The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If we speak about the riddles of existence from the point of view that was characterized here yesterday, then one question in particular must arise for every person in the present who has somehow come close to such a consideration; it is the question: What is the relationship between what has to say in relation to the present-day results of natural science, which over the past few centuries have led the intellectual life of humanity from triumph to triumph and have basically led to everything around us today appearing as a result, as a fruit of natural science. Not only is our external, material existence completely imbued with what natural science has given us, but scientific thinking has gradually penetrated into human thinking, feeling and sensing, into the whole of human spiritual life, giving it a colouring so that one can say: Anyone who wants to speak about the question of spiritual life today and who would have to contradict the scientific results of the present day would, in principle, be met with little credence. Natural science has provided a body of knowledge that, through its intrinsic value, through its relationship to the human-natural sense of truth, to common sense, penetrates our soul in such a way that one must rightly say: There must be a mistake somewhere if a world view feels compelled to contradict these scientific findings. What is to be presented here in terms of the world view is now fully in line with the legitimate results of scientific research at present, although it must of course go beyond this result in almost all respects when it comes to approaching a solution to the great question of existence, the significant riddle of life. And what are these great riddles of existence? They are not those that impose themselves through one or other scientific consideration; the greatest riddles of the world do not impose themselves on man from science alone, but they impose themselves at every turn in life; they are, so to speak, before our soul at every moment; and basically we can summarize these riddles of existence in two questions. Although what is meant here by spiritual science is not exhausted by these two questions, it must be said that, after all, for human interest, for that which man actually wants from spiritual science, all these spiritual scientific considerations ultimately aim at the two great riddles, which can be described on the one hand as the riddle of death, which is at the same time the riddle of life, and on the other hand the riddle of fate. ultimately] to the two great riddle-questions, which can be designated on the one hand by the word: the riddle of death, which is at the same time the riddle of life, and on the other hand the riddle of fate; the riddle of death, which is at the same time the riddle of fate. Surely, my honored audience, this riddle, [the riddle of death] arises for man from his hopes, from his desires, perhaps also from his fear and dread. It looms before the human soul, and it raises the question of what it is that can withstand the transitory existence of its body, what, for example, can be described as something immortal in the face of the temporary. This question is not raised scientifically, however, when it is raised as it usually flows out of the soul, where, in a certain sense, the solution to the question presents itself in concern about the fate of the soul after death, even if it is not admitted. [Man says to himself]: It would be unbearable to think of an annihilation of existence [after death], where one imagines all sorts of sophisticated reasons [for the continuation of the soul] in the face of the passing away of the body. In contrast to this, it must be emphasized that those people who, in the course of the nineteenth century, have managed to say that it is a special kind of selfishness for a person to demand that what he has in his soul as content should last beyond death, must certainly inspire a certain respect. There are certain selfless, if materially minded, noble natures who say: What I have worked for, what I have taken in my soul, I give to general human life, I sacrifice it on the altar of the human community. And so, in a sense, this [attitude] must be regarded as nobler than the one that, out of fear and dread, out of hope and desire, builds itself a belief in an immortality.

But the riddle of death comes from a completely different perspective, and that is truly the human riddle of life, where one reflects on the economy of the world, where one reflects on the nature of the accumulated forces that have come to light in the world. Man acquires - one can look at this quite impersonally - in the course of his life, from year to year, from week to week, a certain [inner] soul content; who could deny that this content in a normal person becomes ever richer, ever more inward, ever more permeated with energy. Now, those who think that the soul's content must be given to the whole [human] race must be confronted with the question: Is it really [even] possible to give away the best, what man has become within himself? Because that [which man must absorb in order to advance his soul personally] is something that is so connected with the individual life that it is impossible to give it to the general public. We can give much to the general public, but it is impossible to give away what is most essential, and precisely this most essential, which can only be achieved through personality, only through individuality, would have to disappear, would have to fade into nothingness if the human soul life, where the gate of death closes, disappears as an individual soul being. So, from the economy of life, this question arises quite objectively.

The second question that arises as a life riddle, which confronts us at every turn, [is that of fate]. It is this: [We see] that a person is surrounded by adversity and misery from the cradle, and that things will not change; this riddle of fate will confront us even more starkly when we see someone with limited abilities growing up and have to say of them: he will be of little use to society. Another will be surrounded by worries from the cradle on – [so that we can foresee]: he can become a significant member of society. These are questions that may not occupy the theoretical mind much, these are questions that in some respects ordinary science cannot even approach; but should it not be just as necessary to raise this question as other sciences seek to answer? These questions do not only occupy the theoretical mind, but the whole of human life. Inner happiness, inner support, inner security, inner joy of work in life depend on the answer that a person can give himself here. The one who believes that he can dismiss this question will notice in the course of his life that something occurs that he cannot explain, as if it came from this question; insecurity, nervousness, and instability can arise if someone does not find a way to find perspectives for a solution to this question. When approaching this question, spiritual science cannot simply take the results of natural science; it must go beyond them in every respect. We shall see why. But by going beyond the results of natural science, spiritual science, as it is meant here, retains - and this it must in the sense of modern times - the same discipline of thinking and feeling, [of research], the same way of confronting the world, which is in natural science. Oh, my honored audience, this has shown us yet another result: it has [in the course of the last century] produced a certain education of human thought, and this education is spreading. He who seeks a Weltanschhauung today, may not sin against this education of human thinking. Even though he who does not want to trouble himself with natural science can stand aside, he who wants to penetrate our culture must be able to justify it before the justified demands of natural science. (That which wants to take hold of our culture must be able to stand before justified thinking). On the other hand, however, we see how great the longing is to arrive at something in the indicated direction, beyond all traditions [about these questions], and especially in the thinking natural scientist we see that what is so often justifiably believed today is by no means considered sufficient. Hundreds of examples could be given to show how today's thinking natural scientists are striving for a worldview that can give them what they are seeking.

Of the many examples, one in particular: if we consider a speech given on July 22, 1909, by the man who had been president of Harvard University in America for forty years, a naturalist, a chemist, Charles Eliot, a man of character At the time, he spoke of the need to move forward from natural science to conquering the great soul question, and he presented it to his listeners as a matter of course, what he wanted to express as the existence of an independent soul alongside the physical life. He said: Man has always recognized in his fellow man an independent soul, a spirit that has its essence in itself, as which man experiences himself when he wants to get to know himself, as which man knows himself - [something separate from the body]. But precisely the way in which such a man attempts to move from the habits of scientific thinking into the spiritual can teach us how necessary it is for a special spiritual science to address the issue. If one follows Eliot's arguments, one actually comes to a strange thought. Although he takes it for granted that a soul being exists that is separate from the body, he never speaks of it other than: Yes, the soul is there. — Soul, soul, and always only soul. What would it be like if he applied the same approach to the field of natural science? It would be as if one did not want to construct this plant, these laws, but rather the whole external natural event, by saying: There is a nature. - The natural scientist [is not content with that]; he goes into [the details], the individual laws, the particular concrete existence of the same.

[Likewise, spiritual science does the same. It delves into the soul and seeks to penetrate the spiritual world and to get to know supersensible beings and facts. ] And that will be the task of spiritual science in the future, to be able to go into the details of spiritual life like natural science. Many people today still do not want to know that it is possible to penetrate into the spiritual world and to get to know supersensible entities there that never come to physical embodiment. That is precisely the task of spiritual science; in undertaking this, it proceeds in its field according to the same method as natural science in its. What matters is the similarity of the observation. Suppose, for example, someone wanted to observe the life of a plant, how it grows, how it produces leaves and flowers and finally the fruit. Is the human being satisfied with how plant growth comes to an end? No, when he gets there, he says to himself: the germ is the end of the plant's growth and at the same time the beginning of a new plant. End and beginning are linked together, and we then see the whole of life at work when we are able to link the end to the beginning.

In the same way, spiritual science does it [only applied to the soul]. It should be emphasized how such a consideration is fundamentally fruitful in the context of everyday life. Nothing could be more revealing of the fruitfulness of such a consideration than to reflect for a moment on the saying of an important man who occupied himself a great deal with the riddles of the maturing soul: a saying of Goethe. Goethe said, “In old age one becomes a mystic.” He did not want to present a gray theory, he wanted to present a way of life with it, he wanted to say: That which one has acquired in the course of one's life, regardless of where one has stood, what has become the content of the soul, what one has basically become has become, so that I have gradually become not only richer but also more mature, has matured inwardly, has taken on an inner energy, and detaches itself more and more from the outer life, gaining more and more independence. We are still relatively young, and everything that lives in us wants to be expressed in action; but we also know that something is increasingly forming in the soul, which the soul regards as its content to be experienced in solitude, through which it builds a world of its own, apart from the outside world. This deepening of our inner life, through the drawing in of a higher human being who reaches into our outer activity, is what Goethe meant by his saying. We become inward, soul-spiritual inward. Something similar takes place within our soul life as takes place outwardly-sensually in the plant, where the leaves and flowers gradually wither and the germ separates. What is sensually and physically separated and what becomes the starting point for a new plant life has its analogy in what is inwardly and spiritually separated, in what Goethe wanted to draw attention to, namely that the human being becomes a mystic, and this spiritual-spiritual soul is an accumulated power. One proceeds entirely according to the scientific method when one connects it with the beginning of the human body, and when one does that, then it must be done in such a way that one sees how, when a child comes into existence, it is gradually developed out of unknown foundations, which then later in the course of life comes to light. I have said here before how anyone who regards the human being as growing from birth to maturity in such a way that he believes that everything that unfolds would come into the line of inheritance, that he proceeds just as inaccurately as people , say, in the sixteenth century, when numerous people, including scholars, believed that a physical being – lower animals, earthworms – can develop from [the mere] river mud. It was a great achievement when, in the seventeenth century, Francesco Redi pointed out that this was based on an inaccurate observation and that all life emerges only from life.

Just as Redi behaved at the time, so does the spiritual researcher in relation to the soul and spirit. He shows that it is a mistake to assume only the physical, the line of inheritance, but that in truth one must see a spiritual unfolding into the spiritual-soul. One then sees how, in fact, the soul and spirit have more significant work to do in the early days of childhood than in later life. No matter how proud a person is of what he develops as intellect and spiritual ability, he is no longer so clever in the later stages of life that he is able to do what has to happen in the early days of childhood. The brain must first be made plastic; there the I has to work tremendously harder to develop a very specific ability. [A spiritual core works on the development of abilities.] There you can see: just as you see the new plant developing from the germ, so you can see maturing in a new human life the new abilities crystallizing out of the still plastic matter. [This is the very same view as in natural science.] From this arises – through a meaningful view of life – repeated earthly life. We see the spiritual-soul core of the human being passing through the gate of death, withdrawn from human observation, and emerging again to work on its physical-corporeal being until it has brought it to what then is it? What then is this? The materialist will say: It is a sum of material processes, from which the spiritual-mental then develops. He who thinks that the spiritual man can develop out of processes that arise out of bodily ones has no sense for the contemplation of what the inner soul life is. Anyone who has an appreciation of this [and wants to characterize it] will perhaps first have to resort to an image in order to construct the relationship between the soul and the body. This image could be the following: if we walk along a wall and we find mirrors hanging at individual points on the wall, we walk up to them and we always see ourselves in the mirror. But it would not occur to anyone to explain this reflection as their very own being, and it depends very much on the mirror whether and what is seen. Just as a person stands before his mirror, where the exterior of the mirror only reflects what he is, so the spiritual-soul life relates to the bodily-physical. The physical body is not a dead mirror, but a living mirror, but it is like a mirror that makes it possible for us to know something of the spiritual soul. But when we are asleep at night, we do not look at ourselves in this mirror. The further we penetrate into the everyday observation of the soul life, the more we will perceive how the spiritual-soul, when it has become independent, becomes aware of itself as in a mirror. But as long as we have not attained this independence in the first years of childhood, and as long as we are unaware of it, our soul and spirit work on our physical and material being, making it plastic so that we can recognize ourselves. Thus we see that through what we have worked for in an earlier life we become the architects of our present life.

Another contemplation of life can shed light on the question of fate. A person who has the right sense for self-contemplation will, when looking back on his life, ask himself: Would you have become what you are if you had not met this or that fate? Only a superficial view of life can separate you from what has been worked on you as fate. If you retrace your life [back to birth], you will realize that what becomes conscious to itself [the inner selfhood] cannot have started in childhood, so you will say to yourself: It must have been much earlier than that. One goes beyond one's consciously experienced destiny into earlier times; one recognizes oneself as the smith of one's destiny and one will not be far from the thought that one has also brought one's destiny in its causes from earlier lives.

Only if one does not look at life thoroughly can one be dissatisfied with such a view. One can say: the world view makes that which causes such pain and suffering to man into something that one has built oneself. But one is only dissatisfied when one looks at the surface; the more one knows that one has built one's own destiny, the more one comes to terms with one's destiny, the more satisfied one is. One is just not always a true observer of one's destiny. (A bad fate is often a necessity for moving forward.) Suppose someone has lived recklessly off his father's pocket alone until the age of eighteen, then the father loses his fortune, the young man has to work to support himself, and is forced to lead a different life. He will rightly consider this a bad fate; but when the man reaches the age of fifty, he will say, “Thank God; I would have become a good-for-nothing; my misery back then made me a decent person.” This shows that fate is a necessary part of our development. Thus, what one might feel as a reproach against this world view could perhaps be summarized by saying that if one can be an objective judge of what it can mean to have created one's own hardship and misery, one will not be dissatisfied, not only seeing misery in it, but also seeing developmental factors in it.

But is there, still apart from actual spiritual-scientific results, [a possibility] to imagine that there is a connection between the deepest core of the human soul, [what one is], and that, [what one experiences as] fate? Such an analogy also occurs in natural science. One need only imagine: Can a mountain plant flourish in the lowlands? It is transplanted [by its nature] into the appropriate environment. [There is a certain attraction between the mountain plants and their environment.] Thus man is transplanted into his destiny, for that is where he has to flourish. So there is always an inner bond between what he brings from a previous life and the following life. We always remain within the thinking habits of natural science, even within spiritual science, when we answer the riddle of death that man passes through the gate of death, leading a purely spiritual life until he enters into life again through birth; [we see a spiritual-soul core forming and perfecting itself in the spiritual world in the present life]. Thus we do not regard immortality as an unbroken line, but we see immortality as composed of individual links, and we see from the essence of the spiritual soul how the destiny of man is explained by this passing through of the spiritual-soul core through the various lives, [earthly life and spiritual life]. This already results in a purely external view of life. But when the pure spiritual-scientific method is applied, what could be regarded as a belief is fully confirmed when it is understood in the way it has just been developed.

Yesterday it was shown how the spiritual researcher is able to develop higher powers within himself. [Only someone who has developed his soul can become a spiritual researcher.] There are various moments. Some of these were already mentioned yesterday. Naturally, it is impossible to cover everything that a person experiences in the course of a lecture, even a sketchy one; but individual aspects can be hinted at, and one important point can be pointed out, which I have already tried to describe in [my] book [“How to Know Higher Worlds” and in] “A Path to Knowledge of the Human Being”. Reference has been made to a discovery that the person who is educating himself spiritually makes, [to the development that man undergoes]. What he experiences [there] he experiences figuratively [at first]; but this experience is the expression of a significant reality, of that which takes place in reality. In my book, I try to describe as vividly as possible what often comes unexpectedly as an image; when you have developed your soul sufficiently long and energetically, the moment comes when something can happen in a hundred different ways, but it can also happen in such a way that you feel: Now something is happening to you that you have never had any experience of before. It can be as if you feel within a complex of forces, as if lightning [strikes], passes through you and had blown up everything material. From that moment on, you feel [how you have come into a different relationship with the body], how you have become free and independent in your inner experience from that which is physically attached to you. One feels, as it were, consciously driven out and one feels as one can only feel when one has experienced the falling away of the body in death. That is why the words were used in the mystical life: one approaches the boundary of death.

Only from this moment on do you know what it means to experience yourself inwardly and at the same time know: It is not linked to the inner physicality, from which you feel liberated; now you know what it means to stand before the mirror. [Thoughts are not brain products]; you now know the spiritual and soul reality; but you are detached from something else at this moment, and that is the essential thing. One knows that one is detached from the body, but one is also detached to a high degree from what one has known as the spiritual-soul, from what one was in, in which one has experienced oneself, [from what one has addressed as oneself]. The mystics who have known it have spoken in such a way that one approaches the external necessity of existence. You only understand the mystics when you know this yourself; yes, you have this experience in this moment – it is a significant discovery. Just as you can only stand by and watch a foreign body, you feel that you can only be a spectator in the things you used to feel you were an actor in; you feel yourself as a spectator in the face of a spiritual-soul life. One feels it oneself as a kind of corporeality outside oneself, feels that there are processes in it over which one has no control. One feels, as it were, chained, forged to a being, to which one must remain until the gate of death and in relation to which one feels oneself outwardly as a spectator. One feels a new thinker awakening in oneself, the old will one feels snatched away, facing it. What matters more than a sensational result is that he - a person developing in this way - can really have such experiences, that he can know himself in a spiritual world; and when he knows himself there, one thing becomes clear to him. It becomes clear to him that with the new being that he has now peeled out of his previous soul life, he stands much closer to the outer physicality than he used to. We are close to the outer physicality. Today's materialist is familiar with the phenomenon of blanching, of blushing; we have experienced physical processes there; these can be thought of as being intensified; one can also refer to circumstances that come to light when one observes a person over a longer period of their life. We find that if a person has an inner life that does not remain purely theoretical, he becomes the master of his life; [the soul acts on the body; facial features change]. But these are all trivialities compared to the feeling that arises at the moment when one has, so to speak, detached oneself from one's soul and spirit, that one has within oneself the powers to create physically. [You feel that you have the strength to shape the physical body], then you feel the forces that are present in the child when it forms the plastic body, [physically develops the abilities]. This experience is not easy, it is quite difficult to bear. One cannot change this body, but one feels: one has gathered forces through one's life that can forge another body. One feels, as it were, the foretaste of the forces that will work on one's destiny in a subsequent life. One feels as if one has been detached, but one has also gained certainty about the spiritual-soul experience, [the spiritual-soul core]. As surely as oxygen and hydrogen are separated, so through the separation that one makes through this meaningful self-experiment, one recognizes that the spiritual-soul is mixed in the human body, a spiritual-soul core, and that the human being reaches out into a new life by carrying the potential for it within himself. Certainty arises for us when we do things this way. There are, however, no experiments that we can do in the laboratory; the only experiment is self-development, self-inspiration, and the only experiment to penetrate into the supersensible worlds is the spiritual-soul itself. He must make himself the instrument of penetration. Then he will actually gain knowledge about the connection of his destiny in the present life and in past lives. Just as the person who believes that he is a product of nature is in error [believes that he is even in the mirror, so the one who seeks his ego in the physical is in error], so is the one in error who experiences the following: It happens to him that he cannot find objects, for example, the buttons he needs to put on his clothes; he gets angry and assumes that someone has misplaced them. [He asks], “Who has done this to me, where should I look?” Then he looks more closely and finds that he himself is the cause, that he has had to search. What he has to do now is the result of what he himself did the day before. [So it is with our destiny.] We face our destiny; we face it in love and in hate; we do not draw it to ourselves because we have forgotten that we have caused it [ourselves]. But a true contemplation of life expands our memory, and we find that it is carpentered by ourselves.

That is the true expansion of true human self-reflection. Of course, natural science can penetrate into many things, but not into the realms of the spiritual and the soul. The aforementioned Charles Eliot said that the old worldview dealt with human suffering and said, “You will find a balance after death.” According to Charles Eliot, the new world view should not deal with death and misery, but with joy and life. We have to admit that without doubt. But can one simply say that one should construct a world view based on natural science that only deals with joy and life? You may say it, fine, you [may refuse to deal with suffering and death], may turn your eyes away from suffering and death - but suffering and death deal with us, they will get to us, and only the one who can look at suffering as a developmental factor, who can basically say to the question: You have experienced happiness and joy, pain and suffering. What would you rather give up of what you have experienced: [suffering or joys]? – I would give up joy for pain and suffering, because I actually owe my realization to them – he would speak correctly because he has acquired true realization. What makes us understand knowledge as a developmental factor, death, from which a new germ of life develops, which pushes away the shell like withered leaves, makes us see death as the event that guarantees us a new life. We would not be able to use what we should use for a new life, [the germ], if we did not have death, [if we did not go through death]. Once education is placed in this world view, it will become a practice of life, a kind of life sap; one will be able to symbolize oneself through the process, the withering of the plant, how the spiritual-soul core becomes more and more energetic, in which new life forces want to work. This will give the courage to face life. This realization will be an elixir of life. I have always pointed out the objection that is raised. Systematic investigations show us how mathematical talent was inherited in the Bernoulli family, and musical talent in the Bach family. The question now is this: Is anything of all these scientific results negated? Does something need to be denied? Through a simple comparison, we can see how everything that can legitimately be said about science can be admitted. [Spiritual science does not deny anything that science says.] The spiritual researcher is not a superstitious person; he is a person who does not want to raise objections, who does not need to reject what is justified. It is fully admitted that there is justification in the facts of heredity, [but alongside the materialistic cause there is also a spiritual one]. Let us assume that someone were standing before us and another personality said: I will answer the question as to why the personality standing before me actually lives. Well, because it has lungs inside and air outside, because it breathes. Quite right, he is right. But someone else comes along and says: Yes, but I know something else why he lives; I once happened to see how he hanged himself, I cut him down. My cutting him down is the reason that he is still alive today! Through this comparison, everything that constitutes the relationship between spiritual science and natural science is made clear. If someone comes along and says: We see the talents of a great general because his [Napoleon's] mother, when she was carrying him, had the inclination to like to be on battlefields, we can admit that, but that does not exclude the possibility that the other is also true, [that spiritual and mental connections are also present]. If we only realize this relationship between spiritual science and natural science sufficiently comprehensively, then we will no longer make the objections that we otherwise hear.

But even otherwise, these objections do not have sufficient logic. We see that genius is always at the end of the line of inheritance. Certainly we can see that the external bodily tools descend from the ancestors, but the individuality had to seek out the bodily tools. [This is proof against inheritance]. But if someone bases an assertion on this that everything only happens in the line of inheritance, saying that someone has inherited this or that quality from his ancestors because the ancestors also had it, that cannot actually be proof in the real sense. It is, in the logical sense, no more proof than saying that if someone has fallen into water, they are wet. At most, external, real proof could also be found logically if one had the genius not at the end but at the beginning of the line of inheritance, so that one could show how the genius is passed on - but one will hardly dare to do that. It can be seen that the assertions are not based on logic, but on certain habits of thought that tend to seek the reasons for everything in the corporeal, and so it must be said: it is the task of science to show what is transitory in man, and thus also to conclude its task; for how should science actually proceed? It makes use of the senses, but these cease with the death of the human being. How then can one use tools that are lost at death to gain insights into the supersensible world? How can one accomplish this with the intellect if the brain to which the intellect is bound is lost at death? It is only possible to penetrate into the spiritual, supersensible worlds if it is possible to appeal to those powers of the soul that are not bound to the senses, to the physical brain. And although it is true, and cannot be disputed, that once Du Bois-Reymond said that we understand the sleeping human being, but that we no longer understand him from a scientific point of view when the ray of consciousness enters him – [What constitutes joy and suffering can no longer be researched] – one must also admit that the solution to the riddle of life cannot be found in this way, which leaves a possibility for a solution open where natural science ends. If one does not do this, then one must despair of solving this riddle of life.

[Where natural science ends, spiritual science begins.] Therefore, there must be a spiritual science that does not want to deny the legitimacy of natural science in any way, but that has to research in the same [strict] way by developing the powers of the soul. Then knowledge comes about in the human being that is also life; it is something that pours out like a spiritual-soul elixir of life, through which we gain courage and security in life, through which we first know what we are as human beings and feel ourselves as spirit itself, as we feel ourselves within the physical-material world, as the same thing that lives out there. When we recognize the nature of the spiritual and the soul, we feel just as much a part of the spiritual and the soul as a link in the spiritual and the soul, which lives and weaves through the world everywhere, [so that we can say: what is in us as laws also lives outside, we are a part of the world]. Spiritual science should bring life and knowing life to modern culture, and that is what modern man needs. Old faith can no longer satisfy him for the simple reason that man has gone through the education that natural science can give him, and because he will demand that what is said about the spirit be said in the same way as what is said about natural science. And this finally leads us to recognize that, on the one hand, what Goethe says is absolutely justified: that because we have the ability to perceive light within us, we also recognize external light; and because we have a divine light within us, we can also recognize the divine. Goethe says:

If the eye were not solar,
The sun could not see it,
If we did not have the power of God within us,
How could we be delighted by the divine?

Goethe then points out how we [always] have a spiritual soul within us and, because we have it within us, it is, as it were, transferred out into the world and we can see it outside; if we had no eye, it is true, then everything would be dark; it is true that if we did not have a spiritual eye, we could not admire the divine outside of us. But Goethe did not just take the side of those many people who only want to recognize the spiritual and soul in man himself, but he took the side of those who knew that because light measures space, we have the eye; [because the eye is solar, we see the sun. That light floods space is the cause of the eye. If there were no light outside of us, the eye could not have become established in our lives! And so we can conclude this evening's reflections, which were intended to show us how man can attain spiritual knowledge by invigorating the forces within him, by saying that not only is the spiritual soul within us, but there is a guarantee that just as we are born out of the physical world, we are also born out of the spiritual soul [that the world lives through].

If the world were not endowed with the sun,
How could eyes blossom for the beings;
If existence were not the unveiling of God,
How could human beings come to be filled with God?

When we speak of spiritual science in our present time in the sense in which it will underlie the considerations of today's lecture, we are by no means speaking of something that is recognized in our time, not even remotely of anything popular. On the contrary, all the habits of thought and ways of thinking that have developed in a large proportion of our contemporaries are rooted in an area from which one believes that anything this spiritual science has to bring to light can be seen as something that is not scientific at all, and in many respects even as something that is mere dreaming or fantasizing. And it must be said that there is no need to be surprised at this state of affairs. On the contrary, anyone who is familiar with the whole essence of spiritual science, as it is meant here, and its task in the present, would be surprised if it could easily find the ear of our contemporaries. All the great achievements of our time, all the intellectual triumphs of our time, are based on a different field from the one in which spiritual science has its roots. And however true it is that this spiritual science fully recognizes everything that has been achieved by the scientific way of thinking since the dawn of modern natural science, since the appearance of the Copernican world view, and however true it is that spiritual science, and especially it, fully recognizes and appreciates this, it is nevertheless understandable that many people today believe that they can only stand on the firm ground of this natural science if they reject everything that this spiritual science does, and this - as will be shown sketchily in this lecture - from the way of thinking, from the same logic from which natural science itself comes.

Even if one does not speak of something popular or recognized, one speaks on the other hand of something that is deeply, deeply connected with all the longings of the human heart and soul, with all the great riddles of existence, without whose the human soul cannot exist in the long run; which do not confront us, as some scientific puzzles do, but with riddles that confront us at every hour, one might say, of our existence, at every turn. And although spiritual science has a broad field - its field is as wide as the whole universe, so to speak - it must be said that what it has to explore in the wide field of spiritual activity and existence is concentrated first of all into two significant life questions, which can be described as questions of fate and death or immortality.

This fateful question confronts us at every turn. If we just consider how one person enters into existence through birth, so that blessing hands surround him from the very beginning, that he grows to the full development of the abilities and powers that are within him, so that one can foresee in a certain way: he will be a useful member of human society. The other person [...] is surrounded from the cradle by circumstances [...] so that one can say that he will have to fight the bitterest battles throughout his life, have little opportunity to develop his abilities and strengths, so that one can say that he will become only a slightly useful member of human society. Between the two extremes – how many nuances of the fateful question that arises before the soul of man! Not so, as with some other questions, let us say, scientific questions, which man always formulates precisely – perhaps not at all in clear words does this or that man express these questions; it does not matter, every soul must ask them. And even if she does not ask: What about fate? , through its contact with the outside world it is tuned one way or another, feeling happy or dissatisfied, working joyfully, going through life confidently or having to weep at every moment. Even if it is not always clear, but rather in the way that every human soul is tuned - in the way it presents itself to others, how it behaves when it is alone with itself - you can tell that at the bottom of its soul, unspoken, it is itself a mystery of the human soul.

And not in the same way as other questions – at every turn you encounter the questions of life. They are not always raised in such a way that they appear scientific. When man faces the riddle of death, affects, feelings, hopes, doubt, all of these are certain to be involved. Fear of death, the desire for another existence, all of these are involved in the question and in the answer that many people give themselves; and it must be said that, especially in recent decades, when many of our contemporaries claim to have to reject all life after death, quite a few personalities, who were not without nobility, but who, out of their materialistic views, arrived at an illumination of the mystery of death, which, when all is said and done, is much better and much nobler than many an answer given by this or that soul, motivated by the fear of death and the longing for life. Many a materialistically minded person rejected any life for the human soul after the human being had passed through the gate of death. But he said to himself: “I will consider what I have worked for in my soul, what I have educated myself to between birth and death, what I have made it capable of, in such a way that I silence all selfishness, all selfishness and self-love and - as my scientific knowledge requires - gladly sacrifice it on the altars of general human development.

So not everything is ignoble, [if you think] that it is better, higher, not [to] wish that you carry what you have developed in your soul through the gate of death, but gladly give it to the following generations, who can do whatever they want with it. But it is precisely these feelings, which certainly cannot be described as ignoble, that show that there is a scientific aspect to the question of immortality, because if one just looks at the nature of the human soul, everything that a person works towards and cultivates up to the gate of death, then a peculiarity of the human soul comes to the fore that cannot be mistaken if one looks more closely at this human soul. One can ask: What is the most valuable, the most significant thing about the human soul? It is the incommensurable, the ideal element that this human soul has shaped in such a personal way that it cannot be given up to any other power, to any other element. This cannot be given up by the individual human soul to the human species at all. And especially when viewed impartially, it can be seen that this would disappear into nothing if the human soul itself were to disappear into nothingness, [that] something is worked out that we could not otherwise describe than that through a whole human life, [so that it] acquires inner strength, becomes richer, and [what] becomes, so to speak, only for the purpose of it [then] disappearing after all. But this contradicts the general economy. Nowhere in the whole world do we see that forces are combined in such a way to achieve the highest tension, and then, when the highest tension is reached, suddenly disappear.

One arrives at the formulation of the question out of admiration for the economy of the world, independently of all fear of death, of all hope for humanity, of personal interests, so objectively through the observation of the world, as one can objectively arrive at such an observation through the observation of any other being or thing in the external world. Thus there is indeed a scientific way of formulating the question of immortality. Of course, one does not arrive at an answer through all of the above, but only at a formulation of the question. That is to be the subject of today's consideration, that one can arrive at an answer through spiritual scientific research.

It must be emphasized from the outset that everything that man can observe in the external world, and that he can also recognize through the external sciences of this external world, is based on such an inner activity that is bound to the organs of the external body. No one can imagine that he could observe what man recognizes as sensual reality if he had no senses. But that the senses fade away with death is an immediate certainty. Likewise, man can recognize that his ordinary mind is bound to the brain and thinks and works in dependence on the senses. He must assume that his mind, his soul activity, is bound to the outer body and must fade away with death. This is just as true, [as] our external organs of perception and the external brain fall away. Thus we see how the question comes down to whether the human being is capable of becoming aware of something within himself that is independent of his senses, of the external corporeality. And it is impossible from the outset to claim that anything other than what is independent of the external body has a duration beyond death.

But do we ever have reason in our normal lives to see something in our own soul that is independent of the external body? Consciously, certainly not at first. But the fact that we have to assume it at first is suggested to us by the consideration of a changing state in human life, which, however, is not always sufficiently observed in normal life and not understood in its importance, because man easily passes by what he experiences habitually. And some of these are precisely what point the researcher as deeply as possible into the secrets of life. What is meant here is what happens to the soul daily: sleeping and waking. We need only consider the moment of falling asleep in a very ordinary way to get an idea of the nature of sleep. From the outset, it should be said that, of course, recent scientific hypotheses, which would be extremely interesting to consider, are not to be considered in a short evening reflection. There are extremely interesting observations about the nature of sleep; and even if it could be shown that the spiritual scientific observations do not contradict the natural scientific ones, but today it must be refrained from this and based on mere spiritual science it must be said: When we observe the moment of falling asleep, we do see how the human being's physicality falls away at the moment of falling asleep. The human being loses control over his limbs, which are left to the force of gravity; they are handed over solely to the force of gravity and the other forces of our earth that are independent of the soul. The human being loses the use of his senses; they gradually begin to fall silent; the surging of desires, drives and passions, ideas and ideals into an indeterminate darkness; memory is silent. Now, anyone who claims that they cannot think differently because of their scientific presuppositions will say: this calmness is only a by-product of the body. When we have the sleeping human body in bed, it is only another way in which it works, through which it conjures out of itself what we call the life of the soul.

Now, science will always recognize – and if it is unbiased, it is already on the way to recognizing it – that everything that goes on in the sleeping human body has nothing to do with the inner life that flows up and down in the waking soul. Not only von Du Bois-Reymond fully admitted in the 1870s: When we have the sleeping human body before us, it is recognizable to science, but the laws that are in this human body, what emerges, what speaks in this existence in terms of passions, sensations, drives, perceptions, will never be recognized. Rather, one will always fully recognize that Yes, when you have the sleeping human body in front of you, all chemical and physical processes take place within this sleeping human body. But thoughts, feelings, passions and drives arise from these just as little as oxygen or air can arise from the life processes of nutrition or from the lungs. Just as the air outside is and is absorbed by the lungs through the breathing process and the human body, so it must be assumed that everything we call mental life springs into the human being when they wake up – like air when inhaled – and that this has nothing to do with the processes that take place in the sleeping human body.

Today, in our time, this is only a spiritual-scientific realization, but especially in this field, spiritual science will always have the help of natural science. It will recognize that it would be just as absurd to derive the processes of the inner soul experience from the body as it is impossible to derive air as an entity from the lungs. This gives us the right to say, at least as a hypothesis, in spiritual scientific terms – we want to believe that it will rise to certainty –: Well, it is indeed the case that the spiritual-soul core of the human being flows out of the human being when he falls asleep and is in a purely spiritual world, and when he wakes up, it flows back into him into the human body. This can be logically compared to inhaling and exhaling, except that we inhale a material substance and quickly exhale it again, while sleeping a spiritual-soul essence. One might call the state of transition between sleep and waking a spiritual inhaling and exhaling of the soul, only in much larger intervals than the physical inhaling and exhaling. But this will always be recognized by the way of thinking of mankind, that it is impossible to derive the soul-spiritual from the physical body. Just as one seeks the air outside, as it has its origin outside the organism, so the spiritual origin of the spiritual-soul life is outside the human body and is taken up by the human body when one wakes up.

Thus we could initially assume – and we do not wish to say too much at this point – that the human being is outside of his physical body with his spiritual and soul-like essence. However, we must say – if we can hypothetically assume this – that when a person is asleep, his soul is alone with itself, separated from the body, but he is unaware of this. Consciousness fades at the moment of falling asleep; he is surrounded by darkness and gloom when he passes into the state of sleep. From this, however, it can be seen what the prerequisite is for recognizing the soul-spiritual. Let us first leave it completely uncertain what is outside the human body when the human being is in a state of sleep. We can then make it certain if we are able to consciously bring about the same state that is supposed to occur during sleep: to make the soul-spiritual independent of the body, and then not to experience it unconsciously, but to make it active within, even though the soul is out of the physical body. Can that be the case? Is that possible?

All the possibilities of spiritual science actually depend on the answer to this question. And this is what makes people real spiritual researchers, what helps people to look into the spiritual world, [...] puts them in exactly the same state in which they are in their sleep, only [now] instead of being unconscious, they are in a state of inner consciousness. And this latter happens through very specific spiritual scientific methods, which are just as much methods as those underlying any chemical experiment in the external world, except that the external methods are applied with hands or with other tools, while the only tool with which man can penetrate the spiritual world is his own soul -[...] there are no methods other than those of the soul - [but only if] it conquers these forces [and] transforms them.

[When] can they be conquered? Only when one is able to say to oneself: Man is unconscious in sleep, inwardly inactive and unalive, because certain forces are so weakly developed that they cannot come to his consciousness by themselves. If a person is in a position where forces in his soul become perceptible that are otherwise asleep but not perceptible, then he can summon up forces that make him a conscious being when he is independent of his body. Then the proof is provided by the experience [and] the observation that the human soul is also something when it is independent of the body.

So, if this is not to be a fantastic assertion, a state must be possible that is similar to the state of sleep on the one hand, and radically different from it on the other. Similar in that the person allows his limbs to be just as inactive and his senses to be just as unimpressionable as in sleep, but through inner arbitrariness he rejects all the worries and concerns of life. Man must be able to bring about such a state in his soul that his soul is independent of the body, as in sleep, that the body is uninvolved in the life of the soul. But then - and now radically different from the state of sleep - this soul, after renouncing all external stimuli, including all memory, must awaken slumbering powers from its own depths through what is called meditation, concentration, contemplation.

What is it? These are certain activities of the soul, admittedly not immediately noticeable activities of the soul, but they transform the soul, change it into a new entity in many respects, at least for itself. If we want to form an idea of what meditation, concentration and contemplation are, which every soul researcher must apply to himself to a great extent, we have to say: in ordinary life we form concepts, let ourselves be stimulated by things into ideas and hold these ideas in thought. How much would remain in our thought-image if we only had what comes from outside? But the spiritual researcher must withdraw all attention from everything that is essential in the normal state through his arbitrariness; and then, when there is complete empty consciousness, he must be able to place some or a single idea or sensation or a single volitional impulse at the center of his consciousness through a stronger development of his will, while in normal life one very easily sinks back into sleep. So here, when the spiritual researcher wants to make his soul into an instrument, everything is placed at the center of consciousness by his own arbitrary will.

Now one can say: It does not matter what kind of idea, sensation, feeling is used for this, [but] the fact that one pushes the whole soul life, which is otherwise distributed over many ideas and impressions, into a single idea, thereby concentrating, contracting it – that is what matters. While in ordinary life one quickly hurries from idea to idea, one must then let such an idea hover in consciousness for a long time. By doing this, during a time when the soul life would normally change from one perception to the next, the entire soul life strives to concentrate on this one point. And that is what matters. We know that we also draw strength from the outside world by exercising it; the living draw strength from exercising it. What matters here are the forces that lie in the depths of the human soul and at most below the surface of consciousness, but are now being strained and exerted.

In general, it can be said that it does not matter which ideas are used for this purpose, but some are better suited than others. But, so that it is not spoken abstractly, not as a theory, we want to draw attention to something concrete right away. In general, one does not get very far in preparing the soul in spiritual research if any old idea is taken; but if so-called allegorical, pictorial ideas are taken, then one gets the furthest – pictorial ideas. Now, especially the materialistically minded person can easily say that they have no value because they do not express anything external. But what they depict is not important, whether they have a value for this or that external thing, but what this idea brings about in the soul, in that the soul concentrates its power on it alone.

An example [that] may initially sound quite crazy: imagine two glasses [, in the first is water, in the other none. By pouring the water from the first into the second, the amount of water in the first increases, not decreases]. The point is that this idea can be a significant symbol for a life process, a process that permeates everything in life: for the effectiveness of love. However absurd this idea may seem, it can still be said that there is something in a person's life that basically works like this symbol. A person who, out of the very impulses of his soul, always performs such acts of love, does not become poorer as a result, but richer and richer. This relationship of love to the human soul can be expressed symbolically through the otherwise nonsensical idea.

Now, when doing such exercises, one can arrange one's consciousness in such a way that one has such a feeling in the background, which gives warmth to the image, so that the soul is permeated with warmth; otherwise, one must turn one's attention away from all external life through arbitrariness, as one otherwise only does in sleep, and then direct all the soul's strength towards this one image. If you do such exercises – how to use them can be found in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. It describes how to do such exercises, how a person can draw on those means in their soul through which they can really, little by little, exclude everything except meditation. And if he has the patience and persistence to work on and educate his inner soul life in such a way that he repeatedly does such concentration and meditation exercises, then he will become aware that something is indeed appearing in his soul that he was previously unaware of. Before, there was only the state of being asleep and awake. Now there is a new state of soul, which arises in the same way as the moment of falling asleep – only deliberately; it occurs when the body is surrendered to its own conditions, its that we reject all ideas, everything that is otherwise stimulated from outside, that only what we want is in the soul; that we are concentrated, bringing out of the soul the powers that would otherwise remain untrained. Then we feel that we are like the sleeping human being, but not unconscious, but inwardly active. And we notice this - if we have come so far as spiritual researchers - that we enter a certain point in time when we no longer have to conjure up images before our soul through our own arbitrariness, but now we have arrived where they arise and appear of their own accord.

Then gradually the state comes where a completely new world picture, a picture full of diversity, which we did not know before, arises before the soul. As in the morning, before the sun rises, first the dawn appears on the clouds, so a world of forms and impressions appears to us. Because we have strengthened what was previously weak within us, because we have brought about a state through inner activity in which our soul perceives something completely new that could not be perceived before; because it has become active, has become active, [it] encounters a new world; just as one can only encounter the world of colors and light when one has eyes, so now one encounters a new world because one has now made [oneself] organs for it.

It is now the case that – in the face of those who lightly object to such soul faculties – one is reminded of the words of the great philosopher Fichte, who said in 1811 and 1813:

Imagine a world of the blind, who know only the things and their relationships that exist through the sense of touch. Step among them and speak to them of colors and the other relationships that exist only through the light for the eye. Either you talk to them about nothing, and this is more fortunate, as they will say so; for in this way you will soon notice the error and, if you are unable to open their eyes, stop talking to them in vain. [...] Or, for some reason, they want to give your teaching a meaning: in doing so, they can only understand it in terms of what they know through touch: they will want to feel light and colors and the other relationships of visibility, assume that they can feel them, feel something within the feeling, contrive and lie to themselves about what they call color. Then they misunderstand, distort, and misinterpret. [...]

This teaching presupposes a new and special sense, sensory organ.

This world [is] not yet the world of the spiritual researcher, but for him it is the piece of spiritual research that he had already come to; there he was aware that he, without organs, speaks of “nothing”, of reverie, and that is why he says that one presupposes a world of [blindly] born. So, Fichte thought, the point is to create a new soul organ.

But only [the spiritual researcher] is able to make the soul into such an organ by means of the methods indicated. And now one must say: When he has reached this point, only then does the most difficult part begin for him, the part that must be observed most carefully. For now he is truly in a new world. The materialist will say, and from his point of view rightly so, that the spirit researcher can grasp all this, but his opponent does not understand it. He will say that the images also occur in the diseased soul, in hallucinations, visions, delusions, not externally, but internally all the more. [...] What is important is that [the inner perception of the spiritual researcher] is different from the delusional world of an unhealthy soul, that he [sees] something different from what emerges from the unhealthy soul. With delusions, visions, hallucinations, the essential thing – as we know to our chagrin – is that the person in question has such a rock-solid belief in them that they see them as a new world, as an objective world. And perhaps many of you know that it is easier to talk some people out of what they see with their eyes than out of their hallucinations, delusions and the like, and that some people invent strict logical systems to justify these delusions in a strictly logical way. But for the spiritual researcher, the important thing is to answer the question: Why is that so, why images that are only reflections of one's own soul, why does he see this as an objective reality?

If one tries to answer with the eye of the soul researcher, one comes upon something that is usually not taken as seriously in ordinary human observation as it should be taken. In truth, this is based on self-interest, one might say, self-love; we just must not take it as we know it in ordinary life. In ordinary life, selfishness is self-love; but we know that there are certain degrees, that because they are mental qualities, one can conquer them. External natural phenomena are different from what is in the soul. With lightning and thunder, we cannot fight against them as we would against selfishness when it arises in the soul, when it tempts us. We cannot command lightning to stand still, or thunder to roll and be audible. We have control over the inner being, not the outer. But the fact that the diseased soul has the mirror images of its own nature before it, makes such inner facts a necessity, so that they then remain as natural facts; that one can do nothing against them, as against the flickering of lightning. That is the peculiar thing, that everything that arises from self-love, from self-interest, to an inner soul activity, remains like a natural fact.

The aim of the proper schooling of the spiritual researcher is that he should not only acquire inner activity, but should also be able, precisely when he is at this point, to conquer even the stronger selfishness that the “objective” world conjures up for us. This is the most important point in his development. Everything he has done before must be overcome, as described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Alongside this, the spiritual researcher must have undergone such a self-education that he not only knows that the world of images that arises on the horizon of his consciousness is nothing other than a mirror image of his own soul; not only must he know this, but he must have trained his soul so that he is able to remove and erase these images at any time. This requires a strong self-conquest, which in itself acts like a force of nature. For just consider, my dear audience, what this means: first, all the strenuous efforts to make the soul so alive within that a new world appears to it, and then, after making every possible effort, to be able to extinguish that world again. Practical experience shows that it is part of the soul's efforts to overcome, because in ordinary life one is never necessarily required to bring about what has just been described. One can extinguish this world, and through overcoming, through constant overcoming, one can extinguish it, up to a certain remnant - one cannot extinguish that, it remains. What is this remnant? One only really gets to know it when one has come to this point. For the spiritual researcher, when he has done everything up to this point, something occurs that is one of the most harrowing experiences that the human soul can ever have. Those who have known about it in the course of human development have coined a word that only those who have reached this point understand. This word is: coming to the threshold of death – I have tried to characterize it in my writing 'A Path to Self-Knowledge of Man'. It can occur in a hundred or a thousand different ways for the human soul, but it always has a certain typical character. It may be that at a certain moment, after doing such exercises long enough – and “long” means different things for different people in this life or later – that then a moment comes when one or in the middle of your daily activities, you experience this moment as follows: you have, as it were, everything that you previously referred to as your self, as your own personality, as yourself, as a human being, beside you as if it were outside. One feels as if one had really gone out of one's body while sleeping and had gone along with everything that is the ordinary phenomena of daily life. One has one's being beside oneself like another being, not feeling, one has the sensation: something has gone through one like a flash of lightning that has struck and taken from one what one has previously called one's self, one's own being. One now learns to approach the threshold of death – not death itself, because at first one recognizes it in the image. One sees what one has to face when one has passed through the gate of death, what one must give up when one passes through the gate of death. One learns what it means to speak only “you” to that to which one has spoken “I” until now.

At the same time, something is now entering and the spiritual researcher must be able to get to this point, to control himself at this moment – which can be characterized something like this: The person has the feeling: All the perception on which you have relied so far is now outside of you; you are now consciously in your soul with inner activity, but there is nothing beside you. One now lives as if standing over an abyss, all supports have now been withdrawn, everything has disappeared, only abyss and emptiness. The feeling that arises is akin, very, very akin to fear, but a fear that arises in the soul with the power of a natural phenomenon, no longer a quality of the soul, but like lightning and thunder over which one has no control. That is why you educate yourself to be able to conquer this fear when it arises. For the paths of spiritual research are not merely theoretical and practical teachings, but victory in life, overcoming of life. And one conquers what arises as fear of the void. And then one becomes even more aware: what remains and what cannot be extinguished – that is actually you, that is your true being. The rest is discarded. But what you are experiencing now is what you bring with you when you enter the physical world through birth or, let's say, conception, and what leaves again when you pass through the gate of death.

So you get to know yourself inwardly, and at the same time something else is connected with that. In the moment when you have experienced yourself in this way, when everything that was previously the reality of the world has been left behind, in that moment the real world emerges, spiritual beings and facts. And in the face of this world, there is a certainty that is different from that in the face of the unhealthy soul - the certainty of life: to distinguish the reality of spiritual facts and entities from fantasies and mere ideas of the unhealthy soul, just as one can distinguish reality from mere ideas in the physical world. Schopenhauer tried to mislead people to some extent [by taking] the world as an idea, even if [he meant] something else by it. [...] If you imagine that you are holding a piece of iron at 90 degrees Celsius [...] to your face, it will not burn you, [whereas an actual piece of hot iron would burn us]. There is no other proof of reality than the proof of life; and this proof is valid. You cannot prove anything against Kant's sentence that ten possible dollars contain no more than ten real dollars. But there is a considerable difference: you can hardly pay debts with ten possible dollars, but you can with real dollars. That having been said, in a lecture, an objection was raised: Yes, but if life is the only proof of the spiritual world, then one must remember that some people have such a power of selfishness that [gap in the transcript]. That someone can have a taste of lemonade on their tongue just by thinking about it and not letting it flow down their throat, that may be, there's no denying it. But the 'proof through life' is not carried to its conclusion: one can have the taste of lemonade, but not quench one's thirst with it. One must always go to the end with the proof of life. And just as there is only the proof of life that something is real, but as this proof of life is sufficient, so it is also the case with the facts and entities of the supersensible world, into which the spiritual researcher enters. He actually enters into a world that shows him spiritual beings that are spiritually close to him, as he is spiritually close to these beings. These beings are not physically visible in the material world, but, like him, are in a state that he goes through when he has passed through the gate of death.

I have shown you how the nature of man is such that it cannot be known through ordinary introspection, but rather by first putting himself in the inner activity and then becoming aware of himself after he has awakened to a new being, as it were. This new being is the same one that passes through birth and through existence and passes through death again. This life is only a school and a labor. This soul is a sum of powers that we also see at work in man in other ways, but only externally. When a person steps into existence through birth, the facial features of such a human being stepping into human life are still indeterminate; they become more and more distinct as soul power upon soul power works its way to the surface from that inner core of being, which we are now getting closer and closer to: that which the spiritual researcher must now see when the soul has arrived and the soul has been recognized in its true essence. The soul-power works its way to the surface from that inner core of being, which we are now getting closer and closer to: that which the spiritual researcher must see when the soul has come there, when the soul has been recognized in its true essence. For the spiritual researcher recognizes that the spiritual-soul core of being, which comes from the spiritual world, connects with what the father and mother give. Especially in the first years, [this spiritual soul] works most to shape the physical body plastically. What the spiritual researcher learns to recognize, what comes into existence through birth, is what we see working at this point; but when he learns to recognize, through the processes described, what he actually has within him, then he gets to know within himself what works in from the outside between sleep and waking, what replaces the expended forces: soul forces; he gets to know the spiritual core of the human being. In this way, the spiritual researcher is in a similar position to the natural scientist not so long ago, in the seventeenth century. [In] river mud, [so it was thought at the time, lower animals, even warmer ones and fish, arise] through the inner activity of the river mud itself; [it was Francesco] Redi, [who proved: one had] observed inaccurately; the exact observation shows that [these] arose because a germ [was present] in the river mud. Life can only come from life; this was only first scientifically stated in the seventeenth century. At the time, such a contradiction arose, in contrast to the prevailing doctrine, that Redi only narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Today's fashion has changed, not becoming more tolerant, but more snivelling – today it is no longer the custom to burn people, in those days people were burned – but in a certain inner sense the matter has remained the same. In those days, there was the greatest contradiction. Today, the spiritual researcher comes and shows: It is a mistake to believe that the qualities and powers of the soul come only from the line of inheritance, from father and mother, from grandfather and grandmother and so on; in this you commit an observation that is just as inaccurate as that lower animals arise from river mud. Rather, you have to recognize that a spiritual core must be present from the past, which takes hold of the physical properties like [the] germs in the river mud. The spiritual comes only from the spiritual.

And if we then go into the nature of the human being in more detail, then we come to the conclusion – if I should have the honor of speaking to you again, I can expand on this – that we recognize this spiritual-soul core of our being as a repetition of earlier earthly lives. Just as the germ in the outer physical body repeats the essence of the species, so the core of our being repeats the essence of the soul, and the present life is so bound up with past lives that, with the help of spiritual research, we can recognize that What comes into existence through birth is what we have acquired through a series of previous lives on earth. We take it with us through the gate of death, then live a purely spiritual life with the powers we have acquired, which do not disappear into nothingness, and use them to build a new life, and so on again and again. This is only the consequence of the law that the spiritual and mental comes only from the spiritual and mental - not from another person, but only from oneself, because it is ideal; that is, from one's previous lives on earth. As [then with] Redi, so [is it] today, the idea of repeated lives on Earth is fought against. [It is] always so: at first [it appears] absurd, ridiculous; after some time, it is taken for granted. And just as Haeckel and Du Bois-Reymond admitted that the living can only come from the living, so it will later be admitted that the spiritual and soul-like can only come from the spiritual and soul-like; because it is bound to the individuality, not to the species. Real research then naturally only results from real spiritual research. But then we have before us the solution to the riddle of fate. The riddle of fate, what does it consist of? We are placed with these or those forces that we have worked out in previous earthly lives; we suffer blows of fate that we have condemned ourselves to in previous lives, in such a way that we have been drawn to those events that correspond precisely to what we have created for ourselves in previous lives. And if that is found to be cruel, if it is said that not only is fate to be endured, but that it is even deserved, it must be countered that it only needs to be seen in the right light for it to appear differently. Let us take an example: an eighteen-year-old man, living off his father's ample fortune, encounters the misfortune of losing the family's wealth. He has to work and gradually becomes a capable person. ... At the age of fifty, he says to himself,] For my father it was perhaps a painful fate, but for me it was a condition of my present perfection; otherwise I would not have become the person I am now, and not from the standpoint that makes fate seem unjust. In earlier life, one predisposes oneself to imperfections that can only be compensated for by overcoming this fate. Then [one's] soul becomes strong, then fate finds not only its explicable, but its great forgiving, because through this [we see] [how] humanity goes in progressive development from life to life, and [how] fate is composed of cause and effect.

Today the question is often asked: Did the earth once have a beginning? We find something else. The fateful question will one day be truly resolved for man when repeated earthly lives are recognized within the stream of fate of man. And what we call eternity, the immortal being, we experience by finding ourselves completely immersed in the supersensible view of the world.

[Let us again use a comparison: just as we can] observe the plant [as it develops] from leaf to leaf, [to] flower, then [to] germ, in which the life forces are so concentrated that they already contain the guarantee for the emergence of a plant the following year, we also look at a person who is constantly acquiring strength and carrying this germ of life through the gate of death by carrying it within themselves, as truly as the plant carries the germ of life within itself. This guarantees that he builds up a life in the same way as the germ builds up life again. [One cannot actually] speak of immortality in general, but [it is] composed of individual lives, [which carry the] germs of the following life [within them]. Likewise, [life follows] life, as plant follows plant. Of course, my dear audience, if you approach these things with today's habits of life and thought, then the opposition is understandable, and [also] that many declare it to be fantastic and dreamy. But it is the same here as with all great truths. Schopenhauer [says about] the poor truth:

In all ages, poor truth has had to blush for being paradoxical; and yet it is not her fault. She cannot take the form of the enthroned general error. So she looks up with a sigh to her patron, Time, who beckons victory and fame to her, but whose flapping of his wings is so great and slow that the individual dies from it.

That's how it is. But many a person should say to themselves – [I can only sketch this out today] – that anyone who gets to know the literature of spiritual research and delves into it could then say that there is not the slightest contradiction with science. Only those believe this who see the truth in scientific thinking habits. Whoever says that heredity is a scientific fact; that this simply contradicts what earlier earth lives say, [overlooks] that the things do not contradict each other at all. [Let us take an example]. If there is a person standing in front of us, a second person: [one] lives because there is air outside and lungs inside. No, [you could say, that does not apply, because the other person lives because he] hanged himself, [but was cut down in time] and saved. Is one thing true and the other false, or are both things true? This is how it is with things: what is inherited is true, and just as true as this scientific fact that we live because there is air outside and lungs inside, but it is also true that these inherited facts are there because these reasons [why a person embodies himself in this inheritance stream] lie in previous lives on earth.

Anyone who engages with spiritual science will see that spiritual science itself is very aware of these objections, and that some people only raise them because they are not yet familiar with these objections. But when spiritual science gradually becomes known, not just as a theory, as abstract spiritual science, but as an elixir of life that can pour into the soul of man, [then all this will become clear], and [one should not] think that one has to be a spiritual researcher to understand them; one can only research these things if one is a spiritual researcher, but when they are brought down into concepts for the physical mind, then anyone can understand the spiritual researcher today, as is also presented in 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds'. But it is the same with these things as with what arises under the earth and what is illuminated by the sun on the earth. When a mine is dug out and then illuminated by the sun, it is the same as with the achievements of spiritual science. One must be a spiritual researcher to ascend into the spiritual worlds, to recognize the beings that live there, to see what is going on there. But when they have been researched, then they can be illuminated like the sun, which can create what can arise through it, the treasures of the mine. Then one recognizes it through the influence of sunlight, sees it only in its individual nuances, and can absorb it into the sensations and feelings of the physical mind. Whether it is the spiritual researcher or someone who just grasps it, when it is absorbed, it is an elixir of life, because then we not only know about immortality, but we also become aware of the soul life in us that goes through death in us; [the soul life] grows stronger [in the same way] that a plant would feel when the germ grows up [and it] knew: next summer [it will] reappear in the same form. Invisible vitality, certainty of life [emanates from that which is acquired through spiritual science]. In this way, it gives people support by answering the question not only theoretically, but practically, as a life force, a life assurance, so that they have what they need in life: security and strength for their work, hope, confidence for the core of their lives, which no external force can break. Fichte says:

I raise my head boldly up to the threatening rocky mountains, and to the raging waterfall, and to the crashing clouds floating in a sea of fire, and say: I am eternal and defy your power. Break down upon me all, and thou earth, and thou heaven, mingle in wild tumult, and ye elements all - foam and rage and grind in wild struggle the last solar dust of the body that I call mine - my will alone, with its firm plans, shall float boldly and coldly over the ruins of the universe; for I have grasped my destiny, and it is more enduring than theirs; it is eternal, and I am eternal, like it.

This is also what the soul says when it has absorbed spiritual science and gained inner support from it. And it will always need this, but then it will also have it. The truth penetrates through thin cracks and crevices, and it will find it too. This is also the case with spiritual science. And anyone who has grasped its essence knows of its certain existence in such a way that he can be certain of life through it; and then he stands, as it were, opposite the opponents who deny the immortality of the soul and so on, as Goethe's saying stands opposite opposing views that he, Goethe, considers nonsensical , towards philosophical views – for there is the philosophical view, already in ancient Greece, [that there is] no movement [because the arrow that has been shot] [is always at one place during every moment of its flight], thus [is always at rest]; [therefore there is] actually no movement, because [it is] always at one place [. This can be proven rigorously by the intellect. But Goethe contrasted this with the certainty of life. He expressed it, not particularly deeply, but certainly:

Enemies may eye each other,
You remain calm, remain silent;
And if they deny you movement,

Go around in front of their noses.

Goethe thought that he had provided the proof; it is proof of life. The spiritual scientist can, without offending in the slightest, say a word in which we may summarize the considerations of this evening - not theoretically, but intuitively - as a certainty in the face of what they deny. To those who are inwardly moved by what spiritual science has to give, one can say:

Adversity may arise,
But you remain calm, remain cheerful,
And if they deny the spirit,
Do not brood over it,
Yes, in the end even agree with them:
Perhaps things are not going well for their spirit.

The [mystery of death] belongs to a field of science that is not only unpopular, but can also be called unpopular. Many an inner, seemingly justified contradiction is illuminated there, appearing fully understandable to those within this field of research. Besides this, there is also another reason why it is difficult to make oneself understood. It is usually thought that the person who presents this matter in a short consideration wants to persuade someone to change their mind. The recently founded Anthroposophical Society has a field of research that is broader and more extensive than that of other research societies. Therefore, the intention is not to convince or persuade, but only to indicate the direction and nature of the investigations and how the solution to the riddles of life can be obtained.

Much stands in the way of unbiased judgment. The human soul, with all its interests and attentions, is involved in nothing so much as in the riddle of death. But nothing can cloud the search for truth as much as a very specific desire and an interest in a particular solution to the mystery. Does that which we call life continue after death? This question can be approached in an absolutely scientific way, but quite differently from what is usually referred to as science. Only someone who, with regard to the question of death, is linked to other interests [than their own] can proceed in a truly objective manner. Linked to the riddle of death must also be the riddle of life. If the question is asked out of an understandable curiosity or out of an interest that is close to the human heart, it cannot be solved.

The investigations into the question of death are also those into immortality. To discuss these questions, a certain transformation of the human being is necessary, a “spiritual chemistry”. It is not readily admitted that there is a spiritual science. But tonight it should be pointed out. When the chemist approaches the study of water, he splits it into hydrogen and oxygen. But if he just fantasizes about it, he knows that he will not be able to break it down. If he surrenders to dualism, that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen, he does not violate monism. Through ordinary science, he too can gain nothing about what is his destiny. What can survive the physical body is not present in ordinary life. Just as hydrogen and oxygen are not visible in water, so what is immortal in man is not present in ordinary life. A kind of spiritual chemistry must first be used to separate what is divine and spiritual. Over the centuries, man has had a kind of scientific education, not only through school and university, but also through general education, which makes it impossible for man today to get beyond the closest matters not only with faith but with knowledge. Not only curious personalities, but also serious and honest researchers exist. But the way the problem is approached today shows that in many cases the right path has not been found. Today is not the time to point out the important work that natural scientists such as Colonel Rochas have done in this regard, conducting experiments using the laboratory method. It is interesting to note how Rochas comes close to what is being proposed today in some respects, but he takes an impossible, unfruitful path. Spiritual science cannot and must not do it this way. Rochas takes a test subject like other sciences, only not external substances, but a medium. The external soul activity is thereby put to sleep, suppressed, so that everything that is bound to the external body is excluded. He assumes that only the soul, only the spirit, is now active. Through certain processes, the thirty-year-old [female] medium is put into a kind of sleep state; then he stimulates her consciousness so that she lives as if she were eighteen years old. She feels the pains or learns what she learned at that age, and only accomplishes what she was capable of at that time. Then she is transported back to childhood; she makes unpracticed strokes, as in the fifth or sixth year. Rochas is also able to transport this personality to the time before its birth. Such souls then stammer out of a spiritual environment, which, despite all imperfection, would be highly interesting if it coincided with spiritual research. It goes further and further back, until finally he believes that it is present from the time when it had another life. Rochas believes that he has obtained several life courses in this way. These are experiments of one of the serious researchers who want to stand firmly on the ground of science. They believe that only the method in which the object is physically present is justified.

Spiritual science cannot stand on this ground. Its methods are entirely spiritual in nature, purely inward, [they are] purely spiritual-soul processes. The spiritual researcher will never make use of a purely external object in space. But within this spiritual research, the same methods are used as in science. One may think: How can something be investigated in such a simple, primitive way? But it is not that simple; it is easy, but easy things are difficult. It is all based on psychological processes. One has to work for years in one's own soul alone to obtain reasonably satisfactory results, to enter into destiny through years of practice. Through years of self-denying work, one first comes to focus one's attention, and secondly to what can be described as “devotion”. What devotion means in ordinary life is only the very first beginning of the soul's possibility of becoming one with the spiritual world.

The attention must be turned entirely to one object, in which the whole life of the soul is concentrated. This attention also exists in ordinary life, because without it, man could not come to self-awareness, and memory is intimately related to the ability to pay attention. The thought may be weak, but one forgets less and less when one repeatedly focuses one's attention on something. Thought is the result of attention, of concentration. It depends on memory that the human being, with a certain sense of self, immerses himself in the physical. This enables us to deepen our inner life. In ordinary life, people develop attention in such a way that they allow themselves to be stimulated by something external. This is where the activity of the soul, which we call attention, begins. Self-observation is necessary; this is supported by very specific soul exercises. To learn what these are, you have to become independent of any external stimulation of attention, distracting the soul life from everything else, and focus it on a self-chosen content. It is not what you concentrate on that matters, but what you do that matters. Again and again, for a long time, over and over again, you focus on the content you have chosen. Then, little by little, you have an inner experience, then you discover what the soul does when it is attentive. And then it is attentive without content, attentive without paying attention to anything; that is what you develop as inner activity. Erasing the content, suppressing it completely, no longer thinking of anything and yet having the same state in the soul - then you know what attention is. The true clairvoyant method, which leads to spiritual research, is based on increasing the soul abilities that are present in every soul. Attention becomes stronger and stronger. This transforms the entire soul life. Then the person senses what the soul life is like in the central and other nervous systems. Then he senses an entity that is apart from the body in the person. In this way, the soul life is gradually separated from the body within. Finally, one feels: one is a duality. At first one thought that one was a product of the body. Then it is the etheric body of the human being that can be observed. One separates it from the physical body. Only then can one observe the etheric body. One experiences something like the following. It can happen in everyday life or when awakening from sleep. This experience can occur in a hundred different ways, but essentially it is like this: one can experience it in the middle of one's daily life or in the middle of sleep. The usual words for it are only stammering. It is as if something were happening in that moment, as if lightning were striking and destroying the body. When the body is separated, the soul life becomes independent. At that moment, one realizes what spiritual researchers throughout the ages have called 'coming close to death in the path of spiritual research'. You get to know the independence of the soul life, and now you have arrived at the stage where you live spiritually in the etheric body. What you then experience can only be described as a morbid soul life, as hallucinations and so on, if you do not know it. My book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' talks about this. It is not comparable to mere fantasy. What flows into the soul life is like images, a kind of dream image. But it is not important that you call it that, but that you learn to read in the world you are now entering. It is like a letter in which all the letters are known, but what you learn through the writing can be new. The spiritual researcher has a world of images in front of him, but he learns to read the spiritual world that stands behind it. It can only be said with a semblance of justification by contemporary dream researchers that one can have realities from the past in front of oneself and mistake them for new images. But the state of the soul, the mood of the soul, is different. It knows what the overall memory of ordinary life consists of: in an overview of life on earth up to a moment when one is confronted with all of one's life on earth or personal life. Then one recognizes: life has the urge to dissolve into the general etheric life.

If you continue to increase your attention to observe how life dissolves and has the urge to dissolve into the general, then you recognize what is peculiar to a person when he passes through the gate of death. Through further inner training, one not only recognizes one's own etheric life, but also learns to distinguish in the environment. This path leads, even if only for a short time and in a way that varies for the individual, to an overview of this life like a panorama. To progress further, the spiritual chemistry must be pursued ever further.

But not only attention is to be trained, but also the complete surrender of the soul life. The devotion consists in the person renouncing everything. What freezes by itself in the state of sleep: he must bring it about arbitrarily - the devotion of all muscular activity, of speech activity, of thinking activity, of judgment activity, which also occurs in the state of sleep. The devotion can be increased if it is practiced for years, if everything that is arbitrary is suppressed for years. Even what is not arbitrary can be suppressed: heart activity, respiratory activity, which are otherwise withdrawn from consciousness. One can bring the physical body into absolute inactivity. Then one does not feel transported into an external world, into something that wants to draw near, but one feels that one has entered into the depths of one's own soul life. What the person then gets to know is the human being's astral body. The sense of self, all thinking, feeling and willing then appear like mirror images. Now one penetrates to what they reflect, one penetrates into the astral body. What the person experiences on this path has nothing to do with ordinary desires and so on, one notices this. The path leads one, in full self-observation, out of birth and death, and shows us how an emerging world of ideas reveals memory as something that was not there before. This is linked to the breaking of desires that are connected with earthly life: satisfaction, joy, the desire to live through what is attached to the outer body. The desire remains for some time. But through the experience of the fact that the desire can only be satisfied through the body, for example, cravings of the palate, one learns what tasks the astral body has after death. Then one gains the ability to see the period of time, after decades, different for different people; then one learns to see what one sees in the future, now also to recognize in the past. There is much in life that hurts us, and we would spare ourselves this pain. So the spiritual researcher does not dream when he looks into the world before conception and sees that the human being has prepared this pain for himself, what is called, has made his own karma, that we have prepared this evil fate, the painful disappointments, ourselves. This does not correspond to our wishes now. One could be critical and hypercritical and still not get along with the ordinary, until one returns to a period where an earlier life on earth occurs, where we were in a different language, in a different environment, in very different circumstances. However unlikely and unpopular it may be, one also comes to see more like a past life on earth. This assertion can only be made under two conditions: either the person making such a claim has no sense of truth, or he must have a sense of truth as strict as in mathematics. Much nonsense has been done in this way. It is often said that a person was this or that in a previous life. But when real memory occurs, it is impossible that one could have an idea of previous lives through wishes. An image may come to mind: 'That was you, but in such a way that no one could object. This is how the riddles of life are solved: 'That was you, that is what you looked like, that is what you could do.'

But it occurs at an age where you can't do anything with it. There is nothing to be gained from it except knowledge. There is no comfortable “That was you.” You know then: some kind of retribution is necessary, but at that moment it is impossible to even out.

The paths and results of spiritual research have been attempted to be indicated here in a brief form. Not sensationally, to convince, but it only depends on encouraging. These experiences show that man recognizes that he has a spiritual-soul life core that has repeated lives as a result of previous lives; and so his fate is the result of previous lives. The present life is directed towards making up for what one has done to this or that person in certain deeds. The spiritual researcher first seeks what is immortal in man, and he finds that when he applies the methods for doing so. He recognizes this in a thoroughly important context; he recognizes earthly life in such a way that it lies like a shell over the deeper core of life. To do this, you have to train your memory, for example, to remember what you have experienced since birth. Man comes from a purely spiritual state and enters a purely spiritual state. We are in an intermediate state in the physical body. One should not ask: Is man immortal? – but seek out immortality. What the materialistic thinker sees of the soul is not immortal. Spiritual research is to be regarded as the path to human immortality; it draws attention to the results of feelings and emotions, to the bliss of religious inwardness. But it is also what makes life strong and powerful for the external arena.

It would be unchaste to speak about the effects of the life of the soul; but the path must be proclaimed. Especially those people who are completely imbued with the spirit often cannot recognize the path.

What science says about heredity is the same as what spiritual science says about repeated earthly lives.

Question: What should one do if one has lost God?

Rudolf Steiner: Actually, one cannot lose God, but only one's conception of God. One should strive to deepen, or one could also say, to elevate, one's conception of God. Every conception of God only approaches God, none can encompass Him. People talk about pantheism and theism, for example, as if one excludes the other; but in reality one is both, because by day one is a pantheist, by night more of a theist. Pantheism means actively experiencing the divine in the world. In theism, one experiences the Deity as watching over the world, as in a clairvoyant world sleep. One cannot rely on proofs, but “whosoever strives, we can redeem him.” One should only not want to stand still, but to want to rise above every point of view. Truth is one, but it is manifold in its revelations. Above all, inner peace, security, and vitality are needed, which one acquires through spiritual science. So the answer is basically: deepening in spiritual science, not an abstract answer.

Question: Is the practice of table turning to be approved, and can messages from the spiritual world be conveyed through it?

Rudolf Steiner: It should be said that the world of the spirits is spiritual. Those who want to get to know the spiritual world by table turning are like those who want to learn mathematics and do not go to a mathematician but to a parrot.

Question: Does a person have to experience rebirth in a spiritual-divine relationship in every life?

Rudolf Steiner: The rebirth that one has experienced in one life remains a fruit for the next life on earth, but does not have to be the seed. What mystics call “spiritual rebirth” may transform into poetic or artistic abilities in the next life.

Question: Do spirit and matter both come from a spiritual source?

Rudolf Steiner: Please read my books on this topic, such as “Truth and Science”, “Philosophy of Freedom” and so on. Question: Do Neptune and Uranus belong to our planetary system or to another?

Rudolf Steiner: They do not belong to our planetary system in the same sense as the other planets, but rather have migrated there.

Question: Where are the dead?

Rudolf Steiner: I deliberately avoided speaking about space and time in this context in the lecture because these [categories] belong only to the sense world; in the spiritual world, time is experienced in a completely different way. In the nineteenth century, even the materialists said: If all souls are transported out into space after death, the world will soon be overcrowded. But that is nonsense, because the law of impenetrability belongs only to the physical world.

Question: How does what was said in the lecture square with the teaching of resurrection and the Last Judgment?

Rudolf Steiner: Some believe that a passage in the Bible is called that, but that is not what this is about, but about direct spiritual research.

Question: Can souls be helped after death? What about suicides? Rudolf Steiner: Only in more oral [personal] conversations can something be said about that.

Question: My brother Theodor Schmidt left on [gap in transcript] 1898. In a fortnight he was insane.

Rudolf Steiner: The I is not dead between falling asleep and waking up during the night. [In] leave alone, institutional treatment.

Question: If a man and woman love each other very much, will one of them soon follow the other?

Rudolf Steiner: In such a case, they long for an embodiment that does not last longer than that of the other. You will also not dispute that many a man and woman lives for a long time after the death of the other. I do not want to talk about Bluebeard, but there are people who quickly find comfort with another love. Inner connections exist between all people in a good and evil sense, in love and hate, in an understanding and unintelligent sense. Our aim should be to establish spiritual bonds in the physical body that are spiritual forces. Our strength increases, our power grows stronger when we connect with another person in our physical life through love, friendship or some other shared bond. If we strip away the forms that belong only to the earthly, what remains are the forces that live on here and in the spiritual world. Consciousness after death is much stronger, except for the period when consciousness, as it were, rejects the outside world; but the inner life is all the stronger. Also, the experience in the “midnight hour of existence” is much stronger, as consciousness can be in the body, even if it is an inner one. All fruits reveal themselves in eternity: what we experience in solitude and what we experience in community with others.

Among the world mysteries that not only impose themselves on man from a purely scientific point of view, but are repeatedly posed by life, is that of the source of evil and evil in the world. Allow me to speak this evening from the point of view of spiritual science about this particular puzzle of human life, and specifically of that spiritual science, the foundations of which I have been expounding to this audience for many years.

Before actually addressing the questions in question, I would like to briefly point out how the question of evil and the evils in the world have occupied the mind of the inquisitive throughout the centuries, and this incessant preoccupation should already show how deeply evil and the evils are felt by the human soul. It will be sufficient to mention briefly that the philosophers, from the most diverse points of view, according to which they saw evil and evils penetrating into life, tried to solve its riddle, but nevertheless did not fully come to terms with it. Let us go back to the philosophy of the third century B.C., known as Stoicism, which attempted to derive the principles of the universe and of human behavior from Greek thought. The Stoics were confronted with another question: How can one come to terms with human life when one feels the sting of evil within oneself in life and sees the otherwise wise governance of the world riddled with the evils of existence? If one wants to try to characterize how Stoicism coped with evil in human nature, one has to look at the states of consciousness arising from the foundations of the world. When the Stoic unfolded the powers of his consciousness, which he assumed to be in harmony with the world, he thought that only good could develop; but evil also occurred; then he said: It is when evil enters into the nature of the human soul that there is a state of twilight in the soul, a kind of spiritual powerlessness. And the Stoic then asked himself: how can the normal consciousness of our soul be dimmed, or even rendered unconscious? Because man is a complicated being and, even if he lives in one of these normal spheres with his consciousness, he sometimes descends into lower spheres, similar to when he falls asleep, and is imbued with what is not and should not normally be in him. The Stoic thus thinks of man as belonging to several worlds; if he follows the good, he is in his own sphere; if he falls to evil, he is among the same. In the visible world, there is something lower than man, in the animals, plants and minerals, a hierarchy of the natural kingdoms. That, then, into which man submerges in evil, must be there as a disharmony of nature. But here it can be said that this attempt at a solution shows the inadequacy of any such way of looking at these riddles, because the question remains unanswered as to why, when a person, in a state of diminished consciousness, descends below his normal sphere and evil comes to the fore, what significance does it have in human life, and what does he bring back from there at all? Philosophical thinking proved - and still proves - to be powerless to approach the problem of evil from this side.

Several centuries later, the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus attempted to approach the problem of evil from the standpoint of mystical philosophy. He reasoned that the human soul, through further development in the sense of spiritualization, can delve deeper into the spiritual and gradually break free from the laws of material existence. In this, Plotinus, and with him many philosophers, saw that which is the enemy of good; he thought that to the extent that the material world had an effect on the soul, evil intruded to the same extent, and so he saw evil in the material world, which was hostile to the spiritual. But even with this, mystical thinking did not come close to the problem of evil: it has not been explained why material forces oppose good and what the human soul should get from the fact that these forces can play into it.

Then came the attempt at an Augustinian solution, which is not really one. But in this attempt, something typical occurs that will reappear again and again from then on; namely, Augustine does not allow evil to exist in its reality. He thinks that only good exists, and just as light can be found everywhere, but not in its full strength, but in the most diverse gradations, so evil is only a weak good with evils. Such solutions have been taken up again and again; they are an example of simply denying the world's riddles that could not be explained by their representatives. If, for example, Campbell called evil only the shadow of good, we doubt with good reason that evil can be understood by this; for us it is not much more than if one wanted to say: Cold is just another, a subspecies of heat, it is not something positive, but something negative, so we don't need to put on a fur coat to protect ourselves from it. Such a triviality had to be cited as an objection to characterize the value of the latter attempts at a solution.

The theosophist and mystic Jakob Böhme delved deeper into the world and its causes, where evil also appears as a positive force when examined with the spiritual eye. He did not stop at concepts and ideas because he increased his entire soul powers to a high level of experience and then felt and experienced what is spiritual and divine. He recognized that evil is deeply rooted in the roots of existence; before him, the entire existence spoke as a “yes” that can only be fulfilled by a “no”.

How do we as human beings attain consciousness? When a person sleeps, under ordinary circumstances he has no consciousness; only when he wakes up and, in the familiar way, collides with the world everywhere, does normal consciousness arise, his self-consciousness, in what opposes the soul. Jakob Böhme sees this way of encountering its objects already in the world's divine primal existence, by having it emerge from the dark existence of the Ungrund (the groundlessness). At that time, the divine consciousness could, in Böhme's view, only ignite itself in its opposite, as in the material in the human being. According to Böhme, the divine source arose out of the ungrounded, and thus, with the former, also the good and the evil. Jakob Böhme goes further with this view than with a mere philosophical explanation. Darkness is present without needing an explanation; it is light that needs explanation. Thus Böhme, like Schelling, allows the effects to arise from the dark ungroundedness of the world, which they see as being permeated by the divine-spiritual existence, and which are thrown into the primal ground by the action of the divine. It is remarkable that Jakob Böhme positively recognizes evil and sees it not in the external sense world, but rooted in the foundations of existence, because every divine must raise itself and the world out of the ungrounded.

It is interesting that a contemporary of Jakob Böhme in Japan, Toju, the sage of Omi, who lived there around the middle of the seventeenth century, established a philosophy in the Far East that strives for a similar solution. His view is almost the same as that of Böhme, the divine “Yes” of the Ungrund rises and plays into the “No”, the “Ri” of the Ungrund into the “Ki” of the Urgrund.

Thus we see how each of them, in his own way, seeks to approach the riddle of evil and the evil one through philosophy and mysticism of varying depth. A certain powerlessness to approach the solution of this problem also appears in Lotze, in that brilliant philosopher who also tries to stand firmly on the ground of natural science with regard to evil. He says: One can assume that evil must be present in the world so that good can be drawn from it by overcoming it. But what about the animal kingdom, where evil cannot be overcome by education? Lotze therefore comes to no other conclusion than to say: evil is there, and we must believe that it seemed necessary for reasons that are not accessible to man, to the wise world government. Human knowledge is denied recognition in this regard.

Everything else that could be said on a large scale would demonstrate anew that conceptual, idealistic philosophy fails when it comes to explaining evil and that this philosophy itself comes to the conclusion that it is currently impossible to come close to solving the problem of evil and evils. And such problems become, for a philosophy tied to the brain as its tool, issues at the limits of its cognitive field; from its standpoint, it must indeed come to the conclusion that human knowledge has fundamental limits. In contrast to this, however, it must be pointed out that the human power of cognition undergoes a development that can be accelerated and deepened by one's own effort. When this happens and the problem of evil is approached with the means of spiritual science, a most remarkable solution arises, which may initially appear paradoxical.

We know that spiritual research is not based solely on the ordinary power of perception, but above all on that which initially lies dormant in man, but can be brought up from the unconscious through the means of meditation and concentration, through an unlimited effort of mental and soul activity, which are otherwise only used in their elementary state. Then, after such strengthening, the human being can experience himself outside of his body, like a table, for example, which stands in front of him in ordinary daily consciousness. Just as it is easily possible for the chemist to separate water into its two elementary components, hydrogen and oxygen, so, as in a kind of spiritual chemistry, the soul can be lifted out of the body and brought to independent activity, leaving the body in the physical world while it works in the spiritual world. In this state, the spiritual researcher experiences the existence of spiritual entities and the processes in the spiritual world as a higher reality.

What then is the nature of evil when man, as a spiritual researcher, develops spiritual eyes and ears? What kind of forces are these that have been dormant in the depths of the soul and are now awakened? The soul then feels in possession of powers that it cannot develop within the physical body, with its tendency towards the wrong, the ugly and the erroneous. However, when growing into the spiritual worlds, it sees that this no longer hinders it , if a person has a clear awareness of these shortcomings before his separation and, when the soul emerges from its corporeality, gains an insight into the fact that these weaknesses and shortcomings become sources of action in the spiritual world as soon as he can look courageously and boldly at his faults. Indeed, the spiritual researcher must train his senses to such an extent that he can look at all ugly passions; for if he does not allow them all to enter into his fully clear consciousness, they will have all the stronger an effect on the spiritual field of perception, penetrating his views and turning them into errors, hallucinations and fantasies. Thus a connection is established between the evil, the work of the spiritual researcher and his ascent into the spiritual world. What is available to the spiritual researcher and provides him with clarity rests in the depths of the soul of the undeveloped human being. When the spiritual researcher visualizes evil in his mind's eye and compares it to the forces that could lift him up into the spiritual world, it turns out that the forces through which the human being commits evil deeds in the world of the senses are transformed in the spiritual world, so that through them one can see with spiritual senses in the spiritual world. Seen there, they are the germs for the blossoming of clairvoyant powers. But this should not be misunderstood as if these elevated powers, which are transformed into their opposite in the physical world and develop into a source of evil and badness, would now readily develop clairvoyant powers in the human soul if they were preserved from taking possession of the physical body. It is precisely this that shines a deep light into human life and explains why it is an obstacle for the spiritual researcher if he does not recognize evil and it then flows into his soul life, where it then presents itself as illusion and error. Evil is like gravity, for example, at a lower level of nature, when it manifests itself in avalanches, volcanic eruptions, which can lead to great misfortune, while gravity, when it is properly and moderately directed, as in the case of a waterworks, will become a blessing for the population.

Just to explain, it should be emphasized that the spiritual-scientific facts show how human life cannot be imagined if one wants to explain it as a simple thing, but it is to be understood as a confusion of different worlds-spheres, whose forces can work well in one world and harmfully in another. The human organism as a whole must develop different forces in one particular life-sphere than in another. A locomotive can easily run over a person if, in desperation, he throws himself in front of its wheels on the tracks and thus comes into conflict with the forces that could have benefited him if he had used the train as a passenger. We therefore realize how, on the one hand, forces must develop that become evil on the other, and it is precisely these that can lead people upwards into the spiritual worlds; for in these forces, which have an evil effect on the physical world, higher forces prevail in a good, beneficial sense in the sphere that suits them. Thus, evil becomes transparent in its significance as a product of the transformation of forces in the life of man, so that we finally come to the fact: this evil is the perversion of a higher good in a sphere of activity that does not suit it.

Thus, when we approach the riddle of evil, we see that we must then apply spiritual-scientific powers that show how evil can be seen as justified in its true nature, even though we can experience good in its equally true meaning in another world. The events of the material world and the history of human thought teach us that those who remain in the material world cannot explain how pain and evil can penetrate it. Schopenhauer and Hartmann, in their pessimistic world view, explain how evil predominates in the world, but they do not really get around to saying how, in their opinion, the divine spiritual source can free itself from the evils of existence and how the human soul can free itself from evil. Wherever evil, pain, suffering, etc. occur in the physical world, the spiritual researcher finds that in the spiritual world all suffering appears as a germ for a development that is to take place later. We can understand this again through an analogy - [not to rely on it, because spiritual science does not rely on analogies, but on facts]: When a desperate person throws themselves in front of a speeding locomotive, two spheres of the material world collide, [which are incompatible with each other]: what is necessary for the unfortunate person to continue living is crushed, the forces of the locomotive, which are otherwise beneficial, push against each other with which they are incompatible. But if the person were to rise in time, he could be saved, and the forces of the locomotive could remain effective in a good sense. The soul of this person would be able to draw new strength from its sudden change of mind for a new beginning at the next stage of life and would be completely restored.

What is put into life is intertwined in such a way that different spheres collide. The spiritual submerges into the physical-sensual and experiences itself there quite differently than it could experience itself in the spiritual alone. As a result, the spiritual grows stronger in a way that would not have been possible without this submersion. Indeed, one could say that certain developments could not have occurred in the spiritual world if evil had not existed in the world, just as no germ of a new plant can arise without the withering away of the flower and part of the mother plant. In every painful experience there is a necessary descent, so that the germ of something new, higher and more luminous, can develop in the bosom of a sphere that is initially foreign to it, from which something must be sacrificed for this purpose, that is, for this development; and in this dying away is the necessity for all evil. In the evil and pain of this world lie the seeds for a future development.

Take, for example, monistic materialism, which has developed from natural science, particularly in the nineteenth century, and under whose ideas some of our most ideal men live as if under a heavy burden. Because this philosophy has penetrated ever deeper into the human soul, it has made it possible to see through material laws, and everyone living today is unconsciously dominated by the knowledge of these laws of material existence, which have, however, pushed back the free view into the spiritual world. And so it became possible that in the nineteenth century minds such as Schopenhauer, Hartmann and Lotze developed, which pushed towards a conception of existence that should have satisfied man, but they could not gain any ideas about the spiritual that would have been suitable to defeat the ideas of natural science in spiritual superiority. Therefore, all that is painful in the world appears inexplicable to them; they see the withering away, but not the germ of hope that lies in the withering away, which must also be found within the dying flower and germinal cover, like the consequence of pain and evil in life. Everything in the physical realm is also affected by the spiritual world. How this should show itself according to its inner nature was not, or not sufficiently, recognized by the researchers of the nineteenth century. We see how difficult it is for the most capable representatives of their time to relate to the phenomena of the world, and how they cannot find a way out with the scientific views alone in many things; we see how such minds thirst for a satisfactory perspective on existence in their innermost soul life, but that their view is clouded by the pressure of the one-sidedly understood natural sciences. For example, this is how the world appears to him: it is like the corpse of a human being whom we know to have been abandoned by his soul. But what lies before us as a corpse is incapable of developing something soulful and spiritual from itself, as if from something left over from a pre-worldly spiritual existence of a divine spiritual substance that was there at the beginning. But in its present state no germ of a new spiritual can be found. This philosopher, Mainländer, who lived in the middle of the nineteenth century, has been appreciated by Privy Councillor Max Seiling in enthusiastic words, but in the facts he is quite right. When one sees the tragedy of such a mind, one recognizes the task of spiritual science in relieving people of the oppressive burden of nineteenth-century ideas, especially in the case of such significant minds as Mainländer, who takes life so seriously, seeing in human existence only old age and evil, pain and death. In contrast to this, however, spiritual science also sees that in all this there is also something alive, the spiritual, which has sprouted towards the future and could not develop later in its special way if it had not been pushed down at times into physical life as evil and pain. From such a point of view, however, one can no longer speak of the “philosophy of pain and its redemption”; then it would be absurd to speak of this redemption - in view of the analogy already used with the plant germ, the so-called seed, for whose development often the whole mother plant, but at least a part of it, the flower and so on, must die, which one would have to regard as an evil for the latter. In the same way, the new and perfect cannot develop from a spiritual germ without evil and pain being aroused in the physical world. If we look at all this from a higher spiritual point of view, we will realize that in all our efforts to alleviate evil, we cannot be released from it in the usual sense, but must learn to endure it. If the painful and suffering in the present is sometimes quite difficult, the gratifying fruit will lie in the future and then come into effect. From such an understanding arises a tolerable, peaceful and industrious outlook on life; who knows, out of suffering, as out of a germ, in the future, the more perfect develops. He who sees the better future in a perhaps painful present, even if he does not close himself to the imperfect and ugly in active remedy. Even when the leaves and blossoms of existence fall away, the germ grows and endures beneath them, enabling a future, richer development, and we understand: what appears to us as evil and suffering in the physical world is a parallel phenomenon to what, in the spiritual world, enables a future, more perfect existence. With this view, which corresponds to reality, we can get over the bitter, the painful and the sorrowful; for in evil and the evils we see something inexplicable only in physical existence, we can only understand and thus bear it when we penetrate to the source of all these processes, to the spiritual world. There the otherwise terrible sight of the sensual-physical world is transformed.

A real and impulsive ethic is also based on all these things. Not a sermonizing of morals emerges from this, which in itself would be easy, but through this, man gets to know the source of evil and evil in the spiritual world, and this and a further urge for knowledge will lead him ever deeper and more thoroughly out of the sensual world and into the supersensible world, as its cause. Spiritual science is able to point out that all evil, all pain and suffering, will remain a mystery to human knowledge as long as their sources are seen only in the world of the senses. Only spiritual science can throw a true light on human life and on all human activity, since it calls back to the origin, which is not really present in the sense world, but teaches the correct form of evil only by showing it in its good origin, which it has in the spiritual world. To summarize, we can present what has been said today in human perception as follows: Much in the world will remain hidden to the seeking soul that does not want to go beyond the physical world in its research; it can easily fall into despair if it does not have the courage to penetrate to the very foundations where life's greatest mysteries lie hidden, to their source in the spiritual world. Spiritual science will lead people more and more to the solution of what oppresses them in their souls. They will be able to come to terms with their existence in the most diverse life situations if they know that evil and ills have their origin not only in the sense world but above all in the supersensible world, recognizing them as the germ of a better future, influenced from the spiritual world, which is also the home of their soul.

Answering questions

Question: So can life only be understood when suffering is evenly distributed?

Rudolf Steiner: When talking about oxygen, we should not expect to solve all of chemistry's questions at once. This is a different question here: the distribution of evil and evil. There is not only one life. Let us assume we have a picture: a variety of things are depicted on it, we cover everything except for one ugly thing: only when the cover is removed does it become apparent that there is something ugly in that very place. [It is the same with knowledge: if it is not merely theoretical, it is not acquired out of joy and pleasure, but out of suffering. Joy is something that is gratefully accepted in life. It is not a matter of asceticism, but anyone who has come to a realization that has permeated his entire soul and is asked, “Would you give up your joy or your pain?” would answer, “I would leave joy and pleasure if only I could keep the pain I have endured, because I owe the realization to it.” And so, when viewed from a higher standpoint, a great deal leads to a justification of suffering and pain.

Question: [Regarding] Hatred, Cruelty, Cannibalism: How can they be the sources of a good strength in the other world?

Rudolf Steiner: I did not say that, it did not even occur to me! There is no cannibalism in the spiritual world, so nothing can be developed from cannibalism in the spiritual world. One can say, for example, that a philanthropic soul would carry out all kinds of good deeds with lion power: that would be something completely different; but one must not say that the lion's power of devouring becomes philanthropy.

Rudolf Steiner: This question is asking me to answer with a simple “yes” or “no”: No.

Question: What is good and what is evil?

Rudolf Steiner: To ask this question after today's lecture seems a bit strange. It is an educational habit of the last few centuries that one asks: What is this? What is that? — What is actually contained in this “what”? One does not notice how shortsighted such questions are. But the question can be deepened. As the question is asked, one cannot answer with an absolute definition. From the whole of life, one should explain every phenomenon of life. So, if good is to be explained, yes, many definitions can really be found. For example: Good is that which is so placed in life that the life of this person is most promoted; or what best satisfies one's own conscience, and so on and so on. Someone may come along and say that evil is something fluid, or time, or a tribe. But that is not what it is about, whether in a partial or general sense; one must try to explain it as has been done today. Question: Good and evil: [Is there no difference]?

Rudolf Steiner: There is nothing to be done with this question either. Gravity, which is extraordinarily beneficial when it drives the earth around the sun, can cause evil as an avalanche rolling down from the mountain. The lecture was not intended to teach reevaluation in a different sphere, but change into a different sphere [hinein]. Even if people do not know what evil they do, that is not the point: it is completely irrelevant whether something happens consciously or unconsciously in the sphere of decay. The lecture was not an apology for evil, as if to say: Those who are truly evil are the best, because they have the gift of clear-sighted good. It was not stated that the best person is the great criminal, but rather that there is no “beyond good and evil” in the sensual world, only in the supersensible world.

From an Anthroposophic News Sheet

The subject of today's lecture sets out from a question which is often asked by people who have perhaps heard superficially of spiritual science and spiritual investigation, for led by the conceptions and habits of thought ruling in the present time, they cannot think how it is possible to draw knowledge from the super-sensible worlds.

We have frequently emphasized that a person standing upon the foundation of spiritual research can best of all understand the objections raised from an external standpoint. Indeed one can say that if the conceptions advanced by a spiritual investigator were to meet the approval of wider circles, this would be far more surprising than if they were to give rise to the greatest possible opposition … for they must give rise to antagonism! This fact is explained by the whole of today's civilization and by the whole development of the external economic life during past centuries. Moreover, we have frequently emphasized that spiritual science always fully recognizes the results achieved for the whole of civilization by natural science, and the natural-scientific mentality depends on the fact that the Spirit of the Time has—if we may use this expression—turned away for a while from the spiritual world. (In the course of human evolution “a while” is long and may last for centuries!) This is evident through the fact that it is the physical world which induces people to think, so that they adopt a mentality which is not accustomed to the contemplation of the spiritual world. But this is not the only reason which induces people to oppose spiritual science; this antagonism is due to other, deeper causes. The subject of today's lecture—“How can we gain Knowledge of the Supersensible Worlds?”—therefore seems very appropriate.

The very first requirement is that the human being should recognize through self-knowledge that he is a super-sensible being and be able to understand his own super-sensible nature. But there are many things in the psychic life of modern man connected with the cultural achievements of the present time, and of humanity as a whole, which are a serious handicap to real self-knowledge.

In regard to his soul, the human being is never alone with it, yet he should be able to face his soul in complete solitude if he really wishes to understand its innermost being. Consciously, he is never quite alone with his soul. Yet there is a kind of solitude which arises when the human being passes over to that condition in which he does not use his external limbs but leaves them to the earth's force of gravity, and when he commands his memory and his intellect bound up with the senses to stand still. This is the case every day, when he falls asleep. The objection raised against the spiritual-scientific statement or truth that when the human being is asleep his bodily organization does not reveal anything that might explain the processes surging up and down within his soul until he wakes up again—that the bodily processes do not in any way explain what takes place in the soul during sleep—this will be unreservedly recognized by natural science in a comparatively short time. Natural science will admit that the soul's content dives down into the bodily organization at the moment of waking up, in the same way in which the air which we inhale becomes a part of our own body. And the same thing can be said of the moment in which we fall asleep, when the soul's content abandons the body. From the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, we therefore confront a being which is severed from the bodily structure and which does not offer us any instruments enabling us to observe this fact.

We can therefore say that the sleeping soul is in a certain sense isolated; that is to say, it is not connected with the external world through the intellect, the senses, and memory, as is the human being when he is awake. But in normal life, we lose consciousness when we fall asleep, and we must therefore say that in this isolated state of the soul the human being is not able to observe the soul that inhabits his body. It is this circumstance which renders a real self-knowledge impossible to ordinary people.

But the following question can be raised: Is it nevertheless possible to attain to real self-knowledge?

It will be of help to consider another condition of the soul. The fact which will now be advanced is not meant as an analogy, but as an aid enabling us to envisage the reality of the soul's condition between sleeping and waking. It is not an analogy, but an explanation pointing to the real facts. This is the SOUL CONDITION OF THE SEASONS OF THE YEAR.

In the Spring the vegetable world springs up, the uplifting world of Nature filling us with joy. In the Spring we see the plants springing up, in the summer we see them growing and flourishing, in the autumn we see them fade way (with the exception of evergreen plants) and in the winter Nature takes them back into her bosom, so that their growth and development cannot be perceived.

Let us now suppose that with the coming of Spring the human being were able to obtain another state of consciousness; his consciousness would be dulled, and as summer advances it would grow more unconscious—only when Nature begins to fade and to decay would he wake up again. Human consciousness would therefore be slumbering on that part of the earth where summer holds sway, but in that case the human being would never gain knowledge of the germinating, flowering plants round about him. The plants which cover the earth during the summer would remain an unknown world to a person or a being endowed with human qualities, a world which his senses could not perceive, a super-sensible world.

Now we have something in human life which really corresponds to this. Those who penetrate more deeply into things will not look upon it as a mere analogy, but as a reality—the reality which thus confronts us in the WHOLE NATURE OF THE HUMAN BEING.

What is the sleeping human being that can be physically perceived by our senses? Though outwardly and substantially he may differ from a plant, he is inwardly of the same value as a plant, for a plant's development attains the stage of life, but not that of consciousness, not even the consciousness of animals. Sleeping man therefore resembles a plant, but under different life conditions.

In regard to certain forces which influence the human being, he appears to us, in his plant-like condition of sleep, similar to the earth during summer, when the sun with its forces of heat and of light draws the plants out of the soil. We know that we fall asleep when our strength is worn out by the day's work. We also know that sleep restores our worn-out strength by drawing forces out of the depths of life.

The same process takes place in the cosmos. If we discard old habits of thinking, we gradually learn to know that sleep is in the real meaning of the word, and not analogously, the SOUL'S SUMMERTIME.

From the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, we pass through the soul's summer.

But when we are awake, the day's work, and particularly our efforts of thought and the soul forces expended on thought, demolish the plant-like processes. Does not man's waking condition resemble autumn and winter which obliterate from the surface of the earth the plants which the summer produced? Our waking hours are the soul's winter season. This is not an analogy. It is easy to maintain the external analogy so as to discover certain similarities, but this would be a superficial way of considering things. We must look upon things from within, in an intimate way.

If we wish to observe ourselves, we cannot find the same access to our being during the soul's summer season as during its winter season, but we lose ourselves as the summertime advances. For if we could observe what forces are at work in order to produce a germinating, growing life, we would really have to grow unconscious. In fact, we are not able to observe the soul; we seem to lose our consciousness in spring and regain it only in the autumn.

We can therefore say that self-knowledge is only possible if the hidden side of man's being can be revealed.

Let us now consider the characteristics of the soul's wintertime; that is to say, of the waking condition. During our waking condition, the soul is filled with emotions, resolutions, thoughts, ideals, and so forth. If we survey all this, we must say that we experience it only in part. For let us only take human thought outside the whole compass of human soul life: How does the human being experience the soul's wintertime, if he wishes to fulfill his tasks in the external physical world? He is interested in his world of thoughts, in everything which he obtains through thinking, only to the extent of asking: What external realities do thoughts reflect? What value should be attributed to thoughts, as images of reality? This constitutes, to begin with, his chief interest.

The whole life of the soul is directed towards this chief interest: to develop THIS side of the soul. Other things have far less importance in the so-called normal life. Can one, however, not attribute to thoughts another value than that which consists in merely reflecting something like a picture in the mirror? Those who only wish to attribute this one-sided value to thought (and most people do), are in the same position of an artist who only sees what his work of art is to represent. Yet in the production of a work of art something quite different takes place than a mere representation: something takes place within the soul. Art could not play such an important part in the development of humanity if it did not constantly bear the soul along the path of progress, if it were not a seed which takes root in the soul, thus enabling it to have new experiences and changing it into something quite different from what it was before it looked upon the work of art.

The soul does not advance by a one-sided pedagogical, pedantic contemplation of works of art, but by recognizing the laws of human development which are contained in art. Those who only recognize the validity of thought in regard to things which it mirrors and represents, resemble people who only look upon a work of art from the aspect of what it sets forth. The human soul is accustomed to look upon thought as a mere representation. The value of truth is determined by the value of reality grasped by thought. Thoughts which do not aim at this are generally rejected. Philosophy, for instance, has a right to adopt this attitude; but let us ask whether such concepts really grasp reality, whether they refer to something real.

There is another way of looking upon thought: it can be measured in accordance with its value as an inner means of self-education. There are thoughts which do not reproduce an external reality, but they are able to advance the soul inwardly. Thoughts of this kind should be taken into consideration when the soul really sets out upon the path of self-knowledge.

We have frequently explained that when we immerse ourselves in thoughts which do not represent an external reality, we may designate them as MEDITATION, CONCENTRATION, or CONTEMPLATION. What does this mean? That we call into being a soul condition which resembles that of sleep. It means that the soul does not use its external members, is not incited by the senses, but by a strong will power, by—one might say—a negative attention which rejects the experiences brought by the normal daytime consciousness. This is a condition which is radically different from that of sleep, because the soul remains fully conscious of itself and is filled by a definite thought, and when the soul is thus immersed in this thought, fully concentrated upon it, it is immersed in concentration or contemplation.

It is not easy to produce this condition; careful and systematic exercises are needed for it. But it kindles in the soul the light of an entirely new life. When this condition has reached the stage of maturity, the soul feels that dormant forces awaken within it. For this reason the thought itself is not the essential thing in meditation, but the essential thing is to practice CONCENTRATION, to concentrate fully upon this thought. This is the same as training the muscles by physical exercises; they develop by physical training. In the case of the ordinary forces of the soul, thought training exercises are of no importance, for new forces have to be drawn out of the soul's depths, forces which render the soul stronger and more elastic; for instance, that part of the soul has to be drawn out which only re-echoes faintly in our ordinary waking life. Consequently the CONTENT of thought is not the essential thing; the essential thing is that the soul should be ACTIVE, that through this activity it should call into life forces which exist in ordinary life, but in a dormant state. This training shows us that the soul can also exist independently without having to rely on the physical body; a condition arises which resembles that of sleep, though it is radically different from sleep.

Why is sleep an unconscious state during our ordinary life? Because the soul's inner life is so weak and concealed that we cannot perceive it. But when these forces awaken, the soul can become aware of itself even when it is not dependent on the body.

We now experience that the soul is really able to face its summer season consciously. The content of our thoughts is now experienced in an entirely different way. In the ordinary course of the day, our thoughts are like grains of corn which the farmer gathers on the field. If they are used as nourishment, they only reach a certain stage of development. But when they are gathered, they do not differ from the grains which are to be used as seed. Thus the ordinary thoughts which we experience during the soul's winter form the soul's spiritual content. They fill the soul, they are like the grains of corn which are used as nourishment. But the thoughts which form the subject of meditation and concentration resemble the grains of corn which are used as seed; dormant forces are drawn out of them, which germinate and grow.

Ordinarily we only learn to know one side of the influence of thought. But through meditation and concentration our thoughts take root in the life of the soul, and their activity changes, for they begin to germinate and grow. We now experience consciously things which we otherwise experience unconsciously during the soul's summertime; a new world arises, the so-called imaginative world. The fruit of our efforts now rises up before the soul and the soul's summer is raised into consciousness, so that we live through it differently than during our normal life, for the experiences which normally glide down into unconsciousness now begin to germinate and grow just as if plants were to grow out of single grains of corn during the winter.

We must learn to know this other aspect of our being which reveals the soul in its fruitfulness, in its greening, sprouting life. Thought will otherwise maintain the character of a mere representation, but it begins to germinate and grow if we do not treat it as a mere image, if we look upon it as a seed which can germinate.

Self-knowledge then enables us to call up in our consciousness the soul's summertime.

Even as we first assumed that springtime dulls the consciousness and that a new world arises during the summer, so the soul is now able to survey a new world, which it did not know before. A world, which otherwise would remain concealed, grows out of the soul's living foundation if we do not remain standing halfway, but use our thoughts as seeds. Meditation, concentration and contemplation simply imply that our thoughts and feelings (for this is also possible through feeling) are able to develop forces which otherwise remain dormant and unknown; that is to say, a new world rises up before us.

Many things work against us if we incessantly strive to produce this world. It is a requirement of human nature that when we enter the summer time of the soul, we must above all maintain within the soul a certain winter constitution if we wish to be capable human beings in life and in ordinary science. This is a necessity in external life, for otherwise we cannot be capable human beings. We should also have confidence in our thinking, for we cannot find our way in the world unless confidence is our starting point; that is to say, unless we confidently believe that we can be guided by our thinking and can trust in the guidance of our thought. Imagine what consequences would arise if there were worlds in which we could not rely upon our thinking! This would shatter us; it would deprive us of every capacity. Human beings must be able to rely on thought; they must have this belief in thought … no matter where they may land with it.

Everything has its light and dark side. But where we need light, we do not take into consideration the shadows. We train our thought in the sensory world; the physical world is our teacher. It is not the physical world which teaches us to rely on thought in itself; from the physical world we learn to rely on a kind of thinking which finds its support in the external sensory world. From the very outset, we are thus not accustomed to look upon thought as an instrument which is able to lead us in every sphere of life. And we lose our confidence; we begin to feel uncertain whenever we come across something which does not approach us in the customary way.

It is this which induces people to take up a negative attitude towards spiritual science. We can understand this, and, as stated, no objection can be raised against it; on the contrary, our contemporaries are quite helpless. But the true cause of their attitude is the fact that their thought has been trained by observing the physical world. In regard to spiritual science, it is as if they were to enter a world which is not the physical world, but with capacities acquired by living in the physical world which trains external thought. This explains the attitude towards realms which are different from those which can be grasped by ordinary external thought. When people are confronted by the super-sensible worlds, they feel that their confidence in thought is imperiled.

There is another thing which characterizes the soul's winter, or the ordinary waking condition. We know that the habits of thinking during the past centuries gave rise to materialism, or—to use a nobler term, which is, however, a mistaken designation—monism. This world conception can, however, only be applied to the external world, to the external aspects of life. Spiritual science shows us that the spirit lives behind everything, and if one penetrates into external things one can discover the spirit everywhere.

If the soul has passed through a conscientious training, as explained above, a point is reached where we pass through extraordinary soul experiences, which show us why we come to materialism, monism, and so forth. When we feel a new world springing up within us (as described in my book KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS), a certain moment arises in which the soul has the same feeling towards this new world as towards the physical world. This means that when we observe things in the super-sensible world, we should develop the capacity to turn our attention towards them in full freedom and then to turn our gaze away from them just as freely.

Imagine what it would be like if we were not able to turn our gaze away at will from the objects of the physical world, if they fascinated us to such an extent that we could not look away even if we wished. This would be the situation of a soul who could not turn away from the things which rise up before it as a result of exercises or through its own faculties.

In the super-sensible world, however, we cannot turn our gaze away from the objects in the same way in which we turn away from things in the physical world. This does not suffice. It should be remembered that the spiritual investigator must be able to obliterate and cancel every new soul content which he produces. In the spiritual world this is the same as turning away our gaze from the physical objects in the physical world.

This is the radical difference between the spiritual investigator and people who have hallucinations, visions and fixed ideas, which they obstinately consider to be objective realities. A spiritual investigator cannot admit such things. He must be aware of the fact that he is only conjuring up shadow images and that he must blot them out again from his spiritual vision. The capacity to obliterate such images pertains to a definite stage of development. One can see how greedily the soul clings to its fixed ideas and images and to blot them out is one of the most difficult things of all!

Why?—Because not only the forces already described develop and grow, but also other forces which normally are quite weak. There is ONE force in particular which grows with the development of the other one; namely, SELFISHNESS, the self-love which exists in ordinary life. It grows like a force of Nature. In ordinary life our moral forces can overcome selfishness, but they cannot overcome forces of Nature, such as thunder or lightning! This increased self-love or selfishness appears within the soul as if it were a force of Nature, an elemental force. The soul development leading to spiritual investigation must consequently bring with it also the capacity to overcome this enhanced selfishness, which lives within the soul like a force of Nature that fetters the soul. The soul's ordinary forces do not suffice for this; they cannot overcome it.

At this point we come across a deeply stirring phenomenon, which appears from the very outset. It may take on various forms, but it is justified to designate it as the APPROACH TO THE THRESHOLD OF DEATH. We feel as if that part which we call our Ego or the soul were torn away from us as if by lightning, taken away from us. Everything which formerly appeared to be connected with us now seems to be severed from us. Our own self appears like a Being outside; we face it in the same way in which we confront an object of the external world.

Though it is easy to describe this in words, it is one of the most stirring experiences which we can have. The ground under our feet seems to vanish. Everything which constituted our thoughts and feelings is surrendered, given up. But if we succeed in remaining steadfast, we shall be borne over a kind of abyss. This experience awakens a feeling which lived in us in a dormant state and which must now rise to the surface: it is the FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN.

The spiritual world is always present, but we do not know it, and at this moment we confront it as if it were a void. This gives rise to a feeling of fear. But if we proceed regularly along the spiritual path, we should not think that we are in any way endangered by this experience. It forms part of self-education, for we must acquire the strength to bear the sight of the spiritual world—we develop the strength and steadfastness enabling us to bear its sight. In ordinary life we are protected against it and we speak of a GUARDIAN OF THE THRESHOLD.

The fact that ordinarily we are not conscious of such things does not prove that they do not exist within the soul. The soul is a twofold being: within its depths it often presents an entirely different aspect from the one which we know. We may, for instance, hate a person and be conscious of this feeling, yet our hate may simply be the cloak of love and we daze ourselves because this love cannot come to full expression. Not only Faust, but every human being, has two souls.

A soul investigator may come across the following: In ordinary life the human being finds support and strength by checking the fear that lives in his subconsciousness. But a spiritual investigator cannot fail to see the fear which always lives in the soul's depths. He enters the spiritual world by overcoming this fear. If this fear rises to the surface without entering human consciousness, if it knocks at the door, as it were, and a person ignores it in spite of all, what takes place and what enables that person to overlook this feeling? He pushes down fear, as it were, by denying the existence of the spiritual world.

Materialists and monists are therefore afraid of the spiritual world; this fear lives in their soul's depth and their materialism dazes them, so that they do not notice it. This is a strange phenomenon; nevertheless it is true that materialism is based upon an unknown, unnamed fear. Of course, it cannot be pleasant for them to hear from a spiritual investigator that monists and materialists speak as they do because they are tormented by fear. But to a real observation this connection between materialism and fear will be clearly evident.

We learn to confront the physical world by training thought through the observation of physical things. This gives us confidence in our thinking power and we ignore our subconscious fear. But this also prevents us from entering the super-sensible world.

A twofold soul condition must therefore be developed if we wish to enter the super-sensible world: on the one hand we should rise to the state of being existing in the spiritual world and on the other hand we should be able to blot it out; that is to say, when we return to the physical world we must push into the background everything that constitutes our field of vision in the super-sensible world. For if we mix up these two worlds we become dreamers, false mystics, and so forth and can never become spiritual investigators.

Strength of soul should enable us to keep these worlds apart, but at the same time we should be able to connect physical things with super-sensible things, because the foundation of the physical world lies in the super-sensible world. This characterizes a spiritual investigator.

It is necessary, for this same reason, that a spiritual investigator should raise into his consciousness, in the soul's summer and winter time, what is normally concealed by sleep. If he fails to do this, he will at every moment fall a prey to the above-mentioned fear.

When we enter the spiritual world we do not only perceive a vague soul-spiritual element, but definite objects, facts and beings which are just as differentiated as the things pertaining to the physical world. Modern people find it so difficult to accept this. They do not forgive the spiritual investigator for seeing a spiritual reality consisting of differentiated beings.

A well-known man, such as Charles Elliot of Harvard University, once declared that he could find a spiritual element behind the physical-sensory world, but that the human being is always distinct and separate from his body. If the spiritual investigator now declares that self-training, of the kind described above, leads to the perception of DIFFERENTIATED spiritual beings that form a cosmos, people reject this. But if one were to tell Charles Elliot that whenever he sees the vegetable world or observes single plants this is nothing but Nature, Nature, and Nature, or that when he studies various substances in his laboratory these substances are “Nature, nothing but ‘Nature’,” he would come to no result whatever! People tolerate spiritual science if it limits itself to speaking of the spirit in general, but they do not tolerate it if it begins to speak of definite objects and beings pertaining to the spiritual world. But even as the physical world appears differentiated to our sensory organs, so the spiritual world has differentiated beings, even though they do not possess a physical body.

When we learn to know the spiritual world, it therefore presents a differentiated aspect. As stated, SELF EXPERIENCE OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD is needed in order to recognize it, or even to admit its existence. The stirring experience mentioned above produces the result that everything which constitutes our Ego separates from us and that otherwise dormant forces awaken within us. Our soul-spiritual being that helps to build up our physical body and unites itself with the hereditary stream, with everything that comes to us from father and mother, separates from us, and this separation is a deeply stirring, significant experience. A new being then comes to life within us and we realize that the Being which passes through birth and death is not that part of our being which we ordinarily look upon as our own Self! We now experience that part of our being described by spiritual science, the eternal part which passes through REPEATED LIVES ON EARTH.

We now face the prospect of solving the problem of infinity in a concrete way, for without such a solution we confront an infinity extending beyond our vision. Infinity comprises single lives on earth. Insight into the super-sensible worlds and knowledge of these worlds can only be acquired along the path described above. People who think that a really satisfactory knowledge can be gained along some other path follow a wrong direction which does not lead to the stirring soul experiences described above. For they wish to acquire super-sensible truths which are really physical facts, truths pertaining to the physical world, but this does not lead them to real knowledge. One can therefore see how difficult it is for modern people to acquire a true knowledge of the super-sensible even for the best of our contemporaries. Here we can only adopt Schopenhauer's standpoint, who says that to begin with truth takes on a paradoxical form, for this has always been its lot. People now adopt the same attitude towards spiritual science as they once did towards Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Copernicus. We must take it for granted that spiritual science necessarily encounters the same obstacles. Giordano Bruno said that the blue vault of heaven was not a boundary, as was generally believed. This made natural science progress immensely. Spiritual science is in the same situation today. There are no boundaries of birth (or conception) and death, even as the blue vault of heaven is not a boundary. Giordano Bruno, though he realized the limitations of human knowledge, showed that one can look into infinity and envisage infinite worlds in the infinite firmament. The spiritual scientist must now speak in a similar way. He sets forth truths pertaining to the super-sensible worlds. But our contemporaries find it difficult to understand such truths. They can see that the teaching of repeated lives on earth can really throw light upon human destiny, and they realize that this conception gives courage and strength, for it shows that death does not blot out the human being, but that he can find himself again in future lives on earth. Many of our contemporaries can see this. Nevertheless they expect proofs supporting this truth, proofs which must be advanced in a different way from the one described above and they reject everything which is set forth from the super-sensible aspect.

A modern writer who really tried to penetrate into the super-sensible sphere and who showed this in many of his writings, recently also occupied himself with the teaching designated as that of repeated lives on earth. This writer is Maurice Maeterlinck. Further down I will quote a passage from his book “ON DEATH.” Maeterlinck has no idea where the proofs for super-sensible truths should be sought, and so he designates this teaching as a mere belief, as mere faith.

Spiritual science, however, has nothing to do with beliefs and dogmas. The Copernican world conception can be accepted independently of any belief, because it is science. In the same way spiritual science, like Copernicanism, does not come into conflict with any faith. Yet Maeterlinck looks upon it as a belief and the teaching of repeated lives on earth is to him something which can also be found in certain religions, as Metempsychosis. Yet spiritual science speaks of something quite different! It speaks of the REPEATED LIVES ON EARTH. In his book on death Maeterlinck writes:

... “There never existed a belief more beautiful, just, pure, moral and consoling, and in a certain sense a more probable belief than theirs. Only the teaching of universal atonement and purification of all bodily and spiritual imperfections can explain every social error and all the injustice in human destinies which so often make us feel indignant. But the strength of a BELIEF does not prove its truth. Although six millions of people adhere to it, although it approaches the darkness of man's origins more than any other and is the only one which is not filled with hatred, although it is the least absurd of all religions, it should have given us what the others failed to bring: irrefragable witnesses. So far it has only given us the first shadow of a first testimony.”

In the first place, spiritual science has nothing to do with religion; it is a world conception like Copernicanism. Spiritual science is never in contrast with any religion which is rightly understood. But Maeterlinck's new book, which also deals with modern spiritual science, shows that he does not see that spiritual science comes to its results along paths which are quite different from those of ordinary external science. That is why he adopts the standpoint that spiritual science fails to supply proofs. What kind of proofs does he expect? Proofs consisting in the very things which must be cast aside when one enters the super-sensible worlds! He confronts this in the same way in which one used to confront the problem of the squaring of the circle. Until quite recently, the almost yearly attempts to transform a circle into a square covering the same surface never passed the test. The Academy in Paris showed that such attempts cannot lead to any results and that they must end in the wastepaper basket! If one day a solution can really be found, it will somehow come to the surface, but the Academicians declared that they could not waste their time in checking all the calculations presented to them in connection with the squaring of the circle, and people who still try to tackle this problem are looked upon as amateurs, because it is evidently impossible to solve it with the aid of mathematics. Consequently one must say that at the present time it is foolish to attempt to solve this problem of squaring the circle.

Spiritual science can easily show that in regard to super-sensible things people try to square the circle in another sphere! Supersensible things have to be treated in accordance with the methods described in “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and their demonstrations must be understood accordingly. Otherwise one chases after problems which resemble that of the squaring of the circle. One can find even today that the teaching of repeated lives on earth is “more beautiful, pure, just, and consoling,” more probable than others, and nevertheless fail to recognize it. But it is possible to grasp it if one can see that one cannot discuss it intellectually.

Supersensible facts must, of course, be investigated by a spiritual investigator, but when they have been investigated, they are accessible to the ordinary intellect. To such truths one cannot apply demonstrations which are obtained by ordinary means, but only proofs such as those required for the understanding of a painting by someone who is not a painter. The ordinary intellect can examine the facts pertaining to the spiritual world and grasp its characteristics. Under the ground there are mines and ores, which cannot exist upon the surface of the earth, under the direct influence of the sunlight. Similarly the results of spiritual investigation cannot be found with the aid of ordinary thought, or through ordinary science. For the investigation of spiritual facts we need the soul forces described above. But when the results of spiritual investigation are communicated, this is the same as sunlight penetrating into the depths of the earth and revealing the ores in all their beauty and refulgence.

The ordinary intellect can therefore grasp the results of spiritual investigation, but super-sensible facts can only be investigated by a soul that undergoes the training described above. When we thus grasp spiritual-scientific truths, we develop within the soul a FORCE which gives us inner strength and support. Fruits ripen within us, which appear as a definite way of thinking and feeling, as a definite volitional attitude towards our own self and the universe.

We have amply explained all the obstacles which the soul must overcome in order to enter the spheres where the spiritual world reveals itself in its authentic form. We must pierce the darkness and at the conclusion of this lecture we may accept the feelings which are expressed in the following words. If the soul never flags, it will finally come

Through difficult soul obstacles,
Through the chaos of spiritual darkness,
To earnest clarity,
To luminous truth.

In the scene in which he is the gravedigger's assistant, the poet has the Danish prince Hamlet speak about the value of the dead Caesar in view of a great and significant historical figure. The poet's Hamlet is disturbed and brooding:

The great Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole, well enough, from the harsh north.
Oh, that the earth, to which the world has trembled,
Might bar the wind and weather with a wall.

It is not surprising that these ideas should occur to Hamlet in memory of the great Caesar, when in his gloomy mind the thought could be conceived that of all the body, the human being, of all that exercised the power of the will, nothing remain of the body, of the human being, of all that exercised the power of will, nothing but a heap of external matter, which, broken down into its atoms and dissolved, could be used to “glue a wall” here or there; but this same train of thought is quite indicative of the prevailing mood of our time. There is an excellent manual by Huxley about physiology, in the sense of our current scientific understanding, which has also been translated into German. Right on one of the first pages, you will find a reference to the words of Hamlet that have just been spoken to you, but said in all seriousness at the end of the “First Lecture”:

It is impossible to follow with any degree of certainty these wanderings, which are more changeable and extensive than those devised by the ancient sages who believed in the doctrine of transmigration; but it is probable that sooner or later some, if not all, of the scattered atoms will be gathered into new forms of life. The sun's rays, penetrating the plant world, combine some of the wandering atoms of carbonic acid, water, ammonia and salts to produce plants. Plants are devoured by animals, animals devour each other, man devours both plant and animal; and so it is easily possible that atoms, which once formed an essential part of the busy brain of Julius Caesar, now enter into the composition of Caesar, the negro in Alabama, or of Caesar, the house dog of some English household.

We do not want to think dogmatically and reason logically, but consider how a distinguished nineteenth-century naturalist like Huxley could arrive at such conclusions based on his innermost feelings. We no longer want to ask: What becomes of the physical components when a person's body turns to dust? but we want to turn our attention to the will embodied in the human being, to his self-aware ego, and pay attention to the paths that this soul-spiritual takes, although otherwise the person feels compelled to ask, not which path the spirit takes, but which of the outer material takes.

We will soon see that there is an intimate connection between the prevailing mood of the time and the approval of winning the hearts of the people when they are told that they can become happy, or at least healthy, if they follow certain rules, eat only this or that, bathe in a special way, dress in a reformed manner, and so on; but But they react badly when one speaks to them of the fact that the spiritual content of ideas, truths, and insights with which we fill our soul become living forces to harmonize our inner being, our whole life, to make it strong and resistant to all possible attacks and to strengthen us to fulfill our life's tasks.

By way of explanation, I would just like to point out how fear and anxiety make people pale, how feelings of shame make them blush, and how the soul affects the body and also has a wider effect than is generally assumed. But if you continue to point out that the thoughts of a spiritual worldview lead us up to spiritual heights, that a correct way of thinking of this kind has a healthy effect on people, both spiritually and physically, we find strong doubt or outright disbelief in the vast majority of our contemporaries, and in many cases only because people of our time have become too lazy to think in order to apply the mental and spiritual effort necessary to work through such views. Both Huxley's book and the experiences to be made everywhere in life show in a characteristic way that our age has come to believe only in the outwardly material and the obvious. The nineteenth century brought us these conditions.

Spiritual science is now far from rejecting the tremendous achievements of natural science, which this century has handed down to us along with an almost incalculable wealth of facts. However, it is necessary to point out that certain concepts have crept into the hearts of people and become ingrained there, becoming, so to speak, fashionable, so that it is difficult for them to decide to believe in the spiritual without trying to imagine it materially. But as a result, humanity is threatened with a mental chaos in the near future, a confusion with regard to the most important things, of which I will pick out only one and therefore refer again to Huxley's “physiology”, namely the concept of life, as far as it is obvious and, so to speak, self-evident. So [there] is said:

But in reality, the immediate cause of death is always the cessation of the activities of one of three organs: the brainstem, the lungs or the heart.

Thus, a man can be instantly killed by injury to a part of the brain called [...] medulla, as can be caused by hanging or breaking the neck. Or death can be the direct result of asphyxiation by strangulation, hanging or drowning, or in other words by the inhibition of respiratory processes. Finally, death occurs immediately when the heart stops pumping blood around. These three organs, the brain, the lungs and the heart, are therefore somewhat fancifully called the triad of life.

Ultimately, however, life has only two feet on which it rests, the lungs and the heart; for death by the brain is always only the indirect consequence of the effect that injury to this organ has on the lungs or the heart. The brain's activities cease when either breathing or circulation has ended. But if blood circulation and respiration are artificially maintained, then one can remove the brain without causing death.

So if Huxley thinks he can preserve life with these means, then under certain restrictions there is no objection to it, but I would still like to raise the question of whether this can actually still be called life. Probably everyone present would say thank you for such a life. Therefore, a statement of this kind in a scientific work that delves deeply into the most essential concepts proves that today's world has forgotten how to think about concepts such as “life” in an accurate way.

But anyone who, as is right, realizes that the thoughts and feelings that we predominantly harbor can make the body healthy or sick will also soon become aware of how difficult it is to pass on clear concepts into the future. With inadequate concepts in our soul about life and death, about spirit and soul, we are placed in a state of mind that soon makes us doubt everything possible in us, paralyzes the spiritual forces in us and prevents us from adequately fulfilling our duties in life; more and more it will become desolate in the soul and spirit of man, such a one will finally be plunged into powerlessness and despair. The attentive observer foresees that humanity can be brought into a dire situation on this path, and he can see that the beginnings of this are already being made in some places, especially when the most advanced science is compatible with such concepts that have an almost murderous effect on our soul and spirit and thus also on our body.

Alongside this, something else arises, namely a need that is suppressed again by a chaos of concepts, but which nevertheless stirs anew in the soul and occupies the mind: people talk so much about development from imperfect life conditions to more perfect ones, but where it would be most necessary to talk about these things, people do not want to believe in them when it comes to the human soul. But this human soul has ever new needs from epoch to epoch, always wanting to live in more advanced circumstances; the soul of the twelfth century is still different from that of the nineteenth century. It is not a matter of external things, of schooling and erudition, but of the different way and conception of life that develops for the soul from epoch to epoch.

This evening, we can only touch on the subject of life; it is significant that almost every person feels the need to develop certain things emotionally and intellectually, which in earlier cultural epochs were accepted on trust. In the past, whole epochs were far more dominated by certain general judgments, and all souls were generally occupied with the same ideas. Today, on the other hand, the urge to be independent is increasingly asserting itself in the souls of people, to find the points of reference within themselves, to tap into themselves the reason and source of existence, in the face of moral commandments and judgments of all kinds.

Our time, however, suffers from the fact that many people allow this need to rest in many respects, or entirely, on the ground of the soul. It cannot arise because it is drowned out by the chaos of life; and such people then go under in their belief in authority - which seems all the more terrible because it invokes the materially intangible - by always repeating that “science” has established and proven this and that. The vast majority of people cannot follow up and investigate for themselves how it has been established, and that is why the authority of science has grown into a formidable general magnitude.

These two schools of thought are in conflict with each other. If spiritual science wants to establish a proper relationship with these two powers, it must pursue the strict goal of making it possible for people to satisfy, in the truest sense, the deep needs that arise within them. I would like to point out that in earlier decades, questions about the destiny of the soul, the origin of man, and the sources of all spiritual life were approached quite differently than they are today. I would like to draw your attention to a leading personality in whom this can be seen in his unique spiritual constitution, in his feelings and perceptions. Goethe, who I have in mind here, rarely expressed himself on this subject without any particular external inducement, but on the occasion of the funeral of Wieland, whom he greatly revered, he spoke to a person close to him about what he thought about the fate of the soul after death. Goethe replied to the question put to him:

[Wieland will now] do nothing small, nothing unworthy, nothing incompatible with the moral greatness that he has maintained throughout his life. [...] The destruction of such high powers of the soul can never be a question in nature under any circumstances; nature never treats her capital so wastefully [...] As for the personal survival of our soul after death, this is how it is in my view. It does not contradict the many years of observation that I have made about the nature of our and all beings in nature; on the contrary, it even emerges from them with new conclusiveness. But how much or how little of this personality deserves to continue, by the way, is another question and a point that we must leave to God.

Goethe then develops a certain hierarchy of souls, which he calls monads here, that makes them suitable for various activities; he considers these monads to be immortal and, in their higher development, to be actively involved in the development of the world system, and then continues:

I am certain that I have already been here a thousand times as you see me now and hope to come back a thousand more times. [...] But this does not mean that by limiting our observations of nature, limits are also set to our faith. On the contrary, given the immediacy of divine feelings in us, it can easily happen that knowledge must appear as a patchwork, especially on a planet that has been torn out of its full context with the sun, leaving all and any observation incomplete, which is precisely why it is only through faith that it receives its complete complement. [...] As soon as one starts from the principle that knowledge and faith are not there to cancel each other out, but to complement each other, then the right thing will be worked out everywhere.

Goethe actually mastered the natural science of his time; he also enriched it through a way of thinking that was alive in the spiritual. That is why it is all the more interesting to experience how all these things are reflected in Goethe's view, how the life of the soul after death could be shaped according to his needs, based on all his long personal and scientific life experiences, and to see how Goethe, according to his spiritual worldview, was far removed from the modern materialistic worldview that was increasingly being developed. So it is up to everyone to form an idea of the spiritual world view through their entire mental configuration.

At that time, the now widespread and scientifically promoted worldview of “monism” was not yet known. People were not yet so anxiously concerned that a gap should not open up between humans and higher animals [...]; rather, they believed in this gap in a physical sense, and if they wanted to bridge it, they thought in deeply materialistic terms [...]. People wanted to have something materially distinct, since they could not find it in the idea that something spiritual could be found as a distinguishing factor. So they searched the entire body, the soft tissues and the skeleton, and found a special intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw of animals, which humans apparently did not possess. With that, they believed that they had discovered the long-sought, exalted difference between humans and animals, and gullible, materialistically-minded people were inclined to accept this without further ado. Goethe studied these conditions and found that the premaxillary bone was present before birth, that is, in the developing human being, but that it gradually fused completely with the adjacent parts until birth. We find more details about this in Goethe's scientific writings, in which he devotes a special treatise with detailed illustrations to the study of the “ossis intermaxillaris” and defends his discovery against Soemmerring 1785 and Camper in special letters, in which he also emphasizes, however, that the difference between humans and higher animals is not to be found in the individual material, but in the spiritual, which towers mightily above the animal. If we take into account what Goethe – according to Johannes Falk – said on Wieland's funeral day about soul and spirit, their transformations and fates after death: how he had reflected during his long life, and when he now compares what he believes he has found with what can be observed scientifically, sensually, then the two are reconciled without contradiction. At that time, one could still say this as a scholar, as a true naturalist, without finding oneself in conflict with the views of the life of the soul in its special field and that of the material side of life. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, this was still the case with a pioneering naturalist who was mentioned by name, who did more than anyone else for the knowledge of the transformation of animal life forms, but who, by showing their development, came to the conclusion of saying:

I believe that all organic beings that have ever lived on this earth have descended from an original form, into which the Creator breathed life.

That was Charles Darwin. He, too, was able to look unhindered into the spiritual world without coming into conflict with the results of his research. It should be noted that the English original contains these words, but the first German translation and its subsequent editions do not. In such a short time, it was no longer possible to connect the view of the spiritual world with Darwinism, which was already much more harshly conceived. Thus, in all so-called popular presentations, we hear and read today that anyone who still clings to the influence of a spiritual world is a fantasist and a fool, since Darwin himself showed that everything spiritual is a function of the physical. Of course, nothing is easier than to refute spiritual science in this way if one translates it into the view. If this or that part of the brain becomes diseased, then, in a certain analogous relationship, the soul becomes ill; if the brain gradually wears out, then the soul is also worn away, and so the soul is to be thought of as inseparably united with matter as a form of expression. Darwin has, after all, done away with the spiritual world anyway - although this is not the case.

We live today in a time when it is already a serious pursuit of truth to make a confession, as Goethe did, and yet to come to terms with science, as Goethe did, who was able to maintain the soul as existing quite rightly. Today it seems impossible to reconcile external, material science and adherence to the spiritual world. Today we live in an age that has accumulated an almost unmanageable amount of empirical results, where it is impossible for the individual to find his way around the ever more and further divided scientific disciplines, where it is completely dizzy, to orient himself exactly about what science has “established”, just as it is difficult to determine for himself what gives him an accurate judgment, a healthy general view of spiritual science.

So here comes this spiritual science and claims that it possesses and applies the same way of thinking and logic as every other science of today, which not only assumes that the soul contains the normal power of knowledge of everyday and scientific life, which, so to speak, every normal can apply, but it adheres to the conviction that forces lie dormant in the human soul that can be developed so that life in the spiritual world will be revealed to the person concerned, as it is to the observer endowed with eyes and the other senses of the external, material environment.

Not everyone can develop their spiritual eyes and ears in life and become a spiritual researcher, but nor can everyone work in a laboratory, be an astronomer and so on, not everyone needs to work as a researcher in such ways. Only a few can achieve it to a sufficient extent, but they can proclaim it to others, and every person has something in their soul that prevents them from devoting themselves to all that is communicated in blind faith; these are: logic and a healthy sense of truth. The messages he receives can enlighten him; he can measure them against life, test them and gain experience from them, to see whether they have a healing and beneficial effect there and in themselves.

In this way spiritual science places itself in life. Through the power of his soul, the human being makes himself an instrument of spiritual scientific research. However, the demand that all results be proven to everyone with absolute certainty and at any time is just as impossible for spiritual science as it is for external material science and its researchers. The latter say that their science demands absolute objectivity, not inward-soul things and experiences, but anyone who speaks in this way does not know spiritual scientific research in its true essence.

When someone, apart from external impressions, delves into the inner soul life, he will first encounter his own inner soul experiences, which are different for each individual, but in reality the soul gradually takes different paths. The budding spiritual researcher will at first bring nothing to his fellow human beings that concerns him alone; he must first develop to the point where he feels that he has now entered with his ego into a completely new realm that has nothing to do with his personality as such. Then his spiritual insights will show the same objectivity as, for example, our sensory eye shows us that the rose before us is not green but red, as other healthy eyes can also see. Then the inner soul experience is transformed into complete objectivity, then the spiritual researcher feels that his experiences are independent of his subjective feelings, and he has attained a certainty in his vision from which the results of spiritual research have been proclaimed here on many occasions.

Our time demands objectivity. This must be respected, but first we must consider its effect in terms of a healthy sense of truth. After all, the entire body of external science speaks a clear language; for our time, it demands recognition of those results that are obtained through research methods as set out in “Mysterium des Menschen” by Ludwig Deinhard , wherein it is shown that science, which to some extent approaches spiritual science with its methods, nevertheless also achieves harmony between external research with its means and internal research through the method of spiritual science. The book shows us the need of the present time to get what is needed from the field of spiritual science, which makes it possible for man to place himself with certainty in the position he has to fill in life.

We have indicated that it is the spirit that gives strength to the human being, not a particular place of residence or a particular remedy, but in the long run only that world view that leads to the center of the spirit. The science briefly characterized above feels compelled to take on the role that natural science previously had for humanity.

Most of those present know how spiritual science demonstrates the truth of a concept, although a large part of the educated world shrugs its shoulders compassionately at it, namely re-embodiment. It may be recalled that speaking disparagingly about it will have the same fate as the assertion of the earlier natural science that hornets developed from a horse carcass, without their eggs, as was taught in the seventeenth and partly still in the eighteenth century , in which such assertions were systematically presented, so for example furthermore that from donkey carcasses wasps and so forth developed directly from river mud worms and even fish developed directly until Francesco Redi energetically objected to this and established the principle: Living things can only descend from similar living things; a view that is generally taken for granted today, not only for Du Bois-Reymond and Virchow, while Francesco Redi in the seventeenth century only barely escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno, because he was considered a heretic.

Today, the scientific opinion is that when a person is born, he is solely influenced by his inheritance from his ancestors; but this is an inaccurate observation. Spiritual science postulates that the soul unites with the physical body that the father and mother can offer it. The soul then develops this physical body and, in the further course of development, acquires the means from its surroundings. But the spiritual and mental can be traced back to earlier embodiments; and just as living things can only come from living things, so the spiritual and mental can only arise from the spiritual and mental. Thus, the present life on earth of each person is also the starting point for later lives on earth, and this is how the independence of the human soul is to be explained. The time will come, and it is not far off, when the abilities of a man of genius will no longer be traced back to his physical ancestors alone, as Goethe expresses it when he says:

From my father I have the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful nature
and the desire to tell stories.
ancestor was the fairest's darling,
That haunts me now and then;
ancestor-woman loved jewelry and gold,
That may well twitch through the limbs.
Can the elements not
be separated from the complex,
What then is to be named
original about the whole thing?

Today, people like to point out that genius is not at the beginning, but at the end of a series of developments, and that proves that it is inherited. That's a nice argument! It should be the other way around, because the circumstances are not at all in this context. Man naturally acquires physical properties just as it is natural for him to get wet when he falls into the water. In order to save this strange theory, it is said that the qualities of the father, for instance, remained latent because they did not show up in the son as they did in him. A tile falling from the roof also has the latent potential to kill someone; with such strange assumptions, anything can be proved, and this is also the case with the potential that was not present in the ancestor but has shown itself in the descendant.

There is more sound research in the field of lower life forms. A poor school teacher [monk] in Austrian Silesia [Brno in Moravia] by the name of Mendel found out in his attempts to achieve plant hybridization that the expected properties did not appear in the next generation, but in the generation after that. So people used to be just as patient about actual inheritance as they have now generally disregarded it.

Scientific materialism calls the theosophists fantasists and dualists who understand nothing of monism when they hold the view that the soul uses the powers acquired in the last life to shape a suitable body with the material means at its disposal – a view that is also, and more purely, monistic, namely from the spiritual side. These twisted minds of the spiritual scientists will no longer be burned, we have become too humane for that, but they are trying to expose them to ridicule and destruction by making fun of them. One objection is usually raised against the return of the soul, namely that one cannot remember a past life; one knows nothing about it at all. A four-year-old child cannot yet do arithmetic either, but we allow for his development and in ten years he will be able to do arithmetic.

The same applies to our review of a past life, we are only at the beginning of our development, and here too, as in many other areas, it is at least conceivable that there will be progress before each soul comes to an ever-greater understanding of past lives. In the present life there are short periods of childhood that cannot be remembered, but nevertheless the present self was already present at that time. You will neither want nor be able to deny this, although you are unable to remember it. Thus, the possibility or impossibility of your remembering has nothing to do with your earlier real existence and with the past life of your soul in the decisive sense.

But why can't we remember earlier lives on earth? Our memory in the present body goes back to the point of development where the self experiences itself. At the beginning of our life on earth, this is not yet raised into consciousness, but the moment it happens coincides with the beginning of the possibility of remembering. Thus the ego forms, so to speak, the outer wall; as far as ego-consciousness exists, so far consciousness and memory extend. But from this also arises the possibility of treating this ego in such a way that it is transformed from the state in which it normally exists in man to a higher state. We must therefore overcome our present ego-consciousness; it is not easy to do so, and I will mention just one pointer.

We can free ourselves from looking backwards if we are able to look towards the future. To do this, we must accept everything that flows towards us from the present with composure and calmness, with equanimity, and revere the world's providence without worry. We must be unmoved by praise and blame, joy and pain; our soul must stand still, calmly awaiting everything, whether it portends life or death, pain or pleasure, while venerating the wisdom of the world's guidance. If we are indeed able to see such a perspective in the future, then the result will be a review of the past; our view will then expand first into the last previous and then into earlier earthly lives.

Although a knower today can confirm the suggested effect of such exercises, in addition to the many other necessary and more difficult works, it is easy to judge this as mere theory. But the knower, who speaks from his own experience, will not be deterred by this, whether one wants to hear him and judge his communications correctly, just as little as it deterred Francesco Redi when he was called a heretic, and just as it does not bother those who do spiritual science in a thorough way when they are called fantasists and twisted minds.

On further penetrating into the nature of cultural development, one will also come to the point of asking oneself: What is my position regarding the great development of humanity, especially regarding Christianity? Before Christ, many thousands of years of people had already lived; so what could those who lived with and after him base an advantage on to be allowed to take up the Christ impulse, and not also those who lived before Christ? Today humanity has advanced to such an extent that it can ask such profound questions. Especially in our time, when people are increasingly learning to think scientifically and historically, such questions must arise. Then spiritual science comes along and says: the same soul has lived through the events before and after the appearance of Christ. Such an objection does not exist for the spiritual scientific world view. It is the same souls that go to school in life before as well as after. These ideas, which partly show us relapses as well, will always give us courage and strength to face life anew, in which we can also recognize progress again in sufficiently long periods of time.

Those who have heard me speak on a number of occasions will know why spiritual science can afford to talk about all the branches of the natural sciences and to assess their methods, goals and progress. Goethe was able to say of himself that when he allowed his scientific gaze to ascend into lofty spiritual realms, he could still always recognize the natural sciences in the process. Spiritual science must always feel itself to be a ferment and work in this sense, so that the gulf between the spiritual and the external-materialistic view of science does not become too great, so that harmony can gradually come about, which is able to give the soul joy and strength, forces that offer the prospect of success and progress.

When it is emphasized that a healthy soul can only dwell in a healthy body, this is to be understood to mean that the healthy soul alone was able to prepare a healthy body as its dwelling, but not the other way around. Thus, spiritual science not only eliminates contradictions in theory, but also drives out all timidity and weakness of soul, so that humanity can then grow up healthy and strong to fulfill its tasks. Starting from social cooperation, a healthy ascent to the heights of material and especially spiritual development can then be achieved, as is destined for humanity. Man will then be more and more able to draw the spiritual secrets out of the spiritual worlds and transfer them into the physical world, thus fertilizing life there with them. But the soul is the place where both worlds touch. Humanity can become and remain strong and healthy if it allows what we can summarize in the words: “From worlds far away, mysterious and enigmatic

The rich abundance of material
It flows into the depths of the soul
From the heights of the world, full of content
The spirit's clarifying light.
They meet in man
To form a reality full of wisdom.

It is difficult to communicate with someone who expresses himself differently than we do. To clarify our own spiritual secrets, it is important to measure our own thinking, feeling, and willing against the spirits of others.

The usual newer historical research does not even know how to determine the lifetime of Zarathustra; they place him in the time of the Buddha, the ancient Greeks place them 5000 years before Christ: as far back as possible or not very far back. Theosophy places him in pre-Asian culture, but his influence can be seen into Christian times.

All soul life has been greatly modified, and the development of what has come into being is now a satisfying study. Man's spiritual development would have to undergo the same investigation to shed light; one has to go back to earlier states of mind, where people became aware of a different environment than they are now. There was a kind of clairvoyant consciousness, an often misused word, an image consciousness. The images that go up and down in the usual forms mean little, they are a leftover remnant of a completely different state of consciousness. The earlier image consciousness can be related to the external reality in the spiritual world behind the sensory world, when the object consciousness was still in its infancy, of an intermediate world between waking and sleeping, through symbols that related to the real spiritual world.

A certain ability is achieved at the expense of another. We have to go back up, but to a form of clairvoyance imbued with intellectuality. First the intellect was lost. Myths, sagas, legends are the oldest records of ancient clairvoyance. The images of the gods in mythology were initially only images. There were two spiritual currents: one from ancient India, the other, more northern, from ancient Persia. These went alongside one another in the older millennia, flowing together in ancient Greek culture. That is why the pessimism of the ancient Indians is so characteristic. The ancient Indian found it uncanny when he saw spiritual beings behind external things. He called them asuras. The last impulse of this, which was therefore so significant, appeared in Buddha. Through an unspiritual tendency towards the inner, he was transported into Maya, and so he had to come out of it into Nirvana. Nirvana has nothing of what the senses offer. Nirvana is the last great call of the senses as this development of humanity is felt to be a descent. This too is shot through with pessimistic anti-reality muzzling.

In ancient Greece, this submergence was not felt in quite the same way. In the Dionysian culture, the Greeks felt what was not yet present in the culture transplanted to Greece from ancient India. Zarathustra developed precisely the opposite, the Persians wanted to lend a hand to direct reality, a transition to a new, joyful future for humanity. He had gained something new, new human soul forces. Zarathustra pointed out to the Persian people that the physical world is not only Maya. To him, the outer world was like the garment of a spiritual world, the sensual world like a carpet. The spiritual world lies behind the sensual world; the spiritual world is behind everything. This is not only meant as a pantheistic reference to spiritual wisdom, but as a concrete insight into the spiritual world. Behind the most important sensual reality, the spiritual importance is hidden. And just as the sun has its great aura, so does man have his small aura: Ahura Mazdao, later Ormuzd. He no longer finds the good through mere mystical insight. These are dying forces, therefore the devas are evil to him, the asuras are the right thing.

This reversal can be explained from the development of culture. Ahuras are the Indian Asuras. There is spirituality in and behind all sensuality, especially behind the center. The Greek Apollo is the Greek translation of the Mazdao culture. Both currents came together when the greatest impulse for humanity came, in Christ.

At that time, in Zarathustra's time, completely different signs were needed, a completely different writing to make sense of this. This ancient writing was in the heavenly bodies. Zarathustra attributed both contradictions to something higher. He needed symbols. During the day, the sun passes through part of the zodiac; the day sun is Ormuzd, the night sun is Ahriman. Ormuzd is associated with one half of the zodiacal signs and Ahriman with the other. There is a common basis for good and evil. In an ever-widening arc, the circle becomes flatter and flatter, finally becoming a straight line, infinity. A circle with an infinite diameter is a representation of the infinite passage of time. The past holds back, the future is for progress, uplifting. The entire zodiac is actually a line, imagined as a minimized circle. “Zaroana akarena” is the image of infinite time.

Thus, the writing in the stars represents what is in the spiritual world. Zoroaster is not an abstract spirit who only moves in generalities; that is why lower spirits are under Ormuzd. Today's man is comfortable and wants to ascend to the highest God right away. The six or seven Amschaspands were, as it were, messengers. Goethe mentions in his Faust: Sons of the gods, preserve the beautiful, and so on. It is the same. Ahriman also has five to six evil spiritual entities; that makes twelve in total.

Each constellation is an expression of one of the forces. Ormuzd, for example, works through [the] lion as a good disposition, through the ram as wisdom. In this way, the spiritual beings enter into people, as it were. But people are not as wise as their little finger, which knows that it is nothing without the whole organism. So the powers of the human soul enter into the person and continue in the person, becoming materially condensed in what is in the person. Thus, a person can be an Ormuzd or an Ahriman person. The new physiology, which dissects the human being, says [anatomically and physiologically]: twelve pairs of brain nerves emanate from the brain. Thus, the materialized twelve Amshaspands have been found again after millennia. Both ages join hands.

There are 28 to 31 Izeds, spirits that perform subordinate functions that are effective in the cosmos and in human nature. In the human head, these are the mental abilities [= the Amshaspands] and the abilities that emanate from the spinal nerves and, for all I care, return [the Izeds]. Then, in the Feroars, we see the spiritual archetypes that underlie everything else.

Plato says: All sensual things are based on archetypes. But here it is meant more abstractly. Plato speaks of the spiritual world, Zoroaster of the spirit world. But Plato still had a living feeling for today's views. Zoroaster saw in the outer light what is inner wisdom, as does spiritual science today.

Pythagoras learned from the Persians the correct attitude towards the spiritual and the moral world. This is quite different from the way it is in Egypt or in the Dionysian mysteries. There, the masculine and the feminine, Osiris - Isis, Apollo - Aphrodite, are valid. Such sexual opposites can be found everywhere. Even with the ancient Hebrews, Lucifer, evil, is indicated by the feminine. Only Zoroaster has it the other way around, taking the organic, moral contrast of good and evil in images, not from nature.

Therefore, Zoroaster must be important in the present day in order not to reduce everything to the opposites of the sexes, as it is today. Hence the scent that emanates from Zoroastrianism. Through purification, through moral cleansing, heroic, moral strength develops, not philistine morality like today's. The ancient Persian is not contemplative, he is hardworking, lays his hands on the treasures of the earth. Thus he becomes the companion of Ormuzd, who always wrestled with Ahriman. Such was the case with this simple cultured people. Through moral purification the obstacles are overcome.

I will speak, come and listen to what is highest in the world. I speak not of it with an evil tongue, but of the opposite. Listen to what I mean, otherwise you will hear bad things at the end of the world. – Thus speaks Zoroaster. It is not enough to study the Gathas literally; one should put oneself in Zoroaster's feelings and thoughts. This requires a sense of history. One should be grateful to Ahriman.

The subject of our lecture today may at first seem surprising. But Theosophy does not just want to bring messages of supersensory research, but wants to let them flow into human life, bringing strength and the joy of working for life. It wants to be a kind of art of living, albeit under certain conditions. It is not something that wants to be quickly established, but rather, Theosophy draws from sources of deep knowledge. Therefore, it cannot seek to win over many people; it is not a doctrine that wants to be promoted with fanaticism to broad circles. [A movement of this kind must keep its distance from fanaticism.] The theosophist must make the opposite of fanaticism his most important quality – [understanding of people should be the theosophist's hallmark.] He must be able to penetrate [into the souls of others], into the souls of opponents [and gain understanding for the justified refutations].

And who would want to deny that there is much to be said against Theosophy in a deeply justified way? After all, Theosophy or spiritual science speaks of the most sacred and dignified matters, and does so more to the heart than to reason. And the heart is easily inclined to surrender to things that might speak of an increase in vitality. To penetrate into the depths of what Theosophy means, a long journey is necessary, which by no means all those who agree with the Theosophical life out of the heart take.

If someone approaches Theosophy in our time, it must be admitted that this is very difficult. One concern after another piles up. Therefore, a scientifically educated person in particular cannot easily find his way around – with a genuine sense of truth. In addition, there are many things today that are called Theosophy, but which are not very useful. Therefore, the elementary principles of what we would like to call Theosophy should be described first, [before moving on to the concerns].

First of all, we must be clear about the structure of the human being. Man does not consist only of the physical body, not only of what we can perceive with our brain-bound mind, but it must be asserted that the physical body is integrated with a sum of higher, supersensible , namely, first of all, the etheric or life body, by which the physical body is permeated throughout. The etheric body ensures that the physical body does not follow the forces of the external physical world. It only follows these forces when it is abandoned by the etheric body at death. Then the physical forces act on the components of the human body and cause them to disintegrate and dissolve. The existence of this etheric body can be determined through clairvoyant research. But it can also be seen that it is necessary, that we need a fighter against the otherwise inevitable physical decay. Other living beings are also endowed with an etheric body as long as they are living beings. Plants also have it.

In addition to this, human beings also have a consciousness soul or an astral body. This we have in common with the animal world. It is the carrier of all the drives, passions and desires we have in our lives. What we no longer have in common with animals is what we call our human sense of self. The fact that we can say “I” to ourselves makes us human beings the pinnacle of creation. From the moment when the child becomes capable of saying “I” to itself, our human consciousness, our memory begins. We therefore distinguish between a physical body, etheric body, astral body and the I.

But that is not the only way in which Theosophy differs from the generally held view. It also considers the inner core of a person's being, the I, to be more than just an earthly existence between birth and death. Theosophy seeks to show that not everything that is expressed through the I in a person has been determined in just one lifetime. Rather, this central core of the human being comes from earlier stages of existence. In a sense, the human being forms his own body before he fully enters it with his sense of self. Then there is the further claim of Theosophy: After death, the human being only discards his physical shell, but the core of his being also lives on after physical death, only to enter into a renewed physical life later on.

The changing fortunes of human beings can only be understood by grasping the repeated lives of the same human being on earth. We see one person living a miserable and unhappy life, while another is happy. Science must ask about the causes of this tremendous inequality of life's destinies. Spiritual science claims that a person has built his own destiny in his previous life; depending on how he lives now, his following destiny in the future life will be shaped.

That it can be so is already evident to a certain degree from the course of his present life. If someone emigrates to America, for example, his fate will essentially be shaped by what he was in Europe. What he has learned here will be very important for his progress and the way he lives over there. Whether he was a shoemaker or a banker here, for example, will have a very significant influence on the way he lives his life over there. But after he has been in America for a while, he will have learned new things and will have become a different person. In order for a person to mature, different destinies are necessary; this cannot possibly all happen in a single life between birth and death. The fruits of our previous lives ripen for us in the present life, and what we learn now will benefit our later life.

Theosophy thus teaches the immortality of the central core of the human being. Between death and a new birth, the soul goes through very different, purely spiritual states of longer duration.

Regarding the state of sleep, Theosophy says that in this state, the physical and etheric bodies remain in the bed; the astral body and the ego, that is, that which is the carrier of consciousness, emerges and lives during sleep in supersensible worlds.

The whole appears as a closed system. We will see in what way theosophy draws its knowledge of this system. This happens through clairvoyant research. How do you acquire this ability? It can be said that these clairvoyant powers can be awakened in man through meditation. In this way, the soul can be made into an instrument of spiritual research, and indeed into a research that is just as exact and methodical as the research that chemists and physicists use physical means for to study matter. In this way, dormant powers are brought to the surface within the human being. We recall Goethe's words about the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears that can be opened in man.

Having said this, we turn to the objections to Theosophy. Of course, we cannot exhaust all the objections to Theosophy. We will only consider a few that may present serious and significant difficulties for an honest conviction. If you are completely under the spell of modern science, you may come to the following conclusion when you first study Theosophy; you can [rightly] say: Yes, I believe that women who are not critically minded [who do not critically examine science but follow the urge of the heart] and have not learned to think logically, can have their world puzzles solved by this spiritual science. And, as far as I am concerned, the same applies to men who do not know science. Just note this: you believe that you need an etheric body as the carrier of the life forces in the body. Do you not know that you are thereby amateurishly reaching back into the time when it was assumed that organically formed substances could not be produced in the laboratory, but only in the living organism? Therefore, in those days, it had to be assumed that special vital forces were at work in all living things. But progressive research [in the nineteenth century] has shown that the simplest of these substances can be produced in the laboratory by purely chemical means, just as they can in a living organism. This dealt a fatal blow to the old doctrine of the life force – vis vitalis – or life ether, because it proved, albeit initially only in the simplest of organisms, that the organic structure of nature is built in the same way as the non-living, inorganic. It is a very serious and worthy thought that once the beginning of the chemical production of the organic has been made, it will continue, even if few substances can be produced in this way at present. This is experimental proof that the same laws apply to the inanimate as to the animate. It is therefore ignorance when Theosophy still speaks of the fact that life in a body can only be explained by a life body. Such a researcher can say: What subtle research had to gradually strive to elucidate, you theosophists simply want to make easy with your fantastic life body. You claim that it is visible to the supersensible faculty of cognition, but the above proves that it is not needed at all, it is not necessary. But it must be a serious first requirement for serious knowledge that it makes no unnecessary assumptions. He who weighs things as theosophists should do, should feel that there is much earnestness and dignity in such an objection.

But let us look further. Theosophy claims that an astral body and an ego are needed to explain the phenomena of consciousness. We can indeed concede what even strict researchers such as Du Bois-Reymond say, that what we experience in us as inner life is not possible from purely material processes within the brain. So let us assume that we have to do without an explanation for the time being and write the famous “Ignorabimus” below it. But is it justified to say that when something different, something supersensory, emerges from matter, that this is an independent entity? An opponent of Theosophy could say this with some justification. He could point to magnetic forces, which do indeed emanate from an inorganic substance, the magnet, and are bound to it. So after all, a supersensible power such as magnetism is produced out of material substance. Furthermore, it is no different with the development of the other forces, for example, with the force of gravity that is bound to the planets. Why should it not be the same with what we scientifically know as states of excitation of the brain, and what takes place in the consciousness and inner life of man? There is absolutely no compulsion to explain the phenomena of consciousness differently. Even what has not yet been researched can be explained in this way. In any case, the hasty assumption of an astral body to explain these processes is amateurish. Even where we are still forced to remain ignorant, we must wait patiently for serious research to say something about it.

What used to be the horror of horrors in science, the so-called theory of potentialities [in psychology], lies behind us. There, a system was built on the premise that if the soul can think, then it has the potential to think. It can feel, so it has the potential to feel. According to this, the soul was a system of nothing but nested concepts of capacity, without realizing that they had not explained anything, but had only put words in the place of something. Now the opponent can say: Isn't your astral and etheric body just as much something nested and unrecognized as the old doctrine of capacity was? Such a thing can rightly be objected.

So Theosophy is not for someone who stands on the ground of in-depth modern scientific knowledge. To such a person, Theosophy appears to be somewhat dilettantish compared to the demands of rigorous research. Furthermore, Theosophy says: During sleep, the astral body and the ego leave the human body with the consciousness. Since they are not present with what remains in bed, they must still be found somewhere. Where else should they be present than in a spiritual world? On the other hand, serious science asks: Is it necessary to invoke a special, supernatural explanation for this state of sleep when the scientifically given explanations are sufficient? It is perfectly possible to explain sleep quite simply. The scientifically applied method views the matter quite differently. It says: When we are awake, the organism wears out. Toxins are formed as a result of the activity carried out by the excited brain during the waking state. When so many toxins have accumulated, they kill consciousness through mechanical or chemical action, which means that sleep sets in. Now it is not the organs that otherwise generate consciousness that are at work, but other organs that continue to work in the human being, which in turn destroy the poisons in the body that the activity of the organs of consciousness has produced, and so on. Such a self-regulatory hypothesis is entirely possible. But if it is possible to explain the alternation of sleep and waking with it, then it is not permissible to say anything else about it. The theosophical theory is at least a daring assumption. The true facts will only be able to be explained gradually, and until then one must stick to the obvious and simplest explanation of these phenomena.

What about the theosophical assertion of the repetition of earthly lives? Theosophy shows how man develops from childhood; this cannot possibly be explained by mere inheritance. Children of the same parents are fundamentally different, and so on. Therefore, something must be added that is not inherited, that is already present in the life germ of the newborn human being, and that can only be explained by repeated lives on earth. For example, twins can be different despite simultaneous inheritance.

The scientific objection to this is as follows: What constitutes the essence of a person is not something that is inherited from a single father or mother, but from a long chain of ancestors. If Theosophy now says: If you attribute everything to heredity, why is there any individuality at all in the development of each person? The objection is as follows: People must therefore be different because so many different influences flow into each individual's life, [which has a transforming effect on people from early childhood on]. Genius is a particularly good example of this. It emerges, endowed with special qualities, which we can, however, already find in the various ancestors. In the case of genius, they are then combined as a grand total. Brentano explains the soul work in geniuses as being able to quickly piece thoughts together, and thus only in a certain increase over ordinary human thought activity. This easier mobility in the brain molecules can only be inherited. The spiritual researcher says, however, This is actually not very logical. The genius is at the end of an inheritance line; it should be at the beginning of the same if it is to be inherited by the descendants. The objection [against this] of the easier excitability in the brain of the genius must apply, and it can therefore be concluded on the part of science: this increased excitability causes the brain to wear down more quickly. Is it any wonder that the reproductive process is affected in a genius, because his brain wears down more quickly? This is a legitimate objection. However, modern science is particularly suspicious of what is referred to as clairvoyant talent. We have to admit that extrasensory experiences do exist. Such perceptions are different from natural perception. This also occurs pathologically in what we usually call hallucinations, for example. It is therefore not surprising when the scientist says: Where is the possibility to recognize the truth and establish objective facts? How do we know that these are not simply subjective experiences? The strict scientist is careful to only call scientifically that which can be objectively verified. But the strict scientific epistemological methods are not applicable to the results of training in the humanities. What supposedly presents itself to the clairvoyant is only a world of images. Even in pathological conditions, it is only reminiscences of reality. It turns out, for example, that clairvoyants have only been able to see a train since trains have existed. In books about clairvoyant experiences, we only ever find what was actually present at the time, combined just a little differently. After all, it is combined from the warmth and cold, light and shade of real life. For example, it is said that the astral body is blue, red, yellow and so on, just like the known physical paints. These are the colors of the physical as they are seen, so nothing new. Such appearances have a pathological background, are only hallucinations and really add nothing new to our knowledge. The mere ability to combine external properties is quite sufficient to explain them.

Theosophists must understand that such objections arise from the deepest, most earnest deliberation of precisely the most serious contemporaries. Those who have grown old in scientific ideas are not easily convinced by theosophical objections.

But Theosophy also comes with religious, moral and ethical ideas and impulses. Can that be right?

The first objection that comes to mind is this: if Theosophy views life in such a way that the present life is seen as the result of past experiences, then interest in life itself wanes. Such a view thus amounts to an education in fatalism. It is a paralysis of life when you can think, “I have time; there are many lives ahead of me.” The objection is actually trivial to take, but it is practically correct, because people are indeed casual by nature.

And the prospect of a supersensible world, how does it express itself ethically? Necessarily in such a way that interest in practical life diminishes. You can see this, for example, in the artist who does not want to devote himself to the practical. Such a view of life makes one ascetic, hostile to life, and paralyzing instead of stimulating. One often sees wonderful people among the Theosophists who live in a kind of cloud-cuckoo-land. Women in particular are easily found to have become self-indulgent and out of touch with reality. This cannot be logically refuted, but only through life itself.

Furthermore, one could say: You have made ethics a result of selfishness. Whoever does good, according to your view, expects a reward in karmic compensation. Whoever does evil, or wants to do evil, refrains from it out of fear of the corresponding evil in the next life. So the doctrine of karma is actually a doctrine of education? A higher form of selfishness! What a person sows, he must reap - [this] is ultimately a selfish principle of life. Thus, Theosophy is also ethically and morally life-threatening.

Furthermore, you transfer divine world justice into the human being himself by letting him work out his destiny in various earthly lives. You thereby transfer that which otherwise lives in the Godhead outside of us as a punishing or rewarding God into the human being himself. Man is thereby deified. Where is the free love of God when the divine is transferred into one's own inner being? Into the inner being of man? - The opponent can say: It is in contradiction to a truly religious world view when one transfers the self-sacrifice of God, the redemption of man out of divine grace, into the inner being of man himself.

Such objections could be multiplied many times over. Devotion to an external God is a fundamental condition of ethics and religion, and this finds no justification in Theosophy. This is how it can be expressed; and we must learn to understand this fully as Theosophists, only then can we keep ourselves free from fanaticism. Only the most important guidelines could be given here. They should also teach us tolerance towards our opponents. We should not try to beat them out of the field, but above all strive to learn to understand them.

Let us now show by way of example how this is to be understood. In 1868, the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann wrote a book called “The Philosophy of the Unconscious”. Although some of it is unmethodical and flawed and not useful to us, it is based on certain spiritual principles and touches on deep existential issues. This book caused quite a stir when it was published. It was, after all, the time of the reign of the most blatant materialism. This book strangely touched the fanatical materialists such as Haeckel and other Darwinists. They found the book extremely amateurish. Many counter-writings against the book were published. But one anonymous refutation caused a particularly great stir. It presented everything that could be objected to Eduard von Hartmann's book in such a methodical and complete way, and with such keen insight, that Oscar Schmidt, for example, said: “It's a shame that the unknown author didn't identify himself.” Haeckel himself said, “He should identify himself, and we will consider him one of our own.” Soon the second edition of this writing was necessary. This time the anonymous author named himself: it was Eduard von Hartmann! This second edition did not have the same success with Hartmann's opponents – [their praise soon died down.]

This is a good example of how one can see beyond one's opponent and judge more correctly in the opponent's interest than the opponent himself.

Much more could be said, but for now we must be satisfied with what has been said. It does not take the worst to be seen sprouting from Theosophy. We must therefore endeavor to learn to understand our opponents.

I have tried to show how Theosophy can be refuted. The day after tomorrow it should become clear whether the refutation is final or whether, nevertheless, reasons can be put forward that will be valid against this fight - which, as we have seen, can be waged with a certain justification.

It could be called frivolous if we first tried to refute Theosophy and then tried to justify it, since the lecturer apparently does not believe in the refutation itself.

But I believe in it in all seriousness! It is not a matter of refuting refutations for me, but rather I would like to use it to point out important things about great riddles of knowledge. In a certain sense, I believe in the correctness and weight of the objections raised. To illustrate what I mean, I would like to tell you a little story.

In a village, the young son of a family was chosen to get the daily rolls needed for the family from the baker. He was always given [ten] kreutzers for the trip. This young son was not very good at math and therefore didn't care much about how many rolls he got for the six kreutzers. Now, however, a foster son came to live with the family for a while, and he was good at math. This foster son now started calculating how many rolls he could get for six. Since a roll cost two kreutzers in that town, he should have gotten five rolls. But the boy had brought six rolls. The foster son was surprised and said: “That's not right, two times five is ten. So he only gets five rolls.” But the next day there were six rolls again, despite the foster son's correct calculation. How did this fit together? It was customary in that place to give a roll for every ten kreutzers. There the puzzle was solved. So it was true, even though the calculation was correct. The result of the calculation had nothing to do with the correctness of the matter. Both were correct in themselves, although they did not agree with each other. Just as I myself believed in the correctness of the calculation as the little boy I was, so I also believe today in the correctness of the objections to Theosophy that I put forward. Objections and refutations have a certain quality, namely that they can be correct without the matter itself necessarily being wrong. Perhaps I will be reproached for one thing, namely, that I present some things in a lively way and speak with the same pathos for and against.

But if the things themselves are right, then they can also be presented with the same vivacity. It is generally easier and more convenient to criticize than to justify. I would like to illustrate this with an example.

The editor-in-chief of a major newspaper had the intention of publishing an interesting weekly supplement. However, there were only a few suitable editors for such a paper who could write in a witty and interesting enough way to really captivate the audience he was aiming for. But since he was a clever man, he knew how to help himself. A number of talented young gentlemen were employed to do nothing all week but sit in coffee houses and read newspapers, and then they simply had to refute every article that interested them. With what was collected, the man filled his weekly paper, and it was read with pleasure and sold well, because a witty critique is something that appeals to people. Something of a critic tingles in every soul. In this occupation, the young gentlemen have all become brilliant polemicists and some of them now hold respected positions.

This is to show that it is not at all difficult to refute something, to criticize it, if you don't want anything more.

Our task today is more difficult, because we want to show how to establish the theosophy.

Let us first address the objection that it is amateurish to assume that an etheric body should be added to the physical body. I would remind you of what has been said about the life force theory, which has long been scientifically overcome. When it became possible to assemble material structures in the laboratory, the way was clear for the displacement of the life force. And it may be said that a time will come when it will also be possible to chemically produce higher and highest organic structures in laboratories. Therefore, it can only be described as ignorance when, in the face of such scientific progress, Theosophy still talks about a completely superfluous ether or life body.

However, one point should be emphasized. Many people consider the great Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to be an especially enlightened mind. Furthermore, one would certainly subscribe to the following sentence today: No one can be considered enlightened who is not opposed to belief in ghosts. But now Lessing says the following:

We no longer believe in ghosts? Who says that? Or rather, what does that mean?

[...] In this matter, on 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 want to ; they make the noise and set the tone; the greatest multitude remains silent and indifferent, thinking one way or another, hearing in broad daylight with pleasure about the ghosts mocking and telling with horror at dark night.

There is no evidence against it, only our thought patterns have changed. The same applies to the life force theory. Our thought patterns about it have changed. However, this does not provide any proof against it.

And the same applies to the scientific objection: we do not need an etheric body. That is also just a change in thinking, which can change again into the opposite, as we can see often enough. In the past, people even believed that they could artificially create a whole, small human being, the so-called homunculus. Nevertheless, the above objection would apply even more, since we see that it is precisely the homunculus-believing human race that completely believes in a supernatural world. In a room with a lot of dirt, there are usually a lot of flies. In the past, this was explained by assuming that the flies came from the dirt. Now we know that dirt only creates the conditions; it makes it easy for flies to enter.

In the same way, owing to different habits of thought, it was formerly easy for the supersensible to enter into the sphere of human activity.

By chance I bought a Freidenkerkalender (Freethinker's Calendar) the other day, in which I found an essay by a freethinking person. This man is not opposed to Theosophy, of which he hopefully knows nothing, but he is against teaching children from an early age to believe in a supernatural world. Before falling asleep, one prays with them that a divine spirit will protect them, and so on. This is nonsense, against which the man seems to be very much opposed. He rails against it and says that today we should not want to force things on children that children do not have of their own accord. — It can only be recommended that we draw the obvious conclusion from this. Children do not come up with language on their own either. Therefore, the man should actually be opposed to teaching children language. But why has the man not drawn such conclusions? The reason is that this man is simply extremely opposed to everything supernatural. He wants to prove everywhere the falsity of the supersensible and therefore does not pay attention to logical arguments. To condemn everything supersensible has become a habit of thinking that he cannot get out of, even if he wanted to - but he does not want to. This is often the case in life. In the end, it is not logical arguments that decide the matter, but habits of thinking.

This raises the question: Is there a way to develop such thinking habits that can be developed into justified habits? Real science posits the principle that only those things should be put forward by the scientist that can be verified by anyone at any time. According to modern science, this is precisely what Theosophy cannot do. For Theosophy refers to sources that the soul develops through itself through the means of meditation. Intimate inner processes transform the soul, and then spiritual eyes and spiritual ears awaken in it. One no longer judges with the ordinary sensory instruments that are accessible to everyone. But strict science must exclude precisely what has only subjective validity.

This is an objection that can only be decided through experience. It must therefore be determined, firstly, whether it is true that science only decides objectively. Secondly, is it true that spiritual science decides subjectively?

Now, the first requirement does not apply to scientific research everywhere. In mathematics, for example, not everyone can verify the matter at any time. Everyone knows that the Pythagorean theorem is correct. But not everyone needs to be able to verify it. However, those who cannot verify it because they do not understand enough mathematics do not prove anything against it.

Mathematics, however, only brings truths that relate to relationships. But whether the results of mathematical science also relate to and prove true in the objective world [...] depends on other things.

Mathematical structures do not occur in nature. There is no such thing as a triangle in itself, nor a mathematically correct circle, and so on. This can never be represented externally, but it can be calculated and imagined internally.

Does this not agree with clairvoyant experience? [Only the lowest levels of the soul experience appear subjective. Those who go further always come to the same experiences. Mathematics is regarded as a living factor in the supersensible worlds, as Plato and others felt.

It can be said that the human organism is “I-ized” in the same way that one can say that God “geometrizes”.

I would like to give you an example of the effectiveness of the supersensible in the physical body. If we observe a person who strives for knowledge - not just a scientist, but a searching, wrestling, internalized soul - when we see such a person again after not having seen him for ten years, we notice a change in his features. We see, then, how the relatively small amount of supersensible work is externally imprinted on his body. Such a change can even indicate a certain kind of inner struggle to the psychologist. But there is a limit to the elasticity of the body. When there is no more room for the outer transformation of the features, then the solutions to the riddles with which one has been struggling come to the person. This can be clearly stated. Inner experience first expresses itself in the outer sensory world of the human being, only then can it enter into consciousness.

How does this compare to the experiences of a student of spiritual science?

The clairvoyant training must create conscious sleep states. By making consciousness possible even during sleep, it can bring powers into consciousness that would otherwise be too weak to do so. So only will-ideas that are not stimulated by anything external. Such training can take a long time. But when it becomes effective, a certain experience can be determined. For the student, inner experiences come, at first like a dream that cannot be grasped. One then feels a resistance from one's own brain. This gradually gives way. Then comes the time when one can transform what one has sensed into concepts. At first it is like a child, one does not really know about it, then it gradually increases to a conscious experience. The clairvoyant then experiences things that present themselves through themselves inwardly as immediate certainty, as inwardly objective. And all clairvoyants experience the same thing in this.

So what is spiritual science based on? Not on something that can be verified by everyone, but on the fact that there is a possibility to grow into the spiritual being itself and thereby draw truth directly from our inner being. Once you have realized that there is a supernatural, then the objections to it are quite different. They are objectively correct objections that cannot be refuted.

Take, for example, the objection that the theosophical explanation for the sleeping state is not needed at all because the self-regulator theory explains the processes much more simply. But there are other self-regulators besides sleep. The clock, for example, is an excellent self-regulator, but – as no one will deny – it can only come about through the activity of thought, through the mind of the watchmaker. Why should the same not also apply to humans? We see, then, that the objection itself is correct, but that it is not at all applicable, since nothing can be decided by it.

But there are still the ethical and moral objections to Theosophy. What about them? The objection to the doctrine of karma, that it can lead to selfishness because good deeds are followed by reward and bad deeds by punishment, is in a way true. It can lead to someone not doing good for the sake of good, but for the sake of reward. Now Schopenhauer once said: “Preaching morality is easy, justifying morality is difficult.” With a mere moral sermon that man should do good, you won't achieve much in general. It's a bit like if someone were to say to the stove: “Dear stove, it is your destiny, your moral duty, to heat the room; so please, be so good and act accordingly.” If nothing else happens, it will probably remain cold inside the stove. But if you take wood and light a fire in the stove, you will achieve the purpose of the stove more quickly and effectively.

Of course, preaching helps people a little more than a stove, but usually not much more. Justifying morals – igniting the inner fire in people – is more important. So let the law of karma first quietly work on people's selfishness and thus ignite them for good. The main thing is that the purpose is achieved. One could also say of a couple that they only educate their children well out of selfishness. Should they therefore rather not do so? The main thing is that the children become well-behaved people as a result of the good education. Even if the parents have only thought of themselves and the personal comforts that well-behaved children can bring them, love for the educational work will come naturally. Thus, goodness can initially arise from selfish motives, and then, through the habit of doing good, selflessness will arise naturally from selfishness.

Now, let us take the case of someone who says, “We will come back anyway, so why bother now? I want to enjoy my life now, I still have time in later life to become a decent person.” If we believe in the law of karma, we must realize that such an attitude will have its consequences for the next life. The consequence will be that his present behavior, even his intention to become decent, will make it difficult for him.

Then we have other objections. It is said that the clairvoyant borrows his ideas only from the physical world, just as in hallucinations. These are only reminiscences of ordinary sensual things, but clothed in fantastically confused form, just as, for example, primitive religions derive their idea of God from man, and so on.

Now, however, a spiritual connection between three people can be proven by clairvoyance, one of whom is dead. There are many such well-attested experiences. I will tell you, as I always do, only one real event that happened exactly as it happened and can be verified.

A couple lived with their son, but the son became ill and died after one day. That was a heavy blow for the parents. They were therefore very busy with the son. After months, both parents dreamt the same dream. The son appeared to them and told them that he had been buried alive. They told each other about the dream the next morning, and it turned out that they had both experienced the same thing in their dream, that they had both had the same dream. They now wanted to be sure and have it dug up. Unfortunately, the authorities prevented the digging, but the fact remains that both had the same dream. Now a dream is not yet reality, but in such cases dreams are the realization of what shines into consciousness from the supersensible worlds.

How this is to be understood can be seen from the well-known dream of the farmer's wife who, in her dream, seems to hear an edifying sermon by the pastor and, upon awakening, hears the cock crow that has awakened her and thereby, in the returning consciousness of a sermon, has aroused the image of a sermon, since she had thought of the pastor's edifying words before falling asleep. Dream images are determined by our attitudes and experiences. From this it is clear that even clairvoyant descriptions, despite being given in everyday images, can contain correct, supersensible experiences. Otherwise one could also say: I see nothing in a book but black letters and printer's ink. What you read from it, I cannot find in it at all.

This may be true for someone who cannot read within, but in terms of content, it is out of the question for someone who has learned to read.

We now come to the religious objections: from the self-deification of man through theosophy. The fact that one transfers God into one's own inner being, while true religiosity requires devotion to an external God, leads to self-exaltation, in that it tempts man to say: I am a god myself.

This is again a not entirely unjustified objection. But we can also say what, based on a living feeling, expresses the theosophical truth. You have a divine spark within you, undeveloped, in a germinal state. You must develop this more and more. It is therefore a breach of duty against the God in you if you do not constantly strive for perfection.

It is not enough for the theosophist to passively surrender to God – as some pious Christians do – but he must demand active devotion, as the Pauline saying goes: “Not I, but the Christ in me”.

So then, deification looks somewhat different, because it constantly leads to impulses for perfection, transforming man's self-righteousness into an eternal imperative of duty.

Here again you see: the objection need not be refuted, nevertheless what Theosophy has to say stands on solid ground. For it is true: the seeking soul does not have to deny itself when it longs for immortality, but finds outside what lives within itself.