The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees, The remarks I am to make to you this evening can only claim validity today, in the age of the spirit of science, if they are preceded by a certain examination of anthroposophy, as it is meant here, and of this spirit of science itself. It must be shown that today it is impossible to speak of knowledge of the spirit without justifying the methods of the corresponding spiritual research in the face of this spirit of science.

That this justification is possible, that the anthroposophy I am referring to here is not in any opposition to this modern spirit of science at all, but that it is only a kind of continuation of it, I have taken the liberty of explaining in that lecture which I gave here a few months ago in the same place. So if I wanted to give this justification again today, it would mean a repetition for a very large audience. I will therefore assume that which is present as such a support. I will therefore refer, but only in this regard, to the lecture from earlier, but of course in such a way that today's lecture should also be understandable in itself.

Now, when a person focuses his attention on what he calls spiritual life, namely on his relationship to the spiritual world, certain difficulties arise in the soul. But one cannot say that these difficulties arise in relation to the existence of a spiritual life in man himself. For man is well aware that he always has such a spiritual life in his waking state. He is in relation to the outer world through his spiritual life, as a cognizant and active human being. He finds his human worth and dignity included in this spiritual life, which is, after all, his experience, his adventure. And even the most ardent materialist will perhaps say: This spiritual life that appears to you arises only from material processes, from material occurrences, but he will not be able to deny the spiritual life as such. And one may say: The difficulties that arise as riddle questions in the human soul with regard to the spiritual world are based precisely on the fact that man is aware of his spirit, that he must seek his value and dignity in this spirit, and must therefore ask about the nature of this spirit: Is it something temporary, something that disappears? Is it something that is grounded only in material life? Is it something that is connected to some external spiritual world and represents something permanent in the face of a transitory existence? Precisely because man has a spiritual life, because he feels himself to be a spiritual being, he must ask about the nature of this spirituality.

Now there is much that emerges from the depths of the soul for some people who are particularly concerned with these things, fully consciously, but for most people as a general feeling, more or less unconsciously, and ultimately comes together in the enigmatic question: What is the essence of the spirit, and what is the relationship of man to a possible spiritual world? I could cite many things to you that show this question arises from the depths of the soul.

Two examples that are perhaps even neglected in other areas of human life, that rarely come to the full consciousness of the human being, but that have all the more effect in the spheres of feeling of the soul life, that are transmitted to the feeling, that cause a certain uncertainty about the nature of spiritual life. As I said, they are perhaps consciously placed before the soul by very few people, but they determine the happiness and suffering of the innermost soul being. They determine our everyday frame of mind, whether we go through life courageously or dejectedly, whether we are fit for life or unfit for our own life or the lives of our fellow human beings. All this depends on how these feelings creep into our soul life and lead to the enigmatic questions characterized.

First of all, there is something that we experience, as I said, more or less unconsciously, every day of our existence between birth and death, when we pass from the waking state to the state of sleep. Every time we feel how that which stirs, what lives and moves from waking to falling asleep as our experience, our inner spirituality, how it fades down into an indeterminate state, how we have to switch off our consciousness, how we have completely faded down our spiritual life, so to speak, in the time from falling asleep to waking up. And when we then bring this unconsciously experienced life in the human soul to consciousness, we have to say: in it, the human being feels the powerlessness of his spiritual life, the powerlessness of his inner activity, of his inner activity, in which he seeks his own human value and human existence. It fades away every day when he falls asleep. Then most people ask, perhaps only in their hearts, but they do ask: Is it the case that this life of the soul fades and leaves people powerless? Is it so that it has dimmed down when the human being passes through the gate of death, so that the human being can no longer catch up with it, as he does every morning? That is one example of how the characterized riddle is formed.

The other example is, one could say, the opposite pole. When we wake up, we may first pass through the indeterminate, chaotic, illusory dream life, which we know to be illusory in the face of external reality when we are of sound mind. Perhaps we pass through this semi-spiritual being until we fully awaken. But then the spiritual takes possession of the body, of the physical body of the human being. We initially dive into the world of our sense organs. What our eyes transmit to us from the world of colors, what our ears transmit to us from the world of sounds, what our sense organs transmit to us, we experience as physical experiences of the effect of the outside world on us. We experience it with our soul life. We experience how we take possession of our limbs, how we become active with the help of our body. We feel immersed in our corporeality, our physicality, our spiritual being. It works, it weaves at this physicality.

But I have already indicated in the last lecture here the way in which we are unconscious of this submergence into physical corporeality. Let us just take the submergence into our elements of will. We have the thought. Let us take the simple action of raising our arm and moving our hand. First we have the thought, the idea; but how this idea descends into our physicality, what complicated process takes place down there before we raise our arm and move our hand, we know nothing about this in our ordinary consciousness. So we have to say: While we feel the powerlessness of the spiritual life when falling asleep, when waking up, that is, when we descend into physical corporeality, we feel how the spiritual flows down as if into an inner darkness, in which it is then enclosed. So that we can say: if we lose the spirit when it no longer works through the body, it then becomes unconscious; but it withdraws from us even more when it flows into our corporeality and works through our corporeality.

These are all examples of how man enters into an uncertain realm when he wants to educate himself about the nature of the spiritual. Now, because he is led into such an uncertain area, man places himself before the spiritual world to which he seeks a relationship precisely because of the better part of his human feeling and willing and thinking. He places himself before this spiritual world precisely the two most significant enemies of human soul life. One of these enemies is the one to whom many people fall prey today who, whether through their will or their circumstances, cannot join the conscientious, serious methods of scientific life that do not make the demands of this science their own. They often place before their soul, out of their own will, that which we then encompass with the word “superstition”.

This superstition is the one enemy of the human soul. Because man must constantly seek a relationship between himself and the spiritual world, he seeks to conjure up from within, through the will, that which he cannot attain from without through knowledge. But if it has no basis, if it lives as superstition in the human soul, in the way a person imagines his relationship to the spiritual world, then he must see how he comes up against all sorts of obstacles wherever he goes in life. Things have their own laws, the things and facts of life, of nature and of human existence. They take a certain course if you approach this life with superstitious ideas. These ideas do not prove true everywhere. You end up in a state of disorientation and insecurity, also in relation to knowledge. You often imagine in your soul that a spiritual being should work through external phenomena in a certain way. You see that it does not work. You become insecure and weak in yourself. Or else the person who surrenders to such impulses, which are not grounded in the objective external world, has no drive for his actions from them; they give him nothing for his will. Therefore, he not only becomes insecure but also incapable, unable to intervene in life. He cannot place himself in the midst of his fellow human beings, co-operating with them, as does the one who does not place illusory conceptions between his soul and life.

If this is the one enemy that stands before the soul of those who do not engage with scientific results, then the other enemy often enters into the soul life of those who are engaged in science. Anyone who is familiar with today's serious and conscientious scientific methods, by which our thinking seeks to follow the external world through experiment and observation to its laws, learns to recognize how this thinking is tamed – one might say – how all arbitrariness is taken from it, how it is adapted to what appears in the external world as law. But, one might say: in this way, thinking also becomes thin and abstract. It becomes estranged from the human being himself. It then becomes only appropriate to the [conditions of] the outer sense world. And one soon realizes: then no way out of the sensory world into the supersensible world opens up for this thinking, which is so wonderfully suited for comprehending the outer natural phenomena.

And then something very often befalls the scientific man of today, and that is doubt, doubt about the supersensible world, precisely because of the certainty he has acquired in his intellectual pursuit of the sensory world. Doubt also arises in the mind. But when it arises there, it arises with all the seriousness of the human soul, then it sinks into the mind, into the emotional life. And this is precisely what the devotee of anthroposophical science can recognize through this science: how the soul and the life of feeling are intimately connected with the healthy or diseased conditions of the bodily life as well; how what lives in an inharmonious, torn or even in a harmonic, happy soul is reflected in the healthy or diseased bodily life. And it may be said that, to put it bluntly, when doubt infects a person with a mental consumption, this mental consumption also affects the bodily conditions. He becomes weak in relation to his physical life. His nervous system becomes defective. He is unable to withstand the struggles of life. He, too, becomes incapable of helping himself and incapable of working with others.

Thus one can see, especially in superstition and doubt, how man, on the one hand, must always strive, out of deeply justified feelings, towards the spiritual world, to which he must feel he belongs. But how certain difficulties arise in the life of the soul, and how, precisely, strong enemies of this life of the soul place themselves between the spiritual world — which one can initially only assume hypothetically — and between the actual spiritual man. That is why even the serious scientific minds of the present day have turned to abnormal mental life, because they despair of the normal mental life that the grandeur of the sensory world transmits to them, but which, in their view, is quite incapable of transmitting to them what the spiritual world is. So they turn away from normal mental life and turn to all kinds of abnormal mental life. Today one finds enlightened minds in the field of natural science who look to mediumship, who look at some visions or hallucinatory states of abnormal life in order to gain clues in this way to answer the question: Does man have any relationship at all to a spiritual environment other than that which is revealed to his senses? One does indeed come across many things, but one should be quite clear about one thing: what one can learn, for example, through a medium, is after all learned by this medium himself through a tuned-down consciousness, through interrupted sensory contact with the outside world. One must, so to speak, turn to the medium for a morbid, abnormal-seeming physicality. It is the same when we turn to visionary experience.

Wherever you look, if you approach the research with sufficient impartiality, you can say that wherever something visionary occurs in the soul, there is a pathological organization. And how is it possible to exercise control over that which arises from the sick person, which is perhaps extraordinarily interesting in some respects, how is it possible to exercise control over that which arises from an imperfect consciousness that is not as highly developed as sense consciousness? How is it possible to gain a critical result about how much the experiences gained in this way are worth?

Anthroposophy therefore does not address any kind of morbid soul life. It firmly rejects having anything to do with mediumship, hallucinations, visions; it is based entirely on healthy soul and bodily life. She tries to find out what exercises the soul can do to further develop the powers of knowledge that are initially present in normal consciousness, so that we are able to see the spiritual world through supersensible organs in the same way that we perceive colors through our physical eyes. If you review what I have said in my various books “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science” and other books about such exercises, you will find that these exercises fall into two parts: firstly, preparatory exercises that a person undertakes to strengthen themselves inwardly, physically and mentally. They are thoroughly suited to lead a person to a healthy physical and mental life. These preparatory exercises are today even appreciated by many opponents of anthroposophy, I dare not say in their value only, but in an outspoken way. But then one does not want to turn to the further exercises, which are supposed to develop dormant powers of cognition in the soul. But how man in this way, as a man who absolutely reckons with the whole enlightened spirit of the present, and yet seeks the way into the spiritual worlds by trying to recognize how man wins such a power of cognition by which he ascend into the spiritual worlds, can be understood more easily by taking up what was attempted in older times to gain knowledge of the supersensible world.

We see today that people who have a strong inner need to feel at least a sense of the spiritual world, who despair of direct knowledge, of a science of the spiritual world, they turn, whether they are learned or unlearned, to the time-honored conceptions that have developed in the course of human history and that are given as traditional creeds or world views. Many philosophies themselves are based on such time-honored conceptions, without the people who believe in them being able to guess it. But today one very often has the feeling that one must accept by faith what is given in such ideas, which have a venerable age, about the supersensible world; one cannot seek such knowledge about the supersensible world as one seeks in our exact science about the sensual world. And one succumbs to all kinds of illusions in the attempt to justify faith in its independent nature vis-à-vis knowledge, when one tries to prove that faith must be a different way of discovering the spiritual, in keeping with human nature, than that which presents itself as knowledge, as science.

Now, anyone who does not use the often rather superficial methods of today's historical science, but rather a certain eye for the spiritual experience of the human being, for that which has taken place in the spiritual experience of human beings over centuries and millennia, with an eye for how this spiritual life has changed from epoch to epoch, anyone who, with such can look with such impartiality at what certain people in more primitive times, than our own, perhaps in very ancient times, sought as paths to knowledge, will come to the conclusion that everything that lives in beliefs and worldviews today, and is often only accepted as historical, as traditional, that it goes back to ancient insights. Yes, everything that people today accept as beliefs once developed in such a way that individual people detached themselves from the general consciousness of people, as scientists do today, and that they sought such knowledge of the supersensible out of the powers of their own soul life. What they then revealed to themselves through such paths of knowledge about the supersensible, about the spiritual, they handed down to their fellow human beings, and this knowledge has then flowed through history to the present day, living in our creeds, in our world views and philosophies. Only, often, people do not seek the sources from which it emerged.

Now, the paths of knowledge of ancient times might seem irrelevant to people today, who have to search in completely different ways. Nevertheless, I will characterize at least two older paths of knowledge, the results of which still live on today in our worldviews. We could characterize many such paths of knowledge. I will pick out two, not to recommend them to anyone for the purpose of attaining higher spiritual knowledge, because they were quite appropriate for an older time, but are no longer so today, as we shall see later. So, not to recommend these things, but to characterize them for the purpose of gaining our understanding of the new, of anthroposophy, through the old knowledge. New paths must be taken today so that people can, through their changed soul life and soul constitution, again attain knowledge of spiritual life and their own spiritual origin.

In ancient times there was one such path of knowledge, which the ancient Indian yoga scholar went through, if I may use the expression. Especially with regard to the characterized qualities, one only gets corrupted ideas today when studying how this path of yoga is sought in oriental countries today. And many of those who, out of desperation, seek ways to find their way into spiritual worlds by resorting to old methods pay the price by damaging their physical and mental lives. For what the human being can practice today, even what is often written about these old ways into the spiritual world, is thoroughly corrupted. But if we look back to the older times of human development, we come to such primitive paths of knowledge that were valid in those days, and on which we can communicate with each other through the modern paths.

What is this yoga path based on? It is based on the yogi taking the breathing, I could give many such details of the yoga path, but I only want to emphasize the breathing process, that the yogi takes the ordinary breathing, which was unconscious, and elevates it to conscious inner activity. How does the ordinary consciousness perceive breathing? It happens in such a way that we inhale, hold our breath, exhale, in a certain rhythmic sequence. At most, we pay attention to this breathing process in pathological conditions. In ordinary, healthy life, this breathing process happens more or less unconsciously. Only scientifically do we have to characterize it, so to speak.

Now, the peculiar thing about the ancient spiritual path of knowledge of the yoga scholars is that they introduced a different rhythm for certain times when they did their exercises in order to gain knowledge of a higher world, that they inhaled, held their breath and exhaled in a different rhythm. What was the effect of this? First of all, it made the yogi fully aware of the breathing process, so that he consciously experienced what one otherwise does not consciously experience. Just as one otherwise experiences inner well-being, inner joy, inner suffering and pain, so the yogi experienced his breathing process, which he had changed at will in accordance with the natural breathing processes. But what happened as a result? What did he gain in terms of knowledge?

From a physiological point of view, we can initially place this before our soul. When we breathe, the breath goes into our physical body, through our spinal canal and up into the brain. The brain is permeated and undulated by the breaths and the rhythm of breathing. As I said, the ordinary act of breathing is unconscious, as is the ordinary soul life. It is always the case that, within our skin, we not only have the physical processes that belong to the nervous organism and that convey thinking, the world of thoughts, to us, but these nervous processes are also permeated by the rhythm of breathing. It is, for example, tremendously interesting to follow what I have at least hinted at in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Mysteries of the Soul), how, in listening to music, the rhythm of breathing merges with what is experienced as a nerve-sense process emanating from the human organs of hearing. But not only in musical perception; in all mental life, the nervous-sensory process is permeated by the respiratory process in its rhythm. That which the human being does not notice in ordinary life was perceived by the old scholar, the yogi. He sensed inwardly how the altered breath permeated his skin, how the respiratory rhythm sank into his thought life. What insights could be gained through this? We can realize this if we put ourselves in the place of the soul life that existed in the people of those ancient times, in which there were yogi scholars who stood out from the general soul being with their special soul being.

It was not like today. Humanity has changed in its soul nature through the centuries and millennia. From today's external science, one cannot even guess how much man's inner soul life and his relationship to the outer world have changed in the course of human history. In those ancient times when yoga originated, people did not perceive the pure colors that we see in the external world, or the pure tones that we perceive when we listen to the external world or have other sensory perceptions. It is only in the course of human development that we have come to see the pure sensual world around us, as we are accustomed to today. But in older times, it was not fantastic for older humanity, as animism today believes, but elementary and natural, that one not only saw the pure colors by looking into the outside world and heard the pure tones by listening to the outside world, but that a spiritual-soul arose in the soul when one looked at the outside world. A spiritual-soul perception was seen in every source, in lightning and thunder, in the drifting clouds, in the whistling wind. They not only saw colors, they not only heard sounds, but, because of their complete conformity with nature, they also perceived a spiritual soul element in everything, just as they perceived color through their senses. In this respect, human beings were not as independent as we have become today. The human soul has also changed in this regard. The inner degree of self-awareness, of awareness of independence, which we today take for granted, did not exist for this older humanity. Man grew by immersing his spiritual soul in lightning and thunder, in clouds and wind, in plants and animals; he grew together with the outside world and felt, to a certain extent, at one with it. The one who became a yoga scholar and practiced in this way, as I have indicated, first achieved, by driving the breathing rhythm into this inner-living thinking, he first achieved what we today take for granted, one might almost say, what we are born with; the yoga scholar entered into abstract thinking, into pure thinking. But through this he came to truly feel the self, the I. He had to acquire the sense of self, the self-awareness that is innate in us, that arises in us in a self-evident way through our education. And the results of this yoga knowledge are expressed in wonderful literature and in wonderful poetic art. The one who ascended into the spiritual world in this way through yoga felt himself as a human being, he felt his spirituality, he felt that he was a living, real spirit. By withdrawing what he otherwise imparted to things in life in terms of spirituality, he felt the reality of his own spiritual self. Therefore we see in such a wonderful poem as the Bhagavad Gita is, how all the delight, all the inner amazement, all the inner feeling of greatness, is described, which these people had, who in this way approached their own spirit through their increased self-awareness, which they had cultivated in this way. In those ancient times, people tried to go on a path of knowledge into the spiritual world. And much of what the yoga scholars have passed on to their fellow human beings has been passed down through the epochs of history; it still lives today as certain sentences, conceptions, ideas about the self of the human being. The religious conceptions adhere to it. The philosophers take it up. They do not know that this was once sought and found by people on a certain path of knowledge.

But we modern people cannot walk this path. This path involves something very peculiar. The one who tries to penetrate into the spiritual world in this way becomes extraordinarily sensitive inwardly. His inner life becomes so active and spiritualized that he must withdraw to a certain extent from the robust outer life and its demands. That is why such spiritual seekers, as I have described them, became lonely people. But in older times people had confidence in such lonely people. That was the peculiarity of that older culture, that one said to oneself: in order to come to real wisdom about the spiritual world, one must withdraw from life, become a lonely person, a hermit. These hermits must be asked if one wants to know something about the spiritual destiny of the human soul. And so one had confidence in the lonely, the hermits.

Today, however, our culture does not encourage this. Today, our culture encourages something different: people today are oriented towards activity. Today, a person must only consider himself capable if he can engage in active life, even if he gains his insights only in a way that is appropriate for participating in life. Today people would not be able to trust someone who has to separate himself from the rest of life in order to gain knowledge. That is why I have characterized these old ways in contrast to the new one, which I will then describe for the sake of understanding. But, as I said, the old path cannot lead to anything equivalent to what an ancient civilization has achieved through the path of yoga, even if this civilization only experienced this way of living in the spiritual worlds in a few hermit specimens of their race.

And now I would like to mention a second path, which has also been taken many times and whose results still live on in our worldviews, our philosophies, our other beliefs, without our being clear about the sources. But this path is already closer to modern man, although it cannot be taken in the same way as it was in ancient times. It is the path of asceticism.

What did the ascetic seek? He tuned down, paralyzed the physical functions of his body. His bodily life had to become calmer than usual. His life had to become one that did not intervene in the external world with all its strength. It even had to become one that inflicted suffering and pain on itself, that carried out asceticism in this way. Such a person came to very specific conclusions, very specific experiences. These experiences should not be misunderstood. One should not believe that by describing these experiences, the view is to be justified that our body, as it exists in a healthy state, is not suitable for our life between birth and death. Yes, just as we carry our healthy body with us, without ascetic weakening, it is suitable precisely for the fully valid life between birth and death. But those who devoted themselves to asceticism in ancient times realized that, however suitable the human body is for the external physical and sensory life, the more it is subdued and paralyzed, the more suitable it becomes for grasping and experiencing the spiritual world. Therefore, through asceticism one can experience the spiritual world. Again, a path that we cannot follow today, again a path that makes us unfit for the outer world. If we weaken our physicality, we also weaken our soul life. We cannot be efficient enough for ourselves; nor can we work for the benefit of our fellow human beings. Therefore, asceticism cannot be our path. But it is extremely important for our understanding that we become aware of the fact that the human body in its healthy state is a kind of obstacle to living oneself into the spiritual world. If this obstacle is removed or weakened, then the human being can live into the will nature of the spirit that underlies the world.

In describing these two paths into the spiritual worlds, I have also had to emphasize that they cannot be ours. Those of you who remember the exercises I described in my last lecture here will have noticed that I have described different exercises. I do not want to repeat them today; you can read about the rest in the various books. However, I would like to quickly characterize a certain aspect of how these exercises work. We do not turn to the breathing process when seeking the path to the spiritual worlds in an anthroposophical way. We approach our thinking, our thought life, directly, not indirectly through breathing. We bring other thought processes into thinking itself, so to speak. In a sense, we leave behind what is particularly useful for all abstract thinking today and celebrates such triumphs. We leave this abstract thinking. We devote ourselves to a meditative life, to a certain resting on images and ideas, in a way we do not otherwise do when we remain in abstract thought. We devote ourselves to a certain inner concentration. In other words, we devote ourselves to a practicing of the life of thought, just as the ancient Indian devoted himself to a practicing of the life of breathing. He allowed breathing to indirectly transform this thinking. We turn directly to the thought. We bring more rhythm into our thinking, whereas in ordinary consciousness we have more logic in it. We gradually attain what I can characterize as the vitalization of thinking.

Yes, we turn directly to thinking with our soul exercises, and we arrive at the thought that the thoughts we otherwise have appear to us more or less dead in their abstractness compared to living thinking. While the ancient Indian yogi was guiding the living thinking, which he and his whole world had in ordinary life, to the abstract thinking that can grasp the self, we in turn start from what we have as self, as abstract thinking in the self, and fully consciously bring this thinking to life, so that we arrive at what I would like to call exact clairvoyance. I beg you not to misunderstand the expression, it is only a term. This exact clairvoyance, which is attained through thought processes, has nothing to do with the vague mystical ideas of ancient times or even of the present. Just as modern astronomy developed from ancient astrology, just as modern chemistry developed from ancient alchemy, just as these sciences have moved more towards the material and have overcome astrology and alchemy, so too, to characterize this, modern exact clairvoyance, as it develops from anthroposoph , leads from the older, more materialistic clairvoyance — since Indian clairvoyance is materialistic —, so modern clairvoyance, by turning first to purely spiritual-soul processes on the side of thinking, leads from the more materialism of older times into the spiritual.

I would like to describe to you how modern thinking, how this living thinking, this exact clairvoyance, leads deeper and deeper into the world, so that within the sensory we can ultimately perceive the supersensory, the spiritual. In doing so, I must come to certain subtle aspects of the human soul life, but if one wants to find real paths to the spiritual world, truthful paths to the spiritual world, one must already engage in soul subtleties.

Let us assume, for example, how the modern human being visualizes a higher animal. He tries to get to know it as far as science is able to do today – but science has ideals to be able to do this better and better, but it will not reach something that I want to characterize right away – with today's abstract thinking we can visualize how the bones, the muscles, the internal organs of an animal are formed, how the individual life processes flow into one another. In short, we can visualize the form and inner life of the higher animal in our abstract thinking, which we are now developing methodically in research in a fully justified way. Then we look at the human being. We do the same with the human being. Again, we visualize how its bone system, its muscle system is formed, how the life processes flow into one another and compose the whole human being as an organization. Then we compare the two. We find that one is, so to speak, a transformation of the other. Depending on our way of thinking and our disposition, we will either say that this human form has developed from the animal form over time, and we will become more materialistic. With more or less justification, we will then become Darwinians. Or, if we are more spiritual or idealistic, we will look for a different context. But such a context arises when we compare the higher animal with the human being itself.

We can do this with the kind of thinking that is abstract and that appears as dead thinking to the mind that has come to exact clairvoyance of living thinking; the kind of thinking through which we can only stand beside external things, through which we can make an inner mental image of every external thing and every external process and compare them in an external way.

With living thinking, as I mean it and as it can be developed in man in the characterized way, we can now also make an inner image of a higher animal. But the living thought is then able to transform itself inwardly, to grow, so that it passes over of itself into the thought of man, without our first having to compare. We arrive at forming a living thought about the animal, which we can then place next to the dead thought of the human being. We gain the living thought that transforms internally, that grows and from which the form of the human being is then formed internally in the soul. That is, after all, the peculiarity of our present-day science when it speaks of development, that it says that one being passes into the other, but that it cannot pass from the thought itself, which it can gain from the one being, to the thought of the other being in such a living way as is only the case with the living thought.

I must therefore draw attention to something that characterizes this vitalization of thought so that I may be better understood in these subtle matters. Let us imagine taking a magnetic needle, placing it in a certain direction, and then turning it this way and that. In all directions, it will behave differently than if we were to place it in just one direction, in the direction that forms the connecting line between the magnetic north pole and the magnetic south pole. This one line behaves differently to the magnetic needle than all the other directions. We see that we do not conceive of space as an indeterminate coexistence, as an indeterminate emptiness, for inanimate nature, for magnetism, but that we have to conceive of this space as being inwardly lived through, so that, for example, for the magnetic direction there is a special spatial direction to which, in a sense, this magnetic direction belongs. So we cannot conceive of space in an undifferentiated way, but rather in an inwardly differentiated, inwardly shaped way. To such a view of space comes living thinking.

We look at the animal. It has its main direction horizontally, which also continues into the direction of the head. Those animals that have an upright head posture are exceptions, which I cannot go into now. Otherwise, I could show that these exceptions confirm what needs to be said about the fact that the animal's organization is such because its backbone lies in a certain spatial direction parallel to the earth's surface, just as the magnetic needle has its calm existence by lying in the direction from the earth's north pole to the earth's south pole.

Now let us take the human being and go over to him with the thought that we form about the animal – with many others, but for example with the only one of this horizontal backbone line. We transform the animal image itself. We imagine the horizontal backbone line vertically. Now the human being is different in space; he acquires this vertical line of space. This is only one detail. One must embrace many things in order to experience how thought, by passing over, by simply passing over the phenomena, the inner experiences, much that is animal, is not merely transferred to the human being, but is inwardly and vitally transformed , by living from animal to human being, and not just by developing the thought in the human being itself, in this way one goes from the thought, which one has vividly developed in the animal, to the thought of the human being in an inwardly vivid way. What do you get out of it? You get out of it that you now have an inwardly living thinking that not only presents itself and compares the facts and things of the world, but that submerges into the things themselves. Our thought itself lives inwardly in the same way that growth lives in the animal, in the human being. We immerse ourselves in the spirituality of the world. But this is something that can very easily be opposed, and it is precisely the peculiar thing about anthroposophical spiritual science that one likes to bring these objections to one's soul. For what anthroposophy has to say about the world should be certain and exact. That is why I myself point out what they could point out when I speak of living thinking. I point out that we have, for example, in the wonderful spiritual life of an Oken and a Schelling, that these thinkers had lively thoughts, but in a certain respect only imaginative, lively thoughts, that they, so to speak, thoughts they developed from a fact, an entity, shaped them out; thoughts about other facts, other entities, thus making thinking alive, capable of growth, transforming, as the beings of the world themselves transform and are growing. But there is one thing we do not find in these thinkers that fully guarantees the reality of what is given by this living thinking. But anthroposophical science must point this out, because it is simply experienced, by coming to living thoughts, to this exact clairvoyance, in the way that the various books describe as anthroposophical science.

Yes, my dear attendees, if you really set about developing such a supersensible world view and the thoughts of an animal, of another being, of a process, and inwardly experiencing the thoughts themselves, metamorphosing them – a process that Goethe already strove for, and he also already came a long way to a certain degree, anthroposophy continues to develop Goetheanism —, if one continues to develop this further, one notices very soon: something connects with this living thinking in the inner soul life, which very much authenticates reality. With each such step, in which we allow the thought to arise from the other thought in a living way, suffering and pain are laid upon the inner soul life. And it is absolutely necessary for anyone who truly wants to achieve an exact clairvoyance to go through pain and suffering. The living thought does not penetrate in the same way as the thought “I want to move my arm, move my hand”, that is, without me feeling it. The living thought permeates all human existence down to the physical. But the experience remains in the soul. It is an experience of suffering, and this suffering, this pain must be overcome. Only then does that arise in man which now fully guarantees supersensible knowledge. But the one who has truly acquired such knowledge, you can ask him what he thinks about his life's destiny. He will always tell you: My joys, the things I feel with relish in life, what I experience as happiness, I gratefully accept from fate. My insights, the things that really enlighten me about the innermost structure and nature of the human being, I owe, even in ordinary life, to my sufferings, my pains, by overcoming them and transforming them into knowledge.

Thus, for someone who is prudent in this way, even the ordinary pain of life prepares them for the suffering that they must experience through the influence of living thought on their entire human existence. But they must overcome this suffering, this pain. As a result, they now become, if I may use the paradoxical expression, a sense organ as a whole human being. Just as we have otherwise buried the individual sensory organs in our organism, and perceive the sensory world through them, so we become a sensory organ as a whole human being when we overcome the painful experience associated with the living thought. You can see this if you consider the following.

Take the wonderfully formed eye. Among other processes, something arises that acts like destruction when we see colors through the effects of light. If we were to experience the subtle processes that take place in a person when perceiving light, they would also appear in us as a quiet pain. However, we are so robustly organized in the present stage of human development that we simply do not perceive what is a quiet pain at the bottom of our sensory life. This is overcome and sensory perception is felt neutrally. In this way, the supersensible knower also struggles through pain and suffering to become a sense organ. The expression sounds paradoxical, but it is justified because with this sense organ, which we become as a whole human being, we perceive a spiritual world around us, just as we perceive the physical world with ordinary sense organs. In this way, the human being becomes a sensory organ, an explorer of the spiritual world. In this way, what he elevates through suffering and pain by overcoming them unites within him with what is living thought.

When this life, this connection between living thought and overcome suffering and pain, comes to life in us, then we see in a different way — let us say, to highlight one example, the most important example — we see in a different way the person standing before us as a physical figure than we did before. We look at him in such a way that our outer eyes see the physical configuration of the space, see the colors through which the person reveals himself in the physical world. We see everything that is revealed externally in the human being between birth and death, we see it through our senses and through the mind, which understands the language of the other, which can summarize in conformity to law what the senses see. But when one has struggled to the realization that I mean, then one sees the physical-sensory of man embedded in a soul-spiritual form, in an auric structure, in a human aura, which now represents the spiritual-soul of man. This spiritual-soul aura, which now reveals to us the real spiritual-soul in man, is not attained through all kinds of fantasies. It is attained today, too, on serious paths of knowledge, on those serious paths of knowledge that awaken the thought to liveliness, that bring the contemplation of the real to assurance by overcoming suffering and pain, to spiritual sensitivity of mind, if I may use this paradoxical expression. And when we see the spiritual soul of the human being before us, the auric, then we do not only see the present human being. Then we look back at how the human being was spiritually and soulfully before he descended from a spiritual and soul world in which he lived before this earthly existence and connected with what had been prepared in the mother's body to become a physical human being. Just as we look at a person today, how he grows, and how we know when a person is an adult, that this adulthood leads back to childhood, so we see in what we reveal in the human being today as the human aura, going back and seeing it currently going back. The child does not exist alongside the adult human being. The spiritual soul in which the human being lived in the spiritual soul world before descending, stands before us in vitality. It stands before us in such a way that we cannot only speak of it in an abstract way, but in such a concrete way that I can characterize this view for you in the following way.

When we are here on earth, we look out into the external world, we see the wonderful starry sky above, we see the clouds passing by, the realms of nature, we look out of our sense organs, out of our eyes, we perceive the external world through our sense organs. But we do not perceive what lives within the human being in the same way. I have already hinted at this today and last time, how little we really understand this. We can look at the outside world. What lives within us, we can visualize it through anatomy and physiology, but there we do not look at the living human being, but at the human being who has become dead.

Anthroposophy teaches us about what lives inside the human being – I would even say inside the human skin itself, as the physical embodiment of the human being. The air circle that extends around the earth is wonderfully certain when we follow it with everything that happens in it. Even if today's meteorology can only explore a little of it, we have a wonderful law in this air circle. Basically, all life on earth is grounded in it. We look into wonderful secrets when we see through the laws of the air circle. But what we can reveal, what lives in the human lungs, is much more wonderful. If the air circle is large and the lungs are small, size is not important. Here, inside the human being, an organ lives, if we know its laws, it is more magnificent and powerful than that of the air circle. And if we look at the sun, the source of light and warmth: everything that comes from the sun, everything that affects the living beings on earth, and everything else that is in space, is wonderfully powerful. But if we look into the human heart, it is smaller than what we see outside in gigantic size, but it is more wonderfully designed and carries a more powerful law within itself.

And so there lives in the inner being of man a microcosm, a small world compared to the great world, here between birth and death. We see the cosmos, we do not see this inner lawfulness. Our spiritual soul, as it was before it descended to physical life on earth, did not see as we see the cosmic outer world through our eyes, but it saw the inner being of man, that was its world. And it prepared itself to now unconsciously rule this inner being of the human being between birth and death in this earthly existence. We now look with a different understanding at the indeterminately formed brain of the child and how it develops plastically. This is shaped out of what our soul looked at before it descended. It sees the human being within. It sees the world that is given to him in the human interior. And because our spiritual soul lives in us between birth and death, and therefore does not see this interior because it lives in it, but sees the outside world because it does not live in it, the spiritual soul sees the interior of the human being as its world before birth.

This is initially one side of the extraterrestrial existence of man. The other refers to what human action is, what human behavior is. We look at it in a more or less external way through our senses and our mind. We find how man lives from childhood to later years. We then find how a stroke of fate comes about, how one person finds another. People find each other, they exchange their inner experiences, so to speak. This exchange becomes decisive for the rest of their lives on earth and perhaps for much further afield. This is how it appears on the surface. You see it, so to speak, higher knowledge shows this as the blind see color, one sees it in its true essence. And as the blind are operated on and live into the world of color and see something completely new in it, so he whose spiritual eyes are opened in the way described today sees something completely new in what man accomplishes in his deeds. He observes how the child takes its first steps in life, how sympathy and antipathy arise, how the child grows up, how sympathy and antipathy develop, and how the human being, by continually living in sympathy and antipathy, is led to the blows of fate. Then one no longer speaks of the fact that people only found each other by chance. Then one becomes aware of the deep wisdom that lies in something like what Goethe's friend Knebel said out of mature experience. He said, addressing Goethe with this age-ripe wisdom: When you look back on your life as a human being and survey what has happened to you since childhood. It is as if we had progressed in a well-planned manner from our first childlike step and had selected through inner longing what we had come to last.

It turns out for exact clairvoyance that the child is guided and driven from the first step by sympathy and antipathy, that in fact an inner longing lives unconsciously for the ordinary consciousness, that we lead ourselves to the blow of fate that is decisive for life. By broadening this, as we look at an adult and look back at his childhood, we look back at what is revealed through the auric in man, and we see the passage of the entire human destiny through repeated earthly lives.

We become aware that just as our development as an adult is dependent on our development in childhood, so what we build for ourselves as fate is the result of a previous life on earth. And in connection with this, it becomes clear to us, especially when we become completely one with our sense organ in the way described, that we can also know how we can live when we no longer have the body, when we pass through the gate of death and discard the body. We learn to see without the body. The essence of this spiritual sense of meaning consists precisely in the fact that we see as a spirit in the spiritual world. Therefore, we learn to recognize what we will be like when we have discarded our physical body. And just as we can describe in concrete terms how we look into the inner being of a person before birth, we also learn to recognize how something develops in us that passes through the gate of death and enters the spiritual world again in order to continue life without the body.

Here we are at the point where genuine modern knowledge, which still seems quite fantastic to most people today, but which is just as precisely founded, where modern knowledge connects with religious, pious-religious life in the same way that ancient knowledge developed into religious life. If we start from such insights, which appear to be purely scientific, we arrive at the deepest experiences, at the fulfillment of the deepest longings of the human soul.

If we can suggest how something of the soul and spirit detaches itself from the physical by returning the body to the earth as a corpse, then we also become aware of how something else detaches itself from physical existence. We see how people form friendships, how they are attached to one another in love, how spiritual and soul bonds extend from heart to heart in the family. We see how this human life creates bridges and bonds from person to person. By being able to look into the spiritual world, we also really gradually learn to see how the soul detaches itself in death – however strange it may sound to people today, it can be spoken of as a truly accurate insight – we learn to look into the spiritual world in such a way that what is physical about all the bonds of friendship and love ties, in family ties, in all that has become dear to us in our life together with our fellow human beings, we learn to look at what is physical about it and at what is spiritual about it, and we learn to look at how the soul detaches itself in death, how human souls find each other again. The hand that we have extended to another, the warmth of which was the expression of what is experienced from soul to soul, the beating of the heart in joy when we feel togetherness in friendship and love, these physical accompanying facts die with our physical body. That which has been lived in you as spiritual and soul, as spiritual and soul together in friendship and love, escapes from the earthly existence, as the spiritual and soul escapes from the physical earthly body.

We do not arrive at this certainty only through religious belief, but through sure paths of knowledge, that those who were together in spirit here on earth will be reunited in spiritual companionship. We learn to recognize that what is lived out in earthly life is but the image of a spiritual vision. If we value and hold dear, we also learn to recognize how this valuing and cherishing of earthly life is only the basis for a further experience that follows when the earthly must be relinquished and the spiritual wrests itself from the earthly. And a religious feeling, a religious experience, a true piety then arises out of a truly earnestly striven-for realization. But this will give something to modern life, which, as I believe, every unbiased person must admit, already lives in the longings of many souls today, and also lives in the souls of those who do not admit it, yes, who, when one speaks of it, perhaps turn away unwillingly and as opponents; it also lives in them. For in all that is preserved for men today from ancient times of spiritual ideas, there is already something that makes him uncertain. In all that he believes in, he finds something uncertain. He longs again for knowledge of the spiritual.

One may say: What does all this concern those who do not experience it themselves? Yes, first of all, in my book 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds' and other books, I have described what needs to be done, and today anyone who has the necessary patience and energy can enter into the spiritual world to a certain extent. You can enter and check whether what I have described today is fantasy or reality. But even if you cannot do it yourself, you can still, for the benefit of today's culture and for the good of social life today and in the future, convince yourself through common sense, without being an anthroposophical spiritual researcher, of the truth of supersensible experience, which today, however, individual people must strive for just as individual people only become astronomers, just as individual people only become natural scientists. But it will be possible to gain trust, as in the old days people gained trust in hermits, in those who can justify themselves by speaking about the supersensible worlds. Just as one need not be a painter to recognize the beauty of a picture through healthy human understanding, so one need not be a spiritual researcher, but only have a straightforward, unbiased human understanding, unhampered by prejudice, to see through healthy human understanding what the anthroposophical spiritual researcher reveals to the world as the results of the spiritual path of knowledge. Today, people can let the results of spiritual science approach them with a healthy understanding of the human being, just as one lets the results of astronomy or chemistry approach, without being an astronomer or chemist oneself.

However, the spiritual researcher today must not withdraw from life. He must place himself in the midst of life. For one can only have trust in someone in whom one sees: intervenes in life and intervenes in life in the same way as other people. Today, life must prove itself in life, and anyone who has something to say about life must also put themselves into life with all their might. That is why today we need different methods of knowledge of the higher worlds from those I have described comparatively, in order to lead to understanding, as those of the older times.

But what do we gain from the fact that such knowledge of the supersensible world is spreading again? Today, if we are not immersed in the most blind materialism, we also have concepts and ideas of a spiritual world. We have them, but we are aware that we have ideas, concepts, images of the spiritual world that are dead. If we look back to older times, we do not want to conjure them up, because humanity must progress. What was experienced in social and other respects in ancient epochs cannot be more appealing to us; as free human beings, we must go beyond them. But when we look back, we must admit to ourselves as unbiased observers of history: Where the ideas originated, to which so many still cling today, there were not only abstract thoughts and ideas present, there people knew, by turning to the spiritual in thinking, feeling and willing, that the spiritual itself descended into human nature; it is a fellow-member of the world in which we live. Not only thoughts, ideas of the spiritual, these people have had according to their consciousness, but the gods, the spirits themselves walked among them. Such knowledge, such knowledge, we need again. We have beautiful, great thoughts about the spiritual, but they are thoughts of a spiritual that is alien to man, that he only visualizes in abstract thoughts.

Anthroposophy, in turn, seeks to introduce the spiritual element itself into these thoughts, so that the human being in turn becomes aware, as he was aware in the best epochs of religious creativity: not only are thoughts in the human being from the spirit, but the spirit itself walks around with us. Just as we human beings live here on earth in a physical body and carry a spiritual and soul element within us, an immortal element that escapes the physical in the way we have described today, so we walk here among the invisible beings of the spiritual world. We are here as human beings, and in turn we become aware of the spiritual world as a living entity. Such an awareness that the spiritual world is our living companion, that we are not dependent on abstract, powerless thoughts from the spirit, has a different effect. This spiritual world has a different effect on us. It transforms our knowledge into something that in turn fills us with religious, artistic, and fully human content, so that we can fully engage with all of life on earth, and indeed with all of life in the world. We get a sense of what we, as temporal human beings, mean for eternal existence. But we also receive impulses for action that are stronger and more powerful than those that are mere ideas.

And this is something that can also be observed today in social life, that people no longer carry a living spirituality within them, and therefore, when they speak of social life, they sink down into instincts and drives. In the East, we see terribly how people, because they have lost a living spirituality, develop a destructive social life that also hangs over Europe like a threatening specter. It must be conquered. But it can only be conquered if people become aware of the living spirituality that can be taken up into thought and into the will and with which man can live as with something living and not with something dead, cognizing for himself, but also as a social being among social beings, with whom he can establish, as with spiritual impulses that are given to him from the spiritual world of which he is aware, that which the serious souls hope and long for as ascending forces of our culture; our culture, which has so many forces of decline within it, but which must be defeated. What can work as a rising force in our time, what can flourish for us from the spirit that we take up in a living way, that is what the earnest souls long for and hope for today, what humanity needs in order to be able to live in the present in the right way, in order to live out of this present into the complicated future of humanity.

For the present and the future, for the progress of our culture, which we must strive for with all our might, we need the living spirit. Anthroposophy does not want to be something fantastic, but, even if it is perhaps still weak today, it wants to be a path to the living spirit. It wants to fathom the relationship between man and this living spirit, so that man may find what he needs at this moment to find the rising forces in the face of the declining forces for the present and especially for the future of humanity.