to concentrate only upon this mental picture.

What I have here described forms the contents of a science in principle. About that, you find additional details in my books How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and Occult Science. An Outline. Here I can indicate the things only in principle. It is important that the soul dedicates itself to a single mental picture some time. One has to delve deeply into the mental picture; it does not need to take much time. One must grow together with the mental picture. However, it is not enough to do such a thing few times, but one has to continue such exercises for years, according to the talent of the person concerned. If the soul repeatedly dedicates itself to such exercises, one makes the discovery that the feelings and mental pictures of the usual life are as seeds that can develop that can produce something new, something special. One gets around by such a strong self-education to forming his images and feelings gradually in such a way that one can realise a world internally which is not bound to the outer senses, but is conjured up as seeds that outlive the soul wintertime. Then we experience the rising of the soul spring, the soul summertime. The spiritual researcher has to experience this consciously. He has to experience how he wakes up a soul springtime, a soul summertime in himself, how he places another world in the world that he has, otherwise, in the soul wintertime. Then he realises a new world, indeed, a world that he has not known before.

Only one thing is necessary: that he learns to behave towards this world that he realises now as he behaves, otherwise, towards the world of the soul wintertime.

I said, this inner world rises at the soul summertime. However, at first this world resembles another world which meets us to our sorrow and which is due to pathological soul states. The resemblance is only an outer one because that which I have just described is quite different from that which arises from pathological states like hallucinations, delusions and the like because it can arise only from a healthy soul life. They are only externally similar to each other because both ascend from the soul.

However, the phenomena that arise from pathological states are a quality, which we have often to deplore. They work overpowering on the human life, even beguiling. Since the soul does not regard a hallucination as a reflection of its being, but it regards it as an objective-real world. This is a big error! We know how strongly this error can work. Somebody who lives with such persons knows that one can never persuade them from their hallucinations. This is in such a way because—if the human being exceeds the normal soul life—something appears from it that exists, otherwise, also in him. We return to our comparison, which is, however, more than a comparison.

When the human being feels spring and summer approaching, and if he is gifted for the manifestations of nature, his heart would like to shout out, then his heart is attached to this sprouting life; he is given away to it. The devotion to that which faces us increases if we go from the snowy earth to the sprouting life of the spring and the summer. However, that also happens if we face that which ascends in the soul as a world that is not the usual world of the soul wintertime. If at the horizon of the pathological soul life visions, hallucinations emerge which do not exist in the usual life in the soul winter life, then the soul feels at first attracted and given away to that which arises there like a new world. However, this is nothing but the outflow of the soul itself. If the human being likes the outer activities towards the spring and the summer, he loves himself in that which emerges from his own soul. This is the secret. From this life, which emerges from the inside, his concealed own life faces him. Therefore, he is attached to these phenomena, cannot break free from them.

One notices only in this area how strongly the human being loves himself. One can understand this if one knows that the human being faces himself [in his visions]. He would have to extinguish himself, so to speak, if he did not believe in his visions. The increased self-love works like a power of nature that makes the visionary believing in his visions.

It does not matter that that who becomes a spiritual researcher produces new feelings from those feelings, which outlive the soul winter, but that he cultivates his will. Since the spiritual researcher has immediately to say to himself that which the ill soul never says to itself, which only the soul says to itself if it is healthy if the world, which I have just described, appears before him. He has to defeat the increased self-love. He has to extinguish this not only in thoughts, but also with a strong will, which the spiritual researcher develops by training. Not before he is successful, he is correctly prepared for spiritual science.

How would a human being be who could not extinguish as a spiritual researcher arbitrarily what spreads out there? Such a human being would be in the area of the spirit like a person who faces an object in the sensory world, looks at it, but could then never look away from it as if he were tied up to this object. Thus, a spiritual researcher would be who would leave that standing which emerges from his soul summertime. He has to be able to extinguish all pictures that ascend there. The right instruction just leads to that which can arise only in a completely healthy soul to extinguish everything that ascends there. As we would never face the plant world properly if we could not freely turn our eyes from one point to the other, we would never approach a spiritual world if we could not turn away from that which I have just described. This is a necessary quality of the real spiritual researcher that he must have defeated the selfishness to such degree by self-education that he is able any time to extinguish the world which he has conjured up with strong inner power. That means to extinguish himself because it is his own soul world.

Defeating oneself is the first stage on the way into the spiritual world.

If this great experience has taken place, the spiritual researcher experiences an objective spiritual world. Then the objective spiritual world appears after the spiritual field has been cleared by extinguishing. Here is the abyss that the soul must cross if it enters into the spiritual world. If the soul has crossed this abyss if it has defeated self-love, then the world that it faces can also give it something.

One can say if one has only materialist ideas and ignores what spiritual research can offer, how do you differentiate what ascends there in the soul from the outer reality?

Only life decides such things, as well as in the outer life only life itself decides whether anything is percept or mental picture. One can distinguish this. I have always appreciated Schopenhauer completely. I myself wrote an introduction to his works. However, if Schopenhauer says that the world is only our idea or mental picture, one can easily disprove that. If one has a piece of red-hot iron, one may say, this is only my mental picture. If, however, one touches it, one perceives very well whether it is only a mental picture or reality. There is not a logical proof of the just said; there only life decides this. Spiritual research induces us in spiritual field to distinguish percept and mental picture that is to distinguish reality and imagination correctly.

We realise by which spiritual research differs from natural sciences. Natural sciences stop at the cognitive forces that the human being brings with him into life and develops in life. Spiritual science only attains something while the human being goes through the described stage; that is he develops his soul so far that you can compare it with the soul condition of the child in the third, fourth years if it awakes to self-consciousness. Everybody knows this awakening where the consciousness of the child becomes self-consciousness. On a higher level, something similar happens with the spiritual researcher: he awakes to such higher spiritual life, compared with which the usual wake day consciousness is a kind of sleeping state.

The soul has to experience a second awakening to penetrate into a new world. The human being is—if he really does research in the spiritual—in the same state in which the sleeping human being is, nevertheless, he is in a contrary condition. The sleeping lets his body rest completely. He does not let any sensory impression get into himself. The spiritual researcher is in the same state, save that that which is unconscious with the sleeping is conscious in him and perceives the spiritual world.

If the human being perceives the spiritual world this way, he does not get to know the spiritual in general only, but he also gets to know single facts and single beings. People forgive in the least today that one speaks not only of soul and spirit, but also of single beings. Today materialism is declining, and people already concede that one speaks of spirit and soul. One already permits that one speaks of single phenomena in nature and says not only, nature, nature, and nature. However, concerning the spiritual, one does not permit even today that spiritual science speaks of single beings and says not only, spirit, spirit and soul, soul. The spiritual researcher penetrates into a spiritual world full of beings that is added to the outer sensory world as a new world. There he beholds the forces that shape the outer world, he realises what forms the basis of the outer world as a spiritual. He really penetrates into the inside of nature at first, however, in his own inside. He is immediately in his own inside.

I have pointed out how the spiritual researcher has to extinguish what he has conjured up in his soul summer at first. He can extinguish this, or more precisely, he can extinguish himself in the world that appeared as a new one to him. However, he cannot extinguish something of it. A rest always remains. If the spiritual researcher settles in this rest, he gets to know his inner being. This is his real essence. If he goes through the described processes and attains real self-knowledge, he gets to know his core as someone who finds the zygote of a lower animal in a mud pool. If then the lower animal originates, the person concerned knows that from the zygote the lower animal has originated. The animal embryo must only have been there; it has attracted the matter, but the lower animal would never have originated unless a zygote had existed.

Thus, the human being beholds into the objective world with his spiritual-mental. He probably beholds how a human being develops in mysterious way from the first hour of his existence on and on. The features of the child, which are uncertain at first, become more and more certain. Science knows that the brain takes shape more and more plastically. From year to year, the human body develops more. Then the human being looks at father and mother, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on, and he says to himself, I find these qualities with my ancestors, however, that which forms the basis of these qualities is the spiritual-mental core that has been discovered on the way of spiritual research. Here spiritual research is at a point where it has to perform something similar as natural sciences had to perform for the present in the seventeenth century when Francesco Redi, a great naturalist, said, life cannot originate from anything lifeless - life can only originate from something living.—Redi was pursued as a heretic. Spiritual science is today in a similar situation. The spiritual researcher is today compelled to say, the knowledge of the human spiritual-mental essence shows that the human being comes from a spiritual existence which he experienced before birth, and that he experienced former lives on earth before this spiritual existence. People do no longer say, this is heresy, but they say, it is humbug. One tries also today to silence those people who pronounce such things. One does not burn them, indeed—the customs have become somewhat milder, one also speaks of tolerance—, but today strictly speaking only another method is applied to the same. It was heresy of Redi in the seventeenth century what one acknowledges today as a scientific fact. Even today, one regards it as a pipe dream if spiritual science speaks of the fact that the spiritual-mental essence of the human being is not rooted in the line of physical heredity, but is rooted in a spiritual-mental experience in former lives on earth. This life on earth in which we live now is the beginning and the embryo of a new life on earth.

What the spiritual researcher recognises as spiritual-mental essence that he cannot extinguish is completely different from that which you experience in the wake day life. This spiritual-mental essence is as the developed plant compared with the seed. It is the true mental-spiritual reality which creates in the human being which receives what is given by father and mother and unveils itself to get to a physical existence, as the seed which was left from a preceding plant and now develops again to a spiritual-mental being. This spiritual-mental core exceeds birth and death.

Here spiritual research is at a similar point as the naturalists Copernicus and Giordano Bruno were during former centuries. They could look out into the cosmic space and say, what the human being has believed up to now that the sky ends with that which human eyes see, that is not true. Giordano Bruno saw the world enlarged, and he recognised that these borders exist only because the human cognition is weak. He expanded the horizon of human cognition of the physical world. The spiritual researcher has to perform the same today again. He has to bring the knowledge to the present humanity that the human being comes from a former life on earth and that he has to live through other lives on earth. Spiritual science expands the view to spiritual-mental infinity. As Giordano Bruno postulated countless worlds in space, the spiritual researcher has to extend time, which belongs to the human being in which he unfolds his spiritual-mental core in many lives back and forth.

Thus, spiritual science places itself beside natural sciences without contradicting them but acknowledging them completely. Yes, just from the same attitude, as natural sciences have it compared with nature, spiritual research would like to come to a science of the spirit. It would like to penetrate into the inner forces of existence as natural sciences penetrate into the outer forces of existence. It will become obvious if once spiritual science will be accepted in the intellectual life of our time that one can only grasp the complete reality, while one approaches this reality from two sides, scientifically and spiritual-scientifically. Thus, one finds the true reality, while one co-operates from nature and from spirit in oppose directions until both directions meet.

Natural sciences had their aurora, when Copernicus sent his significant worldview into the world. Now spiritual science is at the same point and faces the spirit with the same attitude. If one investigates the outer life scientifically, and if one investigates the mathematical laws, one comes to a certain point, which one names with the word life. If the naturalist investigates the plant, he wants to approach life more and more. Life is like the big goal that one heads in natural sciences. It is the big ideal of natural sciences to investigate life. They dig in the tunnel this way.

The world of the spiritual researcher also has such a certain point up to which one comes which one sees in the distance as it were. This point that one approaches, as the naturalist approaches life, is death for the spiritual researcher.

The spiritual researcher has to reach a certain level where he says to himself, I figure the spiritual world out to a certain degree, which spreads out there before me. Then something stands there that one is not allowed to touch with this inner experience to which one must rather hand over the inner experience.—One recognises all possible beings and facts of the supersensible world, and one realises that death stands at the end. One realises that our spiritual-mental essence must go through death, as it has to go through the spiritual world after death to live in this spiritual world. Then it has to return to a new life. One realises how life after life develops. The whole existence is composed of the life in the spiritual world between death and a new birth and the life in the physical world between birth and death.

One copes with death just as little in the spiritual research as one copes with life in natural sciences. The scientific cognition approaches life, spiritual research approaches death vividly recognising in spirit; it is the big goal of spiritual research. Thus, spiritual research relates to death. This is the other direction, it bores [the tunnel] from the other side, and both certainly meet because they must meet. Death can only be there because it originates from life—and vice versa. One strives for the same goal from two sides. This is something that has to place itself as attitude in the modern spiritual life with which natural sciences and spiritual science come to their own in the same way.

As well as natural sciences strive for recognising the outer world, spiritual science has to strive for recognising destiny, and it can recognise destiny only in such a way that it sees the cause prepared of the next life on earth in this life on earth. The causes of destiny, good luck, and misfortune become clear to us thereby. Life faces us as a transformation of death. Immortality faces us in such a way that we know: while we go through death, we bring our spiritual-mental essence to the spiritual world to be active again in a new life.

No empty infinity faces us, but an infinity in which links are strung together, so that we know, why the human being must be immortal. He must be immortal because life carries the forces from birth to death in its spiritual-mental core to produce new lives because we see the seed of the following life laid in one life.

Thus, the big riddles of life are answered, while natural sciences and spiritual science co-operate. Somebody who believes there to have to stop on the ground of natural sciences and wants to establish a worldview from this ground resembles someone in a way who says, the ores down there in a mine appear to me in the true light if I bore a hole and let the sun shine on them. Indeed, everything is lighted up, but the sun produces that only which is on the surface. The sun can light up that only which rests there down in the earth, but it cannot produce it.

Thus, that which unveils the human core may be taken away from the merely outer science. Then it may come to light up it; then the outer science can also understand that which the spiritual researcher investigates.

Here we get to a point where I have to eliminate an objection. Someone may say, what you tell to us there shows that spiritual science is significant only for the spiritual researcher himself. I must point there to my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. You find closer explained in it that one is allowed to say, every human being has advanced so far today that he can become a spiritual researcher to a certain degree. However, it is laborious; one can attain it only with much concentration. However, as the ores arise from the earth and are lighted up then by the sun, one can light up with the usual understanding what the spiritual researcher has found. Then it can give the soul what it needs compared with the riddles of life what it needs for its security. The spiritual researcher also does not have more than that which someone can have who listens to him and reads his writings.

The spiritual researcher beholds the spiritual world. However, it is a science of the soul only if it is conceptualised so that our common sense can understand it. Hence, it is also a prejudice if one says, one cannot understand what spiritual research produces. One can understand it very well and can verify its results with the unbiased common sense. If people are of the opinion that natural sciences disprove spiritual research, they put a spoke in their own wheel.

If people point to heredity, the spiritual researcher will completely agree with them. They are fully right. However, by a comparison I would like to bring to mind how, indeed, spiritual research can stand beside natural sciences. It is like with two persons who say something different; one does not refute the other, the one is as true as the other is. If natural sciences say, the human being has these and those qualities from his ancestors, spiritual science agrees. However, as true it is that the human being has these qualities because he has laid the causes of them in a former life. The world will convince itself that natural sciences must see their strength just in the fact that they confine themselves to their fields and that they can exist beside spiritual science which is concerned with the spiritual in which we are interwoven with soul and body. In physics, one can show with spectral analysis that one can find the same substances here on earth as in the universe. As there the view was extended materially to the immeasurable outer space, we discern that in the wide world of the spirit the spiritual beings and spiritual facts exist to which the spiritual-mental nature of the human being is similar from which it is created. As well as the human being knows that he lives in the material substances which fulfil the whole universe, he can feel secure in the universal spiritual which spiritual science makes him understand. However, this will cause that as well as natural sciences have changed our outer existence, spiritual science will give humanity soul goods, which it needs more and more.

If once spiritual science seizes education deeply, it will educate the human being in such a way that he will know not only in the abstract that in him a mental core is, which goes through death, but he will transform this knowledge of the spirit into inner strength. He will feel this strength in himself vividly. He will feel if his hair turns grey if his skin wrinkles up if the limbs slacken that in him his spiritual-mental essence develops more and more. As in the growing plant the seed concentrates to become a new plant, the spiritual-mental essence concentrates in the human being more and more, the more we approach death. We feel it more and more distinctly; we recognise how we develop as human beings, although our limbs wither away as the foliage drops from a tree. This knowledge will give the human being security in good luck and misfortune. It will fulfil him internally with that which he needs, so that he has strength for his work, so that the whole outer life can prosper. Spiritual science is not mere science; it takes the experienced as starting point and it stops at the experience.

I can today report these things about the contribution of spiritual science and that of natural sciences only sketchily. It has become obvious at the today's representation that the kind of research in the spiritual is different from the kind of research in the outer sensory area. However, if one considers that certain habitual ways of thinking have developed under the long-standing influence of natural sciences, then one is not surprised that spiritual science cannot count on big acceptance and that one can argue against that which it has to say. One would be staggered of the contrary. It is true that Schopenhauer's sentence is right concerning truth:

“During all centuries the poor truth had to blush about the fact that she was paradoxical, and, nevertheless, it is not her guilt. She cannot accept the figure of the sitting enthroned general error. There she looks up sighing to her tutelary deity, the time, that shows victory and fame to her, but her wing beats are so big and slow that the individual dies away in the meantime.”

However, time and its development are in such a way that truth will be victorious. One regarded as truth later what was paradoxical once. That will also apply to spiritual science. Even if today opposition appears, one has to remind of Goethe's sentence that expresses the relationship of the human being to truth so nicely:

“You cannot disprove a wrong doctrine because it is based on the conviction that the wrong is true. However, the opposite can, must and should be pronounced again and again.”

It has to be with the truth of spiritual research this way. You cannot disprove the wrong teaching that spirit is only an appendage of the material existence, because it is based on the conviction that the wrong, the mere material existence, is true. However, the opposite of it is—that the spiritual forms the basis of the material existence and that the human essence is a part of this spiritual. This is the teaching that is not only more comprehensive than the one-sided teaching of the mere material truth, but also this teaching shows the truth, the true knowledge compared with this one-sided knowledge. Thus, it will happen that those who have recognised this truth can and must pronounce it in the spiritual-scientific sense against any contradiction. Then the genius of truth—the time—shows his power. Even if his wing beats are slow ever so much, finally, truth will be victorious. The genius of time will spread his wings over the spiritually recognised truth, over the primordial grounds and over the riddles of life.

Somebody who speaks about spiritual science today cannot count on general approval. Since all habitual ways of thinking of our time have grown out of a ground which is different from that of spiritual science.

Since the aurora of modern natural sciences, the essential progress of human mind is based on the observation of the outer world and on the application of the reason to this outer world. Spiritual science has completely to acknowledge natural sciences and their results. However, today we live again in a time in which mind and soul of the human being long more and more for an answer of those questions that exceed the sensory view and rise to the creative powers of existence, and look for them in the spiritual.

Spiritual science is based not only on quite different requirements but also on another way of research than natural sciences apply. However, one must not believe that spiritual science contradicts natural sciences in any sense. On the contrary. Even if it takes its starting point from quite different requirements and research methods, spiritual science—understood properly—completely complies with the scientific results.

Natural sciences are based on the outer view. They have achieved great things also with the development of those tools that enable us to look into the physically smallest things. However, if natural sciences want to do their task, they have to limit themselves to that which approaches the human being from without which one can grasp with the senses and understand with the reason. Knowledge of spirit can establish only on an inner deepening of the human soul by which the soul discovers cognitive abilities and forces in itself that exist neither in the usual day life nor in the outer science. Yes, if this usual science were intermingled in ambiguous way with spiritual-scientific methods, it would get only to unjustified results in its area. Still one will find if one deeper invades into the matter that the same kind of thinking, the same logic that our natural sciences apply one also applies in spiritual science. However, we have to realise that the human soul itself is the only instrument to invade into the supersensible world. It is not allowed to stop at the everyday life, but requires that it can deeper invade into the things from the point of view of the everyday life. So that this can happen, so that the human being can become a spiritual researcher, it is necessary that the soul behaves in its whole inner life different than it was accustomed before it entered the way to spiritual research.

Our soul life proceeds in such a way that we think and feel certain things, that we have mental pictures in our soul. Which sense and purpose do we connect with this soul life? We mostly connect the purpose with it to get to know the outer world and to orient ourselves in this sensory world. The spiritual researcher is concerned with something else. He has to select single mental pictures, sensations, ideas, or impressions that can be useful for him. I would like to take a comparison.

Let us assume that we compare the whole soul life that proceeds in manifold mental pictures, which change at every moment, with many corns that exist in ears on a field. The owner of the field selects some of the corns. While he lets the other corns achieve their goal to serve as food, he selects single ones that should serve as seeds and have to produce new fruits.

In a quite similar way, the spiritual researcher has to behave with his soul life. While, otherwise, the mental pictures proceed without surveying them, he has to select single mental pictures that he does not use for the outer cognition of the world. One calls that concentration, meditation, and contemplation. Which sense does one connect with these words? We want to figure out the process that the spiritual researcher carries out.

At certain times, the spiritual researcher must try to turn away his attention completely from the outside world. Then he also suppresses all worries of life, all desires, affects, and passions. He has to empty the soul, to cause a kind of empty consciousness. He selects single mental pictures of his soul life or of spiritual science whose contents do not matter and is engrossed in these mental pictures—not in their contents, they do not matter. However, the spiritual researcher behaves in such a way that he moves a mental picture arbitrarily in the centre of his consciousness, and calls all soul forces and retains this one mental picture in his consciousness, namely for longer time and with all inner strain. It only matters that the soul makes an effort that everything is concentrated upon one point. If you have to do any work where you have always to strain your arm and if this work has a purpose, you must exert yourself constantly to fulfil the purpose of this work. However, if you want to strengthen your muscles, it may just mattes not to reach this or that purpose, but to evoke the forces that exert the muscles, so that they develop. That also applies to the soul forces with meditation and concentration, namely with forces which are different from those which one applies in the usual everyday life. We never exert our souls, so to speak, concerning the forces that we consider here if we live in the everyday life. We have to evoke deeper soul forces to concentrate on a mental picture. That is the point that we strain the soul in such a way that we also have the inner will for it.

If we get a mental picture because we can be stimulated from without, then the mental picture is caused in our soul without our assistance. It is there—we have not produced it. The mental pictures that are attached to worries, to desires, and passions originate without any effort. They are to no avail to us if we want to make our soul the instrument of the higher world. Not that is the point that we have a mental picture, but that we exert ourselves to move the mental picture in the centre [of our consciousness]. If the human being calls his deepest soul forces in patience and perseverance this way, something new happens for the soul. You can find the details about that in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. This is something that today many people do not want to believe that for the soul something new can happen. We can compare this new to a moment which takes place in the human soul life [at a certain time]. The little child lives up to the second, third years consciously, but not self-consciously. One may say in a way that the consciousness of the child sleeps, before in the child the moment comes where it knows: I am an ego. This is a kind of awakening. It is a kind of awakening also if in the described way the soul is raised to another level of existence if it is made an instrument to behold into the spiritual world.

What you experience in your soul if you carry out such exercises can be compared with something with which it is similar on the one hand and from which it is, on the other hand, quite different: with falling asleep. How does this usual sleeping state approach the human being? I do not go into the details of the scientific hypotheses of sleep. Without special scientificity, I talk only about that which the human being experiences in the everyday life falling asleep.

We know that at the moment of falling asleep the senses no longer deliver impressions. The mind starts darkening. The human being transitions into a state in which his body is not active. At first spiritual science has to say—what logic already confirms—that the whole human being does not exist in the sleeping human being, but that the real human being leaves the body in sleep and is free from the body, that the human being is beyond his body. Now this is a hypothesis at first, but spiritual science verifies this hypothesis as a reasonable truth. Natural sciences more and more approach that which spiritual science has to say at this point. Du Bois-Reymond states that natural sciences can understand the sleeping but never the conscious-wake human being.

If one does not want to be so illogical to state that every evening all desires and passions disappear and originate anew in the morning from nothing, one has to suppose that they are still there. However, within the physical body they do not exist. This means that the human being is with his inner being beyond his body. However, this inner being is of supersensible nature, hence, one cannot see it.

There may be people who say that just certain things take place in the human being and cause other processes so that the soul life takes place.—Someone who speaks that way is in the same position as someone who believes that one can understand the nature of the air investigating the lung and its activity. One can understand the air if one investigates it beyond the body. Then it penetrates into the human body; the lung is there to use the air. Natural sciences will just discover more and more that one can compare the inner activities of the human body during sleep with the inner activities of lung and heart. It is an inner bodily work. However, just as little as the lung produces the air, just as little is that which penetrates as soul life the organism more and more a product of the body; rather it penetrates into the body, and it is beyond the body from falling asleep up to awakening.

One can still argue many things against that. One can understand these things only really, if one can prove by facts that that is something essential which leaves the body in sleep as one supposes it.

This just happens with the spiritual researcher if he does those soul exercises that I have discussed just now. Thereby he causes that soul condition which is free of the body. While the spiritual researcher refrains from that which his body provides for him, he causes that—completely awake—he leaves the body unexploited. During the soul activity, the body must not be active like in sleep. The senses must be quiet; the worries and passions that the outer life stimulate must be quiet as they are quiet, otherwise, only in sleep. The spiritual researcher causes a completely empty consciousness. Then, however, he puts one single mental picture in the centre of his soul life. For it, he needs forces that slumber, otherwise, in the depths of the soul and that he strengthens now by exercises so that he can perceive them.

What the spiritual researcher experiences he has just to experience if it should be conceded as fact. It resembles the sleep under the mentioned circumstances: it is connected neither with the movements of the body nor with the outer senses and the reason. While such state is caused, otherwise, only in sleep, the spiritual researcher gets around to getting to know his soul from a new side with his exercises. He knows, there is an inner life of the soul, even if the soul renounces everything that comes from the body. One may prove ever so much with some outer reasons that the human soul cannot live free of the body—the insight that, nevertheless, it is able to do it originates only if the body-free state is caused. Then one knows that one has a soul life that is completely different from the former soul life that the body has caused. One would like to say, this is a basic experience which the spiritual researcher attains if he has done such exercises long enough if he has already conjured up strong forces from his soul. In my book How Does One Attains Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, you can read up further details about that. I would like to describe the typical of this experience.

If one has carried out the exercises long enough, a particular inner experience appears. Either one awakes from the depth of sleep, or, one feels tempted to pause in the middle of the day life. What happens then is a kind of pictorial experience. Then you have the feeling that something goes forward, as if a lightning has struck you. What goes forward?

The human being thinks possibly that way: now you feel what you have always felt as your body, filled with physical elements, and is taken away from you.—Indeed, you realise now that strong forces are necessary to keep upright compared with such an experience. One feels that which one has always called approaching the gate of death. One is vividly acquainted with that which appears at death. Indeed, now changed feelings and mental pictures appear in the soul. Now you know what it means to stand no longer by yourself as it was the case before. Now you feel the soul transformed so that you know, it is not dark and quiet, but is internally active if you renounce any co-operation of the physical body.

This experience is very significant. It is a dramatic experience for the soul. It is something about which the soul says, whatever I have experienced up to now in life, I cannot compare the significance of this experience that sometimes shakes the soul. A lot of that which I have felt up to now only as slumbering in the backgrounds of existence of which I believe that I can only anticipate it, takes place before my eyes. Hence, I know now: yes, the human being is connected in his innermost core with that world which is behind the sensory world and which, actually, the sensory world veils only.

However, you know something else. You know that it was necessary to do such exercises, to strengthen the soul. You know this, because you realise that to the experience of the described a certain faculty of judgement is necessary and a kind of moral courage to maintain yourself. The soul forces that you have taken out of its depths give this courage and faculty of judgement. You find the further details of this way again described in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. If you have arrived at this point, you just know: unless you have prepared yourself, you would approach this event with two qualities which are doubtful to the highest degree if they appear in the context with these experiences and which you get to know only at this point of soul development: self-love, or more precisely, self-sense, and a certain fear and insecurity of those regions which are behind the sensory world. Self-sense or self-love plays a big role in the usual life, but the soul can always master them. Bad habits appear in our souls, and we can change them. Unless we want to change them, we can at least feel that we could change them. Compared with a force of nature, flash and thunder, we do not have the feeling that we can change it. If we entered without preparation into the state that I have just described, you would realise that you have strengthened, indeed, your soul forces, but that you have also brought out something else, namely reinforced self-love. Only if you have also strengthened the other soul force, you are able to decrease this self-sense. Just as little as you are able to resist flash and thunder, just as little you are able to resist self-sense, to snatch it away from the soul life.

However, if you have made the soul an instrument for the spiritual world in the right way, then the survey of the picture enables you to recognise this self-sense in its true form. Since this picture shows something else than one could describe it with few words. It shows everything that we have called our ego, our soul up to now as put beyond ourselves. It shows what we have wanted up to now from which you suffer, with which you are pleased. Now you know: I have to place down all that from myself if I want to develop that out of myself, which can lead me into the supersensible world.

You get to know yourself as soul at this point of existence only. You know now what it means to face yourself with true self-knowledge; you know that you retain nothing of that for a higher knowledge which you have called your ego up to now—you have to cast off it and retain it as something external. Facing yourself objectively, considering yourself as another person or as an object is a preparation for penetrating into the spiritual world. However, this requires that you have also developed the strong forces to defeat the reinforced self-sense. Someone who has not done this would experience infinite pain if he realised that he has to cast off and renounce everything that he has suffered in order to behold into the spiritual world.—Nothing of that which serves to you in the world seems suitable to lead you into a higher world.

Hence, it is necessary that you defeat self-sense. Something else yet appears. If the human being does this experience, he notices that his whole security of life was contained in that which you have to set aside from yourself, which you ignore now. There fear seizes you, because you must leave behind for a while what gave you security up to now. Now it is as if you lose ground. Only if you have attained other forces, you do not have fear but courage to penetrate into the unknown land of spirit. What lives there in the soul as fear appears quite different to you. The soul life is something very complex. Only a part of it is aware; another part rests always down in the depths of the soul that the spiritual researcher brings out with his power. The human being only knows a part of his soul life; other parts work into the usual soul life. However, the human being knows nothing about them. Yes, the usual soul life often is there to blanket what rests in the concealed depths of the soul. The human being helps himself to get over them, while he deceives himself. For that who knows the soul a phenomenon is very interesting which appears to the human being of the present paradoxical, but it is true.

In the present, we see people, materialists, who do not want to search the spirit in its true figure on the way of spiritual life. Why does one become a materialist? If you understand, why this is the case, you become tolerant on one side towards the materialist because you realise that under certain conditions the soul cannot be different if it does not receive the suggestion to come out of materialism. Since that who investigates the soul of the materialist notices that in its depths nothing but the fear of the spiritual world prevails.

It is that way. Even if the materialists resent that, it is in such a way. They are afraid in the depths of their souls without knowing it; they are afraid of the spiritual world because they have a dark feeling of the fact that they lose ground if they leave the sure ground of reason. They are afraid of it, and, therefore, they blanket this fear with materialist theories, as one dazes himself against fear. The materialist monism is nothing but dazing fear in the depths of the soul. The true psychologist will be able to recognise this always. In the materialist-monistic theories is not only that which the materialists say, but always fear is visible between the lines. The reinforced soul power must overcome this fear, and then the human being dares to jump over the abyss and to penetrate into the spiritual area.

Then the human being becomes aware that, indeed, his soul life splits for the experience of the spiritual world in a way. What does this splitting mean? Expressly I would like to emphasise that the true spiritual researcher should not be a dreamer or romanticist who wants now to leave the sensory world completely and to live in the spiritual world. He has to attract that again about which he knows that he must cast off it for the spiritual world. The spiritual researcher must manage to move about freely between beholding the spiritual world and living in the sensory world, otherwise he is no spiritual researcher but a daydreamer for the outer world. He reaches this if he takes a healthy soul life as starting point.

Hence, you can convince yourselves that the real spiritual researchers are sober in the everyday life because they have realised objectively, not only subjectively that it is necessary to consider everything soberly to be no romanticists. They position themselves in the usual life as practical people. They know how to keep the balance between the usual life praxis and the life in the spiritual world. It is very important just to stress this point because the soul life must split, as well as a big number of corns are separated from a few which are not consumed, but are used as seeds.

Thus, the human being realises that his soul life is not completely separated from himself. He sees as it were a part of this usual soul life beside himself; he feels it as something that cannot place him in the spiritual world: the corns that serve as food. However, the other part bridges the abyss. This is that part which develops from concentration; it is that part which is used as seeds for the soul life that goes to the spiritual world. So that it develops healthily, it is necessary that the spiritual researcher is able at this point to behave different from that who—with a pathological soul life—has reached this special point which he learns to feel as very painful.

That which approaches the spiritual researcher if he has fulfilled all preconditions is that he does no longer need from a certain time on to concentrate upon certain mental pictures, but they appear spontaneously from his empty consciousness which show a new world. A new world fills his consciousness. For the outer viewer this world becomes very similar to the pathological hallucinations. However, they are only externally similar. A pathological soul life leads to hallucinations. The healthiest soul life of the spiritual researcher leads to the world of pictures or Imaginations. We realise with that who sees an imagery emerging with an unhealthy soul life that he believes with an inner force in their reality that he believes that his delusions are true. Many of us know that one can dissuade a person who is ill this way often from that which he sees with the eyes but not from the “reality” of his hallucinations. Why is this the case? Because just in such pathological soul life which appears with such strong force also the self-sense increases. The person concerned is one with his mental pictures; he produces them from his soul; they are the silhouettes of the soul life, they are compressed imagination. Because he himself is that, he believes so firmly in them. Since the human being must believe absolutely in himself if he wants to stand firmly in the world—and then he believes in his visions like in an objective world.

The spiritual researcher has to attain defeating the self-sense that he has now to remove that imagery arbitrarily again which can work so blissfully on him. If anybody does the exercises in the right way about which I have spoken, he attains the ability to extinguish this imagery—which appears really as a spiritual world as in the morning the sun appears on the horizon. The exercise has to consist of the special will training that one not only gets around to evoking this imagery but also to extinguishing it again—any knowledge is based on it in the higher world. This is the difference compared to the pictures of the pathological soul life. If the exercises are done, the human being attains the peculiar force to make his will gradually stronger and then to diminish it again. One does not have this ability in the usual life. One can make efforts and refrain from them. One has to learn this only by training that one makes the will as strong as I have described it. If the whole imagery has emerged, one must consciously weaken the will more and more which has conjured up this world and must be able to let sink this whole world. However, one is able to do this only after defeating the self-sense.

Think only what you demand from your soul. You demand that you assert yourself at first to evoke such a world; then, however, you must extinguish it again. You cannot enjoy it. You must see the whole world, which we have developed by external strains, sinking in the depths of your consciousness as mental pictures that you have forgotten. If you have attained this, you enter only into the true spiritual world, the world of spiritual beings and facts. The spiritual researcher knows by the preceding exercises that he lives now in the spiritual world. If he did not have acquired this ability to let disappear all that again, he could not be a free observer of the spiritual world. You can compare that with a situation where you look at a thing and cannot turn away from it. Turning your attention to and away from something corresponds in the area of spiritual observation to attaining the impressions and removing them. If the human being has come to this point, not only the splitting takes place which I have already described but he faces two separate areas as it were. From one area he experiences that he has to set aside it from himself; he feels, it is that which he has estimated up to now as his only possession about which he also recognises that he casts off it at death. A certain courage is necessary to grasp this in real knowledge. Since the human being recognises that he must learn to deprive himself of something willingly to which he is attached and which is snatched away from him usually only at death.

Then he gets to know that as it were the fruit that is chosen as seed is the human essence which is not taken up in the physical body, but which is only the basis of it. The essence is due not to the ancestors, but originates from the spiritual world; it uses what the parents give to the external-bodily existence.

Spiritual science points out that in the human being probably the qualities of the ancestors live that, however, it is an inexact consideration if one says that the human being is only composed of that which he inherited from the parents. Physically the human being bears the characteristics of his physical heredity, but something spiritual-mental can come only from something spiritual-mental. You can get to know the spiritual-mental core this way. Because the human being is an internally closed individuality, you are not concerned with something generic. That is, the spiritual-mental core is rooted in the individual of the human being. However, with it we realise that teaching of repeated lives on earth.

This spiritual-mental that we bear in ourselves and through the gate of death is rooted in a former life on earth and further ones, until there comes a time when it lived for the first time. What rests in this part of our being walks through the gate of death and lives then in a supersensible existence. From this, the human being enters into a new earthly life while he proceeds towards the line of heredity.

You realise, the logic is completely the same as in natural sciences. He who wants to fight against it does only not know about which he talks, actually. Since if that who stands on scientific ground wanted to say: nevertheless, one can prove that the qualities are inherited from the parents—, one must answer to him: as far as natural sciences can prove it, one can only say: it is true!—If, however, the materialist monist says, because one has inherited these qualities from the ancestors, they could not be due to that which the human being has acquired in a former life as forces which appear in his current life again, then one has to answer, one can say just as well, the human being is wet because he has fallen into water.—The one is true because the other is true. It is true that the human being has inherited certain qualities from his ancestors—it is true, however, also that he was attracted by these parents because he has to appropriate the forces which he can get just from these parents. Something spiritual causes something spiritual only.

Someone who wants to look properly at this matter admits that today spiritual science has to go forward as Francesco Redi did who had to establish the sentence as a scientific truth: life can only originate from life.—Spiritual science will experience the same destiny with reference to the acceptance of this truth. People did not accept this sentence with pleasure. Only by the skin of the teeth, Francesco Redi escaped from the destiny of Giordano Bruno. Today one does no longer talk of heresy, but today one calls the persons daydreamers who have to announce something new. Today one has milder methods than burning at the stake to prevent what must come into our civilisation. However, it will happen in such a way as it always happened in such cases. What one called pipe dream at first becomes self-evident afterwards.

I have already said, one is not surprised about opposition. The thing is in such a way that not only those who deal a little with these things, but also those who want to enter into the spiritual world with good will do not yet want to understand the teaching of the repeated lives on earth.

With the teaching of reincarnation, we face the question of immortality quite unlike if one judges it concerning an infinite time. Then you face immortality in such a way that you see it establishing link about link. One speaks of the fact that the soul lives on because one realises that in one life on earth the seed of another life is enclosed

We see a human being growing up from his earliest childhood in affectionate surroundings, and we see another human being growing up in surroundings that can work only badly on him. Why is it that way? There we must consider the one and the other life caused by a former life on earth. Even if it sounds hopeless, on the one hand, that every misfortune is self-inflicted, one has to say, and nevertheless that good luck and misfortune concern something else if one considers good luck and misfortune from the only entitled viewpoint.

What I mean with it, I would like to show by an example. An eighteen-year-old young man whose father was very rich led a loose life. He wanted to learn nothing, enjoyed life only, and was on the way to become a scapegrace. Then his father died, and at the same time, his property got lost. The young man was thereby forced to learn something, to work, and he became a capable person. There he had to say to himself, what seemed to be misfortune was good luck for me.

Thus, we have to say to ourselves in a misfortune, we have determined ourselves for this misfortune from a former life; we have led ourselves to this destiny. Then it is unjustified to judge a misfortune, while we experience it. One has to consider it as the result of a former imperfection. We have to say to ourselves, the soul would not be able to develop completely if it did not experience this misfortune. The misfortune can be a school of perfection.

If anybody has already here attained a knowledge that he has gained in life, and we ask him, you have experienced grief and pain, joy, and bliss—which experience would you rather give away?—If the human being contemplated about the true issue, he would answer: I accept joy and bliss gratefully; but from the sufferings, I have just received my knowledge: I would never have become that who I am.—One judges suffering different from the viewpoint of the usual sensations. Thus, one must not call the teaching of repeated lives on earth hopeless. What is given to us with this teaching? The question of immortality and the question of destiny. The question of immortality is solved because we know that this life carries the seed of the following life in itself. Thus, the whole life combines to an immortal one quite scientifically. The question of destiny is solved because destiny is necessary for development. Trying to understand death and pain means strictly speaking that you develop interest for the big riddles of life.

In 1909, a great scholar, Charles W. Eliot, held a lecture about the future of religion. He admitted that the human being has to get from the natural processes to assuming spirit and soul; however, he also demanded that the future worldview must not take death and pain as starting point. He said, the worldviews of the past talked about pain and grief. The sufferings are reduced with joy. A worldview should talk only about joys and overcome pains.—One would like to agree with him, because, indeed, it would be desirable that the human being could speak also about a joyful material life. However, if the human being wants to refrain from death and pain and says, I do not want to build up a worldview on grief and pain, I want to accept a joyful life only, then one must answer to him, even if you accept a joyful life, death and grief come automatically, they approach you, they enter into your life. Only such a worldview can really cope with the riddles, which, like spiritual science, encompasses suffering and joy because both are means of perfection. A worldview can only cope with death if it understands that the spiritual-mental core has to cast off the cover that it has around itself as the plant seed has to cast off the withering leaves and blossoms. To enter into the next life we have to develop the spiritual-mental core that has to cast off the body, has to go through death.

There one copes with death because one recognises that one can get to a new life with it. One recognises death as the root of the immortal life. Not because one copes with the world riddles grief and death that one closes the eyes before them as Charles Eliot means, but that one recognises them as necessary like luck and life. I have just said that in the present many preconditions are not yet there to penetrate into these things. I would like to quote a man who tried to settle deeply in spiritual problems who delivered some wonderful, however, also often mystically-blurred things, Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949, Belgian author). He approached the question of immortality in the last time. He got to know the teaching of reincarnation and karma. You can literally read in the translation of his newest work (La mort, On Death, 1913) about that which he regards as “faith.” He regards spiritual science as faith. He says: “Since there never was a faith, which is nicer, fairer, purer, more moral, more fertile, more comforting and more probable in a certain sense than this.”—He means the “faith” of theosophy.—

“With its teaching of gradual atonement and purification it only gives a meaning to all physical and spiritual dissimilarities, to any social injustice, to any outrageous injustice of destiny. However, the goodness of a faith is no proof of its truth, although 600 million people follow this religion. Although it is closest to the origins wrapped in darkness, although it is the only religion that is not spiteful and not vulgar, it would have had to do what the others did not do: to give us unquestionable proofs. Since what it gave us up to now is only the first shade of the beginning of a proof.”

There you see such a person who has approached spiritual science who finds, however, no possibility to provide a proof—what he calls a proof.

One has to say to that first: if he does not regard anything as proof, it does not mean that this view cannot be proved, but it means that this view has not penetrated him. It is typical for the present that it is so hard for people to find their way to something that once will be a matter of course.

Secondly, one has to say, if you just find such a statement like that of the brilliant Maeterlinck and you figure it out deeper, the thought suggests itself automatically: should this view of repeated lives on earth be proven? As well as I have today discussed that—even if sketchily—I have given what you can call a rationale. However, it may be that anybody demands something of a proof that one cannot demand at all from a proof.

I would like to remind of something else. There were always people who dealt with squaring the circle. Those persons who invented proofs over and over again have gradually become a real scourge of mathematical societies. Since they received a number of such proofs every year, which all were nonsense. However, one always believed that the proof would be found once. Finally, the Paris academy did not know how to escape and cast them into the wastebasket. Nevertheless, it was not allowed to suppose that the proof could not be found. Once one could reflect on squaring the circle, now no longer, because meanwhile one proved that this proof could not at all exist. The squaring the circle is not possible. Nevertheless, there are very simple means to transform the circle into a square. One takes a paper, cuts a circle out, carves it into small pieces; and puts them into a square. Then one has not done it with calculation but with an action. One cannot calculate it, but one can go forward this way. Nevertheless, the thing is true and reasonable, but one has searched the proofs in the wrong way. Maeterlinck does it that way. He demands something that requires a wrong way of thinking.

We realise from it which difficulties even today exist to acknowledge spiritual science. We realise just in this newest work of Maeterlinck that also such a man manages hard [with these thoughts]; we realise that it is difficult to introduce spiritual science into humanity.

One cannot say, well, if the thing is in such a way as you have told, then only the spiritual researchers can enter into the spiritual world. That is not the case. To be a spiritual researcher is only necessary to search the things in the spiritual world. If one has found them, however, one has to transform them into a thought-image as I tried it in my book Occult Science. An Outline. If then this thought-image is properly created, the common sense can understand it, and then one does not need to prove it in such a way, as Maeterlinck believes it. Everybody can understand spiritual science who considers that unbiasedly which the spiritual researcher has transformed into thought-images. As you do not need to be a painter to understand a picture, you do not need to be a spiritual researcher to understand the spiritual facts that the spiritual researcher has received from the spiritual world. The common sense is able to do this if it is not bound to prejudices. The soul needs that which the spiritual researcher has transformed into a picture for its security and strength. The spiritual researcher has still nothing of the spiritual world if he only walks around there; he has something only if he transforms that which he beholds into thought-images and ideas.

Although in our time everybody can become a spiritual researcher to a certain degree as I described it in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, so that he can convince himself directly of that which I have said today, it is not necessary that everybody is a spiritual researcher. It is as with a riddle that you have to solve; you have not to prove the solution if you find it out for yourself. If you face spiritual science properly, you combine with it from understanding, as well as one can find the solution of a riddle.

He who delves into spiritual science settles in it. Because the soul is destined for truth and not for error, we know if we have penetrated into the spiritual world by the messages of the spiritual researcher: we have understood it.—If the solution of a riddle is told to us, we believe not only that it is in such a way, but we also know it. This is the case with the understanding of spiritual science. It cannot be accepted only on authority, but as soon as it has been informed to us, our soul adjusts itself so that we also understand it. The spiritual researcher has a little bit more of this understanding if he has transformed the spiritual facts and truths into thought-images. Every human being who approaches spiritual science has the same for his soul; he has a new relationship to the riddles of life, to the question of death. This understanding is not only theoretic, but can serve as an elixir of life. If a human being is so educated that the spiritual-scientific concepts live in him, he will also feel towards age in such a way that he can probably understand the Goethean word “one becomes a mystic in old age.” Then he says to himself, if my limbs start withering if my body pines away, I am like the plant seed whose leaves wither. The spiritual-mental core arises in me. One will not only know about this essence, one will feel it as a force that goes through the gate of death and through a spiritual world to prepare a new life again. This solution of the question of immortality is practical for life. The human being will experience the immortal in himself.

Spiritual science will become an elixir of life this way; it will be able to give the human being strength and security. We know that today life is more complex because of the triumphs of natural sciences than it was once. We also realise that the soul sometimes needs a support that it cannot have from that which you can get spiritually from the past. Natural sciences continue to lead humanity from triumph to triumph. However, with it the human being will be torn more and more. Strong inner forces have to be there. Only spiritual science is able to strengthen the human beings enough not to get nervous by the effects of modern life. If, however, anybody really penetrates into spiritual science, he rises more and more to those viewpoints to which the true spiritual researcher rises already today.

Since a number of years, I have spoken here about the objects of spiritual science, and several listeners who have already participated in these considerations many a time will find various knowledge that is not new just in the today's comprising consideration. Only that which I have said this year about spiritual science gave occasion to envisage the objects from the most different viewpoints. Since one could say, today spiritual science, as it is meant here, is by no means generally acknowledged and many people confuse it with everything that one calls “theosophy” more or less exactly.

The so-called chance passes something on to you in this respect. When I came on a lecture tour through a certain city, I saw two little writings in a bookstore in which I looked, however, for something quite different. The one contained a popular representation of the philosophical worldviews and approaches to life of the nineteenth century (probably by Max Bernhard Weinstein, 1852-1918, published under this title in Leipzig in 1910). If you look at this writing more exactly, you get the impression that this booklet was written with a certain seriousness; the single chapters correspond to a rather thorough knowledge of that which is discussed there—with the only exception of theosophy or—as it is meant in the narrower sense here—spiritual science.

I try to bring together spiritual science with that which is said there just in this chapter, and there one must say, as good and conscientious other chapters are, as superficial is the chapter about spiritual science. I do not want to dwell on this chapter here, I would only like to point out that beside various incorrect statements the author says that spiritual science spreads abstruse fantasies of these or those world facts.—Now I thought, there could be alluded to my Occult Science, and somebody would deny that what is well proved there, without inspection of the thing. However, I read on straight away, and found the sentence that in the circles of the supporters of this spiritual research everywhere prophecies of wars and earthquakes play a big role.—I ask you, do such prophecies play a big role in my explanations?

One could assume that few people read such writings. However, the other booklet or more precisely pamphlet had the title Seven Sects of Perdition. A Warning for Protestant Christians (edited by a Protestant association in 1913). I will not read out it. You find the following seven sects of perdition enumerated:

First: Adventists or Sabbatists—about four pages. Secondly: the dawn Bible students—also four pages. Thirdly: the new-apostolic—three pages. Fourthly: the Mormons—four pages. Fifthly: the Scientists—three pages. Sixthly: the spiritists—only two pages. Seventhly: theosophy, about that he knows half a page only. However, I do not want to read out it completely but only half of it.

“In particular it [theosophy] teaches self-redemption instead of the redemption by Christ; one can equal it to paganism” and one points to the church history. It is interesting also that this pamphlet contains the remark that you can buy the booklet at any price and dimension, also as loose sheets. For pennies you can form an opinion about that of which should be talk today, and then you can attach the concerning sheet to the wall.

Thereby it becomes clear where from the judgements come which face us from some sides if they condemn the value of our object wholesale. It is typical also that the author of this pamphlet can say only half a page about the “seventh sect.” Now, from this outer example it arises that there, indeed, in our time many prejudices exist against spiritual science and that there is little will to get really to the prime concern of spiritual science. Nevertheless, one may assume that that who wants to judge an object knows this really. It is obvious that this is not the case with spiritual science among wide sections of the population. From those persons who want to know nothing about it one cannot demand that they deal with it; however, from those who judge publicly. It would probably confuse some persons to have to deal with the things about which they want to judge “conscientiously.”

One has repeatedly to ask, how shall spiritual science place itself into the immediate life of the present? How and with which right does it position itself to the big questions of life and to the riddle of death?

It becomes more and more evident that from unaware depths of the soul life these cardinal questions become aspirations in the human souls. However, the area of spiritual science is as big as the world, and one would have to speak a lot if one only wanted to indicate what spiritual science encloses. However, even if spiritual science has to extend its research infinitely, nevertheless, its investigations culminate in both life riddles that we call with the words destiny and death. The knowledge has to assert itself that the outer science cannot answer the big questions of life and immortality if it is aware of its borders. However, this outer science tries to produce the most varied worldviews, namely just such worldviews that believe to stand on the ground of natural sciences, and believe that they are allowed to say that their results are directly contrary to that which spiritual science has to say.

It would be a wild-goose chase to speak of the fact that the bases of spiritual science really conflict natural sciences. These natural sciences have produced many things for three, four centuries, which have changed our whole life largely. If that is true which Goethe says that one has to judge a school of thought according to its fertility, natural sciences have shown their fertility—indeed, only with the solution of material life riddles. However, one has to take something else into account. Natural sciences have educated humanity in a particular way. They have been a wonderful means of education, so that the human being put the questions of life and death in another way than he put them before. It also corresponds to the fact that spiritual science works with its method, its whole view, completely after the pattern of natural sciences. However, while the questions have become deeper, the souls have been duped into accepting that as real only which they perceive with their senses.

Spiritual science cannot offer physical things. It cannot go into a laboratory and create spiritual knowledge there. Already the spirit that lives in us between birth and death can be fathomed for a certain time and for our consciousness by soul processes only. Everybody knows that the spiritual life is in him since his birth; everybody should know that he can reach that which he has experienced, for example, twenty years ago only by memory, and that he cannot bring up this process of memory with outer apparatuses. So one should also recognise that spiritual science has to look for its sources by an increase of such inner experiences like memory. However, it will still last long, until humanity realises that the method of spiritual science is, indeed, an inner one, but is inspired by the same spirit as the outer natural sciences. One can recognise this immediately if one looks at that which such critics of spiritual science say who deny that one can reach what is beyond sense perception. Even if they concede that there is something supersensible, nevertheless, they say, the human cognition cannot penetrate into it. With such spirits, one can observe with which difficulties spiritual science has to fight. Since such an objection has no other value as if anybody wanted to say, for example, what have the today's botanists in mind, actually? They say—and this should be a basic achievement of the nineteenth century—, the plants consist of single cells, and the animals consist of such cells, too. Let us assume that now anybody proves how much a human being can see with his eyes. He cannot see the cells and everything that crosses the borders of physical cognition.—Those who speak in such a way prove that the eyes cannot look into that which, nevertheless, the naturalists have seen. Such a proof can be right; then one would prove that it is impossible to reach the cell composition of plants and animals with the human eyes and to penetrate into these subtlest processes. Someone would be a fool who wanted to prove that such a proof is wrong.—Numerous proofs are of the same quality, which assume that the human cognitive faculties, as well as they are, can know nothing about the supersensible. Such proofs can be quite correct, and a fool would be who wanted to disprove them.

However, completely apart from the limits of the physical eye, [one has to take into account] that one has armed the eyes with cognitive means like microscope, telescope, and spectroscope and can thereby observe processes and substances which [were invisible before], for example, with spectral analysis. The fact that this has been done is also right, and it is as right if old worldviews spoke about the limits of knowledge. Just as natural sciences have sharpened the eye, spiritual science strengthens that about which one can say in its natural state probably rightly: it has limits. However, from it we realise that the proof of the limits of knowledge is justified just as little as the proof of the limits of the eye. The eye arms itself with microscope, telescope, and spectroscope—the human mind gains strength with inner, intimate means: meditation, concentration, and contemplation. I have already mentioned that. From my writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? you can more exactly get to know what one understands by meditation, concentration, and contemplation.

The normal soul activity, however, depends completely on the physical body, on the nerves or the brain. Spiritual science argues nothing against that. However, spiritual science applies methods by which the mental capacity becomes different, as well as the vision became different by the application of microscope and telescope.

Let me speak about the mental capacity first. In the usual life, it deals with the world of the things. How does this mental capacity work? We stand here just at one of those points where it will maybe become obvious already in the next time that natural sciences—if they are properly understood—are in harmony with that which spiritual science has to give. Natural sciences already touch this. If we develop a thought that is directed in the usual life to the area of our sensory existence, the mental capacity intervenes in our brain. This is just a common result of spiritual science and natural sciences, save that spiritual science knows it, while natural sciences hypothesise. However, the usual life already teaches us how the thinking intervenes in the brain, and one knows that the mental capacity works in such a way that it causes destructive processes in the brain, destructive processes of the smallest subtlest structures of the brain. The mental capacity is active, and it destroys the brain perpetually. Our mental capacity could be protected from causing this destruction if it were used different.

Just as a human being behaves who sees himself in the mirror, the mental processes behave; they intervene in the brain: they reflect the work of thinking in our soul, so that we become aware of the mental process. Thus, the usual mental capacity works. The usual life proves it, while the thinking causes tiredness that sleep again balances. This is the regular course: the balance of these destructive processes with sleep. Natural sciences already have words for it like assimilation and catabolism, and for that who knows to observe these things it becomes clear that the results of natural sciences also lead to that which spiritual science teaches.

This process of thinking is as natural as the vision of the eye. Just as one can strengthen the eye with instruments, one can strengthen the mental capacity, not with outer means but with the inner means of concentration, meditation, and contemplation. What do they cause? They cause that the human being gets around—if he wants to become a spiritual researcher - to giving himself contents of thought arbitrarily which are not stimulated from the outside. The usual thinking proceeds in such a way that we get from outer impressions to inner experiences. The spiritual thinking proceeds in such a way that the inner work differs from the usual way [of thinking]. For longer time the thoughts have to be directed to an inner soul experience that the human being himself has created and that is not stimulated from the outside. For example, the soul dwells on the words:

In the bright light living wisdom is flowing.

Of course, this is folly for the usual thinking. However, it matters that we do not have images of the outside world [in the meditation]. These images have rather the purpose to deepen the soul forces. This happens if the soul tries to bring out its inner abilities from its depths to do something that one does not do in the usual life at all: concentrating on such an image. One usually does not apply the soul forces that appear in the meditation in the usual day life; at most, they become faintly noticeable. They are brought up quite different in the meditation. Slumbering soul forces emerge from the depths of the soul, and then it becomes obvious that these soul forces are independent of that on which the usual mental capacity is dependent. While the usual thinking is dependent on the brain and causes destructive processes, that thinking creates an inner power, which gives the soul the experience: I am independent of my physical body.

We want now to characterise this process of the independent mental capacity a little more. We get here to an area that natural sciences can also acknowledge. I have already touched one chapter. Du Bois-Reymond (Emil D. B.-R.,1815-1890, German physiologist) pointed [in his lecture] at the scientific congress in Leipzig (1872) to the limits of cognition and he considered the sleeping human being only as explicable because he is free of affects, desires, and mental pictures. Something is there that just such scientific thinkers who take the facts, as they are, will recognise more and more. Let us assume that anybody says, air surrounds us, the human being inhales it, then a quantity of air is in him; now I want to investigate the air. I investigate the lung how it is nourished how it carries out its organic processes et cetera.—It would be the worst method to investigate the air this way. One would find out something about the lung. However, one investigates the air best of all in the atmosphere, because the air has its existence in the atmosphere. If anybody wanted to recognise the air by investigations of the lung, one would consider him as brainless.

One is still far away from getting to know the affects and passions if one investigates the physical body. One cannot get to know the thinking, while one investigates the brain. This would be as brainless as to investigate the air in the lung. As the lung inhales the air in a respiratory process that envelops the earth as atmosphere, the body inhales the soul life with every awakening. As well as the inhaled air relates to the lung, the soul life relates to the brain. With falling asleep, the body exhales the soul life again. While we are waking, we have the soul life in ourselves, which belongs to the spiritual-mental life in which we live as we live physically in the atmosphere.

Here we have a field where it is clear, how natural sciences and spiritual science intertwine, as Du Bois-Reymond already recognised. The spiritual life belongs to the entire spiritual world, as well as the air belongs to the physical atmosphere. We may say, if the human being sleeps, he has exhaled spirit and soul. His spirit and soul are in the spiritual-mental of the whole world; however, he cannot perceive them there because he has no consciousness.

Somebody who has developed his mental capacity by meditation in such a way tears his power of thought out of the material body forces; he becomes aware of himself as it were beyond the body. That is he develops thought processes that do not originate from the application to the things of the material world, but he goes with his thinking to the spiritual world. He knows by immediate experience that he develops the thought process beyond the body and experiences beings that face him as spirits. This is based on the release of the thinking from the body and is that which can be considered as the first source of spiritual research. One can also experience internally that the thinking is different which one acquires this way; it does not tire us. Since it is an important phenomenon that we experience such processes, which do not fatigue us. However, some meditating people believe at first to note that they fall asleep straight away with the meditation. This is due to the fact that then the process has not yet advanced far enough because it is difficult to detach the thought process from the purely external. It takes years and years.

What do you experience then? Then you experience something that cannot be characterised in the abstract, you experience stupefying inner things. You experience that you have your self beyond yourself that you survey from without what you have experienced.

As you feel enclosed in your skin in the day consciousness, you experience it now as an outer object. The outer world remains interesting, you are attracted to it like with hundred about hundred magnetic forces. You do not want to be torn away from the outside world. You feel, so to speak, that you belong to it. However, these are emotional forces and sensory forces, which belong, above all, to the reality of higher experience. You learn to recognise the forces with which you feel attracted to the outer physical body. Now you get to know the reason, why you wake up in the morning, you learn to recognise that the body says to us, you belong to me, you have to unite with me as that unites with me which is exhaled by the outer physical nature [during sleep] when that is repaired which the outer life has destroyed. One learns to recognise, why the soul returns to the physical body.

You learn something else: the forces that were there before conception. You get to know the soul as it is today, however, you also learn to recognise that they are the same soul forces, which were there before birth, which have drawn us to the parents who could give the physical body. You get to know the forces that led to the present life on earth, also the forces that led to our destiny. If the human beings develop forces to get free from the body with the thinking, then they get around to recognising the forces by symbols that lead their destinies. The materialist dream research has already recognised that one experiences images, memories in the dreams.

One cannot easily imagine that in the usual everyday life a misfortune that a human being experienced twenty years ago is not something that he deeply longs for. If we have drawn ourselves with the thinking from the body, we experience that that which was unpleasant to us at that time that we feel now attracted by it. Why? Because the soul recognises that it has imperfections. They are so deeply concealed that one does not notice them with the usual day consciousness. This inclination to compensate imperfections works in the depths of the soul, even if it knows nothing of it in the usual consciousness. It feels attracted to something that brings ill luck into life; not before it has passed this ordeal, the former imperfection can change into a perfection.

The life with the released mental capacity looks in such a way that in the soul the forces appear to which we feel attracted. The question of destiny becomes the question of imagining. We start understanding the misfortune because we know that the soul must search the misfortune to compensate certain imperfections. It has to know that we were equipped before our birth with forces that have drawn us to the suitable embryo, as well as the plant seed is drawn to the topsoil that is suitable to it. In this respect, spiritual science is also in harmony with natural sciences that cannot deny that, for example, an Alpine plant grows in surroundings whose conditions correspond to its growth. The soul is led to such a destiny in which it can change an imperfection into a perfection. We walk through the gate of death. If the soul did anybody wrong and walks now released from the body through the gate of death, it feels: I can only feel perfect in future, if I try to balance out what I did wrong. Committed crime changes into a feeling: my soul is helpless against that which happened, but I can learn to develop forces which are as predisposition in me and which cause that I get a destiny in which I can transform myself.

In similar way, the human being gets beyond the present soul life if he acquires another soul force. As we can disengage the mental capacity, so that it proceeds internally, we can disengage another force that finds other use in the usual life: the power of speech. What happens with this power of speech? We develop something spiritual-mental in the speech, but it does not remain something spiritual-mental in the usual life. It intervenes in the processes of the brain, of the larynx—the power of speech intervenes in the material-bodily. As we stop the mental capacity, before it intervenes in the brain, we can also stop the power of speech, before it intervenes in the brain and the larynx.

Natural sciences look for the organ of speech in the third convolution of the brain, in Broca's field; monkeys do not have it. Someone who pursues the facts only with the view of natural sciences says, speech comes about with Broca's organ.—However, the fact militates against it that somebody who grows up only on a lonesome island does not attain language, in spite of Broca's organ. The fact is that the power of speech structures the brain, so that Broca's organ is [structured) and from there the activities of will develop in such a way that language originates. Thus, we have something spiritual in the power of speech that intervenes in the organic. However, we can now change the power of speech, while we do not allow it to come close to the bodily. We achieve this, while we make our meditation, concentration, and contemplation somewhat different. To release the power of speech it is not sufficient that we dedicate ourselves only to the contents of mental pictures, but it matters that we penetrate the object of our mental picture with sensation and emotion. We can meditate in thoughts on such a saying like

In the bright light living wisdom is flowing.

However, we can set our thoughts aglow with feelings, we can feel our soul life in that light which becomes a symbol of the flowing wisdom to us. Then we feel that we retain the forces which, otherwise, we let flow out in words. This leads to Inspiration, as well as the thought power—if it is retained—leads to Imagination.

If the human being emancipates the power of speech so that he applies the same forces internally, but retains them in the soul, then the view of the spiritual world extends. Then we can take up other results of spiritual science. Since the soul life extends not only up to the existence beyond the body, but we learn also to look back to former lives on earth. Stopping the power of speech enables us to experience former lives on earth. One always regarded silence as something special. Hence, one needs not limit the outer talking; one has only to apply the inner forces.

I want to bring not only results of spiritual science, but I want also to show the means which lead to them. One maybe contemplates: how long does the interval last, actually, between two lives on earth? For the spiritual researcher arises that our former life on earth goes back to a time where still nothing of the individual language was there. The individual language needed so long time for its development as time passed since our last life on earth.—This is an example of the fact that one can only investigate facts of the spiritual world if the suitable soul forces have developed. However, to understand that without prejudice what the spiritual researcher says, one only needs to think logically. As well as someone can understand a portrait who does not understand the technique of painting, everybody can also understand the messages of the spiritual researcher. One must be a spiritual researcher to penetrate into the spiritual world, but if one puts the investigated into words, one can understand them with common sense.

One has to expect no answer to questions of the spiritual world from science. However, the common sense knows what is right. Numerous philosophers say that the human being puts questions that exceed the usual capacity of the senses, for example, the question of human destiny. The outer life does not answer it. The thinking about which I have here spoken today answers it, while it changes the question of either sympathy or aversion into a question of imagining. The big questions answer themselves in such a way that life confirms spiritual science everywhere.

Except the mental capacity and the power of speech, one can still develop a third. The human being knows that he intervenes with it already in the usual life in such a way that it can seize his blood circulation. Shame makes us blush; fear makes us turn pale. Our soul life intervenes up to the activity of the heart. One can also retain this force in the soul if the human being carries out concentration, meditation, and contemplation in suitable way, so that that which lives in the blood circulation remains in the spiritual-mental. If he connects his will impulses with those forces if he meditates, for example, the sentence:

In the bright light living wisdom is flowing

and feels it in the following way: I want to move through time in such a way that I contribute to the flowing light process, then he tears a part out of that force which expresses itself in the blood circulation, in the movements of the limbs, in the gestures of the everyday life and turns them to the spiritual. The meditation has to come about with such motionlessness of the limbs as usually in sleep. If one breaks away these forces, one can seize that which works beyond the earth as a spiritual-mental life. One gets to know the earth as a re-embodiment of a spiritual being, as one has recognised the human soul as reincarnated from former lives.

Thus, the human being rises in the universe, he experiences his coherence with a spiritual-mental that surrounds us as physically the air surrounds us. Thus, we grow into the spiritual world, while we solve not only the questions of life theoretically, but experience the solution. Then that is not theory which spiritual science gives, it becomes an elixir of life, then it flows out into our soul lives like steam energy into a machine. As natural sciences intervene in the outer life and achieve triumphs, spiritual science will intervene in the inner human life; it will give us power and certainty of life. This will not remain a theory, but get closer to the solution of the questions of life at every turn, while the human being realises what he has in his inside, as well as he has the air in his lung.

Then he knows that he has a soul in himself, something that walks from life to life. One speaks about immortality not only theoretically, but one experiences it in himself, as well as one can experience the future plant in the seed that only creates it. Yes, spiritual science shows the living spiritual core by now; we learn to experience that which prepared the next life. We understand immortality, while we experience it in such a way that there is a guarantee of living on. We will recognise that something exists after this life and something existed before this life. We get to know an originally spiritual state from which we have arisen. We learn to recognise, as long as we are still imperfect, that we must develop that we will go over together with the earth into a spiritual-mental state at the end of our lives on earth. We will know that we must experience our guilt in this and in future lives as imperfections, until we recognise that our lives are lined up. We get to know immortality in our own souls. With it, spiritual science gives us what the human being needs in this present to solve the questions of life and the riddle of death.

It becomes completely obvious—if one looks at the present time—that, on one side, the need exists of that which spiritual science can give—that, on the other side, one has the biggest prejudices if spiritual science answers single questions of everything that it has to be.

Let us take an example. One mostly judges using outer reasons. There is a famous professor of philosophy (presumably Ernst Mach, 1838-1916, Austrian philosopher and physicist). If he speaks about the soul, you find the following words, and countless students carry the words as the highest wisdom into the world. In view of this fact, you must not be surprised about prejudices against spiritual science. There he says, the sum of our experiences, imagining, willing and feeling as they combine in the consciousness to a unity is the soul which rises to moral impulses at a certain level of perfection. Of course, someone who gives such definitions of the soul can only get to the result that the soul dissolves at death. The child has already to learn in the school that one is not allowed to add apples, pears, and plums and “unless the first and second were, the third and fourth would never be.” However, what does the philosopher mean? He talks about a sum of imagining, feeling and willing and—it is strange—this can become moral feeling and willing. He performs a miracle absent-mindedly. Such a miracle is put absent-mindedly: the single experiences combine to a unity, and after they have been summed up, they get to moral feeling and willing. The child already learns at school that one is not allowed to add different things.

From there the objections against spiritual science originate. However, where it is measured in life, solutions are found which can be understood and whose comprehensibility can make the soul healthy. Spiritual science can be measured how it can cope with life. Life answers the questions in such a way as well as the scientific questions are answered. A scientific invention is so long a figment, until life proves it true. It proves itself, while it says, yes, if the facts turn out to be right in life, I can reveal myself to you. This also applies to spiritual science.

If the human being walks through the gate of death, he fights in the spiritual world for that which he has already prepared here: the seed of a new life. Then in the postmortal life, the life between birth and death turns out to be a transformation of a new soul life.

We ask a modern psychologist, Bartholomäus von Carneri (1821-1909, Austrian materialist psychologist)) to get to know something about death which is only another state of consciousness to spiritual science. He says: “Life was a fight, the human being got tired from this fight, and death is the most beneficent if it proves to be sleep after the heavy work of life which no god disturbs.”—Yes, you can touch it here with your own hands in this characteristic that got stuck unconsciously in impossible mental pictures. Someone who wants to prove the cessation of the human soul life talks of the fact that it is the most beneficent if he sleeps without being disturbed by a god. I would like to know which mechanic says if his machine does not work: I put it to bed. There one notices how those get entangled who do not yet want to get themselves into spiritual research.

Others admit [the existence of a soul], as that American who was, actually, a chemist said in a lecture which he held in 1909: every human being has to feel as an independent soul. Yes, so far the naturalists who judge impartially have come: behind the bodily, something exists. One is allowed today to speak about soul and spirit in general which are behind the sensory world. However, one is labelled as a daydreamer if one does not only say: this is spirit, spirit, and spirit. However, if you say, as well as one finds beings in the animal and plant realms, there are spiritual hierarchies that outrank the human being, then one discounts it as a pipe dream.

If humanity gradually understands that spiritual research places itself in the spiritual life of the present, it knows: it is the same situation as it was when natural sciences, when Galilei, Copernicus, and Kepler appeared. At that time, people said, the human view has proved with certainty that the earth stands still and the sun circles around it, against all appearance these men state that the earth circles around the sun, that is nonsense.—Even if Copernicus was denoted a swindler; nevertheless, his teachings were accepted later.

The world does not behave much different today compared with spiritual science that substitutes scientific materialism with spiritual reality. Spiritual research shows what its knowledge can give. It solves questions of life and death. However, one objects what I have read out at the beginning of this talk [from two writings]. People who face spiritual science as those once who denounced Copernicus, Galilei, and Kepler as heretics, will “prove” for long that one can prove the human life only from birth to death. The course of the times and of the universal spirit will be in such a way that humanity has to recognise that it will experience the same as it experienced with Giordano Bruno concerning the outer borders of space. People considered the [visible firmament] as the border of space that encloses the world.

Giordano Bruno proved that only the [restricted] human cognitive faculties gave this border. Spiritual science shows today that the temporal firmament, that [the limitation of the human life] between birth and death has to be wiped out. As Giordano Bruno extended the borders of the firmament, spiritual science shows the infinite temporality [of the human life], the infinite possibility of life transformation, [so that the human beings] will recognise the everlasting work with self-knowledge.

Hence, may popular writings speak of figments and prophecies, that who recognises the development says, may people brand spiritual research and spiritual science ever so much. The course of time will show that spiritual research is as little a sect as natural sciences are a sect. One may say about those who want to progress in the area of truth that the genius of humanity will neglect them, and one will recognise that spiritual science is not a sect, but that it speaks about the riddles of life from deep knowledge and that its knowledge has to be handed over—as the knowledge of Copernicus, Galilei, and Kepler—to the welfare of humanity.

Dear attendees! When a person, after a day's work and toils, takes a little time to reflect and tries to find his way in the life of the soul, the question arises as to how the individual facts of life, how the individual experiences are connected with the whole human destiny, with the great goal of human life in general. One of the questions that then arises for the soul is undoubtedly that of the meaning of human knowledge.

When we talk about knowledge, we can initially mean that knowledge which relates to the direct services of practical life, to everything that enables us to get to know the outside world in such a way that we can put it at the service of our practical interests. The question becomes somewhat different when we consider knowledge that attempts to penetrate the deeper foundations of life, the riddles of existence – knowledge that does not lead us to an immediately practical work and activity. It is said that man has an immediate urge to know and that knowledge is valuable in itself. Those who look deeper will hardly be satisfied with such an answer. What value would knowledge have if it were only an inner image, only a repetition of what is outside in the world? Why should that which is weaving in the world be effective in the outer world and be repeated in one's own soul only as in a mirror? Is it really only the satisfaction of a soul urge that pushes for knowledge that reaches beyond the everyday? This question will occupy us today: the goal and destiny, essence and significance of human knowledge.

If we mean the concept of knowledge that many people have today, which consists in saying that knowledge should provide us with a true reflection of what the world is experiencing, then it will not be easy to relate knowledge to the great goals and tasks of human existence. We will have to ask ourselves: Is knowledge really only the repetition of something external? Or is it one of the forces that must work in our soul in order to advance it on the paths it must traverse in its existence in the world?

This question cannot be answered by external science; it can only be answered if we consider the whole human being. External science only provides us with information about what our senses perceive and our minds grasp. But beyond this ordinary science, there is something that is trying to become part of our entire spiritual life today, which can be called spiritual science or anthroposophy.

What does theosophical spiritual science seek to comprehend? It seeks to comprehend the whole human being. Let us first agree on what that means, the whole human being. When we look at a person, we see two strictly separate states within the normal human existence of today. These two states, which life presents to us, are so familiar to the human being that he does not even notice that the greatest riddles of existence are hidden in them. We express these states in the words “waking and sleeping”. We recall that from time immemorial many philosophies have called sleep the little brother of death. We can combine these words with two others, namely with the words “life and death”. In these words we have a large part of what we can count among the riddles of existence.

Let us try, starting from what presents itself to us in the most ordinary way, to understand the changing states of waking and sleeping. In the waking state, we try to comprehend all the impressions that constantly flow into our soul - impressions that our senses transmit to us, everything that fills us with joy, desire and pain, in short, what constitutes what we call our mental life. We see this ebb and flow of drives, desires, passions, and so on, plunging into an indeterminate darkness in the evening. During sleep, it transitions into another state, that of unconsciousness. It would be absurd to say that the human being as a being of soul disappears in the evening and is reborn anew in the morning. We must ask ourselves: where is that which works in us throughout the day, where is it when we let our soul life sink into an indeterminate darkness in the evening? We are immediately pointed to answers that cannot be given from an ordinary, sensory perspective, because that perspective escapes precisely that which hides behind the nocturnal state in the evening. The question of where the soul is at night can only be answered by theosophical spiritual science, because it rises from the knowledge of the sensual to the knowledge of the supersensible, from the visible to the invisible.

We need to come to an understanding about how theosophical spiritual science can arrive at such supersensible insights by once again taking a brief look at what really fulfills our entire life during the day. We can say that we live with our soul during the day through external stimulation, through external impressions. In the evening, the external stimuli fade away, creating the emptiness of the sleeping state. But because a person in the normal life of today's existence can lead a soul life only when external perceptions evoke from his soul that which we are currently experiencing, we can imagine that the inner work of the soul dies, withers away when the external stimuli are not there. Must it be so?

That it need not be so can be seen if one accepts the experiences of clairvoyant consciousness. What knowledge of the sensory world is comes about through the stimulus of the sensory world. Supersensible knowledge can only come about through the soul's willingness to unfold work within itself, in order to develop powers and abilities even when there are no stimuli from the external sensory world. The possibility of developing such inner powers is given to us by the method of spiritual schooling. This method is there for those who want to penetrate into the knowledge of the supersensible world. This method can only be briefly hinted at here. Those who want to get to know it thoroughly can find it in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. We shall only briefly indicate here how man can find within himself the abilities to ascend to knowledge of the higher worlds.

The first thing is that man learns to artificially evoke, through a strong willpower, what otherwise only comes in the state of unconsciousness, namely, what man experiences when the sensory impressions cease. He must be able to command all outer impressions to stop; all outer impressions around him must fall silent, just as they do in the evening when we fall asleep. But this moment must take place through his will, in full consciousness. He would be like a sleeper if he could awaken nothing in his own soul. But although all outer impressions fall silent, he learns to unfold strong powers; he draws out of the deep recesses of his soul what slumbers there. No outer efforts are needed; they are intimate soul processes. There is a sinking into strong, vigorous thoughts, which are not given from without, but which the soul forms for itself.

This is meditation or concentration, as it is called – a drawing together of thoughts. Without external impressions we must feel joy and sorrow. The spiritual researcher lets powerful, strong thoughts arise in his own soul, thoughts that have nothing to do with the external world, and these are ideals as well as impulses of the will. These must have a stronger effect than external impressions; the soul must be seized by them intensely and powerfully. If a third element were not added, these perceptions would have the effect of volcanoes. This is that through a strong effort of will an inner calm and quiet can be brought about despite these impulses. Then the spiritual researcher experiences - even if only after a long time - the great moment that can be compared to the moment when a blind person suddenly regains his sight after an operation. Just as the impressions of the external world flood into the soul of the blind man after an operation, so too does everything that was previously unavailable to him.

This fact makes it clear to us that there can only be a supersensible world for us if the organ of perception for it is present. When this organ is awakened, a new world opens up. We must not decide about what we do not know, but only about what we know. These organs, which are necessary for recognizing the supersensible world, are developed through meditation or concentration in the calm of our soul. Then “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears” arise - to use an expression of Goethe. It could now be objected: Yes, it may be that the spiritual researcher experiences a higher world, but what do the spiritual worlds have to do with the others who cannot ascend to them? — That is not correct. The spiritual eye is necessary for recognition [of the supersensible worlds], but to understand what the spiritual researcher has to say, unbiased reason is sufficient, and therefore it concerns all people.

Someone in whom the higher organs are awakened can observe such a phenomenon as sleep. It is a very different state from that of waking. Only part of the human being remains in the physical world during sleep, the other part, the soul-spiritual, withdraws from the physical body when falling asleep and returns to its home, the spiritual world. The spiritual world need not be imagined as a different place; it is all around us. We have human nature, divided into two parts; during waking these are together, but during sleeping they are separated. But human nature is not yet fully explained. We can get a rough idea of the two parts that go out at night by comparing man with the animals that are closest to him of all visible creatures. We also find instincts, desires, and feelings in animals. Even if they are not present in the same perfection, they are still more or less present in animals, and only those who cannot rise to a higher [contemplation] will consider them to be the same as in humans. We need only think of something that is usually not emphasized in external science; we need only remember that, for example, in the German language there is a word that cannot be called to anyone from the outside, [the word “I”]. This name cannot sound [from the outside] to our ear when it means our own self; it must arise from one's own soul life. All true religions have recognized this. This is an announcement of what is essentially the same in man as in the divine. Correctly understood, “I” means the ineffable name of God, because Yahweh, correctly translated, means “I am,” no matter what philology may otherwise interpret. This does not mean that man is to be made a god. Just as a drop of water is not the sea, so man is not God.

That which withdraws itself in the evening divides again into two parts: that which is the carrier of desires, passions, etc., and that which lets all these perceptions flow together in us and works through them - the I. Through the I, man becomes the crown of all creatures on this earth. But that which goes out at night is composed of the I and the astral body. What does a human being leave behind? The physical body, and we have that in common with every mineral. It consists of the same forces. The inanimate mineral, the crystal, takes its form from the forces within it; this is not the case with a living being. In the case of humans, we see that their physical body is subject to chemical laws only in one instance, and only at death. In death, we see what the forces imprinted on the mineral do to the body. In life, it never follows these forces. What remains in bed at night is imbued and permeated by another body, and we call this the etheric or life body. This prevents the body from following the chemical and physical laws; it is a faithful fighter against them.

Now we can ask ourselves: Why does this happen every evening, that a person must return to their spiritual home, so to speak? Why must they withdraw into a spiritual world every evening? In the evening, external impressions fade; we are overcome by fatigue. When the astral body and the ego withdraw into the spiritual world, the person falls into unconsciousness. The astral body is the carrier of pleasure and pain, urges, passions and so on. Why does all this disappear from our soul life? How can it be that all this dies away at night? We shall soon understand why this is so. The astral body and the I are the bearers of pleasure and pain, of perceptions and concepts. But in order for this to become conscious to the human being, it is necessary that they are mirrored by the physical body and the etheric body. We perceive nothing but what lives in ourselves. It is like a kind of echo that is produced in us by the physical and etheric bodies. Man does not perceive directly what he feels, but what he experiences is mirrored to him through the astral body and the I, through the etheric and physical bodies. But the work of the astral body involves conjuring up what we call the soul life. The real work is done by the astral body and not by the mirror – just as it is necessary for a person to be active at a mirror in order to create this or that image. The astral body has to work from morning till evening to extract from the physical what we can call the content of our soul. The forces that the astral body needs to work during the day, it must draw from the spiritual world. When these forces are exhausted, fatigue sets in, and it must draw new forces again.

Sleep has a profound significance. In the spiritual world is the source of everything we conjure up during our daily lives. If we look at our daily life in this way, we ask: What is the significance of our daily life if the soul has to draw its strength from the spiritual world? The soul and the ego do not enter the astral world empty, but take something with them from our outer world every evening. Life during the day is not without fruit for the soul's life. We need only look at what is characteristic of our soul in its deepest meaning and what is taken from our daytime life into our nighttime life. This can be seen indirectly when we look at our soul during our youth and in old age. This gives us an idea of development. In youth, we see germinal tendencies, but undeveloped, and later we see our soul transformed, with richer content. How can we transform ourselves? By the soul forming a kind of essence every evening from the external impressions we have received. We carry our daytime experiences into the night, and in the morning that which was the soul's spiritual experience has entered the soul; it joins what is already there, and in this way the soul develops.

You only have to look at people who cannot sleep, and if you are an attentive observer, you will notice how the soul's progress suffers when it cannot get the right amount of sleep. We can only imprint something on our memory if we have had a proper amount of sleep. Only in this way can we develop the forces that lead us ever higher. We imprint in our soul what the world reveals to us during our waking life, and in this way our soul becomes wiser. Knowledge is an important means of developing our soul between birth and death. But let us now ask ourselves how much transformation we can actually achieve. How narrow are the limits within which we find ourselves? We can increase our soul development. We can see this in individual abilities, for example in learning to write. Writing encompasses a whole group of abilities. When we look back, we see what a wide range of abilities were involved, how much work and effort and so on went into learning the art of writing. Or think of the first attempt we made to draw the first letter, of everything that then flowed together into the one skill of writing. From what we experienced then, we extracted an essence, and through such weaving together a soul skill arises.

Whatever has a deeper impact on our lives can only develop within very narrow limits in the time between birth and death. If someone pursues the riddles of the world or has gone through this or that life experience in deep pain, you can even see that reflected in their physiognomy and in their movements. From decade to decade, this is expressed more and more, even in the body. But we can develop in this direction only to a limited extent. Why? Because we have our souls before us like a malleable material, but we cannot work with what our inclinations have created between birth and death into the body, no matter how many experiences we have gathered. Let us take the example of music. If we do not have a finer ear, if we are not musical, we are unable to develop the ability during our lifetime that could change our physicality in this respect between birth and death. We are powerful in the face of the soul, but powerless in the face of the facts of our physicality. But we know that when we face the external world and conjure up all these images, they are born out of our soul - not only, but through its activity, because it could never conjure up such reflections if something were not given from outside. And this outside includes the same forces that make up our physical body. It seems so mysterious to us because we cannot penetrate there. We would have to conjure up a fine musical ear and so on from the same world. It is something like a veil, like a shell. But behind it is something that, if we could master it, would give us the ability to transform our physical body just as much as the astral.

We can gain knowledge, but we cannot utilize it; we cannot transform our body with the knowledge. But there is a possibility to transform our physical body in the same way as the astral one. Even if we recognize the forces, we could not apply them directly, because our physical and etheric bodies are given to us as dense material. Here we want to refer to a law that will be incorporated into modern spiritual life through Theosophy.

In the 17th century, not only laymen but also naturalists believed that worms and fish could arise from mud. If we go back to the 17th century, we find scholarly works that describe how wild animals grew out of other animals – for example, hornets out of a dead ox that had been beaten until it was brittle, bees out of a horse carcass, and wasps out of a donkey carcass. It was [the naturalist] Francesco Redi who first uttered the sentence: Living things can only arise from living things. There must be a germ of something living in order for something living to arise. Redi was almost burned [as a heretic] for saying this. Today, anyone who claims otherwise would be considered backward. Spiritual science says: Spiritual-soul things can only arise from spiritual-soul things. Just as an earthworm does not come from mud, so the spiritual does not come from the inheritance of the father and mother.

We have to distinguish between the environment of the spiritual and the spiritual itself. In spiritual science, this leads us to the law of reincarnation [of what lives spiritually in man]. Today those who have recognized this law are perhaps not exactly called heretics – fashions change. Today the [true] enlightened are declared to be fantasists, dreamers. But in the not too distant future, people will no longer be able to understand how anyone could have believed otherwise. Thus, we see in what comes into existence through birth the repetition of an earlier earthly existence. And what lies between death and birth is a purely spiritual existence. When we look at a child with undeveloped features, we see what it has brought with it from previous lives on earth, and we can understand something that is very important.

Why can we only develop mental abilities during our lifetime? When we wake up, we find the same body with the same organs. But when a person passes through the gate of death, the great moment arrives when he discards his physical body and only what is spiritual and mental remains. Now he is no longer bound to the body. The conditions are quite different than during sleep. In the morning, when we wake up, we find the same physical body; we cannot destroy it and rebuild it. But when the physical falls away at death, what we have taken in knowledge during our life is united with our soul. In accordance with the knowledge and experiences we have had, we can now reshape them and incorporate them into a new body.

Thus, in each life, we build our body according to what we have gained in the last life; we make it the product of our experiences in the last life. Life experience in the present life is our existence in a next life. This is how knowledge works in us; it is one of the most important forces of existence, shaping itself. We are grateful for the knowledge of the last life; it has produced a body in the present life and preserves that with which we have enriched ourselves in the present life, and that will bring us higher in the next life. Now we also understand why there can be a huge difference between different people when we consider the strength and weakness of their cognitive abilities.

Now you will ask: why does man not remember his previous lives? That is also a matter of development. A four-year-old child cannot count. But it would be a false conclusion to say that this is not a human being, because humans can count. Wait until he is ten years old. There comes a time for every person when he begins to remember. One can only remember that which is present. Fichte was right to say that most people would rather consider themselves a piece of lava on the moon than a self. The realization of what the self is is still missing. Just as the flowers can only be recognized through sensory impressions, so can the spiritual only be recognized through spiritual research. From the intimate study of the self, it follows that the self must be there as a conscious idea before one can remember. Only when we have generated the idea of self can we reflect back on ourselves. Thus, knowledge as self-knowledge leads us to build up our memory in such a way that we consciously expand life beyond the life that is enclosed between birth and death. If we can continue to work from life to life, if through knowledge we succeed in shaping ourselves and thus awaken the eternal in us, then the knowledge of development helps us in the shaping of all that is eternal in us. Now we give the work of knowledge and its meaning for our whole life. It brings us immortality and gives us knowledge of our immortality.

Immortality and knowledge belong together. In a particular life, our body appears to be something that has been worked into it from the previous life. We often cannot use the knowledge in this life, but we need it to build a new body. This certainty gives spiritual science a practical meaning in life. It must not remain mere theory, but we must permeate ourselves with it completely. We then see death in a new light. Knowledge has built up our present body. Through the disintegration of our body, we become free from it and gain the opportunity to build a new one. Thus, even if we look at death in pain when it touches others, or with fear when it approaches us, it appears to us in a completely different form. If we can rise to a higher point of view, we can say that we are grateful for death, because it gives us the opportunity to build a new body for ourselves - for a higher life. The old spiritual researchers have always recognized this and also said so. Goethe puts it so beautifully in front of our soul, how we bring in from fresh life what we have worked for in the previous life:

As on the day when you were given to the world
The sun stood in greeting of the planets,
You immediately thrived and thrived
According to the law by which you entered.
So you must be, you cannot escape yourself,
So the Sibyls said, so the prophets said;
And no time and no power can dismember the form that has been stamped, which develops itself alive.

Dear attendees! The word “knowledge” undoubtedly evokes in people the feeling that it is something that is purposefully and coherently connected with the whole human destiny in life. And intimately connected with this feeling is the realization that by acquiring knowledge, man provides himself with a position within his existence and within the whole of human development that corresponds to his true destiny, to his goals.

Now, in the fields of knowledge that are connected with the study of nature, and perhaps also with the study of certain branches of human life, we can very soon see that they provide us with laws, that they show us certain forces of natural or other effectivenesses, through which we are able to intervene in life. We need only consider how, in certain respects, our knowledge of nature makes us masters of the forces of nature, how the laws of nature that we recognize enable us to equip ourselves with tools and devices that enhance life and advance man in existence. And when we allow the most remote fields of knowledge to come to mind, we will feel the connection somewhere between the laws that we acquire through knowledge and the actions through which we enhance our lives in a useful, purposeful way. Thus, when it comes to knowledge that can be directly implemented in our actions and behavior, we readily understand that they do not merely satisfy our curiosity, do not merely correspond to a certain urge to act, but that they arise from the much higher urge to shape life and existence ever more perfectly and completely. Thus, we gain the feeling that these insights have a certain mission, a task in our lives.

Now everyone knows that there are other fields of knowledge in which, when we think of this mission, it comes to mind to an even greater degree, which we can call human dignity and human destiny, humanity and human fulfillment. But these are insights that – in the way just described – are not directly applicable to the purposes and goals of practical life. These are insights that one says one acquires for their own sake. Man feels that he has an urge to explore and recognize the secrets of existence; he feels that knowledge is simply enlightening. It is something that satisfies the soul even if it cannot apply this knowledge directly, so to speak, cannot forge it into external instruments and tools or into actions of daily life that are related to external human goals.

A realization for its own sake, a realization that grows out of a deep need of the human soul and that should satisfy the human being through itself - such a realization is sought by the human being, and he seeks it all the more the deeper the inner needs of his soul develop. He seeks it perhaps less when he feels immersed in a life that drifts from event to event, from sensation to sensation, from work to work in everyday life. He may seek them less when life distracts him and keeps him fully occupied by his external demands. But especially in those moments when a person - perhaps not even of his own volition, but through those events and experiences that tear us out of everyday life - can be still within himself, that is when the urge for such different insights awakens. There are perhaps hours in which man suffers great losses in life, moments when perhaps what is most precious to him is snatched away, when he believes he must see his hopes for life fail. These are moments when a longing awakens in the soul that can never be satisfied by the outer life. And it is people who have this need for knowledge who gradually come to deepen their soul life more and more. Such people then begin to realize, initially through mere feeling, through sensation, that insights that are far removed from the everyday can act as a source of courage and strength where a person becomes weak, indeed that such insights can act as a balm where the soul is desolate and full of pain. Yes, then the soul can develop to a point where it feels that it would not want to live without such knowledge, that existence seems worthless and bleak without such knowledge.

When pondering such an experience of the human soul, the thought may arise: If one already feels that everyday knowledge, for example knowledge of nature or knowledge of the laws of human coexistence or the like, only fulfills its purpose when it not only satisfies the curiosity of our brain, but when it also inspires the strength of our hands and cause us to stir our hands in earthly existence, then one might ask, with what tasks of man, with what goals, are the other insights connected, which one so easily thinks are there for their own sake and find no direct practical confirmation? Do such insights have no task at all, to intervene in human life and to stimulate something that leads to deeds, to actions? That is the big question that one can ask oneself about knowledge and its task in life.

If one is aware of how the soul, in its state of dissatisfaction with the external existence, feels the necessity of knowledge, if one thus gains a certain insight that this intimate knowledge can become necessary for the innermost being of our soul, then one will think that such knowledge, which extends beyond the immediate external life, must be connected with the highest qualities, with the highest aspirations of our humanity, in other words with the essence of the human being itself. And one will soon notice that one must seek the connection between what man calls knowledge in the higher sense and the actual essence of man. But then one will have to organize one's search for knowledge after such an insight has been gained. One will say to oneself: You have to organize the search in such a way that consideration is given to the deepest, innermost nature of the human being. Anyone who believes that all existence is exhausted in the external sense world alone, that all science is exhausted in the knowledge we gain through rational processing of external sense phenomena, in short, anyone who believes that external observation of life and science directed at external being can be the only science, will be ill-equipped to provide answers to the question just raised.

Another science, the so-called spiritual science or “theosophy” - if one wants to use this much-abused and much-misunderstood term - gives us the possibility to answer this question little by little. This science refers to the spiritual, to that which goes beyond the sensual world; it is dedicated to research that alone can lead us to the essence of man. With the help of this science, one can feel that the innermost being of man comes from the spirit and that what is best in us - our true governing being - is spiritual. Only spiritual science can explore this innermost part of our being, and so we can also hope that through this spiritual science we can gain knowledge of the real nature of man and that in this way we can find the mysterious foundation that otherwise only manifests itself in life through a dark feeling that says: I want knowledge that gives me something that everything else cannot give me.

Spiritual science certainly follows different methods and seeks different paths than ordinary external science, but in our time there is still little inclination to see it as anything other than the eccentric or sad aberrations of individuals. It is not yet recognized in wide circles that this spiritual science works with the same strict means of knowledge as the natural sciences, that it applies the same strict means of knowledge, but only to a different area, thus not to the outer natural life, but to the spiritual life. In the course of this lecture we shall be able to point out some of the things that lead man into the spiritual world and the methods by which man can gain insight into the other, the supersensible world. But we want to take the starting point from the everyday. Through rational ascent from everyday life, and thus also from mere reason, one can indeed get some kind of inkling of a possibility to gain knowledge of the spiritual world.

How does this manifest itself in the outer life of the human being? Let us take the human being at four significant points, two of which we are usually unaware of because we experience them as a matter of course. But there are two other things that intervene in each life, one questioningly and the other shockingly. These four things are referred to as waking and sleeping, as living and dying. In these four words lies basically all the mystery of human life. Those who are able to obtain satisfactory explanations will see that the darkness of life becomes light and clear. Waking and sleeping alternate in our everyday life. From waking up to falling asleep, impressions arise in our soul that we owe to our mind. We know that during the state of sleep we shut ourselves off from pleasure and suffering, from instinct and desire. Thus we see our life unrolling from waking up to falling asleep. Then, as we fall asleep, we see all the experiences and activities of the soul descend into an indeterminate darkness. All perceptions and representations sink down. We are as if overcome by a faint; we cease to be connected to our environment. We feel transported from the conscious into the unconscious.

What actually happens when a person experiences this moment of falling asleep? Only an opinion that does not follow the laws of logic can believe that the whole world that sinks into darkness in the evening is reborn in the morning, that everything that a person has left behind in the physical world is reborn. Everyone must ask themselves the question: Where is that which is thought, intended, and felt during the day, what is felt as the power to take action? It is not difficult to see that what we can describe as the actual inner being of a person, what we feel as an inner drive, cannot simply have disappeared [when we fall asleep] and has to arise anew [after waking up]. It is therefore not difficult to understand what the spiritual researcher must say based on his research. He says: That which remains in bed, this human being, is not the whole human being. This human being, who sleeps at night, has released from himself that which, during the day, constitutes the innermost being. How is it that one does not see and cannot observe that which goes out? Everyone can give themselves the answer: You can observe it just as little as a blind man can observe colors. He who maintains that there is nothing that leaves the body and is outside of it at night is like the blind man who says, “Ah, what are you saying about your foolish fantasies, about red and blue colors; that does not exist!” What you do not perceive does not exist.

Of course, only spiritual science can explore what eludes the senses. But a certain beginning is sometimes made by everyday consciousness, albeit only in certain abnormal states of human life. There are experiences that actually every human being could have, that he has more often than he realizes, but they only last for a short time and are therefore not noticed by most people because the external impressions have too numbing an effect on the soul. A certain practice and inner calmness of soul, a special training for spiritual research, is needed if a person is to have such moments. There are people who have such moments and describe how, at the moment of falling asleep, they can experience something that is not usually experienced. Just as chemists describe some chemical process, so observers in this field describe what they experience at the moment of falling asleep.

They experience, as it were, a kind of alienation from everything they do in their sensory life. They experience the powerlessness to move their hands, they feel the powerlessness to move their tongue; they feel how the senses gradually lose the ability to interact with the outside world. And then, in a particularly embarrassing way, the person feels, with severe self-reproach, all the mistakes and wrongdoings they have committed. And then comes the moment when a kind of experience occurs that is aware of being free from the necessity of external sensory perception, but which is not unconscious, but feels that the soul is in the spiritual world: this is a subjective feeling. There is a stronger light, greater clarity, than can ever be present in the external sensory life. A blissful moment of feeling free occurs. Then, for those who are ordinary observers, there follows what appears to be a quick twitch, of which one is aware: Now that which during the day had passed through the hands and feet to work, which had lived in the eyes, which had lived in the brain, has now detached itself. But then what one might call a transition into unconsciousness occurs. A brief, intense feeling arises, combined with the wish: Oh, if only this moment could last forever!

These experiences are just as much facts as any others. They should not be dismissed by saying that only a few people have such experiences, that they have a special subjective ecstasy in their soul because they have an abnormal mental life. These doubts cannot be refuted unless one says: Yes, but spiritual science, on the other hand, knows from its own means and methods that it is right when it says: I cannot prove it, only certain people experience it; you too can experience it yourself if you methodically try to spread inner balance in your soul through completely normal means of education. One would not get very far, however, if one could only cite such rarities of human observational ability. What alone can lead to research and science in this field is the methodical schooling through which man can really achieve what makes him capable of consciously experiencing falling asleep almost as if by chance. If such a science is to come into being, it must be possible not only to rely on such abnormal rarities, but also to really experience, systematically and with full consciousness of the soul, what occurs almost by chance. That is, it must be possible to see, perceive and explore this emergence of the real inner being of the human being, preventing the human being from being unable to observe it precisely when he wants to perceive what is free of his body, because he is unconscious.

So how is it possible to get to know what a person otherwise only experiences unconsciously – the spiritual world in which he finds himself [during sleep]? If what is presented comparatively like [the experience of] a blind person born who gains his sight through an operation could be achieved at a higher level, if it were true that there are forces in the soul that cannot emerge in the outer body but that man and that can be brought out through certain methods - self-discipline and schooling of the soul - then the moment of a higher, spiritual power of vision could occur, and then it could be that the human being could experience that of which he must say: I know that there is a spiritual world.

This possibility exists if a person continues to do what we have emphasized as a natural prerequisite: instilling calm and inner balance in the soul. And if we do more and more in our soul to enable it to have experiences that it does not receive through external impressions, then we enable the soul to perceive for itself. I can only describe everything here briefly, but in my essays “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my book “Occult Science: An Outline of Its Principles” you will find a more detailed discussion. It is certainly no fairy tale, but can be confirmed by those who have achieved it, that the human soul is able to consciously experience the moment of falling asleep in the midst of everyday life. This can be characterized by the words: We can induce that moment when we consciously and deliberately suppress external impressions, when we withdraw with our perception from what makes an impression on us as light, color and sound, as warmth and cold, even as pressure and impact, as pain and joy. If we are able, through a strong willpower, to command all external impressions to stand still, then we are also able to make our soul consciously as empty as we make it empty when we sink into the unconsciousness of sleep. It is true that the one who arouses the strong will to consciously switch off external impressions comes to consciously live through a state in which, although it is empty of the expression of his soul, it is nevertheless permeated and interwoven on the inside by what we can call inner activity, inner awareness that we are something and that we can do something. However, what has been emphasized so far by such efforts leads to an empty soul, which is not unconscious, but whose consciousness is contracted into the basic feeling: You are there, but have nothing in you; you have yourself, but there is nothing in you.

A second step is necessary if man is to penetrate into the spiritual worlds. It is necessary that he should no longer remain empty in his soul. If nothing could penetrate into his soul, then there would be no means at all by which man could ever be brought to the conviction of a spiritual world in the scientific sense. If in such an experiment, which excludes external impressions, the soul remained completely empty, then that would be actual proof that the external sense world is the be-all and end-all of all existence. But anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher continues this work of self-discipline and education of his soul, and now tries, through strong will, to evoke such ideas that can be called symbolic ideas, which do not depict external things but have other properties. When a person devotes himself to meditation and contemplation, he will feel and experience that these ideas evoke feelings and sensations from the depths of his soul just as external impressions evoke pleasure and displeasure.

When a person is alone with himself, when he allows strong, powerful images to live in his soul that do not mean anything external, then, with sufficient patience - sometimes it takes years - he can experience through experience that something is pushing into his soul that he knows for sure is reality. Then he begins to experience a different, higher world, then he enters the supersensible world. And he will keep going further and further with his observation. When he falls asleep, he can observe what now withdraws from the physical body and enters the spiritual world and reality and what, from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, is surrounded by the place from which man's original home originates – he is surrounded by the spiritual world. Then, through his methodical research, so regulated by his soul, the realization springs forth that man, with his actual inner being, withdraws from his outer man when he falls asleep, that he lives on in the spiritual world and that he, when he wakes up, again descends into the outer physical body.

When spiritual researchers present us with these facts, just as a chemical or physical truth is presented to us, we may ask: Is there nothing in life that can make the matter clearer and more distinct? Let us examine life to see if it confirms what the spiritual researcher says. Certainly, the majority of people today have the right to say: Well, we are not spiritual researchers; there may be some who can claim such a thing, but one would still have to find confirmation of what has been said in life. Therefore, let us examine life, assuming that something could help to confirm the researcher's statements.

We see that life proceeds in such a way that a person comes into existence through birth and leaves existence through death. We see that life alternates between sleeping and waking. We ask: Is there an inner meaning, a lawful significance, to the fact that a person always alternates between waking and sleeping? Well, ordinary phenomena of everyday life could make a person aware that it must have a significance. I do not take into consideration the hypotheses of natural science, but neither am I opposed to natural science. That which is to be derived from spiritual science is in perfect harmony with the facts of the most modern natural science. This the spiritual researcher can always show. One must only not confuse opinions of natural science with facts of natural science. Opinions are often in sharp contradiction to facts. Unfortunately, there is not enough time today to go into this in more detail. One phenomenon that can point to the meaningfulness of sleep is clearly evident to us every day: the phenomenon of fatigue. People tire and feel in their fatigue that their strength is waning. When they wake up, they feel how, as it were, the forces that enable them to live their lives from the moment they wake up until they fall asleep draw in and flow into them. Man could never make up for what he has lost through fatigue if he always remained in his physical body. Only by entering into another world in the evening, into the original home of his soul, can he draw from this original home the forces that he pours into his physical body in the morning, through which he balances out the forces he used the day before. The scientific hypothesis regarding fatigue will not be touched upon here. It is spiritual forces alone that we must pour into ourselves if we want to balance what we lose in the physical world, the sense world. We can never find these forces in the sense world itself. Man can fatally make acquaintance with the fact that he can never get the forces out of the sense world when he realizes what it means when sleep does not have a balancing effect. So we need sleep to dive into the spiritual reservoirs from which we draw the strength to live.

We have seen what a person brings with them when they wake up from sleep. But what do they take with them into sleep? These are the facts that take place between birth and death and which we include in the word: we develop into ever new states, into ever different abilities. What enables us to develop new abilities in later epochs of life? Take the fact that we can write, that we can express our thoughts in writing. Do we remember how we acquired the ability to hold a pen, for example? It would be bad if we were to consciously remember all the practice that was necessary to achieve this. We have a whole sum of experiences behind us that are no longer present to us, only in the form that they have enabled us to write as a result. The experiences have poured into the ability to write. What we have experienced in the physical world has - contracted - formed the ability that now wells up from within. What has happened there?

This can be gauged from a simple phenomenon that manifests itself in someone who, for their job, has to learn a lot by heart. Everyone will notice that they can only learn very poorly if they try to memorize and cram as much as possible in a row. But it will go better if a healthy sleep interrupts it; this will have a strengthening effect and will expand what we have learned and what we have acquired at an earlier point in time. When it comes to something as close to our soul as memorization, we notice how significantly the state of sleep is involved. Anyone who observes this will no longer be able to doubt what the spiritual researcher says. During sleep, what has been experienced during the day is transformed into ability and strength. The spiritual researcher shows us how this is the case in all areas of life. We would not learn to write if we were not able to draw the experiences of learning to write into ourselves again and again and to transform them into abilities during the state between falling asleep and waking up. In his primal home, the human being finds the strength to transform life experiences into abilities, to weave them around.

We see that the human being does indeed take something from everyday life into his sleep. He takes in what he appropriates in the sensual world so that he can activate his strengths, so that he can work fruitfully, because that is where experiences are woven into abilities. Today we know little of such things. But there were times in the development of humanity when the guides of humanity knew such secrets and expressed them in those poems that are not everyday poems but prove their worth by their effect over thousands of years. In art that is truly worthy of the name, the deepest, most truthful knowledge is at work.

Let us assume that a poet, knowing that the experiences of physical life are transformed into abilities during sleep, had wanted to express how someone prevents the soul from acquiring a certain ability, a certain power. He would have wanted to show, for example, how one could prevent the ability to love from developing. He would describe a person who ensures that what the external experiences of the day send into [the sleep] and what is woven into the night is again undone, dissolved. Homer wanted to give such a description when he showed how Penelope, Odysseus' wife, was surrounded by suitors who did everything to make her develop the ability to love them. But she prevented it by undoing what she had woven during the day at night.

I know full well that a light-footed contemporary aesthetic, which believes that it can grasp all the secrets of art from a certain obvious understanding, will perceive this as the pinnacle of interpretation. But that is not the point. Rather, it is about something else: anyone who penetrates the human spirit will recognize that the great artists have placed great secrets in their works of art and that these works of art have had an effect on the souls and hearts of people from era to era. So much for the illustration of what has been said about the meaning of waking and sleeping.

We must therefore say that a person progresses in life when he is able to develop abilities through sleep that he did not have before and that he can now utilize in the sensory world in order to live a meaningful and spirited life; thus, the human being is endowed with new abilities for his activity. The experiences are transformed by the fact that he can move into the spiritual original home of the soul, which one enters through the gate of sleep. All perfection depends on the human being transforming the experiences of the sense world into abilities through his connection with the spiritual world, in order to then pour the experiences into his outer being in the morning.

Everything that has been described now naturally has limitations. We can bring these limitations to mind when we think of certain tendencies and qualities that a person brings with them into existence at birth for their outer physicality and corporeality. In relation to certain forces that are connected to our innermost being, we can perfect ourselves through what we experience. However, the nature of our body sets a limit to this. And no matter how high our abilities become through our experiences, we cannot transform these experiences if we find limits to our outer body, because it is part of this process that abilities developed by the soul as powers connect with the whole configuration of the body. After all, the body is always the same when we wake up in the morning. We can only express the abilities that relate to the external body. We can influence these to a certain degree.

You can realize this if you consider what becomes apparent when you observe a person for ten years and follow how they work through ten years of insights [into the physical body]. Everything that can be called inner battles and victories and sometimes also inner decline or downfall lives in this. In someone who, for example, has completed the realization in himself over ten years, you can see how such realization, how such transformation of the soul pushes into the outer body, how it comes to expression in the physiognomy, in the gaze, and how, in fact, the person is able to process this into his body where the soul permeates the body so strongly. But if one sees that someone has had the opportunity to have experiences in the field of music, and [believes] that he could simply use these experiences to advance not only in terms of musical feeling but also of musical understanding and musical activity, then one must say that it is impossible for him to infuse this ability into his body from the experiences if he has an unmusical ear organization. Here we see the limits set to us in the fine structure of the organs of our outer body; they exist because we depend on descending into the same body every morning.

The question must be raised: Are such experiences, which find their limit in the transformation into abilities in the outer body, without significance for the life and development of the human being? We cannot answer this question if we stop within the life between birth and death. We can only answer it if we go out with the deep insights of spiritual science to what lies beyond the mysterious gate that we pass through at death. And just as we have tried to make plausible to ourselves from spiritual science that man does not go into a nothingness of unconsciousness [during sleep], but into a spiritual world, so we can ask: What happens to man when he passes through the gate of death and does not return to his corporeality? External science will not be able to pursue him; but spiritual science can. It arrives at a lawful connection which even today affects so many people that they regard it as fantasy, as folly, perhaps as madness: the law of re-embodiment, of repeated lives on earth - which is nothing other than the development of the realization that the soul and spirit can only come from the soul and spirit.

A few centuries ago, learned researchers still claimed that earthworms and fish could arise from river mud. With the same certainty, it was taught even earlier, in the 6th and 7th centuries, that new life would grow out of matter in a putrefying state. If you beat a horse carcass until it was mushy, then the matter would be able to grow bees out of itself, and if you did that with an ox carcass, then it would be able to sprout hornets and wasps out of itself. It was only in the 17th century that Francesco Redi taught that living things can only arise from living things. And that means nothing other than: If someone claims that living things arise from river mud, this can only be claimed as a result of inaccurate observation. But it must also be said that it is only due to inaccurate observation when we see a person come into existence through birth and believe that he acquires all the characteristics and traits from his ancestors. A close observation shows that the soul and spirit only comes from another soul and spirit, which struggles into existence and attracts the substances and fluids of its surroundings, thereby developing. Thus, the soul-spiritual comes from another soul-spiritual and has nothing to do with the inherited characteristics of the body. So when a child comes into existence, its soul-spiritual must be traced back to another soul-spiritual. It has nothing to do with the line of ancestors. The child receives its facial features and so on from its father and mother. But in the same way, we are led from the spiritual soul of the child to an earlier spiritual soul, because we will not be led from the spiritual soul of the child to the characteristics of the ancestors. Thus, spiritual science points us back to our own previous life on earth.

So we are talking about repeated lives on earth. This present life is the repetition of countless previous lives and is a prerequisite for the future. This law of repeated lives on earth plays the same role today as Redi's law did in the 17th century. At that time, Redi narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Today, anyone who speaks of the law of re-embodiment is considered to be just as much a heretic as Redi was for those who wanted to hold on to the old ways. At that time, burning heretics was fashionable. Today it is fashionable to condemn as fools and fantasists those who teach new laws. But it will be the same with the law of repeated earth lives as with the law of Redi. There will come a time when people will not be able to understand how anyone could ever have believed that a person inherited his abilities only from his ancestors. Goethe says about himself:

From my father I have the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful nature,
and the desire to tell stories.
[...]
What then in the whole creature
can be called original?

Try to see if you can separate out what is original and what he has acquired from the line of inheritance, in order to preserve those qualities by which he means something to humanity.

Thus we see that we have the prospect of a law that seeks to incorporate human culture and human education – a law that may still be called fantastic today, but which will later be said to be: It cannot be grasped how people could ever have believed that something other than the development of humanity existed in the sense of this law. If we understand life in this way, we can ask: What do we do with the experiences that we cannot transform into abilities within the limits of our physicality? What do we do if we have wanted to acquire musical abilities through musical experiences in life and have found limits to an unmusical ear? When we pass away, we discard our physical body and live in a purely spiritual world, where we now spend the entire time between death and a new birth preparing to be able to bring completely different, higher abilities into life through the new birth. Now we have the opportunity to build a new body for ourselves, to work with it and to shape it plastically into our new physicality. Then, with regard to the new birth, we must now make provisions for the shaping of our new body in such a way that we convert into abilities in the new life what was neglected in the previous life, and that we convert into ever higher forms through changing conditions that which we cannot use for our perfection. Thus we truly progress from life to life. Although we may suffer setbacks due to other influences, life as a whole is still ascending, and what we utilize in later lives is productive, creative and constructive for our being.

We may ask: What are the most important, meaningful abilities that a person can acquire? We look at the lives of those individuals who stand more clearly visible to humanity than others. Consider the creations of a great artist, a Raphael or a Michelangelo. Such creations have arisen through interaction with the external world. It is the victory over matter that speaks to us from the walls, elevating our souls and bringing us satisfaction. But then we turn our gaze to other facts, for example to Leonardo's painting “The Last Supper”. Goethe saw it in all its beauty in his youth, but now it has been destroyed. When we consider this, the thought that is undoubtedly true will surely suggest itself. Everything that great men have conjured into such works is doomed to destruction, condemned to the fate of descending. And a time will come when all these works will be crushed to dust. But if everything is doomed to destruction and will have disappeared, will nothing of what held sway on earth be saved into eternity?

We need only realize that Raphael and Michelangelo became different after they had conjured up these works. Not only does something arise that is communicated to the outer world, but something also enters the human soul. While working in the outer world, something connects with the soul and transforms it. What is reworked is connected with this soul, and if we really penetrate the principles of re-embodiment, we say to ourselves: May the works that Raphael has conjured up into the physical world disappear – the ability remains and will ignite new abilities in a new existence, and these will lead people ever further from step to step. Thus we see that the fruit of our labor extends through various embodiments. Even if our outer work disappears, what connects it to the soul will live on with that soul. Souls will preserve the fruits of their creations. The creations will perish, but the soul fruits of these creations live on in the souls. But what are the deepest, most intimate abilities? They are those that enable people to conjure up what gives millions of souls pleasure and can be transformed into works of art and of life. Such abilities are connected with the outer aspects of our lives.

But there is something in human life that is interwoven with the inner essence of our soul; there is something that we know has a different effect on us than what could be called an urge or an impulse, for my part the impulse from which Raphael painted his pictures. Instincts work in us, but we feel that instincts also have something in them that can be called talent. Instincts are changeable, something indefinite for man, where man is not completely there. No one can become a painter unless he has accumulated special abilities. But there is one thing that cannot be acquired: it is something that comes from our deepest, innermost being. This drive cannot be limited to external realization, but must be drawn from the spiritual itself, and that is the urge for knowledge - an urge that lives in us [deepest]. If the soul wants to work [in the world], we need external materials; for what we call the urge for knowledge, we need only life itself. And only this urge can spur us on to develop that power of thinking that allows us to penetrate into the world of imagination and thought and to unite its secrets with our being. Here we feel the transition between thinking and imagining on the one hand and recognizing on the other.

The person who believes that mere thinking can lead to knowledge is greatly mistaken. Only those who fill their ideas with a content that is not given in the external world will come to know what is behind the external world. What one has acquired in life connects with the innermost self, which is the same as the innermost being of our self. The spirit [in the world] is the same as the spirit within ourselves; the spirit outside in the world connects with the spiritual that we carry within us. There we draw the highest fruit from what we can acquire in our waking life. Knowledge is the human activity through which we draw the highest fruits from our experiences; it is the human activity that transforms into abilities in life, for which we find limit after limit to express them outwardly in life. But knowledge causes us to carry these abilities over through death [into the spiritual world]. And in death, because it is a central spiritual faculty, knowledge not only gives the certainty that we carry over the fruits of our present life to perfections that must be awakened again and again, but it also gives the certainty that we acquire abilities that last as long as the spirit itself - that must last as long as the spirit itself, because they have the same characteristics as the spirit. In knowledge we connect with the spirit, and from this connection arises not only the certainty of knowing immortality, but also the power to establish immortality - to establish it in ourselves - so that with knowledge we acquire the power to carry our essential core through the incarnations. Thus, the acquisition of the powers we regard as immortal is intimately connected with what we call knowledge. It is the activity between birth and death that gives us the immortality of our most individual being, our ego, precisely beyond death, for it is this most individual being that must acquire knowledge through its innermost, self-chosen urge.

For human beings, knowledge and immortality are inwardly related. It is true what spiritual researchers have always handed down from time to time: Man has a life that flows into eternity, but only through all the [forces] that have been laid in him [through life in] the material world. It is true what the spiritual researchers say: Nowhere out there in space can you find anything that can guarantee you this immortality. Only when you penetrate through knowledge to that which lives in you as the center, as spirit, do you gain in you the intimate connection between what you strive for in the noblest sense and what, in knowledge, creates in you for the ever-lasting elevation of your being. Thus we see from knowledge that it not only satisfies curiosity, but that it works on our soul, that it transforms the soul, just as external knowledge transforms the forces of nature. Knowledge is precisely that which makes true what spiritual research passes down to us in the following words:

Being follows being in the expanse of space,
Being follows being in the course of time.
If you want to penetrate from the realm of transience
into the realm of the eternal,
then make a covenant with knowledge,
For only so you will find the eternal
in you, the eternal outside of you
Beyond all space,
Beyond all time.

Dear attendees,

If today, as an outsider, one considers the attitude and way of thinking of spiritual science – or, as one is accustomed to calling it, theosophy – and tries to form an opinion about the peculiarity of this spiritual science or theosophy based on the usual conceptions of our time , then an outsider can very easily form the, in a sense, justified opinion that spiritual science is something that conjures up high ideals before the human soul: ideals that tend towards certain insights - perhaps the outsider will say, towards supposed insights - about the human soul, about nature and spirit. And outsiders will say to themselves: Well, these ideas, these insights are very beautiful, they satisfy the human soul that longs for inner certainty, and so it is understandable that many profess Theosophy out of this thirst. And when those who have something to say in spiritual science express what they know about the world of appearances and what goes beyond what our natural science - which is admired by spiritual science - has to say, the outsider may say to himself: Yes, what the spiritual scientist has to say about natural phenomena sounds fantastic. The fantastic element is something that the outsider must notice at first. Those who are immersed in spiritual science will find it extremely understandable that the outsider finds so much fantasy in spiritual science. Those who really want to be grounded in natural science can only say: I can't do anything with it. That is quite understandable. If we now consider, by contrast, a person who has penetrated somewhat deeper into theosophy, who has familiarized himself with what is really presented to the striving soul, who has informed himself about what the human soul and human spirit are, we can see feelings of a completely different kind arising in him. Such a person can direct his gaze to what our present age, out of its scientific views, has to say about the task, goal, and value of spiritual life and its engagement in practical work. And here it sometimes seems truly fantastic to the person who is familiar with spiritual science what the materialistic attitude has to say about individual branches of spiritual life. One need only listen to what is offered in the field of education and pedagogy. To the spiritual researcher, it seems like a collection of empty phrases and words. One can look around in the wide range of what educational cultural endeavors are and will find all kinds of fine words. Who has not heard the words that everything that is implanted into the human soul should be avoided, because it is about the education of the human individuality. But who can say anything other than fantastic, empty words if they cannot grasp the true concept of what the human individuality is. Compared to spiritual science, materialistic science appears as a sum of abstractions; it appears as something unrealistic. And if you cannot convince yourself that spiritual science not only has to cultivate life practice, but that it is capable of realistically getting to the bottom of things, you misunderstand the importance of realistic knowledge for life practice.

When we reflect on the growing child, in relation to whom we have an educational task, with the ideas of spiritual science, then, as this child finds its way into life, we are overcome by the feeling that we have a sacred mystery before us in this being, which we can only solve with deep reverence. In every growing soul we sense that there is something in it that is different from anything we see. We sense an unknown in the developing human being, and we are right. Our awe and reverence cannot be great enough when we face the education of the child, and our humility before every being that always confronts us like a new mystery cannot be great enough either. I would not dare to speak about it if I had only been occupied with spiritual science. But I dare to speak about it because for fifteen years as an educator I have felt the sacred riddles myself.

From the point of view of the modern man, it is child's play not only to scoff but also to refute with the appearance of reason the fantastic idea of the re-embodiment of man, the idea of the reappearance of the human soul in a new life. Today, this idea of re-embodiment will only be mentioned in as much as it is pointed out that our soul, which today lives through the time between birth and death in our body, has often gone through life and that we live through the present life as a cause in order to experience the effects and fruits later. Theoretically, this idea is easy to refute. The matter looks different when one is involved in practical educational work and sees the child's soul growing and developing from week to week, from year to year, with the right feelings. If one starts from the premise that one wants to educate correctly, one must say to oneself: You have to intervene in what has been laid down for millennia. And if you look at every expression of the child from this point of view and take every measure accordingly, then you will see how fruitful the education is. Anyone who knows the laws of so-called logical refutation knows how little a theoretical refutation means. But if you work in the spirit of this view, then you feel its truth.

Now one is indeed faced with a difficult task if one wants to see clearly what is growing in the developing child's soul. Everyone knows the purely external facts. But who has not experienced in life how powerless the educator often is when certain tasks are set by external laws or by the demands of parents, how powerless he feels when the tasks set contradict the abilities and talents that are present in the child. Who has not felt and seen in life that we often cannot achieve anything, even with the greatest effort, if the child's talent does not meet us halfway. How often does life show us how powerless we are, not only because of the child's lack of talent, but also because of our lack of insight.

We have tried to educate the child; however, it is not immediately apparent when we have educated the child wrongly. If we follow a pupil in his later life, something peculiar often becomes apparent to us, namely that he must later squeeze talent and aptitude out of his soul through difficult struggles. And we realize: if we had recognized this, we would have been able to help him, we would have saved him much effort in what could only come later. And we realize how necessary it is to focus on this difficult question: what about the child's abilities and talents, and how should we approach the educational tasks?

Even today, there is understandable confusion regarding these fundamental questions, because there are still influential suggestive ideas and suggestive concepts that understandably have a numbing effect on people, and such concepts guide the whole of human thinking. One such concept is that of inheritance. When talking about a child's disposition and talents, who would not initially think: What has been inherited from parents and ancestors? I have already pointed out that Goethe once expressed the words with very understandable modesty, but they stem from deeper insights:

From my father I have the stature, the serious conduct of life, from my mother the cheerful nature and the desire to tell stories.

And after he expresses some more inheritance relationships, he concludes with the words:

What is now to be called original about the whole figure

?

Posterity has already answered this in part, and a later posterity will still answer it.

Anyone who has studied Goethe for a little more than twenty years has a right to speak about him without bias. All respect for the Frankfurt councilman, from whom Goethe inherited “the stature to lead a serious life”! And when one sees the mother's mobile, loving way of looking at life and dealing with people, then one also realizes what Goethe means to say about what he inherited from his mother, “the cheerful nature and the desire to tell stories.” Try adding all this up and see what comes out. When one adds up and reflects on all that was inherited, one finds: What Goethe could not inherit was precisely that which was effective – that was the actual Goethe himself, that was what allowed the guiding powers to flow in. They used the inheritance that presented itself to them to express [what was special about him.

And it is the same with every individual, as with great and significant people. You can't get by if you want to trace everything back to heredity and don't take into account the individuality that unfolds according to its own laws. For those who look at this life impartially, the question of how what we may trace back to our ancestors, what is visibly there, relates to the individual, is by no means simplified. What is inherited is not denied by spiritual science. But how does spiritual science relate to what is incorporated into what is inherited? After all, inheritance can be seen everywhere. There are people who say that when new traits appear that we do not find in our ancestors, we can still think of heredity, because the traits that we have inherited may have been present in our other ancestors, but they had no opportunity to develop them. This is something that is often said. If you talk like that, then you really have a very vague concept of traits. That is not realistic; one can dream up concepts anywhere. Such people seem to me like someone who says: every brick has the potential to fall on someone's head. But there has to be someone there [for the brick to fall on]. Those who think realistically cannot speak of potential in this way.

It is the task of true education to separate what is inheritable from what is not. Basically, one could – because it is popular today to delve into the animal kingdom – get an idea of heredity. The chicken egg contains what is inherited, but warmth must be added from the outside. Thus we see that an essential prerequisite is warmth, which is not present in the germ itself. Nevertheless, a superficial consideration shows that in animals the things are hereditary, while in humans we must certainly also speak of non-heritable things. Consider how, in the animal, what we call instinct is undoubtedly there from the start, and visibly so, in that it must lie in the line of inheritance; and the animal is a generic creature in that it inherits all the qualities that are more abundant in it than in man, for example, in relation to skill. In this respect, man is worse off than the animal. When he is humble, man tends to twist the concepts according to humility, or when he is proud, to twist them according to pride. And when he is proud, he is inclined to say that animals are far below man. This does not apply in such an absolute sense. Everyone can read about how culture has developed, how long it took human intelligence to come up with paper production, for example. The wasps had already invented paper long before that. So when we look at the animal kingdom, we can see that intelligence is simply realized directly from instincts. One could conclude from this that humans are actually no more intelligent than animals.

There are certain things that humans cannot inherit. Everyone will admit that the ability to build a wasp nest is inherited. But no one should doubt that a person who is placed in a wasteland will never develop language or self-awareness. Language and human self-awareness cannot be inherited; they are not passed on to the next generation, they must always be learned anew. Thus, outward appearances teach that the most important things are not to be judged as they are in the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, who would deny that there are indeed things that are inherited? Who would deny that? When Schopenhauer says that he inherited much of his thinking nature from his mother and much of his will nature from his father, who would deny that there is something important and true in this, even if it is expressed in a misleading way. Thus we see that man actually comes into existence with inherited traits, and we have the task of distinguishing these inherited traits from that which is not inheritable. Experience shows this. Now someone might say: We are happy to admit that language and self-awareness cannot be inherited, but we do not need to make such a subtle distinction, because that takes care of itself; if a person is born into a particular language area, it will simply follow that [he speaks that language].

But what if there are perhaps non-inheritable characteristics that we first have to extract from the deeper sources of human individuality? In this case, it is not quite so easy to distinguish these abilities and talents that lie at the core of a person's being from the inherited characteristics. It is certainly a matter of heredity when seven musicians come from the Bach family. Nevertheless, anyone who takes a practical approach to education will not be able to do other than to single out the inner core of the being from what is inherited. Here one must be completely clear about how the conditions of heredity present themselves in life. We see when a child comes into existence that it resembles the father or the mother more, that it has certain qualities that point to the mother and certain qualities that point to the father. Anyone who looks at life with an open mind will soon notice that there is indeed a difference between what is transmitted from the father and what is transmitted from the mother to the children. Of course, the circumstances mix, but one can still distinguish between what is maternal and what is paternal. And if you look deeper, it becomes clear how the two parts are distributed: it turns out that everything we see in inherited traits and that relates to the quality of intelligence or judgment, to the agility of intelligence or judgment, can be traced back to the mother's traits. And those qualities that can be summarized by saying that the strength of character, the strength and the power to face life, everything that is of a strong-willed nature in the son and daughter, can be traced back to the qualities of the father. I am not saying that the child's intelligence leads back to the mother's intelligence, but I am saying that the child's intelligence leads back to qualities of the mother's intelligence, and the child's strength of character leads back to qualities of the father's character.

If we look at these things more closely, it soon becomes apparent that there are great differences in the way parental life progresses and in the characteristics of the child's life, especially with regard to whether a child is, so to speak, an early child of marriage or a late one. If a child is born later, it shows the educator completely different relationships to the parents than if it is born during the parents' youth. Observation shows that in children born late in marriage, those qualities of the mother or father that have already been lived out in a certain way in their profession tend to emerge more strongly, and in these children the imprint of the parents is much more clearly visible. There is much greater flexibility of intelligence, and the character is much less clearly defined. It is interesting to consider these facts in relation to the child, because we have to take them into account and ask ourselves: what is it that carries the inheritance?

Inheritance is a process that takes place in the physical world. What is inherited? What is inherited is what has actually entered the physical body. If we say that the qualities of intelligence are inherited, we must know that what appears in the child is bound to the physical body, for example to the brain. Because we receive this as an instrument, so to speak, it is natural that we show hereditary traits. We inherit the more intimate formation of the organs and have to adapt to them. Thus it is explainable - because we have inherited organs - that we are dependent on these organs. A somewhat crude comparison: if you are born without a hand, you see how dependent you are on it. It is basically always the physical that comes into consideration when we speak of inheritance, as I have done now. And from this crystallizes that which shows itself to the practical observation of life as an individual core, which we do not understand when we trace it back to inheritance conditions.

The child comes into the world with a certain agility of intelligence and judgment. We look at the mother and see the origins. We study the child's character by looking at the father and thus gain insight into the child's character. But then something strange remains – and that is the most important thing for the educator. Only when he brings this into harmony with heredity can everything [that happens in education] be successful. The judgments that develop have qualities that point to the mother. But within this type of judgment, there are indications of very specific spheres of life that cannot be traced back to the mother. Within the mother's qualities, one child may show an inclination towards music, for example, while another may gravitate towards mathematics. It would be a serious mistake to direct the child's intelligence in any particular direction. The nature of the intelligence can be inherited, but the specific direction, the aptitude for this or that, may be revealed by the nature of the intelligence, but it cannot be inherited. It is left to us as educators to look at the mother and to understand the mobility of the intelligence, for example, why the child must think slowly or quickly. But it still remains for us to understand the inclination towards this or that, towards the specifically individual.

In other respects, strength of character and self-will clearly emerge as traits inherited from the father, and we understand this in the child when we look at the father. But there is one thing we cannot understand. Something emerges, crystallizing like a nucleus: that is the direction of interest towards which this character is turning. We see this direction of interest in one child, and a different direction of interest in another – these are specifically individual.

And if we are clever as educators, we will ask: What are the judgmental qualities of the mother and the character traits of the father? But if we want to educate properly, we need to know the direction of interest of the character and the direction of intelligence. It is very easy to confuse these two aspects. This is why, in a family where a child takes after the father, the father has a difficult time bringing up the child. And conversely, where the child takes after the mother, the mother has a difficult time. Children who take after their father are easier for their mother to bring up. Children who are particularly mother-oriented are more easily brought up by the father. If a child is father-oriented, then it has the will impulses of the father; the father cannot transfer the direction of interest, but the talents occur within the mother's sphere. One consequence is that the father will understand little of the child in this area; the child will take after the father in character, and the mother is best able to cultivate the talents. If, on the other hand, the child takes after the mother, the mother will find it difficult to direct the child's interest; the father can do that:

A talent develops in seclusion,
a character in the stream of the world.

Talents develop in the mildness of the mother's care; characters develop in the firmness of the father's care. This is a golden principle.

As a rule, people do not approach us in such a way that they clearly represent a mixture of the qualities inherited from father and mother; as a rule, it is the case that either more paternal or more maternal influence comes to the fore. This gives rise to extraordinarily important principles for the educator. If we assume that the maternal element predominates, then we can often see that the child appears to be of excellent character, and it is easy to guess the specific talent in this abundance of intelligence. But if the paternal element is suppressed, then it becomes really difficult for us to find the special direction of interest in the suppressed paternal inheritance. In such cases we, as educators, must supply what has not been provided by heredity. We must look particularly at the father to see whether he is relaxed or firm, and then we must replace what has been left out of the inheritance. We can do this by looking at the opposite side. We soon find the talents and abilities, but what is not given in the inheritance, we must replace through education.

What should the educator do? There is something infinitely important here: if he sees that what can be inherited from the father is not pronounced sharply enough, then he must work to ensure that the talents are not left without guidance. He must work to direct the child's attention to such activities and pursuits that correspond to his talents. The talents must be tied to external objects. The interests must be awakened. A child who is inclined towards the mother, we must especially accustom to the fact that it has the objects corresponding to its talents in the environment, to which we draw its attention. But we must not follow the principle: the child has its own abilities, so we let it follow them.

Now, let us assume that a child takes after his father, then it becomes difficult for us to guess the talents, abilities and aptitudes. On the other hand, the direction of interest confronts us with an extraordinarily strong will impulse. This interest will express itself in the intensity of desire. And we must be especially careful not to assume that the direction of interest will always point to the right gift. In such a case, we must pay particular attention to studying the interests in the right way. But if we allow interests to mature for which there is no gift, we harm the child. What expresses itself as a soul quality and does not correspond to any gift is reflected back into the soul. This is a constant source of illness that disturbs the physical nervous system. Many such disturbances can be traced back to a failure to harmonize interests with gifts and talents. It will show - which is extremely instructive to see - how certain interests express themselves impulsively, but lead to clumsiness, while others lead to skill. Far too little attention is paid to this. But one should carefully distinguish between the interests. And then, as an educator, one has the task of keeping away what would lead the interest to clumsiness.

The best way to get along is to ask yourself: What is the father like and what is the mother like? - and then carefully examine what appears as a crystal core within the paternal and maternal inheritance treasure. In this sense, we can say that education must really be based on knowledge and not on empty phrases such as “educate harmoniously” or “take the individuality into account”. How can we educate harmoniously if we do not know what the interests are? How can we emphasize the individuality if we do not know how to find what is specifically individual?

Now, this is only one side of education. The human being is not placed in the world for his own sake, but for the sake of humanity. We cannot merely take into account what appears in the child as inherited. The educator will soon realize that with the law of karma a great, harmonious relationship is expressed in spiritual-scientific terms. You can easily observe outside [in nature] how a being is placed where it belongs. The edelweiss does not grow in the lowlands, but on mountain heights. Every being grows into its environment and cannot thrive where it does not fit in. It is the same with the human core, which fits into the “environment” to which it belongs. Things fit together better than one might think. That is why the talents go well with the mother and the interests go well with the father. Nevertheless, we have to look at something else. The human being is not designed to speak his own language, but that of the community into which he is born. That is the generic. Thus, through the common language, the whole way of thinking and feeling penetrates into the soul.

This can be observed to a certain extent. Try to compare the soul of a Franconian person with that of a West Prussian person, and try to realize how the respective way of thinking and feeling works within him. It is the same with everything into which the human being is placed in accordance with the species. If we educate consciously, we must know that we do not educate the human being only individually. Just as we cannot give him his own language, we cannot do anything extra for each child as educators. Human nature is designed so that the human being fits into what is there in the cultural process. The human being must be educated into what belongs to humanity; it must take root in him. If we bear this in mind, we shall say to ourselves: In the face of these elements we seem quite powerless. If we look at the talents and at the demands of life, it may seem impossible to us to bring harmony into them.

[Only the intimate observation of the human being can help us here]. I will describe two children to you, [put them before you as examples]. One of them was born into an environment where a particular language was spoken. They grew up with this language; it became the property of their soul – a part of the whole inner human being. Anyone who has reflected on the relationship between language and the human being will know that through language, the human being not only learns to think logically, but also to feel. For example, the way the A or U sound works in any language has an enormous effect on the soul's capacity for feeling. Language provides a “skeleton” for feelings and sensations. If we place next to this child, who is completely interwoven with his language, so that he has not only learned to think in language but also to 'be' in language, another child who, by the will of fate, is forced to learn and make another language his own after he has barely learned his mother tongue. We will observe how his soul life is much more mobile, much less grounded. I would like to say that a language that acts like a “skeleton” of the soul gives more robust natures. A language that wears our soul like a “dress” makes the soul more fluid, less solid. The result is that the soul of such a child is much more easily influenced; it cannot face the external influences of life with such robustness.

If we now leave aside the language, it can teach us that it is of great importance for education when what is later to be the educational principle and purpose in life connects with the earlier stages. All erraticism in education destroys the soul life in an enormous way. One of the greatest damages to the soul is when one does not build on what has gone before. On the other hand, conscious building has a wonderful effect. If you have a child with a weak character and you sit down with him from time to time and begin to speak very subtly of what he did three years ago, you can do much more to correct the present than you can by directing your thoughts to the present. You can make the biggest mistakes if you lash out at the child with punishments and disciplinary measures out of anger. When the deed is fresh, it is easy to make mistakes. Life is not without contradictions, you cannot help but make mistakes, but they can be improved. If you are inclined to punish, sit down with the child and talk about a previous misbehavior; the child has moved on and no longer feels the previous one so strongly. Feelings become dulled; they take a completely different path than thoughts and memory. It turns out that we can discuss the past objectively, and the more often we do this, the more we can refresh our memory and turn our attention to the past, and the more we can do for the development of character.

These are the individual rules that arise for the unbiased observer. However, one needs the perspective of spiritual science to group the details correctly. But then one can see the big picture and draw important principles from it. One is forced to look not only at the individual, but also at the whole. Then, however, one must look for harmony between the individual, single nature and the general human nature. By going back to the past, you can draw a certain sympathy. You will find it very difficult to reconcile the child's selfishness with the demands of the environment, but when you go back to past experiences, you will see how the child responds to them. The educator must reconcile the earlier with the later. He must see to it that what the individual human being must harmonize with the demands of all humanity happens by drawing on the past. You educate all the better the more you draw on the child's earlier experiences.

So you have to gather together these things that are good for raising children. In particular, it is a wrong to leave pronounced talents undeveloped and thus put the child in constant conflict with the environment. All these are causes of illness. Suppressed talents and interests creep into the human soul and can later manifest as mental illnesses. We commit a sin against human health when we leave a person's talents undeveloped and his interests unused. And we also do wrong when we fail to take into account the need for adaptation to the environment. If we do not do this, then what arises as a contradiction between the child's soul and the demands of life seems to be pushed back into the soul and is felt as a deep dissatisfaction in life. And for all people who go through life and always complain: I have such a difficult time in my soul - then the soul's judge must say: Yes, there are interests that should have been legitimately cultivated, there are talents that should have been developed, and that has been missed. And that is why the person cannot cope with putting themselves into life and is unsatisfied.

One could easily say: What you are talking about is based on more intimate properties of the soul that can be discovered within the intelligence and the direction of the will. But these are precisely the most important things for the educator; they are the core of the soul and where he can do the most harm. Why? The interests and talents we cultivate initially lead to a certain agility of judgment, and at thirty years of age it is dexterity of the fingers and hands. If someone is thirty years old and handles something clumsily, it leads back to the time of about his seventh year, when he has not yet learned the agility of thought. And the apathy that sets in when we do not develop the interests that shows up as a casual attitude in all practical tasks. Above all, it must be noted that it is precisely the individual essence of the child that is expressed in these qualities.

The humanities scholar will recommend that the child be kept busy, but in such a way that it happens through play. Why does the child play, and why should he play? I will mention something from later life. You know a phenomenon in life, fatigue. Where does fatigue come from? You will often get the answer that it shows up in the evening when the muscles are worn out. Is it true that muscles can come into a state of fatigue by their own nature? If that were so, then the muscles that move your heart would have to be resting from fatigue. It is not in the nature of the muscle to get tired. The muscle does what it is supposed to do; it does not get tired. The heart muscle remains unaffected by external activity. Fatigue only occurs when you ask your muscle to do something that relates to the outside world, that is connected with a conscious action. We can say that a mismatch between our muscles and the demands of the outside world causes fatigue. This is true: fatigue comes from the internal organization not matching the outside world. It shows that there is a certain contradiction between the outside world and the internal organization.

I only want to draw attention to one thing: we must be clear that the human process of culture cannot proceed only according to the implanted laws, so that it only corresponds to the inner [physical] organization. The essence of the human soul life is not directed towards the preservation of the species, but towards the development of the soul-spiritual. Two currents are expressed here: progress [of the soul-spiritual] and that which is inner [bodily] organization. It is written in the eternal laws of existence that man must sacrifice purely organic laws to spiritual laws. He who sees through these things will not complain about it. But he will find it understandable that, on the other hand, a balance is necessary. We must be prepared for life in a healthy way, so that we can grasp external things with our hands and think about external things with our brains. A balance must be created, and this will only be achieved if we are able, at certain times, to cultivate an activity that is not directed towards the outside world, but is content with the activity itself.

When it comes to play, our inner nature follows what is required here. We do our child the greatest favor when we shape the play individually, and in doing so we strengthen our inner being. If you shape the play in a stereotyped way, you can see the consequences. Today, people want to fit everything into a template; they do not even want to admit that clothing should be tailored to suit the individual. It is the basic trait of contemporary culture that even those people who are the worst Nietzschean followers [i.e. the worst individualists] will still eat together at a “table d'hôte”. We must not allow this to influence our education, especially not in play. We have to organize play in such a way that we individualize, that we pay careful attention to the talents and interests of this or that child, otherwise we are committing a sin.

This can lead us to the realization that it is necessary for us as practical educators to believe in the spiritual in the child and not in the muscles, which are supposed to have the strength to counteract their wear and tear. The soul should be left to its own devices in play, and the material should not interfere, so that the child can be free from the “tiresome” influence of the outside world. If we do not believe in an inner soul-being that liberates itself, then we cannot educate practically. But if we approach the subject in a truly practical way, we can see something else of significance; we can also recognize that it is necessary to be free from the coarse material laws of the outer world in childhood. The earlier these laws impinge upon the child, the more they take hold, and this does not allow free activity in play. Childhood needs truths that do not slavishly adhere to what is in the outside world; it needs truths that it can embrace with heart and soul. That is why fairy tales and myths should be given to the child's soul; in this way, inner truths liberate the soul. Mankind used to do this out of a sure instinct, and in our time it will be necessary to take more account of this.

Now one may ask: how does an educator acquire these special talents? It is not really that difficult, because what I have already mentioned is actually the main thing that belongs to the educator, and in a very comprehensive way: the holy awe for what wants to break free as the individual core of the human being. If we have a sense of awe for that which has been preparing itself for millennia and in whose development we must assist, then a sense of responsibility arises that blesses us, that is, it has a certain quality: it makes us “genius” in our education. The educator often has no idea why he is doing the right thing. The child itself tells him what it needs. What is necessary in the educator's profession is love, which is characterized by the fact that we learn to love the blossoming of the child's abilities; and we will see what love can do in the spirit. In the outer life, love may often be blind. When love is directed towards the inner becoming, it opens the soul, for behind this love there is always a mighty faith – the faith that truly enables us to view life in the right sense and that shows us the human being as standing in a world of spiritual life as well as of sensory life, and that we have to establish the connection between them. In the child we see the spirit descending, the marriage of the spirit with the body. And when we see in the child how the spirit unites with the body, then our educational activity can become an expression of what we can call the actual belief in life, which may be expressed in the words:

It surges to the human mind
From the depths of the world, full of mystery
The rich abundance of matter,
It flows from the heights of the world
Into the depths of the soul, full of content
The spirit's clarifying light.
They find each other in the human heart
To form a reality full of wisdom.

Distinguished attendees! When speaking of human knowledge, one initially has two things in mind. One is the knowledge that the individual human soul, the human mind, acquires for its own sake; the other is the knowledge that is a means of progress for the life of all humanity. One has only to think of knowledge that deals with the observation of natural phenomena and that is concerned with putting the forces of nature at the service of humanity to realize that what is called knowledge in this field not only gives satisfaction to the individual human soul, but that this knowledge wants to be a selfless servant to all humanity. It is easy to see that knowledge of the forces of nature serves the aims of humanity to a large extent. We see the knowledge gained through the thinking of researchers and inventors applied in practical life, and anyone who reflects on its value will easily see that the knowledge gained from the study of matter is intended to serve all of humanity.

But beyond this knowledge there is still another knowledge, which by its very nature does not allow for such practical application. This knowledge must exist for its own sake. Humanity needs it and could not live without it. But with this knowledge, too, we may ask whether it is really something that the human soul seeks only for its own satisfaction, or whether this knowledge, too, which we often say exists for its own sake, is not also in the service of human progress. If one tries to explore why the human soul thirsts and hungers, as it were, for such knowledge for its own sake, why it strives for an examination of the secrets of the world in order to recognize the significance of knowledge in the service of humanity, then one must delve into the essence and the [primordial] reasons of the human soul itself.

Now the branch of human research that is called spiritual science or theosophy seeks to recognize the essence of the human soul by pursuing this human soul into its deepest depths and trying to find the essence of the human soul on the basis of knowledge that goes beyond what the senses offer and what the mind, which is tied to the brain, can achieve. Spiritual science believes that, on the basis of its research, it can say something about the human soul that is of particular importance to this striving human soul. However, it must approach all that the intellectual culture of the last centuries has produced in an independent way. In no way does spiritual science take a position against the great achievements of human culture, especially of natural science; but in our time it must undertake exactly the same thing that natural science has undertaken many times over the last few centuries - it must test all the prejudices, all the beliefs of people today in the light of its insights. Spiritual science looks at something that is one of the most important things for knowledge in our time – at something that has only been instilled in science relatively recently.

People are very forgetful. Many truths that are generally recognized today were only conquered by the human mind in the 17th century, because until the 17th century, for example, both laymen and learned naturalists believed that earthworms, fish and other lower animals could develop from river mud. There are books from this time that discuss how living things develop from carcasses, for example. It was only in this 17th century that Francesco Redi first uttered the sentence that living beings could only come from germs of living beings of the same kind. That living beings can only come from living beings was a great heresy in the 17th century compared to the science of the time, and only with great difficulty did Francesco Redi escape the fate of Giordano Bruno.

The situation for the spiritual researcher today is similar when, for example, he focuses his attention on the properties of a human soul that comes into existence through birth. Today, when looking at the different properties of children, it is easy to say that these properties are inherited from the father and mother. Today it is believed that the structure of the human soul is composed of what comes from the physical environment, just as it was believed in the 17th century that living beings would consist only of what came from the physical environment. But the spiritual researcher must say: spiritual-soul can only come from spiritual-soul. He observes the miracle of how a human germ, which comes into existence through birth, develops in the course of its life from stage to stage, and he is clear about the fact that the human essence, which develops so mysteriously, can only come from its own kind. He knows that in order to understand what is developing, one must go back to another spiritual-soul realm. As we ascend from the animal to the human, we have to distinguish between the generic and the individual. We cannot ascribe to the human core of being the same thing that we address as generic in the animal. We have to say: what develops in the child over time does not lead back to a generic, but to an individual that comes into existence through birth. And when this thought is followed to its logical conclusion, this spiritual research into the origin of the soul and spirit leads the spiritual researcher to the idea of re-embodiment, to the idea of repeated lives on earth for human beings. For anyone who looks impartially at all the facts of life, repeated lives on earth are a reality, however much the feelings of people today may still rebel against it. Of course, it is no longer customary to burn heretics, but such things, which are heresies according to today's consciousness of people, are ridiculed. But this truth will be treated the same way as other truths and laws that humanity has acquired in the course of its development; after some time, it will no longer be possible to understand how there could have been people who could not believe that spirit comes from spirit.

Goethe pointed to what his essence had drawn from his environment. He could say:

From my father I got the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful nature
and the desire to tell stories.

And then, after pointing out what he had attracted from his environment through inheritance, he modestly asks:

What, then, of the whole figure
can be called original?

Anyone who, like me, has studied everything related to Goethe has certainly acquired the respect due to Goethe's parents. But try to put together all their qualities – you will try in vain to bring to light what is original about the “little fellow”. Precisely that which we cannot find in the heritage of father and mother, precisely that is the Goethe whom we know and who he will always be in our culture. It is the most appealing task for an educator to assume that in the education of a child, a mysterious core of being struggles into existence that lies beyond all laws of inheritance, and that in every young human being this riddle must be solved anew. If we really apply this truth of repeated earthly lives to a child, it will no longer be out of keeping with us to look at the child's outer form in such a way that it appears to us as shaped, formed out of a soul-spiritual core of being. We observe the indeterminate features of this human countenance in the first days of the child's life; we see that they become more and more definite and, little by little, the child's entire body shows an ever more definite form of its own. We can see how the soul, which has come over from a previous existence, transforms these vague features into ever more distinct ones. It becomes visible how the inner core of the human being works on the forming physical shell.

If we consider this carefully, we will not find it difficult to recognize an ascending and a descending line of human life. We see how indeterminate forces work their way from the inner being to the surface, and at a certain point in time we see how everything that is inherent in the human being is revealed in the skills and abilities that he acquires. Then it happens that a person makes one side of his nature the dominant one. We see a kind of confrontation with his environment through the absorption of knowledge and wisdom, and we can say: This is something that is added to what was brought from previous embodiments. Then a descending current sets in in life, where we can no longer transform anything of what we have become externally and physically in our abilities - we can no longer even absorb anything into our memory.

We will only understand this actual work of the individual core of our being on the human being if we consider the whole of human life. This work on the human being can be divided into two clearly distinguishable states. The human being alternates between two states of consciousness: waking life and sleeping life. To consider life as a whole, we must ask ourselves: What do we owe to sleeping life and what do we owe to waking life? From sleep the soul must draw the strength for new work, and it is shown that invigorating forces accrue to the soul from sleep. An example of this: people who, by reason of their occupation, are obliged to learn much by heart, can experience that they do not progress well with their memorizing if they do not have a good amount of sleep between their work. Today, scientific observation also recognizes the importance of sleep for the removal of fatigue. In scientific circles, the prevailing view is that people get tired because the muscles, nerves, etc. are worn out and need to be supplied with new strength. However, this does not take into account the fact that muscles can also work without showing signs of fatigue. The heart muscles, for example, work without tiring. Why is that?

Asking this question is of tremendous importance for a healthy view of life. On closer observation, it becomes clear that fatigue only occurs under certain conditions. The heart does not tire, but the smallest muscles in the fingers can tire to such an extent that cramp-like pains occur, as can be seen, for example, in writer's cramp. When you research these things, you come to realize that fatigue and our waking daily activity are related. We come to see that fatigue occurs when we do not leave parts of our body to themselves, but instead permeate them with the effectiveness of the external work we do. The laws of the universe are implanted in our body; they are effective in it, and under their effectiveness the body does not tire. Fatigue does not occur when - unconsciously to the person - the laws of the universe work in his body. Fatigue occurs only when the human consciousness permeates the organism with its nature.

The naturalist Thomson asserts the independence of the soul life in relation to the bodily life. He says that the soul life is as separate from the body as the rider is from his horse. It is admitted that there is something in man that stands in the same relationship to his body as the rider to his horse. We tire our body, says Thomson, just as the rider tires his horse, because we are outside the horse and use the horse. Does the old image not emerge from a distant time in human development, in which people looked into a spiritual world by natural gift? There they saw the centaur, the man connected with the horse. It is true that “wise” natural science says today that the people of that time were childlike people, that they saw wild barbarians sitting on their steeds and coming out of the fog from the north, and that in the fog they could not distinguish where man and where steed was; from this these childlike people would have formed the image of the centaur. But in fact the centaur is a reality that shows, from a clairvoyant perspective, the relationship that arises between soul and body, and that is like that between rider and horse.

Thus the fact of fatigue compels us to recognize a certain independence of soul from body. That the course of certain processes in the human body does not result in fatigue is due to the fact that a universal law is at work, but the human being is not present with his consciousness. The human being tires because he is present with his consciousness in the processes of his body. But in the state of sleep, the human being is surrendered to the universal law. The human being needs this immersion in a different element, as it happens every night during sleep, and we will ascribe the right effect to sleep if we follow the essence of the human being as he lives in the world into which he enters when he falls asleep.

Then I have to speak of the experiences of the spiritual researcher. Spiritual research does not mean that one can gain knowledge of the secrets of the existence of the world at any level, but that we awaken dormant, germinal powers of knowledge within us. When these dormant powers of knowledge awaken, they give us eyes and ears of the spirit, so that we find ourselves in a situation like that of a blind person who regains his sight through an operation. We can only recognize how many worlds are around us if we have the organs to perceive them. We can only experience the world of light and color if we have eyes to see them and the world of sounds if we have ears to hear them. The spiritual researcher becomes a spiritual researcher by awakening the powers of knowledge that lie dormant in him, by opening spiritual eyes and ears. He carries out a certain training of the soul, that is, certain exercises through which the soul acquires organs with which it can see and experience new worlds. When a person becomes a spiritual researcher in this way, the perception of the spiritual world is not speculation, but reality.

When a person begins to look into these spiritual worlds, he makes new experiences, and I would like to emphasize one such experience that can shed light on the nature of sleeping and waking. It is the task of the spiritual researcher to investigate certain tasks of ordinary life and then to illuminate them with the light of the spirit. For example, you may reflect on a certain task in life and cannot solve it; the tool of thinking proves blunt. Then the spiritual researcher really feels separated as a thinking and knowing being from his physical body. He feels his physicality as one feels a hammer or another tool or instrument outside of one's being. Just as one can feel a hammer as too heavy, one can feel the failure of the individual parts of the brain: One feels that one cannot intervene in the brain.

The separation of body and spirit can be felt by the spiritual researcher in every one of his activities. But when the spiritual researcher wakes up from a state of sleep, perhaps a very short sleep, which he can induce at will through his developed will, it is as if he woke up from a very specific world in which he has done something, so that when he wakes up, activities that he performed immediately before waking up linger, and these have a very specific configuration. When he wakes up, the activities he performed before waking up could be painted by him in very specific figures and colors. But there is a difference between this mental activity and the usual daily activities. The usual daily activities are such that you think them through beforehand, so you work as if according to a model and are bound to the lines of a template.

The [spiritual] activity, on the other hand, [that a person performs while sleeping] proceeds as if we were following a line from our spirit that arises from the inner laws of our own soul. During sleep, the spiritual researcher feels this as an intervention of his soul activity in his physical body, in his brain. And he feels this activity, to which he has devoted himself in sleep, flowing into his body like warmth, so that this body has grown to meet the demands of the day. He experiences: You have worn out your instrument, and this activity is a repair of the instrument for the daytime work of the physical body. Like an architect, we work on our own physical body during sleep, and the spiritual researcher does this consciously. During the day, the physical body is constantly worn out, and we bring with us from another world the forces we need to build up our physical body. We do this unconsciously during sleep. If we consciously consider what we do unconsciously in our sleep, then we will find it credible that during sleep our soul dwells in a world other than the physical one. From the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, the soul really does enter a spiritual world, and that is the world from which man comes. Every night we have to dive into this sea of spirituality to draw from it the strength we need for our physical body and which alone makes it possible for us to survive between birth and death.

So our life goes, in that we appeal again and again to our spiritual existence, and we see this spiritual essence of man emerging anew from the spiritual world every day, as in a small re-embodiment. We find only one difference between re-embodiment and waking up: when we wake up in the morning, we always encounter the same body that we have built up since our birth. When we re-embody ourselves for a new life, however, we must first build up our corporeality anew.

When we consider the course of life, we see many, varied things approaching us that we can take in with our soul, but which we cannot implement in the life of our body. We develop by repeatedly drawing new strength from our sleep, but there is a certain limit to the incorporation of these forces into our physical being. For example, the soul can only receive musical impressions if there is a musical ear. The soul encounters a limit in the physical. Much of what is in our soul, what it wants to process, it cannot incorporate into the outer physical body. This gives rise to a certain disharmony, which is more than the usual tiredness that forces us to sleep. This gradual mismatch of the body to what our soul is becomes more and more pronounced the more a person develops a richer soul life. The soul life becomes increasingly unadapted to the life of the outer body. And here we must ask ourselves: where do we get this body from? When we see this body developing out of indeterminacy into a definite form in physiognomy and gestures, we regard the body we have in a particular life as a result of previous lives. We use this body as an instrument. We enrich our soul in the course of our life, and we find that what we have acquired in this life reaches the limits of our physical body, and that finally bursts this body.

So we have the descending line of life. We should be grateful to be separated from this body again, to be heading towards death, to have a soul with richly developed content that bursts the bounds of the body, right up to death. Those who look more deeply into these things will understand that a richly developed soul must go beyond the body and that we should not be surprised that in old age, especially in people with a richly developed soul, the brain can no longer serve the soul's life. Kant, for example, became weak-minded in old age, despite his rich mind. The outer tools of the body are no longer suitable for the soul; it withdraws with the content it has gained in this life, and it finally breaks the body. What we call death is different in humans than in animals. The ever-enriching soul of the human being breaks the corporeality and passes through death. Then this soul builds itself up according to the abilities and contents it has acquired during life, the body for a new incarnation.

Now one could say that we do not remember our past life. This objection would have the same justification as if someone wanted to say: A four-year-old child cannot calculate, so no human being can calculate at all. - We want to try to see through the following consideration that it is possible to acquire the ability to remember earlier lives. To make this clear to us, I must mention that there is also a time for the ordinary human life when the person cannot remember. These are the first years of childhood, which a person does not remember, even though he was already there at that time. The point in time up to which memory reaches is connected with another point in time. You know, of course, that in the very earliest period of his life, a person has no sense of self. At a certain point in time, the sense of self arises in the child, and the beginning of remembering coincides with this. What lies before this point in time is not remembered. Why is that? Spiritual research shows that in his normal mental life today, through the development of this self-awareness, through which man attains the highest of this life, man erects something like a boundary around himself. A person's memory goes back to the point where self-awareness occurs. That is the boundary. At this boundary, self-awareness stops and withdraws from observation what happened before.

We can learn to see beyond this boundary if we apply the exercises that the spiritual student has to do to look into the spiritual world to our soul. There comes a moment when the person succeeds in leading this I one step beyond himself. That is the moment when one comes to switch off the ordinary I-consciousness that forms the boundary for memory. Then the person enters the spiritual world. He only has to learn to switch off the ordinary I-consciousness. The sense of self is brought about by the impact with the body. When a person overcomes this, as it is otherwise overcome in sleep, and when he learns to consciously enter the world in which he unconsciously dwells in sleep, the possibility of looking back on past lives begins.

This can only be achieved if man consciously turns his gaze to this other side of life, to the side that lies beyond the gate of death. We must uproot from the soul all fear and dread of what comes to man from the future. How afraid and anxious man is today of all that lies in the future and especially of the hour of death. Man must acquire composure in relation to all feelings and sensations towards the future, look forward with absolute equanimity to all that may come, and only think that whatever may come to us through the wisdom-filled guidance of the world. This must be brought before the soul again and again. This leads us to receive the retrospective powers for past earth lives as a gift.

In this way we can educate our soul until we attain the consciousness that past earth lives are not hypotheses and dreams, but that they stand before the soul as fact, as something that the soul can learn to observe. Our contemporaries do not want to admit that there is a possibility of awakening dormant powers in the soul, so that new worlds, hitherto hidden in the infinite bosom of existence, may be added to what the soul can experience. But we are on the verge of a time when people will gradually develop more and more of a relationship with what can be explored from the dark depths of the past and the future. We are heading towards a future where more and more people will have the urge to know, to recognize what the human soul and its destiny are all about. Thus, we are looking at an expansion of the ability to know, which enters into an alliance with the spiritual world.

All higher knowledge, says Goethe, is an extension of ordinary knowledge. Such extended, such higher knowledge is not abstract reflection on things. Such higher knowledge is a connecting of what is the essence of our soul with the spiritual and soul-like around us. Plato cites as proof of the immortality of the soul the possibility of the human soul's connection with the eternal, with that which is eternal outside of space and time, while things in space and time arise and pass away. If such higher knowledge is taken seriously, it contradicts everything that otherwise occurs as fatigue. Fatigue occurs in the knowledge that strives to explore the things around us. But when man allows the knowledge he has gained about things to take effect in his soul, when he has moments in life when what he has gained through his eyes becomes ideas and he can let these ideas work in him, when he can transform the lofty realm of sounds into ideas and let them continue to resound in his soul, then he learns to be awake in a state that can be compared to the state of sleep. Knowledge is given to us in the same measure as the consciousness of our ordinary ego begins to fade. The arbitrariness of this ordinary ego consciousness shatters, and man experiences true knowledge by feeling that he must fit into the laws of the spiritual world with his true ego.

While man is limited to a small space in the outer world by his physical body, which he repeatedly tires through the work of the day, and he must always compensate for this wear and tear of the body through sleep, he feels when the soul is truly “with itself” that it can also draw forces from the spiritual world while awake. He gets the feeling that a source is opening up for the soul, through which healing potions flow to us from the spiritual world, so that he can become master of the body. He feels that we can consciously enter the spiritual world, as we unconsciously do every night while sleeping. He feels that we can then consciously enter the realm of eternity when our knowledge becomes life. Then it will become something completely new, something that it cannot be for the ordinary consciousness of today's man. Plato said that in ancient times people developed the highest knowledge out of enthusiasm. Even if this ability of enthusiasm may have been lost to today's people, what has not been lost to them is that the knowledge of the world of ideas can become a life force in them, that they can feel how they connect with the root of existence and eternity by penetrating into things with their spiritual self through knowledge.

In this way we come to know knowledge as a living thing, as a healing process that extends into the physical body. It takes a long time before we get to know this knowledge, that is, this source of life in our soul. And we also get to know the connection with a very different factor of our culture. All our knowledge must be incorporated into what we can call being imbued with the living Christ. What is this living Christ in the human soul? It is nothing other than what we can experience when knowledge and truth come to life in us, as has just been explained, when we can feel our personality as if it were being filled by a second personality, by something that is truth itself. This is the living Christ, who is truth and life in the human soul. When one grasps the Christ in this way, He is not an abstract idea, but He is the living Entity Who at a certain point in time intervened in the evolution of humanity, an Entity Who fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha and thereby entered into the life of human souls.

In the past of human evolution, the way people recognized each other was different than after the Mystery of Golgotha. In ancient times, people looked to the origin of man and they felt: Man is not valuable for the development of humanity as a sensual being; as spiritual beings we have descended from a spiritual world into this sensual world to live in a physical body, after we were previously in an ocean of divine spiritual life; through our soul we can in turn find our way back to this common human origin.

This is no longer appropriate for our time; something else corresponds to our time. In ancient times, the human soul sought the origin of humanity in order to become aware of what united people. Today we look at what the human being can become, at a common goal for all people. Looking towards this goal, people must be able to say to themselves: This concerns every human being; something must come alive in the innermost being of every human being – this is the living Christ. In the future, human souls will come together in him. The earth, the physical body – it will fragment in its material existence. But the human souls that have the living Christ within them will advance to other levels of existence. When the body of the entire planet has disintegrated, all mankind will be one again, not as it was before it descended to the earth, but one in which the Christ will live as a common soul-blood in this humanity.

All our knowledge must be dedicated to the great moment in the evolution of mankind when the human soul can turn to the God-man who accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha. When we look into the future of mankind, we look for the Christ-consciousness in every human being. This has a completely different sense and a completely different meaning than when the Buddhist teaching speaks of a Nirvana and means by that a detachment of the soul from all earthly things. No, the soul should not detach itself from the earthly. We look to the living Christ, who can grasp our souls with his life, and to how the soul can shape itself ever more richly through the life of Christ in it, through immersion in the source of wisdom and truth in ever new incarnations.

Thus we see that spiritual science does not stand in opposition to that without which our culture cannot be imagined - to Christianity. It does not want to fight Christianity, but to deepen it by pointing to the living Christ. We, as Westerners, look to the event of Golgotha as to the point in time that is also known from history, but which only acquires its deep value, its deep meaning for us through the fact that we gain the Christ-idea not only from the historical Christ, but deepen this Christ-idea through spiritual science. Only when we have imbued our knowledge with soul, light and spirit through the idea of Christ does this idea of Christ become for us that through which the true idea of immortality is revealed to us ever more surely. And when the Christ in us has become the light of knowledge and the life of knowledge, then we connect with the power through which we pass through many deaths and through many lives. Knowledge of Christ is the way for man to absorb within himself the forces that lead him to true immortality, that is, to victory over death.

This idea can only be gained from higher knowledge - not with ordinary knowledge, which only wants to deal with the material. Nowadays, only the external, the material, is pursued in man, and that is the most fleeting, the most transient. The words of Hamlet, for example, point this out, showing how dying and death must appear to him in his melancholy mind, in which the light of Christ does not yet shine. He speaks of the great Alexander, saying:

Alexander turned to dust;
Dust is earth;
From earth we make clay.

And he speaks of the great Caesar:

The great Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole as well as the rough north;
Oh that the earth,
Before the wind and weather, might stick a wall.

But Hamlet is only talking about where the earth that became Caesar's body may have gone. He pursues the fleeting, transient material instead of reflecting on where the great, richly developed souls of the great Alexander and the great Caesar have gone. You don't see what is important in man if you only look at the transitory, at the material, and think about what might have become of it. You should look beyond what goes through death and birth to recognize what true immortality is.

In recent centuries, when knowledge of the material world has made such great strides, we have become more and more accustomed to regarding matter, that which forces the spirit into its fetters, as the essential. But matter will perish, disintegrate; the earthly body, consisting of matter, will disintegrate. The spiritual researcher, for example, views today's radium research in such a way that he knows: here is the beginning of the disintegration of the atoms that form the earthly body. The material of the earth will perish, but the eternal, even of the earthly body, will merge into the eternal essence of things. Today's striving for knowledge pursues the material, forcing the soul into its spell. One believes that one can speak of eternity, of the indestructibility of matter. In the face of words such as those spoken by Hamlet, it must be said, based on the realization of the true nature of the human being and at the same time on the realization of the true nature of materiality: Not only the great Alexander, the great Caesar, no, all human souls are parts of eternity; they take on a physicality from the materials of the earth in ever new lives, they go through ever new lives, which are only steps towards immortality. This applies to every human being:

The humblest man on earth
is a son of eternity.
And in each new life he will
conquer the old death.