Toward Imagination
GA 169
18 July 1916, Berlin
7. Toward Imagination
When we look at the world around us as our senses and intellect perceive it, we have something we may call, metaphorically speaking, a great cosmic edifice. We form concepts, ideas, and images of what it is like and what goes on in it. What happens in this cosmic edifice, even down to the details, affects us so that we develop certain sympathies or antipathies for this or that, and these then are expressed in our feeling life. Prompted by our will we do this or that, and thus intervene in the processes going on in this cosmic edifice.
At first, people think that this building of the cosmos consists of separate parts, and so they study these parts and find them made up of still smaller parts, which they then examine, and so on. Finally, scientists arrive at what they call the smallest parts, the molecules and atoms. As I told you, nobody has ever seen these molecules and atoms; they are hypothetical—in a certain sense the hypothesis of their existence is justified, as long as we keep in mind that it is only a hypothesis. In short, we are to some extent justified in thinking that the cosmic building consists of parts or members, and there is nothing wrong with trying to get a clear picture of these. However, the people who give rein to their fantasy in thinking about the atom and who perhaps even talk about the life of the atom, or have still wilder notions about it—well, they are simply speaking about the nothing of a nothing, for the atom itself is merely hypothetical. To build a hypothesis upon other hypotheses is nothing else but building a house of cards; not even that, for in a house of cards we have at least the cards, but in speculations about the atom, we have nothing.
Based on the insights to be gained from spiritual science, people should admit that if they want to see more of the cosmic edifice than our senses perceive, they must arrive at a different perspective. They must come to a way of thinking that is as different from our thinking in everyday life (which is also that of ordinary science) as our usual, everyday way of thinking is from dreams. We dream in pictures, and we can have a whole world in these pictures of ours. Then we wake up and are no longer confronted with the pictures of our dreams but with realities that impinge upon us, that push and tug at us, demanding attention. We know this from life itself, not on the basis of a theory, for no theory can enable us to distinguish between dreams and so-called everyday reality. Only our direct experience of life can teach us this.
Now, it is also true that we can wake up from everyday life experiences, which we may call by analogy “a dream life,” to a higher reality, the reality of the spirit. And again, it is only on the basis of life itself that we can distinguish between this higher spiritual reality and that of everyday life.
Now, what we see when we enter this world can be described with the following image—of course, one could use many different analogies to show the relationship between spiritual reality and ordinary reality, but I want to use a special image for this today. Let's imagine we are looking at a house built out of bricks. At first glance, the house appears to be composed of individual bricks. Of course, in the case of a house we can't go beyond the individual brick. However, let's assume the house doesn't consist of just ordinary bricks but of ones that are in turn extraordinarily artful constructions. Nevertheless, on first seeing the house we would only see the bricks, without having any idea that each brick in turn is a small work of art, so to speak. That is what happens in the case of the cosmic edifice.
We need only take one part of this cosmic edifice, the most complete one, let's say, the human being. Just think, as a part of this cosmic edifice, the human being seems to us to consist of parts: head, limbs, sense organs, and so on. We have tried over time to understand each part in its relation to the spiritual world. Remember, just recently I told you that the shape of our head can be traced to our previous earthly incarnation. The rest of our body, on the other hand, belongs to this incarnation and bears within it the rudiments of the head for the next life on earth.
I also spoke about the twelve senses and connected them with the twelve forces corresponding to the twelve signs of the zodiac. We said that microcosmically we bear within us the macrocosm with its forces working into us primarily from the twelve signs of the zodiac. Each of these forces is different: the forces of Aries differ from those of Taurus, which in turn differ from those of Gemini, and so on. Similarly, our eyes perceive different things than our ears. The twelve senses thus correspond to the twelve signs of the zodiac, but there is more to it than that.
We know that the rudiments of our sense organs were developed already on old Saturn, then evolved further during the old Sun and the old Moon periods up to the time of our earth. During our earth period, we have become self-enclosed beings with completely developed sense organs. In the Moon, Sun, and Saturn periods, human beings were much more open to the great cosmos, and the forces of the twelve signs of the zodiac affected the essential core of the human being. While the rudiments of our sense organs were being formed, they were affected by the forces of the zodiac. Thus, when we speak of the connection between the senses and the signs of the zodiac, we mean more than a mere correspondence. We seek those forces that have built our sense organs into us. We do not speak superficially of some vague kind of correspondence between the ego-sense and Aries or between the other senses and this or that sign of the zodiac.
We speak about this correspondence because during the earlier periods of our earthly planet the senses of the human being were not yet developed to the point of being enclosed in the organism. It was only through the twelve forces that the sense organs were built into our organism. We are built up out of the macrocosm, and when we study our sense organs, we are actually studying world-embracing forces that have worked in us over millions and millions of years, and have produced such wonderful parts of the human organism as the eyes and the ears. It is indeed true that we study these parts for their spiritual content, just as we would have to study each brick in order to examine the artistic structure of a house.
I could explain this with yet another image. Suppose we had some kind of structure artistically built up out of layers of paper rolls, some of them standing upright, others at an angle—all of these arranged artistically into some kind of a structure. Now imagine we had not just rolls of plain paper, but inside each roll a beautiful picture had been painted. Of course, just looking at the rolled up paper, we wouldn't see the paintings on the inside of the rolls. And yet, the paintings are there! And they must have been painted before the paper rolls were arranged in the artistic structure.
Now suppose it is not we who build up this artful structure of paper rolls, but the paper rolls have to form it by themselves. Of course, you can't imagine they could do this by themselves; nobody can imagine it. But let's suppose because the pictures are painted on all the paper rolls, the latter now have the power to arrange themselves in layers. And that gives you a picture of our true cosmic edifice. We can compare the paintings on the rolls with all that happened during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods, and is woven into every individual part of our cosmic building. These are not dead pictures, but living forces that build up everything meant to exist on earth. And we draw out what is artfully hidden in the structure made up of the individual rolls of the cosmic edifice—which science describes. This is what confronts us in our outer life. I have given much thought to finding an analogy corresponding as closely as possible to the facts of the matter and have come up with this image of the paper rolls with their living, active pictures. When you think this analogy through, you will find that when we first look at this structure, we cannot know anything about the paintings inside the rolls. If the structure is rather artful and ingenious, we can get an artful and ingenious description of it; however, it will not contain a word about the paintings inside the rolls.
You see, that's how it is with the conventional sciences. They describe this artistic structure, while ignoring completely the paintings on the inside of each roll. Now, you may wonder if a description of the elaborate structure of the rolls allows us to get an idea and to really know what is inside each roll as long as the rolls are rolled up and part of the whole structure? No, it does not! Conventional science is completely unable to arrive at the idea that the spiritual underlies our cosmic edifice. Therefore, simply continuing along the lines of conventional science will not lead to an understanding of spiritual science; something else must be added, something that has nothing to do with ordinary science.
Now picture all these layers of rolls; we can easily describe them and find them interesting and beautiful. Maybe some rolls are more slanted than others; maybe some are curved, and so on; all this can be nicely described. But in order to find out that there is a picture inside each roll, we will have to take out one of the paper rolls and unroll it. In other words, something special must be added to the human soul if we are to advance from the ordinary scientific outlook to that of the science of the spirit. The soul must be taken hold of by something of a special nature. This is what is so difficult to understand for our materialist culture. Yet, this must be understood again as it was in earlier cultural epochs when a spiritual world view permeated the physical one. In ancient times, people were always aware that everything they had to know about the spiritual content of the world was based on the spiritual taking hold of the soul. That is why people back then spoke not only about science, but also about initiation and the like.
Another analogy, one taken from the ancient traditions of spiritual science, will make the matter completely clear to you if you think it through. In spiritual science we speak of an “occult reading of the world,” and rightly so. What conventional science is doing cannot be called “reading the world.” If you look at what is written on a page of some book or other publication and you can't read at all, then what is written there will of course remain completely in comprehensible to you. Still, you could describe the handwriting; you could describe the lines, loops, and crossbars; you could tell what the individual letters look like and how they are combined. It will be a nice description, not unlike the one contemporary science gives of outer physical reality or the one contemporary history provides. However, this is not the same as reading.
Obviously, people do not learn to read by taking a page from a book, without having any idea what it means to read, and trying to figure out the meaning of the text from the shape of the letters. Reading is taught in childhood. We learn to read not by describing the shape of the letters, but because something spiritual is conveyed to us, and we are mentally and spiritually stimulated to read. It is the same with everything we call the higher and lower degrees of initiation. Initiation was not based on teaching souls to describe what was outside them, but on teaching them to read it, to decipher, so to speak, the meaning of the world. Thus, it was with good reason that what is spiritual in the world was called “The Word,” for the world has to be read if it is to be understood spiritually. And we do not learn to read by memorizing the shape of the letters but by receiving spiritual impulses.
That is what I want to make clear through the presentations in our circles. As you remember the themes running through our lectures, you will see I have always tried to use images. Today I am also using them, for it is only through images that one can lead the way into the spiritual. As soon as images are crammed into concepts applying only to the physical plane, they no longer contain what they should. This confuses people because they cannot grasp what is given in images in such a way that it is a true reality for them. Right away, they think of the images themselves in completely materialistic terms. When we look at more primitive cultures, we see that people then did not have our modern concepts but thought in images and expressed their reality in them. Even in Asian cultures, which are somewhat atavistic because they have kept features from earlier times, you find that to meaningfully express something profound, people always speak in images, images that definitely have the significance of a reality.
Let us take an example where the image really has the significance of an immediate reality, of a coarse and rough reality, so to speak. Europeans frequently find it very hard to understand Asians who have preserved older, atavistic ideas of reality; they often have only a very rough understanding of Asians. There is a very beautiful Asian novella telling the following story.
Once upon a time there was a couple, and they had a daughter. The daughter grew up and was sent to school in the capital because she showed special talents. On leaving school, she married a merchant, an acquaintance of her father. She had a son and died when the boy was four years old. The day after the mother's funeral, the child suddenly said: “Mother has gone upstairs to the top floor, and she must be there now!” And the whole family went upstairs.
Now we must put ourselves into the Asian soul in order to understand what follows. I am telling you something bordering closely on reality. Yet if a European were told by a four-year-old that his mother, who had been buried the day before, was upstairs and if he were then to go up with a candle to look around, he would of course find nothing there. The whole thing would be denied. In other words, we have to try to put ourselves into the Asian mind.
Well, the family went up there with a light and found the mother actually standing there before a dresser and staring at it. All the drawers were closed, and the people felt that there had to be something in the dresser that was troubling her. They emptied the drawers and took the items that had been in them to the temple to store them there. In that way those things would be removed from the world. They believed that now the soul would not return anymore; they knew it would return only if something was still binding it to this world.
However, the soul returned anyway! Every evening when the family looked upstairs, she was there. Finally, the family went to a wise guardian of the temple; he came, said he must be left undisturbed, and recited his sutras. And, when the “hour of the rat” struck—in the Orient, the time between midnight and two in the morning is called the hour of the rat—there was the woman again, staring at a certain spot on the dresser. He asked her if anything was there, and she gave him to understand by a gesture that there was indeed something. He opened the first drawer but nothing was in it, the second, nothing, the third, nothing, the fourth and still nothing. Then it occurred to him to lift up the paper lining of the drawers, and there between the last layer of paper and the bottom of the drawer he found a letter. He promised to tell nobody about this letter and to burn it in the temple. He did so, and the soul never returned again.
Now this oriental story actually agrees with reality; it expresses reality. It would be very difficult to present this matter in European concepts. Besides, the conceptions of modern Europeans are still too coarse. They think when something is real, then everybody must be able to see it. Europeans generally allow only for two things; either everyone sees something, and then it is a reality, or not everyone sees it, and then it is subjective and not objective. Now this distinction between subjective and objective applies only to the physical world but has no meaning in the spiritual world. There we cannot call anything others do not see subjective but not objective.
Now you may say that such things as told in that story also exist in Europe. Indeed, they do, but Europeans are generally glad to say it is only fiction and is not necessarily true. That is why it is so much easier to speak about the spiritual world in fiction. Fiction does not lay any claim to truth. People are content when they do not have to believe what is said in stories and the like. However, the objection that this is after all only a novella does not count. Europeans obviously have little understanding of Asians or they would not say such things. What Europeans call novellas, or art, is a most superfluous and useless game to Asians and means nothing to them. They even make fun of our telling stories about things that do not exist. Asians do not understand this. In what they call works of art, they tell only about what really exists, albeit in the spiritual world. That is the profound difference between the European and the Asian world views.
That Europeans write novellas about things that do not exist is, according to the Oriental view, a highly superfluous activity. In their view, all our art is only a rather superfluous and useless occupation. Clearly, we have to understand the Asian art works we possess as Imaginations of spiritual reality; otherwise we will never understand them at all. We Europeans in turn judge Asian stories not by Asian standards but by our own and call them fanciful and beautiful fiction, products of the fertile, unbridled Oriental imagination.
People will gradually have to realize that we have to speak more and more in images. Of course, if we were to speak in pictures only, we would be going against modern European culture, so we can't do that. But we can gradually allow ordinary thinking, applicable only on the physical plane, to turn into thinking about the spiritual world, and then into pictorial thinking, which develops under the influence of the spiritual world. Natural scientists also develop a view of the world, but if they think their view is clear and comprehensible, they make the same mistake as we would if we claimed we could paint a portrait, and the subject would then step out of the canvas and walk around the room.
In my latest book, Vom Menschenrätsel, I move from the usual logical presentation to a pictorial one.1See Lecture Two, note 4. This has to become our general style of presentation if spiritual science is really to become a part of Western civilization. A philosophical treatise about the same matters would cite innumerable logical arguments, would turn the most elaborate and artificial phrases; yet it would be virtually dead. It would aim only at understanding the outer layering of the rolls, not what lives as paintings on the inside of each roll. These things become meaningful only when we apply them in our lives, for that is how we learn to understand life. So-called logical proofs have to be imbued with life before we can understand spiritual science in a living way.
As you know, some people are musical and others are not, and there is a very great difference between those who are musical and those who are not. In terms of the soul a musical person is quite different from an unmusical one. I do not mean this as a criticism of unmusical people; it is simply a statement of fact. Those who look more closely at life may perhaps not go so far as to agree with Shakespeare's statement, “The man that hath no music in himself ... Is fit for such treasons, stratagems and spoils ... Let no such man be trusted.”2William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act 5, Scene 1.
Though we may not arrive right away at that conclusion, there is a certain difference in the souls of musical and unmusical persons.
Now, you may want to know why there are musical and unmusical people. If you look for an answer in psychology, which follows along the lines of the natural sciences, I do not think you will find much that could cast a light on this question. If psychology were to explain why one person is musical and another is not, if it were to deal with such subtleties, then it would finally do some good.
However, there is yet another difference between human beings. We find people who go through life and are, in a sense, hardly touched by what goes on around them. Others go through life with so open a soul that they are deeply affected by what is going on around them. They feel deep joy over some things and suffer over others; they feel happiness about some things and sadness about others. There are those who are dulled to impressions and those who are sensitive and empathize with all the world. There are people who shortly after entering a room that is not too crowded have a certain rapport with the others, because they can feel very quickly what the others feel by way of so-called imponderables. On the other hand, there are individuals who come into contact with many people but do not really get to know a single one of them because they do not have the gift I have just described. They judge others by what they themselves are, and when these others are different from them, they really consider them more or less bad people.
Still, there are those who give their time and attention to others, sharing their experiences. As a rule these are people who can also empathize with animals, with beetles and sparrows, who can feel joy with some events and sorrow with others. Notice how often this happens in life, especially at a certain age; young people are happy about all kinds of things. They are up one minute and down the next, while other people call them stupid because, to their minds, nothing really matters much anyway. So, there exist these two types of people. Of course, the two qualities are sometimes more and sometimes less developed; they are not necessarily very pronounced but are still clearly noticeable.
Now, the spiritual scientist, trying to understand the world from his point of view, comes to the conclusion that those people are musical in this life who empathized with everything and moved easily from joy to sorrow and from sorrow to joy in their previous life. This was internalized, and that is how the rhythmical flexibility of the musical soul developed. On the other hand, people who were dulled in their sensitivity to outer events in the preceding incarnation do not become musical. Nevertheless, they may have other excellent qualities, may even have been great world reformers and have influenced world history.
Imagine a person living in Rome at the time when Michelangelo and Raphael produced their great works and not seeing anything but immorality in the Rome of that time. Now Rome was indeed immoral and decadent. But this individual ignored everything that was not immoral, for instance, the art of Michelangelo and Raphael. Perhaps he became a very important personality, a reformer who accomplished great things. What I am telling you is not meant as malicious criticism. Still, people are unmusical because in the previous incarnation they did not receive vivid impressions of things that do deeply impress other souls.
Think how transparent life would become and how well we would be able to understand others if we approached them with such knowledge. And when we keep in mind that spiritual science imbues our souls with a longing to perceive in pictures, then all this should seem to us something desirable.
Of course, if everything were limited to concepts and if spiritual science were to dissect everyone and investigate what the person was like in previous incarnations, then people would do well to be on their guard against spiritual science. No one would venture forth among people anymore if they would analyze like this. However, this would happen only if we worked with crude concepts. If we stay with pictures, the latter lay hold of our feelings, and we arrive at an emotional understanding of others, which we do not need to transform into concepts. We turn it into concepts only when we express it as a general truth. It is quite all right to talk about the flexibility of the soul in a preceding incarnation and musicality in a later one, as I have done, but it would be in poor taste if I were to approach a person who is musical and describe what he or she was like in the previous incarnation based on this talent. These truths are derived from individual details, but the point is not to apply them to details. This must be understood in the deepest sense.
Most people may understand truths like these, but when we go a bit further, then what is meant to enlighten humanity can easily lead to nonsense. For example, we often speak about reincarnation in general terms, and at one time, I talked to one of our branch groups about the relationship between reincarnation and self-knowledge, a theme that deserves some attention. I said it would be good to try to apply certain concepts we acquire from spiritual science to our efforts to understand ourselves. I explained that at the beginning of our life karma often brings us into contact with people who were connected with us at about the middle of our previous life, when we were in our thirties. In other words, we are not right away with the people we were with at the corresponding time in our earlier incarnation. This is how I have explained various rules of reincarnation; you can also find in my lectures how reincarnation can be applied to self-knowledge. Well, what did all this lead to in those days? It turned out that shortly thereafter a number of people founded a sort of “Club of the Reincarnated.” Yes, indeed, there was a clique that explained who each member had been in the preceding incarnation or even in all previous lives. Of course they had all been exceedingly eminent figures in human history, that goes without saying, and they had all been connected in their earlier lives.
That was a nuisance for a long time. Naturally this is all terrible because it violates what I have emphasized, namely, that if you are to know anything about your previous incarnation, in our era you will not understand it from within yourself. Rather, your attention will be drawn to it through some outer event or through another person. In our time it is generally false when somebody looks within and then claims to have been this or that person. If we are to know anything, it will be told to us from outside.
Those who founded the “Club of the Reincarnated” would have had to wait a long time before being told about their previous incarnations. Yet they had all been important personalities, the most important in human history! When the thing became known, and those people were asked why they had done all this, they answered that they did it because I had said in a lecture one should cultivate self-knowledge in the light of reincarnation. Since then they had all been busy thinking about who they had been in previous lives and how they had been connected with each other.
In such a case we sin against the reverence we should have for the great spiritual truths. This reverence consists in staying appropriately with the image, with the metaphor; only when it is really necessary should the picture be left behind, and should we go beyond the metaphor. In spiritual science we have to develop reverence and to realize that this sophistry, this putting things into the concept, is always a bad thing. It is always bad to think about spiritual matters in the same way we think about things on the physical plane. Indeed, when we acquire this reverence, we also develop certain moral qualities, which cannot unfold if we don't carry all this in our soul in the right way. Accordingly, spiritual science will also lead to a moral uplifting of our modern culture.
Now we Europeans say—and rightly so—that because we can see the Christ Mystery in our spiritual life, we have an advantage over other cultures, for example, over the Asian or oriental ones. What those cultures know about the spiritual does not include the Christ Being. The Japanese, Chinese, Hindus, Persians, do not include the Christ Being in their thinking about the spiritual interrelationships in the world. We are therefore right in calling the Asian world view atavistic, a relic of an earlier age. Though those people may have an exceedingly lofty understanding of the world, as, for instance, in the Vedanta philosophy, their inability to understand the Christ Mystery makes their world view an atavistic one. To be able to penetrate deeply into certain connections is not necessarily a sign of great spiritual heights.
For example, I used to know a man who was among us for a long time and even belonged to the “Club of the Reincarnated,” and he propounded excellent theories about certain conditions of life on Atlantis. Continuing along the lines of my book on Atlantis, this person came to very interesting conclusions that were true. Yet, he was so loosely connected to our movement that he left it when external reasons made it convenient for him to do so. Under certain conditions, it takes only a particular formation of the etheric body to see into supersensible regions. However, if spiritual science is to flow in a living way into our culture, it has to take hold of the whole person so that he or she can grow close to its deepest impulses. And then spiritual science will create what our culture, which is developing more and more into a materialistic one, is lacking.
Thus, we are right in saying we have the advantage of the Christ Mystery over the Asian cultures. But what do Asians say about this? Now, I am not telling you something I just made up; I am telling you what the more reasonable Asians really say. They agree we have the advantage of the Christ Mystery over them. They say, “That is something we do not have, and that's why you Europeans think you are on a higher stage of cultural development. However, you also say, ‘By their fruits ye shall know them,’ and your religion tells you to love one another. But when we look at how you live, it does not seem as though you are doing that. You send missionaries to us in Asia who tell us all kinds of great things; however, when we come to Europe, we find people do not at all live as they should if all we've been told were true.” Well, that's what the Asians say.
Now just think whether they are so entirely wrong. At a religious convention where people from all religions were to speak, this case was discussed, and the Asian representatives said what I have just told you. They said, “You send us missionaries, which is very nice. However, you have had Christianity for two thousand years now, and we cannot see that it has advanced your moral development so much beyond ours.”
There are good reasons for this, my dear friends. You see, Asians live much more in the group-soul and much less as individuals. Morals are in a sense innate to them, inborn through the group-soul. Europeans, precisely because they are developing their I, must leave the group-soul behind and must be left to their own resources. That is why egoism inevitably had to appear. It goes hand in hand with individualism. People will only gradually be able to come together again by understanding Christianity in a higher sense.
Much has prevented those who have thought about Christianity, even the best of them, from truly understanding the consequences of the Mystery of Golgotha. Granted, it is certainly very “profound” to say we must experience the Christ in our own inner being. You see, there is what I would like to call a symbolical theosophy. As you know, I have always spoken out against this theosophy that wants to explain everything as symbols. It explains even the resurrection of Christ as merely an inner experience even though in reality it is a historical event. Christ really did rise again in the world, but many a theosophist finds it easier to deal with the matter by claiming it is merely an inner process. As you know, this was the special skill of the late Franz Hartmann; in every lecture he repeatedly explained theosophy to his audience by saying that one has to understand oneself inwardly, to comprehend God in oneself, and so on.3Franz Hartmann, 1838–1912, doctor and theosophist. Founded his own movement within theosophy.
Now if you understand the Gospels properly, you will not find any grounds for the idea that the Gospels advocate people should experience the Christ only inwardly. There are theosophical symbolists who reinterpret various passages, but in reality everything in the Gospels confirms the truth of the great word, “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.” The Christ is a social phenomenon. The Christ passed through the Mystery of Golgotha as a reality, and He is here as a reality, belonging not to the individual but to the common life of all people. What He does is what is important. These things can often be better understood in pictures than in abstract concepts.
Just recently we went to see a friend on leave from the front lines of the battlefield, where he has since returned. This friend was kind enough to get us a taxicab, and when he returned with it and pulled up, he told us he had had a conversation with the driver. This driver was an altogether peculiar man, for when we had arrived and were about to get out, he opened the door and after he had been paid, he gave us two little pamphlets called “Peace Messenger.” He was making propaganda for the spiritual world while working his job! Then our friend told us that this driver had told him the essential thing is for people to find the Christ, everything depends on the Christ. In other words, our friend had picked out a cab at the taxi-stand and gotten into a conversation with the driver, who told him the world will advance only when people find the Christ, whom they have not yet found.
Well, the cab driver added a few other things and said, “You see, with Christ it's like this. Just think, I am a very respectable man, an exemplary man, and I have children who are all good for nothing. But am I any less respectable and exemplary a man because I have children who are no good? They all know me, or think they know me, but they are still good-for-nothings. That's how I think of the Christ. He belongs to us all, He is the person we all look to but that does not mean everybody necessarily really understands Him.”
This cab driver has created a marvelous picture of the special life of Christ, of His isolated life! He has discovered that Christ is living among us, living with us, belonging to us all and not to any one individual. He saw his sons who were all no good as the individuals, who were good for nothing and would have to struggle before reaching an understanding. If this cab driver had wanted to express this extraordinarily significant idea in philosophical terms, nothing would have come of it. But his picture reflects wonderfully what we are trying to understand. Of course, such a picture is not quite sufficient; an individual may understand it, but you will not influence our culture with it. I just wanted to show you that even the simplest soul can light on a true picture. This is how things should really flow into pictures. I have tried to achieve this particularly in the style of my latest book, which deals with non-theosophical matters. However, in its presentation this book is “theosophical,” if we want to use that expression.
It is important to understand our teachings more and more between the lines, so to speak, if we want to grasp correctly that they have to become life, the life of each one of us. And what weighs so heavily upon one's soul is just this awful difficulty of integrating these things into life.
You see, if these things are important to you, and particularly if you really know our rationalist culture, you will realize that what pulsates through spiritual science has to live in all branches of culture. It must influence thinking, feeling, and willing, only then will it fulfill its mission. To feel connected with our cause really takes quite some inner strength. It is a pity that it takes such an infinitely long time for people to feel thoroughly connected with the impulses of spiritual science. In the meantime, we can see people passing by and ignoring precisely what they should be focusing on.
Now let me tell you about another case. There was a very learned gentleman who used to be a member of our Society; in fact, he was tremendously learned, but his erudition did not satisfy him. He was profoundly unhappy in spite of all his learning, which included a knowledge of oriental languages and the culture of the Near East. Now this man came and asked for advice. In such a case my advice will necessarily have to show that through an understanding of spiritual science the spirit can enter into a science such as oriental philosophy. So I indicated that he should permeate all this scholarly material with what he had received from spiritual science. However, for him the two things merely continued to exist side by side. On the one hand, he pursued his oriental studies as this is done in the universities; on the other hand, he pursued spiritual science. The two never came together for him; he could not permeate the one with the other.
Now just think how fruitful it would be if someone who knows so much—and this man did indeed know a tremendous amount—were to take his science and learning and imbue it with theosophy! He wouldn't even have to let it be known that he thinks theosophically if he feared people might look askance at him for that. Still, he could then present all this in his university lectures. That man could very well have penetrated the culture on the Euphrates and the Tigris and the one a bit further west—he was particularly at home in Egyptology—with spiritual science and could have accomplished something remarkable. In any case, he could have achieved something more fruitful than the popularizing stuff produced by our common writers. Recently a piece by such a popular writer appeared in a widely read daily paper. The fellow had written an article on the discovery of a sphinx-like figure during construction for the Baghdad railway—well, even if his name is Arthur Bonus, he is still definitely not a “good one!”4Translator's note: The Latin word bonus means “good.” This article is absolutely terrible!
The ideal we have in mind, my dear friends, is to let our thinking be carried by what spiritual science gives us. And it should be the same in life too, in our everyday life with each other. Spiritual science can be carried into everything. If we did not intend this, did not have this ideal, then spiritual science would not be able to bear fruit. The challenge to make it fruitful meets us everywhere.
Just think, there are excellent historians who write about the history of England at the time of James I, let's say.5James I, 1566–1625, King of Scotland as James VI and of Great Britain as James I. Son of Mary, Queen of Scots. Succeeded to English throne at death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603. During his reign group of scholars prepared new version of the Bible in English, called in his honor King James Bible (1611). Then there are excellent historians who write books about the life of Francisco Suarez, the Jesuit.6Francisco Suarez, 1548—1617, Spanish theologian and scholastic philosopher. Joined Society of Jesus (1564), considered foremost Jesuit theologian. As you know, I have to be careful what I say when I speak about Jesuitism. That is, I must not say too much that is positive—or at least what can be misunderstood as positive. Nevertheless, it is true that most people know about this Suarez only that in one of his writings he is supposed to have explicitly preached regicide. But this is not true. In general, people often know things that are untrue but don't as often and as thoroughly know things that are true.
Now, excellent books about this Suarez are available nowadays; most of them are written by Jesuits. You can read these books about Suarez, the successor of Ignatius of Loyola, and understand them.7Ignatius of Loyola, 1491–1556, Spanish religious. Founded Society of Jesus in 1539. Began composition of his Spiritual Exercises in 1523. That does not mean that you will become, or have been, a Jesuit, nor that you have to put up with people drawing such conclusions. The facts are clear, and when we connect them, we can answer one of biggest questions of modern history. These two individuals, James I and Francisco Suarez, the Jesuit philosopher, are complete opposites. At the time of James I, a very ahrimanic new development was inaugurated. Another development began with Suarez that was very luciferic. Their combined influence, and particularly their fights against each other, shaped much of what lives and weaves in the present age.
Here we come to mysterious connections. I don't want to blame anyone with what I am going to say now. For example, we find that a great deal of what these days is called historical materialism or Marxism, the Social Democratic outlook, can be traced directly to Suarez. Now please do not take this to mean that I am saying the Social Democrats are Jesuits. Nevertheless, there are in a certain sense good reasons for connecting the Social Democrats with the Jesuits. By the same token, many members of the opposing party, that is, those who oppose social democracy, can be traced back directly to what was inaugurated by James I.
With this, I have indicated something that lives in many people's thoughts. Particularly in occult communities you find two main streams, and from these flows something that is not occult. These two main streams produce two typical, contrasting figures: James I of England, in whom an extraordinary initiate-soul lived, and Suarez.
Now, if you read the biography of Suarez, you will not understand it at all if you have not really grasped spiritual science. Suarez was one of those people who are at first bad students and don't learn anything. According to the contemporary materialist view, such people are hopeless cases and not good for anything. However, one can easily prove that many great geniuses did not learn anything when they were in school. Well, Suarez was also one of the bad students, and even in college he was not yet what one might call a bright man. Then all of a sudden he changed, and every biography of him describes this sudden awakening. The gift of brilliance suddenly awakened in him, and he wrote extraordinarily interesting books, which are, unfortunately, not widely known. This happened all of a sudden, kindled by some of the things I told you about in my lectures on the spiritual exercises of the Jesuits, which Suarez also practiced. Through these he awakened something in himself that enabled him to develop special mental and spiritual forces.
Thus, the biography of Suarez proves—as it can also be proved in the case of James I—that he turned around, so to speak, and came from the unspiritual into the spiritual. This soul, which later achieved outstanding accomplishments, was born at a certain moment. Its development did not proceed in a straight line, but took place in a sudden jolt, produced either by karma or by an influence on the person in question that can be compared to how we learn to read in elementary school: not by describing the shape of the letters, but by receiving an impulse through which we learn to understand the letters.
Here, you see again how spiritual science can guide us in understanding these historical connections, and then we can see life quite differently. If you take in spiritual science in a living way, then your attitude to life really changes, an you can think of other things to do than what you have been doing. It is hard to imagine that a person who takes in spiritual science in a living way could come up with the strange idea, for example, that he or she is Mary Magdalene reincarnated. This would not occur to such a person; instead he or she would focus on other contents of the soul.
It is hard to have to watch how slowly the development in the direction I indicated proceeds. People really take Spiritual science far too much as merely a theory or as simply something to be enjoyed. However, it must be studied in a living way. Now that we are together before parting or some time at the beginning of summer, when we will have to return to Dornach, I would like to discuss briefly a few important points we must consider in this regard.
You see, my dear friends, if things had turned out as many people adhering to older traditions had expected at the time when we first established spiritual science here fourteen years ago, we would have become a sect. For all the ideas brought over from England were headed toward the formation of a sect. And many people felt very comfortable being completely secluded in their small circles. Then they could call the other people outside their circles fools. There was very little control over this. However, this kind of thing had to stop.
Spiritual science has to reckon with our whole culture. We have always considered this culture, and we have emphasized particularly in public lectures what one can get into European heads these days—regardless of how many objections were raised. Now I don't want to criticize—that would be silly—but still, we have to understand that our movement really must not become a sect and must not even have any characteristics of a sectarian movement if it is to fulfill its task. We can accomplish much if we take the general culture into account. People outside our movement for the most part write nonsense about it—if they write about it at all. You may say this does not matter in a deeper sense. On the contrary, it matters very much! That is why we have to defend ourselves and do what we can to stop it. We have to do everything possible so that eventually people will not write nonsense but something better.
However, in a spiritual sense it is even more harmful when what was intended only for members of our immediate circle is brought in the wrong way before the public so that our lecture cycles are now sold in second-hand bookshops. Granted, we may not be able to prevent this. Still it happens again and again, not only that our lecture cycles can be bought in second-hand bookshops but other equally detrimental things as well. For instance, somebody just recently told me about a person he had worked with for a long time. He said that person did not write anything on his own initiative but belongs to a somewhat dubious clique, which has complete control over him. He himself only sits down and goes ahead with his writing. Now this person has written many brochures about our spiritual science and even big books. In those you find not only quotations from my printed and published works, but also long passages from the cycles. In other words, it is not just that one can buy these cycles in second-hand bookshops, but, in fact, anyone wanting to write a stupid book these days is able to get hold of them. Such people then buy two or three cycles and copy passages that sound completely absurd when taken out of context, and then they can make a book out of all that.
These are the problems that result from our having to face the public while at the same time being a Society. However, we have to understand this problem if we want to overcome it. As I said, I do not want to criticize, for that would be totally useless; instead, I want to describe the problem. I want to show you where the difficulties lie, and we just have to watch for them. In the immediate future even more abominable things will be done against our Society than we have had to endure up to now. We won't be able to change that in the twinkling of an eye. Still, we must not ignore both the encouraging, pleasant elements and the annoying ones in the way the world judges our movement as though we were trying to become totally unmusical in the next incarnation.
You see, those who think purely egoistically—as I said, this is not meant as criticism, but merely as description think that spiritual science has more to say about certain relationships in nature than ordinary science. Thus, people turn to me for medical advice even though I have emphasized repeatedly that I am only a teacher or cultivator of spiritual science, and not a physician. Of course, people may want some friendly advice and to refuse that would be absurd. If people come for friendly advice, why should it be denied them even if it concerns matters of natural science? However, after everything that has happened, I have to request that nobody seeks my advice on medical matters who is not in the care of a physician. People who think selfishly do not consider that such things are not permissible nowadays and that they bring us into conflict with the world around us, and that is detrimental to our spiritual science. We have to make an effort to improve things; we have to advocate everywhere that there should be more than just the officially authorized medicine, which is based on pure materialism. We can certainly do this, but we must not just selfishly think of what is good for us individually if this could interfere with what our movement must be.
Spiritual science can give advice, and it would be absurd if it didn't. It would be pathetic indeed if one could not give some advice to a person suffering from this or that ailment. However, it is a great risk to give advice when the following happens—and I am telling you a true story here. Someone was ill in a town where I had just previously said that I definitely do not want people to turn to me in case of illness. I had said so publicly and officially. Now, someone became ill and was admitted into a sanitarium, where he remained for some time. A long-standing member of ours who had always been connected with the most intimate aspects of our cause wrote to this sanitarium, explaining that the patient in question could now be discharged because Dr. Steiner gave such and such advice. The member wrote this to the physician, who replied that this just goes to show we don't mean it when we claim theosophy wants to be nothing but theosophy and does not want to meddle in other people's business.
Yes, indeed, my dear friends, we have to pay attention to such things. If we ignore them, it will not be for the good of the movement. Of course, this is only one case, but variations of this are happening again and again. This leads to a peculiar feature of our movement, about which I have to speak now. What I am referring to is that the new good side of our movement comes to light less rapidly than other new developments that have also never before been there. They prove that our movement is indeed something new; however, these are peculiar novelties.
For example, let us suppose this or that were written in my published books. If no cycles were getting into the wrong hands, people outside our movement would refute what is in my books. Well, let them do it, but then they would present their opinion. It would never occur to people out there who do not belong to our Society to copy sentences from my books to prove I am a “bad guy.” No one would do this; instead people out there would present their own opinions. What happens in our Society, however, is that someone accepts our teaching—swallows it hook, line, and sinker, as the saying goes—but then refutes me with my own teaching. You can see an example of this in an as yet unpublished exposition.
As you may remember, in an earlier edition of Riddles of Philosophy—the book then was called Views of Life and World in the Nineteenth Century—I explained that Leverrier discovered the planet Neptune merely on the basis of his calculations about Uranus, before Neptune had been seen.8Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles of Philosophy, (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1973).
Urbaine-Jean-Joseph Leverrier, 1811–1877, French astronomer. Investigated disturbance in the motion of Uranus (1845), making calculations indicating the presence of an unknown planet, which was discovered in 1846 and named Neptune. Neptune was first seen at the Berlin observatory, but its existence was already known earlier simply because of calculations. I referred to this example to show that something may follow from calculations, that we can know of a fact merely on the basis of our thinking.
Well, just recently someone wrote that he has applied this very obvious and convincing idea, but in a different field. He claims to have found that something is wrong in our movement, that there are disruptions and interferences like the ones Leverrier found in observing the planet Uranus. If Uranus does not move the way it should according to calculations based on the general laws of gravity, then obviously something is interfering. Similarly, according to this individual, something supposedly interferes with our movement. So he propounds the hypothesis that there is something disruptive here, interfering with everything. And then, in the same way Leverrier discovered Neptune, this individual discovered that the evil interferences in our movement are in me. As the astronomers in the observatory here turned their telescope to the place where Neptune was said to be, so this person focused his spiritual telescope on me and found the evil there.
This is a special case; the methods I have given are all applied to my character and I am refuted with myself. In this man's circle a letter was written recently—not by him but by others from his circle—saying that I have no right to complain about this refutation because I myself had always said spiritual science was the common property of everyone and that it would be wrong to think spiritual science originated with the spiritual investigator. Well now, when things get this confused, there can be no simple, clear explanation for them. This, indeed, is something new arising in our Society. Outside, where the old still holds good, others are refuted by means of what the critics themselves think. But within our Society people do not take their own thoughts, but what they read in the lecture cycles and use it against me.
For example, in the letter I mentioned you can find many quotations from my book An Outline Of Occult Science and others.9Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, 3rd ed., repr., (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1989). Everywhere you'll find exhortations to read this or that for yourself so you'll see I am actually an evil, bad guy. Now, the letter does not claim what I say is bad. On the contrary, because it is good, it can be used as evidence. This is something entirely new arising in our midst, a novelty based on the theory that our teaching can be accepted and then used to slander the one who is trying to popularize it. That is indeed something new!
This may be a particularly blatant case; still, on a smaller scale such things occur very frequently. If we so much as say anything about such things, then we get threats! Recently a letter informed us that articles and pamphlets, whose titles constitute a direct threat, would soon appear in shop windows and newspapers. As I said, if we dare make a sound, this is what happens. This is a novelty, something new in our movement, and we must pay attention to it.
We can see difficulties cropping up before they have fully emerged, so to speak, for we can predict what will happen. Tell me, should we really never talk about such a case as the one I have mentioned; should we always keep quiet about it? That is certainly possible. However, since the members themselves are not trying to discover such things, nobody in our circles would ever find out. Therefore, we must speak about it. But what happens when we speak about it? Pretty soon you will probably read in another letter—of course, this is just a hypothesis for now that I have been speaking about a private letter before a large number of members. And this is simply because there are certainly people here who will immediately report somewhere or other what I have said tonight. That is happening all the time. Not talking about these things is no good, but talking about them only encourages what is repeatedly being done. We can predict the outcome.
I do not want to criticize; I only want to point out that in a movement where spiritual science lives, that is, where occult things pulsate, difficulties do indeed arise, and we must pay attention to them. If we ignore them, they will continue and get worse. Yes, we have to be prepared for the attacks to get more and more trenchant. If we were a small sect, this would not be the case. But our movement had to become just what it has become, and so that's the way it is.
Much of what comes from outside is understandable although many attacks ostensibly from the outside actually can be proven to have originated within our circles. Just today we have learned that in Dornach we practice eurythmy, which supposedly consists in dancing to the point of reaching a trance, as the dervishes do, and so on. We were told this news was reported by members. Members have reported that we dance until we reach a state of trance! In reality this was told to one of our members by people totally unconnected with us, but these people said they had heard it from members whose names they mentioned.
These difficulties come up because we have united spiritual science and the Society, and we must examine them carefully. If we ignore them, we cannot progress properly and we risk the dissolution of our Society and its total annihilation. True, all this does not harm spiritual science as such, but it does harm what spiritual science is also trying to be. It is harmful when people come and tell me that much of what they read about spiritual science interested them, but then they sat at a table in a boarding house and heard a lady prattle on about theosophy and say all kinds of things, and, of course, they feel they cannot join a Society where such a lot of rubbish is talked that's supposed to be theosophy. Now, this is not an isolated case; this happens again and again in one way or another.
Speaking about these things at the end of a serious talk may be misunderstood. However, it is absolutely necessary, my dear friends, that you know about them and pay attention to them. Our Society must be the carrier and helper of spiritual science; however, it can easily develop in such a way that it works against what spiritual science is to bring to world evolution. Naturally, in the individual case it is easy to understand that much of this damage could not be prevented. Yet we can be sure that the damage will look quite different if we pay attention to it and if we ourselves try to keep to a certain line, a certain direction, so to speak. Sometimes it is indeed extremely difficult, but also necessary, to take a hard line in a certain direction. Then novelties like the ones I just described will be rightly judged. It does not happen anywhere else that a person is refuted with his own works, for the idea of accepting a person's teaching in order to refute him with them is in itself absurd and foolish. Of course, if someone talks nonsense, you can use his nonsense against him, but that is not the point here. Rather, the new twist here is that the teaching is accepted and the person is refuted on the basis of his teaching.
On a smaller scale, things like that are very widespread. And they are not far removed from another evil I will also speak about before coming to a close. Indeed, it happens nowhere else as often as in our movement that somebody does something one can condemn, in fact, has to condemn. Then people take sides. For example, somebody may say something against the leading personalities in our Society, or against long-standing members, or against the Vorstand, as we unfortunately have to call it. Yet, even if the allegations are completely unfounded and perhaps only made up, clearly revealing the accuser's underlying motivation, you will rarely find that people try to discover whether the unfortunate Vorstand is right. Instead, people immediately take sides with the person who is wrong.
In fact, that is the rule here: people take sides with those who are wrong, and write letters asking the victims of the attack to do something to preserve the friendship, to straighten things out again—after all, one must show love. When somebody commits an unkind deed against another, people do not write to the one who did the deed. Instead, they write to the one who suffered it that he should show some kindness and that it would be very unloving not to do something to set things right again. It never occurs to them to ask this of the one who is wrong. Such peculiar things happen in our circle.
Of certain other things we will not even speak; nevertheless, there may of course come a time when we have to speak about them too. Today, we wanted to talk about a serious topic since we are living in a serious time and our movement is to influence it in a serious way. Still, we absolutely had to point out these peculiar things. You must pay attention to them, for things are indeed happening that you will find hard to believe if you hear about them. Nevertheless, we constantly have to deal with such things, and nobody should misunderstand that I had to speak about them; instead you should all reflect on them a bit.
It is our intention not to have as long a break between lectures as we had in the past. We may be able to meet again in fall; however, it is better not to promise anything specific in this time of uncertainties and obstacles. And so I ask you to use the picture I have tried to paint in this winter of our souls and to let your souls dwell on it during this summer. Bring to life in your souls, in a kind of meditation, what we have talked about and reflect on the basic requirements for the integration of our spiritual science into the general culture.10After these words, Rudolf Steiner spoke about the day care nursery the members of the Anthroposophical Society in Berlin had organized:
“I would like to add here that our dear friends who organized and cared so devotedly for our day care nursery are concerned that it might be forgotten—not completely of course, but perhaps almost forgotten. Naturally, we will have a kind of vacation, but after that the nursery will have to open again. Then we will need some money and, above all, some dear friends who will help with the day care—of course, only those who can help. Maybe there are women here who could help with the cooking or something like that. All this is needed. Those who have worked in the nursery and know something about such matters can tell you that its results are very good. The children gained something from having come here,- something has been made of them. Therefore, I would like to ask that the women who could take on this task again do so as a labor of love. Of course, if you take on such a task, you have to stay with it. If you cannot make a certain commitment to it, it is better not to take it on. For example, we cannot have somebody promising to be in the nursery at 5 o'clock and then send a note in the afternoon to cancel; we will not be able to find somebody else to fill in on such short notice. We have to know about cancellations at least one day in advance. Thus, I now ask those friends who can work in the nursery to contact Frau Dannenberg, who, together with others, has done so much for the nursery, so that the nursery can open again in winter.”
And so let us now part, my dear friends, in the realization that we can do much to help integrate what we take seriously into our times if we are all really committed to it. People now sacrifice much more than ever before in such numbers and in so short a time. We are living in a hard time, a time of suffering. May the hardships and sufferings also be a summons to us. No matter how difficult it may be to incorporate the spiritual into human evolution, it has to happen. However much or however little we can do as individuals, let us do it! Let us try to understand the right way to do our part so that what cannot come about of itself but has to be done through people will result. Of course, there will also be help from the spiritual world. Thus, let us remain united in thoughts like this even when we will be apart for a while. People who are united in spirit are always together. Neither space nor time can separate them, and particularly not a more or less short span of time. Let us remain united in thoughts that try again to penetrate a little bit what I have said here in these days to your souls.
We must take in the full weight of the significance of the truths connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. Let us realize that in order to understand this or that we have to be in the solitude of our souls and return there again and again. But let us also understand that we belong to humanity and that the One Who went through the Mystery of Golgotha brought something from spiritual heights to the earth for all human beings, for the working together of all people. And let us remember that He said: “When two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in their midst.”
Through all we experience in solitude we can prepare ourselves for what the Christ is destined to be to the world through us. But Christ is in our midst only if we try to carry into the world what we strive for in solitude, and we can do that only if we understand the conditions for carrying it into the world. Let us look at these conditions! Let us open our eyes, and, above all, let us have the courage to admit that things are as they are and must be dealt with accordingly.
When I speak here about Christ, I do so knowing that He is helping because He is an actively living being. We can feel His presence among us; He will help us! But we have to learn His language, and His language today is that of spiritual science. That is the way it is for the present. And we have to find the courage to represent and support this spiritual science as much as we can among ourselves and before others.
This summer, let us reflect upon this and let us meditate on it until we meet again.
Der Weg zur Imagination
Wenn wir die um uns liegende Wirklichkeit zunächst so betrachten, wie sie dem menschlichen Sinne und dem menschlichen Verstande erscheint, so haben wir um uns etwas, was wir etwa nennen können, vergleichsweise, bildweise - so wollen wir uns heute zunächst ausdrücken -, ein großes Weltgebäude. Wir machen uns Begriffe, Ideen, Vorstellungen von dem, wie es ist, wie seine Vorgänge sind, und kommen mit dem, was in diesem Weltengebäude geschieht, auch mit seinen Einzelheiten, so in Berührung, daß wir gewisse Sympathien und Antipathien gegen dieses oder jenes entwickeln, was sich dann in unserem Gefühlsleben auslebt. Wir tun selbst aus unseren Willensimpulsen heraus dies oder jenes und greifen so ein in das Getriebe, das da herrscht in diesem Weltengebäude.
Wenn man so vom Weltengebäude spricht, hat man zunächst die Vorstellung, es sei dieses Weltengebäude aus einzelnen Teilen aufgebaut, und man betrachtet ja dann die einzelnen Teile und wiederum die Teile der Teile, bis der Naturbetrachter zu dem, was er die kleinsten Teile nennt, zu dem Molekül, zu den Atomen kommt, von denen ich Ihnen ja sagte, daß sie niemand wirklich wahrgenommen hat, daß sie eine Hypothese sind, aber eine in gewissem Sinne berechtigte Hypothese, wenn man nur weiß, daß es sich um eine Hypothese handelt. Kurz, man betrachtet das, was man vergleichsweise Weltgebäude nennen kann, ja mit einem gewissen Rechte als zusammengesetzt aus Teilen, aus Gliedern, und bildet sich dann keine weitere Vorstellung über diese Glieder, und das ist zunächst gut so. Denn diejenigen Menschen, die über das Atom noch besonders phantasieren, etwa gar sprechen von einem Leben des Atoms oder von noch ärgeren Phantastereien über das Atom, diese Menschen sprechen von dem Nichts des Nichts; denn schon das Atom selber ist eine Hypothese. Also eine Hypothese noch auf Hypothesen aufbauen, das heißt natürlich Kartengebäude machen, ja nicht einmal Kartengebäude, denn bei denen hat man wenigstens noch die Karten, während man bei den Spekulationen über das Atom gar nichts mehr hat. Aus einer aus der Geisteswissenschaft heraus zu gewinnenden Einsicht sollte man vielmehr zugeben, daß, sobald man über diese Betrachtung hinauskommen will, die das uns zunächst umgebende Weltengebäude so ansieht, wie ich es eben angedeutet habe, man zu einer anderen Anschauungsweise kommen muß, die sich gegenüber unserer alltäglichen Anschauungsweise, die ja auch die der gewöhnlichen Wissenschaft ist, so verhält, wie diese gewöhnliche, alltägliche Anschauungsweise sich zum Traumleben verhält. Der Mensch träumt in Bildern, und er kann eine ganze Welt in seinen Bildern haben. Dann wacht er auf. Er weiß: nicht durch eine Theorie - denn man kann durch keine Theorie den Traum von der sogenannten «alltäglichen Wirklichkeit» unterscheiden -, sondern durch das Leben. Jetzt steht er nicht mehr den Bildern des Traumes gegenüber, sondern solchen Wirklichkeiten, die ihn stoßen und drängen und drükken. Das weiß er durch das unmittelbare Leben. Und wiederum ist es so, daß wir aufwachen können aus diesen ja nur vergleichsweise, aber doch «Lebenstraum» zu nennenden Erlebnissen des Alltags, und dann erst eine höhere Wirklichkeit, die Wirklichkeit des Geistes vor uns haben. Und wiederum nur durch das Leben kann man diese höhere Geistwirklichkeit unterscheiden von der Wirklichkeit des Alltags, wie man die Wirklichkeit des Alltags nur durch das Leben unterscheiden kann von dem Traum und seinen Bildern. Aber wenn man eintritt in die Welt, die uns die Geisteswissenschaft ja beschreibt, die uns die Geisteswissenschaft zum Begreifen bringt, dann — man kann sich ja verschiedene Vorstellungen bilden, welche vergleichsweise andeuten, wie die Geistwirklichkeit zu der gewöhnlichen Wirklichkeit ist, aber ich will heute ein besonderes Bild gebrauchen -, dann erscheint alles folgendermaßen: Stellen wir uns vor, daß wir ein Haus betrachten, das aus einzelnen Ziegelsteinen zusammengestellt ist. Gewiß, wenn wir das Haus betrachten, so haben wir es zunächst aus einzelnen Ziegelsteinen zusammengesetzt. Beim Haus können wir nicht weiter gehen als bis zu den einzelnen Ziegelsteinen zunächst. Aber nehmen wir an, das Haus wäre nicht aus gewöhnlichen Ziegelsteinen zusammengesetzt, sondern jeder Ziegelstein wäre selber ein außerordentlich kunstvoller Bau, und man würde, wenn man den gewöhnlichen Blick auf das Haus richtet, eben nur die Ziegelsteine sehen, parallelepipedartig, wie man sie eben sieht, aber man würde nichts ahnen davon, daß ein jeder Ziegelstein sozusagen wiederum ein kleines Kunstwerk ist. So ist es in bezug auf das Weltengebäude. Wir brauchen nur eine Einzelheit aus dem Weltengebäude herauszunehmen, diejenige Einzelheit, die zunächst die komplizierteste ist, sagen wir den Menschen. Denken Sie, der Mensch tritt uns selber wiederum, weil er ein Teil des Weltengebäudes ist, aus Teilen zusammengesetzt entgegen: Kopf, Gliedmaßen, Sinnesorgane und so weiter. Denken Sie, wie wir im Laufe der Zeit uns bemüht haben, jeden einzelnen Teil wiederum aus der geistigen Welt heraus zu verstehen. Erinnern Sie sich nur, wie wir erst kürzlich gesagt haben: Dasjenige, was der Mensch als Kopf hat, weist uns zurück auf seine frühere Erdeninkarnation; dasjenige, was er jetzt als Leib hat, gehört dieser Erdeninkarnation an und trägt in sich die Anlage zum Kopfe für die nächste Erdeninkarnation. Wie unser Kopf geformt ist, das weist uns zurück auf frühere Inkarnationen.
Erinnern Sie sich an etwas anderes. Erinnern Sie sich daran, daß wir erst kürzlich von zwölf Sinnen gesprochen haben, und diese zwölf Sinne, die der Mensch in sich trägt, in Zusammenhang gebracht haben mit den zwölf Kräften, die den zwölf Sternbildern des Tierkreises entsprechen. Wir tragen, sagten wir, in uns mikrokosmisch den Makrokosmos mit seinen zunächst aus den zwölf Sternbildern wirkenden Kräften. Jede dieser Kräfte ist anders, anders die Kräfte des Widders, anders die Kräfte des Stiers, anders die Kräfte der Zwillinge und so weiter, wie anders ist die Wahrnehmungsfähigkeit des Auges, anders die Wahrnehmungsfähigkeit des Ohres und so weiter. Zwölf Sinne entsprechen den zwölf Sternbildern des Tierkreises. Aber sie entsprechen ihnen nicht bloß. Wir wissen ja, daß die Anlage zu den menschlichen Sinnesorganen schon auf dem alten Saturn gelegt worden ist, sich weiter gebildet hat während der Sonnen-, während der Mondenzeit bis in unsere Erdenzeit herein. Erst während unserer Erdenzeit ist der Mensch mit seinen Sinnen ein so abgeschlossenes Wesen geworden, wie er uns entgegentritt. Er war viel offener dem großen Kosmos gegenüber in früheren Zeiten, während der Mond-, der Sonnen- und der Saturnzeit. Während dieser drei der Erdenzeit vorangehenden Zeiten wirkten wirklich herein in unsere menschliche Wesenheit die Kräfte der zwölf Zeichen des Tierkreises. Während sich die Anlage unserer Sinne bildete, wirkten auf sie die Kräfte des Tierkreises. Es ist nicht bloß ein Entsprechen, sondern es ist ein Aufsuchen derjenigen Kräfte, die unsere Sinne in uns eingebaut haben, wenn wir von dieser Entsprechung der Sinne mit den Tierkreisbildern sprechen. Wir sprechen nicht in einer oberflächlichen Weise von irgendeinem Entsprechen des Ich-Sinnes mit dem Widder und der anderen Sinne mit diesem oder jenem Tierkreiszeichen, sondern sprechen deshalb so, weil die Sinne des Menschen während der früheren Vorgänge unseres Erdenplaneten noch nicht so ausgebildet waren, daß sie in seinem Organismus saßen und die Außenwelt aufnahmen. Sie wurden erst eingebaut von den zwölf Kräften her in seinen Organismus. Wir sind aus dem Makrokosmos heraus aufgebaut, studieren also, indem wir die menschlichen Sinnesorgane studieren, weltumspannende Kräfte, die in uns gewirkt haben durch Jahrmillionen und aber Jahrmillionen, und deren Ergebnisse solch wunderbare Teile des menschlichen Organismus sind wie die Augen oder die Ohren. Es ist wirklich so, daß wir die Teile auf ihren geistigen Inhalt hin studieren, wie wenn wir jeden Ziegel studieren müßten bei einem Hause, das wir betrachten auf seinen kunstvollen Aufbau hin.
Ich könnte noch ein anderes Bild bringen: Nehmen wir einmal an, wir hätten vor uns irgendeinen Aufbau, kunstvoll geschichtet aus Papierrollen. Nun können wir zunächst beschreiben, was wir da kunstvoll aus Papierrollen geschichtet haben: Einige Rollen stehen, die anderen sind schief zusammengerollt und das, kunstvoll zusammengestellt, gibt irgendeinen Aufbau. Aber denken Sie sich, wir hätten nicht bloß Papierrollen aufgeschichtet, sondern in jede Papierrolle wäre hineingemalt ein wunderbares Gemälde. Das würden wir gar nicht sehen, wenn wir die Rollen, die zusammengerollt sind und auf der Innenseite die Gemälde haben, ins Auge fassen. Und dennoch sind sie drinnen! Und bevor der Aufbau hat geschehen können, mußten die Malereien hineingemalt sein. Nehmen Sie aber an, es wäre die Sache so, daß wir nicht den kunstvollen Aufbau aus den Papierrollen schichteten, sondern daß der sich selbst schichten müßte. Sie können sich natürlich nicht vorstellen, daß er sich selbst schichtet, da haben Sie ganz recht, kein Mensch kann sich das vorstellen; aber nehmen wir an, dadurch, daß die Gemälde auf alle Rollen gemalt sind, läge in ihnen die Kraft, daß sich die Rollen selber schichteten: Dann haben Sie hier ein Bild von unserem wirklichen Weltengebäude! Die Gemälde, die auf den Rollen sind, kann ich vergleichen mit all dem, was während der Saturn-, der Sonnen- und Mondenzeit geschehen ist, was da hineingeheimnist ist in jeden einzelnen Teil unseres Weltengebäudes. Aber es sind keine toten Gemälde, es sind lebendige Kräfte, die dasjenige, was auf der Erde sein soll, was auf unserem physischen Plan sein soll, aufbauen, und wir holen heraus dasjenige, was kunstvoll verborgen ist in dem, was gewissermaßen aus einzelnen Rollen des Weltengebäudes vor uns aufgeschichtet ist, und was beschrieben wird von der äußeren Wissenschaft, was uns gegenübersteht im äußeren Leben. Wenn Sie aber dieses Bild zu Ende denken - ich habe lange nachgesonnen, ein Bild, das möglichst entspricht dem Sachverhalt, zu finden; es ist das Bild von diesen Rollen, die lebendige, tätige Bilder haben -, dann werden Sie finden, daß kein menschliches Auge, das der Aufschichtung entgegenschaut, zunächst eine Ahnung haben kann von den Bildern, die da drinnen sind. Wenn der Aufbau recht kunstgemäß ist, werden wir etwas recht Kunstgemäßes als Beschreibung des Aufbaues bekommen, aber nichts wird in der Beschreibung stehen von den Gemälden, die drinnen sind.
Sehen Sie, so ist es mit der äußeren Wissenschaft. Sie beschreibt diesen kunstvollen Aufbau, sie läßt aber ganz außer acht dasjenige, was als Gemälde auf jeder einzelnen Rolle steht. Aber wenn Sie den Vergleich zu Ende denken, müssen Sie noch etwas ganz anderes ins Auge fassen: Gibt es denn in all jener Tätigkeit, welche diesen kunstvollen Aufbau der Rollen beschreibt, eine Möglichkeit, auch nur zu ahnen, geschweige denn wirklich etwas zu beschreiben von dem, was auf den einzelnen Rollen steht, wenn eben die Rollen zusammengerollt sind und das Gebäude aufbauen? Das gibt es gar nicht! In diesem Sinne müssen Sie sich auch klar sein, daß die gewöhnliche Wissenschaft zunächst gar nicht darauf kommen kann, daß unserem Weltengebäude dieses Geistige zugrunde liegt. Daher kann in einer geraden Fortsetzung desjenigen, was man sich aneignet in der gewöhnlichen Wissenschaft, nicht das Verständnis für die Geisteswissenschaft liegen, sondern es muß etwas hinzukommen, etwas, was im Grunde genommen gar nichts zu tun hat mit der gewöhnlichen Wissenschaft. Denn denken Sie einmal, Sie haben diese aufgeschichteten Rollen vor sich. Jemand kann sie sehr gut beschreiben, er wird noch wunderbare Schönheiten finden, etwa daß manche Rollen mehr schief, manche weniger schief gelegt sind, manche zu einer Rundung gebaut sind und so weiter, er wird all das hübsch beschreiben. Aber um darauf zu kommen, daß auf jeder Rolle inwendig ein Gemälde ist, dazu ist notwendig, daß er eine Rolle herausnimmt und sie aufrollt. Es hat gar nichts zu tun mit der Beschreibung des geschichteten Gebäudes. Es muß also etwas Besonderes hinzukommen zu der menschlichen Seele, wenn die Seele aus der gewöhnlichen wissenschaftlichen Weltanschauungsweise, wie wir sie heute haben, hineinkommen will in eine geisteswissenschaftliche Betrachtung, es muß die Seele von etwas Besonderem ergriffen werden. Das ist dasjenige, was heute so schwer verständlich ist für die äußere, im Materialismus lebende Kultur, was aber wieder begriffen werden muß, wie es begriffen worden ist in den verschiedensten Kulturperioden, in denen man noch eine geistige Weltanschauung als die physische Weltanschauung durchdringend hatte. Ältere Zeiten waren sich immer klar darüber, daß dasjenige, was man von dem geistigen Inhalte der Welt wissen soll, beruht auf einem besonderen Erfangenwerden der Seele von der Geistigkeit. Daher haben sie nicht bloß von Wissenschaftlichkeit, sondern von Initiationen und dergleichen gesprochen, und mit Recht davon gesprochen. Seien wir uns nur klar darüber, daß diese Anschauung die richtige ist.
Ich will Ihnen noch einen Vergleich bringen, der Ihnen, wenn Sie ihn zu Ende denken, die Sache ganz klar machen kann. Es ist ein Vergleich, der sogar aus alten Traditionen der Geisteswissenschaft genommen ist. Sehen Sie, man spricht in der Geisteswissenschaft mit Recht von einem «okkulten Lesen der Welt». Das, was die gewöhnliche Wissenschaft tut, ist nicht «Lesen der Welt». Wenn Sie dasjenige, was auf einer Seite eines Buches oder eines Schriftstückes geschrieben steht, nehmen, und Sie können nicht lesen und haben auch nie etwas davon gehört, daß es so etwas gibt wie Lesen, - nun, nehmen Sie an, es stünde auf der Seite meinetwillen eine Szene aus Goethes «Faust» -, so bleibt Ihnen das natürlich ganz unbekannt, was da enthalten ist auf dieser Seite; aber Sie können die Schriftzüge beschreiben, Sie können beschreiben: Da oben ist etwas, das hat einen Haken, dann ist ein gerader Strich nach unten, dann ist ein Querstrich. Sie können die einzelnen Buchstaben beschreiben, können auch beschreiben, wie die einzelnen Buchstaben zusammengestellt sind. Das wird eine Beschreibung geben. Solch eine Beschreibung der äußeren physischen Wirklichkeit ist zum Beispiel die Naturwissenschaft heute, ist auch die Geschichte, wie wir sie heute haben, aber alles solches Beschreiben gibt kein Lesen.
Nun können Sie sich fragen: Lernt heute irgend jemand in der Welt lesen dadurch, daß er sich über eine Seite setzt, keine Ahnung hat, wie man liest, und nun darauf kommen will durch die Formen der Buchstaben, was da drauf steht? Nicht wahr, so lernt doch heute niemand lesen! Das Lesen wird uns übermittelt in unserer Kindheit. Wir lernen es nicht, indem wir die Buchstabenform beschreiben lernen, sondern wir lernen es dadurch, daß uns etwas Geistiges übermittelt wird, daß wir geistig angeregt werden zum Lesen. So war es auch immer bei alledem, was man die niederen und höheren Grade der Initiation nennt. Nicht darauf beruhte sie, daß die Seelen angelernt wurden zu beschreiben, was außer ihnen ist, sondern zu lesen in dem, was außer ihnen ist, den Sinn der Welt zu enträtseln. Daher hat man wirklich mit Recht dasjenige, was als Geistiges in der Welt enthalten ist, «Wort» genannt, weil die Welt gelesen sein will, wenn man sie geistig verstehen will. Und das Lesen lernt man nicht dadurch, daß man die Formen der Buchstaben lernt, sondern dadurch, daf$ man eine geistige Anregung empfängt.
Das ist so hauptsächlich, was ich immer erreichen will durch die Darstellung, die innerhalb unserer Kreise gepflogen wird. Wenn Sie sich an mancherlei erinnern, was so durch unsere Vorträge hindurchgeht, so werden Sie immer sehen, daß ich versuche, möglichst Bilder zu gebrauchen. Ich gebrauche auch heute wiederum Bilder, und man kann ins Geistige nur hineinführen durch Bilder. Und sobald man die Bilder gar zu sehr in Begriffe preßt, die eigentlich nur taugen für den physischen Plan, so enthalten sie nicht mehr dasjenige, was sie eigentlich enthalten sollen. Der heutige Mensch aber kommt dadurch in eine Art von Verwirrung hinein, weil er dasjenige, was in Bildern gegeben ist, nicht so auffassen kann, daß es ihm eine reale Wirklichkeit gibt. Er denkt das Bild selber gleich ganz materialistisch. Sobald wir in etwas primitivere Kulturen gehen, sehen wir, daß die Menschen unsere heutigen Begriffe gar nicht gehabt haben, sondern überhaupt in Bildern gedacht haben, und ihre Wirklichkeiten durch Bilder ausgedrückt haben. Wenn Sie die orientalischen Kulturen Asiens nehmen, die etwas Atavistisches, von früher her Gebliebenes sind, so werden Sie heute noch überall finden: Wenn die Leute etwas besonders Tiefes bedeutsam ausdrücken wollen, dann sprechen sie in Bildern, wobei diese Bilder aber durchaus Wirklichkeitswert haben. Nehmen wir ein Beispiel, in dem das Bild eigentlich unmittelbaren Wirklichkeitswert hat, man möchte sagen, groben Wirklichkeitswert hat. Und dennoch wird der Europäer den Asiaten, der ältere, atavistische Vorstellungen bewahrt über die Wirklichkeit, doch außerordentlich schwer verstehen; er wird ihn zu grob verstehen.
In einer wunderschönen asiatischen Novelle wird folgendes erzählt: Es hatte einmal ein Ehepaar eine Tochter. Die Tochter wuchs heran, wurde nach der Hauptstadt in die Schule gegeben, weil sie besondere Fähigkeiten zeigte, kam aus der Schule zurück und heiratete einen Bekannten ihres Vaters, einen Kaufmann. Sie bekam einen Knaben und starb, da der Knabe vier Jahre alt war. Am Tage nach der Beerdigung der Mutter sagte das Kind plötzlich: «Die Mutter ist über die Treppe hinaufgegangen nach dem oberen Stock, da oben wird sie sein.» Nun, die ganze Familie ging die Treppe hinauf. Man muß sich natürlich hineindenken in die Seele des Orientalen, um das Folgende zu verstehen. Denn trotzdem ich etwas erzähle, was unmittelbar, hart an die Wirklichkeit anstößt, so würde ein Europäer das ganz anders erleben. Nehmen wir an, ein europäisches vierjähriges Kind würde sagen, die Mutter, die gestern begraben worden ist, sei die Treppe hinaufgegangen; wenn nun die anderen Leute mit einer Kerze die Treppe hinaufsteigen und in einem unbewohnten Stock nachschauen würden, so würden sie natürlich dort nichts finden. Man würde die Sache natürlich in Abrede stellen. Also man muß sich da in die asiatische Seele hineinfühlen können. Die Leute gingen also hinauf mit dem Lichte und fanden die Mutter wirklich dort stehen, einen Schatten, der vor einer Kommode stand, und starr in die Kommode hineinblickte. Die Schubladen der Kommode waren geschlossen, und die Leute sagten sich - aus ihren Vorstellungen heraus mit Recht -: Da muß in der Kommode etwas sein, was die Seele beirrt. Sie räumten die Kommode aus und trugen die Gegenstände, die darin waren, nach dem Tempel, damit sie dort aufbewahrt würden. Dadurch sind sie ja, nicht wahr, der Welt entrückt. So, glaubten sie, würde die Seele jetzt nicht mehr kommen, denn sie wußten: Das soll ja nicht sein; es kann eine solche Seele nur kommen, wenn sie noch durch irgend etwas gebunden ist. - Aber sie kam doch! Jeden Abend, wenn man wieder nachschaute, war sie da. Da ging man zu einem weisen Tempelhüter, der kam dann, sagte, er müßte ungestört sein, und sprach seine Sutras. Und als die «Stunde der Ratte» kam - so heißt im Orient die Zeit von 12 bis 2 -, da war wiederum die Frau da, schaute starr nach einem Punkte der Kommode. Da fragte er, ob etwas da sei. Sie gab ihm in der Gebärde zu verstehen, daß wohl etwas da sei. Er machte die erste Lade auf- es war nichts drinnen, die zweite Lade - nichts drinnen, die dritte Lade, die vierte Lade - nichts drinnen! Da kam er darauf, auch das Papier zu heben, mit dem die Laden ausgelegt waren. Da fand er zwischen dem letzten Papier und dem Boden der Lade einen Brief. Er versprach, daß von diesem Briefe niemand etwas erfahren solle, daß er ihn im Tempel verbrennen werde. Das hat er getan; dann kam sie nicht wieder.
Nun, diese orientalische Erzählung stimmt mit allem Wirklichen überein, drückt das Wirkliche aus. Würde man innerhalb europäischer Begriffe versuchen, die Sache darzustellen, so würde das sehr schwer gehen. Und anderseits hat der Europäer heute noch zu stark eine Grobheit in seinen Vorstellungen. Er denkt, wenn etwas eine Wirklichkeit ist, so muß sie jeder sehen. Der Europäer hat überhaupt nur die zwei Unterscheidungen: Entweder sieht jeder eine Sache, dann ist es eine Wirklichkeit, oder es sieht sie nicht jeder, dann ist es subjektiv, dann ist es nichts Objektives. Nun hat aber dieser Unterschied zwischen «subjektiv» und «objektiv» gar keine Bedeutung, sobald man in die geistige Welt hineinkommit, er hat nur eine Bedeutung für die physische Welt. Es ist gar nicht so, daß man sagen könnte, das, was die anderen nicht sehen, müsse nicht objektiv sein.
Nun können Sie sagen, solche Dinge gibt es in Europa auch. Ja, das gibt es hier auch, aber der Europäer ist froh, wenn er sagen kann: Es ist eben eine Dichtung, und daran braucht man nicht zu glauben. Deshalb ist es ja so viel leichter, in Dichtungen die geistige Welt zum Ausdruck zu bringen, weil man dann nicht den Anspruch macht, daß die Leute es glauben. Und dann sind sie schon befriedigt, wenn man das, was man da sagt, nur nicht zu glauben braucht. Der Einwand aber, daß es sich um eine Novelle handelt, der gilt nicht, denn da muß man wirklich in Betracht ziehen, daß der Europäer den Asiaten sehr wenig verstehen kann, wenn er solche Dinge ausspricht. Das, was der Europäer seine Novellen, seine Kunst nennt, das ist für den Asiaten ein höchst überflüssiges Spiel, es ist für ihn nichts. Darüber macht er sich eigentlich nur lustig, daß man Dinge erzählen soll, die es gar nicht gibt. Das versteht der wirkliche Asiate nicht. Er erzählt in seinen sogenannten Kunstwerken nur das, was es wirklich gibt, allerdings in der geistigen Welt etwa gibt. Das ist ein tiefer Unterschied zwischen der europäischen und der asiatischen Weltauffassung. Daß wir in Europa Novellen schreiben, in denen wir Dinge erzählen, die es gar nicht gibt, das ist eine höchst überflüssige Beschäftigung nach Ansicht des Orientalen. Unsere ganze Kunst ist eigentlich nach wirklich orientalischer Vorstellung eine ziemlich überflüssige Beschäftigung. Und dasjenige, was wir von asiatischer Kunst haben, das müssen wir durchaus so auffassen, daß es noch als Imaginationen geistiger Wirklichkeit gedacht ist, sonst verstehen wir gar nicht, was von jener Seite herüberkommt. Wir Europäer rächen uns ja auch dadurch, daß wir die asiatischen Erzählungen nicht nach asiatischem, sondern nach europäischem Maße messen und sagen: Es ist eben eine schwungvolle Dichtung, eine schwungvolle Phantasie; das schweift aus, das ist eine fruchtbare orientalische Phantasie!
So muß man überhaupt vielfach in Bildern reden, und auf diese Art der Darstellung kommt es an. Und so wird man nach und nach wiederum verstehen müssen, daß man vielfach in Bildern reden muß. Gewiß, wenn wir heute bloß in Bildern sprechen würden, so würde das gegen die europäische Kultur sein, das können wir nicht machen. Aber wir können gewissermaßen übergehen lassen das gewöhnliche Denken, das eigentlich doch nur für den physischen Plan bestimmt ist, in das Denken über die geistige Welt, und dann ins Bildhafte, in jenes Denken, das unter dem Impuls der geistigen Welt entsteht. So ist es auch aufzufassen, wenn ich zum Beispiel versuche zu sagen: Der Naturforscher zeichnet ein Weltenbild, und wenn er glaubt, daß dieses Weltenbild auch anschaulich ist, so macht er den Fehler, den jemand machen würde, der behauptet, er könnte ein Bild malen, aus dem ihm der Gemalte entgegenkäme und im Zimmer auf und ab geht. Ich falle in der Darstellung - in diesem letzten Buch «Vom Menschenrätsel» können Sie das sehen — aus der gewöhnlichen Darstellung, aus der logischen Darstellung in die bildliche Darstellung hinein. Das muß überhaupt, soll Geisteswissenschaft sich wirklich einleben im Abendlande, darstellender Stil werden. Und darauf beruht ungeheuer viel, daß dies gerade verstanden wird. Eine philosophische Abhandlung, die dasselbe besagen wollte heute, die würde unzähliges Logische aufführen, die künstlichsten Begriffe drechseln, aber sie würde sich in dem bewegen, was heute dem Sterben entgegengeht, was nicht mehr lebendig ist, und was nur darauf berechnet ist, die äußere Schichtung aus den Rollen zu verstehen, nicht dasjenige, was auf der Innenseite einer jeden Rolle als Gemälde lebt. Bedeutsam werden alle diese Dinge erst, wenn wir es eben im Leben anwenden, denn dadurch lernen wir das Leben verstehen. Das, was man im gewöhnlichen Sinne logische Beweise nennt, das muß sich selber erst verlebendigen, wenn man das Geisteswissenschaftliche lebendig verstehen will.
Nehmen wir einen Fall: Es gibt heute musikalische Menschen, es gibt unmusikalische Menschen. Nun weiß jeder, es ist ein gewaltiger Unterschied zwischen einem musikalischen und einem unmusikalischen Menschen. Für eine gewisse Betrachtungsweise kann man sogar sagen, ein musikalischer Mensch ist ein ganz anderes Wesen als ein unmusikalischer Mensch, wenn man die Seele betrachtet. Das soll nicht eine Kritik der unmusikalischen Menschen sein, sondern nur eine Konstatierung einer gewissen Tatsache. Das ist also eine Lebenserfahrung, die wir machen, wenn wir durch das Leben gehen. Wir treffen im Leben musikalische und unmusikalische Menschen an. Das ist das eine. Derjenige, der nun das Leben etwas näher betrachtet, wird vielleicht nicht gleich zu dem in Shakespeare stehenden Ausspruch kommen: «Der Mann, der nicht Musik in sich hat, taugt zu Verrat und Mord und Tücke; traut keinem solchen.» — Es mag nicht gleich, wie gesagt, dieses Ergebnis da sein, aber ein gewisser Unterschied auch in bezug auf die übrige Konfiguration der Seele ist zwischen musikalischen und unmusikalischen Menschen.
Nun möchte man doch verstehen, wie es kommt, daß musikalische und unmusikalische Menschen unter uns herumgehen. Wenn Sie sich in der die Naturwissenschaft nachahmenden Seelenwissenschaft umsehen, glaube ich nicht, daß Sie viel finden werden, was aufhellen könnte, warum eine gewisse Sorte von Menschen musikalisch, eine andere unmusikalisch ist. Und so ist es auch recht, denn würde diese der Naturwissenschaft nachgeahmte Seelenwissenschaft Erklärungen abgeben über den Grund, warum der eine Mensch musikalisch ist, der andere unmusikalisch, würde sie gerade auf solche Feinheiten eingehen, so würde sie etwas Rechtes zustande bringen!
Nun aber finden wir einen anderen Unterschied zwischen Menschen. Wir finden Menschen, welche gewissermaßen durch das Leben gehen und nicht recht berührt werden von dem, was um sie herum vorgeht, während andere Menschen durch das Leben gehen und eine so offene Seele haben, daß sie stark berührt werden von dem, was um sie herum vorgeht, stark über das eine Freude, über das andere Leid, über das eine Fröhlichkeit, über das andere Traurigkeit empfinden. Diese Unterschiede gibt es auch. Stumpflinge und gewissermaßen mit aller Welt mitfühlende Menschen gibt es. Es gibt Menschen, welche nur in ein Zimmer hineinzugehen brauchen, in dem nicht allzu viele Menschen sind, und die nach ganz kurzer Zeit einen gewissen Kontakt mit ihren Mitmenschen haben dadurch, daß sie fühlen, was die anderen fühlen, rasch, durch unsagbare, wie man sagt, Imponderabilien. Es gibt andere, die mit vielen Menschen in Berührung kommen, aber eigentlich keinen einzigen kennenlernen, weil sie diese Gabe nicht haben, von der ich eben gesprochen habe. Sie beurteilen eben jeden anderen Menschen danach, wie sie selber sind, und wenn er nicht so ist, wie sie selber sind, dann ist er eben doch eigentlich mehr oder weniger ein schlechter Mensch. Aber es gibt andere Menschen, die gehen auf jeden einzelnen Menschen ein, leben mit, was der andere lebt. Sie sind in der Regel auch solche Menschen, die mit jedem Tier mitleben können, mit jedem Käfer, mit jedem Spatzen, und die fröhlich werden können mit dem einen, was da vorgeht, und traurig werden können mit dem anderen. Geben Sie acht, wie oft das vorkommt im Leben, besonders in einem gewissen Lebensalter, daß sich ein junger Mensch über alles mögliche freut, bald himmelhoch jauchzt, bald zu Tode betrübt ist, der andere aber sagt: Du bist ein dummer Kerl, das ist doch im Grunde alles gleich! - Diese zwei Sorten von Menschen gibt es auch. Natürlich sind die beiden Eigenschaften mehr oder weniger ausgebildet, brauchen gar nicht einmal stark zutage zu treten, aber sie können sehr gut angedeutet sein.
Nun kommt der Geistesforscher und versucht, über die Welt in seinem Sinne nachzudenken, und kommt darauf: Musikalische Menschen sind diejenigen, die in einem vorigen Leben leicht den Übergang fanden von Fröhlichkeit zu Traurigkeit, von Traurigkeit zu Fröhlichkeit, die mit allem mitgehen konnten. Das verlegte sich in das Innere, und dadurch entstand im Innern jene rhythmische Übergangsfähigkeit, die die musikalische Seele gibt. Dagegen werden Menschen, die in früheren Leben an den äußeren Ereignissen stumpflich vorbeigegangen sind, nicht musikalisch. Dabei kann man ja selbstverständlich sonst ausgezeichnete Eigenschaften haben, kann meinetwillen Weltreformator sein, große Wirkungen in der Weltgeschichte hervorrufen. Es gibt eine Ihnen vielleicht nicht ganz unbekannte Persönlichkeit, welche in Rom war in der Zeit, als dort die größten Maler gemalt haben, in der Zeit, aus der die Malerei Michelangelos, Raffaels hervorgegangen ist, eine Persönlichkeit, die damals in Rom nichts anderes gesehen hat, als daß alles unmoralisch ist. Es war auch unmoralisch, Rom. Er ist daran vorbeigegangen, neben dem anderen, das nicht unmoralisch war, zum Beispiel der Kunst Michelangelos, Raffaels. Es war eine sehr bedeutende Persönlichkeit, die Großes getan hat, ein Reformator, Sie kennen sie alle. Man kann also durchaus nicht sagen, daß das hier in dem Sinne einer bösartigen Kritik gemeint wäre. Aber das Unmusikalischsein beruht doch darauf, daß man nicht lebendige Eindrücke bekommen hat in einer vorhergehenden Inkarnation von dem, was eben manchen Seelen lebendige Eindrücke geben kann. Denken Sie, wie nun das Leben durchsichtig wird, wenn man mit solchen Erkenntnissen an das Leben herantreten kann, wie verständlich einem die Menschen werden können! Und wenn man das festhält, daß aus der Geisteswissenschaft in unsere Seelen mehr die Sehnsucht einfließt, nach Bildern zu charakterisieren, dann bekommt das keinen üblen Beigeschmack.
Selbstverständlich, wenn alles in Begriffen sich auslebte, und es etwa dazu führen würde, daß Geisteswissenschaft nun an jeden Menschen zergliedernd heranginge und studierte: Was ist mit dem in seiner vorhergehenden Inkarnation wohl gewesen, was war der? — dann müßte man sich hüten vor der Geisteswissenschaft. Dann würde man sich ja sozusagen nicht mehr getrauen, unter die Leute zu gehen, wenn man wüßte, daß man da so analysiert wird. Das würde aber nur dann der Fall sein, wenn man mit solchen groben Begriffen arbeitete. Wenn man aber im Bilde bleibt, ergreift das Bild das Gefühl, und man kommt zu einem gefühlsmäßigen Verstehen der anderen Menschen, zu einem Verstehen, das man sich nicht in Begriffe zu verwandeln braucht. In Begriffe wandelt man es sich nur um, wenn man es als allgemeine Wahrheit ausdrückt. Es ist gut, so wie ich jetzt gesprochen habe, von dem Beweglichen der Seele in einer vorhergehenden Inkarnation und dem Musikalischen in einer nachfolgenden Inkarnation zu sprechen, aber es würde abgeschmackt sein, wenn ich einem Menschen, der musikalisch ist, gegenübertreten würde, und ihn nun beschreiben würde, wie er in der vorhergehenden Inkarnation war, weil er jetzt musikalisch ist. Aus dem einzelnen heraus kommen diese Wahrheiten, aber es handelt sich nicht darum, sie auf das einzelne hin anzuwenden. Das ist etwas, was aber im tiefsten Sinne wirklich verstanden werden muß.
Bei solchen Wahrheiten wird es noch verstanden, aber wenn es etwas weiter geht, dann kann sehr leicht dasjenige, was zur Aufklärung der Menschheit bestimmt ist, zu Unfug führen. Denken Sie doch nur einmal, wie leicht es vorkommt, immer wieder und wiederum vorkommt: Man spricht im allgemeinen über die Reinkarnation. Nun habe ich einmal über die Beziehung zwischen Reinkarnation und Selbsterkenntnis in einem unserer Zweige gesprochen. Es ist gut, auf dieses Thema auch zu achten, und ich habe zum Beispiel in diesem Zweig dazumal gesagt, als ich von Reinkarnation und Selbsterkenntnis gesprochen habe: Es ist gut, wenn man gewisse Begriffe, die man aus der Geisteswissenschaft gewinnen kann, in seiner Selbsterkenntnis zu verwirklichen versucht. Ich habe zum Beispiel den einen Begriff angegeben, daß wir, wenn wir geboren werden, im Beginne unseres Lebens durch unser Karma oftmals mit Menschen zusammengeführt werden, mit denen wir zusammen waren in einer früheren Inkarnation so in der Mitte des Lebens, in den dreißiger Jahren, daß wir also nicht mit denselben Menschen gleich zusammen sind, mit denen wir damals in der früheren Inkarnation zusammen waren. Nun, so habe ich einzelne Regeln angeführt, Sie können das in Vorträgen auch finden, wie man Reinkarnation auf Selbsterkenntnis anwenden kann. Ja, wozu hat das dazumal geführt? Es hat dazu geführt, daß etwas Bestimmtes geschehen ist. Es zeigte sich in der nächsten Zeit, daß eine ganze Anzahl von Menschen einen förmlichen «Klub der Reinkarnierten» gegründet haben. Es war wirklich so, daß eine Clique von jedem einzelnen angegeben hat, was er im vorhergehenden Leben oder in allen vorhergehenden Leben war. Selbstverständlich waren alle ungeheuer hervorragende Gestalten der Menschheitsentwickelung, das ist ja schon fast selbstverständlich, und sie hatten auch Beziehungen zueinander.
Das fraß lange. Natürlich ist das ein furchtbares, ein schreckliches Zeug, denn das verstößt ja in der Regel gegen etwas, was ich auch betont habe: Soll jemand wirklich etwas wissen über seine vorhergehende Inkarnation, so ist es in der Gegenwart nicht so, daß man es von innen heraus fassen kann, sondern man wird von außen herein aufmerksam gemacht durch irgendein äußeres Ereignis oder von jemand anderem. Heute ist es in der Regel falsch, wenn einer von innen heraus schöpft und sich diktiert: Ich bin dieses oder jenes. Wenn jemand etwas wissen soll, wird es ihm von außen gesagt. Da hätten diejenigen, die damals jenen Klub der Reinkarnierten begründet hatten, lange warten können, bis es ihnen gesagt worden wäre. Dennoch waren sie alle bedeutende Persönlichkeiten, die bedeutendsten der Menschheitsentwickelung! Und als die Sache ruchbar wurde, wie man sagt, und man die Leute fragte: Woher rührt denn das? da wurde gesagt: Ja, das mußten wir doch tun! Sie haben dazumal den Vortrag gehalten, daß man die Selbsterkenntnis im Sinne der Reinkarnation pflegen soll, und von da ab haben wir uns alle damit beschäftigt, nachzudenken, was wir im vorhergehenden Leben waren, und welche Beziehungen wir zueinander gehabt haben!
Wir fragen nun: Gegen was sündigen wir in einem solchen Falle eigentlich? - Wir sündigen wirklich gegen jene Ehrfurcht, die wir haben sollen vor den großen geistigen Wahrheiten, jene Ehrfurcht, die darin besteht, daß wir in richtigem Maße «im Bilde» bleiben können; denn aus dem Bild herauszugehen, das kommt nur dann vor, wenn es notwendig ist. Das ist schon bei der Geisteswissenschaft notwendig, daß wir gewissermaßen Ehrfurcht entwickeln, und daß wir wissen, daß dieses Spintisieren, dieses In-den-Begriff-Hereinbringen immer vom Übel ist. So nachdenken über die geisteswissenschaftlichen Angelegenheiten, wie man nachdenkt über die Angelegenheiten des physischen Planes, das ist immer vom Übel. Es ist, sobald man diese Ehrfurcht sich aneignet, auch wirklich so, daß man gewisse moralische Eigenschaften entwickelt, welche sich nicht entwickeln können, wenn man nicht die Dinge in der rechten Weise in der Seele trägt. Geisteswissenschaft muß in diesem Sinne auch zur moralischen Erhöhung der neueren Kultur führen.
Wir Europäer sagen mit Recht: Dadurch, daß wir imstande sind, in unserem Geistesleben das Christus-Mysterium zu sehen, dadurch haben wir etwas voraus vor allen, zum Beispiel auch asiatischen, orientalischen Kulturen. Die haben in dem, was sie über den Geist wissen, das Christus-Wesen nicht drinnen. Ein Japaner, ein Chinese, ein Hindu, ein Perser, hat nicht das Christus-Wesen in seinem Denken über die geistigen Weltenzusammenhänge, und deshalb nennen wir mit Recht diese asiatische Weltanschauung eine atavistische, von früher hergekommene. Sie können, wie zum Beispiel die VedantaPhilosophie, ungeheuer hoch sein im Welterfassen; daß sie das Christus-Mysterium nicht begreifen können, macht sie aber doch zu atavistischen Vorstellungen, denn tief einzudringen in gewisse Zusammenhänge ist noch kein Zeichen von einer besonderen geistigen Höhe. Ich habe zum Beispiel jemanden gekannt, der lange Zeit in unseren Reihen war, übrigens auch zu dem Klub der Reinkarnierten gehört hat, wie mir eben einfällt, und der ausgezeichnete Theorien herausgebracht hat über gewisse Zusammenhänge des atlantischen Lebens. Die allgemeinen großen Gesichtspunkte fortsetzend, die zum Beispiel in meiner Schrift über die Atlantis stehen, kam die betreffende Persönlichkeit zu sehr interessanten Ergebnissen, die wahr waren; und dennoch stand diese Persönlichkeit so wenig in unserer Sache drinnen, daß sie sich von unserer Bewegung einfach trennte, als es ihr aus äußeren Gründen paßte. Es gehört unter Umständen nur eine ganz bestimmte Formung des ätherischen Leibes dazu, um in gewisse übersinnliche Gebiete hineinzuschauen. Soll aber Geisteswissenschaft lebendig in unsere Kultur hineinfließen, dann muß sie den ganzen Menschen so ergreifen, daß er mit den tiefsten Impulsen dieser Geisteswissenschaft zusammenwächst. Und dann wird diese Geisteswissenschaft gerade das hervorbringen, was unserer in den Materialismus hinein sich entwickelnden Kultur fehlt.
Also wir sagen mit Recht: Wir haben das Christus-Mysterium vor den asiatischen Kulturen voraus. Aber was sagen denn die Asiaten? Ich erzähle Ihnen nun nicht irgend etwas Ausgedachtes, sondern das, was die einsichtsvolleren Asiaten wirklich sagen. Die sagen: Schön, ihr habt das Christus-Mysterium vor uns voraus; das ist etwas, was wir nicht haben, dadurch steht ihr nach eurer Ansicht auf einer höheren Stufe der Kultur. Aber nun sagt ihr zum Beispiel auch: «An den Früchten soll man sie erkennen.» Nun schreibt eure Religion vor, daß alle Menschen einander lieben sollen, aber wenn wir euer Leben anschauen, so ist das nicht danach. Ihr schickt uns Missionare nach Asien, die erzählen uns alles Großartige; aber wenn wir nach Europa kommen, da leben die Menschen gar nicht so, wie das sein müßte, wenn das alles ganz wahr wäre, was da erzählt wird! - So sagen die Asiaten. Denken Sie nach, ob sie so ganz unrecht haben! Bei einem Religionskongreß, wo Vertreter aller Religionen sprechen sollten, wurde gerade dieser Fall besprochen, und da antworteten die asiatischen Vertreter dasselbe, was ich jetzt gesagt habe. Sie sagten: Ihr schickt uns Missionare, das ist gewiß alles sehr schön. Aber ihr habt das Christentum ja nun seit zweitausend Jahren; wir können nicht bemerken, daß die moralische Entwickelung dadurch so ungemein über die unsrige hinausgegangen ist!
Aber das hat seine gute Begründung, meine lieben Freunde. Sehen Sie, der Asiate lebt viel mehr in der Gruppenseele, er lebt viel weniger als Individualität. Ihm ist das, was Moral ist, gewissermaßen auch eingeboren, gruppenseelenhaft eingeboren, und der Europäer muß gerade dadurch, daß er das Ich entwickelt, heraustreten aus der Gruppenseele, muß sich selbst überlassen sein. Dadurch muß der Egoismus in einer gewissen Weise hochkommen. Der Egoismus ist schon einmal die notwendige Begleiterscheinung des Individualismus, und nur nach und nach können sich die Menschen wiederum zusammenfinden, indem sie das Christentum in höherem Sinne verstehen. Aber vieles hat selbst bei den Besten, die darüber nachdachten, gerade mit Bezug auf das Christentum, entgegengewirkt einem wirklichen Verständnis der Folgen des Mysteriums von Golgatha. Es ist gewiß ungeheuer «tief», meine lieben Freunde, wenn jemand sagt, wir müßten den Christus in unserem eigenen Inneren erleben. Sehen Sie, es gibt, ich möchte sagen, eine symbolische Theosophie. Sie wissen, wie ich immer gegen diese symbolische Theosophie rede, die immer alles symbolisch zu erklären versucht. Sogar die Auferstehung des Christus wird als ein bloßer innerer Vorgang erklärt, während sie in Wahrheit ein historischer Vorgang ist. Es ist wirklich der Christus auferstanden in der Welt, aber manche Theosophen finden sich leichter mit der Sache ab, wenn sie das bloß für einen inneren Prozeß erklären. Sie wissen ja, das war die besondere Kunst des verstorbenen Franz Hartmann, der in jedem Vortrag mehrmals alles, was die Theosophie ist, den Leuten dadurch beigebracht hat, daß er gesagt hat: Man muß sich selbst in seinem Innern erfassen, den Gott in sich selber erfassen und so weiter. Nun werden Sie, wenn Sie die Evangelien richtig verstehen, keinen Anhalt dafür finden, daß in den Evangelien so etwas vertreten wäre, daß man nur von innen heraus den Christus erleben soll. Gewiß, es gibt sehr viele theosophische Symboliker, die deuten verschiedene Stellen um, aber in Wahrheit ist alles in den Evangelien so, daß das große Evangelienwort wahr ist: «Wo zwei in meinem Namen vereint sind, bin ich mitten unter ihnen.» Der Christus ist eine soziale Erscheinung. Der Christus ist als eine Wirklichkeit durch das Mysterium von Golgatha gegangen, und er ist als eine Wirklichkeit da, und er gehört nicht dem einzelnen Menschen, sondern dem menschlichen Zusammenleben. Es kommt auf dasjenige an, was er tut. Solche Dinge kann man auch manchmal im Bilde besser verstehen als mit abstrakten Begriffen.
Wir waren neulich einmal zusammen mit einem Freunde, der kurz da war aus dem Felde, jetzt schon wieder nicht da ist — ich erzähle ein ganz jüngst vorgekommenes Ereignis, das aber wirklich festgehalten zu werden verdient. — Dieser Freund hatte die Liebenswürdigkeit, eine Autodroschke zu holen, und als er damit kam, sagte er: «Ich habe mich jetzt im Herfahren mit dem Kutscher unterhalten.» Es war überhaupt ein merkwürdiger Kutscher, denn als wir dann mit ihm gefahren waren und ausstiegen, machte er den Schlag auf und nahm zwei Traktätchen heraus: «Friedensbote», die überreichte er uns, nachdem wir ihn abgelohnt hatten. Er machte zugleich für die geistige Weltanschauung Propaganda! Nun erzählte dieser Freund, er hätte mit diesem Kutscher, der, seit es Autodroschken gibt, Autodroschke fährt, gesprochen, und der hätte ihm gesagt: «Es kommt alles darauf an, daß die Menschen den Christus finden. Auf den Christus kommt es an!» - Also da hat er sich vom nächsten Droschkenstand die Autodroschke geholt und kam gleich mit dem Kutscher in ein Gespräch, der ihm sagte: «Wenn Sie den Christus finden, den Sie jetzt nicht haben, dann geht die Welt vorwärts.» Nun, der Droschkerikutscher hat dann noch verschiedenes andere erzählt. Er sagte: «Sehen Sie, mit dem Christus ist das nämlich so: Denken Sie sich einmal, ich bin ein sehr, sehr ordentlicher Mann, ein Mustermann, und ich habe Kinder, die sind alle Nichtsnutze. Bin ich dadurch weniger der ordentliche Mustermensch, daß ich Kinder habe, die zu nichts nutze sind? Die kennen mich alle, glauben mich alle zu kennen, sind aber alle Nichtsnutze. So stelle ich mir den Christus vor. Er gehört allen, er ist als solcher für sich die einzige Gestalt, aber die anderen brauchen ihn deshalb noch nicht alle wirklich zu verstehen.»
Denken Sie, welch wunderbares Bild sich dieser Droschkenkutscher gemacht hat von diesem besonderen Leben dieses Christus, diesem abgesonderten Leben! Er ist also wirklich darauf gekommen, daß der Christus etwas ist, was unter uns lebt, mit uns lebt, was allen zusammen gehört, keinem einzelnen gehört; denn als die einzelnen sah er seine Buben an, die alle Nichtsnutze sind, die alle nichts taugen, die alle erst sich zum Verständnis hindurchringen müssen. Hätte dieser Droschkenkutscher, der diese wirklich außerordentlich bedeutsame Bildidee gefunden hat, das philosophisch zum Ausdruck bringen sollen, es würde nichts geworden sein; aber das Bild entspricht wunderbar dem, was eigentlich verstanden werden soll. Nun genügt natürlich solch ein abstraktes Bild nicht, das kann ein einzelner haben, aber mit dem kann man nicht unsere Kultur beeinflussen. Aber ich wollte nur hinweisen darauf, wie wirklich das einfachste Gemüt auf ein richtiges Bild kommen kann, und wie die Dinge wirklich ins Bild hineinmünden sollten. Das habe ich gerade ganz besonders zu erreichen versucht in dem Stil, in der Art der Darstellung bei diesem neuesten Buche, das einen außertheosophischen Stoff behandelt, so daß dieses Buch durch die Art der Darstellung «theosophisch» ist, wenn man den Ausdruck gebrauchen will.
Das ist es, daß wir gewissermaßen unsere Lehre immer mehr und mehr zwischen den Zeilen verstehen müssen, wenn wir das richtig auffassen wollen, daß unsere Lehre Leben werden muß, Leben jedes einzelnen. Und das ist dasjenige, was einem ja so furchtbar schwer auf der Seele liegt: daß es so schwierig zu erreichen ist, die Dinge ins Leben einzuführen.
Sehen Sie, derjenige, der mit diesen Dingen verbunden ist, der muß sich denken, namentlich wenn er das wirklich kennt, was in der äußeren rationalistischen Kultur heute lebt, daß das, was durch die Geisteswissenschaft pulsiert, Leben in allen einzelnen Kulturzweigen werden muß. Es soll das Denken beeinflussen, es soll die Gefühle beeinflussen, den Willen durchdringen; dann erfüllt es erst seine Aufgabe. Dazu gehört aber einige wirkliche innere Kraft, mit der Sache sich verbunden fühlen zu können. Und schwer ist es, daß das so unendlich langsam geht, daß die Menschen sich so recht verbunden fühlen mit den Impulsen, die in der Geisteswissenschaft liegen. Da macht man wirklich Erfahrungen, die zeigen, wie die Menschen gerade vorbeigehen an dem, was sie ins Auge fassen sollten. Ich will einen besonderen Fall nehmen: Jemand war einmal bei uns Mitglied, ein ungeheuer gelehrter Herr, aber seine Gelehrsamkeit befriedigte ihn nicht, er war tief unglücklich trotz seiner Gelehrsamkeit, die die orientalischen Sprachen umfaßte und das, was man durch diese orientalischen Sprachen und Kulturen in sich aufnehmen kann, die vorderasiatische Kultur. Nun, so jemand kommt dann und will einen Rat haben. Mein Rat muß in einem solchen Falle dahin gehen, zu zeigen, wie durch die Erfassung der Geisteswissenschaft Geist in eine solche Wissenschaft, in die orientalische Philosophie hineinkommt. Ich versuche also, ihm anzugeben, wie er dasjenige, was ja an gelehrtem Material vorhanden ist, durchdringen soll mit dem, was die Geisteswissenschaft gibt. Die Sachen blieben aber zwei nebeneinander bestehende Dinge. Auf der einen Seite betrieb er seine Orientalia, wie sie eben auf den Universitäten betrieben werden, auf der anderen Seite die Geisteswissenschaft. Sie kamen nicht zusammen, er konnte nicht das eine mit dem anderen durchdringen. Denken Sie nun, wie fruchtbar es wäre, wenn jemand, der so viel weiß — und er wußte wirklich ungeheuer viel -, auftreten würde - er brauchte ja gar nicht einmal merken zu lassen, daß er theosophisch denkt, wenn schon einmal die Menschen ihn deshalb schief ansehen würden -und er nun diese Wissenschaft nehmen und durchdringen würde mit dem Theosophischen. Dann könnte er das sogar an der Universität vortragen! Der Mann hätte ganz gut die Kultur, die am Euphrat und Tigris lebt und noch etwas weiter nach Westen herüber - da und in der Ägyptologie war er besonders zu Hause - durchdringen können mit der Geisteswissenschaft und etwas Außerordentliches leisten, jedenfalls etwas, was befruchtender wirken würde als dasjenige, was jetzt als Popularisiertes so die landläufigen Schreiber zustande bringen. Neulich trat gerade wiederum solch ein Schreiber auf in einem jetzt viel gelesenen Tagesblatt, schrieb, anknüpfend an eine sphinxartige Gestalt, die beim Bau der Bagdadbahn gefunden worden ist, über diese Gegend dort, - na, wenn der auch Arthur Bonus heißt, wahrhaftig, der ist kein «Guter»! Das ist was Schreckliches!
Dies schwebt schon als Ideal vor, meine lieben Freunde, so das Denken tragen zu lassen von dem, was die Geisteswissenschaft gibt. Aber so soll es auch im Leben sein, im gewöhnlichen Leben von Mensch zu Mensch, im gewöhnlichen Leben mit dem oder jenem. Überall kann man die Dinge hineintragen. Wäre das nicht gedacht, bestünde dieses Ideal nicht, dann könnte ja Geisteswissenschaft nicht in Wirklichkeit fruchtbar werden. Aber überall liegen die Aufforderungen dazu. Denken Sie einmal, es gibt ausgezeichnete Historiker, welche beschreiben, sagen wir, die Geschichte Englands zur Zeit Jakobs I., und es gibt ausgezeichnete Historiker, welche das Leben des Jesuiten Suarez beschreiben. Sie wissen, wenn ich über den Jesuitismus spreche, muß ich mich vorsichtig ausdrücken, da darf ich nicht viel Gutes - also ich meine, was so mißverstanden werden kann - zum Ausdruck bringen. Es ist schon so: Von diesem Suarez wissen die meisten Menschen nichts anderes, als daß er in einem besonderen Kapitel den Königsmord sehr ausdrücklich gelehrt haben soll. Aber das ist nicht wahr. Man weiß ja überhaupt sehr häufig dasjenige, was nicht wahr ist, und dasjenige, was wahr ist, das weiß man sehr häufig weniger gut. Nun gibt es jetzt ausgezeichnete Bücher über diesen Suarez, und man kann schon auch diese zumeist von Jesuiten geschriebenen Bücher über Suarez, den Nachfolger des Ignaz von Loyola, lesen und verstehen, und braucht deshalb weder jemals Jesuit zu werden noch gewesen zu sein, noch sich sagen lassen zu müssen, daß man Jesuit gewesen sei. Die Dinge liegen da, und verbindet man sie, dann kann man eine der größten Fragen der neueren Geschichte dadurch lösen. Diese beiden Gestalten, Jakob I. auf der einen Seite und Suarez, der Jesuitenphilosoph, auf der anderen Seite, sind zwei gewaltige Gegensätze! Ich möchte sagen, während bei Jakob I. eine neuere Entwickelung sich eingeleitet hat, die sehr ahrimanisch war, bei Suarez eine andere, die sehr luziferisch war, hat ihr Zusammenwirken, und namentlich ihr gegenseitiger Kampf, vieles von dem ausgemacht, was in der neueren Zeit lebt und webt. Da kommt man aber auf geheimnisvolle Zusammenhänge. Und ich meine diese Dinge nun nicht so, daß ich etwa Vorwürfe machen möchte. Man kommt zum Beispiel darauf, daß direkt von Suarez abstammt ungeheuer vieles von dem, was man heute historischen Materialismus nennt, Marxismus, sozialdemokratische Weltauffassung. Bitte sagen Sie jetzt nicht: Der hat gesagt, die Sozialdemokraten seien Jesuiten! — Aber die Sache ist doch in einer gewissen Weise sehr gut begründet, während dem manche der Gegenpartei Angehörige, also dem Sozialdemokratischen widerstrebende Leute, eben auch wiederum zurückgehen auf dasjenige, was inauguriert worden ist durch Jakob I.
Ich habe Sie da hingewiesen auf etwas, was vielfach in den Gedanken der Menschen lebt. Man findet namentlich auch in okkulten Gemeinschaften zwei Hauptströmungen, und aus denen geht wiederum das hervor, was nicht okkult ist. Diese zwei Hauptströmungen bringen zwei ganz typisch einander gegenüberstehende Gestalten hervor: Jakob I. von England, mit einer in ihm lebenden Inituerten-Seele ganz außerordentlicher Art, und Suarez. Nun lesen Sie die Biographie von Suarez. Ja, Sie verstehen sie nicht, wenn Sie nicht Geisteswissenschaft wirklich erfaßt haben. Suarez gehörte zu den Menschen, die zunächst schlechte Schüler waren, nichts lernten. Mit denen ist ja nach dem heutigen materialistischen Urteil in der Welt überhaupt nichts anzufangen, obwohl man sehr leicht nachweisen könnte, daß große Genies der Welt nichts gelernt haben als Schulknaben. Aber er gehörte zu den schlechten Schülern, war auch auf der Hochschule noch nicht, was man so einen gescheiten Menschen nennt, aber dann kam es plötzlich, und jede Biographie erzählt dieses plötzliche Kommen. Es erwacht plötzlich eine genialische Gabe, und er schreibt diese ja allerdings in weiteren Kreisen nicht bekannten, aber außerordentlich bedeutsamen Bücher, die eben der Suarez geschrieben hat. Es kam plötzlich, geweckt durch manches, was ich Ihnen ja angedeutet habe in dem Vortrage, in dem die Übungen der Jesuiten geschildert worden sind, die auch Suarez auf sich angewandt hat, durch die er etwas geweckt hat, was ihm die Möglichkeit gab, besondere Geisteskräfte zu entwickeln. Also man kann bei Suarez’ Biographie nachweisen, so wie man bei Jakob I. genau nachweisen kann, wie er- man kann das nicht so sagen, aber es ist das im guten Sinne angewandt «umschnappt», das heißt aus dem Ungeistigen ins Geistige hineinkommt. Diese Seele, die später etwas Besonderes leistet, wird in einem besonderen Moment des Lebens eben geboren. Das entwickelt sich nicht in gerader Linie, sondern durch einen Ruck entwickelt es sich, wenn es das Karma gibt, oder es entwickelt sich dadurch, daß eben der Betreffende einen Einfluß bekommt, der sich vergleichen läßt mit dem, wodurch man lesen lernt im Elementaren: nicht durch eine Schilderung der Buchstabenformen, sondern dadurch, daß man einen Impuls bekommt, daß man die Buchstaben verstehen lernt.
Also Sie sehen wiederum, wie Geisteswissenschaft die Anleitung sein könnte, diese geschichtlichen Zusammenhänge zu verstehen, daß sich das Leben uns so gestaltet, daß dieses Leben ganz anders würde. Und das habe ich ja so vielfach angedeutet. Und nimmt jemand Geisteswissenschaft lebendig auf, so ist es schon so, daß er sich anders stellen lernt zum Leben, daß ihm anderes einfällt zu tun, als ihm sonst einfallen würde. Man kann sich schwer vorstellen, wenn einer Geisteswissenschaft lebendig aufnimmt, daß er zu der kuriosen Idee kommt, er wäre, sagen wir, die wiederverkörperte Maria Magdalena. Das fällt ihm gar nicht ein, sondern er wird auf andere Seeleninhalte seinen Seelenblick richten.
Wie gesagt, es ist schwer, heute zuzuschauen, wie langsam gerade die Entwickelung geht nach der Richtung hin, von der ich eben gesprochen habe, die ich andeutete. Man nimmt Geisteswissenschaft wirklich viel zu theoretisch, will sie zu sehr nur genießen. Und sie muß ganz lebendig betrachtet werden. Und heute, wo wir zusammen sind, bevor wir uns für eine Zeitlang jetzt trennen müssen, wo der Sommer beginnt und wir wohl jetzt nach Dornach müssen, möchte ich schon gerade noch kurz auf einige wichtige Punkte nach dieser Richtung hinweisen. Ich glaube doch, daß wir solche Dinge bedenken müssen.
Sehen Sie, meine lieben Freunde, wenn die Sache so geworden wäre, wie vor jetzt vierzehn Jahren, als wir hier die geisteswissenschaftliche Strömung begründeten, mancher es sich gedacht hat, der von älteren Traditionen herkam, dann hätten wir eine Sekte bekommen. Denn auf Sektenbildung war das Ganze angelegt. Auf Sektenbildung war auch alles dasjenige angelegt, was da von England herübergebracht worden ist. Und vielfach haben sich die Leute gerade wohl gefühlt, wenn sie so recht abgeschlossen in kleinen Zirkeln waren. Da konnten sie sagen: Die anderen Menschen da draußen sind alle Toren. - Es gab ja so wenig Kontrolle darüber. Aber das konnte so nicht gehen. Geisteswissenschaft mußte mit unserer gesamten Kultur rechnen. Und das werden Sie ja gesehen haben: Es wurde immer mit dieser Kultur gerechnet, es wurde namentlich der Öffentlichkeit gegenüber dasjenige hervorgehoben, was - gewiß mögen die Leute noch so viel dagegen haben, aber dennoch - hineingehen kann in jetzige europäische Köpfe. Nun will ich ja nicht kritisieren, das wäre auch eine ganz alberne Sache, aber es wird doch immer mehr und mehr notwendig sein, daß man gerade dies verstehen lernt, daß wirklich diese Bewegung keine Sektenbewegung werden darf, und gar nicht den Charakter einer Sektenbewegung tragen darf, wenn sie ihre Aufgabe erfüllen soll. Dadurch, daß mit der allgemeinen Kultur gerechnet wird, kommt mancherlei zustande. Die Leute draußen schreiben, wenn sie überhaupt über unsere Bewegung schreiben, zumeist Unsinn, nicht wahr? Sie sagen, das schadet nichts, im tieferen Sinne. Es schadet außerordentlich! Und deshalb muß man sich dagegen wehren, und man muß alles tun dagegen. Es muß alles geschehen, daß nach und nach die Welt nicht nur Unsinn schreibt, sondern Besseres schreibt, selbstverständlich. Aber im geistigen Sinne schadet etwas anderes noch mehr. Es schadet, wenn in einer unrichtigen Weise dasjenige, was für das Verständnis des zusammengehörigen Kreises gemeint ist, so weit in die Öffentlichkeit hinausgetragen wird, daß man jetzt Zyklen bereits bei Antiquaren kaufen kann. Gewiß, es mag das in einer gewissen Weise nicht hintangehalten werden können, aber es geschieht - nicht gerade, daß man die Zyklen bei Antiquaren kaufen kann, aber was gleichwertig ist - immer wieder und wiederum. Da sind von einem Menschen - von dem mir jüngst jemand, der längere Zeit mit ihm gearbeitet hat, gesagt hat, er schreibe selber nichts, er gehöre einer etwas fraglichen Clique an, die habe Herrschaft über ihn und dann setze er sich hin und schreibe darauf los - mannigfaltige Broschüren über unsere Geisteswissenschaft geschrieben worden, sogar bis zu dicken Büchern. Darinnen sind nicht nur Zitate aus meinen gedruckten, in der Öffentlichkeit erschienenen Büchern, sondern aus Zyklen sind ganz weite Stellen zitiert. Also nicht nur, daß man die Dinge beim Antiquar kaufen kann, sondern jeder, der ein blödsinniges Buch heute schreiben will, ist immerhin imstande, sich die Zyklen heute zu verschaffen. Natürlich verschafft er sich dann zwei, drei Zyklen, schreibt Stellen, die, aus dem Zusammenhang herausgerissen, ganz absurd klingen, ab, und kann ein Buch daraus machen.
Das sind die Schwierigkeiten, die daraus resultieren, daß wir auf der einen Seite der Öffentlichkeit gegenüberstehen und auf der anderen Seite die Gesellschaft sind. Aber wir müssen diese Schwierigkeit verstehen lernen, dann wird sie schon leichter behoben. Ich will, wie gesagt, nicht kritisieren, das hat ja gar keinen Zweck, sondern ich will charakterisieren; ich will zeigen, worinnen Schwierigkeiten liegen, man braucht nur auf sie zu achten. Selbstverständlich werden in der nächsten Zeit noch viel schändlichere Sachen gegen unsere Geisteswissenschaft geschehen, als schon geschehen sind. Das mag alles gewiß so sein, das kann man nicht so im Handumdrehen anders machen; aber die Bedingungen dieser geisteswissenschaftlichen Bewegung zu studieren, das ist doch, ich möchte sagen, recht notwendig, und nicht vorbeizugehen so, wie wenn man es gerade darauf angelegt hätte, im nächsten Leben ganz unmusikalisch zu sein, an demjenigen, was einen fröhlich machen kann und was einen ärgern kann in der Art und Weise, wie unsere geisteswissenschaftliche Bewegung von der Welt beurteilt wird.
Sehen Sie, derjenige, der nur egoistisch denkt - wie gesagt, da soll gar keine Kritik darinnen liegen, ich will nur beschreiben -, der denkt heute, die Geisteswissenschaft weiß über gewisse naturgemäße Zusammenhänge mehr zu sagen als die äußere Wissenschaft, und da wenden sich Leute immer wiederum an mich mit der Bitte um ärztlichen Rat, trotzdem ich immer wieder betone, daß ich nur Lehrer, Pfleger der Geisteswissenschaft sein und nicht etwa als Arzt dienen will. Nun kann man ja gewiß einen freundschaftlichen Rat haben wollen, und den zu verweigern, wäre auch absurd. Wenn jemand kommt, um einen freundschaftlichen Rat zu haben, warum soll er verweigert werden, wenn er sich auf naturwissenschaftliche Dinge bezieht, obwohl ich nach alledem, was geschehen ist, bitte, daß mich niemand fragt um irgend etwas Gesundheitliches, der nicht einen Arzt hat. Wer nur egoistisch denkt, der denkt nicht daran, daß das schon einmal nicht gestattet ist heute, und daß man in Kollision kommt mit der äußeren Welt und daß das unserer geisteswissenschaftlichen Bewegung schadet. Man muß sich bemühen, daß die Dinge besser werden, man muß sich überall dafür einsetzen, daß es nicht bloß eine abgestempelte Medizin gibt, die auf rein materialistischen Grundlagen beruht. Das kann man tun, aber man kann nicht nur in egoistischer Weise denken: Was tut mir gut? -, wenn daraus eine Beeinträchtigung desjenigen hervorgeht, was unsere Bewegung sein muß. Gewiß können sich nun geisteswissenschaftliche Ratschläge herausbilden, es wäre absurd, wenn sich die nicht herausbilden sollten. Es wäre trostlos, wenn man nicht jemandem über das eine oder das andere, woran er leidet, etwas sagen könnte, aber kann man es denn, wenn folgendes vorkommt - ich erzähle Ihnen wiederum eine Tatsache -: Jemand ist krank, noch dazu in einer Stadt, in der unmittelbar vorher von mir gesagt worden ist, um solche Dinge zu vermeiden, daß ich es ausdrücklich ablehne, daß sich Leute in Krankheitsfällen an mich wenden. Offiziell ist das gesagt worden. Nun ist jemand krank, kommt in ein Sanatorium und bleibt da eine Zeitlang. Fin langjähriges Mitglied von uns, das ganz, ich möchte sagen, in den intimsten Sachen immer darinnengestanden hat, schreibt an jenes Sanatorium: Der betreffende Kranke kann jetzt aus dem Sanatorium schon herauskommen, denn Dr. Steiner hat diesen und jenen Rat gegeben. - Er schreibt das an die Ärztin, so daß die Ärztin dann zu dem betreffenden Mitglied kommt und sagt: «Da sagt ihr immer, Theosophie will nur Theosophie sein, will nicht hereinpfuschen in alle möglichen Dinge; da habt ihr’s wieder!» Ja, meine lieben Freunde, daß diese Dinge vorkommen, das muß man studieren. Wenn man nicht achtet darauf, so ist das nicht zum Heile unserer Bewegung. Das ist ein Fall, aber in den verschiedensten Nuancen, in den verschiedensten Schattierungen kommen diese Dinge immer wieder und wiederum vor. Und es kommt das Eigentümliche in unserer Bewegung zustande - und das ist schon notwendig, daß ich es auch nun bespreche -, daß sich das, was das Gute unserer Bewegung ist, weniger rasch zeigt, das neue Gute, dagegen zeigen sich wirklich Neuheiten in unserer Bewegung, die im Grunde noch nie da waren und die beweisen: Unsere Bewegung ist schon etwas Neues; aber es sind sonderbare Neuheiten.
Zum Beispiel: Nehmen wir also an, ich würde dies oder jenes in meinen gedruckten Büchern haben; wenn keine Zyklen in unrechte Hände gegeben würden, so würden die Leute draußen diese Bücher widerlegen. Das mögen sie tun; sie würden aber ihr Urteil vorbringen. Es würde keinem Menschen draußen in der Welt einfallen, der nicht zu unserer Gesellschaft gehört, das abzuschreiben, was in meinen Büchern steht, um mit diesen Sätzen zu beweisen, daß ich ein schlechter Kerl bin. Das würde draußen niemand tun, sondern er würde seine eigenen Urteile abgeben. Aber in unserer Gesellschaft kommt etwas ganz Neues vor. In unserer Gesellschaft tritt das zum Beispiel auf, daß jemand die ganze Lehre annimmt von A bis Z, wie man sagt, alles gutheißt, aber mit dieser Lehre mich widerlegt! So können Sie jetzt in einem noch nicht veröffentlichten Elaborat das Folgende lesen.
Sie erinnern sich, daß ich einmal in einer älteren Auflage des Buches, das jetzt «Die Rätsel der Philosophie» heißt — früher hieß es «Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im 19. Jahrhundert» - , erklärt habe, wie Le Verrier auf den Neptun gekommen ist bloß auf Grund der Uranus-Berechnungen, bevor Neptun noch gesehen worden ist. Neptun ist auf der hiesigen Sternwarte entdeckt worden, aber man wußte, daß er da ist, schon früher auf Grund der bloßen Berechnung. Ich habe das gesagt, um zu zeigen, wie aus der Berechnung heraus etwas folgen kann. Also ich habe zeigen wollen, daß man aus Gedanken Tatsachen vorher wissen kann. Da hat denn neulich jemand geschrieben, er hätte diese sehr einleuchtende Sache nun auch angewendet, nur auf einem anderen Gebiet: Er hätte gefunden, daß in unserer Bewegung etwas nicht in Ordnung sei, daß Störungen sind, so wie Le Verrier sie bei dem Uranus gefunden hat. Wenn man die allgemeinen Gravitationsgesetze nimmt, und der Uranus sich nicht so bewegt, wie es der Rechnung entspricht, muß er von etwas gestört werden! $o wären Störungen in unserer Bewegung. - Er stellt also die Hypothese auf, es ist etwas Störendes da, etwas, was alles stört. Da kam er darauf - wie Le Verrier auf den Neptun -, daß das Böse in mir ist, was die Sache stört! Und dann, ebenso wie hier der Astronom auf der Sternwarte das Fernrohr an den Ort gerichtet hat, so richtete er sein geistiges Fernrohr auf mich und fand das Böse!
Es ist ein besonderer Fall, wo bis auf meine Charakteristik hin die Methode, die ich gegeben habe, angewendet wird, wo man mit sich selbst widerlegt wird. Innerhalb des Kreises, innerhalb dessen der Betreffende steht, wurde neulich ein Brief geschrieben - nicht von ihm, sondern aus dem Kreise -, darin steht, ich hätte gar keinen Anspruch darauf, daß das nicht so geschähe, denn ich hätte ja selber immer gesagt, Geisteswissenschaft wäre ein Allgemeingut, und es wäre ganz falsch, zu denken, daß die Geisteswissenschaft von dem Geistesforscher ausgehe. Nun ja, wenn die Sachen so konfus werden, kann man sie auch nicht anders als konfus erklären, selbstverständlich. Das ist aber wirklich eine Neuheit, die innerhalb unserer Gesellschaft auftritt. Draußen, wo das Alte noch herrscht, da widerlegt man irgend jemanden mit den eigenen Gedanken. Innerhalb unseres Kreises aber erstehen uns Leute, die nun nicht ihre eigenen Gedanken nehmen, sondern dasjenige, was sie in den Zyklen lesen, und gebrauchen dieses gegen mich. Sie können zum Beispiel gerade in dem Brief, von dem ich jetzt gesprochen habe, überall Zitate aus der «Geheimwissenschaft» und so weiter finden. Da wird überall gesagt: Das soll man nachlesen, das soll man nachlesen, dann werde man schon finden, was ich eigentlich für ein böser, schlechter Mensch bin. Aber nicht etwa so, daß man behaupten würde, daß die Sachen schlecht sind! Nein, weil die Sachen gut sind. Mit diesen Sachen selbst wird das eben bewiesen! Das ist eine Neuheit, die bei uns auftritt, die auf der Theorie beruht, daß die Lehre angenommen werden kann, und daß man diese Lehre gerade benutzen kann, um den zu verleumden, der versucht, diese Lehre zu popularisieren. Das ist wirklich eine Neuheit! Es kommen die merkwürdigsten Neuheiten vor unter uns. Das ist nur, nicht wahr, ein krasser Fall, den ich Ihnen da erzähle; im kleinen kommt es mehr oder weniger sehr, sehr häufig vor, immer wieder und wiederum. Mucksen wir uns nur solch einer Sache gegenüber, dann kommen die Drohungen! Neulich konnte man in einem Brief lesen, daß nächstens in allen Schaufenstern und in allen Zeitschriften Artikel und Broschüren erscheinen werden, und dann wurden Titel angeführt, die direkte Drohungen waren. Mucksen wir uns, wie gesagt, nur, dann kommt’s so! Das ist eine Neuheit, das tritt in unserer Bewegung ganz neu auf, das war noch nicht da. Es ist schon notwendig, daß man darauf achtet.
Nun entstehen aber, ich möchte sagen, Schwierigkeiten unter der Hand. Denn man weiß voraus, was zuweilen kommen muß. Sagen Sie einmal, soll man solch eine Sache, wie ich sie jetzt besprochen habe, wirklich gar nicht besprechen, soll man immer darüber schweigen? Das könnte man gewiß. Aber da die Mitglieder selber nicht versuchen, auf diese Dinge zu kommen, so würde man ja in unserem Kreise niemals darauf kommen. Also muß man es sagen. Und sagt man es ja, was kommt heraus? Nächstens können Sie wahrscheinlich wiederum irgendwo einen Brief lesen - ich stelle es zunächst als Hypothese auf-, worin gesagt wird: Der redet vor einer großen Anzahl von Mitgliedern über einen Privatbrief, den er erhalten hat! - Und das aus dem einfachen Grunde, weil es ganz gewiß Menschen gibt, die irgendwo sofort da oder dort erzählen, was ich heute abend gesprochen habe. Das kommt doch immer wieder vor. Bespricht man es nicht, so ist es vom Übel; bespricht man es, so feuert man dasjenige, was fortwährend getan wird, an. Man weiß es voraus, was getan wird.
Die Dinge müssen studiert werden. Ich will gar nicht Kritik üben, ich will nur darauf hinweisen, daß schon einmal in einer Bewegung, wo die Geisteswissenschaft lebt, das heißt okkulte Dinge pulsieren, daß da schon einmal Schwierigkeiten entstehen. Aber sie müssen beachtet werden. Wenn sie nicht beachtet werden, gehen sie immer weiter und weiter. Gewiß, man muß darauf gefaßt sein, daß die Angriffe immer schärfer und schärfer werden. Wären wir eine Sekte geblieben, dann wäre das nicht so. Aber die Sache hat werden sollen, wie sie eben geworden ist, und daher ist das so. Aber manches ist begreiflich, was von draußen herein geschieht, obwohl manches, was von draußen herein geschieht, sehr deutlich nachweisbar ist in seinem Ursprung von innen heraus. Heute erst wurde uns mitgeteilt, daß wir in Dornach Eurythmie treiben, die darinnen besteht, daß getanzt wird bis zur Bewußtlosigkeit wie bei den Derwischen, und noch manche andere Dinge. Und es heißt, daß das Mitglieder berichtet haben! Mitglieder haben berichtet, daß wir tanzen bis zur Bewußtlosigkeit! Erzählt haben es ganz fernstehende Leute einem Mitgliede, aber diese fernstehenden Leute haben erzählt, daß sie es von Mitgliedern, deren Name auch angegeben war, gehört haben.
Das sind die Schwierigkeiten, die durch die Zusammenkoppelung der Geisteswissenschaft mit der Gesellschaft entstehen, und die wir studieren müssen. Es ist unmöglich, daß wir achtlos an diesen Dingen vorbeigehen, wenn wir in entsprechender Weise weiterkommen müssen, wenn wir es nicht bis zur Auflösung und bis zur vollständigen Annihilierung der Gesellschaft bringen wollen. Wirklich, der Geisteswissenschaft als solcher schadet es nichts, aber dem, was Geisteswissenschaft auch sein muß, schadet es doch, wenn da oder dort jemand kommt - verzeihen Sie, daß ich Äußerlichkeiten erzähle und sagt: Mich interessiert vieles, was ich gelesen habe, aber da war ich oftmals an einem Pensionstisch, und da hat eine Dame geschwätzt über Theosophie und alles mögliche erzählt. Ja, da kann ich nicht Mitglied werden, wenn solches Zeug geschwätzt wird, wenn das Theosophie sein soll! — Das ist nicht ein Fall, das kommt immer wieder und wiederum vor in dieser oder anderer Weise.
Es kann mißverstanden werden, wenn ich diese Dinge am Schlusse einer ernsten Betrachtung heute besprochen habe. Aber es ist schon durchaus notwendig, daß Sie diese Dinge wissen, daß Sie auf diese Dinge achten, meine lieben Freunde! Denn die Gesellschaft muß für die Geisteswissenschaft eine Trägerin sein, eine Hilfe sein. Sie kann sich aber sehr leicht so entwickeln, daß sie gegen dasjenige wirkt, was die Geisteswissenschaft der Weltenentwickelung bringen soll. Man kann natürlich in jedem einzelnen Falle gut begreifen, daß manche Schäden gar nicht hintanzuhalten sind, aber sie treten, dessen können wir sicher sein, in einer anderen Weise auf, wenn man sie beachtet, und wenn man versucht, wirklich, ich möchte sagen, eine gewisse Linie, eine gewisse Richtung bei sich selber einzuhalten. Es ist ja manchmal so außerordentlich schwierig, aber es ist schon notwendig, daß man manchmal auch in einer gewissen Richtung hart wird. Dann wird man solche Neuheiten, wie ich sie geschildert habe, richtig bewerten. Sie sind wirklich Neuheiten! Es kommt sonst nicht vor, daß man jemanden mit sich selbst widerlegt; denn die Tatsache ist so absurd, so töricht an sich, daß man eines Menschen Lehre annimmt, um ihn selbst zu widerlegen. Natürlich kann man, wenn einer Unsinn behauptet, den Unsinn gegen ihn selber wenden; aber das ist es ja nicht, sondern das ist eben das Neue, daß es so gemacht wird, daß man die Lehre annimmt und einen damit widerlegt.
Diese Dinge sind wirklich im kleinen sehr, sehr verbreitet. Und nicht ferne von ihnen steht ein anderes Übel, das ich zum Schlusse auch noch besprechen will: Wirklich, es kommt kaum irgendwo so oft wie gerade in unserer Bewegung vor, daß irgend jemand etwas macht, das man ja verurteilen kann, verurteilen muß. Nun nimmt der eine oder der andere Partei. Wenn es sich darum handelt, daß irgend jemand gegen die leitenden Persönlichkeiten unserer Gesellschaft oder gegen langjährige Mitglieder, oder gegen das, was man jetzt schon fast unglückseligerweise noch den Vorstand nennen muß, etwas vorbringt, was unbegründet ist, was vielleicht sogar ausgedacht ist, woran man sehr leicht sehen kann, daß manchmal ja diese oder jene Motive dahinter sind: Man wird sehr selten finden, daß jemand versucht zu erkennen, inwiefern doch dieser unglückselige Vorstand recht haben könnte, sondern es wird Partei ergriffen für denjenigen, der unrecht hat. Das ist sogar die Regel bei uns: Partei wird genommen für denjenigen, der unrecht hat, und Briefe werden geschrieben, daß diejenigen, die angegriffen sind, doch etwas tun sollten, damit Freundschaft gehalten werden kann, damit die Sache wiederum ins Gleis kommt, man müsse doch Liebe entwickeln! Wenn einer so recht eine lieblose Handlung begeht gegen einen anderen, so schreibt man nicht dem, der sie begangen hat, sondern demjenigen, den sie betroffen hat: Entfalte doch Liebe; es ist doch so lieblos, wenn du nicht irgend etwas tust, daß die Sache wieder in Ordnung kommt! - Es fällt einem gar nicht ein, vom anderen, der unrecht hat, die Sache zu verlangen! Das sind solche Eigentümlichkeiten, die wirklich gerade bei uns auftreten.
Von anderen Dingen gar nicht zu sprechen; aber es kann ja natürlich sein, daß auch von diesen einmal gesprochen werden muß. Heute, wo wir zunächst das ernste Thema besprechen wollten, da wir ja in einer ernsten Zeit leben, und unsere Bewegung in den Ernst der Zeit auch ernst eingreifen muß, mußte schon auch einmal auf mancherlei Dinge in dieser Art hingewiesen werden. Es ist notwendig, daß darauf geachtet wird, denn es geschehen schon Dinge, die so sind, daß man sie eigentlich nicht glauben kann, wenn man sie erzählt. Dennoch hat man fortwährend mit derartigem zu tun. Es sollte niemand mißverstehen, daß diese Dinge einmal vorgebracht worden sind; aber vielleicht könnte doch darüber ein bißchen nachgedacht werden.
Der Absicht nach soll ja die Pause dieses Jahr nicht so lang sein, wie sie sonst gewesen ist. Es wird ja wiederum im Herbste sein können, daß wir uns sehen, nur ist es Ja Jetzt am besten, nichts Bestimmtes zu sagen in dieser Zeit der Unbestimmrheiten und der Hindernisse. Und so bitte ich Sie, dasjenige, wovon ich gerade versuchte, es in dieser Winterszeit vor unsere Seele zu malen, dazu zu benutzen, um in dieser Sommerszeit die Seele damit leben zu lassen, das Durchgenommene in einer Art von Meditation in der Seele immer wieder und wiederum aufleben zu lassen und etwas nachzudenken über die Grundbedingungen des Einlebens unserer geisteswissenschaftlichen Bewegung in die allgemeine Menschenkultur.
Noch hätte ich zu sagen, daß die lieben Freunde, die in so hingebungsvoller Art unseren Kinderhort pflegen, leiten und für ihn sorgen, ein wenig in Sorge sind, daß er gewissermaßen ein bißchen, ich will nicht sagen in Vergessenheit, aber in so etwas ähnliches wie Vergessenheit kommen könnte. Es werden ja eine Art Ferien sein, aber er wird sich ja wiederum einrichten müssen, und es wird dann notwendig sein, daß man wiederum etwas Geld hat, und es wird notwendig sein namentlich, daß liebe Freunde sich finden, die helfen — natürlich nur solche, die helfen können. Aber es wird doch vielleicht Damen geben, die mitkochen und sonstiges leisten können. Das ist notwendig. Es ist ja wirklich das Ergebnis nach dem Urteil derjenigen, die etwas davon wissen können, weil sie gepflegt haben, ein sehr gutes. Die Kinder haben etwas gewonnen. Es ist aus den Kindern etwas gemacht worden. Daher würde ich schon bitten, daß die Damen, die sich dieser Aufgabe späterhin wieder unterziehen könnten, dies als eine Art von Liebespflicht übernehmen, nur muß man dann wirklich, wenn man es übernimmt, dabei bleiben. Wenn man es nicht so übernehmen kann, daß man in gewissem Sinne dabeibleiben kann, so muß man es halt nicht übernehmen. Es geht zum Beispiel nicht, daß jemand, der versprochen hat, um fünf Uhr im Kinderhort zu sein, nachmittags eine Absagekarte schreibt; dann hat man niemanden. So läßt sich das nicht machen, das muß man mindestens einen Tag vorher wissen. So bitte ich denn diejenigen Freunde, welche mitarbeiten können, sich bei unserer lieben Frau Dannenberg, die mit anderen zusammen so viel für den Kinderhort gesorgt hat, ins Einvernehmen zu setzen, damit, wenn der Winter kommt, er wirklich betrieben werden kann.
Und so wollen wir denn nun auseinandergehen, meine lieben Freunde, mit dem Bewußtsein, daß, wenn wir alle uns es angelegen sein lassen, wir doch manches tun können, daß dasjenige, was wir ernst meinen, auch in ernsten Zügen sich der Zeit einverleibt. In einer Zeit leben wir, in der Menschen weit größere Opfer bringen, als jemals in so kurzer Zeit in so großer Zahl gebracht worden sind. In einer schweren, leidvollen Zeit leben wir. Sei dieses Schwere, Leidvolle der Zeit, sei das doch auch ein wenig eine Aufforderung: Wenn es auch schwer ist, das Geistige der Menschheitsentwickelung einzuverleiben, es muß doch geschehen, und wieviel oder wie wenig wir als einzelner nur tun können, tun wir es! Versuchen wir zu verstehen die rechte Art, wie wir es tun können, dann wird es wirklich dasjenige bringen, was nicht von selber kommen kann, was durch Menschen geschehen muß, wenn auch aus geistigen Welten die Hilfen kommen werden. Und so seien wir denn auch in solchen Gedanken, wenn wir vielleicht räumlich eine Zeitlang weniger zusammen sind, beieinander. Diejenigen, die im Geiste zusammen sind, sind immer beieinander. Sie trennt nicht Raum, sie trennt nicht Zeit, und am wenigsten vielleicht eine mehr oder weniger kurze Zeit. Bleiben wir vereint in den Gedanken, die auch wiederum ein wenig zu durchdringen versuchten dasjenige, was in der letzten Zeit von hier aus versucht wurde, zu Ihren Seelen zu sprechen.
Wir müssen so schwer wie möglich gerade die mit dem Mysterium von Golgatha zusammenhängenden Wahrheiten nehmen. Verstehen wir, daß wir in der Einsamkeit der Seele sein müssen und oftmals sein müssen und immer wieder sein müssen, wenn wir das eine oder das andere verstehen wollen. Aber verstehen wir auch, daß wir zur Menschheit gehören und daß derjenige, der durch das Mysterium von Golgatha gegangen ist, das, was er aus geistigen Höhen auf die Erde getragen hat, für die Menschheit auf die Erde getragen hat, für menschliches Zusammenwirken, für menschliches Miteinanderarbeiten, und daß er gesagt hat: «Wenn zwei in meinem Namen vereint sind, so bin ich mitten unter ihnen.» Wir können uns vorbereiten für dasjenige, was der Christus der Welt durch uns sein soll, durch dasjenige, was wir in der Einsamkeit durchleben. Aber den Christus haben wir unter uns doch nur, wenn wir versuchen, dasjenige, was wir in der Einsamkeit erstreben, auch in die Welt hinauszutragen. Wir werden es aber nur hinaustragen, wenn wir erst verstanden haben, welches die Bedingungen des Hinaustragens sind. Blicken wir auf diese Bedingungen hin! Machen wir die Augen auf und haben wir vor allen Dingen den Mut, uns zu gestehen: Dies eine oder das andere ist so, und es muß so oder so angegriffen werden.
Wenn ich über den Christus hier spreche, so spreche ich so, daß ich weiß: Er hilft, weil er eine lebendig wirkende Wesenheit ist. Fühlen wir ihn zwischen uns, er wird helfen! Aber wir müssen seine Sprache lernen, und seine Sprache ist heute die Sprache der Geisteswissenschaft. So ist es für heute. Und wir müssen den Mut haben, diese Geisteswissenschaft, soweit wir können, vor uns selbst und vor anderen zu vertreten.
Denken wir darüber in dieser Sommerszeit, und lassen wir das unsere Meditation sein, bis wir uns hier wieder zusammenfinden.
The Path to Imagination
When we first look at the reality around us as it appears to the human senses and the human mind, we have something around us that we can call, comparatively speaking, an image—let us express it this way for now—a great world structure. We form concepts, ideas, and representations of how it is, how its processes are, and we come into contact with what happens in this world structure, including its details, in such a way that we develop certain sympathies and antipathies toward this or that, which are then lived out in our emotional life. We do this or that out of our own volition and thus intervene in the machinery that prevails in this world structure.
When one speaks of the structure of the world in this way, one initially has the idea that this structure is made up of individual parts, and one then considers the individual parts and, in turn, the parts of the parts, until the observer of nature arrives at what he calls the smallest parts, the molecules, the atoms, which, as I have already told you, no one has ever really perceived, that they are a hypothesis, but a hypothesis that is justified in a certain sense, if one only knows that it is a hypothesis. In short, one regards what one can comparatively call the structure of the world with a certain right as composed of parts, of members, and then forms no further idea about these members, and that is fine for the time being. For those people who still fantasize about the atom, even talking about the life of the atom or even worse fantasies about the atom, these people are talking about the nothingness of nothingness; for the atom itself is a hypothesis. So to build a hypothesis on top of hypotheses is, of course, to build a house of cards, or rather, not even a house of cards, because with cards you at least still have the cards, whereas with speculations about the atom you have nothing at all. From an insight gained through spiritual science, one should rather admit that as soon as one wants to go beyond this view, which initially sees the world structure surrounding us in this way, as I have just indicated, one must arrive at a different way of looking at things, which is to our everyday way of looking at things, which is also that of ordinary science, as this ordinary, everyday way of looking at things is to dream life. Man dreams in images, and he can have a whole world in his images. Then he wakes up. He knows this not through theory—for no theory can distinguish the dream from so-called “everyday reality”—but through life. Now they no longer face the images of the dream, but realities that jostle and press and oppress them. They know this through immediate life. And again, it is so that we can wake up from these experiences of everyday life, which are only comparatively, but nevertheless, “life dreams,” and only then do we have before us a higher reality, the reality of the spirit. And again, it is only through life that we can distinguish this higher spiritual reality from the reality of everyday life, just as we can only distinguish the reality of everyday life from dreams and their images through life. But when we enter the world that spiritual science describes to us, that spiritual science makes us understand, then — we can form various ideas that comparatively indicate how spiritual reality is to ordinary reality, but I want to use a special image today — then everything appears as follows: Let us imagine that we are looking at a house made up of individual bricks. Certainly, when we look at the house, we initially see it as being made up of individual bricks. With the house, we cannot go beyond the individual bricks at first. But let us suppose that the house is not made of ordinary bricks, but that each brick is itself an extraordinarily artistic structure, and that when we look at the house with our ordinary gaze, we see only the bricks, parallelepiped-shaped, as we see them, but we have no idea that each brick is, so to speak, a small work of art. So it is with the structure of the world. We need only take one detail out of the structure of the world, the detail that is initially the most complicated, let us say the human being. Think of the human being as confronting us again because he is part of the structure of the world, composed of parts: head, limbs, sense organs, and so on. Think how, in the course of time, we have endeavored to understand each individual part from the spiritual world. Just remember what we said only recently: What the human being has as a head refers us back to his earlier incarnation on earth; what he now has as a body belongs to this incarnation on earth and carries within itself the seed for the head of the next incarnation on earth. The shape of our head points back to earlier incarnations.
Remember something else. Remember that we recently spoke of twelve senses, and that we connected these twelve senses that human beings carry within themselves with the twelve forces that correspond to the twelve constellations of the zodiac. We said that we carry within us, in microcosmic form, the macrocosm with its forces acting primarily from the twelve constellations. Each of these forces is different: the forces of Aries are different from those of Taurus, those of Gemini are different, and so on, just as the perception of the eye is different from that of the ear, and so on. Twelve senses correspond to the twelve constellations of the zodiac. But they do not merely correspond to them. We know that the predisposition for the human sense organs was already laid down on ancient Saturn and continued to develop during the Sun and Moon periods until our Earth period. It is only during our Earth time that human beings have become such complete beings with their senses as we encounter them today. In earlier times, during the lunar, solar, and Saturn periods, they were much more open to the great cosmos. During these three periods preceding the Earth time, the forces of the twelve signs of the zodiac really worked into our human nature. While the basis of our senses was being formed, the forces of the zodiac worked upon them. When we speak of this correspondence between the senses and the zodiacal signs, we do not mean merely a correspondence, but rather a seeking out of those forces that have built our senses into us. We are not speaking in a superficial way about some correspondence between the ego-sense and Aries and the other senses and this or that sign of the zodiac, but we speak in this way because during the earlier stages of our Earth's development, the human senses were not yet so developed that they were embedded in the human organism and could take in the outside world. They were first built into his organism by the twelve forces. We are built up out of the macrocosm, so when we study the human sense organs, we are studying world-encompassing forces that have been working in us for millions and millions of years, and whose results are such wonderful parts of the human organism as the eyes or the ears. It is really the case that we study the parts for their spiritual content, just as we would have to study every brick in a house that we are examining for its artistic construction.
I could give another example: Let us suppose we have before us some structure, artfully layered from rolls of paper. Now we can first describe what we have artfully layered from rolls of paper: Some rolls are standing upright, others are rolled up crookedly, and this, artfully arranged, forms some kind of structure. But imagine that we had not merely stacked paper rolls, but that each paper roll had a wonderful painting inside it. We would not see this at all if we looked at the rolls that are rolled up and have the paintings on the inside. And yet they are there! And before the structure could be built, the paintings had to be painted inside. But suppose that instead of us layering the artistic structure out of the rolls of paper, it had to layer itself. Of course, you cannot imagine it layering itself; you are quite right, no one can imagine that; but let us suppose that because the paintings are painted on all the rolls, they have the power to layer the rolls themselves: Then you would have a picture of our real world structure! I can compare the paintings on the rolls with everything that happened during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods, which is hidden in every single part of our world structure. But these are not dead paintings; they are living forces that build up what is to be on earth, what is to be on our physical plane, and we bring out what is artfully hidden in what is, as it were, stacked up before us from individual scrolls of the world structure, and what is described by outer science, what confronts us in outer life. But if you think this image through to its conclusion—I have pondered long to find an image that corresponds as closely as possible to the facts—it is the image of these rolls that have living, active images—then you will find that no human eye looking at the stack can at first have any idea of the images that are inside. If the structure is truly artistic, we will obtain something truly artistic as a description of the structure, but the description will say nothing about the paintings that are inside.
You see, this is how it is with external science. It describes this artistic structure, but it completely disregards what is depicted as a painting on each individual roll. But if you think the comparison through to its conclusion, you have to consider something else entirely: in all the activity that describes the artistic construction of the scrolls, is there any possibility of even guessing, let alone actually describing, what is on the individual scrolls when they are rolled up and form the building? There is no possibility whatsoever! In this sense, you must also be clear that ordinary science cannot initially conceive that this spiritual element underlies our world structure. Therefore, a straightforward continuation of what one acquires in ordinary science cannot lead to an understanding of spiritual science; something must be added, something that basically has nothing to do with ordinary science. Just imagine you have these stacked rolls in front of you. Someone can describe them very well, finding wonderful things, such as that some rolls are more crooked than others, some are built to be rounded, and so on. They will describe all of this beautifully. But in order to discover that there is a painting inside each roll, it is necessary for him to take out a roll and unroll it. This has nothing to do with describing the layered structure. So something special must be added to the human soul if it wants to move from the ordinary scientific worldview we have today to a spiritual scientific view; the soul must be seized by something special. This is what is so difficult to understand today for the external culture living in materialism, but it must be understood again as it was understood in the most diverse cultural periods in which a spiritual worldview still permeated the physical worldview. In earlier times, people were always clear that what one should know about the spiritual content of the world is based on a special grasping of the soul by the spirit. That is why they spoke not only of scientific knowledge, but also of initiations and the like, and rightly so. Let us be clear that this view is the correct one.
I will give you another comparison which, if you think it through to the end, will make the matter quite clear to you. It is a comparison taken from ancient traditions of spiritual science. You see, in spiritual science we rightly speak of an “occult reading of the world.” What ordinary science does is not “reading the world.” If you take what is written on a page of a book or a document and you cannot read and have never heard of such a thing as reading, well, suppose for my sake that there is a scene from Goethe's Faust on the page , then of course what is contained on that page remains completely unknown to you; but you can describe the letters, you can describe: Up there is something that has a hook, then there is a straight line down, then there is a cross. You can describe the individual letters, you can also describe how the individual letters are put together. That will be a description. Such a description of external physical reality is, for example, natural science today, and it is also history as we have it today, but all such descriptions do not constitute reading.
Now you may ask yourself: Does anyone in the world today learn to read by sitting down in front of a page, having no idea how to read, and then trying to figure out what is written there from the shapes of the letters? No, nobody learns to read like that today! Reading is passed on to us in our childhood. We do not learn it by learning to describe the shape of letters, but by having something spiritual passed on to us, by being spiritually stimulated to read. This has always been the case with everything that is called the lower and higher degrees of initiation. It was not based on teaching souls to describe what is outside them, but to read what is outside them, to unravel the meaning of the world. Therefore, it is truly right to call what is contained in the world as spiritual “word,” because the world wants to be read if one wants to understand it spiritually. And reading is not learned by learning the forms of letters, but by receiving spiritual inspiration.
This is essentially what I always aim to achieve through the presentations given within our circles. If you remember some of the things that come up in our lectures, you will always see that I try to use images as much as possible. I am using images again today, and one can only be led into the spiritual through images. And as soon as one presses images too much into concepts that are actually only suitable for the physical plane, they no longer contain what they are supposed to contain. But this causes confusion for people today because they cannot grasp what is conveyed in images as something that has a real existence. They immediately interpret the image in a completely materialistic way. As soon as we look at more primitive cultures, we see that people did not have our modern concepts at all, but thought in images and expressed their realities through images. If you take the Oriental cultures of Asia, which are somewhat atavistic, remnants of earlier times, you will still find everywhere today that when people want to express something particularly profound and meaningful, they speak in images, but these images have a very real value. Let us take an example in which the image actually has immediate real value, one might say coarse real value. And yet Europeans find it extremely difficult to understand Asians, who have preserved older, atavistic ideas about reality; they find them too crude.
A beautiful Asian novella tells the following story: Once upon a time, a married couple had a daughter. The daughter grew up and was sent to school in the capital because she showed special abilities. She came back from school and married an acquaintance of her father, a merchant. She had a boy and died when the boy was four years old. The day after his mother's funeral, the child suddenly said, “Mother has gone up the stairs to the upper floor; she will be up there.” Well, the whole family went up the stairs. Of course, one has to put oneself in the mind of an Oriental to understand what happened next. For even though I am telling a story that is very close to reality, a European would experience it quite differently. Let's assume that a European four-year-old child said that his mother, who had been buried yesterday, had gone upstairs; if the other people then went upstairs with a candle and looked in an uninhabited room, they would of course find nothing there. They would naturally deny the whole thing. So you have to be able to empathize with the Asian soul. So the people went up with the light and really found the mother standing there, a shadow standing in front of a chest of drawers and staring into it. The drawers of the chest were closed, and the people said to themselves—rightly so, based on their beliefs—that there must be something in the chest that was disturbing the soul. They emptied the chest and carried the objects that were in it to the temple to be kept there. In this way, they were removed from the world, weren't they? They believed that the soul would not return, for they knew that this should not be; such a soul can only return if it is still bound by something. But it did return! Every evening, when they looked again, it was there. So they went to a wise temple keeper, who came and said that he must not be disturbed, and recited his sutras. And when the “hour of the rat” came—that is what the time between 12 and 2 is called in the Orient—the woman was there again, staring fixedly at a spot on the chest of drawers. He asked her if there was anything there. She gestured to him that there was indeed something there. He opened the first drawer—there was nothing inside, the second drawer—nothing inside, the third drawer, the fourth drawer—nothing inside! Then he thought to lift the paper that lined the drawers. There, between the last piece of paper and the bottom of the drawer, he found a letter. He promised that no one would ever know about this letter, that he would burn it in the temple. He did so, and she never returned.
Now, this oriental tale corresponds to reality in every respect and expresses reality. It would be very difficult to describe the matter in European terms. And on the other hand, Europeans today still have too much crudeness in their ideas. They think that if something is real, everyone must see it. Europeans only have two distinctions: either everyone sees something, then it is real, or not everyone sees it, then it is subjective, then it is not objective. However, this difference between “subjective” and “objective” has no meaning whatsoever when one enters the spiritual world; it only has meaning in the physical world. It is not at all the case that one can say that what others do not see must not be objective.
Now you may say that such things also exist in Europe. Yes, they do exist here too, but Europeans are happy to say: It is just fiction, and you don't have to believe it. That is why it is so much easier to express the spiritual world in fiction, because then you don't claim that people have to believe it. And then they are satisfied if they don't have to believe what is being said. But the objection that this is a novella does not apply, because one really has to take into account that Europeans can understand very little of what Asians say when they express such things. What Europeans call their novellas, their art, is a highly superfluous game for Asians; it means nothing to them. They actually just make fun of the idea that one should tell stories about things that don't exist. Real Asians don't understand that. In their so-called works of art, they only tell what really exists, albeit in the spiritual world. This is a profound difference between the European and Asian worldviews. The fact that we in Europe write novels in which we tell stories that do not exist is a highly superfluous occupation in the view of Orientals. According to truly Oriental ideas, all our art is actually a rather superfluous occupation. And what we have of Asian art must be understood as still being imagined spiritual reality, otherwise we cannot understand what is coming over from that side. We Europeans take revenge by measuring Asian stories not by Asian standards but by European ones and saying: It is just lively poetry, a lively imagination; it digresses, it is a fertile Oriental imagination!
So one must often speak in images, and this mode of representation is what matters. And so, little by little, we will have to understand again that we must often speak in images. Certainly, if we were to speak only in images today, that would be contrary to European culture; we cannot do that. But we can, in a sense, allow ordinary thinking, which is actually only intended for the physical plane, to pass into thinking about the spiritual world, and then into the pictorial, into that thinking which arises under the impulse of the spiritual world. This is also how it should be understood when I try to say, for example: The natural scientist draws a picture of the world, and if he believes that this picture of the world is also vivid, he makes the mistake that someone would make who claims that he can paint a picture from which the person painted would come toward him and walk up and down the room. In my presentation—you can see this in my latest book, The Mystery of Man—I fall away from the usual presentation, from the logical presentation, into the pictorial presentation. If spiritual science is to really take root in the West, it must become a pictorial style. And it is immensely important that this be understood. A philosophical treatise that wanted to say the same thing today would present countless logical arguments, twist the most artificial concepts, but it would remain within what is dying today, what is no longer alive, and what is only calculated to understand the outer layers of roles, not what lives as a painting on the inside of each role. All these things only become meaningful when we apply them in life, because that is how we learn to understand life. What is commonly called logical proof must first come to life if one wants to understand the humanities in a living way.
Let us take a case: there are musical people today, and there are unmusical people. Now everyone knows that there is a huge difference between a musical person and an unmusical person. From a certain point of view, one could even say that a musical person is a completely different being from an unmusical person, if one considers the soul. This is not meant to be a criticism of unmusical people, but merely a statement of fact. This is a life experience we have as we go through life. We meet musical and unmusical people in life. That is one thing. Those who take a closer look at life may not immediately come to the conclusion expressed by Shakespeare: “The man that hath no music in him is a monster of congratulation and treachery; no good man trust him.” As I said, this conclusion may not be immediately apparent, but there is a certain difference between musical and unmusical people in terms of the overall configuration of the soul.
Now we would like to understand how it comes about that musical and unmusical people walk among us. If you look around in the soul science that imitates natural science, I do not believe you will find much that could shed light on why one type of person is musical and another unmusical. And that is as it should be, for if this science of the soul, which imitates natural science, were to offer explanations as to why one person is musical and another unmusical, it would have to go into such subtleties that it would never arrive at anything correct!
But now we find another difference between people. We find people who go through life, as it were, without being really touched by what is going on around them, while other people go through life with such an open soul that they are deeply moved by what is going on around them, feeling strong joy at one thing, sorrow at another, happiness at one thing, sadness at another. These differences also exist. There are dull people and people who are, in a sense, empathetic to the whole world. There are people who only need to walk into a room where there are not too many people and, after a very short time, they have a certain contact with their fellow human beings because they feel what the others feel, quickly, through what are called indescribable, imponderable things. There are others who come into contact with many people but do not really get to know a single one because they do not have the gift I just mentioned. They judge everyone else according to how they themselves are, and if someone is not like them, then that person is more or less a bad person. But there are other people who respond to each individual person and live with what the other person is going through. They are usually also the kind of people who can live with every animal, every beetle, every sparrow, and who can be happy with one thing that is happening and sad with another. Pay attention to how often this happens in life, especially at a certain age, when a young person is happy about everything, one minute jumping for joy, the next minute deeply saddened, while the other person says, “You're a stupid fool, it's all the same in the end!” These two types of people also exist. Of course, the two characteristics are more or less developed, do not even need to be strongly apparent, but they can be very well implied.
Now the spiritual researcher comes along and tries to think about the world in his own way, and comes to the conclusion: Musical people are those who in a previous life found it easy to transition from happiness to sadness, from sadness to happiness, who could go along with anything. This was transferred to the inner self, and this gave rise to the rhythmic ability to transition that characterizes the musical soul. On the other hand, people who were indifferent to external events in their previous lives do not become musical. Of course, they can have other excellent qualities, they can be world reformers, for all I care, and have a great impact on world history. There is a personality, perhaps not entirely unknown to you, who was in Rome at the time when the greatest painters were painting there, at the time when the paintings of Michelangelo and Raphael emerged, a personality who saw nothing else in Rome at that time but that everything was immoral. Rome was also immoral. He passed by it, alongside other things that were not immoral, such as the art of Michelangelo and Raphael. He was a very important figure who accomplished great things, a reformer; you all know him. So this is by no means meant as malicious criticism. But a lack of musicality is based on not having received living impressions in a previous incarnation of what can give some souls living impressions. Think how transparent life becomes when you approach it with such insights, how understandable people can become! And if you hold fast to the idea that spiritual science instills in our souls a greater longing to characterize things in images, then this does not have a negative connotation.
Of course, if everything were expressed in concepts, and this led to spiritual science approaching and studying every human being in a dissecting manner: What was he like in his previous incarnation, what was he? — then one would have to be wary of spiritual science. Then one would no longer dare to go out among people, knowing that one would be analyzed in this way. But that would only be the case if one worked with such crude concepts. If, however, one remains within the image, the image captures the feeling, and one arrives at an emotional understanding of other people, an understanding that does not need to be transformed into concepts. One only transforms it into concepts when one expresses it as a general truth. It is good, as I have now spoken, to speak of the movement of the soul in a previous incarnation and the musical in a subsequent incarnation, but it would be tasteless if I were to stand before a person who is musical and describe him as he was in his previous incarnation because he is musical now. These truths come from the individual, but it is not a matter of applying them to the individual. This is something that must be truly understood in the deepest sense.
Such truths are still understandable, but when we go a step further, what is intended to enlighten humanity can very easily lead to nonsense. Just think how easily it happens, again and again: people talk about reincarnation in general terms. Now, I once spoke about the relationship between reincarnation and self-knowledge in one of our branches. It is good to pay attention to this topic, and I said, for example, in that branch, when I spoke about reincarnation and self-knowledge: It is good to try to realize certain concepts that can be gained from spiritual science in one's self-knowledge. For example, I mentioned the concept that when we are born, at the beginning of our life, our karma often brings us together with people we were with in a previous incarnation, around the middle of our life, in our thirties, so that we are not immediately with the same people we were with in our previous incarnation. Now, I have given individual rules, which you can also find in lectures, on how reincarnation can be applied to self-knowledge. Yes, what did that lead to at that time? It led to something specific happening. It became apparent in the following period that a whole number of people had founded a formal “club of reincarnated people.” It was really the case that a clique of individuals stated what they had been in their previous life or in all their previous lives. Of course, they were all tremendously outstanding figures in the development of humanity, which is almost self-evident, and they also had relationships with each other.
That took a long time to digest. Of course, it is terrible, horrible stuff, because it generally violates something that I have also emphasized: if someone really wants to know something about their previous incarnation, it is not something that can be grasped from within in the present, but rather something that is brought to one's attention from outside through some external event or by someone else. Today, it is generally wrong for someone to draw from within and dictate to themselves: I am this or that. If someone is supposed to know something, it is told to them from outside. Those who founded that club of reincarnated people back then could have waited a long time before it was told to them. Nevertheless, they were all important personalities, the most important in the development of humanity! And when the matter became known, as they say, and people were asked, “Where does this come from?”, they said, “Yes, we had to do it!” At that time, you gave a lecture that one should cultivate self-knowledge in the sense of reincarnation, and from then on we all occupied ourselves with thinking about what we were in our previous lives and what relationships we had with each other!
We now ask: What are we actually sinning against in such a case? We are really sinning against the reverence we should have for the great spiritual truths, that reverence which consists in our being able to remain “in the picture” to the right degree; for to step out of the picture only happens when it is necessary. In spiritual science, it is necessary that we develop a certain reverence and that we know that this speculating, this trying to fit everything into concepts, is always bad. To think about spiritual scientific matters in the same way as one thinks about matters of the physical plane is always bad. As soon as one acquires this reverence, one actually develops certain moral qualities that cannot develop unless one carries things in the right way in one's soul. In this sense, spiritual science must also lead to the moral elevation of the newer culture.
We Europeans rightly say that because we are able to see the Christ Mystery in our spiritual life, we have something that sets us apart from all other cultures, including Asian and Oriental cultures. They do not have the Christ Being in their knowledge of the spirit. A Japanese, a Chinese, a Hindu, a Persian does not have the Christ being in his thinking about the spiritual connections of the world, and that is why we rightly call this Asian worldview atavistic, coming from earlier times. They may, like the Vedanta philosophy, for example, be tremendously advanced in their understanding of the world, but their inability to comprehend the Christ mystery makes them atavistic ideas, for penetrating deeply into certain connections is not yet a sign of a particularly high spiritual level. I knew someone, for example, who was in our circle for a long time and also belonged to the club of reincarnated people, as I just remembered, and who came up with some great theories about certain connections in Atlantean life. Continuing the general points of view that are, for example, found in my writing on Atlantis, this person came to some very interesting conclusions that were true; and yet this person was so little involved in our cause that he simply separated himself from our movement when it suited him for external reasons. Under certain circumstances, only a very specific formation of the etheric body is necessary in order to see into certain supersensible realms. But if spiritual science is to flow into our culture in a living way, then it must grasp the whole human being in such a way that he grows together with the deepest impulses of this spiritual science. And then this spiritual science will bring forth precisely what our culture, developing into materialism, lacks.
So we are right in saying that we have the Christ mystery ahead of the Asian cultures. But what do the Asians say? I am not telling you something I have made up, but what the more insightful Asians really say. They say: Fine, you have the Christ mystery before us; that is something we do not have, and that is why you are, in your opinion, on a higher level of culture. But now you also say, for example: “You shall know them by their fruits.” Now your religion says that all people should love one another, but when we look at your lives, that is not the case. You send missionaries to Asia to tell us all these wonderful things, but when we come to Europe, we see that people do not live as they should if what you say were true! That is what Asians say. Think about whether they are entirely wrong! At a religious congress where representatives of all religions were to speak, this very case was discussed, and the Asian representatives replied exactly as I have just said. They said: You send us missionaries, which is certainly all very nice. But you have had Christianity for two thousand years now; we cannot see that moral development has progressed so much beyond ours!
But there is a good reason for this, my dear friends. You see, Asians live much more in the group soul; they live much less as individuals. For them, morality is, in a sense, innate, innate in the group soul, and Europeans, precisely because they develop the ego, must step out of the group soul and be left to their own devices. This means that egoism must arise in a certain way. Egoism is already a necessary accompaniment of individualism, and only gradually can people come together again by understanding Christianity in a higher sense. But even among the best thinkers, much has worked against a real understanding of the consequences of the mystery of Golgotha, especially in relation to Christianity. It is certainly tremendously “profound,” my dear friends, when someone says that we must experience Christ within ourselves. You see, there is, I would say, a symbolic theosophy. You know how I always speak against this symbolic theosophy, which always tries to explain everything symbolically. Even the resurrection of Christ is explained as a mere inner process, whereas in reality it is a historical event. Christ really did rise in the world, but some theosophists find it easier to accept if they explain it as a mere inner process. You know, that was the special art of the late Franz Hartmann, who in every lecture taught people everything that theosophy is by saying: You must grasp yourself within yourself, grasp the God within yourself, and so on. Now, if you understand the Gospels correctly, you will find no evidence that they teach that one should experience Christ only from within. Certainly, there are many theosophical symbolists who reinterpret various passages, but in truth everything in the Gospels is such that the great Gospel saying is true: “Where two are united in my name, I am in their midst.” Christ is a social phenomenon. Christ passed through the mystery of Golgotha as a reality, and he is there as a reality, and he does not belong to the individual human being, but to human coexistence. What matters is what he does. Such things can sometimes be better understood in images than with abstract concepts.
We were recently together with a friend who was visiting from the country and has already left again — I will recount a very recent event that really deserves to be recorded. — This friend was kind enough to hail a cab, and when he arrived, he said: “I had a conversation with the driver on the way here.” He was a strange driver, because when we had driven with him and got out, he opened the door and took out two tracts: “Messengers of Peace,” which he handed to us after we had paid him. At the same time, he was promoting a spiritual worldview! Now this friend told me that he had spoken to this coachman, who had been driving a motor cab since they came into use, and that he had said to him: “It all depends on people finding Christ. It all depends on Christ!” So he took a taxi from the nearest taxi stand and immediately struck up a conversation with the driver, who said to him: ”If you find Christ, whom you do not have now, then the world will move forward.” Well, the cab driver went on to say various other things. He said, “You see, it's like this with Christ: Just imagine, I am a very, very decent man, a model citizen, and I have children who are all good-for-nothings. Does that make me any less of a decent model citizen because I have children who are good-for-nothings? They all know me, they all think they know me, but they are all good-for-nothings. That's how I imagine Christ. He belongs to everyone, he is the only figure in himself, but that doesn't mean that everyone really understands him."
Think what a wonderful image this cab driver has created of the special life of Christ, this separate life! He really came to the conclusion that Christ is something that lives among us, lives with us, belongs to all of us, not to any one individual; for he saw his boys as individuals, all of whom are good-for-nothings, all of whom are worthless, all of whom must first struggle to understand. If this cab driver, who came up with this truly extraordinary image, had tried to express it philosophically, nothing would have come of it; but the image corresponds wonderfully to what is actually to be understood. Of course, such an abstract image is not enough; an individual can have it, but it cannot influence our culture. But I just wanted to point out how even the simplest mind can arrive at a correct image, and how things should really flow into the image. I have tried to achieve this in particular in the style and manner of presentation in this latest book, which deals with non-theosophical material, so that this book is “theosophical” in its manner of presentation, if one wants to use that expression.
That is why we must understand our teaching more and more between the lines, if we want to understand it correctly, that our teaching must become life, the life of each individual. And that is what weighs so heavily on our souls: that it is so difficult to bring things into life.
You see, anyone who is connected with these things, especially if they really know what is alive in today's external rationalistic culture, must realize that what pulsates through spiritual science must become life in all individual branches of culture. It must influence thinking, it must influence feelings, it must penetrate the will; only then does it fulfill its task. But this requires a real inner strength to be able to feel connected to the matter. And it is difficult that this happens so infinitely slowly, that people feel truly connected to the impulses that lie in spiritual science. One really has experiences that show how people pass right by what they should be looking at. Let me take a specific case: someone was once a member of our group, an extremely learned gentleman, but his learning did not satisfy him; he was deeply unhappy despite his erudition, which encompassed the Oriental languages and what one can absorb through these Oriental languages and cultures, the culture of the Near East. Now, someone like that comes and wants advice. In such a case, my advice must be to show how, through the understanding of spiritual science, spirit enters into such a science, into Oriental philosophy. So I try to show him how he can permeate what is available in terms of scholarly material with what spiritual science has to offer. But the two things remained side by side. On the one hand, he pursued his Oriental studies as they are pursued at universities, and on the other hand, he pursued spiritual science. They did not come together; he could not permeate one with the other. Now think how fruitful it would be if someone who knows so much — and he really did know an enormous amount — were to appear — he wouldn't even have to let on that he thinks theosophically, even if people looked at him askance because of it — and were to take this science and permeate it with theosophy. Then he could even lecture on it at the university! This man could have easily permeated the culture that lives along the Euphrates and Tigris and a little further west—he was particularly at home there and in Egyptology—with spiritual science and achieved something extraordinary, at least something that would have a more fruitful effect than what is now being produced by popular writers. Recently, just such a writer appeared again in a now widely read daily newspaper, writing about this area there, following up on a sphinx-like figure that was found during the construction of the Baghdad railway—well, if his name is Arthur Bonus, he is certainly no “good”! That is terrible!
This is already an ideal, my dear friends, to let your thinking be carried by what spiritual science gives. But this is also how it should be in life, in ordinary life from person to person, in ordinary life with this or that. You can apply it to everything. If this were not thought, if this ideal did not exist, then spiritual science could not really be fruitful. But the challenges are everywhere. Consider, for example, that there are excellent historians who describe, say, the history of England during the reign of James I, and there are excellent historians who describe the life of the Jesuit Suarez. You know that when I speak of Jesuitism, I must express myself cautiously, for I cannot say much that is good—that is, that could be misunderstood. It is true that most people know nothing about Suarez other than that he is said to have taught regicide very explicitly in a particular chapter. But that is not true. People often know what is not true, and what is true is often less well known. Now there are excellent books about this Suarez, and one can read and understand these books, most of which were written by Jesuits, about Suarez, the successor of Ignatius of Loyola, and therefore one need never become a Jesuit, nor have been one, nor be told that one was a Jesuit. The facts are there, and if one connects them, one can solve one of the greatest questions of recent history. These two figures, James I on the one side and Suarez, the Jesuit philosopher, on the other, are two powerful opposites! I would say that while James I initiated a new development that was very Ahrimanic, Suarez initiated another that was very Luciferic, and their interaction, and especially their mutual struggle, has shaped much of what lives and breathes in modern times. But this leads us to mysterious connections. And I do not mean these things in such a way that I want to make accusations. For example, one comes to the conclusion that much of what we today call historical materialism, Marxism, and the social democratic worldview, is directly descended from Suarez. Please do not say now: He said that the social democrats are Jesuits! — But the matter is very well founded in a certain way, while some of the members of the opposing party, that is, people who are opposed to social democracy, can also be traced back to what was inaugurated by James I.
I have pointed out to you something that lives in the minds of many people. One finds two main currents, particularly in occult communities, and from these in turn emerges that which is not occult. These two main currents give rise to two very typical opposing figures: James I of England, with an extraordinarily intuitive soul living within him, and Suarez. Now read the biography of Suarez. Yes, you will not understand it unless you have truly grasped spiritual science. Suarez was one of those people who were initially poor students and learned nothing. According to today's materialistic judgment, there is nothing to be done with such people, although it could very easily be proven that the world's great geniuses learned nothing as schoolboys. But he was one of those poor students who, even at university, was not yet what one would call an intelligent person, but then suddenly it happened, and every biography tells of this sudden emergence. A genius suddenly awakens, and he writes these books, which are not known to a wider circle, but which are extraordinarily significant, books that Suarez wrote. It came suddenly, awakened by many things that I have already mentioned in my lecture describing the exercises of the Jesuits, which Suarez also applied to himself, awakening something that gave him the opportunity to develop special mental powers. So one can prove in Suarez's biography, just as one can prove in the case of James I, how he—one cannot say it like that, but it is, in a good sense, “snapped into place,” that is, he entered from the non-spiritual into the spiritual. This soul, which later accomplishes something special, is born at a special moment in life. This does not develop in a straight line, but rather through a jolt, if the karma is there, or it develops through the person concerned receiving an influence that can be compared to learning to read in the elementary stage: not through a description of the shapes of letters, but through receiving an impulse that enables one to understand the letters.
So you see again how spiritual science could be a guide to understanding these historical connections, that life is shaped in such a way that this life would be completely different. And I have indicated this many times. And if someone takes spiritual science to heart, they learn to relate to life differently, and they think of doing things that they would not otherwise think of doing. It is difficult to imagine that someone who takes spiritual science to heart would come up with the curious idea that they are, say, the reincarnated Mary Magdalene. That would never occur to them; instead, they would turn their soul's gaze to other aspects of the soul.
As I said, it is difficult today to see how slowly development is progressing in the direction I have just mentioned. Spiritual science is taken far too theoretically, people want to enjoy it too much. And it must be viewed in a very lively way. And today, as we are together before we must part for a while, as summer is beginning and we must now go to Dornach, I would like to briefly point out a few important points in this direction. I believe that we must consider such things.
You see, my dear friends, if things had turned out as some people from older traditions had imagined fourteen years ago, when we founded the spiritual science movement here, we would have ended up with a sect. For the whole thing was geared toward the formation of a sect. Everything that was brought over from England was also geared toward the formation of a sect. And in many cases, people felt comfortable when they were closed off in small circles. They could say, “The other people out there are all fools.” There was so little control over it. But it couldn't go on like that. Spiritual science had to reckon with our entire culture. And you will have seen that: it always reckoned with this culture; it emphasized, especially in public, what—even though people may still have so much against it—can nevertheless enter into the minds of Europeans today. Now, I don't want to criticize, that would be quite silly, but it will become more and more necessary to understand that this movement must not become a sectarian movement, and must not have the character of a sectarian movement if it is to fulfill its task. By reckoning with the general culture, many things come about. People outside, when they write about our movement at all, mostly write nonsense, don't they? They say it doesn't matter in the deeper sense. It matters extremely! And that is why we must defend ourselves against it and do everything we can to counter it. Everything must be done so that, little by little, the world not only writes nonsense, but writes better things, of course. But in a spiritual sense, something else is even more harmful. It is harmful when something that is meant for the understanding of a select circle is carried so far into the public domain that one can now buy cycles at second-hand bookshops. Certainly, in a certain sense, this cannot be prevented, but it happens—not exactly that one can buy the cycles at second-hand bookshops, but something equivalent—again and again. There are numerous brochures about our spiritual science, even thick books, written by a man who, according to someone who worked with him for a long time, writes nothing himself, belongs to a somewhat questionable clique that has power over him, and then sits down and writes. These contain not only quotations from my printed books that have been published, but also extensive passages from cycles. So not only can you buy these things at second-hand bookshops, but anyone who wants to write a stupid book today is at least able to obtain the cycles. Of course, they then obtain two or three cycles, copy passages that sound completely absurd when taken out of context, and can turn them into a book.
These are the difficulties that arise from the fact that we are, on the one hand, facing the public and, on the other hand, we are society. But we must learn to understand this difficulty, then it will be easier to overcome. As I said, I do not want to criticize, that serves no purpose, but I want to characterize; I want to show where the difficulties lie, one only needs to pay attention to them. Of course, in the near future, even more shameful things will happen to our spiritual science than have already happened. That may well be the case; it cannot be changed in the blink of an eye. But I would say that it is quite necessary to study the conditions of this spiritual scientific movement and not to pass by as if one had deliberately set out to to be completely unmusical in the next life, to ignore what can make you happy and what can annoy you in the way our spiritual science movement is judged by the world.
You see, those who think only selfishly—as I said, this is not meant as criticism, I am only describing—think today that spiritual science has more to say about certain natural connections than external science, and so people always turn to me again and again with requests for medical advice, even though I emphasize again and again that I am only a teacher and caregiver of spiritual science and do not want to serve as a doctor. Now, one can certainly want friendly advice, and it would be absurd to refuse it. If someone comes to you for friendly advice, why should you refuse them if they refer to scientific matters, even though, after all that has happened, I ask that no one who does not have a doctor ask me about anything related to health. Those who think only selfishly do not consider that this is not permitted today, that one comes into conflict with the outer world, and that this harms our spiritual scientific movement. We must strive to make things better; we must work everywhere to ensure that there is not just a stamped medicine based on purely materialistic foundations. You can do that, but you cannot think selfishly: “What is good for me?” if it results in damage to what our movement must be. Certainly, spiritual scientific advice can develop; it would be absurd if it did not. It would be disheartening if one could not say anything to someone about one thing or another that they are suffering from, but can one do so when the following happens – I will tell you another fact: Someone is ill, and what is more, in a city where I have just said that in order to avoid such things, I expressly disapprove of people turning to me in cases of illness. This has been stated officially. Now someone is ill, comes to a sanatorium, and stays there for a while. A long-standing member of ours, who has always been, I would say, very intimate with us, writes to that sanatorium: The patient in question can now leave the sanatorium, because Dr. Steiner has given this and that advice. He writes this to the doctor, so that the doctor then comes to the member concerned and says: “You always say that Theosophy wants to be only Theosophy, doesn't want to meddle in all sorts of things; here you are again!” Yes, my dear friends, the fact that these things happen must be studied. If we do not pay attention to this, it is not for the good of our movement. This is one case, but these things occur again and again in the most varied nuances and shades. And what is peculiar about our movement—and it is necessary that I discuss this now—is that what is good about our movement is less quickly apparent, whereas the new good things in our movement are truly new and prove that our movement is indeed something new; but they are strange new things.
For example: Let us assume that I have this or that in my printed books; if no cycles were given into the wrong hands, people outside would refute these books. They may do so; but they would be expressing their own judgment. No one outside our society would think of copying what is written in my books in order to prove with these sentences that I am a bad person. No one outside would do that; instead, they would express their own judgments. But something completely new is happening in our society. In our society, for example, someone accepts the entire doctrine from A to Z, as they say, approves of everything, but then uses this doctrine to refute me! You can now read the following in an unpublished elaboration.
You will remember that I once explained in an older edition of the book now called “The Riddles of Philosophy” — it used to be called “Worldviews and Life Views in the 19th Century” — how Le Verrier arrived at Neptune based solely on calculations of Uranus, before Neptune had even been seen. Neptune was discovered at the local observatory, but people knew it was there earlier, based on mere calculations. I said this to show how something can follow from calculations. So I wanted to show that one can know facts in advance from thoughts. Recently, someone wrote that he had now also applied this very plausible idea, only in a different field: he had found that something was wrong with our movement, that there were disturbances, just as Le Verrier had found with Uranus. If you take the general laws of gravity, and Uranus does not move as the calculations indicate, it must be disturbed by something! So there would be disturbances in our movement. He therefore hypothesizes that there is something disturbing, something that disturbs everything. Then he came to the conclusion—like Le Verrier with Neptune—that the evil is in me, which disturbs things! And then, just as the astronomer at the observatory pointed his telescope at the spot, he pointed his mental telescope at me and found evil!
It is a special case where, except for my characteristics, the method I have given is applied, where one is refuted by oneself. Within the circle in which the person concerned stands, a letter was recently written—not by him, but from within the circle—stating that I had no right to demand that this should not happen, because I myself had always said that spiritual science was common property and that it was quite wrong to think that spiritual science originated from the spiritual researcher. Well, when things become so confused, one can only explain them as confused, of course. But this is really something new that is happening within our society. Outside, where the old still prevails, one refutes someone with one's own thoughts. Within our circle, however, there are people who do not use their own thoughts, but rather what they read in the cycles, and use this against me. For example, in the letter I just mentioned, you can find quotes from “The Secret Science” and so on everywhere. Everywhere it says: Read this, read that, and then you will see what a bad, evil person I really am. But not in such a way that one would claim that these things are bad! No, because the things are good. These things themselves prove it! This is something new that is happening among us, based on the theory that the teaching can be accepted and that this teaching can be used to slander those who try to popularize it. This is really something new! The strangest novelties occur among us. This is just a blatant case that I am telling you about; on a smaller scale, it happens more or less very, very frequently, again and again. If we show the slightest sign of disapproval, the threats come! Recently, one could read in a letter that articles and brochures would soon appear in all shop windows and in all magazines, and then titles were listed that were direct threats. If we merely express our disapproval, as I said, then this is what happens! This is something new, something completely new in our movement, something that has not happened before. It is necessary to pay attention to this.
Now, however, I would say that difficulties are arising behind the scenes. For we know in advance what is bound to happen at times. Tell me, should we really not discuss such matters as I have just mentioned, should we always remain silent about them? We certainly could. But since the members themselves do not try to bring these things up, they would never come up in our circles. So one must say it. And if one does say it, what is the result? Next time, you will probably read a letter somewhere—I am putting this forward as a hypothesis—in which it is said: He is talking in front of a large number of members about a private letter he has received! And this for the simple reason that there are certainly people who will immediately tell others what I have said here this evening. This happens again and again. If you don't discuss it, it's bad; if you do discuss it, you encourage what is constantly being done. You know in advance what will be done.
Things must be studied. I do not want to criticize, I only want to point out that in a movement where spiritual science is alive, that is, where occult things pulsate, difficulties will inevitably arise. But they must be taken into account. If they are not taken into account, they will continue further and further. Certainly, one must be prepared for the attacks to become sharper and sharper. If we had remained a sect, this would not be the case. But things had to turn out as they have, and that is why it is so. But some things that happen from outside are understandable, even though some things that happen from outside are very clearly traceable to their origin from within. Only today we were told that in Dornach we are practicing eurythmy, which consists of dancing until you lose consciousness, like the dervishes, and many other things. And it is said that members have reported this! Members have reported that we dance until we lose consciousness! People who are completely unconnected to the group have told a member, but these unconnected people say that they heard it from members, whose names were also given.
These are the difficulties that arise from linking spiritual science with society, and we must study them. It is impossible for us to ignore these things if we want to make progress in the right way, if we do not want to bring about the dissolution and complete annihilation of society. Really, it does no harm to spiritual science as such, but it does harm to what spiritual science must be when someone comes along here or there — forgive me for mentioning something superficial — and says: I am interested in much of what I have read, but I was often at a boarding house table where a lady chattered about theosophy and told all sorts of things. Yes, I can't become a member if such nonsense is talked about, if that is supposed to be theosophy! — This is not an isolated case; it happens again and again in one form or another.
It may be misunderstood if I have discussed these things at the end of a serious consideration today. But it is absolutely necessary that you know these things, that you pay attention to these things, my dear friends! For society must be a support for spiritual science, a help. But it can very easily develop in such a way that it works against what spiritual science is supposed to bring to the evolution of the worlds. Of course, in each individual case, one can well understand that some damage cannot be prevented, but we can be sure that it will occur in a different way if one pays attention to it and if one tries, I would say, to maintain a certain line, a certain direction within oneself. It is sometimes extremely difficult, but it is necessary to be firm in a certain direction. Then one will be able to evaluate such novelties as I have described correctly. They are truly novelties! It does not otherwise happen that one contradicts oneself; for the fact is so absurd, so foolish in itself, that one accepts a person's teaching in order to contradict oneself. Of course, if someone asserts nonsense, one can turn the nonsense against them; but that is not the case here. What is new is that it is done in such a way that one accepts the teaching and then contradicts oneself with it.
These things are really very, very common on a small scale. And not far from them is another evil, which I would like to discuss at the end: Indeed, there is hardly anywhere else where it happens as often as in our movement that someone does something that can be condemned, that must be condemned. Now, one person or another takes sides. When it comes to someone making unfounded accusations against the leading figures of our society or against long-standing members, or against what we must now, unfortunately, still call the executive committee, accusations that are perhaps even fabricated, where it is very easy to see that there are sometimes motives behind them, It is very rare to find anyone who tries to see how this unfortunate executive committee might be right; instead, people take sides with those who are wrong. That is even the rule with us: sides are taken for those who are wrong, and letters are written saying that those who are attacked should do something so that friendship can be maintained, so that things can get back on track, that love must be developed! When someone commits a truly unloving act against another, one does not write to the one who committed it, but to the one who was affected by it: Please show some love; it is so unkind of you not to do anything to put things right again! It does not even occur to us to demand this of the other person who is in the wrong! These are peculiarities that really do occur among us.
Not to mention other things; but it may of course be necessary to speak of these at some point. Today, when we wanted to discuss the serious topic first, since we live in serious times and our movement must also seriously intervene in the seriousness of the times, it was necessary to point out a few things of this nature. It is necessary to pay attention to this, because things are already happening that are so unbelievable that one cannot really believe them when they are told. Nevertheless, one is constantly dealing with such things. No one should misunderstand that these things have been brought up; but perhaps a little thought could be given to them.
The intention is that the break this year should not be as long as it has been in the past. We may see each other again in the fall, but it is best not to say anything definite at this time of uncertainty and obstacles. And so I ask you to use what I have just tried to paint before our souls during this winter season to let your souls live with it during this summer season, to let what we have gone through live again and again in a kind of meditation in your souls, and to think a little about the basic conditions for our spiritual scientific movement to take root in general human culture.
I would also like to say that our dear friends who so devotedly maintain, lead, and care for our children's home are a little concerned that it might, in a sense, fall into a state of, I don't want to say oblivion, but something similar to oblivion. It will be a kind of vacation, but it will have to be reorganized, and it will be necessary to have some money again, and it will be necessary, in particular, to find dear friends who can help—only those who can help, of course. But perhaps there will be ladies who can help with cooking and other things. That is necessary. According to those who know something about it because they have cared for them, it is really a very good result. The children have gained something. Something has been made of the children. Therefore, I would ask that the ladies who could take on this task again later do so as a kind of duty of love, but if you take it on, you really have to stick with it. If you cannot take it on in such a way that you can stick with it in a certain sense, then you should not take it on. For example, it is not acceptable for someone who has promised to be at the daycare center at five o'clock to write a note in the afternoon saying they cannot come; then you have no one. That is not how it works; you have to know at least one day in advance. So I ask those friends who are able to help to contact our dear Mrs. Dannenberg, who has done so much for the nursery together with others, so that when winter comes, it can really be run.
And so let us now go our separate ways, my dear friends, with the knowledge that if we all make it our business, we can still do many things to ensure that what we mean seriously is also incorporated into the times in a serious manner. We live in a time when people are making far greater sacrifices than have ever been made in such a short time and in such large numbers. We live in a difficult, painful time. Let this difficulty and pain of the times be also a little challenge: even if it is difficult to incorporate the spiritual into human development, it must be done, and however much or how little we can do as individuals, let us do it! Let us try to understand the right way to do this, and then it will truly bring about what cannot come about by itself, what must be done by human beings, even if help comes from spiritual worlds. And so let us remain united in such thoughts, even if we are physically apart for a while. Those who are together in spirit are always together. They are not separated by space, they are not separated by time, and least of all by a more or less short period of time. Let us remain united in our thoughts, which in turn have tried to penetrate a little into what has been attempted here recently to speak to your souls.
We must take the truths connected with the Mystery of Golgotha as seriously as possible. Let us understand that we must be in the loneliness of the soul, and that we must be there often and again and again if we want to understand one thing or another. But let us also understand that we belong to humanity and that the one who went through the Mystery of Golgotha carried what he brought from spiritual heights to Earth for humanity, for human cooperation, for human co-working, and that he said: “Where two are united in my name, there am I in their midst.” We can prepare ourselves for what Christ is to be for the world through us, through what we experience in solitude. But we only have Christ among us if we try to carry out into the world what we strive for in solitude. However, we will only carry it out if we have first understood what the conditions for carrying it out are. Let us look at these conditions! Let us open our eyes and, above all, have the courage to admit to ourselves: this or that is so, and it must be tackled in this or that way.
When I speak of Christ here, I speak knowing that he helps because he is a living, active being. If we feel him among us, he will help! But we must learn his language, and his language today is the language of spiritual science. That is how it is today. And we must have the courage to represent this spiritual science, as far as we can, before ourselves and before others.
Let us think about this during the summer, and let it be our meditation until we meet again here.