The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees,

In a sense, my lecture today will make a prerequisite, since I gave the scientific basis for the examination of anthroposophy with the science of the present in the last lectures that I gave here in Berlin, and it would only be a repetition for those of the honored audience who were present at the time if I were to repeat these foundations today. So today I will have a few things to say that can be understood quite independently, but which require those lectures for their scientific justification.

When man speaks of spirit and spiritual knowledge, it must be said that he is actually pointing to something that is constantly present to him, at least insofar as he is awake. Man cannot doubt that both his cognitive and volitional activity with the external world is carried out by him in such a way that he is spiritually active with his whole being. And so man actually speaks of spiritual activity as if it were something independent. The difficulties actually only begin where it is a matter of penetrating deeper into the nature of the human spirit and the spiritual foundations of the world. When this is said, the most diverse things can be pointed out. For from many sides these inner soul difficulties arise in relation to the spiritual life in man. And I will, so to speak, pick out just one example that illustrates how these difficulties arise and ultimately take hold of the whole human soul. I will give an example that is perhaps not always felt as strongly as others. But much of what the human being has to deal with because of the inner destiny he has to live through lies in semi- or wholly subconscious mental processes. People do not always realize the origins of their inner suffering and their inner mood. But with unbiased self-observation, which is based on a certain, also scientific self-education, one can discover the origins of these moods, these feelings of happiness and suffering in the soul life, which mean a great deal, very much, for the way in which a person can engage with life, the way in which he can be active in life, and the way in which he can work for the good or ill of his fellow human beings in the world. And so I would like to point out how, when he summarizes what he calls his spiritual life, man can, as it were, feel the powerlessness of this spiritual life anew every day; as I said, even if he does not feel it, the result of these unconscious emotional connections in his soul life points to it. Man feels the powerlessness of spiritual life every time he sees this spiritual life paralyzing, when he sees it sinking into a state of sleep, and between falling asleep and waking up, this spiritual life completely sinks into a kind of unknown world for him. Then he feels, as it were, the powerlessness of that spiritual life, which he is able to hold within his earthly existence through his own soul power. The course of the world takes away this soul life from him, takes away this inner spiritual activity from him every day.

But then, when a person observes with a certain impartiality how he awakens from sleep again, how he perhaps, with the transition through the dream life, which he can only see as unreal compared to the external physical reality of the world, re-enters his physical earthly existence in such a way that he, as it were, strengthens his soul nature with all that permeates his bodily organization, with all that is active in his will, then the human being feels, or can at least feel, a difference. He feels how spiritual life becomes dependent on physical corporeality. But at the same time he feels that he cannot look down into this physical corporeality. He feels that, in a sense, this spiritual life sinks into his own being, so to speak, sinks into a kind of darkness into which he cannot look. He feels how that which he calls his spiritual life is seized by the processes of bodily life, by nervous processes or by others. He cannot see through it, it eludes him as if in a kind of inner darkness.

What one can feel when one is able to go so deeply into one's powerlessness in the face of the spiritual being of the human being, one might compare it to a kind of emotional breathlessness. And this emotional breathlessness, with all the uncertainties of life that it contains, can spread over the entire state of mind like an inner, spiritual cloud and give rise to the great question of life: What am I? What am I here for in this world?

And again, when a person sees how their spiritual life is submerged in the physical, as it were in darkness, they feel just as if, if I am to compare it with something physical, the air they breathe were being spoiled by the metabolism. He feels as if he is in some kind of mental suffocation, or at least he can feel it. But it is precisely these two poles of insecurity and uncertainty that lie at the heart of the human being. And that is what has led to humanity always searching for the essence of what the spiritual actually is.

Anthroposophy, in the sense in which it is meant here in my lectures, seeks to approach this spiritual world from the point of view of modern human consciousness. However, it must be well aware of what is easily placed before the door of the spiritual world, so that man is either unable to pass through it in the right way or is unable to pass through it at all. For two powerful enemies of the inner human life lie in wait at the gates of the spiritual world: superstition on the one hand, with all its delusions, and doubt on the other. Those who suffer from superstition, despite feeling so happy in it, are those who do not want to come to terms with what modern science has to offer. They then conjure up all kinds of images from the arbitrariness of their inner soul life, through which they try to understand what the spiritual world is for them. Yes, one can, in a certain respect, I would say, with a certain superficiality of mind, be satisfied with the delusions of superstition. But if you want to be or have to be an active person, if you want to intervene in life, when you encounter phenomena in nature or in human life, then you feel how everywhere that what the human soul produces in terms of superstitious delusions is shattered, and you end up with a certain lack of orientation in life. You can't find your way in life because you bump into everything, life becomes full of corners and edges, because what is revealed in things is something different from what superstition conjures up from the soul.

Those, on the other hand, who have become more immersed in modern science educate their thinking by the phenomena of the external world, by what observation and experiment can yield to modern man. But they often find that this thinking sticks to what the external basis of knowledge is, what the senses alone provide. This leads them to say to themselves: I can only apply this thinking to what the senses tell me. And they find this thinking, so to speak, too thin to somehow penetrate from the world of the senses into a world of the supersensible, into a world of the spiritual. Then doubt creeps in. This doubt can be thought up, can perhaps even be logically justified. But doubt cannot be lived in the long run if one does not want to help oneself over it through all kinds of superficiality and illusion. And if you do the latter, then doubt settles deep down in the mind and takes hold of the physical shell through the pathways that lead from the mind to the body. Gradually, through the influence of doubt, a person feels like a weakling, and it may then be that the more he entangles himself in doubt with his logic and science, the more the effects of doubt take hold of him in life and he comes, so to speak, if the expression seems exaggerated, it still has a certain justification, into a kind of mental “consumption” that makes him unsuitable to fully engage in the tasks of life. And if he does not notice how doubt consumes him, then others notice it, and what doubt has made of him comes back to him in the way he is valued in life.

In this way, one can look more deeply into the way in which man places and must place himself in relation to what he calls the spiritual world. In our time, people who have just come to doubt an immediate insight, an immediate realization of the healthy judgment of man into the spiritual world, either find a certain reassurance by turning back or not stepping out at all from what has become of them, to and into all kinds of old traditional worldviews and creeds. Many have a certain fear, a certain shyness, to step out of what they were born or raised into as old creeds, because they fear losing that foothold in life by losing a view into the spiritual world as a result.

Others, who cannot hold on to what has been passed down to us through the immeasurable forces of human civilization and the various revelations of the spiritual world, are going through strange developments today. They despair of the possibility that a healthy person can see into the spiritual world, and so they turn to what anthroposophy, in harmony with true natural science, must also understand, but in a certain respect to the sick person. They turn to what can be delivered to them through all kinds of mediumistic arts. They cling to what certain natures can see in visions and the like. What is the basis for this? In every case, if one really approaches the subject impartially, one can say that a medium can only arise from the fact that the physical organization is such that certain external impressions can be penetrated and suppressed, that the deeper physical nature can stir more than it can when a person is devoted to his healthy sensory impressions. From what can reveal itself in a certain way, it is believed that one can learn a great deal about what does not reveal itself in the normal state of life, and this is then seen as the intervention of another world in this, our world. It is easy to prove that in all cases where something visionary becomes present in the human soul, it is based on some kind of detuning of the human organization. Without delving into the pathological, it is impossible to explain what arises in a visionary way in the human soul as spiritual content. And so we see how those today who despair of the normal, active human being being able to penetrate into the spiritual world turn to the abnormally active person.

In the face of these things, anthroposophy behaves in such a way that it starts from the healthy person, both in soul and body. And when I had to deal here with how man can awaken slumbering powers of knowledge through certain soul exercises in life and in science in order to penetrate into the spiritual world, the prerequisite was made that such exercises are only undertaken when there is absolute mental and physical health. Anthroposophy must, to a certain extent, deal with the directions just characterized, which are taken to enter the spiritual world, if it wants to discuss its relationship to the spiritual world. In this respect, it can be seen that certain spiritual contents, which people today more or less accept as contents of revelation, are effective above all through their venerable age. Today, we also see what impression this venerable age of such revelation makes on people seeking the spiritual. We see people doubting the paths that the human spirit of science can take into the spiritual world.

And so they turn back to the ancient times of human development or turn to what still extends from such ancient times into our time, in order to see, as it were, how people once came to what is available in traditional religious beliefs as a world view through their own powers of knowledge. With supersensible vision, as I have developed it in my last lectures, one comes to an extraordinarily significant spiritual discovery about the development of human spiritual striving. If we look impartially at what is actually present in the traditional beliefs that exist today, to which thousands and thousands of people turn with the deepest needs of their souls, we find that, ultimately, they are based on paths of knowledge that people once walked, perhaps by very different means than we consider right today. It may be said that everything we take in as a worldview from historical development or tradition, or that we take in through faith, has once been regarded as knowledge. All the supersensible assertions and dogmas that can be found in our creeds, in our world views, in our philosophies are based on what people once sought out of themselves, on paths that are similar in some respects to the paths that I will speak of again today as the anthroposophical ones, but which were fundamentally different in earlier times. But even today we can gain some understanding of the path to the spiritual world by turning our gaze back to the paths that were once taken into these spiritual worlds.

Now I would like to pick out two paths that people have taken, both of which are completely impassable for us Westerners today. But if we look at them with an open mind, we will see that ultimately these paths also arose from the same attitude that we act on today when we seek the spiritual world through anthroposophy. These two examples are the ancient Indian yoga practice, through which serious seekers of the spirit once sought to enter the supersensible world, and, further, that which can be called asceticism in the times when it was not in a state of decadence, both paths which, as I said, are not suitable for our Western humanity, but by which one can ascend to an understanding of the path that is necessary today.

What did the ancient practice of yoga consist of? Among other things, it included a kind of regulation of the human being's breathing, such that the person, for the purpose of knowledge, did not give himself over to the natural breathing that is his in ordinary life, but rather breathed differently according to certain laws. What is the actual goal of such yogic breathing? What is the significance of the fact that one imposes on oneself the inner obligation to breathe differently, to draw in the breath differently, to hold it differently than one does in ordinary life, and also to shape the exhalation in a peculiar way, for a while and again and again, and again? The purpose of this is to direct one's consciousness to an inner human process, namely breathing, which otherwise takes place unconsciously, either entirely or at least for the most part. I would like to say that we take breathing for granted in our ordinary lives. We do not pay attention to breathing. But the moment the Indian yoga student begins to breathe differently from the way he takes breathing for granted, the whole attention of his soul life is directed to this breathing process. The breathing process becomes something he can experience strongly within. And what does he experience in the end? He experiences the connection between the breathing process and human thinking. What is presented here can be characterized in the following way in abstract logical terms. As we draw in the breath, we simultaneously push it rhythmically up into the organ of our thinking, the brain and nervous system. The breath interweaves and undulates through what takes place in the brain. As modern people, when we breathe, we do not pay attention to how the breath flows through the thinking process. But it is precisely this flowing that the Indian yogi wants to make clear. He permeates what is abstract thinking for us with the denser current of the breath, which he becomes aware of. In this way, he strengthens his thinking in ways that take place entirely internally in the human organism. He invigorates his thinking, but he also enlivens it. What now comes inwardly to his consciousness is a different thinking from what goes on in everyday life.

To one who has practiced yoga, this thinking of everyday life appears as a corpse appears to a living person. Ordinary abstract thinking, or thinking connected with sense perceptions, appears dead in comparison to the inwardly living thinking that is gained through such strengthening for the consciousness. But then, through his strengthened thinking, he who has done such exercises over and over again for a certain time looks deeper into the world. And because his thinking has now become so strong through this strengthening, as otherwise only our sensory perceptions are when, for example, we direct our eyes outwards, perceive the world of colors and it makes an intense impression on us, or when we perceive sounds through our ears, he sees because his thinking has now gained the same power as his perception. Although he does not see the external world with his thinking, he does experience the world. What has been seen in this way from the spiritual worlds by individuals who have undergone such a yoga practice has then been incorporated into the development of civilization of mankind. And some of those who today accept this or that, which has been handed down to them traditionally and historically as a world view, accept it without knowing that it is incorporated into human spiritual development from the results of this yoga practice. It can be said that in all worldviews, even in those that ascribe philosophical certainty to themselves – if one can only look at them correctly from an inner soul-historical perspective – much of what today's human being accepts comes precisely from that which once flowed into human consciousness in the way described.

Through the fact that thinking has been made alive in this way, the human being comes to know something about the eternal nature of his being, and comes to know something about the fact that he existed as a spiritual-soul being before he descended from spiritual-soul worlds into what had been developed for him in his mother's body out of the physical world: his physical-bodily organism. With our own thinking, without having undergone any training that strengthens thinking and enlivens it, we perceive only that part of the human being that passes between birth or conception and death. With invigorated and enlivened thinking, one perceives in the person what his own eternal being is, what can live even without being in a physical body, and what also immediately announces itself to the enlivened thinking as what lived in a spiritual world as a spiritual being before the beginning of our physical life. One vividly gains knowledge of the spiritual nature and the spiritual past life of the person.

This is the one path. Initially, it led its followers to look primarily at what is called the pre-existence of man in relation to his life on earth. And they devoted themselves to the practice of yoga with a certain one-sidedness. Through this, they gained an insight into the existence in which the human being was present in spirit and soul before birth or conception. They spoke of this part of human existence as if it were something self-evident. And in so doing, they overcame the powerlessness that humans feel in the face of the spiritual when they see it descend into a state of sleep every day. What becomes unconscious in sleep does not escape from animated thinking. For what becomes invisible to the sleeper is, so to speak, permeated with inner spiritual life, but in such a way that it extends beyond birth and death and announces itself as that which has a formative effect on the human organism – and it is already present from the moment of conception — so that it cannot be understood as a product of the human organism, but must be understood as that which submerges and immerses in this organism as its eternal, spiritual-soul nature.

Another direction is the one that has now led certain people of different cultural ages to see through the essence of a spiritual world, but which, on the other hand, spread light in life. As I said, the matter has often taken a harmful turn. But with anthroposophical science, one can look back to times when asceticism — I mean now — had not yet degenerated into its harmful currents, when it was not yet a certain spiritual coquetry, but when it was supposed to represent the most honest path of knowledge of certain soul seekers. Asceticism consists in the fact that man, in a sense, tunes down, paralyzes – one could even say – his ordinary life functions, that he suppresses what would otherwise well up and surge into his conscious life from his instincts, drives and passions in ordinary life, that he, out of full inner strength of soul, , to command certain inner stirrings, which are connected with the organism and the activity of the organs, to stand still for a while, that he even educates his body to keep a calmer pace for a while in relation to the bodily-physical functions and that which is connected with them: the urges, desires and passions. What was the reason for this? It was based on an insight gained through experience. For these ascetics came to certain insights, and in coming to them, they knew what asceticism is for them. They came to the realization that our physical body is indeed the rightful vehicle for everything we are meant to experience between birth and death, but that it is an obstacle to the perception of the spiritual world, and that everything that allows the essence of the spiritual world to arise in consciousness has the effect of descending in the manner indicated, on the expressions of this physicality. Those who in this way have, as it were, removed the physical obstacle to looking into the spiritual world, looked more to the other side of human eternity. They looked towards the gate of life that man has to pass through when he lays aside his physical body by dying, when he re-enters the spiritual world with his eternal being. They did not so much look at the pre-existence of human existence, but rather at the life that man enters when he has passed through the gate of death.

I have given you these two examples to show how, in other times, people have come to experiences and views about the spiritual world from certain backgrounds. But today we are faced with a world development, a cultural development, a life of civilization that must, above all, come into the right relationship with the outside world. Those who had acquired insights into the spiritual world either through the practice of Indian yoga or through asceticism had, in a sense, made themselves unsuitable for the outer life. By going through the yoga breathing practice described, the person tunes himself to become extraordinarily sensitive and to feel everything that is going on around him with extraordinary ease. He develops a tendency to withdraw from the outer life, just as when the horns of a snail are touched, it withdraws from the outer world into its shell. Thus we see that those who have come to real insights into the spiritual world have withdrawn and lived in hermitages, paying little attention to living with the outer world. We find the same with those who come into contact with the spiritual world through asceticism. They undergo exercises that aim to tune down the processes and powers of their physical bodies, thereby making them unsuitable for intervening in the more robust life of the outside world. Again, these people are also led to a certain inability to intervene in the external life. But again it was necessary for these people - for reasons that do not belong here - that they devoted themselves to a knowledge of the higher worlds, so that then the others, who more through authority accepted what such knowledgeable people could reveal to them, then accepted this in good faith and performed in the outer life what the reclusive hermits could not perform. But such behavior contradicts both our current knowledge and the demands of modern life.

We humans, who do not live like the original yogi scholars or like the former ascetics before the Copernican or Galilean era, but who live in the era in which a richly developed natural science has changed our entire external life and demands of us , if we want to be cognizant, we must also know how to intervene energetically in life. Today we must realize that it is no longer possible for us as people of the present to penetrate into the spiritual worlds in the ways described. But that does not prevent the modern man from finding his way into the supersensible world, if he undertakes certain things, as I have already indicated earlier, that have nothing to do with breathing practice, but that consist of meditation and concentration, through which the human being can enliven his thinking. In this way, it is similar to the inner experience of the yoga practitioner. Or when I describe the exercises of the will that a person can undergo, which aim to educate the self, to take one's own development into one's own hands, to discard certain habits with all one's strength, and to attain in terms of disposition or even attitude towards life, then what the human being experiences in this way through a strengthening of his will can bear a certain similarity to what the ancient ascetics experienced. But the aim is not to weaken the physical body, but rather to maintain it in its full efficiency and suitability for the outer life.

But what do we gain when we, on the one hand, invigorate our thinking through meditation and concentration in a way that is appropriate to the present time? We achieve something that, even in knowledge, does not need to withdraw from the outer world, but rather attains a very definite relationship to the outer world, a relationship that is entirely in harmony with what we are accustomed to applying as our methods of observation to the outer world at a lower scientific level. I will give an example in this direction, an example of what can become of our thinking through purely mental animation, through inner soul-strengthening of this thinking, precisely in relation to the outer world.

A large part of our present-day views about living beings, about the connection between animals and humans, for example, have been gained by comparing the individual organs, for example of higher animals or of animals in general, with the corresponding organs of humans. We also compare other things, for example blood composition and the like. From this we form an idea of how the human organization could be related to, how it could be related to what we encounter, for example, in the organization of higher animals. But there is a peculiarity. What I am going to say now is perhaps a little subtle, but the whole modern path of knowledge into the supersensible worlds is indeed a subtle one and must be considered in its details and peculiarities. Let us assume that an unprejudiced observer of the higher animal world forms a mental picture, not merely an external view through the senses, of a higher animal, and that he then also forms a mental picture of the structure and organization of the human being. He can visualize the relationship between the two. But if such an observer were now to be required to do the following, he would immediately notice how dead, how inanimate, how abstract his thought life actually is. It is just that man does not do this in ordinary life and in conventional science, and so he does not realize how inanimate his observation and his thinking are. Let us assume that he has formed an idea about their external organization and so on with regard to the higher animals. If he makes these thoughts alive, he cannot progress and draw the thought of the human organization from the living thought of the organization of the higher animals. He can only find a relationship between the two by first forming the thought of the higher animal, then that of the human being, and then bringing both into connection. But he cannot vividly bring forth the thought of the human being from that of the higher animal. His thinking does not have this inner vitality. We know this vitality from observing how we grow, carry out our daily metabolism and so on. But our thoughts stand side by side. We cannot let the thought of the human organization grow out of the thought of the animal organization, as the individual organs grow out of the more undifferentiated human organism in the human germ during the embryonic period. We have no living thinking in ordinary life, and all our thinking bears this imprint for common science as well as for ordinary life. But in the moment when one does soul-exercises that inwardly strengthen the thinking, the thinking comes to life, and one arrives at inwardly experiencing the form of a higher animal with these living thoughts, by going into how the higher animal bears the main direction of its organization horizontally, while man bears it vertically, how man frees his arms from the tasks they have in animals. To be able to do this, the human being must develop an inner relationship to that to which he has no relationship in ordinary thinking.

Because, dear honored attendees, in relation to external nature, we often think differently because we get by with dead thinking when we think about human nature, about living nature in general. For example, we look at a magnetized needle that can be rotated around its axis and find that it has a particularly distinct direction that points to the magnetic north pole on the one hand and to the magnetic south pole on the other. This leads us to the idea that the magnetic north-south direction in space has something distinctive about it compared to the other directions. We differentiate space, which would otherwise appear to us without distinction. When one has developed living thinking, the vertical direction can be similarly enlivened, which man acquires by bringing the animal organization, which is oriented in a completely different direction, into the vertical direction. One learns in this way to experience the world, and the whole space comes to life. But this enables one to move from the living thought of the animal organization to the living thought of the human organization. The thought of the human organization itself grows out of the living thought of the animal organization. One sees: by observing the phenomena of the outer world, thinking becomes alive. In the case of the Indian yogi, it only became alive through his coming into a relationship with the spiritual world; he did not enter into such a relationship with the outer world as we need in our process of knowledge.

Developing the ability to bring the world to consciousness as a living thing in this way still does not guarantee that we are dealing with reality. What we develop as living thinking could still be mere fantasy. One must have a criterion for knowing that one is not dealing with mere fantasy, but with something that, by living in our living thinking, also lives outside in the things themselves, so that the thought that I experience as living represents that which lives outside in the beings of nature itself. This characteristic arises for the one who, in the way I have presented it in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in my “Occult Science” or in other books, walks the path of knowledge to the living thought. The reality of the living thought presents itself to him simply by the fact that, when he has it, he experiences a mental pain, a suffering, in cherishing and experiencing this living thought with every step he takes inwardly in life. Yes, real higher knowledge cannot be attained without mental pain, without mental suffering. And what does this suffering, this pain, indicate?

Well, this pain and suffering is nothing other than what arises from the fact that our whole organism, our whole human being, becomes inwardly sensitive through and through, as otherwise only the senses are sensitive. We are accustomed to the sensitivity of the senses; they no longer cause us pain, even though processes also take place in the senses – for example in the eyes – which, if we had any sensation of pain at all for such processes, would appear to us as processes of pain. We do not have the sensation of pain for these processes. But when our whole organism becomes a total sensory organ through the exercises indicated, then we initially feel this as pain, as inner mental suffering. Therefore, one must say again and again: He who experiences joy, experiences pleasure, can indeed be grateful to life for this joy and this pleasure. Insights in a deeper sense will not come to him through this. Anyone who has acquired a little knowledge knows how much he owes to the suffering and pain that ordinary life has already given him; so that these sufferings and pains have prepared him to now, in inner self-education to living thinking, also to experience the sufferings and pains that precisely this living thinking prepares for man, because he is precisely placed in the outer world. By experiencing reality in suffering, we experience the spiritual world, which we now grasp with living thought, with the same degree of reality with which we experience the sensual world through our senses. In this way we become entirely spiritual sensory organs, if I may use this paradoxical, self-contradictory, but very real expression, and only as a whole human being can we become that. Then we perceive the spiritual world in its reality. Then we know how the living thought is just as much a reality as we know how to distinguish in ordinary life between a piece of hot iron that we really grasp with our fingers and one that we merely imagine in our minds.

Thus, in order to grasp the higher, supersensible world, these two things belong together: that the living thought is experienced in man, and that through inner, soul pain, his whole being is permeated with inner sensitivity. The thought must become alive – the whole human being must become sensitive to those moments in his life when he wants to seek a connection to the spiritual world. We see that as modern people, we remain entirely in the soul realm. We do not turn to the process of strengthening consciousness through regular or irregular breathing. Nor do we turn to the process of paralyzing our bodily functions. We remain entirely in the soul with our exercises, but on another level we develop the same thing that was developed through yoga practice and through asceticism for the vision of the higher world. We develop these higher insights and yet remain human beings who can fully face robust life, who, as neither men of insight nor men of action, do not have to retreat into hermitage. Why is that? We only perform inner soul exercises, but as a result we arrive at the invigorated thought, which the Indian yogi only achieved by letting the stronger current flow into the other of breathing. And on the other hand, purely inwardly, we arrive at the soul, which in a certain way becomes a kind of downgrading of physical processes. But we now have both in hand. We can, for example, keep suffering to the soul alone and we can return to our healthy soul and body state whenever we wake up from sleep. For it must be emphasized again and again that what is important in anthroposophical methods is that we can return from that state, which leads us into the spiritual world, to that state where we stand with both feet on the earth.

But when one has succeeded in enlivening thinking in this way, then one knows that one has something quite different from what the much-mocked natural philosophy once had. Oken and Schelling also came to a living thinking. And anyone who reads Schelling's works today will notice that there is something in them that is not a dead thought, that is a living thought. But what Schelling does not express is what makes his living thinking different from the mere image of such thinking. It is different because of what I have added, which testifies that we have become a sense organ with our whole being: the pains, the sufferings that one recognizes as a necessity when higher knowledge is to arise in man. Therefore, one can say, such knowledge as seems to be present in Schelling gives only a kind of inner soul voluptuousness, while the knowledge I mean is quite serious when the question arises: how can one bear it?

And yet another difference arises between anthroposophical knowledge and Schelling's. When we acquire knowledge through ordinary science or speculative philosophy, we are accustomed to the fact that once we have it, it remains with us, becoming memory images. I would like to say: it is not as easy as that with anthroposophical knowledge of the spirit, because it is a living thing. Once one has gained access to a certain area of the world in the manner indicated, in order to look into the spiritual, No matter how strong the experience and how powerful the vision at a given moment, after a short time it has faded away, like a dream that has gone cold. And if one wants to revive it, one must awaken it again within oneself, for one has just entered the sphere of the living. And just as no one in the sphere of the living can say that what has gone before makes what comes after unnecessary – for example, that if you have eaten once eight days ago, you do not need to eat again after eight days – so it is here too: that the knowledge you have acquired in the spiritual life must be gained again and again. This gives the soul life a certain disposition in relation to the supersensible world: the disposition that the spiritual shows itself to be alive by having to be grasped again and again by the living forces in order to be there for the consciousness. In short, one lives one's way into the supersensible world by experiencing the reality of this spiritual world at the same time, just as one lives one's way into a reality through the senses.

But then, when one has developed this living thinking within oneself, permeated by inner sensitivity and inner capacity for feeling, then one no longer faces the person one is dealing with in the same way as with dead thinking. In dead thinking, the peculiarity is that we have this person before us, we form certain ideas about him, which we then carry within us. But all these ideas do not extend beyond the space enclosed by the person's skin. If, on the other hand, we look at the person with living thinking, then a spiritual person is added to the physical-sensory view of the person, which in turn is structured within itself. We look at the person in their physical form. But this appears to us as enclosed in a spiritual shell, and this spiritual shell points us back to earlier earthly lives. We see how the present life on earth, in which the present form is being lived out, is a repetition of a previous life on earth. And we come to see the person in such a way that we recognize what he experienced in the spiritual world during the time between his previous death and the beginning of his present earthly existence. We look at the spiritual and soul nature of man as it was before descending into the physical world, and see how the activity of the spiritual and soul nature, which does not yet have a body, developed, how it is directed towards penetrating with a full, and now spiritual consciousness, the secrets of the human body. We now realize the profound meaning of the saying, 'Man is a small world'. For this small world is small only in space compared to the great world of the cosmos. It contains not only the secrets of the cosmos. It contains far more than can be seen with ordinary eyes in the cosmos, as we survey the external cosmos with the intellect and direct our gaze into it so that we can recognize it or act in it. Thus the human being, as a spiritual-soul being, lives in a spiritual world before conception, and his gaze is directed to the human organization, to the human being as he is enclosed here with his spiritual-soul being in his skin. That is the world one lives through between death and a new birth, and we look at this world through what - if one may use this expression - we see like a spiritual aura on and through the human being, and what points us to the world he lived through before his earthly existence.

And we look at the other structure through which it is expressed to us how the person acts in front of us. If we observe with our ordinary intellect how one person meets another in life, then we may attribute it to so-called coincidence if we notice that this encounter has a deeper meaning for the person. If we notice that this encounter, perhaps by bringing these two people together, is decisive for their whole life on earth, we may still attribute it only to chance that these two found each other. But if we look at it with strengthened thinking that guarantees reality, then we recognize how the whole life of these two people moved with a certain magic, and that one of them finally came into the other's field of vision because the other was sympathetic to him. It becomes a certainty, as sensitive people say to themselves when they reach a certain age, as Goethe's friend Knebel put it, for example: When I look back on my life, it seems to me as if I had wanted it out of unconscious, inner desires. It turns out that what wants to come out in a person's destiny binds us together in our inner being with the being of the other.

This is where we come to what the ancient ascetics, the yoga people, called karma, how destiny develops in connection with successive earthly lives. Today, this still seems paradoxical to many people. But anyone who takes seriously the question of how the reality of living thinking can be substantiated will, after all, form a conception of the connection between human destiny and that which one develops as higher, supersensible powers of knowledge. Just as one can say that what lives in the world of colors is unknown to the blindborn, but that the world of colors must not be denied because of this, so for higher knowledge the connection between human destiny and repeated earthly lives does not appear to contradict human freedom. When one considers human freedom, it might appear that it has nothing to do with such a view of karma and repeated earthly lives. But it is not so. For example, I am not unfree because I build a house this year and move into it the next year. But I am no more unfree because I develop certain powers in me and that these then seek their ways in earthly life. It remains, as with the construction of a house, still the freedom of the human being. But through such an insight, one sees how what human action is is the second link in the human aura. And through this one gains an insight into that part of us that works incessantly as the human being is active in the physical world. Not only the ordinary powers of perception live in it, but also that which the human being can otherwise feel in relation to his digestion, for example. In this way, man now sees what he experiences from day to day, what enriches his life, through which he becomes greater and greater – in the spiritual sense this is now meant, of course – and what then goes into the spiritual world through death: He sees the mystery of death.

This is the anthroposophical path to the spiritual world. And this path also explains why those who do not want to go it now condemn it, as we see today. They have an unconscious fear of what must one day be overcome in a higher realization, of suffering, of what brings human functions to a certain calm, but a calm that is under an inner domination. They therefore prefer to see visions and so forth arising from a down-tuned corporeality, as in the medium, but which have no cognitive value. While a cognitive value arises from not experiencing what is worked through the outer corporeality, but what is experienced from the inner soul, but as a certain suffering, which guarantees the certainty of the supersensible world.

And since the path to the supersensible world is sought in this way, its results must also be communicated in such a way that the whole presentation is an expression of the seriousness that must be shown by those who want to go up the path into the spiritual world and from there want to bring knowledge about this spiritual world to other people. The idea must take hold among people today that the messages about the spiritual world can be proclaimed by those who walk this path, and that the secret of birth and death can be revealed through it. People must be able to arise who seek knowledge of the spiritual world, not only of the natural world in natural science. And just as one does not have to be a painter to feel the beauty of a natural phenomenon, one does not have to be a spiritual researcher to feel the value of what the spiritual researcher has to say about the supersensible world. Only when a relationship has developed in which the spiritual world can be understood in a similar way to how one can understand works of art, even if one is not an artist, only then will the right relationship exist between the spiritual researcher and the non-spiritual researcher, just as the right relationship already exists today between astronomer and non-astronomer.

And spiritual science will establish the right relationship between the spiritual researcher and those who want to take up spiritual research. And since this relationship is directed towards truth, truth must also be felt if people allow their sense of truth and common sense to prevail, which is also the aim of the spiritual researcher's messages. But then, when such a relationship exists between spiritual research and this life, as I have just described, then that which can bring the spiritual impulses of this spiritual science into a real life practice will stand up for life. What do we have from the spiritual world today? We have thoughts from the spiritual world, we live in thoughts and ideas, but as I have characterized them, they are actually dead. But if one is able to infuse anthroposophical spiritual science into these ideas, then it gives life to these thoughts and ideas. As a result, the people who are able to understand these anthroposophical thoughts are themselves inwardly spiritually enlivened.

Do we have spirit in our present culture? We may say: we have spirit in the sense that we have developed beautiful, great thoughts from the spirit. But in these thoughts the living spirit is not present. Anthroposophy does not want to develop thoughts about the spirit, but to pour the living thought itself into people as spiritual blood, so that they are permeated with spiritual blood in their spiritual nature just as they are permeated with physical blood in their physical nature. Then, however, we will succeed in permeating our whole life with spirit again, but not just with thoughts and abstractions from spirit, but with living ideas of this spirit. Then, however, the great questions of life, especially the social questions, will be solved in a completely different way when we can say: We not only have thoughts of the spiritual, but the spiritual world itself walks among us. It is there where we ourselves are as physical human beings. But because we — each of us in our physical body — carry a spiritual being within us, we are companions of spiritual beings that walk among us. We will relate to the world quite differently, and the great riddles of the present and the near future will present themselves to us in a completely different way when we stop having only dead spirit in our thoughts, but when we can say again: We humans are not alone on earth, we do not just harbor thoughts of a spirit in us, which, as thoughts, are unproven and lead on the one hand to superstition and on the other to doubt. For out of certainty we can say: We are not alone on earth, spiritual beings are among us, are connected with us, spiritual beings take care of the course of the world with us, and we take care of the course of the world when we enter into a relationship with them!

Thus, anthroposophy does not seek the spirit, which often proves to be a dead thing in life and can only give us a gloomy picture of the future. Rather, anthroposophy turns to the living spirit, so that people may not only have ideas about the spirit, but may have the living spirit walking among them!

Before I move on to the actual topic, please allow me to just note that in today's lecture all sorts of things have to be said for which even the scientific justification cannot be presented today, for the reason that in the last lecture here weeks ago, the dispute between anthroposophy and science was attempted in such a way that the anthroposophy I mean here neither shies away from this dispute nor wants to oppose the scientific methods of the present day. But still, since I assume that a large part of the audience who were present at the time have already heard the things, I may refrain from repeating them today.

Now, when we speak of the great mysteries that confront the human soul when it looks to the spiritual world or wants to feel something, the questions that arise cannot, in principle, relate to the fact that at any given moment a person might doubt that he is dealing with spiritual beings in his own life. Indeed, one could almost say that questions about the nature of the spiritual world arise precisely because the human being knows that, by engaging with the world, he is dealing with the activity of that which is spirit in him. But on the other hand, he cannot get to grips with the question: What is the nature of this spiritual that he himself is dealing with? Actually, all questions relating to the spiritual world must ultimately come down to this: What is the nature of the spiritual that we know well? It is precisely the fate of that which we know well that is at stake in these riddle-like questions of existence. Even those who seriously, not merely out of coquetry, deny the spirit, they only deny that what they regard as spirit has an independent significance in relation to material existence. So their denial refers to the essence of the spiritual, not to the spiritual itself.

But why, since man does possess a spirit, does he encounter difficulties in this area? That is the question that actually arises more or less unconsciously in the human soul. Special people experience these questions consciously, the majority unconsciously, but one cannot say that they experience them any less meaningfully for the soul's mood and disposition. They also experience that these questions take place in the depths of the soul's life and play their way up into the daily state of mind through all kinds of states of happiness or suffering, so that one can indeed say that a person is more or less suitable or unsuitable for himself and the world, depending on how he comes to terms with such fundamental questions of existence.

Now, one could cite much that leads a person to ask these questions. From the whole abundance of that which torments, fills with doubt and the like in the human soul, I want to emphasize something that can illustrate how such riddle-questions, as they are meant here, present themselves to the human being.

We see every day, when we pass from the waking state into sleep, we see that which we carry within us in the waking state as our surging, fulfilling spiritual life, we see it sink down into the sphere of unconsciousness. And we feel, consciously or unconsciously, we feel in this descent of our conscious spiritual life into the unconscious the powerlessness of that which we actually consciously carry within us as our daily, cognizing spiritual life from waking to sleeping. And even if we only feel it, this feeling becomes the soul mood for what can be experienced when that which is most valuable in life, our conscious mental life, descends into the unconscious state. And we then ask ourselves: Does this spiritual life, for the sake of which we actually want to be human, also have to somehow descend into that fate, without it being connected with an inherent, supporting, sustaining, as we say, eternal existence?

That is one side of the question, which is so meaningful and powerful. But this question also exists in contrast. We wake up, perhaps through the transition of the dream life, which we must, however, see as illusory, compared to what we call reality in ordinary life. We grasp, so to speak, corporeality with our soul; we pass over into that state in which we make use of our body in every moment that develops our healthy bodily life. But even here there is something that seems mysterious to us, for we see that which we actually address as spirit sinking down into the body. We make use of the organs as they appear to us, of our body. But how the spiritual works through our arms and legs, how it works through our senses, how it makes use of the body, is something that initially eludes our ordinary consciousness. And one can say: While one becomes aware of the powerlessness of the spiritual through the moment of falling asleep, one can become aware upon waking up of how that which we call spiritual sinks into a kind of unknown world. We do not know how that which we would like to address as spiritual plunges into our physical organism. Fainting on the one hand, and sinking into darkness on the other, are the two poles that arise as such deeply heart-wrenching riddles of man, but which man cannot avoid.

And how does humanity as a whole stand today, in that it perceives these questions as the real riddles of existence? One might say that two things arise for the spiritual world, to which man seeks a relationship for the reasons already mentioned, two things arise precisely for the man of the present day. One is filled with illusions about the spiritual world, the other is filled with pains and torments whose origin remains unfathomable. One is superstition, the other is doubt. Those who have not yet familiarized themselves with the great results of the modern scientific world view, those who have not yet been touched by the conscientious method used by one part of the world, fall into superstition to a greater or lesser extent. They take what comes to them of their own accord or overcomes them from the anthroposophical world view and knowledge, they take that and fill their minds with what can arise in the human interior without it being justified in a faithful, honest way towards themselves. They fill the world, so to speak, with all kinds of thoughts and emotional constructs, and in doing so they feel satisfied in a certain way. But the moment they want to cope with the world, what they have absorbed in this way through superstition shows itself everywhere, coming up against all possible corners of the world. The events and things that confront us from the outside world do not correspond to what we draw from within as illusions. One ends up as a person who is disoriented in this world and unfit for action, because the powers on which he relies fail after all; they are just powers that are born out of his will and desire. This is the situation that the one, less scientifically minded part of humanity encounters in relation to these questions.

The other part of humanity, which has in turn immersed itself in the conscientious, scientific methods of the present day, so that it is able to recognize what significance science has for the overall culture of the present day, has often trained its thinking to seek out connections in the external world of the senses. It has felt how far one can go, which ideals still need to be resolved, for example in the field of natural science. But he has also learned, or at least believes he has learned, that when he engages his thinking with what is presented to him externally through the senses, for which he can find a certain kind of law through thinking, which then satisfies him for the sensory world, then this thinking is no longer sufficient to rise to a spiritual level. The very strength of spirit in modern science leads one too much to despair of the strength of this thinking when it comes to penetrating beyond the sensory realm into the spiritual realm through one's own human research. And so it is that the one who is still sincerely touched by science comes into doubt.

But—dear attendees—just as the superstitious person must become disoriented because their illusions do not prove to be forces for action, the honest person, who doubts with their heart, can no longer cope with themselves. For that which arises out of doubt penetrates deeply into the human mind with such strength that it moves in those ways, which today are still little understood in science, which lead from the human mind, from joy and suffering, of joy and pain, into the health of our nerves, of our entire organic system, that it puts itself into what we have in our minds, and that we, also physically, gradually become weak through doubt. I would like to say: The mental consumption that we have to acquire through doubt continues in the human physical fitness. And so, when doubt gnaws at us, we also become weak in life and, above all, we become shy and recoil from everything that, after all, should turn out to be a necessary relationship with the spiritual world, according to our assumptions or even our healthy sense. This is why a large proportion of those who have experienced these doubts seek a refuge in an area where anthroposophy will certainly not seek them, because it starts from a healthy soul life and seeks to develop higher powers of cognition in the human being through the further development of a healthy soul life, through which he can see into the spiritual world. But those who are often seized by doubt today do not turn to their own healthy nature, which above all needs to be developed; they turn to that which must be regarded as more or less pathological, to visions, to that which often arises in the waking consciousness like dream images. And we can say: all these phenomena are actually ultimately based on a detuning of the human organism.

There is no medium in whom the human organism as a whole is not tuned down, so that precisely because the human organism is not functioning properly, the abnormal spiritual phenomena that are admired in mediums come to light. Even extremely learned people cannot see that there must be an enormous insecurity when one allows oneself to be guided by paths that lead to the pathological for the sake of knowledge. Furthermore, one can also say: All of this must always be based on the fact that something in the human organism is not functioning in the normal way, so that there is always something present in all these ways that can only come before humanity if the human organism itself deviates from the healthy path.

This proves, in principle, how today's human beings will grasp at anything to come to the necessary knowledge of the spiritual world. Anthroposophy, as I mean it here, has to do with a path into the spiritual world — this should be particularly clear from my last lecture — that, above all, starts from a healthy human soul life and body life. Please read up on it. I cannot repeat all of that today, what I have indicated as soul exercises that are to be carried out, suitable for modern man and for the whole of culture, that are to be carried out so that the higher faculties of cognition and will develop from the ordinary soul forces, just as the higher faculties develop from the unconscious forces in the child. Read up on it, you will find all of this in the first preparatory part of my writings, in the part that refers to the fact that everything that is present in the soul and body life of a person in the way of restlessness, rashness, unconsciousness, and so on, and so on, must first be subjected to careful self-discipline. This first part of my books is often said, even by opponents of anthroposophy, to be taken into account, because it gives more or less moral instructions to the simple person who knows nothing about anthroposophy.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it cannot be denied that this is the case, but on the other hand, these efforts are aimed at developing powers of cognition in the healthy human soul, in the whole healthy human being, through which the spiritual world can become visible. And if, proceeding from these views and by means of such powers of knowledge, we look back into the course of human history, we find in this way the means of understanding what the modern soul requires in the sense of anthroposophy in relation to spiritual knowledge.

As I said, since people today often refuse to penetrate into the spiritual world on their own paths, they seek out among the paths already mentioned that which is there in the form of venerable traditions and religious creeds. They accept it, and even carefully select what they accept because it is there, because they were born into it, were raised in it. They accept it and then, to justify themselves a little to themselves, they say: Yes, these things must be based on faith, whereas real science is to be distinguished from faith, but it actually only refers to the external, the sensual. But if one looks not only with an external historical eye, but with the eye that is sharpened by higher, supersensible powers of knowledge — as described in my books and in my last lecture — if one investigates the historical in spiritual life, it presents itself differently than it is seen through today's science. Above all, we see where the world views that people are born into and educated in today actually come from.

Anyone who is able to research this area will find that everything we hold as traditional beliefs today, which has become convincing through its age, was acquired in older epochs of human development through the path of knowledge, not of faith, but through the path of knowledge as it was appropriate for older times. We live in the time that has educated itself to have concepts for what can be considered scientific. And we cannot help but take the view that we take into account what has been incorporated into human spiritual life through modern cultural development.

If we then look back at older spiritual cultures, we see that great and powerful things have emerged from them, but they have emerged through the path of human knowledge. Today, we only have the knowledge that is handed down to our will impulses. We accept them without looking for their sources. But these lie in older insights, and if we communicate with them, we will be able to gain clarity about what anthroposophy can do for today's, for modern man, through the relationship of the spiritual world.

Let us look, for example, at two examples of older knowledge, through the effect of which we can actually find the life into which we are born and educated today in terms of faith. I could pick out other examples from the abundance, but I would like to pick out two characteristic examples that have led people to the old knowledge. I would like to highlight a certain type of ancient, oriental, so-called yoga system, through which people in ancient times tried to strengthen their thought system in such a way that they could not only see the sensory world through the strengthened thought system, but that they could see the spiritual world through it. That is one side of the older insights. We can no longer go there, but by delving into them, one gains an understanding, so to speak, of what modern man needs in this area.

What did the yogi achieve when he did certain exercises that were supposed to lead him to a strengthened thinking? He shared with humanity in general that the inner life was much more soul-filled than our present life. One must only understand what actually lived in the souls of the older human race. They could not help it, but, by observing the outer nature, they added to what they heard in a tone, in their contemplation, what was born in their soul as a spiritual being, and what transformed the whole of nature for them into something that manifested itself spiritually and soulfully everywhere.

The one who lived as the yogi scholar over there in distant Asia was now also in the same situation as general humanity. He was in the same condition as general humanity that I have just described. The man of that time longed to get out if he wanted to gain knowledge, and he longed to get out by wanting to strengthen his thinking.

Now there is a certain method that is regarded by many who understand it as something particularly pernicious, but it goes back to what was quite appropriate for older times, and I would like to describe it in the oldest form in order to make it quite understandable.

The original scholar of yoga, in his quest for knowledge, developed exercises related to human breathing. He performed a breathing process through certain, more or less shorter or longer periods of time, which did not proceed in the same way as the ordinary one. For example, he chose different times for inhaling, holding his breath and exhaling. He thus entered into a completely different kind of breathing rhythm, lived in it and felt so transformed in his thinking powers that he now perceived thinking as a much stronger, much more powerful force than he had felt in everyday life. Through this, he looked into that other world into which he had longed to look. And if we ask ourselves what all this is based on, We can answer: Yes, in ordinary life the breathing process actually takes place in such a way that we do not pay attention to it, that it floats in the unconscious. At most, we become aware of it. Otherwise, it can only enter the human soul life in a semi-conscious or quarter-conscious state. But what lives as unconsciousness for the ordinary consciousness was raised into consciousness by the ancient yoga scholar in such a way that it was modified. He became aware of breathing.

A further consequence of this is that when we draw in our breath, it and its effect permeate our entire organism. What the breathing rhythm is, is thoroughly continued in the brain; what the brain performs is permeated by the breathing process. In our brain activity, we are always dealing with something that is permeated by the inner breathing process, we just do not notice it. Let us learn to look at the musical experience in a psychologically healthy way! I would like to say that the truth would become obvious to us that we are dealing with a thought process that is related to a continuous flow through the organs. The yogi brought to consciousness that which takes place inwardly, but which is a completely unconscious state. Through the different breathing that he practiced, thinking became something completely different for him.

He did not do it in his head, he did not do the thinking according to logical rules alone, but in such a way that it took on a musical character. But this also allows thinking to grasp something completely different than it can grasp with mere logical forms. The old Indian yoga teacher felt through this, his way, how he could enter into another world, which he sought, through such an energization of his bodily organism and thus of the soul-spiritual. But now, what is attained in this way leads one so much back to one's own being, it leads one away from the external, robust world that we as modern people are confronted with, that we as modern people not only must not go this way, but cannot go it either. It leads people so far back into themselves that they must come back to a spiritual hermitage. Such a method of knowledge comes from people who, after all, have separated themselves from the rest of human life. That was one way. We must not imitate them, because such hermits do not fit into our modern culture. We can only trust people who are able to fully immerse themselves in the life that is the task for all of humanity. This must be taken into account for the highest realms of knowledge, otherwise something will be lost that belongs to older times.

Now, that is one thing – esteemed attendees – that I would like to present to you. The other is what has been developed for those forms that are understood by the name of asceticism. Asceticism goes back to forms that were appropriate in the past. It is based on the fact that certain functions that would otherwise occur are now artificially toned down, so that the organism is not as energetically active as it would otherwise have to be when a person is involved in ordinary life. But in this way, the person has very specific experiences, and by getting to know these, what he recognizes on the other hand is complemented. And this asceticism, which is a lowering of the life of the body, is based on something that has been observed since ancient times, that it is a fact for the world that surrounds us here between birth and death. For this world, our organism is absolutely the means by which we can gain knowledge and energy in and for this world. We just have to realize that it is based on the fact that we have the other senses, we experience ourselves together with the rest of the world.

But this organism is, because it is active in the energetic sense for this physical-sensual world, therefore it is an obstacle to the knowledge of the spirit. If one subjects it to ascesis, then it does not function in such a way that we are fully immersed in the sensual world, then it becomes less and less an obstacle to penetrating into the spiritual world. That is why in the past people sought to place themselves in the spiritual background of the world by lowering the degrees of the obstacle. And, my dear audience, that too is not a path that we can follow today. Because by tuning down his organism in this way, man also makes himself unsuitable for the kind of life that is demanded of us today. But anyone who is familiar with the historical development of human spiritual life knows that today's human being, who is placed in this life with its demands of the outside world, has as a traditional creed that which was once found on these paths. Today, through faith, we take in much of what has been achieved in this way, as I have described. We are not aware that it has been achieved in this way; we do not know that it is based on an ancient form of knowledge, and we construct the concept of faith for that which is venerable today.

Anthroposophy now stands before modern spiritual life in such a way that it follows paths that are appropriate for today's people, that are thoroughly compatible with what we otherwise seek as science. While the yoga scholar strengthened his thought process by taking a detour through the breathing process, you will find in my writings “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science” instructions that do not aim to do this. Instead, you will find descriptions of exercises that relate only to the life of the soul, that remain purely in the soul, just as we remain in the soul when we are working on a mathematical task. Through these exercises, thinking is now directly strengthened and one then notices, when one treats thinking more and more through that concentration, those other exercises, of which you can read in the books, when one treats thinking more and more through that concentration, those other exercises, of which you can read in the books, when one treats thinking more and more through that concentration, those other exercises, of which you can read in the books, when one treats thinking more and more through that concentration, those other exercises, of which you can read in the books, when one treats thinking more and more through that concentration, those other exercises, of which you can read in the books, when one treats thinking more and more through that concentration, those other exercises, of which you can read in the books, when one treats thinking more and more through that concentration, those other exercises, of which you can read in the books, when one treats thinking more and more through that concentration, those other exercises, of which you can read in the books, when one treats thinking more and more through that concentration, those Well, in order to understand what I have to say about it, one must already ascend to these intimacies of the soul life.

I would like to start from something that is often the subject of our world view today. One seeks — Goethe did it on his way, modern people try it on their own paths, I myself tried it in my older writings — one seeks today to compare what, for example, the outer forms of living beings are. Let us say that today the modern human being seeks to understand the form of a higher animal, he gains an insight into the form of the higher animal. As a result, he has the higher animal in front of him as long as he is doing his research. Then he carries an inner view of this higher animal with him. He keeps in his soul a kind of mental counter-image of what he has experienced out there. But then the modern human being must look, for example, at the human form. He now also gains an insight into this human form, let us assume that he has achieved the same thing as he did with regard to the form of a higher animal. He then compares these two and draws up a kind of developmental theory. He does all this with the concepts into which we are simply born today, into which we are educated through our ordinary mental life. But now we ask ourselves about something very important, which, however, is little felt by modern people today. Let us imagine a modern person with a very precise inner concept of a higher mammal based on their current scientific education. Now ask: If you have this concept, can you grasp the life force from this thought through an inner, living transformation of the thought? Can you get from what nature presents to you to the transition into the living human form? Do your thoughts undergo the same metamorphosis as nature outside, from the idea of the animal to the idea of the human being?

Now, my dear audience, get an overview of the juxtaposed concepts and thoughts about animals and humans, and then compare these thoughts. You will come to something admirable, but it is not living thinking, not a living world of thoughts. Man stands there with his world of thoughts, which is his inner counter-image of what lives outside; but he turns to the higher animal form with abstract, lifeless thoughts.

But when the exercises I have indicated are carried out, these exercises are carried out, then something is indeed accomplished for the human soul life that can already be compared to when a corpse becomes a living being through some process. We actually come to say to ourselves: the animal, for example, has the salient feature that the direction of its head is horizontal; the human being differs in that it transitions from the horizontal to the vertical direction, and so on.

We look at the magnetic needle and align it with the different directions in space. Everywhere it behaves differently than when we place it in an axis that goes from the magnetic north pole to the south pole. We say to ourselves: This is a special direction that has something to do with the inner nature of the forces that live in the magnetic needle. The human being acquires such a view for an outer world, but he then also acquires it for the higher worlds. He acquires knowledge that consists in knowing that the animal has its main direction horizontally, while the human being has a different direction in the whole cosmic space, with its direction vertical. When he has it vertically, that the spinal cord is thereby in the vertical direction, one inwardly becomes acquainted with the living concept of how the outer world takes on a living concept through and through. Space ceases to be merely indeterminate, extending into the void; space is inwardly filled with directions and essences of force. And once one has recognized the animal form within oneself, one develops the possibility within oneself. One learns to experience how the mere thought of the animal form is transformed into the human form; one learns to recognize an inwardly moving thought life. But one learns to recognize it as a human being who does not come to a hermitage, as the old yoga scholar does, but who, precisely through this, can really enter into the present life, because we come to the living concepts that bring people more than anything else to connect with the innermost essences of the outer world.

But now, my dear audience, you may object: yes, there have always been philosophers who have come to certain living concepts, but who nevertheless give the impression of standing in something unfounded. One cannot have confidence that what takes place in the living thought shows itself in the same way out there in the real world.

Yes, if things remain as they were with Schelling or Oken, if they remain so, then one is not protected from simply grasping something fantastic in an unreal way. Rather, the thought can give a kind of inner voluptuousness, which one brings forth in a living way, like the flower structure of a plant grows out of the leaf structure. But in this path of knowledge, reality is attained through something else. The person who brings thinking to life in the right way begins to experience something from which, however, modern man often shrinks back. And because he shrinks back from this, he also shrinks back from the whole of anthroposophy, which seeks the real spiritual world through these paths of knowledge. The moment one enters into these particular areas of life through these exercises, it becomes clear that each such living concept does not work in the soul in the same way as the dead concept that we otherwise have, but rather each of the living concepts that we gradually acquire initially affects us in such a way that it pains us, causing us mental suffering that affects us no less than any physical ailment. This is where we have to go through and where the gates of the spiritual world should open, that every living concept, which in turn leads him a little deeper into the spiritual world, that every such living thought causes suffering and pain in the soul.

Why is that? For the reason, dear listeners, that we must not only develop a living thinking, but we must also experience reality in this living thinking. But we can only experience reality when an effect is exerted on ourselves.

Let us consider our senses, the eye. What goes on in the eye is, among other things, also purely chemical decomposition processes. If these processes were not so quiet, we would feel pain there as well, but for those of us who have already reached a certain stage of development, this is overcome. What once had to be felt in other phases of human development is now brought about by painless perception.

We have to experience this state of pain so that it appears to us as permeated by the soul and spirit itself, because the entire human being must become a comprehensive sense organ. One cannot see into the spiritual world until the human organism has become a spiritual and soul eye. We must go through that state of suffering, which transforms our whole human organism into a sense organ for the spiritual world. Our whole organism, by overcoming this suffering, becomes a sense organ for the spiritual world. Only then, when one experiences this, does one know that one is standing in a real spiritual world. Then you will say to yourself: I am very grateful to my fate for my joys, but what I have acquired as knowledge, I owe to what I have lived through painfully, and that is what actually led me first to the special essence of what knowledge is. That is what pushed me to pursue this essence further. Without going through the tragedy of life, but also overcoming it, the doors to the spiritual world do not open in reality.

But when they do open, then something completely different arises from the living thinking, then what really arises is that we look – just as we look with our eyes and ears at colors and sounds – we look at the concrete spiritual world to which we ourselves belong with the eternal part of our human life, that we are rooted in the spiritual world around us. And once we have managed to ascend from the individual animal form as described, we find that a further step arises: we now have a human being before us, and we can examine him differently than in the clinic or in the dissecting room, when the life has left him. We can fathom the essence of the human being differently. Just as one surrenders to the thought of the animal form that has now been brought to life, the inner form of growth of the animal, so one also sees in the person standing before one, not just the physical form; now, from a purely spiritual perspective, one can see something that can truly be regarded as a spiritual-soul aura of the person. And when one looks into this spiritual-soul aura – this seeing is a result of the living of thought – then one sees what the person standing before one is as a spiritual-soul being before the person was, before he descended from the spiritual-soul; one sees the person in relation to what lives in him from his pre-earthly existence. The living thought helps us to do this when we follow it in the physical world.

In this way, anthroposophy seeks to arrive at a true understanding of the spiritual-soul entity in the life that precedes this earthly life. And by looking at the human being in his essence, which can also exist without him already having a body, one then also gets to know more precisely what the essence of the spiritual-soul is; one sees in this spiritual vision how a completely different world stands before our spiritual vision during the time that preceded our birth.

Here on earth, as human beings, we cannot see into ourselves. What anatomy provides us with is an exterior. When, for example, a finger is moved only by the impulse of the will, what does the human being know about what is going on in his organism to make the finger move.

Modern anthroposophy recognizes the same scientific foundations as the other exact science in its field. And if we had fathomed all the laws of the starry heavens to their end, everything that shows clouds and sunbeams their way, we would have fathomed everything that is otherwise around us in earthly life, in here in man, who has been called the microcosm, there would still be a richer number of riddles for world views than there are out there in space. What is outside in space, man surveys in his life between birth and death. More wonderful than everything that makes up solar systems in the world is that which can be found in the microcosm.

In the world from which we descended before we united with our physical body, at that time when we lived as spiritual-soul entities in the spiritual-soul world itself, we looked at what we carry within us as human beings. Every attention, every thought is directed towards what the human being can experience in the time just before he descends: How do I connect with that which is connected to me in the line of inheritance? The child experiences the transformation of its brain, how this takes place in accordance with inner laws. We experience the incarnation before we descend to this incarnation. That is the one side that we achieve as our living thinking.

The other side is that we are now learning to look at what the human being does. We see how a person encounters another person in a particular year of life, we see how this encounter gives rise to something extraordinarily meaningful, which then gives their own existence in this physical life on earth a completely different direction. We see this and say to ourselves: this is a matter of chance.

But the one who is able to look in the right way, sees how a person, even before he enters this earthly life, already has certain likes and dislikes and how these consist of rejecting the one and accepting the other. If one denies this, then it is the same as the world of colors is for someone who is born blind and has an operation; he could also deny the colored world. So it appears as something fantastic when the one whose spiritual eye has been opened looks, as from childhood, the antipathy and sympathy pave the way for wisdom or also that which initially appears in life as un-wisdom. One only comes to know through living, suffering-overcoming thinking, this activity of man, interspersed with sympathy and antipathy, how brief the result of antipathy and sympathy itself is. Then one looks at fate and how it was earned in earlier earthly lives. One learns to look into repeated earthly lives.

Here the connecting element of humanity can be found in a spiritual and soulful way. It unites real, deep religious feeling, it unites that which seeks only the education of that which is present in our minds, it unites with that which is the demand of our deepest heart life. By engaging with this spiritual knowledge, the human being gains the possibility of also having knowledge of how to find those with whom he has formed a community here in the spiritual life.

Thus I have again shown a step of that — my dear audience — which leads out of the sensual-physical into the spiritual world through anthroposophy.

What is gained in this way are purely spiritual-soul processes that the ancient Indian yoga teacher found through his breathing process. We do not kill the human physical organism, but we approach the soul life, we let the soul life undergo an inner suffering, which at the same time, however, places the human being externally as an agent, a volition, in today's world and does not destine him to be a hermit. This is what needs to be reappropriated in modern culture: to openly confront the person who presents his research to humanity in this way, to confront him by agreeing with him.

He can do nothing but show again and again, by describing the methods and the results, how what he does is only a continuation of what man can find justified in ordinary life. And if it were said that this concerns only those who already look into the spiritual world, then it must be answered: It is not the case that man, by virtue of his organization, is not capable of error and doubt, but he is predisposed to truth. Therefore, anyone who is not a painter can stand in front of a picture that is painted in truth and beauty and feel it that way.

With this healthy human sense, a person can stand before what the anthroposophical spiritual researcher has to say and recognize the truth for themselves, even if they are not yet a researcher themselves. Those who are not can judge the truth through the healthy powers of humanity. But what Anthroposophy strives to accomplish, it believes, is not just a goal of individual hermits, but what modern man really needs.

What do we have in today's intellectual life? The ancient man had an inner soul life that he even carried into the outer worlds. We can see into the external worlds, but we have lost this inner spiritual life. We have abstract concepts, which are excellent for doing everything that does not require living inner powers of knowledge. But this admonishes us to emphasize again and again: with your thoughts, which are so magnificent,

you have nothing but something dead at bottom; you have thought-ideas from the mind, and although we certainly do not want to conjure up the old days in which spiritual knowledge was sought in such ways, in such old days a living spiritual view was found in a way that was appropriate at the time, the people of that time had achieved an inner soul life, something that realized the living spirit in the inner soul life.

If we turn again to that living thinking as anthroposophy understands it, then knowledge will not only provide us with vivid concepts, but knowledge will provide us with the living spirit that walks among us. In this way we will also experience physical plants and animals, and we will connect our own human feelings with these spiritual beings, the living spiritual world itself, which in turn is to be introduced into physical, sensory existence through that which is now a living knowledge in contrast to dead knowledge.

We must first make it quite clear to ourselves: we want knowledge that does not merely call our world in with thoughts, but that calls in the spirit itself. It is effective wherever the human being works out of the spirit. And particularly today, when social life is in such a terrible state, one feels that one needs something that must be present in social life as a spiritual element. One sees in particular in social life that it cannot continue without the spirit being involved. In short, anthroposophy would like to find understanding among those people who, so to speak, feel the pulse of contemporary culture. Anthroposophy wants us to enter the present day with the living spirit, instead of with mere thoughts and ideas of the spirit, because we have to realize that only with this living spirit will we be able to solve the tasks that are set for all of humanity. Only by solving them in a living way can we grow into a culture in the future that will sustain people at their spiritual and physical peak.

Dear attendees! Before I begin my remarks today, please allow me to say a few words by way of introduction. What I will be saying today can be fully justified scientifically. And I will try again and again to establish a relationship with science by showing that anthroposophy is in no way opposed to the justified results and conscientious research methods of the present day. But I have already allowed myself to make the relevant remarks, at least in outline, in the lecture that I was allowed to give here in the same place a few months ago. And since I can assume that a large number of the esteemed audience who were present that day are here again today, a repetition of what was said then could well seem superfluous to them. And so I will leave out what I said then about the relationship between anthroposophy and science.

Dear attendees! When we speak of the spiritual world, fundamental questions and riddles arise for the human soul, questions and riddles that are not merely theoretical, but are connected with the inner peace and joyfulness, with the whole inner destiny of the human soul, and with the ability and efficiency of the human being in life. But the nature of these difficulties that arise for the human being in relation to the spiritual world is not always considered in the right way. That a human being has a spiritual entity to claim for himself cannot really give rise to any mystery or doubt. For man knows in every moment of his waking existence that precisely that in which he feels himself in his true human dignity and in his true human nature is what he describes as his spirit. He is concerned about such riddles that arise in this direction. He is concerned, after all, with the fate of this spirit, which actually constitutes his being. Whether this spirit is something that belongs to the ephemeral, whether we can ascribe a duration to it, whether it is what emerges from material existence like a bubble, whether it is what gives meaning and value to the material. So that is essentially what it is about, not the spirit as such. Even the materialists will not deny the spirit, but only regard it as a result of the material processes of the world.

If a person feels the urge to explore the nature of the spirit, not only for the sake of science but also for the happiness of everyday life, it is because, in the face of this fate, the soul — one might say — from unconscious depths, which are actually only raised into consciousness by a scientific world view, because uncomfortable, worrying moods continually arise from them. And these are connected with a vast number of experiences that flash through our soul. I could mention many of these experiences that cause a person to worry about the spirit, but I will only give two examples, two that are precisely those that a person does not always realize, that do not always enter a person's consciousness. But it is precisely such worries that dwell in the subconscious depths, giving rise to moods and states of mind, bringing happiness or sorrow to the soul, and which intrude into everything that makes a person capable or incapable in life. When we define them, we often describe something that the simple, naive mind does not bring to consciousness, but which is rooted all the more deeply in the soul and is connected with the whole life of feeling and sensation. And from this realm I would like to give two examples.

The first is the feeling that arises at the moment when a person passes from the waking state into the sleeping state, which actually occurs every day in a person's life. The inner spiritual activity in which the human being finds his true being fades away. It becomes completely unconscious, and the human being enters the indefinite. Even if one does not always feel it, there is something in this experience that could be called the powerlessness of ordinary spiritual life. There is something in the world existence that we enter through the state of sleep and that takes away from us the state in which we recognize our human dignity and our human worth, that takes away our spiritual life. This powerlessness in the face of the spirit is the one thing that, more or less, half or wholly unconsciously underlies the riddle questions about the spiritual being.

And on the other hand, it is that which can arise when a person awakens in the morning, perhaps through the transition of the dream state, which he can only see as a sum of chaotic experiences in relation to the reality of waking life, then immersed in his physical being, serving his bodily senses, his organs. But then the human being notices — I would say — the other pole of that which raises questions about the nature of the spirit within him. He notices that, in relation to what he is as a spiritual being, he is claimed in his bodily presence. He lives in the senses, in the nervous system, in the limbs. But if we ask ourselves the simplest question: how do we move the hand, the arm? In our ordinary consciousness, we cannot account for what flows from the intention to carry out the action down into the body, what works and weaves in this bodily existence, so that ultimately raising and lowering the arm comes about. It is as if what we call our spiritual life were plunging into darkness.

Thus, on the one hand, we see the sense of powerlessness of the spiritual life and, on the other, the descent into an undefined darkness that lies within us. And when a person, through experiencing something like this, brings to mind all the soul moods and dispositions that arise from it, then the question somehow urges itself upon him: Yes, what is the truth about this spiritual life? Is there another spiritual life in which this, which seems so powerless and dark to me, is somehow rooted, that guarantees its continued existence? But then two opinions, two enemies of thought and feeling, are placed between man and this spiritual world, which fill man with illusions about the spiritual world and which feed on something in him, in the mood and state of his soul.

The first is superstition. The person who wants to come to an awareness of his connection to a spiritual world does indeed strive inward, seeking, not through his knowledge but out of his will, to surrender to all kinds of illusions, all kinds of clouds to his judgment, things that are supposed to tell him something about the spiritual world. I need only hint at these things for you to feel what sources of illusion lie in what we call the various forms of human superstition. But let us see how the superstitious person must fare in the world.

What he conjures up within himself and what is supposed to visualize his relationship to the spiritual world collides with external reality at every turn. Let us look at the processes and things around us. If we approach them according to their laws, we find that something else is true than what we believe from superstitious ideas. This leads to a certain disorientation. We stagger through life instead of feeling connected to our spirituality, to the real laws of the world. And we also become unfit because we cannot find the strength within ourselves to adapt to the laws of the outside world. A superstitious person must ultimately become an unfit person for themselves and their environment. Now, it is precisely those who, because of a certain will or a certain situation in life, must refuse to deal with the whole scientific life of the present day who fall prey to superstition. Those, then, who are little touched by the significant insights of scientific life, easily fall prey to the disorientation and unfitness in life that I have just described.

Those who truly enter into this scientific life, who conscientiously penetrate with the scientific methods what the senses, what experiment and observation can offer, are exposed to another pole of mental experience. Such people then feel how they must shape the intellect so that it may find its way unclouded and unmolested through all kinds of illusions into the realm of true reality. But then they feel further: with this intellect, which is so well suited for the realm of the [sensual] world, one cannot ascend into the supersensible world. And precisely those who take the scientific life seriously are then thrown into doubt. And these doubts, when they take hold of the serious mind, the serious soul, they descend from the intellect, in which they are initially rooted, deep into the life of feeling and emotion. And it is precisely through anthroposophical research that we recognize how intimately our emotional life is connected with the states of suffering and joy in our physicality. So that in the end what descends from the intellect into the mind as doubt extends into the bodily existence. So that a person — one may use this radical expression in this case — is thrown by doubt into a certain mental wasting disease, then into physical weakness and unfitness. Through doubt, too, he ultimately becomes unfit for life, for himself and for his fellow human beings.

Because these things affect modern man so deeply, those personalities who take the spiritual life seriously seek the most diverse means of information in order to gain a relationship with the spiritual world after all. We see how precisely these latter natures now turn to that which, because of its vagueness and lack of certainty, can never actually form the basis of real knowledge. They turn to the pathology of human nature. Because they doubt what the healthy soul and healthy body can produce in terms of knowledge about the supersensible world, they turn to the abnormal human nature and believe that, in what they can find in deviation from what normal knowledge produces, normal knowledge, can be found that points to things and processes in another world than this one, in which man also feels just as little at home and where he cannot want that the spiritual could sink into indefinite darkness. And so especially doubters from the fields of science often turn today to mediumistic phenomena; they turn to the sick human nature, out of which come all kinds of visions, all kinds of inner views, which are nothing more than hallucinations after all. For we can see, if we look impartially at the facts in this area, how the medium, who in terms of his normal life of cognition is cut off from the environment, how he, out of a morbid physicality (for a healthy nature produces a healthy capacity for knowledge), has all kinds of inner experiences, which he then communicates. It is never possible to examine these experiences with the same accuracy with which, for example, one examines those of a dream. In the case of knowledge, it is important that what is experienced from somewhere can be examined by the healthy human understanding of everyday reality. We can do this with dreams, but not in the same way with mediumistic revelations, because we do not see through them, because they do not live within ourselves. Nor can it be tested in terms of knowledge what arises from a diseased nature as visions and hallucinations. We will always find that something is wrong somewhere when visionary or hallucinatory phenomena arise from the soul life. And one can say: it is only a continuation of the despair at healthy normal knowledge in the face of the supersensible, which expresses itself in such seeking.

On the other hand, there are many natures in the present day that have not yet emerged from what education, from what we are born into, gives, but there are already a good number of natures today that, by despairing of other ways of entering the spiritual world, they now come to what I might say the most naive minds seek out to satisfy their spiritual needs. There it is, time-honored, the result of a development from ancient times up to our own, there it is. One can quite certainly feel how such confessions, and they extend into our present-day philosophy, how they really reveal something of a spiritual world. But one can actually, since they are simply there as results, since they are preserved by tradition and approach man in a certain finished form, yet give nothing but what in the present day is called belief as opposed to actual knowledge.

Those who lack the courage to penetrate to knowledge seek to justify their belief through all possible conceptual constructions. But those who approach the event with deeper insights of the soul and follow it from period to period, who not only follow the external facts of history but also follow the inner life of the soul of humanity in historical life, they find that everything that occurs today in traditions, in worldviews that exist as creeds or as philosophies, to which one then devotes oneself with a certain faith, they all lead back to old forms of knowledge, not to old forms of faith.

Dear attendees, I will certainly not be one of those who recommend such old forms of striving for knowledge for the present day. However, in order to be able to communicate how man, by nature and essence, can come to a knowledge of another world, it is necessary to discuss the way in which man in earlier epochs of humanity and how that which has been revealed as the result of such earlier paths of knowledge, how that, without our having any clarity today about what these paths of knowledge were, how that was then communicated to the course of development of mankind, how it is still there today. People would be amazed if they realized with complete historical accuracy how even the most self-evident philosophies only contain the results of those that are present on the basis of earlier knowledge.

I would like to highlight two examples of the way in which such insights were arrived at in very, very ancient times. I could also cite others, but I will choose two characteristic ones. The results of these paths of knowledge, which can no longer be ours, still live on today in tradition. Many, indeed millions of people, devote themselves to them without knowing it. For that which lives in all creeds and in all world views has once been sought by individuals on their paths of knowledge. In particular, the first path of knowledge that I will indicate is not really characterized correctly at present. For it actually characterizes only that which has remained in the ancient oriental world as old traditions, but which has remained defective and decadent, of that which was a fully justified striving for knowledge.

The first thing I would like to characterize is what is usually known as the so-called yoga path of oriental spiritual seekers. Through this yoga path – without people necessarily knowing it – which is said to deliver the results that many people devote themselves to, what was it that they strove for? This will become clear to us once we have summarized its most important characteristics. One process that the yoga scholar particularly turned to was breathing that was different from ordinary breathing.

Of course, I know, dear audience, that breathing techniques in particular can be quite detrimental to people today. But what is harmful to human nature today can be traced back to forms of paths to knowledge that were once perfectly justified in older, more primitive forms of human nature and that were really paths into the spiritual world from the essence of the human spirit at that time. The yoga scholar tried to bring into a different rhythm what otherwise takes place unconsciously in the human being, what only becomes conscious in pathological states or otherwise in some abnormal cases, what thus essentially takes place unconsciously in the healthy person. He tried to inhale, hold his breath and exhale again in a different way than in ordinary life. What did he hope to achieve in this way? He sought to bring the one element of the human soul life to a knowledge of other worlds than the ordinary ones, the element of thinking. And the yoga scholar noticed that through this abnormal breathing, his thought process was brought into a completely different orientation. Into which orientation? We can make this clear by referring to the physiology of today. When we breathe in, the respiratory current is driven through the spinal canal into the brain. This is an unconscious process for modern man. But that does not make it any less true that through the processes that take place in the body and that are the exterior for the soul-spiritual processes of life, not only everything for which the brain is the tool is drawn through them, but also that which is the refined rhythm of breathing. As we think about the world, the subtle current that arises from breathing vibrates and flows and undulates and weaves continuously in our brain and in our nervous system. By breathing in an abnormal way, the yoga scholar became aware of what remains unconscious in the breathing process during normal breathing. And he was able to follow what now flows into the brain from the breathing process,

And what came about as a result was that thinking became different. In ancient times, thinking was very much alive for humanity. In ancient times, it was the case for humanity that people did not, as we today justifiably see pure colors everywhere through outer eyes and hear pure tones through outer ears, the ancient man saw everywhere that which arose in his soul as a soul-spiritual. In the cloud, in the thunder and lightning, in the spring, in the plant, in the stone, everywhere man saw, except for the sounds that the ear gave, except for the colors that the eye supplied, and so on, everywhere man in older times saw a spiritual-soul. People today say: These were fantasies. They were not figments of the imagination, just as we perceive the blush through our eyes, so the ancients perceived what was spiritual and soulful in wave and wind, in lightning and thunder, in plants, stones and animals, in springs and streams, in sun and moon. This thinking, which was the common property of humanity in those ancient times, was of course also the thinking of the yoga scholar. But by sending the consuming breath through this thinking, this thinking became something else for him. Through the thinking that he developed as a result, he perceived a different world than through his ordinary thinking. He perceived the world that gave him, above all, the certainty of his own being.

And when we read today the wonderfully poetic descriptions given in the Bhagavad Gita, for example, about the nature and workings of the human self, they were gained through the fact that the yoga scholarship pulls itself together into a thinking that was acquired through the self-regulated breathing process. Above all, the old man, by seeing the spiritual in all things and processes of the external world, did not have his inner spiritual. Through the yoga process, he became aware of his spiritual self. And that which often resounds from ancient times, which was only changed on the outside, lives on in worldviews and creeds. And many philosophers and religious believers do not know how what they say about the human soul and the self in connection with the eternal has developed over time from ancient times, when it was the result of the training of ancient yogis. But it can be realized that these are inner exercises that were intended to lead the way up to this way of knowing in the supersensible worlds, so that one should get to know one's relationship to a different world than the one that otherwise surrounds us. On the one hand, in the direction of thinking, this was such a path of knowledge.

Another older path of knowledge was the one that is still recommended today in many cases, which is less harmful than the yoga path when applied to today's nature, but which cannot bring real knowledge today. The yoga path is inappropriate for today's human being. Because by performing a certain breathing process, one makes the organism different from what it otherwise is. The organism becomes fine and sensitive. The lightest breaths of life weave themselves into it, so that the person becomes extremely sensitive to the hard, robust outside world. The yogi therefore likes to withdraw from this. In the old days, when people sought higher knowledge from those who withdrew from life, this was possible. That does not apply to our lives today. Our modern life has come to the point where anyone who wants to give people knowledge should be fully immersed in life. We will say of the one who wants to withdraw into a hermit's life: You cannot reveal anything to us. Only when you live life with us and yet come to certain insights, then we can follow your paths of knowledge. Therefore, we need different paths of knowledge for the modern person than the old ones were. And one such older path of knowledge was that of asceticism. In turn, what was practiced as asceticism in ancient times as a legitimate path had been corrupted, and what can be read and learned about this asceticism today in many cases is not what an ancient humanity once used in its legitimate way to seek knowledge, which in many cases lives on much more than that of the yogis in today's worldviews. So what is this asceticism based on? It is based on a lowering, a relaxation of our physical body. And it was the experience of those who underwent such asceticism when they tuned down their bodily functions, when everything ran more smoothly than in ordinary life, what takes place in the physical body, so that they were filled with the experience of inner strength. The will became purely spiritual as the outer physical existence was tuned down. And such ascetics said to themselves: Yes, those bodily functions are actually nothing more than an obstacle to penetrating into the spiritual worlds. For the ordinary outer world, our body is indeed the right tool. We can only live spiritually and mentally in a world between birth and death if we can devote ourselves to what the external environment triggers in our senses in a purely physical and physiological way. Only when we can use our body normally can we truly live with the outer world. But precisely because this body, according to both the cognitive and the will side, is so well suited for the waking life between birth and death, it proves to be unsuitable for allowing people to experience inner soulfulness in its purity. Therefore, such ascetics sought to tune down the physical, so that the spiritual-soul within them would arise. And they felt bliss when it arose. And in this bliss they felt that which was otherwise incorporated in powerlessness, united with a spirit that never sinks into powerlessness, into darkness. They felt united with the spirituality of the cosmos.

If we tuned our body down, we would become unfit for the outer world. What we humans need to do today, in an age when we are surrounded by magnificent external culture, we could not do. We would become unfit if we wanted to devote ourselves to such asceticism in the old sense. Therefore, for the modern human being, the inner practice must proceed as I have described in principle in the last lecture and as you will find described in detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my “Occult Science” and in other of my writings. There I showed and in these writings I show how the modern human being practices purely in soul and spirit, not by doing breathing exercises with reference to the physical, not by tuning down the physical body but by doing exercises that are to be done purely inwardly, intimately, exercises that consist of concentration and meditation of thought, that consist of the person not devoting himself to another breathing process, but to another way of thinking. This is the difference between the old yoga method and the exercises you will find described in the books mentioned, the exercises that do not turn a person into a hermit and do not degrade his physical body. The old yoga scholar relied on breathing processes that , but which the modern human being must try by concentrating on certain trains of thought, by overcoming abstract thinking, which is otherwise everywhere in ordinary life and in ordinary science, and by doing so, entering into inner mobility.

I would like to say that our exercises are aimed at achieving the opposite of what the ancient yoga scholar wanted to achieve. He had the naive belief, shared by the rest of humanity, that the peculiarity of the time was that his thinking was inwardly alive and that he wanted to calm it. He sought the abstractness of thinking that we already have today, simply because human nature has developed further, and from which we want to escape today in order to gain knowledge of other worlds. It is remarkable that in ancient times, with all one's might, one strove for what we already have today, and that today, by turning directly to thinking, we are taking this thinking in different directions than it is in ordinary life and in ordinary science. That we inwardly enliven today's abstract thinking, which we increasingly perceive as dead thinking, so that we pass from abstract, dead thought to inwardly living thought. That is the secret of today's practice: to enliven the abstract, dead thought that is present in us in ordinary life and in ordinary science. In this way we achieve the goal today of looking into other worlds in our knowledge.

What happens in the process leads us to the characteristics of certain subtle processes. But one must decide to delve into such subtleties. If one does not want to do this, one cannot really understand the path of knowledge into higher worlds. By practicing such exercises – as I said, I will not describe them further today – a person first notices how his thinking gradually comes to life. And I will hint at what that comes to by means of an example that is appropriate for today's culture.

Suppose we look, as one is accustomed to doing if one has had a scientific education, at a - let's say - higher animal. We make ourselves clear, precisely through our abstract thinking, which is the inner conditions of life and relationships, which are the formal designs, in this higher animal. We make all this clear to ourselves as far as it is possible for today's science to gain a correct idea, so that we can visualize the essence of the animal inwardly. What we visualize in this way, we are then accustomed to relating, for example, to the formative development and inner physical essence of the human being. We then visualize how the internal organs are formed, how they function in the human being, and how the external form is developed. We then compare what we can establish about the human being, which we develop into natural laws, with what we gain about the animal. And by comparing the two, we come to form a certain idea, whether in a more or less materialistic or spiritual sense, about the relationship between humans and higher animals.

But now we ask ourselves something else, something that one actually only learns to ask when one devotes oneself to such exercises, which relate purely to thinking and bring thinking to life. Then one asks oneself: Yes, when one turns to the higher animal world with one's ordinary abstract thinking and realizes what one can realize about it, is one then able to ascend from one's idea of the animal to the idea of the human being? Can we, with our inward liveliness, do with the idea what we can do outwardly with the transformation of form that we observe in the outside world, and then compare in its various aspects and relate to one another through logical abstractions? Can we, with our inward liveliness, do with the idea what we can do with the idea of the animal to arrive at the idea of the human being? Does one thus live through in abstract thinking what is presupposed in us out there in nature, as forces of growth and of formation? No, one does not. But if [he] devotes himself to the newer, purely soul-based yoga, if he arrives at bringing this thinking of the human being to life in such a way that, by gains the idea by which he inwardly visualizes this process, then he comes with this idea, in which it is transformed in the way the outer process is to be transformed, over to the very different nature. Then he submerges himself with this living concept into things, while otherwise, if one has only abstract thinking, one stands and does not submerge into them. And so, through this modern system of exercises in relation to thinking, the human being is inwardly completely transformed. His thinking becomes inwardly something completely different and enables him to truly immerse himself in the world to which he belongs, but to immerse himself with that which he inwardly experiences spiritually. And by immersing himself, he becomes certain of this: that which lives in me as a spiritual being, which may appear to be immersed in darkness and powerlessness, is nevertheless grounded in a spiritual world. For by immersing himself in living thought, he makes himself one with the spiritual of the world, he lives together with the eternal, spiritual foundation of existence, and in this way man gets to know his eternal nature in terms of thought.

But then, my dear audience, the doubts really begin. The path is initially like that on one side. However, one should not think that those who seek their path of knowledge in this modern sense will initially live in pure bliss by entering into a completely different state of mind than that of ordinary consciousness. What is at issue here can be gauged from the well-founded objections that can be raised from all sides against it – and I want to say quite categorically – that can be raised with a certain right, the objections that proceed from the fact that one points to a philosophy like that of Schelling or one like that of Oken: ingenious, powerful, ingenious world conceptions, emerging from a kind of living thinking. But if we enter into both with an unprejudiced human sense, in the way that Schelling or Oken formed their thoughts about individual facts, then, in a more imaginative way, these changed so that they fit into something else, so that they can submerge from being into becoming, there is only mere thinking, a mere dwelling in inner imagery. Nothing guarantees existence, reality. This is precisely what one must reproach such thinkers with: although they set thinking in motion, they cannot give it a character whereby it guarantees its reality in the immediate cognitive life of the human being. And here we may point out that whatever in anthroposophical form seeks to penetrate into the supersensible world, can do so whenever a human being endeavors to follow the path of knowledge in the right way by means of the exercises described here. He then comes to such living thoughts. He develops them by using them to try to grasp the world by immersing himself inwardly in it. But just when he has such a living thought in a particular case and wants to grasp something in all seriousness with it, then inwardly he really experiences what can be called the deepest inner soul pain, the deepest inner soul suffering. Such a thought, which can be transformed inwardly, is not without pain, is not without suffering in the soul. That is why anyone who has acquired even a little knowledge will never tell you anything other than this: Yes, what I have experienced externally as happiness, as pleasure, as satisfaction in life, for that I am quite grateful to my destiny; but what I have acquired as a little knowledge, I basically owe to the suffering that life has brought me, most of all to mental suffering. And these mental sufferings, which came over me by themselves, so to speak, also brought me the certainty that the reality of a living thought can only be experienced by inwardly living through its effect, its truth, in suffering and pain, and that real knowledge of the spiritual world cannot be attained without inner tragedy.

This could also be seen through a somewhat unbiased, more subtle way of looking at things. What about our sensory approach? Well, my dear audience, when we indulge in sensory perception, a subtle change first occurs in our sensory organ; even in the wonderfully constructed eye, small changes occur. Today, because we are no longer aware of what early man perceived – these small changes as pain – we are so organized that we experience them with a certain matter-of-fact painlessness, because we are not in them with the whole person. But what the enlivened thought brings about makes us, as a whole human being, aware that the physical human being is permeated by the spiritual. This practice makes us a sense organ, and we must gain the ability to perceive the spiritual world that we acquire through this sense organ by first going through and overcoming pain and suffering. And by overcoming it, not only does the healthy physical body remain, but the soul in us is now able to look directly into the spiritual world. But then, through this seeing, which is conveyed to us by becoming a pure sensory organ after going through the pain, what presents itself to us in this way connects with what presents itself to moving thought. One acquires a consciousness of reality about the spiritual world through the sense organs interacting with animated thinking, just as we otherwise acquire a consciousness of reality about the world of colors and sounds. But in this way, my dear audience, the modern human being also gains the ability to see into another world. In this way, he has a spiritual reality before the eye of his soul, so to speak, as a whole human being becomes the eye of the soul and, in addition to the sensual reality, the spiritual reality lies around him. For example, the human being, as he is physically formed, also appears before our soul in a different way when we have the living thought. He lives in images. And when we look at a person, what is standing there before us as an outer human form — even what is standing there as an outer human form — shows us something that is connected with the purely spiritual soul. We look, so to speak, at a spiritual soul form, just as we look with the physical eye at the bodily form. And by looking at this spiritual-soul aspect, we connect with the physical body what I call, without hesitation — even if it may cause offence — an auric aspect of human nature. We see an auric aspect; we see a spirit-soul organism. And this spirit-soul organism shows through its own nature, just as the physical organism shows when we have an adult human being before us, that it was once a small child. What we see as the auric human being points back to what we were as pure spiritual-soul beings in a spiritual-soul world before we descended into the physical world and united with that which had been prepared in the mother's body for union with the pure spiritual soul from this physical world. And not only are we pointed in this general way to that which we ourselves were when we had prepared ourselves for it, we are also pointed to in a concrete way to what the person was at that time. We gradually get to know the human being as a spiritual-soul being in the spiritual-soul world in the same way that we get to know the physical human being through our eyes and intellect. However, we have to rise to a certain level of contemplation, which consists of saying to ourselves: Yes, we look at the external world that surrounds us with all the abilities that we have in our normal life between birth and death. We see everything around us in the stars, in the clouds, in the realms of nature; but we look least into ourselves. For we know, if we are unbiased, that what we see within us is basically only a pictorial representation of what we experience in the outside world.

Between birth and death, the human being is organized around the external world. An incredible abundance of content is revealed to the human being as he turns his eyes and other senses out into this environment, from the stars to the smallest worm. But the one who is unbiased enough can intuitively see that what he carries within him is formed in an even more wonderful way. Yes, the outer world may be gloriously formed, and through science we may reveal great and powerful laws from it. If we can look into it, not through anatomy, not through what is revealed to external science, which leads to the glories of the outer world, but through inner faculties, then we will say to ourselves at every moment: That which lies within human nature reveals much more than the cosmic outer world. It differs only in external space, but not in abundance. We can only guess at this human interiority in our ordinary consciousness, but it is truly a microcosm, a small world, and however magnificent the external world may be, here within the human being it appears even more magnificent. But between birth and death we only grasp this intuitively. For when we use our senses and will, we descend into darkness. We do not see what builds up our lungs; we do not convince ourselves that what builds up our lungs is greater and more powerful. We look into our heart, but cannot convince ourselves that the inner organization of the heart is a much more powerful one than what we encounter as an organization when we seek out the relationships between the earth and the sun. We can only guess at all this. With the tools of science, however, we cannot look inside. But if we look into the world with supersensible vision — into the world in which we lived as spiritual beings before our birth, or, let us say, conception — then we find that, while here between birth and death the cosmos is our external world, to which we direct our deeds, our spiritual self before conception — the human inner being — is our external world.

We look at this human interior because we have to immerse ourselves actively in it. For example, we have to prepare for the transformation that takes place so wonderfully in the child as the brain develops. We look at what we make of ourselves out of the soul and spirit before we descend into the physical world. We not only see the human inner world, which appears dark to us between birth and death; it is not only our knowledge, it is not only what we admire when we let our sympathy and antipathy play; it is also what we have turned our actions towards before birth or conception. The human being's will nature aims at what he is then able to make of his inner organization. And, ladies and gentlemen, however unconsciously this may take place in ordinary life, it must be achieved. And what the human being experiences in the purely spiritual world through knowledge and activity is what is then, albeit unconsciously, carried out in this physical life on earth. And that is one side of the auric human being.

The other side of the auric man comes before our contemplation when we do not bring the outer form before our eyes, but that which lives in the human being's will impulses, in the human being's deeds. There we indeed learn to look at the world differently, namely at the world of human beings. One says to oneself: What people do appears to one as the world of colors appears to a blind person who has been successfully operated on. He gets to know a completely new world by opening up an external sense. In this way, a sense is opened up for us by transforming ourselves into a sensory organ as a whole human being. With this, however, we look differently at what people experience. Above all, we get to know ourselves with this sense organ, not like the ascetic who downgrades his outer physicality so as to have no obstacle for the spiritual, who caused suffering in order to come to the spiritual through the suffering of the physical; we come to the spiritual through the suffering in the soul. But through this we get to know in ourselves what is spiritual-soul in this earthly life. We learn to recognize what prepares itself as spiritual-soul and, in turn, strives out of the physical as the second auric when we go through the gate of death. We thus become acquainted with our life after death by becoming sensory organs ourselves. We become acquainted with that which passes through the gate of death as the eternal soul nature of man. We become acquainted with the forces that strive within us towards the spiritual world, towards the spiritual in the cosmos, just as we strove with our deeds and our vision before birth.

But we become aware of something else. We learn to recognize, for example, that when one person meets another, the two paths of life converge. Something develops that is of decisive importance for the fate of both. The two go from there together on their path through life. This is usually called coincidence. But if one learns — I would like to say, like the blind man, when he is operated on, learns to see colors —, if one learns to know what a person does in his life with the sense organs that he forms out of himself as a whole human being, then, from early childhood on, one follows what he does, out of sympathies and antipathies — out of sympathies and antipathies that are replaced by others. What becomes his life path always strives out of us, so we can draw the line as if planned to what has become his destiny. We see: what shapes his life comes from within him. We understand more precisely what older people, who have become wise through age, said without bias. Goethe's friend Knebel once said: “When you look back through life, life seems to be thoroughly planned, and you feel drawn to the individual decisive points as if they had emerged from a previously laid out plan for life.” Thus one can see into one's own life and recognize how it is shaped by actions arising out of likes and dislikes, out of instincts and desires. From there, the path leads to the contemplation of the thread of destiny through repeated earthly lives. We learn to recognize how what springs up in sympathies and antipathies goes back to earlier earth lives. It can only be hinted at how, in this way, by becoming completely a sense organ, one gradually gains a view of the repeated earth lives through which the thread of fate runs. One sees into the eternal spiritual through the higher sense.

Now is the time when, in a very modern way, man can find his way to those other worlds with which his soul must feel connected after all, how he can find this path for real knowledge, without becoming alienated from life but by fully engaging with it. Now he can delve into what he acquires in this way as a knower, so that he stimulates his whole being. Now what knowledge is connects with inner religious devotion, now that man finds the way in a modern way, knowledge can in turn lead to religion, now knowledge can lead to true, genuine devotion. Man reaches this goal of knowledge by a path that is full of the inner way. Before that, one had to tune down the body. Now one leaves the body as it is, so that it remains suitable for the outer life, so that one can have the trust of other people. But in the soul, by making the soul work all the harder, one nevertheless undergoes suffering; one produces suffering in an inner way, which used to be produced in an external way. And now, if such anthroposophy, as it is meant here, is understood, it can be understood that the individual can be understood if one listens to him without prejudice. Today, in a sense, every single person can follow certain rules to pave their own way into the spiritual world. But it is not necessary, for one can grasp through one's own common sense what the spiritual researcher can reveal through his vision, and understand it. Just as little as one needs to be a painter to judge the beauty of a picture, so little does one need to be a spiritual researcher oneself to find the truth of what the spiritual researcher says. For through his higher vision, this spiritual researcher is also only led into the higher worlds. He must also recognize the reality of these worlds through his common sense. Just as one checks by means of common sense that a dream does not correspond to external reality, so one must recognize, by means of a more advanced logic, the truth and reality of what the spiritual researcher fathoms in spiritual worlds, in order to fathom the true relationship of human beings to these spiritual worlds in such a way that there is no feeling of powerlessness or darkness. But at the same time, something else arises that we need very much in the present. In the present time, we are completely immersed in a flood of ideas and thoughts. Science and many other aspects of life give us these ideas and thoughts, but these ideas and thoughts are abstract and, in the sense in which they were mentioned today, dead. At most, we have thoughts of the spirit, ideas of the spirit, but the spirit does not live among us. This is what we, as modern people, must confess when we look back at past ages. Certainly, we cannot wish that they would arise again. Many things must appear quite unappealing to us that people once considered right for their way of life. And in terms of this way of life, today's people have an enormous number of hopes and illusions. But if we do not want to bring back the old days, we have to say: they lived in the spirit; for they immersed themselves in the spirit. They did not devote themselves to abstract thoughts. This spiritual life has become life for people, not just thoughts about spirituality. Today we only have thoughts about spirituality. We will again have spiritual liveliness among us. We need this, by developing thoughts about the spiritual, developing them in such a way that the concrete, the living spiritual moves into ourselves, so that we are penetrated to the innermost being not only by thoughts but by the spirit, so that we also know: spiritual beings live around us, with us, in our life of will, in our thoughts. We need the spirit not only in the form of thoughts, we need the living spirit everywhere in our midst. We must know, in turn, that we can conjure up the experience of the thought, of the living will, not just the abstract, but the concrete spiritual. If we know that the spiritual lives in us as a thought, that it lives with us as a companion, can inspire us, can fill us with enthusiasm, can open up our true human existence and human dignity, then, with such a human relationship to the world, elevated into the supersensible, into the spiritual, we can find paths that lead us to demands that are being made today with deep longing and deep tragedy and also with many illusions. But we must seek the spirit as a companion in our endeavors in the present and the future by spiritualizing our thoughts and by bringing dead thoughts to life. That, and nothing else, is the aim of anthroposophical research into the world, of the anthroposophical paths that are supposed to lead from the physical world into the spiritual world for the sake of inner blessing, for a true experience of the all-encompassing reality that is not only physical but also spiritual. And it is only in spiritual reality that man can find the satisfaction for those riddles that I mentioned at the beginning of today's lecture.

Dear attendees! The remarks that I will be presenting here today require a certain premise if they are to appear justified in the present – I would like to say – in our scientific age. This premise is the examination of what must currently be recognized as scientifically possible. I took the liberty of discussing in my last lecture, which I had the honor of giving here a few months ago, what needs to be said in this regard, what Anthroposophy asserts about its relationship to the scientific world view of the present day, how it is not in opposition to it at all, but fully recognizes its significance, and how it, in turn, goes further than this science. And since I may well assume that a large part of today's honored audience was also present at the time, it seems to me neither possible nor necessary to repeat what was said then. I will simply take it for granted and build on it what Anthroposophy now has to say through its research, through its knowledge of the relationship between man and the spiritual world.

When we speak as human beings of the difficulties we face when enigmatic questions arise about the spiritual world, when we speak of such difficulties, these difficulties cannot relate to the existence of a spiritual world as such, to which the human being feels connected in his earthly existence. For man needs only to reflect on himself, and he lives in a spiritual world. Through his spirit, he is cognitively related to the things around him, to the actions he performs himself. And even the most ardent materialist does not deny this relationship of man to the spiritual world, insofar as man is always aware of his spirit in the waking state. The difficulty only begins when man looks at the nature of this spirit, in that he can actually see his human dignity, his true human value, only through it. Man must indeed say to himself: I have the spirit. As I said, even the worst materialist does not deny that. At most, he believes that what man experiences as spirit within himself is a product, a creature of material existence. And precisely because man feels himself to be a spirit, because he senses his value and dignity in this spiritual realm, he must ask: What is this essence of the spirit, how is it grounded perhaps in an all-encompassing spiritual world that does not belong to the transitory, but which is permanent in the face of the transitory? With this, I would like to point out to you, dear listeners, the inner soul difficulties that man feels himself confronted with every day and every hour when he looks at the essence of his own spirituality. These difficulties, people do not always bring them to their full awareness in the full sense of the word. But they live in the depths of the soul, whether one explores them or not, they live in these depths of the soul, flow up into the conscious soul existence, make up the happiness and suffering of the innermost human being, make up the innermost destiny of the human being, form the soul mood and soul condition. In this way, the human being finds his way into the world and becomes useful to his fellow human beings and the world to the extent that he can educate himself, even if unconsciously and naively, about the nature of the spirit. And from many subsoils, the riddle questions in this regard arise, and I could cite many things that live in the soul consciously or more or less unconsciously.

I would like to highlight two examples from all that is present in the soul, two examples that perhaps do not even belong to the most common ones, but which can show precisely what corners of his soul life a person encounters when he wants to educate himself about the spirit. Every day, when we pass from the waking state to the sleeping state, we see how our inner spiritual activity, our inner spiritual activity, how that paralyzes itself, dawns down into an indefinite darkness, how the time of sleep occurs, in relation to which we cannot say what it actually is with our inner spiritual-soul activity and activity. Then we feel – one may well say – the powerlessness of that which is our spirituality. We live in this spirituality from waking up to falling asleep; we actually feel truly human when we live in this spirituality, but we see it fade away, dim, and are powerless in the face of this everyday disappears from us, from that which is truly human in us, and without us always feeling it – as I said – from the unconscious experience of this powerlessness comes that which gives us insecurity about the nature and destiny of our mind. And that is one side.

The other is, I would say, the polar opposite. We experience it again more or less unconsciously — unconsciously in most people — when we pass from the sleeping state to the waking state, at most with the transition through more or less chaotic dreams, but we know from healthy reason that they have only an illusory value compared to what we call in ordinary life the reality of existence. With this transition through the dream life, we take possession of our physical body with our spiritual self. When we wake up, we grasp our senses, how the outside world is reflected in our senses in its colors, sounds, and so on, and we experience this inwardly. We inwardly experience how we grasp our willpower and thereby become active human beings. However, as I already hinted at in the last lecture from a different point of view, what darkness are we actually looking down into when we have only a simple willpower, when we decide to raise our arm and move our hand? We have this thought, and then we see how this thought is carried out in the movement of the hand, in the raised arm. But how the thought flows down into the organism, what complicated processes are involved before the hand is moved, all this disappears from our consciousness. When we wake up, we take hold of our body with our spirit, but what this spirit experiences down there is shrouded in complete darkness even during the waking state, so that in this waking state, too, we have only an indeterminate relationship to our spirituality and its relation to the outer world – to the outer world that we ourselves are through our body – which presents us with a mystery. On the one hand, we feel the powerlessness of the spirit; on the other hand, we feel it sinking into our own inner darkness when we wake up. From such experiences, man forms the riddle questions about the nature of spirituality, and then two opponents of the soul life stand before this spiritual world, to which man strives with his knowledge, with his will, two enemies, one of whom clouds this spiritual world for him, the other threatens to take it from him. One enemy strikes precisely those who, even in our present existence, still live more or less naively in the face of our scientific worldviews, accepting many traditional ideas into their worldview without examination, often as the worst illusions about the supersensible, about the spiritual, because they feel that they cannot truly live in mental health without such ideas about the spiritual. Then they give themselves over to that which comes from the one enemy of the soul life: superstition. All kinds of soul-forms stream out of the human life of will and place themselves before the human spirit, wanting to tell it what underlies the external world as spiritual reality. Those who have not become acquainted with the scientific conscientiousness and methodology of the present time very easily succumb to such ideas, but they also experience a sad consequence of superstition in the human soul. If we understand the world in such a way that we accept what flows into our consciousness through our will as decisive for the supersensible, then we go to recognize the outer world. We find obstacles at every turn when trying to orient ourselves in the external world. We believe that this or that must apply in the sense world because we accept it through our superstition. External nature does not confirm what we assume in our superstitious experience at every turn. This leads us to a certain reorientation towards this external world. The world appears to us differently than we imagine it. We become unsure of ourselves, and because we become unsure of ourselves, we lose the ability to develop strong impulses for our actions. We become unfit for our own actions, we become unfit for interaction with other people.

That, dear attendees, is the one enemy that arises in the human soul when faced with the riddles of the spiritual world. The other enemy appears primarily to those souls who enter into the modern way of scientific life. They learn to recognize how to develop their thinking in a conscientious, methodical, one might say exact, way in order to follow sense phenomena to their external laws and to permeate them with ideas through which they become understandable. But it is very often the case, especially when one is conscientiously immersed in the external world in this way, that one notices how our thinking becomes, I might say, thin through this scientific path, how it only gradually becomes appropriate to what the sensory world is, and how, in its thinness, it cannot find its way up from the sensory to the supersensible realm, precisely because of its conscientiousness. And then precisely those who enter deeply into the scientific sphere are assailed by doubt, the other enemy of the human soul life. Doubt is certainly something that is connected with the development and education of the intellect. But when doubt presents itself to the human intellect, then it sinks down into the soul, it sinks down into the mind. Those who, on the basis of the deeper insights that anthroposophy can provide, now recognize the connection between the life of the soul and the physical experience of the human being, know how what takes place in the soul pours into the body and how that which — one must put it this way — rushes from doubt into the , how it first causes a certain wasting disease of the soul life in the person, how this wasting disease can weaken us — I would say — to the marrow, to the limbs, to the muscles, that we can become unfit for our soul, for our spiritual and for our physical activity precisely because of doubt. Precisely because this is experienced by modern man from one side or the other, perhaps the worst doubters feel particularly compelled to seek information about the spiritual, about the supersensible, to which they do not want to turn out of traditional belief, like the first type of person, who surrender to superstition. Since they want to turn to the supersensible realm through knowledge, scientific minds are led to study the abnormal spiritual life, the spiritual life of attuned people, mediums, people who have all kinds of hallucinations. It is seen that something else is going on in the abnormal life than in the normal human life of knowledge and will, and it is believed that something can be drawn from this abnormal life, which comes from mediumship or from visions, about human abilities and their connection with another world into the realm of ordinary consciousness.

Those who are familiar with anthroposophy know that all these outlets are from the pathological realm, from a diseased soul life. The soul life of a medium is diseased because their physical life must be attuned down at the moment when they are acting as a medium. This detuning makes it impossible for the person acting as a medium to grasp what his soul is directly experiencing. It is impossible to verify — even for an external observer, who may have a sound mind when observing the medium — it is impossible to realize what kind of relationship the person, the medium, has to another world if one is not immersed in this experience. The medium is, after all, singled out and, with his healthy human understanding, distracted from what he is experiencing in his mediumistic states. Whenever a person has hallucinations, we can always show how these have their roots in a diseased area of the human body and how what arises in the soul as other experiences can only be there because of this diseased part of the human organization. Thus we have no possibility of finding the transition we are seeking from the healthy human soul life to a knowledge of the supersensible, of the spiritual realm. For wherever we turn to the sick soul life, we lack control at every step. And so most of our contemporaries feel compelled to cling to time-honored, traditional ideas when it comes to the supersensible, to the spiritual, to that which has developed from earlier epochs of humanity into our time as the content of creeds and worldviews.

One then tends towards these world-view contents, which go right into our philosophies – people do not even realize how this is the case even in the philosophies that are considered to be unprejudiced by some great thinkers, but they are not – one holds, as they say, with the belief in that which they cannot achieve with knowledge, with insight. And today we have already come so far as to construct all kinds of artificial concepts to justify faith as something that must stand independently in the face of knowledge, in the face of knowledge, which is only supposed to be directed towards our sensual or the like, while faith alone may be directed towards the supersensible. But this supersensible realm is taken from what has been handed down traditionally and has an effect on people with the strength with which it often does so today, through its venerable age. But if we look impartially at what people believe and what they hold in terms of worldviews that have been handed down historically, we can trace this in real history — not just in the history that is recognized today, but in a history that is steeped in psychology and the study of the soul. There one sees that what one wants to believe today, what one accepts as an idea in its effect on the world of feeling, that in older epochs of humanity this was once entirely derived from insights that the individual human being gained out of his need for knowledge, on paths that were to lead him into the supersensible. Everything that is justified as religious belief today can in fact be traced back to ancient knowledge.

At some point, an individual or that person's community found their way, through special inner spiritual paths, into the supersensible world, received ideas from this supersensible world, grasped them with their ordinary consciousness and passed them on to their fellow human beings. Their fellow human beings recognized that through such paths of knowledge one could discover something about the supersensible world. Such earlier paths of knowledge may be primitive compared to what is needed today for us humans in such paths of knowledge. But it is not acceptable for the truly unbiased person to overlook the fact that one cannot help but notice how the beliefs of today go back to such old paths of knowledge, whose source of knowledge has only been forgotten. And if you explore them, sometimes through external history, through some kind of document, then you feel disturbed because you no longer devote yourself to such sources of knowledge; you say: That is good for an earlier civilization and culture. Yes, but – my dear audience – today we believe what comes from these sources of knowledge, we have only somehow changed it in terms, but its true content goes back to such sources.

My dear attendees, anthroposophy, as I understand it, offers people a path of knowledge into the supersensible world, and we will have more to say about this anthroposophical path of knowledge, as it is appropriate for today's people. But we will be able to communicate more easily today if we look at older paths of knowledge, which I mentioned in my last lecture, and the results of which are available to the naive and often also to the learned person today when it comes to the supersensible.

I would like to characterize two of the old paths of knowledge here before you. There is also the possibility of characterizing countless other such paths of knowledge, but I want to pick out two because they are particularly characteristic, and because to a large extent people have forgotten how much of what people today take in as beliefs comes precisely from these sources.

I would like to mention first – as I said, just so that we are all on the same page, not because I would like to recommend such a path of knowledge to anyone, but because it is by understanding the old that we can ascend to the knowledge of the new – I would like to mention first the path that is well known, the path that was taken in ancient India to gain knowledge of a different world from the one that usually surrounds people.

I would first like to characterize what is called the ancient yoga system of knowledge, which was once sacred in the Orient but has now degenerated. The yoga system of knowledge leads, I would say, to its kind of erudition, to its kind of knowledge of another world. What were the essential elements of this yoga system? I would like to mention the characteristic that is questionable today when it is practiced – at the time it was not questionable, but the way it is practiced today is questionable – because it is no longer appropriate for today's human nature, because human nature has changed since the times when the yoga practice was performed. What could be done in ancient times without harming human nature, and was done in ancient times, say, by the Indians, cannot be done today, especially by Westerners, without harming their body and mind. But let us agree on this. The essential and purely essential thing, among other things, in the practice of yoga is a modified breathing in addition to the ordinary everyday breathing of a person.

How does this everyday breathing process take place? More or less unconsciously. Only when we are somehow affected by illness do we become aware of our breathing. Otherwise, inhaling, holding our breath, and exhaling take place to a great extent unconsciously. And it is precisely on this unconsciousness of inhaling, holding our breath, and exhaling that the unbiased matter-of-factness of our life is based. Those who believed in ancient Orient that they could become yoga scholars trained for certain periods of time to regulate their breathing differently than nature itself regulates human breathing. They created a different rhythm for inhaling, holding and exhaling. What did they achieve by doing this? He achieved the ability to breathe more or less consciously, while otherwise breathing unconsciously, to experience breathing as a fully conscious process. This happens to me when I breathe in, this happens to me throughout my entire organism during the flow of inhalation, this happens to me during the retention of breath, this during exhalation. In particular, the yogi focused his attention on what now resulted from this altered breathing process, raised into consciousness, for his thinking. For his thinking, what resulted then? Well, we can characterize it physiologically in the modern sense, what happened there. That which unconsciously takes place in the breathing process, what is it in relation to the human head organization, to the thought organization? We breathe in, the respiratory impulse goes into our organism, works up through the spinal cord channel to our brain, to the tool of our thinking, which performs a certain activity out of the nerve-sense life, so that something flows through this activity from the respiratory current. In reality, we are not only dealing with the activity of our nervous sensory life in our thought life, but this nervous sensory life is permeated and permeated by the rhythmic life of the respiratory current. But we know nothing of this. The yogi, who aspired to higher knowledge, brought himself to consciousness of this permeation of the physical part of his thought activity with the respiratory current. What did he attain there? We can only grasp what he attained there by comparing what the yogi experienced in his consciousness with regard to thinking, when we compare that with what his whole environment, the rest of humanity, experienced.

Yes, my dear audience, in the course of historical development, humanity has changed more than we realize today in terms of the life of the soul. What today, I might say, makes up our whole consciousness was quite different in ancient times. Today we see the external world by absorbing the colors through the sense of our eyes in a, I might say, pure way; we hear the external world through the sense of the ear, absorbing the sounds in a certain purity, and it is the same with the other sensations. It was not like that in ancient times. We misunderstand the senses of early humanity if we say that they fantasized their way into the world, as animism would have it. It was not like that. Early humans naturally experienced what was in the outer world as a living spiritual soul striving up within them. And by looking at lightning and thunder, at the hurrying clouds, at the streaming wind, springs, plants and animals, they saw everything that surrounded people in the outer world. They saw not only a colorful, warm, cold or otherwise sensually shaped world, as we do today. No, they saw a world in which every spring was permeated by the spiritual soul, in every breath of wind that played around them, in the stars, in the sun and moon they felt how the spiritual soul expressed itself. It was just as natural for people to see this spiritual soul as it is natural for us to see colors and hear sounds. That was the usual experience of the people around the yogi. The yogi, however, wanted to experience a different world than the one they usually experienced. That is why he undertook the exercises I have just described. And by driving the conscious flow of breath through his thinking through these exercises, I would say, he made something completely different out of his thinking.

Indeed, the person who immersed himself in this way, seeing a spiritual soul in every spring, in every breath of wind, in everything that is nature, did not have the strong ego, the strong self-confidence that the present man has. strong sense of self that the present-day man has. He could not feel the strong spiritual element in his own self. In a sense, his being merged with the outer world, which was a spiritual element for him, just as his inner being was a spiritual element for him. When the yogi, breathing in this way, transformed his thinking, then his experience was that he attained an insight similar to our own, but by this path of knowledge; he made his thinking strong, he led it into the abstract. In this way he perceived the spirituality of his own self. And he felt this self rooted in another world, in a world that is eternal.

And all the wonderful things that were said in older times about the spiritual world were said from the experience that man, in the way described, came to the self, to the I, that he felt his I as his eternal spirituality connected to the universal spirituality of the world. And if you read the most beautiful chapters in the wonderful poetry of the Bhagavad Gita, you will read how it is described in such a wonderful way how man comes to his self and to the experience of the spiritual world, and you will feel transported to the special spiritual path of those ancient times. Much of what has been revealed to man in this way about the human self, about human spirituality and its relationship to world spirituality, lives in many of today's traditional creeds, in today's traditional world views, and even in the philosophies that one believes one can approach without prejudice. People do not realize how much of what they have adopted in their belief in authority comes from the experiences of the ancient yogi.

Those who today want to educate themselves about the meaning of today's yoga systems usually come to something wrong and believe that by applying such a method they can still achieve something special today. This is not the case. People will harm themselves, both mentally and physically, if they want to resurrect on their path of knowledge that which was appropriate for an ancient humanity. But even with regard to that which is necessary for today's human being to attain higher knowledge — and which we want to discuss later, also in order to communicate about it — such a characteristic of old, no longer useful paths of knowledge cannot serve us. I would like to say that, on the other hand, the opposite reveals itself to us as an example when we look at an older path of knowledge, the one that was walked in asceticism, a path of knowledge that we can no longer walk today.

We cannot have the yoga path. We cannot follow the yoga path because the person who lives in his breathing in the way described, and then lives in the thinking that is permeated by breathing, becomes so highly sensitive that he can no longer endure the robust external world to any great extent. Because of this sensitivity, he must withdraw from the outer world, he must surrender to a certain solitude, even hermitage. But it was precisely in the views of the ancients that they sought wisdom about higher worlds precisely from those who did not experience as they did, but who isolated themselves, so to speak, in the corner, in order to strive in this solitude into the higher world, in order to explore that which is supersensible in human nature, in order to be able to proclaim it to others. Today, the healthy person cannot relate to human natures that seek solitude and hermitage in this way. Modern life makes such tough demands that we have to find our way into it in its liveliness, and the modern person can only have trust in the one who does not need to withdraw from life, but who places himself in life as much as anyone else. Therefore, we cannot use the yoga path. It would not inspire trust in those who understand themselves within modern cultural development.

The same applies to the old ascetic path. What does the ascetic do in the old sense of the word? He downgrades his bodily functions, he paralyzes them to a certain extent. His physical organism should be less active in those periods when he should be open to higher knowledge than he would be if he were to devote himself externally to a robust life. Through this attunement of bodily functions, the person striving for a higher life experiences and realizes that, yes, for the life we lead outwardly, this body we carry is suitable and appropriate, and we may not really wish for a different body, and so there is no need for the bodily functions to be slowed down. But if we want to look into the spiritual world, then this body, which is constituted for the sensual world, is an obstacle. If we degrade it, make it less active than it is in ordinary life, then we remove the obstacle and the supersensible world flows into our consciousness. This is simply what the ancients experienced: the body is an obstacle to the knowledge of higher worlds. On the other hand, it was the case that by attuning the physical body to pain and suffering in order to come into contact with the spiritual world, the ascetic entered into an inner experience that took him away from the robust outer world into solitude, into hermitage. From there he was able to explore many things that then sank deep into the human soul when the soul wanted to know: How am I connected to the spiritual worlds, how do I find the happiness of my mind?

But then again, the people who could say such things — and this goes right back to our present-day religious beliefs and world views, without people being aware of it —, then again the people had to tune down the functions of their physicality in relation to the robust outer life, they had to develop a hypersensitivity to this life, to loneliness, to hermitage. The old path of asceticism, which has also been corrupted today, is not suitable for modern man. Through such asceticism, man first of all makes himself alien to reality, in which we must fully place ourselves today, but he also makes himself unfit for his actions, he makes himself unfit for working for the benefit of his fellow human beings. But we can still look at the two paths by which people once struggled to gain an insight into the supersensible worlds.

How a person today can raise themselves in the supersensible world, my dear listeners, is something that I described in my last lecture here, at least in principle. You can find it described in full detail in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science” and in other books of mine. But there you will see that today's man can no longer follow the path of, say, a reorganization of his breathing, the path of conscious breathing, in order to change his thought life in the sense that ordinary views of man become the wonderful world view of the Bhagavad Gita. I would say that for his path of knowledge, for his path of thought, man started from something that was still entirely appropriate for those ancient times, something that was intimately connected with his bodily functions.

All that I described to you in the previous lecture, and what I describe in my books, are processes that are not carried out in breathing, that are not carried out in this way in the body, but that are carried out in the life of thought itself, in the inner life of the soul, through a special training in meditation, through a special training in the concentration of thought, in contemplation. Today's exercises, which are intended to lead to the higher world, are done through practices that are carried out in the regulation of thinking itself. The ancient Indian yogi regulated his breathing; we regulate our ordinary thinking directly, we bring a different rhythm, a different inner lawfulness into meditation and concentration in thinking. We do not approach a transformation of our thinking indirectly through breathing, we go straight to the thinking. Of course, I cannot repeat all the exercises that you can read about in the books mentioned, “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and “Occult Science”; I can only hint at the principles in this way.

But what do we achieve by doing such exercises, which address human thoughts so intimately? Through them we come to see through what we have today as our ordinary thinking, through birth and upbringing, in its abstractness, in its deadness, if I may express it so. We arrive at essentially enlivening thinking, whereas the ancient Indian yogi — I might say — started from a certain liveliness of thinking, from which he went away to abstract thinking, to the thinking that we have as a matter of course in life. There he experienced the self. Now, we have this self through birth and upbringing; we have to, by grasping thinking, not breathing, enliven this thinking. But in doing so, we come to perceive ordinary thinking precisely as the abstract, as the dead, and to move on to a living thinking through inner exercises.

This is the significant transformation that the modern seeker of knowledge who wants to penetrate into the higher worlds, into the world of the spiritual, must undergo. This is the method that the modern seeker of knowledge must go through, which leads from abstract, from inanimate, from dead thinking to inwardly living thinking.

And now I would like to give you a characterization of modern forms of consciousness, where we arrive when we acquire this living thinking. I will point out something that is close to every person today. If we have any connection at all with today's worldviews, we realize how a so-called higher animal is constituted, how its functions, its bodily processes work. We form an inner image of this higher animal in our thoughts. In doing so, we visualize the nature of this animal. But then we may turn to the human being. We form an inner picture of the human being again, using all the material that science provides us with today. Later it will be even more complete, but in principle no different, as long as thinking is applied only in the abstract, as it is today in the study of natural laws — we form an image of the human being, of the structure of the bones, the structure of the muscles, the structure of the other organs, of the interweaving and interflowing of the inner bodily processes. Then we compare this picture with the picture we have of higher animals and we find a certain relationship. Depending on whether we think more or less materialistically, we imagine that man then emerges physically from the higher animal. If we think more idealistically or spiritually, we imagine this relationship differently. But we look at it by forming the idea of the higher animal on the one hand and the idea of man on the other and comparing them, we form something through this comparison, which is then to become our world view of our environment. But now let us ask ourselves a question that may interest us. What is the difference between thinking, with which one compares the concept of the higher animal with the concept of man, as one can outwardly compare a higher animal with a lower animal, the lower animal with a plant. Let us ask ourselves the question: What is the difference between this dead abstract thinking and that living thinking that one acquires through the modern exercises of knowledge for the supersensible world?

If we form an idea with our ordinary thinking about the higher animal, about its inner structure, about its processes, about the intermingling of its life processes, then, I would say, we have inwardly visualized the being of this higher animal through a thought. But the thought lives, and this thought changes inwardly, if it lives, without us having to look at it. It forms the thought of the human being out of itself, it undergoes this metamorphosis inwardly. With dead thinking, we can only form the thought of the higher animal, then go over with our thinking to the human being, to the human being whom we experience outwardly, find human thought, but with animal thought we never come to human thought. Simply by allowing the thought to come to life in us, through which the human thought then arises from the animal thought, we arrive at a different, a spiritual relationship to the world.

I would like to illustrate it in the following way. Consider a magnetic needle. You can point it in many different directions. Only one direction is the excellent one, the direction that points from the magnetic north pole to the magnetic south pole. This one line is the excellent one. Wherever you point the magnetic needle, you do not have such an excellent direction. By its own natural law, this magnetic needle belongs in the north-south direction. Thus, through the living thought, the whole space is differentiated. In living thinking, we do not have the space of indifferent juxtaposition, the calculative space, but we experience the space in which something else becomes the vertical line that goes from the earth to the stars; the horizontal line that is the tangent of the ground on which we stand. Space is experienced inwardly by the living thought.

Then we turn to the higher animal, we find its backbone line horizontal, and where this line goes into the vertical, are the exceptions that show that what I say is right. We see the vertical direction in the human being, we feel that this line is different from the one the animal maintains with its backbone, and we feel this line, in which the human being now places himself, and many other things that we have to change when we move from animal thought to human thought. We feel that a different being is emerging, and by seizing the animal thought, we have to keep the form flexible and know: if we enter into a different spatial direction, we come to a different being. We allow one thought to arise from the other in our inner experience.

Consider, my dear audience, how alive our soul life becomes, how spiritualized our soul life becomes, while we juxtapose one with the other with the dead abstract thought, how we stand before the world, how we now become similar to the interweaving, the growth and becoming of external things with our inner experience, how we immerse ourselves in the outer world, no longer merely standing beside it.

This is the first step for modern man. To bring abstract, dead thinking to life, and in so doing, to live in the spirituality of the world. But all of you – my dear audience – can raise a significant objection as I describe this living thinking. You can object that there have been all kinds of thinkers, natural philosophers Oken, Schelling, who have had such living thinking in a certain sense; they have known how to grasp the thought of an external object in a certain imaginative way and have understood how to transform it in order to find something that then coincides with another thing of its own accord. And modern humanity has indeed recognized how much fantasy there is in Schelling and Oken precisely because of this thinking. But there is something that anthroposophy must add to what the most recent ancient times did not have. When such thinkers as those mentioned describe what actually takes place in their spiritual life, one does not find what anthroposophical research and experience must point to.

The person who, as I have described it, forms thoughts about the things of the external world, who is himself alive, cannot take a step with this living thought without feeling pain inwardly, in a certain way suffering. And now, when this living thought is felt as suffering, as pain – not initially in the physical sense, for it can only be transmitted in that direction – now something begins that can be felt as reality. Anyone who comes to realize that higher knowledge in the modern sense can only be attained by going through suffering and pain will always tell you something about their ordinary life as well: they will say, “What I have experienced as happiness, as joy, as good fortune, I am grateful to my destiny for. What I have had in the way of suffering, pain, disappointment and privation in my ordinary life, I owe to the little knowledge that I have gained. And the fact that I have gained such knowledge through the ordinary pains and disappointments that life has given me means that I have undergone preliminary training for that which must be experienced when the living thought, as living spirituality, fills the soul, is therefore also alive in the soul, and therefore also drives the soul to suffering and pain.

What is achieved by this? Through this our whole human nature becomes an organ of perception – the expression sounds paradoxical – but now not an organ of perception that, like the eye and ear, perceives the outer world, but it becomes an organ of perception that spiritually perceives itself within and also looks into the spiritual world, into the world to which the living thought gives its thought-content, and now truly experiences this living world. One can understand why we have to go through pain and suffering. It is now the case – esteemed attendees – that even in such a perfect structure as the eye, some processes, changes take place due to the light acting on it. These changes that take place, if we had a fine sense for it, we would have a sensation of pain, and this sensation of pain would only change into the sensation of color. And in the earliest times of human development, this was what man had. Sensory perception arose out of pain, man became robust against it, became neutral, today he experiences the sensory perception directly; that which underlies the pain withdraws from perception. But if we are to live our way up into the spiritual world, we must force our way through suffering and pain, and only when we have overcome these, when we have turned suffering, pain to our advantage, can we glimpse into the spiritual world, which is opened up to us on the one hand through the living thought. And then, after we have transformed our whole organism into a sense organ by bringing thought to life and overcoming the suffering, we see ourselves, as a modern human being, facing the spiritual world with understanding, with science.

We can now seek spiritual knowledge for ourselves, and we do not need to withdraw from life into a hermitage. We can immerse ourselves in life, our outer physicality does not lead us to asceticism, our outer physicality remains as it is, and can therefore robustly face the external world and fulfill all the demands that today's life places on modern people. In this way we can create an understanding of the spiritual world by remaining in this world, in which modern man must one day remain. But when we create such insights, then man certainly approaches us in a different way than he approaches us when we merely look at him with our sensory eyes. Usually we perceive only the external physicality of this human form. But the person who has struggled to the mobile, living thoughts does not just see this outer, sensual human form; he sees something spiritual and soul-like in this human form, an auric, a spiritual and soul-like aura. The word “aura” is to be understood only in this sense, not in any superstitious sense. One beholds the auric in which the human form is embedded, but one does not only recognize in this aura that which stands externally in front of one, but one looks at that which the person already was in his spiritual-soul before he descended from a spiritual-soul world. One gets to know the person through their auric being, which reveals itself through the kind of contemplation that I have characterized as a spiritual-soul being, and one learns to look back into the spiritual-soul world, into one's preexistence, into the life that one had before one entered one's earthly life. And one does not just learn in such abstractness that the person truly lived in a spiritual-soul world before his birth, one also gets to know the concrete of this spiritual-soul human being, that is, our self, as we get to know the outer world through sensory perception.

I can characterize this in the following way. While we are here between birth and death, we look out into the outer world, we look up into the cosmos, admire the stars, admire the glory of the sun and moon; we look at the kingdoms of nature, we see more and more of the wonderful laws that live in all of this through our science. But by looking out there and looking back at ourselves in an unbiased way, at what is within us, we have to say to ourselves: Dark is what the human being sees between birth and death in the ordinary consciousness when he looks into his inner being. We have to say: what lives in there as our organism – certainly, some of it, but only in its deadness, shows anatomy, physiology – but anthroposophy shows that the human being has a world in there in a completely different sense than ordinary science shows us. When we really get to know what is inside us, we will say to ourselves: Yes, the air we breathe and its inner laws are wonderful, but what goes on in our own lungs as laws is more wonderful than this air circle with all its secrets. The sun is wonderful out there with all the effects that emanate from it, which express themselves in light and warmth, but more wonderful than the light, than the currents of warmth, more wonderful than all that is what lives inside the human organism, in the structure of our heart. And so, when we look at the human interior in terms of the bodily organization, we can say to ourselves: great and powerful is the world of external knowledge; greater and more powerful is that which lives in us as a microcosm.

That, my dear audience, is something that one learns to recognize more and more. You can see this from my “Secret Science” and from other of my books. But what is shrouded for the ordinary consciousness between birth and death today ceases to be shrouded when we look at the spiritual and soul nature of the human being before he descended into the physical world. What was man's world while he was a spiritual being in a spiritual world? Not the external world of space, which we otherwise survey, but precisely this human inner world. What is human inner being for the earth is the outer world for our spiritual being.

Just as we have the sun, moon and stars, the three kingdoms of nature around us here, so we have the secrets of the lungs and heart in front of us in the spiritual world, from which we descended. We have the human interior as an external world before us, and there we acquire the ability that is exercised by us human beings to integrate with this physical body. We see the inner laws as an outer world before we descend from the pre-existent life into earthly life; this is the outer world of the spiritual and soul that we experience before conception. And only when we enter the physical body does the outer world appear around us, and the world of the human inner self disappears. What is revealed to us by the one aura is out there.

The other aura that we acquire reveals to us what lives in human actions. Here in the physical world, we look at these actions with our ordinary human consciousness, we see how this or that action is done from childhood on, we see an encounter between people, we see how this encounter shapes the destiny for the whole of the following life, how these people now form a community; as one often says, this appears out of the ordinary consciousness, as a coincidence.

If we acquire the consciousness that leads to the auric, which I have characterized, then it is like the world is for the blind person who has undergone an operation. He used to be unable to perceive colors or lights, but now he can perceive them. Previously, what a person undertook as steps in their life was seen as a matter of chance. But now, after the spiritual eye has been opened, we look at the first steps that a child takes, at the endless sympathies and antipathies, and see how the child develops its life steps more and more. Sympathies and antipathies that arise in him guide the child in the following steps, which become decisive in human life, and we realize how the goal was already present in the sympathies and antipathies that were present in the first childlike steps. In other words, we look at the shaping of human destiny, and in a completely natural, elementary way we become aware when our spiritual eye is opened – just as we realize when we look at an adult that they were a child – we can know that this destiny, which course of life, that people's lives on earth are lived through in repetitions, that the whole of life is cause and effect of other lives between death and a new birth, and that what is fateful carries over from one life to the next.

One might think that this sense of destiny takes away our freedom as human beings. But we do not impair our freedom any more than we impair our freedom by building a house this year and wanting to move into it the next. We only become free by creating such foundations for our lives. Nor do we take away our freedom by building a house for ourselves in this life for the next.

So, my dear attendees, the spiritual world, the relationship of the human being to this spiritual world, is revealed by anthroposophy reopening the paths by which individual people can ascend into the spiritual world and proclaim the results to their fellow human beings. We need a method that can be trusted in the same way as the natural sciences are trusted. In the books mentioned above, I have described how everyone can become a spiritual researcher to a certain extent, and how people can develop such views of the supersensible and spiritual that give them their true value and true human dignity. But people do not necessarily have to become spiritual researchers. Just as one does not need to become an astronomer in order to include astronomical findings in one's knowledge, or a botanist in order to include the necessary botanical findings in one's education, one also does not need to become a spiritual scientist in order to include the findings of spiritual science.

I would like to use another comparison that I have used often, I believe here as well. A person who wants to judge a painted picture in terms of beauty and artistic value does not need to be a painter himself. Man's organization is directed towards truth and beauty. Even someone who is not a spiritual researcher and whose mind is not oriented towards illusions and error can test what the spiritual researcher says with his common sense. And even the spiritual researcher must first test what is revealed to him through his own common sense, just as the other person must do, because the higher vision provides him with a higher world, but not its reality. Just as we first test the dream through common sense, so we must first test the reality of what we see in higher worlds through our common sense. The one who acquires exact clairvoyance — not the old mystical clairvoyance — the one who acquires this modern clairvoyance, finds his way into the spiritual world by means of paths that are entirely appropriate for today's human being, and what he explores there can be thoroughly examined with common sense in the manner indicated.

But what does our civilization gain from this, ladies and gentlemen? Well, what is gained is not unimportant. What is gained can certainly be used. Do we have spirituality today? We have thoughts about the spirit and we live in these thoughts and ideas. But if we look back to older times, it was different. Yes, my dear audience, it was different. We do not want to conjure up old times again, nor do we want to overestimate them. We know that humanity must always move forward; we do not want to bring up in a reactionary way what belongs to a bygone era. But when we look at the ancient epochs from which many unconscious beliefs have come down to us, we see that in those ancient times there were insights through which the spirit was grasped not only in thoughts, but through which the spirit entered the whole human being in a living way. One can say of a person of those times, not only: He has thoughts about the spirit, he has ideas about the spirit, but through his thoughts and ideas the living spirit moves into the human being. Such epochs have existed, and such epochs have actually given the right power and the right impulses for the development of humanity, where it was known that the spirit lives among us, the divinity lives among us. Only then did spiritual knowledge deepen into true religious devotion. If such times can arise again, not in the old form but in the modern form, then the human being acquires a true religious inwardness, an appropriate piety, through deepening their knowledge of anthroposophy. But through this, the modern being gains the knowledge that a time will come when not only, as is the case today, thoughts and ideas live in dryness, but also in the spirituality. Spirituality will move through the living thought. And through the suffering-overcoming conception of reality, the living thought, the living reality, the spirit itself in its liveliness will move into the human being. We must long for such a time because we need it, in which we say to ourselves again: Not only do we exist in the world, we as human beings with our outwardly random actions, but because we human beings ourselves are spiritual , we recognize our relationship to the eternal spirit, we recognize how other spiritual beings are at work beside us, a spiritual world, just like the sensual one, how the spirits not only live in our thoughts, but how they are our fellow travelers in earthly life.

That – dear attendees – when we perceive the spiritual world as the world of our fellow creatures, not as mere abstract theoretical thoughts, then we enter the world that today's humanity, and even more so the humanity of the near future, needs , in order to become more life-affirming, to achieve inner devotion, to achieve fruitful insights, to achieve actions, to achieve impulses for activity, which today's humanity longs for – longs for more than it usually believes.

Today we look into our social life, we see how people long for new impulses to come. But we also see what impulses of doom are indulging themselves. There must be something wrong, and that is what is wrong, that we have lost the living spirit. It is only with this living spirit, which does not merely enter into our scientific, abstract thoughts but permeates our entire human being, that we will solve the great difficult social questions of the present, as far as they can be solved in any age.

Anthroposophy, which is so often rejected, seeks to be nothing other than the spiritual activity, the spiritual life that leads people to recognize and actively embrace this living spirituality, this spiritual co-creation, so that mankind, imbued with this knowledge, with a will, with enthusiasm that comes from this spiritual life, can fully grasp the present and live into the future, as is necessary for the further welfare and development of humanity. Much of this is already sensed by humanity today, but it lives in the unconscious depths of human souls. Anthroposophy seeks to advance to a full understanding of what humanity needs for its inner realization and for its social goals in the present and especially in the future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear attendees!

When speaking about the relationship between anthroposophy and human life, it must be pointed out again and again how, on the one hand, this school of thought arrives at its results and how, on the other hand, these results can be absorbed by the human being. Anthroposophy only arrives at its results, however, when the anthroposophical researcher has first undergone intimate inner soul exercises, soul exercises that enable him to move with his soul forces independently of the conditions of the physical body, so that he can truly enter into that state which must be described as 'experiencing the soul outside the human body'. But when, after such preparations by the anthroposophical researcher, the content of the higher worlds has been glimpsed to this or that degree and results are available, then every human being, even the simplest human mind, can grasp these results with common sense and also appropriate them. And today I would like to speak about what Anthroposophy can become for the individual through this appropriation of the meaning of life, which the individual can acquire for himself through the appropriation of anthroposophical insights with the help of common sense.

What the anthroposophical researcher himself has, by penetrating into the supersensible worlds, needs no mention from me. For those who have even just begun to tread the path that leads to these worlds need no further convincing of what they gain from beholding them. But we must go somewhat further than this meditation on the path to the supersensible worlds if we are to understand what a person who appropriates the results with common sense actually gains.

There are essentially three stages of inner soul-searching by which the anthroposophical researcher reaches his goals, and today I will only briefly mention what has already been discussed in the previous lectures I have given here in the last few days. The first stage of these soul exercises consists in strengthening the power of thinking through a certain practice, making it more intense than it is in ordinary life and in ordinary science. Through this strengthening of the power of thinking, the human being then arrives at what I call imaginative thinking, imaginative imagining. One goes beyond the pallor, the abstractness of ordinary thoughts; one arrives at thoughts that are transformed into images, but in which one is just as vividly immersed [with the soul] as one is otherwise immersed in the experience of an external sensory perception. Through such exercises one attains a certain inner mobility of thought and through all this one's thinking is liberated from the physical corporeality of the human being, to which otherwise ordinary thinking is thoroughly bound. When the spiritual researcher has completed these exercises to the degree necessary for his particular disposition, he comes to survey his past life since birth as in a comprehensive tableau.

But this overview is an entirely active inner activity; it is not mere remembering either. This overview is a remembering of that which has been working and strengthening in our organism since our birth. The thoughts have become more intense and more pictorial; in this way they have at the same time become something different from the ordinary abstract thoughts that we carry in our soul. We have connected with thoughts that are indeed forces, and the same forces that our brain, when we are still a very young child, shapes and permeates and empowers until we are a fully grown human being. Thus, we first experience the forces of life in this empowered thinking. Through this, we see ourselves in our inner becoming here as an earthly human being since our birth.

Once you have managed to have the inner image of your earthly life before you in this comprehensive imagination, you can move on to the second stage of the exercises for anthroposophical research, which brings you to what I call inspired knowledge. One must absolutely disregard what these expressions traditionally carry with them; one must not think of anything superstitious or the like when doing so, but only of what I myself characterize here.

This second stage of supersensible knowledge is not attained by strengthening the thinking, but by treating the already strengthened thinking in such a way that one removes from consciousness those ideas that are present in consciousness through the strengthened thinking, and thereby acquires what can be called empty consciousness. If you are able to find yourself in this empty consciousness in your state of mind, which now allows nothing to enter from the external sense world or from the memories that are usually in you, then it is precisely by having first strengthened your thinking and then , to the perception of a real spiritual world, both in our present surroundings and, in particular, to the perception of the spiritual world to which the human soul belonged in its eternal essence before it descended from the spiritual world through birth or conception to take on a physical body here. Within the empty consciousness, one arrives at a real vision of that which is not present in the ordinary consciousness and which may therefore be called the object of an inspired realization, because it flows into our soul from initially unknown worlds, which is thus truly inspired by that which is so accessible to us from the supersensible worlds.

Once we have come to know the immortality of the human soul in this way, we can also come to know the other side of this human immortality by continuing the exercises from the thinking exercises to the will exercises. Again, one would say: on the one hand, the eternity of the human soul expresses itself as unbornness, and on the other hand, in the beyond of death, as immortality. But the further continuation to the third stage of supersensible knowledge then arises from exercises of will.

One trains the will in such a way that it strengthens itself. I have already mentioned that this is achieved by detaching the will itself from the thread of external events, for example, by looking back at the end of the day at the course of one's daily life, by feeling a melody backwards, by imagining a drama backwards [going back from the last scene of the last act to the first scene of the first act] and so on, thus in the opposite direction to the external course. If one tries to control and develop the will in this way, as one sets out to do individually in the way I have described in my books “Occult Science: An Outline of Esoteric Science” or “How to Know Higher Worlds”, and if one succeeds in this way in tearing the will away from its usual course and physical conditions, then one, as a spiritual researcher, enters into a real spiritual world. One gets the picture of death, of the soul leaving the physical body when a person passes through the gate of death; one gets the cognitive picture of the eternal part of the human soul after death.

[My dear audience], these are three stages through which man works his way up into the supersensible world. What he has to say about these supersensible worlds after going through these stages of knowledge can be followed with the ordinary human mind, provided one is unbiased enough. However, it is the case that this human mind must now, of course, take a certain different attitude, I would say, in that it must become somewhat flexible if it is to follow what anthroposophy has to say. So, for example, this common sense must behave in different ways depending on whether it is following what the spiritual researcher has to say from imaginative knowledge or what he has to say from inspired knowledge or from the third level of knowledge that I mentioned and that I call intuitive knowledge. It is really the case that someone who follows the results of spiritual science only through their common sense feels compelled to look differently at what is gained through imagination, differently at what is gained through inspiration, differently at what is gained through intuition.

If we get to know the supersensible world of human existence through imagination, we get to know through inspiration what the human being has gone through before birth or conception. By extending inspiration to intuition, we get to know what the human soul goes through after death. But once you have come to know these two worlds, what man comes to know in the physical world as supersensible and what he comes to know as the supersensible world before birth and after death, then you also have an overview of the relationship between these two worlds and you now come to know something even higher. What presents itself to intuitive knowledge is something still higher, in relation to both the sense and supersensible worlds. One comes to the realization of repeated earthly lives, which certainly once had a beginning and will have an end; but for the intermediate situation of the human soul, it is the case that the person once goes through a life between birth and death and then an existence in a supersensible world between death and a new birth, and that this is repeated by the individual human beings at the most diverse levels. By pursuing what is brought out of the supersensible world in this threefold way with the ordinary human mind, that which can be gained from anthroposophy as the purpose of life develops precisely in this pursuit.

Dear attendees, anthroposophy does not give trivial rules for life, it does not give trivial comfort for this or that situation in life or the like, but it points to what the human being accomplishes by struggling to understand it. And in what one goes through in coming to this understanding through one's own inner work lies what one can work out for oneself as the purpose in life that comes from anthroposophy. Anthroposophy does not impose a specific content on the human being, but rather points to an inner work and may promise only this inner work, that it is able to give the human being a purpose in life, an inner support and inner security through this work.

Let us take the first step: a person tries to use their common sense to work their way through everything that the spiritual researcher has to say from imaginative knowledge, for example about the forces that organize the human being as an organism and work within the human being. Anyone who tries to reflect on what the spiritual researcher has discovered will find that in the process of reworking the material, their thinking itself becomes more inwardly powerful and inwardly active than it is in ordinary life and in ordinary science. Ordinary life and ordinary science do not need this inner activity either, and that is precisely what holds back a great many people from anthroposophy, especially in our time. Today, people are accustomed to passively accepting everything that the outside world presents to them; they actually want to receive everything that comes to them, even in the form of knowledge, only passively, to enjoy it, so to speak. But anthroposophy, by its very nature, must make a different demand on the human being. Man cannot just passively surrender himself in thinking and imagining in order to understand; he must, by virtue of his inner nature, make his thoughts more powerful by setting about to gather the thinking power that reigns within him, to set it in motion and, in a moving thought, to follow what the spiritual researcher sees. But as a result, some people feel repelled by anthroposophy in the presence of it. They do not want to develop this inner strength in their soul; they want everything to be given to them, while they can remain passive. But it is precisely by demanding this kind of understanding that anthroposophy develops in the human soul that which leads to a certain independence of personality.

This, [my dear audience], is probably one of the first life experiences that a person has when he wants to get to know the world through anthroposophy. His personality becomes inwardly more independent, it is, as it were, inwardly condensed in such thinking - which he must practice - and thus he is given the opportunity to behave differently in life to many things than is often the case today.

[Dear attendees], one need only look a little impartially at life to see how passively people today are devoted to life, and especially to spiritual life. If you go to a party meeting today, for example, you can experience all kinds of interesting psychological phenomena. You can see how the audience does not counter the speaker with any inner independence of their own, but rather absorbs what is presented to them as if by suggestion. Catchwords would not have such power, phrases would not play such a role, if people could confront what is offered to them in this way with greater inner independence. And here it is precisely what one can get from anthroposophy: that one's own judgment is strengthened, made denser, that one's full personality is confronted with what comes from the outside world. That is an achievement for life in the first instance.

But what we get from this thinking, with which we pursue imaginative knowledge, goes much deeper into the destinies of human life. If we follow with common sense what the spiritual researcher says about the human being's inner organizing power, when he speaks of what a person thinks and what is more than thinking, what is a sum of inner living forces — we must then adapt this thinking to the inner work that the spiritual researcher himself develops. If he wants to bring his own ideas and thoughts, which are his means of expression, to people from the depths of his soul, he must speak in different thoughts from those borrowed from the external world of the senses. This stimulates the human being to unfold his active life forces; [by contemplating the spiritual researcher, the human being] appeals to his life forces, to his vitality. This causes the human being to bring his thinking down into his life, to bring life into it, so that a certain [freshness, an inner] confidence and strength comes into his thinking. The thinking undergoes a complete transformation, it becomes more powerful internally through the study of anthroposophy. If one continues this for a long time, this invigoration of thinking becomes apparent in what one achieves for one's organism.

[Dearly beloved attendees], there is a great difference in the way — this is just one example to characterize what a person gets from such a study of anthroposophy —, such as remedies that are absolutely correct remedies for certain diseases, acting on one or another human individuality. One can find remedies for these or those illnesses from the best medical methods and will still see that this or that organization remains dull in the face of a completely correct remedy. But by appealing to the deeper forces of his organization, by discerningly following what the spiritual researcher has to say, he calls upon healing powers in his organism. For what I recently called the body of formative forces, which we can see in a large tableau at a certain stage of higher knowledge, contains healing powers. It is not necessary that this strengthened thinking should work as a healing force from the outset; it can do so, but it will only really do so in the rarest of cases. However, anyone who has awakened their thinking through the inner freshness of their thinking power enables themselves to be affected by healing remedies in a more favorable way than someone who has not awakened their thinking power in this way. In this way we can bring about the possibility of being receptive to certain healing powers to which we would otherwise be insensitive. Many more examples could be cited of how directly such an understanding of the human being, which has been strengthened and refreshed in the way described, affects the human organism. We must say without reservation: precisely what is attained in relation to imaginative knowledge not only makes the human being stronger in relation to his thinking than he would otherwise be, but at the same time it invigorates him in relation to his physical being.

Anyone who has approached anthroposophy in this way will also soon notice that thinking becomes something that, like a current permeating it, fills their body more and more, so that they feel something going into their limbs; they become more skillful, actually simply in terms of the physical tasks they perform. People will discover how, by actually doing what I have described, they become much more skilled at the ordinary tasks of life, whatever their occupation. Anthroposophical work offers an extraordinary amount for our practical lives; in this respect, it already provides a purpose in life.

[Dear attendees], if we look at the second stage, which is reached in inspired knowledge, thinking feels stimulated again in a different way when we reflect on what the spiritual researcher in inspired knowledge from the supersensible world about the nature of this supersensible world, whether it underlies the nature that surrounds us or whether it is the supersensible world in which we ourselves are before birth or after death. Then thinking feels so stimulated [in a different way] that certain feelings are awakened in the person, feelings that are refreshed and become powerful. These feelings do not become so fresh and so powerful under any other influence than through the thinking pursuit of what has been explored through inspiration. Above all, you will see that [by training your mind in this way] you are able to penetrate nature with a completely different sense than you were able to before. I would like to say: Whereas before, when you looked at a plant, for example, you saw with your eyes its green leaves, its colorful petals and, to a certain extent, what the flower reflects of the sun, afterwards you penetrate, as it were, into the secrets of the plant itself. You feel, as it were, the sunlight absorbed by the plant pulsating within the plant. One gradually identifies with how the plant grows out of the germ, how leaf comes to leaf, how it drives out the flower; one's soul life goes hand in hand with the inner becoming of the plant itself and thus with every single [natural process]. It is something like a submerging into nature, like developing an elementary sense of nature. The peculiarity of the anthroposophical science that is meant here is that it does not produce a world-unrelated mysticism, but brings people closer to reality, gives them a sense of nature through which they can gradually deepen their understanding of the beauty and grandeur of nature, so that they can grow together again with nature and ultimately feel at one with it.

I am not saying, [dear attendees], that all these things cannot also be present to a certain extent through certain original, elementary, human predispositions. But what I am saying is that even for those who, through their innate abilities, have such qualities to a high degree, these can still be increased by pursuing the results of anthroposophical inspiration. Whether one has little or much of a sense of nature, one can still increase what one has in this way.

And another thing also comes about through the intellectual pursuit of inspired knowledge: one learns to empathize with one's fellow human beings in a different way. If, through the mental reliving of the imagination, one comes to possess one's own independent personality, then through the reliving of inspiration one comes into the inner life of nature, but also, to a certain extent, into the inner life of other people – again something that should be particularly considered in the present.

Let us look at how people today often pass each other by without understanding, or let us see how few people there are today who can really listen to others. Being able to listen to others is part of understanding people. How often do we see today that when someone speaks, if the other person has only a louder voice than the other, they interrupt and say what they want to say, what they know, even though social life could be very different if people were to approach each other with understanding. But [my dear audience], the person who follows the inspired insights with their thinking gradually realizes that what they experience with other people is basically something that belongs to the deepest part of their own soul. Here we have already reached a point where anthroposophy must go into its more precise results in order to be able to present certain things that are present in life in their correct relationships.

In our [sensory and] emotional life, we as human beings reveal what we experience in the outside world, which is the result of impressions from the outside world. But not all of these impressions directly form the content of our feelings, of our entire mind during our waking day-to-day life. Those who are able to study the nightly dream life with its inner drama more closely than is usually the case will already get an inkling of what anthroposophy can then raise to complete certainty: namely, that in the depths of our emotional life sits that which is the result of our intimate relationships [with the people] we come together with in life. Just as our dreams reveal in the most diverse ways what we might not even consider during the day, to which we are not attached with intense feeling, as it appears in the image, so the circumstances in which we find ourselves in our social interactions with people penetrate much deeper into our mental life than the things of which we are aware in our daily lives. There are relationships between people that penetrate deeply into the emotional life. We stand between people and talk to each other because we are involved in life, perhaps always only superficially, but there are many things that play between people at a deeper level. (Even for those who are not spiritual researchers, the dream life reveals many things.

Everything we experience [from person to person] forms the basis of our emotional life, our entire system of feelings. And some of the disharmony that arises from the depths of this emotional life, which arises in such a way that we feel permeated by an inner pain, an inner deprivation or disappointment, often stems from the fact that that relationships have been formed between people [that we have not brought to consciousness], which sit deep down in the mind, plague us and are just waiting for us to fully bring them into consciousness in order to place them in the right way in relation to our own soul life. Sometimes the solution to the mystery of our own mental life is that we know how to bring our experiences into consciousness in the right way.

If we now follow the results of inspired knowledge in our thinking, we acquire a sense of how to listen carefully to other people, for example, but in a broader sense, we also acquire an understanding of our fellow human beings, and it is precisely through this that we develop a social sense in the deeper sense. We develop that in us which makes us particularly suited to find our way into the social order of mankind for our own satisfaction and for the benefit of other people, insofar as this benefit can come from us. A person's life becomes most rich when he influences all good and evil in man by having trained his thinking in the comprehension of inspirational truths. World and human knowledge through this sense of nature and understanding of man is acquired by trying to penetrate the results of inspired knowledge. Again, it is the case here that anthroposophy does not make people unworldly, but rather brings them close to life and to people.

We experience many things in our time that are called social demands. But what is social feeling and perception is — [the unbiased can see it] — less developed in our time. But this is something that our time urgently needs to develop, and in this respect anthroposophy can and may fulfill a kind of task for the time by bringing people closer to each other in the way I have indicated. It is fair to say that it is precisely anthroposophy that can serve through understanding what I have described, through understanding the other person, through genuine, powerful love of neighbor. [And how is all this achieved, ladies and gentlemen? It is achieved by man acquiring a very specific internalized sense of truth by pursuing the inspired truths in the manner indicated.]

In our ordinary lives, we have – if I may call it that – a logical sense of truth. Through our conclusions [and judgments], we come to find one thing to be right and another to be wrong; this has a certain logical character. If we then apply this logical character to the inspired truths, our whole understanding of the world becomes internalized. Our sense of truth itself becomes different. We begin to feel that which proves to be right in the context of the world as something healthy. [This is a great achievement, my dear audience, when we no longer perceive a judgment, a conclusion, merely as logically correct, but truly perceive that which is right as something that heals, preserves and strengthens the soul so that we have a sympathy in looking at what is true]; when error presents itself to us in such a way that we perceive it as something that makes the soul sick, weakens it, and inwardly as an antipathy. As a result, something arises in the soul at a higher level that can be called a “psychic-instinctive life”, something that, precisely because it is instinctive, can guide us safely through life.

We know that animals have a certain security through instinct [in relation to physical life]; they avoid what is harmful to them as food and choose what is beneficial to them. Of course, we cannot compare the life of the soul with the life of physical instinct; but when we see something similar occurring in human life at a higher level [because it occurs at a higher level in the soul], we have to speak of a psychic-instinctive. [One comes to live in the world in such a way that one feels instinctively secure about truth and error, like a color, as an animal feels through its instinct about its food and poisons. It is precisely through this that this soul instinct enters our human organism through the contemplation of inspired truths. It is precisely through this that we enrich our purpose in life quite substantially.

Man gains something, [as inner support], such as life security, by being able to acquire this instinctiveness at a higher level. And precisely because we acquire the ability to perceive something as healthy conclusion or to perceive it as something pathological or destructive, precisely because of this, we are able to develop a sense of nature and understanding of people.

If I may mention another [dear audience], we come deeper into the results of anthroposophy. What is needed above all as preparation to receive the revelations of the supersensible worlds with one's developed knowledge is a certain quick apprehension, a certain presence of mind. I have described how to develop this in the writings “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science: An Outline”. Why do you need presence of mind? Well, at the moment when the real spiritual world appears before you, you are no longer dealing with the same conditions of space and time as before; rather, it is necessary to grasp a spiritual reality at the same moment it appears. For if one is not sufficiently quick-witted to grasp it at the very moment it appears, it is already gone; one cannot grasp it at all. It is a basic requirement for the anthroposophical spiritual researcher to acquire a certain presence of mind for his research. What he gains through inspiration and grasps with presence of mind still has something of the way the thing was found clinging to it when he reflects on it. For when a person reflects on it, he stimulates in himself the qualities that led to the discovery of something like this. (It is therefore a training of presence of mind to follow the inspired truths, if they really are such, in thought.) But in doing so, we make ourselves more capable of dealing with life. For how much some people suffer today when they cannot come to a decision about this or that in life that requires them to make a decision! Becoming decisive is what can be gained particularly from thinking about the inspired truths. And this presence of mind is further enhanced when one becomes consciously aware of how one can now grasp in an instant many things that previously required long chains of thought to understand, because one perceives them directly as healthy truth or as a disease-causing, destructive error, as directly as one otherwise has a taste, smell or tactile experience. It is absolutely the case that one develops the same kind of aliveness in relation to truth and error within oneself as one otherwise has in relation to external sensory perception, but that one develops this aliveness as the experience of a higher, supersensible realm.

[Now, dear attendees], the spiritual researcher then goes on to explore what presents itself to him through intuitive knowledge by further developing and strengthening his will so that this will becomes independent of the physical body and the person is able to place himself in the external spiritual world. He is then able to be in the external spiritual world with his soul and spirit just as he is in the physical world with the help of his senses. But this standing within the external spiritual world is basically nothing other than an experience of one of the noblest human impulses on a higher level of life: it is an experience in love. It is also an experience in freedom, for man becomes unfree only by becoming dependent on his physical body, as I explained in detail in the early 1890s in The Philosophy of Freedom.

, as I explained in detail in the early 1890s in The Philosophy of Freedom. The moment a person rises to have impulses that he grasps through moral intuition, he becomes a free personality [in a moral sense]. But he can also become a free personality in relation to his whole position in relation to the environment, namely to the spiritual, supersensible basis of this environment, to the supersensible basis of his own human being, when this supersensible basis presents itself in the experience before birth and after death and also in the experience of repeated earth lives.

What is contained in an external spiritual world, and also in an external spiritual world of facts, is love on a higher level, the love that, even in the sense world, frees man in a certain sense from what would otherwise be imposed on him by his physicality through his urges and instincts. Karl Julius Schröer once gave a beautiful definition of love, which he explained in more detail in his book about Goethe, saying, “Love is the only passion of man that is free of selfishness.” It cannot be said that love is free of selfishness in its lower stages; but it must be said that as love develops to ever higher and higher stages, allowing itself to be more and more imbued with soul and permeated by spirit, it will make the essence of the human being, in which he merges with his own essence into the other being and submerges with his own essence into the other, more and more free of selfishness. And precisely by making this love a real power of knowledge in intuitive insight, it will also awaken love in this sense in man, in accordance with the intuitive truths that are contemplated.

Dear attendees, I know very well how the present shrinks from speaking of love as a power of knowledge; nor is it at all about ordinary love as a power of knowledge. But when love is elevated through such [serious soul-will exercises] into the experience and experience of the spiritual world, then love becomes a power of knowledge; then, precisely through this loving engagement with spiritual beings and spiritual facts, one attains real objectivity, the penetration of the object in its true form into human knowledge and thereby also into the human overall experience. It is precisely in this development of intuitive knowledge and also in the intellectual pursuit of the results of this intuitive knowledge that one notices how man comes to the experience of his self and also what hinders him from experiencing his self.

For, [my dear audience], anyone who looks into his own heart without prejudice will very well realize how little his own self actually stands before his soul. More or less, what we call our self in ordinary life is only a summary of what is reflected from the outside world as if in a single point. But what the real I, the real self is, is not at all vivid to ordinary consciousness; and if we were to live in such a way that our ordinary consciousness were not interrupted again and again by sleep, we would not experience the human I at all for ordinary consciousness. If we were able to go back to an experience of things in an uninterrupted, uninterrupted course of our consciousness since birth, we would still only find a sum of external images of experience in it, but not the human ego. We become aware of the ego precisely because we withdraw again and again from external experience into a state of sleep – even if we do not develop consciousness in the process. [It is exactly the same when we look back and remember our life.] We actually only ever see what we have experienced during the day, and we always have to see it interrupted [by sleep] during the night. What presents itself through this interruption is, in a person's life, a sum of dark spots in the brightly lit space of memory. If it were not for these dark spots, we would have no resistance to the light that arises from them. We would only experience the outside world, not ourselves!

But the one who ascends through intuitive knowledge to the contemplation of repeated earthly lives, only then gets a view of the true self of man, which goes through repeated earthly lives and can only be recognized in this going through repeated earthly lives. Anyone who has gone through this, as the spiritual researcher has to express himself about the nature of his research into repeated lives on earth, gets a vivid idea of the self of the human being. But he also gets a vivid idea of what knowledge in love is: merging with the external object of the spiritual world. And he gets an insight into the fact that we can only really experience our true self when we become selfless. And love in particular, when it is described in its higher stages as the “only passion that is free of selfishness,” it is at the same time that which allows us to experience the power of our own self in our experience of the external world, in our devotion to the external world.

This is a profound mystery of human nature: that one only experiences one's self when one experiences the outside world, embraces the outside world in love and is able to penetrate [into the secrets of the outside world with love] so that one can immerse oneself in it with one's entire being. This underlies many sayings, such as Goethe's: He first acquires his true self who first loses it in order to gain it. Only when we live ourselves into the world do we thereby live ourselves into our true self; whereas our ordinary self is only [thereby ours] in that it is based on physical corporeality and thereby diverts us from our true self. But by training himself in such a way of thinking about the results of intuitive knowledge, the human being comes to not only think, feel or sense his self, but to bring into a certain [context] that which is most important to him for the earth – that is the human will.

How do we actually stand in relation to the will for ordinary consciousness? When we are awake, we are really only fully awake in our mental life; our feelings are in a state towards our ordinary consciousness that is otherwise like dreams, except that they occur in our soul life differently than dreams; but what will is, has sunk so deeply into the subconscious that it is experienced like the states from falling asleep to waking up. Let us just realize what happens when we carry out the simplest volition, for example when we raise our arm and hand. First we have an idea: the intention to raise our hand and so on. Then what is mysteriously hidden in this intention penetrates down into the depths of the organism, and we know just as little about what is going on down there as we do about what is going on with us from falling asleep to waking up – until we then find ourselves waking up. We also find ourselves again when we look at the raised hand or arm from the outside after the executed volition. [Thus we find the volitional content of our thought.]

In a sense, every single act of the will is a falling asleep and a waking up and an intermediate state of being absorbed in sleep. By developing in oneself the strengthening of willpower and the liberation from the physical body, the whole will becomes like a transparent, holistic sensory organ. Just as we have physical organs, for example our eyes, and through them see the physical world, so at a different level the human being sees into the spiritual world through his or her entire spiritual organization, and thereby also into the essence of his or her will. When a spiritual researcher describes the nature of the will or the nature of the human ego, they must clothe this description in such thought forms that anyone who follows these thoughts with a healthy understanding of human nature will receive something of the reflection of how the will must be spoken of in this particular way, how the human ego is connected to the will [this deeper aspect of human nature]. This human ego is basically as deep down in human nature as the will itself; it must be brought up. But a reflection of this bringing up passes over to him who reflects on the intuitive knowledge of the ego. In this way he develops energy of action in himself, in this way he strengthens his will.

While the reflection of imaginative insights elevates the personality and can make it independent, while the reflection of inspired insights ignites the human mind in the most diverse ways, leading to an understanding of nature and of true human understanding and to an experience of the healthy and the sick in truth and error, the reliving of intuitive knowledge educates the human will. Those who educate themselves in this way will soon notice how their will becomes more active and how they truly begin to love what their destiny imposes on them in the outside world. We learn to fit into our destiny, we become strong in relation to our will in an active and passive way towards life; we become strong also in bearing suffering and pain as well as in experiencing joy. We become strong – not by passing by the suffering and pain of life; no, but through what is aroused [in our mind in the healthy and sick soul life], we become more receptive to the joys and pains of life. We do become more sensitive to things and experiences, but by reliving intuitive insights, the will is strengthened so that we can go through life more uprightly and endure our destiny more surely in both suffering and joy.

And by developing the reliving of intuitive knowledge, we feel connected to the world in a way that itself represents a religious sense of the world, which represents what the deepest divine impulses in the world - through immersion in love in this world - are capable of achieving. The religious and artistic sense is kindled by this immersion in love in the world, to whatever extent it may be present. Those who adhere to anthroposophy in this respect will benefit themselves in terms of the further development of their artistic, [religious] and moral being if they adhere to what has just been indicated in anthroposophy.

So, [my dear attendees], anthroposophy, by wanting to speak of what can become the purpose of life through it, does not approach people with some abstract sermons or admonitions, but in such a way that it tells them: When people experience what can be explored in the spiritual worlds through it, he acquires inner strength for his thinking, which he makes alive, and for his feeling, which he makes more inward and more accessible to world phenomena. He also acquires further development for his will, which he makes stronger and at the same time more capable of suffering, but also more suitable for responding to the joys of life in the right way.

This is what anthroposophy has to say about the purpose of life that a person acquires by immersing themselves in anthroposophy and delving into it [a certainty in life that cannot be gained in any other way]. Anthroposophy has nothing ready to give to a person in this regard as their purpose in life, but only what they can work for themselves, but will possess all the more surely for it.

Life is something that philosophers view in a variety of ways: one views it pessimistically, another optimistically, and yet another more neutrally, and so on. But however one may feel about these various nuances, anyone who looks back on what he himself has been through in life will agree with the maxim: “Only those who have to conquer it daily deserve freedom and life!”

In every sense, life wants to be conquered by people every day. And that is good; because those personalities who would only passively grow into life would also have nothing of life for their own being, because what a person really possesses is what he has to conquer in life. If we remember the truth that only those who must conquer it daily deserve freedom and life, then we may add: Anthroposophy, for its part, wants to bring the means to man through which this daily conquest can be carried out by man!

When I read Richard Wahle's 1885 essay 'Brain and Consciousness', I had the impression that a personality was speaking who knew how to describe in a sharp-sighted way what human consciousness can say about the content given to it when it philosophizes, putting itself in the perspective of currently accepted science. This essay contains the germ of what Wahle would later discuss impressively in his books 'The Whole of Philosophy and its End' and 'On the Mechanism of Spiritual Life', and for which he found such apt formulations in smaller essays, particularly in his 'Historical Overview of the Development of Philosophy up to its Last Phase'. In “fast sündhafter” Kürze is the extract of a thought-provoking work in the preceding short essay given; in extraordinarily commendable detail, the result of this work is in the mentioned works.

I described the impression that I gained from Brain and Consciousness in a short review of this work, which was printed in 1885 in the Deutsche Wochenschrift (No. 86, $. 9), which was then published in Vienna. I concluded this review with the words: “The main significance of this little work lies in the fact that it has shown, in sharp contours, what experience actually gives us and what is often only added to it. All that the individual sciences can find consists only in the observation of related events, whereby we must assume that the connection itself is based on some true fact. We consider the author's arguments to be thoroughly convincing, but we believe that he has not drawn the ultimate conclusion from his views. Otherwise, he would have found that the true facts of the matter are given to us as experiential events themselves – namely, the ideal ones – and that the negation of materialism consistently leads to scientific idealism. Thus, while we see the progression from the thoroughly solid foundation laid by Wahle to a higher level of knowledge as the right thing to do, we unreservedly admit that we see in this writing an outstanding achievement that will have a decisive effect on the branch of science to which it belongs and that will certainly take a place in the history of philosophy.

For me, before I read Wahle's writing, the content of which was given from the philosophical consciousness of the end of the nineteenth century; and I found this content presented in it in a way that seemed convincing to me. It was clear to me, however, that we must not stop at thinking this content through. Otherwise, we lack the 'final consequence'; and this cannot be a consequence of thinking, it must be a consequence of experience.

But must we not also recognize that dreaming encompasses a world of events, and waking another; and that the events of waking arise when dreaming suddenly changes into a different form of event? And must we not also recognize that the reality value of dreaming arises from the point of view of waking? If I have to answer these questions with “Yes,” I do not see myself in contradiction to what Wahle has said about dreaming in his “Mechanismus des geistigen Lebens.” I want to say, entirely in his spirit: There are series of events of waking and series of events of dreaming. One can think of the two types of series as being connected to each other, as Wahle does. In this way one is protected from the danger that Wahle so aptly characterizes (p. 459 of his “Mechanismus des geistigen Lebens”): “Dreaming makes a tremendous impression on people and when they talk about dreams they become quite dreamy and mystical.”

But it is different to consciously run through the stages in which waking and dreaming intertwine; it is different to experience waking and dreaming, and also the sudden transition from one experience to the other. It is precisely in the experience of waking, which occurs when one not only “wanted to get to know” Wahle's excellent “elucidations, refutations, demonstrations, analyses” and many “psychological and physiological insights”, but makes them the fully grasped constitution of “spiritual life” - I use this word entirely in Wahle's sense - is the impetus to move from the ranks of dreaming and waking to the others that I describe in imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge. The transition of experience is as sudden as that from dreaming to waking; and the events of waking life receive from the standpoint of exact imagination, inspiration, and intuition a similar illumination of reality that they do not possess in themselves, just as dreaming receives one from the standpoint of waking life.

The objection that is raised, that nothing forces people to refer from the point of view of ordinary consciousness to that of imagination, inspiration and intuition, is naturally to be raised against the above statements. It will be raised by all those who do not go far enough in their cognitive life to notice the point in this life at which awakening from ordinary consciousness must occur.

It should not be raised by the man of choice alone. For he has ($. 174 f. of his “Mechanismus des geistigen Lebens”) written the fact-finding sentences: “We believe that once one realizes what is actually being said when one claims to perceive acts of the ego, one will be horrified by one's own presumptuousness. — Does one see, that is, perceive, not with the eyes, but does one clearly perceive the ego as a being, as a substance? Do you see the ego, which is supposed to appear as apperceiving, judging, willing, feeling in ever different acts, always as a constant thing, as the same being? When you see a person fencing, running, rowing, climbing, for example, you still always see the same person in the different activities. Do you always see the same ego here too? For heaven's sake, who can say that he has perceived this ego-being psychically?” And ($. 177 £.): ”But one must turn away from all this abstruse stuff, which of course was not gained by observation, but by the fear that one could only do justice to the complications by means of peculiar psychic brackets, and often was only gained by indirect spiritizing over literary enunciations. From metaphors and acts, unions, innate categories and symbols, one must turn to the simple representation of the multiplicity of sensual series.

Whoever says this indicates that ordinary consciousness dreams when it wants to claim something other than “series of images and bodily actions”. But then the next step cannot be to remain within ordinary consciousness, but to awaken from it. And with this awakening, the dreaming talk of a “will that shows itself to consciousness as power,” of an “act of loving,” of an “act of desiring, of judging, of imagining,” ceases. And an awakened speech about these “dreams” begins, similar to the way an awakened person speaks about his nocturnal dreams. For what is said in anthroposophy from exact imagination, inspiration, intuition about the phantasms of ordinary psychology, would like to relate to these as the judgments of the waking about the confused, confusing of his dream world.

The difference between awakening from the ordinary dream world to waking everyday life and awakening from this life to supersensible consciousness is only that the former is felt to be involuntary, the latter as brought about by one's own (but trained) will. (I also use the word will here with the same awareness as Wahle himself does in his writings, despite having seen through the fantasy of ordinary psychology with regard to the “will”).

Since Wahle is clear about the dreaming of ordinary consciousness, he cannot really close himself off from awakening either. But then it will also be possible to reach an understanding that by awakening to imagination, inspiration and intuition, one is on the way to the “primal factors” without sinning against one's justified “enlightenment, refutation, demonstration, analysis”. One has only to take a serious look at the corresponding occurrence of this awakening. Dreaming is often joined by nightmare. It is overcome by awakening. Such a “nightmare” is also present when one does not merely mentally imagine the “rows of flat, sensuous occurrences” and the “motoric activity in peculiar types,” but experiences them. This “nightmare experience” is what a person has when, in ordinary consciousness, he strives from the sensory into the supersensible. The dreaming of ordinary consciousness wants to merge into waking in the supersensible, just as the dream wants to merge into ordinary consciousness. Liberation from the “nightmare experience” is all striving for supersensible knowledge and for religious inwardness.

Spintizing about whether the results of imagination, inspiration and intuition now place us squarely in the realm of the “primal factors” ceases to have any significance when it is recognized that the point is not to speak of these “primal factors” in the way of dreaming, but to free ourselves from the nightmare of ordinary consciousness.

Wahle has analyzed and demonstrated the dream in a completely unique way (in his “Mechanismus des geistigen Lebens”). Anyone who moves in such trains of thought as he does, who can thus follow the dream sequences into the sequences of waking consciousness, should be able to understand that in the realm of occurrences not only the “frame principle” is assumed to be justified, but also the image principle. There is not only a framework, there is also a picture in the framework. And precisely those who can strictly experience the events in their immediacy, they arise in the field of the senses as images; in the field of bodily actions as experienced dreams. And through this, they are driven out of the image and the experienced dream into the supersensible reality, just as the (dreaming) dreamer is driven into the sensual.

The world of events is misinterpreted when one says: “Something that corresponds to the scurrying events of the world - still conceived without bodily senses - namely, how the world was and is, insofar as humans and senses are not, there must be it in living active power, and something that corresponds to the senses, there must also be it in truly living active power. Let us arbitrarily call the first substantial being X, the second substantial being in general Y. Then the following must hold: the free-floating, in themselves undeclared occurrences are the function of the interaction of XY. — That is the ultimate conclusion of “knowledge”: put XY, unknown how, the occurrences into the world.

But the occurrences say something else. They do not place all kinds of partial occurrences on the right side of the equals sign and X or Y on the left; nor do they add: Don't dissolve the calculation, but leave X and Y standing. They invite calculation; and calculation consists of imagination, inspiration, and intuition; and then, in the calculation, something comes out. We are not left with X and Y at the end of the path of knowledge, but at the beginning of the path of insight, with calculations to which we have applied the diligence of dissolution.

Actually, other objections to anthroposophy should be discussed here; but this “agreement” must also be of “almost sinful” brevity, and it already comprises more than double Wahle's remarks.

But from these allusions it should be clear that anthroposophy, without betraying itself, can do justice to Richard Wahle's excellent achievements. It will have no objection to the validity of the “destructive psychology” (the first part of “The Mechanism of Spiritual Life”); it will have to illuminate the astute “constructive psychology” (the second part of the aforementioned book) from the point of view of the awakened consciousness. For here Wahle relies on a physiology that, as numerous works in the anthroposophical literature show, is in great need of correction. But how can valid statements be possible for a mode of thinking that Wahle has so precisely analyzed and demonstrated? After all, even the dreamer can only judge his dream world after awakening.

And so I can still subscribe to the final sentences of my review of Wahle's “Brain and Consciousness” from 1885 today. Yes, I can extend them to include his later works.

There is only one thing I would like to say about the review at the time. It contains the sentence: “We consider what the author has presented to be thoroughly convincing, but we believe that he has not drawn the final conclusion from his views. Otherwise, he would have found that those true facts are given to us even as experiential occurrences – namely, the ideational ones – and that the negation of materialism consistently leads to scientific idealism.” What is underlined here often recurs in my writings from the eighties and nineties of the last century in various forms. Certain personalities, who are absorbed in outward appearances, certainly do not want to find in such sentences what leads to the later anthroposophical presentations in my consistent further development. If, when I wrote these sentences, I had not wanted to ward off being lumped together with those “spiritual cognizers” who materialize the spiritual in their imagination after all, if I had not wanted to make my view clearly recognizable as one of the “real spirit,” then perhaps I would not have had to run the risk of what I wanted to say clearly being later distorted by others into something unclear. For example, I could have formulated the above sentence as follows: “. . empirical occurrences, namely spiritual experience based on ideas, are given, and that the negation of materialism leads consistently to spiritual knowledge rooted in scientific idealism.” I do believe that anyone who wants to can see from my formulation decades ago the reference to what I currently call anthroposophy.

Considering all this, I would like to add my own to Wahl's final sentence: At the boundary of his steel-hard, narrow terrain of knowledge stands a turret with windows of frosted glass. If you leave them closed, the view into X and Y becomes cloudy, and you can only let “the hunch wander into a necessary but unsearchable realm”. But you can also open the windows, and then the inkling turns into an unsearchable realm – anthroposophy. But I have to return the sympathies, which are so gratifying to me, wholeheartedly, because one of the “little towers” that one needs to feel secure in the certainty of knowledge has been erected by Richard Wahle as a good master builder.

Criticism of Knowledge and Anthroposophy

by Richard Wahle

One happiness of the mind is to grasp truth, another is to dream. There is said to be truth and there is not said to be knowledge, because truth can consist in knowing that knowledge is impossible. But the mere certainty of knowledge, however sad the state of human knowledge may be, could not give rise to joy; rather, joy can come at most from getting rid of errors and vain hopes, and from having firm, albeit narrow, ground under one's feet instead of shaky ground.

I am free of all philosophical fallacies. Those who want to get to know the relevant explanations, refutations, demonstrations, analyses and many psychological and physiological insights would do best to read my works, especially my Mechanism of Mental Life. Here, in the utmost, almost sinful brevity, I shall mention what should lie behind us, in the night of false concepts and misleading words; I shall show the positive achievement that has been attained through my radical critique. And precisely that formula of the most certain and modest knowledge will then open the gate to the city of dreams.

First, let us recall the simplest analysis. There is no such thing as will essentially revealing itself as power to consciousness; there are only series of images and bodily actions. There is also no such thing as a psychic act of loving, no act of desiring, of judging, no act of imagining; but there are only series of two-dimensional sensory occurrences and motor functions - in peculiar types (which I have described in detail), for which those practical, abbreviated names are used, but behind which there are absolutely no recognized functions.

With the existence of the senses, there is certainly the occurrence of the world of expansion, of physicality; it is simply there, as a sensory occurrence, a reality. But there is no certainty, no chance for the assertion that this expansion is an effective, powerful potency, a factor of creation and energy.

It is quite certain that the extended reality exists on the one hand in the primary form of the real occurrence - as a crystal, a tree, a human body, an eye - and it is equally certain that on the other hand there is a secondary reality of occurrences in the form that is called memory - of crystal, of eye - or further emerging combinations of such occurrences, which are called fantasies. But it is not certain, it is even a deception that these events are found in the possession of an “I”. It is certain that all these primary and secondary occurrences are realities pure and simple, but it does not appear justified to assume that they exist as “known,” existing in the bosom of an “I.” There are free-floating, powerless, shadowy realities, without in any way betraying their origin, their rooting; we know nothing of their origin and their substance! That they are a treasure of an inner core-ego, that there is a consciousness of it, is a lie. It is easy to explain how the lie arises. It arises through the play - through opening and closing the eyes - of the senses, which, however, are themselves nothing but freely fluttering realities that show no power or way of acting and are not suited to tell us the true processes.

If we now summarize our critical certainty in the face of the abundance of unproven and premeditated events, we have to say: something that corresponds to the scurrying events of the world - still without bodily senses - corresponds to the world as it actually was and is, in so far as humans and senses are not present - must exist in living, active power; and something that corresponds to the senses must also exist in truly living, active power. Let us arbitrarily call the first substantial being X, and the second substantial being in general Y. Then the following must apply: the freely floating, in themselves undeclared occurrences are the function of the interaction of XY. That is the ultimate conclusion of “knowledge”: XY, unknown how, bring the occurrences into the world. And now one is pushed further to assumptions that allow a meager fixation, but cannot be thought out far. Thus, the realm of dreams opens up here, and four main streets emerge.

It is a fact in the area of occurrence that there is one circle of primary and secondary occurrences for sensory complex A and another for sensory complex B, and so on. The occurrences show themselves in spheres that are not open to each other, or at least cannot be declared open with certainty. So at first we may or perhaps must say that in the processes of effectiveness XY a principle of the departments exists. I called it the framework principle.

Then it can or must be thought that the X and Y, the elemental force of the extended world under the deduction of the senses, and the elemental force of sensuality are unified in the essence. For in order to interact, they must be equivalent. So perhaps only one elemental substance with an internal elemental differentiation is to be believed, with an internal cause to give itself in spheres, in the framework.

Furthermore, it is easily possible that this original substance in its functions also leaps its bounds, and so those spheres of occurrence could somehow flow together in the depths of the roots. And one can even dream that perhaps threads are spun from sphere to sphere in the realm of occurrences as well.

And finally. From the standpoint of man, we know joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. But an almighty primary substance cannot suffer. And so every pain here must somehow be a part of a whole, in which it is not pain, but perhaps only a spice and an intensification of joy.

My absolutely radical analysis and critique of the existing, which only tolerates neutral realities floating around, unknown from where and how, makes it necessary to rave about true primal forces. At the edge of my steel-hard, narrow terrain of knowledge stands a turret from which the presentiment can roam into a necessary but unknowable realm. — And there is also the bridge over which my sympathies can cross over to the structures of anthroposophy and its thoughts.

It is often said, and rightly so, that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will only attract the attention of the right people when it is able to engage with philosophical matters. Until it does so, it will make an amateurish impression on philosophers, and until then people will also say that the followers of this spiritual science are only followers of it because they lack a thorough philosophical education.

It would be quite hopeless to wait until a sufficiently large number of people with a philosophical education would realize that spiritual science is something that lifts even the most philosophical person far above mere philosophy. But since we cannot afford to wait for the spiritual-scientific movement, and must give spiritual science to the public as this public is capable of receiving and grasping it, even without the individual members of this public having received any particular philosophical training, if we is generally compelled to do so, it must be strictly emphasized that in the field of anthroposophy there is nothing that cannot be discussed in the strictest sense with what is necessary and right in the field of philosophy. And even if I am not in a position to give philosophical considerations due to the general direction of the theosophical movement, I would still like to use this short hour to draw the attention of those who have studied philosophical matters to some philosophical points of view. And I ask you to take this as something that falls completely outside the scope of the other anthroposophical considerations, as something that is purely a single philosophical consideration. You may find some of the things that need to be discussed difficult. But don't worry if you have to sit through a short hour of difficult and not-so-heartfelt reflections here. In any case, you can be sure that it will be extremely useful for you to establish the foundations of spiritual-scientific truths. You will find again and again, when you take in real philosophical thinking, that this philosophical way of thinking will not only greatly facilitate your understanding of spiritual science in general, but also of what is called “esoteric development”. So today's purely philosophical reflection is to be quite out of the ordinary.

You should not regard philosophy as something absolute. Philosophy is something that has only emerged in the course of human development, and we can easily state the hour of its birth, for this is more or less correctly stated in every history of philosophy. In recent times, some have objected to the fact that every history of philosophy begins with Thales, that is, with the first appearance of philosophy in Greece; and it has been thought that philosophy could be traced back beyond that time. This is not correct. What can justifiably be called “philosophy” actually begins with Greek philosophy. Oriental wisdom and knowledge are not what should properly be called “philosophy”. If we disregard the great philosophical intuitions, as they appear in a different way in Heraclitus, Thales, and later in Socrates, and go straight to philosophy as it presents itself to us in a closed world-building, in a closed structure of thought, then Pythagoras is not the first philosopher. For Pythagoras is, in a certain respect, still an intuitive seer who, although he often expresses what he has to say in philosophical forms, is not a philosophical system in the true sense of the word, any more than the Platonic system is. A philosophical system in the true sense of the word is only the great system - as a philosophical system - that Aristotle built up in the 4th century BC. We must first orient ourselves on these things.

If Aristotle is called the first philosopher and Plato is still regarded as a half-seer, it is because Aristotle is the first who has to draw solely from the source of philosophy, namely from the source of thinking in concepts. Of course, all this had been prepared for a long time; it was not as if he had to create all the concepts himself; his predecessors had done considerable preparatory work for him in this regard. But in truth, Aristotle is the first to give precisely that which, for example, was the subject of the mysteries, not in the old seer form, but in the conceptual form. And so, anyone who wants to orient themselves in philosophy will have to go back to Aristotle. In him, he will find all the concepts that have been gained from other sources of knowledge in earlier times, but he will find them processed and worked up into a conceptual system. Above all, it is in Aristotle that we must seek the starting point of a - let us call it 'science' - a science that did not exist in this form within the development of mankind and could not have come into being. Anyone who can follow the development of humanity in this way, with the means of spiritual science, knows that before Aristotle – of course this is all to be understood with the famous Gran Salz – an Aristotelian logic was not conceivable in this way, because only Aristotle created a corresponding thinking technique, a logic. As long as higher wisdom was imparted directly in the mysteries, there was no need for logic. In a certain way, Aristotle is also the unrivaled master of logic. Despite all the efforts of the 19th century, logic has basically not made much progress in all essential points beyond what Aristotle has already given.

It would take us too far afield today to point out the reasons why philosophy could only enter into humanity at this time, in the time of Aristotle. Through anthroposophy, it will gradually become clear to many why a very specific age was necessary for the foundation of philosophy.

We then see how Aristotle is the leading philosopher for a long time and, with brief interruptions - which seem more like interruptions to today's people than they really were - remains so until today. All those who are active in other fields, let us say in Gnosticism, Platonism, or in the church teachings of early Christianity, they processed the Aristotelian arts of thought. And in a wonderful way, what Aristotle gave to humanity as the formal element of thinking also spread in the West, where what the Church had to say was more or less clothed in the forms that Aristotle had given in his thinking technique. Even though in the first centuries of the spread of Christianity, Aristotle's philosophy was still disseminated in the West in a very deficient form, this is essentially because the writings of Aristotle were not available in the original language. But people thought in terms of the thinking technique developed by Aristotle.

In a different way, Aristotle found acceptance in the East, only to come to the West again via the Arabs. Thus Aristotle found his way into the West in two ways: firstly through the Christian current and secondly through the current that gradually flowed into the culture of the West through the Arabs.

It was during this period that there was a great interest in Aristotle's thinking, which represents the actual high point in medieval philosophy, namely the first form of what is called “scholasticism”, specifically “early scholasticism”. Scholasticism essentially existed to be a philosophy of Christianity. It was compelled for two reasons to take up Aristotle: firstly, out of the old traditions, because one was accustomed to knowing Aristotle in the first place; even the Platonists and Neoplatonists were more Platonists in content; in their thought technique, they were often Aristotelian. But there was another reason why scholasticism had to rely on Aristotle, namely because scholasticism was compelled to take a stand against the influence of Arabism and thus against Oriental mysticism, so that in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries we find scholasticism philosophically justifying Christianity in the face of the Arab world of ideas. The Arab scholars came with their wonderfully honed Aristotelian knowledge and tried to attack Christianity from a variety of positions. If one wanted to defend Christianity, one had to show that the Arabs were using the instruments they were using in an incorrect way. The point was that the Arabs gave themselves the appearance that only they alone had the correct way of thinking of Aristotle and therefore directed their attacks against Christianity from this correct way of thinking of Aristotle. In the interpretation of the Arabs, it appeared as if anyone who stood on the ground of Aristotle must necessarily be an opponent of Christianity.

The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas arose in the face of this endeavor. His aim was to show that if one understands Aristotle correctly, one can use Aristotelian thought to justify Christianity. Thus, on the one hand, there was the tradition of proceeding in Aristotelian thought technique, on the other hand, the necessity to handle this very technique of Aristotle in the right way against the onslaught of Arabism, which was expressed in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.

Thus we find a peculiar synthesis of Aristotelian thought in what constitutes the essence of scholastic philosophy in its early days, a philosophy that was much maligned but is little understood today. Very soon, then, the time came when scholastic philosophy was no longer understood. And then all kinds of scholastic aberrations occurred, for example the one that is usually referred to as the school of thought called “nominalism”, while early scholasticism was “realism”. It is due to this nominalism that scholasticism soon outlived itself and fell into disrepute and obscurity. In a sense, nominalism is the father of all modern skepticism.

It is a strange tangle of philosophical currents that we see emerging in our more recent times, all of which basically flow against scholasticism. We still see some minds that stand firmly and firmly in the Aristotelian technique of thought, but which are no longer completely protected against the onslaught of modernity. Nicholas of Cusa is one of them.

But then we see how the last thing that can be saved from this philosophical-methodical basis is to save Cartesius. And on the other hand, we see how all the good elements of Arabism - that kind of philosophy that combined more Western-Oriental vision with Aristotelianism - have intertwined with that technique of thought that we call “Kabbalistic”. Among the representatives of this trend is Spinoza, who cannot be understood otherwise than by linking him, on the one hand, to Western Orientalism and, on the other, to Kabbalism. All other talk about Spinoza is talk in which one has no solid ground under one's feet.

But then “empiricism” spread with a vengeance, especially under the aegis of Locke and Hume. And then we see how philosophy finds itself increasingly confronted with purely external material research - natural science - and how it gradually retreats before this kind of research. We then see how philosophy becomes entangled in a web from which it can hardly extricate itself. This is an important point where the philosophy of modern times gets caught, namely with Kant! And we see in the post-Kantian period how great philosophers appear, such as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, who appear like a kind of meteor, but who are least understood by their own people. And we see how a brief, strange wrangling over ideas takes place in order to escape from the net in which Kantianism has caught the philosophers, how impossible it is for philosophy to escape from it, and how German thought in particular suffers from Kantianism in its most diverse variations, and how even all the beautiful and great attempts that are made suffer from Kantianism. Thus we see a deficiency appear in all of modern philosophy that has two sources: One is evident in the fact that at our philosophy chairs, which believe they have more or less freed themselves from Kantianism, people are still floundering in Kant's snares; the other is evident in the fact that philosophy suffers from a certain impossibility of asserting its position, which it should defend as philosophy, against the very short-sighted natural science.

Not until our philosophy has freed itself from the nets of Kantianism and from all that causes philosophy to stop in the face of the onslaught of natural science, not until our better-intentioned elements recognize how they can get over these two obstacles that stand in their way, can any salvation on the philosophical field be expected. Therefore, the philosophical field, especially within Germany, presents a truly sad picture, and it is highly distressing to see, for example, how psychology is gradually receding, how, for example, people who are actually incapable of doing anything other than processing elementary things a little in a philosophical way, but who do not get beyond certain trivialities, have a huge reputation, like Wundt, for example. On the other hand, it must be seen that minds such as Fechner's - who could be stimulating if people had an appreciation for it - are regarded by those who are pure dilettantes as a new Messiah. This was bound to happen and is not meant as criticism.

I would now like to start from a concept that is so closely related to the web in which philosophy has become entangled since Kant, which is the fundamental evil of the philosophical mind, an evil that can be characterized by the words: “philosophy has fallen prey to subjectivism!”

If we want to understand Kant, we must first understand him historically. Kant's view is actually born entirely out of the developmental history of human thought. Those who know Kant better are aware that the Kant of the 1750s and 1760s was completely absorbed in what was the most common philosophy in Germany at the time, which was called the Enlightenment philosophy of Wolf. In its external form, it was often a jumble of empty phrases, but its spirit was partly still borrowed from the old Leibnizianism. But let us concern ourselves here with a brief characterization of Wolffianism. We can say that for Wolffianism, the world view is divided into two truths: firstly, that of external observation and what man can gain from it; secondly, that which man can gain through pure thinking: 'a priori'. Thus there was also a physics - an astronomy, a cosmology - that was gained from the consideration of facts, and a rational physics - a rational astronomy - that was gained by pure thinking. Wolff was aware that human thinking, without taking any experience into account, could construct knowledge about the nature of the world purely rationally, out of itself. This was knowledge from pure reason, “a priori”, while “a posteriori” was knowledge that was gained from the senses, from mere understanding, from experience. Likewise, for Wolff there were two psychologies, one in which the soul observed itself, and the other, the rational psychology. And in the same way, Wolff distinguished between a natural theology based on revelation, on what has come down to us as revealed truth and is present as the supersensible in religious creeds; from this he distinguished rational theology, which could be derived from pure reason - a priori - and which, for example, draws the proofs of the existence of God from pure reason.

Thus, all knowledge of the time was divided into that which was derived from pure reason and that which was derived from pure experience. Those who stood on this ground studied at all universities at that time. Kant was also one of them, even though he went beyond them, as can be seen from one of his writings entitled: “On the Concept of Introducing the Negative into the World”. Then he became acquainted with the English skeptic Hume and thus became familiar with that form of skepticism that has a shattering effect on all rational knowledge, especially on the view of universal apriority, the law of causality. Hume says: There is nothing that can be gained by any a priori form of thinking. It is simply a habit of man to think that every fact is to be understood as the effect of a cause. And so the whole rational structure is something that one has become accustomed to. For Kant, who found something plausible in Hume, the ground was thus removed for Wolffian rationalism, so that he said to himself that only knowledge from experience is possible.

Kant then found himself in a very strange situation. His whole feeling and perception resisted the assumption that there was actually nothing absolutely certain. If you were to go along with Hume completely, you would have to say: Yes, we have seen that the sun rises in the morning and warms the stones, and we have concluded from all the cases that the sun rose in the morning and warmed the stones that there is a certain causal connection in this; but there is no necessity at all that this conclusion is an absolute truth. That is Hume's view. Kant did not want to abandon the absolute truth. It was also clear to him that no a priori statement is possible without experience. He therefore turned this last sentence around and said: Certainly, it is true that man cannot arrive at anything without experience; but does knowledge really come from experience? No, said Kant, there are mathematical judgments that are quite independent of experience. If mathematical judgments were derived from experience, we could only say that they have proved true so far, but we do not know whether they are correct. Kant added: The fact that we can make judgments like mathematical ones depends on the organization of the subject at the moment we make these judgments; we cannot think differently than the laws of mathematics are, therefore all experience must conform to the realm of mathematical lawfulness. So we have a world around us that we create according to the categories of our thinking and our experiences. We begin with experience, but this has only to do with our organization. We spread out the network of our organization, capture the material of experience according to the categories of perception and understanding of our subjective organization, and basically see a world picture that we have spun according to its form. [Gap in the postscript.]

Since Kant, philosophy has become ensnared in this subjectivism – except to a certain extent in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel – in this subjectivism, which states that man has something to do with things only insofar as they make an impression on him. More and more has been attributed to Kantianism. Even Schopenhauer, who in his “World as Will and Representation” really goes beyond Kant, but also others to a much greater extent, have only understood this Kantianism to mean that the “thing in itself” is completely inaccessible to human knowledge, whereas everything that occurs in man - from the first sensory impression to the processing of impressions as knowledge - is merely an effect on the subject.

You see that man is then basically cut off from everything objective, only wrapped up in his subjectivity. “Our world is not a world of things, only a world of ideas,” says Schopenhauer. The thing is something that lies beyond the subject. The moment we know something, what we have before us is already our idea. The thing lies beyond the subject, in the trans-subjective. The world is my idea and I only move within my ideas. That is the net in which philosophy has caught itself and you can find it spread over the whole thinking of the nineteenth century. And this thinking could not lead to anything else in the field of psychology either, except to understand that which is given to us as something subjective. This is even noticeable in the individual sciences. Consider the teachings of Helmholtz. Helmholtz says: That which is given to us is no longer just an image, but only a sign of the real image; man must never claim that what he perceives has a similarity to reality.

The whole development of subjectivism in the nineteenth century is an example of how people can lose their impartiality once they are wrapped up in a thought. Eduard von Hartmann's “Transcendental Realism” is an example of this. It was impossible to talk to Eduard von Hartmann about the fact that perhaps the world could not just be “my imagination”. He had become so wrapped up in this theory that it was hardly possible to discuss an epistemological question with him objectively. He could not get beyond this definition “the world is my imagination”.

Anyone who is fair will not deny that this subjectivism, which lies in the sentence “the world is my imagination”, has something tremendously seductive about it. If you look at it from the subject's point of view, you will say that if we want to recognize something, we must always be active. From the first sensation to the last generation of the point in our field of vision that means “red”, we must be active. If it were not for the way our eyes are organized, “red” could never appear in our eyes. So that when you survey the field of experience, you have the activity of the subject in the experiences, and that therefore everything within your knowledge, viewed from the subject, is produced by yourself. This is in a certain way very significant, that man must be active, down to the last detail, if he wants to recognize. The subjectivity of the human being touches on the “thing in itself”; wherever it touches, it experiences an affection; you only ever experience a modification of your own powers. So you spin yourself in; you do not go beyond the surface of the “thing in itself”. All you could achieve is to say: My own activity always pushes against the surface of the 'thing in itself', and everywhere I feel only my own activity.

I would like to give you an image. This image is one that none of the subjectively oriented philosophers has really thought through. For if they did, they would find in this image the possibility of getting out of subjectivity.

You have a sheet of paper, drip liquid sealing wax on it and now press a seal into the sealing wax. Now I ask you: What has happened here? On the seal there should be a name, let us say “Miller”. When you have pressed it, what is in the seal is absolutely identical to what is in the sealing wax. If you go through all the sealing wax, you will not find the slightest atom that has come from the seal into the sealing wax. The two touch each other, and then the name “Miller” appears. Imagine that the sealing wax were a cognizant being and would say, “I am sealing wax through and through; that is my property, to be sealing wax. Out there, the seal is a ‘thing in itself’; not the slightest part of this ‘thing in itself’ can get into me.” The substance of the brass remains completely outside; and yet, if you remove the seal, the name “Müller”, on which it depends, is absolutely correct for the sealing wax. But you cannot say that the sealing wax has produced the name “Müller”. The name “Müller” would never have come about if there had not been a touch.

If only sealing wax could talk and say, “This imprint is only subjective!” – That is basically what all Kantians conclude; only they do so in such convoluted thoughts that the simple person can no longer recognize the error in such something simple.

Now, however, the seal impression completely matches the name engraved in the seal, which is what matters here, apart from the mirror image, which is not considered here. Therefore, the impression and imprint can be considered identical, at least with regard to the essential, the name “Müller”. It is exactly the same with the impressions we receive from the outside world: they are identical with the way in which things exist outside, that is to say, in relation to the essential in both.

Now, the sealing-wax could still say: “I do not get to know brass after all.” But that would mean that what contains the name “Miller” would also be recognized in terms of its material nature. But that is not the point. You have to distinguish between refuting Kantianism – if we follow this example to its conclusion, Kantianism is absolutely refuted – and completely transcending subjectivism. And that raises the question of whether we can now also find the other thing, which is neither in the nature of the sealing wax nor in that of the brass, which is above both and will be a synthesis between objectivism and subjectivism? For merely refuting Kantianism is not enough.

If we want to answer this question, we have to delve a little deeper into the problems. The fact that recent philosophy has not been able to make any headway in this area is due to the fact that it has lost touch with a real technique of thinking. Our question now is this: Is there anything in man that can be experienced that is not subjective? Or does only that live in man that cannot go beyond subjectivity?

If humanity had been able to follow the straight path from Aristotle, it would never have been entangled in the web of Kantianism. The straight path – without the break in the Middle Ages – would have led to the realization that there is a supersubjective reality above the subjective. Mankind did not progress in a straight line from Aristotle, but rather took a detour, and this deviation already began in the later scholasticism due to the emergence of nominalism. It then rolled further and further down this wrong path until it finally found itself entangled in a formal net with Kant. To get out of this impasse, we have to go back to Aristotle and ask ourselves: Is there nothing that goes beyond the merely subjective, that is, so to speak, subjective-objective?

Let us consider how Aristotle treats cognition. He distinguishes between cognition through the “sense” and cognition through the “mind”. Cognition through the sense is directed towards the individual sensual thing, cognition through the mind is directed towards making a distinction between “matter” and “form”. And Aristotle understands “form” to mean a great deal. Mankind would first have to be made aware of Aristotle's concept of form in the right way. An old friend of mine in Vienna always made this clear to his students using one example. Matter is basically not the essence of a thing, but the essence of a thing for our minds is the “form”.

If we want to make this distinction correctly in the sense of Aristotle, then we must say: All wolves are based on the species from which they “sprang”, which transformed matter into wolves. And the human soul represents the wolves in the concept, so that the generic concept in the human soul is for Aristotle what is represented in the soul, what the species is. How man recognizes the genus in the generic concept depends entirely on him, but not the reality of the genus.

Thus we have a union between what is only in the soul, the concept, and what is in the realm of the trans-subjective or the genus. This is absolute realism, without falling into the error of Plato, who subjectivized the species and regarded them as a kind of trans-subjective powers. He grasps the concept of the species again as the essence in itself, whereas the concept is only the expression of the soul for the transcendental reality “species”.

From here we then come to the task of early scholasticism, which of course had the very special task of justifying Christianity. Here, however, we will only deal with the epistemological basis of early scholasticism in a few words. It is initially based entirely on the fact that man knows nothing but his ideas. It is true that we know through ideas, but what we imagine is not “the idea” but the object of the idea. The “representation” is an impression in the subject, and need not be more. Now it is important that you understand the relationship between subject and object in the early scholastic sense. Everything that is recognized depends entirely on the form of the human mind. Nothing can enter or leave the soul that does not come from the organization of that soul itself. But that which originally underlies the work of the soul comes about through the soul's contact with the object. And it is the subject's contact with the object that makes the idea possible. This is why early scholasticism said that man does not present his ideas, but that his ideas represent the thing to him. If you want to grasp the content of the idea, you have to look for the content of the idea in the thing.

However, this example shows that in order to absorb the scholastic concepts, one needs a keen mind and a fine distinction, which are usually lacking in those who simply condemn scholasticism. You have to get involved with such sentences: “I present” or “My ideas represent a content, and that comes from the object”. Modern man wants to get straight down to the nitty-gritty with all the concepts, as they arise for him out of trivial life. That is why the scholastics all appear to him to be school foxes. In a sense, they are, because they have just seen to it that man first learned something: a discipline of thinking technique. The thinking technique of the scholastics is one of the strictest that has ever occurred in humanity.

Thus, in all that man cognizes, we have a web of concepts that the soul acquires from the objects. There is a fine scholastic definition: in everything that man has in his soul in this way, in the representations and concepts, the object represented by the same exists in the manner of the soul. “In the cognized, the objective exists in the manner of the soul.” Down to the last detail, everything is the work of the soul. The soul has indeed represented everything in its own way within itself, but at the same time the object is connected with it.

Now the question is this: How do we get out of subjectivism today? By taking the straight path from Aristotle, we would have got beyond subjectivism. But for profound reasons, this straight path could not be followed. The early days of Christianity could not immediately produce the highest form of knowledge through thinking. In the first centuries, something else lived in the souls, which prevented scholasticism from [gap in the transcription] rising above subjectivity.

We can easily understand how to get beyond subjectivism if, in the manner of the scholastics, we understand the difference between concept and representation. What is this difference? It is easiest to understand this using a circle as an example. We can gain the representation of a circle by taking a boat out to sea to a point where we see the vault of heaven on the horizon all around us. There we have gained the idea of the circle. We can also gain the idea of the circle if we tie a stone to a thread and swing it around. Or, even cruder, we can get this idea from a wagon wheel. There you have the circle everywhere in the life of ideas. Now there is another way to get the circle, the way in which you get the circle through purely inner construction, by saying: the circle is a curved line in which every point is the same distance from a center. - You have constructed this concept yourself, but in doing so you have not described yourself.

You can gain the idea through experience, you can get the concept through inner construction. The idea still has to do with subject and object. At the moment when a person constructs internally, the subject and object are irrelevant to what he has constructed internally. Whether you really construct a circle is absolutely irrelevant to the nature of the circle. The nature of the circle, insofar as we come to it through internal construction, is beyond subject and object.

Now, however, modern man does not have much that he can construct in this way. Goethe tried to create such [inner constructions for higher areas of natural existence as well. In doing so, he came up with his “archetypes”, his “archetypal phenomena”].

In such an inner construction, the subject rises above itself, it goes beyond subjectivity. To return to the image - the sealing wax, as it were, into the matter of the seal.

Only in such pure, sensuality-free thinking does the subject merge with its object. This high level could not be attained immediately. Man had to pass through an intermediate stage first. Up to a certain point in time man worked directly out of the spiritual world; he did not think for himself, but received everything from the Mysteries. Thought only arose at a certain time. Therefore, logic was only developed at a certain time. The possibility of developing pure, sensuality-free thinking was only attained at a certain stage of development. This type was already attained, potentially, in the nineteenth century in minds such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. And we have to develop it further in the more intimate areas through spiritual science. Spiritual research is to be re-founded on pure, sensuality-free thinking, as it has been lived and expressed, for example, in the Rosicrucian schools. In earlier times of human development, people were initiated into the deeper secrets of existence by initiates. Now they must train themselves to gradually work out these things for themselves. In the meantime, it was important to maintain the connection with the divine world. In order for Christianity to mature calmly, the knowledge of the supersensible had to be withdrawn from human research for a certain period of time. People should learn to believe, even without knowing. Therefore, for a time, Christianity relied on mere belief. People were to let the idea mature quietly. Hence we have the coexistence of faith and knowledge in scholasticism. In scholasticism, the concept only wants to provide a firm support for what, with regard to supersensible objects, should be left for a certain period to what has been imparted to it through revelation. This is the standpoint of scholasticism: to keep the things of revelation aloof from criticism until man's thinking has matured. The foster-father who gave thinking its technique was Aristotle. But this thinking should first be trained on firm points of support in outer reality.

Today it is a matter of understanding the spirit of scholasticism in contrast to what dogma is. This spirit can only be recognized in the fact that what was beyond the power of judgment remained the subject of supersensible revelation, while the consequence of rational knowledge was that man himself should arrive at productive concepts, at that which is imperishable in them, through the world of sensual experience. This method of constructing concepts was to remain - and it is precisely this method that modern philosophy has completely lost. Nominalism has conquered modern philosophy by saying: the concepts that are formed according to the nature of the soul are mere names. The connection with the real had been completely lost because the instrument of those who no longer properly understood scholasticism had become blunt. Early scholasticism wanted to sharpen thinking on the thread of experience [for the supersensible-real]. But then came others who clung to the documents of experience, whereas reason was only to be trained on them. And then came the current that said: Forever must the supersensible be withdrawn from all human rational knowledge! - And according to Luther's saying, reason is “the stone-blind, the deaf, the mad fool”.

Here we see the starting point of that great conflict between what could be known and what could be believed; and Kantianism arose from this one-sided, nominalistic school of thought only in a mysterious way. For basically, all Kant wanted was to show that Reason, when left to its own devices, is nothing but a “stone-blind, deaf, and crazy fool.” When reason presumes to transgress the boundaries it itself has laid down in [...] [... gap in the transcription], then it is the “blind fool.” In the one-sided development of [nominalistic] thinking, we see the web in which Kantianism has spun itself maturing. Knowledge is tied to external experience, which is now even prescribed the limits. And faith [gap in the postscript].

It is a task that only anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will be able to accomplish: to get philosophy back on the right track.

Clairvoyance, which is the basis of the modern science of initiation, has always existed. In the past ages it was something that rose up within the human being like an elemental force, and on the path of initiation those who had gone through fewer stages were essentially dependent for their progress upon the authority of those who had gone through more stages than they. But to meet the needs of the human soul of today we cannot build on authority; to do so would be to contradict the stage it has now reached.

In our age the methods are entirely built, as in external science, upon the continuous and full control of the individuality and personality; in the soul life there must be control in every stage and in every step taken by the new candidate for initiation. Hence in speaking of exact clairvoyance in connection with the modern science of initiation we use the word ‘exact’ as it is used in the term “exact” science. Yesterday I spoke of the insight we gain into the cosmos and into the working of all things through the modern science of initiation. That insight is by no means something which, when we study it, lives in the soul merely as a theory or an abstract conception; it is something which becomes a living, spiritual force which penetrates us fully in all our powers and faculties when we allow it to work upon us. Thus the anthroposophical spiritual movement has been made effective in many spheres of life and particularly in that of the artistic life. Through the help and self-sacrifice of its friends and members in many countries the movement has been able to build the Goetheanum, its headquarters at Dornach, near Basle, Switzerland,¹ as an independent school of anthroposophical science. And in all its forms this building expresses that same deep spiritual reality which finds utterance through the spoken and the written word for the ideas and thoughts of the science.

Had any other spiritual movement in our time required to build a headquarters it would have commissioned an architect to design it on Antique, Renaissance or Gothic lines, or in one of the prevailing styles. This the Anthroposophical Movement, by reason of its inner nature, could not do. The architectural forms of the Goetheanum are drawn from the same source out of which the ideas of the super-sensible spring, as they are proclaimed through the world. Everything that is found in Dornach, be it sculpture or painting, is carried by a new style out of which Anthroposophy is born in this modern age. Whoever visits this School for Spiritual Science will find that on the one hand the anthroposophical world view is proclaimed from the rostrum in words and on the other hand the forms of the building and the paintings express in an artistic way what is expressed by the word. That which can work from the stage should only be another form of revelation than that what can be effected through the word. Anthroposophy should come out of the deepest foundations of humanity, of which theoretical Anthroposophy is only one branch, education and the arts are the others. In this way anthroposophical life becomes a factor in the most varied fields of human existence. The Waldorf School, which has been founded in Stuttgart, is not in any sense a school where children are taught a particular anthroposophical conception of the world. It is one where the teachers themselves, not so much in what they teach as in how they do so and in the whole way in which they exercise the art of education—are permeated in their faculties with that which anthroposophy can give them. Reference could be made to other directions in which the modern science of initiation is proving itself of use in every branch of human life and activity. Moreover it operates upon and vitalizes the religious needs of civilized humanity, and as these needs are deeply connected with an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha it is with that subject that I propose to deal now.

Let me begin by connecting what I have to say with what was said yesterday about the path of spiritual development for modern times leading to imagination, inspiration and intuition. I showed how by imagination and concentration, by means of certain exercises, the student can develop his thought-power until it becomes something which may be called imaginative in the real sense of the word, and in such a way that thought becomes not what it ordinarily is—abstract, cold, and in outline sketchy if compared with the intense vitality of sense impressions—but imaginative, pictorial, vivid and full of life, and in these characteristics no way inferior to impressions of the senses. The man who has attained to imaginative thinking, has something as full of life as when in normal daily existence he yields to the impressions of the world of colour or of sound.

But between the students of the new science of Initiation who attain to this imaginative thought, and those who abandon themselves to uncontrolled vision and hallucination, there is an important difference. The man who is subject to visions and hallucinations is not aware that the pictures which arise before him are subjective; on the other hand, he who has imaginative thought is fully aware that what he has before him is not an external reality but is something subjective having its origin in his own inner life. He knows the subjective nature of that imaginative picture-world. He knows too, that when through ‘imaginative thought’ he comes to perceive what was called yesterday his ‘time organism’—the formative force body that works within the physical body as its sculpturer and architect—he is perceiving the first spiritual super-sensible thing that he can experience, and something that essentially belongs to his own inner being.

Then there comes the second stage on that path of development when he becomes so strong that he is not only able to concentrate the full forces of his soul at will upon the concepts, and then upon the imaginative pictures he has before him in imaginative thought, but can divert that picture world away from his consciousness while maintaining it in a fully wakeful condition. He is now ready for the real imaginations to pour into him from the external world spiritually, speaking through the outside spiritual universe, i.e., the objective imaginations as against the subjective picture-world that he had before. Here is attained the stage I have described as inspirational knowledge. He perceives his own spiritual being as it exists independently of his physical bodily organism, and as it existed in the worlds of soul and spirit before he entered into this physical life through conception and birth. He has before him a picture of his prenatal existence in the spiritual world and of the spiritual realities of the whole universe, and comes in contact through conscious knowledge with the spiritual reality of man and of the universe. Thus, through this imaginative, inspirational knowledge, he discovers what he was before he descended into this physical incarnation in a physical body for this life. He discovers also that when he came down from the spiritual worlds he carried with him into this physical life the power of thought which he here possesses in his ordinary consciousness. What is this power of thought? It is that which he already had in his life in the spiritual worlds before birth, but ordinary consciousness only shows it in a pale and abstract outline.

He then comes to recognize something that may be thus described: he gazes upon the picture at the gate of death, and the moment of death, and sees that the physical body is no longer held together and built up in its whole forces by the force of an indwelling human soul but is given over to the forces of the earth as they work in the external mineral world; he sees how, through decay or the process of burning, the human physical body is given up to those mineral forces and assimilated with the earth. He sees by comparison how, in effect, what is carried into the earthly life through birth is something (speaking now in the sense of the soul) that dies into the physical body just as the latter dies into the earth at death. What he had in his power of thought in the ordinary consciousness was something that was vital and full of spiritual life in the spiritual worlds before conception and birth, but was then killed in the physical body so that it appeared in ordinary consciousness as the power of deadened thought.

Because of this fact knowledge of today is so unsatisfactory for man, as he comprehends, in a certain sense, only lifeless nature. It is an illusion when he thinks that through scientific experiments he can reach anything else. Certainly there will be progress beyond representing only lifeless nature; they will be able to create organic substances. But it will not be understood by the deadened thinking, even when they have been created in the laboratories. With this kind of thinking, which is the corpse of the soul which is spiritually dead, only death can be understood.

In what then does the process consist that was described as the development of the soul to imaginative, inspirational and intuitional knowledge? It is in effect this, that we call to life within ourselves what was killed in our power of thought. When we develop the living, imaginative, plastic thought, and inspirational and intuitional cognition, we call to life our power of thought, which was dead.

We have now reached the point where we should be able to understand human evolution and history. Modern scientific history usually skims over the surface of external events, without regarding the metamorphoses that go on within the soul of man from age to age. We may ask why is it that in this age humanity has had to pass through a period when thought was abstract and of a deadened quality. The answer is that the full, living, spiritual thought, by its very vitality and fullness of life, exercises a kind of compulsion on the human soul. It is by passing through this dead and abstract thought that humanity has been able to achieve freedom, and for the evolution and development of freedom this stage was a necessary one.

After man has attained to Imagination and Inspiration, he has to say to himself: Something has happened to me, which causes me anxiety. I mention this as an unusual fact, for the strange thing happens, that the man of today when he has risen to Imagination and Inspiration, experiences real anxiety. This stems from the fact that today, when he becomes clairvoyant, man has to say to himself: I have become too strongly egotistical through my development. Anxiety arises in the heart and mind (Gemüt), for man has the feeling that his ego works too strongly. In ancient initiation, before the Mystery of Golgotha, the candidate went through the opposite experience: As he attained to initiation he found that in a sense he was becoming less ego-conscious, that he was pouring himself out into the universe and becoming less in possession of himself. His ego-consciousness was rather weakened than strengthened.

The turning point between these two characteristics of initiation is the Mystery of Golgotha. The first human being to pass through initiation, and to experience this deeply disquieting feeling when the ego becomes too strong, was St. Paul at Damascus. The passage in the New Testament (Acts 9) is so well known as to need no further reference here. It was on that occasion that he gained insight into the necessity for weakening the power of his ego; he realized that the initiate of the new age stood in need of a force to weaken the intensity of the ego-life, and as a result of his experience he pronounced the words which were to give the keynote to the whole development of humanity through initiation as from the moment of the Mystery of Golgotha. These words, which resounded forth into the future and pointed out the direction to be taken by the succeeding period of evolution, were ‘Not I, but Christ in me.’ When we look upon the place of Golgotha, and receive into ourselves the forces of the Christ Who descended to earth from the spiritual worlds and Who since the Mystery has permeated the earth, we are enabled to diminish the forces of the ego and to pass through initiation in the right way.

The abstract thinking of which I spoke in the first part of this lecture, where the power of thought is deadened and becomes like a soul-corpse living in the physical body, has prevailed only in the more recent times of human evolution. It began, gradually, some three or four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha. In the more ancient people, man brought with him into his physical life out of the spiritual worlds more of the full life of thought which is now dead abstract thought. This may be confirmed by studying, without bias, the evolution of humanity and the records and experiences of man, whether initiate or non-initiate, in ancient times. Much is said today about so-called Animism, the poetic fancy of simple and primitive peoples, in an endeavour to explain the experiences of the past ages as recorded and handed down in tradition. But by facing up to realities we see that it was not in a kind of poetic fancy that ancient man described the woods and forests, lakes and mountains, springs, brooks, clouds and thunder and lightning, and everything physical in the world of Nature in a spiritual way. He saw and described not only the physical things that we see, but the spiritual beings that inhabited every flower and mineral, every spring and wood. That description was not, as in the modern conception of Animism, something created out of poetic fancy, but a direct experience of the living, spiritual power which man brought with him into physical life. It was as though, in a spiritual sense, he sent out feelers which felt and touched and realized, giving him experiences of the spiritual beings which inhabit everything in external nature. It is only since the third or fourth century after Christianity that gradually developed in humanity dead thinking, that dead consciousness which today can only see the mineral world. Ancient man experienced in himself something that was living; he was able to experience and to know the spiritual beings in the world and to recognize them as the same thing that had lived within him before he entered into the physical life. His experience was a very practical one, explaining his pre-natal existence in spiritual worlds, and he felt that something was born with him into this physical life and lived within him; he did not feel that this thought proceeded from the organism of his physical body, for he knew it was a living thing he had brought with him from the spiritual world before his birth.

Now we can quite well realize how the course of human evolution would have continued along the line that has been described, and how the thinking power of man would have become more and more dead. We can imagine evolution continuing in a straight downward line, and that is what would have happened if the Cross had not been raised upon Golgotha. Looking at the picture of death we see that had it not been for the Mystery of Golgotha the physical body of man would die, that his soul-life would die with his physical body. We can say out of our consciousness of this abstract, deadened thought, that our soul-life, i.e., our life of thought, partakes of death. And this is what humanity would have had to experience gradually more and more but for the Cross on Golgotha; no longer would there have been the living thought, but the soul-life would have slowly expired in universal death.

This is how we can regard the Mystery of Golgotha by means of the modern science of initiation, just as it is possible for those who are rooted in Christianity to regard the Mystery through the simple study of the Gospel records. This fresh aspect of the Mystery is the starting point for a new evolution and an upward one. He who goes through the experiences and training of the modern path of initiation, and who attains to inspirational and intuitive cognition, is able to attain to the point where a spiritual world is revealed, of which the Mystery of Golgotha is shown as the great solace in world existence. He also realizes that he has attained freedom, but as the price of that freedom he finds this deep and troubling experience, as he passes through the way of initiation to ‘imagination’ and ‘inspiration’, that his ego has been strengthened and intensified, and is now too strong. That is one pole of his experience. The other pole is that in spite of the strengthened ego he has gained from evolution he cannot save himself or mankind from the universal death of the soul-life. But when he looks out, from his spiritual experience in inspirational and intuitive cognition, upon the picture of the Cross on Golgotha, he sees that through the passing of that Divine Being, the CHRIST—first through the physical body of a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, and then through the gate of death—mankind can be redeemed from universal death. On the one hand man has strengthened the ego-consciousness, but this cannot save him from universal death; and on the other hand he sees redemption from that death in the picture of the Cross on Golgotha and of the dying and the risen Christ. Through this conscious spiritual knowledge he is able to understand from out of what experience the wonderful writers of the Gospels wrote. He sees that until the third or fourth century after Golgotha something still remained of that living thought in humanity, something of that spiritual world which man brought into his physical life, and that it was this which enabled isolated human beings in the first three or four centuries to understand the Mystery of Golgotha; even as the modern initiate can understand it by means of the new science of initiation when he goes through that path and through the exercises which have been described.

From the knowledge contained in the Gnosis—which resembles in some respects modern anthroposophical science—we find that in the first few centuries there was a certain understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, and that unless that understanding had still existed in isolated human beings the Gospels never could have been written. They were written out of the last relics of the old pre-Christian science of initiation. Hence we see why St. Paul out of his experience was able to say, “Were it not for the risen Christ then all our faith and all our life of soul would have been in vain, would have remained dead'. Then we understand that the Divine Being, the God, descended to the earth and went through the gate of Death, and lives in and with the earth since the Mystery of Golgotha, and, as was not the case before, the forces of Christ are working especially in the evolution of humanity upon the earth. We know that He passed through and conquered death, that He rose again through conquering the death of the soul forces and redeemed the soul from death. And so are we able to enter our thinking life again, to enliven what has become dead in the soul-life by looking up from the deeply moving and troubling experience of our too much strengthened ego to the picture of the Mystery of Golgotha.

It is thus that anthroposophy can show the path, not away from Christ, but to Him. I shall now give an outline of what anthroposophical cognition tells us of the evolution of mankind in its approach to the Mystery of Golgotha.

In primeval times, when man's thinking was still alive and filled with spiritual vitality, he saw the spiritual alongside the physical being when he looked out upon the physical phenomena of the world of Nature. The spiritual thought he experienced in a somewhat dreamlike, instinctive consciousness, and he knew that his spiritual origin was in the spiritual worlds. From out of the great masses of men who thus knew instinctively of the spiritual world there arose individuals who gave themselves up to science, to the path of knowledge, just as in our time individuals become scientists and learned men. In that time when in the forces of all human souls there was still a connection with the spiritual world, there arose men of science and learning, initiates, who also by exercises and by training the soul (though different in character from those described for the modern science of development) attained to a kind of imagination, inspiration and intuition.

Intuition is the third stage of spiritual development, Here the initiate perceives not only pictures of the spiritual world, but enters into and communes with the spiritual beings themselves. In the spiritual worlds the initiates held a mighty and majestic communion with beings who descended from the divine spiritual worlds; they raised themselves to this inter-course. The most ancient and primeval teachers of humanity were spiritual beings who taught, not through the external senses and not by walking in physical bodies among men and teaching through the physical ear, but through the spiritual consciousness of the ancients. Now what was it primarily that these spiritual beings, the sublime teachers, taught mankind through these ancients? It was the mysteries of ‘unbornness’ of the human soul. They taught in clear knowledge that which was already known or felt instinctively by the masses of mankind, namely, how the life of man is connected in the spiritual worlds before birth. From these ancients, divine spiritual teachers, humanity learnt to know the destinies of the human soul through its connection with the life before birth. We can see how in ancient times death and resurrection were represented merely in pictorial form in the cults and ceremonies. The cults represented the death and the resurrection of gods, of divine beings, prophetically and in a picture that was not at that time a real and practical experience of the mysteries of death. For man had not then the same tragic experience of death as he has today; he still had within him the living life he had brought from the spiritual worlds into his physical life. Death to him did not mean that tragedy which it was to mean later when the soul-life had been drawn into the physical body and become like a corpse. In those ancient cults where death and resurrection of the Divine Being were represented as in a picture it was more like a pictorial prophecy of what was to come—the Mystery of Golgotha. The men who witnessed these cults and ceremonies were already able to say in dim prophecy that the god passes through death and conquers it, and that because the god conquers death so can the divine in the human soul. Nevertheless the pre-Christian mysteries and understandings and teachings of humanity by the divine spiritual beings was a teaching principally of the mysteries of birth not of death. And that is a deeply significant fact in the evolution of humanity.

The first initiates of the Christian era, looking upon the Mystery of Golgotha, recognized that the old initiation and the old teaching of the mysteries did not penetrate into the knowledge of death. They realized however that this knowledge was revealed in the Mystery of Golgotha. Then there was understood and was revealed what can only be described by saying literally that in the Mystery of Golgotha something happened which concerned the destinies of the gods themselves. It may be put in this way: looking down upon the earth, the divine spiritual beings could see that through a destiny that was beyond the power of the gods, the earth and humanity and all that was connected with humanity were being given up to death. But who was it that had no experience of death? The gods, the divine spiritual beings, those from whom the ancient primeval teachers of humanity descended to commune with the initiates when they had raised themselves to a consciousness of the spiritual. And they, the gods, did not partake in that death through which all earthly human beings were destined to pass. Therefore it was decided between the gods, not only as a matter concerning mankind but as one concerning the gods themselves, that a god should pass through the mystery of death on earth in a human body. That is the great mystery that we must understand about the Mystery of Golgotha. It not only concerns man but also the gods.

So it is that when we come to view the Mystery through the modern science of initiation our aspect or outlook is super-sensible. Anthroposophy leads to an understanding of this. Not only the initiate of today but every man may receive a stimulating impulse, encouragement and understanding from the modern science of initiation. We, all of us, may attain to an intensified and strengthened power of knowledge, and having done so may recognize that the Mystery of Golgotha which took place within earth-existence, was at the same time a cosmic and an earthly event. Then are we able to say, ‘It is not I, but Christ in me Who makes me live again in the spiritual life of the soul.’

Anthroposophy does not lead to irreligion but to a religious life in the fullest sense of the term; we are deepened and penetrated with new spiritual forces. Through spiritual-scientific cognition of the Mystery of Golgotha man overcomes all doubts which are contained so strongly in today's religious life. External science has given us freedom, but with it has come doubt. It is the task of Anthroposophy to sweep away these doubts that have come in the train of external science and which were a necessary stage in the development of humanity, and because Anthroposophy is a spiritual science it is able to do so. It can instill into the heart and soul of man a religious sense for everything in the world and in mankind, and above all it can give an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha in a form that can be received, not only by those who adhere to the older Christian tradition, but by all men on the earth.

Anthroposophy did not come to found sects or new religions. It came to call to life again what is the religion of humanity, the synthesis of all religions, the religion that is already there—Christianity. Not only is it able to call Christianity into fresh life, but for those who have been bereft of Christianity by modern science and the doubts arising from it, it is able to bring about, in the fullest sense, a resurrection of the religious life. Amongst all the other life-giving forces, Anthroposophy is able at this present time to enliven us and to bring about the resurrection of religious experience for all mankind.

• 1. Refers to the first Goetheanum, destroyed by fire on December 31, 1922. Rebuilt as the present Goetheanum. (Ed.)

If we look at the spiritual life in our age, we cannot but see – if we are sufficiently unprejudiced – that the whole and the great in this age have lost more and more of their soul, especially since the second half of the 19th century. Soul is missing from our contemporary civilization; and if the individual wants to awaken his soul to inner life, then it becomes necessary for him to do so not through experiencing the great traits of our civilization, but in solitude.

We have generally lost the ability to truly follow the basic impulses of our present life with an alert mind. There have been phenomena for external observation, which began in the 19th century, that should have called for a powerful attention to what is happening in spiritual life. But such phenomena have passed more or less without a trace. Indeed, it can be said that such phenomena have not even been formulated in modern times in such a way that their formulation could have made a sufficiently deep, awakening impression on modern humanity.

I would like to begin today's reflection with an observation that, on the basis of its externality, may be received by one person with a certain smile, by another historically registered as one of the many world-view aberrations with a neutral meaning, and by a third combated with some anger. Above all, however, I would like to try to simply formulate the facts as I see them.

In the last two decades of the 19th century, it often became an important question for me as to who was actually the cleverest person of the age. Of course, such things can only be understood in a relative sense. So please don't construe the things I will say in connection with this question too literally, of course; but with the necessary grain of salt with which one takes such things, I ask you to consider the matter as something that I may present as a characteristic of our age.

Our age is the age of intellectualism. Intellect has reached very special heights. And so one must ask oneself: What does the intellect of man actually depend on during earthly existence? Certainly, the powers of the intellect, the active part of the intellect, depends on the soul of the human being – and we will have to consider this soul later – depends on what the human being unconsciously carries within him for earthly consciousness in the form of an etheric organism, a body of formative forces, an astral body and the I organization.

But in the present period of the earth's development, the human being is simply not yet so far advanced that he can really bring the activity of the intellect, as it lives in these three links of human nature, to existence. If the human being did not have his physical body, the intellect would have to remain silent during his earthly existence. It would be like the way a person walking into a wall feels: when walking straight ahead and not even paying attention to his arms and hands, he sees nothing of himself, but if the wall he is walking into is a mirror, then he sees himself. Just as a person who does not see himself, so would the intellect of man be: he would not perceive himself if he did not have the physical body that reflects his activity, that throws back his activity. Thus man owes the greatness of his intellect in the present age to the reflection of his inner soul activity through the physical body. But while man will never mistake his mirror image for himself, this is precisely what happens with intellect. Man ultimately mistakes as intellect that which lives only in the physical web as the mirror image of the intellect. He surrenders himself to the mirror image. But then the mirror image will rule in him.

In a sense, man surrenders himself completely to his physical body with his intellect. If man succeeds in truly surrendering himself completely to the physical body with his intellect, then this intellect becomes highly perfected. When we allow our inner being to be active, then we still occasionally grope our way through all kinds of feelings and urges that we have, through prejudices, through sympathies and antipathies, then we grope our way into the intellect. There we make it imperfect. But if we become completely dry, sober, cold natures, if, to speak in the Hamerling sense, we combine the male soullessness of the billionaire with the female soullessness of the mermaid, as Hamerling has portrayed such a union in his “Homunculus,” and thereby acquire the ability to think as we must think in accordance with our physical bodies, then a relative perfection of our intellectuality is precisely possible in this age. Then we learn to think in such a way that, in a sense, the intellect moves itself within us, that the intellect becomes, in a certain sense, an automaton, playing at a relatively highest perfection.

I said this to myself back then in the last two decades of the 19th century and asked myself: Who is the cleverest person in contemporary civilization in this sense, that he has brought the intellect to a relatively highest perfection? Well, you may smile, but I really couldn't come up with anything other than that the cleverest person in contemporary civilization is Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher of the unconscious. It is by no means some kind of daring paradox, but something that emerged for me from a perhaps not entirely soulless consideration of the last two decades of the 19th century.

You can imagine that one has great respect for the person whom one considered the most intelligent person of the age. That is why I also dedicated what I wanted to express in terms of epistemology in my booklet “Truth and Science” to Eduard von Hartmann. So I am not speaking out of disrespect, I speak out of deep respect. The preconditions for Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy are, after all, that Eduard von Hartmann was actually trained as an officer. He made it to the rank of first lieutenant, but then contracted a knee injury and subsequently transformed the intellectuality that was actually intended for modern militarism into philosophy. It is interesting that this is precisely how what I can only formulate as follows came about: Eduard von Hartmann was the cleverest man of the last third of the 19th century.

He therefore also saw clearly what one can clearly see with the understanding of the last third of the 19th century. He saw through human consciousness, as it is bound to the earth, but bound to the physical human body. Being clever, he did not deny the spirit. But he transferred it into the sphere of the unconscious, into that which can never carry a body, which can never come into intimate contact with the physical, and which, therefore, since it is always extra-physical, that is, spiritual, can only be unconscious.

Conscious – Eduard von Hartmann told himself – one can only be in the body. But if the body is not the only thing, if there is a spirit, then the spirit cannot be conscious, only unconscious. When a person passes through the gate of death, Hartmann says, we cannot expect him to penetrate into a different consciousness, because beyond this earthly consciousness there is only the unconscious. The person enters the sphere of the unconscious spirit. The unconscious spirit is everywhere except where the person's consciousness is.

Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy is therefore a philosophy of the spirit, but a philosophy of the unconscious spirit. So that there is no consciousness except in the human body, that there is spirit everywhere, but spirit that knows nothing of itself or the world and nothing of itself.

Is it not absolutely clear that this unconscious spirit can never penetrate into anything outside of itself except through the physical human body? That is clear from the outset. But something very significant is said with this. It is said that this intellect, which thus elevates itself to the status of the unconscious, lacks love.

I am not saying that Eduard von Hartmann lacked love, but his intellect, which was precisely its significance, lacked all love. It is not possible for the loveless intellect to build the bridge anywhere. Therefore, it remains only in itself, but as a result, it cannot gain consciousness. He remains in the sphere of unconsciousness. One could also say that he remains in the sphere of unkindness.

This already indicates that this is also the sphere of soullessness, because where love cannot occur, soulfulness gradually fades away altogether. And so, I would say, we have to feel the atmosphere of unkindness from the whole and great civilization of the second half of the 19th century, on whose shoulders our civilization stands.

It is now highly remarkable where Eduard von Hartmann has led this indulgence of the unconscious mind, combined with unkindness.

He looked at this world of earthly life that gives man consciousness. But if we could not live as earth people in our body, if we could not submerge ourselves in our body with every waking and connect ourselves completely with our body, what would we face?

When we awaken as earth humans, the I and the astral body, which were secreted during sleep, return to the physical body and the etheric body. There the I and the astral body connect very intimately with the etheric body and physical body, and this I and the astral body become one with the etheric body and the physical body.

And as long as we are awake as an earthly human being, we must speak of an intimate unity of the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily. But if we separate the spiritual-soul from the physical-bodily, as Eduard von Hartmann does intellectually, then the following reality would correspond to it: a reality that would occur when we, on waking up, enter our physical and etheric bodies, but do not merge with them, but only dwell in them. According to Eduard von Hartmann, the unconscious mind dwells in the body and thereby becomes conscious in physical life on earth. So it thinks something that, if it were to occur in reality, would be as if, when we wake up, we would indeed enter our physical and etheric bodies, but would not merge with them – but would live inside them, looking around as we look around in a house, seeing everything inside – so we would be separate inside. But what would happen then?

Now, if we, with our spiritual and mental selves, were not merged with our physical body but lived separately from it, then that would mean an unspeakable, unbearable pain for our soul; because every pain arises from the organ not functioning properly, from the organ becoming diseased, from us being expelled from a part of our physical body. If we were to be expelled altogether, if we were to be, if I may express it this way, 'extra' to our physical body, we would have to experience an unutterable pain. Every morning when we wake up, this pain threatens us, so to speak. We overcome it by immersing ourselves in our physical and etheric bodies and connecting with them.

Now, Eduard von Hartmann was certainly no initiate; he was merely an intellectual, the best intellectual of the second half of the 19th century. He merely grasped in thought what I have now painted before you as a reality. He presented the world as if we did not connect with our I and our astral body with the physical and etheric bodies. He imagined the relationship of the human being to his body as I have just described it in reality.

This led him to the following conclusion: He came to the conclusion of a complete pessimism. Of course, pessimism would be experienced if we were separated from our physical body when we woke up. Eduard von Hartmann conceived it. And what does he propose as the result of his thinking? The world is the worst conceivable. The world contains the greatest amount of evil and pain, and the real cultural development of humanity can only consist in gradually extinguishing, destroying the world. And at the end of “The Philosophy of the Unconscious” an ideal does indeed emerge.

Eduard von Hartmann lived in the age of ever-increasing technological development, when more and more machines were being used to perform this or that task. Anyone who takes a look at what is possible with machines is fascinated by the possibilities that lie within them. If you expand the possibilities that can arise for the world as the perfection of the mechanical, it has a tremendous suggestive power.

Eduard von Hartmann has surrendered himself to this suggestion. And he thinks that humanity – which, precisely because it has come to intellect, must gradually become more and more intelligent – must also increasingly realize that the right thing for this world is to destroy it; that humanity will one day will come to a machine through which one can drill down to the center of the earth and then set the machine in motion to hurl this whole worst earth into the vastness of the cosmos with everything that lives on it.

One can only say that the foundations for such a way of thinking are actually present in all others, who may not be as clever as Eduard von Hartmann, but are also very clever, but they have not had the courage to think the final consequences in this sense. And one can say that if one is really able to grasp what the intellect can achieve, detached from the rest of the world, then, with this one-sided development of the intellect, this ideal, as presented by Eduard von Hartmann, even appears, in a certain sense, necessary.

I said that one did not really come to formulate certain phenomena of the time that were there after all. But one should really aspire to a formulation that is as concise as possible by the philosopher of the unconscious, who presented this perspective to humanity in 1869. And in this, Eduard von Hartmann was actually also really cleverer than the others, because he did, after all, accomplish that deed, which I have often related, after he presented this ideal to people. In the same book in which he presents this ideal, he speaks of the spirit, albeit the unconscious spirit, but he speaks of the spirit. It was a terrible sin, because science had come so far that one was not allowed to speak scientifically of the spirit, even in the harmless way of leaving it entirely unconscious.

And so the other clever people saw this “philosophy of the unconscious,” which made itself very noticeable in literature, as dilettantism. Then Eduard von Hartmann played a trick on them. A refutation of the “philosophy of the unconscious” by an unknown author appeared. And in it, this spirit philosophy was thoroughly refuted. The writing was called “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Physiology and the Theory of Descent”. In this anonymous writing, the ghost of Hartmann's other clever minds was so strong – yes, I must say now, the ghost, because I am not allowed to say spirit in this case – that the most important natural scientists of that time, Oskar Schmidt, Ernst Haeckel and a host of others, wrote the most laudatory reviews of this anonymous book and said: “There's someone who has thoroughly dealt with this dilettante Eduard von Hartmann! It's a shame that he's not known, this anonymous. He should tell us his name and we would consider him one of our own.

It is understandable that after such a blow to the trumpet, the anonymous's writing was soon discontinued and a second edition was needed. It appeared: “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Physiology and the Theory of Descent, second edition, by Eduard von Hartmann”.

So, as you can see, Eduard von Hartmann also proved that he was already the cleverest, because firstly he could be as clever as he was, and then also as clever as the others, his opponents.

If yesterday I had to say that psychoanalysis is amateurism squared, then one would actually have to say that because soul qualities always multiply: the cleverness of Eduard von Hartmann was cleverness squared, multiplied by itself.

We should not pass by such a phenomenon of the age in such a deep sleep, as we do. We should formulate it and bring it to mind, then we would really have the absurdities of the age before us. And why was Eduard von Hartmann so clever? He was so clever because he really looked at everything that one was allowed to take note of in his time with a penetrating gaze. He became, so to speak, the naturalist of philosophy. It is, of course, rather like saying: the flour of soup. But he became the naturalist of philosophy.

Now it is a matter of realizing quite empirically, precisely in the face of such an occurrence, where one must go if one does not want to fall into these abysses. If one wants to find one's way out of the confusion that this civilization brings, one must look at what the human being really carries within.

But if we now move from the physical body of the human being and gradually move more into the spiritual, we approach the soul, as we discussed again yesterday, the etheric body or formative forces.

Eduard von

Hartmann knew nothing of such an etheric or formative body, in accordance with what could be known in his time. He did not ascend from the consideration of what is externally natural-physical to the next thing that borders on the physical, to the etheric or formative body.

We know that when a person falls asleep, his I and his astral body separate from the physical body and from the etheric body. The etheric body remains in the physical body. If a person merely applies earthly consciousness, he can never really know what the nature of his etheric body is. For when he is awake, he enters with his astral body and his ego into the etheric body. Then he is inside. Then he experiences what he himself has brought into it with his ego and his astral body. A being of a much higher organization would have to plunge into this etheric body during human sleep, while the I and the astral body are outside. Such a being, which could really objectively see how it actually relates to this etheric body, would find what the human being actually leaves behind with the physical body when he falls asleep, his etheric body. If one were to determine what it is that the human being leaves behind, one would find that this etheric body or formative forces body is truly the epitome of all wisdom in an earthly and in a much higher sense.

It cannot be denied for true knowledge: When we have left our physical and etheric bodies at night, the two that we have left behind are much cleverer together than we are when we are inside. For we are, in our I and our astral body, children of the development of the earth and the moon. The ether body, however, goes back to the development of the sun, and the physical body goes back to the development of Saturn. These are at a much higher level of perfection. Today, we in our I and in our astral body cannot measure up to what has accumulated over time from the solar developmental epoch here in our ether body as wisdom. One could say: this ether body is concentrated wisdom. But when we humans bring our wisdom into this etheric body with our astral body and with our ego, then we need a counterforce, just as we need the counterforce of the mirror if we want to see our reflection. We need the physical body as a counterforce. Just as we could not stand if we did not have physical ground, so we could not live in our etheric body without the etheric body bordering on the physical body and bumping into the physical body everywhere, having an abutment on the physical body. The etheric body with its inner life would be like a human being floating freely in the air without a base. In our ordinary earthly existence, we have only a soul life, which lives in the etheric body but needs the physical body as a support.

With this soul condition, we can only get close to the mineral world. We can only see through the inanimate. If we want to get close to the plant world, we need the ability to use the etheric body without the physical body.

How can we do that? How can we use our etheric body without our physical body? We can do this if we increasingly transform ourselves, through inner exercises, from people who live primarily through their physical body in the element of heaviness to people who live through the light in the element of lightness, who through the light no longer feel their connection with the earth, but with the vastness of the cosmos; when looking at the stars, the sun and moon, the vastness of the universe, gradually becomes as familiar to us as looking at the plants that cover the meadows. When we are mere earthly children, we look down at the plants that cover the meadows. We take pleasure in them, but do not understand them, because we are earth-bound human beings. But if we can learn to stand in the expanse of the universe, in the meadow of heaven, studded with stars — not on the floor but on the ceiling — and feel can feel a kinship with it, as we otherwise do with the soil of the earth, then we begin, by transforming our earthly consciousness into a cosmic consciousness, to use our etheric body in the same way as we otherwise use our physical body. Only then will we be able to penetrate to the plant world with our understanding. For plants are not produced from the earth upwards, but are drawn out of the earth through the heavens.

You see, Goethe was filled with this longing when he developed his Metamorphosis of Plants. And there is much that he said that is as if he felt he was such a person, inclined towards the sun rather than the earth, who felt how the sun draws the power of plant growth out of the earth even at the root , how the sun, with its powers, gradually develops the leaf in connection with the effect of the air, and how the sun finally, in the flower and in the formation of fruit, gradually cooks that which it has sucked out of the earth.

Just read this wonderful little book by Goethe, published in 1790: “Attempt to explain the metamorphosis of plants”, and you will find the beginnings of such a representation everywhere. Goethe longed to penetrate the plant world. But he repeatedly stumbled over the difficulty of really developing the ethereal vision instead of the physical vision. This is what was already present as an impulse in Goethe, and what the person who really draws on Goethe must further develop. This person does not want to take the dead Goethe, but the Goethe who continues to live and work.

For by realizing that the human soul can do something like this, if only it really becomes aware of its etheric body, it is able to feel its heavenly origin, its independence from the earth, its being on earth. The human soul can say to itself: You are of cosmic origin; you are on earth through the physical human body, but you are of cosmic origin. And when you can take joy in the plant world here, then that which rejoices in you is a son of heaven, who delights in what the heavens in turn draw out of the earth in the plant world. Man seizes himself soulfully from the earth by thus truly grasping his etheric or formative body in reality.

When one does this, that is, when one comes so far - and what can bring one to it is real love for the plant world - to live in the etheric body as one otherwise lives in the physical body, then not only one's own ether body is raised into consciousness, but in the same way as the physical nature is raised through our senses into our consciousness through our physical body, so the etheric world is placed into our consciousness through the etheric body.

And what do we feel when we look out, as it were, through our etheric body into the etheric world, just as we look out with our physical body into the physical world? We see there what is spread out before our physical eye, the real past from which this physical world has emerged. There we see in spirit the images of what was, so that the present can be.

Therefore, from the earliest times of humanity, the first initiation given to man was the initiation of the cosmos. In the oldest schools of humanity, people worked towards this initiation of the cosmos. The teachers of the first mysteries were the initiators for reading in the ether of the cosmos, which can also be called reading in chaos, in the Akasha Chronicle, reading the Akasha, reading that which has passed and has conjured the present before our eyes. And it was basically the first level of initiation that humanity has achieved in its existence on Earth, this initiation through the cosmos.

A second one that can be achieved is this: when we awaken, we let the astral body and the ego sink down into the physical body and etheric body. We animate the etheric and physical body, we connect with them. But we can only grasp as much of the infinite wisdom of the etheric body as we carry into it. But it constantly stimulates us. If we have a good idea somehow, then it is the etheric body that, because it is intimately connected with the ether of the cosmos, stimulates us to have the idea. Everything that a person develops in the way of ideas and ingenuity when they are awake comes from the etheric body and thus indirectly from the cosmos. The genius speaks with the cosmos by stimulating the astral body through the etheric body.

But the person who does not see this through lives in it, and his soul consists in that he sinks the astral body and the I into the physical body and the etheric body in the waking state.

When we make the stars our home, just as we do the meadows, we have the opportunity to experience the etheric, in that we make the world's widths the upper ground of our being. The human being always experiences it, only in his knowledge he does not penetrate there without initiation; but in reality every human being experiences it. If we look for a counterfoil for our astral body, this counterfoil is always there. It is only that spiritual science draws attention to what is present in every human being.

Suppose you could not see the physical floor, but you could stand on it, you would stand on it. If someone, who had only discovered through science that the floor was there, were to tell you about it, you would still stand on the floor. So the one who has mastered spiritual science can tell you that you are rising to the upper ground, to the starry heavens; but you are really rising all the same. And so the human being stands in another world with his astral body, in the world of living spirit beings, which we have enumerated as the world of the higher hierarchies.

Just as we, when we place ourselves in the physical world, have this physical world as our real one, just as there are minerals, plants and animals in this physical world and the soil is what the human being ultimately outgrows in the evolution of humanity, so the human being is in the world of the beings of the higher hierarchies with his astral body. When he lives in this world, he has the corresponding counterfoil for his astral body. But he always carries within himself that which he can only get to know through spiritual science. And he carries it within himself as the faculty of feeling.

Everything we make our own in the world through our feelings, through this most intimate life of the soul, exists in the undulations and weavings of the spirits of the higher hierarchies in our own astral body. When we become conscious of our feeling, this consciousness of feeling is what the human being has at first, but in this feeling the weaving and working of the spirits of the higher hierarchies lives through the human being. We cannot truly grasp the soul if we do not feel this soul immersed in the spiritual worlds of the higher hierarchies. And just as the past is revealed to us for the sensory present through etheric vision, when what has been developed in the first earthly mysteries as the initiation of the cosmos is recreated in a modern way, so too can the soul be so deepened that it attains an awareness of what is actually taking place in the astral body.

To do this, we need to lovingly immerse ourselves in what has been lived as a connection with the spiritual worlds in the great mysteries. If we allow the cosmos to teach us, under the guidance of the wisdom of initiation, we will arrive at the reality of the first level of the soul. If we can penetrate into what actually took place in the mysteries, we can, so to speak, not only read in the Akasha Chronicle the past of the stars, the past of the animals, the past of the physical human being, we can read what has lived in the souls of the great mystery teachers, we can truly awaken in us something like what I have tried to present in the way can be presented to the modern human being in my book 'Christianity as Mystical Fact'. If we can bring to life what the mystery teachers developed through their contact with the spiritual beings themselves, then we come close to that initiation which in later times on earth was added to the cosmic initiation and which I would like to call the initiation of the wise.

Thus one can speak of two levels of initiation: initiation through the cosmos and initiation through the wise. What the wise had taught as cosmic knowledge formed the content of cosmic initiation. Looking into the souls of those who preceded man in the life of the soul leads to the second level of soul being. Man can begin with all this in his outer historicity. When we grasp with inner aliveness what still shines through from ancient times – let us say in the wonderful Vedanta wisdom and other wisdom of older times – then in turn our own inner aliveness is grasped, and we are brought close to the initiation of the cosmos. And when one delves into such things with heartfelt love, as I presented them in my book 'Christianity as Mystical Fact', where an attempt has been made to present the old mysteries in their content in connection with the mystery of Golgotha, then one comes close to initiation by the wise.

And then, for the present, it is necessary to look honestly into one's own inner being and to get to know this inner being, one's own spirit, which then illuminates the soul from within. But I will speak in more detail about this, as the third stage of the initiation necessary today, next time. It is the initiation of self-knowledge.

But when spiritual science speaks of the soul today, it must speak from the spirit of these three stages of initiation: initiation through the cosmos, initiation through the sages, initiation through self-knowledge. In this way one measures the various boundaries of the soul's life. It is not possible to take even the first steps on this path without love. And I had to tell you that precisely the intellect of the present day, when it emerges at the highest level, forgets love, loses love. But in this way something very special takes place.

To really lovingly engage with what can be described as the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I,

can be done by hearing something of the voice of the genius that rules our time, if one has the good will to listen to the voice of the genius of our time. But can the man of the present day take what is said when one speaks of “the genius of our age” with the deep seriousness it deserves? When we speak of the genius of our age, does it not remain an abstract concept for most people? Think how far removed people are from grasping a truly spiritual force that is active, weaving and living in our time when we speak of the genius of our time.

But it may be said that even if people deny the spirit, they will not be rid of the spirit. The spirit is inextricably linked to humanity. Only when people renounce the genius of an age does the demon of that age approach them. And when the intellect had progressed so far at the beginning of the last third of the 19th century that it followed only the mechanism of the physical body, even became automatic, mechanical, and thus reached its highest level, so that it became as clever as it and as clever as the others are, when this intellect advanced to the point where the mechanical and material aspects of the intellect called into existence, the intellect behaved as a person behaves when they reject genius. 'Then the demon of the age takes hold of him. The intellect had separated itself from the soul. The intellect became mechanical, soulless, and in this state it founded a philosophy. It had no love, could not love wisdom. Its philosophy could only become the intellectual image of earthly demonology, that demonology that conceives the ideal of a machine that is drilled into the center of the earth and blows the earth out into the universe.

That is what the demon of the age has told the intellect of the age. The demon of the age will often make itself heard if one does not want to recognize the soul. Then it will appear to this intellect as man would really experience it if, waking up, he were to submerge into his physical and etheric bodies and did not unite with them, but remained inwardly separate from them. For this intellect is alien to the human being; it emancipates itself from the human being. The intellect that is connected to the human being struggles out of earthly consciousness and up to other states of consciousness. For the intellect that only binds itself to the earth, but then separates itself, and therefore has only the reflection of the intellect, all other states of consciousness become the infinite sea of the unconscious. The human soul ceases to become aware of its heavenly origin, to become aware of its independence from earthly life.

But the soul-life of man consists in this, that man in his nature vibrates between the bodily and the spiritual. It is in this vibration between the bodily and the spiritual that the soul-life exists. If man honestly believes only in the body, and because he cannot leave the spirit alone, it only becomes unconscious, then the denial of the soul-life occurs.

While Hartmann conceived the destruction of the earth in such a demonic way, as only a person could conceive it who would sleep in the physical body, but then would become clairvoyant in the physical body - while Hartmann came to an intellectual formulation of earthly suffering, a person who was a friend of his who had exchanged many letters with him, writhing in real pain on his sickbed, in whom it had come about that many organs of his spiritual soul had not let him into the physical, who was experiencing earthly suffering, not inventing it, could only treat the soullessness of his age in a satirical way. That is Robert Hamerling, who wrote his “Homunculus” in the 1880s, when the perspective of the soullessness of the age dawned on him: the human being who only strives outwardly, who only ever accumulates more and more outwardly, and who finally becomes a billionaire – this terrible perspective of the soulless age was before Hamerling's soul's eye. And the soulless billionaire, the homunculus, who is born not through the agency of the soul but only in a mechanical way, through mechanical procreation, Hamerling has married to the soulless elemental spirit, to the mermaid, to the Lorelei.

Thus Robert Hamerling saw the prospect of the soulless age before the eye of the soul in the striving of man, who works purely materially, for spiritless intellectuality, which is certainly present in nature spirits, but which, in man, evokes all the forces of destruction, up to the demonic destructive urge to blow up the whole earth into space. Robert Hamerling could only treat this problem of the soulless age in a satirical way.

But soul must be given to the newer civilization and culture again. This soul can only be given when the earthly experiences of man are illuminated by the light of a knowledge of the spirit.

And so that which has been presented in a truly terrible, one might say chilling, way to the cleverest man of our age and which, writhing in pain, has satirically presented itself as a perspective by the one who felt the cleverness of the age most tragically, must be transformed for people through spiritual knowledge into the perspective of the soul, towards which we must strive as a second perspective.

Yesterday we spoke about the physical perspective. Today we want to speak about the perspective of the soul, and tomorrow we want to speak about the spiritual perspective.