The Rudolf Steiner Archive

4. Foundations of Knowledge of true Philosophy, Cosmology and Religion

[ 1 ] For the development of inspired cognition, it has been said that a fundamental exercise is to remove from consciousness images that have arisen in meditation or as a result of the meditation process. However, this exercise is actually only a preliminary exercise for another one. Through this process of clearing away, one comes to see the course of one's own life as described in the last meditation. We also gain an insight into the spiritual cosmos, insofar as this is lived out in an etheric event. Projected onto the human being, one receives an image of the etherically living cosmos. We see how everything that can be counted as heredity passes from the physical organisms of the ancestors to the physical organisms of the descendants in a continuous process. But you can also see how the facts of the etheric organism are subject to a continually new effect of the etheric cosmos. This effect is opposed to heredity. It is one that affects only the individual human being. Having insight into these things is particularly important for the educator.

[ 2 ] In order to progress in supersensible knowledge, it is necessary to train the practice of creating imaginative images more and more. This strengthens the soul's energy for this development. For at first one only achieves an overview of the course of life since birth. There is indeed a soul-spiritual aspect of the human being before us, but one that cannot be said to have an existence beyond the physical life of the human being.

[ 3 ] In the continuation of these exercises for inspiration, it becomes apparent that the power of creation for the imaginative images becomes ever greater. It then becomes so great that one can also create the total picture of one's own life out of one's consciousness. One then also has a consciousness liberated from the content of one's own physical and etheric human being.

[ 4 ] Through a higher inspiration, an image of the soul-spiritual entity then enters this consciousness, which is empty to a higher degree, as it was before the human being entered the physical world from a soul-spiritual world and united with the body that comes into being through conception and germ development. One gets an idea of how the astral and ego organization is clothed in an etheric one, which originates from the etheric cosmos, and in a physical one, which arises in the physical sequence of heredity.

[ 5 ] It is only in this way that one gains knowledge of the eternal essence of man, which lives itself out during earthly existence in the reflection of the imagination, feeling and will of the soul. But this also gives us the idea of the true nature of imagination. This is because it is not present in its true form within the earthly existence.

[ 6 ] Look at a human corpse. It has the form, the structure of a human being. Life has vanished from it. If one understands the nature of the corpse, one does not regard it as something original. It is recognized as a remnant of the living physical human being. The forces of external nature, to which the corpse is delivered, can destroy it, but they cannot build it up. - In a similar way, at a higher level of perception, one recognizes human earthly thinking as the corpse-like remnant of what thinking was as a living thing before man passed from his experience in the spiritual-soul world into earthly existence. The essence of earthly thinking is just as incomprehensible by itself as the form of the human organism is by the forces that rule in the corpse. One must recognize earthly thinking as a dead one if one wants to recognize it right.

[ 7 ] If one is on the way to such recognition, then one can also see through the essence of the earthly will. One recognizes this as a certain kind of younger component of the soul. What is hidden behind the will is related to the thinking in the same way as the very young child is related to the dying old man in the physical organism. Only for the soul it is so that childhood and old age, even corpse-like existence, do not develop one after the other, but exist side by side.

[ 8 ] However, one can see from what has been explained certain consequences for a philosophy that only wants to form its ideas from the experience of earthly existence. It receives only dead or at least dying ideas for its content. Its obligation can therefore only be to recognize the dead character of the world of thought and to conclude from the dead to a previously existing living thing. Insofar as one remains in the conceptual-proving method of the physical man, one can want nothing else. This merely intellectualist philosophy can therefore only arrive at the true nature of the soul in an indirect way. It can examine the nature of human thought and recognize the first dying of it. Then it can prove indirectly that the dead points to the living, just as the corpse points to a living person.

[ 9 ] Only inspired knowledge can lead to a real insight into the truly spiritual. Through the soul exercises for inspiration, the thinking corpse is revived in a certain sense. One is not completely transported back to the state before the beginning of earthly existence; but one revives within oneself a true image of this state, from whose essence one can recognize that it is radiated from a pre-earthly existence into earthly existence.

[ 10 ] Through the training of intuition in exercises of the will, it results that in the subconscious the pre-earthly existence that has died in the mind is revived during the earthly existence. Through these exercises of the will the human being is placed in a state through which he enters the world of the spiritual outside his physical and etheric organism. He receives the experience of existence after detachment from the body. This gives him a foretaste of what really happens in death. From this view, he can speak about the continuation of the soul-spiritual after the passage through death.

[ 11 ] The purely intellectualistic conceptual philosophy can only arrive at a recognition of the immortality of the soul indirectly. Just as it recognizes something corpse-like in thinking, it can determine something germinal in the will, something that has a life existing in itself, which points beyond the dissolution of the body, because its essence shows itself to be independent of this even during earthly existence. In this way, by not stopping at thinking, but by making the entire life of the soul a self-experience, one can arrive at an indirect recognition of the eternal human essence. To do this, one must not limit one's contemplation to thinking, but subject the interplay of thinking with the other powers of the soul to the philosophical method of proof. However, this only leads to an experience of the eternal human essence as it is in earthly existence, not to a view of the state of the human spiritual-soul before and after earthly existence. Bergson's philosophy, for example, is in this position, which is based on a comprehensive self-awareness of what can be grasped in earthly existence, but which does not want to enter the realm of real supersensible knowledge.

[ 12 ] All philosophy that merely wants to remain within ordinary consciousness can only attain an indirect knowledge of the true essence of the human soul. Cosmology in such a way that it also encompasses the entire human being can only be attained through imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge. Within ordinary consciousness it only has the evidence of the first dying and germinal reawakening of human soul life. From these facts, it can form ideas which, when viewed impartially, point to the cosmic and allow such a thing to be inferred. However, these ideas are only that which radiates from the spiritual cosmos into the human being's inner being and also shows itself within the human being in a changed form. In earlier times, philosophy still had a part that appeared as cosmology. But the real content of this cosmology were ideas that had become very abstract and had traditionally been preserved from old forms of cosmology. Mankind had formed these ideas when an old dreamlike imagination, inspiration and intuition were still present. These ideas were extracted from tradition and incorporated into the fabric of purely intellectual logical or dialectical reasoning. One was often not even aware that one had inherited these ideas. ideas. They were thought to be self-generated. Gradually it was discovered that there was no real inner life connection with these ideas in modern intellectual life. That is why this "rational cosmology" was almost completely discredited. It had to give way to a physical cosmology based on purely physical and sensual knowledge of nature, which, however, no longer encompassed the human being for an unbiased observer. A true cosmology will only be able to emerge again when imagination, inspired and intuitive knowledge are accepted and their results are utilized for the knowledge of the world.

[ 13 ] What had to be said for cosmology applies to an even greater degree to knowledge in the field of religion. In the field of religion, knowledge must be acquired that comes from an experience of the spiritual world. It is not possible to deduce such experiences from the content of ordinary consciousness. The content of religion cannot be inferred in intellectual terms, but can only be clarified. When people began to search for proofs of God, this search itself was already proof that they had lost the living connection with the divine world. That is why no intellectualistic proof of God can be given in a satisfactory way. In traditionally adopted ideas, which can only be brought into a system through one's own mental work, every theology that merely appeals to the ordinary consciousness must work. In the past, philosophers also wanted to gain a "rational theology" from this ordinary consciousness. This theology, however, has succumbed to the fate of theology based on traditional ideas to an even greater degree than "rational cosmology". But what has emerged as a direct "God-experience" remains in the world of feeling or will and even avoids going over to any conceptually proving method. Philosophy itself has lapsed into considering existing forms of religion in a mere history of religion. It does this out of the impotence to arrive at ideas through ordinary consciousness about what can only be experienced outside the physical and ethereal organism.

[ 14 ] A new basis of knowledge of the religious life can only be gained by recognizing the imaginative, inspired and intuitive methods of knowledge and by utilizing their results for this life.