| 190. The Spiritual Background of the Social Question: Lecture III
11 Apr 1919, Dornach Translator Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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| One even becomes offensive to people, offensive in the highest degree, if one bestirs oneself in thoughts. When first I began to speak about Anthroposophy in Berlin, all sorts of people came from the most diverse directions of so-called spiritual life and wanted to see really what was happening, people who had taken part in Spiritualism, who had tried by means of all sorts of questionable mediumistic methods to experience something of the Spiritual World—all of them came there. |
| 190. The Spiritual Background of the Social Question: Lecture III
11 Apr 1919, Dornach Translator Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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Translator Unknown From the various discussions on our present-day stage of development you will have seen that, from a certain higher point of view, mankind is at the present time passing through a very important phase in its existence. If I say "at the present time" we must naturally be aware that what is in question is a very long period, and when we speak of the "present time" today we mean the epoch of the consciousness soul, into which mankind entered roughly at the middle of the 15th century and which extends over 2,000 years. We will, in turn, be succeeded by another epoch, in which an essential part of human nature, quite different from what has developed in the epoch which has just elapsed, will force its way to the surface. We always divide up the whole evolution of mankind, you see, into sequences of seven phases, whether we are fixing our eyes on longer or shorter epochs. We are now standing in the fifth epoch, and we know that in the sixth epoch the spirit-self is to take possession of mankind. The development of the Ego belongs to our epoch, although it particularly brings the consciousness- soul to expression. In passing over from the fifth to the sixth post-Atlantean epoch man passes over a sort of Rubicon (see diagram), when the whole of mankind enters into a phase of development which leads up to higher spirituality. This is a very important, significant fact. Now when one is describing conditions of evolution on a great scale, for example those which concern the whole of mankind, it is always inadequate to do so by means of the conditions of development of individual men. If one does this, one is very liable to get mere comparisons. What I am about to quote is, of course, more than a mere comparison, but you must be on your guard against taking the matter pedantically. You must take it in a broad sense. You know that when a human being enters into the supersensible world he has to pass what we call the Guardian of the Threshold. One comes into the supersensible would by passing this Threshold. You will find this passing- over depicted in my little booklet The Threshold of the Spiritual World. If you take what is depicted there, together with certain chapters of the work How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, you can get more precise representations of this. You know that when one passes over the Threshold the existing bonds in the human soul which connect thinking, feeling and willing become more loosened. Thinking, feeling and willing become in a certain sense more independent. On this side of the Threshold in a normal spiritual life, these three activities of Man are more interwoven. Regard must be had to these facts, that one has to pass over the Threshold on entering into the supersensible world, and that, in a certain sense, a kind of splitting apart of the three principal activities of human soul-life takes place, which makes thinking, feeling and willing independent. What the individual man can consciously experience while passing over into the supersensible world is being experienced by the whole of mankind in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In this fifth post-Atlantean epoch lies the Threshold through which the whole of mankind must pass.  The fact that the whole of mankind is passing through the Threshold does not at all need to come directly to the consciousness of individual men. If, for example, men were to persevere in that disposition which the majority now has, in refusing all spiritual knowledge, the whole of mankind would pass over the Threshold just the same in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, but men, for the greater part, would not be aware of the fact. That powerful soul-spiritual event which can be described as the Crossing of the Threshold can only be experienced consciously by men if they partake in that knowledge which is obtained through Spiritual Science. But event if not a single man were aware that the whole of mankind is passing over the Threshold, that in reality mankind is already, at this time, engaged in this passing, the passing would, nevertheless, take place. It does not in the least depend on whether mankind is aware of it or not. It can be that men are not aware of it. They can hinder the spreading of knowledge of this fact by their stubbornness. But the bringing to expression of the fact in the development of mankind is not thereby prevented. If you first of all take this in its abstract aspect, you will be able to say to yourselves during this fifth post-Atlantean epoch of ours, during the development of the consciousness-soul, something significant and mighty is happening to mankind. To this belongs the fact that a certain separation is taking place of the life of thinking from those of feeling and willing. Please fix your attention clearly on this fact. A separation is taking place in mankind in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, which makes independent the life of thinking, that of feeling and that of willing. The three spheres of the soul-life of the whole of mankind are becoming more independent. And this will distinguish that mankind of the future from the mankind of the past, that in the past the soul was more centralised in itself, while in the future it will feel itself to be three-membered. If a human being is alone by himself, he will certainly be able to undergo his development in this sense in which we find it intimated in the work How Does One Attain Higher Worlds?: this concerns single, individual men. When men are taken together as a people, a state, and economic organisation and so forth, when men have intercourse with one another to get to know and to satisfy their common interests, this splitting of the whole soul-life into three spheres is developing because, as has been said, behind the scenes of existence of the whole of mankind is passing through a phase of development which one can compare with the passing of the individual man through the Threshold into the supersensible world. Now there area actually men in our time who are aware of something of these events which are occurring behind the scenes of existence. But they are only aware of them, I should like to say, in the negative sense. I have often mentioned to you the name of Fritz Mauthner, who has written a Critique of Speech and a thick, two-volume Dictionary of Philosophy.1 After I have recently said something substantial to you, just about the significance of speech in human life,2 it will be interesting to you to hear how a man of the present day thinks about the soul-life of man, who, like Fritz Mauthner, directs his attention just to speech but in doing so has no inkling of the existence of Spiritual Science, who has no idea of what Spiritual Science can do for mankind. Just in the case of this kind of man of the present-day, who is entirely ignorant of spiritual-scientific matters but who has an acute brain, more intelligent than those of innumerable official learned men, one can find peculiar opinions uttered about human development when he turns his attention to the working of speech, to the human soul. On the whole, as you know well, the mankind of today is still infinitely proud of what it calls its Science. Fritz Mauthner is not at all proud of this Science. He sets no store at all by this Science. For he believes that, while they think they have a Science, they are in fact, merely muddling about with words, that they are merely relying on words, and that while they think in words, come to an understanding with words and think that they have an inner soul-life, they are, nevertheless, fundamentally only moving about in the external words. Fritz Mauthner has made this clear. Now call to mind that I recently said to you3: of the whole construction of our speech, the dead most clearly understand what we say to them in verbs, while they aware of almost nothing of what we want to say to them when wee speak to them in nouns. In this connection you can already have a feeling of what importance speech has in the real spiritual life of men. And if men cannot rid themselves of the speech-content of their so-called thinking then, when they think in nouns, they are in actual fact thinking something completely unspiritual, something which does not make its way into the Spiritual World at all. They cut themselves off from the Spiritual World as a result of thinking in terms of nouns. It is, indeed, very much the case at the present day that men are cutting themselves off from the Spiritual World by a kind of thinking in terms of nouns. Peoples which have already fallen into decadence and which experience their verbs in a very substantive way [...] are thereby setting themselves completely off from the Spiritual World. Now after Fritz Mauthner had found that, in everything which is carried on today as Science, there really exists nothing more than a sort of "making a fool of oneself" through speech, he comes to an opinion about the human soul which is remarkable in the highest degree for the present day. He says in the first place, men confront the world. While they are confronting the world and perceive it with their senses, they are really only becoming aware of those impressions which they denote by means of adjectives. People do not pay attention to this, but it is a good remark. If you see a bird flying, if you see a table standing, you are really only perceiving qualities through your senses—let us say, the colour of the bird. You are also only perceiving the qualities of the table. It is really only a self- deception, an illusion, that you still perceive a special table apart from these qualities, that you can perceive something else besides those impressions which you denote by adjectives, namely what you can denote by nouns. With his senses, man only perceives the qualities of things. When he puts these sensible qualities into words by means of adjectives, by means of the adjectives of speech, he is living sensually with the things, in an external way. And a man like Fritz Mauthner asks himself: but what can a man, who is living with the things in an external way, really receive into himself from the things? What can he reproduce about the things? He can only receive, thinks Fritz Mauthner, what is reproduced through Art, by which is understood the whole development of art from the most primitive stages of mankind to what can be indicated today as the highest stage of art. When man digests what he perceives with the senses, what he can uttered through adjectives, Art arises. For people like Fritz Mauthner, who have stripped off much that is superstitious in the present time, especially the superstitions of our schools, artistic creation, even the most primitive of all, is the only thing which man achieves creatively in union with things. But man is not satisfied with merely expressing the qualities of things by means of adjectives: he forms nouns. But with the nouns he indicates nothing at all of what approaches men in the external sense-world. Fritz Mauthner makes this especially clear, and for this reason he says in the second place: when Man arises to illusionary life by forming nouns, mysticism arises in his soul. Here he believes that he is penetrating into the essence of things, and is not aware that he really has nothing in the nouns. In this sphere—so Fritz Mauthner thinks—he can only dream. He therefore says: if you men really want to live, you must represent things artistically, for only then are you awake. If you have no mind for artistic representations, you really are not awake at all in your soul. You are dreaming if you think that you can penetrate into the essence of things further than can be done by the mere artistic forming of sensible quality- data. You fall into unreality with your mysticism, but you have a certain satisfaction in this mysticism. You dream of things by forming nouns in reference to them. It is true that, from the spiritual-scientific point of view, this is a foolish assertion, but one which is extraordinarily acute and important for the present time, because in fact a man does only experience dream illusions if he develops only those qualities which people love today in the whole world of nouns, in which he can live mystically. But the majority of men do not make this clear to themselves. However strangely it may sound, it is an extraordinarily important fact for the life of the present day that men work with the external, sensible qualities of things, with what they bring to expression in adjectives. They work on these external things by altering their qualities in some way. Then, disregarding the fact that they are working on these external things—let us say, in primitive art, people turn to the churches, to the schools, in order to learn something about the essence of things. But there they get only get an education expressed in nouns, really nothing but illusions. A man like Fritz Mauthner has a quite correct feeling for this. If one walks over a meadow and sees the green surface there, differentiated in the most varied way, interspersed with white, blue, yellow and reddish varieties of flowers, one has what is the true reality in the sensible world. But men believe that they can get hold of something beyond this. If they walk on the road, one beside the other, and the one stretches out his hand and picks something which looks yellow, he then asks the other: but what is the plant called? The other has, perhaps, learned at some time, from someone else or at school, what this plant is called, and he utters a noun. But this whole proceeding is an illusory one—it is a mere dream-activity. The true activity consists merely in seeing something yellow of a particular shape, but what is said about it in nouns is a dream-activity. Men love this dream-activity today, but in fact it has no content. Many people, who are left unsatisfied by mere occupation with the external, qualitative impressions, listen to sermons and take part in divine-services. But all that lives in their souls as a result of the sermons and church services is also, at bottom, no more that a dream, a tissue of illusions, nothing real. Men who occupy themselves more accurately with the character of speech, as Fritz Mauthner did, notice this and draw attention to the fact that in the moment when one goes beyond what is artistic or artistically handled one at once enters the sphere of mystic dreaming. Then Fritz Mauthner differentiates yet a third stage in the soul-life of men today, one which he calls Science. Today this is quite specially proud of the idea of development, of evolution. It prefers to express what it presents in verbs. But now take what I have said to you with reference to the experiencing of verbal activity, the activity of verbs. But how many people experience verbs eurhythmically today? How dry, insipid and abstract is what men experience in verbs! The German says Entwicklung. One says "evolution" if one is going to utter the same idea in speech in a different way. But one certainly has no idea at all of the reality of the words "evolution" or Entwicklung unless one is in the position concretely to carry one's feeling right through this word, inwardly to live through it.  But how many people, if they say: "the physical man of today has evolved (entwickelt) from lower organisms" think of a ball of thread is wound together and which is being unwound, which is "e-volved"! If you have a ball, the thread of which is wound up, and unwind it, you can say: "you are evolving this". This is evolution (Entwicklung). For you have the concrete representation. Now consider Ernst Haeckel, who says that man has evolved from the apes. We do not wish to speak of the substance of the matter. Do you believe that he pictures to himself that there is a ball of thread and that something has been unwound from it by the changing of the ape into a man? Is it not the case that quite certainly nothing concrete like this lies in the word which is uttered when someone says that man has evolved from the ape—otherwise he would have had to think of the "unwinding of a thread from a ball!" What does it mean when one utters the word "evolves" but really calls up no picture of it before oneself? This is the remarkable thing that men today, while they are thinking scientifically, prefer to express themselves in verbs, take refuge in verbs, but that they think nothing at all while using verbs. For if they were to make clear to themselves what they really are thinking, they would not get on at all with the object of their thoughts. Scientific concepts are really nothing else than scientific absence-of-thought. Today you can take the thickest text book, especially in political economy, and go through the concepts there—there are just as many absences-of-thought contained in them as there are concepts. Now in this way somebody like Fritz Mauthner, who has no inkling of Spiritual Science, naturally cannot look into the reasons for the absences-of-thought into which we area now looking after we have just discussed how things are connected with speech. But Fritz Mauthner feels that, in the present day scientific way of thinking, this scientific talk is nothing more than an absence-of-thought, in consequence of the boundaries of thinking in terms of speech. It is, however, a hard fact if one has to confess: in the lower school grades, where, to be sure, plenty of sins are being committed against the children, the nature of the child demands that one gives it concrete thoughts, because it still wants to have something perceptible to the senses. But then, when people pass into the Gymnasium or become high school girls, one can already expect more from them in the way of absence-of-thought, for already the Conceptional is ceasing to have a content. And when one passes right on to the University, this is the summit of the absence-of-thought with is there traded-in as science, for the only reality today consists in handling things, what is artistic, what one brings out of the laboratory, the dissecting room and so on, the technical, the artistic. But what is "thought-out"—yes, I see, to be uttering a piece of nonsense—is nothing thought-out: it is an absence-of-thought. Fritz Mauthner feels this. He therefore sets out this list of three steps, firstly Art, secondly Mysticism (which, however, is a state of dreaming), and thirdly Science, of which he says that in reality it is a learned ignorance a docta ignorantia.
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| 210. Old and New Methods of Initiation: Lecture VII
18 Feb 1922, Dornach Translated by Johanna Collis Rudolf Steiner |
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| For a Catholic priest, for instance, it is frightfully uncomfortable to entertain the thought that there might be something right about Anthroposophy. In such a case there can be no question of developing any exact thoughts. Instead, the matter is approached with all sorts of misconceptions and prejudices, and judgements are formed on the basis of these. |
| 210. Old and New Methods of Initiation: Lecture VII
18 Feb 1922, Dornach Translated by Johanna Collis Rudolf Steiner |
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Considerations such as those we embarked on yesterday are, of course, not necessarily set out for the purpose of inviting anyone to start practising what is needed for attaining super-sensible knowledge. To a certain extent this intention is, of course, also present. But the main reason is to make known what kind of higher knowledge can be attained by such means. A declaration stating that one thing or another is possible in man's development is, at the same time, a declaration about the intrinsic nature of the human being. It can be stated that the human being seeking initiation is capable of extricating his soul and spirit element from his physical body, either by the means described yesterday with reference to the ancient Mysteries, or by means suitable for today, which I am about to discuss briefly. A statement such as this shows that the element of soul and spirit is an independent entity which has its own existence over and above that of the body. So a discussion about higher knowledge is, at the same time, a revelation about the being of man; this is, in the first instance, what is important for the dissemination of anthroposophical wisdom. Yesterday I described how in the ancient Mysteries the bodily nature of man was treated so that it became able to free its soul nature in both directions. I said that the two main aspects of this in the ancient Mysteries were, on the one hand, the draught of forgetfulness, and, on the other hand, the occasioning of states of anxiety, fear, shock. The draught of forgetfulness, I said, wiped from memory everything pertaining to ordinary earthly life. But this negative effect was not the main point. The main point was that during the process of coming to Mystery knowledge the brain was actually made physically softer, as a result of which the spiritual element which is usually held off was no longer held off by the brain but allowed through, so that the pupil became aware of his soul and spirit element and knew that this had been in him even before birth, or rather, even before conception. The other aspect was the shock which caused the organism to become rigid. When the organism grows rigid it no longer absorbs the soul and spirit element in the way it usually does with regard to its expression in the will. On the one hand the rigid bodily organism withdraws from the element of soul and spirit, and on the other hand the element of soul and spirit becomes perceptible to the pupil. Through the softening of the brain the thought aspect of the soul became perceptible to the pupil of the ancient Mysteries, and through the rigidifying of the rest of the organism the will aspect became perceptible. In this way, initiation gave the pupil a perception, a picture of the element of soul and spirit within him. But this picture was dreamlike in character. For what was it that was freed on the one hand towards the thought aspect, and on the other hand towards the will aspect? It was that part which descends from realms of spirit and soul to unite with the physical, bodily nature of man. Only by taking possession of the body can it become capable of making use of the senses and of the intellect. It needs the body for these things. Without the use of the body these things remain dreamlike, they remain dull, twilit. So by receiving his detached soul and spirit element as a result of the processes described, the pupil received something dreamlike, which, however, also contained a thought element. As I said yesterday, if people were to follow these procedures today, the condition induced in consequence would be a pathological condition. For since the Mystery of Golgotha human beings have progressed in such a way that their intellect has become stronger by comparison with their earlier, more instinctive manner of knowing. This strengthening of intellectual life has come over mankind particularly since the fifteenth century. It is extremely significant that throughout the Middle Ages people still knew that in order to attain higher knowledge, or indeed to lead a higher kind of life, it was necessary to extricate the soul from the body. If Schiller had managed to write a great drama he had planned, Die Malteser (The Knights of Malta), German literature would probably have been all the richer for a work on this medieval knowledge about the super-sensible world, a work on the relationship of the Middle Ages to super-sensible matters. It is a most interesting aspect of German culture that, precisely in the years when Napoleon destroyed the Order of the Knights of Malta,1 Schiller was planning to write a drama about them, about the siege of Malta by the Turks and its defence by the grand master of the Order, de La Valette. Schiller was obviously prevented from writing this drama. He left it on one side and wrote Wallenstein (Wallenstein's Camp) instead. The Order of the Knights of Malta originated at the time of the Crusades. Schiller's drama would have shown clearly that the members of such an Order, which had the external task of working for the community and caring for the sick, considered that they could only do such work if they at the same time strove towards the attainment of a higher life. At the time when the Order of the Knights Templar and the Order of the Knights Hospitaller of St John—which later became the Order of the Knights of Malta—were founded, and indeed throughout the Middle Ages, people had the certain feeling that human beings must first transform themselves before they can undertake such tasks in the right way. This is a feeling about the nature of the human being which has become entirely lost in more recent times. This can be put down to the fact that the human intellect has grown so much more intense and strong, with the result that modern man is totally intellectual because the intellectual aspect predominates entirely. Now, in our own time, there is once more a great longing amongst mankind to overcome the intellectual aspect. Though literature and, above all, journalism, still express the opposite, nevertheless amongst the broad masses of mankind there is a longing to overcome the intellectual element. One thing that shows this especially is the fact that talks about spiritual matters are extremely well received in the widest circles. Another thing, even though it is not yet fully understood, is the way our eurythmy impresses the widest circles—not intellectually, but in what comes from the imaginative foundation of human beings. This became very obvious during my more recent lecture tours and especially the recent eurythmy tour. Eurythmy makes a very strong impression, even in circles where it cannot be understood in its deepest sense when it is seen for the first time. Nevertheless, it is felt to be something which has been called up out of the profoundest foundations of human nature, something that is more than what comes out of the intellect. Now what is this intellectual element which is so much a part of the human being today? Let me draw you another diagram. As I said yesterday, with regard to the human brain (white), we can imagine how, as a result of the draught of forgetfulness, the element of spirit and soul, which usually came to a halt before penetrating too far inwards, now penetrated the brain (red). In the pupil of the ancient Mysteries the element of spirit and soul then rose up through the brain which had been thus prepared. Compared with ancient times, let us say prior to the Mystery of Golgotha, today's intellectual faculties are as they are because the element of soul and spirit is inwardly much stronger and more intense. The people of ancient times were far less intellectual. Their soul and spirit element was not etched with such sharp lines of thought as is the case today. Intellectuals think in straight lines, which is not how people thought in more ancient times. In those days thoughts were more like pictures, they were dreamlike and softer. Now, thoughts are endowed with sharp edges, clear contours. Yet, even though the element of soul and spirit is much stronger than it used to be, human beings today are still nevertheless incapable of grasping these thoughts with their soul and spirit element.  Please do not misunderstand me, my dear friends. Human beings today are considerably stronger in their soul and spirit than were people of old. They dream less than did people of old, and their thoughts are firmer. But their thoughts would be just as dull today as they used to be, if the element of soul and spirit alone were at work in them. Even today, human beings cannot think out of their soul. It is their body which relieves them of the power of thought. Sense perceptions are received by the element of soul and spirit. But to think these sense perceptions we need the help of our body. Our body is the thinker. So nowadays the following takes place: The sense perception works on the human being; the element of soul and spirit (red, top) penetrates and mingles with the sense perception; but the body acts like a mirror and keeps on throwing back the rays of thought (arrows). By this means they become conscious. So it is the body which relieves human beings of the effort of thinking, but it does not relieve them of the effort of perceiving with their senses. So today, if human beings want to strive for initiation with regard to the thought aspect, they must turn their exercises towards strengthening their element of soul and spirit even more. We know these exercises from Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and from the second part of Occult Science. Thus will they gradually make their soul and spirit element so independent that it no longer needs the body. So let us understand one another: When we think in ordinary life today, our element of soul and spirit does participate. Above all it takes in the sense perceptions. But it would be incapable by itself of developing the thoughts which are developed today. So the body comes along and relieves us of the effort of thinking. In ordinary life we think with our body, our body is our thinking apparatus. If we pursue the exercises described in the books mentioned, our soul will be strengthened to such an extent that it would no longer need the body for thinking but would itself be able to think. This is, basically, the first step on the path towards higher knowledge; it is the first step when the soul and spirit element begins to dismiss the body as the organ that does the thinking so far as higher knowledge is concerned. And it cannot be stressed often enough that a person who ascends to higher knowledge—that is, to Imagination—must remain at his own side with his ordinary good sense, keeping a watch on himself and being his own critic. In other words, he must remain the same person he always is in ordinary life. But out of the first person that second one develops, capable now of thinking without the help of the body, instead of with it. The element of spirit and soul which revealed itself to the pupil of the ancient Mysteries came out of the body and penetrated through the brain, and as it oozed forth the pupil perceived it. Today what is perceived in initiation is a strengthened thinking which does not in any way make use of the brain. The pupil in ancient times drew what he saw in the way of spirit and soul out of his own bodily organization. Today the human being perceives the soul and spirit element, as far as thoughts are concerned, in such a way that they penetrate into him in the same way as sense perceptions penetrate into him. In taking this first upward step towards higher knowledge the human being must accustom himself to saying: I am beginning to perceive myself with regard to my eternal element of soul and spirit, for this comes in through my eyes, it comes in from outside in every way.  In a public lecture2 in the Bernoulli Hall in Basel I said: Anthroposophical spiritual science has to regard perception through the senses as its ideal. We have to take our start from perceiving with our senses. We must not return to dreamlike perception, but have to go forward to even clearer perception than that of perceiving with our senses. Our own being must come towards us, just as colours and sounds come towards our senses. I showed two things in the last diagram. Both this (top) and this (bottom), the element of soul and spirit, are supposed to be one and the same thing. And they are one and the same, but seen from different sides. When a human being descends from the world of spirit and soul to physical incarnation, his element of soul and spirit, in a way, dies from the point of view of the soul and spirit world. When a human being is conceived and prepares to be born he dies as regards the spiritual world. And when he dies here in the physical world and goes through the portal of death he is born in the spiritual world. These concepts are relative. We die in respect of the spiritual world when we are born. And when we die in respect of the physical world we are born in the spirit. Death in the physical world signifies spiritual birth, birth in the physical world signifies spiritual death. Birth and death, then, are relative concepts. There is something which makes its appearance when the soul is on its way to birth, something that would not be capable of surviving in the spiritual world; it would disintegrate in the spiritual world, and so it streams towards a physical body in order to preserve itself. In a diagram it can be depicted like this: The element of spirit and soul (red coming from the left) descends from the spirit and soul world. It arrives, you might say, in a cul-de-sac; it can go no further and is forced to equip itself with physical matter (blue). But the physical matter actually only works in the way I have described—from the brain, but not from the rest of the organism. As regards the rest of the organism the spirit and soul element does indeed travel onwards, having recovered through not being allowed to pass by the brain, through finding resistance and support in the brain. It is able, after all, to come to meet itself (red, right) throughout the rest of the organism, especially the system of limbs and metabolism. This blue part in the drawing is the head organism. Here (yellow) is the system  of limbs and metabolism; under normal conditions it absorbs the element of soul and spirit, but only to a certain extent.  As we grow up from childhood our spirit and soul element keeps making an appearance. At the moment of conception, and all through the embryonic stage in the mother's womb, the element of spirit and soul descending from the spiritual world is absorbed into matter. But because it finds a support it recovers again. Because of the shape of the embryo, at first that of the head, the element of spirit and soul finds a support (see drawing). Then the rest of the organism begins to grow, and once again the element of spirit and soul oozes through, as I have shown in the diagram. As we grow up through childhood our element of spirit and soul gradually becomes ever more independent. I have often described this in detail and also shown how at major points of transition, such as the change of teeth and puberty, the element of spirit and soul becomes increasingly independent. As we grow up our physical body recedes more and more as we attain an independent spirit and soul element. This independent element is more intense today than it was in ancient times. But it would still be incapable of thinking. As I have said, it needs the help of the body if it wants to think. If this were not there, whatever grew towards us would remain forever dreamlike. Initiates in ancient times strove to make their brain porous, so that what was then the element of spirit and soul could ooze through as it descended; in a certain way they could still see their life before birth through their softened brain. Today initiates are not concerned with that; they are concerned with what evolves during the course of life. This awakens a higher intensity with regard to the thought aspect. Initiates in ancient times would not have been capable of this. They would have been unable to take such a firm hold of the new spirit and soul element that begins to develop in the child—to begin with in an unclear way, and which later passes through the portal of death. In a way they slew the physical aspect, they paralysed it, so that the element of spirit and soul could emerge that had existed before conception. Today we take a firmer hold of what we develop—at first in a weak way—through childhood and into adulthood, strengthening and reinforcing the new element of spirit and soul that has been developing since birth. We endeavour to achieve independence of our spirit and soul element over against our physical body, as far as our thought life is concerned. The pupil in ancient times made manifest the element of spirit and soul belonging to him before birth by toning down his physical body. We today endeavour to make manifest that element of spirit and soul which develops more and more from birth onwards. But we do not make it manifest to a degree which would be necessary in order to be able to see independently into the spiritual world. This is the difference. As regards the will, the situation is as follows. The initiate in ancient times endeavoured to paralyse his will organization. This made it possible for him to perceive the element of spirit and soul he had from before his birth and which was normally absorbed by his will organization. If the body is rigid it does not absorb the element of spirit and soul, and so it is revealed independently. As modern initiates we do not do this; we do it differently. We strengthen our will by transforming the power of will in the manner described in the books already mentioned. It would be quite wrong to bring about a cataleptic condition by means of shocks or anxiety states as was the case in the ancient Mysteries. For modern man, with his highly-developed intellect, this would be something quite pathological. This must not be allowed to happen. Instead we use retrospective exercises—remembering backwards what has happened through the day—and also other will exercises to transform our will in a way which might be described as follows: Consider the human eye. What must be its constitution if we are to be able to see? A cataract comes about when the physical matter of the eye makes itself independent so that it dresses itself up in physical matter which is not transparent. The eye must be selfless, it must be selflessly incorporated in our organism if we are to use it for seeing; it must be transparent. Our organism is most certainly not transparent for our will. As I have often said, we can think that we want to raise our hand. We form the thought: I want to raise my hand. But what then happens in our organism as this thought slips over into it and performs the action—this is as obscure for us as are the events which take place between going to sleep and waking up. The next thing we see is our raised hand, another perception. We perceive something at the beginning and we perceive something at the end, but what lies in between is a state of sleep. Our will unfolds in the unconscious just as much as the events of sleep unfold in the unconscious. So we can rightly say that for ordinary consciousness our organism is as untransparent as regards perceiving how the will functions as is an eye afflicted with cataract. Of course I do not mean that the human organism is ill because of this. For ordinary, everyday life it has to be untransparent. This is its normal condition. But it cannot remain so for higher knowledge; it has to become transparent, it must become transparent for soul and spirit. This is achieved by means of the will exercises. Our organism then becomes transparent. We then no longer look down into something indeterminate when our will works, for our organism becomes as selfless as the eye, which is set selflessly into our organism so that we may perceive external objects properly. Just as the eye is in itself transparent, so our organism becomes transparent with regard to the element of spirit and soul; our whole organism becomes a sense organ. Thus, with regard to the will, we perceive the spiritual beings as objectively as we perceive external physical objects through our external eyes. Our will exercises are not aimed at making our body rigid in order to free our element of spirit and soul. They are aimed at developing the element of soul and spirit to such an extent that it becomes capable of seeing through the physical body. This is the main point. We see into the spiritual world only if we look through ourselves. We see external objects with our eyes only by looking through our eyes. And we do not see into the spiritual world directly, but only by looking through ourselves. This is the other side: development with regard to the will. The whole of evolution in recent times depends, firstly, on our developing our thinking to an extent which makes it independent of the brain, and secondly, on our developing our will to an extent that the whole human being becomes transparent. It is impossible to see into the spiritual world through a vacuum, just as it is impossible to see the world of colours without looking through the eye. We have to look through ourselves, and this is brought about by means of the will exercises. This, then, is for modern man what can be carried out by initiation. On the one hand, with regard to thinking, the element of soul and spirit can be made independent of the body, and on the other hand the material nature of the body can be overcome so that it becomes transparent for spirit and soul. Thus the element of spirit and soul has become independent through its own strength. This is the great difference between ancient and modern initiation. Ancient initiation transformed the physical body—the brain on the one hand, and the rest of the organism on the other—and, because the body was transformed in this way, the element of soul and spirit became faintly perceptible. Modern initiation transforms the element of spirit and soul, strengthening it with regard to the thought aspect on the one hand, and the will aspect on the other; thus it becomes independent of the brain, and at the same time so strong that it can see through the rest of the organism. What the initiate saw in olden times appeared in ghostly form. Whatever beings of the spiritual world were able to reveal themselves when the procedure had been completed, appeared in a ghostly form. I could say that the spiritual world was seen in etheric shapes. The great anxiety of the teachers in the ancient Mysteries was that the pupils, despite the fact that what they saw of the spiritual world was ghostly, would learn to disregard this ghostly aspect. Ever and again they warned their pupils: What you are seeing appears to be material, but you must regard it as a picture; these ghostly things that you are seeing are only pictures of the spiritual world; you must not imagine that what you see around you in a ghostly form is actual reality. In a similar way, when I draw on the blackboard the chalk marks are not reality but only an image. Of course this expression was not used in olden times, but in modern terms it is a good way of putting it. It was the great concern of the teachers in the ancient Mysteries that their pupils should regard as pictures what they saw in a dreamlike, ghostly form. In modern initiation there must be anxiety on a different score. Here, knowledge of the higher worlds can only be achieved at all by means of Imagination. Here we have to live in a world of pictures; the pictures have a picture character from the start. There is no danger of mistaking them in their picture character for anything else. But we have to learn to assess them correctly. In order to know how to relate these pictures to the spiritual reality they represent, we have to apply to them the exact thought processes we have acquired as modern human beings. We really have to think within this world of pictures in the very way we have learnt to think in the ordinary physical world. Every thoughtless glance is damaging to modern initiation. All the healthy ways of thinking we have developed as modern human beings must be brought to bear on higher knowledge. Just as we can find our way about the ordinary physical world if we can think properly, so can we only find our way about in the world of the spirit—which we enter through modern initiation—if we are able to penetrate with the thinking we have gained here in the physical world into all the knowledge we attain through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition. In my book Theosophy,3 as well as in Occult Science and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have always stated categorically that this is a characteristic of modern initiation. That is why it is so important that anyone who desires to enter into the higher worlds in a modern way should learn to think with exactitude and practise thinking with exactitude. This is not as easy as people suppose. To help you understand what I mean let me say the following: Think of something really startling: Suppose our present respected company were to be surprised tomorrow here in the Goetheanum by a visit from, say, Lloyd George4 of course this is only hypothetical, but I want to give an extreme example. If Lloyd George were to turn up here tomorrow you would all have certain thoughts and certain feelings. These thoughts and feelings would not be the result of simply observing all that went on from the moment of his appearance until the moment of his departure. In order to simply follow all this, you would not need to know that it was Lloyd George. If you did not know who it was, you would simply note whatever can be noted with regard to somebody who is entirely unknown to you. Until you learn to disregard everything you already know and feel from elsewhere about something you are observing, as long as you cannot simply follow what is going on without any of this, you are not thinking with exactitude. You would only be thinking with exactitude if you were capable—should Lloyd George really appear here tomorrow—of entertaining thoughts and feelings which applied solely to what actually went on from the moment you first noticed him to the moment when he disappeared from view. You would have to exclude every scrap of prior knowledge. You would have to exclude everything that had irritated you and everything that had pleased you about him and take in only whatever there was to take in at that moment. Only in this way is it possible to learn to think in accordance with reality. Just think how far human beings are from being able to think with exactitude as regards reality! Only let something stir in your soul and you will see what feelings, living hidden and unconscious in your soul, you allow to rise up. It is extremely difficult to confine oneself solely to what one has seen. Read a description of something and then ask: Is the writer merely describing what he saw or is he not also calling up hundreds and hundreds of prejudices, both in feeling and in thinking, which are bound up with it? Only if you are capable of restricting yourself solely to what you have seen will you be in a position gradually to attain to thinking with exactitude. It is necessary to lay aside everything we have been taught or have learned from life with regard to what we see, and follow solely what life presents to us. If you consider this and meditate on it a little you will gradually come to understand what I mean by thinking with exactitude. In ordinary life we have little opportunity under today's conditions to practise thinking with exactitude except in geometry or, over and above that, in mathematics. Here we really do restrict ourselves to what we see. We have not many prejudices about a geometric form, a triangle for instance. Here is a triangle. Let me draw a parallel line here. This angle equals that angle, and the other one is equal to this one, and the one in the middle equals itself. This is a straight angle, so all three  angles of the triangle equal a straight angle. I am simply taking account of what I see before me, without applying the colossal prejudices I would bring to bear if Lloyd George were to arrive here tomorrow and I were to know about it in advance. In saying what I have just said, I was, of course, merely endeavouring to point out that thinking with absolute exactitude is a good preparation for seeing properly in the higher spiritual world. A kind of thinking in which you have firm control of the beginning of the thought, as well as a clear view of every step of thought along the way, is necessary in order to enter the higher worlds, that is, in order enter there with understanding. Above all a clearly-defined conscientiousness in thinking is necessary, a calling-oneself-to-account about one's thoughts. Ordinary life is very remiss in this, too. In most cases, people have no interest in thinking with exactitude; they prefer to think in a way in which they can enjoy the thought and feel comfortable with it. For a Catholic priest, for instance, it is frightfully uncomfortable to entertain the thought that there might be something right about Anthroposophy. In such a case there can be no question of developing any exact thoughts. Instead, the matter is approached with all sorts of misconceptions and prejudices, and judgements are formed on the basis of these. Most things in life are decided on the basis of prejudices. Consider, for instance, what a strange impression is created sometimes when a simple attempt is made to describe something entirely objectively. Here we live in the Goetheanum. Nobody would consider me to be less of an admirer of Goethe than anyone else, and yet have I not said a good many things against Goethe? How often have I not attempted to describe Goethe from a narrow, overseeable point of view, whereas usually when Goethe is mentioned a whole host of prejudgements arises in response to his name alone. Merely to mention the name of Goethe sets up an excitement in the soul. It is impossible to approach any new phenomenon without prejudgement if one brings along a colossal collection of prejudices before even starting. For the most part these things are not taken into account, and people therefore frequently say: Oh well, we can't get any further with our project of entering the spiritual worlds! Indeed, if elementary matters are not attended to first then, naturally enough, there is no way of entering those worlds. People just feel that unreasonable demands are being made of them if it is suggested that they take account of even the most elementary things. Here is an example: In the nineties5 I happened to be in Jena when Bismarck gave a grand speech after his forced resignation. He appeared on the platform in the wake of Haeckel and Bardeleben and other Jena professors. Imagine the huge crowd in the market square in Jena. They were expected to follow Bismarck's speech as they would a speech made by someone they had previously never heard of! Such a thing is unthinkable under normal conditions. And yet for someone who really desires to undergo a kind of initiation it is certainly necessary to develop an impartiality which enables him to take everything he sees as something entirely new, however many prejudices his soul might previously have harboured in that respect. Everything must be treated as though it had arrived like a bolt from the blue. For it is a special characteristic of the spiritual world that we have to win it afresh at every moment if we desire to enter it. And to do this we have to prepare ourselves in a suitable way. It can be said that the general drift of civilization indicates that mankind is indeed headed in this direction. But for the moment this still appears in a light that is not all that pleasing, namely, in opposition to any kind of authority, and to any kind of received judgement, and so on. These things will have to be ennobled. But meanwhile mankind is indeed moving in the direction of impartiality and freedom from prejudice. But, for the moment, the more negative, the uglier sides of this are more prevalent. We must, therefore, judge the evolution of civilization with regard to the future in the very manner I have just been describing.
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| 198. Healing Factors for the Social Organism: Thirteenth Lecture
10 Jul 1920, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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| Stein's short paper, from his dissertation, how close he has come to this, through a spirited interpretation of what can be gained in the field of anthroposophy, of the character of the world of perception. In fact, there is nothing in the current physiological literature as good as this little book by Dr. |
| 198. Healing Factors for the Social Organism: Thirteenth Lecture
10 Jul 1920, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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Today I would like to present you with something specific from the whole sequence of ideas on which the considerations presented here are based, in order to expand on it tomorrow from a more general point of view. You have gathered from the reflections that we have been cultivating here for some time that, in order to revive the declining culture of the West, it is necessary to develop a true knowledge of the human being based on spiritual science. This knowledge of the human being has been prevented for a long time. In the form in which it is needed for the future development of humanity, it has been prevented, first of all, by the kind of intellectual life that emerged in the 13th and 14th centuries of the Middle Ages, and then, again, by the intellectual trend of the time from the middle of the 15th century to the present, which has moved more and more towards materialism. On the one hand, we have seen the development of a detached, unworldly, religiously colored way of looking at things, which separated the spiritual from the world, did not allow it to approach the human being and therefore left the human being unexplained in terms of his essence. One might say: In the last centuries of the fourth post-Atlantean period, in the last centuries of the Greek-Latin development up to the middle of the 15th century, humanity increasingly began to look up to a completely unworldly divine-spiritual and lost the opportunity to get to know the human itself in its divine origin. Then came the time when mankind directed its gaze to the subhuman, to what nature principles are, but which only explained everything in the world that is not human, the mineral, the vegetable, the animal , and in this way again left man unexplained, so that in a certain sense in an older time there was a looking up to a foreign spiritual, from the later time to our days a looking at a subhuman material. Man fell through in between. To consider the human being in his entirety, spiritually and soulfully, is the task of our time, and to this end we have tried to bring more and more elements into anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Today I would like to talk about how the human being initially finds himself in the world between two extremes in his inner experience. Let us dwell first on the inner experience of the human being. On the one hand, the human being experiences the world of ideas, but he experiences it in such a way that the more he immerses himself in this world of ideas, the more abstract and cold it appears to him. When man rises to the level of ideas, he feels that he cannot become inwardly warm. But he feels something quite different. He feels that in these ideas, which are then also expanded into natural laws, into world laws, he has something that, as an idea, does not include a reality, that as an idea is basically merely an image. Therefore, when faced with the world of ideas, the human being does not feel, let us say, that he wants to somehow implant his own existence in this world of ideas in a cognitive way. No matter how much the human being likes to reflect, he gradually retains the feeling, even with the most perfectly spun philosophy, that he cannot find proof of his real existence in the universe in the world of ideas. The ideas have something, as it were, rootless about them, as they are experienced in ordinary life between birth and death. That is the one, so to speak, the one pole of outer experience in ordinary existence: the abstract, sober, cold ideas, in which one cannot anchor, nor would one want to anchor, the reality of the actual human being. And finally, modern humanity has not warmed to Descartes' maxim: “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum), because no matter how much people think, they also feel: there is no getting out of thinking for the time being. The other pole of inner experience is memory. Anyone who really practices psychology, not the art of words that is often practiced as psychology at universities today, knows that these memories we have are substantially exactly the same as the fantasies we create by working at them, so to speak, only that we use the same power we apply in weaving the fantasy differently when remembering. By remembering, by cultivating our memory, we ultimately live in the same element as in the creative process, only that we build on what we have experienced through the senses or through life in general and thus shape the “phantasms” in memory in a logical way, while in the imagination we let them roam freely. This is the other pole in our inner experience. In the world of ideas, which we then also develop into laws of nature, we have the decisive awareness that our will cannot actually achieve anything through itself in the shaping of the world of ideas; it must submit to the inner logic, to the fabric of reality of the ideas. If we want to grasp reality, we cannot use our will to string one idea to another; we must adapt to the inner laws of this world of ideas, which is only pictorial and does not directly support any being. At the other pole, in phantasms, which also live in memory, we recognize very well: our will rules there – and our will is also quite appropriately there, and we notice in two respects that these phantasms, insofar as they shape memory, very much have to do with our ego, with our personality, with what our reality is. No matter how much we rail against mere fantasy or phantasmagoria, by sensing that our ego is at work in it according to its own arbitrariness, we feel at the same time that our ego, our personality, is contained in these phantasms. That is one thing. The other is: in the moment when, due to some illness, our memory continuity is disturbed, when the thread of our memory breaks somewhere, so that we cannot remember a piece of our life, in this moment the real solidity of our inner I-experience is also disturbed. So, on the one hand, our sense of self is not directly connected to our world of ideas. On the other hand, we feel that this sense of self is part of what we call our world of phantasms, although we cannot rely on this world of phantasms and, in a sense, in this phantasmal world, although we know that it is active in it, and that it cannot properly live in our consciousness if this memory is not in contact with it. The deepest riddles of life are contained in what I have now more or less abstractly discussed, and we can approach these riddles by taking together various aspects of what is scattered in our anthroposophical considerations today. The world of ideas appears abstract to us, pictorial to us! Where do we use it first? We use it when we think through what affects our senses from the outside world – colors, sounds, warmth and cold. We think through our perceptions. You will find more precise details in my books 'Truth and Science' and 'Philosophy of Freedom'. When we penetrate our perceptions with thinking, we use this world of ideas to imprint it, as it were, on our spiritual and psychological experience, on what we have as a world of perception. But we need to look a little more closely at what is actually happening. And this can be done by directing one's own soul abilities through spiritual scientific methods, as described in my books. One can actually raise the question: What would it be like if our sensory perceptions only penetrated us from the outside, if only what penetrates our eye as color, our ear as sound, our sense of warmth as heat, and so on, from the light, what would happen to us then? Let us be clear about this: when we are awake, we never let this world flow into us alone. Even if we develop only a little active thinking in ideas, we nevertheless bring, as it were, from within ourselves, to meet these sounds, colors, smells, tastes, and all sensory qualities that are rushing towards us, the counter-attack of the world of ideas that rises from within us. And anyone who does not think according to the abstract psychology of words of the present time, but who has really learned to observe, can ask themselves: How do the contents of perception that rush in from outside and the counterattack from within, the world of ideas, meet in our sense organs? If we were merely given over to the world of perceptions, then we would actually live as human beings in our etheric body and with our etheric body in an etheric world. Just imagine how you, surrendered through your eyes to the world of colors, would live in a surging, ethereally surging world of colors, how you, surrendered through your ears to the sounding world, would live in a surging sea of sound. This is not ethereal at first, but it would be ethereal if you did not provide the counterblow through ideas. The way in which sounds are for us human beings is the way they are in the etheric. We swim in the ocean of air and thus in the condensed etheric. It is therefore aetheric that is only condensed materially up to the air; the tones are only the air-shaped material expression of the etheric. And so it is with the warmth qualities, with the taste qualities, with the smell qualities, with all sensory qualities. So, imagine the counterattack of the world of ideas from within. Imagine that you live in an ethereal sea as an ethereal being. You would never come to that human consistency with which you actually stand in the world between birth and death. How can you come to this consistency? By being organized to kill this ethereal, to paralyze it. And how do we paralyze it? How do we kill it? Through the counter-attack of ideas! It is really so: the world of the content of perception in living ethericity (red) would come from outside, so to speak — if I am to draw schematically — and we would swim as etheric beings in living etheric substance, if we did not send out from within the counter-impact of the world of ideas (blue), which, as it is the world of ideas between birth and death, kills the etheric substance and allows us to perceive the world as a physical world. We would have an etheric world around us if we did not kill this etheric substance through the world of ideas, bringing it down to physical form. The world of ideas, as we have it as human beings, connects with the sensory qualities in our organs, paralyzing these sensory qualities and bringing them down to what we experience as the physical world.  That is the fact of the matter. You can see from Dr. Stein's short paper, from his dissertation, how close he has come to this, through a spirited interpretation of what can be gained in the field of anthroposophy, of the character of the world of perception. In fact, there is nothing in the current physiological literature as good as this little book by Dr. Stein regarding the physiology of the senses. So on the one hand we have this fact: that through the world of ideas we dampen the etheric surge of the sense qualities. What is the broader context of this? It is connected with the fact that the world of ideas that we experience as human beings between birth and death, as rising up from within, does not appear in its true form. People cannot see through this, that the ideas as they are experienced by them as human beings in the physical body do not have the true form of these ideas. People are still so crudely organized in present-day civilization that they would never think of saying to themselves, for example: You wake up from sleep, you have experienced a whole dream that has symbolically expressed to you what is screaming “Fire!” outside on the street. One experiences symbolically something that is quite different outside. What we have in ideas is very different from the way an external event is formed in the dream fantasy; but in the world of ideas we nevertheless also have something that is nothing other than the reflection of a completely different world. And what world is it? We have often spoken of this. It is the world that the human being has gone through before birth, or let us say before conception. This is what is shadowed here in life, up to the abstract world of ideas, experienced in a concrete way. Between death and a new birth, we live in the reality of what is only present here in the world of ideas in these shadow images of concepts, perceptions and ideas. Just as the outer world shines into the dream, so the prenatal world shines into our world between birth and death, by having an effect on the formation of ideas. But while everything is alive in what the ideas are between death and a new birth, while what is real in the world of ideas touches our own being, while we touch our own substantial being by touching ourselves, as we now touch our physical body, only that which we do not even know is cast into this earthly life from the world of ideas. But we use this shadow of our spiritual existence to make our very existence on earth possible. What do the gods give us when they send us into this world through birth? They give us the shadow image of the existence we have between death and a new birth. These shadows are the ideas, and these ideas serve us here to become physical human beings at all, otherwise we would swim as ethereal beings in the ethereal sea. We kill off the etheric life with the shadow images of our life between death and a new birth. In this way, we place the human being in the whole universe, in the cosmos. This is another point where we gain real human insight. Here we connect what we have in our present experience with eternal experience. Here we say: When you think, when you look at the outer world through your senses and dull the etheric life that takes place in your eyes and ears with your ideas so that you can bear it and be human, then you do so with the inheritance, with the after-effect of your eternal human being, as you have developed it between death and a new birth. Thus expanding human consciousness, thus pouring into the human being some of the knowledge that connects us with the whole universe — that is a need of the present. And all outer science will wither away, all outer culture will lead to decline. The death of the West will occur when people do not decide to acquire such a knowledge of the human being that, by observing the external conditions of life, reconnects the human being to the cosmos and thus reconnects the human being to the cosmos in such a way that the human being, by experiencing the world of ideas here, becomes aware of the eternal. It is precisely for this reason that this world of ideas is something so sober and abstract, because it is only the shadow image of the eternal and because it is basically intended to deadening the sense life that otherwise floods us ethereally. Thus we are connected with our life with the prenatal. The traditional religious denominations do not like to point to this prenatal, indeed they even decisively reject it. I have already touched on the fact that it is precisely the peculiarity of the present traditional religious denominations that they speak only of the after-death, not of the prenatal, of the pre-existence. They do not want to speak of this because then one cannot appeal to man's egoism, to which one appeals when one preaches to man only about the life after death; for man wants to enjoy the knowledge of the life after death between birth and death. That which imposes obligations on them for this life, because the gods have released them from the spiritual world to fulfill their mission, does not appeal to human selfishness, it appeals to human responsibility and human obligation. That is why one finds little agreement when one speaks of this prenatal life. And these religious beliefs have managed to make people sleep so much about this prenatal life that we may well have a word 'immortality', that is, we negate mortality, but we have no word 'unbirth', which would be equally justified. For just as little as we die with our spiritual-mental, just as little are we born with our spiritual-mental. We should have a word in the language that suggests this. Yes, the German language needs the word unbirthlich (unborn) as much as it needs unsterblich (immortal), for man recognizes only half of himself if he can only say the word unsterblich but not the word unbirthlich. From the inability of language we can recognize the inability to rise to spiritual heights in this realm. If we now look at the other pole, we see that man has in the phantasms, from which he also forms his memory images, something in which his I surges and surges, but often surges and surges in a chaotic way. Although man knows that his I lives in it, he does not rely on letting himself be told something about the nature of this I from the phantasms. If we look at the facts — and you can see this in the most diverse passages of our anthroposophical literature —, we have to ask ourselves: What exactly is it that develops from within us as the sum of our memory images, or, for that matter, as the sum of our imaginative images? It is nothing other than the transformation of that which, before it is metamorphosed into the power of memory or the power of imagination, lives in us as a growth force. What lives in the body as a growth force, when it emancipates itself from the physical, becomes the soul-spiritual power of memory. You know that up to the age of seven, when the change of teeth occurs, the same force appears in the human being that later forms well-contoured memories in the soul memory; it works on the body, shaping it. What ultimately drives out the teeth is the same force that lives in us as the power of imagination. In short, in what lives in us as phantasms, we have the same power that actually makes us grow, that underlies our becoming organic. We emancipate it from the organism. What does that mean? There is another significant life riddle hidden there; it says: We are, so to speak, tearing this phantasmagorical power out of our organism. If we think that we leave it inside, how would we stand in the world? Imagine that everything you detach from your organism, so to speak, so that you can control it at will with your ego, with your personality, everything would surge in your organism. You would not say: I will – but you would feel the surging of your blood that drives you to your movements; you would not say: I take up the pen – but you would feel the mechanism of your arm muscles. You would feel yourself inside, losing yourself in the world, if you did not tear the world of phantasms away from your organism. Your independence would disappear. What moves within you, what lives within you, would be only a continuation within your skin of what is outside. Man must therefore say to himself: the grass grows out of certain forces outside my skin, within my skin my spleen grows, my liver; but I would not feel any difference if I could not tear my phantasms away from what organizes within me. Out there, I do not tear something away; I take the entity in its totality. Within my skin, I tear away the world of my phantasms. In this way I come to my independence. This is how we can find the bed, the substrate for the 'I'-ness in man. That is the other pole of inner experience. While we have to kill our sensory experience through the world of ideas so that we can place ourselves in the physical world, for otherwise we would flood as spectra in the etheric sea, we have to tear away the world of phantasms from our organic events, otherwise we would simply be a link in nature like the growing tree. We would not stand there as an independent entity, emancipated from the rest of the world. In this way, we recognize ourselves as human beings in our essence within the human being. And if we look further, we say to ourselves: This personal life between birth and death is what makes us experience the ego here between birth and death. But we do not experience the whole of our inner life, that which lies within our skin; this remains a shadow of that which constitutes our being after death. Just as we are connected to the pre-birth through the pole of ideas, we are connected to the after-death through the pole of phantasms, in which the will lives. We are attached to our unborn through our world of ideas, and to our immortal through our world of phantasms, which is now a world of phantasms, so that when we pass through the gate of death, it is shaped into a regular cosmos in which we then weave, live and are after death. This is the effect of a true knowledge of the human being, of a spiritual realization of one's place in the cosmos. By answering these questions in terms of what he really recognizes in himself, in terms of what has entered from the cosmos into our inner being, the human being knows where he comes from, where he stands, and where he is going. Such knowledge is not like the knowledge that has gradually destroyed the culture of the West. Such knowledge has a different significance. This culture of the West has really been destroyed by its knowledge. Look back at the knowledge that people had until the middle of the 15th century. People today scoff at this knowledge. They consider it the childish knowledge of a childish humanity. They say to themselves: We have come so gloriously far in the present; only now do we have real chemistry, real physics, real biology, and so on. But there is a significant difference between the old knowledge, when it can only be properly understood in its truth and the rootless knowledge of the present. If you look into the old knowledge, as it existed until the middle of the 15th century, you will see: by appropriating elements of knowledge from the world, the human being always took something with him, through which he was connected to the world. Just consider: however cleverly you reflect on a tree and however much conceptual content you absorb into your soul about the tree, you are still aware that more lives in the tree than you can absorb with your ideas; the same applies to a flower and even to a crystal. If you look at the modern world, which has gradually become machine-like, then the human being is, I would say, standing in front of the object that has become completely transparent in terms of ideas. The machine we build, the mechanism we construct, we see through it. We know: the machine is built from these forces, in this and that combination. - Following the pattern of what man has built in technology, he has then also formed a world view and he now also imagines the universe as a large machine. Because we have lost reverence for the enigma in the mechanical cultural order, because the machine has become ideationally transparent to us, we need to reconnect with the human being today in order to rediscover spirituality. People who could still seek spirituality by looking for it in natural objects did not need knowledge that was brought forth from the human being as we need it. We, who have gradually torn ourselves away from the world to the point of mechanically grasping it, to the point of building a mechanized technology, need the living spiritual science in contrast to dead technology, which also impacts our thinking life. This spiritual science connects human beings to the spiritual universe, to the spiritual cosmos, in the way we have again indicated today. But we must achieve this connection in the present by truly transforming our inner being before we go to the outside world. This transformation is taken into account by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wherever it occurs in practice. We founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Little by little, people come to observe in the Waldorf School. This is what people of the modern age do; when something interests them here or there, they go and see it, then they “know” it, and under certain circumstances they can also set something like that up. That is how our lives have gradually become. But that is not what the Waldorf School is about. What it is about is the fact that, above all, one can delve into the inner life that has been introduced into the didactics and pedagogy at the Waldorf School. It is about the fact that one can grasp the relationship between the human being and the world in a completely new way. In terms of the world of ideas, people are indeed generous. Man does not want to keep his world of ideas to himself. He would like everyone to have the same ideas, that is, he would like to give his ideas to all people. Man is not so generous with regard to other goods; he prefers to keep them to himself. He is happy to give everyone his ideas. This is precisely what makes the radical difference between the spiritual world on the one hand and the economic world on the other. This difference is radically present if one only wants to look at it, and basically, if someone under the old system tends to be a teacher, it only consists of generosity with regard to the world of ideas. This is because children are even better at accepting gifts than adults, who may encounter you with criticism and resistance. It is even easier to give gifts of knowledge to children. Of course, these instincts must also be taken into account in Waldorf schools and by Waldorf teachers. But a new element is introduced that can only come from the spirit of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. That is, to what was always traditional in the earlier confessions, to the afterlife, is added the decisive view of the prenatal, so that we are clear that in the child that grows up, what comes down from the spiritual worlds is gradually revealed. We came down from the spiritual worlds at a certain time. The gods sent us into this world, and we carry out what the gods have placed in us. The children come down later; they have been in the spiritual world longer. We look to what shines out of the children's souls. They carry messages from the spiritual worlds, where they were longer than we were. A feeling that something is coming down from the spiritual world into the present, that falls into the children, that the teacher first has to unravel, that a giving, which one so gladly does, is joined by a taking - that can only come from the spirit of true spiritual science, when the idea of pre-existence is joined by the idea of post-existence in living feeling. What is new and what is poured into the pedagogy and didactics of the Waldorf school is what matters; that is to say, basically only someone who has taken up anthroposophically oriented spiritual science into his own heart and soul can understand the Waldorf school. And only then should he sit in on classes, otherwise the few hours he has sat in on classes at the Waldorf school will show him nothing but writing on the board or speaking to the children and so on. But it is so inconvenient for people in the present day to really find their way into spirituality. Basically, why should we want to find the cause of this? If we take such works, which are truly born out of a current of the old, into our hands, we can ask: What is thought about the acquisition of spirituality by the human being? I have laid out in front of me the “Textbook of Philosophy on an Aristotelian-Scholastic Basis for Use in Higher Educational Institutions and for Self-Teaching” by Alfons Lehmen, a Jesuit priest, fourth expanded and improved edition, published by Peter Beck, a Jesuit priest. The work was first published in 1899 and the fourth edition was published in 1917. I would like to read to you what is written on page 8 of the introduction about the spirit of this philosophy, which is thus genuinely Catholic philosophy. We will see in a moment that we are dealing with genuine Catholic philosophy. It says: "From what has been said, it is not difficult to see what is to be thought of the principle of the ‘absolute freedom of science’. This principle grants every individual the right to form and advocate any opinion they choose, without fear of any doctrinal authority objecting to it. But freedom is not boundless. The Church's teaching authority has the right to condemn a philosophical opinion if it contradicts a revealed teaching or logically leads to such a contradiction. We assume here that an ecclesiastical teaching authority has been established by God with the task of protecting and interpreting divine revelation. With this mandate, the right in question is directly established. For the execution of the mandate given to it, the teaching office of the Church must be able to explain the true meaning of the word of God and to designate false interpretations as false. Hence, when the opinion of a philosopher or of a school of philosophy directly or indirectly challenges the true meaning of the content of revelation, the teaching authority of the Church has the power to judge the error as such and the authority to condemn it before the public. This is quoted as the preface to a textbook on philosophy! Now, if you take the whole spirit of such a controversy, as is also the case today, what does it reveal? It reflects the whole Christian spirit that Paul meant when he spoke the word: “Not I, but the Christ in me.” As the Christ lives in us, He awakens the spiritual element in us, and it is precisely through this Christ-ization that we become able to connect man to the spiritual cosmos. We have often spoken about this meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha and we will speak about it again in more detail tomorrow. But there is one thing the Christ had to make clear to people, in order to show people how man has to gain his truth from the spirit, from the divine spirit. One need only recall another saying of Christ Jesus, and everything in this direction is given: “My kingdom is not of this world”; that is, the kingdom that the Christ wants to ignite in man must not be established in this world. It must be established by man's finding the way out of this sensual world and into the supersensible world. My kingdom is of that other world, which is not this sensual world. Who has sinned most against this Word of Christ? The one who claims that a kingdom founded on this world, a kingdom that has its center in Rome, in physical Rome, a kingdom that works with physical advice and counsel, such a physical kingdom that is entirely of this world, is the kingdom that can somehow spread the Christian truth. Since the Kingdom of Christ is not of this world, it is certainly not of Rome. We are thus pointing out that in the present time, all that is of this world, all that wants to stamp even the truth so strongly with the character of this world that it says: ” The teaching authority of the Church has the right to condemn a philosophical opinion when it is in contradiction to a revealed doctrine or when it leads consistently to such a contradiction,” that is, insofar as the Church decrees it! Therefore, such books do not appear as books, for example, by anthroposophists, that one enters with one's whole personality and only with this and says: What I have to represent, I represent out of my connection with the spirit of Truth” — but here is the title: ‘Textbook of Philosophy on an Aristotelian-Scholastic Basis’, by Alfons Lehmen S. J., fourth edition 1917. If you turn the pages, you will find: Imprimatur Friburg, Thomas, Archbishop. That is, here not a personality represents what she has to represent as a personality, but a worldly body, from which everyone who wants to publish something that is to be recognized must get the imprimatur. Here a body, which is of this world and stamps truth from this world, represents that which is established as truth! Today, we must not be cowardly, but look courageously at what true Christianity is and what alleged Christianity is. We are living in a time that has led to this catastrophe because people have been cowardly enough not to live outwards what they have more or less recognized inwardly. Our catastrophe is, in its origin, a spiritual catastrophe – as we have often said – and we will not emerge from this catastrophe until we turn to the Spirit of Truth, which, in spiritual vision, seeks that power which gives it the “Imprimatur”, not an ecclesiastical authority established by a worldly organization. |