The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday I tried to look at the essence of man and the essence of human life from the point of view that arises when human life in its completeness is placed before the soul. I said that this human life does not only flow during the waking hours, but that about one third of the entire human life flows during sleep. And initially, if we consider only the ordinary human consciousness, we stand before this human life in such a way that when we look back into our earthly existence in terms of memory, we actually only ever remember the days, those times of our life that we spend awake. We always overlook, so to speak, that which takes place in the time that we have slept through. Now, however, it must be said: For what we have to create outwardly for earth culture, earth life, our waking day life comes into consideration; but it is a question of whether only those ideas come into consideration that take place in the waking day life before the ordinary consciousness.

That this is not the case can already be taught by a superficial consideration. Only those considerations which I want to make today and in the last days of this week will show that the events which the human soul experiences from falling asleep to waking up remain hidden, but that these events are still incomparably more important for the inner being of the human being on earth than the events which take place during the day.

Today, in continuation of what was said yesterday, we first want to consider some things which again result from a comparison of the sleeping life and the ordinary waking life. The life of sleep takes place partly in complete dreamless sleep. The time we spend with our earthly life during this dreamless sleep, if it contains events for our life, is completely unconscious. From this unconsciousness, from this complete darkness of consciousness, dreams then emerge, and from dreams we either wake up to ordinary consciousness, in that earthly reality is given to us through sensory perception and through the combination of the intellect, or we also sleep from this reality through the dream into dreamless consciousness.

Let us once again make it clear to ordinary external observation what the difference is between dreaming and external sensory observation, which lives in images and concepts of the mind.

We can say that for many people dreams often contain a more vivid reality than that which takes place in waking daily life. But this is a pictorial reality that we do not follow with our will, but inevitably with our soul. And we can precisely indicate the difference between following these dream images and following the ordinary reality images of waking daily life. We do not want to get involved in particular philosophical speculations. These could also be made, but we will refrain from them now. We only want to look at what the very popular consciousness gives us. We can say that the dream images are such that we live in them. We live in the images themselves. We live with the images. In waking daytime life we naturally have color images, sound images and so on before us in the same way as in dreaming experience. But we are compelled to relate these images, be they facial images, sound images, thermal images, tactile images and so on, to a certain extent to hard reality. We see everywhere in day-to-day reality the need to come up against what the image shows us with our will, so to speak.

This is not the case with, well, let's say dream reality. Dream reality is, if I may put it crudely, to be penetrated everywhere. We can only find the point of view from which we judge the significance of dream reality within waking daily life. As long as we dream, we consider the dream to be reality, and if we were to dream our whole life, dream reality would be the only reality for us. We need not imagine that outer life would then be different from what it is now. We could imagine that individual human beings would not meet in life through their own will, but would be pushed towards each other as if automatically by natural forces or pushed towards each other by some higher being. We could also imagine that people are driven to their work, pushed by higher beings or by forces of nature. In short, everything that happens to us in waking life could happen. We don't need to know anything about it. If we were only dreaming, we would have a dream reality before us. It would not occur to us to want to somehow break through this reality to another reality. We wake up through the natural organization of our organism and then gain the viewpoint within sensory reality to judge the other relative reality value of the dream.

So it is only when we go through this life-jolt from dreaming to waking that we gain the point of view to judge the relative reality value of the dream.

But we must now ask ourselves: Is everything that we experience during daytime waking really a waking state? Well, yesterday I explained in detail that this is not the case. I explained in detail that actually only our imaginations, but these only in so far as they depict external reality, bring us into wakefulness. So that we are actually only awake in our imaginations. In our feelings we have no other reality before us with regard to the state of the soul than in dreams; only that the dream appears to us in images, the feelings in that indeterminacy with which they emerge from the depths of the life of the soul.

However, if one is not an ordinary psychologist who forges everything according to some preconceptions, but if one approaches the emotional content of the soul with impartial observation, one sees how the feelings, which, if I may put it this way, shoot up against the life of imagination, show a blurring, a fluctuating merging like the dream images. We also dream with feeling when we are awake. Only because, I would like to say, the substance in which the dream images appear is different from the substance of the feelings, we do not come to the conclusion that actually all feeling has only the meaning of reality that the dream also has. So that, while we are really imagining while awake, our imaginations are continually flooded with the indeterminate subjective contents of feeling.

Imagine vividly how, on waking, the dream images play into the waking consciousness of the day, how in the dream images everything is fluctuatingly enlarged, diminished - as the case may be - so you will be able to say to yourself: Something comes, seemingly naturally, to the human being in images, which otherwise comes to the human being in the emotional life, again blurred, subjectively enlarging, reducing things, from within.

And with regard to our volition, we are also in deep sleep when awake. We only know the intentions of our will. But these are thoughts, ideas. If I want to go for a walk, I first have the idea of going for this walk. This is my intention. Ordinary consciousness shows just as little of how this intention constantly enters my organism as it shows what passes from falling asleep to waking up. Again, I can only measure the success by the movement that I make, by the change in the aspects that appear before me when I take the walk - in other words, again by ideas. What actually takes place in the organism between the idea of the intention and the idea of success, I sleep through for the ordinary consciousness just as I sleep through what takes place from falling asleep to waking up.

So we can say that man is willing, even when he is awake, in a deep dreamless sleep, that he is sentiently dreaming, even when he is awake, and that he is only awake in a certain way when he lives in ideas. But if man really looks honestly within himself, he realizes that these ideas are only awake in relation to external nature, not in relation to their own life. In relation to his own life of imagination, man cannot come to a real wakefulness. One only has to be clear about the fact that for most people, if they cannot imagine anything external, imaginative activity no longer exists at all. But that is actually only because, especially in today's culture, man is devoted to the outside world, so that we can compare this devotion to being in a roaring, roaring world.

Imagine someone here playing the piano or some instrument, and out there the machines are roaring in a quite extraordinary way. You would hear the machines. You would hardly be able to hear the piano, especially if you were a little further away from it. Basically, it is the same with what actually lives inside the human being from the activity of thinking. But we have to use the comparison correctly. When we learn external natural science today, when we absorb all the concepts that are brought to man in the external theory of evolution, then it is basically a din of thought, a noise of thought. And this noise of thinking, which today's man indulges in, especially if he is a scientist, disturbs his finer perception of inner thinking activity. That is why he sleeps through the inner activity of thinking.

In my “Philosophy of Freedom” I referred to this pure thinking, which does not think something external, but which runs entirely within the human being. But I am also aware that with this pure thinking I have actually described something of which many of our contemporaries say that it does not exist; just as someone who hears the roar of machines out there and not the piano would say that it does not exist.

But if this is so, we can see something extraordinarily important from it, namely that we are actually only awake for thinking, insofar as it has an external natural content, but that we are at most dreaming with regard to the inner activity that we accomplish there. Moreover, we dream the feelings and sleep through the will. Thus the activity of the soul, that which lives within us, is basically not awakened when we are awake to the sense world. We continue to sleep, even during daytime waking, for our thinking activity, for feeling, for willing. We only wake up for external nature. And this waking up is something we are still developing through instruments, through experimental methods, and thereby arrive at the meaningful natural science of the present. This must come into being by reflecting the external processes in our ideas, so to speak. But we do not wake up to the same extent for our thinking, feeling and willing. And whoever can observe impartially how the dream actually differs from the outer physical-sensual world of perception, will not find the life of the soul according to thinking, feeling and willing similar to that which outer sensual perceptual impressions are, but will at most find this life of the soul similar to its most significant element, dreaming. With regard to the content of our soul, we are actually dreaming and sleeping all the time. We only wake up to the content of nature. We do not wake up at all to the content of our soul in ordinary consciousness, we sleep gently away. And as we said, the dream images are, so to speak, such that one can penetrate them, that they do not rest on a hard external reality that is subject to the will. But our soul content is also like that. It lives in images. And anyone who has the ability to compare qualities, not just quantities, will find that if he attributes pictorial character to the dream content, which initially does not point to a reality, he must also attribute pictorial character to the content of his own soul.

But then a meaningful question arises from this. If I live in dreams, I wake up to physical reality, then feel connected to physical reality as a reality by the fact that I am switched on with my will in my body, and from the point of view of this physical reality I attribute to the dream at most a relative, a completely different reality.

Can I now - so the question is - wake up to the life of the soul in the same way as I wake up to nature? Can I switch myself on, just as I switch the dream images into what is the structure of reality through my will, which I press into my body, can I also switch thinking, feeling and willing into a corresponding reality through a higher awakening? This, you see, is the question: Can I wake up to the life of the soul in the same way as I wake up to nature? The content of nature, which I experience as a human being during my earthly existence with the outer physical-sensual reality, appears to me pictorially in my dreams. But the whole life of the soul also only appears to me pictorially as in a dream. So, can I wake up to the life of the soul?

Yes, you can wake up. One can awaken by first sharpening and internalizing one's thinking through such exercises as I have given in the book “How to Gain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and in my “Secret Science”, by not merely allowing oneself to be stimulated to a thought content from outside, but by giving oneself a manageable thought content, which is not suggested to one, from within, then resting on this thought content, concentrating on such a thought content actively given to the soul from within. In this way, one gradually arrives at the real consciousness of thinking.

You do not have the consciousness of thinking at all if you only allow yourself to be stimulated for the ideas from the outside. Only if one stimulates oneself to think from within again and again through meditation, through concentration on the content of thought, then one becomes aware of oneself within thinking. Then you realize that you actually live in this thinking, but that you only don't know it when you allow yourself to be stimulated from the outside. Thinking becomes alive in this way, whereas otherwise it is abstract and dead. Thinking becomes something that does not merely exist in the shadows of thought that we receive from outside, but something that stirs inwardly like the blood of the soul. One becomes as if filled with a second humanity.

The thoughts become living forces, image forces, as I have also called them in my book “Theosophy”. And one becomes aware that one actually carries thinking within oneself as a second body, as the etheric body, as the body of formative forces; for one becomes aware that that which otherwise exists only shadowed in thoughts is actually the same forces that bring about our growth. One withdraws into the growth of one's human being, and one comes to realize how that which would otherwise proceed merely chemically as processes according to the peculiarities of the substances we absorb is processed through the same inner spiritual corporeality, etheric corporeality, which forms our thoughts, how we become a unified inner human being through these inwardly living, stimulating thoughts. In this way, we get to know a second person within ourselves.

But you also come to something else. This second person, whom we get to know, is not merely a cloud that fills the physical body in a vague way. This second person is actually in constant motion, and it is not possible to hold him in one moment. You see, it is actually like this: if we have the physical body of the human being in a certain point of life, then we can draw what we experience in this way, and what is identical with our thinking - only that in ordinary thinking we have the shadows of thoughts, not the living thoughts themselves - for a moment there (see drawing). What pervades the human being as such a second etheric or visual force body can only be captured for a moment. In the previous moment it was quite different; in the next moment it will be different again, and so on backwards and forwards.

But this leads to the conclusion, if one comes to it in the inner, contemplative experience, that this body of formative forces, which for the ordinary consciousness expresses itself as the shadowy abstract thoughts, is nothing spatial at all, that it is something that runs in time. This leads us back as a living tableau to a certain moment of our first childhood. I will now draw this schematically. \

Imagine that we are already an older person in this time; but this pictorial body of forces is not limited to one time, but leads back to our childhood. We do not view our life in terms of memories, but like a tableau all at once. What I am drawing here spatially is temporal. This now leads back to our childhood, to the time in our childhood up to which we usually remember.

There is now also this etheric body, this body of imagery. But if, through careful practice, you acquire the ability to look back to that point, then you reach the point where you learned to think as a small child. It is as if one reaches a limit with thinking, at first with ordinary thinking. For ordinary consciousness, for ordinary memory, you reach this limit. In the imagination you come further back to the other side. One looks into the soul content of the child that one had when one was not yet able to think, when one dreamed oneself into the world as a child. For it was only at a certain moment that thinking occurred, namely after speaking.

Now you can see into time, see what it was like in the soul before you had the shadowy abstract thoughts. Then we still had living thinking. And living thinking had a powerful plasticizing effect on the human brain, on the entire human organization. Later, when much of this thinking is taken into the abstract, into the dead, there are only remnants left to work on the human physical organization. While one is dreaming as a child, not yet able to think, thinking is active. Precisely because in later life one cannot look at such thinking through the noise of the world, it does not happen at all that one looks back into the thinking that was still active. Now one can look back. And then this thinking appears as the sum of the forces that actually built you up as a human being, as forces of growth, as forces of nourishment and so on. One notices how the human organization is built out of the ether of the world, for these forces lie within it. You get closer and closer to the etheric body. One knows how this etheric body is most active from the outside into the child in the very first years, when the child cannot yet think, when it still spends its life dreaming. This is how one advances to the imagination.

But something can remain. You don't realize it if you don't do the exercises I've mentioned in the books I've mentioned in the face of today's culture, which is roaring with scientificity. But then you realize that something has remained of this thinking from the other side, as you had it as a small child. This thinking, which is constructive, formative for the organism, to which one owes one's outer physical organism in the first place, this lively thinking I have called imaginative thinking in my books. But something of this imaginative thinking remains with you, and through practice you can also explore it again in later life, so that you can approach the etheric body.

I already drew attention to this yesterday, but since not everyone was there, I would like to point it out again: Take the human eye, the optic nerve of the human eye, which goes inwards, spreads out in the eye. If you go so far with the visual force body (purple-red), which essentially follows the outer physical nerve processes (yellow), that you come close to those processes (red) where the outer world is reflected through the eye, then you have perception of the outer world. And what then establishes itself in the nerve - I will now only describe this approximately, it would take too much time if I were to describe the exact process - that which establishes itself through the nerve in the body of visual forces can then always be stimulated to activity again. With the activity of the body of visual forces, the nervous system, one reaches the point where the nerves end (yellow). One does not, so to speak, penetrate the nerve as far as the processes that reflect the outer world, one only gives an impulse to that which lives in them in the formative forces body, pushes this formative forces body to where the nerve stumps end, then one receives the memory impression. The memory impression consists essentially in the fact that one reaches the nerve endings with the inner activity; while for the sensory impressions one pushes through the nerve endings and advances to the processes in the senses that are mainly caused by the blood.

There you see the living activity of the body of formative forces. But everything that you push into memory must have entered the nervous system, so it has only been there since we learned to think as a very small child. What was there before is now so - and if one has now trained the mind through exercises and looks back, one sees this in retrospect through the temporally passing second human being -: There one becomes aware of how, on the same paths on which otherwise the impressions entering from outside turn around again through the memory in the memory faculty, how that which is now also the activity of the body of formative forces comes in from behind, so to speak. We actually have these two activities all the time. But in ordinary consciousness man knows only of the one, of memory. But one has these two activities: That which stems from the external sensory perceptions, which are pushed back and can in turn be pushed forward to the nerve stumps, so that the memory images emerge; but there is also something that pours into the whole nervous system from that side, so to speak, in a human-creative way, where one does not perceive sensually with the same strength as on the front of the body.

The creative forces enter the human being from behind - of course, this is not entirely accurate - but from behind: In early childhood, when one is not yet able to think, quite powerful, later weaker. This is the thinking that is not taken from the sensory world, that is taken from the entire universe, that is taken from the world ether, that we acquire by descending from pre-earthly existence into earthly existence, that we still retain superhumanly until the moment when we learn to think. At the moment when we learn to think, we close the door, so to speak, to this active thinking, to this development of the human formative forces in the formative body, in the etheric body, according to the continuous stream of our life. Learning to think for the outer sense world means closing the gate for the universal world-forming powers of thought.

When we were children, we closed the gate for the world-forming powers of thought. But they remain in us, because we need these formative forces continuously in the first period of our lives, as long as we are growing as growth forces, and later as the processing forces for what we absorb as nourishment and so on. But we do not notice them. We only notice that which is reflected by the formative forces in the body from the impressions we have absorbed, which then reach the nerve endings in the memories.

But through exercises in concentration and meditation we can become aware of that which now forms us from the world etheric. In our self-perception we become aware of processes which also take place in time, which we have not absorbed through external impressions, but which only have a flow to one side. If we then follow these up to the point where the nerves run out, where we otherwise have the memories of external impressions, then we not only get the image of our etheric body, but the image of how we as human beings are contained within the entire world ether. We become aware of ourselves as a second human being. We learn to recognize how the etheric forces move in and out, and how everything that is everywhere outside as a universal play of world forces and moves into us is the same as the weaving of thoughts within us in the shadow image. We become aware of how the thoughts within us are the shadow image of the etheric body, how the etheric body is actually a living thing, how it is a link in the whole world ether. We have reached the first stage of supersensible knowledge.

You could say: What comes to light in thinking is actually formed as if through a mirror (see drawing). There is the coating of the mirror. Thus the mirror is directed forwards, towards the senses (red arrow). That which is taken in through the senses is reflected back and comes to consciousness when it reaches the nerve stumps. But there is also an inner activity which does not proceed in this way, but which passes through the mirror (purple arrows). If we follow this, then we have a body of image forces that is part of the image forces of the whole universe. In this way, however, we have come to the other side, so to speak, for thinking.

What is this practicing that leads to imaginative thinking? It consists in the fact that, whereas otherwise one always sees only as far as the mirror of one's inner being, to that which is reflected from within, but which is nothing other than outer nature, one now acquires the ability to see behind the mirror. There is not the same as in outer nature; there are the human-creative powers. This is the other side of thinking. Here is dead thinking, also called abstract thinking. There is living thinking. And in living thinking, thoughts are forces.

This is precisely the secret of thinking, that what one actually has within oneself in ordinary thinking is only the shadow image of what true thinking is. But true thinking pervades the world, is in the world as a power structure, not just in man.

It is not very clever at all for man to believe that thinking is only in him. It's a bit like drawing water from a stream and drinking it and then thinking: Yes, my tongue, it has continually brought forth the water. We draw water from the entire water supply of the earth. Of course, we are not under the illusion that our tongue produces the water. Only when we think do we do that. There we speak of the brain producing thought, while we merely draw from the total thought that is universally spread out in the world, which we then have within us as a sum of thoughts.

Man indulges in yet another illusion when he thinks of his imagination, an illusion that I can compare with the following. Imagine a path like the one down to Arlesheim and Dornach, such a soft path! I am now walking over it. You will see the tracks of my feet (see drawing, red). Now someone comes from Mars, has never seen anything like it on Earth, sees the tracks. He doesn't know any humans, because he comes from Mars, and it's at a time of day when no one has ever walked before. He sees the tracks. Aha, he thinks, there's the earth, there are the tracks; down there is earth, that's substance - he already knows that from Mars - down there in the earth's substance are all kinds of forces, vibrating forces, or whatever, ions or electrons, whatever it may be. These forces, they play below, and they cause the traces here, and that is why you can see the traces.

But the good inhabitant of Mars is mistaken, he does not notice that I have gone over there and that the earth has done nothing at all, that this earth down to Arlesheim is most innocent of these traces. There are no forces down there that have caused it to be configured, it came from outside.

Man also indulges in these illusions with regard to the brain. Such structures are also there, and he thinks that these structures are caused from within, and that this then appears in the thoughts. But they are traces made from the outside. We really do find a complete imprint of thought in the brain. There is nothing better to do than to follow how a person's thinking is represented down to the smallest detail in the forms of the brain. But just as little as the footprints in the earth have arisen from below, just as little have these formations of the brain arisen from anything other than impressions which the living thinking, which comes from the world ether, which lives and lives in the world ether, has dug into it.

What I am telling you now becomes a living view when one penetrates to this imaginative thinking. And just as you can grasp thinking from the other side, so to speak, you can now grasp another element that you experience somewhat earlier in normal human life, speech, also from behind, so to speak, from the other side.

Imagine that you let the air flow inwards through your lungs, through the larynx and through the other organs of speech. Through the formation of the larynx, the tongue, the palate and so on, the sounds are formed on the outside. If you follow this whole process from a certain point in the organism, you will have outward speech. But imagine that you are not tracing speech outwards from the speech organs, but you are tracing the process backwards (see drawing, red) to speech. Again, you cannot do this with ordinary consciousness, you must achieve this through exercises, that you follow the inner up to the point where the speech of earthly life forms outwards, that you follow the inner up to this point where speech first forms. This is not found in the physical and not in the etheric body, this is now found in an even higher part of the human organism than the etheric body or the body of formative forces, this is found in what I have called the astral body in my books.

What is spoken outwardly is language for earthly life. That which approaches the human being from behind, as it were, that which reaches the organs of speech, that which does not sound outwards as speech, but that which speaks inwards, that which does not emerge from the larynx outwards as earthly audible speech, but that which comes from behind, stops at the larynx, becomes mute there, instead of speech beginning there, which goes out earthly: that is spiritual speech. This is what we can call the spiritual language that is spoken to us from the spiritual world.

The impression that one receives through it, that is the inspiration, now meant in a quite rational sense. This inspiration must be brought about by withdrawing the consciousness, again through the exercises which I have described in the books I have mentioned, from being devoted to the outer words. Again, that which reaches the larynx or the organs of speech was particularly strong, and that which speaks to us from the world, whereas otherwise we speak to the world through our organs of speech - this inspiring was particularly strong in childhood, until we learned to speak. When we learned external language, these forces ceased to work in this way. They are now only present within us, and we attain them when we rise to the gift of inspiration.

Then we become aware of a third element within us, a third person who now does not belong to space and time, but who is strong and formative within us. This is the astral body. It is the astral body in which the processes are inspirations, where we experience what is actually behind our emotional life. The emotional life is the dreaming of that which flows into us in an inspiring way. And this emotional life is intimately connected with the breathing and speaking process.

Therefore, in older times, when people wanted to ascend into the spiritual world in a different way, this breathing process, the inner breathing process, was influenced by exercises. And the old yoga exercises were calculated to direct attention to that which lies behind speech. By putting artificial breathing in the place of natural breathing, one became aware of it, just as one becomes aware of something everywhere when one deviates from the ordinary.

Just think that you perceive the water in a river around you in different ways when you swim with the speed of flowing water, or when you swim slower or faster. If you swim at the speed of flowing water, you do not perceive a certain counter-pressure. If you swim more slowly, you will perceive it. Because the Indian yogi shapes his breathing in a different way than it naturally proceeds, he perceives that which is in the breathing stream as spiritual, that spiritual through which we have our astral body, and through which we in turn project into a higher world than the etheric world.

For us these exercises are the right ones - because humanity is progressing - which I have described in “How do you gain knowledge of the higher worlds?”. But you see, everywhere one can point to the concrete processes that underlie what the outside world finds so fantastic when anthroposophy speaks of man not consisting of the physical body alone, but of the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. We will talk about this next time. But these things have not been pulled out of our fingers, these things have not been speculated, but have come about through careful research, which takes the scientific method further right up to the human being, to the whole being of the human being - albeit research that is dependent on the human cognitive faculties being increased more and more.

So what does the imagination consist of, through which one penetrates into the etheric world and into the actual etheric life? This imagination consists in the fact that one not only pursues into the senses the processes that are first pushed backwards through the senses and can then be pushed forward again to the nerve endings, but that one becomes aware of that which is from the universe, from the cosmos, of the same kind as the sensory perceptions, but now belongs to the supersensible world, that one becomes aware of it as otherwise only the memories do.

If one becomes aware of the world-creating forces, as one otherwise perceives the memories, then one has imaginative being, then one experiences the etheric being of the world. If one becomes aware behind the language of that which now does not go out from the larynx to the front, but speaks in from the other side from the universe, from the cosmos, but falls silent at the larynx, then one becomes aware through inspiration of a further world to which we belong with our third human organism, with the astral body.

However, one thing becomes apparent. Here in the physical-sensory world we have on the one hand the physical processes and on the other the moral impulses that rise from within us. They stand side by side in such a way that even today theology would like the sensory world to be understood only sensually, and for the moral world there would be a completely different kind of knowledge. The moment we advance to inspiration, when we live not only in the world in which we speak from the larynx forward, but when we live in the world which speaks through our whole human being, but falls silent at the larynx, because we push the gate forward when we learn the outer language, so that we experience the outer language as a substitute for the heavenly language - the moment we live into this world, when we live into this world, which now ends at the larynx, then we experience the inspirational content of the world, then we experience the secrets of the world, and then we do not merely experience a nature which moral impulses cannot approach, but we experience a world behind the natural existence where natural impulses, natural laws and moral laws are interwoven, where they are one. We have lifted the veil and found a world in which the moral and the physical resonate with each other. And we shall see that this is the world in which we were in the pre-earthly existence before we descended to earth, into which we enter again after we have passed through the gate of death.

Anyone today who strives from within to gain knowledge of the supersensible world is usually referred to the methods and results that come from ancient times. If one then takes a closer look at what is referred to, one encounters the so-called mysteries in the development of mankind. These were places where, on the one hand, religious and cultic life was cultivated - the spiritual flowed through the religious and cultic - and, on the other hand, what we call scientific knowledge was cultivated. The spiritual flowed into this other form of human perception. And a third aspect was the artistic, which was expressed in the mysteries. On the one hand, what flowed through religion, cult and science revealed itself to the senses, to the directly perceptible view of life. And on the other hand, what flowed through art revealed itself. Basically, humanity, which strives for the supersensible, still lives today from what tradition has preserved from ancient times.

In today's lecture, I do not want to speak of these old traditions, nor of the old mysteries; but I would like to speak of the possibility of a new mystery life, of the possibility of a new path to the supersensible worlds, which in its meaning and conception can be greater than what is demanded today as scientific knowledge by the enormous progress of scientific thinking in modern times.

When we look into our own inner being, we find the following activities within it: thinking, feeling and willing. Of these soul activities, only our thinking is independent of our physicality, as long as this thinking is healthy. The person who is able to completely surrender to the character of thinking with their soul knows that there can only be independent, logical laws because healthy thinking in the natural human being is independent of the physical. It is only when a person begins to think pathologically, when something morbid enters his thinking, that he becomes dependent on the physical. But what does that mean? It means nothing other than this: as long as thinking is healthy, it remains outside the physical; it only submerges into the body, only enters the unconscious when it becomes ill.

This is not the case with our feelings, nor with our will. In its completely normal state, our feeling submerges into physicality and is hardly conscious to us as something dream-like. It dwells entirely in physicality. It is the same with our will. In our ordinary lives, we are not aware of the actual process of willing because it is deeply submerged in physicality.

If we now want to attain a higher knowledge, then we must develop abilities as human beings that are just as independent as our ordinary thinking is from this physicality, but which are capable of perceiving higher worlds than this ordinary thinking, which in the present state of humanity is only capable of perceiving and dissecting the physical-sensual environment.

In the ancient mysteries, this release of spiritual abilities from the physical organization was brought about by external processes. Let us realize, for example, what effect a sound, a tone, that moves quickly, has on our soul, a sound that startles us. This rapid impression does not allow us to immerse what is happening emotionally in our soul in the physical. And if we experience shock, fear and dread in quick succession, we are able to hold the soul qualities outside the physical. The very methodical events of the ancient mysteries consisted of freeing the soul from the physical in this way. Frightening, dramatic processes that lead the soul life to a peak and then let it fall were designed to let people experience the soul life as something that remains outside the physical, not submerged in the physical. When a person came to after such processes, it was clear to him: during such experiences he had gained insight into a world into which he would not otherwise have seen. And he called this world the “supersensible”. Such external practices, which for the most part have taken on a cultic form in the old mysteries, are no longer suitable for modern humanity. They also presuppose that those who have been led to higher knowledge isolate themselves. The mysteries were strictly segregated sites, strictly governed by priestly sages who could arrange the external performance in such a way that a person really did develop the habit of keeping their soul independent of the body and, with this independent soul, of entering the spiritual world, by undergoing the process over a period of years.

Modern man would have no trust in people who have to seek the way into the spiritual world in this way. For these methods require strict separation of the spiritual seeker from the world, and in ancient times it was the case that one only had trust in the spiritual man when he separated himself from the rest of humanity. Today, one can only have trust in the man of knowledge if he is fully involved in life, if nothing is alien to him from the full, direct human life. Therefore, the present time and the near future will require methods for the path to the spiritual world that are more inwardly soul-based, so that in pursuing these methods, man is independent of external activities and influences. I would like to speak to you about methods for the path to the spiritual world that work quietly within the soul, but which lead just as surely to knowledge of the spiritual world, that is, to initiation, as the older methods of the mysteries led to this initiation.

In my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” which has been translated into French as “Initiation,” I discuss the modern methods of initiation. This evening, I would like to speak in principle about what these modern methods of initiation are.

The beginning of the path to knowledge of spiritual worlds must be made through a special inner soul treatment of our world of thoughts, our powers of thought. In our ordinary life we devote ourselves to the outer world or to the thoughts that arise from our inner being. And however much we develop relative activity in this ordinary consciousness, in our thinking as a whole we are still passive, devoted to the sensual or the inner soul world. Indeed, modern man even places great value on remaining in this passivity of thought because he is afraid that in the moment when he forms his thoughts out of himself, he will enter the unreal, the realm of fantasy. This whole attitude towards thinking must change if man wants to enter the supersensible world. He must activate his thinking. I have named this activation of thinking 'meditation' after an old custom. It consists of our not giving ourselves over to our thinking, to anything objective, but rather, out of the inner strength of our soul life, we place a clear thought content of the simplest possible kind at the center of our consciousness and, for a certain period of time, with the exclusion of any other attention, we focus all the soul's attention on this one soul content.

When we rest actively with our whole soul on a soul content, something occurs with the soul forces that otherwise occurs with the physical forces when, for example, we use a muscle repeatedly in the course of our work. The muscle grows stronger. In the same way, the soul forces are strengthened and invigorated inwardly when the soul's activity is repeatedly directed towards one content. This content must be clear and transparent, because it must not contain anything that can come from the unconscious. We must rest entirely on this soul content with all the deliberation of which we are capable. If we take something complicated, something that may have been brought up from memory as reminiscences, something that is linked intellectually or emotionally to these old soul contents, that must not be. We therefore do best if we allow such soul content to approach us either by, let us say, taking a completely unknown book that we have certainly never read before, we open it somewhere, we read a sentence that otherwise does not interest us at all, the content of which otherwise has no interest for us. We place this sentence at the center of our consciousness and rest on it. We concentrate all our soul life on such content for a long time. It is even better if we can gain the confidence to go to someone who really has knowledge in these matters and have them give us a soul content of the characterized kind. Then, if he is already a spiritual researcher, he will have practice in simply telling us, from the mere sight of us, what kind of spiritual content is best for our meditation. If we take such a content, which is fully present in our consciousness and easy to grasp, concentrate on it, and remain in that concentration in a completely meditative way, our thinking will gradually be completely transformed. All abstractness in our thinking disappears, all coldness disappears. Thinking becomes entirely pictorial; we gain the ability to think in saturated images that become ever more saturated and colorful. Images that gradually resemble living dream images, but have a completely different soul character, enter our consciousness. We experience something that we have never experienced before in this consciousness. We experience the possibility of thinking as calmly as only the most calm logician or mathematician can think, but not in the abstract, not thinking natural laws, but thinking in images that we do not initially know where they come from.

This first step in the recognition of the supersensible may be called imaginative knowledge. We must develop these faculties if we want to enter the first sphere of the supersensible world. If such exercises are continued long enough — for some people, depending on their individuality, they take years, for some months — then the person finally comes to develop, in a sense complete, an ability to think in images, in the same way that one can think abstractly in ordinary consciousness; not dreaming in images, but being able to think in them. But then, when one has progressed far enough with such pictorial thinking, then one knows through direct awareness: this pictorial thinking does not descend into physicality, it is free and independent of physicality. One now feels oneself in this independent pictorial thinking, one lives entirely in it, one now lives in this independent pictorial thinking as one otherwise lives in one's physical body. Just as one feels in one's physical body with one's general bodily feelings, with all that one feels flowing from this body into the soul, perhaps in the form of pain or general well-being, in short, just as one feels in one's physical body, one now feels in a finer, in a second human being. One has detached this second person from this physical body and one can then say from inner experience, from direct life: I experience myself as a human being not only in the physical body, I experience myself as a human being in an etheric body, in a body of finer substantiality. One now knows from experience that a second person is contained in the first. Just as one can perceive through the physical tools of the physical body in the physical world, through the eye the colors, through the ears the sounds, so one can now - when one feels in the etheric body and knows oneself as a second person through this etheric body, which is organized in the same way as the physical body - perceive a new world that remains impenetrable to the physical body.

The first new world that one perceives is the world of one's own last life on earth. In a mighty tableau, majestically standing, everything that was in succession in time – simultaneously as in a panorama – our life on earth stands before us from the present moment in which we live, looking back to our birth. Just as things usually stand next to each other in space, so in this retrospective, the experiences we went through in the eighth year of life, for example, stand simultaneously with those we went through in the twentieth and fiftieth year of life. Time becomes like space. And what we experience there in vivid images in a majestic panorama of life, we learn to distinguish well from ordinary memory. The ordinary memory, which we bring forth in individual thoughts, ideas, images from our human nature, is weak and pale. What we see in this overview is full of content, powerfully colored, if I may use the expression. But everything also appears to us as external things appear to us. We now know, in the overview of a moment that is, however, expanding somewhat, how our life appears to a soul's gaze. And there it shows us that in every moment of our earthly existence since our birth, or rather since our conception, a spiritual-soul element has been surging and weaving within us. This spiritual-soul substance condenses into the power of growth, the power of nutrition, into all that surges and weaves in our physical body, but ultimately it is a spiritual substance that we see when we ascend to the first step of supersensible knowledge. But at the same time we learn to recognize, besides our own etheric body, the etheric world that is around us and to which our etheric body belongs; we learn to recognize how differently we relate to this etheric world - which is there like the physical world - than to the physical world. In the physical world, the thing is there, I am there. I speak of physical things as something that is strictly separate from me; I point to it. With the etheric world, I am connected through my etheric body in the same way that a limb of my organism is connected to the whole organism. And just as a limb, my finger, separates itself from my organism, so the etheric body separates itself from the etheric universe, but it is still a limb in it. We are much more one with the world that stands behind the physical world than the physical body is one with the physical world. That is the first step in the supersensible world, and that is also the first supersensible world that we reach on the way to supersensible knowledge. The level of supersensible knowledge that I have described so far does not go further than an insight into this essence of human nature, which from birth to death develops and changes as a unity, but remains permanent remain throughout our entire life on earth, while the individual substances that we absorb are absorbed by us and then expelled by us, so that we, as physical human beings, are constantly renewing ourselves, even during our life on earth. That which is the etheric body remains as a unity from birth to death.

But if we want to go beyond this first supersensible realm, then a second level of knowledge must be developed within the soul. This can be done by activating our thinking, which we had to do in order to grasp and take hold of ourselves in our etheric body, so that we can grasp and take hold of ourselves in our etheric body, and then, for the second level of knowledge, we must again remove from our consciousness everything we gain in this way through activated thinking. Once we have firmly brought a content into our soul by concentrating with all our might, we must now leave it out again. You know what state a person enters when they have to remove the usual content of their soul, the world that the senses give them: they fall asleep. Gradually, they sink into a paralysis of the soul. This must not happen and does not happen. It is difficult to remove from the soul the content that we have brought into consciousness with all our strength. It is harder to remove this content than the content of ordinary consciousness. But if we succeed in removing it, something has occurred that is otherwise never there. A complete emptiness of consciousness has occurred in the human soul life. Through what the human being has gone through in the powerful experience of his own etheric body, he becomes able to abstract, to detach himself from all the sense world and from all ordinary thinking. He lives in a higher region. If he now removes this higher region, his own life tableau, then his consciousness becomes empty and we are in that state that is significant for all higher knowledge: we are in the state of mere waking, without this waking having any soul content. We direct an intensified, strengthened consciousness out into the emptiness of the world. We do not fall asleep while performing this task, but we remain awake, but for a moment we are only confronted with nothingness. This does not last long. When we have maintained mere waking in our consciousness, real empty consciousness, then a spiritual world penetrates into us that is not our etheric body, not that which is related to it, but which is now a spiritual world that is initially very distant. The real spiritual world penetrates into mere waking and empty consciousness, but this empty consciousness and waking must be acquired through long soul exercises, which I could only describe in principle. For this suppression of all content does not succeed at the first attempt. It must be practiced again and again. Again, for some it takes years, for some, if they are predisposed to it, depending on their destiny, it takes months to achieve that they can keep their consciousness empty without lulling it to sleep, so that the spiritual world can penetrate them.

Of course, one could say that when a person enters the spiritual world, it could be mere suggestion, an autosuggestion. How can one distinguish between suggestion and what the spiritual researcher, the initiate, calls the real spiritual world? One can only distinguish between them through life. Just as one distinguishes in life between a hot potato that has been imagined and a real hot potato, because one does not get burnt by an imaginary hot potato, but one does get burnt by a real hot potato, so one experiences real facts in the spiritual world that flows into the empty consciousness. One simply knows, just as one can distinguish a real live issue from an imagined one, through life, whereby this spiritual reality is distinguished from mere autosuggestion.

In the book mentioned earlier, I referred to this second stage of supersensible knowledge as inspired knowledge, according to an old usage that need not be objected to – we need a terminology. When one arrives at inspired knowledge, one experiences oneself, as it were, still in a third man. First there is the physical human being, then the etheric human being, and now one experiences oneself in a third human being. But by experiencing oneself in this third human being, one knows oneself not only through the strengthened, imaginative thinking independently of one's physical body, but completely outside of one's physical body. One has attained the state that can be called: life in the spirit outside of the physical body. Then the human being is also able to leave the etheric body, that is, as he has erased all imaginative content from his consciousness, he can completely erase this life tableau, to which he first came, and dive into the unconscious and live outside of his physical and etheric existence. But then, when a person achieves this, the retrospective view extends further into the past than just to the birth or conception: we look into a spiritual world in which we were as spiritual beings before we descended into the physical world. We see ourselves acting and living in this spiritual world, just as we see ourselves as physical human beings in the physical world. We learn to recognize that what nature develops as our physical human germ must unite with what descends from the spiritual worlds, for that is what we now see for ourselves. And when we have attained this knowledge, through which we go completely out of our physical and etheric bodies, then, when we go back again – that is, when the moment of our beholding the spiritual world has ceased – we look into our own physical and etheric bodies and find that our earthly life is a reflection in the soul-spiritual of what we were in the spiritual-soul before we descended to earth. And precisely by entering into our body again, into the physical and etheric body, we acquire the power of a, I would say, configured, individualized vision. Now that we are experiencing more of the general spiritual world that we passed through in our pre-earthly existence outside of our physical body and our etheric body, now that we are returning to the physical and etheric body, now we are learning, not by immersing ourselves, dive into them, but I would say to dwell in them, to live in our physical and etheric bodies, now we learn to distinguish between the spiritual beings of a higher world, with whom we were united before we descended to earthly life, and how we distinguish between individual human beings here. We learn to recognize beings that never descend to earth, that never take on a physical body, divine spiritual beings. We are fellow inhabitants of the spiritual world with them before we descend to this earth. And we learn to see, precisely because we can now be alternately outside and inside our body with the spiritual and soul, we also learn to recognize how human souls are now among these higher spiritual and soul beings, among whom we were before we descended to earth, waiting to descend to earth in order to experience it in a later time than we did.

And so, through this stage of inspired knowledge, we learn to recognize that part of the eternity of the human being that is very little considered by our sense of time, even by the religious. The present does not like to look at the pre-earthly existence. It is true that man is interested in facing up to what lies beyond death, even if only through faith or tradition, because that must come first, while man is present and therefore does not need to reflect particularly on what existed before birth. He is here, after all! But whether he will also remain here is of interest to him; in his selfishness he is interested in the second part of eternity, immortality. We do not even have a word in modern languages for the other half of eternity, for the pre-earthly existence, which is as infinite in the past as immortality is in the future. For in truth, one only comes to recognize the eternity of human life when one can again point to the words that the original languages had for eternity, and which spoke just as meaningfully of unbornness as of immortality. More recent esoteric teachings on initiation again define the eternity of the human being as consisting of the unborn and the immortal. However, the unborn is needed less for selfishness than for true knowledge. People can remain with mere belief when it comes to the immortal. Only by looking at the unborn within me, not only at the immortal, can I learn to recognize the unborn, the certainty that a spiritual essence, existing before my physical formation, is my being.

When one has emerged from one's physical and Arther body in this way and feels among spiritual beings, as one previously felt among physical beings and things in the physical body, one always knows oneself as a human being, as this particular self. And so, in a sense, one only has to start the journey back, going backwards through the sequence of times into the world that one has lived through before life on earth. But if a person, when he feels himself outside his physical and etheric bodies within a spiritual world, then looks down at the world of the stars, and the stars no longer appear to him as stars, but as worlds where higher or even lower entities dwell, then everywhere where there is a star for the physical eye, there is a world sphere of other entities. When man, as he otherwise feels in the physical body on earth, now feels in the starry world in a spiritual world, then one can speak of the astral body, as one speaks of the etheric body in the first stage of supersensible knowledge, because one is now within the spirituality of the starry world.

If man wants to progress further, then he must add to imagination and to the empty consciousness a third faculty of perception, a faculty of perception that is very often not regarded as a faculty of perception by today's consciousness. It is an ability that plays the greatest conceivable role in human life, but which is not recognized as having any right to be part of knowledge. That is the human power of love: love that brings people together in such a way that they approach the being they love through the physical body or through the embodied soul or embodied spirit. By further developing this love, so that this love can reach into the experience of the etheric body first, but that one can also bring this love over into the experience in the astral body, by further developing this ability to love, we finally not only come to but we gradually develop the ability to increase our love to such an extent that we not only see other beings, but also enter into a relationship with these other spiritual beings – we ourselves then become spirit – in the same way that we have entered into a relationship with physical people on earth. Intuition gives us the opportunity to interact with spiritual beings, just as physical abilities give people the opportunity to interact with physical people on earth. But when we have developed our ability to love to such an extent that the spiritual becomes objective to us, as the sensual is objective to us in the physical world, then we not only look back into our pre-earthly spiritual existence, but we look back into earlier earth lives, and it becomes a fact that we go through the whole human life in forms of existence between birth and death and then between death and a new birth, again from birth to death, again from death to a new birth, that we live through life in successive earthly lives and in successive purely spiritual lives. We learn to look back on our previous earthly lives and see the present, current life as a repetition of these earlier ones.

But no one can arrive at the realization of what he was like, what he was, that he even existed in a past life, who has not progressed to the point of developing love to the point that he can face himself as well as another, as another being faces him. There must be a mighty difference between the ordinary power of perception and that power of perception steeped in love, through which we see our previous lives on earth as we see the life of another person in the present. When we ascend to this level, which I have called the intuitive, the truly intuitive level, we see ourselves in our mind's eye as spiritually effective beings in repeated earthly lives. Only then are we completely outside of our physical life. But he who experiences this, he knows what death is. Death now stands before him as the external, objective realization of what he himself has experienced in knowledge. Just as he has discarded his physical and etheric bodies in knowledge, so he knows that death only discards the physical and etheric bodies, and that through the gate of death man enters into a spiritual world. Belief becomes knowledge, opinion becomes insight. We are given certain, exact, vivid science by that which we otherwise call immortality in life. We look at the immortality of our own human life, at the entry of this own human being into a post-mortal life, as we look at a prenatal spiritual life, at a pre-earthly life.

But we also look at what has developed between people in physical life during physical life on earth, at the relationships that exist in the family, where one person comes into contact with another, at the relationships that are brought about through love and friendship in human life. We look at all of this. Just as the physical body of the individual falls away at death, and the soul ascends into a spiritual world, so too, when people who have been brought together on earth by their destiny have passed through the gate of death and find themselves there among higher beings, what is physical in friendship, in love relationships on earth, falls away, and a more soulful, all the more intimate life together then occurs. Modern initiation can only show how to find the path that is otherwise a matter of mere belief, through seeing, to secure for knowledge that which is immortality, the other side of eternity.

Thus man ascends through imaginative knowledge to the view of that which lives between birth and death. Man then ascends when he acquires this knowledge to his etheric body. Inspired knowledge leads man to his astral body, and through it he enters the world he passed through before his birth, which he will enter again after death. In the astral body, one becomes acquainted with the pre-earthly and post-mortal life spheres of the human being. In the ascent to intuitive knowledge, one becomes acquainted with the fourth aspect of the human being, the true, eternal self, which passes from earth-life to earth-life and which, between individual earth-lives, has purely spiritual forms of existence.

In conclusion, now that this path of modern initiation has been sketched out in a few strokes, at least in principle, let me say this: when one looks at the ancient knowledge that was acquired in the manner described at the beginning, through external cultic and other events, this knowledge was more dream-like, instinctive. And from old instinctive, dream-like knowledge, men's convictions about the supersensible, about the spiritual, have finally emerged and remained as tradition. But today one can already sense that more people than they realize have the urge, the deep longing to rediscover the paths to the spiritual worlds. Few people are the first to admit this consciously, but in the subconscious, if one is able to see such things, one can see today how numerous people are who long for mysteries again because they want to find the way to supersensible worlds.

We were only able to make a timid beginning with what we call the Goetheanum in northwestern Switzerland, where a place of mystery was created, where man was to find a way into the supersensible in a similarly modern and prudent way as he found a way into the mysteries in ancient times in a more instinctive way. Enemies have snatched this place from us. It was destroyed by arson some time ago. These things also have their eternity. The physical fire could take from us the physical building, the Goetheanum, the physical building in which until then that spiritual science had been cultivated, of which I was allowed to give you a hint. But there is also a spiritual fire. This spiritual fire does not burn physical sites, but will always let them arise again. In the new mysteries, the students of spiritual wisdom will approach their task quietly and not as noisily as in the old mysteries. They, in turn, will bring people the knowledge of the eternal in man and the world that they so urgently need. For people need this knowledge for their thinking, for their feeling and willing, so that they may come to clarity within themselves, to a life of inner harmony, and so that they may also gain strength and security for their outer life. He needs the connection with the spiritual world. And something like the spiritual school in Dornach, on the border of Switzerland towards the northwest, will awaken more and more as a longing in human souls, born out of humanity's eternal urge for the spiritual. This urge rested for a while through centuries. These centuries have brought people the magnificent external knowledge of nature. Today, man stands and knocks again at the door that leads to the supernatural, because he cannot advance his soul with knowledge of nature. That which yearns for the spiritual world, consciously in a few people but unconsciously in a large part of humanity, can only be satisfied by the modern mysteries. Anyone who is sincere about the spiritual world will see that people will definitely crave new mysteries in the future, because spirituality will only come back to people when new mysteries arise in which people can find the spirit in a more sober and enlightened way than in the old mysteries, but in which they can be led in a more developed and perfect way through the mysteries back to the spiritual, divine world and thus to the source of humanity.

Anthroposophy, as I am attempting to expound it, represents a science of initiation originating in the necessity of the day. A science of initiation has existed always. Anthroposophy springs from the same foundation as ancient science, but in the course of human evolution ages succeed each other and vary in their demands. And thus the science of initiation arising out of the modern spirit is in some respects peculiar to this age, just as there was an initiation science of the Middle Ages, of Ancient Greece and of yet older periods of human evolution.

In the course of history the whole constitution and mood and tendency of the human soul undergoes changes. The so-called science of initiation has to investigate and understand what is the eternal in the human being and in the universe. We have to consider the needs and the subconscious longings of today, and a science of initiation, an ancient science that meets those needs and longings, is what Anthroposophy strives for.

It is for that very reason that it meets with such opposition, for the present time, standing as it does in the midst of the thoughts of natural science, is filled with certain judgments and prejudices which very often prevent us from consciously recognizing the sub-conscious longings within. And yet, if we regard life without bias, we have to understand that the conceptions of external natural science do not reach to what is eternal in the human being and in the universe, when, on the other hand, we of to-day turn aside from the external thoughts of natural science and attempt to find the eternal by inner mystic contemplation, we may indeed reach to a certain amount of faith or belief, but we do not attain that clear knowledge which to-day is necessary. Between these two extremes Anthroposophy has to take its stand. So it is that Anthroposophy is so generally misunderstood, because it endeavours in accordance with modern needs to attain to a science of initiation which is exact and of the nature of knowledge, and not of the nature of vague kinds of mysticism. But to understand what are the unconscious longings and needs of our time is to understand the need for such a thing as Anthroposophy.

I am not dwelling any longer on this introductory aspect because I assume that those who are here this evening have already experienced two things: that our natural scientific thoughts—borrowed from natural science and modeled upon it—do not reach far enough to penetrate and place before us the eternal in man and in the world, and that mysticism only reaches in a vague and unclear way and therefore, in that sense, is insufficient to meet present needs. One could prove these things by a multitude of examples if one were to dwell upon them further. Anthroposophy seeks for what may be called exact clairvoyance, again to borrow a term from scientific usage; that is to say it seeks to develop a knowledge and perception of the spiritual worlds which is no less exact, no less conscientious in the sense of exact science, than is the best tendency and striving of our natural scientific age.

I shall now indicate briefly how this path is begun. We must consider in the first place what we know in the ordinary life of the soul by means of our ordinary self-knowledge as the three forces or faculties that work in the soul, viz., thinking, feeling, and willing. We know in our thoughts that we are, as it were, awake; that we are essentially wakeful human beings. It is by virtue of our thinking life, which ceases between going to sleep at night and regaining consciousness in the morning, that we are awake, and it is in our thoughts that our soul-life is filled with a kind of clarity, an inner light.

Next, as to the feeling life. The feelings are perhaps even more important for the human being (or he attaches more importance to them) than are his thoughts, but we know from our ordinary observation that the feelings of our soul-life are far less clear and filled with light than our thoughts. In a sense our thoughts, our conceptual life, play into our feelings and bring them into a certain clarity, but our feelings seem to surge up from the unknown depths of our life. They do not appear with the full clearness of our life of thought.

Then we come to the third category of our soul-life, the impulses of will. Our impulses of will come from still deeper down and are still less clear and have less light. But from what we know already in the observation of our ordinary life about thinking, feeling and willing, we realize at once how little we know of what is happening within us; for example, when an impulse of will arises making us take some action! We realize how little we know of what is happening in that life of will itself, and yet we find that thinking, feeling and willing still form a kind of unity in our soul-life. At the one pole is our conceptual life, our thinking life, we find in the way in which we join the concepts together like the links of a chain that there is an element of will at work in the process. Then passing to the other pole, the life of will—for the feeling life stands midway between the two—we find that for willing there is a certain element of conception; the concepts play into our willing life. So we see that in our soul-life there are the two poles, thinking on the one hand and willing on the other, with feeling as it were between the two, and that in these three something works in them all.

Now with the development of a higher science, the science of initiation, according to modern requirements and to Anthroposophy, it is necessary to train, develop and evolve by our own conscious activity both the conceptual thinking-life and the will-life, and it is thus that we can trace what has been called an exact clairvoyance, a modern science of initiation. In the one case we have to carry out exercises in thought, and in the other of will. So it is that the way is sought to pass through those portals which lead into the super-sensible worlds; indeed without entering those worlds in consciousness it is impossible to gain that clear knowledge we need of the eternal in the soul and in the universe.

It is while taking the exercises in thought that special attention has to be paid to what is not generally observed in ordinary life, viz., that slight additional element of will which is playing into the thinking life. This subject is dealt with in much greater detail in my book that is translated into English under the title Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It. We have above all to train that element of will which is at work in our thinking life, and in a sense have to exercise it. We have to select that very thing which passes unnoticed in the ordinary everyday thought-life, and pay less attention to what is most important to us in that life. We have to form a clear concept in our minds—its content is not of much importance; it may be either a simple or a complex concept—and then hold it as the full content of the soul to the exclusion of all else. To do this calls forth the full energy of the soul and an exercise of strong will power. The selected concept must be clearly abstracted for a certain time from everything else in the world, so that the forces of the soul are concentrated upon it alone. In the case of one individual these exercises may have to be carried on for months, in the case of another years, but sooner or later, provided they are undertaken systematically and with persistent energy, the soul-life will develop and experience an inner strengthening. What happens may be compared with the effect produced by exercising a certain muscle, by its doing the work for which it is best fitted, until it is developed to its full power. After a time has elapsed (varying, as we have seen, according to the individual) there will come a certain moment when the soul will have an experience of such strength and power that it will be shaken to its very foundations.

This experience may be described somewhat as follows: with the strengthening of the soul-life the door is opened to an entirely new way of thinking and to entirely new thoughts. It may be compared with the way in which sense impressions and thoughts are experienced in the ordinary soul-life. How do we experience sense impressions? In all sense impressions such as those of colour and sound, heat and cold, there is a certain vitality and life; they are experienced in a very living way and in the full sap of life. But in the way in which the thoughts are experienced there is something abstract, something vague and sketchy in outline; it is all grey and pale as compared with the intensity and living nature of the sense experiences. Now, when this new way of thinking has been attained, we find that the whole thought-life has become as intense and as full of life as is the ordinary soul-life in sense experiences and perceptions. It is called imaginative thinking; imaginative not in the sense of arbitrary fantasies in the mind but a pictorial, formative thought filled with inner life and possessing a quality of strength and intensity comparable with the sense impressions of the ordinary life. And with this life of imaginative thought, which is saturated with a kind of plastic vitality, there comes the realization that within us is an entirely new human being of which we never knew consciously before. The ordinary physical human being may be described as an ‘organism in space’; we see the different organs spread out in space, so to speak, and know that they are all connected together, that the heart is connected with the whole and the right hand with the left and so forth. The new human being that we come to know within us in the life of imaginative thought, however, is better described as ‘an organism in time’. Suddenly there stands before us in a single imaginative tableau or picture a memory of our whole life; in the first place to a point in early childhood; not, however, in the way in which isolated memories of the past appear more or less dully in the ordinary consciousness, but as the whole individual life laid out before us in a single moment. In this sense we, as human beings, are time-organisms. We have come to experience what in the modern science of initiation are called the ‘formative forces of the body’; not the full human being, using the term body in its extended sense, but its formative forces which in the older science of initiation are called the ether or etheric body. So we come to experience something that works within and builds up the physical organism of man; to know that when we entered this life in the physical body of a child we brought with us certain super-sensible forces direct from the super-sensible world; to know that these forces were modeling and moulding our physical organs, our minds, the circulation of our blood, even in our earliest childhood, and were gradually taking possession of the whole of our organism stage by stage. In the space-organism of the physical body the formative forces of the etheric body were building all the time. With this experience comes also an understanding of how we enter this world with certain particular faculties and qualities of character, and of how one individual will develop in quite a different direction from another. This knowledge of what works in our physical organism as a super-sensible thing brings us to the stage of the exact higher knowledge which the present age needs as its science of initiation. Thus to know the formative forces or etheric body from imaginative knowledge is the first and necessary stage we must pass through before we can learn to know what is essentially the eternal which was working in the human being in the spiritual worlds before birth.

As we have to learn to carry the power of will into our thoughts, and to strengthen that power in the holding of thoughts with the full forces of the soul, so we then have to carry out exercises in the opposite direction. We have to attain the power to extract the soul from the concept that we have learned to hold to the exclusion of everything else, so that they fill our consciousness, and then to extract ourselves from them so that our consciousness is empty of content and yet we maintain our wakefulness.

Now let us consider our ordinary life. Here our consciousness is always filled with thoughts, sense perceptions and memories, and the moment they cease to be there we tend to drop into sleep. Therefore it needs a still greater activity, a greater power, to hold the soul in full wakefulness when it is rendered empty of what has been held within it by imagination and concentration. This power is attained in the next stage if, by means of the exercises referred to earlier, we have once attained the power to hold a concept in our consciousness to the exclusion of all else. It consists in being able to detach the soul from the particular concept leaving the consciousness empty of content and yet wakeful, and once this is acquired there enters into the emptied but wakeful consciousness something which is entirely new to us, something which is not of the nature of a reflection, a memory or a conception, but a super-sensible reality. It floods into the soul, this spiritual reality of being which is in all the individual things of the world, and we see it blossoming forth from everything in nature. Into the consciousness that we have had the strength to train through meditation and concentration, and then to empty of content while keeping it fully wakeful, there streams the reality of spiritual being so that we perceive the super-sensible reality of being in the world. This is the super-sensible reality of which Anthroposophy and the science of initiation speak, not as of a vague ‘beyond’ but of something that is present, that is certainly outside the world of the senses and not perceived therein. So we may learn to penetrate into an entirely new thinking, to see that whereas our ordinary thought is making use of the time and the instruments of the physical brain and the nervous system, this new thinking is independent of the physical organism and outside it. It is thinking purely through the forces of the soul.

This new thinking is so entirely different in its conditions from our ordinary life of thought that we may say we recognize for example that in this new spiritual perception, this spiritually perceptive thought, you have something in which there is no such thing as ordinarily you have in memory. In our ordinary life of thought, if it is healthy and sound at all, there is memory. If we learn a certain thought or concept we can call it to memory again. But in this super-sensible thinking, which does not make use of the physical organism, we cannot call back to mind; we have no memory of the experiences in this new thought we have had, and if we wish to return to it we must only remember the activity of soul, the exercises and the precise path which we took in inner activity and concentration of will in order to reach that particular knowledge or super-sensible concept. We can remember the path our soul took and we can repeat that path. Then that perception, that super-sensible knowledge, is freshly again before us. In the physical world if we have seen a rose, for example, and want to have it raised before us again in all its full colour and freshness, it is no use trying to remember it. No memory will restore what we received by our sense perception; we must come before the rose again. So in the higher super-sensible thinking to have our thoughts again before us in all their freshness we must return by the path that led us to them. Let me put this to you in a personal way. When I speak on the higher knowledge it is not from reading books on the subject or from hearing about it, but as one who has attained to and experienced it. If I give a lecture I cannot do so like one who speaks on external science, who simply has his knowledge systematized in his memory and then gives it out; I must pass through the full experiences, through all those qualities of feeling and of thought, of inner life and activity, through which I had to pass before I had gained that knowledge for the first time. I must speak from the full freshness of the past to give it full freshness in the present. So different are the conditions of this higher knowledge that is attained by the science of initiation from the conditions of the ordinary knowledge which is connected with the physical instruments of the physical brain and nervous system.

There is yet another faculty of soul in which the student of the higher knowledge must train himself. It is that faculty which we know in ordinary life as presence of mind, the power to meet a circumstance that comes upon us suddenly and, without spending a long time in deliberation, to perceive the right course immediately. This faculty must be developed and enhanced, so that he who has these experiences before him in the super-sensible world, shall be able to grasp the reality of the spiritual world as it flits past. He must have the presence of mind to recognize it at once.

Now by the exercising and training of the soul to attain the power of detaching it from the content of consciousness, and of holding it empty and yet fully awake, we are led to perceive something still higher than was explained in the first part of this lecture. We are led to what is essentially the soul and spiritual being of man that had lived in the spiritual worlds before it united with the physical substance of heredity, with the physical bodily substance, for the course of this earthly life. We come to know our own eternal being, our life of soul and spirit in the spiritual worlds before birth. This second stage of knowledge is known as inspired or inspirational knowledge, as a technical term in this modern science of initiation. Just as the outer air enters our lungs through inhalation so does the spiritual world enter into our emptied consciousness. Thus we inhale, so to speak, the spiritual world as we knew it before we descended into physical earth existence. So we learned to know one facet of our being, the other side is the spiritual immortality. This will be dealt with in the third part of this lecture. We come to know in this second stage, but to know clearly, what might be defined as the ‘birthlessness’ or ‘unbornness’ (just as we speak of deathlessness or immortality) of that other side of the eternal in man, viz., that which existed in the spiritual worlds, his life in those worlds before birth. Our present age has very few conceptions, even though it may have dim conceptions through faith, about immortality, but in this second stage we learn to know our birthlessness, our eternal on the other side, our life in the spiritual reality before we entered this particular earthly life.

This higher ‘inspired knowledge’ leads us also in another direction which however can only be touched upon here, since it would take many lectures to describe it in detail. Just as we learn to know the super-sensible, the eternal reality of our own being, and to enter through inspired knowledge into our own soul and spirit before we entered this physical life, so do we learn to recognize the spirit in the world around us. This must be described in a few short sketches. If we look out upon the universe the sun appears to us as a physical ball, but when we enter into ‘inspirational knowledge’ we see it not only as the concentrated physical object that is seen by the senses. We see something that spreads through the whole universe and is accessible to us, namely, the spiritual quality and being of the sun, the sun-like being itself. What we see everywhere in mineral, in plant and animal, what is in man too as sun-force that we see physically concentrated when we look up to the sun. Though it may sound strange from the point of view of modern science, what we thus attain through inspirational knowledge is the power to perceive this sun-like being in everything, in the mineral, the plant, the animal and the human being. We learn to perceive the sun-force working in every single organ, in the heart, the liver and so forth, of the physical organism, and in everything within the whole universe that is accessible to us. This is the actual reality that is attained through the science of initiation.

And out of inspiration-knowledge we see that just as the sun does not only have a sharp outline, the same applies to the moon. The external physical moon is only the physical concentration, while the moon-substance streams through the whole universe. It is in mineral, plant and animal and every organ of man, in them the moon- and sun-substances live on. This experience comes in the second stage of inspirational knowledge, and it leads to something which is eminently practical and which already has been developed as a science, viz., the anthroposophical science of medicine. By its means we learn to see how in every human organ there is a kind of balance between the sun-force and the moon-force, the sun-substance and the moon-substance. In the former we recognize that there is something that expresses itself in the life element, in the blossom and growth of youthful forces, and in the moon-force something that expresses itself in degeneration and aging, in the thinning down of those blossoming, living forces which we can describe as a spiritual reality, as the sun-force. We recognize that there is a kind of balance and that both forces, both qualities of being which are at work permeating every single organ, are necessary; we see how that when we are sick it is because there is a preponderance, an imbalance of the one force over the other. Hence it becomes possible to exercise a healing influence on this or that organ of a sick human being by bringing to bear upon it the particular forces that are at work in some plant or mineral from the external world; the preponderance of one force at work in the sick man is counteracted by a particular plant or mineral in which the opposite spiritual force is at work. So we attain to a definite and rational science of medicine, and one that has not merely collected a number of empirical results but is built up scientifically upon rational conceptions.

I have shown how we can come to a true self-knowledge, how this can also help us in practical life. I have shown this for one field of activity, it is also possible to do the same for others. So we can say: initiation science provides on the one hand the basis for the deepest longings of the human soul; on the other, gives us what we need to work practically in the world, but deeper than through external science. This second aspect of human knowledge leads to the Spirit of the Cosmos. Higher still is that which leads us to conscious knowledge of man's passing through the gate of death.

It is only when this inspirational knowledge is attained that we come to perceive and recognize in full consciousness, the inner soul nature of our own human being. We then recognize our reality, the reality of our existence purely in soul, that is to say, independently of the body, for we recognize how we lived without a physical body in the spiritual worlds before birth.

Having thus dealt with the inspirational knowledge that brings us experience of our spiritual life before birth, I now come to the third stage of higher knowledge, that which leads us to conscious knowledge of the passing through the gate of death to immortality.

This knowledge of the soul-spiritual of man remains one-sided if there is progress only up to inspired knowledge, before birth. To obtain knowledge of life after death, the exercises to develop super-sensible knowledge must be raised to a still higher degree. This time, just as to start with, the element of will was trained and carried into the life of thought which thus became strengthened, so now it is a matter of carrying the thoughts into the life of will. For example, suppose that in the evening we set ourselves to think over the events and experiences of the day that is past, not however by beginning with the morning and following out the events in the order in which they took place, but beginning with those that were the most recent and tracing them backwards. What is the effect of this exercise of following the events of the day in the opposite way from their natural sequence? In our ordinary life and experience our thoughts all the while are being moulded and conditioned and determined by the course of our experiences in ‘time’; as they occur so do our thoughts take their impression. Whereas in those exercises whereby we pass from one event or experience to another in the reverse order we are training a strong element of will, not in the way that is determined by the external events or experiences but in the opposite way. By this means we develop strong forces of will and carry the thinking life into the willing life. It may be done by remembering a tune or melody backwards, or by following the action of a drama from the fifth Act back to the first. It may at first only be possible to pick out isolated episodes during the day, but gradually the power is attained of having the whole of the day's experiences before us in a kind of picture, passing backwards from the evening to the morning. Thus do we drive the power of thought right down into our will-life.

Further, the will-life should be trained so strongly that not only do we go about our life with those qualities and faculties and characteristics which we already had in childhood, or gained through education; we also carry on a rigorous self-education as mature men and women, especially if we set ourselves deliberately to train one or other specific quality or characteristic wherein we are lacking, and to develop along those lines, no matter if the exercises take a number of years. Thus by self-education we train ourselves to will, until we come to pass into the super-sensible world from yet another side. This may be explained as follows. Think of our soul life; what is our volitional life like? For instance, we have a certain conception, and as a result we wish, let us say, to raise our arm; a conception and then an act of will. But we have no knowledge of the way in which we raise our arm; that will-process by means of which we pass from conception to action is entirely hidden from us. We are asleep, so to speak, in our will life, and we are awake in our conceptual and inner thought-life. By way of comparison, how is it that the eye enables us to see the external world? It becomes transparent, and by thus practising a sort of self abnegation enables us to see right through it to the world. So much for the physical sense, but in a sense of soul the whole of our organism must be made transparent so that we learn to look on our physical organism in a physical sense and in a sense more transparent. Then do we come to experience the moment of death. When we have attained the power, through these exercises of the soul, of making our physical body transparent, we have before us a picture of the moment of death and we pass in conscious experience out through the gate of death and experience our immortality. This is the stage of Intuitive knowledge, the true intuitive knowledge. We know that once we have reached this stage after passing through Imagination and Inspiration, that we then belong to the universe as an eternal being, that we behold the spirit in the universe with the eternal spirit in us. That is the plateau initiation science reaches when it adapts to modern consciousness. In old times it rose in us in an atavistic, dreamlike way, but today it has to be in full consciousness, from the transitory to the eternal.

The conclusion should not be drawn that this science of initiation is only of importance to those who immediately set out to acquire these higher faculties of knowledge which have been described as imagination, inspiration and intuition. No. It is necessary for every human being, but just as it is not given to every man to become a painter so it is with this science. Everyone with a healthy and unbiased artistic sense can understand and appreciate a painting, and in the same way those who through the science of initiation have attained imaginational, inspirational and intuitional knowledge of the spiritual world, can describe that knowledge to their fellow men. And when once shown it can be understood by those who will exercise the simple unbiased faculties of thought and judgment normal to our present stage of development; such people can then take their stand upright as human beings equal to the tasks of life in the present age.

We must not meet this science of initiation with all sorts of prejudices and all sorts of confusions arising out of the prejudices and habits of thought and judgment that are external. For example, we must not confuse it with any kind of vision and hallucination, for it is outside and beyond the visionary, hallucinatory, or the mystical experiences. Imagination, inspiration and intuition are the very opposite of such. What is the characteristic of hallucinatory and visionary experience? It is that the person is completely given up to his visions and hallucinations; dependent upon them and therefore unable to maintain his full independence. But when undergoing this higher training of the soul that has been described, when we are developing this higher knowledge, imagination, inspiration and intuition in the soul, all the time there is standing beside us, fully present and fully there, the ordinary human being with his feet on the ground, his firm and sound judgment unhampered, entirely capable of exercising criticism, and with the full presence of mind of the ordinary healthy human being at the present stage. We are not completely given up and lost in these spiritual experiences but maintain full control; standing beside us is a normal and healthy human being.

Anthroposophy is actually a continuation of that modern striving for knowledge which has led to the results of natural science with its achievements of external scientific knowledge. This the anthroposophist would by no means decry, but would maintain that the results of external science need to be supplemented and completed, in the present experience and stage of the world, by a science extending into the higher spiritual worlds. In that sense it is a continuation of the true striving for knowledge of our age, and despite the triumphs of natural science it may well be said by those with a heart and an understanding of the experiences of the modern world, that the need of men for this higher knowledge is being proclaimed on every side. One may speak, for instance, of the need for higher knowledge in the religious and moral and ethical demands of the human soul. The subject that will be dealt with in the following lecture is the application of this science of initiation to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

In conclusion, just as we see the external features and physiognomy of a man confronting us but do not know him well until we become his friend, entering into his life with heart and soul until we know him from within, so it is with the natural science that we have attained so far. For it shows the external features or physiognomy of the world, and the need of the world and of humanity to-day is to gain a knowledge that not only shows those things but enters into the spiritual and soul-life of the universe. It is that which this higher knowledge of initiation reaches; something that perceives the spiritual and soul-being in all the universe and in the human being himself. In that sense and to develop to its real completion, the fundamental striving for knowledge, this science of initiation springing from the needs and from the spirit of the age in which we live and whose tasks we have to accomplish.

Dear Participants! It is my duty to extend the warmest greetings to you, who have gathered here for the spiritual work to be done during the next eight days here at the Goetheanum. You will believe me when I assure you of my sincere and heartfelt conviction that what is to be achieved here in this Goetheanum should not arise from the subjective arbitrariness of a single person or group of people, but that it should be the fulfillment of the demands placed on present-day humanity by the spirit of the time itself, for everyone who is able to hear it. And so I not only greet all of you here, but together with all of you who have come together for honest work, I would also like to greet this spirit of our time, this spirit of the present, which speaks so clearly of the forces of decline that most diverse areas of life and human work and what must be replaced by new forces from the mind, from the heart, from the souls of human beings, by new forces that can only be found if certain spiritual sources of the human inner being are tapped into in this present time: This spirit of the time, one would like to greet it through everything that can be achieved here in this Goetheanum, which itself has its origin in its demands. But there are many things standing in the way of the fulfillment of this demand at the present time. There is an enormous amount that comes from a certain kind of inner human laziness; there is much that comes from a very particular kind of human fear. And finally, there are many obstacles rooted in old habits of thinking that are difficult to overcome. It is hardly possible for anyone to offer the spirit of the modern age a completely honest greeting if they cannot come to terms with all the obstacles that lie in this mental laziness, in this spiritual fear, in these inherited habits of thinking. People have become so accustomed to the great, significant, genuine fruits of human development that have been brought forth by the last few centuries that they now find it quite uncomfortable to seek a transition to anything new.

At the end of the Middle Ages, humanity found a transition from belief in external authorities in spiritual matters to a certain inner freedom. But in the last three to four centuries, it has become dependent on something else, on all kinds of authorities that it believes to carry in its own heart, but which, in essence, are again only [external] authorities. It is the indeterminate, barely comprehensible authority of what one has been accustomed to calling “scientific” and there are other external authorities that lie in the social institutions to which the man of the present wants to submit and from which he can only escape if he escapes them out of his very own initiative, out of complete human freedom, if he outgrows them in activity, which he [but] finds so difficult to outgrow because he would prefer to continue comfortably in the way that the precepts of science or of external social institutions may suggest; he sinks, as it were, into what customary education, what customary general scientific belief, general culture have brought. He seeks, as they say, his place in the social world and does not find the very own initiative of the soul life, the complete freedom of the inner being. For the latter is uncomfortable: one cannot think in the worn-out ways, one must get out of them. This can only be done through inner courage, through inner initiative, and out of a complete sense of freedom. It is comfortable to move in well-trodden paths that have been laid out through the centuries. It is uncomfortable to seek out the demands of the spiritual in our present time from spiritual heights with inner courage, inner freedom, and inner initiative.

And the second thing, esteemed attendees, is, I would almost say, a mysterious fear that is present in humanity today. There is no other anxiety to be found in this present time; but it is as if the sum of all anxieties that could accumulate in the human mind were summed up in a common inner fear, the fear of the new, the fear of the still unknown rising forces in all areas of the soul and of the outer life that we need. But this fear does not appear in its true form. People today would be ashamed if this fear were to appear in its true form and they had to show it. This fear appears in a mask. It appears in a mask that does not seem so ugly, in a mask that is even very seductive. It occurs in such a way that the one who is actually merely afraid of the new, the unknown, in the face of the older, seeks all possible logical and intellectual reasons by which he can substantiate it. We experience it every day that the fear of the new, the unknown, actually sits in the souls of people. They come and say: What is being brought to us, that contradicts, as can be proved, the certain scientific results. Often such alleged proof appears in a tightly closed form, so that one can hardly escape its web of thoughts. But these thought webs are nothing more than the pleasing mask in which the fear of the new and the unknown is clothed. And because it is basically so nice to be able to say: You can prove something logically, all the individual reasons against the new are correct – you also mask the fact that you are afraid of the new, a fear that you would be ashamed of if you showed it in its true form. Much of what appears today with seemingly scientific justification, with seemingly strict logic, is nothing more than the mask of inner fear of the new, the unknown. Anthroposophical spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants nothing more than to lead these inner soul dangers for the further progress of the present time before the soul's eye in full deliberation.

And the third thing is to persist in those habits of thinking that have been brought up since the last three, four, five centuries, truly not from worthless sources; they have come up from what has really developed in strict science since the time of Galileo, which reached a certain culmination in the 19th century. Strict inner disciplines, disciplines of outer observation and experimentation, have come upon humanity; they have poured the spirit of their work and labor into even the lowest schools. But with that, those habits of thought have also emerged, which - because they are basically so easy to achieve, even though the methods are strict - also take root most intensely in the human soul, those habits of thought that we find everywhere today, wherever we hear any conversation about science and about faith, about art, about the progress of humanity, about social life. And these habits of thinking are most intimately connected with the outer life. Man has learned in a magnificent way to deal technically with the outer life, precisely through these habits of thinking. Therefore, these habits of thinking have also connected most intensely with egoism, with all that has brought it, this human being, into modern social life. And so these thought habits, which are only the product of the last four to five centuries, appear to today's human being as something that leads to thinking in all absoluteness itself. And while a person, once he has acquired certain habits, clings to these habits to such an extent that, out of an unconscious belief, he thinks that if he were to abandon these habits he would lose part of his own being, it is even much worse with thought habits, especially with those thought habits that have formed within humanity in the most recent epoch. Man regards what is only a habit of thinking as the actual essence of thinking itself. And since he rightly believes that thinking is connected with the deepest nature of man, he clings to these habits of thinking because he believes that they are the only correct thinking and thinks that he would lose his self, his human essence, with these habits of thinking. He believes that he would lose all ground of a world view, of a conception of life, if he abandoned these habits of thinking. And often he has not even an inkling of how much he has fallen prey to these habits of thinking of the last four to five centuries, habits of thinking that must be overcome just as the habits of thinking of older epochs have been overcome.

Only when we are confronted with the full magnitude of the task that arises from overcoming our inner psychological comfort, spiritual fear and thought habits, will we find the right path to the place where the spirit of the present wants to speak in a comprehensible language about the demands that are necessary so that the forces of decline do not carry away the victory over the forces of the rising sun. They have led humanity down into chaos. And this spirit of the time, it speaks quite clearly of the fact that people must seek a knowledge, a view of the supersensible, of the immortal, of the eternal, in contrast to the sensual, the transitory, the temporal. Especially that which has become so ingrained in the habits of the soul and in the habits of thought of modern times, my dear audience, is always connected with a human tendency towards the transitory, the temporal, the sensual.

This is not a criticism of the temporal and the transitory. Nor is it a cheap criticism of the temporal and the transitory. On the contrary, when one stands on the ground of anthroposophical spiritual science, one fully recognizes that humanity once had to go through what lies in having a world view that thoroughly deals with the transitory and the temporal. It is recognized, for example, that the greatness of the 19th century is based on the fact that man learned to see through, with the strictest views, the essence of the transitory, the essence of the temporal. But it would be a sad state of affairs for humanity if, in turn, the eternal, the imperishable, were not seen above the transitory and the temporal. But this eternal, this imperishable, cannot be seen with those powers of the soul that have been of great, great service to research in the transitory and in the temporal. These powers of the soul, the intellectual powers, the powers of abstract thinking and experimental research, have been developed to their highest level in the last few centuries. These last centuries have indeed developed in man everything that could lead to the feeling of freedom, to the awakening of the inner human personality values. But that which one develops in one's own human soul when one only draws near to the external transience and the temporal being does not penetrate inwardly to the full human being, and so, in a certain way, in his latest ascent, man has lost precisely that which is connected with his own human being.

It is easy to object: So the anthroposophical spiritual science, the Goetheanism, leads away from the proven, outwardly practical world, into dizzying, bottomless cloud cuckoo lands, into that which wants to rise to fantastic heights away from the strict methodology of the last centuries. One wants to forget and oversleep here – one could object – in this Goetheanum everything that the Galilei era has brought, and one wants to dream oneself back into the eternal, for example in a Platonic way. They want to enthuse about the eternal and the immortal in Plato's world of ideas because they lack the patience to engage with the achievements of the last few centuries in relation to the real external world. But if one only really got to know it without prejudice, this anthroposophy, as it is cultivated here in this Goetheanum, one would find that one does not want to flee here with a careless skipping of Galileism into a dreamt-up Platonic world, but that one wants everything here that man can achieve in truly understanding this outer, transitory sense world, in terms of the practice of outer life, that one wants to take up Galileism fully in order to carry its rigor and discipline to the heights to which Plato was allowed to ascend without this modern culture. Plato lived in his world of ideas, which was a living one for him, and he could do so because of the limitations of his epoch, before the age of Galileism. We would have to descend into the abyss, into enthusiasm, into fantasy, if we were to enter the Platonic world of heights in a dreamy state without the preliminary stages of what the times of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and Giordano Bruno brought us. Therefore, if one only gets to know what the anthroposophy meant here intends, then one will not reproach it for wanting to turn away from life in a fanciful, enthusiastic way into a Platonic world of ideas. No, it wants to draw the forces full of reality from the spirit in order to penetrate into real practical life. And just as the anthroposophy in question does not want to dream and fantasize about the outside world, it also does not want to lead to the inner life of the human being in such a way that the human being as a mystic becomes a hermit of life, that he wants to steal away like a hermit from all that is his task in real, outer, practical life.

Anthroposophy knows very well that methods such as those cultivated in India, such as the yoga method, have had their time; it knows very well that anyone who, with a complete misunderstanding of the spirit of modern times, wants to return to old mystical systems, that such a person is striving for something that should be avoided here. He strives for a certain mysticism of which nothing else can be said than the following.

My dear audience, there is a superficiality towards the outer world that never wants to go into the real facts, that does not want to follow the finer gradations of the facts, that, I might say, wants to enjoy life arbitrarily on the outside in large meshes. There is such a superficiality on the outside; but there is also a superficiality of the heart. This is the superficiality that, without thoroughly experiencing the inner human secrets, only ever speaks of withdrawing from the perception of the outside world, of cultivating the innermost. Such mystical striving, as it is making its way into many circles today, does not correspond to the demands of the spirit of the time, but rather adds to the external superficiality the superficiality of the heart. And in many circles that today think of themselves as particularly mystically exalted, nothing lives but that mysticism which is inner soul superficiality. With this soul superficiality one does not penetrate into the eternal secrets of life. One can only penetrate them if one has the patience to truly awaken the forces slumbering in the soul or at least to engage intellectually with what the forces slumbering in the soul can find from stage to stage. Only by overcoming the superficiality of the heart, by overcoming this superficial mysticism, lies the possibility of finding those powers of the soul that lead upwards in the right way, from the temporal, from the transitory to the eternal, to the everlasting. But when grasped in this way, it is truly capable of having a fruitful effect on the most diverse areas of today's life. And we need this fertilization. We have a magnificent science that has taken hold of the external course of things out of intellectualism and external observation. We need to advance from this science of the senses to a spiritual science, which is carried out in the same way as the pursuit of sensory science. Just as if it always had to give account before the strict methods and disciplines of the outer sensory science, the anthroposophical spiritual science meant here would like to fertilize today's scientific life in general.

Other branches of life sometimes show an impossibility of being fertilized by ordinary science in its present form. The intellectualism and abstract concepts that have been brought forth in more recent times are avoided by the artist; the artist believes that the more elementary power and force of his artistic experience would be taken from him if the mildew of science were to be poured into his heart, if he were to try to deepen his artistic experience with the help of today's science. And so many people say: Yes, spiritual science also wants to fertilize artistic life, but we understand how destructively scientific life affects artistic life. — People only say this until they realize how closely related artistic experience is to what the soul of a true spiritual scientist must go through to enter the realms where spirit and soul truly live. On this path one must not reflect, one must create, one must connect with that which lives and abides in the essence of things, which constitutes the secret of things. And soul-forces are released from the innermost being with the same vividness, with the same directly effective presence as they have in the artistic experience. And when one first becomes acquainted with the extraordinarily living, creative and formative side of spiritual science, then one will realize that this spiritual science does not bring abstract concepts, but directly inner impulses of life, which again to those spiritual regions from which the artist must draw if he does not want to imitate mere external nature in a superfluous way and thereby fall prey to a superfluous naturalism. What the spiritual scientist has to go through is intimately related to what the artist has to go through. And what the artist forms in his imagination, the spiritual researcher forms in supersensible intuition. These are two different paths that can lead to a good understanding, as many people in the past have understood each other. Those, for example, who, out of a deep intuitive perception of the secrets of the world, have presented something before their soul, as it then lives through Raphael in the Sistine Madonna, as it lives in Leonardo's Last Supper. Again, we have to reach into regions of spiritual life, but in the sense of the newer time, the modern time, so that we also have something in the artistic field that is not just an imitation of nature. Because imitation of nature, that is not possible for anyone. Whatever one wants to imitate in nature, nature can always do better. Only then can one find the way to art, when one finds the way to the spirit.

And if we look at another area in which the newer life has led to a real inner tragedy for many individual human personalities, we see how, in the religious sphere, the depth needed for a real religious experience has been lost. Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, is not meant to be a new foundation of religion! To say that is to defame it. For what we need is not a new religion; what we need is a deepening of the religious impulses in the human heart, in the human soul, but this can be found by man again finding the paths to the spiritual essence of the world. Just as science and art can be fertilized by the anthroposophical spiritual science meant here, so religious life can be deepened through it. And I believe I need not speak of it at all for all those who, looking beyond the immediate everyday, see how we have come into a social existence in the civilized world that is truly threatening, with every year growing larger, that is already horrifying enough today. All sorts of speculations as to how this or that institution should be set up, what should be done from state to state, from nation to nation, have certainly not been lacking in the old ways of thinking. There has been much talk about such things, but nowhere is there any prospect that social chaos might be resolved in a better light.

Does this not indicate how necessary it is for individuals to find their way to the social life, those individuals who find their way to the innermost part of the human soul, from which understanding can be found for what is necessary between human and human, between nation and nation, between race and race! Only when social life is absorbed in spiritual clarity in each individual will the age of individualism also be able to become a social age. But one does not arrive at these social impulses, these social feelings, in the human individuality by, for example, talking in fine phrases about deepening the human soul, about all kinds of social impulses that people should educate in themselves. We only arrive at this when we learn to belong to the world of the senses with our sensory organism, as we have learned to do in the last three to four centuries; when we learn to belong to a spiritual world with our spiritual organism; when we learn to belong to a spiritual world with our spiritual organism, when we are able to carry down ideas about the great destiny of humanity into the individual everyday life.

Humanity has become so proud of the practice of life developed in recent times. What has this practice of life revealed itself to be? It has withdrawn more and more into small circles in certain gestures of life, and in the end it has led to a situation where people can no longer follow the overwhelming course of world events fleeing into chaos with their thoughts. What has emerged is not real life practice, but routine in individual areas, mere life routine. What the human body would be without soul and spirit is this life routine without the fertilization of ideas, which can only come from the acknowledgment, from the realization of the spiritual regions. The most mundane, the smallest things in life become routine if they cannot be directed in the right way towards that which can pulsate in a person out of their sense of connection with the all-encompassing spiritual world. We will not arrive at such a practice, which in turn can support our social life, if we do not introduce the spirit into everyday life, going beyond all routine. For only a life of everydayness that is truly spiritualized and ensouled is truly practical.

Therefore, what wants to be spiritually worked on here in this Goetheanum does not want to become something unworldly, something fanciful, something that leads people away from the practice of life like a hermit; on the contrary, it wants to place them completely within it. We need true and genuine practical life. Every day shows us this when we are told how every day more and more humanity is drawn into decline. Therefore, in these eight days, we will speak of that which in turn leads to the rising, what the spirit of the time demands of the person of the present, what it demands in the sense that only from the insight into the eternal, into the supersensible, into the immortal, can that strength be gained which is needed to transform the forces of decline into forces of ascent. We need only recognize in the right sense how the inner obstacles of mental laziness, spiritual fear, and thought habits lie before us, and we will feel that what we need — inner initiative, activity of the soul , the courage to do something new, the fearlessness in the face of the new and the unknown – that all this can be won if we are so seized by the spirit that it is the spirit itself that lives in all our impulses. For just as the world is created by the spirit, so human activity, human endeavor, human knowledge will be true when they are permeated by the spirit. May all that is to be worked out in experiments bear witness to such spirit-filled practice and knowledge, as has been the case in previous such events during these past eight days here in this Goetheanum. And inspired by this wish that we may work together here in accordance with the great demands of the spirit of our time, I wanted to bring you today the warmest greeting from the spirit that should prevail here in this Goetheanum dedicated to anthroposophy at the beginning of these working days, and I wanted to greet the spirit itself, which should and may prevail here more and more during these eight days and always.

Dear attendees, We will take the liberty of presenting a performance of eurythmic art to you, one that will be performed by children, in order to illustrate the pedagogical-didactic value of eurythmic art. Since today we are dealing primarily with the educational and teaching side of eurythmy, I will present what needs to be said about eurythmy as art in particular at our next performance on Wednesday and will limit myself today to saying only what relates to eurythmy as an educational tool and subject of instruction. I would like to say a few words in advance to the effect that eurythmy is a truly inaudible, visible language, a language that is performed by the moving human being, that is, by movements of the human limbs, the whole human body, or that is also expressed by groups of people in space. What emerges as the eurythmic art, what is achieved on the basis of a visible language, is not an ordinary play of gestures, nor is it something in the ordinary sense of mimicry and least of all a dance art. Rather, it is a truly careful study of what the human organism wants to do, tends to do, by revealing itself in speech or song. The movements that the larynx and the other speech and singing organs are predisposed to perform are transferred to the whole human being according to the principle of Goethean metamorphosis. And because we are dealing with human movements that are natural and elementary way from the essence of the human organization itself, as language is taken in a natural and elementary way from the laws of the human organism, that is why eurythmy is also a means of education and teaching.

At the Stuttgart Waldorf School, which Emil Molt founded and which I direct, we have introduced this eurythmy as a compulsory subject from the earliest elementary school lessons up to the fourteenth or fifteenth year, as far as we have come with the Waldorf School so far. And it has already become apparent during the [two-year] existence of the Waldorf school that the children take this subject on with a special inner satisfaction. If we disregard the artistic aspect for the moment, we could call eurythmy in this respect: soul-inspired and spiritualized gymnastics. And as a subject, it is added to ordinary gymnastics like soul-inspired and spiritualized gymnastics. This ordinary gymnastics is, after all, only a logical consequence of the physiological study of the human organism, of the study of physicality.

The movements that children perform in eurythmy do not arise from this one aspect of the human being, the physical body, but from the body, soul and spirit, that is, from the whole human being. That is why the child also feels what it is doing as a soul-inspired gymnast, as if it has been taken out of the full human being, and it lives into these movements with particular satisfaction.

If we want to understand how this is, we need only think of how, for someone who is able to intuitively place themselves within the laws of the human organism, every possible movement that the body is striving towards is already present in the resting human form. The one who can see in this way sees in the resting human being how this being is constantly seeking to merge with the organism in movements that are already expressed in their formation in the formative or in the calm form. One only sets the human form itself in motion by moving from the observation of the sculpture of the human organism to this moving sculpture of eurythmy, which is at the same time a visible language. Anyone who is able to study the movements of the human being, which arise from the element of will deeply rooted in the subconscious, these possibilities of movement that lie within the human being, will find everywhere that these movements are nothing other than what, in turn, wants to come to rest in the same way as the human organism, when it rests, stands quietly or sits quietly, shows its calm form. You only need to look at a hand and the adjoining arm: If you look at the shape of the fingers, the forearm or anything else, you cannot imagine that it is meant to be at rest. Its resting shape is such that every possible movement and mobility is already expressed in the resting shape.

And when a person's arms and hands are moving, we see how only movements that are natural and elementary are possible, and these in turn point to the calm form of the hands and arms themselves.

The child senses that everything in eurythmy is derived from the inner laws of the human organism. That is why, as we see at the Stuttgart Waldorf School, they perform these eurythmic movements with such great enthusiasm, as spiritualized gymnastics.

And if we look even more at the soul, we have to say that ordinary gymnastics can actually only get out of the human being that which lies in his physical organization. One day we will think about these things more objectively, without today's prejudices. Then it will be seen how one-sided ordinary gymnastics is. I certainly do not want to go as far as a famous physiologist, perhaps even the most famous in Central Europe, who once sat here, listened to such an introduction, and who later told me: So, you consider gymnastics in general to be a one-sidedness that is taken out of physiology? I, as a physiologist, said he, I regard gymnastics as it is practiced today not at all as a subject for instruction, but as a barbarism.

Now, out of courtesy to our culture — one must always be polite too — I will not say that gymnastics is barbaric, but I would like to say: it is one-sided, it is only taken from the physiology of the human organism, while this inspired gymnastics, which occurs in eurythmy, is taken from body, soul and spirit, from the full human being. That is why it is used as a teaching tool, as an educational tool that brings out in the child what the present and future generations in particular will need very, very much, namely the will initiative, the initiative of the soul life.

This has already been demonstrated in the Waldorf school through the teaching of eurythmy, how the development of the will, the will initiative, is released from the subconscious depths of human experience during childhood. This has been achieved because eurythmy does not neglect the physical side, only address the soul and spirit, but takes into account all three elements of human life, developing the spirit, developing the soul, developing the body. that the child experiences eurythmy as something so natural that when it is brought to the child, the child learns to love it out of an equal inner urge, as is the case with speech. Just as with speech, when it is presented to the child, the natural urge in the child to reveal the speech is there, so too with eurythmy, when it is presented in a natural way, there is such an urge in the child to engage in eurythmy as in speech. And so we can hope, ladies and gentlemen, that eurythmy will be increasingly recognized as an educational tool in the pedagogical and didactic fields. What our time lacks, what our time needs, is for the introduction of eurythmy into the curriculum to be seen as a matter of course.

Dear attendees, Last Monday we were able to present eurythmy as an educational and teaching tool, and I took the liberty of talking about eurythmy as a form of gymnastics that is inspired and spiritualized. Today, eurythmy as a free art will be presented to you here. To explain that which seeks to reveal itself as art is actually an inartistic undertaking. For everything that is truly artistic must work through that which it presents directly in perception. And on the other hand, people demand of the truly artistic that they can grasp its whole essence, without first having to seek the way in some roundabout way through a conceptual or other explanation.

If I nevertheless take the liberty of saying a few words in advance, it is because the eurythmy we are trying out here at the Goetheanum and elsewhere is an art that draws from hitherto unfamiliar artistic sources and also makes use of an unfamiliar artistic formal language. And allow me to say a few words in advance about these artistic sources and this artistic formal language.

What reveals eurythmy as a free art are movements of the human being in his or her individual limbs, or also movements of groups of people in space. These movements are not mere mimicry or pantomime, nor are they merely gestural or even dance-like; rather, eurythmy is meant to be a truly visible language, and a visible language that is derived from the sensual-transcendental observations of the human organism itself, so that in eurythmy one can bring forth something from the human being that comes out of him just as organically - without being an instantaneous gesture or facial expression - as human language itself. And just as a sound, or a tone when singing, wells up in a lawful way out of the human soul, so too should that which emerges as eurythmy art come out of the human soul, out of the human organization.

As I said, it is important to carefully study, in a way that is both sensory and supersensory, which movement tendencies or tendencies to move begin in the human speech or singing organs when the person prepares to speak or sing. I say expressly: movement tendencies, because what I mean by this is not a real movement, but one can actually only observe what lies at its basis in the process of coming into being, so to speak in the status nascendi, because that which wants to form itself as movement in the organs of singing and speaking is stopped in its development by the singing or speaking person and converted into those movements that can then represent the tone or the sound, so that what arises in the individual organ systems, in the singing or speaking system in humans, must be transferred to the whole person. This is entirely in accordance with the principle of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. Goethe regards the individual leaf as a simplified plant, and in turn the whole plant as a complicated leaf. What Goethe applies here only to morphological considerations can be elevated to the artistic. One can transfer what is assessed in a single organ system in terms of movement possibilities to the whole human being, just as nature transfers the form of the individual leaf to the whole plant in a more complicated form. Then the whole human being becomes a speech or singing organ. And even groups of people become a speech or singing organ. And one should seek just as little a connection between the individual movement and the individual soul process as one may seek a connection between the individual sound or tone and that which takes place in the soul. But just as speech as a whole is formed according to law, so too the formation of eurythmic movements as a whole is absolutely lawful. This can be achieved by allowing the human being to reveal himself through this eurythmy, to present in his very own element precisely that artistic element that underlies singing or speaking. For in speech, through the human organization, the conceptual and that which does not merely come out of the head like the conceptual, but rather comes out of the whole human being: the volitional, flows together. But the more the merely conceptual lives in any content, the less artistic that content is. The thought kills the artistic. And only as much as can pass through language from the element of will that comes from the whole, from the fully human, so much can be found in language that is truly artistic and poetic.

Therefore, the poet, who is truly an artist, must wage a constant war against the prosaic element of language. This is particularly the case with civilized languages, where language is increasingly becoming an expression of cognitive thought on the one hand or, on the other, of thought that is suitable for social convention. As languages grow into civilization, they become an increasingly unusable and unusable element for the expression of that spiritual reality which the artistic poet must truly seek. Therefore, the poet must go beyond the prose content and, through rhythm, rhyme, harmony, meter, the musical or imaginative-thematic, lead language back, as it were, to that element in which the human being, through sound or phonetics, makes himself the revealer of the spiritual and can thereby truly elevate the sound or phonetic into the spiritual-artistic.

Now, because of the particular way it expresses itself through movement, eurythmy works from the human will element in an elementary and natural way. It is precisely through this that the truly artistic, both musical and poetic, can be brought out in people. And what the poet, I would say, is already striving for in an invisible eurythmy, can be seen in the human movements that occur in eurythmy. One can create an accompaniment to any piece of music in eurythmy, and then, in a sense, a visible song is performed. One can also sing in eurythmy, just as one can sing audibly. And one can also present poetry in eurythmy, in which case what appears on stage as eurythmy must be accompanied by the recitation or declamation of the poem. In an unartistic age, there will be little understanding for what is necessary for recitation and declamation to accompany the eurythmic art. And today is such an unartistic age.

Today we understand little of what Goethe meant when he rehearsed his iambic dramas with a baton in his hand like a conductor with his actors. He did not look at the prose content, he looked at the artistic formation of the iamb. Or it is difficult to understand how Schiller, especially in his most significant poems, did not initially have the literal prose content in his mind, but rather a melodious theme into which he then incorporated the literal prose content, so to speak. In an unartistic age such as the present, when the importance of declaiming and reciting is seen in the fact that the prose content is emphasized and that what lies behind the prose content as rhythm, rhyme, harmony, musical and imaginative themes lie behind the prose content. In such an age, one will understand little about what forms recitation and declamation must take in order to be performed simultaneously with eurythmy.

But the unartistic person must understand how a secret eurhythmics is sought in real poetry and how this secret, invisible eurhythmics can reveal itself in the visible language in which it appears here. Before such performances I must always say that we ask the audience to be lenient because we know very well that this eurythmy is still in the early stages of development. But anyone who delves into its true essence can also know that it offers unlimited possibilities for development. For why? When Goethe says, “When nature begins to reveal her secret to him who beholds her, he feels the deepest longing for her most worthy interpreter, art,” it may be added, justifying eurythmy: “When human essence itself in its formation and in its movement begins to reveal its secret, feels the deepest longing to reveal to the eye that which lies within this human form in terms of possibilities of movement, of eurythmy.

If, as Goethe says elsewhere, when man stands at the pinnacle of nature, he sees himself as a whole of nature, taking order, harmony, measure and meaning together, in order to rise to the production of a work of art, then, with regard to eurythmy, one may say that this eurythmy does not use an external tool, but the human being itself, and in the human being all the secrets of the world are truly hidden. If we can draw them out of him, then the revelation of these secrets of humanity, of these microcosmic secrets, is a revelation of the macrocosmic secrets.

Eurythmy uses the human being as its tool, drawing from the human being's nature order, harmony, measure and meaning and presenting the human being as a work of art. By undertaking this, there must be unlimited possibilities for development within it, because if the human being is taken as a tool for artistic expression, this is in any case the most worthy artistic tool.

And so we may hope that artistic revelations will come out of eurythmy, which is still in its infancy today. These revelations may still be somewhat influenced by us, but will probably come first through others. These revelations can establish eurythmy as a fully-fledged younger art alongside its fully-fledged older sister arts.

I would like to say a few words about the building idea, with the supporting, direct view of the building. From the outset, the view could arise that if one must first speak about such a building, it indicates that it does not make the necessary impression as an artistic work; and in many cases, what is thought about the building of Dornach, about the Goetheanum in the world, is thought from a false point of view influenced by a sensory view. For example, the opinion has been spread that the building in Dornach is meant to symbolize all kinds of things, that it is a symbolizing building. In reality, you will not find a single symbol when looking at this building, as is popular in mystical and theosophical societies. The building should be able to be experienced entirely from artistic perception and has also been created from these artistic perceptions in its forms, in all its details. Therefore, it must work only through what it is itself. Explaining has become popular, and people then want explanations; but in mentioning this here before you, I also say that such explaining of an artistic work always seems to me to be not only half, but almost completely unartistic, and that I will now give you a kind of lecture in the presence of the building, a lecture that I fundamentally dislike, if only because I have to speak to you in abstract terms about the details that arose in my mind when designing the building, the models and so on, and what was created from life. I would rather speak to you about the building as little as possible.

It is already the case that a new stylistic form, a new artistic form of expression, is viewed with a certain mistrust in the present. I can still hear a word that I heard many decades ago when I was studying at the Technical University, where Ferstel gave his lectures. In one of them, he says: “Architectural styles are not invented, an architectural style grows out of the character of a nation.” Therefore, Ferstel is also opposed to the invention of any new architectural style or type of building. What is true about this idea is that the style that is to stylize the characteristics of a people must emerge not from an abstraction, but from a living world view, which is at the same time a world experience and, from this point of view, comprehensively encompasses the chaotic spiritual life of contemporary humanity. On the basis of this thoroughly correct idea, it becomes necessary to transform what was peculiar to previous architectural styles into organic building forms by incorporating the symmetrical, the geometrically static, and so on.

I am well aware of what can be said, and rightly said from a certain point of view, by someone who has become inwardly attuned to previous architectural styles, against what has been attempted here in Dornach as an architectural style: the transference of geometrical-symmetrical-static forms into organic forms. But it has been attempted. And so you can see in these forms of construction that this building here is an as yet imperfect first attempt to express the transition from these geometric forms of construction to the organic. It is certain that the development of humanity is moving towards these forms of construction, and when we again have the impulses of clairvoyant experience, I believe that these forms of construction will play the first, leading role. This building should be understood in the same way through its relationship with the organizing forces of nature as the previous buildings are understood through their relationship with the geometrical-static-symmetrical forces of nature. This building is to be viewed from this point of view, and from this point of view you will understand how every detail within the building idea for Dornach must be completely individualized here. Just think of the lobe of your ear: it is a very small part of the human organism, but you cannot well imagine that an organic form such as the lobe of the ear is suited to grow on the big toe. This organ is completely bound to its place within the organism. Just as you find that within the whole organism a supporting organ is always shaped in such a way that it can have a static-dynamic effect within the organism, so too the individual forms in our building in Dornach had to be such that they could serve the static-dynamic forces. Every single form had to be organized in such a way that it could and had to be in its place what it now appears to be. Look at each arch from this point of view, how it is formed, how it flattens out towards the exit, for example, how it curves inwards towards the building itself, where it not only has to support but also to express support in an organic way, thereby helping to develop what only appears to be completely unnecessary in organic formation. Ordinary architecture leaves out what goes beyond the static, which the organism develops. But one senses that the building idea has been transferred to the organic design of the forms, and that this is also necessary.

You will have to look at every column from this point of view; then you will also understand that the ordinary column, which is taken out of the geometric-static, has been replaced by one that does not imitate the organic – everything is so that it is not imitated naturalistically – but transferred into organically made structures. It is not an imitation of an organic structure. You will not understand it if you look for a model in nature. But you will understand it if you understand how human beings can live together with the forces that have an organizing effect in nature and how, apart from what nature itself creates, such organizing forms can arise. So you will see in these column supports how the expansion of the building, the support, the inward pointing, and, in the same way as, say, in the upper end of the human thigh, the support, the walking, the walking and so on, is embodied statically, but organically and statically. From this point of view, I also ask you to look at something like the structure with the three perpendicular formations at the top of the stairs here below. The feeling arises here of how a person feels when he climbs the stairs. He must have a feeling of security, of spiritual unity in all that goes on in this building, indeed in everything he sees in this building. Everything came to me entirely from my own intuitive perception. You may believe it or not, but this form came to me entirely from my own artistic intuition. As I said, you may believe it or not, but it was only afterwards that it occurred to me that this form is somewhat reminiscent of the shape of the three semicircular crescents in the human ear, which, when injured, cause fainting, so that they directly express what gives a person stability. This expression, that stability is to be given to the human being in this structure, comes about in the experience of the three perpendicular directions. This can be experienced in this structure without having to engage in abstract reflection. One can remain entirely in the artistic.

If you look at the wall-like structures while handling them, you will find that natural forces have been poured into the forms, but in such a way that these forms, which are radiator covers, are first worked out of the concrete material of the building, and then further up out of the material of the wood, and that they are thereby metamorphosed. You will find that in these structures the process of metamorphosis is elevated to the artistic. It is the idea of the building that should have a definite effect on such radiator covers, which are designed in such a way that you immediately feel the purpose and do not need to explore it intellectually first. This is how these elementary forms, half plant-like, half animal-like, came to be felt. Only after having shaped them out of the material does one realize that they must be so. And it also follows that it is necessary to metamorphose them, depending on whether they are in one place or another, depending on whether they are long and low or narrower and higher. All this does not result from calculating the form, but the forms shape themselves out of the feeling in their metamorphosis, as for example here, where we have come so far, where the building is a concrete structure in its basement and where one has to empathize with the design of what concrete is. You enter here at the west gate. This is the room where you can leave your coat. The staircase, which leads up here on the left and right, takes you up to the wooden structure containing the auditorium, the stage and adjoining rooms.

Please follow me up the stairs to the auditorium.

We are now entering a kind of foyer. You will notice the very different impression created by the wooden cladding compared to the concrete cladding on the lower floor.

I would like to note here: When you have to work with stone, concrete or other hard materials, you have to approach it differently than when you have to work with soft materials, such as wood. The material of wood requires you to focus all your senses on the fact that you have to scrape corners, concaves, and hollows out of the soft material, if I may use the expression. It is scraping, scraping out. You deepen the material, and only by doing so can you enter into this relationship with the material, which is a truly artistic relationship. While when working with wood you only succeed in coaxing out of the material that which gives the forms when you focus your attention on deepening, when working with hard material you do not have to do with deepening. You can only develop a relationship with the hard material by applying it, by working convexly, by applying raised surfaces to the base surfaces, for example when working with stone. Grasping this is an essential part of artistic creation, and it has been partially lost in more recent times.

You will see when we enter the auditorium how each individual surface, each capital, is treated individually. A capital in this organic structure can only be such that one feels: in what follows each other, a kind of repetition cannot be created, as is otherwise the case with symmetrical-geometric-static architectural styles. In this building, which is the product of an organic idea, you have only a single axis of symmetry, running from west to east. You will find a symmetrical arrangement only in relation to this, just as you can find only a single axis of symmetry for a higher organism, not out of arbitrariness but out of the inner organization of forces of the entity in question.

At this point, I would like to mention that the treatment of the walls also had to be completely different under the influence of the organic building idea than it was before. A wall was for earlier architects what demarcates a space. It had the effect of being inside the room. This feeling had to be abandoned in this building. The walls had to be designed in such a way that they were not felt as a boundary, but as something that carries you out into the vastness of the macrocosm; you have to feel as if you are absorbed, as if you are standing inside the vastness of the cosmos. The walls had to be made transparent, so to speak, whereas in the past every effort was made to give the wall such artificial forms that it was closed and opaque. You will see that the transparent is used artistically at all, and that was driven from elementary foundations into the physical in these windows, which you see here and which you will see under construction. If you see windows in the sense of the earlier architectural style, you will actually have to have the healthy sense that they break through the walls, they do not fit into the architectural forms, but they only fit in through the principle of utility. Here, artistic feeling will be needed down to the last detail. There was a need to present the wall in such a way that it is not something closed, but something that expands outwards, towards infinity. I could only achieve this by remembering that, using a single-colored windowpane, you can, as it were, scratch out designs using a kind of etching method, a glass etching method. And so monochromatic window panes were purchased, which were then worked on in such a way that the motifs one wanted could be scratched out with the diamond pencil. So for this purpose, a glass etching technique was conceived, and the windows emerged from that.

When you consider the motifs of the windows, you must not think that you are dealing with symbolic design alone. You can see it already on this larger windowpane: nothing is designed on these windowpanes other than what the imagination produces. There are mystics who develop a mysticism with superficial sentences and strange ideas and constantly explain that the physical-sensual outer world is a kind of maja, an illusion. People often approach you and say that so-and-so is a great mystic because he always declaims that the outer world is a maja. There is something about the human physical countenance that is maya, that is thoroughly false, that is something else in truth. What appears on this windowpane is not something that symbolizes; it is a being that is envisaged, only it does not look to the spiritual observer as it appears to the senses. The larynx is the organ of vision for the etheric; the larynx is already Maja as a physical larynx, and that which is a mere physical-sensual view is not reality. What is behind it spiritually? The spiritual fact that what is whispered into the ear, left and right, are world secrets. So that one can truly say: the bull speaks into the left ear, the lion into the right ear. If one wants to express this as a motif in a picture or in words, then one can only attach to the word that which is already in the picture itself. However, one must be clear about the fact that one can only understand such a picture if one lives in the world view from which it has emerged. A person who does not have a living Christian feeling will also not be able to behave sympathetically towards the pictorial representations that Christian art has produced.

The artist experiences a lot when he lives into a vision; but such an experience must not be translated into abstract thoughts, otherwise it will immediately begin to fade. An example of the artist's experience is this: When Leonardo da Vinci painted his Last Supper, which is now so dilapidated that it can no longer be appreciated artistically, people thought it was taking too long. He could not finish the Judas because this Judas was to emerge from the darkness. Leonardo worked on this painting for almost twenty years and was still not finished. Then a new prior came to Milan and looked at the work. He was not an artist; he said that Leonardo, this servant of the church, should finally finish his work. Leonardo replied that he could do it now; he had always only sketched the figure of Judas because he had not found the model for it; now that the prior was there, he had found the model for Judas in him, and the painting would now be quickly completed. - There you have such an external, concrete experience. Such external, concrete experiences play a much greater role in all the artist's work than can be expressed in such brief descriptions.

Dear attendees, you have entered the building through the room below the organ and the room for the musical instruments. If you look around after entering, you will see that the architectural idea is initially characterized by the floor plan depicting two not quite completed circles, whose segments interlock. It seems to me that the necessity for shaping the building in this way can already be seen when approaching the building from a certain distance and if one has an idea of what is actually supposed to take place in the building. I will now explain in more detail what the building idea is. First of all, I would like to point out that you can see seven columns arranged in symmetry solely against the west-east axis, closing off the auditorium on the left and right as you move forward. These seven columns are not formed in such a way that a capital shape, a pedestal shape or an architrave shape above it is repeated, but the capital, pedestal and architrave shapes are in a continuous development.

The two columns at the back of the organ area have the simplest capital and pedestal motifs: forms that, to a certain extent, strive from top to bottom, with others striving towards them from bottom to top. This most primitive form of interaction between above and below was then metamorphosed into the following forms of architraves, capitals and pedestals. This progressive metamorphosis came about through artistic perception, in that, when I was developing the model, I tried to recreate what occurs in nature. What takes place in nature, where an unnotched leaf with primitive forms is first formed at the bottom of the plant, and then this primitive form metamorphoses the further up it goes, into the indented, intricately designed leaf, even transformed into petal, stamen and pistil, which must be imitated - albeit not in a naturalistic way. One must place oneself inwardly and vitally into it and then create from within, as nature creates and transforms, as it produces and metamorphoses. Then, without reflection, but out of much deeper soul forces than those of reflection, one will achieve such transformations of the second out of the first, of the third out of the second, and so on.

It can be misunderstood that, for example, in the fifth column and in the architrave motifs above the fourth column, something like a kind of Mercury staff appears. One could now believe that the caduceus was placed in these two positions by the intellect. I believe that someone who had worked from the intellect would probably have placed the caduceus in the architrave motif and below it - the intellect has a symmetrizing effect - the column motif with the caduceus. The person who works as we have done here finds something else. Here, with the motif that you see as the fourth capital motif, only by sensing the metamorphosing transformation, without me even remotely thinking of forming a Mercury staff, this Mercury staff emerged as a petal emerges from the sepal. I did not think of a past style, but of the transformation of the fourth capital motif from the third. One can see how the forms that have gradually emerged in the development of humanity have developed quite naturally.

Then we come to the epoch when man intervenes in the evolution of his soul-life. When this is individualized and worked into the column, it follows later what is worked on this architrave surface earlier. That is why you see the caduceus on the capital later than on the architrave.

A plant that is thin and delicate develops different leaf shapes than a sturdy one. Compare just a shepherd's purse with a cactus, and you will see how the filling and shaping of space is expressed in the figurative design. At the same time, a cosmic secret emerges in it, as one feels evolution all around. There has been much talk of evolution in recent times, but little feeling for it. One only thinks it out with the mind. One speaks of the evolution of the perfect from the imperfect. Herbert Spencer and others have done much harm in this regard, and the idea has arisen that is completely justified in the mind, but which does not do justice to the observation of nature: In intellectual thinking, one starts from the assumption that in evolution, the simpler forms are at the beginning and that these then later become more and more differentiated. Spencer in particular has worked with such evolutionary ideas. But evolution does not show it that way. There is indeed a differentiation, a complication of the forms; but then one comes to a middle and then the forms simplify again. What follows is not more complicated, but what follows is simpler again. You can see this in nature itself. The human eye, which is the most perfect, has, so to speak, achieved greater simplicity than the eye forms of certain animals, which, for example, have the xiphoid process, the fan, which has disappeared again as the eye in evolution moved further up to become human.

Thus it is necessary that man connects with the power of nature, that he feels the power of nature, that he makes the power of nature his own power and creates out of this feeling. So it has been attempted to design this building in an entirely organic way, to design every detail in its place as it must be individualized from the whole. You can see, for example, that the organ is surrounded by sculpted motifs that make it appear as if the organ is not simply placed in the space, but that it works out of the entire organic design as if growing out of it. So everything in this building must be tried to be made in the same way.

You see here the lectern on which I stand. With it, the first consideration was to create something in this place that would, as it were, grow out of the other forms of construction, but in such a way that it would also express the idea that from here, through the word, one strives to express everything that is to be expressed in the building. At the moment when a person speaks here, the forms of the spoken word must continue in such a way that, like the nose on a face, its form reveals what the whole person is. Anyone who has made artistically inspired nose studies can turn a nose study into the “architectural style”, the physiognomy of the whole person. No one can ever have a nose other than the one they have, and there could never be a lectern here other than the one that is here. However, if one asserts this, it is meant in one's own view; one can only act in one's own view.

That an attempt has been made here to truly metamorphose the body can be seen from the fact that the motifs here in the glass windows are in part really such motifs that arise as images of the soul's life. For example, look at the pink window here. You will see on the left wing something coming out like the west portal of the building; on the right wing you see a kind of head. There you see a person sitting on a slope, looking towards the building, and another person looking towards the head. This has nothing to do with speculative mysticism; it is an immediate inner visual experience. This building could not have been created in any other way than by mysteriously sensing the shape of the human head in it, and the organic power on the one hand and the shape of the human head on the other hand result in the intuitive shape of the building. Therefore, the person sitting on the slope sees the metamorphosis of the building in his soul, sometimes as a human head, sometimes as the building revealing itself to the outside world. This provides a motif that leads, if I may say so, to an inner experience.

There you will find in the blue windowpane a person who is aiming – on the left – to shoot a bird in flight. In the right-hand pane you will see that the person has fired. The bird in the left-hand field is in a sphere of light. Around the man you will see all kinds of figures vividly alive in the astral body, one when he is about to shoot, the other when he has fired. This is a reality, but one from mundane life. I can imagine that those who always want to be dripping with inner exaltation may be offended if they experience such things as they are meant here, simply as a human being shooting. Yes, I was pleased when an Italian friend once used a somewhat crude expression about theosophists, who are such mystics. The friend who had already died said it, and I may say it in the very esteemed company here, because the person concerned was a princess, and what a princess says, that can also be said. She glossed over such people, who always want to live in a kind of inner elevation, by saying that they are people with a “face up to their stomachs”. I also repeat her not quite correct German. Now, ladies and gentlemen, the same idea was also implemented in painting. I can only talk about the actual painting, about spiritual painting, by referring to the small dome. Only in the small dome was it possible for me to carry out what I have indicated as the challenge of a newer painting: that behind the effort to create a window experience, drawing disappears altogether. I had one of my characters in the first mystery drama express this as follows: that the forms appear as the work of color. For when one feels with the feeling for painting, then one feels the drawing, which is carried into the pictorial, as a lie. When I draw the horizontal line, it is actually a reproduction of something that is not there at all. When I apply the blue sky as a surface and the green below, the form arises from the experience of the color itself. In this way, every pictorial element can be formed. Within the world of color itself lies a creative world, and the one who feels the colors paints what the colors say to each other in creation. He does not need to stick to a naturalistic model; he can create the figures from the colors themselves. It is the case that nature and also human life already have a certain right to shape the moral out of the colored with a necessity.

Yesterday, Mr. Uehli quite rightly pointed out how newer painters already have an intuitive sense of such effects resulting from light and dark, from the colors themselves, and how they come to paint a double bass next to a tin can. They are pursuing the right thing in itself, that it is only a matter of seeing how the light gradates in its becoming colored when it falls on a double bass and then continues to fall on a tin can. That is the right thing. But the wrong thing is that this is again based on naturalistic experience. If you really live in the colors, it arises from the colored something other than a can and a bass violin. The color is creative, and how it puts together, but it is a necessity of the mere colored out, you have to experience. Then you do not make a can next to a bass violin, because that is again outside the colored.

So here I have tried to paint entirely from the colors. If you see the reddish-orange spot here next to the blue spot and the black spot, this is initially a vivid impression from the colors. But then the colors come to life, then figures emerge from them, which can even be interpreted afterwards. But just as little as one can make plants with the human mind here, so one can just as little paint something on them that one has thought up with the human mind. One must first think when the colors are there, just as the plant must first grow before one can see it.

And so a Faust figure with Death and the Child emerged. The entire head emerged from the colors with all its figuration. Only in the human soul does a spiritual-real object form by itself.

For example, you can see above the organ motif how something is painted that a philistine, a person attached to the sensual world, will naturally perceive as madness. But you will no longer perceive it as madness when I tell you the following: If you close your eyes, you will, as it were, feel something inside the eye, like two eyes looking at each other. What takes place inwardly can certainly be developed further in a certain way. Then what, when viewed in a primitive way, looks like two eyes glowing out of the darkness towards you, and what is experienced inwardly, can be shaped in such a way that, when projected outwards, an entire beyond, an entire world-genesis can be seen in it. Here again an attempt has been made to create out of color what the eye experiences when, by narrowing the pupil, it sees itself in the darkness. One need not merely read the secrets of the mind, one can see them - suddenly they are there.

In a similar way, attempts have been made to bring other motifs into reality, again not from the naturalistic imitation of signs and forms, but entirely from color. The ancient Indians and their inspiration, the seven Rishis, who in turn were inspired by the stars to paint with an open head, is, if you do it that way now, abstract, actually nonsense; I say that quite openly. But when one experiences what was experienced in the ancient Indian culture in the relationship between the disciple and the guru, the teacher, one feels as if the ancient Indian did not have a skullcap, but as if it had evaporated, and as if he were not a human being who lives in his skin, but one feels as a sevenfold being, as if his soul power were composed of the seven soul rays of the holy Rishis of ancient Atlantis, enlightening him, and that he then communicated to his world that which he revealed, not from his own spirit but from the spirit of the holy Rishis. The more one works out what is said here, the more one comes closer to what has been painted here. The intuitive perception has first placed itself in ancient India, in ancient Atlantis. That which can be seen there has been painted on the wall here, and only afterwards can one speculate when it is there. This is how the message can relate to artistic creation. This is how everything in this building should actually come about.

You will find this building covered with Nordic slate. The building idea must be felt through to the point of radiating outwards. The slate, or the material used to cover it, must shine in a certain way in the sunlight. It seemed to happen by chance here – but of course there is always an inner necessity underlying it. When I saw the Nordic slate in Norway from the train, I knew that it was the right material to cover the building. We were then still able to have the slate shipped from Norway in the pre-war period. You will certainly feel the effect when you look at the building from a distance in good sunshine.

My main concern while the building was being constructed was the acoustics. During the construction, the building was of course also provided with scaffolding on the inside so that work could be carried out upstairs. This did not produce any acoustics, the acoustics were quite different, that is, they were a caricature of acoustics. Now it so happens that the acoustics of the building were also conceived from the same building idea. My idea was that I could expect the acoustic question to be solved for the lecturer by occult research. You know how difficult it is; you cannot calculate the acoustics. You will see how it has been achieved, but to a certain degree of perfection, to carry out the acoustics. You may now ask how these seven pillars, which contain the secret of the building, are connected with the acoustics. The two domes within our building are so lightly connected that they form a kind of soundboard, just as the soundboard of a violin plays a role in the richness of sound. Of course, since the whole, both the columns and the dome, are made of wood, the acoustics will only reach perfection over the years, just as the acoustics of a violin only develop over the years. We must first find a way to have a profound effect on the material, to be able to feel through the building idea what is now sensed as the acoustics of this building. You will understand that the acoustics must be sensed best from the organ podium. You will also see that when two people here in the middle talk to each other, an echo can be heard coming down from the ceiling. This seems to be an indication from the world being that one may only speak from the stage or the lectern within the building and that the building itself does not actually tolerate useless chatter from any point.

Now, dear attendees, I have tried to tell you what can be said in this regard while looking at the building. I will have to supplement what I have spoken today in my presentation of the building idea, which I will give at the final event next Saturday. Then I will say what can still be said. Now we have to clear the hall for the next lecture.

Dear attendees! In the introductory words to the last but one performance here, I took the liberty of saying a few words about the educational and artistic aspects of eurythmy. If I now also take the liberty of saying a few words before today's performance, it is for a special reason. Today, we will not only have eurythmized lyrical and similar material in the performance, but also dramatic scenes, and indeed dramatic scenes from my Mystery Dramas. We are dealing here with the use of eurythmy in the dramatic presentation of the dramatic. Now the peculiar thing about eurythmy is that it moves away from the treatment of speech and sound as practised by the poet and the composer and back to that visible language that expresses through the movements of people or groups of people what would otherwise be expressed through music or speech.

But now, in order for the poetry, the tonal, to be real art, one must go back from the mere content of what is heard to the deeper treatment of the tone, the sound, the word, the word connections and so on. One must go back to what rhythm, beat, what rhyme treatment is, what the musical or imaginative theme is and so on. Why is it necessary to go back from the literal content or the musical content, which is basically just an invisible eurythmy, to this eurythmy? Because all art, ladies and gentlemen, must carry what can be experienced into the realm of the supersensible, of the spiritual. And it is precisely through this that one is able, for example, to carry the linguistic up into the spiritual, that one carries this formal - the rhythmic and so on - into speech treatment.

Since eurythmy is particularly concerned with bringing this imperceptible, or rather, only indirectly perceptible, into direct sensory perception, it is particularly suitable for depicting dramatic scenes in which the actions that otherwise take place on earth in the sensual-physical realm move up into the supersensible-spiritual realm; when something is to be presented on stage that connects the human being in the innermost being of his soul with the world soul and the world spirit, in fact with the supersensible.

We have had this experience, at first in particular in the performance of individual scenes from Goethe's Faust – where Goethe is compelled by his entire Faustian plot to carry the individual actions up into a supersensible realm – in order to reveal that which cannot be represented by ordinary gestures in the sensual-physical realm. The prologue in heaven, the Ariel scene at the beginning of the second part, the scenes in the classical or romantic Walpurgis Night, much of what is found in the second part in particular, is treated by Goethe in language in such a way that one sees that the poet as an artist feels that in this case must depart from the more or less naturalistic of stage presentation in the gesture — and proceed to something that also stylistically elevates that which the human being presents on the stage through himself, into a stylized realm, and thereby brings the supersensible to revelation on the stage. Such scenes, in which the supersensible plays, do not tolerate the ordinary gestures that have to be used in the reproduction of such actions that play in the physical-sensual realm. And in particular, it may be said that this can be illustrated by my mystery dramas, which in so many cases have to carry the developmental impulses that play in these mysteries into the supersensible realm. And here one can say that they can easily be carried upwards. For, you see, my dear audience, these mysteries are slandered if one believes that something is conceived abstractly in them and then brought into a poetic-artistic form. I may say, without committing any immodesty, that these mysteries, as they appear before our eyes in their pictorial sequence today, were originally seen in pictures in the mind; everything in these mysteries, in space and temporality, everything in these mysteries has been conceived in pictures, and I always feel annoyed when people appear who interpret these mysteries symbolically in some way, because I had nothing symbolic in mind. I also had the supersensible scenes in imaginations, in pictures, so precisely, so down to the hearing, the inner hearing of the sound of the words, as they stand there. They were conceived literally and are only copied from what was seen.

Therefore, the scenes that play into the supersensible realm must have a certain eurythmic quality right from the conception, and I would say that this is particularly brought to life in the art of eurythmy in an elementary way. We may believe that precisely where drama must rise into the supersensible, that is where eurythmy will be able to render great service to drama.

I do hope, however, that ordinary naturalistic theatre, where gestures are used to imitate natural gestures, will one day be able to be treated in some way using eurythmy, if not in terms of the gestural-mimic expression of the individual action, but at least in terms of the stylization of the ductus that runs through the entire drama. It is possible that a eurythmic style can be found for more naturalistic dramas. So far I have not succeeded, but I cherish the hope that, as with lyric, epic and so on, the dramatic will also be able to make use of eurythmy on a larger scale, where it does not rise into the supersensible either.

But precisely through that which can be achieved in the dramatic field today with the help of eurythmy, perhaps in a way that is convincing for the spectator, one may perhaps also say, from a different point of view than before, that eurythmy can become something – even if is still in its infancy today, and if basically we can only make attempts at it today, that eurythmy will be able to become something that can one day stand as a fully-fledged art alongside the other fully-fledged arts in all its individual branches.

Dear attendees! At the kind instigation of Baron Rosenkrantz, a number of questions have been put by our friends, which are now to be answered within the framework of this event.

Before that, however, since the request has been expressed so frequently and I have also asked some friends personally, I would like to ask those artists present here and a few others who have never seen the wooden group, which is still in progress, to come to the studio tomorrow at 9 a.m. This group will then be shown. But I ask you to take this matter very seriously and I really ask only those to come who have never seen the group before.

Now a number of questions have been handed to me.

Question: If the content of a work of art is the most important thing, why can't we express it in accordance with the Greek ideal?

Dr. Steiner: The question is not quite clear. I would like to think that it alludes to what I have often said about Goethe's view of art, which was expressed when Goethe, upon arriving in Italy, wrote to his friends in Weimar: When I look at these Greek works of art, I believe that the Greeks, in creating their works of art, proceeded according to the same laws by which nature itself proceeds, and which I am trying to grasp. I would just like to note that if it is possible for a person to truly find a way to experience and relive the creative forces of nature, as I have indicated on various occasions when discussing this building, then we do not actually become imitators of nature, but we do create with our materials in the same way that nature creates. We need only remember that, in the full perception of man, the aim should not be to imitate nature, because whatever we encounter in nature, whether in the form of landscape or anything else, is always done more perfectly by nature than even the most accomplished artist can achieve. Art is only justified if, in the Goethean sense, it does not imitate nature, but continues nature's work from the same forces that nature uses to create. And then, if we create in this way, we can recreate nature just as the Greeks did. We must only be clear about the fact that humanity does not go through various stages of development in vain, just as the individual human being does not either, but that our present humanity has different developmental impulses from those of the people of the Greek age. What the Greeks had in common with nature in their art is there for us in a different form, and if we accept and understand this metamorphosis of the whole coexistence of man with nature, then we can definitely say that what we create is just as “recreated according to the laws of nature” as the Greek works of art are.

Question: If we take beautiful colors from nature, why shouldn't we be able to take beautiful forms from nature?

Dr. Steiner: I would not be able to see that either. But I ask you to consider again how I repeatedly spoke about colors in connection with this building and how I spoke about forms in my lecture on art. It is not a matter of imitating the inartistic, which is characteristic of an inartistic present time, but of not imitating nature's colors, but of experiencing them. We do, after all, inwardly experience color and then create from the world of color. Likewise, we can, of course, also experience form from within, and then we will create forms for ourselves as they also appear in nature. But we must bear in mind that when we draw, we are actually demanding not to imitate nature's forms, but to counterfeit them. We have to draw the surfaces.

It is indeed the case in nature itself that the horizontal line, when we draw it, is a fake – I said a lie a few days ago. What can be seen is the blue sky, the green sea, and the form is the result of the color. This is already in nature, and when we work artistically out of color, the form arises just as the form arises in nature itself.

Question: Should color be used in painting from a moral point of view?

Dr. Steiner: If I understand the question correctly, it is asked whether one should try to translate a moral intention into colour or even into colour harmony if one has a moral intention.

I believe that anyone who tries to embody human and moral thoughts in colour in this way actually creates in an unartistic way. Only that which can be experienced as spiritual in the world of color can be embodied in color. To the same extent that one has the moral intention of artistically forming what has been morally conceived, one falls back on symbolizing, and allegorizing is always inartistic.

To illustrate what I actually mean, I will say the following: I was once obliged to reconstruct the forms of the Kabirs, the Samothracean gods, the Samothracean mysteries, for the purpose of a Faust performance here. They had to be shown while the Goethean text was being spoken. I believe that I was able to construct these Kabirs out of spiritual contemplation. Then – and I say this not out of immodesty but because it is a fact that should be communicated – then it occurred to one of our members to have these Kabirs, who fell, as well and they should be photographed. Now, the thought of photographing a three-dimensional work is so repulsive to me that I actually want to run away from every photograph of a sculpture, because what is really artistically created is created out of the spiritually experienced feeling for material, and because it is impossible to directly experience what is conceived in spatial forms in the form of a surface. Therefore, at the time, I preferred to do it again in black and white, because I wanted to take this wish into account, and then you could photograph it.

Anyone who thinks that moral intentions can be realized in painting is thinking that you can take any content, I mean a novella, and then pour it into any material. That is not true. It is artistically untrue. In a material, any artistic thing can only be formed in one way.

Question: Does this mean that in the future sculpture should express inner feeling and painting inner wisdom?

Dr. Steiner: I will allow myself to answer this question now because it belongs together with another question, in connection with the other question.

Question: Would art under the influence of anthroposophical teachings not tend to become monotonous, which would not be interesting? Is there not a danger that art would bear an anthroposophical stamp, as if from a particular school of painting? Dr. Steiner: If one grasps what can really arise out of anthroposophical thinking as art, grasps it correctly, then I think the question will not arise at all, and one will not be led to believe that anthroposophy could ever aspire to influence art through anthroposophical teachings. To think in any other way than that the artistic can arise out of the experience of the spirit flowing in the material, out of living together with the material, cannot actually be assumed from an anthroposophical attitude.

In a somewhat primitive way, many anthroposophists understand this to mean, for example, that they somehow paint what they have been given in the teaching of the Rosicrucians on a blackboard, and then one encounters these images in all the individual branches. There is inner feeling, inwardly intended, outwardly recorded. I usually help myself with regard to such “artistic attempts” by not looking at them in the respective branches, because these are admittedly primitive and not very far-reaching, but they are precisely wrong attempts to transfer what can be represented in the spirit, which now becomes word, which becomes teaching, into some artistic aspect. That is nonsense. You cannot carry what is teaching into the work of art.

But what real anthroposophy is, whether you approach it through the teachings or through art, leads to the inner experience of something far more original than anthroposophical teaching and anthroposophical art is, of something that lies further back in human life. If, on the one hand, artistic forms are created that have nothing at all to do with the anthroposophical teachings, and if, on the other hand, one focuses on the word, on the thought, then, from the same foundations, one creates contexts of ideas. Both are branches that come from the same root. But you cannot take one branch and stick it into the other.

In any case, I cannot understand how a life that has developed out of such art could possibly become monotonous, because – and I am speaking only illustratively now – I can assure you that if I had to build another one after this one is finished, it would be completely different, it would look completely different. I would never be able to build this structure again in a monotonous way; and I would build a third one differently again – it will certainly not come to that in this incarnation. But I feel, especially in what underlies the anthroposophical as the living, that in art, beyond everything monotonous, it comes to life. I can tell you, one always only wishes to comply with what one can do, with what presents itself to the soul, and not at all in a monotonous way, but to show in great variety what one would like to show.

The questions that were asked in English have now been answered, and since Mrs. Mackenzie has promised to tell us about some of her intentions, I believe that we may use the time we still have left to listen to Mrs. Mackenzie about her intentions.

Mrs. Mackenzie: (remarks in English not written down)

Dr. Steiner: I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Mrs. Mackenzie and ask Baron Walleen to translate her words into German.

Baron Walleen: (translation:) Dr. Steiner has given his consent to hold a seminar for teachers here around Christmas time. Mrs. Mackenzie has taken on the responsibility of finding suitable individuals in England and America who could be accepted as students in these seminars, and Mrs. Mackenzie hopes that if such a beginning is made, it will be possible to gradually develop a teacher training seminar for the whole world here. The matter is being handled quite informally in order to gain time, so that when she returns to England, Mrs. Mackenzie will immediately try to make contact with such personalities as she finds suitable to attend this course. It would be important to know early on, in October, which personalities and how many can and will come here. Of course, Dr. Steiner himself will lead the course.

Dr. Steiner: I would just like to say this very briefly in response to Mrs. Mackenzie's words: if this extraordinarily satisfying plan can be realized, everything should be done here to bring satisfaction to those who are making such efforts to expand the effectiveness of the Goetheanum in this important area. Thank you very much on behalf of our cause and the promise that all efforts will be made here to implement your intentions in a dignified manner!

Dear ladies and gentlemen! With your permission, I will expand on and supplement what I have already said during the tour of the Goetheanum, and present a summary of our building here today.

For many years, our anthroposophical movement worked by holding its meetings in ordinary halls, as can be found today. And even when we were able to present dramatic performances based on the impulses of the anthroposophical worldview, starting in 1909, we initially had to limit ourselves to having these performances in ordinary theaters and under ordinary theater conditions. As our anthroposophical movement grew, a large number of our friends came up with the idea of building a house for anthroposophy. And now I was given the task, so to speak, of creating a home for the anthroposophical movement. I would like to make it clear that the commission to build did not come from me, but from friends of the anthroposophical worldview.

The question now arose: how should the construction of such a house be approached? If any other society, an association with any task or goal, builds a house for itself today — and today there are all kinds of associations with all kinds of goals — then it consults with some architect. They agree on the style in which such a house is to be built: Greek, Gothic, Renaissance or some other style. This is the usual process today. If Anthroposophy had been a movement like all the others, it could have proceeded in this way. But Anthroposophy takes into account the great demands of our time for a thorough renewal of our entire culture, and therefore it could not be built in this way. Furthermore, Anthroposophy is not a one-sided body of ideas, but the ideas of Anthroposophy arise from the whole of human experience, from the deep sources of the human being. And that which lives in the ideas of anthroposophy has arisen from a primeval source, just as it was the case with the older cultures. And just as the words of Anthroposophy can be proclaimed by human mouths and given as teaching, so too can that which flows from the sources from which the Anthroposophical ideas also flow be given on the other side for direct artistic insight. It is not a translation or transposition of anthroposophical ideas into art that is at issue here, but rather a different branch that can develop as art from the same source of life from which anthroposophical ideas come.

What Anthroposophy has to reveal can be said from a podium in words that signify ideas. But it can also speak from the forms, from the plastic forms, from painting, without sculpture or painting becoming symbolism or allegory, but rather within the sphere of the purely artistic. This means nothing other than that if anthroposophy creates a physical shell in which it is to work, then it must give this physical shell its own style, just as older worldviews have given their physical shells the corresponding style. Take the Greek style of architecture, as it has partly been realized in the Greek temple: This Greek temple has grown entirely out of the same world view that gave rise to Greek drama, Greek epic, Greek views of the gods. The Greeks felt that in creating their temples they were building a dwelling for the gods. And this corresponds to what earlier cultural views saw in the further development of the human soul that had passed through death; there is a certain qualitative relationship between the Greek god and the human soul that has passed through death, as it was felt in earlier cultural currents. And something similar to how in ancient times dwellings were built for human souls that had passed through death, while still believed to be on earth, was later shaped by the Greeks in their temple. The temple is the dwelling of the god, that is, not of the human soul that has passed through death itself, but of that soul that belongs to a different hierarchy, a different world order.

Those who can see forms artistically can still feel in the forms that have been created by carrying and burdening and other things for the Greek temple, as in older times the dead, who still remained on earth after death, who, as a chthonic deity, as an earth , this house was formed out of the earth, so that the temple was built as a continuation of the gravitational forces of the earth, as they can be felt by man when he somehow looks through his limb-being, as such a connection of forces. A Greek temple is only to be considered complete when one views it in such a way that the statue of the god is inside. Those who have a sense of form cannot imagine an empty Greek temple as complete. They can only imagine, they can only feel, that this shell contains the statue of Athena, Zeus, Apollo, and so on.

Let us skip ahead in art history and look at the Gothic building. When you experience the Gothic building with its forms, with its peculiar windows that let in the light in a unique way, you always feel that when you enter the empty Gothic cathedral, it is not a totality, not complete. The Gothic cathedral is only complete when the community is inside it, whose souls resonate in harmony in their work. A Greek temple is the wrapping of the god who dwells on earth through his statue. A Gothic cathedral is in all its forms that which encloses the community in harmony and with thoughts directed towards the eternal.

The Greek worldview, or the worldview that took shape in the Gothic period, are dead worlds for today's humanity. Only the degenerate forces of decline that stem from them can still live today. We need a new culture, but one that is not only expressed one-sidedly in knowledge and ideas, but one that can also express itself in a new art. And so the development of art history also points to the necessity of an architectural style of its own for anthroposophy, which wants to bring a new form of culture.

The way anthroposophy is to be lived is based on the fact that, to a certain extent, a higher being in man, but which is man himself, speaks to the person who lives in ordinary life, which takes place between birth and death. By feeling this, the two-dome structure presented itself to me as the necessary building envelope for this basic impulse of the anthroposophical world view. In the small dome, what is inwardly large and wide is, as it were, physically compressed; in the large dome, what is inwardly less wide is spatially expanded, what inwardly belongs to the life that we lead between birth and death. And when a person enters this building in the sense of such an anthroposophical world view, they must find their own being. This is based on what has just been said. And while he is inside, he must feel the structure in such a way that he, as a human being, as a microcosm, does not feel constrained by the structure, but is externally connected to the universe, to the macrocosm, through the entire structure. But if you look at the structure from the outside, you must have the feeling: Something is going on in there that brings something unearthly, something extraterrestrial to earthly existence. Something is going on in there that is hidden in the earthly itself. So it must be possible to look at the building in terms of its overall form and also in terms of the sculptural extensions, which, as I said over there, must represent organic structures.