The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the fifth post-Atlantic period, spiritual effects are breaking through the veil that shrouds the spiritual world. These effects come from the spirits of personality, just as the effects of the spirits of form occurred in ancient Lemuria. These spiritual effects want to be understood. They show themselves by causing phenomena to occur that, through their own essence, urge the will to view them spiritually. It is the relationships between people that should no longer be judged by what has become of them through the course of nature. What is reported for Russia about the relationship between descendants and ancestors is significant: a person comes into a relationship with the spirits of the personality while awake, which is an echo of a prenatal relationship.

Through the mechanisms that replace human strength, however, beings enter into development that contradict the spirits of personality revealing themselves as creators. From the connection with the mechanism springs a state of mind that drives into the most violent struggle against the newly revealing spirits of form. This new form of the spirits of darkness will have to be brought into the inner soul process of man - for through man the new spirits of personality will be able to take possession of the conditions of the earth - the earth conditions will cause difficulties for man in the future if he wants to adapt to them; he must adapt to spiritual conditions. On earth equilibrium would be necessary; but this equilibrium is the manifestation of a struggle – the struggle in the spiritual field is not evil; it is the element of life: man must find the means to transfer the struggle into his inner being; at first he still resists under the guidance of the spiritual powers that want to keep the struggle external. But the external is not to be spiritualized mechanically, but a new external is to grow alive out of a new spirituality - the spirits of form are to give up their forming and the spirits of personality are to take their place - the archangeloi are to enter into the personality, i.e., man is to learn to understand the spiritual order; the Angeloi are to give the power for this - but man is to find that he is not in his body; he can only do so if he understands it spiritually - in spiritual understanding he will slip away from it.

People feel that demands are being made of them by the spiritual realm, if their spiritual life is adapted to the fifth period; by pretending that they are dealing with fantasies, they want to keep people at the present stage of their development – the shaping of social life that depends on the mechanical order could serve this purpose.

We cannot continue to move the process of redemption behind the scenes, as churches and masonic societies want to do with rituals and dogmas of redemption: It must be summoned before the scene. One must have the courage to face the spirit. Symbolism must end and reality must take its place, that is, the contemplation of the spiritual. The strongest enemies of this process will be the keepers of the confessional and ritual traditions will be the strongest enemies of this process - they will use the unconscious moments to sneak in and pursue their business - they still have much that enables them to catch dull minds with this business. —

The astrological element is most likely to seduce one into helping the mechanism to gain control, for it draws on the last dying impulses. At present it can only be useful if it leads to a defensive council that refers to something that cannot be averted in any other way. Old Christianity is still full of astrology, but this must be recognized as a disguise. The world of men, not of nature, ordered according to the astrological mode of thinking, would be the death of the human race. The astrological classes, the keepers of ritual, the historical classes, etc., all represent residues; they all refuse to enter into the mode of thinking of the fifth period.

1.) Natural science creates the necessity for man to know himself. But it contains no means of acquiring such knowledge. Behavior of natural scientists: Nägeli, Hertwig, Ziehen.

2.) In discussions about scientific questions, e.g. about the life force, I am always on the side of the natural scientists: according to du Bois Reymond. But he too used a dictum to inhibit the transition into the spiritual realm.

3.) One cannot speak of a speculated life force, but one can speak of a perceivable body of formative forces. But in order for such perception to come about, mere imagining must be transformed into perception. The “seer” and the “non-seer”. —

4.) For a long time, only body and soul have been spoken of. This was acceptable as long as the soul was attributed spiritual properties. When this was no longer done, the natural consequence was “psychology without soul”.

5.) The spirit cannot be known through the usual soul experiences. Not even if these are “mystically” intensified.

The physiologist says: a chemical change in the blood is necessary for the feeling of hunger. The spiritual researcher says: for an idea to have a will-arousing effect, it must undergo a change in its imaginative content.

6.) One speaks of the phenomena of the soul in such a way that one regards as its laws precisely that which causes the spirit to perish: associations.

7.) Drawing from the “I”, which is “spirit” after all.

8.) In the soul, mere sensing, etc. of the truth, the soul allows a glimpse of a supernatural world, etc. The spirit allows it to be recognized: it is the eternal.

Du Bois Reymond believed that where supernaturalism begins, science ends: a future view of the world will only recognize a knowledge of nature to the extent that it is based on supernaturalism:

Where supernaturalism ends, science dies.

Because you have: atoms without content.

Laws without entities.

Apparitions of souls without ego entities, etc.

In ordinary life, the soul does not have the strength to know itself as “spirit”. It has even less strength to recognize the spirit in the outside world. In the outside world, the soul encounters the supersensible when it becomes more powerful within. When the ability to live in mere imagination is developed, when it is heightened to an imaginative cognitive faculty, then the world of life presents itself as an impression from the outside – one gets to know the different pace between one's own and the foreign course of life – for this it is necessary to go back 2-3 days in one's life – then behind it lies the true soul. This is no longer influenced by the remnants of sensation - to see it as a product of the brain would be like wanting to see the table or another person as a product of the brain, because one knows: with everything one is through the brain, one stands outside of this true soul. It includes practical realization: Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu nisi ipses intellectus. —

This “true soul” must not evoke dreams or fantasies, or even visions or hallucinations. For all these arise through the bodily organism: what is no longer bodily must be sensed like an external object -: one returns to the sensation - one senses the “spirit”.

At this moment, nothing can be achieved with mere abstract programs. What matters is to address the instincts of the masses, which assert themselves with elemental force, and to organize through their honest and truthful shaping that which the bourgeoisie, in the time when it was the leading section of the population, neglected to organize. But action in this direction can now, at this moment, only be based on personal thought and action that directly encompasses the individual concrete situations. Above all, it requires an understanding of what lives in the masses. The classes that have been leading up to now have neglected everything in order to gain this understanding. They have missed every opportunity to interact with the proletarian classes at the moment when they awaken to self-awareness of their personalities. And as long as there is still a belief in the bourgeoisie that one can do something in the necessary development if one takes one's ideas of social order according to the way of thinking of the previously valid education and science, then one will only drive into the destruction. Socialists have these ideas drummed into them by bourgeois science, literature and the press. They swear by everything they have inherited intellectually from the old ruling classes, as if it were infallible. They just draw different conclusions from these ideas than the bourgeoisie. Only by speaking a completely new language can anything be achieved. For the time being, the continuity of economic life must be assured by the leading personalities in the economic bodies not excluding themselves by their lack of understanding from the councils that are being formed, for example in education, but, insofar as they are inclined to speak the language of the new era, including themselves in it. No one who is a leader in economic life need do anything other than voluntarily place himself within the proletarian formations in the position to which his insights into economic management will easily lead him if he has an understanding of the instincts of the masses. But he must not believe that this understanding will come to him “by itself.” The proletariat has, over decades, absorbed ideas about capital, wages, surplus value, class struggle, and materialist historiography. Many a proletarian today knows more about these things than a university economist, or especially than a statesman. While the proletarians were absorbing these things in their evening meetings, the bourgeoisie were playing cards, reading newspapers or watching “entertaining” theater performances. The proletarian knows this. That is why it is difficult to gain his trust. Of course, he will not simply accept the bourgeois into the order he wants to establish when they declare themselves ready to sit with him. They have to behave in such a way that he can see they will be useful to him. They do not have to conform to him, but they have to apply their knowledge and skills, and they have to decide to engage with the way of thinking that he has about entrepreneurial profit, rent and wages. The proletarian wants to paralyze the harmful characteristics of these three types of economic values for his understanding by socializing all means of production. It is necessary to show him how these three types of values can function in the economic process so that entrepreneurial profit never goes to a private sector, rent never flows into an economic channel other than that of intellectual life and support for the disabled, and wages can never be less than the proceeds of labor – less the entrepreneurial share that does not flow into the private sector and the necessary rent share as defined above. By communicating with the proletariat about these things, one must at the same time achieve an understanding of the radical reorganization of the entire educational system. It is necessary to create an understanding of the necessity for this revolution to precede the building of a new economic life. And one must know how to secure the free individuality of movement in this area. To do this, it is necessary that all educational monopolies come to an end and that in the field of intellectual life, completely free private mobility and competition enter into their full possibilities. Free competition and private freedom in the intellectual field can only be realized under the coming conditions if the intellectual sphere remains within its own field and does not, for example, by the use and exploitation of entrepreneurial profit or rent, want to put the intellectual sphere in the service of the material, especially in the service of financial speculation. —

Jah-veh is the impulse of heredity; he lives in the process that transmits the earth consciousness through heredity. Through this, man has the abstraction that reveals itself in him. Evil now comes when the abstractive power that is transmitted in material existence comes into existence. The will then enters the sphere of spirits that distract. Yahweh directs consciousness out of sleep, but he does not direct in consciousness. The cosmos revealing itself to waking consciousness - the spatial cosmos - is not God-revealing. No divine can be recognized through the wisdom of Yahweh. It appears only in the process of love under the validity of this wisdom, insofar as this is bound to the blood. At the time when the impulses of revelation through the blood cease, something else must step forward to complement this revelation, something that understands the human being as soul and as spirit. The human being is understood as a soul through a science of freedom and as a spirit through an anthroposophy. Modern science has simply revealed what was contained in the Jah-veh revelation; but the time has come when this revelation is in danger of falling prey to its opponents. The spirits of space want to destroy the spirit that works in space but is not present in space. They will not be able to do so if the spirit, of which man knows himself to be part in space, turns to the extra-spatial spiritual.

In the West, a consciousness directed only towards the spatial threatens to turn people into mere spatial beings, imitating a crusade; in the East, the spatial impulses want to prevent the incoming spiritual impulses from uniting with the human consciousness. In the West, people would like to make the soul forget that it has an existence outside of space; in the East, people would like to make them forget the conditions of the spatial existence itself.

The West is leading itself through its legal system into a dead end - from which it will only turn back at the “Threshold” when it perceives this legal system as a ghost; in the East, the soul, which does not want to fit into space, leads to an insoluble wavering between spirit and matter, - from which an attachment will only occur at the “threshold”, when the sensations hostile to space are felt as an nightmare. The West must not expel the Father; it is on the way to doing so – it can only come to the right way if it realizes that its present path leads to a spectre; the East must not seek the Son on the wrong path; it can only come to the right way if it perceives the confused intellect as an nightmare. The way out must be found in the spirit. The West must place the human being in the place of abstraction – by perceiving its human being as a ghost; the East must perceive its human being as a nightmare, so that it comes to understand it as a spatial being. The East must come away from its fight against the Father, the West from its fight against the Son; the West needs a spiritualization of science; the East a scientific penetration of its religious consciousness.

In the cosmos, the West must find the inner essence of nature – its inspiration; the East must find the revelation of inner spirituality through nature.

To the West it must be said: What appears to you as a human being is a spectre; you do not see the spectre because you avoid the abilities for this seeing; to the East it must be said: what appears to you as a human being, the seer feels as a nightmare; you do not feel the nightmare because you keep away from the associated sentience. To the west: You destroy the future by leading humanity into a dead end; to the east: You destroy the future by taking the light for the following path of humanity and wanting to walk it in darkness. To the west: You cut off the way; and make humanity a prisoner of the earth; to the east: You make it impossible to walk the way because you do not want to fan the light that illuminates the way. To the West: You make humanity unfree by not leading them into the sphere of freedom; to the East: You make humanity unfree by depriving them of the ability to use their own will in the sphere of freedom. To the West: You paralyze people; to the East: You blind people. —

Of all the Elohim, Jah-veh is the one who has turned to the world of physical processes in human development; to nature in humanity. His rule over human nature is the result of a struggle that ended with man coming into natural necessity with his soul life: Jah-weh is not originally “born”, but is present in the cosmic-soul element within the sphere of elective affinity; but he leaves this sphere to enter the “realm of birth” by starting a fight against the other Elohim, whom he expels into those realms that are accessible to man only through the powers of “illusion” as long as man stands at the level of intellectual consciousness - they only become apparent again at a different level of consciousness. The worship of God in the form of the child is essentially a beginning of a liberation from Jah-veh; for the latter can only reveal himself in processes that end with birth; Jah-veh's birth is an apparent one - he cannot enter into earthly forms that are “born”. He can only be represented in symbols whose content belongs to a form of life that reveals itself in the “unborn” state: the mineral-mathematical and part of the plant world.

Jah-veh is not the “Word made flesh”.

The development of the consciousness that man has a relationship to Christ that is not inherent in his natural existence, that in him he has a being to whom he is related through the powers that transform the air in him (in his heart) make him a being that can grasp thought; through the flesh, which does not live in the process of the prenatal natural order, but only in that which begins with birth; which proceeds personally in the interrelationship of man to the world.

As a Christian, one cannot see in the manifest universe the revelation of “God the Father”, but that it comes from the same source as the “born human being”: what is manifest in the universe is only insofar as it is reclaimed through Christ], for Jah-weh has confined divinity to the embryology of the world, pushing the other Elohim into the “sphere of illusion”. The fate of humanity, which can no longer see Jah-weh in the revealed universe, is therefore atheism - the worship of the mere natural order, which, however, only came about because Jah-weh removed the other Elohim from this natural order in the human realm. Yahweh has chosen his people; but in so doing, he has inserted them into the mere order of nature; they have thus become the opponents of all other spirit beings, all spirit beings that do not reveal themselves through human nature; they have also become the opponents of the spirit being that reveals itself in the flesh after birth – the opponents of a spiritualized natural science. Man can attain knowledge through the powers he has at birth; but with this knowledge he cannot consciously bring himself into a relationship with the spiritual world; he must gain this through other spiritual beings if it is not to remain instinctive. otherwise he remains an “animal with the capacity for abstraction,” ideas remain images, and his reality is guided by instincts - that is, by the spiritual beings whom Jah-veh has pushed into the “sphere of illusion.” In order to make man free from the other Elohim, he has driven the other Elohim out of the nature of man – he has moved back in time, that is, materially effected what would later have been spiritually The totality of the Eloh[lim] has been led back [by Christ]; first the “healer” - the “Hermes” - the next will be the “seer”. —

Yahweh is working through the process of the sleeping, not the waking, fleshly organism – therefore the waking is exposed to lower spirit beings – it is now the age in which Yahweh himself cannot sustain himself against the lower spirit beings. –

When the body is alone, it decays: that is to say, the causes of its continued existence do not belong to this world.

Because Jah-weh has assumed the autocracy of consciousness, the flesh in man, which is included in the waking process of life, has come under the rule of lower spirit beings than those in whose spheres Christ lives. The establishment of the personal relationship with Christ] returns to man his conscious kinship. Otherwise, only reason remains, turned to the Christ-Divine, as it was in fact in pre-scriptural times; but now reason too is seized by the animalistic.

Now the consciousness nourished by Jah-weh, the Christ-Christus-Revelation, is in preparation.

I was born on February 25, 1861. I was baptized two days later. It happened in the Croatian-Hungarian border town of Kraljevec, where my father worked as a telegraph operator for the Austrian Southern Railway. At that time, the Southern Railway still had a unified administration in Vienna, and the employees were alternately deployed on the later Hungarian and Austrian lines. My father had only been transferred from a small southern Styrian railway station to Kraljevec shortly before my birth.

My father and mother came from the Horn area in Lower Austria; my mother was born in Horn and my father came from Geras, the seat of a Premonstratensian monastery in Lower Austria. In 1862, my father was transferred from Krajelvec to Mödling near Vienna and in 1863 to Pottschach in Lower Austria.

My two siblings were born in the latter place and I spent my childhood years there until I was eight. The daily passing of the trains, a spinning factory in the immediate vicinity, the Austrian Schneeberg with the other Alpine mountains around it formed the objects of daily experience. In Pottschach there was a Lichtenstein estate with a castle. The accountant's family often visited us. The pastor of the neighboring village of St. Valentin was an almost daily visitor. This man was completely without priestly airs in his profession. He was a man of the world in his own way. His visit to us was the end of his walk, and he was probably more interested in observing the passing and stopping trains than in talking to my parents. The pastor of Pottschach also frequently came to such a train, but he was not taken particularly seriously by his counterpart in St. Valentin. The pastor of St. Valentin was tall, the pastor of Pottschach was short; and I once witnessed the spectacle of the former taking the latter under his arm, picking him up and carrying him like a package for quite a distance.

I soon became familiar with the workings of the railroad. My favorite places to spend time were the waiting room of the small train station and my father's tiny office. I was sent to school at the age of six, but was soon taken out of it because my father had fallen out with the old schoolmaster. After his retirement, I then went to school for a short time with a young teacher in Pottschach. My father taught me most of the lessons.

The whole atmosphere was unsuitable for developing any kind of enthusiastic interest. All the people I saw were interested in the railway and the spinning mill nearby. The “Valentiner Pfarrer” was a sober man with a somewhat cynical tendency in his conversations, often something of a prankster.

The following experience made a deep impression on the boy. My mother's sister had died in a tragic way. The place where she lived was quite far from ours. My parents had no news. I saw it all while sitting in the waiting room at the train station. I made some allusions in front of my father and mother. They just said, “You're a stupid boy.” A few days later, I saw how my father became pensive when he received a letter, and then, without me being present, he spoke to my mother a few days later and she cried for days. I only found out about the tragic event years later.

During this time I only learned reading and arithmetic; I made no progress at all in writing.

When I reached the age of eight, my father was transferred to Neudörfl (L[ajta Sz[en]t Miklös) near Wiener-Neustadt. I now went to school there. The teacher was horrified by my writing. I rounded all the letters, ignored the capitals and wrote all the words unorthographically. But in the teacher's library I discovered a book “Mo£nik's Geometry”. I borrowed it for a while and studied it eagerly. I always listened to the piano lessons, which were given in my teacher's room.

This teacher was an excellent person. He was a good drawer and also gave me drawing lessons, although I really needed thorough writing lessons. The teacher only had an annual salary of 54 guilders, and ate with the head teacher. The latter came to school very rarely, as he took care of the secretarial business of his community. We children thought that our substitute teacher was a “real” teacher; the schoolmaster “doesn't understand anything.”

My parents were not particularly pious people. Even in Pottschach, my father always said that “service to the Lord comes before service to God” and used this as an excuse for never going to church, saying that his work left him no time to pray. Nevertheless, in Neudörfl I became a “church boy” and a favorite of the pastor, who also liked my father very much, even though he never saw him in church.

This pastor was a man of pronounced character. He was Magyar through and through, a die-hard cleric. He could preach so powerfully that all the pews in the small parish church would shake. I owe him an enormous debt because he introduced me to an understanding of the Copernican system as early as the age of nine. He did that with the help of very instructive drawings. He came to our school twice a week. All the children enjoyed his catechism and Bible lessons because of his likeable personality. As a church boy, I served at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, at the afternoon service, at funerals, and at the Feast of Corpus Christi. This service came to an abrupt end one day. Several altar boys, including myself, were late for the service one morning. They were all supposed to get a beating at school. I had an irresistible aversion to such beatings and knew how to avoid them. I always managed to avoid being beaten by evading the task. However, my father was so indignant at the thought that “his son” should have been beaten that he said: “Now you're through with being an altar boy. You're not going anymore.”

Today, anthroposophy is for many people a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into a realm that serious science should not concern itself with through knowledge. And those who, among the many specialized subjects to which a scientist can currently devote himself, want to accept something similar to what anthroposophy talks about, find, or claim to find, that the way anthroposophy wants to recognize is the opposite of true science. It is still difficult for anthroposophy to seriously engage with contemporary science on a large scale. The representatives of science prefer to be able to categorize this dubious intellectual construct as a form of scientific enthusiasm or a philosophically decorated form of superstition.

But it cannot be said that minds disposed to enthusiasm and superstition find much joy in anthroposophy. Of course, some people of the kind who get an excited heart and nimble legs when there is talk of any kind of “Sophia”, or even of something “occult”, also believe they hear words in anthroposophy that they can think about in their own way. They fail to hear, out of politeness to themselves, that anthroposophy does not particularly value their thoughts. And those who talk about anthroposophy without any intention of engaging with it think they are being witty when they refer to their “hysterical, eye-rolling” followers. But for the real enthusiasts, the whole nature of anthroposophy is not sensational enough; it appears to them to be too much in the guise of thinking, which they prefer to avoid.

It is not easy to respond to this fluctuating image of anthroposophy with a brief description of its intentions. Not only do we have to talk about something that many consider recognizable and scientific, we also have to talk about the other differently.

Almost half a century ago, at the 45th Naturalists' Convention in Leipzig, one of the greatest naturalists of modern times, in his famous Ignorabimus speech, forbade the recognition of nature to enter the territory that Anthroposophy wants to speak about. It might therefore seem as if the spirit of modern natural science was to be renounced. This is not the case. Anthroposophy takes its place most earnestly on the ground of this natural science. It recognizes the blessings that have come from the scientific and intellectual treatment of observation and experiment. It seeks to work in no other spirit than that which is fostered by the modern scientific ethos. It seeks its true co-workers among those who can imbibe this ethos with understanding.

But she also sees the possibility of penetrating into a supersensible realm without having to deny the spirit of modern natural knowledge. The fate of many a thinker of the latest time makes a deep impression on her. I will mention here one of the most important, Franz Brentano, who, although little known to a wider public, has been of profound influence for a narrower circle of students. Brentano wanted to establish a modern psychology. The brilliant scientific results of the 1860s and 1870s, when he made his decision, had a suggestive effect on this excellent thinker. He wanted to work on the science of the soul in the spirit of natural science. One volume of this work appeared in the 1870s. There were to be four or five. However, he was unable to follow up the first one. A sigh in this first volume reveals the reason. Brentano soon found himself limited to dealing only with the everyday details of mental life by what he believed to be the true spirit of natural science. How the representation follows the perception, how attention works, how memory works, etc. – one could believe that one could elucidate these in the sense in which one observed and experimented on nature. And when he was writing his first volume, Brentano still thought he could continue in this spirit and still advance to the questions that seemed to him the essential ones for the science of the soul. What were all the individual investigations for, he exclaimed in despair, if they did not succeed in learning something about the questions that Plato and Aristotle had already considered essential: about the preservation of the spiritual and mental part of man after the decay of the physical body. Brentano was a thoroughly honest thinker. He wanted to continue in the spirit in which he had begun; and in no other way could he reach his highest goal of soul research. He could not do that. The natural scientific orientation of thought, if it honestly remained on its own ground, could not penetrate to these highest goals.

We must grasp this impossibility and, on the basis of this understanding, come to the other way of investigating the soul and spirit if we want to gather fruits equal to those of natural science. Anthroposophy comes to this understanding. It regards the thinking human being who conducts research about nature. He will best achieve his goal if he lets thinking only speak about the facts of nature. If he uses it only to bring these facts into such a context that they say everything about themselves, and he adds nothing of his own. It is right that science sees its ideal precisely in such a relationship to thinking. Goethe had this scientific ideal in mind in its fullest purity. Modern scientific thinking has not yet reached this purity. It leaves scientific ground when it advances beyond the world of phenomena and its forces to atomistic or energetic hypotheses.

But with such a kind of research one does not get to the soul-spiritual. For if you look at the world around you, everything you see must be a being of the senses. You come to nothing that could underlie it. And if you look inward, you see nothing but the external world as it is processed by the soul. This external world is, however, manifoldly transformed within. The impressions have passed through emotional experiences and will impulses. The imagination has transformed them. In this transformation they are incorporated into memory. The prudent person will still recognize what has been taken in from outside even in the transformation. He will not fall into the error of many a mystic, who mistakes for an inner revelation a completely different world, when it is only a reflection of the external world, transformed within.

False mysticism is one danger for anthroposophical spiritual research. It passes off memories that have been transformed as the knowledge of a supersensible being that manifests itself through the human being. From the clear insight into this fact, anthroposophy draws part of its means of knowledge. It does not stop at mere memory. It develops the soul in such a way that the faculty of memory itself is transformed. This is brought about by exercises that work as precisely in the inner activity of the soul as the physicist works externally when he makes his instruments to eavesdrop on nature's secrets. Certain ideas that are not brought in from memory are treated in the same way as remembered ideas. They have to be easily comprehensible ideas that one forms oneself or that one allows another to give one. It is important that nothing of the processes involved in ordinary remembering interfere with the mental activity to which one devotes oneself with such ideas. However, one does live completely in the activity that unfolds during remembering. It is now a matter of continuing such practice until one feels, so to speak, inwardly permeated by a being that makes the thinking power appear to be pulsating with life. In this way, thinking as a real process has been lifted out of the physical body. With ordinary thinking, one lives in the processes of the physical body. With the thinking that one has now attained, one lives in the etheric body. One has elevated into consciousness a process that otherwise takes place unconsciously through the physical body. One's own personal being has moved into the etheric body that has become conscious. We see the consequences. The past life since birth, which otherwise forms a subconscious stream from which the echoes of experiences emerge like waves in memory, either voluntarily or involuntarily, becomes in its entirety an immediate present experience. One feels oneself in it with one's I, as one otherwise feels oneself in one's physical body. Experiences that took place ten years ago are felt to be as much a part of oneself as the hand and the head. One experiences oneself in the etheric or formative body, but as if in a process. In this way one gets to know the ether, which forms spatially but is temporal in nature. One lives in images, but these are not static, they are mobile.

These images then merge with the physical being. One notices that one's consciousness has entered the realm of processes that work on the physical organs as the forces of nutrition, growth and reproduction. But one experiences all this in the same way as one experiences the activity of a sensory organ. One feels compelled to perceive the etheric being not as sharply distinguished from the external world, but as connected with the etheric external world, as one perceives the experience that occurs when the eye sees. Thus the etheric processes within will appear connected to etheric processes in the external world, as the perceptions within are connected to the external objects being looked at when seeing. The only difference is that in the ordinary process of seeing, fleeting thoughts arise for the inner being in the present moment, while in the etheric picture gazing it becomes clear how the etheric world actually works on the human organization inwardly.

But this experience is not like the ordinary life of memory. In the time when one is cognizing in this way, one lives only in pictures; and one sees this quite clearly. It would be an unhealthy element if one were to mistake the experiences for something other than pictures. One would then enter the region of illusion, hallucination, mediumistic imagination. This is a path that must not be taken. The reality that one erroneously senses in “dreaming”, in hallucination and the like, arises from the fact that the soul experience flows down into the physical, and from the physical it is given, as it were, the density of reality. For anthroposophical spiritual research, everything must remain in the realm of conscious life, and this knows that what it experiences is only images, as in memory images.

Reality must enter this world of images through further fully conscious exercises, not through unconscious physical processes. The next stage of practice lies in the development of an ability that one does not love in ordinary life. It is forgetting. First, you imitate memory by allowing images to be present in consciousness; you imitate forgetting by using full willpower to remove these images as if you had never had them. This makes you receptive to the perception of realities that are completely closed to ordinary consciousness. You take them into the etheric body like you absorb oxygen when breathing.

One can call the cognitive experience in images the imagination; the second stage, in which a spiritual-soul reality penetrates into the imagination, can then be called inspiration. Anyone who associates only what is described here with these names cannot possibly take offense at the fact that all kinds of evils have been attributed to the names of enthusiastic mystics.

Inspiration first leads to an understanding of the soul. In imagination, one lives in the soul, but one does not look at it. Only when one has freed oneself from imagination is one's own soul perceived by looking. Everything that lives in it as a thought is felt in the same way as hunger, as consuming one's own being; the will, on the other hand, is felt in the same way as satiety, as building up one's own being. The emotional experiences appear as the rhythmic back and forth between the two forms of feeling. In the will, a world comes to life that is not there for consciousness in ordinary life. If we want to understand it, we must reflect on our relationship to the will in our ordinary lives. We are familiar with the idea that this or that should be done. But we know nothing about the way in which the hand or leg is moved. We only see the movement, the unfolding of the will. What lies in between is as much immersed in darkness for consciousness as the processes from falling asleep to waking up. Into this darkness the spiritual shines. In the act of will, man, as it were, breathes in the spirit; in the activity of imagination, he breathes it out. The perception of being permeated with the spirit produces the feeling of satiation in the act of will; the activity of imagination is felt as a surrender of one's own being, as a consuming.

This opens up the possibility of educating oneself about sleeping and waking. During sleep, the soul sinks into the spirit. It then dwells precisely in the element that withdraws from its consciousness during will activity. It is in the world of the will, but outside the body. It is interwoven with the creative forces of the world. In wakefulness, it lives in the body, but the spirit that guides the will is not conscious of it. Its presence is limited to the sphere of the body. In inspiration, the will activity that is working in the body becomes visible. It is opposed in its nature to the external creative forces of the world. It consumes the body. Physically, there is a consumption, a breakdown of the body in the will. But these are felt precisely as saturation by the spirit. In the imagination, the body is created. Perception works in the same way as will; it destroys the physical. In the imagination that follows perception, the destruction is reversed. This is felt as an exhalation of the spirit.

From the experience of these inner processes of the soul, the path leads to an understanding of birth and death. Through birth, inspiration beholds the soul life that existed in the spiritual element before birth – or conception – as it will exist in the physical. The same applies to the soul life beyond death. In imagination, the personality is traced back to birth; in inspiration, it is pointed beyond. The life of the soul is thus recognized as an imagistic life during the time from birth to death. The external world can be reflected in the human being because he has suspended his soul life at the time of conception. It has poured itself out into the bodily life. New soul life is created in the experience of the external world.

Anthroposophy does not initially lead to life after death, but to life before birth – or conception. The consciousness of Western civilization has lost this focus on the prenatal life of the soul. Therefore, it denies the possibility of grasping immortality through knowledge at all. It would relegate the acceptance of immortality to the sphere of faith. It is right if it merely wants to develop an interest in life after death. But anthroposophy seeks knowledge in this area. It must develop interest in the other direction. Only when one has an overview of what part of the soul was present at the time of conception can one recognize how the soul shapes the body. In this knowledge, however, lies the other in relation to death. If the soul becomes a concrete reality for contemplation, then so does the transformation that the outer world undergoes in the soul through ordinary consciousness. One recognizes the lasting element in human life that has nothing to do with the body and that is led through death to the realm of the spirit.

What has been described as forgetting borders on the soul's capacity for love. It can therefore be brought to such an extent that what is conveyed through the body in love occurs as a pure spiritual experience. Then one perceives not only a uniting and separating of one's own being with the spirit, but a real standing within the spiritual reality. Inspiration becomes intuition. This level of knowledge can be given such a name because it has a similarity in a higher realm to what is called in ordinary life. Only there, intuition is an immediate awareness of a context that applies to the physical world, without logical mediation; intuition in the higher sense is the experience of the spiritual in such a way that what is imagined and inspired acquires objective validity, as if, by determining the weight of an object given to the eye in the image, it acquires objective validity.

In its own essence, the spirit is seen in the soul through intuition. And that is the one that returns in repeated earthly lives. Just as the soul exists only in the image during earthly life and has its reality in the prenatal, the spiritual does not even have an image in earthly life as I. It is only present there as a black circle within a white surface, or like the processes of sleep within life. What one addresses as “I” is a void for the ordinary consciousness. The real ego effects are the after-effects of previous earthly lives. The present ego can only develop its effects in the following earthly lives.

By living in the realization of the relationships between successive earthly lives, one arrives at an understanding of the relationship from spirit to spirit. The universe reveals itself as a spirit universe. The succession of earthly lives is a reflection of this spiritual universe. Therefore, intuition, which can see through this succession, can venture to penetrate to a certain degree into the spiritual essence of the world. In an act of will, the fulfillment of one's own nature with the spirit is seen. In an experience that is not indifferent to our will, but determines it in a fateful way, a spiritual emptiness appears, a longing. This is carried within us as a consequence of previous earthly lives. We build our lives out of such longings. Everything that is not done out of pure thought wells up out of this subconscious life-stream as fate. It is possible to will purely, because the etheric has come out of the etheric to the independent entity in man. As soon as one enters the realm of imagination, freedom is immediately lessened. There, everything proceeds consciously; one lives circumspectly. But one can only form images that lie within the laws of the etheric world. In the field of inspiration, one's soul is integrated into the general world of souls, just as one's physical soul is integrated into the breathing process. One experiences oneself as a part of the whole. And in intuition, everything in life that does not flow from mere thoughts is felt to be a fateful connection of repeated earthly lives. What is realized out of pure thoughts in freedom has only one reality in the one physical life on earth. For the following ones, it only has a meaning in that the person experiences inner satisfaction in accomplishing free actions. This consequence of freedom leaves inner traces that then show their effects in the following lives on earth.

Intuition offers the possibility of penetrating into the spiritual foundations of the universe. One experiences there, for example, the difference between the sun and the moon. One experiences this through observing their effect on human beings. Just as the outer world of the senses lives on in the human being as content for thinking and feeling, etc., so the sun and moon live on in growth and reproduction. The effect of the sun is seen in everything related to growth and will; the effect of the moon in decomposition and thinking. The effect of the sun in the human inner being conditions the ability to remember by exciting the inner being, whereby the outer sensory impressions are reflected. The effect of the moon conditions all devotion and love. It paralyzes and deadens the inner being. In this way, the human being is able to relive the outer world within himself.

Once one has been enabled in this way to recognize the deeper basis of the sun and moon effects, one's view can sharpen for what is sun- and moon-like in the earthly environment. For example, we see in plants both a tendency to break down and to build up. We see the moon-like quality in the solidifying of the substance, and the sun-like quality in the blossoming and sprouting. And we then recognize the relationship to the human organism. A plant that carries a certain salt is recognized for its healing effect on a pathological process in the human organism. Of course, today's medicine will reject such findings. It simply knows nothing of what can be recognized with such inner clarity through supersensible vision, as it is also present in mathematical thinking. For this vision, the human organism is different from that for physical research. And the beings of external nature are also different. One no longer perceives limited organs in the organism. Not lungs, liver, etc., but processes: the lung process, the liver process. And in the same way, one perceives not the plant but its formative process. This also makes it possible to judge the interaction of the one and the other process when they flow into each other through the administration of medication. One penetrates into the intimate relationships of the human being with his natural environment.

Life is brought to the historical assessment of human development through the means of knowledge of anthroposophy. One has tried to recreate the view of the historical process of becoming according to a beautiful scientific idea. This idea is known: that the human germ, before birth, passes through the forms in a shortened development, which are realized in stages in the animal series. Accordingly, it has been thought that a people at a later stage of culture can also be understood as representing a later age of the individual human being, so to speak. One looks at the ancient oriental peoples and sees humanity at the childhood stage in them. In the Greeks and Romans, one sees the youth stage captured. The more recently civilized peoples would then have entered into manhood. This view presents only a vague analogy. Through real observation, something quite different is found. When one reaches a certain age, one's intuitive perception is awakened to intimate soul processes that are, as it were, held back from unfolding in the physical body. It is like the human germ, which passes through the animal series in a rudimentary way, but is prevented from realizing the corresponding form at a certain stage. The body points to earlier stages of development as it grows; the soul does this at the end of life. In the older stages of human development, what is currently shown in the soul's rudiments was actually present in the human body. People were organized differently. At present, a clear parallelism between the physical and the soul-spiritual can be seen in the child and adolescent stages of life. One need only think of sexual maturity with its accompanying psychological phenomena. For a more subtle observation, such a parallelism is also still noticeable up to the end of the twenties. But then the physical processes become, so to speak, too firm to have such mental side effects. The mental and spiritual life emancipates itself from them and continues in dependence on education and the life experiences aroused by the outside world. This was different in earlier epochs of human development. In those times, the human being also developed spiritually and mentally simply by developing physically. The significance of this fact can be seen from the fact that, as a result, the human being not only participated in the ascending physical development with all his or her mental activity, as is the case now, but also in the descending one. Today, at most, he or she participates in the descending physical development only through what arises from it as mental decline. But if we are able to correctly assess the mental and spiritual rudiments just described, we come to the insight that in older epochs, especially in old age, people have attained a state of mind that meant a spiritualization of their entire being. That is why the views about a spiritual foundation of the world all come from older times. But this leads to a historical view according to which humanity records the culture that arises from physical development at ever younger stages. While the Greeks were still able to draw the strength for their spiritual culture from the development of their physical bodies in the first thirty years of their lives, the present-day civilized nations only manage to make use of their physicality until the end of their twenties. But this brings about an understanding of historical life that shows man his place in historical evolution. Great human tasks become apparent from history. One sees the necessity for humanity to deepen spiritually. For the time that began around the fifteenth century only developed what is possible in accordance with the development of the body until the end of the 1920s. These were the great achievements of the Galilean-Copernican age. Humanity would have to become rigid in them if completely different guiding forces of existence did not set in. Scientific life must be fertilized by the study of the supersensible. What man can experience through imagination, inspiration and intuition must be given to an existence that can no longer draw from the development of the physical. From the sense of human development, the emergence of an anthroposophical spiritual science appears as a necessity of the present epoch.

[Concept for the above text, from notebook 496, 1920/1921)

1.) Anthroposophy is seen as a fantastic attempt at knowledge. Taken as superstition.

2.) The enthusiasts take no pleasure in anthroposophy.

3.) It is difficult to speak of its essence in a nutshell.

4.) Du Bois-Reymond forbade to penetrate into the realm of the supersensible in a scientific way.

5.) Not opposed to science.

6.) The usual scientific method cannot penetrate into the life of the soul. Example Franz Brentano.

7.) Impossibility to go beyond the phenomena through external research. Hence the contempt for Oken-Schelling's natural philosophy. The ideas lose their content.

8.) But with such research, one also cannot approach the soul and spirit. The wrong path of false mysticism sees into the interior. But it only finds the reflection of the sensory outside world.

9.) In anthroposophical research, the ability to remember is transformed. Thoughts are absorbed into the etheric world. One detaches oneself from the body. 10.) One then lives in images. With full composure, one expands one's personality through one's experiences since birth. One has thereby become entirely a sensory organ.

11.) One must consciously remain in the soul realm. Slipping back into the body realm gives rise to dreams, hallucinations, etc. One then mistakes the pictorial-experiential for reality.

12.) One notices that one has entered the realm of body formation. One has taken the forces of growth up into consciousness.

13) One must now progress to supersensible perception. This happens through the process of imitation of forgetting.

14) One transforms the imagination into an inner power, which one then perceives just as little as the eye. But this power, which has flowed back into the inner being, opens up the vision of the soul's outer world. The astral aspect comes to the fore. The moments of waking up and falling asleep become representational. An interrelationship becomes visible that can be compared to breathing. Oriental wisdom therefore consciously transformed the breathing process.

15) In a further step, that which sends no impressions into consciousness during sleep is recognized as that which connects with the physical at birth (conception). This also passes through death.

16) You have thus come to an understanding of the interrelationship of your own human being with the outside world, but you have not yet grasped the spiritual outside world itself.

17) This happens through the further development of the method of forgetting. The power is trained in the soul, which otherwise works in dependence on the body as love. One thereby transfers one's own experience into that of another. The spirit reveals itself in its reality. The repeated lives on earth are recognized.

18) Intuition offers the possibility of seeing the inner world without false mysticism. And the outer world in its spiritual background. Just as ordinary soul experiences are an abstract reflection of the sensory outer world, so the material inside of a person is an effect of the spiritual content of the outer world.

19) This makes it possible to deepen medical knowledge. The natures of the natural kingdoms are seen through and their relationship to the organ processes of the human being is revealed.

20) The effects of the sun and moon are recognized. Their relationship to the inner processes of the human organization.

21.) Life is brought into the historical development of humanity.

22.) The artistic experience becomes conscious perception. This opens up a source for the artistic. Goethe spoke with a sense of what is entering the realm of experience. The unconscious is not affected. For one does not symbolize; one does not allegorize. One lives one's way towards artistic perception with insight. Dornacher Bau. Its forms arise from the same source as anthroposophy. — Eurythmy.

23.) Education is stimulated. A real knowledge of human nature is developed. From this arises the art of forming human beings.

24) Social conditions can be understood with a thinking based on anthroposophy. Natural science works with sharply defined contours towards a goal. Such ideas are not suitable for grasping the essence of capital, labor, money, etc. Such ideas can only be thought. They have no inner life. Anthroposophical ideas are alive. They connect with life. They become social sympathies and antipathies; they take hold of feeling and pulsate through will. They are absorbed into social life just as life forces are absorbed into the human organism. But that needs the present.

25) It was intellectualism that made natural science great. It will be supersensible vision that penetrates into life.

1. Anthroposophy aims to provide an understanding of the human being; it begins with its results where science ends, which alone is accepted as such in the broadest circles today - but it also begins with its research methods where this science ends.

2. Nevertheless, it is not opposed to this science. It must, however, see how it is fought by it. But it believes that this science is becoming quite unscientific in this very struggle.

3. This science is based on observation, experiment and rational consideration. In its pursuit, limits are reached in relation to the external world and to human beings. Natural science does not penetrate behind the sensory world. Here, speculation with the mind takes place. But one speculates in the void. Self-knowledge does not penetrate beyond memory. There one mystifies into the soul nebula. - False mysticism.

4. Science would have to have the courage to phenomenalism in nature and materialism in relation to man.

5. If one wants to recognize something different, one must become aware of other forces in the human being, and also consciously apply them.

6. You have to start at the end of science. With the ability to remember. Forming images – strengthening the power of imagination – manageable images. – You know that you are still working from the physical. But you only stick to what the body can form, not to what it forms through external impressions.

7. One must completely free oneself from the body. This is achieved by suppressing the images with willpower. The power of meditation now proves to be a real power - and consciousness takes on a spiritual content: the creative aspect of the individual being comes into consciousness. - The etheric body as the shaper of the physical. Because one sees how the soul and spirit are formed. One must come to shape one's organs. The brain, so to speak, remains elastic.

8. But you can also suppress this individuality. Then you experience yourself in the existence before birth - in a spiritual-soul world. You have to learn to regulate your emotions - this is how you learn to see how the soul is placed into the organism from the spiritual-soul world. The strength that one develops intervenes in the rhythm of the soul organism. One comes to distinguish the soul rhythm from the bodily rhythm. Like the breath, so the interplay of the prenatal and the experiences of life. One sees that which passes through death. One only comes to shape the soul.

9. Complete self-education. This makes a person an unbiased observer of themselves. You become the judge of yourself. You do not change your life – otherwise it would be pathological – but you recognize the results of previous lives in this one. Freedom is completely compatible with this. Just as you do not feel limited in your freedom by yesterday, even though you depend on it. Free action comes from thought.

10. One sees the dependence of the metabolism on the will. A decision – pulling oneself together – action: strength is drawn from the organization – physical strength is transformed into spiritual strength; but now, through this counteraction, one shapes one's subsequent life. One sees the creative aspect in the doing.

11. Through imagination, the organic interior is revealed. This is the stimulus for medicine. - The relationship to the environment. And on the other hand for art.

12. Through inspiration, stimulus for social life.

13. For religious life.

14. [breaks off]

Franz Hartmann comes from Bavaria, studied medicine, undertook extensive travels through America, which introduced him to the customs and traditions, especially the so-called magical arts of primitive peoples. He then met H. P. Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, who from 1875 onwards tried to spread mystical and occult teachings by founding the Theosophical Society. He went to India with them and spent a long time there in the central place of the Theosophical Society. In addition to the “Theosophy” propagated by H. P. Blavatsky, H. was also interested in other mystical teachings of the Orient, especially [Shankaracharya], whose late Vedanta system he then propagated in several writings (partly translations, which he probably did not prepare according to the original texts) for Germans. He also published the Bhagavad-Gita in a German translation and tried to spread the underlying philosophical system. After his return to Germany, he met a primitive German mystic (a former craftsman) in whom he saw a follower of the Rosicrucian teachings and insights. By combining what he had learned from the teachings of this mystic with the teachings of Blavatsky, H. then developed the views that he sought to imbue with the results of his Paracelsus studies and which he presented in numerous writings in a popular, down-to-earth tone. The most important of these are his “Black and White Magic” and “Occult Signs and Symbols”. He also published a magazine called “Lotus Flowers”, in which he presented his views. H. died in 1911 (August?) –

A penetrating examination of all modern scientific thinking, as was already the case with “The History of Idealism”: One must find that Catholicism preserves an ancient wisdom. Insofar as one accepts that the Church is the embodiment of this wisdom, and insofar as one accepts that this is present in the Church and nothing of it can be rediscovered, the individual must feel secure with all his life, his knowledge, etc. as a member of the positive ecclesiastical organism that embodies the inviolable spiritual heritage.

In addition, scholasticism, in so far as it was realism, recognized the reality of ideas in things, and thus points to the spiritual world with this knowledge. All newer “knowledge” has lost this insight.

Thus Willmann is quite consistent: inviolable teaching material, embodied in the church; the most far-reaching insight in ecclesiastical philosophy.

He is just not able to see how time progresses by not just making a sensual institution the carrier of the spiritual on earth, but by bringing the spiritual world itself into the earthly. This spiritual world is not just “reason”, which, because of its abstractness, cannot in fact be the basis of a catholicity, which Willmann quite rightly sees – this spiritual world is a living thing. It all comes down to humanity absorbing an understanding of the real spiritual world and not getting stuck at the formal, as if the human spirit were just a kind of summary naming of sensory perceptions.

Thus Willmann's book is a great force as an advance for Catholicism - for it is superior to all schools of thought of the present day, except for the one, the anthroposophical, which is still struggling for the very first seed of an understanding of its true nature. —