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Answers of Spiritual Science to the Great Questions of Existence
GA 60

15 December 1910, Berlin

Translated by Antje Heymanns

How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Spiritual World?

Before I start with today’s topic, I would like to make you aware that today’s discussions are the beginning of a whole series of such discussions, and that basically all subsequent topics this winter could have precisely the same title as today’s topic. The path a human being must take if he wants to attain knowledge of the spiritual world will be explored in the course of the next lectures in relation to the most diverse phenomena of human and scientific life in general and to various cultural personalities of mankind.

Allow me to start with something personal, although this topic, this contemplation, must head, so to speak, in the direction of the most impersonal, most objective Spiritual Science. Yet the path into the spiritual world is such that it must lead through the most personal to the impersonal. Thus in spite of the impersonal, the personal will often be a symbolic feature of this path, and one gains the opportunity to point out many important things just by starting, so to speak, from the more intimate immediate experience. To the observer of the spiritual world many things in life will be symbolically more important than they initially seem to be. Much that might otherwise pass by the human eye, without particularly attracting attention, can appear to be deeply important to someone who wants to study intensely an observation such as the one that forms the basis for today’s examinations. And I can say that the following—which may at first seem like a trifle of life to you—belongs for me to the many unforgettable things on my path of life that on the one hand marked the longing of today’s human beings to truly ascend to the spiritual world. Yet on the other hand, they marked a more or less admitted impossibility of somehow gaining access to the spiritual world by means, that were not only provided by the present, but were also available in the past centuries, insofar as they were externally accessible to man.

I once sat in the cosy home of Herman Grimm. Those of you who are somewhat familiar with German intellectual life will associate much with the name of Herman Grimm. Perhaps you will know the spirited, important biographer of Michaelangelo and Raffael, and might also know, as it were, that the sum of education of our time, or at least of Central Europe, or let’s say it even more narrowly, of Germany, was united in the soul of Herman Grimm. During a conversation with him about Goethe, who was so close to his heart, and about Goethe’s view of the world, a small thing happened that belongs to the most unforgettable things on my path of life. In response to a remark I made—and we will see later how exactly this remark can be of importance in relation to the ascent of man into the spiritual world—Herman Grimm answered with a dismissive movement of his left hand. What lay in that gesture is what I consider, as it were, to be one of the unforgettable experiences on the path of my life. It was supposed to be in relation to Goethe, how Goethe wanted to find the way into the spiritual world in his own way.

In the course of these lectures we will have another talk about Goethe’s path into the spiritual world. Herman Grimm willingly followed Goethe’s pathways into the spiritual world, but in his own manner.

It was far from his mind to enter into a conversation about Goethe, in which Goethe would be seen as the representative of a human being who had really brought down spiritual realities—also as an artist— from the spiritual world and then undertook to embody them in his works of art. For Herman Grimm, it was much more obvious to say to himself: Alas, with the means that we as human beings have nowadays, we can only ascend to this spiritual world by way of fantasy. Although fantasy offers things that are beautiful, great and magnificent and are able to fill the human heart with warmth; but Knowledge, well-founded knowledge was not something that Herman Grimm, the intimate observer of Goethe, wanted to find in Goethe either. And when I said that Goethe’s whole fundamental nature is based on his willingness to embody the true in the beautiful, in the art, and then attempted to show that there are ways outside of fantasy, ways into the spiritual world that will lead you on more solid and firmer ground than fantasy—then it was not the rejection by someone who would not have liked to follow such a path. Herman Grimm did not use this gesture to express his rejection of such a path, but—in a way only those who knew him better would understand—he laid in it roughly the following: There may well be such a path, but we human beings cannot feel a calling to find out anything about it!

As I said, I do not wish to present this here as a personal matter in an importune way, yet it seems to me that just in such a gesture the position of the best human beings of our age towards the spiritual world is epitomised. Because later I had a long conversation with the same Hermann Grimm on a journey that led us both from Weimar to Tiefurt. There he explained how he had freed himself entirely of a purely materialistic view on world events, from the opinion that the human spirit, in the successive epochs, would produce out of itself that which constitutes the real soul-wealth of man. At that earlier time Herman Grimm talked about a great plan that was part of a piece of work that was never realised. Those of you who have occupied themselves with Herman Grimm will know that he intended to write a ‘History of the German fantasy’. He had envisaged the forces of fantasy to be like those of a goddess in the spiritual world who brings forth out of herself that which human beings create for the benefit of world progress. I would like to say: In that lovely region between Weimar and Tiefurt, when I heard these words from a man, whom I, after all, acknowledge as one of the greatest minds of our time, I had a feeling that I would like to express in these words; ‘Today, many people say to themselves: One must be deeply dissatisfied with everything that external science is able to say about the sources of life, about the secret of existence, about world riddles—but the possibility to step powerfully into another world is missing.’

There is a lack of intensity of willingness to realise that this world of spiritual life is different from what man imagines in his fantasy. Many enjoy going into the realm of fantasy, because for them it is the only spiritual realm that exists. About 17 years ago, on the journey to Tiefurt, I met Herman Grimm, who already through his scriptures and many, many other things, had made an impression on me. Facing this personality I remembered just then that, 30 years ago, I had glanced at just the passage in one of Grimm’s Goethe lectures,1Herman Grimm: Goethe-Lectures, Berlin 1877, 23rd Lecture, Pages 215 et seq. which he had held in the winter of 1874/75 in Berlin, and where, with reference to Goethe, he spoke of the kind of impression that a purely external study of nature, devoid of spirit, must make on a spirit like his own. Already 30 years earlier Herman Grimm appeared to me to be the kind of human being whom all feelings and emotions urge upwards into the spiritual world, but who, unable to find the spiritual world as a reality, can only perceive it in its weaving and workings as a fantasy. And on the other hand—just because he was like this—he did not want to acknowledge that Goethe himself searched for the sources and riddles of existence in a different realm, not just in the realm of fantasy, but in the realm of spiritual reality.

There is a passage where Herman Grimm speaks about something that must affect our souls today, at the beginning of our contemplations. This passage refers to something which, as I have already indicated, and although its importance cannot be denied by Spiritual Science, is regarded as an impossibility by natural science—or by a worldview that claims to stand on the firm ground of natural science. It is an impossibility not only for feeling and emotion but also for a realisation that truly understands itself. What I mean is the Kant-Laplace theory that explains our solar system as if it were made up only of lifeless, inorganic substances and forces, and as if it had clenched itself out of a giant gas ball. I would like to read to you the passage from Herman Grimm’s Goethe lectures that shows you what this world-view, which is so fascinating, so deeply impressive today, meant for a spirit like Herman Grimm’s:

As much as Goethe here prohibits reason to accept as truth more than one can indeed grasp with the five fingers of a hand, the more he grants license to the poet’s fantasy, to create out of an unconscious, dreaming force pictures of what the spirit wishes to behold. However, he sharply upholds the boundaries between both of these activities. A long time ago, already in his youth, the great Kant-Laplace fantasy about the origin and the future downfall of the globe, had gained ground. Out of the primeval, cosmic, in itself rotating world-nebula—the children learn this at school already—the central drop of gaseous matter forms itself, which later becomes the Earth and, as a solidifying ball in incomprehensible periods of time, goes through all phases including the episode of mankind’s habitation. This ball will finally crash back into the sun as burnt out slag: This is a long, but completely comprehensible process for the audience, that does not require any further external intervention for its implementation apart from the endeavour by some outside power to maintain a constant heating temperature on the Sun.

There cannot be imagined a more futile perspective for the future than the one that is being imposed on us today in this expectation as a scientific necessity. A carrion bone, around which a hungry dog made a detour, would be a more refreshing appetising piece in comparison to this latests excrement of creation—the form in which our Earth would finally pass to the Sun again. The inquisitiveness with which our generation embraces such things and thinks it believes them, is a sign of a sick imagination. Scientists of future epochs will use a lot of astuteness to explain it as a historical phenomenon of the time.

I felt it was necessary to point out such a quote, as basically it is rarely done these days. Today, when the concepts of these world-views have such a fascinating effect, and when they seem to be based so solidly on natural science, little reference is made to the fact that there are, after all, spirits who are deeply connected to the cultural life of our time, and yet relate in such a way out of their whole soul make-up to something about which countless people now say: It is obvious that things are like that, and anyone who does not concede that they are like that is really a simpleton! Yes, already today we see many people who feel the deepest longing to forge links between the soul of man and the spiritual world. But on the other side, we see only a few outside of those circles that are more deeply engaged with what we call Spiritual Science, who are busying themselves with means that could lead the human soul to what could after all be called the land of its longings.

Therefore, when we speak today about ways that are to lead man into the spiritual world, and speak so that what we say applies not only to a tight circle, but is addressed to all those who are equipped with a contemporary education, we still encounter strong resistance in a certain respect. Not only is it possible that what will be presented is regarded as daydreaming and fantasy, but it may also easily annoy many people of the present. It can actually be an annoyance to them because it deviates so much from those ideas that are currently considered valid in the widest circles, and which are the suggestive and fascinating imaginations of people who consider themselves to be the most educated.

In the first lecture it was already hinted at that the ascent into the spiritual world is basically an intimate affair of the soul and is in stark contrast to what is common for the imaginative and emotional life both in popular and scientific circles. Namely a scientist easily makes the demand that to be valid as science today, something has to be verifiable at any time and for anyone. And he will then also refer to his external experiment that can be proven anytime to anyone. It goes without saying that this demand can not be met by Spiritual Science. We are about to see why not. Spiritual Science here means a science that does not speak about the spirit as a sum of abstract terms and concepts, but as something real and of real entities. Spiritual Science therefore must contravene the methodical demands that are currently so easily established by science and world-views: to be verifiable anywhere and at all times by anyone. Spiritual Science very often encounters resistance in popular circles for the reason that in our time, even where there is an inner longing to ascend to the spiritual world, feelings and emotions are penetrated and permeated by a materialistic view.

Even with the best intentions, even if one yearns for the spiritual world, one cannot help but imagine the spirit as in some way material again, or at least imagine the ascent into the spiritual world as somehow connected to something material. That is why most people may prefer that you talk to them about purely external matters, like what they should eat or drink or shouldn’t eat and drink, or what else they should undertake purely externally in the material world. They would much rather do this than be asked to introduce intimate moments of development into their souls. But that is exactly what ascending into the spiritual world is all about.

We now want to try to map out—entirely in line with Spiritual Science’s own view—how this ascent of a human soul into the spiritual world can happen. The starting point must always be a person’s current life situation. A human being, as he is placed in our present world, lives completely and firmly in the external sensory world. Let’s try to become clear about how much would remain in a human soul, if one would disregard the concepts that the outer sense perceptions of the physical world have ignited within us, and that which has entered into us through the outer physical experiences, through eyes and ears and the other senses. And disregard that which is stimulated of sufferings and joys, of pleasure and pain within us through our eyes and ears, and what our rational mind has then combined from these impressions of the sensory world. Try to eliminate all of this from the soul, imagine it away, and then ponder what would be left behind. People who honestly undertake this simple self-observation will find that extremely little will remain, especially in the souls of people of the present time. And it is just so that initially the ascent into the spiritual world cannot proceed from something that is given to us by the external sensory world—it has to be undertaken so that a human being develops forces within his soul, which ordinarily lie dormant in it. It is, so to speak, a basic element for all possibilities of ascent into the Spiritual world, that a person becomes aware that he is capable of inner development, that there is something else in him than what he is initially able to survey with his consciousness.

Today, this is actually an annoying concept for many people. Let’s take a very special person with a contemporary education, for example, what does a philosopher nowadays do, when he wants to establish the full meaning and the nature of Knowledge? Someone like this will say: ‘I will try to establish how far in general we can get with our thinking, with our human soul forces, what we can comprehend of this world.’ He is attempting in his own way—depending on what is momentarily possible for him—to comprehend a world view and to place it before him, and usually he will then say, ‘We simply cannot know anything else, because it is beyond the limits of human knowledge.’ Really this is the most widespread phrase that can be found in today’s literature: ‘We cannot know this!’

However, there is a another standpoint that works in a completely different way from the one just described, by saying: ‘Certainly, with the forces I have now in my soul, which are now probably the normal human soul forces, I can recognise this or that, but here in this soul is a being capable of development. This soul may have forces within it that I first have to extrapolate. I first have to lead it along certain pathways, must lead it beyond its current point of view, and then I will see whether it could have been my fault when I said that this or that is beyond the limit of our knowledge. Perhaps I just need to go a little further in the development of my soul, and then the boundaries will expand and I will be able to penetrate more deeply into things.

In making judgments, one does not always take logic seriously, otherwise one would say: ‘What we can recognise depends on our organs.’ For this reason, someone who is born blind cannot judge colours. He would only be able to do so, if through a fortunate operation he were to become capable of seeing colours.

Likewise it may be possible—I do not wish to speak of a sixth sense here, but of something that can be brought forth from the soul in a purely spiritual way—that spirit eyes and spirit ears can be brought forth from our soul. Then the great event could happen for us—which occurs at a lower level when the one born blind is so lucky to be operated on—so that then for us the initial assumption could become a truth: Around us is a spiritual world, but to be able to look into it, we first have to awaken the organs within us. This would be the only logical thing to do. But, as I said, we do not always take logic very seriously, because people in our time have very different needs than finding their way into the spiritual world when they hear about it. I have already told you that once, when I had to give a lecture in a city in southern Germany, a courageous person, who wrote feature articles, opened his article with the words; ‘The most obvious thing about theosophy is its incomprehensibility.’ We like to believe this man that for him theosophy’s most outstanding characteristic is its incomprehensibility. But is this in any way a criterion? Let’s apply this example to mathematics about which someone would say: ‘What I notice most about mathematics is its incomprehensibility.’ Then everyone would say: ‘Quite certainly, this is possible, but then, if he wants to write feature articles, he should be so good and learn something first!’ Often it would be better to transfer what is valid for one particular subject and apply it correctly to another.

So people have nothing left to do than either to deny that there is a development of the soul—and they can only do this by speaking a word of power—namely, when they refuse to go through such a development, or, alternatively they can immerse themselves into the development of their soul. Then the spiritual world becomes for them an observation, reality, truth. But in order to ascend into the spiritual world, the soul must become capable—not for physical life, but for the realisation of the spiritual world—of completely transforming itself in a certain relation to the form it initially has, and in a certain way becoming a different being.

This could already make us aware of something that has been emphasised repeatedly here, namely, that someone who feels the urge to ascend into the spiritual world, must first and foremost make it clear for himself time and again whether he has gained a firm foothold in this world of physical reality and whether he is able to stand firm here. We have to maintain certainty, volition and sentience in all circumstances that take place in the physical world. We must not lose the ground beneath our feet if we want to ascend from this world into the spiritual one. Doing anything that can lead our character to stand firm in the physical world is a preliminary stage. Then it is a matter of bringing the soul to a different kind of feeling and willing for the spiritual world, than the feeling and willing in the soul normally are. The soul must become, as it were, inwardly a different feeling and willing organism than it is in normal life. This brings us to that which can, on the one hand, initially really place Spiritual Science in a kind of opposition to what is recognised as ‘science’ today. On the other hand, it places Spiritual Science yet again directly next to this science with the same validity that external science has. When it is said that everything that is supposed to be science, needs to be at any time and by anyone verifiable, then, what is meant by this is that what is deemed to be science must not be dependent on our subjectivity, on our subjective feelings, on any decisions of will, will impulses, feelings and emotions that we only carry individually within ourselves. Now, someone who wants to ascend into the spiritual world, must first take a detour through his innermost soul, must reorganise his soul; at first he must completely turn his gaze away from what is outside in the physical world. Normally, a human being only turns away from looking at what is within the physical world when he is asleep. Then he does not let anything enter into his soul through his eyes, his ears, nor through the entire organisation of his senses. But for that he also becomes unconscious and is not able to live consciously in a spiritual world.

It has now been said that it is one of the basic elements of spiritual realisation for a human being to find within oneself the possibility to go beyond oneself. However, this means nothing else than to first let the spirit become effective within oneself. In today’s ordinary human life we all know only one kind of turning away from the physical world, namely when we enter into the unconsciousness of sleep. The contemplation of The Nature of Sleep 2Lecture GA 60 #5, The Nature of Sleep, Berlin, 24 November 1910 has shown us that a human being is in a real spiritual world during sleep, even if he knows nothing about it. For it would be absurd to believe that a person’s soul-centre and spirit-centre disappears in the evening and newly comes into being in the morning. No, in reality, it outlasts the stages from falling asleep to awakening. However, what for a normal person today is the inner strength to be conscious—even if there is no stimulation of consciousness through sense impressions or through the work of the rational mind —is missing in sleep. The soul life is so turned down during sleep, that the person is unable to kindle or awaken what allows the soul to experience itself inwardly. When the human being wakes up again, events from the outside enter. And because a soul content is gifted to the human being in this way, he becomes conscious of himself by means of this soul content. He is not able to become conscious of himself if he is not stimulated externally, because his human strength is too weak for this, when he is left to himself in his sleep.

Hence the ascent into the spiritual world means an arousal of such forces within our soul that enable it, as it were, to truly live consciously within itself, when it becomes, in relation to the external world like a human being who is asleep. Basically, the ascent into the spiritual worlds demands a spurring on of internal energies, an extraction of forces that are otherwise asleep, that are, as it were, paralysed within the soul, so that man cannot handle them at all. All those intimate experiences that a spiritual researcher must experience in his soul, ultimately aim at what has just been characterised. And today, I would like to summarise something for you about the path that leads upwards into the spiritual world. This has been presented in detail by element, so to speak, by their rudiments, in my book published under the title: How to attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? 3Now published under the title - How to Know Higher Worlds, GA 10. But today, I do not want to repeat myself by just presenting you an excerpt from this book. Instead, I wish to approach the issue from a different side, that is what the soul must do with itself to rise up to the spiritual world. One who is interested in this more deeply, can read the details in the book mentioned above. However, no one should think that what was presented in detail there can be summarised here in the same words and sentences. Those who are familiar with the book will not find that it is a summary of what has been said there, but a description of the topic from a different angle.

For a spiritual researcher who wants to direct his steps into the spiritual world, it is extremely important that much of what would lead other people directly to a realisation and a goal becomes for him simply a means of education, an intimate means of education of the soul. Let me illustrate this with an example. Many years ago I wrote a book, The Philosophy of Freedom. As it is out of stock since years, it is currently not available, but hopefully a second edition will appear in the near future.4The Second Edition of the The Philosophy of Freedom was published not until 1918. At this occasion Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture about the genesis of this book, which is featuring as the sixth lecture of the cycle Historical Symptomatology, Dornach 1942. Newly published in Rudolf Steiner's Letters, Volume 2, Dornach 1953 This Philosophy of Freedom was conceived in such a way that it is quite different from other philosophical books of the present time, which more or less aim by what is written to share something about how things are in the world or how they must be according to the ideas of the authors. However, this is not the immediate aim of this book. Rather, it is intended to give someone who engages with the thoughts presented there a kind of workout for his thoughts, so that the kind of thinking, the special way to devoting oneself to these thoughts is one in which the emotions and feelings of the soul are set in motion—just as in gymnastics the limbs are exercised, if I may use this comparison. What is otherwise only a method of gaining insight, is in this book at the same time a means of spiritual-soul self-education. This is extraordinarily important. Of course this is annoying for many philosophers of the present time, who associate something quite different with philosophy than that which may help a human being to progress a little further—because, if possible, he should remain as he is, with his normal innate capacity to gain knowledge. Therefore, in regard to this book it is not so important to be able to argue about this or that, or if something can be understood one way or another, but what really matters is that the thoughts which are connected as one organism, are able to school our soul and help it to make a bit of progress.

This is also the case with my book Truth and Science. And so it is with many things that are initially supposed to be basic elements to train the soul to rise up into the spiritual world. Mathematics and geometry teach man knowledge of triangles, quadrangles and other figures. But why do they teach all this? So that man can gain knowledge about how things are within space, which laws they are subject to and so on. Essentially, the spiritual ascent to the higher worlds works with similar figures as symbols. For instance, it places the symbol of a triangle, a quadrangle or another symbolic figure before a student, but not so that he will win immediate insights through them, as he can acquire these also by other means. Instead, with the symbols he receives the opportunity to train his spiritual abilities so that the spirit, supported by the impression he gains from the symbolic pictures, ascends into a Higher World. Thus it is about mental training, or, do not misunderstand me, it is about mental gymnastics. Therefore, much of what is dry external science, dry external philosophy, what is mathematics or geometry, becomes a living symbol for the spiritual training that leads us upwards into the spiritual world. If we have let this affect our soul, then we will learn to understand what basically no external science understands, that the ancient Pythagoreans, under the influence of their great teacher Pythagoras, spoke of the universe being made up of numbers because they focussed on the inner laws of numbers. Now let us look at how we encounter numbers everywhere in the world. Nothing is easier than to refute Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy, because from a standpoint, imagined to be superior, one can easily say: There are these Spiritual Scientists again, coming out of their mystic 5This was mentioned in the earlier lecture What is Mysticism?, given on 10 February 1910, as part of The Architect House Lecture Series, 1909/1910, and was printed as part of Paths of Soul Experiences, GA59 darkness with numerical symbolism and say that there is an inner regularity of numbers, and, for example, one has to consider the true foundation of human nature according to the number seven. But something similar was meant also by Pythagoras and his students, when they talked about the inner regularity of numbers. If we allow those marvellous connections, which lie in the relationships between numbers, to affect our spirit then we can train it in such a way that it wakes up when it would otherwise be asleep and develops stronger forces within itself to penetrate into the spiritual world.

Thus it is a schooling through another kind of science. It is also what is actually called the study of someone, who wants to enter deeply into the spiritual world. And for someone like this, gradually everything that for other people is a harsh reality, becomes more or less an external allegory, a symbol. If a human being is able to let these symbols have an effect on him, then he is not only freeing his spirit from the outer physical world, but also imbues his spirit with strong forces, so that the soul can be conscious of itself, even when there is no external stimulation. I have already mentioned that if someone lets a symbol like the Rosy Cross affect him, he can feel an impulse to ascend into the spiritual world. We imagine a Rosy Cross as a simple black cross with seven red roses attached in a circle at the crossing of the beams.

What should it tell us? One who allows it to have an effect on his soul in the right way will imagine: For example, I look at a plant; I say of this plant that it is an imperfect being. Next to it I place a human being, who in his nature is a more perfect being, but even only in his nature. For if I look at the plant, I have to say: In it I encounter a material being which is not permeated by passions, desires, instincts, that bring it down from the height where it otherwise could stand. The plant has its innate laws, which it follows from leaf to flower to fruit; it stands there without desires, chaste.

Beside him lives the human being, who certainly by his nature is a higher being, but who is permeated by desires, instincts, passions through which he can stray from his strict regularity. He first has to overcome something within himself, if he wants to follow his own inner laws as a plant follows its innate laws. Now the human being can say to himself; The expression of desires, of instincts in me is the red blood. In a certain way, I can compare it with chlorophyll, the chaste plant sap in the red rose, and can say: If man becomes so strong within himself that the red blood is no longer an expression of what pushes him down below himself, but of what lifts him above himself—when it becomes the expression of such a chaste being like the plant sap, which has turned into the red of a rose, or in other words; when the red of the rose expresses the pure inwardness, the purified nature of a human being in his blood, then I have before me the ideal of what man, by overcoming the outer nature, can achieve and which presents itself to me under the symbol of the black cross, the charred wood. And the red of the rose symbolises the higher life that awakens when the red blood has become the chaste expression of the purified, instinctive nature of man, which has overcome itself.

If one does not let what is depicted be an abstract concept, then it becomes a vividly felt evolutionary idea. Then a whole world of feelings and emotions comes to life within us; we will feel within ourselves a development from an imperfect to a more perfect state. We sense that development is something quite different from the abstract thing that external science provides us with in the sense of a purely external Darwinism. Here, development becomes something that cuts deep into our heart, that pervades us with warmth, with soul-warmth—it becomes a force within us that carries and holds us. It is only through such inner experiences that the soul becomes capable of developing strong forces within itself, so that it can illuminate itself with consciousness in its innermost being—in the being that otherwise becomes unconscious when it withdraws from the external world.

It is of course child’s play to say; ‘Then you recommend an idea of something completely imaginary, of something entirely made up. But only those concepts which are reproductions of external ideas are valuable, and an idea of the Rose Cross has no external counter-image.’ But the point is not that the concepts we use to school our souls are reflections of an external reality, instead it is about concepts that are strength-awakening for our soul and that draw out of the soul what lies hidden within it.

When the human soul is dedicated to such pictorial ideas, when, so to speak, everything that it normally values as reality now becomes a cause for pictures that are not arbitrarily retrieved from fantasy, but are inspired by reality, just like the symbol of the Rosy Cross, then we say: The human being makes an effort to move upwards to the first stage of knowledge of the spiritual world. This is the stage of ‘Imaginative Knowledge’ that leads us above and beyond what is immediately concerned with the physical world only.

Hence, a human being who wishes to ascend into the spiritual world works in his soul with very particular concepts in a precisely determined way, to let the otherwise external reality affect him. He works in this soul itself. When the human being has worked in this way for some time, then it will be so that the external scientists can tell him: This has only a subjective, only an individual value for you. But this external scientist does not know that when the soul undergoes such a serious, regular training, there exists a stage of inner development when the possibility for the soul to express subjective feelings and emotions ceases completely. Then the soul arrives at a point where it must tell itself: Now concepts arise within me that I encounter like I normally meet trees and rock, rivers and mountains, plants and animals of the outer world that are as real as otherwise only external physical things are, and to which my subjectivity can neither add anything to them nor can it take anything away from them.

So there actually exists an intermediate state for everyone who wants to ascend into the spiritual world, where man is subject to the danger of carrying his subjectivity, which is only valid for himself, into the spiritual world. But man must pass through this intermediate state, for then he reaches a stage where what the soul is experiencing becomes as objectively verifiable—to anyone with the ability to do so—as all things in the outer physical reality. Because, after all, the principle that applies to external science—for something to be regarded as scientifically valid it must be verifiable at any time by anyone—also applies only to one who is sufficiently prepared for this. Or do you believe that you would be able to teach ‘the law of corresponding boiling temperatures’ to an eight-year-old child? I doubt it. You will not even be able to teach him the theorem of Pythagoras. Thus it is already bound to the basic principle that the human soul must be appropriately prepared if one wants to prove something to it.

And just as one must be prepared to understand the theorem of Pythagoras—even though it is possible for everyone to understand it—one must be prepared through a certain soul exercise if one wants to experience or realise this or that in the spiritual world. However, what can be realised, can then be experienced and observed in the same way by anyone who is appropriately prepared. Or, when messages are conveyed from observations of Spiritual Science by those who have prepared their soul for this, such as, that a particular man is able to look back on repeated Earth lives so that these become a fact for him, then it is likely that people will come and say; ‘There he brings us some dogmas again and demands that we should believe in these!’ Yet a spiritual researcher does not approach his contemporaries with his realisations so that people should believe them.

People who believe that we speak about dogmas, should ask themselves, is the fact that a whale exists a dogma for someone who has never seen one? Certainly, it is explainable in this way: A whale is a dogma for someone who has never seen one. Yet spiritual research does not approach the world with messages alone. Neither does it do so when it understands itself; instead it clothes what it brings down from the higher worlds in logical forms. These are exactly the same logical forms with which the other sciences are permeated. Then anyone will be able to verify, by applying a healthy sense of truth and unbiased logic, whether what the spiritual researcher has said is right. It has always been said that a schooling of the soul is necessary for someone wanting to explore spiritual facts by self-searching, whereby the soul must have gone through what is now being described here. But to understand what is being communicated, all you need is a healthy sense of truth and unbiased logic.

Now, if the spiritual researcher has allowed such symbolic terms and pictures to affect his soul for a while, he will notice that his feeling and emotional life becomes completely different from what it was before.

What is the feeling and emotional life of man in the ordinary world like? Nowadays it actually has become somewhat trivial to use the expression ‘egoistic’ everywhere, and to say that people in their normal life are egoistic. I do not want to express it in this way, but prefer to say: In their normal lives people are at first closely tied to their human personality, for example, when something pleases us, yes, especially in relation to things which we enjoy of the noblest spiritual creations, things of art and beauty. The saying, there is no accounting for taste, already expresses that much is connected to our personality and depends upon our subjective stance towards things. Check how everything that can please you is related to your upbringing, in which place in the world, in which profession your personality is placed, and so on, in order to see how feelings and emotions are closely connected to our personality. But when one does exercises of the soul, like the ones described, one notices how feelings and emotions will become completely impersonal. It is a great and tremendous experience when the moment arrives in which our feeling and our emotional life becomes, so to speak, impersonal. This moment comes, it certainly comes, when a human being on his spiritual path, inspired by those who undertake his spiritual guidance, allows the following things to really affect his soul. I will now list some of these things that will affect our whole feeling and emotional life in an educational way if someone allows them to work on his soul for weeks, or months.

The following can be considered. We focus our attention on what we find at the centre of philosophical observations, on the spiritual centre of the human being, the Ego—if we have learned to rise to the concept of Ego—which accompanies all our ideas, the mysterious centre of all experience. And if we continue to further the respect, this reverence and this devotion, which can connect to the fact, that for many is certainly not a fact but a figment of the imagination,—that there is an Ego living within us!—if this becomes the greatest, the most momentous experience to keep telling yourself that this ‘I am’ is the most essential of the human soul, then mighty, strong feelings develop in relation to the ‘I am’, which are impersonal. These lead directly to an insight into how all of the world’s secrets and mysteries that float around us are concentrated, as it were, in a single point—the Ego-point— to comprehend the human being from this Ego-point. For example, the poet Jean Paul 6The Works of Jean Paul, Berlin 1865, Volume 16, Page 26 et seq. talks about becoming conscious of the Ego in his biography:

“I will never forget what manifested in me, which I have never told anyone about, whereby I stood at the birth of my self-consciousness, and of which I can tell at which place and at what time it happened. One morning, when I was a very young child, I stood under the front entrance and looked left at the woodshed, when suddenly the inner vision—I am an I—flashed before me like a bolt of lightning from the sky and since then has remained shining; there my Ego had seen itself for the first time and forever. Memory errors are hardly imaginable here, and since there was no extraneous retelling, nothing could be added and mixed into the narrative about an occurrence which took place only within the veiled inner sanctum of a human being—only the novelty lent permanence to these everyday, incidental circumstances.

It is already quite a lot to feel the devotion for the concentrated crowdedness of the world-being at one point, with all the shivers of awe and with all the feelings for the greatness of this fact. Yet, when a human being feels this time after time and allows it to affect him—although it will not enlighten him in regard to all the riddles of the world—it can give him a direction entirely focussed on the impersonal and the innermost human nature.

Thus we educate our emotional and our feeling life by relating it to our Ego-beingness. And when we have done this for a while, then we can focus our feelings and emotions in a different direction and can tell ourselves; this Ego within us is connected to everything we think, feel and perceive, with our entire soul life, it glows and shines through our soul life. We can then study human nature with the Ego as the centre point of thinking, feeling and willing, without taking ourselves into consideration or getting personal. The human being becomes a mystery to us, not we to ourselves, and our feelings expand from the Ego across to the soul. We can then transition to a different kind of feeling. In particular, we can acquire this beautiful feeling without which we are not able to lead our soul further into spiritual knowledge—this is what one would like to call it: The feeling that in each thing we encounter, as it were, an access to something infinite opens up for us. If we let this appear before our soul again and again, then it is the most wonderful feeling. It can be there when we go outside and look at a wonderful nature spectacle: cloud-covered mountains with thunder and lightning. This works greatly and forcefully on our soul. But then we must learn not only to see what is great and powerful there, but we may take a single leaf, look at it carefully with all its ribs and all the wonderful things that are part of it, and we will be able to perceive the greatness and might that reveals itself as something infinite in the smallest leaf, and we will hear and feel as if we were at the greatest spectacle of nature. It may appear to be strange, yet there is something to it, and afterwards one must express oneself grotesquely; it may make a great impression when a human being witnesses a glowing lava flow ejected from the Earth. But then, let us imagine someone looks at warm milk or the most ordinary coffee, and sees there how small crater-like structures form and a similar scenario unfolds on a small scale. Everywhere, in the smallest and in the greatest is access to an infinity.

And if we steadily keep researching, even if so much has been revealed to us, there is still something more under the cover, which perhaps we may have explored on the surface. So right now we are sensing what may result in a revelation of something intensely infinite at any point in the universe.

This imbues our soul with feelings and emotions that are necessary for us, if we want to attain what Goethe has called ‘spirit eyes’ and ‘spirit ears’.7For example in Goethe’s Colour Theory, Goethean Science, edited by Rudolf Steiner, Volume 1, Bern 1947, Pages 107 and 262. In short, it is a realisation of our feeling life, which is usually the most subjective to the point where we feel ourselves as if we were merely a setting where something is happening—where we no longer consider our feelings to be part of us. Our personality has been silenced. It is almost as if we were painters and stretching a canvas and painting a picture on it. Hence, when we train ourselves in this way, we stretch our soul and allow the spiritual world to paint on it. One feels this from a certain point in time onwards. Then it is only necessary to understand oneself, and in order to recognise what the world essentially is, it is necessary to consider a particular stage in the life of the soul as solely and only decisive.

So indeed what a human being acquires in ardent soul striving becomes the deciding of truth. It is in the soul itself where the decision must be made if something is true or not. Nothing external can decide, but the human being, by going beyond himself, must find within himself the authority to behold or discover the truth. Yes, basically we can say; in this regard we cannot be entirely different from all other human beings. Other people search for objective criteria, for something that provides us with a confirmation of truth from the outside. Yet a spiritual researcher searches within for confirmation of the truth. Thus he does the opposite. If this were the case, one could say in pretence; ‘Things are not looking too good when Spiritual Scientists in their confusion want to turn the world on its head.’ Yet in reality natural scientists and philosophers don’t do anything different from what spiritual researchers are doing, they only do not know that they are doing it. I will provide you with proof of this, taken from the immediate present.

At the last conference of natural scientists, Oswald Külpe 8Oswald Külpe, 1862-1915, Philosopher and Psychologist, Epistemology and Natural Sciences, Lecture given on 19 September 1910 at the 82nd Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Medical Doctors, Leipzig 1910. gave a talk about the relationship of natural science to philosophy. There he came up with the idea that the human being, by looking into the sensory world and perceiving it as sound, colour, warmth and so forth, only has subjective qualities. This is only a slightly different slant from what Schopenhauer said; ‘The world is our conception.’ But Oswald Külpe points out that what we perceive with our external senses, in short, everything that appears to be pictorial is subjective. And in contrast to this, what physics and chemistry say—pressure, the forces of attraction and repulsion, resistance and so on—must be characterised as objective. So in this way we partly have to deal with something purely subjective in our world-views, and partly with something that is objective such as pressure, forces of attraction and repulsion.

I do not want to go further into the criticism that has been voiced, but only want to address the mindset. It seems so terribly easy for a contemporary epistemologist to prove that because we cannot see without our eyes, light could only be something produced by our eyes. But what happens in the external world, it is said, when one ball hits another, those forces which cause resistance, pressure and so on, must be shifted into the outer world, into space. Why do people think that? At a particular point Oswald Külpe gives this away very clearly when he speaks about sensory perceptions—because he regards these as pictures, he says; ‘They cannot push or attract each other, neither can they pressure nor warm each other. They cannot have such and such large distance in space that would allow them to send light through space at such and such speed, nor can they be arranged as a chemist would arrange elements. Why does he say this of sensory perceptions? Because he sees sensory perceptions as pictures that are brought about solely by our senses.

Now I want to present a simple thought to you, to illustrate that the pictorial nature does not change anything. Things do push against or attract one another. When Mr Külpe now observes the sensory perceptions, this world—which supposedly could neither attract nor repel—simply does not face Mr Oswald Külpe as reality, but as a mirror image. Then he really has pictures in front of him. But push, pressure, resistance and anything that is placed into this world as different from sensory perceptions, will in no other way be objectively explained than through the pictorial nature of the sense perceptions. Why is this so? Because when the human being perceives pressure, push and so on, he turns what lives within the things, into sensations of the things. Man should study, for example, that when he says that one billiard ball hits another, what he experiences as the impact force is what he himself puts into these things! And someone who is standing on the ground of Spiritual Science, is not doing anything else. He makes what lives in the soul the criterion for expressing the world. There is no other principle of knowledge than that which can be found through the development of the soul itself. So the others do the same as the spiritual research. But only spiritual research is aware of this. The others do it unconsciously, they have no idea that they do the same at an elementary level. They just remain standing on the very first level and deny what they themselves are doing. Therefore we are allowed to say, Spiritual Science is in no way contrary to other research on the truth: the other researchers do the same, yet they take the first step without knowing about it, while spiritual research consciously takes the steps as far as a particular human soul can take according to its level of development.

Once it has been achieved that our feelings have, in a certain way, become objective, then, what I have already indicated will even more certainly come about, as it is a necessary pre-requisite for progress into the spiritual worlds. This is that man learns to comprehend how to live in the world in such a way that the weaving and living of an all-encompassing spiritual regularity within the spiritual world is presupposed. In daily life man is far removed from such a way of thinking. He gets angry when something happens to him that he doesn’t like. This is quite understandable as a different standpoint must be hard won. This other standpoint consists in saying; we have come from a former life, we have placed ourselves into the situation in which we are now, and have led ourselves to what is now facing us out of the lap of the future. What approaches us there corresponds to a strictly objective spiritual regularity. We accept it, because it would be an absurdity not to accept it. What approaches us from the lap of the spiritual worlds, whether the world admonishes us or praises us, whether joyful or tragic things happen to us, we will accept it as wisdom-filled experience and interweaving of the world. This is something that slowly and gradually must become once more the whole basic principle of our being. When it does, our will begins to be schooled. Whereas prior to this our feelings needed to be reorganised, now our will is transformed, becomes independent of our personality and thereby turns into an organ of perception of spiritual facts.

After the stage of ‘Imaginative Knowledge’, there occurs for man what can genuinely and truly be called inspiration, the fulfilment through spiritual facts. We must always be clear that man can attain the training of his will at a particular stage only, when his feelings are in a certain way already purified. Then his will can connect with the lawfulness of the world and he will exist as a human being only so that those facts and entities which want to appear to him, can erect a wall before him in his will, on which they can depict themselves for him, so that they can exist for him.

I could only describe for you some of what the soul must go through in silent, patient devotion, if it wants to ascend into the higher worlds. In the following lectures I will have much to describe of the evolution of the world history that the soul must experience to rise up into the spiritual worlds. So consider what has been said today as an introduction only, so that through such schooling our feeling and willing life and our complete imaginative life will develop to become bearers of new worlds, so that we will actually step into a world that we recognise as reality, just as we recognise the physical world as a reality of its own kind.

At a different occasion I have already mentioned that when people say,‘You only imagine what you believe to see,’ then it must be replied, that only the experience, the observation can yield the difference between reality and appearance, between reality and fantasy, just as this is also the case in the physical world. You must win the difference by relating to reality. For example, someone who approaches reality with a healthy thinking can distinguish a red-hot iron in reality from one that only exists in imagination—and no matter how many ‘Schopenhauerians’ may come—he will be able to tell both apart, he will know what is truth and what is imagination. Hence, man can orientate himself on reality. Even about the spiritual world he can only orientate himself on reality. Someone once said that if a person only thought about drinking a lemonade, he could also perceive the lemon taste on his tongue. I answered him, ‘imagination can be so strong that someone who has no lemonade in front of him, could perhaps feel the taste on his tongue through the lively imagination of a lemonade. But I would like to see, if someone has ever quenched his thirst with an imaginary lemonade only. Then the criterion begins to become more real. Thus it is also with the inner development of a human being. Not only does he learn to know a new soul-life, new concepts, but in his soul he collides with another world and knows: you are now facing a world that you can describe just as you can describe the outside world. This is not mere speculation, which could be compared with a thought development only, instead it is about the forming of new organs of perception and the unlocking of new worlds that truly stand before us just as real as our external, physical world.

What has been hinted at today is that contemporary circumstances made it necessary to point out that spiritual research is possible. This is not to say that everyone should immediately become a spiritual researcher. For it must always be emphasised that when a human being with a healthy sense of truth and unprejudiced logic allows the information from Spiritual Science to approach him—even if he himself is not able to look into the spiritual worlds—yet all that which arises from such messages can turn into energy and feelings of strength for his soul, even if he at first believes in Haeckelianism or Darwinism. What the spiritual researcher has to say, is suitable to speak more and more to man’s healthy sense of truth, all the more so, as it is connected to the deepest interests of every human being. There may be people who do not consider it necessary for their salvation to know how amphibians and mammals relate to each other, or something like this. But all people must warm up to what can be said on the sure basis of spiritual research: that the soul belongs to the sphere of eternity—insofar as it belongs to the spiritual world, descends at birth into the sensory existence and enters again into the spiritual realm through the gate of death. It has to be for all human beings of profound interest, that the strength, which sinks more and more into the soul, is of a quality that the soul can gain certainty from it to stand in its place in life. A soul that does not know what it is and what it wants, what the essence of its nature is, can become hopeless, can ultimately despair and feel dreary and desolate. Yet a soul that allows itself to be filled by the spiritual achievements of Spiritual Science cannot remain empty and desolate if only it does not accept the messages of Spiritual Science as dogmas, but as a living life that streams through our soul and warms it. This provides comfort for all the suffering in life, when we are being led upwards from all temporal suffering to that which can become comfort for the soul from the share of the temporal in the eternal. In short: Spiritual Science can give man what he needs today in the loneliest and most work-intensive hours of his life due to the intensified circumstances of our time —or, if the strength would want to leave him, Spiritual Science can give him what he needs to look into the future and go energetically towards it.

Hence, Spiritual Science—as it arises from spiritual research, from those who want to undertake steps into the spiritual world—can forever confirm what we want to summarise in a few words that express with sensitivity the characteristics of the path into the spiritual world and its significance for the people of the present. What we want to summarise in this way is not supposed to be a contemplation on the theories of life, but one on remedies, means of strengths, tonics for life:

The Spirit World remains shut to you
Unaware of the spirit in yourself
That shines in your soul
And can uphold light for you
In world depths, on world heights! 9Poem translated by Norbert Mulholland.

Wie erlangt Man Erkenntnis der Geistigen Welt?

Bevor mit dem heutigen Thema von mir begonnen werden soll, möchte ich darauf aufmerksam machen, daß diese heutigen Auseinandersetzungen der Anfang sein werden einer ganzen Reihe von solchen Auseinandersetzungen, und daß im Grunde genommen alle nächstfolgenden Themen für diesen Winter genau denselben Titel tragen könnten wie das heutige Thema. Es wird in Anlehnung an die verschiedensten Erscheinungen des menschlichen Lebens und des wissenschaftlichen Lebens, an die verschiedensten KulturPersönlichkeiten der Menschheit überhaupt im Laufe der nächsten Vorträge zur Erörterung kommen der Weg, den der Mensch zu gehen hat, wenn er zur Erkenntnis der geistigen Welt kommen will.

Gestatten Sie mir — obwohl dieses Thema, diese Betrachtung, sozusagen in die Region des Allerunpersönlichsten, des Objektiv-Geisteswissenschaftlichen führen soll —, daß ich trotzdem in der Einleitung von etwas Persönlichem ausgehe, denn der Weg in die geistige Welt ist ja ein solcher, der durch das Persönlichste ins Unpersönliche führen muß. Daher wird trotz des Unpersönlichen das Persönliche oftmals sinnbildliches Kennzeichen für diesen Weg sein, und man erlangt so auch die Möglichkeit, auf mancherlei Bedeutsames gerade dadurch hinzuweisen, daß man gewissermaßen von dem intimeren unmittelbaren Erleben ausgeht. Dem Betrachter der geistigen Welten wird mancherlei im Leben sinnbildlich wichtiger sein, als es zunächst erscheinen kann. Manches, was vielleicht sonst vor dem Menschenblicke vorübergehen kann, ohne von der Aufmerksamkeit besonders gestreift zu werden, kann dem tief bedeutsam erscheinen, der sich intensiv mit einer solchen Betrachtung befassen will, wie sie auch den heutigen Auseinandersetzungen zugrunde liegen soll. Und ich kann sagen: es gehört das Folgende — was Ihnen zunächst wie eine Kleinigkeit des Lebens erscheinen wird — für mich zu den mancherlei unvergeßlichen Dingen, die mir auf meinem Lebensweg auf der einen Seite kennzeichneten die Sehnsucht der Menschen unserer Gegenwart wirklich hinauf nach der geistigen Welt, auf der anderen Seite aber doch die mehr oder weniger eingestandene Unmöglichkeit, mit den Mitteln, die nicht nur die Gegenwart, die sogar die letzten Jahrhunderte geben, soweit sie äußerlich dem Menschen erreichbar sind, irgendwie einen Zugang in die geistige Welt zu erlangen.

Ich saß einmal in der traulichen Wohnung von Herman Grimm. Diejenigen von Ihnen, welche mit dem deutschen Geistesleben ein wenig bekannt sind, werden mit dem Namen Herman Grimm einiges verbinden. Sie werden vielleicht den geistvollen, bedeutenden Biographen Michelangelos und Raffaels kennen und vielleicht auch wissen, wie gewissermaßen die Summe der Bildung unserer Zeit wenigstens Mitteleuropas oder — sagen wir noch enger — Deutschlands in der Seele Herman Grimms vereinigt war. Bei einem Gespräch mit Herman Grimm über den ihm ja so nahestehenden Goethe und über Goethes Weltanschauung fiel dasjenige, was eine Kleinigkeit ist, vor, was eben zu den unvergeßlichsten Dingen meines Lebensweges gehört. Bei einer Bemerkung, die ich machte — wir werden nachher sehen, wie gerade in bezug auf den Aufstieg des Menschen in die geistige Welt diese Bemerkung eine Bedeutung haben kann —, antwortete Herman Grimm mit einer ablehnenden Bewegung der linken Hand. Was in dieser Handbewegung Jag, das ist es, was ich gewissermaßen zu den unvergeßJichen Erlebnissen meines Lebensweges rechne. Es sollte sich darum handeln, in Anlehnung an Goethe davon zu sprechen, wie Goethe in seiner Art — wir werden noch im Laufe dieser Vorträge den Weg Goethes in die geistige Welt zu besprechen haben — diesen Weg in die geistige Welt finden wollte. Herman Grimm folgte gern den Wegen Goethes in die geistige Welt — aber auf seine Art. Es lag ihm völlig fern, in einer solchen Art auf Goethe einzugehen, daß man etwa Goethe als den Repräsentanten eines Menschen betrachtet, der wirklich — auch als Künstler — aus der geistigen Welt herunterholt geistige Realitäten, um sie in seinen Kunstwerken zu verkörpern. Es lag Herman Grimm viel näher, sich zu sagen: Ach, in diese geistige Welt können wir mit den Mitteln, die wir heute als Menschen haben, doch nur hinaufgelangen durch die Phantasie. Die Phantasie bietet zwar Dinge, die schön, groß, gewaltig sind und das menschliche Herz mit Wärme erfüllen können; aber Erkenntnis, festbegründete Erkenntnis, das war etwas, was Herman Grimm, der so intime Betrachter Goethes, auch bei Goethe nicht finden wollte. Und als ich davon sprach, daß Goethes ganze Grundwesenheit darauf fußte, daß er das Wahre im Schönen, in der Kunst verkörpern wollte, und dann zu zeigen versuchte, daß es doch Wege gebe außerhalb der Phantasie, Wege in die geistige Welt, die auf festeren Grund und Boden führen als die Phantasie, da war es nicht etwa die Ablehnung desjenigen, der nicht gern einen solchen Weg gehen möchte. Nicht die Ablehnung eines solchen Weges war es, was Herman Grimm in diese Handbewegung legte, sondern in der Art, die nur der kennt, der ihn genauer verstand, legte er in die Handbewegung ungefähr das Folgende: Es mag wohl einen solchen Weg geben, aber wir Menschen können uns doch nicht berufen fühlen, irgend etwas darüber auszumachen!

Wie gesagt, ich möchte das nicht etwa in aufdringlicher Weise als eine persönliche Angelegenheit hier vorbringen, sondern mir scheint, daß in einer solchen Geste sich die Stellung gerade der besten Menschen unseres Zeitalters gegenüber der geistigen Welt verkörpert. Denn ich hatte später einmal ein langes Gespräch mit demselben Herman Grimm bei einem Wege, der uns beide von Weimar nach Tiefurt führte, in dem er auseinandersetzte, wie er sich ganz befreit habe von aller bloß materialistischen Auffassung des Weltgeschehens, von der Auffassung, daß der Geist des Menschen in den aufeinanderfolgenden Epochen aus sich selbst hervorbringe, was des Menschen eigentlichen seelischen Reichtum ausmacht. In einem großen Plan, der ja — wie die wissen, die sich mit Herman Grimm beschäftigt haben — nicht mehr in einem Werke, das er vorhatte, zur Ausführung gekommen ist, sprach Herman Grimm damals davon, daß er beabsichtige, eine «Geschichte der deutschen Phantasie» zu schreiben. Er hatte im Auge das Walten der Phantasie wie einer Göttin in den geistigen Welten, die das, was die Menschen zum Heile des Weltenfortschrittes schaffen, aus sich hervorbringt. Ich möchte sagen: in jener lieblichen Gegend zwischen Weimar und Tiefurt hatte ich bei diesen Worten eines Menschen, den ich immerhin als einen der größten Geister unserer Zeit anerkenne, ein Gefühl, das ich etwa in folgende Worte kleiden möchte.

Es sagen sich heute viele Menschen: Tief unbefriedigt muß man sein bei alledem, was die äußere Wissenschaft über die Quellen des Lebens zu sagen vermag, über das Geheimnis des Daseins, über die Welträtsel; aber es fehlt die Möglichkeit, kraftvoll in eine andere Welt hineinzutreten. Es fehlt die Intensität des Erkenntnis-Willens, als etwas anderes diese Welt des geistigen Lebens zu erkennen, denn als etwas, was der Mensch sich in seiner Phantasie ausbildet. Gar mancher geht eben gern in dieses Reich der Phantasie, weil es für ihn das einzige geistige Reich ist. Ich wußte mich gerade gegenüber dieser Persönlichkeit zu erinnern — dieser Weg nach Tiefurt liegt vielleicht jetzt siebzehn Jahre zurück —, daß vor jetzt mehr als dreißig Jahren einmal — neben vielem, vielem, was Herman Grimm schon durch seine Schriften an Eindruck auf mich gemacht hatte — mein Blick auf jene Stelle fiel innerhalb seiner «Goethe-Vorlesungen», die er im Winter 1874/75 in Berlin gehalten hat, wo er in Anlehnung an Goethe von jenem Eindrucke spricht, den die rein äußerliche, geistentblößte Naturbetrachtung auf einen solchen Geist machen muß, wie der seinige es ist. Ebenso war es schon damals vor dreißig Jahren, als mir Herman Grimm als der Typus eines Menschen erschien, den alle Gefühle und Empfindungen hinaufdrängen in die geistige Welt, der aber die geistige Welt nicht in einer Realität finden kann, sondern nur in der Phantasie, in ihrem Walten und Wirken, und der auf der andern Seite — gerade weil er so war - nicht zugeben wollte, daß Goethe selber in einem anderen als bloß im Reiche der Phantasie, nämlich im Reiche der geistigen Realität, die Quellen und Rätsel des Daseins suchte.

Eine Stelle ist es, die heute am Ausgangspunkte unserer Betrachtungen auf unsere Seele wirken soll, wo Herman Grimm von etwas spricht, was auch schon von mir angedeutet worden ist als zwar in seiner Bedeutung von der Geisteswissenschaft nicht zu leugnen, was aber doch so, wie es von der äußeren Naturwissenschaft genommen wird oder von jener Weltanschauung, die auf dem festen Boden der Naturwissenschaft stehen will, nicht nur für die Empfindung und für das Gefühl, sondern für eine wirklich sich selbst verstehende Erkenntnis eine Unmöglichkeit bedeutet. Ich meine die Kant-Laplacesche Theorie, die unser Sonnensystem so erklärt, als wenn es nur aus leblosen, unorganischen Stoffen und Kräften bestünde und sich aus solchen herausgeballt hätte aus einer riesigen Gaskugel. Ich darf aus Herman Grimms Goethe-Vorlesungen die Stelle vorJesen, welche Ihnen zeigt, was diese heute so faszinierende, so tiefen Eindruck machende Weltanschauung für einen Geist wie Herman Grimm zu bedeuten hatte.

«Allein, sosehr Goethe dem Verstande hier verbietet, mehr für Wahrheit zu nehmen, als sich in der Tat mit den fünf Fingern der Hand greifen lasse, um so voller gibt er der Phantasie des Dichters das Recht, aus unbewußter, träumender Kraft Bilder dessen zu schaffen, was der Geist zu erblicken wünscht. Nur daß er mit Schärfe die Grenze beider Tätigkeiten aufrecht hält. Längst hatte, in seinen Jugendzeiten schon, die große Laplace-Kantsche Phantasie von der Entstehung und dem einstigen Untergang der Erdkugel Platz gegriffen. Aus dem in sich rotierenden Weltnebel — die Kinder bringen es bereits aus der Schule mit — formt sich der zentrale Gastropfen, aus dem hernach die Erde wird, und macht, als erstarrende Kugel, in unfaßbaren Zeiträumen alle Phasen, die Episode der Bewohnung durch das Menschengeschlecht mit einbegriffen, durch, um endlich als ausgebrannte Schlacke in die Sonne zurückzustürzen: ein langer, aber dem Publikum völlig begreiflicher Prozeß, für dessen Zustandekommen es nun weiter keines äußeren Eingreifens mehr bedarf als der Bemühung irgendeiner außenstehenden Kraft, die Sonne in gleicher Heiztemperatur zu erhalten.

Es kann keine fruchtlosere Perspektive für die Zukunft gedacht werden als die, welche uns in dieser Erwartung als wissenschaftlich notwendig heute aufgedrängt werden soll. Ein Aasknochen, um den ein hungriger Hund einen Umweg machte, wäre ein erfrischendes appetitliches Stück im Vergleiche zu diesem letzten Schöpfungsexkrement, als welches unsere Erde schließlich der Sonne wieder anheimfiele, und es ist die Wißbegier, mit der unsere Generation dergleichen aufnimmt und zu glauben vermeint, ein Zeichen kranker Phantasie, die als ein historisches Zeitphänomen zu erklären, die Gelehrten zukünftiger Epochen einmal viel Scharfsinn aufwenden werden.»

Es war mir notwendig, auf eine solche Stelle hinzuweisen, weil es im Grunde genommen heute wenig geschieht. Heute, wo so faszinierend die Vorstellungen jener Weltanschauungen wirken, die scheinbar so fest auf dem Boden der Naturwissenschaft stehen, wird wenig darauf hingewiesen, daß es immerhin Geister gibt, die tief mit dem Kulturleben unserer Zeit zusammenhängen und dennoch in einer solchen Art aus ihrem ganzen Seelengepräge heraus sich zu dem verhalten, wovon jetzt unzählige Menschen sagen: Es ist selbstverständlich, daß die Dinge so sind, und es ist jeder eigentlich ein Tropf, der nicht zugeben wird, daß die Dinge so sind! Ja, wir sehen heute sehr viele Menschen schon, welche die tiefste Sehnsucht haben eine Verbindungsbrücke zu schlagen zwischen der Seele des Menschen und der geistigen Welt. Aber wir sehen auf der anderen Seite außerhalb derjenigen Kreise, die sich tiefer mit dem befassen, was wir Geisteswissenschaft nennen, nur wenige sich mit den Mitteln beschäftigen, die diese Menschenseele zu dem hinführen könnten, was man immerhin nennen könnte das Land ihrer Sehnsucht.

Wenn wir deshalb heute von den Wegen sprechen, welche den Menschen in die geistige Welt führen sollen, und gewissermaßen so sprechen, daß das Gesprochene nicht für einen engen Kreis gelten soll, sondern sich an alle die richtet, welche mit der heutigen Zeitbildung ausgerüstet sind, dann stoßen wir in einer gewissen Beziehung noch sehr auf Widerstand. Da kann es nicht nur sein, daß dasjenige, was vorgebracht wird, als Träumerei und Phantasterei angesehen wird, sondern es kann auch sehr leicht sein, daß das Vorgebrachte sehr viele Menschen der Gegenwart eigentlich ärgert, ihnen etwas Ärgerliches ist, weil es so sehr von dem abweicht, was — wie die suggestiven und faszinierenden Vorstellungen derer, die sich für die Gebildetsten halten — für die weitesten Kreise heute gilt.

Es ist schon in dem ersten Vortrage angedeutet worden, daß das Hinaufschreiten in die geistige Welt im Grunde genommen eine intime Angelegenheit der Seele ist, und daß es recht sehr dem widerspricht, was sowohl in populären wie auch in wissenschaftlichen Kreisen heute gang und gäbe ist für das Vorstellungs- und Empfindungsleben. Namentlich der Wissenschaftler ist heute gleich bei der Hand mit der Forderung: Was wissenschaftlich gelten soll, das muß sich zu jeder Zeit und für jeden Menschen beweisen lassen, und er weist dann wohl hin auf sein äußeres Experiment, das man zu jeder Zeit, vor jedem Menschen beweisen kann. Es ist selbstverständlich, daß dieser Forderung die Geisteswissenschaft nicht genügen kann. — Wir werden gleich sehen, warum nicht. — Daher wird die Geisteswissenschaft — das heißt jene Wissenschaft, die vom Geist nicht als einer Summe von abstrakten Begriffen und Ideen spricht, sondern als von erwas Realem und von wirklichen Wesenheiten — schon gegen die methodische Forderung verstoßen müssen, welche die Wissenschaft und die Weltanschauungen heute so leicht aufstellen: Für jeden überall und zu jeder Zeit beweisbar zu sein. In populären Kreisen stößt die Geisteswissenschaft schon aus dem Grunde sehr häufig auf Widerstand, weil nun einmal in unserer Zeit — selbst da, wo man die Sehnsucht in sich trägt in die geistige Welt hinaufzusteigen — die Empfindungen und Gefühle von materialistischer Anschauungsart durchsetzt und durchdrungen sind. Man kann beim besten Willen nicht anders, selbst wenn man sich nach der geistigen Welt sehnt, als doch den Geist in irgendeiner Beziehung wieder materiell zu denken, oder wenigstens das Hinaufschreiten in die geistige Welt sich an Materielles geknüpft zu denken. Daher wird es den meisten Menschen lieber sein, wenn man ihnen von rein äußeren Mitteln redet, zum Beispiel was sie essen und trinken oder nicht essen und trinken sollen, oder was sie sonst rein äußerlich in der materiellen Welt unternehmen sollen. Das wird ihnen viel lieber sein, als wenn man von ihnen verlangt, daß sie intime Entwickelungsmomente in ihre Seele einführen. Aber um solches gerade handelt es sich beim Hinaufsteigen in die geistige Welt.

Nun wollen wir — ganz in dem Sinne, wie die Geisteswissenschaft das selbst ansieht — einmal versuchen kurz zu skizzieren, wie dieser Aufstieg der Menschenseele in die geistige Welt stattfinden kann. Der Ausgangspunkt muß ja immer von dem genommen werden, worin der Mensch zunächst lebt. Nun lebt der Mensch, wie er in unserer Gegenwart in die Welt hineingestellt ist, ganz und gar fest in der äußeren, sinnlichen Welt. Man versuche es nur einmal sich klarzumachen, wieviel noch in dieser Menschenseele übrigbleibt, wenn man den Blick von dem abwendet, was die äußeren Sinneseindrücke der physischen Welt an Vorstellungen in uns entzündet haben, was durch die äußeren, physischen Erlebnisse, durch Augen, Ohren und die anderen Sinne in uns hereingekommen ist, was auch durch Augen und Ohren in uns an Leiden und Freuden, Lust und Schmerz angeregt wird, und was dann unser Verstand sich kombiniert hat aus diesen Eindrücken der Sinneswelt. Man versuche das alles aus der Seele auszutilgen, sich wegzudenken, und überlege einmal, was dann zurückbleiben würde. Die Menschen, die es ehrlich mit dieser einfachen Selbstbeobachtung nehmen können, werden sehen, daß äußerst wenig gerade beim Gegenwartsmenschen in der Seele zurückbleibt. Das aber ist es, daß zunächst der Aufstieg in die geistige Welt nicht ausgehen kann von dem, was uns von der äußeren Sinneswelt gegeben ist, sondern er muß so unternommen werden, daß der Mensch in seiner Seele Kräfte entwickelt, die für gewöhnlich in dieser Seele schlummern. Es ist sozusagen ein Grundelement für alle Möglichkeiten des Aufstieges in die geistige Welt, daß der Mensch gewahr werde, daß er innerlich entwickelungsfähig ist, daß in ihm noch etwas anderes liegt als das, was er zunächst mit seinem Bewußtsein überschaut.

Es ist das wirklich schon für viele Menschen heute eine ärgerliche Vorstellung, denn — nehmen wir gleich einen ganz besonderen Menschen der heutigen Bildung — was tut denn zum Beispiel der heutige Philosoph, wenn es sich ihm darum handelt, die ganze Bedeutung und das Wesen der Erkenntnis festzustellen? Ein solcher wird sagen: Ich will einmal versuchen, wie weit wir mit unserem Denken, mit unseren Seelenkräften als Menschen überhaupt kommen können, was wir erfassen können von der Welt. Da sucht er auf seine Art — je nachdem es ihm augenblicklich möglich ist — ein Weltbild zu erfassen und vor sich hinzustellen, und er wird dann in der Regel sagen: Das andere können wir eben nicht wissen, das liegt jenseits der Grenzen menschlicher Erkenntnis! — Es ist überhaupt die verbreitetste Redensart, die man in der heutigen Literatur finden kann: Das können wir nicht wissen!

Nun gibt es aber einen anderen Standpunkt, der ganz anders zu Werke geht als der eben gekennzeichnete, indem er sagt: Gewiß, mit den Kräften, die ich jetzt in meiner Seele habe, die vielleicht jetzt die normalen menschlichen Seelenkräfte sein mögen, kann ich dieses oder jenes erkennen, aber hier in der Seele ist ein entwickelungsfähiges Wesen. Diese Seele hat vielleicht Kräfte in sich, die ich erst aus ihr herausholen muß. Ich muß sie erst gewisse Wege führen, muß sie über den jetzigen Standpunkt hinausführen, dann will ich einmal sehen, ob nicht ich schuld gewesen bin, wenn ich gesagt habe, dies oder jenes liege jenseits der Grenze unserer Erkenntnis. Vielleicht brauche ich nur etwas weiterzugehen in der Entwickelung meiner Seele, dann erweitern sich die Grenzen, und ich kann tiefer in die Dinge hineindringen.

Mit Logik nimmt man es ja, wenn man darüber urteilen will, nicht immer ganz genau, sonst würde man sagen: Was wir erkennen, hängt ab von unseren Organen. Deshalb kann zum Beispiel der Blindgeborene nicht über Farben urteilen, er kann nur darüber urteilen, wenn er durch eine glückliche Operation sein Sehvermögen bekommen hat. Ebenso könnte es sein — ich will hier nicht von einem «sechsten Sinn» sprechen, sondern von etwas, was rein geistig aus der Seele herausgeholt werden kann —, daß es möglich wäre, daß Geistesaugen oder Geistesohren aus unserer Seele herausgeholt werden. Dann könnte für uns das große Ereignis eintreten, das auf niederer Stufe eintritt, wenn der Blindgeborene so glücklich ist, operiert zu werden, so daß dann für uns die Vermutung zunächst Wahrheit werden könnte: Es gibt um uns eine geistige Welt, aber um hineinzuschauen, müssen wir erst die Organe in uns erweckt haben.Das wäre das einzig Logische. Aber mitLogik nimmt man es — wie gesagt — nicht immer genau, denn in unserer Zeit haben die Menschen ganz andere Bedürfnisse, wenn sie von einer geistigen Welt hören, als sich hineinzufinden in diese geistige Welt. Ich habe schon einmal erzählt, daß in einer süddeutschen Stadt, als ich dort einmal einen Vortrag zu halten hatte, ein braver Mensch, der Feuilletons schreibt, sein Feuilleton anfing mit den Worten: «An der Theosophie ist das, was einem am meisten in die Augen fällt, ihre Unverständlichkeit.» Das wollen wir dem Manne gern glauben,daß dieTheosophie für ihn als hervorstechendsteEigenschaft die Unverständlichkeit hat. Aber ist das irgendwie ein Kriterium? Man übertrage dieses Beispiel einmal auf die Mathematik, daß jemand von ihr sagen würde: Was mir an der Mathematik am meisten in die Augen fällt, ist ihre Unverständlichkeit. Dann wird jeder sagen: Gewiß, das kann sein; dann möge er aber eben so gut sein, wenn er Feuilletons schreiben will, erst etwas zu lernen! — Oft wäre es besser, das, was für ein besonderes Gebiet gilt, auf ein anderes sachgemäß zu übertragen. So bleibt also nichts anderes übrig, als daß die Menschen leugnen — das können sie dann nur durch einen Machtspruch —, es gäbe eine Entwickelung der Seele — nämlich wenn sie es ablehnen, eine durchzumachen —, oder aber, daß sie sich hineinbegeben in die Entwickelung der Seele. Dann wird die geistige Welt für sie zur Beobachtung, zur Realität, zur Wahrheit. Aber um hinaufzugelangen in die geistige Welt, muß die Seele fähig werden — nicht für das physische Leben, sondern für die Erkenntnis der geistigen Welt —, sich in einer gewissen Beziehung der Gestalt gegenüber, welche sie zunächst hat, vollständig umzuwandeln, in einer gewissen Beziehung ein anderes Wesen zu werden.

Das kann uns schon aufmerksam machen, was hier oft und oft betont worden ist, daß der, welcher den Drang hat hinaufzusteigen in die geistige Welt, vor allen Dingen sich immer wieder und wieder darüber klar sein muß, ob er hier in dieser Welt physischer Wirklichkeit zunächst festen Boden gefaßt hat, ob er imstande ist, hier festzustehen. Denn für alle Verhältnisse, die sich in der physischen Welt abspielen, müssen wir Sicherheit, Willenskraft und Empfindungsvermögen haben, dürfen nicht den Boden unter den Füßen verlieren, wenn wir hinaufsteigen wollen von dieser Welt in die geistige. Das ist eine Vorstufe: alles zu tun, was unseren Charakter dahin führen kann, festzustehen in der physischen Welt. Alsdann kommt es darauf an, für die geistige Welt die Seele zu einem andern Fühlen und andern Wollen zu bringen, als Fühlen und Wollen in der Seele gewöhnlich sind. Es muß gewissermaßen unsere Seele innerlich ein anderer Fühlens- und Wollensorganismus werden, als sie im normalen Leben ist. Da kommen wir darauf, was die Geisteswissenschaft auf der einen Seite zunächst wirklich in eine Art von Gegensatz bringen kann zu dem, was heute als «Wissenschaft» anerkannt wird, was die Geisteswissenschaft aber auf der andern Seite doch wieder unmittelbar neben diese Wissenschaft mit derselben Gültigkeit hinstellt, welche die äußere Wissenschaft hat. Wenn man sagt, daß alles, was Wissenschaft sein soll, zu jeder Zeit und für jeden Menschen beweisbar sein muß, so meint man, daß das, was man als Wissenschaften betrachtet, nicht abhängen darf von unserer Subjektivität, von unsern subjektiven Gefühlen, von dem, was wir als irgendwelche Willensentschlüsse, Willensimpulse, Gefühle und Empfindungen nur individuell in uns tragen. Nun muß aber zunächst der, der hinaufsteigen will in die geistige Welt, den Umweg durch das Innere seiner Seele nehmen, muß seine Seele umorganisieren, muß zunächst den Blick völlig abwenden von dem, was außen in der physischen Welr ist. Der Mensch wendet ja im normalen Leben den Blick von dem, was innerhalb der physischen Welt ist, nur dann ab, wenn er schläft; dann läßt er durch seine Augen, Ohren und durch die ganze Organisation seiner Sinne nichts in seine Seele herein, aber dafür wird er dann auch bewußtlos und ist nicht imstande, in einer geistigen Welt bewußt zu leben. Es ist nun gesagt worden, daß es zu den Grundelementen der geistigen Erkenntnis für den Menschen gehört, in sich selber die Möglichkeit zu finden, über sich hinauszugehen. Das heißt aber nichts anderes, als in sich selber zunächst den Geist wirksam zu machen. Wir kennen alle im heutigen normalen Menschenleben nur ein Sichabwenden von der physischen Welt, wenn wir in die Bewußtlosigkeit des Schlafes eingehen. Nun hat uns die Betrachtung über das «Wesen des Schlafes» gezeigt, wie der Mensch da in einer realen geistigen Welt ist, wenn er auch nichts davon weiß. Denn es wäre absurd, zu glauben, daß das, was des Menschen Seelen- und Geisteszentrum ist, des Abends verschwindet und des Morgens wieder neu entstünde; nein, es überdauert real die Zustände vom Einschlafen bis zum Aufwachen. Aber was für den heutigen normalen Menschen die innerliche Kraft ist, sich bewußt zu sein — auch dann, wenn keine Anregung für das Bewußtsein durch die Eindrücke der Sinne oder durch die Arbeit des Verstandes hereinfließt —, das fehlt im Schlafe. Das Seelenleben ist so herabgestimmt im Schlafe, daß der Mensch nicht fähig ist, dasjenige anzufeuern und aufzuwecken, was die Seele sich selber innerlich erleben läßt. Wenn der Mensch wieder aufwacht, dringen von außen die Erlebnisse herein, und weil dem Menschen auf diese Weise ein Seeleninhalt geschenkt wird, wird er sich seiner an diesem Seeleninhalt bewußt. Er kann seiner nicht bewußt werden, wenn er nicht angeregt wird von außen. Dazu ist die Kraft des Menschen sonst zu schwach, wenn er im Schlafe sich selbst überlassen ist. Der Hinaufstieg in die geistige Welt bedeutet also die Anfachung solcher Kräfte in unserer Seele, welche die Seele fähig machen, gleichsam in sich selber real bewußt zu leben, wenn sie gegenüber der äußeren Welt so wird, wie sonst der Mensch im Schlafe ist. Also im Grunde genommen fordert zunächst das Hinaufsteigen in die geistigen Welten eine Anfeuerung innerlicher Energien, ein Herausholen von Kräften, die sonst schlafen, gleichsam gelähmt sind in der Seele, so daß der Mensch sie überhaupt nicht handhaben kann. Alle diejenigen intimen Erlebnisse, die der Geistes£forscher in seiner Seele durchzumachen hat, gehen zuletzt nach dem Ziele hin, das eben jetzt gekennzeichnet worden ist. Und ich möchte Ihnen heute einiges zusammenfassend erzählen über den Weg in die geistige Welt hinauf. Ausführlich sind diese Dinge dargestellt in ihren Elementen — sozusagen in ihren Anfangsgründen — in dem Buche, das von mir unter dem Titel erschienen ist: «Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?». Aber ich will mich heute nicht gerade dadurch wiederholen, daß ich Ihnen einen Auszug aus diesem Buche gebe, sondern ich will von einer andern Seite her darstellen, was die Seele mit sich machen muß, um in die geistige Welt hinaufzukommen. Wer sich tiefer dafür interessiert, kann die Einzelheiten in dem genannten Buche nachlesen. Nur darf niemand glauben, daß das, was dort ausführlich gesagt worden ist, hier so dargestellt werden kann, wenn man es kurz zusammenfaßt, daß man dieselben Worte und Sätze gebrauchen kann. Die das Buch kennen, werden es also nicht so finden, daß es eine Zusammenfassung des dort Gesagten ist, sondern daß es doch von einer andern Seite her die Sache charakterisiert.

Außerordentlich wichtig ist es, daß für den Geistesforscher, der die Schritte in die geistige Welt lenken will, vieles von dem, was für die anderen Menschen direkt zu einem Erkennen und Ziel führt, einfach Erziehungsmittel wird, intimes Erziehungsmittel der Seele. Lassen Sie mich das an einem Beispiel aussprechen. Ich habe vor vielen Jahren ein Buch geschrieben: «Die Philosophie der Freiheit». — Es ist augenblicklich nicht zu haben, weil es seit Jahren vergriffen ist, wird aber hoffentlich in zweiter Auflage in nächster Zeit erscheinen. — Diese «Philosophie der Freiheit» ist so gefaßt, daß sie sich doch ganz unterscheidet von anderen philosophischen Büchern der Gegenwart, welche mehr oder weniger durch das, was in ihnen steht, das Ziel haben, sozusagen etwas zu geben, wie es in der Welt ausschaut oder ausschauen soll nach den Vorstellungen der Verfasser. Das ist nicht das nächste Ziel dieses Buches, sondern es soll dem, der sich auf die Gedanken einläßt, die dort stehen, eine Art Gedankentrainierung geben, so daß die Art des Denkens, die besondere Art, sich diesen Gedanken hinzugeben, eine solche ist, welche die Empfindungen und Gefühle der Seele in Bewegung bringt — etwa wie man beim Turnen, wenn ich es damit vergleichen darf, die Glieder in Bewegung bringt. Was sonst bloß Erkenntnismittel ist, das ist in diesem Buche zugleich geistig-seelisches Selbsterziehungsmittel. Das ist außerordentlich wichtig. Daher kommt es bei diesem Buche — was selbstverständlich für viele Philosophen der Gegenwart ärgerlich ist, die mit Philosophie etwas ganz anderes verbinden als das, was den Menschen ein Stück weiterbringen kann, denn er soll womöglich so bleiben, wie das normale Erkenntnisvermögen dem Menschen eingeboren ist —, es kommt bei diesem Buche daher nicht so sehr darauf an, ob man über das oder jenes streiten kann, ob etwas so oder so aufgefaßt werden kann, sondern darauf, daß wirklich die Gedanken, die da zu einem Organismus verbunden sind, unsere Seele schulen können, sie ein Stück weiterbringen können.

So ist es auch in meinem Buche «Wahrheit und Wissenschaft». Und so ist es mit vielem, was zunächst Grundelemente sein sollen, um die Seele zu trainieren, in die geistige Welt hinaufzukommen. Mathematik, Geometrie, sie lehren den Menschen die Kenntnis von den Dreiecken, Vierecken und anderen Figuren. Aber warum lehren sie das alles? Weil er dadurch Kenntnis bekommen soll, wie die Dinge im Raume sind, welchen Gesetzen sie unterliegen und so weiter. Mit ähnlichen Figuren als Sinnbildern arbeitet im Grunde auch das geistige Hinaufsteigen in die höheren Welten. Es legt dem Schüler zum Beispiel das Symbol des Dreieckes, des Viereckes oder andere symbolische Figuren vor, aber nicht, daß er durch sie unmittelbare Kenntnisse erlangt, die kann er ja auch so erlangen, sondern daß er in ihnen die Möglichkeit erhält, seine geistigen Fähigkeiten so zu schulen, daß der Geist an dem, was sich ihm als Eindruck ergibt aus diesen Sinnbildern, hinaufsteigt in eine höhere Welt. Also um Gedankenschulung oder — mißverstehen Sie es nicht — um Gedankenturnen handelt es sich dabei. Deshalb wird vieles von dem, was trockene äußere Wissenschaft, trockene äußere Philosophie ist, was Mathematik oder Geometrie ist, für die geistige Schulung lebendiges Sinnbild, das uns in die geistige Welt hinaufführt. Wenn wir dies auf unsere Seele haben wirken lassen, dann lernen wir verstehen, was im Grunde genommen keine äußere Wissenschaft versteht, daß die alten Pythagoräer unter dem Einflusse ihres großen Lehrers Pythagoras von dem Weltall als bestehend aus Zahlen gesprochen haben, weil sie die inneren Gesetzmäßigkeiten der Zahlen ins Auge faßten. Nun betrachten wir, wie uns die Zahlen in der Welt überall entgegentreten. Es ist ja nichts leichter, als Geisteswissenschaft oder Anthroposophie zu widerlegen, denn man wird leicht von einem sehr erhaben sich dünkenden Standpunkte sagen können: Da kommen diese Geisteswissenschaftler aus ihrem mystischen Dunkel mit der ZahJlensymbolik wieder hervor, sagen in den Zahlen liege eine innere Gesetzmäßigkeit, und daß man zum Beispiel die wahre Grundlage der menschlichen Wesenheit nach der Siebenzahl betrachten müsse. — So etwas aber meinten auch Pythagoras und seine Schüler, wenn sie von der inneren Gesetzmäßigkeit der Zahlen sprachen. Wenn wir jene wunderbaren Zusammenhänge, die in den Beziehungen der Zahlen liegen, auf den Geist wirken lassen, können wir ihn dadurch so trainieren, daß er aufwacht, wo er sonst schläft, und stärkere Kräfte in sich entwickelt, um hineinzudringen in die geistige Welt.

Also es ist eine Schulung durch solche andere Wissenschaft. Das ist es auch, was man eigentlich nennt das Studium desjenigen, der in die geistige Welt eindringen will. Und nach und nach wird für einen solchen alles, was für die anderen Menschen derbe Wirklichkeit ist, mehr oder weniger zum äußeren Sinnbild, zum Symbol. Wenn der Mensch imstande ist, diese Sinnbilder auf sich wirken zu lassen, so macht er dadurch nicht nur seinen Geist frei von der äußeren, physischen Welt, sondern durchdringt ihn auch mit starken Kräften, so daß sich die Seele ihrer bewußt sein kann, wenn keine äußere Anregung da ist. Ich habe schon erwähnt, daß der Mensch, wenn er ein solches Symbol, wie es das Rosenkreuz ist, auf sich wirken läßt, einen Impuls haben kann, um hinaufzusteigen in die geistige Welt. Unter dem Rosenkreuz stellen wir uns ein einfaches schwarzes Kreuz vor, an das sich kreisförmig am Schnittpunkt der Balken sieben rote Rosen angliedern.

Was soll es uns sagen? Derjenige läßt es richtig auf seine Seele wirken, der sich dabei vorstellt: Ich betrachte zum Beispiel eine Pflanze; ich sage von dieser Pflanze, sie ist ein unvollkommenes Wesen, — und stelle daneben einen Menschen, der in seiner Art ein vollkommeneres Wesen ist, aber eben nur in seiner Art. Denn betrachte ich die Pflanze, so muß ich sagen: In ihr habe ich eine materielle Wesenheit vor mir, die nicht durchdrungen ist von Leidenschaften, Trieben, Instinkten, die sie herunterführten von der Höhe, wo sie sonst stehen könnte. Die Pflanze hat die ihr eingeborenen Gesetze, denen folgt sie vom Blatt durch die Blüte bis zur Frucht herauf; so steht sie da trieblos, keusch. Daneben lebt der Mensch, gewiß in seiner Art ein höheres Wesen, aber durchtränkt von Trieben, Instinkten, Leidenschaften, durch die er von seiner strengen Gesetzmäßigkeit abirren kann. Er muß erst etwas in sich überwinden, wenn er ebenso seinen inneren Gesetzen folgen will, wie die Pflanze den ihr eingeborenen Gesetzen folgt. Nun kann sich der Mensch sagen: Der Ausdruck für die Triebe, Instinkte in mir ist das rote Blut. Das kann ich in gewisser Beziehung vergleichen mit dem, was der keusche Pflanzensaft, das Chlorophyll, in der roten Rose ist, und kann sagen: Wenn der Mensch in sich selber so stark geworden ist, daß das rote Blut nicht mehr ein Ausdruck ist für das, was ihn unter sich herunterdrückt, sondern was ihn über sich erhebt, — wenn es der Ausdruck eines so keuschen Wesens ist wie der zum Rot der Rose gewordene Pflanzensaft, oder mit andern Worten: Wenn das Rot der Rose die reine Innerlichkeit ausdrückt, die geläuterte Wesenheit des Menschen in seinem Blut, so habe ich das Ideal dessen vor mir, was der Mensch durch Überwindung der äußeren Natur erreichen kann, die sich mir darstellt unter dem Symbol des schwarzen Kreuzes, des verkohlten Holzes. Und das Rot der Rose symbolisiert das höhere Leben, das erwacht, wenn also das rote Blut zu einem keuschen Ausdruck der über sich selbst hinausgegangenen, geläuterten Trieb-Natur des Menschen geworden ist. Wenn man das Dargestellte nicht eine abstrakte Vorstellung sein läßt, wird es zur lebendig empfundenen Entwickelungsidee. Dann lebt eine ganze Welt von Gefühlen und Empfindungen in uns auf; wir spüren in uns eine Entwickelung von einem unvollkommenen zu einem vollkommeneren Zustand. Wir spüren unter Entwickelung noch etwas ganz anderes als jenes abstrakte Ding, das uns die äußere Wissenschaft im Sinne eines rein äußeren Darwinismus gibt. Da wird Entwickelung etwas, was tief in unser Herz schneidet, was mit Wärme, mit Seelenwärme uns durchzieht, sie wird in uns eine Kraft, die uns trägt und hält. Nur durch solche inneren Erlebnisse kann die Seele starke Kräfte in sich entwickeln, daß sie in ihrem innersten Wesen — in jenem Wesen, das sonst bewußtlos wird, wenn es sich zurückzieht von der äußeren Welt — sich durchleuchten kann mit Bewußtsein.

Es ist natürlich kinderleicht zu sagen: Dann empfehlt ihr ja die Vorstellung von etwas ganz Imaginärem, von etwas ganz Erdachtem. Wert hat aber doch nur das an Vorstellungen, was Abbild ist einer äußeren Vorstellung, und eine Vorstellung von dem Rosenkreuz hat doch kein äußeres Gegenbild! — Darum aber handelt es sich nicht, daß die Vorstellung, durch die wir unsere Seele schulen, ein Abbild einer äußeren Wirklichkeit ist, sondern darum, daß die Vorstellung kräfteweckend für unsere Seele ist und aus der Seele herauslockt, was verborgen in ihr schlummert. Wenn die Menschenseele einem solchen bildlichen Vorstellen hingegeben ist, wenn ihr gewissermaßen alles, was ihr sonst als Realität wert ist, Anlaß wird zu Bildern, die nicht willkürlich aus der Phantasie herausgeholt werden, sondern so an die Realität angelehnt sind, wie jetzt das Symbol des Rosenkreuzes, dann sagen wir: Der Mensch bemüht sich, zur ersten Stufe der Erkenntnis der geistigen Welt hinaufzurücken. — Das ist die Stufe der imaginativen Erkenntnis, die uns hinaufführt über das, was sich unmittelbar nur mit der physischen Welt beschäftigt.

So arbeitet der Mensch, der in die geistige Welt hinaufsteigen will, in seiner Seele mit ganz bestimmten Vorstellungen, mit einer ganz bestimmten Art, die sonst äußere Wirklichkeit auf sich wirken zu lassen. Er arbeitet in dieser Seele selber. Wenn der Mensch in dieser Weise eine Zeitlang gearbeitet hat, steht es so, daß der äußere Wissenschaftler ihm sagen kann: Das hat für dich nur einen subjektiven, nur einen individuellen Wert. Aber der äußere Wissenschaftler weiß nicht, daß es unter einer solchen strengen, gesetzmäßigen Trainierung der Seele eine Stufe innerer Entwickelung gibt, wo für die Seele die Möglichkeit ganz aufhört, subjektive Gefühle und Empfindungen sprechen zu lassen, wo die Seele dort ankommt, wo sie sich sagen muß: Jetzt gehen in mir innerlich Vorstellungen auf, die mir so entgegentreten wie sonst Bäume und Felsen, Flüsse und Berge, Pflanzen und Tiere der äußeren Welt, die so real sind wie sonst nur äußere physische Dinge, und zu denen meine Subjektivität nichts hinzubringen und nichts hinwegnehmen kann.

So ist in der Tat ein Mittelzustand vorhanden für jeden, der in die geistige Welt hinauf will, wo der Mensch der Gefahr unterliegt, daß er sein Subjektives, was nur für ihn gilt, etwa hineintragen kann in die geistige Welt. Aber durch diesen Mittelzustand muß der Mensch durch, und er kommt dann an eine Stufe, wo das, was durch die Seele erlebt wird, ebenso objektiv — für jeden, der dazu die Fähigkeit hat — beweisbar wird wie alle Dinge der äußeren, physischen Wirklichkeit. Denn schließlich gilt ja für die äußere Wissenschaft der Grundsatz: Was wissenschaftlich gelten soll, muß zu jeder Zeit für jedermann beweisbar sein, — auch nur für den, der genügend dazu vorbereitet ist. Oder glauben Sie, daß Sie das Gesetz der «korrespondierenden Siedetemperatur» einem achtjährigen Kinde beibringen können? Ich bezweifle es. Nicht einmal den pythagoräischen Lehrsatz werden Sie ihm beibringen können. Also es ist doch schon an diesen Grundsatz gebunden, daß die menschliche Seele in entsprechender Weise vorbereitet ist, wenn man ihr irgend etwas beweisen will. Und wie man dazu vorbereitet sein muß — obwohl es für jeden Menschen möglich ist —, den pythagoräischen Lehrsatz zu verstehen, so muß man durch eine bestimmte Übung seiner Seele dazu vorbereitet sein, wenn man dieses oder jenes in der geistigen Welt erfahren oder erkennen will. Dann aber ist das, was erkannt werden kann, für jeden Menschen in der gleichen Weise erfahrbar und beobachtbar, der dazu in der nötigen Weise vorbereitet ist. Oder wenn Mitteilungen gemacht werden aus den Beobachtungen der Geisteswissenschaft von denen, die ihre Seele dazu vorbereitet haben, daß ein solcher Mensch auf wiederholte Erdenleben zurückblicken kann, so daß diese für ihn eine Tatsache werden, dann kommen wohl die Menschen und sagen: Da bringt er uns ja wieder Dogmen und fordert, daß wir das glauben sollen! So tritt aber der Geistesforscher nicht vor die Mitwelt mit seinen Erkenntnissen, daß die Menschen es glauben sollen.

Wenn die Menschen meinen, es wären Dogmen, was gesagt wird, so frage man sich einmal: Ist die Tatsache, daß es einen Walfisch gibt, ein Dogma für den, der nie einen gesehen hat? Gewiß, man kann es damit erklären: es ist für den ein Dogma, der nie einen Walfisch gesehen hat. Aber nur mit Mitteilungen tritt die Geistesforschung nicht an die Welt heran. Das tut sie auch nicht, wenn sie sich selbst versteht; sondern sie kleidet das, was sie aus den höheren Welten herunterholt, in logische Formen, die genau dieselben logischen Formen sind, von denen auch die andern Wissenschaften durchdrungen sind. Dann kann jeder nachprüfen durch gesunden Wahrheitssinn und unbefangene Logik, ob das stimmt, was der Geistesforscher gesagt hat. Immer ist es gesagt worden: zum Selbstaufsuchen der geistigen Tatsachen gehört eine Schulung der Seele, gehört, daß die Seele das durchgemacht hat, was jetzt beschrieben wird, nicht aber zum Verstehen des Mitgeteilten; dazu genügt gesunder Wahrheitssinn und vorurteilslose Logik.

Wenn nun der Geistesforscher eine Zeitlang solche symbolischen Begriffe und Bilder auf seine Seele hat wirken lassen, so merkt er, daß sein Empfindungs- und Gefühlsleben ganz anders wird, als es vorher war.

Wie ist denn das Empfindungs- und Gefühlsleben des Menschen in der gewöhnlichen Welt? Es ist eigentlich heute schon etwas trivial geworden, überall den Ausdruck egoistisch zu gebrauchen und zu sagen, im normalen Leben seien die Menschen egoistisch. Ich möchte es nicht so ausdrücken, sondern lieber sagen: Im normalen Leben sind die Menschen zunächst eng an die menschliche Persönlichkeit gebunden, so zum Beispiel, wenn uns irgend etwas freut, ja gerade gegenüber den Dingen, welche uns freuen, von den vornehmsten geistigen Schöpfungen, von Dingen der Kunst und der Schönheit. Das drückt ja schon das Sprichwort «Über den Geschmack läßt sich nicht streiten» aus, daß vieles an unsere Persönlichkeit gebunden ist und daß davon abhängt, wie wir uns subjektiv zu den Dingen stellen. Prüfen Sie, wie alles, was Ihnen Freude machen kann, damit zusammenhängt, wie Ihre Erziehung gewesen ist, an welchen Ort der Welt, in welchen Beruf Ihre Persönlichkeit gestellt ist und so weiter, um zu sehen, wie die Empfindungen und Gefühle eng mit unserer Persönlichkeit zusammenhängen. Wenn man aber solche Übungen der Seele wie die charakterisierten macht, dann merkt man, daß die Empfindungen und Gefühle ganz unpersönlich werden. Das ist ein großes und gewaltiges Erlebnis, wenn der Moment eintritt, wo unser Empfindungs- und Gefühlsleben gewissermaßen unpersönlich wird. Dieser Moment kommt, er kommt sicher, wenn der Mensch im Verlaufe seines geistigen Weges angeregt wird durch die, welche seine geistige Führung übernehmen, namentlich folgende Dinge so recht auf seine Seele wirken zu lassen. Ich will jetzt einiges aufzählen, was, wenn es der Mensch wochen-, monatelang auf seine Seele wirken läßt, erziehend auf unser ganzes Empfindungs- und Gefühlsleben wirkt.

Da kann folgendes in Betracht kommen. Wenn wir unser Augenmerk auf das richten, was Sie in der Philosophie in den Mittelpunkt der Betrachtungen gestellt finden, auf das geistige Zentrum des Menschen, das Ich — wenn wir gelernt haben, uns zur Ich-Vorstellung aufzuschwingen —, das alle unsere Vorstellungen begleitet, das geheimnisvolle Zentrum alles Erlebens; und wenn wir immer weiter treiben jenen Respekt, jene Achtung und Hingabe, die sich verknüpfen kann mit der Tatsache — für viele allerdings keine Tatsache, sondern eine Chimäre —: Da innen lebt ein Ich! — wenn das zum größten, zum einschlagendsten Ereignis werden kann, sich immer wieder zu sagen, daß dieses «Ich bin» das Wesentlichste der Seele des Menschen ist, dann entwickeln sich an dem «Ich bin» gewaltige, starke Gefühle, die unpersönlich sind und gerade darauf hingehen, zu erkennen, wie gleichsam in einen Punkt — in den Ich-Punkt - zusammengedrängt ist alles, was uns an Weltgeheimnissen und Mysterien umschwebt, um vom Ich-Punkt aus den Menschen zu erfassen. Über dieses Bewußtwerden des Ich erzählt zum Beispiel der Dichter Jean Paulin seiner Lebensbeschreibung: «Nie vergeß ich die noch keinem Menschen erzählte Erscheinung in mir, wo ich bei der Geburt meines Selbstbewußtseins stand, von der ich Ort und Zeit anzugeben weiß. An einem Vormittag stand ich als ein sehr junges Kind unter der Haustür und sah links nach der Holzlege, als auf einmal das innere Gesicht, ich bin ein Ich, wie ein Blitzstrahl vom Himmel vor mich fuhr und seitdem leuchtend stehenblieb: da hatte mein Ich zum erstenmal sich selber gesehen und auf ewig. Täuschungen des Erinnerns sind hier schwerlich gedenkbar, da kein fremdes Erzählen sich in eine bloß im verhangnen Allerheiligsten des Menschen vorgefallne Begebenheit, deren Neuheit allein so alltäglichen Nebenumständen das Bleiben gegeben, mit Zusätzen mengen konnte.»

Das ist schon viel, schon mit allen Schauern der Ehrfurcht und mit aller Empfindung für die Größe dieser Tatsache die Hingabe zu spüren an das Zusammengedrängtsein des Weltwesens an einem Punkt. Aber das kann, wenn der Mensch es immer wieder und wieder empfindet und auf sich wirken läßt, so sein, daß es ihn zwar nicht über alle Weltenrätsel aufklärt, aber ihm noch eine ganz auf das Unpersönliche und ganz auf das innerste Menschenwesen gehende Richtung gibt.

So erziehen wir an der Ichheit unser Gefühls- und Empfindungsleben. Und wenn wir es eine Zeitlang getan haben, können wir unsere Gefühle und Empfindungen in eine andere Richtung bringen, können uns sagen: Dieses Ich in uns ist verbunden mit allem, was wir denken, fühlen und empfinden, mit allem unserem seelischen Leben, durchglüht und durchglänzt unser Seelenleben. Da können wir, ohne daß wir auf uns selber Rücksicht nehmen oder persönlich werden, die menschliche Natur mit dem Ich als dem Mittelpunkte des Denkens, Fühlens und Wollens studieren. Der Mensch wird uns zum Mysterium, nicht wir uns selbst. Da erweitern sich unsere Gefühle vom Ich aus über die Seele. Dann können wir zu anderem Fühlen übergehen, können uns namentlich jenes schöne Gefühl aneignen, ohne das wir unsere Seele nicht weiterführen können in die geistige Erkenntnis, das ist das, was man nennen möchte: das Gefühl dafür, daß in jedem Ding, welches uns entgegentritt, gleichsam der Zutritt zu einem Unendlichen sich uns eröffnet. Das ist das wunderbarste Gefühl, wenn man es immer wieder und wieder vor die Seele treten läßt. Das kann da sein, wo wir hinausgehen und ein wunderbares Naturschauspiel sehen: die von Wolken eingehüllten Berge in Donner und Blitz. Da wirkt das groß und gewaltig auf unsere Seele. Aber dann müssen wir lernen, das Große und Gewaltige nicht nur dort zu sehen, sondern wir nehmen vielleicht ein einzelnes Blatt, betrachten es genau mit allen Rippen und allen wunderbaren Dingen, die daran sind, und können dabei ebenso das Große und Gewaltige, das sich wie ein Unendliches aus dem kleinsten Blatt enthüllt, vernehmen und fühlen wie bei dem größten Naturschauspiel. Sonderbar mag es erscheinen, aber es ist doch etwas daran, und man muß sich nachher grotesk ausdrücken: Es mag einen großen Eindruck machen, wenn der Mensch sieht, wie die glühende Lavamasse aus der Erde herauskommt. Dann aber denken wir uns, es sieht jemand warme Milch oder gewöhnlichsten Kaffee an, sieht da etwas wie kleine kraterförmige Gebilde und sieht da ein ähnliches Schauspiel im Kleinen sich abspielen. Überall, im Kleinsten wie im Größten, der Zugang zu einem Unendlichen.

Und wenn wir immer weiter forschen, und wenn sich uns noch soviel enthüllt hat: es ist immer noch mehr unter der Decke, die wir vielleicht oben erforscht haben. So empfinden wir also gerade, was sich in jedem Punkt des Weltalls als eine Offenbarung eines intensiv Unendlichen ergeben kann. Das füllt unsere Seele aus mit Empfindungen und Gefühlen, die uns notwendig sind, wenn wir das erlangen wollen, was Goethe «Geistesaugen», «Geistesohren» nennt. Kurz, es ist eine Auslebung unseres Gefühlslebens, das sonst das Subjektivste ist, bis zu dem Punkt, wo wir uns nur mehr fühlen als der Schauplatz, auf dem sich etwas abspielt, wo wir unsere Gefühle gar nicht mehr zu uns rechnen. Unsere Persönlichkeit ist zum Schweigen gebracht. Es ist ungefähr so, wie wenn man eine Leinwand aufspannt und als Maler ein Bild darauf malt, so spannen wir unsere Seele auf, wenn wir uns so trainieren, und lassen die geistige Welt auf dieser Seele malen. Das fühlt man von einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt ab. Man muß sich dann nur selbst verstehen, daß es notwendig ist zur Anerkennung dessen, was die Welt wesenhaft ist, eine gewisse Stufe des Seelenlebens einzig und allein als ausschlaggebend zu betrachten.

So wird in der Tat das, was sich der Mensch im heißen Seelenstreben erwirbt, zum Entscheiden der Wahrheit. In der Seele selber muß entschieden werden, ob etwas wahr ist oder nicht. Nicht ein Außerliches kann entscheiden, sondern indem der Mensch über sich hinausgeht, muß er in sich die Autorität finden, um die Wahrheit zu schauen oder zu finden. Ja, wir können im Grunde genommen sagen: Wir können uns da doch nicht ganz von den übrigen Menschen unterscheiden. Die andern Menschen suchen nach objektiven Kriterien, nach etwas, was uns die Bestätigung der Wahrheit von außen gibt. Der Geistesforscher aber sucht die Bestätigung der Wahrheit von innen. Also das Umgekehrte tut er. Wenn es so stünde, könnte man vielleicht zum Scheine sagen: Es steht schlimm, wenn die Geisteswissenschaftler in ihren Verdrehtheiten die Welt auf den Kopf stellen wollen. Denn in Wahrheit tun die Naturforscher und Philosophen nichts anderes als die Geistesforscher, nur wissen sie nicht, daß sie es tun. Ich will Ihnen einen Beweis dafür geben, der aus der unmittelbaren Gegenwart herausgenommen ist.

Auf der letzten Naturforscher-Versammlung hat Oswald Külpe einen Vortrag gehalten über die Beziehung der Naturwissenschaft zur Philosophie, in welchem er darauf kommt, daß der Mensch, indem er in die Sinneswelt hinausblickt und sie als Ton, Farbe, Wärme und so weiter empfindet, nur subjektive Qualitäten hat. Das ist nur etwas anders gefärbt, als wenn Schopenhauer sagt: «Die Welt ist unsere Vorstellung.» Aber Oswald Külpe macht darauf aufmerksam, daß das, was wir durch unsere Sinne wahrnehmen, kurz alles, was uns bildhaft auftritt, subjektiv sei, daß dagegen das, was die Physik und die Chemie sagen — Druck, Anziehungs- und Abstoßungskraft, Widerstand und so weiter —, sich als objektiv charakterisieren lassen müsse; so daß man es auf diese Weise zu tun habe in unsern Weltbildern teils mit etwas rein Subjektivem, teils mit dem, was objektiv ist wie Druck, Anziehungs- und Abstoßungskraft.

Ich will mich auf die Kritik, die sich darüber geäußert hat, nicht weiter einlassen, sondern nur auf die Denkweise eingehen. Das scheint ja für den heutigen Erkenntnistheoretiker so furchtbar leicht zu beweisen: weil wir ohne Augen nicht sehen könnten, wäre das Licht nur etwas, was durch unsere Augen bewirkt würde. Aber was in der äußeren Welt geschieht, so wird gesagt, wenn eine Kugel die andere stößt, was da als Kräfte, als Widerstand, Druck und so weiter wirkt, das müsse man doch in die Außenwelt versetzen, in den Raum. Warum meinen das die Leute? Oswald Külpe verrät sich an einer bestimmten Stelle sehr deutlich, wo er von den Sinnesempfindungen spricht. Weil er diese als Bilder ansieht, darum sagt er: Die können sich nicht stoßen oder anziehen, auch nicht drücken oder gegenseitig erwärmen, können auch nicht im Raume eine soundso große Entfernung haben, daß sie das Licht in der und der Geschwindigkeit durch den Raum schicken, können auch nicht so angeordnet sein, wie der Chemiker die Elemente anordnet. Warum sagt er das von den Sinnesempfindungen? Weil er die Sinnesempfindungen als Bilder ansieht, die nur durch unsere Sinne bewirkt werden.

Nun möchte ich Ihnen einen einfachen Gedanken vorlegen, der zeigt, daß die Bildartigkeit gar nichts ändert. Die Dinge stoßen sich und ziehen sich an. Wenn Herr Külpe nun aber die Sinnesempfindungen betrachtet, diese Welt, die sich nicht anziehen und nicht stoßen könnte, so tritt sie Herrn Oswald Külpe eben nicht als Wirklichkeit, sondern als Spiegelbild entgegen. Da hat er allerdings Bilder vor sich. Aber Stoß, Druck, Widerstand und alles, was da in die Welt hineingelegt wird als sich unterscheidend von den andern, den Sinnesempfindungen, das wird auf keine andere Weise objektiv erklärt als durch die Bildartigkeit der Sinnesempfindungen. Warum ist das so? Weil der Mensch, wenn er Druck, Stoß und so weiter empfindet, dasjenige, was in den Dingen lebt, zu den Empfindungen der Dinge macht. Der Mensch sollte studieren, wenn er zum Beispiel sagt: Die eine Billardkugel stößt die andere, daß er dabei das, was er als Stoßkraft erlebt, hineinlegt in die Dinge! Und wer auf dem Boden der Geisteswissenschaft steht, macht auch nichts anderes. Was in dem Innern der Seele lebt, das macht er zum Ausdruckskriterium der Welt. Ein anderes Erkenntnisprinzip gibt es nicht als das, was durch die Entwickelung der Seele selber gefunden werden kann. So machen also die andern dasselbe wie die Geistesforschung. Die Geistesforschung weiß es nur. Die andern tun es unbewußt, haben keine Ahnung davon, daß sie auf elementarer Stufe dasselbe tun, sie bleiben nur auf der allerersten Stufe stehen und leugnen das, was sie selber tun. Deshalb dürfen wir sagen: Die Geisteswissenschaft steht in gar keinem Gegensatz zur übrigen Wahrheitsforschung; die andern Forscher tun dasselbe, nur machen sie den ersten Schritt und wissen nichts davon, während die Geistesforschung die Schritte bewußt so weit macht, als es eine bestimmte Menschenseele nach ihrer Entwickelungstufe machen kann. Wenn nun das erreicht ist, daß unsere Gefühle in gewisser Weise objektiv geworden sind, so tritt das erst recht ein, was ich auch schon angedeutet habe, was aber eine notwendige Voraussetzung beim Fortschritt in die geistigen Welten ist. Das ist, daß der Mensch begreifen lernt, so in der Welt zu leben, daß man voraussetzt, eine allumfassende geistige Gesetzmäßigkeit webt und lebt in der geistigen Welt. Im gewöhnlichen Leben ist der Mensch von einer solchen Denkweise weit entfernt. Er erbost sich, wenn ihm irgend etwas passiert, was ihm nicht paßt. Das ist ganz begreiflich, denn ein anderer Standpunkt muß schwer errungen werden. Dieser andere Standpunkt besteht darin, zu sagen: Wir kommen aus einem früheren Leben her, haben uns in die Lagen, in denen wir jetzt sind, selber versetzt, haben uns hingeführt zu dem, was uns aus dem Schoße der Zukunft entgegentritt. Was uns da entgegentritt, das entspricht einer streng objektiven geistigen Gesetzmäßigkeit. Wir nehmen sie hin, denn es wäre ein Unding, sie nicht hinzunehmen. Was da aus dem Schoße der geistigen Welten an uns herantritt, ob uns die Welt tadelt oder lobt, ob uns Freudvolles oder Leidvolles erscheint: wir nehmen es hin als weisheitvolles Durchleben und Durchweben der Welt. Das ist etwas, was wieder langsam und allmählich zum ganzen Grundsatz unseres Wesens werden muß. Wenn es das wird, fängt unser Wille an geschult zu sein. Während vorher unsere Gefühle umorganisiert werden sollen, wird jetzt unser Wille umorganisiert, wird unabhängig von unserer Persönlichkeit und dadurch zu einem Organ, um geistige Tatsachen wahrzunehmen.

Dann tritt für den Menschen nach der Stufe der imaginativen Erkenntnis das ein, was im wahren und echten Sinne die Inspiration, die Erfüllung durch geistige Tatsachen genannt werden kann. Darüber müssen wir uns aber immer wieder klar sein, daß der Mensch die Trainierung des Willens nur auf einer bestimmten Stufe erreichen kann, wenn seine Gefühle in einer gewissen Beziehung schon geläutert sind, daß sich sein Wille mit der Gesetzlichkeit der Welt verbinden kann und er als Mensch nur noch da ist, damit diejenigen Tatsachen und Wesenheiten, die ihm erscheinen wollen, ihm in seinem Willen eine Wand vorhalten, auf der sie sich ihm abbilden können, so daß sie für ihn dasein können.

Ich habe Ihnen nur einiges von dem schildern können, was die Seele in stiller, geduldiger Hingabe durchmachen muß, wenn sie hinaufsteigen will in die höheren Welten. In den folgenden Vorträgen werde ich Ihnen vieles aus der weltgeschichtlichen Entwickelung zu schildern haben, was die Seele durchmachen muß, um in die geistigen Welten hinaufzudringen. Sehen Sie also das, was heute gesagt worden ist, nur als eine Einleitung an, daß sich durch eine solche Schulung unser Gefühls- und Willensleben und unser ganzes Vorstellungsleben so entwickeln, daß sie zu Trägern neuer Welten werden, so daß wir tatsächlich in eine Welt eintreten, die wir ebenso als eine Realität erkennen, wie wir die physische Welt in ihrer Art als eine Realität erkennen. Ich habe schon bei anderer Gelegenheit erwähnt: Wenn die Menschen sagen: Du bildest dir das, was du zu sehen glaubst, doch nur ein, so muß erwidert werden, daß nur die Erfahrung, die Beobachtung den Unterschied zwischen Wirklichkeit und Schein, ergeben kann, zwischen Realität und Phantastik, gerade wie in der physischen Welt auch. Da muß man an der Realität den Unterschied gewinnen. Wer zum Beispiel mit gesundem Denken an die Wirklichkeit herantritt, weiß ein glühendes Stück Eisen in der Wirklichkeit zu unterscheiden von einem solchen, das nur in der Vorstellung besteht, und es mögen noch soviele Schopenhauerianer kommen: er wird die beiden voneinander schon unterscheiden können, — was Wahrheit ist und was Vorstellung ist. An der Realität also kann sich der Mensch orientieren. So kann er auch nur an der Realität sich über die geistige Welt orientieren. Es hat einmal jemand gesagt, daß der Mensch, wenn er nur daran denke, Limonade zu trinken, auch den Limonadengeschmack auf der Zunge empfinde. Ich habe ihm darauf erwidert: So stark kann die Einbildung sein, daß jemand, der gar keine Limonade vor sich hat, vielleicht bei der lebhaften Vorstellung einer Limonade auch den Geschmack auf der Zunge empfindet, aber ich möchte einmal sehen, ob sich schon einmal jemand mit einer nur vorgestellten Limonade den Durst gelöscht hat. Da beginnt dann das Kriterium realer zu werden. Und so ist es auch mit einer inneren Entwickelung des Menschen, daß der Mensch nicht nur ein neues Seelenleben, neue Vorstellungen kennenlernt, sondern in seiner Seele mit einer andern Welt zusammenstößt und weiß: Du stehst jetzt vor einer Welt, die du ebenso schildern kannst, wie du die äußere Welt schildern kannst. — Das ist nicht ein bloßes Spekulieren, was sich nur mit einer Gedankenentwickelung vergleichen ließe, sondern das ist ein Heranbilden neuer Sinnesorgane und ein Erschließen neuer Welten, die wahrhaftig ebenso real vor uns stehen wie unsere äußere, physische Welt. Was heute angedeutet worden ist, ist der durch unsere Zeitverhältnisse notwendige Hinweis darauf, daß eine geistige Forschung möglich ist. Es ist nicht deshalb gesagt, daß jeder gleich ein Geistesforscher werden müsse. Denn es muß ja immer betont werden: Wenn ein Mensch mit gesundem Wahrheitssinn und vorurteilsfreier Logik die Mitteilungen der Geisteswissenschaft an sich herankommen läßt, auch wenn er nicht selbst in die geistigen Welten hineinschauen kann, so kann doch alles, was aus solchen Mitteilungen kommt, zu Energie und Kraftgefühlen für die Seele werden, auch wenn er zunächst an einen Haeckelismus oder Darwinismus glaubt. Was der Geistesforscher zu sagen hat, das ist geeignet, immer mehr und mehr zu dem gesunden Wahrheitssinn der Menschen zu sprechen, um so mehr als es zusammenhängt mit den tiefsten Interessen eines jeden Menschen. Mag es Menschen geben, die es nicht für ihr Seelenheil notwendig halten, zu wissen, wie Amphibien und Säugetiere zueinander stehen oder dergleichen. Das aber muß alle Menschen erwärmen, was aus der auf sicherer Grundlage ruhenden Geistesforschung gesagt werden kann: daß die Seele — insofern sie der geistigen Welt angehört, heruntersteigend durch die Geburt ins sinnliche Dasein und durch die Pforte des Todes wieder in das geistige Reich eintretend — der Sphäre der Ewigkeit angehört. Das muß für alle Menschen von tiefstem Interesse sein, was sich ihnen immer mehr und mehr in die Seele hineinsenkt an Kraft, die so ist, daß die Seele daraus Sicherheit gewinnt, um an ihrem Platze im Leben zu stehen. Eine Seele, die nicht Bescheid weiß über das, was sie ist und will, was sie ihrer Wesenheit nach bedeutet, kann trostlos werden, kann endlich verzweifeln und sich öde und leer fühlen. Eine Seele aber, die sich mit den geistigen Errungenschaften der Geisteswissenschaft erfüllt, kann nicht leer und öde bleiben, wenn sie die Mitteilungen der Geistesforschung nur nicht wie Dogmen aufnehmen wird, sondern als lebendiges Leben, das unsere Seele wärmend durchströmt. Das gibt Trost für alles Leid im Leben, wenn wir hinaufgeführt werden von allen zeitlichen Leiden zu dem, was der Seele an Trost werden kann von dem Anteil des Zeitlichen an dem Ewigen. Kurz: die Geisteswissenschaft kann dem Menschen das geben, was er heute braucht wegen der gesteigerten Zeitverhältnisse in den einsamsten und in den arbeitsreichsten Stunden seines Lebens, — oder wenn ihn die Kraft verlassen wollte, was er braucht, um in die Zukunft hineinzusehen und kraftvoll dieser Zukunft entgegenzugehen.

So kann die Geisteswissenschaft, wie sie von der Geistesforschung, von denjenigen ausgeht, welche die Schritte in die geistige Welt tun wollen, immerdar bekräftigen, was wir in wenige Worte zusammenfassen wollen, welche die Charakteristik des Weges in die geistige Welt und seine Bedeutung für die Menschen der Gegenwart darin empfindungsgemäß ausdrücken. Was wir so zusammenfassen wollen, soll nicht eine Betrachtung über Theorien des Lebens sein, sondern eine Betrachtung über Heilmittel, über Kraftmittel, über Stärkungsmittel des Lebens:

Die Geisterwelt — sie bleibet dir verschlossen,
Erkennst du in dir selber nicht
Den Geist, der in der Seele leuchtet
Und tragend Licht dir werden kann
In Weltentiefen, auf Weltenhöhen!

How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Spiritual World?

Before I begin with today's topic, I would like to point out that today's discussions will be the beginning of a whole series of such discussions, and that, in fact, all of the topics that follow this winter could bear exactly the same title as today's topic. In the course of the next lectures, we will discuss the path that human beings must take if they want to gain knowledge of the spiritual world, based on the most diverse phenomena of human life and scientific life, and on the most diverse cultural personalities of humanity in general.

Although this topic, this consideration, is intended to lead us into the realm of the most impersonal, of objective spiritual science, so to speak, allow me nevertheless to begin with something personal in my introduction, for the path to the spiritual world is one that must lead through the most personal to the impersonal. Therefore, despite the impersonal, the personal will often be a symbolic characteristic of this path, and one thus also gains the opportunity to point out many significant things precisely by starting, as it were, from the more intimate, immediate experience. For the observer of the spiritual worlds, many things in life will be symbolically more important than they may appear at first glance. Many things that might otherwise pass before human eyes without particularly attracting attention may appear deeply significant to those who wish to engage intensively in such contemplation, as should also underlie today's discussions. And I can say that the following — which may at first seem like a trifle in life — is for me one of the many unforgettable things that have marked my life's journey, on the one hand characterizing the longing of the people of our time for the spiritual world, but on the other hand, the more or less acknowledged impossibility of gaining access to the spiritual world by means that are available not only in the present, but even in recent centuries, insofar as they are externally accessible to human beings.

I once sat in the cozy apartment of Herman Grimm. Those of you who are somewhat familiar with German intellectual life will associate certain things with the name Herman Grimm. You may know the witty, important biographer of Michelangelo and Raphael, and perhaps you also know how, in a sense, the sum of the education of our time, at least in Central Europe or—let's say even more narrowly—in Germany, was united in the soul of Herman Grimm. During a conversation with Herman Grimm about Goethe, who was so close to him, and about Goethe's worldview, something happened that was a small thing, but which is one of the most unforgettable things in my life. In response to a remark I made—we will see later how this remark can be significant in relation to man's ascent into the spiritual world—Herman Grimm replied with a dismissive movement of his left hand. What was in this hand gesture, that is what I consider to be one of the unforgettable experiences of my life. It was about talking, in reference to Goethe, about how Goethe, in his own way — we will discuss Goethe's path into the spiritual world in the course of these lectures — wanted to find this path into the spiritual world. Herman Grimm liked to follow Goethe's paths into the spiritual world — but in his own way. It was completely foreign to him to approach Goethe in such a way that one might regard Goethe as the representative of a person who really — even as an artist — brings spiritual realities down from the spiritual world in order to embody them in his works of art. It was much closer to Herman Grimm's heart to say to himself: Alas, with the means we have today as human beings, we can only ascend to this spiritual world through imagination. Imagination offers things that are beautiful, grand, and powerful, and that can fill the human heart with warmth; but knowledge, firmly grounded knowledge, was something that Herman Grimm, who was such an intimate observer of Goethe, did not want to find even in Goethe. And when I spoke of how Goethe's entire fundamental nature was based on his desire to embody truth in beauty, in art, and then tried to show that there were indeed paths outside of imagination, paths into the spiritual world that lead to firmer ground than imagination, it was not a rejection of someone who did not want to take such a path. It was not the rejection of such a path that Herman Grimm expressed in this hand gesture, but in a way that only those who understood him more closely would recognize, he expressed roughly the following: There may well be such a path, but we humans cannot feel called upon to make any decisions about it!

As I said, I do not want to present this here in an intrusive manner as a personal matter, but it seems to me that such a gesture embodies the attitude of the best people of our age toward the spiritual world. For I later had a long conversation with Herman Grimm himself on a journey that took us both from Weimar to Tiefurt, in which he explained how he had completely freed himself from all purely materialistic views of world events, from the view that the human spirit in successive epochs produces from itself what constitutes the actual spiritual wealth of human beings. In a grand plan, which—as those who have studied Herman Grimm know—was never realized in a work he had in mind, Herman Grimm spoke at the time of his intention to write a “History of the German Imagination.” He had in mind the reign of imagination as a goddess in the spiritual worlds, which brings forth from itself what humans create for the good of world progress. I would like to say: in that lovely area between Weimar and Tiefurt, when I heard these words from a man whom I recognize as one of the greatest minds of our time, I had a feeling that I would like to express in the following words.

Many people today say: One must be deeply dissatisfied with all that external science has to say about the sources of life, about the mystery of existence, about the riddles of the world; but there is no possibility of entering forcefully into another world. There is a lack of intensity in the will to know, to recognize this world of spiritual life as something other than what man forms in his imagination. Many people like to enter this realm of fantasy because for them it is the only spiritual realm. I remembered, especially in relation to this personality — this trip to Tiefurt was perhaps seventeen years ago now — that more than thirty years ago, among many other things much else that Herman Grimm had already impressed upon me through his writings — my gaze fell upon that passage in his “Goethe Lectures,” which he gave in Berlin in the winter of 1874/75, where, following Goethe, he speaks of the impression that a purely external, spiritless observation of nature must make on a spirit such as his. It was the same thirty years ago, when Herman Grimm appeared to me as the type of person whose every feeling and sensation pushes him up into the spiritual world, but who cannot find the spiritual world in reality, only in the imagination, in its reign and workings, and who, on the other hand — precisely because he was like that — did not want to admit that Goethe himself sought the sources and mysteries of existence in a realm other than merely that of the imagination, namely in the realm of spiritual reality.

There is a passage that should affect our soul at the starting point of our considerations today, where Herman Grimm speaks of something that I have already hinted at, which, although its significance cannot be denied by spiritual science, nevertheless, as it is taken by external natural science or by that worldview that wants to stand on the firm ground of natural science, not only for perception and feeling, but also for truly self-understanding knowledge. I am referring to the Kant-Laplace theory, which explains our solar system as if it consisted only of lifeless, inorganic substances and forces and had formed from a giant gas ball. I would like to quote from Herman Grimm's Goethe lectures, which shows you what this worldview, so fascinating and deeply impressive today, meant to a mind like Herman Grimm's.

"However much Goethe forbids the mind to accept as truth anything more than what can actually be grasped with the five fingers of the hand, he gives the poet's imagination the right to create images of what the mind desires to see from unconscious, dreamlike forces. Only that he sharply maintains the boundary between the two activities. Long ago, in his youth, the great Laplace-Kantian imagination of the origin and eventual demise of the globe had taken hold. From the rotating nebula—children already learn this in school—the central gas drop forms, which then becomes the Earth, and, as a solidifying sphere, goes through all phases, including the episode of habitation by the human race, in inconceivable periods of time, finally falling back into the sun as burnt-out slag: a long process, but one that is completely comprehensible to the public, and one that requires no external intervention other than the effort of some outside force to maintain the sun at the same heating temperature.

No more fruitless perspective for the future can be imagined than the one that is being imposed on us today as scientifically necessary. A carcass that a hungry dog has given a wide berth would be a refreshing and appetizing morsel in comparison to this final excrement of creation, as which our Earth would ultimately fall back to the sun, and it is the thirst for knowledge with which our generation accepts such things and believes them to be true, a sign of a sick imagination, which scholars of future epochs will once again apply much acumen to explain as a historical phenomenon of the times.

It was necessary for me to point out such a passage because, basically, little is happening today. Today, when the ideas of those worldviews that seem to be so firmly grounded in natural science are so fascinating, little attention is paid to the fact that there are still minds that are deeply connected to the cultural life of our time and yet, in such a way, behave out of their whole soul character toward what countless people now say: It goes without saying that things are this way, and anyone who won't admit that things are this way is actually a fool! Yes, today we already see many people who have a deep longing to build a bridge between the human soul and the spiritual world. But on the other hand, outside the circles that are more deeply involved with what we call spiritual science, we see only a few people concerned with the means that could lead the human soul to what might be called the land of its longing.

When we speak today of the paths that are supposed to lead people to the spiritual world, and when we speak in such a way that what is said is not intended for a narrow circle but is addressed to all those who are equipped with the knowledge of today's world, we still encounter a great deal of resistance in a certain respect. It may not only be that what is put forward is regarded as dreamery and fantasy, but it may also very easily be that what is put forward actually annoys many people of the present day, that it is something annoying to them because it deviates so much from what — as the suggestive and fascinating ideas of those who consider themselves the most educated — are considered to be valid by the widest circles today.

It was already indicated in the first lecture that ascending into the spiritual world is basically an intimate matter of the soul, and that it contradicts quite strongly what is common practice today in both popular and scientific circles for the life of imagination and feeling. Scientists in particular are quick to demand that anything that is to be considered scientific must be provable at all times and for all people, and they then point to their external experiments, which can be proven at any time and in front of anyone. It goes without saying that spiritual science cannot meet this demand. We will see in a moment why not. Therefore, spiritual science — that is, the science that speaks of the spirit not as a sum of abstract concepts and ideas, but as something real and of real beings — must already violate the methodological demand that science and worldviews so easily make today: to be provable for everyone, everywhere, and at all times. In popular circles, spiritual science very often encounters resistance for the simple reason that in our time — even where people carry within themselves a longing to ascend into the spiritual world — their perceptions and feelings are permeated and imbued with a materialistic outlook. Even with the best will in the world, even if one longs for the spiritual world, one cannot help but think of the spirit in some material way, or at least think of the ascent into the spiritual world as being linked to the material. Therefore, most people will prefer to hear about purely external means, for example, what they should or should not eat and drink, or what else they should do in the material world. They will much prefer this to being asked to introduce intimate moments of development into their souls. But this is precisely what ascending into the spiritual world is all about.

Now let us try — entirely in the spirit of spiritual science itself — to briefly outline how this ascent of the human soul into the spiritual world can take place. The starting point must always be taken from that in which the human being initially lives. Now, as he is placed in the world in our present time, the human being lives entirely in the external, sensory world. Just try to imagine how much remains in the human soul when we turn our gaze away from the images that the external sensory impressions of the physical world have kindled in us, from what has entered us through external physical experiences, through our eyes, ears, and the other senses, what is also stimulated in us through our eyes and ears in terms of suffering and joy, pleasure and pain, and what our mind has then combined from these impressions of the sensory world. Try to erase all this from your soul, to think it away, and consider what would remain. People who can honestly engage in this simple self-observation will see that very little remains in the soul, especially in the soul of modern man. But this is precisely why the ascent into the spiritual world cannot come from what is given to us by the external sensory world, but must be undertaken in such a way that the human being develops forces in his soul that usually lie dormant there. It is, so to speak, a fundamental element for all possibilities of ascent into the spiritual world that human beings become aware that they are capable of inner development, that there is something else within them than what they initially perceive with their consciousness.

This is already an annoying idea for many people today, because — let us take a very special person of today's education — what does today's philosopher do, for example, when it comes to determining the whole meaning and essence of knowledge? Such a person will say: I want to try to see how far we can go with our thinking, with our soul forces as human beings, what we can grasp of the world. In his own way — depending on what is possible for him at the moment — he seeks to grasp a worldview and present it to himself, and he will then usually say: We simply cannot know the rest; it lies beyond the limits of human knowledge! — It is the most common saying to be found in today's literature: We cannot know that!

But there is another point of view that works quite differently from the one just described, saying: Certainly, with the powers I now have in my soul, which may now be the normal human soul powers, I can recognize this or that, but here in the soul is a being capable of development. This soul may have powers within it that I must first draw out of it. I must first guide it along certain paths, must lead it beyond its current standpoint, and then I will see whether I was not at fault when I said that this or that lies beyond the limits of our knowledge. Perhaps I only need to go a little further in the development of my soul, then the limits will expand and I will be able to penetrate more deeply into things.

When judging this, one does not always take logic very seriously, otherwise one would say: What we perceive depends on our organs. That is why, for example, someone born blind cannot judge colors; they can only judge them if they have regained their sight through a successful operation. Similarly, it could be — I don't want to talk about a “sixth sense” here, but about something that can be drawn out of the soul purely spiritually — that it might be possible to draw spiritual eyes or spiritual ears out of our soul. Then the great event that occurs at a lower level could happen for us, when someone born blind is fortunate enough to have an operation, so that our assumption could initially become reality: there is a spiritual world around us, but in order to see into it, we must first awaken the organs within us. That would be the only logical thing. But, as I said, logic is not always taken seriously, because in our time, when people hear about a spiritual world, they have needs that are quite different from finding their way into this spiritual world. I have already told you that in a city in southern Germany, when I once had to give a lecture there, a good man who writes feature articles began his feature article with the words: “What is most striking about theosophy is its incomprehensibility.” We are happy to believe this man that the most striking feature of theosophy for him is its incomprehensibility. But is that somehow a criterion? Let's apply this example to mathematics, where someone would say: What strikes me most about mathematics is its incomprehensibility. Then everyone will say: Certainly, that may be so; but then he should be so kind as to learn something first if he wants to write feature articles! It would often be better to transfer what applies to one particular field to another in an appropriate manner. So there is no other option than for people to deny — which they can only do by a decree of power — that there is such a thing as the development of the soul — namely when they refuse to undergo it — or else to enter into the development of the soul. Then the spiritual world becomes something they can observe, a reality, a truth. But in order to ascend into the spiritual world, the soul must become capable — not for physical life, but for the knowledge of the spiritual world — of completely transforming itself in a certain relationship to the form it initially has, of becoming a different being in a certain relationship.

This can already draw our attention to what has been emphasized here time and again, namely that those who feel the urge to ascend into the spiritual world must, above all, be clear again and again whether they have first gained a firm foothold here in this world of physical reality, whether they are able to stand firm here. For in all circumstances that occur in the physical world, we must have security, willpower, and sensitivity; we must not lose our footing if we want to ascend from this world into the spiritual world. This is a preliminary stage: to do everything that can lead our character to stand firm in the physical world. Then it is important to bring the soul to a different feeling and different will for the spiritual world than are usual in the soul. In a sense, our soul must become an inner organism of feeling and will that is different from what it is in normal life. This brings us to what spiritual science, on the one hand, can initially bring into a kind of opposition to what is recognized today as “science,” but which spiritual science, on the other hand, places directly alongside this science with the same validity that external science has. When we say that everything that is to be science must be provable at all times and for all people, we mean that what we consider to be science must not depend on our subjectivity, on our subjective feelings, on what we carry within us individually as decisions of the will, impulses of the will, feelings, and sensations. But first, those who want to ascend into the spiritual world must take the detour through the innermost depths of their soul, must reorganize their soul, must first turn their gaze completely away from what is outside in the physical world. In normal life, human beings only turn their gaze away from what is within the physical world when they sleep; then they allow nothing to enter their soul through their eyes, ears, and the entire organization of their senses, but in return they become unconscious and are unable to live consciously in a spiritual world. It has now been said that one of the basic elements of spiritual knowledge for human beings is to find within themselves the possibility of transcending themselves. But this means nothing other than first making the spirit effective within themselves. In today's normal human life, we all know only one way of turning away from the physical world, and that is when we enter the unconsciousness of sleep. Now, our consideration of the “nature of sleep” has shown us how human beings are in a real spiritual world, even though they know nothing about it. For it would be absurd to believe that what is the center of the human soul and spirit disappears in the evening and reappears in the morning; no, it actually survives the states from falling asleep to waking up. But what is the inner power of conscious awareness for normal people today — even when no stimulation for consciousness flows in through the impressions of the senses or through the work of the mind — is lacking in sleep. The soul life is so subdued during sleep that the human being is not able to encourage and awaken what the soul allows itself to experience inwardly. When the human being wakes up again, experiences penetrate from outside, and because the human being is thus given soul content, he becomes conscious of this soul content. He cannot become conscious of it unless he is stimulated from outside. Otherwise, the human being's power is too weak when he is left to himself in sleep. The ascent into the spiritual world therefore means the kindling of such forces in our soul that enable the soul to live realistically within itself, as it were, when it becomes to the outside world what a person is otherwise in sleep. So, basically, ascending into the spiritual worlds first requires the kindling of inner energies, the drawing out of forces that are otherwise dormant, paralyzed, as it were, in the soul, so that human beings cannot handle them at all. All the intimate experiences that the spiritual researcher has to go through in his soul ultimately lead to the goal that has just been described. And today I would like to tell you something in summary about the path up into the spiritual world. These things are described in detail in their elements — in their basic principles, so to speak — in the book I have published under the title: “How does one attain knowledge of the higher worlds?” But today I do not want to repeat myself by giving you an excerpt from this book; rather, I want to describe from another perspective what the soul must do to ascend into the spiritual world. Those who are more deeply interested in this can read the details in the book mentioned above. However, no one should believe that what has been said in detail there can be presented here in a brief summary using the same words and sentences. Those who are familiar with the book will therefore not find that it is a summary of what is said there, but that it characterizes the matter from a different perspective.

It is extremely important that for the spiritual researcher who wants to guide the steps into the spiritual world, much of what leads other people directly to knowledge and goals simply becomes a means of education, an intimate means of education for the soul. Let me illustrate this with an example. Many years ago, I wrote a book: “The Philosophy of Freedom.” It is not currently available because it has been out of print for years, but hopefully a second edition will be published in the near future. This “Philosophy of Freedom” is written in such a way that it is quite different from other contemporary philosophical books, which more or less aim, through their content, to give a picture of how the world looks or should look according to the authors' ideas. That is not the immediate aim of this book, but rather it is intended to provide a kind of mental training for those who engage with the ideas presented in it, so that the way of thinking, the particular way of devoting oneself to these ideas, is one that sets the sensations and feelings of the soul in motion — somewhat like gymnastics, if I may compare it to that, sets the limbs in motion. What is otherwise merely a means of knowledge is, in this book, at the same time a means of spiritual and mental self-education. This is extremely important. Therefore, in this book — which is of course annoying to many contemporary philosophers who associate philosophy with something completely different from what can help people progress, because they want people to remain as they are, with the normal cognitive abilities that are innate to humans — it is not so much a question of whether one can argue about this or that, whether something can be understood in one way or another, but rather that the thoughts that are connected to form an organism can truly train our soul and help us progress.

This is also the case in my book “Truth and Science.” And so it is with many things that are initially supposed to be basic elements for training the soul to ascend into the spiritual world. Mathematics and geometry teach people about triangles, quadrangles, and other figures. But why do they teach all this? Because it is supposed to give them knowledge of how things are in space, what laws they are subject to, and so on. The spiritual ascent into the higher worlds also works with similar figures as symbols. For example, it presents the student with the symbol of the triangle, the square, or other symbolic figures, but not so that he may gain immediate knowledge through them, which he can also gain in other ways, but so that he may train his spiritual abilities in such a way that the spirit ascends to a higher world through the impressions these symbols make on him. So it is a matter of training the mind or — do not misunderstand — of mental gymnastics. That is why much of what is dry external science, dry external philosophy, what is mathematics or geometry, becomes a living symbol for spiritual training that leads us up into the spiritual world. When we allow this to work on our soul, we learn to understand what, in essence, no external science understands, namely that the ancient Pythagoreans, under the influence of their great teacher Pythagoras, spoke of the universe as consisting of numbers because they grasped the inner laws of numbers. Now let us consider how numbers confront us everywhere in the world. Nothing is easier than to refute spiritual science or anthroposophy, for one can easily say from a very lofty standpoint: Here come these spiritual scientists out of their mystical darkness with their symbolism of numbers, saying that there is an inner lawfulness in numbers and that, for example, the true basis of the human being must be considered according to the number seven. But Pythagoras and his disciples also believed this when they spoke of the inner laws of numbers. If we allow those wonderful connections that lie in the relationships between numbers to work on the spirit, we can train it to awaken where it would otherwise sleep and develop stronger powers within itself to penetrate the spiritual world.

So it is a training through such other science. That is also what is actually called the study of those who want to penetrate the spiritual world. And little by little, for such people, everything that is crude reality for other people becomes more or less an external symbol, a symbol. If a person is able to allow these symbols to work on them, they not only free their spirit from the outer, physical world, but also imbue it with strong powers, so that the soul can be aware of them even when there is no external stimulus. I have already mentioned that when a person allows a symbol such as the Rosicrucian cross to work on them, they can receive an impulse to ascend into the spiritual world. We imagine the Rosicrucian cross as a simple black cross with seven red roses attached in a circle at the intersection of the beams.

What does this tell us? Those who allow it to have the right effect on their soul imagine the following: I look at a plant, for example, and say that this plant is an imperfect being — and I place a human being next to it, who is a more perfect being in his own way, but only in his own way. For when I look at the plant, I must say: in it I have before me a material entity that is not permeated by passions, drives, instincts that would bring it down from the heights where it could otherwise stand. The plant has its innate laws, which it follows from leaf to blossom to fruit; thus it stands there, undriven, chaste. Beside it lives the human being, certainly a higher being in its own way, but saturated with drives, instincts, and passions that can lead it astray from its strict lawfulness. It must first overcome something within itself if it wants to follow its inner laws in the same way that the plant follows its innate laws. Now, man can say to himself: The expression of the urges and instincts within me is red blood. In a certain sense, I can compare this to what the chaste plant sap, chlorophyll, is in the red rose, and I can say: When the human being has become so strong within himself that the red blood is no longer an expression of what presses him down, but of what elevates him above himself — when it is the expression of a being as chaste as the plant sap that has become the red of the rose, or in other words: if the red of the rose expresses pure inwardness, the purified essence of the human being in his blood, then I have before me the ideal of what the human being can achieve by overcoming external nature, which is represented to me by the symbol of the black cross, the charred wood. And the red of the rose symbolizes the higher life that awakens when the red blood has become a chaste expression of the purified instinctive nature of the human being that has transcended itself. If we do not allow what is depicted to be an abstract idea, it becomes a vividly felt idea of development. Then a whole world of feelings and sensations comes to life within us; we feel within ourselves a development from an imperfect to a more perfect state. We feel something quite different from that abstract thing that external science gives us in the sense of a purely external Darwinism. Development becomes something that cuts deep into our hearts, that permeates us with warmth, with warmth of soul; it becomes a force within us that carries and sustains us. Only through such inner experiences can the soul develop strong forces within itself, so that in its innermost being — in that being which otherwise becomes unconscious when it withdraws from the outer world — it can illuminate itself with consciousness.

It is, of course, very easy to say: Then you are recommending the idea of something completely imaginary, something completely invented. But the only ideas that have value are those that are reflections of an external idea, and an idea of the Rosicrucians has no external counterpart! — But that is not the point. The point is not that the idea through which we train our soul is a reflection of an external reality, but that the idea awakens powers in our soul and draws out what lies hidden within it. When the human soul is devoted to such pictorial imagination, when, in a sense, everything that is otherwise of value to it as reality becomes the occasion for images that are not arbitrarily drawn from the imagination but are based on reality, as is now the case with the symbol of the Rosicrucians, then we say: Man is striving to ascend to the first stage of knowledge of the spiritual world. This is the stage of imaginative knowledge, which leads us beyond what is immediately concerned only with the physical world.

Thus, the person who wants to ascend into the spiritual world works in their soul with very specific ideas, with a very specific way of allowing external reality to affect them. They work within this soul itself. When a person has worked in this way for a while, the external scientist can say to them: This has only a subjective, individual value for you. But the external scientist does not know that under such strict, lawful training of the soul there is a stage of inner development where the soul completely ceases to allow subjective feelings and sensations to speak, where the soul arrives at a point where it must say to itself: Now ideas are arising within me that confront me like trees and rocks, rivers and mountains, plants and animals of the outer world, that are as real as outer physical things, and to which my subjectivity can add nothing and take nothing away.

Thus, there is indeed an intermediate state for everyone who wants to ascend to the spiritual world, where the human being is in danger of carrying his subjectivity, which is valid only for him, into the spiritual world. But human beings must pass through this intermediate state, and then they reach a stage where what is experienced by the soul becomes just as objectively provable — for anyone who has the ability to do so — as all things in external, physical reality. After all, the principle applies to external science that what is to be considered scientific must be provable at all times for everyone — even for those who are sufficiently prepared for it. Or do you believe that you can teach the law of “corresponding boiling temperature” to an eight-year-old child? I doubt it. You will not even be able to teach them the Pythagorean theorem. So it is already bound by this principle that the human soul must be prepared in an appropriate way if one wants to prove anything to it. And just as one must be prepared — although it is possible for every human being — to understand the Pythagorean theorem, so one must be prepared through a certain exercise of the soul if one wants to experience or recognize this or that in the spiritual world. But then what can be recognized can be experienced and observed in the same way by every person who is prepared for it in the necessary way. Or when communications are made from the observations of spiritual science by those who have prepared their souls for this, so that such a person can look back on repeated earthly lives, so that these become a fact for him, then people come and say: He's bringing us dogmas again and demanding that we believe them! But the spiritual researcher does not present his findings to his contemporaries with the demand that they believe them.

If people think that what is being said is dogma, then ask yourself: Is the fact that whales exist a dogma for someone who has never seen one? Certainly, one can explain it this way: it is a dogma for someone who has never seen a whale. But spiritual research does not approach the world with mere statements. It does not do so even when it understands itself; rather, it clothes what it brings down from the higher worlds in logical forms that are exactly the same logical forms that permeate the other sciences. Then everyone can verify, through a healthy sense of truth and unbiased logic, whether what the spiritual researcher has said is true. It has always been said that in order to seek out spiritual facts for oneself, the soul must be trained, must have gone through what is now being described, but not in order to understand what is being communicated; for that, a healthy sense of truth and unbiased logic are sufficient.

When the spiritual researcher has allowed such symbolic concepts and images to work on his soul for a while, he notices that his life of feeling and emotion becomes quite different from what it was before.

What is the life of feeling and emotion like for people in the ordinary world? Today, it has become somewhat trivial to use the term “selfish” everywhere and to say that people are selfish in normal life. I would rather not put it that way, but say instead: in normal life, people are initially closely bound to the human personality, for example, when something makes us happy, especially in relation to the things that make us happy, the most distinguished spiritual creations, things of art and beauty. The saying “there's no accounting for taste” already expresses that much is bound up with our personality and that it depends on how we subjectively relate to things. Consider how everything that gives you pleasure is connected to your upbringing, where in the world you live, your profession, and so on, to see how closely sensations and feelings are linked to our personality. But when you do exercises for the soul such as those described, you notice that sensations and feelings become completely impersonal. It is a great and powerful experience when the moment comes when our life of sensations and feelings becomes, in a sense, impersonal. This moment comes, it comes surely, when, in the course of their spiritual path, people are inspired by those who take on their spiritual guidance to allow the following things to have a real effect on their soul. I will now list a few things which, if a person allows them to work on their soul for weeks or months, will have an educational effect on our entire life of feeling and emotion.

The following may be considered. When we focus our attention on what you find at the center of philosophical considerations, on the spiritual center of the human being, the I — when we have learned to rise to the concept of the I — which accompanies all our ideas, the mysterious center of all experience; and if we continue to cultivate that respect, that reverence and devotion that can be linked to the fact — for many, however, not a fact but a chimera — that an I lives within us! — if this can become the greatest, the most striking event, to tell ourselves again and again that this “I am” is the most essential part of the human soul, then powerful, strong feelings develop around the “I am” that are impersonal and aim precisely at recognizing how everything that surrounds us in terms of world secrets and mysteries is concentrated, as it were, in one point — the I-point — in order to grasp human beings from the I-point. The poet Jean Paulin, for example, recounts this awareness of the I in his autobiography: "I will never forget the phenomenon within me, never before told to anyone, when I stood at the birth of my self-awareness, the place and time of which I can specify. One morning, as a very young child, I was standing under the front door and looking to the left toward the woodpile when suddenly the inner face, I am an I, flashed before me like a bolt of lightning from the sky and remained shining ever since: there my I had seen itself for the first time and forever. Deceptions of memory are hardly conceivable here, since no foreign narrative could add to an event that occurred only in the most sacred inner sanctum of man, whose novelty alone gave permanence to such everyday circumstances.

That is already a lot, already with all the shivers of awe and with all the feeling for the greatness of this fact, to feel the devotion to the compression of the world's being at one point. But if man feels this again and again and allows it to affect him, it may be that, although it does not enlighten him about all the mysteries of the world, it still gives him a direction that is entirely impersonal and entirely directed toward the innermost human being.

In this way we educate our emotional and sensory life in the ego. And when we have done this for a while, we can take our feelings and sensations in a different direction, we can say to ourselves: this ego within us is connected with everything we think, feel, and sense, with our entire soul life, it glows and shines through our soul life. Then, without being self-centered or personal, we can study human nature with the I as the center of thinking, feeling, and willing. Human beings become a mystery to us, not ourselves. Our feelings expand from the I to the soul. Then we can move on to other feelings, we can acquire that beautiful feeling without which we cannot lead our soul further into spiritual knowledge, that is what one might call: the feeling that in every thing that comes our way, access to the infinite opens up to us, as it were. This is the most wonderful feeling when we allow it to come before our soul again and again. It can be there when we go out and see a wonderful spectacle of nature: the mountains shrouded in clouds, with thunder and lightning. This has a great and powerful effect on our soul. But then we must learn to see the great and mighty not only there, but perhaps take a single leaf, look at it closely with all its veins and all the wonderful things that are on it, and in doing so we can perceive and feel the great and mighty that reveals itself like an infinity from the smallest leaf, just as in the greatest spectacle of nature. It may seem strange, but there is something to it, and one must express oneself grotesquely afterwards: it may make a great impression when a person sees the glowing lava mass coming out of the earth. But then we think to ourselves, someone looks at warm milk or ordinary coffee, sees something like small crater-shaped formations and sees a similar spectacle playing out on a small scale. Everywhere, in the smallest as in the largest, access to the infinite.

And if we continue to explore, and even if so much has been revealed to us, there is still more beneath the surface that we may have explored above. So we feel what can emerge at every point in the universe as a revelation of an intense infinity. This fills our soul with sensations and feelings that are necessary if we want to attain what Goethe calls “eyes of the mind” and “ears of the mind.” In short, it is a living out of our emotional life, which is otherwise the most subjective thing, to the point where we feel only as the stage on which something is happening, where we no longer even count our feelings as our own. Our personality is silenced. It is roughly like stretching a canvas and painting a picture on it as a painter; we stretch our soul when we train ourselves in this way and let the spiritual world paint on this soul. You can feel this from a certain point in time. One must then understand for oneself that in order to recognize what the world essentially is, it is necessary to regard a certain level of soul life as the sole decisive factor.

Thus, what a person acquires in the fervent striving of the soul becomes decisive for the truth. It must be decided in the soul itself whether something is true or not. Nothing external can decide; rather, by transcending themselves, human beings must find within themselves the authority to see or find the truth. Yes, we can basically say: We cannot completely distinguish ourselves from other human beings. Other people seek objective criteria, something that gives us confirmation of the truth from outside. The spiritual researcher, however, seeks confirmation of the truth from within. So he does the opposite. If that were the case, one could perhaps say for appearances' sake: it is bad if spiritual scientists want to turn the world upside down with their distortions. For in truth, natural scientists and philosophers do nothing other than spiritual scientists, only they do not know that they are doing it. I will give you proof of this, taken from the immediate present.

At the last natural scientists' meeting, Oswald Külpe gave a lecture on the relationship between natural science and philosophy, in which he concluded that when humans look out into the sensory world and perceive it as sound, color, warmth, and so on, they only have subjective qualities. This is only slightly different from what Schopenhauer says: “The world is our idea.” But Oswald Külpe points out that what we perceive through our senses, in short, everything that appears to us pictorially, is subjective, whereas what physics and chemistry say—pressure, attractive and repulsive forces, resistance, and so on—must be characterized as objective; so that in our worldviews we are dealing partly with something purely subjective and partly with something that is objective, such as pressure, attraction, and repulsion.

I do not want to go into the criticism that has been expressed about this, but only to discuss the way of thinking. This seems so terribly easy to prove for today's epistemologists: because we cannot see without eyes, light would be only something caused by our eyes. But what happens in the external world, it is said, when one ball collides with another, what acts as forces, as resistance, pressure, and so on, must be transferred to the external world, to space. Why do people think this? Oswald Külpe reveals himself very clearly at a certain point when he talks about sensory perceptions. Because he regards them as images, he says: They cannot collide or attract each other, nor can they press or warm each other, nor can they be so far apart in space that they send light through space at such and such a speed, nor can they be arranged in the same way that chemists arrange the elements. Why does he say this about sensory perceptions? Because he regards sensory perceptions as images that are only produced by our senses.

Now I would like to present a simple thought that shows that the nature of images does not change anything. Things collide and attract each other. But when Mr. Külpe considers sensory perceptions, this world that cannot attract or collide, it does not appear to Mr. Oswald Külpe as reality, but as a mirror image. He does indeed have images before him. But impact, pressure, resistance, and everything else that is placed in the world as distinct from the others, the sensory perceptions, cannot be explained objectively in any other way than through the pictorial nature of the sensory perceptions. Why is that so? Because when a person perceives pressure, impact, and so on, he makes what lives in things into the sensations of things. Humans should study, for example, when they say: One billiard ball strikes another, that they are putting what they experience as impact force into things! And those who stand on the ground of spiritual science do nothing else. What lives within the soul, they make the criterion of expression of the world. There is no other principle of knowledge than that which can be found through the development of the soul itself. So the others do the same thing as spiritual research. Spiritual research only knows it. The others do it unconsciously, have no idea that they are doing the same thing at an elementary level, they only remain at the very first level and deny what they themselves are doing. Therefore, we can say that spiritual science is in no way opposed to other research into truth; other researchers do the same thing, only they take the first step and know nothing about it, while spiritual research consciously takes the steps that a particular human soul can take according to its stage of development. Once we have achieved a certain degree of objectivity in our feelings, what I have already indicated, but which is a necessary prerequisite for progress in the spiritual worlds, will come about. This is that human beings learn to live in the world in such a way that they assume that an all-encompassing spiritual lawfulness weaves and lives in the spiritual world. In ordinary life, human beings are far removed from such a way of thinking. They become angry when something happens to them that they do not like. This is quite understandable, for a different point of view is difficult to attain. This other point of view consists in saying: We come from a previous life, we have placed ourselves in the situations we are now in, we have led ourselves to what meets us from the bosom of the future. What meets us there corresponds to a strictly objective spiritual law. We accept it, because it would be absurd not to accept it. Whatever comes to us from the bosom of the spiritual worlds, whether the world reproaches or praises us, whether joyful or painful things appear to us: we accept it as the wise experience and interweaving of the world. This is something that must slowly and gradually become the whole principle of our being. When it does, our will begins to be trained. Whereas previously our feelings needed to be reorganized, now our will is reorganized, becoming independent of our personality and thus an organ for perceiving spiritual facts.

Then, after the stage of imaginative knowledge, what can truly and genuinely be called inspiration, fulfillment through spiritual facts, occurs for the human being. However, we must always be clear that human beings can only achieve the training of the will at a certain stage when their feelings have already been purified in a certain way, when their will can connect with the laws of the world, and when they are only there as human beings so that the facts and beings that want to appear to them can hold up a wall in their will on which they can be reflected, so that they can exist for them.

I have only been able to describe to you some of what the soul must go through in quiet, patient devotion if it wants to ascend into the higher worlds. In the following lectures, I will have to describe to you much of the world-historical development that the soul must go through in order to ascend into the spiritual worlds. So consider what has been said today only as an introduction, that through such training our emotional and volitional life and our entire life of imagination develop in such a way that they become carriers of new worlds, so that we actually enter a world that we recognize as a reality just as we recognize the physical world as a reality in its own way. I have already mentioned on another occasion: when people say, “You are only imagining what you think you see,” it must be replied that only experience and observation can reveal the difference between reality and appearance, between reality and fantasy, just as in the physical world. There, too, one must gain the difference through reality. For example, anyone who approaches reality with sound thinking knows how to distinguish a glowing piece of iron in reality from one that exists only in the imagination, and no matter how many Schopenhauerians may come along, they will still be able to distinguish between the two — what is truth and what is imagination. So people can orient themselves by reality. In the same way, they can only orient themselves to the spiritual world by reality. Someone once said that if a person just thinks about drinking lemonade, they can also taste lemonade on their tongue. I replied: Imagination can be so powerful that someone who has no lemonade in front of them may feel the taste on their tongue when they vividly imagine lemonade, but I would like to see if anyone has ever quenched their thirst with just imagined lemonade. That is where the criterion begins to become more real. And so it is with the inner development of the human being, that the human being not only gets to know a new soul life, new ideas, but also encounters another world in his soul and knows: You are now standing before a world that you can describe just as you can describe the outer world. This is not mere speculation, which could only be compared to the development of thought, but rather the formation of new sensory organs and the opening up of new worlds that are truly as real to us as our outer, physical world. What has been indicated today is the necessary reference, given our current circumstances, to the fact that spiritual research is possible. This does not mean that everyone must immediately become a spiritual researcher. For it must always be emphasized that when a person with a healthy sense of truth and unprejudiced logic allows the messages of spiritual science to reach them, even if they cannot themselves see into the spiritual worlds, everything that comes from such messages can become energy and strength for the soul, even if they initially believe in Haeckelism or Darwinism. What the spiritual researcher has to say is suited to appealing more and more to people's healthy sense of truth, all the more so because it is connected with the deepest interests of every human being. There may be people who do not consider it necessary for their spiritual welfare to know how amphibians and mammals relate to each other, or similar things. But what can be said from spiritual research based on a secure foundation must warm the hearts of all people: that the soul — insofar as it belongs to the spiritual world, descending through birth into sensual existence and re-entering the spiritual realm through the gate of death — belongs to the sphere of eternity. This must be of deepest interest to all human beings, as it sinks more and more deeply into their souls as a force that gives the soul the security it needs to stand in its place in life. A soul that does not know what it is and what it wants, what it means in terms of its essence, can become desolate, can finally despair and feel empty and void. But a soul that is filled with the spiritual achievements of spiritual science cannot remain empty and desolate, if only it does not accept the messages of spiritual research as dogma, but as a living life that warms our soul. This gives comfort for all suffering in life, when we are led up from all temporal suffering to what can become comfort for the soul from the share of the temporal in the eternal. In short, spiritual science can give people what they need today because of the increased temporal conditions in the loneliest and busiest hours of their lives — or when their strength is failing, what they need to look into the future and face it with vigor.

Thus, spiritual science, as it emanates from spiritual research, from those who want to take steps into the spiritual world, can always affirm what we want to summarize in a few words, which express the characteristics of the path into the spiritual world and its significance for the people of the present in a way that can be felt. What we wish to summarize in this way is not a reflection on theories of life, but a reflection on remedies, on sources of strength, on fortifying agents of life:

The spirit world — it remains closed to you,
If you do not recognize within yourself
The spirit that shines in the soul
And can become a guiding light for you
In the depths of the world, on the heights of the world!