The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I have often had the opportunity to speak to you about subjects of spiritual science, or, as one is accustomed to saying, of Theosophy. Naturally, this leads to the question: What paths must the soul take to attain knowledge of the spiritual world?

These paths differ greatly from what we are accustomed to calling scientific. It is all too easy to dismiss these methods as unscientific. Today, we understand something quite different by the word “scientific”. Therefore, it is necessary to first examine what “scientific” is.

What does the scientist of today demand of a method in order to call it “scientific”? In answer to this question, today's man has developed the attitude that what is to be scientifically provable must, firstly, be researchable by every person at every moment and, secondly, it must be completely independent of what is called “subjective”.

These requirements are met by experiment and, for the most part, by everything that is done in the laboratory. The experiment is independent of sympathy and antipathy and so on, in short, of everything that depends on what is subjectively going on in us.

The situation is different with research into the spiritual world. We must choose the path that is completely independent of the world of the senses, that is, of what today's science is based solely and exclusively on. We need precisely what is to be excluded from today's science. When we speak figuratively of spiritual science, we want to apply a word from Fichte. He says: “What I have to say to you cannot be explored with the ordinary mind, because a special, higher sense is needed for that.” It would be like someone born blind suddenly being given the ability to see colors and light, if one attained this special sense, the “spiritual eye,” as Goethe says.

If a person must first have a new sense in order to recognize a new and different world, then it is already indicated that this is not possible in every place, at every time, by every person and so on, as external science demands.

If we take the ordinary human life, this inner experience differs greatly from one person to another. But this should be excluded in the case of external science; after all, there can be no agreement in what people experience within themselves about the spiritual world. But this judgment is a very superficial one.

However, all this can be easily refuted. I have given a method of refuting Theosophy in the appendix to Seiling's 'Theosophy and Christianity'. But this easy refutation is possible only so long and only insofar as this soul life does not proceed with the strict regularity of which I will speak in a moment. As long as the soul life still flows along in an unregulated way, as long as one stops at that, one is not a spiritual researcher. If this soul life advances methodically enough, it will eventually reach a point within. If we now disregard everything that comes to life in us as pleasure and suffering through the impressions of the outside world, what actually remains in the normal soul life? One fact sheds light on this: sleep, when all external tools are tired and relaxed and no longer supply us with anything (no sensory impressions).

No one will admit that a person ceases to exist in the evening with their inner being and begins again in the morning. But this core of our being is unconscious from the moment our experiences cease, when, figuratively speaking, it dies.

Is it not conceivable that the human soul can create something out of itself [to maintain consciousness] when this soul, which is too weak in the ordinary person during sleep, is made strong? It is indeed conceivable that the soul no longer needs impressions from the outside. We would have to learn to distinguish between a person's unconsciousness during sleep and an arbitrary withdrawal of this core of being, where life is drawn from the soul itself. The impressions of external life are bound to the external sense organs. The soul must withdraw from these external sense impressions artificially. Yes, how can it do that? We are left empty-handed if we do not have external sensory impressions, since our entire soul life only receives nourishment through these impressions.

If we want to sustain our inner life only through these external impressions, we will never come to a broader experience. We must, in order to experience this, not only use the external sense impressions to gain knowledge of the world around us, but also learn to see them as symbols.

For example, we see the plant: it takes root in the soil, green sap courses through it, chaste, without drive or instinct, it stands there. And if we compare it to the human being: the human being is permeated by drives, desires, instincts; he is permeated by blood. The red blood carries the life of the instincts. Thus the green sap can emerge as a symbol for the chaste life, the red blood as a symbol for the life of instincts and drives. The human being must become like the plant, which is free of drives. Let us take a look at the rose, for example, which has transformed the chaste green sap into the color of the instinctive blood. The rose is then a symbol for the human being who has transformed the instinctual life of the blood into chastity. This is expressed in Goethe's words:

And so long as you have not
this:
Die and become,
you are only a dull guest
on the dark earth.

“Stirb und Werde” (die and become) – that is what matters. We should not want to achieve this in an ascetic way, but in full power. Why can we hit something with a hammer? Because we are objective towards it. So our body should become [a powerful tool] for us, [which we put at the service of the higher worlds]; the body, the life of the senses, should die for us. The “Stirb und Werde” must be taken seriously. The Rose Cross is a symbol for Goethe's “Stirb und Werde”. We have the “die” in the dead black cross of the wood, our blood that has died to instincts and lower desires, and in the roses we have the “becoming”. Yes, man can “become” something. The sprouting red roses are the symbol for this. Now one can say: Yes, these are after all images taken from the world of sense. But roses will never grow out of black wood. — The black wood and the red roses are indeed taken from the world of sense, but the combination is formed only as a symbol for the soul.

[The staff with the snake is also a supporting symbol. We can compare life with a staff; the higher life leads straight up, the snake-like lines are the external impressions through which the human being winds upwards.

No scientist would set up such a symbol. What scientists say is all true, as if you could see it everywhere in space. What the spiritual scientist sets up as such symbols, on the other hand, is arbitrarily put together.

But these symbols have a remarkable effect on our soul. We imagine that we close all our sensory organs and immerse these symbols deep, deep into our soul. These symbols will not initially convey any truths to us, but they do have an effect on our soul as a living force. When a person repeatedly allows such symbols to take effect on them, they experience something. But it is important to let them take effect on you again and again. You have to be patient. You have to do such an exercise fifty times and then fifty times again. Constant dripping wears away the stone. Not one, nor fifty raindrops on a stone are enough, but again and again we have to awaken our will, not just let external impressions get to us, but let such symbols live with our will, in us, again and again. We are inwardly invigorated by this, so that we can eventually revive them at will within us. When a person has been active in such practice, then eventually one wakes up in the morning in such a way that one sinks into the physical body, can make use of one's organs again. One experiences that one can live outside one's body, can be active outside one's physical body. Through such practice one learns to recognize that one can, as it were, leave one's body and be active, spiritually active. This is how this state differs from sleep. One can think, one can feel without one's body. One comes to this realization after undergoing such exercises. This is annoying for some people today, but it is nevertheless so.

Our physical body acts as a mirror. Our consciousness is the reflection of our soul life in our physical body. But [today's scientists] say that the brain has to be completely intact for our consciousness to be real. — Yes, that is quite true. Likewise, we also see ourselves quite differently, whether we look into a smooth mirror or into a concave mirror. Such exercises have torn our consciousness away from the ordinary external reflection of the body, and it is only as such a spiritual being that the human being perceives that he experiences, that he lives together with other spiritual beings.

This first step is “imaginative knowledge”. Here we are dependent only on these combined symbols, combined from elements taken from the world of the senses. We must let go of these, we must let go of the cross and the roses. We must let go of these external impressions, and now we think: What was your activity in this combination, when you combined the snake staff, the cross? What we then have is something that is no longer stimulated from the outside. The external world does not stimulate anyone to form symbols; man does this out of the depths of his soul. He reflects on the inner soul activity; this process is not influenced or even stimulated by the external world, it is purely spiritual and soul-based. This is called meditation. Then real inner powers arise that bring us into contact with the spiritual worlds. We call such spiritual knowledge “inspired knowledge”. We have experienced that there is a world independent of the physical. Now we get to know this world itself. It is like when you come to a coast that emerges on the distant horizon, and you gradually get to know it. This is how it is with the knowledge of the spiritual worlds.

We have to go even further after this inspired realization. We also have to let go of the activity of the soul. It can be described as a conscious sleeping – it can occur, can occur quite consciously. But it can also occur that we get to know the spiritual world in such a way that we become one with it, flow into it. This is called 'intuition'. This should not be confused with what is today called “intuition”, when something suddenly occurs to you. This is something quite different. The greatest effort of the soul is needed for intuition. All subjectivity should be eliminated from the soul, just as scientists demand, so that it is truly scientific. The soul is a place of vision in the intuitive world. All subjectivity is eliminated, even the activity that brought us here. (The soul becomes a place where things express their essence.)

The way described here seems very abstract, but in reality it is not, and those who want to go this way have to go through very, very difficult struggles. Renunciation and struggles are on this path. Our inner soul life takes hold of us as if with tentacles when we have given up external stimuli. The moral and immoral urges, as far as they are in the soul, come up there. Then what we actually are comes before our soul. Self-knowledge arises. The mystics have written about this, about the moral trials and temptations when they become aware, when they want to descend into the soul: You were a person of a certain nature, regulated by convention, custom, tradition, but now the truth of the soul comes up. People swear by the most opposing worldviews, they have morally examined everything. The monist accepts his view out of feeling, and so does the spiritualist. Only now does man recognize the reason for accepting this or that view; now we see what illusions we had when we thought we were being logical.

It can fill one with a certain irony when people come and say that the spiritual scientist is a fantasist and so on, and such people have no idea how little they themselves have looked behind the scenes of fantasy and illusion. One can only overcome what one has had within oneself. This cannot be achieved without pain. Not only with one's thoughts, but also with one's happiness one has become attached to what one sees sinking as an illusion, and not only the illusion, but the source of this illusion, both must be given up with heroic strength. If the human being also wants to overcome inspiration, it happens to him that he finds himself very 'light'. Logic doesn't help here; you can't fight impotence with logic. You can't achieve anything, even the surrender of happiness is of no use – you end up thinking like that. You enter the realm of doubt and despair, and all the doubts of the external world are nothing, they are inferior compared to the doubt at this level. The only way we can overcome this terrible region of ice is not to arrive there unprepared. Instead, we must gain strength beforehand.

It is difficult to get there, very difficult. It is only outlined, but it is not impossible, and no one should be deterred by that. There are ways to overcome the difficulties. To explore and experience the spiritual world, it is necessary to penetrate the spiritual world, but to understand it, unclouded logic is necessary.

However, it is difficult to apply unclouded logic today. What has been proven is not always believed. It is important that the evidence be believed. Everything that spiritual researchers say can be proven, but often people do not accept this evidence at all. Anyone can become a spiritual researcher, but a healthy sense of truth and unclouded logic are sufficient in advance. The most beautiful prospect for us is that spiritual nourishment is given more and more to people, and people give it more and more to physical life. And that is the mission of spiritual science: to bring down this spiritual life, this spiritual sap, and let it flow into what the senses convey, and what we can summarize in the words:

It presses to the human soul From the depths of the world, mysterious The rich abundance of matter. It flows into the depths of the soul From the heights of the world, full of content The clarifying light of the spirit. They meet in the human interior To a reality full of wisdom.

Question and Answer

Question: Isn't it pride to want to know about spiritual worlds in this life?

Rudolf Steiner: On the contrary; it is humility when one does not want to remain as one is. It is pride when one does not want to use the powers that lie within us. One surrounds oneself with the mask of complacency, which does not want to ascend into spiritual worlds.

When we discuss the questions and riddles of life in the sense of modern spiritual science, as has been the case here for several years, it is always good to remember that great man in the developmental history of humanity, namely Copernicus, and [also] many other men who, in the same sense, contributed to the revolution in intellectual life with him. In doing so, one must remember what is rarely thought of today: what it must have meant for a thinking person of that time, when the ground literally trembled under his feet, even moved , so that it seemed as if the earth was no longer at the center of the world, but rather, as a rotating body, also orbiting the sun, while he had clung to the earlier opposite assumption with all his thoughts and ideas. Copernicus now presented a world view that reversed everything that had been believed before. Just as people gradually came to accept the essence of his proclamation, so they used to believe in the constellation of the visible stars on a moon bowl, a sun bowl, on individual planetary spheres up to the seventh, the fixed star sphere. In addition to this, they believed that there was an eighth sphere, which was supposed to form the conclusion of the spatial world. This was what Giordano Bruno already considered to be erroneous, saying that what the eye perceives as the blue vault of heaven is nothing more than what appears to be caused by the limited perceptive ability of the eye; rather, instead of such limited spheres, unlimited worlds are to be thought of, that is, infinite distances and an infinite number of worlds.

But what was it that was expressed in multiple ways? Through such views, Copernicus and Giordano Bruno, as well as their followers, pointed out that knowledge is not exclusively promoted by the perception of the senses, but that one must move beyond the sensual result to a view that is based on the supersensible element of thinking. But at that time these minds, which had passed over to a view beyond the tangible observation of the world, had to fight against many parties who wanted to hold on to the traditional and therefore rejected what the new science could offer them against the meaning of this (traditional).

The same applies to what is presented here as spiritual science. This also coincides with the world of external contemporary phenomena, insofar as the events of our own soul life take place in it and relate to the most important questions and riddles that are incorporated in the two words “death” and “immortality”.

We must be clear about the fact that only a serious striving can achieve knowledge about these two enigmatic words, because this is not possible in idle curiosity or with the so-called thirst for knowledge, but only if we lives within ourselves; for man can only fulfill his tasks in the world - whether they be of greater importance or merely those of the recurring everyday life - when he can consciously work and proceed with what essentially rests within him. This is why the question of death and immortality develops into a question about the nature of the human soul, so that in answering it we gain strength and certainty for our work in life, for life in general.

A German philosopher has rightly said: Immortality does not begin only after death, but must be able to be found at all times in the life of the soul, even during our lives. But to do that, it is necessary to get to know the nature of the soul. If we follow the progress of human spiritual development before and since Copernicus, we can see that its successes were slowly prepared. Something similar can be observed here in the questions about death and immortality in the past period of time, although it is only recently that the research methods by which such questions can be discussed and answered have become known in wider circles. In doing so, however, spiritual science must look at a comprehensive law, namely that of human development, which is fully in line with the developmental concept of modern natural science, and with all its consequences. The compulsion of Western intellectual life has long since led important minds in this direction. I would like to refer you, for example, to Lessing: when he was at the peak of his intellectual development, he wrote his 'Education of the Human Race'. He wanted to present a common concern of the entire human race, to show how a law runs through all developmental epochs of mankind, in which not only cause and effect follow one another in a pedantic sequence, but the course of development of humanity is at the same time the education of humanity. He indicated how humanity needed an elementary education in the past, and referred first to the Old Testament period, calling the “Old Testament” the first elementary book of humanity. To grasp the truth in a higher form, humanity was given the “New Testament” in the Christian era, in order to lift it up to further epochs of human development. Thus the education of humanity was carried out by a guiding divine being.

But now the question arises as to whether it makes sense to call the development of humanity an education when the individual souls completely disappear again to make way for souls born later; it only makes sense if the same souls come back for a new development, to be reborn on earth as human beings at a higher level. This is where Lessing's idea came from that the human soul does not live only once, but comes back again and again to take part in the education of the human race anew at a higher level; this is why he speaks of repeated earthly lives of the human soul. Lessing also raises objections to himself and anticipates the easily occurring thought that the soul, for example, does not remember previous lives, by saying, “What useful purpose could such a memory serve?” When the soul has become mature enough, then the memory of earlier earthly lives will also awaken; and he transforms these thoughts into a feeling by saying: When we are filled with the idea of repeated earthly lives, then we can look forward calmly to the future, where the souls will unfold in ever higher earthly lives.

Is not all of eternity mine?

It is clear to see that Lessing has emerged from Western development; his train of thought is different from that of Buddhism, which is related to his. Therefore, his, as a modern conception, must not be confused with that of the latter; because in Buddhism one asks oneself: How should the individual behave in order to reach Nirvana as soon as possible? In Lessing's work, the idea arises from a Christian motive; he regards the whole of humanity on earth as a single, unified family, connected by eternal bonds, destined to develop gradually and together, and to gradually perceive and consciously promote this as a common affair. When so-called enlightened minds speak of Lessing today, they do recognize most of his achievements, but as soon as they come to his thoughts on the education of the human race, they consider him an aging man who had set down these thoughts in his weak time. But one does not follow the necessity in the development of great minds, but only wants to accept what suits oneself.

Hebbel once wrote in his diary: “Let us assume that Plato were to return in a new life and attend a modern secondary school, where he would also have to read his own works again, then it is possible that the reincarnated Plato would understand these old writings the worst.” This is the best way to express the idea that great minds can contribute to the idea of development.

The idea of repeated lives on earth has resurfaced in the educational life of the nineteenth century, being brought to our attention by the psychologist Droßbach, who had taken it up again for scientific reasons. And when, in the in the fifties of the last century a prize was offered for an answer to the question of death and immortality, a paper was awarded in which this idea was developed in the sense of successive earth lives. It is indeed remarkable that around the middle of the nineteenth century a mind like Widenmann answered the question of the life of the soul in this way, from which one then later, out of the necessity of thinking, as one thought, one departed.

Research in spiritual science shows that these repeated lives must be a fact of life, so that it now stands on the standpoint that the human core of our being has been here before, that it once took on a beginning and will often be here again will be, so that his human life will proceed in an earthly life between birth and death and in a spiritual way between death and a new birth, in which part of life our innermost core of being continues its existence in supersensible worlds.

If we now want to see how life everywhere provides us with the results for the affirmation of this view, we must observe the beginning in the independent development of the human being from birth onwards, how gradually the hazy features and awkward body movements develop into more definite features and more purposeful movements, and after a few years the human being is increasingly able to make better and better use of his brain, the noblest tool. Then, on unbiased observation, one must admit that all this is not the result of a self-developing physical power, but that a supersensible entity is working on the striking development from within. But let us look further to see if and how we can also capture the supersensible existence of the soul through external observations. We can observe how the life and events of the soul impress themselves vividly on the physical exterior and the whole being of the human being. If, for example, a person has been eagerly occupied with questions of knowledge for ten years and his soul has been surging up and down in the most diverse moods in the struggle for certain results, then the effects of this cannot simply vanish into nothingness. This is particularly noticeable to anyone who meets someone who has been working hard in this way after quite some time: how the features of the face have changed, shaped by the efforts of the struggling soul. In this way, we can perceive the unique shaping of the soul in the body. Something else also presents itself to us here, which makes this observation a scientific experience; for everyone who struggles in this way can notice in himself, and without any contradiction, that from a certain point on he sees the fruits of his struggle ripening more and faster, as the answer to the questions he wants to answer comes down upon him like a grace. When his soul has arrived at the expression of its struggle in its ultimate consequences in the bodily, then his bodily nature no longer changes, and this is because these struggling forces now emerge fully into consciousness, whereas before they also poured into the bodily and transformed it. When the transformation reached its limit, the forces changed in order to be consciously utilized in accordance with the intention of the developed human being. We can therefore be convinced that everything that forces its way into consciousness and thereby blesses us has worked in the dark depths of the subconscious to develop the organs we needed so that the soul could be completely master of itself and its body.

Once we have directed our attention to the development of the human being, we must still point out something that everyone knows even without clairvoyant abilities, namely, when our life that lies beneath our daytime consciousness shines up into our consciousness during our dreams, which we cannot grasp firmly, however often we have experienced them, even if we experience them according to inner laws, not in random dream figures. The following dream experience may clarify this: a rather zealous, conscientious young person, who also enjoyed drawing in his other lessons, was given a difficult template to copy in his last year at school; he needed quite a long time for his precise, somewhat laborious work and therefore did not finish it by the end of the school year; it did not harm him in the judgment of his teachers, since he had worked diligently and efficiently. Nevertheless, during every lesson, especially towards the end of the school year, he was seized by the fear of not being able to finish his work, and this oppressive sensation haunted him even in his dreams. Even after many years, as an adult, the experience would still come up in his dreams, making him feel like a schoolboy again and, with intense fear, much more than in his daily life, he felt that he would not be able to finish his work, as this had once so often disturbed his school life. This repeated itself for weeks, temporarily ceased, only to recur later. If we want to examine this scientifically, we have to go back over the entire previous life. As a schoolboy, he developed his talent for drawing and also made progress, but this only manifested itself periodically, in leaps and bounds. Each such leap was already preceded by such a series of inner experiences in the schoolboy's life; when these then failed to materialize, he sensed that he had made progress. It remained the same in the development of other abilities in his later life. Now consider whether it is unreasonable to claim that the inner core of the human being was working to bring progress to this person. Before this progress occurred in his soul life, everything took place in the subconscious, but he kept pushing further and further into the physical, and shortly before the breakthrough, before his organs were developed for the external activity of the heightened mental ability, that is, before the last steps, it became apparent in the dream life described that the soul was almost finished with the development of the bodily organ, and then finally, without an accompanying dream experience, to emerge as a product of the spiritual core of the being, externally completely usable in its configured and transformed form.

From this point of view, we can gradually proceed to all the everyday events of life in their alternating states of waking and sleeping. From this point of view we can gradually proceed to all the everyday events of life in their alternating states of waking and sleeping. Through the sensory observation of sleep, one can come to such a realization. How does the moment of falling asleep occur? The person feels how all the senses become duller, the sharp contours of the images fade, everything becomes hazy. If someone who is trained observes this stage, then he comes to an idea about what he did the day before; he feels in a vivid feeling whether he can be satisfied or dissatisfied with himself. In the former case, this feeling is accompanied by such bliss and by the wish that this transition and these thoughts would not end, which fertilize him and flow through his limbs like a new invigoration. But then there is a jolt with which the spiritual and mental core of the being, as a reaction on the body, moves away, and sleep sets in.

It has been pointed out before that those who have to learn a lot soon realize and know from their own experience how good it is to be able to indulge in a revitalizing sleep. Physiologically, sleep and the refreshment it provides can be understood as a state or a process in which what has been worn down during the waking state of the day is rebuilt, and new strength is generated by the spiritual and soul core of the being working into the sleeping body during the state in which it is physically free, as indicated earlier.

When we look at a child as it gradually develops, it is a well-known fact that it lives into the existence of the later waking day life in a formal dream existence, in a sleep life that is only briefly interrupted, especially at the beginning. Everyone knows that it is only from a certain point in time that they can say “I” to themselves, and thus only from that point on that they have become aware of themselves. Anyone who recognizes the principles of physics and chemistry must admit that the mental and spiritual powers with which the child can say “I” to itself after the first years of development must have been there earlier, at a time when they developed the most important and noblest organ of the human being, when the human core formed the brain and worked it out in ever greater detail. The fact that the materialistic science cites that the left cerebral convolution is the speech center, that man cannot speak if these brain parts are not well developed, may be countered only briefly by the fact that a person cannot learn to speak if, for example, he lives on a deserted island, whereas other physiological processes, such as teething, would occur without further ado. Therefore, the mental capacity in the child must be developed to such an extent that the development of speech is initiated and the brain is trained for this purpose; therefore, speaking is not the consequence, but the accompanying and constantly effective cause for the development of the speech center. The soul and spirit must always first have an effect on the physical, working on it so that the organs can develop that are later to be used in the physical world in the sense of conscious thinking. If we summarize these individual thoughts, we are thereby shown everywhere that the process of development takes place in such a way that the whole human body is built up from a supersensible core of being. We can never come to understand this supersensible being if we only remain with its product, the physical body organization. We must always go back to what takes possession of this organization at the beginning of its formation; observation always teaches us this.

Now, in natural science, it is always particularly emphasized that in order to establish conclusive proof, the results of observation must also be obtained in an experiment. The possibility [to do so] is also present here, even if this test is not always necessary. But how [can this be done]? Man must prepare and use his own soul, himself in the fullest sense, as an instrument for grasping the spiritual world. You will find a more detailed account of how this is possible in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. Today, I would merely like to point out that man can also experience the onset of sleep while fully conscious if he makes himself capable of doing so by concentrating on his innermost soul life and through long continued meditation on suitable thoughts. If we hypothetically assume that at the beginning of sleep the spiritual core of the being steps out of the person falling asleep and, figuratively speaking, enters a higher world, then the sufficiently trained person can directly observe this core of the soul through real, experimental observation of the spiritual world. This core of being very easily eludes ordinary perception when falling asleep, since usually too little energy is present in the person to become aware of it when experiencing the soul's separate state. These latent energies must be strengthened, developed; the person must practice discarding all the hindering conditions and try [to achieve a state] in which, so to speak, physical hearing and seeing passes away. Of course, this is only possible gradually and must be initiated by first achieving lasting control over one's earlier emotional movements; grief, anger, and agitation of all kinds must be balanced out, and we must pour calmness over ourselves. When we have worked in this way for a while with sufficient success, we can begin to devote ourselves to certain thoughts of the good, the beautiful, and the true, thoughts that are not borrowed from the world of the senses, and to cultivate symbolized thoughts that express nothing external. If we are willing to move and experience enough within ourselves, then after long and strenuous devotion, we will achieve that our soul becomes an instrument of observation in the sense indicated, in that the powers that previously proved to be too weak to arrive at self-conscious perceptions when falling asleep, now push their way to ever-increasing clarity, instead of leading to a blurred consciousness in the indefinite depths of the soul. Organs are incorporated into the soul organism, which allow us to gain new possibilities of perception. Then the person developed in this way is able to perceive vividly what was previously unconscious and to suppress anything that disturbs him, thus making the soul empty and suitable for the finer impressions of the spiritual world; he will then perceive that the tired person can gather new strength in the spiritual world, which he enters when he falls asleep.

It is also possible for a person to experience a state equivalent to the generally known fatigue in this sense, [but] without the disturbance of the former, during concentration of thought, in such a way that the latter state allows one to remain fully awake and conscious, thus making an effort to ensure that all experiences occur in conscious forms and thus continue completely. Then the person will perceive that he cannot use his body and also his brain, but feels outside of them and cannot chisel into them what he experiences outside of the body. With continued practice of the appropriate exercises, the feeling and the possibility will gradually arise to influence the physical body with the inner soul processes, so that it becomes more and more docile and pliable to the demands and impressions of the soul, until it is generally so prepared and particularly the brain is so formed that it is able to express what is experienced outside of it, to communicate it to others.

This experiment can therefore be done to observe the hypothetical workings of the soul on the body itself; there is no difference in terms of the evidence of these processes compared to the method of natural science. Then we are faced with the possibility that we can say: When a person is born into earthly physical life, his supersensible core of being emerges completely from the supersensible world, and so the human being will also have emerged into life for the first time. As educators, we can observe that young people bring nothing unknown to our world into the earthly world that could never have been connected to our world. Rather, they come equipped with powers that they have already gathered at an earlier time in the physical world, in earlier stages of cultural development. If we look at life more broadly, we are immediately confronted with the fact that every morning, when we wake up, we feel confronted by our past life. When, as mentioned earlier, the human being struggles with his body and this struggle of the soul finds an end in the formation of wrinkles and furrows, the soul ceases the physical transformation, and the soul's powers then become consciously perceptible. Every morning, the soul meets the body at this boundary and can lead it further, as far as it allows with its inherent elasticity. We also see from this that we experience and learn more than we can utilize in our body, because it is, after all, largely fully formed; nevertheless, it continues to have an effect on our spiritual and soul core.

All this can be observed in everyday life, and if it is applied in healthy educational principles, the good effects will be maintained throughout the whole of life. It will be felt that the human being always feels like a student during his life, never loses the bliss of constantly letting new things take effect on him, while a wrong education makes one blasé. When the body has reached the peak of its development and maintained it for a while, but then slowly begins to degrade again, which occurs in the second half of life, we feel that the soul can no longer work on the body as it once did, but that our spiritual-soul core of being, in constant connection with the outer, physical body, now really grows in the emotions and sensations. With the destruction of the brain, the soul life of the person concerned will only cease in the physical, since it is not the brain itself that thinks and so on, but with the help of the brain, thought takes place in the physical. But what is not directly connected to the brain, we feel with increasing age and perceive the decline of the physical, which can no longer be further developed, as a relief.

Finally, the human being passes through the gate of death. The spiritual and soul essence has been enriched in many ways during earthly life and is now working on the preparation of those forces that bring about a repetition of life, in which a new life material is given to a person who has been reborn as a child.

The memory of the previous life is interrupted in an immediate way, especially the memory of details, because the physical body is completely given over to the physical world as a corpse; even that which has only superficially impressed itself on the soul is, as it were, thrown off like a second corpse, since the soul can no longer use it. Only that which the soul can use to achieve new abilities is retained, as formative powers for a new life, which are suitable for building a new body. Thus the idea of repeated earthly lives is justified in itself, and the idea of development that lies at its heart follows as a logical, necessary consequence of what the natural sciences have achieved. In this connection, however, the fact must be taken into account that not all courses of life are to be understood in the sense of a continuous ascent, but despite many fluctuations, whether rooted in man or not, the sum total of repeated lives is an upward climb, a gain.

Sleep can be delayed or even prevented altogether by vivid thoughts that arise in a person as soon as they relate to emotions, joy, fear, worry, or concerns of any kind; for these connect the spiritual and mental core of the being with everyday consciousness and therefore do not allow it to penetrate into supersensible worlds. The person can only fall asleep when this state is finally numbed by excessive tiredness, or when it is distracted from the earlier thoughts by returning to calmer thoughts, especially those of a more ideal direction in life. Similar conditions also apply to the building of a new life. This will be achieved in a downward sense if the forces for this have to be taken from selfishness, or if those who cling to it have to be drawn upon. This also makes the ascending and descending nature of the individual courses of life understandable, so that in this respect, too, life can provide us with evidence for the views presented. The spiritual soul essence enters the germinating body of the child and forms it as the builder of this body. And whoever encounters man uninhibitedly in his natural conditions of origin and growth will find such conditions confirmed as facts. We have been able to verify this, for example, in the case of a man who attained a particularly high level of clairvoyance, namely Michel Nostradamus (Notre-Dame), born in St. Remy in Provence in 1503 and died in Salon in 1566. He was a doctor who worked with the greatest devotion as long as he was left in peace. He was banned from practicing medicine and withdrew to a kind of spiritual observatory, where he studied nature and astronomy. Here he allowed the constellations in particular to take effect on him spiritually and in doing so became aware of some inner abilities of his soul that had previously remained hidden from him. He saw these as a divine gift bestowed upon him for his seclusion. Particularly when he devoted himself to the macrocosm in full tranquility, without being affected by the surging and surging of his soul life, his clairvoyant gift emerged, with which he also achieved great results in his prophecies for the future. We see how the spiritual-soul core of his being broke through the natural conditions of existence, after the forces he had previously used as a physician could no longer be expended; they asserted themselves in the way indicated, because it was not possible to to let them disappear without further ado, and entirely in line with the scientific view of the “conservation of energy”, those forces that had previously been channeled into external activity were transformed into clairvoyant powers, which in turn evoked further inner soul energies. This can also be achieved through meditation and concentration, under the influence of which the human being is prepared to overcome space and time with his perceptions and to see differently than is possible when seeing in physical everyday life. On this occasion, I would like to draw attention to the book “Das Mysterium des Menschen” by Ludwig Deinhard, which explains the complete harmony of external methods with those of spiritual science.

Thus we can look back from our time, in which spiritual science can once again draw new courage for further success, to those upheavals in world and life views, as they were indicated in the introductory words of our lecture, where new elements entered into the sphere of human feeling, just as humanity today, when observing the development of soul and spirit, is in a similar situation to that when Copernicus removed the ground from under our feet and applied thinking instead of observation. If we look only at the sciences, such as astronomy, biology and so on, which have grown not through observation alone, but mainly through thought, just as in Copernicus' time he and still Giordano Bruno Bruno dissolved the narrow-minded views of humanity into seemingly immeasurable atmospheres and spaces, breaking through the eighth sphere created only by the world of the senses.

From this point of view, spiritual science stands today when it sees people who, until now, limited their environment according to spatial-material perception and their own soul nature between birth and death according to temporal perception. However, since these living conditions could only be limited by misleading observation, this self-imposed limitation can also be broken through. Just as astronomical science, for example, must also have a future in the same sense, so must spiritual science expand the firmament of the limited soul life beyond the limits assumed by most people, and indeed beyond this life, beyond birth and death, into an eternity. Then spiritual science will open up to the world the infinity and immortality of the soul. Once Giordano Bruno was condemned to death by burning at the stake by his opponents and burnt in Rome. Perhaps some people would like to see the same thing happen to the representatives and followers of spiritual science. If this is no longer permissible today, then they try to ridicule and belittle spiritual science as much as possible. But those who cannot get enough of it will thereby pass judgment on themselves instead of on those on whom they believe they can carry it out. But that world view will also receive its judgment, and that through the further development of spiritual science, just as the time has come for the recognition of the scientific view of nature, in the face of retrogressive efforts. But spiritual science will also prove to be particularly capable of giving people real life and not just a theory, blessing them more than the natural sciences, not in opposition to them, but by expanding their healthy principles on new paths of development for humanity. Those who can then see that the world is advancing in this way will not condemn spiritual science, but will march with it to victory.

[Man's yearning to answer the question of eternity does not arise] only from a [fearful] desire for existence, not only from a [petty] yearning for one's own immortality, but, [as a deeper look into the human soul teaches us, it] corresponds to the soul's need for eternity, [it arises from] a deep [spiritual], moral need for human perfection. [There is no moment in the soul when it does not have to be filled with the striving for perfection.] The question about the nature of eternity corresponds to the question of all deeper reflection. It is one of the fundamental questions of all deep human research.

But there was also a certain shyness in the human soul to approach these questions.] Hence the belief in immortality: Only through religious feeling one comes [to a conception of eternity], to the feeling of the immortality of the human soul.

The task of Theosophy is to show that research, [real science], is also possible in the realm of the spirit. [For decades, it has always endeavored to awaken the consciousness in certain circles that research in spiritual spheres is possible.] This contradicts today's habits of thought, people's perceptions [yes very much; it is only too understandable that Theosophy must still be considered fantasy, wild reverie]. But the completely logical way of proceeding in spiritual research, [the basic methods] meet the strictest requirements of natural science, even if it is not admitted.

[All this comes to us in a very special way when we raise the fundamental question of the eternity and nature of the human soul, which is connected with it.

The soul and spiritual core of the human being is already manifest in ordinary life and will do so more and more in spiritual science. [Spiritual science must point to what actually governs human life [...], what the soul and spiritual core is like, how this core relates to the realm of transience.

The idea of repeated lives is a spiritual-scientific idea, as is the developmental principle of the human soul and spirit. [Most of you are familiar with these facts, which should be considered from the perspective of ordinary life.] Goethe said: “Consider the ‘what’, more consider the ‘how’.” The 'what' is known, but what can enlighten us arises from the 'how'. It is believed that the human soul is exhausted in conscious thinking, feeling and willing. [One does not sufficiently take into account the factors that are constantly taking place in the depths of the soul. How little man can say about his temperament, disposition.]

But just as the depths of the sea are unknown to him who only observes the play of the waves on the surface, so the subconscious, in which the ordinary life is rooted, is unknown. [A fleeting glance at life reminds us how unconscious factors are constantly playing into life.] An injustice, for example, experienced as a child and repeated in the student, can lead to suicide. [The student had been reproached and so on by the teacher. Now, that also happens with other children. It is only with this child that it leads to suicide. It is the experiences of the fifth year that had so stirred his soul in hidden depths that they led to the act.) The conscious part of the soul points everywhere into hidden depths of the soul. Where consciousness fades, darkness surrounds you – in sleep or in dreams. [If we eavesdrop on human consciousness, we can find many things.] There is an extensive science of dreams, even if it is not known. An example: a student was given a difficult drawing assignment. After a whole year, he still hadn't finished it. This caused the pupil to become anxious towards the end of the year when the drawing was still not finished. Later in life, the following happened: he kept having a very specific dream in which he saw himself as a pupil with the same fear; but each time it was followed by greater manual dexterity. The latter is only an expression of the abilities developing in his whole being. First it worked in the lower depths of the soul life, and as a transition comes the presence in the half-consciousness of the dream consciousness. It is not enough to say: there is a transformation of natural processes. Humanity will have to come to terms with the fact that there is also a transformation of forces in the spiritual realm. Before they become conscious, they live in hidden depths of the soul in the subconscious. Man would have destroyed these soul forces if he had consciously submerged himself before. At first the soul force works in the subconscious, in the soul core; it is not exhausted by the work on the soul, it works in the subconscious on the human body. The body thus shows the effect of the soul-spiritual shaping.

In a child, we first find untrained movements, an expressionless gaze, and so on. However, the soul-spiritual works into the physical, and gradually the physiognomy changes. Memory only comes from the third year onwards. [Jean Paul's word is true]: There - [in his first three years, of which he has no memory] - the child has learned more than in three academic years, and has also done much more intimate work in the brain. [When we come into existence through birth, our brain is in many ways not yet differentiated.] Consciousness is still dull, still asleep, dreaming. Thus we find the work of this dream-conscious soul-spiritual in the whole human being first in the lower parts of the bodily organization, then in the finer shaping of the human body. Does this activity ever stop? As long as the human being is physically present, from conception onwards, the physical is shaped by the spiritual. From the moment that the subconscious achieves its goal, it can penetrate into the consciousness of the person. It must first work in the subconscious of the organization, on the fine shaping of the human body.

In this way, we can follow the activity of the core of our being in its own physicality by methodically observing our mental life.

The first thing that spiritual research teaches is that the spirit connects with the line of inheritance. Two cases are possible here: that the spiritual soul is doing this for the first time or for the umpteenth time. [Now it will be a matter of finding out whether what is working on the person was already there, whether it provides us with evidence that it was present in previous lives.

A person would have to see himself as a mayfly if he had no memory of previous days. [How does a person recognize himself as a unified being throughout his life, since his consciousness breaks down every day? Without memory, this would not be possible.] He does not have memories of previous earthly lives, but he does have an inkling of them.

[We have to develop the ability to observe how this works in a person's physicality from year to year.] The most important educational problems are solved when we recognize how the abilities that the child brings with them can be adapted to what is already on earth. This is how temperament develops. In a person with a distinctly melancholic disposition, life shows the keynote of a certain sadness. How does this person come to this? A mourning experience looks quite different for a melancholic than for a sanguine person. This basic mood goes to the depths of the soul. [The soul lives in the aftermath of the grief it once went through, which can sometimes be seen even years later. The soul's mood is the consequence of previous grief. In the melancholic, we find grief in the most hidden depths of his being.] The mood of mourning was already imprinted in the body because it was brought from the core of the soul. This cannot come from experiences on earth, it was brought from previous lives on earth. [The spiritual core of the human being worked the mood of mourning into the structure of the human body.] For the mood of mourning could only be brought from there, not from the spiritual world, where there is no mourning. Here it is shown with all clarity what a person has acquired in previous lives. It is just as accurate as the results of science. So that is what ordinary life reveals.

Only through an instrument can a person see into the spiritual world; that is the person himself, as he stands before us in his spiritual and soul life. Through concentration and meditation, he can work his way up into the spiritual world. Another soul life is to be developed. A radical transformation of the soul life in order to gain this instrument is necessary for higher knowledge. Then the human being feels: You are something other than what you were before, when you only thought you were in the physical body [because your feeling ran parallel to certain external or physical processes]. Now he realizes: Now you experience yourself as a real being outside of the physical body; you can completely free yourself from the physical body.

In a spiritual sense, such a person carries out an experiment as in a laboratory. The first experience is a kind of idiocy. One experiences oneself as a new being. No concept can make this clear to a person. It cannot be grasped in concepts, it seems “idiotic” because the brain cannot grasp these experiences, [because there is nothing in the physical world that can provide clarity about them]. At a higher level, [when the soul powers are getting stronger and stronger, then concepts arise]; there the brain, [which appears as a rough block], must now be consciously worked on, as unconsciously in the case of a child. Then we look at what we can only grasp logically in ordinary life.

[Humanity would be paralyzed in the future if it did not receive knowledge about its spiritual and mental powers.

In the thirty-fifth year of life, the ascending line is transformed into the descending line. On the descending line, the forces from earlier lives are exhausted, but forces from new experiences are accumulated, [which we have acquired in this life]. These never attain the strength to work into the bodily organization. One will accumulate body-forming forces, but one's own physical body stands as an obstacle.

[But at the same time, the person will feel forces entering him that can shape a new life for him.

For many people, the joy of life fades by the age of thirty-five because they have not kept the sense of the richness of life open in their youth, but in the depths of the soul, forces develop, a feeling that one carries within oneself, forces for a new core of being, then no sadness of old age follows.

In the education of the child, one should never lose the sense of the school of life. An open, healthy mind will develop the human soul from an early age in such a way that the person remains open to spiritual science. The feeling is to be developed that the human being carries within himself a spiritual-soul core of being that freely builds itself a new body after death. [Through spiritual science, we gain security and confidence through the moral forces it gives us.]

In this way, we can experience the victory of the immortal, the victory of eternity over mortality. All creations are mortal, but what lives to eternity is immortal, as Giordano Bruno says. [The spirit is the creator of the mortal, and we thereby recognize its immortality.] Immortality does not begin only after death; man can already experience it now.

Ladies and Gentlemen! The subject of today's lecture must interest every human being. Not only is it interesting to ask what happens to a person after they have crossed the threshold of death, but they also have a profound moral obligation to know something about the essence of the human being. Man feels what can be called the urge for perfection in the noblest sense. This striving can never be completed. With this realization, the endeavor arises to know something about how man can succeed, what the possibility is to satisfy the striving for perfection. This raises the question of death and immortality.

Our time with its habits of thought is not favorable [for such questions]. Therefore, a new school of thought, spiritual science, is trying to approach this question. It has to be so alien to today's life that it seems strange. Therefore, some people who are here tonight will not be immediately convinced. Those who have never heard of it before will perhaps only shake their heads, be ironic, or perhaps even just scoff. I realize that I will face all kinds of resistance. I will only give one example of logical thinking, which is entirely in line with genuine scientific thinking. If one wants to penetrate to the essence of the human heart, one must be made aware of the saying of a philosopher, to the effect that the immortality of the soul, if it exists, cannot begin only with death, but must already be linked to ordinary life.

How do you come to the realization of a thing, being and the like? This is what science asks. Combining hydrogen and oxygen to form water is quite different from considering each of these two substances on its own (for example, separating the oxygen and examining it on its own).

Just as we have our soul in our daily lives, it lives in the body like oxygen in water. The soul perceives through the ear, the eye and so on. All expressions of the soul are only possible because the soul is connected to the organs – like hydrogen with oxygen in water. If there is no way to separate the soul, then one would despair of not being able to recognize the basic nature of the soul.

Is there a state in life where the spiritual-soul life separates from the physical being? It can be said that something different occurs during sleep; the bodily functions take place differently [than in the waking state]. Is it not much more likely that the soul separates and leaves the body alone? Can the content of our soul, our emotional experience – joy and suffering – be logically explained, can this soul-being have an existence separate from the body?

There is a logical thinking that cannot escape this. Let us assume that a person would indeed undergo a change in such a way that only the body is still active; all soul, on the other hand, is extinguished. When the lung activity is maintained, we cannot recognize the nature of oxygen, [that is] of what enters the lungs, but the lung life activity remains in itself - it is something other than the oxygen itself.

Thus we must seek to recognize the nature of the soul as something different from the organization of our body. The independence of oxygen from the lungs is therefore the independence of the soul from the life activity of the lungs.

In the moment when the soul leaves the body during sleep, consciousness becomes deeper and deeper, and the independent life of the soul thus begins.

Today we want to take a closer look at dream life. A boy with a talent for drawing was given a particularly difficult drawing task that he was unable to complete in time for the school exam. He therefore had a fear. Nevertheless, even though he had not completed the task, his grade was not worse for it.

Periodically, a dream now returns as a state of fear in this person's life, but much stronger than before, so that he often wakes up trembling from it. Then days go by without him dreaming like that. However, it becomes apparent that his drawing ability is improving. At the end of such an intermediate period, the fearful dream always returns. Before this greater ability flowed into the hand, it roamed in the subconscious; the states of fear appeared in dreams. And when the increased abilities showed themselves, when they were there, then the dream stopped. These abilities first work in the organism – in materialistic terms, on the nerves, the organs. Before they enter consciousness, the soul prepares the physical organization, it works on the organs.

Here we approach the soul; we catch the soul at work in the organization of the body. The soul works on the organization from conception to death – or, to put it more precisely, [still] somewhat differently. We can remember back to a certain point in our lives. In the years before our memory, the soul works in a completely different way on our organization – without our consciousness. Even before we become conscious, the soul must have been there, and consequently before it was active in the body. Down in the organism, these forces are at work preparing the organization, just as in the example mentioned earlier, the drawing skills, the soul work, presented itself in dreams. In this area, materialistic views are absolutely insufficient.

That a human being gets false teeth happens in any case; that a person can speak is not so obvious. Without other people, he will never learn to speak. So the ability to speak cannot just be due to the speech organs, but the life and weaving of language within us works out this ability.

Since the human being is a coherent being, it must be assumed that there is something spiritual about him from the very beginning, even before the physical work.

[Here is another comparison:] How can one assume that a person who has had trouble all day will be in a different frame of mind in the evening? This is how the spiritual always works. The state of mind can be compared quite well with what the person has experienced before. [So one must assume:] Not from supersensible worlds, but only from living with people can the state of mind arise with which the person enters life through birth. Such trains of thought are entirely in line with the way of thinking of today's natural science. So the idea of repeated earth lives is something that arises by itself.

Only two hundred years ago it was assumed that animals, worms for example, could develop out of inanimate mud. But Francesco Redi formulated the now irrefutable sentence: “Living things can only come from living things.” It was only with great difficulty that he was able to escape the fate of Giordano Bruno because of this sentence. However, the sentence “Spiritual-mental can only arise from spiritual-mental” will initially be ridiculed and mocked, but then gradually accepted and finally taken for granted in the future.

What happens in this life affects later lives; these are only logical conclusions - but experiments [in this field] are also important and possible. Ludwig Deinhard has written a book about this.

But everyone can only use their own soul as a tool to investigate the soul. Not everyone can become a spiritual researcher, but just as anyone can educate themselves about astronomy, chemistry and so on, the same is true here, as will be briefly explained. People make themselves a tool for exploring the spiritual world.

[Let us take another example:] Nostradamus. - In the book by Kemmerich about prophecies there is a whole chapter about Nostradamus. Nostradamus was a doctor, he was a doctor by nature and did an infinite amount of good, especially during the plague in Provence. But] it was said that he was a Calvinist, which undermined his reputation. The powers that he otherwise gave to humanity with all his soul were transformed into prophetic gifts – visionary gifts, like the power of thought into warmth, warmth into movement and so on. The visionary gifts could only take place under certain conditions. Nostradamus created a laboratory for himself, that is, a room with a glass roof where he stayed at night. When the soul had become completely calm, the stars were then observed, and this triggered sayings that Nostradamus recorded. All worries and concerns ceased. This state of mind was inherited from his fathers. The modern-day seer must artificially create this state of mind. He has to bring special impulses to the forefront of the soul. Symbols are best for this, those that stimulate our soul, shake us up inwardly. The forces slumber beneath – these slumbering forces are awakened by this. Then the person is as if asleep, but not unconscious. We then no longer perceive anything through the [sense] organs. We have the soul as we have oxygen when it is separated from water. We then say to ourselves: You are experiencing another world. At first the experience is such that one cannot put what one has experienced into words. However, spiritual science could never be taught if it remained that way. The spiritual researcher must go further and further, especially when he has experienced something that he cannot express. One knows: one experiences something, but one cannot think it. If one continues the exercise, one also learns to speak about it. One experiences what one experienced as a child when learning language. We learn to use our brain. We can only experience this in pain, so to speak.

If one has triumphed over one's organism, then one has also explored it experimentally.

Once our culture has been permeated by spiritual science, it will be possible to approach the education of young people quite differently. People can then have different, inner soul experiences than in today's spiritual culture.

In the second half of life, when the soul no longer has a constructive effect on the bodily organization, these soul-spiritual forces, which one acquires through schooling in life, accumulate and have reached their greatest tension at the moment of death. The energies to work in the [physical] organization again must be sought in the soul-spiritual life.

These spiritual-mental powers that build the body are beyond decay and becoming. These powers arise precisely because of death. This realization gives us courage and strength.

Two questions, which undoubtedly touch the interest of every human soul in the most significant sense, will be dealt with in the two lectures today and tomorrow. This evening, more from a general point of view, and tomorrow, the consideration of certain individual questions will be introduced. There is no doubt that the questions concerning the nature of death and what may be hidden in the word “immortality” must truly arouse the deepest, most sincere interest in every human soul, and one may say, must still be the greatest conceivable interest, if we disregard all the wishes and desires that attach themselves to the event of death and to the question of immortality for the human soul.

But all idle curiosity, even all that is called curiosity in ordinary life, can be set aside when considering these two questions. We can refrain from doing so because in every profound moment of our lives we are constantly stimulated – sometimes more consciously, sometimes more from the deepest, most hidden parts of our soul – by two things: the strength and confidence, the certainty of hope in our lives, to want to know something about these questions. There are two things. The first is everything that is included in the idea of human destiny. This destiny not only raises theoretical questions for us, but vital questions, and we know that if we cannot receive any information that can somehow satisfy us, this must mean a weakness, doubt, belittling of our soul. Human destiny mysteriously and enigmatically intervenes in human existence. One person is placed, seemingly through no fault of their own, in a position that can hardly give them satisfaction, a place where it is impossible for them to develop any significant powers for the good of others and their work. On the other hand, we see how, seemingly without merit, the other stands in a place that not only makes a rosy existence possible for him, but also allows him to develop the best talents for the benefit and good of others. Man, with his theories, asks for the causes when external facts occur, and there is a certain reluctance to search for the causes of human destiny.

When we look at our emotional life, with all the mysterious things that can happen in it, we realize that it is precisely the most intimate depths of our soul that raise the questions about the causes of our destiny. Perhaps the individual does not ask: What are the causes of this or that happening in my life – that would be a theoretical coloring of the question; but what we feel calls us to contentment or despair, to hopeful work or to dejection in the face of all activity. But the most important questions in this area are those that perhaps cannot even be formulated in theoretical terms, but which express themselves in satisfaction, in depression, in a feeling of abandonment and loneliness; they are questions that, only half posed in the soul, remain stuck before an open formulation, but constitute the happiness and suffering of our entire existence. If fate could intervene in our lives in such a way that we could say it promotes our abilities here or there, our actions, [or] hinders our progress, then the questions would not be so burning. But if we look more deeply, we find that everything we are in the innermost part of our being – how we live, how our value, our ability presents itself – is the result of our fate. Man says to himself that the whole being, the whole inner configuration of the being, is not so dependent on what appears to approach life from the outside and shape and form this life.

So it is the anxious question to fate, which, perhaps only half raised, goes to ask: Where does our whole existence actually come from? What is it that is mysteriously enclosed within us and is so dependent on what we have to experience as our outer destiny? We need only think of two facts, in addition to the countless individual cases: there we will find how our whole being, our innermost nature, is dependent on destiny. The first fact is that the human being is placed in some linguistic area, in a national context. Who knows how much of our intimate soul life overflows from the way language penetrates us. Or how much of our sense of confidence in life and our hopes depends on how our parents, our environment and our teachers respond to us in our early youth. How a rough treatment can harden our whole being throughout our earthly existence! One need only think how mysterious the connections of fate are in this area in particular. A case taken directly from life can teach us about this very area: a child who, in his seventh year, experienced a strong injustice at the hands of those around him, due to the way his destiny placed him in a community. Sometimes the child forgets it, seemingly on the outside, but in the depths of the soul it lives on and continues to have an effect in the deep layers of the soul, which has taken root as injustice in the soul. The child then becomes a middle school student. Something special happens in his sixteenth year. A strong effect comes from his teacher in the sense that the student has to experience a new injustice. If he had not experienced the injustice in his seventh year, the matter might have passed by without effect, as it did for his fellow student. But because the old impression continued to work in the depths of the soul, while it was forgotten for the outer being, it joined together with the experience of the seventh year, and a student suicide resulted. Thus we see how our whole being, the way we enter into life, is more deeply connected with the question of our destiny.

The second thing can be seen by reflecting on how one's life unfolds, how one gathers one's life experiences, how one becomes more and more mature as the years go by. This may be more or less the case for one person or another, but this maturing is evident from a close examination of life, and it is usually the case that we have to say to ourselves: we have matured in those things that we did imperfectly, from the point of view that we have to take after we have gained experience. If we were allowed to do them a second time, we would do them better. We learn things in life, but we learn precisely by doing imperfect deeds in this life. The most intimate life experiences result from making our imperfect actions our teachers. Then we look back from a point in our development and say to ourselves: We learn many things, we have become more mature, and this knowledge is within us. What happens to this experience when we pass through the gate of death? Does it disappear without a trace in the floods of nothingness? Yes, we do not always have to take such a life experience, we can say: What we do, learn to refrain from, has an effect that other people experience through it, either as support or perhaps as harm. We know that our value as a human being depends on whether we have harmed or helped other people. From this arises the other life experience, which is concentrated in the overall feeling, in basic sensations, in the need to do many things differently than we did in the past life. So we feel as if we have the sensation of having many debts that we can no longer repay. This is because we have created the debts in such a way that we have the actions in which we committed the debts behind us. These are the most intimate, deepest experiences of the soul. Does everything we have acquired, everything that makes us different from what we were at the beginning of life, does all this end in an indefinite nothing? That is the second thing. No matter what a person's nature may be, no matter how unexpressed it may remain, it remains a question of feeling and of life within him.

Now we can say: in our time, a period of human development lies behind us in which the noblest, most moral people, who were also scientific materialists and yet clung to moral ideas, came to terms with such soul questions in a very peculiar way. If one takes the standpoint of spiritual science, which is to be represented here, an attitude is required that is never unjust, even towards opponents. For it must be said that it was nothing short of heroic how materialistic thinkers found their way, especially in regard to a question such as the one that has now been touched upon. They said to themselves: With death, our inner soul life extinguishes, like the light of a candle when the fuel is used up. But then we have the awareness that what we have experienced lives on in the process of human historical development. Everyone gives to posterity what they have worked for, even if it has only been conquered and worked for in the smallest of circles. Many such thinkers have said to themselves that it is selfish to demand that human beings have their own personal immortality. But it is selfless in the highest sense to die in the full knowledge that the personal self perishes and what one has done passes into the process of humanity. One may say: this information is heroic; compared to much religious egoism, this heroism of materialism appears great, but it cannot stand up to a deeper understanding of the question, for the reason that when everyone looks at life, they must say to themselves: The most intimate part of our life experience is such an innermost good of your soul that you cannot simply give it to the outside world. We can give much for the outside world, but what we give does not belong to the most intimate part of our soul. The best we have learned is so tied to our individuality that it cannot possibly be handed over to the world. So the question remains: how do we cope with the sight of that which the soul has experienced, which has given it value in the way described, which makes it necessary that life is not closed off if this value is to be lived out, which it does not give up when a person passes through the gate of death?

These are the two things: the contemplation of fate and the contemplation of one's own development. These questions are to be answered in such a way that the answer can be called logical and scientific in the same way. To give answers, as answers are given in today's external science, is the goal of the endeavor that can be called spiritual science, which is entering into the culture of the present and through which something of this culture is to be incorporated as an insight into much of what life needs in order to become strong and powerful. It cannot be demanded that the suggestions given today and tomorrow be more than mere suggestions. Those who believe that scientific answers are only those that tie in with external events, with what can be seen with the eyes and grasped with the hands, will naturally not accept the answers as scientific. Only suggestions are to be given, but these are intended to show that the whole way of thinking, the whole way of looking at spiritual life, is the same as the ways of research in today's science. Modern man also demands information about the questions characterized in such a way that this information can stand up to strict scientific scrutiny. Thus, the answers will appear to be different from science in the usual sense, but anyone who delves deeper will see that the way of thinking in Theosophy is such that the scientific needs as well as the heartfelt needs of modern humanity can be satisfied.

The starting point must be that of real, true self-knowledge. Because fate shapes the essence of our “self” and because our “self” becomes more and more mature, we are confronted with these questions and can therefore hope that a true knowledge of our innermost being, of what we call our “self”, will lead to an answer. But it is difficult for the modern man to recognize what can be called self-knowledge. There are formidable obstacles to the contemplation of one's own nature. Only by overcoming these obstacles can he enter into self-knowledge, and from self-knowledge, through the connection of his own ego with the world, pass into knowledge of the world.

If we want to examine a substance in science, we cannot recognize its essence under certain conditions. Although oxygen is contained in water, we cannot examine it in water; we must first separate it from the water by a physical process, only then can we examine its essence. How different it is when it comes to us in water! It must be something similar if we want to examine our self so that this examination can satisfy us. Our self is, like the oxygen to the hydrogen, bound to the outer body in ordinary life. What we call our soul body, that in which we find ourselves as in our most intimate inner being, we always experience in such a way that we look at the outer world through our bodily organs, so that we learn to understand it through the human brain. Just as oxygen is bound to hydrogen to form water, so is the life of the soul bound to the life of the body, to what we have before us as human beings, as ourselves. So there arises the necessity that we first detach the life of the soul from the life of the body in order to truly examine it.

How can we do this? How can we present our soul life to ourselves in such a way that we can contemplate it in its truth? Now, according to the results of spiritual research, everyday life detaches the soul from the body during the night in the course of twenty-four hours. Let us accept this for the time being as an assertion; we will come back to it later. When a person falls asleep in the evening, the full human being is not contained in the body; what continues the external soul functions, as happens in the waking state, but not the actual soul life, which we recognize as our innermost being, as suffering, affects, drives and passions, is truly set aside during the night's sleep and in the morning reenters and submerges into the body, in order to use the bodily organs, the senses and the brain, the instrument of the soul. If we start from scientific prejudices, we will say that it is possible that the entire spiritual life, with all its sensations and feelings, with everything that takes place within, is nothing other than a result of physical life, just as the flame is the result of processes in the candle. But this does not hold up under deeper examination. It must be clear to us from common sense that there is something to it.

In the state that a person goes through from falling asleep to waking up, the processes that we can only understand as life processes take effect on his body. What flows from within as organic activity into the brain and other organs continues to have an effect. A comparison suggests a logical thought, which cannot be escaped on deeper reflection. If we compare our sense organs with the lungs, we find that our lungs, like our sense organs, are nourished from within and sustained by the organism. What we see flowing in as a life activity can be compared to what flows into the brain and other organs from within the body during the day and also during the night as a nutritional activity. But can something be identified that takes place within the body and supplies the activity of the lungs from within, through the nature of the air that must flow into the lungs? Could the activity of flowing into the lungs from within ever reach the lungs' goal if the air did not flow in from the outside? Does this inner life activity have something to do with the nature and composition of air? We cannot learn anything about air from within. It is the same with the soul. Just as the essence of the air that flows into the lungs is not connected with the activity that flows into the lungs as organic activity, so the content of our soul, which flows in in the morning and leaves the body in the evening, has just as little to do with what our inner bodily activity is, with what flows into our soul organs from our organism as nourishment.

If you look deeply into this comparison, try to think it through – you will not escape the logical thought that what we live in as our soul life, what flows into us, is just as foreign to the inner bodily activity as the air is to the inner bodily activity, so that the independence, the inner essence of our soul life appears well-founded. A person truly does not live with their soul life in such a way that they say: I live in my muscles, my brain. That is not their soul life, but rather: I live in my feelings, affects. That in which they live in this way enters their body in the morning like an inhalation process and leaves it in the evening like an exhalation.

In response to this thought, logical thinking can now raise the question: How can we observe soul life, which is so independent of bodily life, in itself? If we could observe it during sleep, we would be helped. But in normal life, although the soul separates from the body, we cannot examine the secret nature of soul life, because at the moment it separates, it becomes unconscious and eludes examination. But there is another way to penetrate to this soul life, which can be encountered by every person, and that is through a psychic experiment by the spiritual researcher who has obtained the instrument to artificially separate his soul life from the body; this is clairvoyant observation.

The first observation that can arise for anyone is the following. It starts from the question: What prevents us from observing our soul life separately from our bodily life? There are two reasons. Firstly, the moment we wake up, a connection is made through the senses and the thinking bound to the senses with the sensual outside world, so that we do not have our soul life to ourselves, we are not in our soul life, but in what is around us as a luminous, sounding world. The experiences of our soul flow together with what enters us through eyes and ears. Whenever we enjoy a sound, we always have, so to speak, the sound that enters from outside and the joy within us as two things that flow together. But we merge with the outer sound. We do not separate our soul life so that we lose ourselves in the outer sensory world. When we look up at the magnificent starry sky and contemplate the wonders of the rising and setting sun, everything that affects us from the outside, we feel it flowing together with what is happening in the innermost part of our soul, what uplifting and devotional experiences we have in our soul, what strength flows to us. We have never chemically separated our inner being from what penetrates from the outside world. That is why some philosophers say that there is no such thing as an inner soul life, even denying the inner soul content and allowing it to merge with those images that ebb and flow on the horizon of our soul life. For the more intimate observer, Goethe's words come true: What gives the numerous stars, all the glories of the celestial space, their true value? But only that everything that lives outside in the wide world is reflected in the human heart, is expressed, so that something is experienced that goes beyond ordinary expression. And if one proceeds to a thorough self-observation, one will find: The soul feels what is happening outside, it knows that it is experiencing inner things in outer events, that it has gradually progressed, that inner soul events have followed one another and a continuous stream has arisen from the present moment to the moment until which we can remember back, that this stream is something different than what merely affects us from the outside. The independence of our soul life seems convincing, and we wonder whether our soul life can detach itself from its surroundings when we are directly confronted with the external world and flow together with it. But when we look back on what we have not only seen but also experienced in terms of elation and despondency, and what we can remember, we find a stream of inner soul life.

This stream is precisely what was mentioned earlier. It is the experience of life. With this we stand at a certain point in our lives. No matter whether our life is short or long, when we pass through the gate of death we will find ourselves in the same situation. We will see the stream of evolving life, see what has welled up in this soul from the outer world, and we will ask ourselves the question when we take the great leap through the gate of death: Where to put what has developed as a continuous stream in our soul? So there is one obstacle: our growing together with the outside world.

Therefore, it is essentially a developmental success if we learn to isolate ourselves through a review, through an examination of the interior. But one thing comes to us when we isolate the soul life, that we say to ourselves: It is coherent, what flows there step by step. We look back to our first memory; what lies before, we can not remember ourselves, but older people can tell us about it. We remember what happened from that moment on, and we will make an effort to have moments like that again, where we artificially induce the state of sleep, but only on that side, whereby we exclude the external impressions.

When we close ourselves off from the splendor of the outside world and from the other stimuli of the outside world at such moments, then we secrete the inner life, as we separate oxygen from water. This is a matter of experience for which no theoretical proof can be provided, just as one does not need proof that whales exist if one has never seen one. If we always keep this inwardness in mind, we can say that the soul life lines up step by step, and we come to the point at which external memory reaches back. We can conduct a kind of experiment with our entire inner experience. If we see that this stream of soul life flows from the point just characterized and the later is added to the earlier, what is added to the point up to which the first memory reaches? We see how our soul life strives forth; but what caused the first moment that we recall? Now it is possible to evoke something within the soul life that only works in the soul experience, that can give something completely new, never before seen, to the human soul.

To characterize what this new, never-before-seen thing looks like, I would like to point something out. Hydrogen is a gas, oxygen is a gas; these two gases give water, something completely new from two different things. Just as something new and unlike anything in the world is created through the interaction of external things, so too, if we turn our gaze ever further into the stream of our soul life, all the way back to the starting point in this reminiscence, something entirely new can arise. Someone who had never seen that two gases produce liquid would not believe it. What provided the initial impetus in our lives? What we experience as our destiny presents itself to us as if of its own accord. Our destiny presents itself as an answer to this question. Why did it start from precisely this starting point? Why did it turn out this way? This question is answered by looking at our destiny and considering only that we have to consider destiny not with an idea, but with something completely different. What do we want to consider our destiny with? What we want to look at our destiny with, arises from the second obstacle, namely that we usually do not look at our destiny as we do now, when we have come to this point. The second great obstacle is self-love, self-will.

This self-will is a strange thing. Let us try to characterize it. What it is that makes us feel content with ourselves, that gives us satisfaction in our lives, does not need to be characterized. But this self-will has something peculiar about it: it breaks through something in our soul life. This will, it may accomplish whatever deeds, wishes, desires – if our reason is to remain true to us, we must admit that it cannot readily intervene on its own in the way that life experience has formed itself. We let life teach us, we go to the school of life and let life dictate what we have to believe. Whether we consider something to be true or false does not depend on our own will. It is precisely that which makes us mature in life, that which gives us knowledge, from which the will must be excluded! We may not summarize our experiences arbitrarily, but as common sense, the logic of the facts, dictates.

But this will is bound to our corporeality as a power of the soul in a different way than our ideas and perceptions, on which our experience depends, and in which we cannot distinguish between inside and outside. Our will is bound to our corporeality differently. We see very clearly how it continually intervenes in our corporeality. Let us consider what we learn in the normal course of life as fatigue. It comes from the fact that muscles or other organs are worn out. Nothing seems more obvious to the superficial impression than this. It seems credible that physical organs wear out, and yet it is not true. The physical organs that live in a very specific way in our organism do not wear out. How would it be if organs like the heart had to recover through sleep? The organs that are not influenced by the conscious will always remain active and do not wear out. Consider the lungs, heart, diaphragm, and even the inner workings of the nervous system; these forces are always at work. What wears out is what emanates from our conscious will. When we work to make our muscles move through our will, we become tired. No work tires us that comes from the organism itself, but remains within the organism itself. As long as the will is active, active itself, it does not wear out the organism.

Another fact also shows it. It is the same with the thought process: if we give ourselves up to the day's musings, we do not get tired, but we do when we intervene in the thinking with our will, in that consciousness, as an expression of our soul life, intervenes from the outside in our bodily organization, which we see works independently. The human will can only work as self-will by allowing itself to be stimulated from the outside, by feeling compelled by some coercion; this will wears down our organism, so that we can say: Everything that is the wear and tear of life, that consumes our body, springs from the will, which is forced by something, which does not remain in the being of the human being or within the soul's being, which is stimulated and determined from outside, which, as self-will, is in opposition to what must be from outside, which is a destructive force for our organism.

What is the opposite that builds up our organism? What actually brings it into its configuration? It cannot be a thought, not ideas, not feelings; it must be something that, like the will, intervenes in our organism. Our own will must not feel forced from the outside; it must be able to be completely as its own will. It can be when our destiny presents itself to us in such a way that we do not imagine it in ideas and concepts, but with the will, so that our own will does not come into conflict with itself. This can only happen if, however much we may quarrel and struggle with our destiny, we imagine that we would have wanted this destiny, as if we had ordained it ourselves. This can be carried out as a decision of the will. In this way we remove the obstacle of self-will. The will that regards fate as if we ourselves had placed ourselves in the community of language, in the family, has made a decision of the will, even if of a reverse nature.

These are not assertions, but so far we have only evoked certain moods of the soul. Then, as if we ourselves had willed it, our destiny wanders back to the first moment we can remember, like hydrogen wandering to oxygen. Then we have something in our soul that stands before us with certainty, as certain as we know that the flame is hot. Now we are really experiencing something new: the addition of our soul life. Our destiny enters into our soul life, and we have the answer to the question: What gave the first impetus? What we have set up as our self-willed destiny has given the first impulse, and only in this way do we come to a real insight into what we were when we began our present existence on earth, when we understand destiny as something self-willed and connect it with our soul life, which we get to know through self-observation. But then, when we have gained this inner experience, which removes the two obstacles, the outer world - Ahriman - and self-will - Lucifer -, through self-observation, then we penetrate to the realization that it is we ourselves who have shaped fate. The moment – and anyone can experience this moment – can be compared to the moment when we wake up, when we do not say to ourselves: You came from nothing, but: You are what you are now because you fell asleep last night. Those who seriously recognize their soul life in an observation that disregards external observation and destroys self-will come to an experience that is like waking up and remembering earlier lives on earth. His inner core comes across from previous earthly lives and has put together his own destiny; we come to a memory that we have gone through previous earthly lives. It is not an ordinary memory, but our life itself appears to us as a great memory. We come to the assumption of repeated earthly lives. This earthly life, which we go through between birth and death, is the result of previous earthly lives. A person has lived many lives on earth, and it is a given that, based on how the person is now, they will go through further lives on earth. We are dealing with an essence that penetrates into a spiritual world after death and then returns again to another life on earth.

What we can hope for in the time between death and a new birth also arises from introspection. You cannot intervene with your will. Your will and your thoughts, feelings and what you have conquered in the school of life are separate in your soul life. How strange the will is: we move our hand, but what happens from the moment of willing to what we then see as movement, we do not know at first in normal life. We see the will as it expresses itself in life in outer movements, gestures, deeds, but we lack any possibility of seeing how the will passes into movements and deeds. What lies before us, what we have acquired through our life experience, we have to keep at a distance in this life, because if our will were to interfere, it would be falsified by our will. But in the course of life we experience that we cannot let our will work. We cannot influence the way we are placed in this life. When we are somewhat outside of life, then our will need not be hindered from penetrating purely and powerfully through what we experience inwardly. When our body no longer forms the barrier between our will and our life experience, when these outer experiences can no longer form the barrier, then the will can grasp, penetrate and permeate our life experience. We do this between death and a new birth. Our will will permeate everything we have experienced so that we can give the first impetus in a new existence, which we have seen that we have grasped at the beginning of our life on earth.

Thus we see how, by establishing the connection with our ideas, the forces are formed that call us to a new earthly existence. Spiritual science thus arrives at the view of repeated earthly lives, which has become a matter of course for thinkers of modern times, so that they could not help but let their thoughts flow into this world of ideas, for example Lessing, who gave us the 'Education of the Human Race' as the fruit of his life. Then you realize what led Lessing to say that this view is the only way to understand death and immortality. This thought is perhaps despised because people knew about it from time immemorial, because in the past people were not yet confused by the events of the outside world and by what has taken place within human culture, as they are in this time. The soul of man has absorbed what India, Persia, Egypt and Greece have offered, what can be called the stream of human development. Does it make sense for a soul to die forever after absorbing all this? No, it makes no sense. When the soul carries over everything it has acquired into later times and new experiences are added, it is the souls themselves that carry the old cultural achievements over into modern times. Even in the nineteenth century, despite the fact that external scientific conditions were as unfavorable as possible, people came up with this.

But how spiritual science itself comes to an irrefutable conclusion through spiritual experiments by the spiritual scientist can be discussed tomorrow. It should only be explained how it comes about that such an insight is gained by processing the inner soul life. But through this it also has an effect on the inner soul life. On one side we look back at how we have placed ourselves in this life according to our deeds, thoughts and feelings from past lives. We feel that we also have to go through this life with everything that fate brings us, so that our school of life can continue. Feeling this, we say to ourselves: our life, as it unfolds in and around us, is the effect of previous causes that we ourselves have set in motion. This is the doctrine of karma, which for the new spiritual science is not an old law from Buddhism, but is derived from the modern soul itself, educated by science.

This life itself falls into an ascending and descending line. In youth, many forces from previous lives work in such a way that our physical organization can ascend. Our powers develop, becoming richer and richer, until the peak is reached, which gives us satisfaction. Then comes the descending life, where the face wrinkles and the body becomes tired. It is certain for everyone that it will come, and they need thoughts that give strength. But anyone who looks at human life in a spiritual-scientific sense, not just theoretically or rationally, will see that spiritual science gives strength, that it works almost like an elixir of life when we recognize its truth. We feel what flows into our confidence in life, our hopes, our life's work, and people will always feel it once our culture is placed in the light of spiritual science. There we feel how, in the descending life, that grows and must grow, which does not disintegrate in death, but is grasped by our will and, when the greatest resilience is reached, has the strength to enter into the spiritual and, after it has drawn the forces from the spiritual world, to build a new life.

We do not just theoretically consider the questions of immortality; we live and learn and feel the immortality of the soul by feeling the richness of our soul through an intuitive understanding of spiritual science, which tells us: Towards the end of life, you develop ever stronger powers that do not perish any more than the physical powers, which not only transform but are eternal and immortal. In the growth of your powers, in the real existence of your powers, you feel your immortality. Immortality does not begin when we are dead, but already during our lifetime. It is because the human soul is there and because a person can feel it during their lifetime in the body. Spiritual science is not theory, but lifeblood, and if we understand it correctly, it becomes vitality. Thus it does not drive us to speculate, but rather, immortality is something that the soul can feel as something substantial, physical, that enhances our powers and bears within it immortality as its deepest essence and [its deepest] quality. To feel and sense immortality as the source of one's confidence in life, that is what must spring from spiritual science. And so we may summarize in a variation of words how the insights of spiritual science become an elixir of life:

The human senses speak to
the things in the vastness of space,
they change in the course of time
at the deepest core of their being.
The human soul penetrates, recognizing
the vastness of space, unlimited
and unperturbed by the passage of time
into the realm of eternity.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak to you about two important questions from a general point of view, about death and immortality from the point of view of spiritual science. This evening I would like to be allowed to go into some special things that may shed light on these questions. Just as it was possible yesterday, in view of the two major questions discussed, to point to two important experiences of the human soul, which actually always raise these questions more or less explicitly or implicitly from the hidden depths of the human soul, so we can also today we can start from two experiences of our inner being, from two experiences which the human soul constantly points to that idea, which must actually make the mind dizzy when it tries to grasp it in any particular way: the idea of eternity. And when the human soul is often inclined to say that it has something to do with eternity in contrast to the transitoriness of the outer form of the body, it might seem as if such questions arise rather from the longings of the human soul, which desires to have a different fate from the one between birth and death. But here too we can disregard all wishes and desires, even all curiosity, and point to two experiences of the human soul that direct it towards the idea of eternity. These experiences are of the deepest, most inner sense of morality. For what could the human soul feel more deeply and earnestly than the invincible striving for everlasting perfection? One need only, as it were, truly and without prejudice delve into one's own soul and one will have to say that one would have to be dishonest with respect to what the soul wants to be if one did not want to say: an invincible striving for perfection, for a more meaningful existence, dwells in this human soul. That is one experience.

But the other experience, which can assert itself just as strongly, is that at no moment in our lives, even if we reach a very old age, can we deny how far we are from what can shine before us as the ideal of perfection, how much we feel imperfect compared to what we actually want to be according to the innermost being of our minds. The striving for perfection and at the same time the necessary confession of imperfection awakens in the human soul the longing for an eternal striving, for a striving that is unhindered by those external laws of arising and passing away, which we seriously cannot imagine as being able to offer any limits, inner limits to our striving for perfection. Thus we see that man, not out of any greed or desire, but out of the yearning to serve the highest moral order that he has in mind, to strive for the highest moral ideal of perfection, which he must present out of this highest moral desire, raises the question of the immortality of the human soul – but that is the question of eternity.

Yesterday, it was mentioned how the German philosopher Hegel said in a beautiful way: immortality of the human soul as a property that is related to the nature of this soul cannot begin only when man has passed through death; if there is something in the human soul from which one can recognize that this soul has a claim to an immortal existence, then this must also be announced in the life of the soul within the physical existence. Immortality cannot begin only after death; it must also be present in life - in this physical life. So then the question of the nature of eternity also points us to the investigation of the nature of the human soul, in order to recognize from this nature of the human soul to what extent it is conceivable, indeed necessary, to think of the soul as being lifted out of the laws of the perishability of the body. And if we want to examine this nature of the human soul, then, as was also hinted at yesterday, if we want to meet the real, if not the prejudiced demands of modern science, we have to separate this human soul from its connection with the body. For we were able to point out yesterday that it is also impossible, for example, to examine the nature of hydrogen as long as it is bound to water; we have to separate hydrogen from its connection to water if we want to examine its own nature. And so we know that in ordinary, external, normal life, the soul is connected with all that we can call the bodily organization, in that we feel through our body, look outwards, observe things through the external bodily sense organs, in that we think things through that thinking which is bound to the instrument of the brain, and, when we feel and want, we are also bound to our corporeality. Just as hydrogen is bound to water and cannot be recognized within water, the nature of the human soul cannot be recognized in the way it appears to us in normal life, where it is firmly bound and not detached from external experiences and those inner experiences that arise from physicality.

Now, as we said yesterday, basically every night when a person sleeps, a detachment of his soul experiences from the outer bodily life is evoked. In the course of today's lecture, however, we will be able to prove what was only asserted by spiritual science and logically proven yesterday, so to speak, by approaching it from the so-called spiritual scientific point of view. For the time being, however, we will accept it as it was stated as an assertion or logically proven yesterday, that the life we experience in our innermost soul is not something that, like the flame of a candle, , but something that, as an independent entity, emerges in the morning when we wake up, enters into the life of the body when we fall asleep and leaves it again, and thus relates to this bodily life as air relates to the lungs. But it was already mentioned yesterday that something, one could say with joy, makes it “literally” impossible for us to examine the independent soul life, when we have it before us or in us, from falling asleep to waking up. It is impossible because where the detachment occurs, unconsciousness also occurs. So we cannot do the examination in this normal life. We could only become independent of the physical if we became aware of the soul, when it flows away, when it withdraws from the physical.

But there is a possibility to consider an intermediate state, which is not discussed here in the sense of a superstitious dream science, but in the sense of the strictest science: it is the dream state, that strange state of dream life, in which we live in such a way that, on the one hand, we feel that ideas are being conjured before our soul, but on the other hand, the course of these ideas is completely different from the life that the ideas lead in their context in normal, waking daytime life. The dream state is an intermediate state between the waking state and deep, dreamless sleep. Perhaps we can – let us express ourselves in this way for the time being – learn something from the strange illusions of dreams about the nature of the human soul. In order to do so, however, we must proceed according to the same strict, logical and scientific laws of research in the study of dreams as are otherwise applied in the study of life. And so, in order not to extend this consideration too much, we would like to draw your attention to a very specific dream, from which we want to recognize, as it were, how strangely the dream life can have an enlightening effect on what actually goes on inside the soul. I just want to say in advance that when such examples from life, for example from the dream life, are told here, they are not made-up things, but things that have really happened - because only in this way can conscientious research proceed. The dream in question is as follows: There was a student at a secondary school who had a particular talent for drawing. As a result, in the last year of secondary school, he was given a very difficult drawing to copy. Everyone else was given easier templates. It had now become the custom at that secondary school for several such copies of drawings to be handed in at the end of the year. And it so happened that this particular student, precisely because he had a special talent for drawing and was given that difficult template, did not finish the whole year and also by the end of school. This made him very anxious, and this state of anxiety increased towards the end of school. And although the humane administration of that school fully understood that this was natural and did not harm the student, he still had this experience behind him, he had gone through the anxiety attacks. It is interesting to follow this person in the further course of his life. Of course, he continued to show his special talent for drawing. And, recurring periodically, a very specific dream occurred to him, which always lasted several nights and then passed. The dream was that he always felt transported back to the last middle class, where he felt he was trying to draw and draw and could not finish. And the anxiety he went through, so that he always woke up trembling, was so strong in the dream that it could not be compared to the anxiety he had actually experienced. After a break of several years, the dream always returned periodically. This will not be understood unless this strange dream experience is considered in the context of the rest of that person's life. The strange thing was that every time he had recovered from such a dream experience, this person felt that his drawing skills had improved in some way; he could draw better lines, could express what he imagined better, he had become more skilled. So it looked like a gradual perfection of his drawing skills, and each stage was initiated by the characterized nightmare.

You will not find it unnatural if spiritual science now attempts the following explanation of this dream. It is natural that something like an increase in drawing ability cannot suddenly occur in a person's nature, but it appeared as if it always occurred suddenly after that nightmare. This can easily be explained: first certain inner, bodily processes had to take place, finer rhythmic-physiological processes, because we have bound everything that relates to the outer world to the instruments of the body. Changes had to take place in the instruments of the body. These changes took place slowly and gradually through those periods in which consciousness had no inkling that increased abilities would show themselves. For a while, one experiences it in consciousness as if the same intensity of ability were present. But what was needed was being prepared from below, in the depths of the entire human organization, and then, as the heightened drawing ability rose up into consciousness, it became available to the person concerned. And how did what was fermenting and working down there show itself? It showed itself in that it first, in the moment when it was able to break through into consciousness, took place in the half-consciousness of the dream, lived itself out in images of the dream. Before the will was even able to make use of the abilities, it conjured itself up out of the hidden depths of the soul in the dream experience, which basically only bears an external resemblance to what develops in the depths of the soul. We can see two things: the transition from a working process in the subconscious or, let us say, unconscious bodily organization to a process of awakening, first to half-conscious ideas of the dream and then to an entry into full consciousness. Who could doubt that the same forces that later appear in consciousness as an increase in drawing ability are only the transformed abilities that previously worked below in the body's organization? They showed themselves, so to speak, in their half-transformation in the dream images. That is one thing that we have clearly and distinctly before us: the possibility of thinking in this field of spiritual science in the same way as a natural scientist thinks. Every physicist will understand that pressure turns into heat. It is part of the same way of thinking to say that what later appears in the consciousness as drawing ability has first worked in another form below, has itself first prepared the organs, and only when the organs were there could the ability be increased – as when a person must first work at the machine in order to then use the machine. What finally emerges as a usable instrument must first be prepared by the same spiritual power. What finally emerges as a result is itself, having first prepared the organs in the depths of the soul's organization.

The other thing is this: how the dream works in a remarkable way – and this is perhaps even more interesting for a deeper consideration of human nature. What does it have to do with what happened there with the transformation of soul forces at work in the depths of human nature into conscious ones, what is being lived out as states of fear in strange images that belong to a long-gone lifetime? One thing is certain: the emotional context is at work in this person, not the life of imagination. What the person has gone through, what he has experienced in his mind in terms of anxiety, is a force that is much more intimately connected with the soul, with the innermost self, than the powers of imagination, which in ordinary life are borrowed from the external world. But the dream shows itself to be more intimately connected to the life of the soul than the conscious imaginative life of the day, because it presents itself in images in such a way that we, so to speak, place images before us that are reminiscent not of an act of imagining but of an inner experience, of the life of the feelings. We can see that at all, how our emotional life works in its strange seeming connections, as in dream images. Everywhere the images that are conjured up in our dreams are the indifferent ones; they live and weave themselves out in a seemingly arbitrary way – arbitrary in comparison to the regular connections that we see outside.

For example, we may experience the following. A person in the distant past did not like another person because he could not particularly appreciate that person's activities, and had formed a certain feeling, a certain emotional experience about that person. Now he had long since forgotten those things that were connected with that person. After many years he dreamt again of that person, but now that person was not a person, but a little dog that barked unpleasantly, but then changed the barking to a language whose sound was reminiscent of that person's language. And in the dream the little dog could fit into a context quite arbitrarily. But there was something that turned out differently than one wished. One wished that this person was not completely offended. And so one said something to the puppy, and the puppy barked in such a way that it said: It was bad what you did to me, but it doesn't matter, it will be okay, it was just a misunderstanding. What does the little dog have to do with that person? If we consider logical thinking, all thinking that is trained on the outside world, then the little dog really has nothing to do with what is really going on. But if we consider the state of mind of the person in question, the way he related to that person, we see that it faithfully recurs in a much later “dream”. But in terms of the way we shape our imagination, our mind is free to transform what it feels into the symbol of the little dog, transforming dream consciousness into seemingly arbitrary images. But only what we call the logical causal connection, a connection that we have from the outside world, is arbitrary; but the interweaving of the perceptions, however different they may be from the outside world, with what our mind, our inner being, carries forward from the events of life, is entirely lawful. Thus the soul shows us in dreams that it is more in its inner being than when it is connected with the limbs of the body. When it looks outwards, when it is connected with its bodily organs, it lives with everything external, with everything we can learn from the school of life. In dreams, the soul does not adhere to what it experiences from the outside; there it forms its emotional states only in images, and these bear the exact seal of the emotional life. From this we can see that what we call our emotional life and then our will life is more intimately connected with our deepest soul than the mere life of imagination. And now let us apply what has been shown to us by observing the dream world of the person with the anxiety dream to a consideration of the whole human life from birth to death. There we see something remarkable: that in our coherent memory, in what we regard as the actual content of our soul life, we go back in ordinary life to a certain point in our childhood. Beyond this point, we cannot remember ourselves. What happened before this point can only be told to us by other people, parents, older brothers and sisters and so on. Without doubt, all that we know later was already there. It is the conscious content of our soul; it is the content of what we can think like the continuous stream of soul life, what is at work, weaving and living within, already present before. The fact that we become aware of our self from a certain point in time is no proof that it was not there before, that it has only developed from this point on. That we know something has nothing to do with reality. The fact that we only become aware of our self from a certain point in time has nothing to do with the fact that this soul life was already present before.

But now, when we look at the life of a child in a very special way, if we only look at it closely, we realize how it was present before. Is it not the case that we can say about the life of a child that sleeps and dreams that it has something in common with what we feel in the vague darkness of our conscious soul life? The human being sleeps or dreams, so to speak, into earthly existence: the way a child engages with its surroundings, how it carries over what it experiences into later moments, how it forgets things and lets new ones penetrate, this whole way of life of the child has a similarity to the life of sleep and dreams. The human being sleeps his way into life, the human being lives his way into this earthly life with a diminished consciousness, with a soul life that has been tuned down. But how much he owes to this tuned-down soul life! Jean Paul's saying that we learn more in the first three years of life than in the three 'academic' years is deeply true. But something else is also true: in the first years of life, when we have no possibility of calling our soul life to consciousness, we can observe how thoroughly work is done, first in the shaping and organizing of our physical body. The more delicate organs of the human bodily life are still indeterminate, as even the hard-nosed natural sciences have to admit. Indeed, for anyone who can perceive such things, it is a truly mysterious thing how a child learns the most important things in the first years of life. In a wonderful way, the child rises from one who cannot walk to one who walks uprightly, from one who cannot speak to one who is able to speak. But all this is connected with the preparation of our bodily organs, with their chiseling and plastic shaping. Is this not something similar on a large scale to what we see in our dreamer, who dreams his fearful dream?

As we were able to say in the case of the dreamer: During the dream period, what first emerges later in consciousness first worked in the organs, so the dreaming child soul first works on the shaping of the body, on the development of the life of the body - it is a transformation of what later occurs consciously into those forces that work in the unconscious on our bodily organization, so that we have to say: Everything that we experience later, that is the content of our soul, is consciously present in our memory as a continuous stream. It is subdued because it has other tasks than to evoke consciousness; it has to work on shaping the body. If we follow this in the sense of modern thinking, we see that we must regard the soul as the original: not as a result of the body's organization - as the flame is a result of the candle - but as that which works on the body's organization, which first shapes this body's organization.

Yesterday I already mentioned that it is only natural that today's scientists and those who blindly follow them do not admit this. But a truly unprejudiced consideration of modern findings shows that spiritual science is right in its assertions and that we are heading for a time when the results of spiritual science will be recognized. Today it is easy to say: Does this not show, in relation to spiritual science, that a certain area of our brain, for example, draws our attention to the fact that we are dependent on a material structure in our brain for our speech and language? But it is precisely this thought, when formulated correctly, that shows the independence of the soul life, so that we can recognize how it is the soul that works on the body, not the other way around. We just have to separate in the right way what lies in the mere line of inheritance, what appears in us as directly inherited. What we have inherited occurs in us even without our coming into contact with the outside world. We could transfer a person to a distant island; they would certainly get dentures because this is based in heredity, but everyone knows that if we separate them from human language, they will not be able to speak and think through their inherited traits. This can only be accessed from the outside by speaking the thought into the environment. So, the other way around: those brain convolutions that later become the tool basis for speaking are only formed through the influx of language as an instrument.

Thus, the fact that is expressed by the materialistic or, to put it more modernly, monistic world view can serve precisely as a pointer to spiritual science. Thus we arrive at the idea that the soul works in the body and that we have no right to regard this soul-life as a mere function of the bodily. And the deeper we go, the more we realize that this soul-life must work in life from the very first atomic or cellular formation of the body. This means that the soul must confront us as something that must have existed before the first atom of the body began. We look back on a life of soul, because it must be there before the physical life, must be there in a purely soul-spiritual life. We grant the eternal use of the soul, we see how we cannot think of the soul-spiritual as emerging from some physical-bodily, but from a spiritual, and must assume that our soul, before it enters the body, existed in a spiritual existence, lived through spiritual lands. This was the conclusion of all who were able to reflect on the matter without prejudice. And everything that leads to this conclusion is to be found, only differently expressed, in Aristotle. But Aristotle makes a remarkable leap here: the soul comes directly from a divine existence, detaches itself, as it were, from a divine existence, enters into human existence, from which it detaches itself again at the moment of death. This idea, that in every individual life a special soul has been wrenched from God, founders when confronted with an unprejudiced observation of life.

Let us consider how our soul develops in earthly life. No one will deny that our soul life, especially in its emotional content, in its moods, in its entire basic state, is always as it can be on the basis of previous experiences, as, for example, people who have been annoyed all day, then become grumpy in the evening for their surroundings, and the latter can often already recognize from the facial expressions, from the way the person enters, what has affected the person during the day. In this way, we see how our mood is connected to what we have experienced before. But when we look at our soul life, as we enter it into our present earthly existence, it turns out that there are, so to speak, already existing moods and wills of the soul. They are so distinctly marked that even a philosopher, Schopenhauer, who was wrong about this, believed that these moods and wills, the whole character of a person, are given at birth and remain unchanged throughout life. This is not the case. An unbiased observation shows that we can also progress in terms of our will and character formation. But Schopenhauer's error could only arise from the fact that man shows us a certain mood, which is expressed in the basic nuance of his character, which we do not find at all different if we only look at it properly, a mood that we acquire through the events of ordinary life. We enter the world in such a way that this character, this mood, is already evident, that we carry this mood with us through our present existence. It is impossible, if one does not fantasize but relies on real facts and serious observation, to think of the mood with which the soul enters earthly existence as anything other than a mood that we have acquired in life. When we look at a child, we see that it does not yet have a life of ideas, but in the way the child rejects something, feels sympathy or antipathy, how it moves and so on, we already see the basic mood that we also encounter in later life and of which we cannot think otherwise than that it does not cut itself off from a beyond, not from an immediate divine existence, but that it is the result of earthly life - just as it is a mood on a small scale - so that we can say: From the way we look at the soul, we can see that there is a concept of repeated lives on earth, of a law that says that, although we belong to ourselves at the innermost core of our being, we go through life on earth with that innermost core from life to life and that, between each death and a new birth, our soul is embedded in a purely spiritual existence. So the entire life of a person is such that on the one hand it is in the physical body between birth or conception and death and again in a spiritual world between death and a new birth.

These things could now be explained in detail, but that is not the important and essential thing today. But what is more important is that it is also shown how, so to speak, through spiritual experiment, it can be confirmed that the soul is an independent being that works on its bodily organization. However, this experiment cannot be done in the same way as external laboratory experiments. What Goethe prophetically said applies to this to a particular extent:

Mysterious in the bright day
Nature cannot be robbed of her veil,
And what she may not reveal to your mind
You cannot force out of her with levers and screws.

Those who would like to reinterpret Goethe emphasize the “not” as if it were not possible to reveal what lies behind things. So the spiritual experiment cannot be that we use our physical tools, but that we actually transform our own soul life, our own inner being into a tool. A more detailed account of this can be found in 'Knowledge of Higher Worlds'. Today, we shall merely sketch out how the soul makes itself an instrument for looking into the spiritual world.

We must be clear about the fact that the soul must first turn to its inner life and become independent of all outer life. For this to happen, it is essential that the human being should artificially reproduce what otherwise takes place naturally when falling asleep. Everyone knows that at this time the soul loses the power to use the bodily organs, can no longer see or hear, and so forth, but at the same time, in normal life, it sinks down into the darkness of unconsciousness. We must achieve the one thing and prevent the other from happening. The spiritual researcher must, through a special training of the will, which is possible, be able to truly enter into that inner calm of the mind, where, as in the moment of falling asleep - but voluntarily - he silences all that speaks to him through the senses, he also makes the ordinary thinking that he has developed through external observation fall silent. We must also suppress all that we can remember, insofar as our life is stimulated from the outside, through joy and suffering. We must suppress all of this artificially, to make the soul pure and free from all external impressions. And then we must be able to push something into the soul through our mere will, through our strong will, on which we focus our entire soul life in strict inner concentration or meditation. In this way, the soul is transformed into an instrument of the spiritual world. What can we put into the soul? Not ordinary ideas – they have the task of depicting the truth as it is outside. If we only acquire images of what is going on outside, we cannot properly detach them, we cannot make them the actual property, the inner content of the soul. We must therefore form ideas that are connected with life, but are put together in such a way that they arise purely from our own will.

Let us assume that a person who wants to make their soul an instrument of spiritual life says to themselves – and what is said here is feasible, and those who carry it out will see the success in their practical life: I will imagine what love is in the deepest moral sense. – Here we have to tie in with external processes, but we cannot actually see through the external. So we will not be able to think through the concept of love, but we can think of a quality of love. We will not just think of a quality of love, but we will make an image of a loving action, an image that appears to be arbitrary but is in a certain emotional context with what is present in us as an experience of love. We form the image of a glass of water that is not completely filled; we pour out the water in small portions, but each time the water does not decrease, but increases. An image that is fantastic, dreamy, almost crazy in relation to the external world – but we are aware that for us it is only a symbolic image. We cannot grasp what love is, but we can feel this one quality in love. The person who loves gives, and by giving, he becomes more and more capable of love. We give our best, but love makes us richer and richer. Precisely because we give more and more completely in love, it multiplies.

This abstract idea does nothing for the education of our soul. But by consciously doing what the dream does unconsciously, by transforming the human being into a puppy, and by placing this idea at the center of our consciousness in such a way that we now focus our entire conscious activity on such an idea, then such an idea reaches us. Such an image has something quite different about it than when we give ourselves a definition of love in abstracto. This is already noticed by the person who forms this image. It is precisely such images, which do not have the task of depicting the external, but which work through what we feel about them, through what they are to our mind, where the one is connected with the other not according to the laws of the course of the image , but of the life of the mind, [...] through the mediation of feeling, they must now live in our consciousness as representations, as images that fill our soul, and we must devote ourselves to such representations to the exclusion of all other life. This is often a long, inner life's work, but if we carry it out, then we become spiritual researchers and in no other way. The objection could justifiably be made: Yes, if it is often necessary to practice this unchangingly for many years and with great energy, then not everyone is able to become a spiritual researcher and convince themselves of the reality of the spiritual researcher's statements.

But how many people today are convinced of what is going on in the observatories? Outside, one only gets to know the external appearance; the essentials are fathomed by those who work in the laboratories, and from this the others form a world view. One can indeed carry out these things in every life, but depending on one's disposition, one will only get to certain degrees. But the spiritual researcher must, by means of such exercises, tear the soul away from the body. This brings him into a state that is similar to sleep and yet quite different, in that all the outer world is silent, all worries and concerns are silent, extinguished as if by sleep, but we are not surrounded by the darkness of consciousness, but experience something that we have not experienced before , of which we had no idea before; yes, we experience it so clearly that we now experience something within our soul, something without our bodily organs, yes, outside of them, so clearly that we go through an intermediate state that is even uncomfortable, that when we have taken it to a certain extent, we feel: Now you are experiencing your soul, now you are so within yourself that you experience what you do not experience from the outside, but now you experience what only arises in the soul – to use this expression of Jakob Böhme – what only exists in the spiritual. But one only experiences it and at first one cannot conceptualize it in the way one was accustomed to conceptualizing external perceptions. Why not? The inner experience shows us clearly how it is outside of the body; the brain has been formed only for the representations we are accustomed to. Now we are experiencing something new; the brain is not prepared to conceptualize this. We therefore experience it in such a way that we feel like fools, like a child who cannot yet express in words what he is experiencing.

And if you then continue such soul exercises in energy and with inner moral strength, with self-built energy, you first feel resistance after resistance, but now our brain itself, our whole body seems like a block that cannot keep up. And only by continuing, by continuing with great moral strength, do we feel how it gradually comes about that we can think what we have experienced ourselves; we can then also see it. We feel and see how something happens in us again during the spiritual exercises, which otherwise only happened in the first years of childhood. We form the tool of our soul in a plastic way, so to speak, we reshape our body, and when we feel: Now we have made the great effort that the child makes while playing with the awake body, now we have done something similar, we have worked on our body - then it happens that we can also tell what we have experienced, and only if it is told, it is spiritual science. And when it is told, then everyone can see it, as in life, through their common sense. This is the way to experience the soul in its independence through genuine spiritual experiment, so that we know: It is this soul that, out of its spiritual and soul content, always works on its bodily organization in the same way that we become aware that a child works on its bodily organization with the formative forces it has brought with it from its previous life.

And now we survey our life between birth and death once more, and we see it in an ascending and descending line. We see how the inner forces that we see coming over from a previous life gradually work their way up, how the indeterminate features form distinct features, and clumsy movements transform into skillful movements: We see this as emerging life. Then one part is released into consciousness, while another continues to work until we feel that life is moving in a descending line, until we feel that this tool of ours is moving in a descending line. Now, however, we feel that this life has continued to enrich itself, that we have taken in new things. So we feel that what is primarily shaping our present life, what our life puts into the basic lines of our character, comes from a previous life, but that we are powerless – because our life, our interaction with the outside world, comes from a previous life, because this life is given from before – to directly energize into life what we have received as enrichment. We then feel that it forms and forms as strength. If only our mind, our will, can grasp what we have gained, then when we go through the gate of death, we will be able to prepare our future life. We just need to grasp something correctly, namely that what we acquire in one earthly life is basically only what the intellect has, but that the basic direction of our mind, as it enters into life, must come from previous earthly embodiments. And so we see the confirmation of Lessing's statement that the life of imagination cannot enter from a previous life. Nothing we imagine can come from a previous life. This is because our ideas are expressed in language, and for many people, all imagining is just a daughter of language. However, we acquire language in this life, and language has to be learned anew. In any case, high school students would have to acknowledge that even if they were embodied in ancient Greece, it does not make learning the Greek language easier for them. That has to be learned anew. Only the basic direction of the disposition, the will, the character is the result of previous incarnations, is what is saved from the imaginative life of previous lives.

Friedrich Hebbel once wanted to write a drama, for which he wrote the first draft. In it, the re-embodied Plato was to appear as a student who cannot understand Plato. This could have shown how something that was direct imaginative life is not carried over from an earlier existence into a later one. What Plato experienced back then is transformed into emotional life, into emotional direction, into soul mood, and is thus carried over into a new existence. Therefore, it must be clear to us that the objection that one does not remember one's past lives in ordinary life cannot be accepted either. One remembers them in such a way that one's present life appears in its emotional content as a repetition of the past, but not in the way one remembers earlier events in one's mental life. For the mental life is what distinguishes the present memory in the one embodiment. Thus we see that especially in the face of a true contemplation of life, that which we must say the most enlightened minds have been driven to acknowledge appears to be confirmed: the fact of repeated earthly lives. One can, of course, argue with Lessing that he wrote The Education of the Human Race in the weakness of old age. One argues against greater minds, even when a work like The Education of the Human Race presents itself as the final result, as the ripe fruit of a rich life. Such minds then believe that the spirit of such a person has weakened. They just don't assume that they can't keep up with the point of view that they still recognize, to the point of view that the spirit of these people has risen to. But this excuse does not hold up in the face of another assertion made by Lessing in the full power of his life, in the “Hamburg Dramaturgy”, and which contains something that connects to what spiritual science must lead to if it continues to pursue the thoughts developed today and yesterday. The contents that we have in the soul between death and a new birth lead an independent, purely spiritual existence. But this is the recognition of the existence of a purely spiritual world. What modern enlightened thinker does not shudder when he hears that a spiritual world beyond the material one is assumed? And who would not declaim: Have such enlightened minds as Lessing and others worked to such an extent that we should go back to the old superstitious view of the existence of a spiritual world? But one could hold up the following saying of these same enlightened minds to them: for example, Lessing's saying:

We no longer believe in ghosts? Who says that? Or rather, what does it mean? Does it mean something like this: We have finally come so far in our insights that we can prove the impossibility of it; certain irrefutable truths that contradict belief in ghosts have become so common knowledge, are so constantly present even to the meanest man, that anything arguing against it must necessarily seem ridiculous and absurd to him? That cannot be what it means. We do not believe in ghosts now, so it can only mean: in this matter, about which almost as much can be said for as against it, which is not decided and cannot be decided, the currently prevailing way of thinking has given the reasons against it the upper hand; a few have this way of thinking , and many seem to have it; these make the clamor and set the tone; the greatest multitude is silent and indifferent and thinks one way now, another then, hears by daylight with pleasure mocking the ghosts and by dark night with horror telling about them.

This is certainly an uncomfortable passage for modern materialistic natural science. But we could also cite many a spirit in the course of the nineteenth century who, through an inner necessity, even if not yet on the basis of all considerations that have been cited today from spiritual science - because this was not possible at the time - came to the only possible assumption of repeated earth lives for the human soul. That is why Lessing emphasizes so strongly that this is the only possible assumption about the life of the soul beyond arising and ceasing. But with this we rise to a truly meaningful idea of eternity, because now life is not just a void into which we are placed by something outside of us, but now we feel: What we have brought into this life, we have brought with us from previous lives, we have worked for in previous lives. But what we experience now is transformed, it is processed when we go through the gate of death, so that we acquire the powers by which we can shape the later body again. We see that growing in this embodiment, which will be shaped alive in us in a next embodiment. Thus we see how eternity comes together as something concrete. We do not feel eternity as an infinite void from the beginning to the end, but rather, we experience what eternity will become as the soul lives into eternity, she repeatedly feels: “This is what I carry over from earlier stages of existence; this is how I utilize in later lives what I have acquired in earlier ones – it is what creates the form for me; and in the same way, through the present life, I can acquire an entitlement for the future.” And from these individual claims on the future, a concrete, real idea of the nature of eternity emerges. Because where we add future-proof work to future-proof work, we expand into eternity in terms of our hopes for life. We feel the real, true idea of eternity, not the empty idea that is so often presented to us. And the only way we can feel it is by looking at this whole inner life, not only in terms of ideas, but also in terms of the whole state of mind, the moods of the soul, and the life of the will. If we consider the threefold nature of the soul, how these forces transform into one another, how that which matures in the life of ideas passes over into moods of mind, in order to appear as such in the next life, to appear as a life of will, then we grasp the whole life of the human soul as a whole.

We need only fulfill one thing in order to lead what spiritual science can give us not only to a reasoned hope for eternity, but to one built on genuine knowledge. We need only look at the soul not in one of its aspects, but in its totality, and then we come to feel how true it is when we say: In thinking, in feeling and willing, in the whole nature of the soul, the world reveals itself to us insofar as we are grounded in it, insofar as we will be grounded in it for all future. What - let me add this once more - does not live in us as a theory, not as an abstract science, but pours like an elixir of life into our entire being, so that we not only fathom eternity but experience it - experience how it is built up from its individual building blocks , is expressed in the verse of the second mystery drama, where it is expressed what the soul can feel when it feels its own life, when it feels what it must carry over from one earth life to the next as a claim to eternity. Thus a true knowledge of ourselves, of our soul life, calls out to us when we grasp this soul life in true self-knowledge:

In your thinking live thoughts of the world,
In your feeling weave world forces,
In your willing work world beings.
Lose yourself in world thoughts,
Experience yourself through world forces,
Create yourself from will beings.
Do not end with what is far from the world
Through the play of thought
Begin in the vastness of the spirit
And end in the depths of your own soul:
You will find divine goals
Recognizing yourself within yourself.

When a Greek philosopher was asked about the purpose of philosophy, he replied [in the following way]: Imagine there is a fair. Some people have various things to sell; others are there to look at everything; [manifold interests, interacting] – that is life at the fair. Not the most ignoble task is that of the philosophers, who look at everything without themselves participating in the fair. But sometimes mere exploration of things might not seem useful; pangs of conscience might arise from such knowledge, from knowing for the sake of knowing. [Should playing the “gawker” really be the noblest task? Does life justify knowing for the sake of knowing?] Such a thing seems to concern the few. But it is a general human concern. Every human being feels the urge to know something [about the things of life] without a principle of utility. Why should man, as he lives, have something beyond mere knowledge? [This is a question that has been asked at all times.] There is a higher world, [underlying reality of the external world], a supersensible world, and man has certain relationships to this world, which is cognizable to him if he rises to this world, which is possible through religious faith. The religious need, the longing, is no less now than it was in the past. But this world, in which one believes, can also be explored through knowledge. [So there are no limits to knowledge.] The prejudice that one can only believe in it is no longer justified today. Other prejudices are found in those who think monistically, [they think that human knowledge can never penetrate into these worlds. It should not say anything about them]. But man must then humbly acknowledge that there is a supersensible world. Part of this is the subject of our evening meditation today: [to show the relationship between man and the supersensible world].

The external world approaches man from two sides. Firstly, through the perception of the senses, and secondly, when man tries to look into his own inner being: suffering, joys, urges, raptures and so on. In everyday life, this is often much closer than the external world. Life forces us to look at it. But on closer reflection, it becomes clear that we have formidable obstacles on both sides. There is, as it were, a boundary in forms and colors in the outer world; but we can think them up. We come up against a wall when we turn our gaze out into the world; we are in a difficult position when observing the outer world. For it is difficult to eavesdrop on ourselves in this observation. We are especially hampered in separating ourselves from the outside world. We grow together with the outside, can no longer distinguish between the external and the internal, for example, at a beautiful sunrise. It is hopeless to want to separate: this is us and this is the outside world. Or with compassion that you have for someone - [all the strength of your soul is taken away] - with devotion or indifference to others. We know that something arises from the depths of the soul, but it is hopeless to try to separate the inner sense from the outside world, [from what presents itself externally and from the supersensible within].

Within oneself, objective knowledge of one's own being is difficult, much more difficult. Self-love is a constant obstacle. In this respect we are a good person, in that a bad one. Self-love confronts us like a second wall, preventing us from formulating it as: “We are such people.” Semi-conscious states show us quite clearly where we end up when we do not control ourselves from the outside world - [in the dream world]. There is a lawfulness when falling asleep; dream images are to be judged impartially. It is characteristic: someone dreams that they are with several people; these people have various very specific relationships with him, for example, antipathy. But the dreamer does not see this as people, but as a little dog that barks, the barking turns into bickering. The little dog says something like, “Oh, it was a misunderstanding, everything is fine again.

The logical character leaves the person. What prevails when you imagine a person as a puppy? You are emancipated from the control of the outside world. The state of mind transforms [into an appropriate image] of how [the unloved person] lives in the mind of the person. That is the real law, [the characteristic] of the dream world. People imagine that they are painters. That would be pleasing to the person concerned. Every imagination is subject to a mood of the will. What is valid in the dream is our self-will, our self-love, that is the determining principle. In the waking state, this self-will must be able to be controlled, [must be broken. Our entire organization depends on how our will works in our external life.]

[Let us consider fatigue.] Fatigue – what is it, why does it occur? It is not the muscles or the organs that tire. If the heart muscle had to rest, things would go badly for the human being. They do not tire, nor do we tire when we let our thoughts wander. [Everything that follows from the human organization does not tire.] But when we are thinking about a calculation or something like that, we tire; even when a muscle is not determined to be active from within, but by the conscious will of the person. The unconscious will, the power that makes the heart, lungs, diaphragm, etc. work, does not tire when the impulse comes from within; only when self-will, self-love, self-life are at work, then they interfere with the organism. These three are in constant struggle against the rest of the world; they have to submit to the general world order – and fight against it. Self-will [self-love] prevents us from recognizing ourselves; self-will must be broken in order to understand what it is. If a person could look inside themselves, they could discover the spiritual and psychological. Dreams show us how we build ourselves through self-will. (When we are awake, we are merged with the outside world. When we submit to our own will, we become tired. Tiredness is a constant rebellion against the workings of the organism.

The relationship between the human soul and the outside world must be established elsewhere. [A saying of Goethe's is:

When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels in the world as a large, beautiful, worthy and valuable whole, when the harmonious comfort grants him a pure, free delight, then the universe, if it could feel itself, would reach its goal, exult and admire the summit of its own becoming and being. For what is the point of all the effort of suns and planets and moons, of stars and milky ways, of comets and nebulae, of becoming and becoming worlds, if not, ultimately, a happy person unconsciously enjoys his existence?]

How can we find what lives within us if we cannot detach ourselves from the external world? It becomes possible when we go beyond the ordinary, [when we rise above our immediate surroundings], when we devote ourselves to the contemplation of how the human being has come into being, when we reflect on ourselves, on the ego, on the enduring in change. But we must have pangs of conscience when we consider that the ego is repeatedly extinguished. Fichte, the ego philosopher, wants to construct an entire world out of the ego. Does the creation of the world stop for hours when we are asleep? [We must realize]: During the day we do not have the ego, but the image of the ego, like a figure in the mirror. The mirror image indicates that there is something that we only perceive in the mirror. Where is the activity of the I itself? How we have grown from epoch to epoch, our particular development is due to the particular coloring that the I has. Then there is getting over the extinguishing of the I. The idea is extinguished, but not the activity of the I. The core of the I is there in waking and sleeping, [there it shows itself to us in its reality]. We must ascend to the real grasp of the ego; our soul life will grow and become richer. The ego is to be looked at as if in a chemical laboratory some process. We must learn to feel. The task is difficult, but in the end it can lead to grasping the ego. It is difficult to get beyond imagining, to gain an impression of ourselves. Then there is the second thing that must guide us: Up to a certain point we remember; we cannot go back beyond the beginning. But it is absurd to believe that the I is not there [before]. Life, the character of the soul, is laid down in the child when it comes into the world Schopenhauer. The child will immediately push away, attack; the fundamental nature of the child remains even beyond the point where one remembers. How can the I be found as it was before?

We go to this point with our ideas. But we have to leap beyond those ideas. With our mood and our will, we go beyond our own will. We are placed in a certain ethnic and linguistic community. This is to be accepted as if I had not placed myself there. It is not based on knowledge, but on the decision of the will. Thus, with our retrospective view, we are led even further back. Then something strange happens, as if one had two glasses and poured water from one into the other, and the glass from which it was poured would never become empty – [or like gases that then result in water]. Something completely new arises. [Feeling and will come together and say: You have made your own destiny. Through a decision of the will, one has to accept one's fate, “in which I am stuck”, a feeling that one is stuck in one's fate. There one comes to the feeling of one's remaining, there we step out of ourselves behind the physical, sensual world, there we are permeated, souled by our I itself. Thus the wall is removed. In the world of imagination, it is like a wall; but our destiny is built by our I itself, out of the supersensible world. Today, the most important thing is not to look at the outside, but to experience within ourselves the feeling: “You are.”

[While a person surrenders to their will in a dream, they are guided by a world of images. There are symbols that affect the soul, not out of their own will, but out of certain necessities:] The imagination of love is like pouring from one vessel into another, whereby the one from which one pours is never empty. That is how love is. It does not help much to imagine it in the abstract. Not through definitions, but through comprehensible, symbolic images, [triangle], our soul continues to progress. If one allows such images to take effect, one comes to a separation from the external world. In this way, one grows together inwardly with the supersensible world, builds a bridge to it, and receives the assurance: “It is.” This has an immediate effect on life.

It also becomes clear through further reflection that earlier lives are [necessary, in which causes were laid for later lives].

Heroic natures will say to themselves: What we work for, we give to our descendants. [That would be] the most intimate thing we can experience; [if we were to] pass it on to the [next] generations, it would be lost [to us].

As the physical declines, the spiritual grows stronger, and it becomes tangible that something is growing within us that will give rise to a new life. Man experiences the spiritual and soul core within himself. Through this, man experiences eternity. [It is like an] elixir of life. He draws strength and confidence from such contemplations. Destiny is the supersensible law of karma. Man experiences the supersensible world and feels that he connects with these thoughts inwardly and then becomes useful in a new life to be built up, thus will not be a “gawker”. These are forces that move people forward - like the steam in the locomotive. Our thoughts are living weaving forces in the universe. The soul, which understands itself as living in the whole universe, feels its connection with it.

Answering questions Question: About Nietzsche.

Rudolf Steiner: [One should] not let one's own judgments flow when one wants to talk about certain personalities. As a cultural phenomenon, he is particularly interesting, growing up with Schopenhauer, Wagner, [with] Greek culture. Nietzsche is not a creative spirit. He loaded the fate of culture onto his own soul. He suffers from the positivism of the time. The fate of the heart will make him see others as mere [i.e., other than mere?] theory. Darwinism: ditto — applied to Nietzsche's life.

The life of ideas must be fertilized from within. Nietzsche tries; [he] does not come to the path of knowledge, seeks the supersensible in man in the contemplation of [?] the will. He is captivating because of the tragedy of his life. How one relates to spiritual science – objectively – is how one should relate to Nietzsche.

Question: [not handed down].

Rudolf Steiner: Surrender to a higher being without egoism promotes soul development. The same applies to prayer or meditation; this must be imbued with the original mood: “Not my will, but yours be done”.

[The] folding of the hands: It causes a promotion when the thought is serious. It is a kind of togetherness, according to human physiology. Naturalness - unvarnished - already causes the movement of the hands of the speaker.

Dear attendees! Allow me this evening to summarize some of what has been said in the course of the lectures I have been privileged to give you here from this place, in relation to spiritual-scientific knowledge of the human being, and to place it under a particular point of view, so that in the next lecture, the day after tomorrow, I can succeed in speaking fruitfully about one of the most important questions of our present spiritual life: about the origin of the human being.

The human being who occasionally casts a glance at his own soul, at himself, will undoubtedly have the impression in some cases that he not only faces his own being as if it were something unknown, but this impression can deepen to the point that this own being may well appear to the person as something that sometimes fills him with apprehension, perhaps even seeming like fear of something unknown. What takes place in our conscious soul life, what we experience from morning, from waking up until we fall asleep in the evening, often seems as if everything that lives in our consciousness comes up from unknown depths, surges up and ripples up like ocean waves from the unknown depths of the sea. And although, when we look at this stormy sea and these rippling waves, we can well imagine that something or other is going on in the depths, we often say to ourselves: How little does what is happening on the surface reveal what is going on in the depths. And so it is sometimes with our own soul life. What takes place in our consciousness is like waves breaking up from unknown depths, and since we ourselves are the scene of all this activity, the question of what is going on down there sometimes takes on an anxious character. Yes, the impression can become even more profound when we see how, from the hidden depths of our soul life, these or those feelings, these or those passions or drives, these or those volitional impulses arise, which we cannot can't control, that are there to our chagrin, perhaps often also to our joy; we can also feel as if we were standing on the earth's surface and, as it were, as if the underground depths were beginning to tremble, as in an earthquake. It is the impression of not knowing what will come, which weighs on our minds. We can often have this feeling about what is coming up, and we are aware that it is not in our hands at all. We best gain access to the hidden depths of the soul when we start from the familiar processes in the life of the soul, that is, when we start from what we are aware of; and what, after all, would a person be more aware of than what he believes he has grasped, what he believes he has recognized, in which he believes he has insight from these or those branches of knowledge of this or that science or believes he has recognized from his life experience? What, after all, is more conscious and better known in our soul life than what we call our clear ideas? Yes, but when we survey these ideas, this knowledge of ours, this insight of ours, then – if we face the matter without prejudice – a feeling of powerlessness will arise in us in the face of this knowledge, so to speak a feeling of being closed off from the world in our knowledge.

From Greek intellectual history, we know that a great philosopher was once asked how people actually relate to life, and he is said to have replied: Those who want to recognize and actually achieve it, act like certain people at some fair. While some come to a fair to sell this or that and are interested in selling their goods, and others are interested in buying, there are also those everywhere at fairs who neither want to sell nor buy, who have simply come to look at the things, at life at the fair.

It is the same with people of knowledge. They come to the market of life, not to interfere with the conflicting interests, but to quietly observe life.

Now, it might seem that a person who is immersed in ordinary life could care little about the universal task of the special people of insight, but in a sense we must say that every person, wherever they are in life, has a corner where they are people of insight; and without being a philosopher, without being a person of insight, no one can actually walk through this life satisfied. So for those moments when we are just watching without getting caught up in the “fairground life,” when we are philosophers, we are able to have the qualities of those who merely watch. And as a spectator, as a little standing in the corner, one actually always feels when contemplating the most significant performances in terms of the urge for knowledge and insight. And what applies to ideas of the life of knowledge applies, so to speak, to our entire life of ideas. There we will realize something of what is called the powerlessness of the life of knowledge.

Now one could say: Yes, you label people of knowledge as a kind of gawker of life and make knowledge into something that does not really intervene in the real surge and hustle and bustle of life. But it is precisely from this impotence of life that one gains knowledge when one observes how the human being seeks to understand and recognize the hidden forces, how they work in life, how they can advance it and keep it in order. And yet, even when a person is completely imbued with the light that, let us say, emanates from moral or other ideas, it may still be the case that his urges speak, his instincts, his passions assert themselves, and that in reality he cannot follow what has arisen in his ideas. We have to say: the images have no power to intervene in our soul life, to work and weave in such a way that we would adapt our soul reality entirely to the life of images. The power, the strength of the impulse, that is what the images lack in relation to the reality of the soul life, and we feel the powerlessness of the life of images and the real impulses of life as a duality within ourselves.

How people here and there believe, how they have believed at all times, to grasp important worldviews, yes, the whole world - and lo and behold: if the ideas had the power to really implement into life impulses what they seemingly contain, then it would have to be easier to convince people of such ideas. Every time this is at issue, one recognizes the powerlessness of ideas in the face of reality, in the face of life.

One can understand only too well if the artist in particular, who is supposed to create out of the totality of his soul, would become sober and dry if he were not there with the whole of his soul - we can see how he of being absorbed in the soul process, because he feels: the moment when, instead of receptive soul impulses, a certain logical sequence of thoughts [constructed ideas] intervenes, the moment soul life becomes weak. That is why one speaks of [the] sobriety [of the life of ideas]. The artist knows that art cannot work if it is taken from mere conceptual life. Indeed, one recognizes works of art by whether they are created out of the life of the soul or out of abstract ideas.

The basis for such a feeling is an awareness of the powerlessness of the life of imagination. And since our imaginations are actually what makes us truly human in life, and we realize that our imaginations actually reach deep into our soul life, the question arises: is it all about these imaginations, what, so to speak, ripples on the surface and does not penetrate into the deeper regions of the soul life? Here we are confronted with the most primitive question of the hidden life of the soul. Nevertheless, we can only penetrate to the essence of the feelings and sensations of the deeper soul life if we start from the everyday, from this primitive question.

Now we all know that what we experience in our conscious waking state unfolds in this way: Those who have an eye for the peculiarities of their soul life will realize that in the course of what lives in their imaginations, emotional and mood experiences are connected with the ideas. Only with the most outstanding ideas do we really feel that we are experiencing joy or sorrow. This resonance of moods with the life of ideas, however, is basically always present. No one can say that anything takes place in their conscious life that does not bring with it, even if only to a small degree, a sense of pleasure or sorrow, hope or fear, and the like. In everyday life, we never have pure thinking, mere life of ideas in consciousness; but always connected with what takes place in the conscious life is that which we can call mood, feeling, sensation.

In the course of life, however, this element of the life of ideas behaves quite differently from that which arises as a concomitant of the life of ideas in the form of a state of mind. You can see this when you try, after ten or twenty years, to recall something you have experienced more or less clearly in such a way that you can recreate the event in the life of ideas. If things are linked, some with great pain, others with great joy, we will always realize that this joy or pain does not appear with the same strength and energy in our memory. For example, if someone has experienced a death, then they know that the pain cannot be relived in their memory with the original strength in their emotional life. It is the same with joy. So in our memory, the ideas play a completely different role.

The question may be raised: Yes, but if the images that we can form of painful or joyful events are alive in our memory, where are the moods, where is the emotional life that was connected with these ideas? Now this question, however much it belongs to the “primitive”, is not so very simple. And many people will still dispute that one can give an answer to such questions using strictly logical methods. But much of what has been said about elementary questions of spiritual research does put us in a position to get an idea about the fate of the moods associated with the ideas. While the images can be conjured up again from memory, the same cannot be done with the moods. If we look at life as intensely and thoroughly as is necessary to answer such a question, we find that every person we know for a long time The overall state of health of this person is expressed in the fact that he is a more or less happy person, so that his happiness is expressed not only in the way he perceives the outside world emotionally, but also in the way he feels in his organization, in terms of harmony and health. When we speak of a person's overall state of mind, we must not separate emotional experience from what we call overall state of mind, and this also includes those moods that depend on our physical condition, on how our blood flows, on how the flow of thoughts in our brain and nervous system takes place.

If we consider the overall state of a person at a certain point in time, when he is not in a happy frame of mind, when he is melancholy or downhearted or tired of what his whole being indicates as his overall ; if we observe this state of a person and compare it with how we knew him in earlier days of his life, we will [...] find there the moods and sensations and feelings that do not enter into the memories. He does not live in the regions from which we draw our memories, but has descended into the depths of life, where the constitution that makes up our mental life is worked on, but which is also connected to our entire physical organization as a state of mind. How we are full of life and hope, how we can be melancholy and downhearted, how we can be full of zest for work, tired, exhausted or prone to attack each of these states of mind has arisen from the fact that they separate from the life of ideas and descend into the deep foundations of the soul. Where our personal happiness is built, so to speak, we see a certain line separating itself from the life of ideas; we see that part of it that accompanies this life of ideas diving down and working in hidden depths of the soul, where our life essence is incorporated into our personal state. There we have an element that comes from conscious experiences, but is always submerged in those regions where it can work on our entire life.

But sometimes what has gone underground in our overall state is brought back up, but brought up in a certain way, not just brought up when the ordinary, everyday consciousness through which we connect with the external world is switched off in a certain way - what has gone underground can sometimes be seen rising in the semi-conscious states of the dream world. This is why the images of the dream world appear to us so meaningfully that they transport us to distant, past times in our lives. If we had tried to somehow reflect on what had happened, we might or might not have gotten a clear picture. But we cannot retrieve what we have experienced in our feelings. However, anyone who examines the dream images finds that it turns out that someone expresses ancient moods in the symbols of his dreams. It may well be, for example, that someone reaches a ripe old age and is no longer inclined to go out on the street with a paper cap or a toy sword and command children as they do. He will have an idea of what has happened to him, but the moods can no longer have the same power in his daily life. They take them on in his dreams. And it is not uncommon for someone of a certain age to dream every night that he is actually a major or that he is “taking a journey in his dream”. In his outer life, he may remember what he read in children's books, but he no longer experiences the bliss he felt at the time. But in his dreams he does.

Where everyday life ends, where the human being feels the images of his or her ideas in dreams, we find that the emotional states that play and work in the hidden depths of the soul life come up when they have not yet been used – and this is important – to work on our physical organization. If they still live in a corner of our hidden soul life, then they come up in dreams. When someone is transported in a dream to earlier moods, then the whole way in which they come up in the dream reveals to us: certain feelings have remained; they have not yet exhausted their strength, so the half-asleep life of the dream brings them up into our half-consciousness – the dream images present themselves to us. Here we have an example of how we can penetrate the ceiling of our everyday state of consciousness, how what lives in the hidden life of the soul can indeed come to mind, but how these ideas are not then checked against the outside world, but live entirely in the moods present in our inner life of the soul.

This is something very primitive, but it can lead our understanding to what can be explored from the hidden depths of the soul through spiritual science. We see a property of the moods that withdraw from our imaginative life; we see a property that they acquire that is extraordinarily important: by releasing the ideas, they gain power. And we can say to ourselves: While we used to speak of the powerlessness of knowing the life of ideas in consciousness, we can see precisely from this how used moods of mind transform themselves or how moods of mind, without our intervention as dream images present themselves to us in such a way that we do not have the power to correct them through logic. We see how this life of the soul snatches itself away from outer experience through the senses, away from outer thinking, which is bound to the brain. In this way, this subconscious soul life acquires a certain power, a certain reality.

At first, this reality is one that leads us only into ourselves, into our own reality. Dreams like the ones just discussed are a reflection of what we have stored up in terms of fear and hope, of anxiety and confidence in life. But we come to something that affects our inner state and is expressed in our dream life. We do not come out of ourselves, but we get to know reality and have to say: the moods had to break free to become real in us.

How the constitutions, these moods, work down there, how that which detaches itself from the ideas works, can be seen if one considers the training that has been discussed several times, which one must undergo if one really wants to become a knower of the spiritual world. You will find – this cannot, of course, be discussed in detail today – you will find the instructions for how to penetrate into that which has descended into the depths of the soul and which makes us appear healthy or ill and only shows itself in fleeting dream images, in the writing “How to Know Higher Worlds”.

Through training, through imagination, [inspiration] and intuition, when the soul is actively immersed – not in the vague way described in the two cases mentioned – when the soul is actively immersed, then the human being learns, albeit only initially, to know what is confronting him, to know himself. All methods of meditation and concentration lead, in a sense, to the study of deep self-knowledge. They do not lead to the self-knowledge that one thinks one has exhausted when one takes a normal look at the forces with which one works in everyday life, but they lead one to where that deep individuality is in oneself, in which those moods are. He gets to know what lies dormant in the hidden depths of his soul, as if kept under a blanket. And here the human being must familiarize himself with the fact that when the forces for his recovery or illness emerge from the soul, he can acquire completely new insights into the peculiarities of this hidden self.

Only real results of spiritual research can be cited. In particular, the human being gets to know how moods of joy, delight, bliss, moods of sadness and melancholy, impressions of ugliness or impressions of beauty, impressions of error, deception, impressions of truth or wisdom affect his or her entire being. Yes, you learn to recognize that everything that has just been mentioned, the impressions we have of joy or sadness, of beauty or ugliness, are connected with the becoming and passing away of something deeper within us, so that when we begin , when we move on to this realization, we are no longer indifferent to the outside world, but learn to know: certain things that take place in the world have a real destructive effect, taking something away; others have such a fertilizing effect that they help us.

We cannot say that at the moment when we consciously or unconsciously tell lies, we are really destroying anything. We cannot say that what has a destructive effect on our being when we tell lies, and what has a fertilizing effect when we speak the truth, is the same as the external forces of becoming and passing away, but something akin to them.

He who does not form his knowledge at the point where the soul benefits or destroys itself through what takes place in his mind, is not on the right path. Self-knowledge, which takes place in the hidden depths of the soul, is therefore not what could be given to humanity at a time when humanity had not yet matured to acquire this self-knowledge, which is related to the forces of arising and passing away; it must now be incorporated into humanity. Weak humanity has been spared from realizing the devastating effect of lying and deception, and the uplifting effect of honesty and sincerity. Usually, people believe that lying and deception or honesty and sincerity are things that can only be judged by means of ideas. But what is there, without our being able to judge it, penetrates down into the depths of our soul life and takes effect there as a real force.

Self-knowledge is the true starting point for all higher knowledge. A person who wants to recognize what lives out there behind the sensuality of the outside world must delve into his or her self and will see that moral and emotional forces are not just something abstract, but something that descends and is the decisive factor not only for our entire human value, but for our entire humanity. How we grow into the outer sensory world with our body, which we wear as the garment of our self and which has the sense organs, how we see this sense world with the eyes of the body, hear this sense world with the ears, how we establish a connection with the mind, which has its tool in the brain, with this sense world, develop an inner experience of what is outside of us in the sense world, and thus come into relationship with the outer world through our outer human being. In the same way, we come into contact with spiritual forces and impulses from our outer environment through the human being that we develop within us.

When we look out into the world with our eyes, we perceive colors and forms. When he has discovered his self resting in the deeper soul forces, then what is in the outer sense world does not emerge in the usual way, but the realities of the outer world also arise, and then we get to know a new context of things, that which stands between the beings of the outer world.

As we now take the first step into the qualities of the soul forces that have a destructive and constructive effect, we then learn that the inner self expands, so that we not only have it in its arising and passing away, but we feel it interacting with the external reality, with the spiritual reality of the outer world. Therefore, the images of the spiritual environment then arise in these hidden depths of the soul.

Man comes to know the spiritual world indirectly through his self. Much of what appears impenetrable or even random to the ordinary view, which is limited only to the external sense world, is revealed to us within the context of such knowledge, in which the self grows together in its hidden depths with the environment. The strange thing about this is that the deeper we penetrate into our own self, the more the horizon with which we are connected in the external world expands; the more we dive into our subconscious, the more spiritual aspects of the external world we recognize. To delve into the powers of the soul means to go beyond belief, to learn about the spiritual world. For down there we are much more deeply connected with the essence of things than we can be with the senses and the mind, which is bound to the physical brain. When one can say that consciousness has created a larger horizon, then at the same time a spreading of one's own self and an penetration into the spiritual worlds has been achieved. There is no other way to reach hidden depths of the soul than to gradually penetrate the external spiritual world. In the process, a real knowledge of the spiritual foundations of existence arises for those who penetrate it through the observation of everything we can achieve through the knowledge of the higher world. What is described in spiritual science and what you can find in theosophical books occurs.

But it is possible - although in our time one can only gain an unchallengeable view into the spiritual world through training - for certain individuals to gain insights that come from ancient heirlooms, from the inheritance of clairvoyant qualities, insights that are nothing other than a descent into the hidden depths of the soul, so that an expansion of the hidden human being beyond the external world occurs, through which the human being perceives what would otherwise remain closed to the external life of the senses and mind. Then intuitions arise, everything that a person can recognize without proper training - also about the fate of the soul, about the fate of the soul between death and a new birth in the sense of reincarnation. On the one hand, this can happen through proper training, on the other hand, these hidden depths of the soul can 'push themselves up'. Like dreams, what is in the deeper layers and cannot be perceived by the senses or the mind can be discharged; through a “second sight” or [deuteroscopy] it can be brought to light. Insights can also be brought to light about the fate of the human soul, even if it is not embodied in the body.

We must only realize in what respect one or the other is or is not beneficial for the human being, we must realize that there is a tangible difference between looking through spiritual training and that looking, which, as it were, pushes its way up out of the hidden into the known depths of the soul. There is a fundamental difference. When a person enters the spiritual world through proper schooling, as indicated, for example, in Occult Science, it happens in such a way that the person, after penetrating into the depths of the soul, consciously brings up the forces hidden there. However, visions can also occur with the full vividness of a play of colors and sounds, corresponding to what we receive as sense impressions. But while we receive them in such a way that we know we must surrender to the control of the external world, we let those colors and tones of the visions take effect on us in such a way that we do nothing to them – and then we become fantasists, dreamers. Such visions are removed from our inner arbitrariness, our generative power, our spiritual willpower.

Conversely, in the training we have to experience the hidden depths of our soul in such a way that we know: What is there has been brought forth by our free will, by our generative power. Only when one knows: What you perceive [gap in the transcript] is made by you, because you must — because you are experiencing something spiritual that is otherwise not perceptible in the outer world — fill what you experience with colors and sounds, then the person is protected from deception. If the visions confront him with the full vividness of a play of colors, then he is one who hallucinates. The moment the vision presents itself as a sensory perception, it is a hallucination; it does not yet belong to the realm of true clairvoyance, but to the realm where the hidden powers of the soul emerge without the conscious willpower of the human being, without arbitrary training.

When the trained clairvoyant can control the way in which things present themselves to him, when they present themselves without such conscious willpower in the soul's imagination, without the inner self-activity generated by training , then we find ourselves in the realm of unschooled clairvoyance, and then man is at the mercy of the forces that play into the hidden depths of his soul; then he is unfree. Then he is connected with all the dangers with which he must be connected when he is in contact with supersensible reality without conscious willpower. In the world of the senses every phantasm reveals itself. But in the spiritual world, the moment things present themselves, it is no longer possible to distinguish objectively between reality and fantasy, and there is a danger that the human will sphere will be affected in some way and that the human being - instead of facing the spiritual world as an individuality - will be surrendered to the things that play in the hidden depths of his soul; just as the unconscious life of the soul plays out, like the rippling of the sea over the depths of the sea, so the I, one's own personality, is opened up and then plunged down again, [and he is guided from another side, through] hallucinations [and visions], [...] carried by hidden depths of the soul, and it can happen that [that this] is presented to the outsider, to the one who wants to investigate scientifically, as a phenomenon, as a specific thing, so that he can distinguish what of what he sees is real objective reality and what is fantasy; but it can only lead to fruitful observation if a trained clairvoyance exercises criticism.

It can result in fruitful observation to extract insights from the depths of the soul in this way, and since science is allowed to take anything as an object, wherever it may come from, which it must then take up into right knowledge, one cannot speak of something unlawful can be said when these things are examined, which even the untrained clairvoyant sees and which can be based on correct, useful perception of what leads tremendously deep into the hidden depths of the soul. What the objective, critical clairvoyant can contribute regarding the facts that arise through untrained clairvoyance can be extraordinarily fruitful, especially today. I may here again and again point out the fact that we now have a fine book - as I have often pointed out - which, in addition to the so-called esoteric clairvoyance, also sheds light on this side of clairvoyance: “The Mystery of Man”, written by Ludwig Deinhard.

So, when the hidden depths of the soul are discussed, one must not forget that there is a difference between proper training and the kind of clairvoyance that breaks away with elemental force and rises from the subconscious to the conscious mind. The former must be examined with critical means, while the latter, who has expanded his consciousness within himself, can take on the criticism and exercise control himself. There will come an age in our culture when individuality will become more self-assertive, when humanity will 'enter' into what can be achieved through properly trained clairvoyance, when this will be introduced into culture. When this is made clear to him, the person can then test it out in life itself, in the ordinary things of life.

There is yet another difference between the trained clairvoyant and the person who has “exposed” his clairvoyance through elementary, primitive powers, namely that the trained clairvoyant first comes to realizations that are general; and he comes to see how the visible human body differs from the supersensible human being, to see how man, as a being with many parts, is endowed with visible and invisible members, to see what there is between birth and death, not just in one life, but in several. He comes to understand everything that arises as experiences in this life between birth and death and between death and new birth, and also to understand what the origin of man is, what the course of the great world order became, of which we will present an example here in the lecture the day after tomorrow. The clairvoyant comes to an understanding of the things that concern all people, and he works his way through them with great caution, so that he first gets to know his own intellectual processes and does not carelessly communicate the fate of some disembodied soul. He can work his way to perceiving such individual circumstances and to experiencing the spiritual that plays into everyday life, but he advances from the general to the individual only with difficulty. He first recognizes that a person has an etheric body at all, but only later the individual etheric body.

In the untrained clairvoyant, however, the opposite is the case when the hidden depths of the soul struggle to emerge; he begins with visions that actually need to be carefully controlled; he begins with individual, everyday things. It is peculiar that he has basically little interest in what are general great insights. Particularly in those who have retained an old, atavistic clairvoyance, one can observe that they have little interest in things [that must prove to be significant for all people through spiritual science]. And nowhere are there such snobbish people among clairvoyants as those who call a naturally inherited clairvoyance their own.

Thus we see that which leads us into the hidden depths of our soul life and what makes us healthy and sick there, we see that which connects us to the spiritual world. Now it is natural that this is not only there because one recognizes it, only there when man dives down and beholds it; it is just as truly there before the recognition as the whale was there before man saw it.

So we are deeply connected with our hidden soul life with the spiritual world that is there. The spiritual foundations play a role here, and we should not be surprised that there is a much deeper essence down there than comes up and comes to our consciousness. We see that the bases that connect us to the spiritual world actually lie there, in the hidden foundations, and that the forces that come from the spiritual worlds have an effect on them. Only part of it enters our consciousness, so that our consciousness is only part of what we actually are. But this consciousness of man is there because man is able to raise to a higher level what can emerge from the hidden depths of his soul. For we see these things emerging in many different ways – they could emerge distorted or embellished, of which we would otherwise know nothing – but what emerges from the spiritual worlds into the depths of our souls and strives upwards is expressed in the sublime and the beautiful, which consciousness can control.

What happens when that which penetrates from the spiritual worlds into the hidden depths of the soul's life is transformed on its way up to consciousness? Then it is so that the impressions can live out as artistic fantasy, as that about which no one but the artists can say: the things are there, they rise up from the depths of the soul. And then we understand the powerlessness of ordinary consciousness, understand how the artist wants to expose the depths of his soul, even if he does not have them in front of him like a clairvoyant, and that it seems more important to him how things permeate each other.

Everything that a person can have in his consciousness without being stimulated by the outside world comes from the hidden depths of the soul. Even that which each of us needs to make this life fruitful must arise from the hidden depths of the soul. Not only the poet needs this, not only the artist, but also the merchant, the engineer – each of us needs this fertilizing stimulus from the hidden depths of the soul. We can see what these depths are truly rooted in when what lies down there rises up into consciousness. When it permeates him and presents itself in such a way that it can be perceived, conceived, experienced, then it becomes dependent on the way in which the person can absorb it. If someone has the ability not only to perceive what can be perceived through the external senses and through the mind bound to the senses, but has the ability to perceive in images, in beautiful fantasy, what lives in the hidden depths of his soul, then he can give in images what he cannot draw from nature, but what lives in the hidden depths of his soul.

But if a person is so constituted that he is untruthful, then the hidden depths do indeed come to the surface, but in such a way that, on the way from the hidden depths into the manifest, the person takes on the character and appears as a liar, as a deceiver or the like, through that part of the hidden powers of the soul that he cannot control in relation to external reality. Thus we can see how these hidden soul forces can make one person an artist and another a liar. This is what is necessary to recognize in order to penetrate into what a person has in his hidden soul forces.

This should be our first goal today: to recognize that everything that takes place in our conscious mental life is rooted in the depths of the soul, in the depths that we find in many other ways.

Finally, I would just like to say – because time is pressing – that in our ordinary lives, precisely in our consciousness, in our interaction with the outside world, in our perception through the senses and the mind, we merge with this outside world, that in the most important things we cannot distinguish what we have within, what is at the core of our being, from the outside. The human being is not capable of detaching the core of his soul from what he has grown together with externally. That is why he must take the path into his inner being. He can take it if he imagines how the ball of sunlight rises out of the dawn. We can best recognize what we experience inwardly by whether it is present in one person or not. And when we feel compassion for something that our fellow human experiences, we cannot separate what lives in hidden depths from the sight of compassion and pain; we grow together with it.

But there is a way that leads from this conscious soul life into something that can be inferred from the faith of a great man like Goethe: that it is not what lives in the external world but what lives in the spiritual environment that is significant, and this includes basically all stellar worlds, everything that works in the external world.

If it does not awaken its own life in the human soul, if we only get stuck in what connects us to the outside world, if we only remain in consciousness, then we will not penetrate into the spiritual. But we can find the way into the spiritual world.

When we look back into the past and see that up to a certain point our parents and brothers and sisters can tell us about it, but when we go back to the point where our memory awakens, we see that we have not only gone through external experiences, but that something else is connected with these experiences: the carrier of our experiences, that which we call our I. By looking back over our lives, we can see our own development. We feel how we have become more mature and more mature, because we feel we have gained in life experience. There is one thing we have to tell ourselves: the most important thing we have learned is actually one that we cannot apply in life. We have attained our greatest maturity through the mistakes we have made. We only know how to do something better when we have done it. Man learns most important things from the unrepeatable, most from what has passed. Especially with the most intimate things in our soul, we feel that something has arisen in us, of which the materialist says: When man goes through the gate of death, it disappears, or at most it is handed over to the human race, to cultural life. But the spiritual person knows that what he has experienced in his innermost being cannot be handed over to anyone else. It shows when he delves into the hidden depths, it shows that what we allow to mature within us can be fulfilled directly in us. When we examine our lives and find that we were born into certain family circumstances, into a certain environment, then something occurs – if we do not grasp our destiny in an intellectual way with our ordinary consciousness, but appeal to forces that are somewhat hidden from our ordinary consciousness . It is something that cannot so much become knowledge as a volitional impulse, when we look back at our lives and our destiny as it was when we were placed in life, but then make the decision to depart from the experiences of ordinary consciousness. Those who face their destiny with ordinary consciousness, who say that everything has happened to us by chance, will be resentful of their destiny, will feel resentment. If we move away from these peculiarities such as antipathy and sympathy towards fate and appeal to a force that we can develop within us, to the power of non-self-will - letting our own will remain silent for a while, calmly facing this fate and indulging for once in the idea: How is it that this fate is there? It continues through our ego, after all. Was our ego not there before?

If we seek our self by calmly looking at our fate, and if we now trace our self further back, we find that through such a deeper contemplation of life, our self grows together with fate, and we understand our fate as if our self were included in this fate and brought about in it before we were there. Then we come to see that we pass through the gate of death with the best that is in us and that we have allowed to mature, and that what we have experienced in previous lives meets our ego again as fate in our next life. We see that it works in the depths of the soul, and when we leave this body, what we have acquired as forces to build a new life for ourselves continues to work in us. So we see our own hidden beingness building up this soul life anew, we see it becoming real down there, becoming constructive forces in the hidden soul life.

When we look at the world in this way, we grow out of the hidden depths and into the spiritual world. And the knowledge that penetrates into these depths is so truly connected with the spiritual worlds as thinking, feeling and willing are the powers of our soul, to which the soul clings as the bonds that penetrate from the spiritual world. By penetrating into it, the human being finds his connection with the macrocosm; the forces grow out of the microcosm, [the human being grows] into the macrocosm, as [it is presented in] the drama 'The Testing of the Soul', [and every] soul can say to itself:

In your thinking live thoughts of the world,
In your feeling weave world forces,
In your will work world beings.
Lose yourself in world thoughts,
Experience yourself through world forces,
Create yourself from will beings.
Do not end with world distances
Through the play of thought-dreams ---;
Begin in the expanses of the mind,
And end in the depths of your own soul: —
You will find divine goals,
Recognizing yourself within yourself.

The previous lecture, which is followed by today's lecture, was about the hidden depths of the soul's life and explained that the soul's life is not absolutely bound to matter, that it is not only separable from the physical, but also from the ideas that are gained from it through the senses and the mind. The possibility of the separation of soul experiences from physical ideas was demonstrated by the difference between memories and dreams. Those [memories] arise without the original power of the soul's compassion, these [dreams] with the original accompanying phenomena of the emotional life of joy, suffering and the like. There - in memory - the soul life detaches itself from the life of imagination, which is gained in the outside world, and withdraws into the hidden depths of the soul, where it works and works, where it exercises its power by working on the entire human organism.

While the life of imagination often proves powerless – for we know not what goes on in the depths of the sea when the surface ripples – the hidden life of the soul proves itself to be a power. We see this in dreams, in the trance of mediums, in the work of art and in the knowledge of the spiritual researcher. For man can penetrate into it by training his mind, so that he learns to consciously draw from the sources of truly real life, into which he not only gazes without control like the dreamer and fantasist and thereby becomes a dreamer, hallucinist or even a liar, not like the one with atavistic gifted with atavistic clairvoyance, becomes the plaything of the spirits of such a soul or astral world in his dreams, nor alone, as the true artist draws from the spirit and shapes it in beauty, but as a knower, consciously seeing, can distinguish what is vision from what is true and self-willed. [...]

This knowledge of the hidden can only lead to the right spiritual research if it is gained, firstly, through self-knowledge, through descending into one's own inner being. With this self-knowledge, secondly, knowledge of the spiritual environment arises and grows. The greater the self-knowledge, the broader the spiritual horizon, the power to penetrate into the realities of the environment, into the hidden world spirit. l..]

Dear attendees! When approaching the subject of today's consideration, then one comes, starting from the points of view that are represented here, in a basically quite strange situation compared to everything that has been thought and researched in our age for decades about the important question of the origin of man. The reason why one finds oneself in a strange position is that, over the past few decades, the origin of man has been presented primarily in the form in which one believes one should think about the origin of man in the present day: in terms of the results of modern science. And who could deny that the great and tremendous advances in natural science in recent times have every right to have a say at the moment when this important question is put to man.

Most of the people present who are dealing with the question from the point of view of natural science must understandably have the impression that anything that can be said here from the point of view of spiritual science about this question is basically directly opposed to what natural science has to say about the point – understandably, dear attendees, and I ask you to bear in mind that this is being said. For it is precisely with such questions that what should emerge on the occasion of the two lectures of my last visit, which dealt with how to refute theosophy on the one hand and how to defend it on the other, always hovers in the background. Especially with questions like today's, the spiritual scientist must be completely clear that much, much can be brought forward from the ideas of the present, seemingly with good reason, against his assertions. Therefore, it must be understood that a lecture such as this evening's can provide some suggestions, but is far from quickly convincing someone who is still unfamiliar with the theosophical views. This is said as an introduction to characterize the attitude from which such a lecture is given. What have we experienced in recent decades [in relation to our topic today]? More and more, those [scientists] who believe they have a judgment in this area have come to the conclusion that man in the totality of his being has its origin from creatures that, in the sense of a systematic arrangement of living beings, actually belong to the sphere of what today's man calls his education, his culture, in fact, the sphere of his human activities. The extraordinarily fruitful principle of development has led to the belief that in the past, development would have progressed in such a way that from simple, primitive life forms, to which today's primitive life forms still resemble, through slow development - as a result of the “struggle for existence,” through adaptation - gradually more and more complicated forms of life have formed, up to the higher animals, and that in such a progressive development, man has risen, as it were, from the lower realms. So man's ancestors are sought in animal life, and there is such a conviction in [wide] circles on this point that anyone who wants to put forward something that does not agree with it is actually thought of as a retarded mind. Now, first of all, the natural scientists – not so much the natural scientists who remain in the realm of facts, but rather the natural scientists who have felt called upon to link worldviews, world mysteries to their research – they have felt compelled to present, so to speak, the outer form and the outer physical conditions of human life as a first as complications that arose from the forces that come from the realms that stand below the human, so that one would only have more complicated living conditions than in the case of animals, especially those that stand one step lower than humans, but that one must still derive the forces from what is already found in the lower living beings.

Those natural scientists who wanted to tie an outlook on life to the facts of natural science have strengthened this belief. But not only has this belief become established, but it has also become established that the higher intellectual powers, what we call man's aesthetic perception, his moral impulses, are also only higher forms of the spiritual, of the soul, that one finds in the animal kingdom, that one can also look for the more primitive forms more primitive forms of moral behavior in animals that can be grasped in terms of moral concepts in relation to humans, so that one is often convinced that man has emerged as an intellectual, moral, and aesthetic being only through complication from the living beings below him.

It must be conceded that in the face of the magnificent results of modern natural science, it is extremely difficult to come up with any other attitude, any other view. And it must be readily admitted that as a spiritual scientist one often finds oneself in a strange position when, on the one hand, one allows the achievements of natural science to take effect and, on the other hand, one has to deal with what certain more or less amateurish spiritual scientists believe they have to extract from the scientific results. When one compares the conscientiousness of the two presentations, it is the case that, in terms of conscientiousness, one would actually prefer to side with the natural scientist than with some amateur spiritual researchers.

Now the point is that spiritual research in this field is also in a very special position because, basically, it only comes into disharmony with the thoughts, ideas and hypotheses that have emerged from the results of natural science , while it becomes ever clearer to the spiritual researcher that the actual results of natural science virtually force human thinking to gradually take a perspective as it is given by spiritual science. Actually, the dichotomy between spiritual science and natural science is not that great, because the facts of natural science correspond more to spiritual science than to the monistic and materialistic [interpretations]. So, as a spiritual researcher, one feels in harmony with the facts as one progresses, and only comes into conflict with the hypotheses that are drawn from the facts from some quarters.

If one observes man in his development and wants to trace him back to his origin, it seems only natural that the views about him must be in line with the views one has about the course of the earth's development, [this going back] was indeed [previously] held entirely in the materialistic sense in which the biological theory of evolution, the theory of the development of living beings, is [carried out]. When one reflects on the course of the Earth's development, then as a rule one only considers what the external, inanimate forces, the forces of physics, chemistry, geology, can achieve, and one follows the Earth in a state in which it looked different from what it looks like today, in which it was perhaps in a state that, compared to our present-day Earth formation, resembles a gaseous ball. We know that this is a widespread hypothesis, that it is assumed that the Earth condensed from a gaseous state. It is known that if you trace this back even further into the distant past, you come to see the whole solar system in a gaseous state. The spiritual researcher recognizes that objections have recently been raised against this so-called Kant-Laplace theory, but in the broadest circles it still prevails. It is believed that the whole solar system itself emanated from a kind of primeval nebula that was in rotation, and it is also imagined that the planets, including our Earth, were separated by the forces that were at work in this rotation.

I have often pointed out how the so-called [Plateau's] experiment is carried out in schools to illustrate this Kant-Laplacean theory. You take a large drop of a substance that can float on water, let a sheet of card penetrate at the point of the equator, pierce it at the point of the axis with a needle and make the drop rotate, thus showing that small drops do indeed come off and move around the center. What could be simpler than to prove in this way how a planetary system could have formed in such a way? But in an experiment, it is important to take into account everything that needs to be logically included, and it turns out that something is forgotten in this experiment: one forgets oneself, forgets that one is standing there and turning, and that you only have the logical right to put forward the hypothesis [and to transfer the experiment to the solar system] if you assume that there is a giant teacher out there in the universe who has caused all this movement with a giant needle. If you do not make this addition in this experiment, then you are on completely unjustified ground.

Of course, spiritual science does not place a professor out in space, but it does say that nowhere is there a formless matter like this cosmic fog; that matter is permeated or at least directed by spiritual powers and forces everywhere, [without us falling into anthropomorphism in the process]. Therefore, for spiritual science it is clear: Even if it is justified in terms of material formation that such a primeval nebula is there, then a spiritual event underlies this outer event, just as the activity of the spiritual soul underlies the events in the human body. Spiritual science does not start from an analogy, but from spiritual research. In the specifically concrete, spiritual science seeks the spiritual events, the spiritual forces and the spiritual entities that underlie them, so that instead of external, materialistic hypotheses, it sees the spirit in them.

Now, if one were to undertake the usual presentations of the Kant-Laplacean theory and the associated operations, one could say that it is possible to derive what our body is and the shaping of physical and mental structures from the rotation in the primeval nebula. If we want to make the assumption that some kind of giant teacher is out there and sets the whole thing in motion, then we can speak, if need be, of the formation of the earth having emerged from the Kant-Laplacean primeval nebula. But then we come to a critical point again, and this has been seen not only by spiritual researchers, but also by thoughtful natural scientists. This point concerns the origin of life in general on our earth body. One can, of course, if one does not take certain conditions into account, perhaps indulge in the belief that living things could once have come into being through the spontaneous generation of certain substances. It would be a very long way indeed if one wanted to explain all the philosophical and other reasons that demonstrate the impossibility of deriving life from conditions that are purely physical. It is much more important that this impossibility has become clear to deep-thinking natures such as Gustav Fechner and Wilhelm Preyer, the brilliant biographer of Darwin, that they found no way to come to terms with it in their thoughts, to see life emerging from a spiritless, [inanimate] earth. So these researchers have resorted to the assumption that our Earth, at the beginning of its formation, was by no means just any physical or physical-chemical body, but they assumed that, even if it is true for the present that the Earth body that we have under our feet, presents itself as a lifeless one to mineralogists, and that the living beings on it reproduce in their own realms through inheritance, this does not apply to ancient times, but Preyer and Fechner were forced to think of the earth in the distant past as a living being, as a large organism, so that in the sense of these naturalists the earth was originally a large living organism in the universe. Then the time would have come when certain substances and components of this earth crystallized out of this so-called living substance, and what crystallized out is our present body, containing chemical and physical forces. While originally the earth had a life of its own, it now gives its life, in its own way, to individual earth creatures, so that the origin of living beings could be thought of as the emergence of a living being from a living earth body.

It makes a strange impression when Darwin's biographer directs his thoughts to this primeval form of the earth and creates an image out of his thinking. When we read in Preyer that the earth organism was originally to be imagined as being alive, that its bloodstreams were glowing iron vapors, that the breath of this earth body was incoming world vapors from the environment and the nutrition of the earth body was matter that flowed to it from the universe - a strange mixture of natural physical ideas [with life processes]! He cannot completely free himself from his physical conceptions, but he must admit that something like nutrition, breathing and blood circulation can be assumed in the incoming vapors. We do not think of glowing iron as performing these functions when it comes to nutrition. But Preyer shows us one thing: that even natural scientists can feel compelled to recognize the earth as an organism. They meet spiritual science halfway; they admit that if you go backwards, you come to a starting point where the earth [was a large living organism], that the earth, as something dead, in the further course [of development], has set the living [...] aside, [specialized] into [the most diverse] beings, into [plants], animals, humans. They think of remote pasts imbued with full life. But there is still something missing, which spiritual science must ascribe from these prerequisites to this earth body: [The thought is missing] that the earthly body must in truth not only have a living starting point, but that it must be thought of as having a soul and a spirit, so that when we look at the origin of the earth, we are not only dealing with a living organism, but we have to imagine the earth as a soul-inspired, spirit-inspired organism.

Yes, now one could say: What is being done here, other than what is to be explained first, is being placed into what was originally assumed? Instead of developing the spirit, one assumes the spirit as originally existing. But that is what one must do, ladies and gentlemen, according to all the possible prerequisites of a science of knowledge, because it is nowhere possible, even conceivable, that the higher natural kingdoms develop from subordinate natural kingdoms; nowhere in the course of experience are we given a stepping out of the spiritual-soul from a merely physical, of a living being from a merely [physical-] chemical. What we encounter, especially in ourselves, is that we see the spiritual-soul working on the material; and anyone who has followed the lectures given here and has heard what has been said about this spiritual-soul will know how right it is to say that, especially in the case of human beings, the spiritual-soul works on the external physical-material.

We follow the person in us, let us say, in the time from that moment until we remember back in normal [human life], and see our experiences emerging from the depths of our consciousness in our memory. We see at the center of these events of consciousness becoming more and more alive that to which we apply the word “I”. It would be absurd to assume that this 'I' only began at the moment up to which we can remember. It must also have been there in the dream-like, dusky consciousness, when the child does not yet say 'I' to itself. The 'I' must have been there. How was it present in connection with the other soul forces? If we consider the ordinary life of the human soul, we can say that what emerges as consciousness in this stage is something special, something personal. We see how we work the special life energies, which are individual to us, into it. Therefore, we are compelled to think of what we see working within our consciousness later in life as the actual agent of our whole organism. We have to think that we inherit the general structure of this organism from our ancestors, but that the energies that make up our organism have to be worked into it, [right down to the finest plastic formations of the brain].

When we recognize this, then we are no longer far from being able to trace this individuality back to a previous life on earth. There we see the spiritual and soul forces at work on our inner physical and material being, and we can then say to ourselves that, as today, as in our earthly present, our ego with its soul forces is still working on our body in early childhood. This work is not inherited from our ancestors; rather, there is still a certain scope left in what we have become through the forces of heredity, in which we can work our spiritual and soul nature. We see this, for example, in the fact that we develop from a crawling creature into a walking one. We see how the spiritual-soul element lifts us up, we see the spiritual-soul element working on the physical.

Only when we progress to what was mentioned in the last lecture - about the hidden depths of the soul life - to the spiritual training through which one gains insight into the spiritual world behind the physical, then we can consider what has already been described here. If you apply the methods that you will find in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds” to yourself, you will gradually come to a point where you, as a human being, are no longer dependent on living in the soul in such a way that you have to use physical tools. Spiritual science shows that man can apply methods of meditation and concentration to himself, through which he can acquire a spiritual essence, independent of the physical, so that he has experiences and knows that he did not have them with the help of the senses; but knows: Now you are experiencing something in your original spiritual-soul nature, you become aware of what you are beyond this physical being.

And it is particularly interesting that when you ascend to such a training, you have the feeling from the very beginning: Yes, you are now experiencing something supernatural. But at the same time, at the beginning you are not able to express what you experience in the same way in concepts and ideas and words. Why not? Because when you express ideas and concepts in words, you need the instrument of the brain. The ideas and concepts that people form are taken from the world, so that a gap opens up between what one experiences and what one can express. Only when one practices patience and perseverance and continues the exercises does the time come when one is able to truly express the experiences one brings down from the spiritual world in terms of concepts and ideas taken from the outer life. Before this possibility arises, one knows that one feels the brain as something that offers a great deal of resistance. One feels that in the further course of training, one must do the work of shaping the brain plastically, in a way similar to the way the child must shape the still clumsy brain plastically for life. The aim is to work such fine shapes into the brain that they cannot be recognized by natural scientists with external instruments. The work of the soul-spiritual being on the material substance of the body can, however, only be followed inwardly. Thus, we see again in the spiritual-soul realm the actual origin of what is becoming.

It is no longer an unjustified claim to say that, as things currently stand on our earth, the spiritual and soul life of man, as it was before the first material atom of our body came into being, is only able to use the scope that is limited in the general structure of our physical body. While this scope, over which the conditions of heredity have no power, shapes the soul and spirit, we see that the physical, the general human form, can only be preserved by human beings of a similar nature. Thus, under today's living conditions, the soul and spirit are only able to shape certain things within a body received through heredity.

If this is the case today – and if we assume that the earth has undergone an evolution, which even natural science admits – it is not to be said that in the distant past the spiritual-mental was only able to work within a certain scope. Take it for the moment as a hypothesis; it need not be dismissed out of hand as absurd, when spiritual science says: The further we go back into primeval conditions, the more powerfully the spiritual-soul [of man] is effective. In the remote past, this spiritual-soul was so significant, so powerful that it could also shape that which today can only be shaped within heredity. Just as we see today that the spiritual soul forms only a small part of the material human being, so we see that in ancient times it formed the entire organism, so that the human soul was present in the ensouled earth organism, and the earthly body was once able to yield such a substance that could be formed directly from the soul into a full human being by the spiritual-soul worlds.

Thus we look back into the ancient past, where conditions were not yet as they are today, where within the total soul of the earth organism the human souls were contained, that is, the earth organism also had organic substance that was different from the present one, which can only be classified according to the forces of inheritance in the human body. So we come back to an earth configuration - in contrast to the earth formation in which we stand - in which there was no such reproduction as in our time; we do not find such a connection between generations, between male and female. In the place of the interaction between male and female, we find the interaction between the spiritual soul and the living substance of the earth body. The spiritual-soul aspect had a fertilizing effect on the earthly substance and allowed that to emerge which the human being was at the origin of his earthly existence: a creature formed and developed purely out of the spiritual-soul core of his being.

If we look at present-day conditions with an open mind, this may seem like a daring hypothesis, but it is certainly not something absurd.

So we see that our earthly body is formed, as it were, out of living substance.

Something else must be said, which is also true. When the spiritual researcher refers back to epochs of the earth when it made no sense to speak of male and female, but when the heavenly and earthly fertilized each other, the views of the natural scientists get in the way, but not the facts of natural science that have emerged in recent decades. These facts have led natural scientists to particular assumptions. We see how, in recent times, which began with Ernst Haeckel's belief that he had to give a materialistic interpretation of human origin in his conception of the Darwinian theory at the [Stettin] Natural History Society [in 1863]; we see how the naturalists who hold this older point of view felt compelled to draw a straight line of development [from the monera] to man, and how they are always obliged to say that, before man came upon the earth, there lived a creature similar to the present-day ape. [But more recent research has] corrected this view. Everywhere we see that attempts have been made to bring man's ancestor closer to a physical, animal-like being, which, through the perfection of its physical organization, also produced the height of the spiritual organization.

We can no longer accept such things, that man had an ancestor who was somehow similar to a present-day animal form. We see the necessity for this. Naturalists say that there were once human ancestors that resembled today's apes. That which now lives as the animal world has arisen from decadence, so that what we have as apes is a being that has arisen from a declining formation of a higher form on the one hand, and on the other hand we have man. We see monkeys and humans as two branches leading back to a being that no longer exists, that was only in very distant geological times. This common ancestor of animal-kind and humanity, to which the facts lead the natural science worldview people, is [hypothetical], a being that is purely imagined.

Now, certain naturalists have been forced by careful results to move this being further and further up, so that many are already forced to say that even higher mammals do not resemble this hypothetical being, we would have to go back even further to a being from which the very first mammalian forms descended, and this being would have developed a branch at the same time that was always superior to animality and that finally developed into man. When one sees a monkey, one must always trace it back to an earlier stage of animal existence and then assume a purely hypothetical, purely imagined entity that developed a branch that became reptiles, while another branch was formed that became human. So we see the naturalist going to something that formed humans and animals from the same being.

How far removed are such scholars from what we have expounded from spiritual science? No further than that their habits of thought compel them to shape the conditions of the earth's development in such a way that they can only conceive of the origin of present-day life forms in a physical way, whereas the spiritual researchers put something in this place that emerged under completely different earthly conditions and from completely different conditions: the fertilization of the earthly substance by the spiritual soul.

We also find the possibility of thinking of the further progress of development up to the human being as an entity worked out of the spiritual-soul. Just as today's human being is the product of a father and a mother, so too was such a primeval human being, as I have now described him in the sense of spiritual science, joined together from two sides, from the substance of the earth and the spiritual-soul of the earth's surroundings. Thus we can say that the human being belonged to the spiritual environment. Through this primal element, the human being has lived more in the whole of the heavenly environment and felt his connection with cosmic conditions.

But we could only receive our spiritual and soul germ at a certain point on the earth. Through this, the human being is individualized, through the fact that he came [to a certain place], through this he has become a special being, a being that has become native, that has become firmly bound to the locality of the earth.

Thus in this primeval man we have at the same time: a general human and an individual, an earth-bound and a more heavenly, macrocosmic element. Strangely, we see the after-effects of what we have just characterized in today's man.

If we carefully examine everything that comes to man through heredity, it shows that, despite all the other circumstances that have been specialized through heredity, we find a general human element at the basis of man, and that every human nature is individualized into a second. We still find both today: something universally human and something specialized. If we examine present-day humanity, we find that the universal human element is inherited from the female side, while the specific, individual character is essentially inherited from the male ancestors, regardless of whether the individual as an individuality is male or female. This means that we can still see the after-effects of what manifested itself in primeval man as a general heavenly element – if the expression is not taken pedantically – and what came from the general life substance of the earth. Therefore, we need only assume that in the primeval men, who were formed out of the spirit, in the one case the macrocosmic element predominated, which had a fertilizing effect from the surrounding area, while the element that came from the earth itself receded more. As a result, some of the primeval men specialized. Where the heavenly element was more active, specialization led to the female principle, while where the earthly element predominated, where the specific earthly destiny gained the upper hand, the more individual was formed, the tendency towards the male. Thus we see how, out of these general conditions, the tendencies were formed in the original human being, consisting of soul and spirit, and how these tendencies became more and more concentrated and took shape as man and woman.

And this whole process, my esteemed audience, must be imagined in such a way that the conditions were always changing, that is to say, nothing else but that the conditions that had made it possible for the cosmic elements to fertilize from the spiritual environment were disappearing. The living earth substance released the purely mineral and chemical from itself and was therefore no longer able to release living substance. What had been brought into being through spiritual fertilization by the lower and the higher, and which could no longer shape the human being in this way, was replaced by something that emerged in a different way and became formative by being incorporated into the human being itself, so that reproduction occurred from generation to generation. We see that the forces that shape the human being lead back to each other in such a way that the female contribution leads back to a cosmic, heavenly element, and that which is given in reproduction by the male leads back to the original, organically living earth substance. We still see the general in the female and the individual in the male. No one will be able to shed light on the relationship of heredity and the contribution of male and female who does not take these things into account, even if only hypothetically. The forces that worked between the earth's environment and the earth itself had to be passed on to heredity.

We must now consider how the development of animals relates to this development of man, to this view of the origin of man. For in a certain way, the origin of man is not properly understood without considering the development of animals. It shows that man, as he stands before us today in his duality - so that on the one hand there is still a certain scope for the spiritual and soul to work, and on the other hand he receives what he has inherited - could only develop as he is today , if he retained this spiritual-soul education until a certain point in time, until the conditions on earth were such that they could no longer provide the possibility for the human being to arise from the spiritual-soul. Only then did today's form of reproduction develop. As a being formed from the spiritual-soul, the human being had to wait.

What would have happened if he had abandoned the origin of the spiritual and soul earlier and merely submitted to earthly conditions? Simple considerations can show us this. If the spiritual and soul had not remained in its original nature until the extreme moment of time, but had allowed earthly conditions to prevail, then the spiritual and soul would have become weak in the face of earthly conditions. If man had earlier adopted the mode of reproduction that is now his, his spiritual and soul forces would be weaker and that which comes from the earth would have gained the upper hand – because it was even more powerful when the earth still had organizing forces within it – and he would have descended to a lower level under the influence of the organizing forces of the earth.

This is the case with animality. The spiritual soul of the animals united with the earth at different times, descending into the spheres of the earth before man. The animal preceded man. But man does not descend from the animal, but from its spiritual archetype. Those spiritual archetypes that have become animals descended earlier than man, who remained longest at the top in the spiritual regions. Thus the lines of development do not lead to the archetype of the animal kingdom and of man. We must think of the archetype of the animal kingdom as separate from the soul-spiritual of man.

Thus we see how, in the sense of a logically developed theory of evolution, spiritual science places the human being in the context of the earth's overall development, and how this coincides with a properly considered scientific view. Spiritual science places man in such a line of development, in which the metamorphoses of the earth itself are taken into account, how then the animal forms arise and finally man arises, having waited so long in the spiritual surroundings of the earth, so that he could adapt to the conditions of the earth in such a way that the greatest scope was given for the spiritual and soul life.

Dear attendees, I have already indicated that what has been said today, especially by people who have equipped themselves with all the knowledge of today, must often be regarded as unthinkable, as absurd. And if only a few people have the inclination and the will to recognize that these things [of spiritual science] that play into cultural life should be pursued with the same seriousness as [those of] natural science, then that will be enough to show how this influence on cultural life occurs. Spiritual science starts from a different point of view, and admittedly arrives at something to which the natural scientist must still relate negatively, but those who want to can see that true natural science, based on facts, comes straight to meet what spiritual science has to give. Spiritual science starts from a different point of view from natural science, but it does arrive at something to which the natural scientist must still be hostile. If we disregard the fantasies of natural science and consider only the facts, we shall see that these everywhere substantiate and prove what has been characterized today.

But for man it is important to be aware that there is an independent spiritual element within him that is not the result of a material body, but that the physical is the result of a spiritual element that has its origin in the spiritual environment and has sunk its seeds into the now inanimate substance of the earth.

The study of the external facts in the development of the earth [does not contradict the independent significance of the spiritual and soul in human nature, but rather, through every deeper reflection, every living in its essence – like a soliloquy, like a conversation that the soul has with itself, must form itself, which, from the depths of human nature, must repeatedly shape itself in such a way that we can summarize the relationship of the human being to himself and to life in the words:

From the spirit man has sprung,

In the spirit man's whole life works and moves,

To the spirit man's whole being strives.

Dearly beloved! I request that the two lectures of today and tomorrow be regarded as a whole. Although I shall endeavor to present each one as a self-contained whole in a certain sense, that which I shall have the honor of presenting to you can only be fully illuminated when what is given in one lecture is measured against what is given in the other.

If today, from the point of view of the world view from which my presentations are to be given here, we speak about the nature of the human soul and its connection with the supersensible worlds, then, understandably, to someone who judges what is to be said here from the point of view of today's general education, it must at first appear strange, peculiar, perhaps even fantastic. The one who has the point of view of this world view, which starts from a kind of spiritual research, will understand this the best, because how could it not appear strange on the one hand when, compared to today's world views, which think that they stand on the firm ground of today's science, it is explained by this so-called spiritual research that the human soul is a much more comprehensive being than everything that known to man by this soul itself in ordinary life, during the whole course of life between birth and death, because this spiritual research wants to show that this human soul life is not exhausted in all that comes to light between birth and death, but that this human soul being goes its way from birth to death and again from death to birth into new life, as the consequence of the previous ones [earth lives and the cause of later ones].

Man's entire existence can therefore be divided into successive earthly lives, with intermediate stages of spiritual existence in a purely spiritual world. At first this appears quite understandably as nothing more than a fantastic thing, and no one needs to be surprised, not even those who are grounded in spiritual research, that in the broadest circles of those currently educated such a view is taken as nothing more than the fantasy of some strange enthusiasts. And if on the one hand the matter itself appears highly contestable, then to such a contestation will easily be added the other, which is also raised by many, namely the one that says: Even if there really is such a thing as a soul life that is separate from the everyday, particularly separate, man with his ordinary powers of knowledge, which are at his disposal, certainly cannot penetrate to such a solution of the world's riddles, which stand on a ground as it has just been characterized. So if someone who subscribes to the current conventional wisdom says that nothing of the kind can be recognized at all, the other would explain the matter as completely fantastic. And indeed, my esteemed audience, one does not easily come close to the research methods, the research paths, that lead to insights, of which those hinted at concerning the human soul are only a part. Man cannot arrive at such results by external performance, by external experiments, nor by the ordinary method of observation of external science, and anyone who would imagine that spiritual research can resort to methods like those of ordinary science would be labouring under a great delusion. Spiritual science cannot resort to similar proofs as the usual science. Oh, [undoubtedly] all that [to which what is said refers] lies outside the realm of what human souls can observe and what can also be experienced by those powers of human cognition that are bound to the instrument of the brain. This immediately gives rise to the question: Yes, are there any possibilities in the nature of the human soul to gain knowledge that is not conditioned by the senses, that is not through the human brain? Of course, the answer to this question can only be provided by experience, the experience of those who have come to such realizations. But anyone can ask: Is there any possibility at all of speaking of an “super-being” of the human soul that exists separately from the external corporeality of the human brain?

We must take a starting point, my esteemed audience, which I have often taken when I had the honor of speaking to you, from a fact that is intimately connected with all the highest riddles of human life, that imposes itself on man anew every day, that is only not observed because man least wants to observe in life what he experiences as an everyday occurrence. The life riddle that is to be discussed in more detail tomorrow, however, is surprisingly more significant. It is connected with the question of death and immortality. But intimately connected with this life riddle, which touches every human being so deeply, is another, everyday one. This is the life riddle that is contained in the state of change that we experience every day between waking and sleeping. We will not be talking here about the highly interesting scientific hypotheses about the nature of sleep, but rather about what spiritual science has to say in a very elementary way about the nature of the state of transition between waking and sleeping. Spiritual science must first draw attention to the illogicality of the assumption that everything that comes up during the day from morning to evening would disappear in the evening when we plunge into [darkness], into the unconsciousness of sleep. Instincts, desires, passions, sensations, perceptions, [joy and suffering], everything sinks into the unconsciousness of sleep; that it should vanish in the evening and [come again] in the morning, form itself again, that no logical thinking can assume. Therefore, this thinking can look to that, and provisionally regard as a hypothesis, what spiritual science has to say for its part. It says namely that when falling asleep, when man loses control over the outer limbs and movement, when he loses the possibility of feeling, of thinking, man's soul-spiritual being, so says spiritual science, leaves the body at this moment. Outside of the body is [then the human soul-spiritual being] during sleep, and it returns in the morning; when the person [awakens] again, begins his day life, this soul-spiritual being - so says spiritual science - [again] plunges into the [physical] body [and] begins to stir to interact with the physical-sensual outside world.

Of course, my esteemed audience, this must be a hypothesis for anyone who has not yet dealt with spiritual science in more detail; because even if one assumes that the spiritual-soul being withdraws from the body and leads its own existence, man is not able to know anything about this soul-spiritual being; even assuming that it has emerged from the external body, man nevertheless loses the possibility of feeling conscious, active and suffering in what is supposed to be outside. And if there is no possibility to show that what emerges is really present, if there is no possibility to show that a person can experience themselves outside of the body, then there can be no real proof for what spiritual science says. The one who wants to be a spiritual scientist must provide this proof, and it is impossible to look into the spiritual world, it is impossible to gain knowledge in the spiritual world, so that what is submerged in sleep [in the spiritual world] is activated in the human being as his own human soul-being, is enlivened, is raised to consciousness even when it is separated from the body. The spiritual researcher must undergo this as a development of his spiritual-soul nature in order to arrive at a [new] perception. The spiritual researcher must learn to perceive, to communicate with the spiritual-soul being, of which the human being in ordinary life knows nothing, of which he must say: Even if it is my lot to experience it, I do not know it. This implies that something could occur to the spiritual researcher that would be similar to the state of sleep [and] yet radically different. Let us assume that the hypothesis is correct; then one could say: During sleep, the human being leaves his physical body. The conscious life ceases, the [sense] organs fail to function, so the state of sleep is [constituted] by the human soul becoming [apparently] unconscious, sinking into the darkness of sleep, where it does not make use of the tools. The spiritual researcher must be able to bring about this state of the soul through his will, through his will that has been energized. He must actually bring about what otherwise befalls people without will of their own: to suspend all contact with the physical world. The spiritual researcher must artificially induce this. But that is not enough; he would not bring about anything for spiritual knowledge if he only did that; he would induce the state of sleep.

A second thing must still be [the following]: when [the spiritual researcher] has made himself independent of all service to the body through his arbitrariness, he does not fall into unconsciousness, but knows that he is in a new world with the ego, in a world beyond the ordinary world, that is, he must be able to to develop inner life and activity in the I, which otherwise appears paralyzed, feels no inner activity, no inner life; what otherwise appears as something unreal and paralyzed, he must make completely real.

At least in principle, I have to tell you, dear readers, what leads to such a revival; a detailed description of how a person can come to a real inner revival [of his soul] can be found in my writings “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”, “Theosophy” and “[A Way to Self-Knowledge of Man]”. What is said there in detail is given here only in principle. One does not achieve this through external measures, but through intimate inner processes that can be described with the words meditation, concentration of the soul life, contemplation. What does that mean? You get the best idea if you do not initially imagine that it refers to something that is completely foreign and separate from the ordinary soul life. Everything that the spiritual researcher applies to his soul is only a continuation of what he otherwise accomplishes.

Let us take an example. One of the great advances in the spiritual life of humanity is characterized by what Giordano Bruno once did, who, as a world thinker, stood on the ground of the Copernican world view. What has been gained for the developing spiritual life with Giordano Bruno? We can construct it something like this, what was gained there: A large part of the people saw [then], in the time that preceded the Giordano Bruno, up into space, he saw [there] the various stars circling, but he imagined, the naive man of that time, that the whole space would be closed from the ether, from what was called the crystal sky, because one saw the blue sky vault. But how did Giordano Bruno look into space? He looked out into space and realized that every gaze that looks out sees infinity, and where the eye perceives a boundary, there is actually nothing. It is only through the eye, through the whole human perception, that something like a blue hollow sphere is seen. What the eye could see was thus broken through, and through the world view of Giordano Bruno that which the mission of the development of humanity needed up to his time was [broken through]. A new element emerged. [Infinite cosmic space is what the eye sees], embedded in infinite cosmic space, infinite worlds. Man can say to himself: What you see there, just as your gaze falls on the blue vault of heaven, is only an illusion, is only brought about by your interaction with the outside world, is [actually] not there at all in truth. How was such a view gained? This insight was not gained through external observation, of course, because this contradicted such insights, but through a higher energization, [a permeation] of the human cognitive and spiritual life. One had the courage to acquire inner knowledge from the information provided by the senses and thus to break through what the senses offered. Something comprehensive had been explained as appearance [– what the senses offered]. Through the fact that the human soul has developed powers within itself that can enlighten it about reality despite appearances, what is termed meditation, contemplation, [concentration] has become a continuation, as it were, of the limited development of the soul to which the leading spiritual personalities devoted themselves.

How man comes to that arbitrariness of withdrawing attention can be read [in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds?”]. Just as it is possible in ordinary life to withdraw attention from something, so it is possible, through an inner, higher act of the will, to divert all soul attention from all external impressions, so that one artificially enters into the state as one involuntarily enters sleep. But] then you must have already taken care to make your soul life so strong that you do not fall into inactivity and lethargy, and that is achieved by performing the inner soul activity that is necessary for this. And how this is to be done will become most clear to us when we consider that everything a person experiences, thinks and feels is based on the outside world. One need only reflect on how empty the human soul would be if it were to suddenly, in an instant, forget everything that comes from outside. Some soul beings would feel only too empty. But now one can also achieve a certain deepening, internalization [of the soul life] if one takes the ideas gained from external impressions, holds them back, [withdraws and] processes them inwardly. That is already a kind of meditation. It only becomes effective when the spiritual researcher brings to life ideas that do not come from outside, but which he creates out of his soul, even if they are reminiscent of external realities. I would like to emphasize one such concrete idea here, an idea that may at first seem rather foolish to the outer man: Imagine having two water glasses in front of you, one empty and one partially filled; further, imagine imagine that you are pouring water from the half-filled glass into the empty one; try to imagine that the glass does not become emptier as a result of the pouring, but rather fuller and fuller, the more water you pour. A foolish notion in the external world, but such notions are important and essential for something else. To those who would object that this notion is quite foolish, one would have to say: such a notion is not meant to depict anything from the outside, but [this notion is meant] to evoke the soul to action, to stir up an allegorical notion in the soul. What is our attitude to this? This idea can be an emblem for something [very mysterious] and profound in human life; and that is what is included in the word “love”. Wherever we look in human life, we encounter it as something that fertilizes and invigorates. It presents us with riddle upon riddle [the riddle of life at its most profound]. Who would dare to say that they can look into the depths of the soul that are touched when love is mentioned? But one of the qualities of love is wonderfully illustrated by the parable of the two jars, by this impossible idea: the one who gives and gives again and again out of love does not become emptier and emptier, but fuller and fuller, richer and richer. That is a peculiarity of what is expressed there: that the soul is given more and more richly when it gives out of love. We can apply what is given in this symbol; we are not doing anything so incredibly foolish, because we are doing it according to mathematics and geometry.

Let us assume that someone has a medal in front of them, but has no idea what its substantial content is. However, there is one thing they can see: that it is circular. They draw a circle on the medal and imagine it. Everything they can imagine as a circle applies to the medal. So what does he do? He separates the properties of things and considers them individually, separately, and in this way he arrives at his insights. With such a mental image, one cannot go as far as in mathematics. But this symbol is intended to lead to the [independent] inner life of the soul. Now, the point is to, excluding all other ideas, excluding all worries, [regarding what other life experiences are], spend a while devoting oneself entirely to such an idea, to live entirely in it. What is achieved here? What is achieved is that the person who wants to become a soul researcher has united everything in his soul that he would otherwise have fragmented into many sensory perceptions and many will impulses, that he has concentrated everything on a single idea that he has created himself and that he therefore fully comprehends [as a symbol]. An enormous amount of energy of the soul life must be applied when such a concept has no support, no crutch, in the outer soul life. But it is not enough to do such a training only for a short time. Much is necessary, as stated in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Moral conceptions of all kinds [are necessary], they are particularly fruitful for the inner energization, for an inner revival, for a stimulation of the soul life.

The first thing the soul feels is not, for example, immediate supersensible knowledge – it is that it now knows: there is the possibility in you to evoke other forces than those that can be experienced in ordinary life. It is an important and essential moment in life to experience this. This moment cannot be compared to anything else that one experiences in ordinary life in another science, which one can call an expansion of knowledge in the ordinary scientific field; what one experiences there can only be compared to something else in human life, to what the child experiences after it is intimately connected to the physical for the first time, the first years after birth. We see it growing up in such a way that the soul is, as it were, not separated from the body, the spiritual influence expresses itself in physical movement, then we become aware of that [important] moment when it is aware that it is an I, until later it remembers back, while the earlier time disappears. Childhood presents itself as an inner division into a spiritual and a soul life. The physical now presents itself to the soul life as something different; a kind of birth of the soul life takes place, a detachment of the soul life; not only has the child gained something, but it has become different, it has become a different being. In the same sense, one feels one's self growing when that which can be attained through meditation occurs; [one feels something similar to the experience of the child.] In that moment, one feels more and more how something is detaching itself, just as the physicality of the child detaches itself from the soul life. The soul life becomes twofold; one sees something emerging, as when a new human being is born out of the old one, [one becomes a different being, acquires a new self, a new inner soul life awakens]; just as the child, when it begins to become aware of itself as a self, relates to its corporeality quite differently than before, so the person who has experienced this relates to his or her entire soul life. But this is a moment that is essentially different from the moment that has just been discussed in the life of the child; how, that can become clear when you consider that a person is what he has developed as his feeling, thinking and imagining throughout his life; what he now experiences in his soul, he must detach from himself like a new self. What was inward must now become outward; the greater part of it becomes outward, and a new inner, at the same time higher, soul life awakens. Only at this moment do you feel two things; the experiences are well known from the past, but you have never gone through them with such intensity.

The first thing that occurs is: Now you know what self-love is. In that moment, self-love becomes clear. Now you know: you have to separate yourself from what you were so in love with, what you thought was your everything, what you used to call your being; it is as if the ground disappears under your feet. Only now do you feel how you loved yourself, and what you have to tear out when this soul life is shown to you objectively. It must be so for everyday life, because man loves most what he is, however selfless he may think he is. One overlooks the fact that one loves most what one has gradually developed in one's soul life, [what one must snatch from oneself]. It is a difficult task to detach oneself from oneself; and without getting to the point where one, so to speak, tears out from oneself what one loves and values most in oneself, without this fact one cannot recognize the soul as grounded in the soul worlds. One also has a sense of what the expulsion of self-love is in ordinary life; one only gets to know the strength [of selflessness] that this sense now requires at a certain point in the development of meditative, concentrated mental life, which only allows the soul to become aware of itself in its essence.

The second thing is to become aware: What are you now [at your core], now that you have made your core your shell [now that what seemed to be the core is only the shell]? At first, you feel that you are not much at all, that what appears to be a new self is very thin. What is needed now is inner courage to maintain oneself in the face of the feeling of powerlessness, of the bottomlessness of the whole new being. It is basically one of the most important experiences of the spiritual researcher to tear out self-love and overcome the tremendous fear that arises when one recognizes one's own powerlessness of the new self. Now, in ordinary life, what the spiritual researcher achieves is also present in everyone; something new is not given to people at all, it can only be perceived by the soul researcher at the characterized level. There, what he actually is confronts him; only now does self-knowledge occur. Why can't people have it all the time? [Why wasn't it there before?] And here we come to the important discovery that everyone who wants to become a spiritual scientist, who transforms the nature of his soul so that he can see into the supersensible worlds, must make: He comes to the realization that it is good in ordinary life that all this [that self-knowledge] does not occur because man would not be able to bear it. The training must consist of the fact that he [at the moment when he lays aside the soul's cover] is then also able to face himself in such a way that he tears out all self-love, that he has the designated courage to a sufficient degree. The fact that a person does not face this in ordinary [real] life is a form of protection, because [the ordinary person] would not be able to bear [what used to be inside becoming external]. That is why spiritual science speaks of [this moment of] standing before the “Guardians of the Threshold”. By the threshold is meant the one that one must cross if one wants to enter the supersensible world. It is said that ordinary life finds protection through this guardian of the threshold, because only now does the possibility of the soul's relationship with the supersensible worlds begin, only now is the soul ready to look into the supersensible worlds. Only now does the human being begin to become a spiritual researcher.

For there comes a time when the human being, if he has practised such an inner strengthening of his soul life for a sufficient length of time, when he has brought such symbolic images before his soul for long enough [which he knows they serve to strengthen the soul], then his soul has become strong, then he also perceives the fruit of this strengthening, then he becomes aware of that important, significant moment, which he feels like an epiphany. Such images arise [of their own accord] from the indeterminate depths of the soul's life, which seem to show him new worlds. Now the most important and decisive moment for the soul of the spiritual researcher has come. Now he must be able to make a decision that is extremely difficult. Why it is difficult may be seen from a comparison, from the comparison of what happens to a person when new images arise in him without his doing, which do not come from external facts. You know, they are called visions, hallucinations, delusions and the like. The person who is an external scientist will be tempted to say: What the spiritual researcher experiences is nothing more than delusions that arise in an ill soul.

Now, of course, the difference cannot be readily explained, but it can become clear to anyone if they make another comparison. You will also be aware of what happens to a person who has come to such delusions through illness. To talk such delusions out of such a sick person is a futile exercise. Now it becomes clear how much a person is in love with what he has created. As a spiritual researcher, a person must not be in love with his image, and therefore he must uproot self-love; he must know: In all that comes as an image, you live only in it yourself; like shadows of your own being - what the inner nature of the soul's mood is, that is expressed in what surrounds you. That is very difficult, because you can meet people who have come to such experiences through some exercises, through states of illness, which should not be mentioned here, and the like. Oh, such people are blissful in the world that they claim to have gained. They can tell you some strange things, they are completely convinced of this new world. To prevent that from happening is part of spiritual training. Yes, the will must go further; it must not remain merely with knowledge, that does not help in the long run. A glorious new world comes to meet you, but you have to know what it means, that it has arisen from the inner nature of the soul mood. (It takes a strong will to say to yourself: All this is only a reflection of your own being; abstract knowledge is of no use here.) The willpower must be so strong that it is capable of extinguishing this entire [imaginary] ego-world so that it is no longer there. That is the Rubicon that must be crossed. You have created this world for yourself and you have to be able to extinguish this world again. Only someone who has gone through this can talk about it. But when he has managed to extinguish this entire ego-world, then he has made himself objective, and then he has freed his consciousness for the experience of an objective new world. The things come back, similar to forgotten images that lie dormant in the soul life, and yet they are quite different. Only now is the soul, through its powers, transported into a completely new world. It is so strange, what one experiences at this stage of realization; it is as if one has experienced a completely new thing, which has enabled the soul to perceive an objective spiritual world. Now the soul life has become the spiritual eye, the spiritual ear; now it does not perceive itself, one has become objective; now the soul is the spiritual eye and ear, because it no longer sees itself. Just as the outer eye [does not see itself] and knows nothing of itself, and thereby becomes permeable to the outer world, so man must, through the procedures undertaken, have made himself permeable, as it were, to the spiritual world; [then one sees the supersensible world]. When he has made himself permeable through his energy at his root, then he finds what lives within the soul!

Now, one could say that everything the spiritual researcher finds could be autosuggestion, deception. I have already mentioned here what someone told me in another [gap in the transcript]: The soul is a peculiar thing, it often imagines that it is facing a reality. — One would have to object that there is no proof of anything that can be experienced in any world except the experience itself. Only the experience provides the proof. We only need to recall a strange philosophical assertion by Schopenhauer, on which philosophies were founded. When we hear that the world is an idea and that basically everything that comes to man is only an idea, we have to answer that ideas can be clearly distinguished from experience. It is quite a different matter when we form the clearest idea of a piece of hot iron and when we actually touch a hot iron; we will get burned by the latter, but certainly not by the former. There is no proof of reality except that through direct experience. If no one had seen a whale, we could never prove that such an animal really exists. In life itself, reality is indeed guaranteed by this experience. It is the same in the supersensible worlds. Anyone who has progressed to where the spiritual researcher should go, experiences the reality of those worlds into which he has entered. When the Lord said that there are people who can imagine a lemonade so clearly that they believe they can taste it, one must say: Yes, of course, it happens that someone can imagine the taste of a lemonade from the mere idea of it, but has the experience been carried to its conclusion? It is only complete when he has quenched his thirst, and no one has quenched his thirst with the mere idea of taste. The experience must be brought to a conclusion, and this conclusion of experiences is experienced when one has [really] entered into the supersensible worlds with one's soul. Only when one has approached the supersensible worlds in this way is one in principle able to see through the supersensible self-substantial being.

This self-substantial being becomes particularly evident when one looks back on one's own life. But it is very difficult for a person to recognize this own life, because everything that it usually appears to be is actually, one might say, a one-sidedness brought about by life circumstances and by one's own disposition. We meet idealists, materialists; one regards the other as a fool. It is not enough to see through superficial self-knowledge. More profound minds, such as Goethe, for example, have known that fundamentally each of these points of view represents only one-sidedness. Material things must be recognized with material laws; spiritual things with spiritual laws. But Goethe has placed himself in each point of view and he did not come to regard the spiritualist as a fool, because he knew that one can only understand the supersensible life through one's spiritual powers. Some who have not progressed as far as Goethe think that one has to look for the truth in the middle; for someone who knows the truth, it is just as if you had two chairs, and it could happen that you sat down on the floor between the two instead of on one of the chairs. You don't get to the truth by taking the arithmetic mean, but by making each point of view your own, then you find the way to the truth, as Goethe says. But you can only do that when you have a deeper self-knowledge; when you look back on your life, you realize: you have achieved this and that because of your point of view, from which you look at the whole world, and that is how you have become what you are. In this way, life becomes an image, and one comes ever closer to what one could call the removal of the human being, because the human being is usually no more than his point of view. When man removes himself, his own life becomes an image, something that confronts him as previously mentioned in the imagination, and when he now applies his strong willpower to his life, when he suppresses everything he recognizes [through strong willpower ], when the whole of life, when it has first happened, becomes like a forgotten image, then what one is outside of the body between birth and death, what goes beyond death, [what one is outside of the individual life in a purely spiritual world]. One gets to know oneself as a spiritual being that discards the body and lives in a purely spiritual world between death and a new birth, that takes what it has experienced with it into the new life and that now helps build the human body in order to become aware of itself later. In short, through experience one will also get to know the more extensive nature of his soul, which is not limited by the boundaries that delimit our lives; [it is a nature that extends beyond the boundaries of life and goes from life to life.

In this way, this new life takes on an element that is similar to what Copernicus and Giordano Bruno brought.] While in the time of Giordano Bruno man looked up at the stars and assumed a limited world, the latter broke through it and explained it as taken out of the limitation of the soul's life; so spiritual research, in full agreement with natural science, will solve the death riddle [gap in the transcript] by showing that Just as the firmament is not a real boundary, so the boundary set for life from birth to death is not a real one, but is only created by human perception. As if from a spiritual firmament we are enclosed by birth and death; but just as Giordano Bruno broke through the limited [and pointed people to the infinity of space], so spiritual research will do the same in full harmony with science [and point to the infinity of the spirit].

But how does the spiritual researcher relate to those who cannot become spiritual researchers themselves, who can only read and hear what the spiritual researcher can communicate? The objection that only the spiritual researcher can see into the spiritual worlds is not justified. The spiritual researcher is in the same position as the painter in relation to his picture. When two people stand before the picture, one indifferently, the other with a vivid intuitive perception, a whole world can unfold for the latter. But that the picture could come into being, the cause of that is the skill of the painter. He must have overcome what led to the picture being painted, but when the viewer penetrates, what the painter thought becomes present to him. The spiritual researcher must be able to describe in ordinary terms and words what he has brought out of spiritual science. You don't have to be a painter to understand a picture. In the same way, one can sense as truth what the spiritual researcher expresses. Therefore, the results of spiritual research can be recognized even if one is not a spiritual researcher. Thus, what spiritual research reveals can certainly become part of our cultural life. Those who truly engage with the insights of spiritual research can thereby come to a real knowledge of the supersensible world and the human soul. [He can] become aware of the supersensible world with such certainty that he is put in a similar position to Goethe, who was once pushed to make his strange statement, in the face of all the objections that may come from those who, for understandable reasons, regard Theosophy as folly and fantasy. Even in ancient Greek philosophy, the denial of movement was present. These philosophers said: When [an arrow is shot and] the flying arrow is seen in one moment, it [always] rests at the point of rest, in the next moment it is at the point of rest and so on; therefore it is always at the point of rest, therefore it is not moving at all, [so there is no movement]. Goethe said, when this came before his mind's eye, which is credible proof after all:

Enemies may eye each other,
You remain calm, remain silent;
And if they deny you movement,
Go around in front of their noses.

He meant that facts have been proven, which can be proven without gaps by the intellect, but to the contrary. In the same way, one would like to behave when one has gained certainty about the reality of the spiritual world, the human soul itself and its foundation in the supersensible world. Then one would like to remember this saying of Goethe when people come and want to prove without exception from their point of view that there can be no supersensible world, and if it is, it cannot be recognized. Then one would like to hold out to these deniers of spiritual life and of the existence of the human soul in it, when they face the world view of spiritual research with hostility:

Enemy events may occur,
but you remain calm, remain cheerful,
and if they deny the spirit,
do not brood about it any longer.
Yes, in the end even agree with them,
their spirit is in a bad state.