The Rudolf Steiner Archive

4. Anthroposophy as the Content of Sensation, Knowledge, and Life

[ 1 ] Since we are able to meet so rarely these days, it might be a good idea to address questions where anthroposophy directly intersects with life. Anthroposophists are often asked: What is the relationship of anthroposophy to those who are not yet able to look into the spiritual worlds through clairvoyant consciousness? — For, essentially, the content of Spiritual Science has been received, derived, and communicated from the research of clairvoyant consciousness.

[ 2 ] It must be emphasized time and again that all facts and connections that can be investigated and communicated through clairvoyant insight must be understood using common sense. For once the things discovered through clairvoyant consciousness are present, they can be grasped and understood using the logic inherent in every natural human being, provided that the assessment is conducted without prejudice.

[ 3 ] Furthermore, one might ask: Are there not certain facts in ordinary human life, certain experiences of this ordinary human life, that point from the outset to the assertion of spiritual research that a spiritual world underlies our physical world and all its phenomena? — Well, there are indeed many such facts in ordinary life of which we can say that a person will never be able to comprehend them—even though they must accept them—if they know nothing of the existence of a spiritual world.

[ 4 ] Today, as we begin our reflections, we wish to point out two facts of ordinary, normal consciousness in human life that simply must be regarded as inexplicable unless one accepts the existence of a spiritual world. What we are to discuss are two facts that people certainly know as part of everyday life, but which they generally fail to view in the proper light; for if they did, there would be no need for a materialistic worldview. If we therefore wish to first bring one of these two facts to mind, let it be the following, and let us do so by drawing on very ordinary events of everyday life.

[ 5 ] When a person is confronted with a fact that he cannot explain using the concepts he has acquired up to that point, he is filled with wonder. In fact, to use a very concrete example, anyone seeing a car or a train in motion for the first time—even though this will soon no longer be unusual even in the heart of Africa—must be astonished to the highest degree, because the following train of thought is taking place in their mind: Based on everything I have encountered so far, it seems impossible to me that something could race across the earth without something pulling it. Yet I see that it races along without being pulled! That is astonishing. — Thus, what humanity does not yet know evokes wonder, and what it has already seen no longer evokes wonder. Only those things that humanity cannot connect to what it has already experienced are surprising. Let us keep this fact of ordinary life firmly in mind.

[ 6 ] And now we can link this to another fact that is also quite remarkable. In daily life, people are confronted with many things they have never seen before, yet they accept them without being surprised. There are numerous such events. What kind of events are these? Well, it would certainly be something very astonishing, for example, if a person were to experience in the ordinary course of things that, while sitting quietly in a chair, they suddenly began to fly up through the chimney into the air. That would indeed be very astonishing, but when it happens in a dream, he goes along with it without being surprised. And we experience even more incredible things in dreams, at which we are not at all surprised, even though they cannot be linked to everyday events. When awake, we are already surprised if someone takes a high leap into the air, yet in a dream we fly and are not surprised at all. Here we are faced with the fact that, when awake, we are surprised by things we have not yet experienced, whereas in a dream we are not surprised at all.

[ 7 ] The second fact to which we wish to draw attention today as an introduction to our reflections is the question of conscience. In whatever a person does—and in a highly sensitive person, even when a person thinks—something stirs within us that we call conscience. Conscience is actually quite independent of what external events signify. For we might, for example, have done something that would perhaps be quite useful to us, and yet this act could be condemned by our conscience. But when conscience stirs, every person feels that something flows into the judgment of an act that has nothing to do with its usefulness. It is like a voice speaking within us: You really should have done that—or: You shouldn’t have done that!—There we stand before the reality of conscience, and we know how powerful the warning force of conscience can be and how it can haunt us throughout life, and we also know that one cannot deny the existence of conscience.

[ 8 ] Now let us consider the fact that in dreams we do the strangest things, things that, if we did them while awake, would cause us the most terrible pangs of conscience. Everyone can confirm from their own experience that they do things in a dream without the slightest twinge of conscience—things that, if done while awake, would cause their conscience to speak out. Thus, these two facts—the fact of wonder and amazement and the fact of conscience—are, strangely enough, suspended in dreams. Although people let such things pass unnoticed in ordinary life, they nevertheless shine deep into the depths of our existence.

[ 9 ] To shed a little light on these matters, I would like to point out another fact that concerns not so much the conscience as a sense of wonder. In ancient Greece, the saying arose that all philosophy stems from wonder, from amazement. The sentiment underlying this statement—and I mean the sentiment the ancient Greeks had in mind—cannot be traced back to the earlier periods of Greek development; it first appears at a certain point in the history of philosophy. This is because people in earlier times did not yet feel this way. How is it, then, that it was precisely in ancient Greece, from a certain time onward, that the realization arose that we are amazed? Well, we have just seen that we are amazed by what does not fit into our life up to that point. But if we have only this amazement—the amazement of ordinary life—there is still nothing special about it, no more than mere wonder at the unfamiliar. Those who are amazed by automobiles and railroads are not yet accustomed to seeing them, and their amazement is nothing other than amazement at the unfamiliar. Far more astonishing than the wonder at automobiles and railroads, than the wonder at the unfamiliar, is the fact that a person can also begin to marvel at the familiar. There is, for example, the fact that the sun rises every morning. Those people who, with their ordinary consciousness, are accustomed to this fact, are not amazed by it. But when there is wonder at the everyday things one is accustomed to seeing, then philosophy and insight arise. The more insightful people are those who can marvel at things that the ordinary person takes for granted. Only in this case does one become a person striving for insight, and for this reason the ancient Greeks coined the phrase: All philosophy comes from wonder.

[ 10 ] What, then, about conscience? It is interesting to note that the word “conscience”—that is, the concept itself, since a word only emerges once a mental image of something has taken shape—is found in ancient Greece only from a certain point in time onward. There is no way to find a word in older Greek literature, from around the time of Aeschylus, that could be translated as “conscience.” In contrast, we find such a word among the later Greek writers, for example in Euripides. Thus one can point out quite clearly that, just as with wonder at the familiar, conscience is something of which human beings only became aware from a certain point in ancient Greece onward. What later emerged as pangs of conscience from a certain point onward was something entirely different for the Greeks of antiquity. In earlier times, it did not happen that pangs of conscience arose when a person had done something wrong. Back then, people possessed a primal, elemental clairvoyance, and if we were to go back just a short time before the Christian era, we would find that all people still possessed this primal clairvoyance. If a person had done something wrong, there was no pangs of conscience; instead, a demonic figure appeared to the ancient clairvoyance that tormented them, and these figures were called the Erinyes and the Furies. It was only then, when people had lost the ability to see these demonic figures, that they acquired, when they had done something wrong, the ability to feel the conscience as an inner experience.

[ 11 ] We must now ask ourselves what such facts reveal to us and what is actually happening in the everyday experience of astonishment, as, for example, a native from an uncultivated region of Africa might experience it—someone who has been brought to Europe and now sees trains and automobiles in motion. His resulting astonishment presupposes that something is entering his human life that was not there before, something he used to see differently.

[ 12 ] If the more advanced person feels the urge to explain many things to himself, to explain the everyday, because he is also capable of marveling at the everyday, this presupposes in the same way that he previously viewed the matter differently. No one would have arrived at any explanation of the sunrise other than the mere visual impression that the sun is rising, were it not for the feeling in his soul that he had once seen it differently. But, one might object, we have seen the sunrise unfold in the same way from our earliest youth, and would it not be downright foolish to be amazed by it? — There is no other explanation for this than that, if we are nevertheless amazed by it, we must have once experienced it differently in a previous state than we do today, than we do now in this life. For if Spiritual Science says that the human being existed in a different state between birth and a previous life, then in the very fact of being astonished by such an everyday occurrence as the familiar sunrise, we have nothing other than an indication of this earlier state, in which the human being also perceived this sunrise, but in a different way, without physical organs. There he perceived all this with spiritual eyes and spiritual ears. And in the moment when, feeling in the dark, he says to himself: You stand before the rising sun, before the roaring sea, before the sprouting plant, and you are amazed! — in that amazement lies the realization that he once perceived it differently than with the physical eye. It is precisely his spiritual organs with which he had seen this before he entered the physical world. He now senses vaguely that it looks different from how he had seen it before. That was, and could only have been, before birth. These facts compel us to acknowledge that such insight would not be possible at all if the human being did not enter this life from a preceding supersensible existence. Otherwise, there would be no explanation for the amazement and for the insight it brings about. Of course, the human being does not recall in clear mental images what he experienced differently before birth, but even if it is not clear in thought, it does arise in feeling. Only through initiation can it be brought forth as a clear memory.

[ 13 ] Let us now consider why we are not surprised in our dreams. To do so, we must first answer the question of what a dream actually is. A dream is an ancient legacy from past incarnations. In past incarnations, human beings experienced other states of consciousness of a clairvoyant nature. In the course of further development, however, human beings lost the ability to look into the spiritual-soul world clairvoyantly. It was a twilight-like clairvoyance, and evolution gradually progressed from this earlier twilight-like clairvoyance toward our present clear waking consciousness, which was able to unfold in the physical world, only to then, once fully developed, ascend once more into the spiritual-soul worlds with the abilities that human beings have acquired through the “I” in waking consciousness. But what, then, did the human being acquire back then in the old clairvoyance? Something of that has remained, and that is precisely the dream. The dream, however, differs from the old clairvoyance in that it is an experience of the present human being, and this present human being has developed a consciousness that contains the urge for knowledge. The dream, as a remnant of an earlier consciousness, does not contain the urge for knowledge, and that is why the human being perceives the difference between waking consciousness and dream consciousness. But what was not present in the old, twilight-like clairvoyance—that sense of wonder—cannot enter into dream consciousness even today. Amazement, wonder, cannot enter the dream, but we have it in waking consciousness when we are turned toward the outer world. In a dream, a person is not in the outer world; a dream is a state of being placed within the spiritual world, where a person does not experience the things of the physical world. But it is precisely in relation to the physical world that a person has learned to feel wonder. In a dream, they accept everything just as they accepted it in the old clairvoyance. Back then, they could accept things that way because spiritual beings came and showed them what good or evil they had done; that is why people back then did not need a sense of wonder. Thus, the dream itself, through its very nature, shows us that it is a legacy from ancient times, when there was still no sense of wonder regarding everyday things and no conscience yet.

[ 14 ] Here we are, at the point where we ask ourselves why it was necessary that human beings, having once been clairvoyant, could not remain so. Why did they descend? Did the gods perhaps chase them down for no good reason? — Well, the fact is that human beings could never have attained what lies in wonder and what lies in conscience if they had not descended. Human beings descended so that they might acquire knowledge and conscience; for they can only acquire them if they are separated from these spiritual worlds for a time. And he has acquired knowledge and conscience down here so that he might ascend again with them.

[ 15 ] Spiritual Science shows us that between death and a new birth, a person always spends a certain period of time in a purely spiritual world. Immediately after death, we experience the Kamaloka period, the state in the purifying realm of desires within the soul world, where the human being stands, so to speak, only halfway into the spiritual world, because there he still looks down upon his instincts and sympathies and is thereby still drawn to what connected him to the physical world. Only then, when this Kamaloka period has been extinguished, does he fully experience the purely spiritual life, or Devachan.

[ 16 ] When a person enters this purely spiritual world, what does he or she experience there? How does each person experience it? Well, even a very ordinary intellectual consideration shows that between death and the new birth, our surroundings must look quite different from what they do here in our physical life. Here we see colors because we have eyes; here we hear sounds because we have ears. But if, after death in the spiritual realm, we have no eyes, no ears, then we cannot perceive these colors, these sounds. After all, even here we see and hear poorly or not at all if we do not have good eyes and ears. For anyone who thinks about it even a little, this should be self-evident. It is quite clear that we must imagine the spiritual world very differently from the world in which we live here between birth and death. You can get a mental image of how this world must change when we pass through the gate of death by means of a small comparison we wish to make. Let us suppose that a person sees a lamb and a wolf. A person can perceive this lamb and this wolf with all the sensory organs available to them in physical life. There they see this lamb as a material lamb and the wolf as a material wolf. They also recognize other lambs and wolves and call them lamb and wolf. They then have a conceptual image of the lamb and also one of the wolf. One could now say—and indeed one does say—that the conceptual image of the animal is not visible; it lives within the animal; one does not actually see, in a material sense, what the essence of the lamb and the wolf is. One forms mental images about the essence of the animal; but the essence of the animal is, after all, invisible.

[ 17 ] There are theorists who believe that the concepts we form of the wolf and the lamb exist only within us, and that they have nothing to do with the wolf and the lamb themselves. A man who makes such a claim should be made to feed a wolf with lambs for so long that, according to scientific research, all the material particles of the wolf’s body have been renewed, so that the wolf is entirely composed of lamb matter. And now this man should see whether the wolf has become a lamb! If it turns out that the wolf has not become a lamb, then it is proven that what is the “wolf” as an object differs from the material wolf, and that the objective aspect of the wolf transcends the material.

[ 18 ] This invisible reality, which in ordinary life we can only conceive of as an abstract concept, is what we see after death. It is not the white color of the lamb that one sees there, nor the sounds the lamb makes that one hears there, but rather one beholds what works as the invisible force within the lamb—a force that is just as real and that is present for those who live in the spiritual world. In the very same place where the lamb stands, there also stands a real spiritual entity that one then sees after death. And so it is with all phenomena of the physical environment. One sees the sun differently, the moon differently, everything differently; and one brings something of this with oneself when one enters the new existence through birth. And when one is then seized by the feeling that one once saw things quite differently, then, along with the astonishment and wonder, the realization comes down.

[ 19 ] It is a different matter when one considers a person’s actions. That is where conscience comes into play. If we want to know what that is, we must pay attention to a fact of life that can be observed without having developed clairvoyance. One must pay attention to the moment of falling asleep. This can be learned without any clairvoyance, and what can be experienced in this process is something every person could experience. When one is about to fall asleep, things first lose their sharp contours, colors fade, and sounds not only grow weaker but seem to drift away, far away; they come as if from a distance, and this fading can be explained as a kind of receding. The entire process of the sensory world becoming less distinct is a transformation, as if a mist were settling in. The limbs also become heavier. One feels something in them that one had not felt in the limbs while awake; it is as if they were taking on a weight, a heaviness. In waking life, if one were to reflect on it, one should actually have the sensation that the leg, as one walks along, or the hand, as one raises it, has no weight for us. One should actually say to oneself: When I walk like this and raise my hand, my hand has no weight. Why does the hand have no weight? Because the limb belongs to my body. Now let us imagine that we are carrying a hundredweight in each hand; why do we feel the hundredweight as a weight? The hand belongs to me, which is why we do not feel its heaviness; but the hundredweight is outside of me, and because it does not belong to me, it has weight. Let us imagine the case of a Martian coming down to Earth without knowing anything about earthly things, and the first thing this Martian would see would be a human holding a weight in each hand. The Martian would initially have to assume that the two weights belong to the human, as if they were a part of his hands, a part of the whole human. If it were then later to form a mental image of the human being perceiving a difference between a hundredweight and a hand, it would be astonished. It is truly the case that we only perceive as weight that which is outside of us. So when a person, upon falling asleep, begins to feel their limbs as heavy, this is a sign that the person is emerging from their body, stepping out of their physical form.

[ 20 ] What matters now is a subtle observation that can be made at the very moment when our limbs begin to grow heavy. A most peculiar sensation arises at this point. It consists in the fact that it speaks to us: “You did this; you failed to do that.” — Like a living conscience, the deeds of the past day come to the fore. And if there is something in them that we cannot approve of, then we toss and turn in our bed and cannot fall asleep. But if we can be satisfied with our deeds, then as we fall asleep there comes a blissful moment in which one says to oneself: Oh, if only it could always remain this way! — And then comes a jolt—that is when a person steps out of their physical and etheric body, and then the person is in the spiritual world.

[ 21 ] Let us take a closer look at the moment when we experience this phenomenon, which appears like a living conscience. Without actually having the strength to do anything sensible, the person tosses and turns in bed. This is an unhealthy state; it prevents him from falling asleep. This occurs at the moment when, as we fall asleep, we are about to leave the physical plane to ascend into another world, which, however, does not wish to accept what we call a “guilty conscience.” The person cannot fall asleep because they are repelled by the world into which they are supposed to enter upon falling asleep. Therefore, the saying: to consider an action in relation to one’s conscience—means nothing other than having a premonition of how one should be as a human being in the future in order to be able to enter the spiritual world.

[ 22 ] Thus, in wonder we find an expression of what we have seen in the past, and thus conscience is the expression of a later vision in the spiritual world. Conscience indicates whether we will recoil or be blissful when we are able to see our actions in Devachan. Thus, conscience is a prophetic foreboding of how we will experience our deeds after death.

[ 23 ] A sense of wonder and the drive for knowledge on the one hand, and conscience on the other—these are living signs of the spiritual world. One cannot explain these phenomena without drawing upon the spiritual worlds for an explanation. A person who is able to feel such awe in the face of the facts of the world—awe and wonder at the facts of the world—will be more readily inclined to become an anthroposophist. It is precisely the more developed souls who are able to feel wonder more and more deeply. The less one is able to marvel, the less advanced the soul in question is. Now it is the case that people respond with far less wonder to what they experience during the day—the everyday phenomena of life—than is the case, for example, when they admire the starry sky in all its splendor. But the truly higher development of the soul begins only when one can marvel at the smallest flower, the smallest petal, the most inconspicuous little beetle or worm just as much as at the greatest cosmic events. It is, in fact, quite remarkable with these things. In general, people are easily moved to demand an explanation for such things that strike them as sensational. The inhabitants of a volcanic region, for example, will demand an explanation of the causes of volcanic eruptions, because people there must be particularly attentive to such things and therefore pay more attention to them than to everyday occurrences. And even people who live far from volcanoes demand an explanation for them, because these events are also surprising and sensational to them. But if a person enters life with a soul of such a nature that they marvel at everything, because they sense something spiritual in everything that surrounds them, then they are no more particularly astonished by the volcano than, say, by the tiny bubbles and little craters they notice in the cup of milk or coffee on their breakfast table. They are just as interested in the small as in the large. |

[ 24 ] To be able to arrive everywhere with a sense of wonder—that is a reminder of the way of seeing before birth. To be able to go everywhere with a conscience regarding our actions—that is, to have the vivid intuition that every deed we perform will appear to us in the future in a different form. People who feel this way are more predestined than others to approach Spiritual Science.

[ 25 ] We are now living in a time when certain things are coming to light that can only be explained through Spiritual Science. Certain things defy any other explanation. And people react quite differently to such things. In our time, we undoubtedly observe many different human characters, yet within the wide variety of character nuances, we will encounter mainly two types of nature.

[ 26 ] We can describe some people as sensitive souls, as those inclined to contemplation, who are capable of feeling wonder everywhere and whose conscience is stirred everywhere. So much suffering, so many gloomy, melancholic moods can settle in the soul amid an unsatisfied longing for explanation. A sensitive conscience can make life very difficult. But there is also another kind of person present today. They want nothing to do with such an explanation of the world. To them, all the explanations of things put forward by spiritual research are terribly boring, and they would rather live life to the fullest than seek explanations; and as soon as one begins to speak of explanations, they start yawning. And it is certainly true that in such natures the conscience is less stirred than in the others. But how is it that such character contrasts arise? Spiritual Science is inclined to explore why one character trait is distinguished by its sensuality and thirst for knowledge, while the other is directed toward simply enjoying life without seeking explanations.

[ 27 ] When one examines the scope of the human soul through spiritual research—and one can only offer a few hints here, since it would take many hours to go into this in greater detail— one finds that many people who are endowed with a meaningful life—who cannot live at all without seeking enlightenment—have lived in previous incarnations in such a way that they had a direct inner knowledge in their souls of the fact of reincarnation. Even today, there are still numerous people on Earth who know this and for whom reincarnation is an absolute fact. One need only think of the Asians. Thus, such people who lead a meaningful life in the present connect their current life—albeit not directly—but they nevertheless connect it to another life in a previous incarnation, where they knew something of reincarnation.

[ 28 ] But the other, more robust types of people come from lives in which they knew nothing of previous earthly lives. They feel no urge to burden their consciences with the deeds of their lives, nor do they concern themselves much with explanations. There are very many people of this sort among us in the West, and it is precisely the character of Western culture that people have, so to speak, forgotten their past lives on Earth. Yes, they have forgotten them; but we stand at a turning point in our culture where the memory of past earthly lives will be revived. Therefore, the people living today are moving toward a future that can be characterized as a restoration of the connection with the spiritual world.

[ 29 ] Today this is still the case for only a few people, but it will certainly become a common trait among people in the course of the 20th century. And this is how it will be: Let us suppose that a person has done this or that, and afterward is plagued by a guilty conscience. That is how it is now. Later, however, when the spiritual connection is restored, a person who has done this or that will feel the urge to move back from their deed, as if with their eyes bound. And then something will appear to the person—like an image, like a kind of dream image, yet a very vivid dream image—of what is destined to happen in the future because of their deed. And when people experience this image, they will say to themselves something like this: Yes, it is I who am experiencing this, but I have not yet experienced what I see there!

[ 30 ] For all people who have never heard of Spiritual Science, this will be something terrible. But those people who have prepared themselves for what is to come to everyone will say to themselves: “Yes, I have not yet experienced this, but I will experience it in the future as karmic compensation for what I have just done.”

[ 31 ] We now stand, as it were, in the threshold of a time when karmic balance will be revealed to humanity in a prophetic vision. And now imagine this experience becoming ever more intense as time goes on; then you have the human being of the future, who will witness how his deeds are judged karmically.

[ 32 ] What, then, causes people to become capable of seeing this karmic balance? It has to do with the fact that people used to have no conscience; instead, after committing evil deeds, they were tormented by the Furies. That was the clairvoyance of old; it has passed away. Then came the time when they no longer saw the Furies—the middle age—but what the Furies had once done now manifested inwardly as a conscience. And now we are gradually approaching a time when we will see something again, namely karmic balance. The fact that human beings have acquired a conscience enables them to now consciously look into the spiritual world.

[ 33 ] If certain people in the present have become perceptive souls because they acquired powers in earlier incarnations that manifest themselves in wonder as memories of past lives, then today’s people will also carry these powers into their next incarnations if they acquire knowledge of the spiritual worlds today. But those who have now resisted accepting an explanation of the law of incarnations will, on the contrary, fare quite badly in the future world. For these souls, this will be a terrible reality. Today we are in an age where people can still get by in life even if they have no explanations for life in relation to the spiritual worlds. But this age, which the cosmic powers have, so to speak, permitted for a time, is coming to an end—and in such a way that people who have no connection with the spiritual world will grow up in their next life in such a way that the world into which they are reborn in their next incarnation will be incomprehensible to them. And when they then leave the physical existence that was incomprehensible to them upon death, they will no longer have any understanding of the spiritual world into which they are growing after their death. It goes without saying that they will enter the spiritual world, but they will not comprehend it. They will then find themselves in an environment they do not understand, which seems to them as though it does not belong to them, and which torments them as only a guilty conscience can. And when they then enter a new incarnation, it is just as bad; for there they will have all manner of drives and passions, and in these they will live, as if in illusions and hallucinations, because they are unable to develop a sense of wonder. It is the materialists of today who are heading toward a future where they will be tormented in a terrible way by hallucinations and illusions; for what a person thinks in this life today, they will then experience as an illusion and a hallucination.

[ 34 ] One can form a clear mental image of this. Let’s take, for example, two people walking down the street together today. Let’s say one is a materialist and the other is a non-materialist. The non-materialist says something to the materialist about the spiritual world. The materialist, however, says or thinks: “Oh, that’s nonsense! Those are just illusions!” — Yes, for the latter they are illusions, but for the one who spoke about the spiritual world, they are not illusions. The consequences will begin for the materialist as soon as he dies, and even more so later on in his next earthly life. Then it will be the case for him that he finds the spiritual worlds tormenting, so that they are a living reproach to him. During his time in Kamaloka between death and rebirth, he will, so to speak, perceive no difference between Kamaloka and Devachan. And when he is reborn, and the spiritual world appears before him in the manner described, it will seem to him like something unreal, an illusion, a hallucination.

[ 35 ] Spiritual Science is not something intended merely to satisfy our curiosity. We are not gathered here simply because we are more curious about the supersensible world than other people, but because we sense, to a greater or lesser extent, that the people of the future will not be able to live at all without Spiritual Science. All other endeavors that do not take this fact into account are heading toward decadence. Well, it is arranged in such a way that those who resist accepting Spiritual Science today will still have the opportunity to approach it in later incarnations. But there must be outposts. People who, through their karma, already long for Spiritual Science today have the opportunity to become outposts. This opportunity comes to them precisely because they must be and will become outposts.

[ 36 ] Other people will see the longing for Spiritual Science arise more from the general karma of humanity.