The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Spiritual science is theosophical in nature because it leads man back to his original source. People today fight against theosophy and are therefore anti-theosophical in their thinking.

The entire soul and spiritual being is engaged in the first years of childhood in order to develop the physical organization, especially the nervous system; all forces are consumed in this work. From a certain point on, the human organism has become harder and more determined. This is the moment when self-awareness arises in the child. The spiritual and mental powers are reflected back upon themselves; before that, he [the human being] threw them all into the organism. Now the spiritual and mental is thrown back upon itself. At first we see as through a pane of glass, but then the organization becomes like a mirror that reflects the spiritual and mental life back upon itself. Then he says to himself “I”. From then on, life proceeds in self-awareness.

The fact that in early childhood our physical organization is transformed into a mirror and our spiritual and soul life is reflected back into itself is how the human being owes his entire earthly destiny and essence. The forces he has brought with him from his previous lives he has worked into his physical organization. In life, the forces are poured into the organization. At first, the child has no self-awareness because the spiritual and soul forces are still flowing into the physical and material organization; this must face us like a mirror. Man would be born a theosophist if he could see this working into the physical organization himself. A new germ is also forming in man, as in plants, that future life demands.

The child would have to remain stunted if it were conscious, because then the spiritual-soul forces would not all pour into the bodily organization. In the spiritual-soul forces, through which we raise our self-awareness, germinal forces for our next life are formed. These, however, must not rise up into our self-consciousness; they must remain asleep, for they are constructive forces and may only unfold their character in our next life. If man were aware of these germinal forces, he would have to fall into a dream or sleep; if we knew of these germinal forces, we would know ourselves in the divine, we would be born theosophists.

The forces that can develop our self-awareness ever more strongly must be formed out of the soul-spiritual world. During our earthly life, we must swim through a stream, on one bank of which lies the transition from theosophical to self-awareness and on the other, the transition from self-awareness to theosophical consciousness. It is precisely from our being set apart from our divine-spiritual mood that we draw the forces of our self-awareness. Our earthly mood must be anti-philosophical.

After the preparations, he [man] can penetrate to these germinal forces, as was explained in the previous lecture. The human being would believe that his self-awareness would be endangered, undermined, and therefore the human being is afraid to let the germinal forces arise for his next life, hence the anti-sophistic mood. The human being has a revulsion for the fact that the germinal forces could overwhelm his self-awareness and throw him into world consciousness. The human being has a secret fear of letting the connection emerge from the foundations. The soul must first become strong and energetic before it can confront the deeper forces, just as a self-confident person confronts this mirror. Man can make his future into a mirror to see his spiritual self, just as we have a mirror in the physical body through which our self-consciousness arises.

By having the secret human being within himself, the spiritual researcher has a guarantee that he is immortal, that he is preparing a life in immortality; just as the germinating powers of the plant guarantee the emergence of a new plant.

We must cultivate those forces most strongly that lead us away from our divine spiritual connection; we cultivate an anti-sophical mood. Humanity has to develop between opposites. Just as man oscillates between freedom and bondage, so he also oscillates between theosophy and anti-theosophy. But there are moments when man becomes aware of his original source, and this mood can grow and lead him to theosophy. Our present culture in its complexity was favorable for the anti-sophical mood. When life was much less complicated, the time was favorable for the theosophical mood. King Leon of Phlius, as Cicero tells us, once asked Pythagoras what he considered his life's work. “I see myself as a philosopher,” he said. ”I can express it in a comparison. I see life as a kind of fair. People come from everywhere to enjoy the festivities, to buy and sell things, for the sake of profit. But there are also those who come just to watch and see everything.” He feels the same way about the fair of life. He leads an inner life that is of no external use to anyone, that exists for its own sake; Pythagoras, a philosophos, was considered such a person.

Now a strange philosophical worldview is coming over from America to Europe. James, Schiller and so on are its representatives, and it is called the pragmatic worldview. This wants to say: What people acquire in ideas that go beyond sensory observations has no basis in truth. One only forms the ideas that are useful; what is useful for life is seen as truth. We form the concept of breath because it is useful to imagine something like this; one cannot perceive it. It is useful to imagine life in terms of ideals and to organize life according to ideals, which is why ideals are true. For our view of the world, it is useful to imagine a God and to bring order to the world. The “Philosophy of the As If” is the European edition of the American one. After its author ceased to be a professor, he published this philosophy. You can't find security, so you act as if there is a God, as if there are ideals, not that they are there in any way. This philosophy is also called fictionalism. Under the ownership of the former and the current religion, it was possible for a “philosophy of as if” to arise, and no matter how much this old religion is renewed, it will continue to develop as a “philosophy of as if”.

In his Ignorabimus speech, Du Bois-Reymond, the great physiologist, sought to define the field that science is capable of grasping. He shows that it is impossible for this science to comprehend sensation, the simplest psychic phenomenon. Regarding everything that is spiritual and mental, Reymond says: We will never recognize it. This attitude makes people materialistic and monistic. At the end, Reymond says: Science must limit itself to what exists and happens in space and time, and therefore must remain incomprehensible to everything that looks beyond spatial and temporal events, because only supernaturalism could know about that, but that is where science ends. If this sentence were true, then no logic could exist, no speech could be there. Spiritual science seeks to explore the question: How do people come to say: Where the sensory ends, science must end?

The soul is greater than consciousness. Many people cannot give clear reasons for their actions, and this is recognized by psychology. The unconscious reasons can be imaginative or affect- and drive-like. The hidden person in us still has power, still beats; man is under his influence.

So man is under the influence of fear; it can be conscious or unconscious, he acts accordingly. The Danish scientist Lange has written a paper “On the Expression of Emotional Movement”. Under the influence of fear, a person turns pale and their eyes become cloudy. The person cannot find a way to find their footing. The vessels contract and with them the muscles. Then the person cries: Where is something I can hold on to, or I will fall over? Thinking directed outwards brings the person into the same state in his nervous system, in his vascular system, as fear. This fear does not come to the consciousness, it remains subconscious. On the one hand we see the timid person who is too weak to stand on his own, who needs external support; on the other hand, the thinker who, through his outward-looking thinking, comes into the same situation. All materialism is an unconscious fear; its clamor for matter is a result of its subconscious fear. They need the material world to support them. When I enter the supersensible world, I fall over; may something hold me – so they unconsciously call out to the material world out of fear. What Reymond said last was an expression of horror of thinking.

Today the human pendulum is swinging in the direction of anti-Sophian sentiment. The consequence will be that Theosophy will also grow strong. Anti-Sophia is one-sidedness; the whole soul must do justice to the consciousness of self and of God. The soul finds rest only where its power is bound to the divine power. The best people, those who have advanced humanity, have sensed Theosophy. Goethe was imbued, aglow and warmed by the theosophical mood. Once, an anti-theosophical mood met him; anti-theosophists can also be great minds. One of them was Albrecht von Haller. He said:

No created mind can penetrate the innermost nature,
Happy the man to whom she shows only the outer shell.

To remain in the shell is anti-philosophy in the most eminent sense of the word. Goethe's answer is well known:

Nature has neither core nor shell, [...]
Only thou, thou, examine thyself,
Whether thou art core or shell.

Fichte says from his theosophical mood: Whoever recognizes himself in his real self is already standing in the spiritual world. - In his lecture on “The Destination of the Scholar,” Fichte expresses himself as follows:

I raise my head boldly 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 I defy your power. Break down on me, all of you, and you earth and you sky, mingle in wild tumult, and you elements all - foam and rage and grind in wild struggle the last sun dust of the body that I call mine call mine; my will alone with its firm plan shall float boldly and coldly over the ruins of the universe; for I have seized my destiny, and it is more enduring than yours; it is eternal, and I am eternal, like it.

To those who are anti-Sophian, he says:

That ideals cannot be represented in the real world is something we others perhaps know as well as they do, perhaps better. We only claim that reality must be judged by them and modified by those who feel the strength to do so. Even if they cannot be convinced of this, they lose little by doing so, once they are what they are; and humanity loses nothing by it. It merely makes it clear that they are not counted on in the plan for the ennoblement of humanity. The latter will undoubtedly continue on its way; let kind nature prevail over the former, and give them rain and sunshine, beneficial nourishment and an undisturbed circulation of the fluids, and, in due course, wise thoughts! Question

Question: Can reincarnation be linked to facts, or does it have to be accepted as dogma?

Rudolf Steiner: It is no more a dogma than memory is. After all, memory is also an inner fact. You can't pump out and look at what you need to remember. Thus, we cannot prove past memories of previous earthly lives other than by experiencing them.

This is how it is with all supersensible truths. To understand them, only an unprejudiced contemplation of life is necessary; to investigate them, one needs clairvoyance. Between death and a new birth, the decisive point of view is the striving to perfect oneself and also the whole world, not the question of whether it is pleasant or unpleasant or causes pain. One can come to an understanding of reincarnation if one behaves as if strokes of fate are not random, but [as if] one has inflicted them on oneself. These are soul proofs, so we must be there ourselves.

Question: [What about the] seven-year periodicity, and what deeper causes [does it] have? [What about] suicide?

Rudolf Steiner: Regarding the question of suicide, the [Schopenhauer] saying applies: “It is easy to preach morality, but difficult to explain it.” One should do good because it is absorbed into one's soul. (?)

Question: Which is the best prayer? Is it the Lord's Prayer?

Rudolf Steiner: The Lord's Prayer is indeed a universal prayer for the most primitive and the most developed mind. It has this power in itself, even if one does not know its laws, just as a plant grows according to laws that it does not know. Every prayer must be carried by a devotional mood, otherwise it can also be of evil. “Not my will, but Thine, be done.” It is only through this mood that every prayer becomes a true prayer.

Question: The point where man simply feels the connection with the higher worlds, how does he express himself? Please give me more details.

Rudolf Steiner: This is similar to the question: How can I imagine the spirit? - Just spiritually. No spiritual materialism! In the Theosophical Society one could hear such expressions [as]: Today there are wonderful spiritual vibrations in the room. The spiritual researcher would simply say: There is a good atmosphere in the room today. In the theosophical books, the spirit is described as follows: First there is matter, then it becomes thinner and thinner, but matter never actually ends. You should imagine the spirit without leaning on anything material. Feeling is something that has its center within itself.

For many years now, almost every winter I have had the privilege of speaking here about one or other topic from the field of spiritual science, as it is meant in tonight's reflections. And just on the occasion of my last lectures, which I was allowed to give here, I allowed myself to make the remark that when one speaks of spiritual science today in our present time in the sense in which it is meant here, one then by no means talking about anything in our time that is well known or even popular in wider circles; on the contrary, with this spiritual science one has to talk about something that is widely unrecognized and, above all, misunderstood. Indeed, this spiritual science has to fight against misunderstanding upon misunderstanding. One person may be informed about this spiritual science from second or third or sometimes even seventh or eighth hand reports and come to the conclusion that it is something like a new sect entering the world or some new attempt to found a religious community or something similar. The other comes to the opinion that this spiritual science has fantasy and 'dreaming' at its sources. Above all, it contradicts in the most eminent sense what today, as a worldview, wants to establish itself, as they say, as genuine, true science.

Perhaps I may, just on the occasion of this lecture, conclude with a few words about the misunderstandings that are currently close to us here, and may I first devote the greater part of the lecture to our topic and to that from whose field I have already been able to bring some details here for discussion, today in general, in order to then consider some special questions in the lecture on January 27 of next year.

Above all, it may be said that spiritual science wants to place itself in the spiritual life of the present, precisely as this spiritual life of the present has developed from the scientific way of thinking that has taken hold of the spiritual life of humanity for three to four centuries. And it may be said that the most serious misunderstanding is the assumption that this spiritual research can somehow come into conflict with the legitimate claims of true scientific research. From its point of view, this spiritual science will admire and fully recognize this science, and must do so if it wants to stand on the ground of true and genuine observation of humanity and the times. It will admire and recognize the great scientific achievements of our age where it is justified, will acknowledge what science has done for the transformation of our entire cultural life, will acknowledge how it is a scientific way of thinking, what is at work at every turn today and lives in our cultural assets and, in particular, what has virtually transformed all external areas of the rest of life in the course of the nineteenth century.

To what extent this spiritual science is fully included in the natural scientific series of development on the one hand, but on the other hand must go beyond its final conclusions, precisely because it draws the last and most genuine conclusions about what today is often called natural science thinking, I would like to explain this first by means of a kind of comparison, by which we simply want to communicate, but by which we do not want to prove anything special about what spiritual science has to say.

I do not want to talk about what science has achieved in terms of commercial and industrial aspects of contemporary cultural life; I want to talk about what scientific thinking has achieved. Apart from the fact that it has influenced the various cultural fields, it has contributed to a certain education of all human thinking, it has transformed the nature of the habits of thought, of the life of imagination and the cognitive needs of the human soul to a much greater extent than is usually realized. For this transformation has not only taken hold of those who have been drawn to science directly through their profession, their inclination or their interest, but of all souls; people simply think differently today than they did five or six centuries ago. We are accustomed to holding very different ideas about what we might call the reign of a sense of existence than we had in earlier centuries.

This is not something that has been arbitrarily brought about; rather, it is based on that inner necessity that had to take place in the history of mankind, just as human life must be different for an old man of sixty than for a man of thirty. These things correspond to historical laws of life, and anyone who wants to deny them must deny the inner truth of things. Those people who today are not yet seized by this change in thinking will be seized by it in the future, in difficult times, in the very near future. Thus, if we may say so, centuries of scientific education have transformed the innermost part of human thought and feeling. We may say so.

How does that which wants to shape cultural development as spiritual science relate to this transformation of human thinking over the last four centuries? I would like to illustrate this to you through a comparison. Let us look at the farmer who harvests the fruits when they are ripe. The greater part of the harvest is used as human food. But a part must be used, if life is to continue, to be sown as seed again, so that a harvest can ripen again next year.

We can compare this process in the life of nature with what has been achieved in recent centuries through scientific knowledge. The greater part of this must be used to allow human cultural life to flow broadly; it is incorporated into the important industrial achievements, into commercial life, into external social coexistence, into the individual sciences; and the individual branches of this culture flourish because the scientific way of thinking flows into them all. This part of human thought can be compared to the part of the seed that is used for human food.

But a part – and certainly not the least valuable part – of thoughts that have entered the human soul only in the last century, a part of these inner acquisitions, of what we have learned about the secrets of the existence of the world precisely through the natural sciences, can be used like the seed that goes into the field to produce new fruit. This is the part we use for what is referred to as meditation, concentration of thought. We can process this part of scientific thoughts and ideas inwardly with the soul, allowing them to take effect in our soul, to germinate there, so to speak. Under the influence of these thoughts, to which we devote ourselves in meditation, which we practise in the very innermost, most intimate soul work, we can allow precisely these scientific ideas to work on our soul in such a way that they work, weave, and bring forth sensations and feelings within it, that they practise this soul life so inwardly that this soul life not only expresses the word 'development', which is so popular today, but also comes into development itself. It is precisely the scientific way of thinking, when meditatively processed, that transforms our soul, makes our soul into something else. And it will soon become clear how, from this point of view, spiritual science is the correct continuation of the scientific way of thinking. But with regard to this spiritual science, when such considerations are employed, as is the case today, only suggestions can be given, only communications about the method of research, through which the spiritual researcher himself can devote himself to contemplation, the means by which everyone can be convinced.

Therefore, I would first like to draw attention to some of the results of spiritual science and then show how the spiritual researcher arrives at these results. These results are so at odds with what people today believe and suppose to be truth that they seem quite paradoxical, like something fantastic, like a flight of fancy for some. The spiritual researcher in particular knows how alien these results must be to many a soul of the present time, and he is least surprised when someone who wanted to be his friend walks away from him with the impression that he was talking to a fanatic. The spiritual researcher is fully aware of every reaction, even hostile confrontation, because he knows where such antagonism can come from.

Above all, spiritual research is a unique discipline in that it seeks to connect the human soul with its spiritual source in a way that is based on scientific thinking. It shows that what man carries in his soul as the deepest, innermost part is spiritual , a spiritual core; and that this spiritual core is connected with an all-embracing spiritual life of the world that lies beyond the life of the senses, and that it cannot be perceived or recognized by the ordinary human senses or by the intellect that binds itself to these human senses. But in this method of research, a tremendous difference between spiritual science and all other sciences immediately comes to light. Every other science works with the same means of thinking and looking at things, which are otherwise peculiar to man in everyday life. Just as man is, just as he develops in the normal way from childhood to later age, as he develops a certain capacity for knowledge, so he also approaches the scientific research objects of the present. And everything that such a normal person has to say forms the content of the sciences in the various fields of life.

It is quite different in spiritual research. It takes development seriously. It is based on the fact that with the powers of knowledge, with the soul faculties, which are initially inherent in people in their everyday lives, these boundaries cannot be crossed, which separate the sensual from the supersensible, the material from the spiritual; but it is based on the fact that a person's powers of knowledge, a person's soul powers, can be developed. It is serious about the word “development”. And today we will be speaking about intimate inner processes and activities of the soul, through which the soul elevates itself beyond itself, comes to develop powers of knowledge that are not those of ordinary life, but that, within this soul, which can be addressed in the soul as the true, immortal, spiritual core of the human being.

In a sense, spiritual research is not as comfortable as other forms of research; it cannot accept people as they are, but must make uncomfortable demands of them. If you want to become a spiritual researcher, you have to transform your soul so that it is guided beyond the ordinary level through its own activity and conducts research with powers that are not present in everyday life. This is the language of spiritual research. Only these powers lead to the regions of the spiritual world and to its beings.

But then, when the soul is led out so that it grasps its own essential core as a soul, then it first comes to a truth that, in the truest sense of the word, represents the continuation of the findings of natural science, but which is still everywhere looked upon as fantasy wherever it has not been studied in detail. One comes to the truth about repeated lives, the truth that can be expressed in a nutshell by saying: What we experience and work for in this life between birth and death, we do not experience and work for only once. As we see our life, when we look back into childhood as far as we can, and as we hope for our life in relation to the rest of the life before death, we do not live only once. We go through the gate of death and live in a purely spiritual world, which can only be seen with the spirit, a life between death and new birth, and then enter with the fruits of this life, also with those that we gather between death and new birth, into a new life on earth, to which we can look in the future just as we can look back into the past on the already expired earth lives of the individual human. So we always look forward to life on earth - between birth and death - and to life that passes between death and new birth in a purely spiritual world. The way we present this truth in today's spiritual life, it seems quite naturally fantastic to the vast majority of people. But all new truths in the world have seemed as fantastic as they have appeared. It will always be the fate of new truths that at first they seem like fantasies, then they become something that can no longer be seen as different; they then become a matter of course. Then, when man beholds himself as in an extended memory, then he can also explore the connections of this spiritual-soul core, which goes from life to life, with the spiritual worlds, through which the divine-spiritual, which interweaves and lives through this life, also passes. But from that which the spiritual researcher has so fully brought to life within himself, it springs forth for man that which he needs more and more for the cultural development of our earth, especially in the present and in the future.

Thus I have presented some of the truths of this spiritual research. It now remains for me to show how the spiritual researcher arrives at these truths, that is, how the spiritual world is investigated and researched. One must not believe that this spiritual world can be investigated with the senses that we can apply to the sensory world. It is a spiritual world precisely because it cannot be perceived by the senses. It is necessary for the study of this spiritual world that man himself should make himself the instrument of investigation. All other sciences have their external instruments. Spiritual research has as its only instrument the human organism itself, which is, however, the most wonderful instrument we can find on earth. But this organism must undergo a certain transformation if it is to acquire, to use a phrase from Goethe, “spiritual eyes and ears” in order to see what is always around us in spiritual form, but which cannot be seen unless a spiritual eye and spiritual ear are developed in the human soul, which would otherwise remain dormant.

How does one develop the spiritual organs through which the spiritual world becomes visible, audible and perceptible to man? Not tumultuous external processes, not experiments that can be carried out in the same way externally as in laboratories or clinics, bring about this change, but inner soul processes that the spiritual researcher can carry out with himself if he wants to gain insight into the spiritual world. What I have to say in this description may appear to many people to be extremely mundane. But it must be said: however mundane these things appear, in their execution they are among the most difficult that a person can undertake on this earth, including all his other activities. But we are not speaking of special wonders, of some things that in their simplest form not every person would know, when one has to speak of what the spiritual researcher must develop in his soul if he wants to come to the real exploration of the supersensible. The soul forces that the spiritual researcher has to develop are always there in the soul, but only in their beginnings, as they are needed for everyday life. The spiritual researcher has only to develop these qualities to an unlimited degree. Here I must call attention to something that is not only present everywhere in everyday life, but is also necessary in the most eminent sense. It is what is called attention: the attention of the soul to these or those things, the turning of interest to these or those things, as we have them in ordinary life.

We need to pay attention to two things. Many people need to reflect – but usually they think about these things when things are no longer going well – they need to reflect on why their memory is getting worse in life. Why does memory get worse at all? If you delve deeper into the question of memory, you come to the conclusion that it is actually a question of attention. What we grasp intensely with our attention remains in our memory.

You could say something quite mundane as an introductory remark when you want to point out the importance of attention. Many a person is quite annoyed in the morning when they cannot find this or that thing that they put here or there in the evening. They have completely forgotten it. For example, they cannot find their cufflink. Why does this happen? Well, they have forgotten where they put it. He can remedy that. A sure way to help himself is to resolve not just to lay it down thoughtlessly, but to think: I am putting the button in this place, I am laying it down with will. If you also pay attention to the act from your inner arbitrariness, you will not forget it, you will surely remember the place where you put the button. This can be extended to all other memories. If only people realized that they also take into their memory everything they take into their arbitrary attention, then they would combine the attention problem with the memory problem, and a training of the memory can be summarized in a training of attention.

And there is another point to which attention must be drawn, which seems even more important. It is necessary for a healthy mental life that we are able to recognize the experiences we have had back to the point of our childhood as ours in memory. If we are incapable of this, if, let us say, at the age of thirty a person's soul life is such that he cannot recognize certain experiences that he had at the age of five as his own, then a perforation of the ability to remember occurs that is somewhat unhealthy. Only then are we healthy when we can follow our entire present self as a continuous thread. This depends on our being able to experience the events that happen to us in such a way that they line up on a thread of memory through which, as it were, our ego runs. And a person - this happens in certain mental illnesses - can, as it were, come to have a double ego in that he can have the opinion that someone else has experienced what he has actually experienced. Such things happen. Then his healthy soul life is destroyed, torn apart. Much could be achieved for the education of people in whom one can recognize in many cases that such a perforation of the ego is taking place, much could be achieved for education if one were clear about the fact that the ability to remember is intimately connected with the way we pay attention to and are interested in the things of the world. Nothing but attention — that is what belongs to the imaginative soul forces.

It is this attention that must be developed to infinity by the spiritual researcher in what is called concentration of thought. To do this, however, an ordinary, everyday soul force must be driven with tremendous inner energy and resignation to an extent that it is otherwise never driven in external life. The human being must bring himself to explore the state of mind in which he is when he is attentive; he must become aware of it when he is attentive in ordinary life. His attention is aroused by external impressions, by sensational things that have a strong effect on him. But the spiritual researcher must transform his attention so that he does not allow himself to be forced by anything external, but is able, through inner arbitrariness alone, to unfold the activity of the soul that would otherwise only be unfolded in attention.

The safest way to achieve this goal is one that is highly inconvenient for many people. In order to achieve something very safely, you have to force yourself to turn your attention to something that is as uninteresting as possible in ordinary life; something you would like to run away from, that is completely uninteresting. If you can bring yourself to treat that from which you otherwise run away with your soul in such a way that you place it at the center of your spiritual life, that you concentrate all the powers of your soul on this one thing, but in relation to the rest of your soul, through inner arbitrariness, through training of the soul, you come to be as in sleep, so that no eye, no ear perceives anything externally, that all the worries of life fall silent: Anyone who has silenced their entire being in this way, as is otherwise only achieved in sleep, but then does not fall asleep but focuses on something that they have deliberately placed at the center of their mental life and now turn their soul's attention to in an unlimited way, will awaken forces in their soul that would otherwise remain dormant in their soul.

This brings about what could be called – I do not particularly value the expression – a spiritual chemistry. Because when you develop your imagination and thinking, you are doing something in your own soul life that can be compared and only compared with the separation of hydrogen from water in the chemical laboratory. When we have water in front of us, it is liquid. If we separate the hydrogen from it, we have a gas that has very different properties than water. No one can see the properties of hydrogen and oxygen in the water. And no one can recognize the spiritual destiny in the person who stands before us every day. To do this, the spiritual and mental must be separated from the physical and bodily. This does not happen through external processes, but through the increase of that which may appear so ordinary to man, into the immeasurable. So that one can indeed say: “Although it is light, the light is heavy.”

There are many details that need to be observed. Here, only the principle can be stated. If the soul then increases its attention, as required, it is able, through the concentration of forces that are otherwise unconscious, to tear everything of the soul and spirit away from the physical, just as hydrogen is torn away from oxygen in the laboratory.

If you continue such inner exercises of the soul life, then the day will come when you can connect a meaning to the words that are otherwise just a phrase: Now I know that I can think even when I am not thinking with the brain; now I know that I can think and visualize even when I am not using my body; now I know what it means to leave the body and to feel and experience the soul and spiritual realm. And when someone leaves the physical body with the soul and spirit, he has completely different qualities and experiences in his inner life than a person has within his body. Just as someone says that hydrogen can be extracted from water, then hydrogen has the properties of a gas that burns, so from the point of view of an everyday materialist, one can laugh at what the spiritual researcher experiences when he reaches the point of lifting his spiritual soul out of his physical body through long, energetic exercises. It sounds like empty phrases when he talks about it. And yet I would like to describe the progress, at least in detail.

What the spiritual researcher experiences when he continues the exercises is indeed so completely paradoxical that from a certain moment on he feels: Yes, your thinking used to be such that you had to use your brain to think – but now you feel that you are actually thinking outside of your brain. He feels as if he can move like a sun in the spiritual with his present thinking, emancipated from the brain. He experiences himself in such a way that he now even knows: the way he thinks otherwise now runs almost automatically, it is bound to the brain. From a certain moment on, one acquires a very definite knowledge about it: When you are in your present state, you have to slip back into your brain if you want to use your brain again. You perceive your brain as something external to you, like you would perceive an external object, a table, a chair, next to you.

Then comes that significant experience, which makes such a significant, such a shattering impact on the spiritual life of the spiritual researcher. It must be repeated several times in life, but when it occurs for the first time in life, it is the most harrowing event that cannot be compared to anything else in life. It can occur, for example, as the following: one wakes up in the middle of sleep as if to a dream, but it is not a dream, but a spiritual reality that outshines all the rest of the reality of the day. The experience can also occur in the middle of the outer life of the day, but it does not disturb it, because true and correct preparation will never make a person fantasize. In the life of the day as well as in the life of the night, the moment may arise, which I would characterize in the following way. But it can also occur in hundreds of other ways; I will give only a typical example. Something of what is attempted to be described with words will present itself to every person who becomes a spiritual researcher. He will communicate what happens in such a way that he says: It is like a room in which he finds himself. Lightning strikes the room; he follows the lightning as if speaking to himself inwardly, he feels the elements striking his body in a flash, as if his body were being destroyed. From that moment on, he knows that he is united with the spirit without the body, he knows that man carries a spiritual and soul element within him; this is the direct experience of every person who can have the experience if he wants to. Only from that moment on do you know what the human essence is in the truest sense of the word; what lies beyond birth and death.

This experience can only be made in a spiritual way, not through external experiments. Those who demand that the spiritual be established through external experiments should also demand that some experience they had fifty years ago be extracted with some kind of powder so that it can be prepared and made visible externally. Spiritual facts are not established externally. That which spiritual researchers of all times have called “approaching the gate of death”, that is, experiencing death in the image, that is, what a person experiences in real death when his eternal core detaches itself from the physical body, is experienced in the image in the serious experience, which so absorbs the soul of the person who has already had it once, imprinting on the soul that seriousness that can be expressed and felt with the words: You were connected to the deepest core of your being, to that which, as the eternal, spiritually permeates, lives through and interweaves the world. However, this seriousness is to be lived through painfully and not without making the greatest efforts to which man is unaccustomed. Not without surrendering what is otherwise considered pleasure and joy; what one otherwise likes in life, not without giving up what one otherwise strives for in life for certain moments, one attains this purest experience, which has been spoken of and points to light in the spiritual world. Then one attains something further when one adds the following to what has just been said: One must also give up everything that one perceives as desirable in everyday life, and one must give it up in such a way that one completely renounces everything that one otherwise desires, everything that one otherwise likes, that one gives up everything that gives one pleasure, and one must not give it up in such a way that one has only a very specific self-awareness in the devotion, but in such a way that one really renounces during this devotion all such activity that we otherwise call our complete devotion to the world, which one otherwise does not really know, that one gives up no compulsion and nothing that otherwise calls us to devotion in life. This must be added, and the spiritual world, into which we have entered, senses this with what we call the spiritual state.

One should not imagine this perception in the spiritual world as being the same as the perception in the external world. The external world is presented to us in such a way that we can say: there is an object out there that I see with my eye or perceive with my other sensory organs. One can only experience spiritual states if, after devotion, one becomes one with the states. We do not experience these states from outside ourselves, but in such a way that they enter into us. We have to immerse ourselves, become one with the spiritual states that come to meet us. Therefore, when a person increases his inner thinking through attention, and when we make this thinking an organ of perception for spiritual states through devotion, then we perceive these spiritual states.

What one experiences inwardly can be called spiritual mimicry. Just as in ordinary life one unconsciously expresses one's spiritual states in facial expressions, so too, through the processes described, one becomes one with the spiritual world because one feels at one with it. As the soul experiences, it is driven to a facial expression, it becomes very active, very active, as it lives into the conditions. By experiencing the spiritual world, it undergoes something similar inwardly in a spiritual-soul way, as it is the facial expression of our face. A reliving is the perception of the spiritual world, an invisible, supersensible reliving. This reliving is attained, as it were, through this spiritual chemistry, through this detachment of the life of ideas from the instrument of the brain.

Likewise, one can detach the faculty of speech from the tool that otherwise serves language. When we speak, a certain part of the brain is externally active, which we have to use as a tool of our body, the one that specifically leads to the larynx. The one who studies the secrets of human speech knows that, even when one is thinking, finer movements take place internally than the coarser external speech movements. Now, as a spiritual researcher, one must be able to grasp the inner activity of the soul, which one otherwise expresses in speech. The mental researcher must detach it from the sound and the word; he must keep it as an inner activity, not allowing it to become a word, not shaping it into words, and he must keep it so inwardly that not even the parts of the brain that are otherwise active when speaking are used. He detaches the power of speech from speaking. He learns to keep something inwardly in his soul that otherwise vibrates inwardly when speaking. Then he does not speak, but what otherwise floods and pulses through the soul in the word is a strong power, a power through which he not only performs inner facial expressions, but also what can be called inner gestures, inner gesticulation, signs. Then not only intermediate states of the spiritual world, intermediate processes of perception, come to light, but the spiritual world itself is revealed, revealed in us, when we can imitate it in inner gestures. And only through the power of language will it be possible to imitate the processes of the spiritual world.

You can put yourself in the shoes of the beings and actions of real spirits around us. Only by living in their gestures and becoming one with them can you perceive the spiritual beings; this is how you gain knowledge of the spiritual world, but you also gain knowledge of your own sojourn in the spiritual world. When the ability to speak has been chemically detached from speaking, so to speak, the moment has arrived when memory can be extended beyond the previous life on earth, when it is realized that these are not theories; when it is known that our life did not begin yesterday, but that it is the continuation of many previous lives. From the moment we can imitate the spiritual world through the power of speech in an inner gesture, we know that our present life on earth is part of a whole chain of lives. In an inner gesture, we come to the spiritual essence that represents the eternal.

Something else has to be separated from our activity. But this is more difficult to understand. I would like to express what I mean in the simplest way. When we remember our childhood, we have to say: In our childhood we were all four-footed creatures. We walked on all fours. We straightened up through our own inner activity, which was certainly practiced, but which left no memory of its inwardness to the human being. And just imagine what the human being, as a cultural being on earth, is because he looks up into the heavenly sphere with his face! That has changed his entire direction in space. The human being has only made himself into the being that he is. To experience again in later life that inner urge that inspired us when we made ourselves into an upright being and thereby formed ourselves into a human being, that is what we should activate in our soul.

This leads us to a third power of the soul, which we separate from our bodily life. We have already used this power in the past of our present life. We no longer need it in later life, because then we can straighten ourselves up. But now we bring out the strength with which we straightened ourselves up; we apply it, we become aware of it. At that time it worked without us having caught up with it in our soul; we were content with becoming upright beings from crawling beings through the inner application of this strength. The spiritual researcher learns to recognize a wonderful soul power in this power. Through this power he is able not only to experience the spiritual through the state of thought and the gestures of spiritual beings through the detached power of speech, as in the state of thinking, but he is able to experience the spiritual beings themselves, to become one with them, as it were, to become one with the spiritual worlds, to work and weave in them. With them one learns to recognize that the human being has come to earth as a spiritual being, and by bringing these forces with him, he has become what he is as an earthly being. He has become a human being by bringing the body from a horizontal to a vertical position. Only man uses this power in the universe to change from a quadruped to a biped. If you discover this power inwardly in the soul, then you enter into the inner being of other spiritual beings that permeate and live through the world. These are beings that have different tasks to perform because they have a different purpose in the world than humans do. One gains insight into earthly conditions by concentrating one's attention, recognizing spiritual beings with their co-experiences, by unfolding in the spiritual world precisely that which gives the human being his spiritual physiognomy as a human being. Through inner physiognomy, one becomes one with the spiritual beings. Inner gestures and movements lead to the perception of processes in the spiritual world; but spiritually motivated physiognomy, as it gives the upright physiognomy to a person, leads to the knowledge of that which people can only experience and experience in the spiritual world, in association with other spiritual beings.

The paths that lead the spiritual researcher into the spiritual worlds are briefly indicated. These ways cannot be particularly popular. Today they are such that one must say that they go against one of the characteristics of the human soul: its love of comfort. This love of comfort goes so far today that the human soul only acknowledges the existence of something when it can simply passively devote itself to it. If one demands of this soul that it should first be active itself, that it should itself experience that which previously meant nothing to it, and through which it should then recognize the object in its own experience, then this goes against the complacency of today's soul, which wants to be passive, which does not want to conquer truths for itself, but wants to be given them.

Therefore, spiritual research is so aligned with the goals of the present that these goals of the present do not want to know about spiritual science, because, especially in the most spiritual sense, these goals are directed towards passivity. Spiritual science demands the development of soul powers that are based on activity and that, in their further pursuit, lead into the higher, supersensible worlds; because the spiritual can only be experienced through inner activity.

But today's man often imagines the spiritual to be mere fantasy. He imagines it to be like an external object that commands him: “I am here, you have to recognize me.” In this way, he is very far from the right understanding. The following was explained quite philosophically in a newspaper: When you immerse yourself in Kant or any other philosopher, all the concepts are so intangible that you have to think about them for a long time before you can understand them. Can our time provide a remedy for this? And precisely because of the spirit of our time, he [the author] finds that they can be made tangible. Everything should be made tangible, including the spirit. Yes, even that which every human being can know is not visible, human thinking, the thought should become visible. And how should that happen? Well, Spinoza, for example, who is said to be difficult for people to understand, who want to make everything vivid, should be approached in such a way that the cinematograph is used. Why not? You could do the following, says the person concerned. This has not been suggested as a fairy tale, but as a serious proposition based on the aims of our time. It shows how Spinoza arrives at seemingly difficult thoughts. Through the idea of the expansion of thought, it shows how the whole of ethics, up to God, are juxtaposed, culminating in the higher ideas. Cinematography could be used to illustrate Spinoza's entire ethics from individual forces. That is one of the aims of our time. And the editor of this journal, who is taking up the treatise, makes the following comment: “So we could finally hope that the ancient masters of humanity can be brought closer to people in a way that corresponds to the present day through what most people today obviously see only as a game, namely the art of film.

In this way, however, spiritual science cannot keep pace with the goals of our time. These goals of our time are geared towards passivity, and even if we were to talk for hours about the goals of our time, this passivity of the spirit is the necessary correlate in relation to what could be said about these goals in intimate terms. This much can be said.

If you look closely, you will see that the spiritual life of humanity is no different from the rest of nature. What is gained on the one hand must be taken away on the other. One has to admire the boldness of the inventions of the mind that are used in technology. Man will even conquer the unruly air; but all this is achieved with the most profound spiritual passivity.

But precisely for this reason our time is also so ripe for developing the spirit itself in its activity. Indeed, more than that, our time has the necessity of making the spirit inwardly active. The innermost moral, intellectual and emotional powers are brought forth through the habits of thinking and feeling that are gained through spiritual science. On the one hand, as a result of the education that humanity has already acquired under the influence of what is truly admirable in itself, spiritual science is seen as something paradoxical, something fantastic, perhaps even something quite different; but as a result, this opposition locks itself onto the other side. Opposition is necessary. Just as when you press an elastic ball for a long time, it finally develops that strength, which is perceived as an elastic counterforce against the pressure, so the soul must come to strong and ever stronger passivity precisely through the admirable achievements of thought, so that it longs for inner activity. Unconsciously, it already longs for this activity today. And all activity can become a power through which the soul is liberated and redeemed when spiritual research is allowed to work in the fabric of contemporary spiritual culture.

With just these few remarks, I wanted to show today how spiritual science wants to engage with the whole spiritual fabric of the present.

Looking back at what has just been discussed, it will be fully understood that spiritual science faces opposition from all sides. One of these oppositions comes from those who believe that religions or something else is endangered by spiritual science. They will not appear incomprehensible to the observer of history. For the time of Copernicus, the fact that the earth orbits the sun was just as fantastic as the fact of repeated earth lives is for our contemporaries. At that time, people believed that religion was endangered by Copernican astronomy; just as people today believe that religion is endangered again by the teaching of spiritual science about repeated earth lives.

We can be more reassured about such beliefs if we consider that when an outstanding scholar-philosopher, who was also, admittedly, active in the [cosmological] field, came to the realization that truth is invincible, he was talking about Galileo. He said that today the Church has learned to see in Galileo, in Copernicus, no longer those whom she once saw in them; but today she has learned to point out that through discoveries in the field of science, the glory of divine revelations is revealed to mankind all the more brightly. Science in the true sense of the word is to the praise of religious life, not to critically do something detrimental to true, religiously understood life.

That it is not so widely understood, that was made clear to a large number of our friends who want to start building a relatively small structure in the near future that will provide a home for spiritual science and a variety of studies. Many of these voices were instructive, which certainly sometimes spoke from a point of view that is so thoroughly imbued with what fantastic stuff, what a reverie this spiritual science actually is. Yes, it was interesting from a cultural-historical point of view when the remarks that had been made about the building in the most diverse places were also presented to me. It was interesting to look at things from this point of view as well. Indeed, one could admit that the humanities or their adherents have a little imagination, but they don't have as much as those who have occasionally written these articles.

At most, they can measure up to the article that I also received, about a spiritual researcher who is quite close to me and which states what he expresses in terms of fantasies. You can't get enough of his fantasies, and then you move on to the second section, where you are then really told, probably from the elbow, the very worst fantasies about birth, kinship, descent. Truly, even if he had some imagination, if he were inclined to fantasize par excellence [...], he would never dream up so much fantasy, especially not a fantasy about external descent, about kinship and so on.

The strangest things can be read. For example, it is said that a Buddhist temple is to be built on the site. Just as modern chemistry is far removed from what was once practiced as chemistry in distant Asia centuries or millennia ago, so too is modern spiritual science far removed from what Buddhism is. It takes more than a little imagination to talk about Buddhism. Today I have tried to explain, albeit insufficiently, what the adherents of spiritual science actually want. Perhaps some of the ideas will be able to be gained from it after all. But that will have little to do with what these spiritual researchers are supposed to be, according to the newspaper reports. One remark, which has appeared in at least thirty newspapers, has particularly caught my attention. We learn of a remarkable ability of the spiritual researchers: they can make it rain. It was emphasized everywhere that the foundation stone was laid in the pouring rain. What kind of people must the spiritual researchers be that they can order rain so that they can lay the foundation stone protected by the rain? If that were the case, they would certainly be very dangerous. But if you get to know those who make the Dornach building their own, you will recognize that they like sunshine just as much as you do; that they did not order the rain at all and did not shy away from the day. It would even have been daytime when the foundation stone was laid if some of the members who would have liked to have been there had not come on a later train. That is a more trivial explanation, which cannot be made much of, but it looks a little better if one says: These people must have certain reasons for working at night and in the rain. That was not said, but it was still in the subconscious and can be interpreted from the words. But reality is not that interesting. As for the rest, the future will show how little foundation there is for the fantastic ideas that have been spread in the outside world about this place, which is said to be a place of activity in the sense indicated in this lecture. This lecture was not given to talk about this place, but because it is being given, I may refer to it with these few words, because, so to speak, spiritual science has made an unwanted sensation in this area.

If you want to say what this building is for, yes, isn't it true that stations are built so that people can travel by train? They are built so that the machines, the trains, can drive in and out. For this, the stations must be usable. We must see as the characteristic quality of this building nothing other than that which is useful for the purposes of spiritual science, which is capable of stirring the soul when the word of spiritual science is spoken, as is necessary to bring the soul into contact with the spiritual world. To evoke the mood of the soul that is necessary in our time, to prepare the soul to receive the spiritual world, it is necessary to speak not only through the word, but also through that which is around us. What otherwise can only be expressed in words should be poured into the architecture. In the form of symbols that are truly artistic, a building should be created in the interior design that can serve the cultivation of spiritual culture in a spiritual way, just as a train station serves its material purposes in the right way. Even if the comparison is a trivial one, it is still apt.

It will be more and more recognized that what spiritual science can achieve from the human soul is connected with all the goals of the present. By appealing to the active element in the soul, to that which can only be awakened through activity in the soul, spiritual science speaks at the same time to the most important activities of the soul through the results of its research. More and more, those souls who can be active in the truest sense will desire spiritual science in the spirit. Spiritual science will appeal to soul powers that can only be taken into account from the present time onwards, but which also have to intervene in all the aims of human culture; above all in artistic life, so that just as in ancient times spiritual science developed on the one hand and art on the other from the common source of spiritual life, so here too artistic activity will go hand in hand with the current of spiritual science. And a weak beginning for this is to be given in the architecture of the site that will be built in Dornach. The architecture should speak to those who, in the longings of the soul, feel drawn to it, through the form of the same spiritual secrets, of which otherwise only in words can be actually stammered. Spiritual science has a hope. How many opponents it can grow up with in the present, that it corresponds to a necessity of the heart and the human soul, that will be seen from what it has inserted into culture. Just as scientific and religious prejudices were unable to stop Copernicanism, so the truths of spiritual science will not be hindered by the prejudices of these opposing sides. That which lies in the organism of human becoming and happening will happen with the same inevitability with which a young person matures and ripens according to an inner law. Just as this natural property is inherent in humanity, so too will this spiritual science mature. And just as natural science intervenes in and transforms the outer material life, so too will spiritual science intervene in the social, moral and spiritual conditions of the soul life. Just as we travel differently today – by rail – than we did two centuries ago, so too do longings live differently in the soul today than they did two centuries ago.

These longings must be satisfied; we can also see this from the following remarkable matter, which may be recalled again, even if something external is compared with something internal: When the first railways were to be built in Germany, the Medical College was consulted. The college replied that no railways should be built, otherwise people would suffer severely from nervous disorders when traveling on them. And if some people still want to travel, then the railways should at least be fenced in with boards so that the other people do not become dizzy. That was the judgment in 1837. The railways run all the same. That is how it is in life. And spiritual science will run through spiritual life, just as the obstacles of antagonism will want to assert themselves. Spiritual science will show precisely in those in whose hearts it is to take root how unfounded all the prejudices against it are. Science will see how in spiritual science it finds its best ally, how science, limiting itself to external matters, cannot achieve what spiritual science must give it. It will recognize that spiritual science contradicts natural science just as little as there is a contradiction for healthy thinking in the following. We can have three people standing in front of us, one and two others in front of him. The question arises: Why does the one live? Well, because he has a lung inside and breathes air in and out. Nothing to be said against that. But the other says: I know he also lives for another reason. I found him hanged eight days ago; because I cut him down, he is alive today. Everyone is right. The natural scientist is fully justified in saying that when certain qualities appear in life, we have inherited them from our parents, our ancestors and so on. He has the merit of pointing to what is given in the line of inheritance. The spiritual scientist says: what develops in the wonderful mystery of growth, that is brought by the person from previous earthly lives. There is no contradiction in this; both are true.

And with the religious concerns it will be as with the concerns about Copernicanism. The one who stands on the ground of revelation nevertheless feels united with all those minds that have grasped the truth from their point of view; what spiritual research is supposed to be, that it will become, and when spiritual research is an achievement of our time, then the people blessed by this cultural progress will have counted these spiritual goals of spiritual research as their own; as spiritual beings, they will have felt united with spiritual research, they will have grasped its point of view in relation to the spiritual world.

As with all other honest minds connected with human progress, spiritual research also feels at one with Goethe, and with his words I would like to summarize today's reflection from this point of view. To all those who are prejudiced against spiritual research, I would say this: if people believe that religion or something else is endangered by spiritual science, then the spiritual researcher, whose soul has been touched by spiritual science, knows that he is walking through the world and knows that Goethe's words are true, and that they that the one who truly allows himself to be penetrated by science and art, enters in such a way that his soul is truly religiously moved; and that only the one who lacks the gift for science and artistry in the right sense will not be religiously moved in the true sense of the word. Therefore, allow me to characterize the position of spiritual science in relation to the goals of all times and also of our time with Goethe's words, by saying with Goethe:

He who possesses science and art
also has religion;
he who does not possess those two
shall have religion.

Dear attendees, for a number of years now I have taken the liberty of speaking from this place about the subject of spiritual science, as it will also be meant in tonight's reflection. May I be allowed to present the foundations of this spiritual science in a certain way, I would like to say, in a clear way, and then to speak in more detail about some special subjects of this spiritual science in the next reflection the day after tomorrow.

It is - and this has been mentioned frequently over the years - fully understandable to anyone who stands on the ground of this spiritual science, as it is meant here, that in our time, from the most diverse sides, not only the most manifold objections, but, one might even say, hostilities against this spiritual science are asserting themselves. Not only does this spiritual science present itself to the rest of contemporary spiritual life as something still foreign to this spiritual life today - it has that in common with everything that has been incorporated into it as a new acquisition of human spiritual culture in a certain respect - but precisely in relation to the spiritual goals of our time, this spiritual science must appear on the one hand as something quite incomprehensible, fantastic, dreamy, although on the other hand it represents something that arises from the deepest longings and, one may say, from the most urgent needs of the soul life of the present day. With this I would like to have defined, so to speak, the theme of this evening.

Spiritual science, as it is meant here, differs from the outset precisely from that in a fundamental way, the continuation of which it wants to be, and it is only too understandable that it experiences hostility after hostility from that side. I am referring to the scientific school of thought of our time, because basically, spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants to be a continuation in the truest, most genuine sense of scientific thinking for the spirit and its secrets, its laws - a continuation of the scientific way of thinking that has left its mark on the spiritual life of the West for three to four centuries.

Nevertheless, although precisely because of this characteristic spiritual science is in no way obliged to confront the justified claims of natural science, it nevertheless differs in a certain respect from what is actually called science today from the point of view of the natural scientific way of thinking. It is just as much a science as natural research, but because it considers the objects, entities and processes of spiritual life, it must necessarily develop the scientific methods in a different way than natural science, which is limited to the senses and to the intellect (which has the senses as its basis), must do today. And so, let our attention be drawn to this fundamental difference between spiritual-scientific research and natural-scientific research.

What we usually call science today starts from that state, from that mood of the human soul, which is present in normal life, in everyday human life. We speak of what man can do by virtue of his soul, by virtue of his body, by virtue of his mind applied to the observations of the senses and to experiment, what man can do by virtue of all this, where the limits of knowledge for what has been indicated; in short, it is perfectly right to say that this scientific direction takes the human soul as it is, observes the environment of this soul and from this gains the laws of sensual-physical existence. The most important work for this science is therefore done in research, always within the activity of working itself, and what comes out of this activity is science, is a scientific result.

Spiritual research is different. Spiritual research, as it is meant here: Although, as we shall see in a moment, it is the same processes in the life of the soul that spiritual research has to undertake, which also govern external science, external scientific knowledge, but these activities of the spiritual researcher are for him preparations for his research, are for him there to prepare the soul for it, so that it can arrive at what can be called seeing. Of course, everything is meant spiritually, but if one assumes this spiritual meaning, then one can say: outer science presupposes the human soul, and these observations are based on the observation of the senses, on what the intellect has to say about the laws of existence.

Spiritual research uses all human soul powers, whether they are powers of understanding, will or feeling, to prepare what could be called the senses – in a figurative sense, of course – which then lead to direct perception , to prepare for the spiritual researcher to devote his work and efforts to preparing himself, so that he can then, as it were, access the impressions of perceptions from the spiritual world through himself.

Now I do not want to speak, not in this reflection, of abstractions, of concepts, of speculations, of a philosophy of ideas, but I want to lead directly into the facts of the soul life, which is suitable for spiritual research. All spiritual research is based on the fact that the human soul can apply to itself what is always on everyone's lips today as a scientific buzzword, that the human soul can apply to itself what lies in the word 'development'. Spiritual research starts from the premise that the human soul can undergo an inner development that brings about a transformation, a change in these soul forces, so that these soul forces become different in a certain sense. So everything that is the result of this spiritual research is not gained by simply accepting the soul in its abilities, but only comes about when, through careful preparation, the soul has transformed itself in such a way that it no longer has the sensual world around it in its direct spiritual perception the sensual world around it, but that it has another, a higher, a spiritual world around it, just as it has the sensual-physical world around it in ordinary life, which is viewed through the senses.

Now one could easily believe that some very special preparations are needed to transform the soul in this way. That is not the case, basically. What the soul has to undertake is based on things that are actually always present in everyday soul life, that belong to the most essential powers of this soul life, but which, in order to become suitable for spiritual research, must be developed into the infinite, one might say.

I will now show from a different angle, than I have often done in the past years, how the human soul, as it were, goes beyond itself, beyond its everyday point of view, in order to become an observer of the spiritual world. What it has to undertake in the intimate inner life has, as its elements, as its starting point, precisely the forces that are necessary in the most everyday life. One of these forces can be touched upon by using an easily understandable term that refers to something that is absolutely necessary in everyday life. It is what we call in this everyday life attention, interest in the things of the environment. This attention – I have already spoken about it from a different perspective in these lectures – consists in our focusing on some object in our environment, so that through this focusing it remains, as it were, in our soul life, living on in memory.

How necessary this attention is for everyday life can be seen from a very ordinary way of looking at things, which focuses on the connection between this attention and memory. Many a person will complain that their memory is either weakening or that it is in some way faulty or deficient. If one were to study – to the extent that such study is necessary for ordinary life – the connection between attention and memory, one would get over many of the things that one so often notices as defects in oneself.

I will start with a very trivial matter. Many a person cannot find an object in the morning that they still had in the evening. They have put it down with half-consciousness, not with attention. A cufflink that we put down in the evening in such a way that we harbor the arbitrary thought: You are now putting this button in this place - maybe we even think about the surroundings - in this environment. You will see, if you let these thoughts pass through your mind in the evening, that you will go directly to the place of the button in the morning, and it turns out that there is a connection between our ability to remember and what can be called attention. To a certain extent, the memory problem is an attention problem, and if we could get used to arbitrarily paying attention to things that we know need to be remembered, we would contribute an infinite amount, not only to the memory of the things in question, but we would also see that our memory is really strengthened by frequently practicing such activity, which means that the forces behind our memory would also become strong. Just as it is true that, to a certain extent, a good memory is part of an outwardly healthy mental life, it is equally true that observing what we call attention is very necessary in everyday life.

But there is another way to convince oneself of the connections between the human mental life and attention. Everyone knows – and especially those who are a little familiar with the literature on contemporary psychology – how a healthy psyche must be a coherent psyche, so that when we look back to the point of childhood that we usually remember, we must recognize the events that have occurred to us as our own. It would be unhealthy if the memory were so full of holes that we see our own experiences as those of a foreign being, when we would not recognize them as our own. In the case of diseased souls, these experiences emerge as if they were another ego.

Much could be done if, through spiritual science, one had trained oneself to be attentive to these things – one can recognize them – to be attentive to souls that show a tendency towards such holes in, let us say, their ego, their continuous memories, and one would then intervene in such a way as to strengthen and systematically strengthen interest. Much of the harm done to such souls could be averted by a certain education if one considered the connection between the life of memory, the life of the soul as a whole, and what we call attention.

What we might call attention is not attention to this or that, but the activity of attention, the activity that unfolds in the soul life while we are paying attention. For the purposes of spiritual research, this must be strengthened, increased, in intensity and without limit. This happens in what we might call the concentration of human thinking, feeling and willing, or, in general, the concentration of the entire soul life.

In our outer, everyday life, we develop attention by being stimulated by impressions from outside, by what, I might say, has a more brilliant, outstanding effect on our soul than anything else. This challenges our attention. We very rarely succeed in producing this attention through pure arbitrariness; but spiritual research must prepare for this: increasing attention to an unlimited degree through inner arbitrariness, through training of the soul, through intimate practice - one may say - into the unlimited.

An increase in attention is brought about in this way: If we have stimulated certain ideas, perhaps ideas that do not correspond to an external fact, but symbolic ideas that we can survey precisely, so that we know that no supernaturally conscious ideas are involved; that we take the same , quite arbitrarily, without any process forcing us, into the center of our consciousness, and then bring about such a life of consciousness as only develops in normal human existence during sleep.

During sleep, all external senses fall silent, all movement ceases, and the human being lies still in relation to his corporeality. Even the worries and concerns of life fall silent in sleep; only in normal life during sleep does unconsciousness occur. Again, I can only describe the principles here, not everything. You can find more details in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my “Occult Science”. But the soul can, through training, through years of exercises, produce such a mood in itself that its inner self arbitrarily silences everything in itself that otherwise only remains silent during sleep. The soul is, so to speak, in the same state in relation to outer activity and perception as in sleep, except that it is awake and thus detached from all outer life. The soul focuses solely and exclusively on the self-chosen idea with the most intense attention of all its activity. As a result, everything that the soul would otherwise use up of its energy to absorb and process the manifold impressions of the day, everything that the soul expends in energy, is now used to push itself towards this one goal of the idea. The soul life is concentrated, and something is now being created with that which even the most significant minds of human development have always regarded as the most worthy apparatus for all world exploration. What is needed now is what can be compared with the apparatus of the human soul, but I do not attach any particular importance to the comparison, with something like spiritual chemistry.

To understand why a person carries out an experiment on the soul, which is not just an inner process of imagination but a real process in the soul that actually brings about something in reality, I will use the comparison with chemistry to help us understand each other. Something is done with the soul that could be called spiritual chemistry. When we have water in front of us, its components are not necessarily recognizable externally. The chemist breaks this water down into hydrogen and oxygen. He separates the hydrogen from the water. Hydrogen has very different properties than water, properties that cannot be suspected in water as such. Just as one can only assume the properties of hydrogen in water, so too can one only assume the properties of the soul and spirit in the human being standing before us in everyday life; for just as hydrogen is bound to water, so too are soul and spirit bound to the physical body in everyday life. What I have characterized as an unlimited increase in attention to an arbitrary idea or sensation or concept concentrates the soul's powers so that this soul stands out from the physical body. Now it must be said, though, that when the soul wants to prepare itself, it must do so with patience and energy and often for years – that varies from person to person – but then the one who prepares his soul really does achieve connecting a meaning with something that can justifiably appear nonsensical to many people in the present. The spiritual researcher attains to connect a meaning in direct inner experience with the word: I now experience, I now feel in the pure spiritual-soul realm and know that in what I experience and feel, nothing lives that is connected to the physical-sensual. The spiritual researcher now knows the meaning of this word, which in ordinary life seems nonsensical, because he experiences this meaning through the direct power of the reality of what it means to have emerged from the physical body with his spiritual soul. The soul and spirit are as independent and endowed with other properties as hydrogen is endowed with other properties when it is removed from water. It is not an external process that can be compared experimentally with any external process, but it is a process that leads to the soul and spirit being drawn out. Only then does it prove its true independence, only then does it show itself in what it is in its true, own nature and what connects it to the physical-sensory for everyday life, which it uses to perceive the external world and to carry out the tasks of the external world.

The first thing that a person can experience from their physical senses is thinking and imagining. Since I do not want to speak in abstractions, but rather in the concrete facts of the inner experience of the , I do not wish to shy away from pointing out this experience, even at the risk, which I fully understand, of not being taken seriously by some people who believe they are standing on the firm ground of science. When the spiritual researcher, after years of hard work and sacrifice, has come to the point where he associates a meaning with the words: You experience and perceive things outside of your body, then at first he experiences this only in relation to thinking, which, as one can already suspect in ordinary life, one knows through spiritual science. That one must use the brain for thinking, that stops. One feels that one is inside the imagination, and one does not feel with this inner experience of the brain and nervous system, but one feels - as I said, I say this at the risk of not being taken seriously by some - that one what one is experiencing now, one feels oneself like an external object, like an inner self circling around a body located outside of oneself, if one has given it independence, and one experiences oneself circling around one's own body, one's own brain, and an important experience then occurs. One learns to recognize how ordinary thinking occurs, because in order to make progress in real spiritual research, one has to advance in stages. At first it is often a dull experience. But when you have progressed to the point where you can connect a full meaning with the word: You now live in a thinking that happens outside of your brain, human life is indeed between birth and death – so you have to return at a certain time.

You can only develop the thoughts you have outside the body with your brain when you return. This gives a very different feeling than the usual one, because you perceive the process with your brain. You start to use your brain as an instrument, you know that you have something in your brain that offers resistance, that you have to forcefully push into. A strange feeling arises when the imagination moves outside the brain and the brain begins to imagine, a feeling that can only be compared to a certain fear of now having to think again through the instrument of the brain, because one is now facing life outside oneself. You have, so to speak, got to know yourself from the outside for the first time, have learned to look back at your physical body from the outside, and the immersion imposes the necessity of working with heavy matter, plastic, so to speak, so that those experiences that you first undertook outside of this brain can now be expressed within.

In this way, a kind of emancipation of intellectual life from physical life can occur, so to speak. When this emancipation occurs, one no longer has the physical-sensory world around one. This physical-sensory world disappears at the same moment as the emergence from the physical body occurs. One has a new world around oneself, a world that can be described as the world of spiritual states. Only now can one see through what spiritual states are through direct contemplation. Something occurs that I would like to mention at this point, because I always want to progress from the abstract to the concrete in these considerations; one imagines this entering into the spiritual world wrongly if one imagines it according to the pattern of external perceptions. Here the observer stands there and the object stands there. When a spiritual researcher begins to perceive spiritual states, after having prepared himself, he must, in a certain sense, immerse his entire being in the object or being he is perceiving. Just as, in everyday life, when we experience something in our own soul, we experience this or that mood, this or that inner [affect ], how one expresses this in what is called the development of one's outlook, so one can only experience what states of mind are by imitating, as it were, with the spirit freed from the body, immersing oneself in what one perceives, really imitating in an inner play of expression the states of the spiritual outer world.

It is therefore an inner play of expression that one lives into, and one cannot say, when speaking correctly, “I have perceived an object or being of the spiritual world as if it were a being of the sensory world.” Rather, one can only say, “I have experienced in this being that which, in me, causes me to express myself with my soul and spirit in such and such a way.” In my inner expression, I emulate the peculiarity of the being in question. One becomes acquainted with an inner play of expression, in the reception of cipher-like ideas, and in a certain sense one becomes one with the being of the spiritual world. But it requires the spirit to be so sensitive within itself that the spirit expresses its own states as one otherwise expresses the states of one's own soul. An experience, in contrast to mere perception, is the beholding of the spiritual world, a becoming one with its states. This is precisely how this living into the spiritual world differs from the experience of everyday reality, which is ultimately something passive, something that one stands by, as it were, while that which allows itself to be led upwards by the will, to live into the spiritual phenomena, must certainly be in action, in activity - this inner activity, which in itself creates expression, forms. The soul must transform itself for the conditions of the spiritual world if it wants to penetrate into the spiritual world.

In this way, one experiences the conditions of the spiritual world, as one experiences forms in the physical-sensual world. But one can experience not only the conditions of the spiritual world, but also the processes, the events of the spiritual world. This happens when one leads other powers of the soul upwards from the physical body. Not only the power of imagination can be led upwards, but also another power. But then another everyday activity of the soul must be increased to infinity, and that is what can be described with a word that is a necessity in everyday life, the word “devotion”. If one succeeds in consciously developing this devotion, as it were, in the general world process, which we otherwise only develop unconsciously in sleep, when one is, so to speak, completely devoted, without doing anything oneself, to the general happening, as in sleep, when one so learns to be devoted, fully consciously while awake, to the spiritual world, then one comes to tear out, as it were, yet another soul activity of our inner life, out of the physical-sensual. This activity is the one through which we - as strange as it may sound, but it is true - experience the fruit in the outer physical: speaking, the power of speech. This power of speech, as is well known, is rooted in the activity of the brain, in the activity of the organs that ultimately lead to the larynx and so forth. This power of speech plays a completely different role than is usually believed. Most human thinking is expressed in words, so that the words run through the mind, so that, as modern science admits, for those who look more closely at things, all speechless thinking in humans also runs in such a way that they vibrate inwardly in a subtle way. The body is actually in a state of perpetual inner activity when it thinks. This activity silently repeats, so to speak, what would otherwise be expressed more robustly in the movements of the speech organs and the nervous system.

If, through careful practice, increased attention, that is, through concentration, increased devotion, that is, meditation, one arrives at the activity that the soul must expend when it speaks in everyday life, if one arrives at this activity without living it out in external speech, then one has raised a second soul power from the physical body. This elevation is somewhat more difficult than the other, but it can be attained through robust, energetic practice.

When I speak to you, my soul is spontaneously active, and that which is carried out in this activity is expressed in the outer word. If we now succeed in holding back the activity that would otherwise fade away in the word, so that it is carried out without a word and without that vibration, purely inwardly, in the soul, if, so to speak, the word “strength” is experienced inwardly in the soul, then the soul life is strengthened and invigorated the soul life inwardly strengthens itself far more than in the mere operation [separation?] of the thought from the physical-sensual, and then, through a similar spiritual chemistry, so to speak, one draws the ability to speak, the power of speech, out of the physical body, experiences it only in the soul. Once again, you know what it means to be outside of your physical body in your spiritual and mental experience and to now experience, where you cannot use your larynx to speak, where you develop these activities outside of your body, as you usually do when speaking, you now experience the ability to speak inwardly. You now experience the inner word. You experience the inner word purely spiritually.

This experience of the inner word is very closely related to the experience of the power of memory. Of course, when I say the experience of the power of memory, I do not mean what is expressed in the ability to remember, but rather what stands behind this ability to remember, what does not consciously live in everyday life, what works and remains half unconscious. When we incorporate a thought into memory, we are exercising soul activity, and this is related to speech power. This is therefore something we call the lower-soul power of memory, just as we can say the lower-soul power of speech, which we draw from ordinary speech and in which we then live as spiritual researchers. We live purely in the spirit and soul in the word, in the power of remembrance, when in ordinary daily life the memory is transformed so that we remember the everyday experiences, those where all memory is silent, as in sleep. What is left, so to speak, is what is otherwise used for memory. In everyday life, something is always used for remembering; inner strength is used to make what is happening take root in the soul life. Now that we have brought about a soul life that erases ordinary memory, this strength, which is otherwise used for remembering, is used purely spiritually, it pulses in the inner purely spiritual, recognizing literally.

So when we raise the power of speech from the physical-bodily, we not only experience states, but we can immerse ourselves in the essences of the spiritual world so that we experience what happens in them. We now develop not only a play of facial expressions, but what could be called an inner spiritual power of the gesture, [an inner gesture]. This must always be emphasized - that on which activity as a spiritual experience is based. If you want to experience a spiritual being, you have to immerse yourself in it and experience its processes, just as we accompany our own inner experiences with gestures, expressing in the gesture what is going on in our soul itself. Many people - myself included - use far too many gestures to express what is inner soul life. Just as the soul life, flowing out, branches out, so it must lead to inner gestures of spiritual and soul experience. Then one experiences processes, not just states; these are experienced through the thoughts that are raised up, the processes through the ability to speak and remember that is raised up. Then, when one experiences conditions of the spiritual world, one also experiences one's own inner conditions, and this leads deep into the nature of the human soul.

As the spiritual researcher begins to experience inner states, he connects the following with a meaningful concept: He knows why the materialistic view of the present is so difficult to refute from a purely idealistic point of view. This is because, as the materialistic way of thinking correctly asserts, everyday thinking does indeed arise from the nervous system, from the brain. For what one has in ordinary consciousness as content, as something experienced by the soul, is basically only an image of the soul.

There is not enough time to go into the arguments regarding pictoriality in detail. I will merely suggest that it is quite clear to the spiritual researcher who has come this far what ordinary feeling, will and imaginative life want. They take the form of images that emerge from the body. They emerge like the reflections of our own self when we stand in front of a mirror. The body forms what could be called a mirror for spiritual and psychological experience. However, like every image, the image is not actually complete. The image would only be complete if, when we step in front of a mirror in our ordinary lives, we had to send out forces from ourselves to shape the mirror in such a way that its material composition becomes such that it sends the images back to us. For we actually accomplish this in our body, that we first place this body with our deeper spiritual-soul in the ability to reflect back to us what we call our everyday life. We first make it a mirror in truth, it must be said, and that is the secret of the human soul life.

The spiritual researcher is led to a spiritual-soul experience that stands outside and behind the physical body, and he observes how the truly true spiritual-soul aspect first works on the body so that the contents of everyday soul experience then emerge from the body. It is as impossible for the spiritual researcher who sees through it to think that the spiritual-soul experience is only a function of the brain as it would be to think that the image we have in front of us rises up out of the mirror as a reality. With the same right one could claim: When one sees oneself in the mirror, what looks out comes out of the mirror – so that the spiritual-soul comes out of the nervous system. The reality of the soul and spirit lies behind the physical, and in truth the body is between the truly spiritual, which is its active agent, its plastic creator, and the everyday, limited to sensory experiences that in reality only take place in images. In this way one arrives at what is truly spiritual and soulful and stands behind the physical. When one arrives at this, then what one experiences as a state is quite different from what one would like to describe as the spiritual-soul through external speculation, because one is confronted with direct vision, with what the I is spiritually and soulfully in human nature. Then the doctrine of repeated earthly lives ceases to be mere theoretical knowledge. Then an expansion begins, one might say, of memory, which can then extend beyond repeated earthly lives. The complete human experience is seen through, how it unfolds not only between birth and death, but through many earthly lives and through the spiritual experiences between death and birth. That which can be called repeated earthly lives becomes an immediate experience. By developing the memory and power of speech, by transforming them into a power of knowledge and experience, past earthly lives emerge from the floods of spiritual life as reality, and the certainty emerges that the present one is also the cause of the following ones, and that between death and a new birth there is a much longer life than earthly life.

By pushing back the ordinary power of memory, the higher power of memory is awakened. When the power of memory, which otherwise only allows us to look back to birth, is eradicated, it awakens to an increased power that now extends to an understanding of repeated earth lives! This realization does not need to take on a modern spiritual truth from old religious systems. People who know nothing about the methods of spiritual research and who have superficially absorbed something of it, that this spiritual science must speak of repeated earthly lives, can very easily come to believe that some old Buddhist truth is being recycled. Such a claim is no more useful than if one wanted to claim that today only one person could prove the Pythagorean theorem by going to the [gap in the transcript].

Spiritual science has nothing to do with anything historically handed down, but only with what the mind can explore within itself at any time through the stated means. Just as one arrives at the results of science through external experimentation, so one arrives at the results of spiritual research through inner experimentation. That the results of spiritual science may appear fanciful today is hardly surprising to anyone who knows the nature of this spiritual science and how it can be applied to the spiritual life of the present time. In this sense, it must be emphasized time and again: Just as the Copernican view seemed strange, so the results of spiritual science may seem paradoxical to the modern mind. But just as the Copernican world view has become part of modern culture, so will the results of spiritual research. Certainly, the way people today approach this spiritual research is the same way they approached the Copernican worldview; and if someone back then had planned to give a lecture to present something like the Copernican worldview, which at the time also had to appear as something quite fantastic , one would perhaps have announced such a lecture back then: the Copernican world view as a surrogate for Christianity; especially because one could have believed that the Copernican world view endangered Christianity. It took a long time before people began to realize that the matter is different, and in our time one can actually have a different experience from the genuine aims of the present.

Compared to the experiences I have here, one must be touched in a pleasant way, as one could hear a Catholic theologian, who is a deeply feeling philosopher, said: Certainly a prejudiced world once opposed the Copernican worldview as if it could endanger religious life; today - and it is not I who says this, but this Catholic theologian - today the true Catholic will even know that what is being explored in the secrets of existence, what is being of the greatness of the world, can never contribute to the satisfaction of religious life, but only to the greater admiration for the greatness of the divine Creator, the more one gets to know his deeds in the development of the world. - The time will also come when one will recognize in repeated lives on earth a promotion of the Christian point of view, as today in the Copernican worldview a promotion of the Christian view. Thus I have spoken to you, as it were, of two soul powers that can be led upwards from the experience with the physical body.

There is still a third soul power that must be spontaneously led upwards on the path to spiritual research, and through this third soul power one now attains not only to the states and processes, but to the entities of the spiritual world itself, so that this spiritual world becomes, on another level, something like the natural world — not something that is spoken of in generalities, but rather as one speaks not in generalities about nature, but about individual animals, plants, stones, individual clouds, mountains, rivers, and so on.

Where the spirit does not appear before the eyes as a sum of real spiritual beings, something else must indeed be brought up from this human truth as it stands before us in everyday life. We must remember how we entered life as human beings. What distinguishes us as human beings from the other sensual phenomena on earth is that we must, in the early days, make of ourselves that which most beautifully characterizes our destiny. We enter the world as quadrupeds, so to speak; we first acquire the ability to stand upright and walk. I want to make it clear from the outset, to avoid any misunderstanding, as I have done elsewhere, that I am aware that other creatures also walk on two legs, such as chickens, for example, but the difference is that they are designed to do so from the outset, whereas humans overcome gravity by the application of an inner force that acts purely in the material world. In the first years of his physical existence, the human being makes himself into an upright being, into that being of whom those who are more deeply attuned have always known what it means to stand upright, to be able to direct one's gaze out into the universe. But the human being makes himself into this. An inner strength is applied, through which the human being actually becomes what he is destined to be.

This power does not come to our consciousness again in the course of life. In a time when our consciousness is still in the realm of dreams, we experience what, so to speak, gave us our position, our equilibrium in the world, whereby we are human beings. But we can rediscover them, and the spiritual researcher must rediscover them, these powers. These powers remain in the soul. In normal life they are only used to maintain the upright position of the human being, but then they rest. They are again brought up, and this inner soul power, when it is experienced, is something that is revealed by a will that is also being led upwards, permeated by that will, which allows our spiritual and mental experience outside of the physical body to bring us into different situations regarding the various truths of the universe. In this way one attains the following: Just as man in the physical world makes himself what he is only through his upright balance, as he, so to speak, grasps his I-being in his inner activity and power of preparation for the earth, so he grasps, when he grasps this inner activity through which he human being, when he grasps this activity in its organization, he grasps the inner truth of other spirit beings, grasps the inner essence of real spirits, experiences how other beings make themselves into their essence, as he makes himself into an essence on earth through what has been stated.

However, all these things can only be attained through a certain resignation, through a certain inner tragic mood. Much has to be overcome, and in a sense these surmountings are a kind of suffering. But if the spiritual researcher courageously goes through this suffering, then he will succeed in detaching from this suffering the inner activity that is now able not only to educate us, that gives man on earth his true outer purpose, that makes man can turn his gaze out into the universe, but also to delve into other beings, to grasp their destiny by living it, and to experience how they become what they are in their worlds in a different way from human beings on earth. Now one experiences not only conditions and processes, but the inner life of the spirit beings themselves. One enters into it by becoming one with these truths through inner mobility, through the right inner strength. Now it is a certain, but inwardly mobile physiognomy. Just as a person acquires his overall physiognomy on earth, so he emerges into the physiognomies of the other truths on this third level.

In this way one ascends to the spiritual co-experience of the spirit beings through inner play of features, through inner gestures and postures, then through inner physiognomy, through knowing the inner being of other spirit beings. In this way the spiritual world gradually becomes a true reality, and it always shows that this becoming of the spiritual world a true reality differs from the experience of the outer physical world. This is experienced in passivity. A spiritual world can only be experienced in activity, and this brings us to the point that really shows us how this spiritual science must be introduced into the spiritual cultural life of the present.

As I said, I wanted to show today how the spiritual researcher comes to his experiences. I will develop special experiences the day after tomorrow. But what can emerge from today's is that the spiritual researcher appeals to the activity of the soul, to that which the soul can only lead up from the physical-bodily in un- [gap in the transcript] activity, can experience purely spiritual-soul activity. In the immersion, which is purely spiritual-soul, in the other truths, the states, processes and the essence of these truths themselves are experienced.

All these things cannot be experienced without extending to the entire soul what is otherwise only experienced in the moral. When a person experiences inwardly in the moral sense: 'You want to do this, that is good', then the experience of one's inner duty, which must become an outer deed, is indeed the experience of the highest morality. This experience is an inner one, and it is such that the person must disregard himself, because basically all immorality comes from selfishness. Morality, however, comes from disregarding the narrow-mindedness that man places in the foreground. Just as man, through his feelings, becomes free in the moral, at least from that which he otherwise uses in everyday life, so in the life of the soul as a whole he becomes free in the experience of the higher worlds. In a certain respect, the moral life is the dark model for the higher life of knowledge.

I did not want to show by words, but by describing soul processes, what spiritual science consists of and what the relationship between spiritual life and spiritual science is. If, on the other hand, we look at contemporary life, we can truly say that this experience is not geared towards the inner life of the soul. In particular, when a person is supposed to recognize the world, he is passive today. One could substantiate with almost grotesque examples how much man likes to be passive today. It is very gratifying that you have appeared today in such large numbers, even though [gap in transcript] are connected with light images. But you will all admit that the presentations that are linked to light images are preferred to those where such promises are not made. The spiritual researcher appeals to the supersensible, the invisible, and if he also makes use of the light pictures, it is only to make something extraordinarily sensible. But humanity today is to a great extent not disposed to be won over to the spirit or to something that can be explored by appealing to the activity of the soul, but to contemplation.

Of course, in the spiritual fields that have produced the most admirable achievements, this beholding is necessary; but the spirit cannot be grasped in external contemplation. What is sensual is not spiritual. This is trivial, but it is not understood. I am not telling fairy tales. It could happen that an otherwise very meritorious contemporary philosopher recently said or presented a [monistic] idea. In an introduction in which he wanted to write about an evolution in philosophy, he said that if you read Kant and so on, you read into concepts, but that could be remedied, because today – and again, it should be noted that nothing should be said against the technical achievements of the present time , these technical achievements have their significance, their justification; but what has been said is characteristic – the philosopher says that if you want to immerse yourself in Spinoza's Ethics, it is difficult to live into the intangible concepts. So you use the movie to help! You depict how Spinoza sits there spontaneously when a thought occurs to him, how the thought expansion then occurs to the same. Then you depict the force on the one hand, which represents the expansion, then you depict the remaining orderly concept, as concepts are generally formed.

The person in question has set out to do nothing less than present Spinozian ethics through film. Thus, one might hope to see a complete cinematographic adaptation of Spinoza's Ethics, or Kant's “Pure Reason”. As I said, I am not criticizing the arts, although it seems strange when the editor says that in this way ancient metaphysical longings of the human soul can be satisfied by an art that the superficial mind usually regards as something playful. Thus, ancient metaphysical longings could be satisfied by the application of this cinematic art.

I wanted to mention this because it shows how man today has the need not to put his soul into action, not to appeal to what, out of all passivity, must go into the fullest activity, as well as what man today wants to be offered everything, that is, how he does not boldly want to achieve existence in his own activity, does not want to prove existence to himself by leading this activity in his own activity to a proof of existence, but wants to have existence proved to him from outside. The reasons why one assumes something to be must be forthcoming. This is there for the thought habits of the whole of philosophy: increasingly imaginable from the standpoint that all thinking that cannot prove that it is based on foundations of something, to which nothing has been added, that all this thinking is understood as mere fantasy.

Gradually, the goals of the present tend to declare all thinking to be fantasy that cannot prove that it has been sucked out of the material existence that presents itself from the outside. I have indicated this basic character in the goals of the present. This basic character was necessary, because only through the fact that man has enjoyed an education through the natural sciences have the great, powerful explorations of natural science come about, which has commercially and technically transformed the globe, and has also greatly increased knowledge. For this to happen, it was necessary for man to be passively confronted with the outside world. The boldness that man must develop for his inner experience is, so to speak, incorporated today into outer activity.

It is a law of human life that whatever grows on the one hand must, in a sense, wither on the other. The last three to four centuries have brought it to the point that humanity has been able to undertake such tremendously bold things as the achievements up to aeronautics. The fact that boldness was developed for the external achievements has resulted in an education in humanity that has provided inner boldness for a certain period of time, where it is necessary to grasp a spiritual that cannot be grasped if one surrenders positively, but only if one is able to surrender to this spiritual with its activity, so that one stands on the point of view: What you experience in yourself is not reality. One can never come to a real knowledge of the spirit, because the spirit only lets us actively enter into its spheres.

So, what is the basic requirement for the recognition of spiritual science is, of course, spontaneously opposed to the goals of the present. However, this too turns out to be the case for the process of becoming as a whole: just as an elastic body, when sufficiently compressed, exerts its counter-force, so too, when something is pushed to a certain point, the opposing force, the reaction, asserts itself. Anyone who can observe our age knows how in our time, already quite thoroughly in souls, without them knowing it themselves deeply, that opposite longing is present - after education in external natural science has brought it to a certain high point - the soul, as I said, longs, without often knowing it itself today, for a knowledge of that which is present behind the senses as the actual basis of all human life. To use the same comparison again: spiritual science today is at the same point in relation to the aims of our time as natural science was at the time of Giordano Bruno, who, in his insights, broke through what had been thought of as a blue celestial sphere, as a blue vault. What was significant was that Bruno said: What is up there is not a real boundary, it is only caused by the boundary that man sets for himself. What the human being recognizes must set as a boundary, that extends there. In those days, the limited world was broken through, the view was expanded into the unlimited distances of space.

But such a firmament – now a temporal firmament – is there for mere natural science, and when it asserts it from its standpoint, it is justified; only it should recognize its limitations. Such a temporal moment is what asserts itself for the external world in birth and death. Just as the physical firmament is only set in space by man himself and knowledge could be newly expanded in relation to spatial infinity, so spiritual science will do the same for the spirit, [as] what was once the temporal firmament [has been broken through] for birth and death, and teaches us to look into a temporal infinity, that is, into the eternity, into the immortality of the human soul. The opponents will still have to find the newly expanded view of the spirit today.

But just when you are considering the goals of the present, you see that on the one hand there are people for whom it seems completely outrageous and nonsensical that such things can be said as they are said in spiritual science. On the other hand, however, it can be perceived how the soul always thirsts to really get to know the world as spiritual science recognizes it as its task to explore. Much of what later emerges clearly in the soul is first present as a dark urge. The spiritual researcher sees it and knows that the very near future will find souls who will come to recognize spiritual research as the path to spiritual science.

So superficially everything speaks against spiritual science. But if one considers what is taking place in the depths of the soul, then there is a guarantee that spiritual science will truly win the hearts and souls of people. Today, people only draw from what they often say is based on the true goals of science; they do not draw the right conclusions, otherwise they could come to something that is to be said now for our understanding through a kind of metaphor.

I do not want to deal with the meaning of the great significant word that stands at the beginning of the Bible. To what extent it corresponds to a fact in human life on earth can be dealt with on another occasion. But with a tremendous view of the development of human experience, this Bible word stands before us, this Bible word, which is put into the mouth of the adversary of humanity, so to speak:

You will be like the gods, knowing good and evil.

And this indicates to both the religious person and the scientifically discerning person, when the matter is only considered in its depths, how man has been tempted in certain respects to go beyond the measure allotted to him in primeval times. Here too, it has already been discussed how this word, or rather what lies behind it, is connected with the possibility of evil and the fact of human freedom.

Thus one could say that a world view that is hallowed by tradition, which spiritual science certainly recognizes as much as anyone, that such a world view sets the word at the beginning of human development of the temptation to want to go beyond human beings in inner experience. One can say of every time that it is a transitional time. It is often said in a trivial way, but it is important, even if every time is a transitional time, that one characterizes the transitional moments in the right way, and that he who tries to penetrate into the goals of the time recognizes them even where they still remain unconscious to the souls. But whoever reveals them, whoever penetrates them, notices that today, in fact – if nothing superstitious is meant – something like an evil spirit lurks at man's side. Allow me to say what I want to say with a strong expression. [Gap in the transcript.]

The saying may seem paradoxical to some; but it is intended to express as clearly as possible, by means of an apparent [paradox], what is to be said. If we consider the transitional moments of our time, it becomes clear that much of what is believed today is a kind of seducer, not meant in the superstitious sense. But when you say something like that, using extrasensory words, you have to remember the word:

The little people never feel the devil,
And if he had them by the collar.

Again, there is something like a tempter, and it is difficult to become aware of him because one does not draw the consequences from what lies dormant in the goals of the world. Because one does not draw this conclusion, it seems paradoxical when [one] shows you the conclusion. If it were true what some materialistically minded people draw from current science, then one would have to say: Man is placed in the mere animal kingdom by what is today understood as the theory of evolution. Today, one only feels quite clever, and one thinks that one can consider the lower classes stupid when one can say: what man experiences in terms of morality and intellect is only a higher education of what appears in the animal kingdom, and the more one can associate man with the animal kingdom, the more one believes today to be scientific.

Even if a philosophy today makes the somewhat weak attempt to come up with a value system alongside it, this itself is something imperfect, because it must be said that if the consequences were really drawn from what is regarded today as a genuine scientific way of thinking, then it would consist in the fact that distinguishing between good and evil would amount to the same thing that we feel towards the laws of nature. Good and evil would arise from the human soul with the necessity of natural law. Since, if one wants to base oneself on the ground of science, as one often does, one wants to base oneself on the narrowly defined science, it is inconsistent not to draw the conclusion that man should actually be understood merely as an animal transformation, and that the moral should be classified in what is recognized as natural laws, as natural necessity. But then it follows that, just as there is no distinction between good and evil in the law of nature, there is no distinction between good and evil.

As I said, it sounds paradoxical, but it is true nevertheless; the tempter is standing there again, only due to inconsistency we do not see him, the tempter who now says the opposite of the tempter who is put at the top by the Bible. Now he says: You will be like the animals and no longer distinguish good from evil. This may seem ridiculous to some people today; it only seems ridiculous to those who do not understand the consequences that lie in some purely materialistic views of the present. So one could say that today the tempter speaks the opposite of what he did then. Back then he said:

You will be like the gods, knowing good and evil.

Man was to be elevated above himself. As a result, he stands there today, saying: You will be like the animals, you will also recognize as animals and no longer distinguish good from evil. - Just as that was a tempter's word, so is this a tempter's word, even if it is not spoken out of inconsistency. The more one will recognize – it rests in the goals of the present – how the soul, when it becomes aware of this temptress word, that the soul will then develop the longing to recognize the spirit again in its immediate form, which lifts it out of what the [gap in the transcript].

On the one hand, it [spiritual science] may be perceived as a dreamer, as something nonsensical. One can understand that. But on the other hand, it can also be seen as being called for by the deepest goals of our time, which rest in the souls. Because it is so intimately connected with all the goals of the human soul, when one stands on its ground one feels how one is in harmony with what spiritual science wants to express with clarity, how one is in harmony with the intuitions of the spirits who have always worked for spiritual science. These spirits of the past, because spiritual science is something that is only to be bestowed upon our time, have not yet tried to express in a clear way what spiritual science has to say today. But as what can be clearly expressed in a time [gap in the transcript], so the leading spirits have always felt what spiritual science is.

I had to express clearly some things that had to follow today from what is often called science, which is not followed because people are not consistent enough; the soul, familiar with the spirit and its development, has always felt this. Even if development is fully recognized as the continuous pole of our lives, something enters into this human experience with the human soul that goes beyond everything that can be observed externally as external development. And spiritual research only shows, one might say – if I may use the may use the word, which sounds dry and pedantic in the face of these things, only shows through spiritual experiment that what we call the immortal, the eternal, the truly spiritual human soul can really be experienced in detachment from the physical.

Thus, through spiritual science, man will always look at what man's dignity and man's destiny in earthly life really is. We feel when the tempter approaches, however unconsciously, however unacknowledged, and wants to tell us: Development shows man only as the last link in animal development - when he says: You will be like the animals and no longer distinguish evil from good. In the face of this temptation, spiritual science will stand united in the good with the personalities of all times who are striving towards the spiritual light. It will hold up as knowledge to this tempter what Schiller said out of deep poetic intuitions and in which what has been considered is to be summarized. When Schiller became aware of how the similar idea emerged through Herder and Goethe, that man [is] placed at the pinnacle of the animal organization, it was clear to Schiller that such a teaching could only be properly grasped if at the same time the spirit is fully recognized in its independent significance, separate from the physical. That is why Schiller does not say what so many say today, and which, when taken to its logical conclusion, gives the tempter language, but rather, Schiller said the following – and at the same time saw humanity's true destiny – he said the following about the incarnation of man on earth, at the moment when man comes into existence:

Now dullness has lifted from animality
and humanity steps forward with a clear brow
and the lofty stranger, thought,
leaps from the wondering brain.

It goes without saying that there is opposition [to spiritual science or theosophy is widespread], which is why [this] topic [was chosen] for today's lecture. Spiritual science [it is called] in relation to the constitution that the human soul must have in order to be theosophically minded. This mood is called theosophical in the same sense as it has been for centuries. [It is] that mood of the human soul through which it experiences the conviction that there is an inner core of being that can be reached by man, which is linked to the divine-spiritual that pervades and permeates the world. The theosophical mood gives a very general characteristic of knowing oneself as one with the cosmos.

[Gap in the transcript. What is spiritual scientific research?] There are certain soul activities through which the soul itself undertakes the experiment, whereby something like spiritual chemistry is brought about. This makes one so detached in soul and spirit from the physical and bodily that one connects a meaning with the words: I live, I feel myself spiritually independent of my body, so that I look at this body from the outside. Just as inorganic chemistry separates hydrogen from water, so spiritual chemistry separates the soul-spiritual from the physical-bodily. In this way, the human being experiences himself as having been emancipated threefold in the soul-spiritual. What is otherwise experienced in sleep, unconsciously, the spiritual researcher experiences consciously; for he works consciously, from outside, on the physical-bodily.

We can call this a conscious sleep experience. The physical body is like a mirror. The spent forces of the physical body are in a state of constant disintegration during wakefulness. The growth forces are depleted, hence [comes] sleep. The researcher consciously becomes acquainted with what then occurs during the replacement. A kind of reproduction occurs, a reawakening of pure growth forces.

The second thing is the wonderful mystery of the onset of physical life. The first periods of childhood appear to us like a dream. Our powers of consciousness are still as in dream life. We only remember back to a certain point in childhood, [to] where full self-awareness sets in. We can then say “I”. In these early days, the same powers and abilities are already present that will later break out. How are these powers present in the child? In such a way that they are used for the plastic development of the physical body. Only the formal, the form-like, has been inherited by the human being. He himself refines these plastic powers into individual talents. One can see this in the physical organization of a being who works plastically. One observes how this spiritual core descends from above and works into the inheritance from father and mother. I have said before that this core is the fruit of previous earthly experiences. A moment comes when the physical organization is, so to speak, hardened, to use a rough expression, so that the spiritual soul can no longer work plastically on it. This is comparable to standing in front of a mirror. If we can stand in front of it, we cannot go through it, but the reflection that arises in front of us is reflected back. The process just described can be compared to that. What has been flowing in earlier is now reflected back into itself. This is the emergence of self-awareness.

These forces are the same ones that work on our body. The spiritual researcher is in the spiritual world, knows that he is within the Divine-Spiritual that permeates the world. This spiritual-soul experience is the fruit of a soul practice full of renunciation that lasts for years and years. Thus, in what is reflected in the hardened organism, the spiritual scientist is absolutely on the ground of a theosophical view. We could not live this life without the soul-spiritual emerging from the soul's subconscious in its reflection. But at that moment it is only the part that is not allowed to penetrate into our work and creativity. It is the non-creative part. That remains with us for our everyday life. With this, we must turn our attention to what [gap in the transcript]. This is how it presents itself to the spiritual researcher at the moment of our life when we remember a later existence on earth; our spiritual and soul core is there, but it is covered by what can only experience itself in its self-reflection. We do not see what lies behind the reflecting surface as our spiritual and soul core.

Then it becomes clear that our spiritual and mental core is hidden within the physical organism, which acts like a mirror that covers everything. All diligence is based on developing this self-awareness. Our organism has to create something to cover the spiritual and mental core in order to be diligent in the world. This is the anti-osophical mood. It is no wonder that it is so. The spiritual researcher also has to make sure that this is intact in him. He has to forget his theosophical mood and behave exactly as if he were an anti-osophist.

Now it is always the case that abilities develop in a one-sided way. It is natural for most people to let the pendulum of their soul life swing according to the anti-sophical mood. This is rooted in human nature in the deepest sense. Life itself produces this; there is no need to be surprised. We may extinguish our consciousness of the spiritual for external purposes, But there are moments when every human being experiences a kind of yearning, a dawning of consciousness of his spiritual core. Then he is apt to let the theosophical mood enter into the anti-Sophical mood. In itself it is so understandable that this theosophical mood can be overgrown by the everyday mood. We therefore see the two currents: earlier the scientific, antisophical, now the theosophical longing of the soul in our time. The consequence of this is that the antisophical mood has taken hold in another current. You are probably familiar with the beautiful story of Pythagoras, who, when asked by Cleon why he was a philosopher, replied: “Human life seems to me like a fair, full of people who are supposed to buy and sell or enjoy games. But I am like someone who wants to see everything.” In our time, this saying can no longer be used in this way. But what is the meaning of the words? What did Pythagoras want to say with them? His saying is based on the feeling that man achieves something particularly valuable with knowledge that cannot be readily applied in outer life. To let the soul rule freely is a kind of theosophical mood. In our inclination, born of the theosophical mood, towards that which leads man away from the physical, we now transcend centuries.

But now the opposite of the above is coming from America: pragmatism in the form of many brilliant aphorisms. This attitude says: whether there is truth in a perception is not important, but whether what is perceived proves useful. For example, immortality: there is no need for objective reasons to prove it. But it makes life more secure, and a person becomes useful if they perceive it to be true. So we act as if a god et cetera were there. This attitude has found a kind of companion in the “Philosophy of As If”. The book is already in its second edition. While the author wrote the preface as a young man, he only completed the work itself after his retirement. This philosopher claims that whatever can be said about transcendental things can be regarded as if they were there. It is therefore the direct opposite of the theosophical sentiment of Pythagoras and Socrates, because that philosophy of “as if” knows no objective truths in the transcendental. The anti-Sophian mood is dominant today among certain leading minds, and it is to be found in the broadest scope of human mental life. I would also like to refer to some other significant minds, but I do not want this reference to be taken as a disparagement of intellectual capacities. I only mention the opponent because a certain acknowledgment can lie in the mention. I would like to remind you of the famous speech by the great physiologist Du Bois-Reymond about the limits of knowledge of nature. According to this attitude, the world is to be regarded only as an enormous mass of interacting atoms.

Where does a science based on such arguments end up? It says: we can understand the mathematical processes underlying the visible world, but not what matter is, not what consciousness is. What lies beyond the realm of the sensually perceptible is not only “ignoramus”, but “ignorabimus” – we will never know. It is characteristic that Du Bois-Reymond assigns a strictly defined area to science. But beyond that, there is supposedly nothing more to be known. Then, at the end of the speech, we find the following striking statement: “There are limits to our knowledge of nature. Supranaturalism would have to be applied to that which haunts space as matter. But here is how Du Bois-Reymond expresses it: Where supernaturalism begins, science ends. — This statement is eminently anti-sophistic. It virtually forbids man to penetrate to the spiritual core of his being.

As one searches in the broadest periphery today, one encounters this anti-sophistic mood everywhere in leading science. It is characteristic of our time. But the strange thing is that, despite all the great logic with regard to external science, despite all the education of human thought when it comes to the theosophical mood, an assertion pops up like a shot, a counter-assertion that is not even attempted to be justified. Is this justification omitted out of affect or out of antipathy towards the spiritual world? Where does this antipathy come from? Where it begins, it penetrates from the depths of the soul as an impulse with a certain passion.

I must mention here that there are subconscious depths of the soul life that are much greater than we suspect. Many things emerge from the subconscious that give impulses. Our entire, so mysterious, soul condition depends largely on the subconscious soul activity. Is the spiritual researcher able to explore this? He can explore it and substantiate it with expressions of the conscious soul life. We have many kinds of subconscious urges. One can clearly feel that a sentence like the one just mentioned by Du Bois-Reymond about supernaturalism emerges from the subconscious soul regions. [gap in the transcript]

Consider someone who is overcome by fear. There is great tension in their soul life; certain subconscious soul powers are vividly active. I would like to refer here to the excellent research by the Danish physiologist Lange. These phenomena can be scientifically proven. Fear affects the organic body down to the vessels, so that certain irregularities occur in the organism. When someone is in fear, it is very easy for him to get into the mood that can be described with the words: Above all, give me something to hold on to, otherwise I will fall over.

Let us observe a scholar who occupies himself only with science. His organism develops in such a way that a mood is awakened in him by his stay-at-home thinking, which can express itself like a sudden shock, like fear in increased measure. This mood of fear sits deep down in organic processes. What happens there are instinctual, subconscious forces.

The spiritual researcher must now move from the passive to the active. If one is primarily concerned with sensory perception, then it is precisely out of a subconscious mood of fear that one can come to such a conclusion: Give me something material that I can hold on to, otherwise I will fall. Materialism breeds fear. It breeds the belief that you are only in front of a reality when you are in front of something you can hold on to in space. So the anti-sophical mood, as a mere belief in sensual quality, is basically nothing more than a mood of fear. You will have to get used to the fact that this is true, however paradoxical it may sound. The “Ignorabimus” has the same reason: fear. The anti-soph falls over when it has nothing to hold on to as reality. This shows us what we have to hold on to if we want to explore the reasons for the anti-sophic mood.

Never can it be missing [...] that this soul of mine, like a compressed ball, suddenly springs open and feels the longing for the home from which it comes.

These explanations should lead us not to disdain anti-philosophy, but to learn to understand it. The achievements of our time, especially the great technical ones, all that in a certain sense signifies the greatness of our time, needs an anti-philosophical mood as its correlate. But anti-philosophy will produce the theosophical mood as a natural reaction.

All those who have delved deeper into the knowledge of the world with all their soul have had the theosophical mood. The human soul cannot do without it. One must recognize that anti-philosophy may well produce efficiency in the outer life, but that in the long run man cannot be satisfied with it. The core of the soul proves to be the reality of human life and asserts itself from the deep sources of the soul. There will always be moments of celebration in life when the theosophical mood arises and rises. Then man is at one with all that is great and sublime in all times. Goethe, for example, was such a spirit. He, in particular, expressed the theosophical mood in many places.

Not a lesser man next to Goethe, but a great man, the naturalist Albrecht von Haller, who deserves the highest respect, made the following statement out of an anti-theosophical mood:

No created spirit can penetrate into the innermost nature
. Blessed is he to whom she only
The outer shell shows.

This is anti-philosophy. Only the shell, not the actual core, which is connected to the cosmic soul! Goethe sensed this as an anti-philosophical sentiment and, speaking from his theosophical perspective, said:

“Into the innermost part of nature,”
O you philistines! —
“No created spirit,“
May you and your brothers and sisters
Not remember me of such a word.

We think: Place by place
We are within.
“Happy the one to whom she only
Shows the outer shell!”
I hear this repeated for sixty years,
I curse it, but furtively;
Tell me a thousand, a thousand times:
She gives everything abundantly and gladly,
Nature has neither core
Nor shell,
She is everything at once;
You, above all, prove yourself,
Whether you are core or shell.

Dear attendees! After having repeatedly spoken about various individual areas of spiritual science in this city over the past few years, allow me this evening to present some fundamental principles from the field of spiritual science to you, and then, in tomorrow's lecture, to present some of the consequences and benefits of spiritual science for practical and spiritual life.

Spiritual science, as it is meant here, is by no means something that can be said to be popular or even recognized in wider circles in our present time. On the contrary, from the most diverse sides and points of view, one will have to hear again and again the most diverse objections of the opposition to this spiritual science. Wherever one wishes to advocate it, one must be prepared for the most diverse misunderstandings that are brought against it.

As on previous occasions, I would like to take this opportunity to emphasize right at the outset that anyone who is grounded in this spiritual science will not be surprised, but will consider it quite natural, that the points of view from which we are starting here will meet with opponents and be misunderstood. Indeed, anyone who is familiar with this subject will be quite clear about the fact that, according to the habits of thought and imagination of the present time, according to the general, one might say generally recognized or believed, aims of our present time, this spiritual science must still find opponents for the time being. In this respect, it is no different from the one whose continuation for our time it seeks to be. However strange it may seem to some, it must be said that this spiritual science is the continuation of, or at least seeks to be, what has emerged with regard to nature through the newer natural science at the dawn of modern spiritual life.

Just as in those days, by elevating and rising above traditional views and received ideas, one went directly to nature itself, so in our time spiritual science wants to go directly to the world of the spiritual, to the processes of the spiritual. And one can say: Nothing is more unfounded than when it is asserted from any quarter that spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants to be opposed to natural science. On the contrary, anyone who has a clear insight into spiritual science will fully recognize and correctly assess the significant advances and the great blessings that the scientific view and way of thinking have brought.

Spiritual science cannot, as it were, follow the example of natural science in the realm of the spiritual, and apply the methods and way of thinking that are common in natural science, for the reason that a correct adherence to the natural scientific attitude requires something different for the study of the spiritual.

But before I proceed to our actual consideration, I would like to explain how this spiritual science is the continuation of scientific thinking by means of a kind of parable. This parable is not intended to say anything in particular, but only to express the relationship between scientific progress and what spiritual science seeks to be.

If we cast our soul's eye on the activity of the farmer who sows his grain at the appropriate time of year, we find that this grain rises, that by far the largest part of this grain is used for human nutrition. Only a small part of the sown seed is used to be returned to the element of the earth and to become grain again. So let me look at what scientific thinking has brought us over the centuries in the light of the demands of spiritual research. Science has brought us, one might say, a complete transformation of the face of our earth. It has intervened in all of human life, right down to our everyday lives. For all around us we can see the fruits of modern science. But in addition to all this, we also owe it an insight into the connections between world phenomena, into the realm of the senses, which mankind would hardly have dreamed of before. But we also owe it something else: a sum of ideas, concepts and perceptions has emerged; they have become established over the last three, especially the last century. People's minds had to come to terms with these ideas. They had to answer the often puzzling question: How can the soul come to a state of harmony within itself when it has to come to terms with the ideas and concepts that scientific thinking has brought forth, and with the feelings that follow from this scientific thinking?

I would compare the new ideas, concepts and notions that have been instilled into our souls in just a few centuries with the relatively few seeds that are sown to bear fruit the following year; compared to what is used from the harvested fruits for human food. In the realm of scientific thinking, we can compare what is used for human nutrition with what is spread into our external cultural life, what is used for human benefit and for the knowledge of the connections in the sensory world. But what has been raised in new ideas, concepts and perceptions sinks into our soul, and is entrusted again to the element from which it emerged. We should live with this, and try to bring our innermost soul powers and soul harmony into connection with it. In contrast to this, we should ask: How is it possible to have security, hope and joy in our work in life?

Not only what is given to us theoretically through scientific ideas and concepts should be considered, but also what the soul experiences through them. For it is precisely these scientific ideas, when used as indicated in the following consideration, that give the soul the most beautiful direction to the spirit through themselves. They lead the life of the soul directly into the realm of the spirit. Although this is a result of life for all those who have studied spiritual science as it is meant here, it must seem strange to those who have not done so when it is said that this spiritual science wants to be a true successor to natural science. For precisely because it enters the spiritual realm, the scientific method must take on a different form in order to remain true to the scientific spirit.

And to bring this form to mind, I would like to compare spiritual science with spiritual chemistry, to make myself understood, with reference to the way it gains its results. Not that I want to say anything special with this comparison, but the comparison can lead us to understand what will be meant by the following remarks. If we have water in front of us, we cannot see what components it has in the sense of today's chemistry; that it consists of hydrogen and oxygen cannot be seen from the outside. With the means of chemistry, we can come to know: water has a completely different property, a completely different characteristic; it is liquid, it extinguishes fire. The hydrogen can burn itself, is gaseous. That this water contains something like hydrogen can only be known by separating this hydrogen from the water.

In a very similar way, but with the help of spiritual methods, something must be done with the human being himself for the purpose of spiritual science. Just as he appears to us in the outer world, he cannot be recognized in his components, just as water cannot be recognized in its components. What the human being is in spirit and soul, what every soul longs to know, is bound to the body in ordinary life as hydrogen is bound to water, and cannot be recognized in its very nature within the body, just as hydrogen cannot be recognized in water.

Now the methods by which we separate the spiritual and mental from the physical are not as robust, not directed towards handling in the sensory world as the chemical method by which hydrogen is separated from water. But that does not make them any less to be taken in a strictly scientific sense. These are methods that take place entirely within the life of the soul itself. They are delicate, subtle processes of the soul's life. It is not by external manipulations that one can arrive at the riddles of the spiritual life. The only instrument available to man to penetrate into the spiritual world is man himself, and that is his spiritual-soul life.

How is it that we, hypothetically speaking, separate this spiritual-soul life from the physical life with which it is connected in everyday life? The methods used are not ones that resort to anything particularly miraculous; they are extensions of mental activities that every person is familiar with in their daily life; only these mental activities have to be extended into the realm of unlimited strength. But this requires a resignation, a devotion in the soul life, for which one must first prepare oneself. You can find a more detailed description of the method by which the soul can penetrate into the spiritual world in my books “The Secret Science in Outline” and “How to Know Higher Worlds?” To begin with, there is an activity of the soul that is familiar to everyone, that is needed in everyday life, that is needed for the health of the soul, and that is therefore applied by the soul in ordinary life. For the purposes of spiritual science, however, it must be intensified to an unlimited degree. It is what can be called: turning one's attention, one's interest, to something. We all know that in order to get along in life, in order to find our way in the world, we cannot just go along indifferently, but we have to turn our attention to the most diverse things. And the more we do this, the more it becomes, in our minds, our own, the more we carry a sign of it through our further life and have connected with it.

And attention is intimately connected with another soul ability, the significance of which for life everyone must recognize, namely with what we call memory. And one can even say: in a sense, the question of a good memory in the human soul is the same question as that of the activity of attention. An object to which we only fleetingly turn our attention fades from our memory. An object to which we turn our attention, and repeatedly at that – repetition is often important – becomes our mental property.

Everyone can see for themselves the importance of attention for memory in the most mundane of everyday life. Let me give you a trivial example: Who hasn't woken up in the morning and not found things that they put down the night before? If you practice it, let's say, not just putting your cufflinks down, but paying attention to the act of putting them down, linking the thought to it: Now I'm putting this object down - then tomorrow you will go straight to the place where you put the object down. That is, the power that inscribes in our memory what is to be inscribed, that is attention.

And anyone who has taken a little look at the inner life of humanity will often notice at least echoes of that unhealthiness of the inner life, or have heard of it, which consists in the human soul not being able to remember what it has experienced as if the experiences were its own experiences. We then speak of a split in the ego in the face of such an unhealthy inner life. It may happen to such a soul that things it has experienced itself, so to speak, belong to another self. This radical case is less common, but it does occur.

However, the ego's full context, its continuity, is disturbed with regard to a clear insight into one's own past, and this happens more often. This could be prevented if the good pedagogical principle were more introduced into life, to awaken attention, interest in what is going on as important in our environment, as in general the connection between attention and a healthy spiritual life should play the very greatest role in pedagogy.

Thus we see that attention is something we need for our ordinary lives. The spiritual researcher must develop this attention, that is, the activity that is exercised by directing the soul power to a specific object, by drawing it away from other objects at that moment and concentrating it on a specific object. The soul researcher must develop this activity of the soul life, which and slight in everyday attention, to an unlimited strength; that is, he must take it upon himself to do such soul exercises again and again, which are an unlimited intensification of what would otherwise be active in the soul life as attention and interest. This is called, in a technical expression of spiritual science, the concentration of thinking or feeling. All soul forces can be concentrated again and again, drawn together to one point. This must be repeated again and again, because it often takes many, many years to make the soul a true instrument of spiritual research. To achieve this, one must repeatedly and repeatedly concentrate the soul forces on an idea or a feeling that one has moved into the center of one's soul life only through one's own will. It is best to draw into the soul life an image that one has really put together, for example, a symbolic image, a symbol; what one has borrowed from the outer life, to that one is too accustomed used to; a greater effort is required if one contracts one's mental life, all the forces that one otherwise disperses, to the mental processes, to an arbitrary compilation that one always returns to the center of one's mental life. In this way, a state gradually becomes possible for the human being, which allows his spiritual-soul, which is otherwise poured out into the physical-bodily, to be grasped by the same power that is concentrated there, and finally set free from the physical-bodily. There is no other way to be convinced in practice that there is really a second person in us, a spiritual-soul person, just as hydrogen is in water, if you do not grasp this soul-spiritual person by he is permeated by what is the unlimited amplification of the activity of ordinary attention, and in doing so, he is so strengthened in himself, this soul-spiritual human being, that he stands out from the physical-bodily. He is lifted out of the physical-bodily in this way, as hydrogen is lifted out of water through chemical processes.

If everything that has now been discussed in principle is undertaken by the soul, as indicated in the books mentioned earlier, we can extract the spiritual-soul from the physical-bodily through purely soul-related activities.

If this is really successful, then a great change occurs in the inner life of the person. One receives completely new inner concepts of life. One is seized, so to speak, by something within oneself, of which one had not even had a correct idea before. Above all, in this way one is brought to a certain concept, to an idea, with which one can now connect a sense of what it means to be outside one's body and yet still lead a fully conscious life; to be able to grasp oneself inwardly, to take hold of oneself inwardly, without doing so through the tools of the senses, through the physical tools of the brain.

The next thing to happen to the spiritual researcher on the indicated path, when he has come far enough, is that a state comes over him that can only be compared in ordinary life to something that occurs involuntarily. The human being reaches a state in which, just as the external sensory world fades away when falling asleep, so too does this sensory world now, as it were, lift itself away from the human being, as it does when falling asleep. But the human being also experiences this: he feels his physical body passing over in complete calm, in complete inner serenity, and now fully consciously, as it otherwise happens unconsciously in sleep. Nothing of what can otherwise stir in the body through everyday activity then stirs. The human being, with his soul-spiritual, has emerged from the physical-bodily.

For the first time, the human being now has an idea of what it means to face my body as I would otherwise face an external object. In ordinary life, one only has an idea of what it means to experience oneself when one is, as it were, inside one's body; in this way the body is connected to oneself; one relates to it quite differently than to other things. But now one's own body becomes an external object, which one faces as one used to face other external objects. But one does not face it as it appears to us physically as long as we use the tools of the physical world. How it appears to us, how we face this body, turns out to be a harrowing event that man can undergo on the way to spiritual research.

What I am about to describe can be experienced in many different forms and in many different ways. In a small book, 'A Path to Self-Knowledge of Man', I have attempted to describe a typical form in which it can occur. From this description, one can get an idea of what the spiritual researcher has to experience at a certain stage. But, as I said, it is only a typical form, it can always be different. Let us say that a person is directly involved in their outer life, or even asleep during sleep. This event can occur during sleep or during wakefulness; it will never disturb the healthy life of the soul in any way if it happens correctly. In the midst of waking, in the midst of sleep while sleeping, in such a way that it is more than even the most vivid dream – it can overtake us, this event, so that we feel something like what [I] would like to express in the following words – one can only stammer what is experienced by the soul: What is happening to me? It is as if lightning, as if fire, were flashing through the air; as if the room in which I am were illuminated by lightning; as if my own body were being struck by lightning and destroyed by the elements. It is not just a matter of what I can describe in words, but of what kind of inner experience one has at this point in one's soul development. What matters is that one knows from now on: one has experienced in one's mind what it means to live in one's soul and spirit in such a way that one is lifted out of the physical body; that the image of the physical body presents itself to one. But it is an image that cannot help but represent the physical body in a state of destruction.

And then you realize what you are actually experiencing when you can really immerse yourself in what you have felt. You come to realize: yes, when you are in the midst of life, your spiritual and soul self is indeed an independent being. But the way you experience everyday life is bound to your physical body. Throughout life - even science admits this - the spiritual and soul destroys the physical and bodily. From the moment we wake up in the morning until we fall asleep at night, we use our physical body as a tool for what arises in our soul, in our ideas and feelings. Fatigue expresses the destruction of the soul life. Sleep is the compensation. The fact that we experience the soul life depends on the fact that, basically, we carry out a continuous work of destruction on our body, which ends with death. This is evident from the image that shows us: the moment you become aware that your soul and spirit are independent and can emancipate themselves from the body, you experience your body as if it were destroying itself before you.

Spiritual science – not as it should be considered in our time according to the scientific education that humanity has enjoyed for centuries, but as it has gone through the various epochs – spiritual science has always existed, only very few people have known about it. But those who knew about it also knew the harrowing moment in the spiritual researcher's life that I have just described, and they called it by saying the words: I have come to the gates of death. — That is, one has come to know in the image what death is; one has come to know how, in death, the spiritual-soul triumphs in its independence from the physical-bodily. From the point where one has experienced this, one knows what it means to live independently in one's spiritual-soul. One knows that this spiritual-soul life, in its separation from the bodily, is something that has completely different qualities from the bodily.

But it is true in a certain way that what gives progress towards the spirit is linked to difficulties of the inner life; it can even become a kind of inner martyrdom. Above all, patience is needed to concentrate the soul's power in such a way that the soul-spiritual, emancipated from the physical, can grasp itself in its independence. I wanted to describe this to you as it happened because I do not want to speak in general terms, but because I want to tell of the living experiences of the spiritual researcher himself.

From that moment on, you know what it means to live outside your body, especially in terms of thinking. You now associate a certain sense, a sense full of reality, with it when you say: I now know that I think, that I can form ideas not as in everyday life; I now know that I can form ideas with the soul that has left the brain, purely in a spiritual and mental way. And because I don't want to speak in general terms, I don't want to shy away from something that, when viewed superficially, can appear very vulnerable: in the moment when you have the described experience, you experience yourself in your thinking, which, for the moments when you leave your own body, is no longer tied to the brain; you feel as if you are living outside the brain, in the environment of the brain. And you know: if you want to think again as you do in everyday life, you have to submerge yourself in your brain again. You begin to see it as something external that you have to submerge into.

One thing is necessary if you have progressed to this point. And what I will mention here as necessary can also refute the objections of those who do not know spiritual science and, from the point of view of today's science, would like to push what the spiritual researcher experiences into the category of hallucinations. They are talking about something they have no idea about. For it is precisely the spiritual researcher who knows how to distinguish at every moment what the difference is between a hallucination, an illusion and what he really experiences as something spiritual. In ordinary everyday life, too, it is no different than learning to distinguish reality from mere imagination through life itself. In ordinary life, one can easily distinguish the idea of a hot iron and the actual perception of a hot iron when one touches it. It is the same when you really immerse yourself in the spiritual world in the way described.

But what is necessary is that you feel what you are experiencing now so inwardly, imbued with this inner strength, that you are immersed in it with your will. For let us not mistake: what one experiences as a world of ideas that is outside of the body must arise as an experience in such a way that one does not feel it at first as an external being, but one must feel it as one feels one's hand, one's foot, one's eye; one must feel it as a spiritual sense organ. You must first know exactly: what you have developed within you is a part of your spiritual-soul being; it is something within you that you must use in the same way as you would use your hand to grasp something or your eye to see by looking into it.

In this way, one first develops the organs. One does something within oneself that is as subtle as a web of dreams in relation to external reality, but whose reality one experiences. One does something with one's spiritual-soul being; one is involved with one's will. One must experience something in the new being that one has drawn out of one's body, which one can describe as an inner play of facial expressions. Just as one is able to express one's thinking and feeling with the muscles of one's face, and to express one's soul experiences in one's gaze, so one must now develop the ability to have a clearly conscious inner handling of the spiritual-soul being that has been raised out of the body. One must be able to express oneself through this being. In short, one must have the feeling: In what you have made out of yourself, you are involved with the will. Not like in dreams; the dream presents images to us, but these images occur without our will. It is different when we bring ourselves, through genuine spiritual development, to experience something outside of our body. There we ourselves are the actors who make an image, which arises to the highest intensity, disappear, and bring it from one place to another. We are so immersed in this world of images that we can control it, that we can whirl it around.

In the same way that we have become familiar with this through the exercises we have performed, which, after all, are basically only the training of our external attention to an unlimited degree of mental and spiritual concentration, we initially only manage to make ourselves mentally and spiritually independent beings. We do not yet perceive other spiritual processes and spiritual entities that are around us. In order to do that, we have to add other categories of exercises to those that fall under attention, so to speak, that are completely opposed to attention.

But spiritual progress depends on not just practicing one-sidedly, but on alternately exerting our soul in practicing in one direction or the other. We have to do the most intense exercises in increasing our attention. But at the same time, we have to do inner exercises that are exactly the opposite. We must also do the opposite of what happens in ordinary life. For example, when a being loves another so devotedly that he feels absorbed in that being, or when any being is completely devoted to something that concerns him in prayer or in other religious sentiments. Devotion, which we also have in ordinary life, as we have attention, but again increased to infinity. We must really, quite arbitrarily, through a strong volition, bring about the suppression of all external sensory perception, as it otherwise only happens in sleep. One gradually acquires the ability to suppress, so to speak, everything that is necessary for everyday sensory life, right down to the involuntary muscles and other organic tools; completely, with the exclusion of what is ordinary sensory life, to devote himself with his soul to that which is most immediately presented by us as the Divine-Spiritual, which stands beyond all concepts, permeating and flowing through the world. In particular, we must try to suppress everything that otherwise occupies us in our judgment. We must accept the arbitrary faculty of everyday activity and, in the innermost serenity and devotion, live consciously of nothing but the expectation: What comes to you when you suppress everything arbitrary that otherwise made an impression on you, and when you are devoted to what you will come to know? This devotion must be increased to the point of infinity, then the moment will come when we can use what we have developed in terms of spiritual and mental being, emancipated from our self.

Then the images that we have placed within us will become us in such a way that we connect spiritually with a spiritual world; but in such a way that we now connect with this world not passively, as in everyday life, but actively. In the everyday world, we are outside of an object that we look at. If we want to penetrate the spiritual world, we have to immerse ourselves in the object and merge with it, become one with it, as one as we were before only with our own soul.

And just as we express through our facial expressions what lives in our soul, so it is when, after sufficient devotion, we immerse ourselves in a real, a spiritual world, that we recognize in it, that we live in the activity of our spiritual soul, that we express states of the spiritual world within us. We experience them through inner facial expressions, by immersing ourselves in the spiritual world, which we can only grasp by actively immersing ourselves in it. We have to acquire a spiritual facial expression in the spiritual world; we have to acquire the ability to express ourselves.

Then we know that a spiritual world is always around us, just as, for example, the world of a language is also around a deaf-mute child, but he knows nothing about it; he does not get to this world of language, even though his speech organs are quite healthy. He is unable to imitate in speech what he does not hear, to express it in facial expressions. Just as the world of words is also around the deaf-mute child, so the world of spiritual entities and spiritual processes is always around every human being.

And just as the human being only has to open up to the outside world and imitate the words in language, so the human being, as a spiritual and soul being, has to open up to the spiritual world through devotion in order to express through mimicry what he experiences, through the means he has cultivated within himself. For the spiritual world is only received through active engagement and not passively. What we do not experience in ourselves through the spiritual world, as if through an inner mimicry, cannot reveal itself to us. We must become one with the spiritual world so that we can develop the spiritual mimicry in what we are revealed, by immersing ourselves in the spiritual world. This mimicry then brings us to the awareness through our own experience: You are now experiencing conditions of the spiritual world. What I have described can be experienced by detaching the power of thought from the physical tool, from the brain.

But there is another power in us that can be released from the physical tool, namely what is called the human power of speech, and, related to this, the power of memory. Both belong to the same kind of soul activity. Just as we have drawn our thinking out of the bodily tool, so we arrive, by continuing our exercises, at being able to grasp the spiritual-soul power by which we otherwise speak. When you think about me as I speak to you now, my spiritual-soul life is active. But this activity is first transmitted to the brain, then to the speech organs, and then to the air. First, it is a spiritual-soul force that then flows outwards. If, by continuing our intensified devotion, we succeed in excluding everything that is connected with speech in the body, but in developing in the soul and spirit that which is otherwise poured out into speech, if we succeed in doing so without speaking, even without making that inner, fine vibration, which even in ordinary thinking sounds like a soft, inaudible speaking, and which is also admitted by modern science, if we succeed in doing so, we exclude everything that is connected with speech in the body, but in the soul and spirit we develop that which is otherwise poured out into speech, if we thus leave the power of speech inwardly, if we inwardly leave that which is expressed in speech, then we can, through the power of our soul and spirit, make ourselves heard in the air. body is bound to speech, but in the spiritual and soul life, develop that which is otherwise poured into speech, so if one leaves the power of speech inwardly, if one is silent with regard to what is expressed in speech, but still applies the power inwardly, then one reaches a further stage in spiritual research. One reaches the point where one experiences not only that as

something external, which one can call one's body; one now comes to recognize: You are an independent entity that can lift itself out of its inner soul life of everyday life. One separates oneself, just as one used to separate from the body, from what is ordinary thinking, feeling and imagining. And the same thing that you develop in speech, you also develop in memory, as you accumulate external stimuli and impressions in the course of your life. The soul power that inspires speech is active in memory.

But now, when you experience yourself outside of your everyday mental life, you have another harrowing event. For now one experiences, as in a review, the whole past life up to the point where one can normally remember back, a point in childhood. What one has lived through comes to mind in distinct images, in ever clearer and clearer images, but not as one's ordinary memory is, but quite differently.

I would like to explain this with an example. Let's assume we have done something morally objectionable. You look back on it. It appears in the picture and it shows you: By doing this, you have strayed from the true image of a human being that you are supposed to represent. That is how far you have fallen in becoming human. — It stands before you as a warning, so that you cannot say otherwise than: Until I have overcome, through a further life, through corresponding good actions, what I am overlooking here, I must always look at it when I experience myself outside of my own soul life.

This is the case with good and bad, with all experiences that one has gone through. One's past life trails behind one like a comet's tail; but now so changed that it shows one what one has to do in order to balance out what should not have been done, and so that one can make appropriate use of what one has done in the world. The experiences of one's own life are grouped together in such a way that they become an externally complicated overall experience. It is permeated, as it were, by an inner power that one perceives, of which one is now aware: it was always in you, you just did not perceive it, the power to extinguish a deficiency; a real power, something that you have achieved as an ability to apply fruitfully. Now you get a full idea with inner reality: a plant develops from the soil. It unfolds leaf by leaf, draws its life together in a narrow germ. But in this germ, life is so concentrated that it contains the possibility of a new plant developing. Just as there is physical force in this seed, so we realize that, owing to what we have lived through and which we only recognize in its true form when we survey it, we have within us a force like a germinating power that must continue to work on the basis of what we have experienced. From now on you know: When death comes upon you, there is a spiritual-soul germ in you that passes through the gate of death and lives on, as surely as the germ of the plant lives on. An ever-victorious spiritual germ springs from your inner being. From that moment on you know: When your body falls away, your soul and spirit will pass through death into the spiritual world.

When one studies a life that enters the world, a child's life, which basically represents the greatest mystery for the spiritual researcher, when one studies a child's life with this knowledge, or one's own childhood – because from now on one can look back further into one's life – or when one child, then it becomes clear to you how ability after ability unfolds in development, how the child's features become more and more defined, more and more certain, how talents emerge. It becomes clear to you: just as the plant grows from the germ, so what sprouts from the spiritual world comes out of it. It is the same thing that we recognized earlier as conquering death. It comes back into the world, and our spiritual and soul life develops out of what we have carried through death. Now we know what it means to repeat life on earth. We know that we live alternately; that we live between birth and death in a physical body, that we then pass through death and live in a spiritual world. We know that every birth means: something from the spiritual world descends and connects with what comes from the father and mother. It works through the fruits of a previous life, which project into this life in one's destiny.

By emancipating the power of speech within us, by developing that which we waste in life, so to speak, in language, in special moments of practice within, so that it remains in the soul, we thus become immersed in the spiritual world in which we find ourselves, going from life to life, because we now experience not states but processes of the spiritual world. In this way we ascend from conditions to processes.

In practice, the spiritual researcher first reaches out like a spiritual tentacle to grasp what is outside of him, where he had previously only perceived conditions. But now the spiritual researcher experiences that he, with his emancipated soul life, which has also taken in the power of speech, emerges completely from himself and immerses himself in the other beings in such a way that he knows: you are now moving from being to being in the spiritual world; you are immersing yourself in the spiritual world. Most of the time it will be like this: Until one has a complete skill in coming to an experience of conditions, one must try to give oneself so far; then one feels as if awakened to another state.

In this way, one experiences events by really living them inwardly, by emerging and submerging with them. One could say that one now experiences events in the spiritual world not through inner facial expressions but through inner gestures. Just as one experiences events in the outer world through movement, so in the spiritual world one must take part in the movement; one must go along with the events. So you move up from inner facial expressions to inner gestures, and gradually you perceive not only conditions but also processes in the spiritual world.

And finally, if you practice this more and more, if you really develop it systematically, as described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, if you continue with the two categories of inner practice, what falls under the category of attention and what falls under the category of devotion, we also call it concentration and meditation, then, my dear audience, then one finally arrives at a third, at a third, which I must hint at in the following way.

Something is reserved for man – I know that this is open to criticism from the point of view of superficial external science, but it is nevertheless true; I just lack the time to prove it now, but it can be proved – man has an advantage over the other creatures on earth in that he actually only becomes himself in the course of life, compared to the beings that stand in the world as he does. For when we come into the world, we have to crawl on all fours. Other creatures, the animals, are not dependent on the outset, but they are different from the human being, they have incorporated forces that give them the position they should take in life. Man must rise in the course of life to that of which one can say: it actually makes him a human being in the physical sense. Again and again, great thinkers have pointed out what man is by rising from the ground and directing his face outwards. But man only makes himself into that by directing his willpower. He has an inner directing power through which he brings himself into alignment with the cosmos, through which he is human in the physical sense. This is what inner spiritual-soul forces are for. But in ordinary life they are poured entirely into the physical.

Now, dear attendees, just as one can emancipate the power of thought from the physical body, so too can one emancipate the powers through which we first make ourselves human in the world in the physical sense. And just as one can allow what would otherwise pour out through speech to remain in the inner life of the soul, and thus arrive at an inner gesture, so one can inwardly emancipate the powers of uprightness through practice. Then, through the use of these inner forces, one comes to understand beings in the spiritual world that are different from human beings. The fact that we only know human beings in the physical world comes from the fact that we have used the forces that are the directing forces to make human beings what they are. If we practice emancipating these forces inwardly, we get to know beings that are somewhat different from human beings. This leads to an inner study of physiognomy. One imitates the forms of the other beings with which one then comes into contact. In short, one now enters into a living relationship with the spiritual world. One takes on the physiognomy of the beings with which one comes into contact. I would like to repeat what has been said: through inner mimicry one comes to states; through inner gesture one comes to processes; through inner physiognomy one comes to really get to know the spiritual world as such.

I have tried to show you in real terms how true spiritual research becomes immersed in the spiritual world, how man really comes to grasp a spiritual world. Spiritual science is just as much a science as chemistry, physics and so on. What can be presented to humanity through this spiritual science needs to be accepted just as little on authority as the results of other sciences. Tomorrow I will describe how this spiritual science can become part of a person's life.

When we consider the aims of our time, we may say to ourselves: precisely the great, the admirable progress of natural science has accustomed people to accepting what is to be accepted as true only when the truth is presented to them in such a way that they can remain passive. Every step in spiritual research, however, shows us that we have to actively familiarize ourselves with the spiritual world; that we first have to create the expression for what we want to perceive. Spiritual science is to natural science as activity is to passivity. One need only glance around at our contemporary circumstances to see that people are inclined to say: “That's fantasy!” if something does not confront them in such a way that they can remain passive. In this way, spiritual science is fundamentally opposed to the currents of the time.

But on the other hand, it happens in life that where something has soared to the highest power, its opposite is done. For anyone who can search the souls of the present, it is quite clear that in the depths of the souls of people today there lives a longing to experience something of that activity through which man can also cognitively grasp his eternal, his immortal, his connection with the divine. It is only natural that on the one hand opposition after opposition is directed against spiritual science, because education in natural science has led to passivity. But in the depths of the soul there is a yearning, a yearning that awaits fulfillment. Many souls live in the present, unaware that their insecurity, their not knowing what to do with themselves, simply comes from the fact that they have the longing to come together with the spiritual, and that they cannot do so. They long for spiritual science.

Therefore, one can say: No matter how much what appears on the surface to be approaching the souls is opposed to the aims of our time, in truth the souls long for the aims that spiritual science sets itself. One could show from many things that confront us in the present how man at the present time wants to be completely passively devoted to the outside world; how he wants to receive everything that he is to accept as true from outside. People are happy to go to a lecture that is advertised as including “slides”. No claim is made other than to surrender passively, to look, to receive sensations that are at most supported by words. It is different where a lecture without slides demands that one work in one's soul.

And so it is basically in the broadest scope of our lives. After all, one thing has been able to take hold in our time: A very popular magazine recently published an essay that contains the following: the author has a respected name as a philosopher; he is also rightly admired for many things. I would also like to take this opportunity to mention that I always make it a point to only quote opponents that I can also respect; and I would like to mention a respected man to you now. But this man has come to a strange idea. He says: When you read Kant or Spinoza, it is difficult to read; the concepts are all over the place. But couldn't it be made easier? Today we have slides, film, and the cinema. You could show people Spinoza sitting there grinding lenses. That would be the first image. It transforms itself. The thought “substance” appears in his mind. The thought of substance appears. In the next image, “Thought and Expansion” and so on. Spinoza's “Ethics” - that is the name of the work I have just mentioned - it will be a nice future prospect to be able to walk past a movie theater and read on the posters: “Spinoza's Ethics” or “Kant's Critique of Pure Reason”.

Dear attendees! I only mention such things because they grotesquely show you where the goals of our time are heading and how they are opposed to the goals of spiritual science, in which everything is activity in order to strengthen activity in the human being, to make the human being more and more independent and independent. The person who reprinted the aforementioned essay in his newspaper said that one would have to have great hopes if something like this could be realized; it would fulfill the metaphysical yearning of human beings. The spiritual researcher, however, cannot hope for this fulfillment. He must therefore accept being scolded for being “superficial” because he cannot hope for much from Spinoza's “Ethics” and Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” in film.

I need not go into the individual goals of our time any further; I need only present the general character of passivity that was bound to arise from it, because through the wonderful deepening of external life, man has become accustomed to being active in that to which he can add nothing. But the more people of the present time wrap themselves in such passivity, the more the longing will awaken for that activity of the soul through which man can feel himself as an eternal, as an independent, as a being independent of the body beings that conquers death because it has powers within itself that have nothing to do with birth and death, but that point back to earlier lives on earth and point forward to a later and eternal existence.

I only wanted to characterize; I did not want to hint at the details of what I would like to call a glimpse into the future of human development.

What is the purpose of this activity? We will look at tomorrow at what spiritual science is intended to be as a way of life. But what can it lead to?

Now, let us take a look at the basic character of our time, at the world view that seeks to create a world picture only from materialistic-sensory facts. This is not very consistent, otherwise one would have to say: according to this world view, as it is beginning to emerge in the sense of a misunderstood Darwinism, the human being is said to have arisen purely, without any spiritual-soul element connecting to his physical body, which has arisen out of animality, man is supposed to have arisen out of animality; and the qualities of thinking, feeling and willing, the quality of religious deepening and so on, are supposed to be only an intensification of what appears at a lower level in animals.

It is superficial to speak of living in a transitional period with regard to certain things. Every time is a transitional period. But one may say, and that is what matters: with regard to such things, this time is a transitional period. And I would like to ask your permission to suggest, perhaps somewhat grotesquely, but thereby particularly clearly, how spiritual science wants to relate to the goals of our time. We have only not been consistent enough, otherwise we could say the following, precisely from the materialistic way of thinking: Whatever is meant by what is stated in the Bible at the beginning of human development with the appearance of the spirit, which is symbolized by the serpent; what word resounds from this symbol?

You will be like the gods, knowing good and evil.

However you may feel about this symbol, it is a significant saying, a saying that is connected with everything we call “freedom” in human beings. A great saying that goes deep into human nature: “You will be like the gods, knowing good and evil.” If one were as consistent as the snake was consistent, if one is a materialist or a monist, then one would not, inconsistently, veil what one would actually have to say with this composition: everything that man can immerse himself in is an intensification of what comes to light in the animal's instinctual life. It is as if the tempter were standing before us and calling out to us: “You will be like the animals, no longer distinguishing good from evil.” For when everything is harnessed to the objective-physical law of nature, then everything proceeds as animal life proceeds. Thus, the tempter's words stand before us as the goal of our time: “You will be like the animals, no longer distinguishing good from evil.”

Between these two extremes lies the true progress of the human being. Spiritual science is intended to lift humanity above what it can only gain from the contemplation of sensual reality, to which it may only passively surrender. Instead, spiritual science is intended to intervene in the cultural world and give it goals that lie in the activity of the soul, which places man in the world in such a way that he can better find his progress in the development of freedom and all that is human in the right middle between divinity and animality.

With these true goals of spiritual science, one is certainly in harmony with all those personalities who, in the course of human development, have tried to gain a feeling and a sense of the true essence of man through deep soul contemplation. Even in ancient times, spiritual science was able to express clearly what it can express today, although it could not be expressed as clearly as it is possible in our time because we have the model of natural science before us. It was felt and sensed by all those spirits, all those personalities who took genuine human progress seriously. They were far, far from allowing the direction of their thinking to be confined to a goal that must be characterized as follows: You will be like animals and no longer distinguish good from evil; your thoughts will be no more than the highest activity of your brain, just as magnetism is the highest activity of that which can take place in the material processes of iron.

How many great minds from centuries past could resound in our poetry and thought! Let us mention just one, in whose words I would like to summarize what I wanted to present here today. Let me quote a saying of Schiller, who also wanted to realize how it is with the relationship of man to the developing animal world; how it was in the formation of the earth, when man appeared, in addition to the other beings. Truly, even deeper than he could feel, we would like to express Schiller's words from a spiritual scientific point of view, as a feeling summary of their most important result, knowing that the correct position of man in the universe is expressed in such a word:

Now the dull barrier of animality fell,
And humanity stepped out of the cloudy brow,
And the lofty stranger, Thought,
Leaped from the wondering brain.

Dear attendees! After yesterday's lecture, which I was allowed to give here, some of the listeners may perhaps be astonished that one can speak of spiritual science or theosophy as a way of life. For what I tried to explain yesterday, as the fundamental, the basic principle of the study of the spiritual worlds, presupposes a vigorous, patient, long-lasting exercise of the human soul. Only through this can what was spoken of yesterday be achieved: that the soul becomes so strong and powerful within itself that it can feel itself to be a spiritual being and actually leave the physical body, thus living in such a way that, in the true sense of the word, the soul itself becomes a spiritual being among other spiritual beings in its experience, that it enters a new world in this spiritual world.

That was the purpose of yesterday's paths. If we allow ourselves to be guided very briefly once more by the soul, what has emerged is that the human soul is capable of doing spiritual chemistry; that it is capable of extracting itself as a spiritual-soul being from the context in which it stands in everyday life with the body, just as one is capable of extracting hydrogen from water. And we have seen that by vigorously continuing the exercises we characterized yesterday, the soul really does come to know its physical body first as something external, like the other things, but to know itself as being lifted out and transferred into a spiritual world. And in the further progress of the soul's practice, it turns out that the soul also leaves what it experiences in a soul-like way in everyday life – which only brings back the memory of its life to the point where our ordinary memory, as at a point in our childhood, emerged before our self-awareness – but that then this inner content of the soul changes and that what comes out can be called the spiritual core of the human being , which, when it is experienced, contains the eternal part of the human being, which passes through the gate of death and of which one can then know from real knowledge that he [the human being] goes through repeated earthly lives, that he leads a life alternating between a life on earth that runs between birth and death, and a life in the spiritual world that runs between death and a new birth.

Now it could be said: Is it not in the nature of things that this leaving of the physical body, this experiencing oneself as a spiritual-soul being in a completely different world, which can only be achieved after great efforts, that it is perhaps suitable for few people in the present, [that] therefore not everyone can become a soul researcher? Is it therefore not unnecessary to make that which only a few can really do, that which only a few can know, into common knowledge? One could object: How can someone who does not become a spiritual researcher themselves have any understanding of the messages that are given to them by the spiritual researcher about processes, conditions and entities in the spiritual world? For individuals, for a few people, one might say, the attainment of spiritual science may be a life asset; but for those who do not want to go this way, who do not reach a certain point on the path described yesterday, for them spiritual science cannot be a life asset. And yet! Even to the abstract thought it must appear as if that which can be attained in the indicated way must be a real inner good.

In today's lecture, the term “theosophy” is used. One could say that spiritual science is a theosophical world view. For this has always been understood to mean a world view that gives the human soul certainty and knowledge that the deepest, innermost core of our being can be reached, and thus it turns out that in its essence we experience that as the root of our existence, is connected with the root of all existence in the world, with the divine-spiritual existence of the world. Through our essential core, we ourselves are rooted in the divine-spiritual. This is what is meant by the term theosophy. And a theosophical world view does not just want to say that one can sense and believe that the human being is connected in his nature to the divine spiritual world, but it wants to say that the human being can also recognize this connection, that he can penetrate to this point within himself where he is connected to the divine spiritual that permeates and interweaves the world. And from the consciousness of this cognizable connection, a theosophical world view wants to create strength and hope for life.

Thus, a theosophical world view should actually be a true asset in life. But even if someone has gained the conviction through the path of the soul described yesterday that one can recognize how our soul is connected to its source, it might still seem as if only those who are able to undertake such research of the soul themselves can have a real awareness, a consciousness of this connection. But it is not so. This must be emphasized again and again: the conditions, processes and beings of the spiritual world can only be investigated by the method described yesterday. Only by going out of our physical body ourselves through the application of the described method and being among spirits, can we recognize the spiritual foundations of the world. But once they have been recognized by the spiritual researcher, the person to whom they are communicated need not be a spiritual researcher himself to find them understandable and comprehensible, to apply them in the fullest sense in life, to permeate life with them.

To be able to research something in the spiritual world, one must be a spiritual researcher, just as one must be a painter to be able to paint a picture. But once the picture is there, it would be sad if only the painter could understand it. And so it is with what can be found through spiritual research. If it is presented in the right way, then the human soul is attuned to truth and not to error. And just as we can understand the picture that the painter, who can paint, has painted, so we can understand and grasp everything that the spiritual researcher has to say and put it at the service of life, without being a spiritual researcher ourselves.

However, in our present time, it is still a long way before this can be achieved for a wider circle of people. For there is much that stands in the way of the modern soul if it wants to understand what the spiritual researcher has to say to the world. Today, people come from an admirable scientific culture. It has equipped him with habits of thought directed towards the external. Today, man is not accustomed to living in the very different concepts that the spiritual researcher brings out of the realm of the spiritual world.

But this will change when people's habits of thought have recognized that what stands in the way of spiritual research is prejudice. Then people will find that the descriptions of spiritual science can be understood by everyone. Just as chemistry, physics and any other science cannot be used to benefit life, even though not everyone can become a chemist, physicist or whatever, and people use what comes from chemistry and physics without being chemists and physicists, it is certainly true that what the spiritual researcher has to say can be put into the service of life, can become part of our soul, can penetrate the soul.

But then the concepts and ideas that the spiritual researcher has to give directly from the spiritual world have a different effect on the soul than the external concepts and ideas. And only when one has considered what spiritual research can be as a theosophical world view does one come to realize what a valuable asset this spiritual science is. Of course, one might say: When the spiritual researcher speaks of a vital good, this spiritual science cannot give bread and external goods at first. But what it has, it gives; and what it gives is food for the soul, but such food for the soul as it gives is more and more needed by souls due to the particular configuration that our life has taken on in our time.

Now, in order to understand the essence of spiritual science, we must first think of one thing. That is, spiritual research differs from ordinary research in the sensory world in that the human being allows himself to be passively impressed by the truth through the other sciences; that the human being must devote himself and the world transmits the truth to him from the outside. In spiritual research, however, the soul must be active from the very beginning, developing inner energy.

We have seen how the soul must ascend in three ways to the purely supersensible states, processes and entities. By placing itself in these states, it develops an inner facial expression, a purely spiritual mimicry. One cannot merely let what the states of the spiritual world are shine in from the outside. One must unite with it; one must become so one with it that one expresses it in oneself, but expresses it in one's soul, emancipated from the body. Thus, as a spiritual researcher, one enters the spiritual world. As long as one remains passive, it says nothing. Only when one expresses what it has to communicate, when the inner spiritual expression is an expression of what one experiences, only then does it speak. And the gesture, the movement of the soul, it enters into the spiritual world, but again actively, not by living into it as in the outer science, by speculating, but by letting thoughts live within you, you grasp the processes of the spiritual world. Only by imitating them with your own spiritual being can you become aware of them. And the third way was that the human being penetrates through spiritual physiognomy by immersing himself in the spiritual being and raising up the forces in himself from his depths that make him similar in his spiritual and mental state to the moments when he wants to immerse himself in a spiritual being, this spiritual being.

Thus the spiritual researcher enters the spiritual world in three ways: through spiritual facial expressions, through spiritual gestures and postures, and through spiritual physiognomy, but always actively, always in activity. And what he brings forth from the spiritual world must be formulated in concepts. And here we arrive at the point where it turns out that it is actually more difficult to communicate the insights of the spiritual world than it is to communicate the insights of the physical world. A person in our time claims that spiritual science also expresses itself externally in exactly the same way as external science expresses itself. Now, external science expresses itself in such a way that it presupposes the object it wants to recognize. And only afterwards does it want to give the concepts about it. And it does right from its point of view. The spiritual researcher actively immerses himself in the spiritual world and he must himself become an expression of what he experiences in the threefold way as described; and his concepts are formed in such a way that they arise within him vividly, and testify to their truth not as an image, but through their content and their power. The external researcher communicates what he has seen, what he has observed. The spiritual researcher is different: He gives conceptual expression to that which he has experienced, that which has become a part of himself, that which he has struggled to understand; these concepts must be fluid and must illuminate each other so that the concepts are like living beings. But they are such that they arise out of what the deepest essence itself is.

When the spiritual researcher forms his concepts and presents them to the public, these concepts contain information that he can only experience by bringing together the depths of the human soul with the foundations of the world, insofar as they are accessible to us, with the spiritual foundations of the world, so that his concepts are drawn from the depths of the soul. And these depths of the soul are present in every human soul. The spiritual researcher speaks of something that is present in every human soul. When he has researched it and expresses it, he expresses it in such a way that he lets a sound ring out with which the strings of the soul can resonate, to which it can bring full understanding because it is precisely the sound of one's own being.

But these concepts, these ideas, these feelings, in which the spiritual researcher must clothe what he experiences, have the effect of impressing the innermost part of our soul so that it feels drawn to them, because the concepts are active and lead to activity. One cannot understand spiritual science with a casual mind that does not want to be alive within itself. It can only be understood by trying to follow it with the living life and activity of the concepts. Thus spiritual research arises from the activity of the soul and at the same time challenges it to be understood, the activity of the soul.

From this we see that when we respond to spiritual research, we awaken the active power of the soul. It appeals to everything in our soul that wants to be active. The centuries-old scientific education of people has, however, pushed this active power of the soul into the background. But when a force is stretched to its highest degree, the counterforce asserts itself. And anyone who can look into the depths of today's souls knows that the souls long to get out of mere looking and observing, to do what calls for the innermost activity. In this way, the human being learns to feel and experience that he is in the midst of the spiritual world, but not as an understanding being that participates in its life.

Thus, the concepts and ideas and feelings of spiritual science are themselves the educators of the soul, which they seek to guide to participate in the reasons for existence in which we are rooted. First of all, this is realized in the fact that our thinking is oriented – and we can truly speak of an inner soul-good that permeates us through the understanding we bring to the ideas of spiritual research – that our thinking habits, our way of understanding, our soul mood is seized. And while it is otherwise possible to experience that in our presence, especially with well-meaning thinkers, there is something about the orientation of thinking that leaves much to be desired, spiritual science, the messages of spiritual research, can really bring people to orient his thinking in such a way that he imbues this thinking with habits that have a certain natural tendency towards truthfulness; that have a tendency not to get involved in the contradictions of life; to notice how thinking must penetrate into external things. The education of our thinking, the sharpening of our thinking, is what will emerge first when spiritual science enters into our cultural life.

I would like to give an example that can really show what the sharpness of thinking is like in our time. Let us assume that a very important thinker of the present day, who is regarded in the broadest circles today as an astute mind, has done many things that are noticed by those who have trained their thinking in what thinking must not do. There is a recent book by a thinker in which two assertions are found, separated by thirty or forty pages. The thinker in question wants to explain in what sense people today can still be Christians. And one approaches the soul of today's free-thinking people in a pleasing way when one says – and he says it –: Today we must go beyond the demon stories told in the Bible. All right, he may be of that opinion. Thirty pages later, however, one reads the remarkable sentence in the same book: When the spiritual and the physical touch in the soul, then demonic powers arise. You tell that to someone, and he can say: Well, the second time he didn't mean it like that, then he meant it figuratively. Yes, my dear audience, that is precisely the point: people are allowed to use such phrases and are not aware of the grotesque way in which they contradict all orderly thinking.

But people do not notice this today. And we are only on the way to our thinking being corrupted by mere passivity in this direction. This is how it is for those who can see through and observe things. In another famous book, you can read today - there is talk of combating a certain philosophical school of thought - that an author uses the image: This philosophy moves like a clown who pulls up the ladder he has climbed up to him and falls down. The book is quite witty, but I would like to ask you how the clown is supposed to pull the ladder up to him. You only think and write something like that when your thinking is disoriented. But today we are only at the beginning; such books are full of impossible thinking.

But since external culture is, as it were, the imprint of what people think, our culture must gradually be permeated by disordered thinking, unless this thinking is educated in such a way that it can respond with a fine feeling for what can and cannot be said. What can be said must be felt as connected with the essence and weaving of reality. Through orientated thinking, we can become familiar with reality, and this will be the fruit of spiritual science. Everyone will notice that this fruit of spiritual science harmonizes our lives; that it pours something into the soul that is able to bring this life into harmony with reality. In this way, spiritual science already has an educational and training effect on our thinking, making it inwardly active and alive.

And something else results from this. Those who gradually absorb what educated thinking in spiritual science can form in them will feel within themselves the independence of their inner being, the wisdom, the spirituality of their actual core. And there would be no materialism and no monism if one were to really engage in truly trained, energetic, inwardly self-gathering thinking. The strengthening and invigoration of our soul is the fruit of what we have for our thinking from spiritual science.

But spiritual science also brings forth as a second fruit of life that which belongs to the field of self-knowledge. Just as a diseased organism sometimes cannot endure the freshest air, but it can be seen from this that the organism is not healthy, so it can also be seen by some people in relation to spiritual science that they cannot tolerate it, that it makes an impression on them, this spiritual science, that it is fantasy, illusion. One will gradually come to realize that this is a form of self-knowledge; that from it one can see how one should struggle upwards in the soul in order to be able to understand what the spiritual researcher can obtain from the depths of the world.

How far you are from self-knowledge can be recognized by measuring yourself against the demands that the spiritual researcher places on the soul. Therefore, no one should be deterred if they notice that, through spiritual science, their thinking is at first somewhat numbed, disturbed, or their memory no longer seems as coherent to them as it used to. All these are transitional phenomena. We must recognize ourselves in this and say to ourselves: We must struggle to bear the stronger demands in the soul. But then this spiritual science will communicate its healthy spiritual life to us all the more.

And if we go further, we may find that perhaps even today spiritual science is not universally respected as a valuable possession because its value is not so immediately apparent. Nowadays, material goods are of course valued much more than spiritual goods because people do not really understand how material goods depend on spiritual goods. But if many a person could really ask himself out of a certain realization of things – and we can hear this question in our time from many souls who do not quite know how to begin with this or that, who lack a healthy direction in life, who lack the ability to give themselves direction and strength out of a powerful inner being – if many a person could ask himself: Where does all this come from?

These things affect even our physical well-being. Today more than ever, we have to speak of the nervousness of our age, of how unbalanced people are, how they lack balance. Where does this lack of balance come from? Ultimately, it is rooted in the soul. An example of this: that which can most lead to an external feeling of unease, to all possible symptoms of nervousness, to everything else that makes our social life so difficult, what can lead to this is spiritual barrenness, emptiness of the soul, a non-connection of the soul with what spiritual research wants to give, what spiritual research wants to fill the soul with.

Of course, there are some people today who say they have no need for the concepts of spiritual science. That is certainly true. But that is only in their conscious mind. In the depths of the soul there is always a longing for the sources of existence. And what we do not give to the soul asserts itself in it as emptiness, desolation, doubt. And, not overnight, but over decades, what is missing in the soul, what is present as chaos in the soul, pours out into the physical organization. We are no longer up to life. We can no longer pour the soul's strength into the physical because the soul is empty. Because people have become accustomed to paying attention to outward appearances in a natural way over the centuries, they have become estranged from that which can permeate the soul with spiritual content. A great many unhealthy symptoms, which go as far as the physical body and make people unable to cope with life, stem from this. And it will get worse and worse if spiritual science does not intervene and give the soul what it craves without knowing it with the higher consciousness.

Have we not seen that in our time – I do not want to say that there is pessimism in general, but that it has been examined in a peculiar way? If one speaks of pessimism in general, one would have to mention all sorts of misunderstandings. One could mention that some older religions also contain pessimism. But that is not the point, but rather the way in which one tries to support pessimism in our time. This support shows something very peculiar. Perhaps some of you will see what I am about to say as a curiosity. In our time, Kant has found followers. And one of these followers has written Studies in a Psychology of Pessimism. He undertook a strange investigation that takes a completely objective, passive scientific approach to the human being and seeks to examine whether life contains more suffering, more unpleasantness than pleasure, happiness, etc. This professor [Kowalewski] first tried to determine whether this is really the case by asking schoolchildren. He had the children write down what they call happiness in life and what they call suffering in life. They wrote down the following as suffering: illness, death, flooding. As for pleasure, they wrote down: ice cream, playing, gifts. We should not be surprised at the quality of this zest for life. But for the positive researcher, it depends on numerical relationships, and Kowalewski did indeed not just come up with ordinary numbers, but difficult integral terms. His reasoning about pessimism is therefore not easy to read. He was able to determine that in 39 cases suffering was emphasized, in 25 to 27 cases pleasure. So one can conclude from the children's minds that life offers more of the painful than of the pleasurable. And he thought: That doesn't quite go into the positive, you have to do it differently. He also used the diary of a well-known contemporary philosopher. He always wrote down when he felt pleasure and when he felt suffering. And when Professor Kowalewski looked through this diary, he found that suffering outweighed pleasure. So he had the second piece of evidence. But he went further, he was looking for something more certain. He observed people who walk quickly and people who walk slowly. When you are sad, he says, you walk slowly; when you are happy, you walk quickly. That is the professor's premise. And lo and behold, it turns out that there is a far greater number of sad, slow walkers. And so a book has been written in which these numerical relationships have been expressed in mathematical integral forms, and one can say, so to speak, equipped with these: Well, if you examine the external life, the pessimistic world view turns out to be justified, because the external life contains much more of the fatal, the sorrowful, than of the beneficial, the pleasurable. Science has now proved that!

Now there is no need to smile at such ideas. I am not going to talk about the value of such research, in what way it characterizes certain sciences. I just want to ask: What is actually being looked at here? Well, it is what touches man from the external world, what makes an impression on man, for nothing else can be investigated with such methods. No attention is paid to what man is capable of opposing to the impressions from outside, in the way of the unity and self-contained nature of his inner being.

I would like to quote something else that Mechnikov said in his 'Contributions to Optimism'. He talks about someone who was a friend of his, a person who was very nervous, who experienced the disinclination of life in the deepest sense. He could no longer hear a carriage rattle. He could not hear that someone was ringing his bell. He could not see that many people were coming to meet him. And many other things as well. You can imagine what was unbearable for this person. In the end, he knew of no other way to save himself than through morphine, in order to have a sense of stability within himself. Often he was close to taking such a large morphine dose that he could find death. He was also close to death more often, but was saved again and again. Then Mechnikov continued: So that was the man, but it got better and better with his pessimism. And actually Mechnikov says quite rightly why this is so: his external perception, so to speak, became more and more dulled; the outside world no longer made such a strong impression on him as it had done before.

Now we ask ourselves: What led to a greater balance of the soul in this person? That he became duller to the impressions of the outside world, that he was able to close himself off to these impressions. But throughout his life, his inner being was weak. But it can never be a matter of weakening us for everything beautiful and sublime that may come from the world, not to become nervous, but only for what I would like to express as follows: Could not man have had the same earlier, if a strong inner being, permeated with soul substance, had opposed the perceptions of the outer world? But that is precisely what spiritual science strives for: to make man strong within himself against the changing impressions of the outside world; so that we need not become dull to the world, and yet stand securely in the world.

Then it will no longer be necessary to examine the questions of a better or worse life according to purely external things. Kowalewski has done an even more precise experiment and a careful analysis has shown that we have every reason to approach the outside world when we are confronted with it as being much richer in suffering than in pleasure. He did the following. He says: Let us assume that we are examining the sense of taste. Now he has established – in external science you need concepts; where the spirit is absent, you need concepts and words – he called what makes a taste impression in us in the smallest amount of any substance the 'gustie'; and so he established what the gustie is of quinine, which makes an unpleasant impression; sugar makes a pleasant impression. And so he had a number of people take quinine and sugar together to see how much of each was needed to balance it out. And lo and behold, he found that almost twice as much sugar gusti had to be used than quinine gusti if the sugar gusti was to balance the quinine gusti. That means that, in terms of taste, we have to double the pleasant if we want to eliminate the unpleasant.

What I am reflecting on is that we cannot measure something that has an impact on our lives. And the mistake is that one does not take into account that one is actually not at all suited to assess the sugar level in the right way in relation to one's outer life. We take it for granted, but we estimate the quinine level quite strongly. As is well known, we are very much affected by the disease, but we rarely feel the full extent of our desire for health. And this is connected with the mistakes that are made in such investigations.

But we can also fill our health, which must gradually become boring to us when the soul emptiness remains, with what comes to us from the spiritual world, and we can hold out, so to speak, what flows in from the spiritual world to us, which can always hold and carry us, against the obviousness of the disaffection of the outer world. One should not treat a pessimistic mood by asking: Is the world good or bad? but in such a way that one says to oneself: The person who does not find the strength to stand securely in the world has not drawn enough from the spiritual world. What the person of whom Mechnikov speaks acquires through the deadening of his outer organization flows into our soul as a true asset of life when we take up spiritual-scientific concepts and ideas. Just as the most important things for the development of the soul of the spiritual researcher himself flow from the soul's harmony, so the soul's harmony and balance flow out again as a vital asset from the communications of spiritual research.

And we can cite another thing. We have now spoken of the influences of spiritual science on our thinking and imagining, on our minds. We can also speak of an influence on our will, on the initiative of our actions. The fact that we receive such concepts from the spiritual researcher, which are brought down from the spiritual worlds, means that these concepts also penetrate into our soul in such a way that they are suitable for pointing our soul to what is independent in it from the external sense world.

But now, how much arises in our will as a result of external stimulation? I see something that stimulates me. Perhaps I see a flower, I pick it; I am stimulated by it. I do something in life in one way or another. Once the educators taught me something; as a result, the skill arose in me for this or that. If we examine our will, we find external stimuli everywhere. This is precisely what characterizes the will in everyday life: it is stimulated from the outside to a greater extent than is usually believed. Even people who believe themselves to be the freest are dependent on this or that stimulus. They believe they act freely, but they only act according to what has been exerted as a stimulus from the outside world. In particular, we can often see that when people resist this or that in the name of the freedom of their soul, they are in fact resisting because of their stubbornness, their lack of freedom, and not because of the freedom of their mind. In short, the will is rooted everywhere, so to speak, in the external world.

When we take in spiritual science, what flows from its insights has a strengthening and invigorating effect on this will in particular. It works in such a way that this will in the soul becomes independent. But when it does that, we feel it as a force in the soul, as something that can only receive stimulation from within. We are enriched in our soul when we strengthen our will in this way. The external causes no longer affect that part of our inner being that we have acquired through our own will. We withdraw from external causes with our will. When someone becomes more and more deeply involved in spiritual science, they feel their will growing stronger. They can say: “I can now want more than I could before.” But this can only be achieved through devotion to spiritual science.

But if there is no external stimulus for the will, where must impulses come from? Again, what arises as new will not remain in rest, in inactivity, if it receives impetus from within. There is only one thing that no longer compels: what we call love in the broadest sense. This means that the motives of our will must be warmed through by love through the influence of spiritual science. We learn to recognize more and more the deep meaning of the word:

[duty]: where one loves what one commands oneself,

where that which leads us to action leads us entirely through our love for the task at hand, and we strive to accomplish it with the strength of soul with which we strive to accomplish everything that arises from love. With this, we have gained a beautiful fruit of spiritual science as a treasure for life. We have achieved the transformation of our will into the will to love. The treasure of the will to love grows ever greater when spiritual science becomes our life's treasure. Again, it is not something that provides us with material goods. But this will to love is a strengthening, valuable good for our external security in life, which we will see grow and grow as we properly penetrate into spiritual science through the concepts and ideas of spiritual science.

And again, a piece of self-knowledge can be linked to it. We often hear that people think highly of themselves when it comes to their will to love. But this is not the case. For when people, in wise self-observation, become aware of how the ideas and concepts of spiritual science make them aware of the selfishness and lack of love that still exists in them, spiritual science is once again the beautiful corrective, the genuine guide to self-knowledge. On the one hand, it gives us the will to love; on the other hand, it makes us aware of how much we still lack of this will to love. Thus, spiritual science is also the highest form of life, which can be described by the word self-education.

And further, spiritual science leads us beyond what the concepts borrowed from the external world can give us. It leads us to what the spiritual researcher finds by going out of his body with his soul and connecting with the roots of the world from which he, spirit from spirit, is taken. It thus leads us to what is deepest in our soul.

More and more one will see, as I also tried to explain yesterday - through the parable at the end - that science, which is built according to the pattern of external science, must stop at a certain point if it wants to become a worldview. I could explain this for many ideas that are important life ideas. I will explain it for only one idea now. Let us suppose that some philosopher, who at first wants nothing to do with spiritual science, Lotze, a man of spirit - I will stick to my habit of quoting those whom I consider worthy of opposition, those whom I regard as authorities - Lotze, who has written a book, 'Microcosm', which contains many significant works on philosophy, has also tried to present a philosophy of religion. But he arrives only at a conception of truth, at a recognition of such a conception of truth, which is won according to the pattern of those conceptions and ideas that are far removed from outer reality, that are won passively. Lotze therefore attempts to win a philosophy of religion by building it up in the sense of outer science. And, lo and behold, Lotze goes as far as is humanly possible. From his presuppositions he arrives at the assumption of a spiritual being, a divine being, that permeates and pervades the world, that is creatively active. He arrives at being able to conceive of the laws of nature as shaped and spiritualized by a unified divine essence. But every time a religious philosophy of this kind seeks to show how that which is shaped according to the pattern of external truth, like a natural law, is connected with the moral commandments, with that which, as inner impulses, inspires us in life, then it must come up against a duality for which it knows no connection. On the one hand, there are laws that operate with rigid, cold necessity. Where, in this whole system of natural laws, does that which lives in us as our moral impulses arise, as that which drives us to be noble in our human existence, that which permeates us with morality? Where does it spring from out there? If philosophy is to become a way of looking at life, then this question becomes relevant. It takes on significance. If philosophy is to become a regulator of our view of life, pointing out that on the one hand there is the world of necessity, and on the other the world of moral commandments, which, however, lives in us as if cut off from the world - how is it rooted in the world? As long as we remain with the passive concept of truth, we will never be able to bridge this gap, because there is a relationship between necessary truth and its legitimacy and moral truth and its legitimacy that cannot be seen in the external world, that cannot be passively grasped. The relationship between the natural order and the moral order cannot be grasped any more than the relationship between a mother and her child can be grasped through natural laws alone. The father could be there without the child being there. If the child is there, the child emerges from the father, but the father could be without a child. There is no necessity in the father, yet the father leads to the child. Perhaps one of the most significant conceptions and ideas of Christianity is that the relationship of the one God to the God who is to permeate our innermost being is presented in our morality as the relationship of the Father to the Son, the Christ. Theosophy or spiritual science shows us that there is a relationship between the moral world order and the natural-law necessity and world order, such as that of the Son to the Father.

But this relationship can only be understood by going beyond what can be given in passive terms to what can be grasped in the spiritual world; which stands before us in such a way that Goethe can coin the words - he looked to Kant, who tried to set limits to human knowledge, who wanted to regard as mere belief that which is moral world order ; he called it an “adventure of reason” that should not be undertaken. Goethe, who had to reject the kind of world view that Kant represents; he said that if one could truly rise to the upper regions through virtue and faith in the moral order, then one should bravely endure the adventure of reason and also go up with the whole soul to a higher world.

Then, at the same time, something is poured into the natural order as well as into the moral order that is as communal as that which exists between father and son, because nature, if we look at it as it is, could exist without morality, like the father without a son. Only when we look at what has really happened do we find the right relationship between father and son.

So we have to go to what has really happened in the world, and there we come to the very core of Christianity.

I wanted to give you an example of how religious concepts, which the human mind needs to feel its connection with what pulses through the world as divine-spiritual, how the human being can be strengthened in his religious life through spiritual science. For spiritual science shows him that one can really still grasp and understand that which, according to a great philosopher such as Kant, one should only assume and only be able to believe.

Our time, however, is living into an epoch in which it is once again quite clear to the spiritual researcher how souls are increasingly longing not only to accept religious deepening based on the authority of faith, but also to be able to recognize as we recognize nature, that which binds people together with the Divine-Spiritual in the cosmos outside.

Another asset for life will be that the newly awakening religious needs - for they will awaken, the religious needs appropriate to our time - will give these spiritual scientific concepts of inner support, of being set within, again.

The spiritual researcher himself is familiar with all the objections that can be made. If someone wants to say, for example: Now you have presented spiritual science as a special bringer of love. Doesn't Christianity do that for itself? — Yes, of course. The person who says that is fully convinced of it, and perhaps from his point of view he is quite right. But one could give him an answer, which I once had to give to a clergyman who said to me: Yes, what spiritual science says about Christianity, at least in many respects one can certainly go along with that. But one thing strikes me. The way you speak, you only speak to a few educated people who fulfill certain conditions. But we speak to all people. And that must be a true teaching that speaks to all people. I replied, “Pastor, have you found that all people go to church with you?” He could not say that. You see, I said, I want to speak to those who do not go to church with you, because they also have a living yearning for an understanding of Christianity. The fact shows that you are not speaking for them. So you are not speaking correctly for all people. And we do not have the right to say: something is right because we like it; we have to observe the facts. You may think you can dress your teaching in words that will appeal to everyone, but what we think is not always right, the facts must speak. For those who do not go to church but still long for an understanding of Christianity, we must also speak.

Of course, Christianity also speaks of love, but the point is not just to talk about the way to love; the point is to find the way that is the right way for a particular time. You must not be so selfish as to say: I want nothing to do with such a way to love, because the old way is good enough for me. That is egoism, which does not want to pay attention to the longings and tendencies of the souls that are touched by what will touch more and more souls in the future. But it is these souls that need the new paths, and the number of these souls will grow. The spiritual-scientific worldview wants to inspire them. It wants to give life goods of the kind that have been discussed here.

I could speak about many other life goods that can flow from spiritual science, but the principle is how spiritual science creates life goods, how spiritual science brings forth that which is immortal in us. But through this, what consciousness evokes in us is awakened and activated: You are an independent being; within you is a source through which spiritual life can bubble, which empowers you, which can give you strength, which can give you everything you need for your life.

Spiritual science is indeed gradually transformed into feelings and sensations. We not only experience immortality theoretically. From the whole structure of my lecture, you could see that the concepts of spiritual science bring to life and resonate within us what the spiritual researcher explores. This is particularly the case with one of the most important questions in life, the question of immortality.

If you delve deeper into spiritual science, you will receive a spiritual doctrine of immortality, a teaching about the core of the human being that can be clothed in concepts and ideas so that we not only know about immortality, but feel within us what is immortal in us. We become like a plant that could feel how the germ grows within it into a new plant. We feel what passes through the gate of death; we learn to experience it. And the time will come when principles such as those set forth in my book 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science' will be applied to the education of the child, when the soul will be so stimulated that it will live on in us, that we will have acquired a feeling through the concepts we have absorbed, that we will know: by living towards death, you develop more and more what your eternal part is. In the second half of life, when we see wrinkles forming on our skin and our hair turning gray, we will feel how all this is like the fading blossoms of plants, but how there is something in us that is emerging ever stronger, overcoming what fades away in us. And as we live towards a new life, we will feel that life. Old age will not be filled with an empty hope, but with the experience of what is felt within as a reality, which will be carried through death into the realm of the spiritual. This, however, will give certainty in life. It will dispel all superficiality, all incoherence of the spirit, all chaos in life. Thus, in addition to the other possessions of life, there will be a particularly intimate possession for our soul.

Just as I have pointed out that with the insights of spiritual science from the depths of human inner and outer perception, one can feel in harmony with all those who, in the right sense, have sensed the significance of human soul life and its relationship to the whole spiritual world through the whole development of humanity, so I would like to conclude by speaking of a thinker who is often forgotten today; a sincere, courageous thinker who, in a small booklet, which is really what is written on its title page, a “Dietetics of the Soul” - I would like to remind you of this dear connoisseur of the human soul, of Feuchtersleben.

The human soul cannot deny that ultimately its happiness consists only in the expansion of its innermost being and possessions.

Yes, the soul's true happiness and, we may add, the soul's true spiritual possessions consist in the expansion of the soul's inner being and possessions. And if spiritual science is what I tried to present yesterday and today, then it is indeed entirely that which, with all its impulses, strives for the expansion of the soul's inner being and possessions. And truly, with what spiritual science gives, one feels oneself standing within what the best minds of humanity have longed and thirsted for, because the soul needs it for its inner spiritual nourishment. Therefore, one is in harmony with such a fine, delicate soul as Feuchtersleben, one that nevertheless thinks and feels on a grand scale. And to sum up, if one wants to collect together in a general feeling what spiritual science can give as its best, one may say: spiritual science gives life's goods; it promotes the genuine, true happiness of the soul. It is held in the sense in which Feuchtersleben's saying is meant:

The human soul cannot hide the fact that its happiness ultimately consists only in the expansion of its innermost being and possession.

Question & Answer: Question: Can you slap children on the hand?

Rudolf Steiner: That is not so easy to answer. Such questions take on a new significance and importance in our time. There is not always a simple answer to a simple question. Simplicity is convenient, but even a clock is not simple. The universe is even less simple, with less power in it than in a clock. Spiritual science does not make things more comfortable, but through it one sees into areas that are indispensable for shaping life. Then one finds that simple things are complicated. Spiritual science gets one used to taking things more precisely, taking things more seriously. Farm children are quite properly tapped on the knuckles, with proper taps, decorated with an iron ring, but they have not become nervous. City children, who have never been tapped on the knuckles, are often nervous. Life is complicated. What is achieved in one nature through something is not always achieved in the other nature through it.

Goethe is right when he says, “One thing is not suitable for all”; we must take people as individuals and not judge abstractions. We cannot say that one thing or another is generally harmful or useful. Spiritual science will lead us from the abstract to the concrete, to an immediate understanding of immediate, concrete life. Then one will find that the question of nervousness will not have much to do with it; but much more important is the question of education from the spiritual-scientific point of view. Then one can completely dispense with what is indicated here. But this education requires much more of the activity of the soul of the educator, who is able to find his way into every soul.

Beating is usually required by the nature of the educator, not the person being educated. In general, it can be said that corporal punishment is not particularly recommended as a means of education, regardless of whether it is on the fingers or elsewhere.

Question: Is clairvoyance possible while awake? [...]

Rudolf Steiner: As a rule, one cannot see the physical-sensory world and the spiritual world at the same time. The physical world is then like a sinking, and simultaneous seeing is usually caused by bringing something like a having [raising?] of the soul into the spiritual vision. What matters is not the state, but the fact that one is so present in the spiritual vision with one's ego, with one's consciousness, that one does not experience it as if in a trance, but consciously. Only then can one seek the connection between the two worlds. It is said that matter does not appear to be present when this state occurs. Yes, it was said yesterday that one has a picture in front of oneself and that one must first learn to read these pictures. You cannot relate them to reality as in the physical world, but must first learn to read them.

Question: Is the concept of God actually set aside in Theosophy, or at least not emphasized as it is in the Christian religion?

Rudolf Steiner: That is a strange question, because theosophy is named after the concept of “God” or “Theos”. It is as if one speaks of Selters water, from which the watery, liquid part has been completely removed. Such objections can only be made if one has not studied the subject. We do not have the immodesty to constrict God into a limited concept; in him we live and move and have our being, and so do our concepts. One can only gradually become familiar with the divine. Most of the time, such a question only wants to say: I do not want any other Christianity than I have always understood. Question: Should flawlessness be achieved?

Rudolf Steiner: That is an abstraction. Questions are often asked about the beginning and end of the world and so on, but the human being can only gradually ascend to understanding. The concepts that are usually brought up are usually as unsuitable as possible. Spiritual science places us in life and keeps us from abstract speculation. Through theosophy, morality is also led into the concrete.

Question: Is there not a danger for the theosophist of being withdrawn from his fellow human beings by the cult of the ego?

Rudolf Steiner: Where there is strong light, there is also strong shadow. There must be a transformation into the will to love, so that the ego is sought much more outside than inside.

Question: Christ's suffering and death is only an archetype for us, since we have to atone for our mistakes later anyway.

Rudolf Steiner: I first have to familiarize myself with this question. It is based on a misunderstanding of the idea of karma. One then says: Why should I help a person who is in need and misery? One should help him first, that is written on his karmic account and has a further effect. How I can help one person, I can help two, three, five, fifty, a hundred, a thousand, and a mighty being like the Christ can help all people in karma.

Question: How can I be released from a sin of thought that I cannot make amends for because the person concerned has since died?

Rudolf Steiner: This must be balanced out in the further course of life. One must not judge this from a merely earthly point of view. We are not dissatisfied with our fate from a higher point of view. Between death and birth, we would be very dissatisfied if we did not have the suffering that flows from our deeds; we do not feel it as suffering at all, but as a relief to be able to balance it out; we strive to balance it out. There is a completely different state between birth and death than between death and a new birth.

Question: What influence does anesthesia have on the finer bodies?

Rudolf Steiner: Wherever it is possible to avoid anesthesia, it should be avoided. Normally, the soul and spirit leave the body during sleep; with anesthesia, they are forced out, that is, they are subjected to force. If it is necessary, it should be used, of course. Question: Does a stillborn child have an ego?

Rudolf Steiner: No more than a corpse. It may have been an attempt at incarnation of the ego before it died in the mother's body.

Question: We have often heard about the effects of karma. What about the cruel punishments in the Middle Ages?

Rudolf Steiner: It is like an account book. The punishment is, so to speak, on the debit side and balances with the other side. There is no need for an absolute balance to be there immediately when a punishment occurs. The soul would not even be satisfied with that after death, because it wants to balance.

Question: Some of the Theosophists look unusual in their hairstyles and clothing. A stranger can feel uncomfortably touched!

Rudolf Steiner: This is certainly not a result of the spiritual current! One must be tolerant of the tastes of others; this is perhaps one of the assets of Theosophy. If you want to wear what you like, why shouldn't others be allowed to do the same? Hopefully it doesn't happen too often that Theosophists become Theosophists through hairstyles and clothing. And, ladies, wearing what you like is something that other women do too, and the Theosophists don't say anything, even if they don't always like it.

Question: [Is there a] sense of self after death?

Rudolf Steiner: Self-awareness is rooted in what remains after death. Only after death we have other tools for perception. Eyes and ears fall off. The soul produces other tools. [The] sense of self is preserved, indeed with a much more intense character. Other theosophists are said to have stated that after death there is only consciousness but no self-awareness? This may be stated in some books, but it has nothing to do with the spiritual science referred to here.

Question: On the other hand, the seer of Prevorst: the people she speaks of still show remorse.

Rudolf Steiner: This does not exclude self-awareness.

The other questions are not of a nature that would be suitable for answering here.

When I last had the honor of speaking here a few weeks ago about spiritual science, I tried to explain the general character and the nature of the research of this spiritual science and also to point out the extent to which this spiritual science is not only in full agreement with scientific research and its discoveries, but also that it must necessarily fit into the aims of the time as a humanities today through the aspects that this natural scientific research has acquired for our general world view, that it must be taken up by the aims of our time.

This evening I will take the liberty of speaking about the mood that can evoke opposition and hostility in the soul towards this spiritual science. But so that we understand each other, so that those who were not present among today's esteemed audience at the last lecture can also follow the remarks, please allow me to say a few words in introduction to what was the subject of the last lecture and what is intended to characterize the general character of spiritual science.

Just as it is true that, on the one hand, spiritual science is a kind of continuation of scientific thinking, of the scientific world view for the spiritual realm, it is equally true, on the other hand, that this spiritual science, because it extends to the realm of spiritual life, of the spirit, of spiritual beings, needs different research methods, a different kind of world view, than the natural science directed towards the outer material existence. The natural scientist uses external instruments and external methods of observation for his research and to obtain his results. He has, so to speak, before him what the objects of his research give him and what the laws of his research allow him to gain. The spiritual researcher is different: he must find the connection to a world that, as the source, as the spiritual source of our existence, underlies all external reality, but which eludes the senses and also the mind, which relies on the statements of the senses, on external perception. The spiritual researcher must penetrate into a realm that is initially not accessible to external perception, to external observation. And the only instrument that is initially available to him, in the sense of true spiritual science, to penetrate into the spiritual world, is only his own soul.

But this own soul, as it is initially found in everyday life and also for external science, is not suitable for penetrating into the spiritual world. This human soul is so arranged for external life that it must make use of the organs, the instruments of the body. Through the sense organs, through the intellect, which is connected to the brain, the external world becomes accessible to it. The fact that the senses and also the intellect, which is connected to the brain, can only penetrate to the physical-sensory existence, was explained in more detail here last time, so it should not concern us today.

Let us first deal with the fact that this human soul, as it is in everyday life, must be transformed in order to penetrate into the spiritual world. It must first become that through which it can penetrate into the spiritual world, and it can only become this through the fact that the human being himself makes it so. And not external events, not experiences that are in the physical world, can advance the soul so that it can penetrate into the realm of the spirit, but only intimate, inner processes of the soul itself. These essentially consist of the soul practicing concentration of thought and meditation, as these things are called. You can find more details in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'.

When the soul, under certain conditions, erases and extinguishes the perceptions of the senses and the thoughts of the ordinary mind, and yet remains aware of itself as a soul, then it is in the state in which it gradually develops into the spiritual world. This state can be compared to the ordinary state of sleep in which a person finds themselves. When the ordinary senses gradually become silent as a person falls asleep, when ordinary thinking, the ordinary impulses of perception, feeling and will cease, then the human soul is indeed no longer using its body as an instrument. But at the same time it becomes unconscious. The darkness of unconsciousness spreads around it. Everything that is silent in sleep must also be silent in the spiritual researcher. But through inner strengthening of the soul life, through the spiritual researcher energetically and patiently over many years often concentrating a soul activity, even if only for a short time, just for minutes, on certain ideas — you can find more details in the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'? — by means of which the soul is enabled to contract in inner power so that this soul can develop a life that is not mediated by the body, not by the sense organs.

One can indeed bring the soul into the same state in which it is otherwise only in normal sleep, but which differs from this state in that one is awake, although one does not think and perceive as in the ordinary waking state. One can detach this soul - the expression has already been used here - from the body as if by spiritual chemistry. If one strengthens one's thinking and feeling in the appropriate way, if one makes it increasingly stronger, one attains something in the instrument of one's own human being that can be compared to the separation of hydrogen from water in external chemistry. Just as water reveals nothing of the properties of hydrogen as such, so man, facing everyday life, reveals nothing of the actual properties of his soul.

But when this soul is strengthened by appropriate reinforcement of its inner powers, then it comes to experience itself not unconsciously, but fully aware outside of its body, so that its own body and its otherwise everyday destiny, its everyday experiences, face it like the outside world. Like the table or the chair as an object, the powerfully strengthened soul can face its own body. It expresses itself out of the body through the increased power that it acquires through meditation and concentration, as these exercises to strengthen the soul are called. In this way we can look inside when our soul has been strengthened; we see, as it were, ourselves in the world, but our soul is outside the body, which is very vivid through the method that really makes the soul go out of the body.

The possibility of penetrating into the spiritual world essentially rests on the human soul being able to become alive and perceptive outside the body. The strictest proof of the soul's independence also rests on the fact that the soul can experience and perceive outside the body through the spiritual-scientific method. One could deny that the soul is something outside the body, for example, when the person is asleep. One could say that the soul is nothing other than what is brought about by the machine of the body; when the machine of the body comes to a standstill, no expressions of life are shown. One could claim that when the machine of the body comes to a standstill in death, all soul activity ceases.

But when spiritual science shows that the soul can experience itself and perceive itself when it is outside the body, when it has the body before it, then at the same time proof of the independence of the soul is brought. This proof is possible. It is possible through the strengthening of the same inner powers that we otherwise also exercise in life, but only apply to all external events of life, and through the detachment of these powers from the external events of the day and the strengthening of these powers through meditation and concentration. These proofs — as far as they can be discussed, they were in the last lecture.

When the spiritual researcher has arrived at this kind of body-free perception, when he experiences himself in his soul, so that this soul is outside his body, then he is in fact in the spiritual world exactly as he is in the everyday life in the material world, when he has immersed himself with his soul in his body and makes use of the senses and the ordinary mind. In a spiritual world, the spiritual researcher then knows himself, and he knows himself in the spiritual world in such a way that he not only surveys the life between birth or, let us say, between conception and death, but he also surveys the life after he has passed through the gate of death to a new life. Because one of the most important criteria is the prospect of repeated lives on earth, in which the whole of life on earth is such that a person lives between death and rebirth and between birth and death.

What we experience in our present life is the consequence of previous lives on earth. But between two lives on earth, we spend time in the pure spiritual, in that spiritual in which the spiritual researcher immerses when he brings his soul to experience free of the body. Thus, the overview of human life is expanded through spiritual research. And the subject matter that has just been discussed, together with broader and broader aspects of these connections in the world and their creation, of the source of human life, of that which brings security, hope and purpose to human life, is precisely what spiritual research seeks to encompass and to add to what natural science has to give for the external world.

Now, in our time, there are opponents of spiritual research – but there have been opponents at all times – people who view spiritual research with outright hostility. Today, we will not go into the individual attacks of possible opponents of spiritual science. Something else should be shown. It should be shown where hostility against spiritual science can come from in human nature, what is present in human nature, normally, one would like to say, which, when it occurs particularly intensified and developed in this or that personality, must lead to a real hostility towards the research of spiritual life, towards the methods of the spirit. Spiritual science is, in the true sense, in the genuine sense, that which, where the words are understood, has been called Theosophy. That spiritual science has been called Theosophy does not mean that spiritual research, as represented here, wants to identify with all that is called Theosophy. For today, quite dubious teachings are summarized under the name of Theosophy. If one understands it honestly and righteously, the word theosophy means nothing more than that man can become aware that he carries within himself a soul-spiritual source through which he is connected to the divine-spiritual sources that spring and work through the world, that man can feel within himself what is present through the whole world as the divine-spiritual source. That he can experience it in himself, that he can not only suspect and believe in a divine within himself, but also bring it to realization. This gives the theosophical mood. An anti-theosophical mood would arise if man either completely denied that he can grasp something in the depths of his soul, or that what he grasps is connected with a divine spiritual life that surges through the world. Or an anti-Sophian mood would arise if he at least denied that he recognizes these connections with the divine-spiritual through the powers of human nature.

One can say: the human soul can develop a theosophical and an antisophical mood. And because spiritual science shows, as it were, through the soul's experiment, through soul chemistry: one can experience the soul if one first brings it to the point of view where it is free of the body —, spiritual science must stand on the theosophical point of view and surrender to it. That which can be made free of the body is, when it is free of the body, immersed in a world of spiritual facts and spiritual entities. The life with the spiritual worlds and the spiritual entities is theosophy, is spiritual science. But it will, precisely because it is able to go into the sources of existence, differ from other world views in that it can never become narrow-minded. We experience it in the other worldviews that their adherents simply want to understand and grasp what they themselves assert, and often blindly fight everything else, almost like a folly, and say that it should not be there. Spiritual science, because it tries to penetrate into the very sources of the human soul, can understand, fully understand, where other moods come from than its own, yes, it can even, as we want to show today, fully understand the anti-Socratic mood. Today's reflection is precisely about the fact that the anti-Sophian mood is not only forgivable, so to speak, when it occurs among the enemies and opponents of spiritual science, but that to a certain extent it even corresponds to human nature and its inclinations.

The spiritual researcher is not at all surprised that opponents and enemies of his line of research arise, because he recognizes that this antagonism is basically rooted in human nature. Let us cite a fact from the field of this spiritual research itself, which will also immediately show what is meant by the naturally given anti-philosophical mood.

How should spiritual science view human beings? It has already been stated in earlier lectures that for the spiritual researcher, the entry of human beings into the earthly world is a wonderful mystery. It is clear to the spiritual researcher that when a person enters earthly life through birth, they establish their earthly life on the basis of previous earthly lives that they have gone through. Before birth, he was a spiritual being in the spiritual world. In addition to what the person inherits from his father and mother, from his ancestors, and what he receives through the hereditary substance, the spiritual soul comes from the spiritual world. What comes from the father and mother combines with what comes from the spiritual world. We see first how that which comes from the spiritual world slowly works its way into that which comes through the hereditary tendency. We see first how even the child's facial features are indeterminate, but that they become more and more distinct as the child's soul-spiritual element comes to the fore. The spiritual researcher knows that the soul and spirit are only loosely connected to the physical body at first. So with each step towards a more definite facial appearance, with the emergence of abilities and talents, we see the soul and spirit becoming more deeply embedded in the physical body. If time allowed, I could cite evidence that the soul gradually disappears into the growing physical body, that the soul gives the physical body its three-dimensional shape, that it takes possession of the physical body's movements and skills.

Perhaps I may draw the attention of some of the honored listeners who have already taken a closer look at something like this, to the way children often look when they first enter the world through birth, so that one does not know who they resemble, that they only grow into the similarity over time. This is because two currents oppose each other: that which is predisposed in the physical body, which, so to speak, works its way up as physical strength, and that which comes from the soul and spirit, which permeates the physical body and gradually asserts itself. These currents determine the reasons why a person should be born into this or that family. One is not born into a family for no reason, but because what one brings with one from the spiritual and soul world feels a certain affinity to what is often in the family in question. Even if there is misfortune in the family in question, the soul needs precisely that for its further development, which can happen to it as misfortune. The attraction of the soul and spirit and the attraction of heredity interact. The soul and spirit only gradually grow into what the outside world brings them. Therefore, a balance with what is given in the line of inheritance only takes place gradually.

Spiritual science cannot participate in the discussion of these matters in the brutal way in which the physical experimental method does so. One must be able to look more closely and intimately at the living conditions if one wants to understand them from a spiritual scientific point of view. And so we see the soul and spiritual aspects of the human being descending and connecting with the physical and bodily aspects. We see that in the early stages of a child's development, the body is almost dream-like. Not only does the child have to sleep through a large part of its existence in order to stay healthy, but there is something dream-like about its life. Then comes the time – it is the point up to which one remembers – when self-awareness clearly emerges, when the child learns to feel itself as an ego, to express its self-awareness clearly.

What is this based on? In the early days, before this happens, the spiritual and soul forces are first at work to make the body a suitable tool for the mission, the sending forth. When a person is born, the brain and the finer organs, which are still quite undetermined at first, still have a long way to go. The spiritual soul must immerse itself, must increasingly take possession of the physical body, and grow into the physical body. The forces that descend from the spiritual world do this, they shape the brain plastically, they “organize” the individual members of the human body so that it has an instrument for acting and perceiving in the outside world. This inner work that the soul performs in the body is infinitely significant and important. As long as this inner work lasts, the child must live a kind of dream life, especially as long as this work is still focused on the physical development of the brain and the finer limbs of the nervous system. Then there comes a point, which we remember later. At this point, the inner work is completed to a certain extent. It is difficult to express such things precisely in the ordinary language of everyday life, because our speech is made for the outer world, not for the spiritual world. Therefore, one must try to coin the words in such a way that they point to what underlies them. When, I would like to say, that which the spiritual soul has to do with the physical body is so far worked out that the physical body is condensed and prepared as the human being needs it for his later life, then the forces that used to work within are released. They no longer sink into the physical body, they will be there for themselves. And what is the result of this? I would like to express what the result is by means of a comparison. The parable is not to be used as an analogy to explain anything, but it should only make it clear what is meant here: if we think we have a glass plate and a mass in front of us and we look through the glass, we see what is behind it. If we now take the mass and shape it so that we can place it on the glass plate as a covering, we gradually turn what was a transparent glass plate into a mirror. If we now look into the glass, we seem to be looking at ourselves. What is presented here as a parable, thought out accordingly, makes it clear to us what happens in the first years of a child in a human being.

The child's soul and spirit work together to shape the body, to mold it plastically. We can say that they make it so dense that it no longer takes in spiritual and soul activity and works itself into the body. We can compare this to the fact that you can no longer see through a glass that has a mirror coating. The body will now reflect the spiritual-soul activity, will reflect it back; self-awareness begins. From the moment the spiritual-soul activity is complete, the body becomes a mirror, the nervous system becomes a mirror. And just as you see yourself in a finished mirror, so from that moment on, you experience yourself as an independent I, as a child, using the spiritual and soul forces to make your physical body a mirror. So, just as you perceive yourself in your mirror image, self-awareness begins to feel itself as an I. This is the point to which one later remembers going back. This is the awakening of self-awareness, this is the appearance of the ego in the child. And at the same time, we know from this that the forces that were previously used to organize the body, that brought the body to the density whereby it became a mirroring apparatus, that these are now used for everyday life, for feeling, imagining and thinking. What else comes into play here? This will be shown by the development that the spiritual researcher must undergo. When the spiritual researcher truly forms his soul free of the body, when he truly comes to a body-free experience and perception through the means mentioned in the last lecture and described in Occult Science, then he makes use, precisely in his soul, of the means that the child uses to shape the body plastically. He must reintroduce the means that ceased to be used when the relationship with the outside world began to become conscious. What the spiritual researcher needs for his spiritual method had to be stemmed by the bodily views and ideas.

One can use a precise way of expressing oneself that makes use of a word that is already frequently used today. One can say: That which the spiritual researcher must bring to consciousness is the same as what would be present in the ordinary person if consciousness were to suddenly arise in a state of sleep and the person would still be asleep. The spiritual and soul life in the ordinary person lies in the subconscious, it does not come to consciousness. For what comes to consciousness in everyday life? Not the soul-spiritual itself, but its reflection in the body, just as the person standing in front of the mirror does not see himself standing there, but his image, his reflection. So too, everyday consciousness is not one in which the soul-spiritual perceives itself, but rather what is reflected back from life as a mirror image from the moment self-awareness is awakened.

From this particular point in time onwards, what has ceased to be part of ordinary human experience, and been pushed down into the subconscious, so that the human being can focus his attention during physical life on the mirror image, must be retrieved by the spiritual researcher. This is done by the spiritual researcher in what is a fragment of the human organization itself, which is first worked out during the embryonic period and later during the time after the human being is born, up to the moment when self-awareness occurs. Two things are juxtaposed: everyday life, where man only has to do with the mirror image, while in the subconscious remains the truly real experience of the spiritual and soul. What the spiritual researcher has to do is to bring up that of which one otherwise has only a mirror image in daily experience.

Now we must bear in mind that it is in the nature of man that he is so placed in everyday life that he sends the forces into his body only in the first, most tender childhood, until the moment when the dream life transforms into the fully conscious ordinary day life, when man perceives the reflection of his soul life. Everything by which man is capable in the outer life, by which he stands firm in the social life, by which he accomplishes ordinary science, is based on the fact that he no longer uses the forces for the outer life from the characterized childhood standpoint, which can only be reflected, that he used before this point in time for the development of the physical body.

The forces that a person needs for their external physical body must therefore have the tendency to push back, to push down into the unconscious, everything that the spiritual researcher needs for their spiritual research, but that is there and that shapes the person from the spiritual world, that makes them in the image of the spiritual world. The mood must necessarily develop through this, especially in the person who is immersed in the outer physical life, who is aware of the fact that I have become capable of the outer world through what I have acquired as a human being – and who does not know that there are other forces, namely the forces that have so far worked on his inner being, for him the mood must arise to hold on to the forces that are opposed to the forces of spiritual research. This mood easily gets out of hand in ordinary life. It produces an aversion, an antipathy, to all spiritual research. One instinctively feels that one should apply those powers in the physical body that one needs for physical life. These powers have nothing to do with the powers that the spiritual researcher wants to talk about.

If one wants to state the matter forcefully, it can be characterized in the following way. One can say: Yes, the human being feels within himself the consciousness that he is capable in the physical sense of being through the powers of his body, when he forgets the other power, the spiritual-soul power, which, without his intervention, without him making an effort, has prepared the body in the first years of his childhood, on which the soul then reflects. Man pays no attention to the fact that the forces are alive that have made him what he is and that enable him to be capable. He takes for granted the instruments that he has prepared without effort. He does not think that they are formed out of the soul-spiritual world. He perceives this instrument when it is ready so that it makes him capable in the outer, physical world.

If a person is tuned in this way, if he says to himself, 'How they came into being is not my concern, I just want to use this tool', then he can enter into an anti-Sophian mood. He wants to know nothing of the forces that have formed this tool and that the spiritual researcher must bring forth and bring to consciousness. Do you realize that just at a time when material life makes so many demands on people, at a time when there are such rich and flourishing fields of knowledge, when people are so proud of material progress, that in such a time the anti-spiritual mood must get out of hand? Will you understand that there is antipathy towards Theosophy, towards the power that reigns in secret and must be brought forth by the spiritual researcher, that there is resentment? But these powers lie hidden in the depths of the soul and are brought out through spiritual research. And when they are brought up, these powers become the means by which we are introduced to the real facts and entities of the spiritual world.

Now the anti-sophical mood can be ignited a second time because the path of spiritual research is not particularly easy. What happens when a person comes to release the soul and spirit from the body, to slip out of the physical and bodily as it were? Then perceptions arise in his soul that are no longer the perceptions of the outer senses, thoughts that are no longer thoughts of his ordinary mind. Then, just as in falling asleep, the everyday world of the senses sinks away. So the outer world fades into the indefinite. But not the darkness of sleep emerges, but a new world, a world that must be understood in the right sense if it is not to be misunderstood.

When the spiritual researcher has practiced patience and energy long enough to free his soul, so to speak, to set it apart from the body, then the first thing that happens is not that he is immediately confronted with a multitude of spiritual facts and entities. But he does feel that he is in a different world. From a certain moment on, one knows what it means to be outside one's body in a spiritual-soul state. It occurs when one begins to have dream-like images with a kind of inner soul activity, just as dreams can interrupt the night's sleep, intermingling with it, and we know that they are not caused by external things in the usual way. Images arise that someone who does not understand them will consider to be fantasies, but that the spiritual researcher knows: if his spiritual-soul is developed in the right way, not as today's humanity understands evolution, but in such a way that the soul develops from the depth of its natural being, then he is in a new world. There are images that one has never seen, impressions that one has never had.

Lest I be misunderstood, I must now immediately point out something. Of course, when the soul has emerged from the body and sees a world around it, reminiscent of color images flitting back and forth, a world of sounds. But basically, not everything in this new world is the same as in the physical world. If everything were only a memory, a reminiscence of the sensory world, one could be under the impression that Plato's disciple made when he said, “Socrates knew nothing but what other people also know. Every schoolboy knows that too. Why should Socrates know more than a schoolboy? Certainly, the individual color pictures remind us of the outer purpose in life, but just as the letters of a book convey something completely new to us, even though we know all the individual letters, so the experiences of the soul introduce us to the spiritual world, even though they appear like reminiscences of the outer physical life.

There is only one point that must be overcome. What first appears, what fills our soul's field of perception, is something that the materialist can call images of the imagination, if he does not know that these images are not initially a real perception of something external, but the first manifestation of the spiritual organism. Just as we learn in the course of childhood to form our organs, to feel things in the right way, to see, and only through this do we become aware of our body, so we must, if I may use the expression, become aware of our spiritual body. What these people see as a spiritual world is only what we have to develop like a spiritual body. And in this spiritual body we have to feel, as it were, the real spiritual world. And indeed, what we perceive first is ourselves. In this sense, one can speak of visions, of hallucinations. The materialistic researcher gets to know nothing but this. And because he cannot get to know anything else, he cannot believe that the time will come when the real spiritual researcher needs them. Just as the material scientist needs his hands to perceive the physical, so the spiritual scientist needs what is produced by the senses free from the body, in order to grasp and perceive the spiritual world. First we train the mind's eye and mind's ear, and when we make use of them, we enter through them into the spiritual world.

There, on this threshold of the spiritual world, two things arise that, to a certain extent, make people shy away from really entering the spiritual world. What arises is as follows: First of all, the world of the spirit that we enter is quite different from the physical world. We cannot simply use our concepts, ideas and notions from the physical world to penetrate into this spiritual world. In our ordinary everyday life, we are accustomed to perceiving realities that we perceive with our bodies, that we perceive through our eyes and ears. We are accustomed to calling real that which we can touch with our hands, which we can understand in its laws through our mind, which is bound to the physical brain.

But we have shed this body when we enter the spiritual world as spiritual researchers. There is nothing in it that can be perceived through the body. At first, one experiences oneself in one's soul in such a way that one knows: the body is gone, one is only in the spiritual world with one's soul. What asserts itself is what one can call a complete unfamiliarity with the new situation. While you were used to being surrounded by the body in the world, you now stand there with only your soul and no inner experience. And the same strong feeling arises that can only be compared to what you experienced when you dreamed. You suddenly feel undressed in a place where many people are, full of shame because you feel you don't belong in this world. This dream gives a blurred image, somewhat like a premonition, of what happens with infinite amplification when you enter the spiritual world and feel out of place, so that you say: You stand opposed to that which you have called reality differently, you cannot see or feel what the real world has meant to you so far. What is the point of trying to enter a world that is stripped of what you have really perceived? As soon as you enter the spiritual world and are in a world that contains completely different entities, which are merely spiritual-soul, between which actions take place that lie only in the spiritual world, as soon as you enter, you must first preserve your ego with all your might. If you do not preserve your ego, you will be immersed in this entire spiritual world. Therefore, when you read the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” you will see that all the exercises recommended there are aimed at carrying the ego into the spiritual world more strongly than it is experienced in the outer world. When I see a blue color in the sensory world, I say: I see it. I think it is outside of me. When one enters the spiritual world, one takes on its properties. When one submerges into the spiritual world, one must become one with the spiritual world. The entire inner being spreads out into the spiritual world, flows out into the spiritual world. And the thoughts – one does not feel as though one is thinking them, but rather they think themselves. You are really in this spiritual world so much so that you are like Erl King and his son at the same time: the father full of worries, the son with all kinds of visions surging through his soul. You are both at the same time. You perceive a new world, but you feel as if you are drawn to every thing, to every deed by some indeterminate forces. You feel as if you have been torn out of yourself. This creates a feeling in the soul that one must get to know well. A feeling of fear of being taken from what has so far guaranteed reality.

Both feelings, the feeling of being unaccustomed to the spiritual world and of being exposed in it, the feeling of fear of it, are found in the depths of the human soul. Both feelings would arise and suddenly seize the person if he were to awaken, as the spiritual researcher must awaken when he awakens from his everyday sleep; he would be seized by an infinite fear of being unfamiliar and exposed. But the ordinary sleep immediately corrects these feelings. They do not express themselves. Man numbs himself by the will arising in him to withdraw into his body and thereby wake up. That is why man feels as if he is being pushed by a will impulse towards his body when he wakes up, as long as the body can take him, that is, until death, because the body numbs the feeling of being exposed. Man numbs his feelings of fear by not allowing himself to penetrate into the spiritual world at all at first.

At the moment when man begins to penetrate into the spiritual world through exercises advised by the spiritual researcher, this fear quietly approaches his soul. Man tries to deaden it by keeping away from the spiritual world, by being materialistic, in other words, by developing to the highest degree that which is in him an anti-sophical mood, because man must deaden himself to what would fill him if he wanted to penetrate into the spiritual world. Through the feeling of fear, the soul is anti-sophically tuned. In order not to be anti-Sophian, man must do such exercises that enable him above all not to feel exposed, but to feel clothed by a spiritual body, as he is clothed here by a physical body. To overcome the feeling of fear, man must do exercises that enable him to approach the spiritual world fearlessly and boldly.

Therefore, many people are anti-philosophical. But this is basically not ill will, not something that can be strongly attributed to people, but rather it is the human desire to numb themselves to fear. This is what drives them to anti-philosophical sentiment. It is not a figure of speech when a building is erected for spiritual science somewhere and the opposition asserts itself in the whole environment and continues to do so everywhere. Therefore, the anti-sophistic mood arises from the fact that people want to numb themselves from their own abilities to enter the spiritual world. Because people cannot overcome this fear, they become anti-sophical. Just as people persuade themselves of something in order to avoid facing something else, not to let it enter their consciousness, so too, to put it frankly, they would have to say what is in their subconscious: we are afraid of the spiritual world, therefore the spiritual world must not exist for us. The consequence of this is that the person declares spiritual science to be nonsense, fantasy, dreaming, unnecessary, that he invents all kinds of things to denigrate it. These are means to numb the fear - the fear that one naturally does not understand when one speaks.

We can use the methods of spiritual science to draw particular attention to this fear in the present day and also to point out that it is not admitted, but something is invented to numb it. I would like to draw your attention to a characteristic phenomenon.

A very important physiologist who died some time ago pointed out something that only needs to be looked at in the right way to corroborate the fact just mentioned. However, I would like to point out that when I cite something that is anti-Sophistic, I am not willing to attack opponents whom I do not belittle, but whom I hold in the highest esteem in their own fields. I appreciate Du Bois-Reymond, who gave a famous, spirited speech at a famous natural science conference in the 1870s. The brilliant, outstanding explanations of a person grounded in current natural science find evidence for what he is explaining everywhere, he produces reasons everywhere. Then he approaches the conclusion.

What did he come to? He showed that natural science can only lead to an understanding of the world in which it understands motion of the smallest parts, and that it traces everything back to motion. But as much as all natural science is based on the investigation of the motion of atoms and so forth, it is also true that natural science can never grasp the soul. The naturalist can say that the red color arises from certain movements, but he cannot say how the consciousness of the red color arises in us. No natural science could ever comprehend anything of the soul from movement. If one wanted to comprehend the soul from what is solely justified in natural science, then what he calls supernaturalism would begin. And so Du Bois-Reymond concludes his speech: Natural science must stop at external movement; it can never grasp even the simplest part of the human soul. This soul could only be grasped where supernaturalism begins and natural science ends.

We can go through Du Bois-Reymond's speech and find the most beautiful reasons for what he says everywhere. Only the last assertion is like a shot from a pistol. He does not provide any evidence for it. We have the feeling – and we must have it, because it is justified – that Du Bois-Reymond, in moving from what is the justified field of his science to supernaturalism, no longer presents reasons, but antipathy. The feeling of dislike shoots out of his subconscious, making him look at supernaturalism with antipathy, but he has no reasons for his assertion. Du Bois-Reymond is not alone; I have only mentioned him as a typical representative of this tendency. Wherever there is antipathy towards the communication of spiritual science, i.e., wherever anti-Socratic sentiment arises, we see people everywhere, whether we call them materialists or monists, who give the most beautiful reasons for what they say in the way of positive arguments.

But you see, a hundred and a hundred proofs could be brought for this; where people express their antipathy towards spiritual science, the reasons stop. This antipathy comes from the subconscious, from what has nothing to do with what they know how to justify. To see what arises, we must shine a light into the human soul organization with the means of spiritual science, and here external natural science actually meets spiritual science halfway, as natural science always does when the latter understands itself and does not want to found a comprehensive world view on misunderstood knowledge.

One can examine how his organization works under the influence of thinking, which is directed only at the outer world of sense perceptions and the intellect, through the particular way in which the purely external, purely fact-based scholar, who otherwise only relies on what his thinking gives him about the outer world, investigates. You can see that the nerves are put in the same position as when a person is in a state of fear, only that in the case of a state of fear caused by a sudden shock, can be disturbed in its circulation; it can be drawn from the outer parts of the body and directed to the heart and brain, so that fainting can occur as a result of sudden fright. The scholar attributes what suddenly causes the fear to a long life. He dissolves the states of fear, as it were. When he encounters the world, he is overcome by fear in his entire soul, then he dissolves this fear into the anti-Sophian mood.

The Danish researcher Lange has written a book about the emotions, in which the states of fear are also characterized in psychological terms. But spiritual science can also do this with its means. The whole vascular system is put into a different mood when a person experiences fear or shock. When fear arises in the human soul, even the fluids are put into a different mood. This could be described in detail. It would take up too much of our time, but there is one thing you will all know: when a person is overcome by terror or fear, they suddenly feel insecure. They have the urge to hold on to something, and may even faint. Physically, they seek to hold on.

What one produces through an activity directed purely towards the external world of observation is a fear and terror spread over the years. Slowly and gradually fear is poured into the soul and into the organism that which is the state of fear when one only experiences that which relates to the external sense world. When people are in this state of fear, then that which expresses itself in them, in their field, is what expresses itself in a person who is in fear and terror and says: I am falling over, give me something to hold on to. This is what the person who is so inclined that he rejects the supernatural world says. I will reject the spiritual world, give me something to hold on to. Physical observation, the theory of atoms, is what those who are seized by a subconscious sense of fear hold on to.

This is the answer that science, which is directed towards the external, must produce, which wants to know nothing of this spiritual science, of the conditions that one is supposed to experience without being able to hold on to external knowledge, to physical laws. Just as the fearful want to hold on to the table or chair, so those who are afraid of the spiritual world want to hold on to matter, because they are afraid of sinking into a spiritual powerlessness if they cannot hold on to matter. He numbs himself with this fear by imagining: there is nothing supernatural.

From these remarks, we see how anti-Sophian sentiment must be generated in a natural way, we see how anti-Sophian sentiment must be generated precisely in the forms that this external science takes. You will find all the more anti-Sophian sentiment the more man lets himself be inwardly infected by the sentiment that this science generates, which is directed outwards. Thus, it can be said that something is given to man entirely in his natural disposition, which can be described as an antisophical mood. And the more man places himself in the outer life - be it in practice or in science - the more antisophical mood is stored.

But just as a pendulum, when it swings to one side, must also swing to the other side, so too, when external form swings to the anti-Socratic mood, man must also swing to the other side - theosophical. Man cannot stand there in spiritual peace, just as the pendulum cannot be at rest when it has swung to one side. Man could only then keep his soul at peace if he were to remain completely dull in a spiritual twilight. It can happen, precisely because of the mood of the present, that the soul is carried away by the antisophical mood. All the more reason to note, in the depths of the human soul, for those who can look at it more intimately, that the pendulum wants to swing to the other side, that the theosophical mood is also in numerous human souls. It is a matter of this theosophy being guided in the right direction for spiritual science in particular. It does not have the task of creating the theosophical mood; this mood will arise of its own accord, like the opposite swing of the pendulum. The more we approach the future, the more the theosophical mood will arise in all human souls that understand each other, in contrast to the anti-sophical mood. But the theosophical mood, however little it needs to be created, needs to be guided and directed by spiritual science. It must find the right path through spiritual science, just as the anti-theosophical mood must find its right path. Otherwise, what I want to suggest by way of a comparison could easily happen.

Tasso is known not only through his own poetry but also through the work of Goethe. Tasso spoke of a spirit with whom he converses. He did not speak as the spiritual researcher speaks. The spiritual researcher who brings himself to consciousness and knows what kind of being it is, who can maintain his consciousness, must speak differently than the poet who dresses what he feels in fantasy. The spiritual researcher of the present holds on to the ego and does not allow fear to arise. Tasso did not yet live in the age in which spiritual research began to educate about the spiritual world. Tasso spoke of a spirit with whom he conversed and to whom he owed his best thoughts. Manso, who had written a life of Tasso, always laughed at this strange spirit with whom Tasso conversed. He sees nothing, they say. So Tasso once said to him: “I will make you see and hear him for once.” And once, after they had been hunting together, Tasso suddenly looked towards the window where he was standing with Manso. Manso saw how Tasso began to speak as if to a foreign being. Tasso was holding a conversation with him. And Manso could not content himself with saying that Tasso might have invented it. He spoke in such a way that he gave answers that he could not have given of his own accord. When the conversation was over, Tasso said to him: 'Do you now have proof of the spirit to which I am speaking?' 'Yes,' said Manso, 'I heard you talking to a spirit, but I saw nothing.' Then Tasso said: 'You have seen and heard enough. If you had seen more, then – he broke off. You could not have borne it, we could complete his words in this way.

This is how it could be for souls if they did not, as is natural, have to develop the theosophical mood as a response, as a counterbalance, to the antisophical mood. They could necessarily perceive the spiritual, but one must doubt whether they could bear it. Spiritual science must guide these souls in the right direction. As long as people indulge in anti-sophical moods, it will be there that anti-sophists are, so to speak, the images of Mephisto, the original anti-sophist of modern times. He is the original anti-sophist. When he gives Faust the key to the realm of mothers, he explains that Faust will enter into nothingness. Faust, the theosophist, declares: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.” He has overcome fear, he does not need to anesthetize himself in the face of fear.

If we develop this, which leads from the anti-theosophical to the theosophical mood, then again the case is that one can say: With spiritual science, one feels in harmony with all those people who, over time, even if they have not yet been able to embrace spiritual science – for spiritual science can only in our time grasp the soul and stand alongside natural science – with all those who, out of true, genuine spiritual research, represent the progress of humanity, with all those one feels in harmony.

When we consider the human soul with its anti- and theosophical moods, both of which must necessarily be present in the human soul, as we have done today, then we can say that we are fully understanding of all opponents and enemies of spiritual science. We have to defend ourselves against them, but we understand them. And this understanding can even lead to compassion, because in most cases, opposition is nothing more than an anaesthetic for the fear that overcomes a person when they first want to penetrate into the spiritual world and are not prepared. The anti-Sophist does not feel this fear, but it is present in his subconscious. And he places himself on the side of the person who, in the eighteenth century, responded as a philosopher to the antisophical trend. Haller, the great sage, who is also well known here in Switzerland. He is mentioned here, just as other people are mentioned, rather than lesser opponents, because he was one of the greatest in his field. Because in his soul, precisely in order to achieve that in which he had become great, namely as a natural scientist in the external fields, the anti-Sophian mood grew ever greater, he says:

Into the innermost nature
No created spirit penetrates.
Happy he to whom she only
The outer shell rejects.

This is the anti-Sophian sentiment, which cannot penetrate, recognize that man has an inner source of existence, and cannot approach this source scientifically. Goethe opposes this with his theosophical sentiment. He does not speak of theosophical or anti-Sophian sentiment. But he says, with regard to Haller's words:

I have heard this said for sixty years,
I curse it, but furtively;
Tell me a thousand, a thousand times:
She gives everything abundantly and willingly,
Nature has neither core
nor shell,
She is everything at once;
She only tests you most of all
Whether you are the core or the shell.

Man can develop an anti-Sophistic mood within himself. He can come to the frame of mind of saying: I want to get to the core, to that which guarantees my reality when I am only in my shell. What underlies what life hides from me, its core, may remain hidden. This is expressed in the sentence:

No created spirit
Can penetrate the innermost nature.
Happy the man to whom she
Only the outer shell shows.

The theosophist says: Man is, in the innermost part of his being, that which is spiritual and soul-like in him. The spiritual and soul-like triumphs over the body, [it is that] which conquers the body in death and passes through death into the spiritual world, in order to experience the spiritual world through death and to come back to the body again through a new birth for further development! A person can live in their core, and when they live in their core and only experience it, then they experience the spiritual and soul life that flows and surges through the world. Just as we are present in the entire physical world through our body as instruments and forces, so we are present in the spiritual and soul life of the world by experiencing the innermost part of our soul. And even if not everyone can become a spiritual researcher, the soul of man is predisposed to the knowledge of truth. Only a few people need become spiritual researchers. But even if one is not a spiritual researcher oneself, if one only examines one's own ordinary human thinking, one is able to understand everything that the spiritual researcher says, if one applies what has been indicated about soul development.

The spiritual researcher is not limited to speaking only to spiritual researchers. He knows that he speaks to the innermost core that is in every soul. And if external prejudices do not prevent it, every soul can feel the truth of what the spiritual researcher says. This theosophical mood will become more and more a part of life, will increasingly embrace the goals of spiritual life, especially as people come to ever more glorious and fruitful spiritual life. Then the human soul will defend itself against the anti-theosophical mood in its quiet hours, in the moments when it feels, when it becomes aware of how it is connected with the core of all existence. Then the soul will try to awaken such a theosophical mood, which expresses itself in saying more and more in the face of all anti-theosophical sentiment:

Nature has neither core
nor shell;
All at once it is everything;
— Nothing is inside, nothing is outside.
Because what is inside is also outside. —
You, most of all, test yourself
Whether you are core or shell.

The first two lectures on spiritual science that I was able to give here this winter were more about the way in which spiritual knowledge is acquired. They were about those forces in the human soul that generally still oppose this spiritual knowledge in our present time, are hostile to it, and the like.

This evening, I would like to take the liberty of saying a few words, even if they are naturally limited in a short lecture, about the relationship between spiritual science and various religious and social currents in our present-day culture. I may remark that, as is natural, I can only advocate spiritual scientific research, which was the subject of the first two lectures here, and that we should carefully avoid confusing this spiritual scientific research with all kinds of other currents that call themselves theosophical or similar and are active in the present day. Generally speaking, it is not pleasant to talk about such currents, but perhaps it is not necessary after these lectures. We live in a time in which the human soul, which is only a little aware of what is going on around it, must undoubtedly feel how it is increasingly being forced to step out of the instinctive life of the soul and to live more and more consciously and recognizably in that which one can call the demands of the world, namely the cultural world, on man and his soul development. We need not look back to the very early days of human cultural development to be convinced, very soon indeed, if we are unprejudiced, that in those earlier times man was able to live much more instinctively, much more, one might say, naturally, than in our own time. This is the basis for what we experience as the progressive aspect of our time. The human soul is increasingly compelled to think and imagine about what, if the expression may be used, was instilled into it by inner, soul-spiritual forces that remain more indeterminate, so that they could express themselves more instinctively.

In a genuine and true sense, spiritual science seeks to serve this human soul, which is striving for maturity and full consciousness. But since it must do so from a point of view that, at least initially, is seemingly in stark contrast to the traditional habits of thought and ways of thinking for many souls, it is, on the other hand, quite natural, as has already been emphasized, that the general consciousness revolts against what spiritual science wants to bring into the present, so that it really corresponds not only to what is present, so to speak, on the surface of the soul, but to what, in the deep longings of the soul, weaves and strives towards the human future.

For some, what spiritual science has to say must seem radically different in a much more profound sense than, for example, what was radically different in the dawn of the new spiritual life that the scientific way of thinking brought. To a much greater extent, man of today must feel that spiritual science has apparently — and this must always be emphasized — pulled the ground from under his feet, in contrast to the time when Copernicus, with his new physical worldview, shook what people had previously believed, namely that the earth, along with man, was stationary in space. That people had to accept the new truth, which was new for that time, they felt it somewhat as if the ground on which they stood quietly had been pulled out from under their feet. If one felt something physically at that time, one can certainly feel it today to an increased extent, if one wants to hold on to old habits of thinking, when spiritual research speaks of repeated earthly lives and says that the spiritual spheres can only be explored if one frees the soul from the experiences in the body. Spiritual science requires a soul observation that is free from all sense perception and free from the brain-bound thinking.

It is natural that in contrast to this, many a person feels insecure who has always sought the safe ground of human perception and observation, human philosophizing, in that the soul makes use of the senses and the intellect that is bound to the brain. For the latter, a feeling of insecurity arises, as if the ground were being pulled from under his feet, only to a much greater extent than was the case at that time in the dawn of the new spiritual life.

Anyone who is even slightly familiar with the meaning and spirit of spiritual science cannot but be repeatedly amazed at certain objections and attacks that come particularly from one side, namely from the religious denominations of the most diverse orientations. One must be all the more amazed at this, although it is understandable, since attacks also come from materialistic and other scientific sides. One must be all the more surprised by the attacks that come from religious denominations. In the face of these attacks, it must first be emphasized, albeit this has already been done, in a few words, what the actual stumbling block is for many souls when they encounter spiritual science.

Spiritual science wants to be a continuation of the scientific way of thinking in the most eminent sense, but since it deals with the spiritual realm, it must overcome this scientific way of thinking. It must, so to speak, develop in a different way what the scientific way of thinking has achieved in its field, because spiritual research deals with the realm of the spirit. Recent spiritual science shows that with the means available to man when he wants to explore the natural world and fathom the great truths of nature, he cannot enter the spiritual world with these powers and soul abilities. It is evident that no insight into the spiritual world is possible if man wishes to make use only of those soul faculties that can be developed when man, from waking to sleeping, is in the resulting state of consciousness, that man makes use of the senses of his body, of thinking, feeling and willing, for which he needs his nervous system and his brain.

That, in addition to the soul faculties that man must apply precisely in the realm of external sensual life and also in the realm of scientific research, that in addition to these faculties, other faculties slumber in the soul that can be developed if man does something to further them – this is what is objectionable for many minds of the present day. Many minds of the present time do not even consider the fact that in a certain respect a similar change takes place in miniature, in the primitive, in man in the course of his entirely natural life, as is required by spiritual research if it is to develop in accordance with it.

Every human being develops soul powers in the first years of their childhood that they could not get through life with if they remained throughout their whole life as they were in their first childhood years. The fact that we, as adults, find our way in life, that we can position ourselves in life in such a way that we develop an appropriate relationship with other people and with the world as a whole, depends on the abilities we have in early childhood being developed further, and on the abilities of childhood being raised to a higher level. Just as the forces slumbering in the human being in the first years of life are developed in such a way that the human being can orient themselves in their sensory world, so too, if the human being really wants to recognize, look at and perceive the spiritual world, a change must take place in them in later life. And through exercises, the principle of which has been explained in the last lectures and in my books Occult Science and The Threshold of the Spiritual World, and so on, through such exercises the human being is able to transform the abilities of the soul, which he naturally has without doing anything, into abilities through which he can see into the spiritual world. And this transformation is connected with the fact that man learns to really draw his soul out of the body.

In this way the human being comes to the clear concept of consciously distinguishing between two different states of life. The one state is that of ordinary waking. There one knows that one must make use of one's senses. And anyone who has even slightly penetrated the way of thinking in modern times knows that he must make use of his brain and nervous system-bound thought life in order to orient himself in the outside world. Consciousness is such that everything of the soul is directly connected with the body, that the body is contained within the soul and spirit. Through the effort of the powers of thinking, feeling and will, which the human being must develop in certain spiritual exercises, he is able to concentrate and strengthen his soul forces in such a way that the soul detaches itself from the body. He is able to truly experience that moment which is otherwise also experienced, but unconsciously: the moment of leaving the physical body. This moment is otherwise experienced - but unconsciously - when falling asleep. The person still perceives how the impressions and inner activity fade away. Slowly he then passes into unconsciousness. In a similar way, someone who has strengthened their thinking, feeling and willing by doing certain spiritual and soul exercises feels how they can make their soul so strong that it feels: I am still something even when I no longer move my hands, no longer use my eyes and ears, I am still something within myself.

These soul-spiritual exercises are based on the fact that the deeper forces are brought out, through which the soul is also something when it renounces the bodily impressions and the feeling of itself, by exerting the will in the limbs of the body. Through these exercises, the soul is able to leave the body. The body is then an external thing for the soul, like the other things outside our body. In the last lectures, I used the comparison of a spiritual chemistry: just as hydrogen is extracted chemically as water, so the soul experiences itself as a spiritual-soul being, and so it will withdraw from the body. Then it knows itself in a world of spiritual processes and entities, just as it knows itself in a world of sensory processes and entities as long as it uses the senses and the intellect, which is bound to the brain.

I have already pointed out that in the presence of some people it is still forgiven to refer to the spirit in a general way; but it is no longer forgiven when the spiritual world, in which the soul lives, is referred to in such a way that this world, like the sensory world, consists of individual, very concrete processes and entities. It is difficult to forgive when one does not dream oneself into a general, hazy, pantheistic spiritual world, but enters into a world of spiritual diversity. And yet this inner strengthening of the soul leads to it becoming free of the body, to the human being really entering into concrete spiritual worlds.

I do not wish to speak in abstractions, but rather to draw attention to what the spiritual researcher experiences in concrete terms. Through devotion to very specific thoughts that he thinks, he experiences the feelings and will impulses crowding together, and in so doing, he causes the soul to become free from the body. He experiences this, as it were, while awake, which is otherwise only experienced in a dormant and unconscious state. At first he feels how the outer sensory world, the world of colors, light and sounds, fades away as he falls asleep. Then he feels that his thoughts, of which he has rightly said, “I grasp these sensory impressions with them,” become as it were detached from him. And a new world opens up before him.

Man pours out his thoughts about the new world. And when the impressions of the sensory world disappear, then man knows: Yes, so far, where I have seen the carpet of the sensory world around me in my state of consciousness, as it were, something like a veil was woven for me. Now that this veil is gone, a new world is opening up for me. When you live consciously in the body-free soul, you not only experience the disappearance of the sensory world, but something like a veil also disappears, which is felt as if it has covered a world of the spiritual. You then experience a world of spiritual beings that emerge when the veil of the sensual tears.

When the veil disappears, one experiences beings that are one degree higher than the human soul in the order of the world. One then becomes familiar with a feeling that enriches the soul infinitely. One then feels: When you look around here in the world of the senses, you have the beings of the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms beneath you. The highest realm, which you have around you, is on the same level as you. You immerse yourself in a world that comes to you, and as a soul you know: what lies in your depths, what you are not aware of in your ordinary existence, what does not enter into your self-awareness, that is something through which you will be enriched. It is a world of spiritual beings that stand above you in the order of the world, that are not embodied in the body, but that are “ensouled” and within which you yourself are when you have become a body-free soul.

That is one thing. A second thing that comes to you when the veil of the sensual world is blown away is that you perceive what you otherwise call natural laws in a completely different way. The laws of nature, which one comprehends in the sense of being through thoughts, are no longer laws of nature when one perceives outside of the body; the thoughts are gone, they have united with spiritual beings that stand above man. What we experience in the laws of nature, which we previously perceived through thoughts, is now life itself. These are spiritual beings, which, when one has attained the relevant level of knowledge, stand before the soul of man as real as animals, plants and minerals otherwise stand before the senses of man. One familiarizes oneself with these entities, in relation to which one says to oneself: the laws of nature show us something like silhouettes, like abstractions of them. But what is present in the laws of nature when the veil is lifted are high spiritual entities. In spiritual science, these entities, which constitute the form of the laws of nature, are called the spirits of form because they instruct everything in the world to take on form through their spiritual power, out of the life of the world. Everything that exists in minerals, in animals and plants as form is the result of the activity of these entities.

When the physical body of a person is at rest, but in such a way that consciousness is maintained, when every will that only acts through limbs, that only acts through the body, when every such will is paralyzed, when it rests as it then does in sleep, when the person his physical body lies motionless in bed, when the will has been weakened by the application of soul power, but the person does not sink into unconsciousness but remains conscious, then he realizes: there is something within you that is the giver of your will, that radiates into your will. Your will is permeated and permeated by exalted spirits that permeate and interweave the world. One is tempted to call them spirits of the will. By paralyzing the will within himself, man discovers the spirits of the will.

In this way he lives into the spiritual world in the same way as when he opens his eyes at birth and becomes familiar with a world that he perceives through his senses. In this way he lives, when the ordinary conscious powers of the soul are rejected, into a spiritual world. This living into comes about through man's submerging with his own soul into the spirit, as modern natural science submerges into nature in its experiments. What has led to the great triumphs in natural science? It has separated observation from experiment. In the experiment, the natural event is detached from the immediate impression it makes on the senses. It is true that one must observe, but in the experiment one tries to penetrate into what lies behind the sense impressions in the physical. We dive down into nature, and every natural science experiment demands that what is to be seen be made independent of the subjective impressions of the senses.

Spiritual science goes to the other side. It makes the human being himself the subject of experimentation. It does not do it, as it is done in some spiritualistic circles, where experiments are done on people in the manner of observation. Spiritual science knows that man can only make himself a tool to find his way into the spiritual world. And so it shows how the physical and perceptible detaches itself from the soul-spiritual in man, and how he comes to be among spirits and souls under spirits and souls.

All this, which has now been discussed, is offensive to many minds of the present time. It is understandable that it must have this effect. Why is it so offensive? I cannot now go into what I have already mentioned in the last lectures. Only those who train themselves spiritually can perceive in the spiritual world, but in order to take in and understand what the spiritual researcher writes in books after he has researched it, one does not need to be a spiritual researcher. You have to be a painter to paint a picture, but not to understand it. It would be sad if only painters could understand paintings. In the same way, you don't have to be a spiritual researcher to understand what spiritual research has to say.

More and more, the world will realize that even if only a few people can be spiritual researchers – after all, my books explain how everyone can become a spiritual researcher to a certain extent – the world will be directly and convincingly affected by what these few have to say and by the way they express it. And the time will come when even non-spiritual researchers will crave descriptions of the spiritual world. Human souls are designed for truth, not error. To see in the spiritual world, one must consciously look into it, one must be a spiritual researcher. To comprehend, one need not look into it, one need only accept fully and without prejudice what the spiritual researcher has to say.

In this way, the human soul will be directly grasped by what the spiritual researcher has to say. In the depths of the human soul lies a hidden language. This language only needs to be developed. It slumbers in every human soul. It approaches the human soul directly and is awakened by the spiritual truths that the spiritual researcher brings from the spiritual world. The spiritual researcher is understood more and more through the intimate, profound language that the human soul has for the spirit.

Above all, in this way, the human being gets to know his own soul. He comes to know that it is possible to speak about immortality, about that which goes beyond the world of the senses, in a truly scientific way, when, through the development of his spiritual powers, he comes to find the soul core, which can detach itself from the physical and then lives on as a living being when the human being passes through the gate of death and hands over the physical to the elements.

To get to know the immortality of the soul consciously, one must follow the paths that lead to this human soul. In the ordinary person, the properties are as hidden as the properties of hydrogen in water. Therefore, he cannot approach the soul with any philosophy, not with mere concepts. He can certainly determine all kinds of things theoretically about what is called immortality, but it is only possible to speak knowledgeably about immortality when one really understands the nature of the soul. Then it will be shown that our whole life on earth between birth and death presents itself in such a way that we really develop something with what we carry in our soul, which the spiritual researcher only extracts from the body, but which always remains independent of the physical. as the natural scientist discovers the living germ in the plant as it grows from the root to the leaves and blossoms and fruits, which gradually develops and which, when the plant fades, offers the prospect of a new plant life.

In this way, the spiritual researcher senses the soul, and discovers in the human being that which grows inwardly, spiritually and soulfully in the whole of life between birth and death, and which then, as a living soul, passes through the portal of death and enters a spiritual world, undergoing the events that are spiritual and that in turn lead to repeated earthly lives. What passes through the human being in the form of a disembodied soul must go through repeated earthly lives. And what passes through death in this way is truly discovered by the spiritual researcher. But it is discovered by the fact that the ground is actually pulled from the knowledge on which one initially wants to rely. Just as Copernicus undermined the basis of the sensory evidence on which people believed they saw everything correctly, so spiritual science undermines the belief that the soul, if it only detaches itself, if it itself becomes a spiritual-soul being, can really see into the spiritual world.

This is the offensive thing about spiritual science, that it likewise repudiates all knowledge of which man is so proud and which has led to such great triumphs in external science, just as Copernicus repudiated the evidence of the senses. And this is why man recoils from this spiritual science, because it says: Not one power of knowledge, which is already there, but one that must be carefully prepared and acquired, is alone capable of looking into the spiritual world. Man recoils from this. For everything that demands of man to go further than he already is contradicts the view, often unconsciously slumbering deep in the soul, that man, as he is, is already very perfect, that he has no need at all to go beyond himself.

Spiritual science knows that it is necessary to go beyond the ordinary powers of perception, just as a child must go beyond its powers of perception if it is to orient itself in the world. Basically, we know that some children are uncomfortable when we want to lift them beyond their innate powers of perception. Children just don't have the stubbornness and resistance that people have at a later age. If you say to a person, “If you want to get close to the spirit, you have to believe in other forces than your ordinary power of perception,” then it contradicts human vanity, the belief in the perfection of the human being. But no matter how much one resists recognizing the truth of what has just been said, it is the vanity and discomfort of a new, unfamiliar way of thinking that prevents people from approaching spiritual-scientific interests.

And basically, this is what has always held back or tried to hold back all real progress in human cultural life; it is only more so in the case of spiritual science. Those who oppose spiritual research today, whether from a liberal or orthodox point of view, are truly the successors of the opponents of Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno. Just as the opponents at that time believed that everything that had previously been recognized as true by people was now being called into question and was in danger, so it is also believed today to an increased extent of spiritual science. And this, and nothing else, is actually the basis of the attacks that are made on spiritual science, particularly by religious communities. Here one must address the question: Why is it that religious communities stubbornly resist the progressive development of humanity? How could it be that in the time of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno, certain people believed that religion was endangered by the advent of these scientific discoveries? How can it be that the successors of these people today believe that religion is endangered by spiritual science?

When one hears how the confessor of this or that religious community rebels, one might say with all the weapons at his disposal, against something like spiritual science, I am repeatedly reminded of a priest who was elected rector of a large university not so long ago. He gave his inaugural address about Galileo Galilei. He was a priest and at the same time a great scholar, an amiable scholar. He, the priest, said at the time, contrary to the views of his church community, with regard to new cultural achievements in the field of the mind: At the time when Copernicus and Galileo appeared, people who judged the matter from the perspective of their religious community in a shortsighted way believed that such discoveries would endanger the worship of God and religious sentiment. Today, we should have outgrown such beliefs. Today, it should be clear that every new insight into the great truths of existence can only serve to reveal the holiness and glory of the divine order of the world. These are the words of a man who, as a Catholic priest, understood the core of his religious community better than those who today want to be the successors of those who fought Galilei and Copernicus. That he said it in the spirit of his religious community was clear to anyone who sensed in him something that was not entirely genuine, as he held on to it throughout his life. And even in his dying hour, he held fast to what he had said. He spoke in his hour of death, saying that he wanted to die as a faithful son of his church. One must sympathize, without perhaps standing on the ground of this priest, with what true, inner connection with the core and soul of a religious community means, if one at the same time finds the possibility and ability to speak, as he does, about the progress of humanity.

Every religious community, more or less in the course of its existence, allies itself with certain views, with the insights of its time, because it has to work. Thus, as is quite natural, the Christian religion has associated itself with the ideas of the pre-Copernican world view. But the fact that it associated itself with them was an expression of its time. Those who said that religion would be endangered if something different were now known about the world view were short-sighted. Those who said: The God we carry in our hearts, the Christ with whom we feel, the religious feeling that runs through us, that will be effective, however the rest of the world view may be shaped. And it is still somewhat understandable when today's religious communities behave antagonistically towards materialistic world views that believe they are building on the basis of science, but which are usually far removed from true knowledge of nature.

But one cannot understand at all why individual representatives of these religious denominations are so terribly opposed to spiritual research, although deeply-disposed natural scientists – one need only think of Galilei, or, if one does not want to mention him, Copernicus, one could also mention a whole series of profound naturalists and scholars of the nineteenth century who really carried the call of natural science throughout the world - although more deeply inclined naturalists were basically always pious. It was said of Newton that he did not pronounce the name of God without baring his head. Those who today behave as materialists and say that the observation of nature forbids them to believe in the idea of God rely on him. Newton was so attached to it that he never bared his head wherever he was when he uttered the name of God, he, the alleged founder of the movement that today wants to be monists in the materialistic sense.

Nevertheless, one can understand how opponents can arise. From a superficial observation of nature, some may believe that science demands to deny immortality, to deny God - superficially considered, in that one has detached from sense perception that which is hidden in external nature. By refraining from this hidden knowledge and arming the senses to observe external nature, science has grown. It will always come from superficial observation of nature, from dilettantish knowledge of nature, if one believes oneself forced into atheism, into a lack of religion. This can only come from a misunderstanding of things. This can lead to those who feel religiously inclined rebelling against what arises from a non-religious observation of nature. However, spiritual science affects the mind differently than a worldview that claims to be based on pure natural science. People very quickly understand how this spiritual science works if they just open themselves up to it a little. Anyone who engages with spiritual science is presented with a set of concepts and ideas about the world and its processes to which the soul truly belongs. If you absorb these concepts and ideas, they are of a completely different strength than the ideas of external natural science. These ideas can, so to speak, solve many external puzzles, but they will no longer reach what sits in the depths of the soul. They will no longer stir the inner being into activity, they leave the depths of the soul barren. But spiritual science, with its concepts, reaches into the soul, into the mind, into the will and feeling of the soul, permeates and spiritualizes all impulses, even all affects and passions of the soul. It interweaves and lives through the whole soul. And the consequence of this living and interweaving of the soul through spiritual science is that the soul of the human being is given a religious bent. Spiritual science wants to be a real, genuine science, and has no desire to found a new religion or to compete with an old religion. It wants to be anything but a new religious sect. It wants to be a science for the soul, just as natural science was a science for the external world of nature from the moment its time had come. It wants to be scientific, but the way it approaches the soul means that the soul is tuned to religion from the outset. You can be a great natural scientist, you can get to know the full extent of natural laws, and you can be irreligious, an irreligious person. One does not become a spiritual researcher by having already prepared this or that religious sentiment, but by carrying the scientific mind and spirit upwards. But if one is attracted by spiritual science, one becomes interested in spiritual science, then one necessarily becomes a religiously minded person, a religiously minded soul.

If the religious communities of the present day were to sense correctly what is happening through spiritual science, they would not fight it so much. They would say: Thank God that a world view is emerging that gives souls a sense of religion. It will bring the soul what so many are being deprived of through misunderstood natural science. One can misunderstand natural science, but no-one will misunderstand spiritual science in an anti-religious sense. The souls of the various communities should rejoice that a spiritual power is emerging that will once again give a religious outlook to souls that have become irreligious as a result of so many things in the present day. And it is strange that this trend, which occurs in spiritual science and gives religious spirit to souls, is not felt. It is not felt because people are not at all inclined to learn from history. They have been able to fight and even burn the representatives of the scientific world view; it has prevailed. You may fight the proponents of the spiritual-scientific worldview; it will prevail. It is only surprising that the members of religious societies do not ask themselves: Must we go through the same thing with the spiritual-scientific achievements as our ancestors did with the natural-scientific ones? Could we not learn something from history after all? The fact that humanity has still not progressed far enough to learn from history, in turn, gives rise to the question: Why, for example, is there opposition to spiritual science?

It must be said that many people certainly have their conception of God, their religious feelings, but they have forgotten how to rejoice, to feel joy when a time shines forth anew that deepens these religious feelings. They are too lazy to go along with this new time because of it. Let us look at individual aspects. Spiritual science fully recognizes the Christ whom the true Christian worships. Spiritual science even deepens it, going along with the course of development of humanity, saying that all human development before the Mystery of Golgotha pointed to the event of Golgotha, that through this event a spirit that was previously extraterrestrial entered the earth to live and remain on earth with people, albeit invisibly.

Spiritual science shows that something tremendous happened at that event, to which the Bible so alludes, namely at the event at Golgotha. At that time, a spirit that had previously only worked into humanity from outside the earth entered into earthly activity through the human being as if through a gate. Spiritual science says: What was not previously in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth has been in the earthly atmosphere since that time. Christ has entered the earthly atmosphere. Spiritual science says: A cosmic being has become an earthly being. And in the man Jesus of Nazareth it lived in order to become a companion of men. Spiritual science says: The Christ, who from the birth of Jesus of Nazareth hovered around this Jesus from the outside, so to speak, entered into the depths of his soul at his baptism in the Jordan.

Now the opponents come and say: You teach a Christ idea that we cannot recognize when you claim that until the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, Jesus was merely preparing to receive the Christ, while the Bible prescribes that the Christ being was connected with the Jesus of Nazareth from the beginning. The Bible will also teach something different in this regard. It will prove the spiritual scientific interpretation right, because it can no longer do otherwise. Today, insightful translators translate a passage from the [Gospel of] Luke:

This is my beloved son, today I have begotten him.

that is, immersed in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth. In the face of the all-encompassing grandeur of this Christ-idea, which can truly grasp the soul in its very depths, opponents may say that it is not Christian, that one should not present the Christ in this way, because you do not seek the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth before his baptism in the Jordan.

When you look at a child and say: From the moment the child learns to say “I”, that is, from the point in time up to which you remember later in life, from that moment on, something new has entered the child has entered into the child – will it be possible to come and say: You must not call the child, who is called Paul, Paul before the moment when the child learns to say 'I', because something significant happened at that moment? Does the fact that the significance of the baptism in the Jordan has been recognized in spiritual scientific terms, that something that previously surrounded Jesus of Nazareth has entered into his inner being and become one with this inner being, change anything about what is now Christian? No, that is the right thing, that all the conceptions of the soul, all the deep feelings, all the union with Christ Jesus, that only some Christian soul can feel, are preserved, and that something is added which, because times progress, makes the idea of Christ appear even greater, even more glorious. So when spiritual science has to say to those who approach it from a Christian point of view: what you demand to believe, spiritual science does not deny it, spiritual science admits that what you believe can be believed. Only something is added, which we believe must be added because the Christ has said:

I am with you until the end of the world.

He is alive among us, and He reveals Himself continually in the souls of people today. It is He who introduces us to spiritual science, and through Him we feel connected to spiritual science. The adherents of this spiritual teaching do not want to say: You should believe everything we ask you to believe; that is not the case. Spiritual science does not deny anything, it adds something. It does not demand that something be believed that it believes, but it does demand that what it does not believe but knows be not believed but known. It conveys that the idea of Christ grows and advances in the world. How does it do that?

Let us assume that it could have happened that, before Columbus discovered America, people would have come to him and said: There are supposed to be other areas of the earth? That cannot be possible, because the sun shines so warmly on our areas of the earth. If it had to shine on other areas, it would not have enough warmth left for our areas. But others would have said to Columbus: Of course, the sun shines on other parts of the earth as well as on ours. Those who are so weak in their conception of God that they believe this conception to be endangered when people discover a new area, a new physical fact, are the same as those who do not believe the sun is strong enough to shine on a newly discovered land. But anyone who wants to live with his Christ, who is sufficiently imbued with his religious feeling, knows that this concept of divinity, this connection with the Christ, this religious feeling will shine over all areas, physical and spiritual, that man will ever discover. Must we not conclude how weak-minded people's concept of God is, who believe that this concept of Christ is endangered because they cannot accept that in this newly discovered spiritual realm the sun of the spirit will shine as it shines in the old realm?

So it will be more and more recognized that opposition arises from religiosity that has become weak, from religiosity that has become fearful, as in the various religious denominations towards the discoveries in the field of spiritual life. We should recognize much more where we actually stand with our religious life. Do we not see that it is becoming more and more fragmented? Do we not see how all possible shades, all possible religious denominations, are spreading from the most orthodox right to the most radical left? Do we not see these representatives fighting each other more and more? If you look at these beliefs from a spiritual scientific point of view, you can ask: where do these antagonisms come from?

If you go into this hatred, many things turn out to be so weak. To mention just one example, which I have already pointed out, a few months ago a Free-Religious preacher said that children should not be taught religion because it is against nature. You just have to let children grow up on their own, so they do not come by themselves to religious ideas. It is therefore not natural for them to develop out of themselves. Therefore, they should not be taught artificially. This saying seems convincing to a great many souls through logic. But if one asks what this logic is based on, one must say that it is a weak, one-sided logic. Man is not so constituted that he can do everything new out of himself. The same logic also speaks quite precisely against a child learning to speak. Logic only needs to be sharpened a little, then we can see so clearly what is actually taking place at a deeper level. For it is not logic that is fighting against logic. What is fighting from the far right to the far left are passions, human temperaments - that is what human souls carry within them in the way of affects and passions before they are illuminated and fully enkindled by Christ. When the various groups in our present time confront each other in this way in the field of religious world view, they reveal how our fragmented time must long for what spiritual science can give it.

Spiritual science does not found a new religion. It says what it has to say about the world of the spirit, in the same way that natural science speaks about external nature. Spiritual science speaks about Christ in the way one must speak about him when one teaches the soul, which has become free, to look into spiritual realms and there find the effective Christ. Spiritual science will increasingly provide the disputing parties with the basis for their mutual understanding.

The disputing parties in religious communities today are like people who, at the time of Copernicus, argued about what he had to say about the solar system. The dispute will end as soon as there is a positive basis. The task and mission of spiritual science will be to create a positive foundation, to really say how things are in the spiritual world, about which one could only form a basis from the groping feeling of the soul's indeterminacy. And anyone who looks into the souls of human beings knows that it is a task longed for by them.

Thus spiritual science will not throw a new bone of contention into the souls of the present, but will bring about the peace that can truly live in souls by balancing them. In this way it will give shape to the striving of the human soul. These souls will thereby have a basis for combating, out of their own intuitive perception, that which, through the character of the individual, tends too much towards liberalism or orthodoxy, so that people would have to fight out of this temperament. Spiritual science will bring the positive, the truly spiritual, in contrast to what is only sensed.

And when we consider this, we will recognize how spiritual science truly relates to the various religious denominations. We might say that the individual religious parties are separated from one another by a stream that they cannot yet cross. Spiritual science is the bridge that leads across this stream. It has something to say to everyone, just as it has something to say to anyone who has looked beyond a certain radius. On the one hand, it speaks to those who have retained their faith, and on the other hand, it speaks to those whose religious feeling is seeking a new form. It shows that in the end it can unite everyone. This is how it will be with spiritual science: it has to find the positive.

And this positive aspect it has to contribute not only from the religious point of view, but also to the social currents. Oh, these social currents! When we look through these social currents with understanding, we see that people are basically quite helpless when we try to think more deeply, when we try to form ideas about a possible future for humanity in the social sphere and about the effect of these social currents.

One example among many can be cited in our present time, and in this way we can fathom from the most diverse intellectual and physical causes what the social organization has actually brought about. Sombart wrote a book some time ago to make it clear how this capitalist spirit that dominates the present has emerged. He is not a fanatical representative of the capitalist spirit. Sombart spent his whole life trying to understand what has brought man, as he now stands in economic life, into this economic life. He actually found, to a certain extent, beautiful explanations about capitalism, which has taken hold of the human soul. After the author has endeavored to gather together everything that can provide insight into what our organization has created, he concludes his book – tellingly, it is a thick book – as follows:

What will happen when the capitalist spirit has ceased to have its present resilience is not our concern here. Perhaps the giant

– by which he means the present economic order

– will then, when it has gone blind, be trained to pull a democratic cultural cart. Or perhaps it will be the twilight of the gods. [...]

Who knows?

This is how the attempt presents itself in today's current, the attempt to know how people could rise from the present economic order to a fully human existence. So strong is this “who knows” that it calls the spirit of this economic order a “blind giant”. And when we survey the various attempts to understand intellectually what is to become of our present economic system, which is not national in any way, which is taking hold of the whole earth beyond all countries, we see how, again from left and right, from radicalism and conservatism, the most diverse attempts are being made to move the whole.

Sombart's book contains certain references to what I have dared to say for many years in terms of spiritual science. He describes what has happened since ancient times to bring about the present order, how present-day humanity is determined in the field of economic life as by the command of its soul: “This you shall do, that you shall leave.” He describes how man is seized by an impersonal organism, how he is driven into the wheelwork. This observer of contemporary social life describes it vividly and with expertise. And if you look at this social life in detail, then we already have knowledge of this being seized by people who are right in the middle of this life.

Just read the autobiography of a great railroad king. You will always find the same tone, the same type of man who, for example, says:

My [...] intention was limited to acquiring enough through the construction of railways to buy a larger estate, then to retire from business and, when the opportunity arose, to accept a mandate for the House of Representatives and devote myself entirely to parliamentary work. That is what he wanted.

That's what his soul told him. He threw himself into this life. He realized: if I throw myself into this one endeavor, I'm bound to lose. Only by using these funds for a next venture, only by letting myself be dragged from one into the other, only in this way can it be done. - By plunging into a second, a third, a fourth venture and being driven from one into the other, he is driven ever more sharply into it.

Man cannot follow his own path. Anyone who looks at economic life knows that it always depends on how the affairs of the present are integrated into the objective order. Man is plunged into this objective order, seized by it, and his personal life is completely eliminated, so that Sombart can say: People have lost various things over time. If you look at today's entrepreneur, you have to say that he has given up the last thing that could still separate him from this objective economic machine. He has lost all subjective feeling and all his love for the work in the company itself. What used to be directed at completely different things has been poured into the company. Man no longer knows anything about himself, but has become homeless in his work. That is not a word of mine, but of Sombart.

This is the social current of the present: the soul is homeless in modern life, and is it only the case for those who work in leading entrepreneurial positions? No! This social spirit of the present has taken hold of everyone, so that not only the entrepreneur, but also those who work as simple laborers in the economic life do not feel connected to what they work. If, in the course of work, the question of wages or something else is a cause of disagreement, then it is not work that is at the center of interest, but the question that has been raised by our economic system. This interest is intertwined with work. This plays a role in contemporary social life. In this area, the present is certainly moving forward.

All that I have just said has not been said in order to criticize. The way things have become, they had to become – they have become necessary. But what is characteristic is what man has to say about this order. The individual human being cannot really live in a way that befits human dignity, but rather says: Today I will have to do this or that, tomorrow is none of my business; let the “blind giant” do later what cannot be known, that is none of our business. Sombart says even more. I mention him not precisely because he wrote this book, but because what he says is typical. Sombart says: This social order, this economic order has come to the point where we see it taking hold of people, making them spiritually homeless, throwing them into the wheels of industry, mercilessly throwing them in. And now a very characteristic word! He says: And what means do we actually have to counter this? Labor protection laws, homeland protection laws and the like. Means that make one shudder when they are set up. But – as he puts it – no Weimar-Königsberg doctrine of wisdom will ever change this course of the economic order. – Weimar-Königsberg [means]: a wisdom that could emanate from Goethe's or Kant's world view.

What is expressed in such knowledge? Something that should actually only surprise us when so few people today are moved by it, are disturbed by it. How do such people relate to the current social trends? It can be said that at this stage of development, individuality has become detached from people. Today, we can no longer say: the human being calculates in his business; he plunges in, it calculates, it counts, the capital flows from one place to another.

What does man say when he does not want to behave prudishly in the face of the 'fact' that it must go on and on like this? What does man say when he examines the efforts made so far to gain scientific insight into human life, to gain a worldview? Man says: No Weimar wisdom, no Königsberg wisdom will change anything. Why not? Because man shuts himself off from that wisdom that comes from spiritual science and which has quite different powers to gain access to human souls. For what is meant in Sombart's sense as Weimar, as Goethean wisdom, as Kantian wisdom, is void. But spiritual science has not only concepts, not only ideas; it is something that takes hold of the whole person and brings him back to himself.

Spiritual science alone will have the strength and power to strengthen human souls within themselves, to take hold of them in such a way that these human souls can find themselves again, after they had to lose themselves in the spirit of the economic order of the new age. This spirit of the economic order was so strong that it could make man a stranger to himself. The spirit of spiritual science will be so strong that it will take hold of the soul, that it will offer the soul its spiritual and soul home in the hustle and bustle of the modern economic order. Man has been numbed by the economic order, so that he must speak of it as of the “blind giant” of which he does not know what it will bring. Spiritual science will open the power of the soul to see, which will grip people so that it becomes their home, so that they can become glowing and spiritualized through what they do on this earth.

Such a thing can still be little understood by people of the present time. And what is not understood is most often met with hostility. If you do not understand something, you are its opponent. That is the easiest thing. Learning to understand is more difficult. Laughing and not understanding is easier. And it is precisely in the realm of antagonism that some people have gathered in relation to the building we are trying to establish as a place for the humanities. This place is already proving to be something special in what is new in our spiritual life, in that people are trying to find names for it from all possible angles of the old. Maps have already been shown on which the building is called “Anthroposophical Temple under Construction”. It will not be a temple, but a name is needed. It will be no more a temple than anthroposophy wants to be a new religion or the founding of a sect. If one wants a name, one can say: it will be a “Free University for Spiritual Science”. But for the reasons that have been given, it will have nothing anti-religious about it; it will not be an opponent of religion, but this college will have religiously minded souls within its walls. For through what has been explained, souls are so attracted by spiritual science that they are religiously minded.

But without striving for religion, religion is particularly protected by spiritual science, and souls are again led to understand and recognize the greatness of their religion. And many a soul that may have been alienated from the religious mood by education, that is, by that which lives outside of religion, will be won again for a sure conception of God and Christ through what is taught in this religious college, is shown. We do not undertake to build a church or a temple; but what we build, what we want: just as there are laboratories and cabinets for the physical, so we will build a laboratory, a cabinet for research into spiritual life. What we want will be an image of this spiritual endeavor in its entire configuration and in its entire design. Those who have envisaged what has just been said about the relationship between spiritual science and the social currents of the present will understand that something like this must come into being.

When buildings are erected on a large scale in which such a spiritual foundation extends to the last detail, to the last edge, and when the souls, strengthened by spiritual science, do not face it as something they do not understand, then the human souls who have not found their heaven on the socially configured earth will combine love with their work. Then we will not ask: What will become of the “blind giant?” but rather: What will become of this human soul, attuned to religious spiritual science? And we know: Our conception of God, our religious feeling is so strong that this soul will carry it over into the future. We do not ask: Who knows what will happen then? We see the well-founded knowledge that our soul passes through death, that this soul founds a new life for itself on earth, that it will carry what it acquires through death into the spiritual world, so that it will work from the spiritual world again before the soul reappears on earth. We do not say: Who knows what the future will bring? We seek to acquire in the present that which offers a guarantee that the future of the human soul will be such that one cannot say, through the stupefaction of social life, that man has lost his home. Rather, one will then be able to say: No matter how much the capitalist system spreads, no matter how much it numbs people, the human soul will find itself and will know how firmly it is rooted in the soil of its original spiritual life. It will not live in a world led by a “blind giant”, but in a world in which it can see and in which its economic system can also see. This will give it well-founded hope for the future, because the soul itself provides the building blocks for the construction of this hope. This may be said to the social movement.

This spiritual science will show anyone who takes even a little time to familiarize themselves with it that it is in search of the path that the human soul traverses from the beginning to the end of life. Spiritual science speaks of the path along which man walks towards his future. Spiritual science speaks of truth, not only of a truth of external impressions that arise through sensory perception, but of that truth that is experienced inwardly by the soul in such a way that it feels itself to be a spiritual citizen of the soul in that world. In that world, Christ can be found directly. Many a spirit in the present seeks the present Christ, but it only comes to yearning, it only speaks of it.

It is Christ who harmonizes. He will find the new harmony with the religion of old Europe, he will give the souls to themselves. Anyone who reflects must find that there is a spiritual connection between all things. And that which is subject to an external power today must long for the direct living presence of Christ. Spiritual science points out that the living Christ will maintain the order of the world as long as earthly time lasts. Spiritual science points to the Christ that the soul needs if it wants to feel truly strengthened, and to whom it turns in times of need and danger. Spiritual science imparts this Christ. It grasps the world in truth by allowing the soul to experience the truth. In this way, truth itself comes to life, so that the dead abstract truth is so enlivened that the whole human being is grasped by it.

While today's economic system has killed the human being and thrown him out of his homeland, spiritual science returns him to his living homeland. It has the way, the way that the soul had previously lost and had to take a different one instead. The soul seeks truth and will grasp it directly, so that it does not feel separate from life but connected to it. The path, the truth and the life shine forth for spiritual research. And just as it earnestly seeks these three, so it is also aware that it will find them. And it also finds the one who said that he is what it seeks. No matter how the opponents of this spiritual research fight it, whatever arguments they put forward, spiritual research points to the truth and the life through what lives in its adherents, who can only come to this adherence through their own power of judgment, through what lives in them and what they strive for. And so, no matter what the opponents of religious denominations may say, those who honestly and sincerely seek the path to the spiritual realm, and who strive for it in the same way as the adherents of spiritual research, need have no fear. They will find, in the right sense, in the sense in which souls must reveal it today, the one who said:

I am the way, the truth and the life.

And no matter how powerful the voices may become that rise up against spiritual research, In the knowledge that it is always seeking the Way, the Truth and the Life and is thus directly aware of the connection with the One who was the Way, the Truth and the Life, in this knowledge it becomes bold and free, but also aware of its glory, in modesty and humility it can always answer anyone – even those who say that spiritual science is looking for a false Christ – We seek the One who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Whatever He says, we know that we may express ourselves freely and honestly to everyone: We follow Him in our own way, which we believe gives souls their new home on earth. We follow Him, He calls us, He will lead us.

The question has been raised as to what lies behind the now so famous horses of Elberfeld which are able to count and do sums, and also possess other kinds of wisdom. Let me say from the very outset that I am not personally acquainted with the facts relating to the horses of Elberfeld that can calculate and do other tricks, for I have never been there, but I have made the acquaintance of Herr von Osten's “clever Hans”, a horse similar to those of Elberfeld which caused such a sensation in Berlin for a long time.

Indeed, it is surprising to see that while the whole of Berlin was at that time really interested in “clever Hans” for quite a long while, this interest should have died out so soon. The short duration of people's interest in something is a very characteristic feature of the present time.

Very interesting experiences could be made in connection with this horse. To begin with, all who heard of such things for the first time were quite skeptical, until they decided to observe these facts more closely, since the information concerning the fine things performed by “clever Hans” seemed to be quite reliable. He could do excellent sums, extract roots, etc.; he also found out the right card in a card trick, and so forth. In fact, we may say that gradually it became impossible to deny that something extraordinary was taking place. The owner of the horse called in strangers, experts, trainers, tamers of wild animals, etc. He also invited a commission of philosophers. Finally a pamphlet appeared, written by a philologist, a certain Dr. Pfunge—a most interesting pamphlet. After rejecting everything that the people who were present had said, the philologist came to the following conclusion: “It is of course obvious that ‘clever Hans’ cannot do sums, but Herr von Osten, or others who set him a task, influence him in some way.” And these influences had to be explained as materialistically as possible. That an influence can actually pass from soul to soul was something which modern professors no longer admit, for philologists have already entirely forgotten the soul. Our honorable philologists nevertheless admit that there can be certain influences—namely, influences which are as materialistic as possible. They assume, for instance, that a person may make an almost imperceptible gesture, which influences the animal. For instance, the animal may be set the task of finding out the square root of 16. Very slight gestures are made, expressing what the person thinks, expressing what the square root of 16 is. The horse perceives these gestures and by stamping his foot it indicates the square root of 16. This explanation is entirely realistic. Herr von Osten then called in animal experts. These experts, versed in every trick and gesture of the finest kind, were not able to perceive anything of the fine shadings which according to the professors, might influence the animal. These people who were really able to understand how an animal obeys at a glance, could not discover such gestures, so that we must say: These almost imperceptible gestures can only be perceived by someone who has worked for years in a physiological or philological laboratory! For the deep explanation had been given that only a professor who has worked for years in a laboratory can perceive what horses are able to perceive! Such an explanation, however, rescued materialism. This is truly a curiosity—to question every psychic influence, and to assert that a horse knows immediately when a professor learns to know after years of work in a physiological laboratory!

This question should however be considered more seriously. I should like to explain to you the conclusion which I have reached. Nevertheless I must point out that what I shall now tell you must be described absolutely as a hypothesis, just because this question is so extraordinarily complicated. Nevertheless it is a hypothesis, but I think that further a occult investigations will support it. If we consider the whole matter, we shall find that it is really a most complicated thing, and we shall come across extraordinary phenomena. Consequently I have the courage merely to draw up a kind of hypothesis, and occult hypothesis concerning the whole question, as the result of observations which I was able to make while watching Herr von Osten at work with his horse. I feel sure that later on this hypothesis will be confirmed by a occult investigation.

I discovered that mathematical thinking, the whole mathematical conception, is something far more objective than one generally thinks. The whole mathematical thinking is something which works like a kind of automaton, namely in the following way: The foundation of mathematical thinking can be explained by the fact that all mathematical concepts are contained in the structure of the whole earth. The earth is not that undifferentiated body theoretically thought out by people. It has an extraordinarily fine structure and influences from inside the beings inhabiting it. In a human being, the mathematical ability is principally dependent on three channels situated in the middle ear, which are connected with the sense of equilibrium. In the case of man there is a kind of connection between this organ situated in the ear and the whole nervous system constituting the spinal cord. If a human being arrives at mathematical conclusions, we are able to observe that he is really a spectator to a far greater extent than we generally imagine. For mathematical conclusions are formed, as it were, by themselves, and particularly in the sphere of mathematics the human being is more a kind of automaton. Hence it is a peculiar feature of mathematics that we really feel impelled to develop it as it were a kind of automaton. In our system we count as far as 10. Then we count the tens, etc. In this way a whole system of reckoning becomes inwardly automatized. Numbers really contain an inner system of laws which is connected with the Earth through a kind of mathematical automatism. This automatism does not work so strongly in man, because the human being is lifted out of it through his power of judgment, which keeps in check the whole mathematical automatism. Now it is strange to see that in “clever Hans” the whole spiritual atmosphere of the horse acts in such a way that at the slightest instigation, with the slightest tap, the whole atmosphere of the earth is struck, as it were ... Through the different positions of his spine, as compared with man's, the horse participates in the life of the earth, and the force which really thinks in him is, after all, the earth. The earth thinks through the whole instrument of the horse. Thus we really obtain the following impression! On the one hand is Herr von Osten, who does not need to calculate the various mathematical problems which he gives to the horse, but merely touches upon something mathematical. In doing so, he becomes incorporated within the mathematical automaton of the earth. This passes into the horse's spine and the horse is then able to express it quite independently through its soul life. But the earth is the one that transmits this soul element. Never have I become aware so strongly of the way in which the mathematical automaton can be transmitted, as in the case of “clever Hans.”

Thus we may see the cooperation between Herr von Osten's soul-element and the soul-element of the whole earth. I could not help thinking: If we run a wire to the ground, in the case of a telegraphic apparatus, all we need is another wire in order to connect it with another apparatus. Now the earth cooperates as a whole, as a totality. All we need is to install the connecting wire, in which case the earth as well will be involved as an apparatus. In the mechanical sphere the result would be that a definite signal which retransmits through the keys of one apparatus will appear again as a signal on the other apparatus. But in the case of what fills the earth, in the case of the mathematical automaton, there will be a connection which may really be termed as subterranean, a kind of connecting wire between Earth and the one who is in contact with the horse. The horse must allow itself to be connected with the whole apparatus of the earth.

Let me add, for the sake of comparison, something which I was able to observe in this connection many years ago. I made the acquaintance of several small boys—not all at once, but successively. One of them was a very stupid boy in every subject, but if he was given an arithmetical example—for instance, to extract the root of a number consisting of six or seven figures—he was able to solve this problem. He could multiply very large numbers together. A famous professor of mathematics once set him the task of raising a number of four digits to square. The professor had to work out the solution, but the boy was able to answer almost immediately, and had no difficulty in extracting the roots of numbers consisting of 10 and even 12 figures. Suddenly he became restless. He could not reckon anymore. In fact, he became quite wild. He felt that he was being connected in a very strange way with the mathematical automaton. Why? Because the professor had raised a wrong number to the square.

It must in fact be considered that the earth is the chief factor in this particular spiritual activity. If we succeed in bringing about a contact through the special psychic connection existing between the trainer and the horse, which has a certain amount of affection for the man, no thinking will then be required in order to solve a problem which has been set. The horse may be given in arithmetical problem, and it is not necessary at all that it should pass through its head. The only thing that will be required is to teach the horse the programme; this will be enough, for the whole of mathematics is a totality—consequently, all roads, squares, etc. are connected. And just because there is this connection between all mathematical things, it will be sufficient to give the animal a tip, if we have trained it up to the point of being able to express something; the rest will come by itself. This is based on the connection between the human soul and the animal soul. The earth has a transmitting role. In its conscious life the animal is merely concerned with sweets which it receives, and while its whole attention in the conscious life goes toward the sugar, the most curious things take place in its subconscious life. But all these processes take place entirely in its subconscious regions. In its consciousness the horse knows nothing of all this. Besides, owing to the delight it feels in munching constantly at the sugar, it has no time to observe anything else.

What lives in the souls of those who sacrifice themselves outside today? All the souls of the leaders are included in it, as if they were to live in the people of the present. We want to focus on two in particular, as living examples, not to evoke sentimental feelings but as exemplary fighters. Let us start with the deaths of Schiller and Fichte. (Herman Grimm is quoted about Schiller's death.) Goethe passed away, fell asleep, but Schiller died! His body had decayed, but his soul was victorious. The spirit that lived in Schiller's body still had much to say to the people. Even more significant was the death of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He gave his people the most German speeches. At his deathbed, his son brought him the news of Blücher's crossing of the Rhine. He was feverish, thought he was on the battlefield, and that was when German philosophy came into play. He rejected the medicine and said, “I don't need medicine, I've recovered, I feel it.” And so he died.

The greatest sons of Germany teach how the German feels differently about his nationality than the other nations. The German is not, he becomes. Goethe expresses it this way: “Only he deserves his German nationality who must always conquer it for himself.” The most magnificent creation about the becoming of man has been brought forth by Schiller: the “aesthetic letters”. For him, the question of the essence of Germanness was always clothed in form: the essence of Germanness is most deeply felt by he who always seeks the ideal of humanity in it. Not under the compulsion of mere logical necessity, nor only under that of the senses, nor only under that which comes from the physical world. All this is not the true human being. Schiller wants to plant in man the balance between sensuality and reason, that one is never enough, that one always asks oneself: How do I become human? This lives in all his poems at the bottom. The humanities only want to continue the impulses that came in through our spiritual heroes.

In Fichte's speeches, there are three questions that it would be impossible to ask today: firstly, whether there is a German nation; secondly, whether it is worth or not worth preserving. Schiller and Fichte themselves are the answer to this; thirdly, whether there is a sure means of preservation and what it is. Fichte believed that this means was education. Spiritual science is this education. Every person can receive it. But as a nation, the Germans are most closely connected to the idea that true humanity does not rest in the material, but in the spiritual. The recognition of the invisible as the only true thing, that is what Fichte calls it. That is precisely what spiritual science strives for. How the human being will consciously continue to live in his soul after death, spiritual science speaks of this true reality, not abstractly from the spirit. It is brave in the face of passive science. Fichte did not express this, but the stimulus about the invisible came from him. Fichte wanted to give his nation a different education. How many cling to the old, he expresses in a parable that seems to come from modern spiritual science: Time appears to me like a corpse (the quote was much longer, it begins with these words).

Whoever is familiar with the life of the soul immediately after death could not draw on any other comparison. It must be the possibility for the German spirit to shape everything that is in it. Fichte says: The path of the German is the harvest of his entire time.

What these geniuses have instilled as impulses lives on in the heart of Europe. We do not want to say, as Fichte and Schiller could, what the people of Central Europe have become. Today we are called “barbarians” from the west and east and northwest.

Emerson says of Goethe: One quality that Goethe shares with his entire nation is inner truth. England has talent, France has brilliant ideas. The German mind has a certain probity that never stops at appearances. (All this and more is quoted from Emerson.) The distinguishing concepts used in higher conversation are therefore all German.

(Then Mrs. Wylie is quoted, whose book “Eight Years in Germany” was excerpted in the “Süddeutsche Monatshefte.”) This is addressed to the English by Mrs. Wylie: German literature, German religion, German philosophy are books with seven seals for us. We know how many ships they have. It is wrong to believe that Germany is already at its peak. It knows that on its eastern and western borders and over the water they are lurking, waiting for it to weaken a little so they can attack. (Quote continues.)

(Then Herman Grimm is quoted:) Everyone here is willing to sacrifice themselves for their fatherland, but to do it by means of war is far from our minds. France presents its war plans as a moral demand and requires Germany to recognize them as such. (Quote continues a little further.)

Going back to the last days of June, when the press campaign in St. Petersburg began. The pressure on Austria's right. (Here Bismarck is quoted, his speech on the occasion of the defense bill of February 6, 1888. This about Russia's policy against Austria, thereby putting Germany at odds with Russia. And then again Bismarck in the same speech, where he says:) If I were to demand a billion for a war of aggression, I don't know if you would have the confidence to give it. I hope not.

(Then the speech of Manchester is quoted, which was held only this year or last year, in which the speaker, an Englishman, emphasized the following three characteristics of the Germans: true, thorough, and loyal. And it is said that the preface to this book, in which the speech by Manchester appeared, was written by Lord Haldane, and it quotes how Haldane specifically praises the strength and straightforwardness of Germany as exemplary. The book is a compilation of speeches made in various cities on the occasion of visits by, I believe, German city councils.)

(Then it is said that the inclusion of Bosnia and Herzegovina was part of Austria's Balkan mission and the agitation of Herbst is mentioned, which led Bismarck to call Herbst and his supporters the Herbstzeitlosen. Dr. Steiner said:) This is one of the words of cultural history. Lord Salesbury gave Austria this mission - namely Bosnia and Herzegovina - and now Austria owes the assassination of the heir to the throne to England's policy. All the hatred from the East stems from this mission, which was given to Austria by English policy. And yet today England wants to avenge what it did itself. Is that true, thorough or faithful? And we are called 'barbarians'. (Then the punishment of Austria is discussed and Bismarck is quoted again. After that, the violation of Belgian neutrality is mentioned. Bismarck is quoted again, where he says that war is not waged out of love. Dr. Steiner's sentence follows: That has never happened before, that one people sacrifices itself for another. (Schiller and Goethe are mentioned, both of whom want to say that one finds the German in oneself best when one finds the human in oneself, when one stands above things, but also above nationalities.)

Today, there is much talk about the nature of the relationship between the Germans and the other peoples of Europe. How they hate the English because of the overwhelming challenge (so it is said). I do not believe in this hatred. There are cases where we love you English more than you love yourselves. Where is Shakespeare more cultivated, where is he more appreciated, at least more understood, than in England? In the German character! The Germans have shown that they love the English better than they love themselves.

(Then Goethe is mentioned, Faust and Euphorion.) Who was the model for Euphorion? The Englishman Byron. Goethe loved the essence of the English.

If we look to the West, we see how the figure of the maiden is taken from there. She is glorified and lives in the hearts of the German people: Schiller. In a few years, the same will be said for the East.

One more saying of Bismarck: We Germans fear God and no one else in the world. What can we promise to anyone who wants to help us carry out our world mission? However the German spirit may spread throughout the earth, the man who bears the German spirit and German mind within him will never stand otherwise than with the words of Faust: “Auf freiem Grund mit freien...” and so on.

Never will the German destroy a legitimate root. Can we hate as the others hate? No! We cannot. We face the opposing powers as a symbol, as it was given by Goethe in his Mephisto!

(Emerson is quoted: The world is young. We must write sacred scriptures to reunite the world of the spirit and the world of the earth. Recognizing the truth is Goethe's principle, Emerson says. Then follows a final quote from Bismarck, which is said in Bismarck's sense by Dr. Steiner): The German hates the spirit of lies, the spirit of untruth, but hates nothing and no one else in the world!