The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. Ordinary and Higher Consciousness

Since I plan to describe the problem of human death and the soul's immortality in relation to the Christ and Christianity's development, it will be necessary today for me to throw light once again from a different viewpoint on some of the topics I have already presented here.

When we look at the two conditions of waking and sleeping that alternate in daily human life, we find that during sleep, in regard to ordinary consciousness, man's sense perception is suspended and that what he experiences in his soul life as thinking, feeling and willing is also extinguished. Everything that we as human beings sum up as our “self” when we are awake is actually extinguished.

All that is here extinguished will now be rekindled bit by bit through imagination, inspiration and intuition. Meditation must first deal with ordinary thinking in order to produce imaginative thinking. I have described how thoughts are employed so that through meditating imaginative perception is attained. Particularly concerning the problem of death, it is necessary to clarify still further what is experienced on the path of initiation knowledge, for only then does it become clear what kind of a relationship man acquires in regard to his physical body and his soul-spiritual being when death occurs.

When thinking is used in meditation in the manner I have described it, the first experience of a person is that he actually cannot think for a while as he feels himself with his whole soul to be outside the physical organization. To a degree, thinking is, as it were, for a short time forgotten. It takes a certain amount of courage, inner energy, and also a certain presence of mind to experience this moment with full awareness. But then, as he awakens to renewed awareness, he notices that he experiences a much stronger activity of thought in his soul than he has had earlier. Thinking begins again.

Man progresses in the following way. To start he has his ordinary consciousness—I emphasize that ordinary consciousness is retained during genuine imagination—, then he must find his way into the other form of consciousness, and back again. While the ordinary, earthly view of things is naturally preserved as far as ordinary consciousness is concerned, in this other state of mind that man can enter he loses the capacity, so to speak, to produce thoughts. A stronger activity of thought sets in, however, as meditation is continued, a more pronounced, inner thought experience is acquired. In ordinary consciousness the thoughts that are experienced have to do mostly with the outer sense world and memories. Also, there are dim thoughts that arise out of any number of emotional experiences. Now, in this higher state of consciousness, man possesses a thinking with which he can call up into awareness in active thoughts the course of his own life from birth to the present moment in the manner I have described. This, however, has to do with a deeper layer of the course of man's life. I have already mentioned that they are not the memories a person also has in ordinary consciousness, these are on a deeper level. Man actually sees into an etheric process that builds up, saturates and penetrates, indeed, has always penetrated the physical organization. Everything that has occurred since birth in the physical body as growth was produced in it—how the separate organs were plastically formed, how our capacities of thinking, feeling and willing were drawn out of the depths of the bodily organization, everything connected with organic life that is otherwise hidden from consciousness—all of this shoots up in the form of active, inwardly experienced, substantial thoughts. In a certain sense man passes from ordinary thinking across an abyss to a thinking that experiences its own etheric body.

In developing imaginative thinking in this way, strict attention must be paid to what escapes you during the moments when you are within this imaginative thinking. The first thing you actually lose are your memories. You have the memories in ordinary consciousness, but alongside this ordinary consciousness, the other imaginative consciousness develops. In it, no memories exist. I ask you to clarify this to yourselves through the following explanation. When you recall anything as in all experiences of ordinary consciousness, you actually live in the present. You perceive what confronts you at the present moment and you think thoughts about it, and if you remember something of the past you nevertheless have before you in your mind a picture in the present moment that merely points to the past. Hence, ordinary consciousness experiences the present. Imaginative consciousness experiences its own life's course in such a way that the individual stages are surveyed all at once as if the things existing in time were spread out in space. Just as you experience one thing alongside another simultaneously in sense perception, so you now experience your own past on earth, all at once. Time becomes like space. The events you have lived through in your thirtieth, eighteenth, tenth, seventh or fifth year stand before the soul side by side.

In this way the experiences of imaginative consciousness differ from those of ordinary consciousness. Ordinary consciousness lives in the present, for the past it only has its memories. Imaginative consciousness experiences different times but in such a way that these time periods appear simultaneously before the soul. I said that recollections, the memory thoughts, slip away first. This is really the case. In imaginative consciousness man does not possess a memory or recollections, faculties that in his ordinary consciousness are a great help to him in life. It goes without saying that the capacity of memory in his normal human nature remains as it was because the ordinary human being remains unchanged alongside the new faculty. But man cannot remember his newly acquired imaginative experience of the ordinary course of his life. Let us assume that at a given moment a person experiences his life's course in imaginative consciousness. If in three days he wants to relive it again, he will not be able to recall what he has experienced today. He must repeat the same efforts that led him to experience the course of his life. Again, he must do the exercises that lead to this experience. Just as a real, physical object cannot actually be present in your memory—you have to walk over again to where it is located—so what you now experience, namely your etheric body, cannot simply be called up by memory for it is a living reality. It has to be summoned anew again and again.

This is something that disappoints many people who do such soul exercises. They set about doing them and achieve and see something. They assume that they can retain this view, that they can call it up again any time in memory. They are unable to do this and are disillusioned. The efforts have to be renewed each time in order to produce the experiences inwardly again. Let me give an example. Assume that a person gives a lecture, basing his talk on the new science of meditation. He lectures in such a way that he has not turned everything into abstract ideas but rather speaks out of living perception. He therefore cannot prepare himself by memorizing what he has in mind. Matters pertaining to the physical world can be memorized but not those relating to imaginative consciousness, for they always have to be produced anew. A person can indeed prepare himself, but this preparation is a kind of exercise. It is like acquiring a skill through practice. Earnest, constant meditation and practice help you to bring forth what you want from the supersensible world. But it must be produced in the present moment, it must arise instantly, if it is to come out of the spiritual world in truly alive form. It then contains the immediate echo of the spiritual in its formulation, its expression. Forgive me if I mention something personal here. I have perhaps spoken already thirty or forty times about one subject. It makes it no easier for me to speak on it for the thirtieth time. It is just as hard as it was the first time, for it is always the same process again. As a basis for producing such material a person needs composure and quiet so that the subject can arise out of a calm soul. Perhaps it is unnecessary, but to make myself clear I might add that in this regard an audience that expects a person to lecture on some aspect of the spiritual world is often really cruel to him—naturally the present audience is always excepted. It may be acceptable in a professorial lecture but not in a spiritual one that any number of persons come up prior to a lecture and ask all kinds of questions without considering at all that in the next moment facts from the spiritual world are to be brought forth.

In this way I have sought to describe to you the subjective experience of one who has imaginative consciousness. Because a person knows within his own mind how this active, living thinking comes to the surface, which now has as its content his own life's course, he also understands the nature of ordinary thinking. From the vantage point of imaginative consciousness he can now look back on ordinary thinking and arrive at the realization that in itself it has no reality at all. Actually, everyone lives in imagination. He does so unconsciously, carrying this substantial thinking within himself. But because he has not strengthened his soul forces sufficiently, his soul is too weak to lift into consciousness what is within him. When he wants to think, therefore, he always takes hold of his physical body. That becomes for him the basis of ordinary consciousness. But what actually happens there?

Because this inner activity—which even in ordinary consciousness is unconscious imagination—turns to the physical organism, it slips right into it. This unconscious imagination of which man knows nothing, which remains unconscious until it lights up in imaginative knowledge as active thinking, slips in ordinary consciousness into the physical organism and makes use of it. Then, as imaginative consciousness, which does not know what it is since it remains unconscious, it is reflected in the form of inner mirror-reflections. These, then, are the ordinary thoughts. They have as little reality as mirrored reflections have in relation to the objects standing before a mirror. Something is reflected back to us from our physical body, and these are the thoughts that arise in ordinary consciousness, merely mirror images. He who experiences these thoughts, therefore, experiences nothing substantial. There is no strength, no life in these thoughts of ordinary consciousness. At the moment, however, when active thinking sets in through imagination there is substance in thinking. In every imaginative thought there is substance and energy. You know that with this imaginative thinking you live within a force like the one that brought you from the state of childhood to that of a grown human being.

When a person works his way through to imaginative thinking, he actually passes to begin with from ordinary, physical reality to etheric reality. But in doing so he now receives the first insight into the physical body. He sees it as a reflecting apparatus that throws the thoughts back to the human being. Along with this, man begins to approach the problem of death, for it is not until his physical body becomes for him an external object that he can consider the problem of death. If man actually still exists as a being after death, he is quite certainly not present in his physical body. If, therefore, he wants to solve the problem of death while he is alive, he must have his physical body outside himself and view it as objectively as is the case, relatively speaking, when the body is beside or outside the human entity in death.

This characterizes the first step toward solving the problem of death. In the second part of today's lecture we shall discuss what else is required.

On the basis of a perception such as I have described to you, man is really in a position to judge how the soul-spiritual in the human being relates to the corporeal-physical. Not until he can objectively survey the physical organization, the etheric body and the soul-spiritual by means of the imaginative as well as the subsequent methods of super-sensible cognition, can he perceive how the two parts conduct themselves in the various stages of life. It is therefore of immense importance to bear in mind that in the super-sensible perception of which I am speaking here man retains the ordinary consciousness he possesses in everyday, waking life alongside all the other perceptual experiences. Already in imaginative consciousness, when he confronts something of his past life—for instance, the manner in which certain traits appeared in connection with the processes of growth when he was still a child of nine or ten, how moral tendencies, etc., arose—he perceives all this because he has before him the unity of the physical and soul nature at age nine or ten. He observes what took place then in the organism. But at the same time, he must retain his everyday consciousness. This means that he must now have this view of the ninth or tenth year of his life which reveals something that otherwise remains entirely unconscious; on the other hand, at his own discretion, he must be able to bring to mind instantaneously the memories that he has in ordinary consciousness, which carry him back in the normal way to his ninth or tenth year. Man must always be able to compare the one with the other, the higher with the ordinary consciousness. In the same way that he usually passes from one thought to another he must pass back and forth between an experience in imaginative consciousness and one in ordinary consciousness.

This characteristic of the higher consciousness referred to here is especially important. Those people who judge anthroposophical research only from the outside frequently believe that what appears as imagination can be dismissed like the hallucinations of some visionary. But you must become aware of the radical distinction that exists between true imagination and a vision. A vision certainly conveys a pictorial content also, but man is completely bound up in his vision. While the vision goes on, his consciousness has transformed itself into it and he cannot go back and forth at will from the vision to his ordinary consciousness. In contrast, a person who experiences imaginative consciousness has not transformed his ordinary consciousness into a vision, he has enriched it with imagination. He has added what he already possesses in ordinary consciousness to what he has attained in imagination. A person with imaginative consciousness therefore firmly rejects the common visionary experience, but he can also discern the visionary's predicament in life. For, whoever has achieved the heights of perception indicated here can observe in detail how a soul is inwardly active, in what way it employs the physical organism so that the body can reflect the thoughts back to it.

The person experiencing imagination and inspiration is familiar with the soul's relationship to the physical body in normal consciousness. He therefore can also form a judgement about a visionary. In the case of a visionary the soul has not become free of the body. The person who possesses imaginative consciousness knows what it means for the soul to be free of the physical body, for he has actually lifted the soul out of the body and has driven it into activity. When he observes a visionary, however, he sees that such a person's soul is submerged more within the physical body than is the case when it perceives the outer world with ordinary consciousness.

This is the difference between a person who has imaginative consciousness and the visionary. The visionary immerses himself more deeply into his body's functions than one does in ordinary life, while in imagination man actually emerges out of the physical organization. But at the same time, the ordinary soul content in the physical organism is consciously retained. If the vital significance of this difference is not recognized, if imagination is not kept under rigorous control by ordinary thinking which is retained side by side with imagination, the latter will always be confused with visionary activity that has no accompanying control, for there a man simply descends further into his physical body, and what appears to him as his vision is perhaps only a passing indisposition of his liver or stomach which was already present in ordinary life, but into which he has now submerged himself.

On the other hand, the imaginations of a person with imaginative consciousness have nothing to do with his bodily organs. He consciously looks into a part of his soul of which he was previously unaware. Imaginative consciousness therefore does not lead away from ordinary consciousness to something visionary, as some people believe. Rather, the schooling, the exercises for cultivating imaginative consciousness are a precise antidote for all uncontrollable, visionary elements. You do not develop in the direction of visions but in the opposite direction. The goal is to become free of the physical organization, and, in addition, to be able to utilize the soul in imagination, to start with the etheric organism, in order to arrive at a substantial, real thinking. In ordinary life, the physical body represents substantiality and what you possess in addition to it are mirror images in thinking that have no substance, no real, inner activity. It is precisely the contrast between the supersensible insights referred to here, and the visionary life, that makes it abundantly clear what is meant here by imagination, inspiration, and intuition in the higher consciousness.

Again, you see how you can gradually learn to comprehend the relationship of the soul-spiritual to the physical bodily nature by means of such perception. You realize that visionary activity can arise when someone's soul descends more deeply into the physical body during earthly life. But you can also understand what it implies to be outside your physical body, and what the soul experience is like at a time when you are outside your body. By means of this psychic-spiritual experience outside the body you sense and experience in advance how you must live when you no longer have a physical body. This means that the problem of death is solved within physical earth existence, for you must be able to live in a condition in which you will find yourself one day when you no longer possess your physical body. I ask you to understand that it is my aim to show how the problem of death can be approached and characterized with the greatest discernment, for this problem is nowadays dealt with so often in an amateurish fashion. But I want to make it clear that, above all in anthroposophical research, all the circumspection in thinking that could be demanded is indeed used to consider this problem. For this reason, I have not hesitated to formulate today's lecture in a more exact way so as to have a good basis for comprehending the problem of death. More concerning this will follow in the third part of today's considerations.

If we acquire a view of man's soul-spiritual constitution on the one side and his physical-bodily organization on the other then when we rise to imaginative, inspirational perception, and so on, we can survey the relationship that exists between the two—as I said earlier—in any given situation of man's life. Several days ago, I described how, in descending from the soul-spiritual world, man works on the creation of his own physical organization, how it then falls away from him and how he finds it again in another way through conception and birth. I described furthermore how the problem of birth appears when it is viewed from the standpoint of pre-earthly existence. Now, let us look more into earthly existence, as it is placed between the events of birth and death, for if we want to arrive gradually at an understanding of death, we must be able to link death to birth or conception by means of earthly life.

Particularly, when we observe the way the soul-spiritual in pre-earthly existence relates to what a man bears as physical body in earthly life, we can arrive at the realization that one part of the soul-spiritual—a part that man also possesses in pre-earthly existence—is completely transformed due to conception and birth. While it is still present in pre-earthly life, it now actually disappears; it is the part out of which thinking has developed. It is there in pre-earthly life but disappears as a soul-spiritual element the moment man arrives on the earth. Traces of it remain in the infant, but gradually this part of soul-spiritual life disappears entirely. What has happened to it?

The part that here disappears has been transformed into the life and form of the human head organization. Now understand this correctly: It is entirely wrong to believe that the whole soul-spiritual configuration of man exists as such in pre-earthly life and then, on earth, it receives a kind of house by means of the body into which it enters and lives. It is quite wrong to think in this way about that part of the soul I now referred to above. That part fades and disappears; it is transformed into a really physical material thing, namely our head organization. The life and form of our head organization is a physical metamorphosis of a soul-spiritual element of our pre-earthly existence. Look at your head organization. I do not mean now merely the head that falls off when one is beheaded, but the head with its whole inner content, with all the nerves running into it, and the blood circulation insofar as it is cerebral blood circulation. All this is a result of the transformation of a part of man's pre-earthly sojourn. This part of pre-earthly soul life disappears into the head organization. As a result of the fact that our head organization represents a real metamorphosis of what we possess in our pre-earthly life, and because we behold in the human head a true physical replica of our pre-earthly existence, this head is a real mirror for reflecting thoughts. This has come about because the head has formed and enlivened itself as a physical organism out of the experienced thoughts of the pre-earthly life. This way it is a mirror for the thoughts we form by means of all the sense perceptions.

By contrast—I might say, on the other side of the soul's life—another part of the soul emerges that passes in man through conception and birth and does not transform itself into the physical corporeality but comes only into loose contact with man's metabolic and limb systems. It is that part of the soul life that is ordinarily experienced in its reflections, as will. Compare the will with the conceptual life, with thinking. As human beings we are always fully conscious in the life of thoughts when we are awake. Indeed, “awake” actually means “living in thoughts.” It is not so with the will. Take the simplest act of will, the raising of an arm or hand. How much of this are you fully conscious of? In waking consciousness, you first have the idea: I will raise my hand.—Then something happens that runs its course in the depths of your bodily organization. You may experience all kinds of undefined feelings, shreds of emotions and the like, but what you next experience clearly and in full wakefulness is the result: The arm is raised—you can see it. Ordinary consciousness is as unaware of what takes place in the depths of the organism in the actual sphere of the will between the resolve to do something and the accomplished action as it remains unconscious of events during sleep. We are awake in our thought life; in our actual life of will we sleep even when we are awake.

This partial life of sleep that becomes evident in our will is therefore a sleep that also permeates our waking condition. We are always asleep in one part of our soul even when we are awake, namely, in that part where the will is rooted. Now this is the part of the soul that is not transformed into the physical organization at the time it undergoes human conception and birth. One part of the soul reappears in the physical world after birth as man's head organization. The metabolic- and limb-system, on the other hand, is not a direct replica of that other part of the soul; it is born out of the physical world. The will-segment of the soul has linked itself with it in a loose way; for this reason, the metabolic-and limb-system does not mirror what the soul experiences. This is why man is asleep in his will and also in relation to his metabolic- and limb-system even when he is awake. When this part of the soul is observed by supersensible perception in its relationship to the physical organization, it bears a strong similarity to the relationship of the ego and astral body, the whole soul, to the entire physical organization during sleep. Indeed, man is a much more complicated being than is usually believed. There are certain descriptions of the supersensible which simply state: When a person is awake, his soul-spiritual nature is within his physical-etheric organization, when he sleeps it is outside. But the matter is not as simple as this; at most, one can speak in this way of the head organization, but not of the rest of man's corporeality. For in regard to this remaining organization, a part of the soul sleeps even when the human being is awake.

This part of the soul's life that is asleep and arises from the dark depths of man's organization only in certain mental images is brought into view the moment a person attains to intuition, for, as I have shown, intuition is a result of will exercises. In that way man learns to see into what is otherwise always concealed in waking life; he learns to look into the mysteries of the human will. The human will is a mystery even for waking life; it is revealed partly by inspiration, but only intuition finally unveils it. Paradoxical as it may sound, once man has succeeded in perceiving the true nature of his own will he also has insight into the divine spiritual world. In the head organization the spiritual world is contained only in physical metamorphosis, not much of the spiritual world as such can be discovered there. The human head is actually the least spiritual part of man. But the remaining physical organization contains the unchanged soul life the way it was when man dwelt in pre-earthly life without physical and etheric bodies. In this soul life that lives concealed in the will, man is wholly spirit even between birth and death. Through intuition one can now discern the nature of this spirit.

The spirit that is unveiled to intuition as the element that underlies the will appears to this perception as the reservoir for everything a person has undergone during earth life in the form of intellectual activities of the mind and soul-initiatives, as moral inclinations and impulses in the soul. As I have already indicated from another standpoint, this is revealed as the younger part of the soul, the part that remains in an embryonic state in our present earth life and is at the beginning of its development. If we look at this part of the soul, we behold something in man's inner being that heads toward death in order to be actually born only at death, just as the soul in pre-earthly existence approaches earth life in order to be born into it through conception and birth. Beneath our will lives the soul embryo which reveals its embryonic life when intuitive perception beholds its true nature. We can tell by its nature how it is born to a new spiritual life at death, just as we can tell by the appearance of the human soul in pre-earthly life that it enters earthly existence through birth.

In order to gain insight into physical existence, it is therefore our concern to become acquainted—to begin with in supersensible existence—with the soul being that underlies the will. I shall conclude these observations in the last, the fourth part, and they will lead us tomorrow to a summation of the problem of death in relation with the questions concerning the Christ.

Through higher perception man gains a view of the evolution of his eternal being through pre-earthly existence, earth life and the life after death. Now, however, to unprejudiced observation a mighty riddle arises. It arises when we see how ego consciousness is acquired. From yesterday's lecture you may have surmised that ego consciousness is dependent upon the physical organization, for it originates only at that point in the course of human earth development when man in ordinary consciousness can utilize nothing else besides his physical organism. Particularly here, imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge make it abundantly clear that we as human beings attain our ego consciousness initially in the physical world between birth and death and that the attainment of this ego consciousness is linked to the use of the physical body. The body, however, is taken from us at death.

To a higher perception such as I described again today, the eternal nature of the soul life that was experienced by earth humanity prior to the development of ego consciousness can only appear as a soul life that passes from pre-earthly through earthly to post-earthly existence—in other words, through repeated earth lives. Concerning what man acquires as ego consciousness, however, we can say with absolute certainty: You attained it through the use of your physical body; indeed, only in the course of humanity's evolution—at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha entered human evolution—did you learn to make use of your physical body in such a way that ego consciousness lit up within you.

It is therefore equally certain that inasmuch as we gain ego consciousness by means of the physical body we must fear that we shall lose it at death. This is one of the problems of death. Even if the eternal part of our being in thought, feeling and will has revealed itself to us and we behold it in its metamorphosis as the element appearing only as a mirror image in thinking—actually it is the vanished soul life that has been transformed into the head organization—even if we see in the will the shadow of what leads an embryonic soul life in the rest of the physical organization and will only come to birth at death, even if we are able to look clearly into the soul life in this regard, we are still bound to become fearful. Indeed, we do not become afraid because of an insignificant emotional attitude, but because of our insight when we face the question: What do we manage to retain of the physical organism beyond death, for the physical body decays after death? If we have gained our ego consciousness by means of the body, then the scientifically justified fear arises: How do we carry our ego consciousness through death?

Only the Mystery of Golgotha can answer this question. Man could never carry his ego consciousness beyond death unless this ego consciousness, having developed in the physical body, unites with the Christ Who holds and supports it when it would otherwise melt away from the human soul along with the physical body. Ego consciousness has been attained by means of the physical body. In death, along with the physical body, it would leave the soul, if it were not bound up with the Christ Being in the sense of Paul's words, “Not I but the Christ in me,”—for the Christ takes our ego and carries it through death.

In the following lecture I will describe in detail how this takes place and I will show how the Christ is that Being Who makes it possible for us to preserve our ego consciousness and carry it through the portal of death.

Only anthroposophical research as meant here reveals the whole significance that the Christ event has for human life. After all, the significance of such insight already begins in the case of ordinary philosophy! Ordinary philosophy is only awakened to an inner life and gains a perception concerning itself when it can be nourished by imaginative knowledge. Think of what I said at the beginning of my lecture. When we advance through meditation to imaginative perception we cross over an abyss, as it were. Our thinking ceases, a state of non-thinking exists between ordinary thinking and the active, life-filled thinking of imagination. Several philosophers have experienced this non-thinking—for instance, Augustine and Descartes—but they were unable to interpret it correctly. They spoke of the doubt that arises at the start of philosophical thinking. This doubt that Augustine and Descartes spoke about is only the reflection, brought into ordinary consciousness, of this condition of non-thinking that man finds himself in between ordinary thinking and imaginative thinking. Since neither Augustine nor Descartes had submerged their souls into this actual non-thinking, they did not come to the true experience, only the reflection, of what a person experiences when his thinking, particularly the thoughts of memory, ceases between ordinary and imaginative thinking. The doubt of Augustine and Descartes is only the reflected image in ordinary consciousness of this experience that does not appear until the transition into imaginative consciousness. Thus, when we observe it in the light of imaginative philosophy, we can correctly interpret what appears vaguely in the mere philosophy of ideas.

Likewise, we have seen how a person confronts the course of his life as a unity and how, to a perception that enables him to be consciously alive in his ether body, events that run their course in time are seen to stand side by side. Through this insight, events that ordinarily occur one after the other are seen side by side like you normally see the objects in space. Bergson, for example, felt this when he formulated his idea of “duration.” This idea of duration plays a prominent role in his philosophy, but because of the manner in which he conceived it, it is only an inkling of the truth. The truth is the imaginative view of time as simultaneity. Bergson only arrived at the abstract feeling that if he entered more deeply into the matter, he could now, in the present, reach beyond this world and experience duration as such. But since Bergson would not approach a form of anthroposophical perception, he again arrived only at a reflected image of what a person experiences with imaginative perception in regard to time as simultaneity. He called this elusive element, experienced as a reflected image, duration, durée. It plays a prominent role in Bergson's philosophy.

Regardless of which aspect of philosophy you focus upon, it becomes evident that philosophy will only attain substance and life when this substance is grasped in the way it was done today. I have already indicated that cosmology and religious knowledge also gain substance in this way, and I will elaborate on the matter further in regard to the questions about the Christ in the next few days. I will show that for man today all higher perception leads basically to an appeal by his own being to the Mystery of Golgotha. And when man's will aspires to reach the Mystery of Golgotha and, once again, the Christ Being enters man's consciousness in His complete, supersensible reality, then modern supersensible perception will lead by means of a spiritual philosophy and cosmology to a firm foundation not only of supersensible life in general but of a spiritual Christianity.