The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! In yesterday's lecture, in which I took the liberty of characterizing the essence of spiritual science as it is meant in these considerations, I pointed out how this spiritual science did not arise out of the arbitrariness of an individual or a few people in the present, but how it has become a necessity precisely through the emergence of natural science, which has shown such great success; how it must stand alongside this natural science, because this natural has been compelled, in order to arrive at its brilliant results, to develop such methods, such forms of research, such a way of looking at things, which are actually only useful if one wants to survey and recognize the field of external nature, but which prove unsuitable if one wants to get to know the field of spiritual life in its true form, in which it can be accessible to man.

Yesterday I already hinted at how this scientific approach, in a sense, asserts between the lines of its work that only the human urge for knowledge directed towards the sensory world can lead to a true science, and how this scientific approach condemns from the outset what wants to come from other, if not less strict sources of knowledge to a science about the spirit.

Now it can be said, dear assembled guests, that not only does natural science in this respect make it more difficult for spiritual science to come into existence – one can still say today – but also that the particular natural scientific attitude that is generated in this field gives rise to habits of thinking and ways of feeling that are averse to genuine spiritual research. Nevertheless, spiritual research has an aim that cannot be repelled by the human soul. Therefore, just at a time when spiritual research is rejected by recognized science on the one hand, and on the other hand, habits of thought and ways of feeling are developed that make spiritual research unappealing – just at such a time, when one wants to turn to science because of general educational prejudices – at such a time, the need to know something about the spirit must awaken all the more.

And it is awakening even in the circles of natural scientists. But there one is accustomed to devote oneself to such thinking, to such research, which proceeds by the hand of that which external nature offers in the way of facts, of entities, of events, which one can extract from it through experiments. We are accustomed to looking at the things to which the soul's life of research is directed and guided by the external. And so, precisely where even among scientifically minded people the need has arisen to learn something about the eternal, the immortal in human nature, one also wants to explore this area in the same way as one explores the area of nature itself.

Then one can only rely on very specific phenomena, phenomena that, so to speak, do not require the soul itself to be prepared by means of all kinds of exercises, as I discussed yesterday, so that it can conduct research in a particular field. A certain reluctance arises to explore that which, so to speak, must first be summoned up because it is hidden from the ordinary consciousness. One would also like to explore the soul by approaching something that presents itself externally in the same way as natural phenomena present themselves.

Therefore, a certain area that extends into the ordinary consciousness of the human being, so to speak, that mysteriously extends into this consciousness, a certain area of existence has been repeatedly considered in recent times: the broad area of what is summarized today with the rather broad-hearted, one could also say uninformative, expression of the “unconscious”. And since spiritual science is confused with many a subject that is brought into the unconscious, into the category of the unconscious, spiritual science itself is obliged to clarify its own approach to this area of the so-called unconscious. And so I have taken the liberty of announcing a second lecture, a consideration that, from a spiritual-scientific point of view, focuses on the revelations of the so-called unconscious.

Of course, since this is a broad area, I can only consider certain groups of what is considered to be in the realm of the unconscious. And so today we shall consider the phenomenon of a broad and wonderful area that is well known to every human being in its manifestation: the phenomenon of dream life. Then, honored attendees, we shall consider those other phenomena in which so many today seek to gain insight into something that underlies the human being as soul and spirit. We shall consider the phenomena which are summarized under the term somnambulism, which includes everything that is still observed by many people today with such hopes of insight: the phenomena of mediumship and the like.

But then there is a human field of activity in the realm of the unconscious that everyone knows, that is, so to speak, everyone's life companion, but which one is sometimes afraid to look at because one believes that by looking at it one takes away the magic of this realm: I am referring to the field of artistic creation, of which everyone can be convinced by an external observation that it belongs to a certain extent to the field of non-comprehensible, non-fully conscious human activity, but flows from a certain unconscious or subconscious source of human nature.

And finally, these areas of the unconscious include the spiritual activity itself, of which I spoke yesterday as the method of spiritual research. It includes the spiritual activity through which the spiritual researcher wants to prepare his soul to look into the spiritual realm in such a way that one can truly recognize the spiritual world that surrounds man and to which man belongs. Today I would like to subject these groups of unconscious phenomena to a kind of observation before you, although I must limit myself to a strictly spiritual scientific observation.

The realm of dreams is familiar to everyone, and yet, for anyone who begins to delve more intimately into the realm of dream life, it becomes more and more wondrous and wondrous, so to speak. Man's dream life is a field that one only passes by without astonishment when one looks at it superficially. The more intimately one looks at it, the more one senses that there is something in this dream life that announces itself as the higher nature in the human soul, even if it announces itself chaotically in the dream life. Of course, we bring our personal, our selfish interests into every area, including the area of dream life, and so it happened that the most superstitious, the most unscientific interpretations were attached to the dream life, which of course would have to be ruled out if it were a matter of a truly cognitive interpretation of this dream life.

He who believes that he is viewing such experiences from the dream life from a scientific perspective, which relate to all kinds of superstitious hopes, will not be able to come into his own in the face of a scientific consideration of the dream life. But on the other hand, one need only look at this dream life and one will find that the surging dreams of human sleep or half-sleep interpose themselves in a remarkable way into the existence of man, into the entire human life. On the one hand, we see how dreams can be influenced by sensory stimuli that are only partially effective. Everyone is familiar with something like, say, falling asleep near a light. If they were awake, they would see the light near the light. They fall asleep. The light makes an impression on his eye that is not processed in the usual way, and he may dream, as a result of the incomplete impression of the light, of a conflagration, to which he then attaches all kinds of dream images! He can attach a whole inner drama to these sensory stimuli. And one could tell many stories if one wanted to tell all the kinds of dreams that are connected to sensory stimuli.

On the other hand, we have those dreams that arise more from the human bodily mood, from the overall feeling of the person, whether the person is in any overall mood, for example, an overall mood that seems to him like a lukewarm bath in which he is comfortable while lying in bed and dreaming pleasantly. Or if he dreams of a boiling stove and wakes up with a pounding heart, so that the heart has symbolized itself in the stove in the dream. We are dealing here with what is lived out in the dream from inner stimuli of the organism.

And we have, in turn, the other broad area of dreams that connects to memory, to what lies in our memory, from which a particular area is then brought up through the images of the last few days, and is presented to us in a dream with inner drama. But through such, I might say, pedantic classification, that which everyone knows enough about the wonderful world of dream life is evoked. Some peculiarities of dream life, which are also more generally known, are already suitable for leading into that which we then want to observe about the dream of its essence.

Everyone knows that in dreams we are quite different people than in our waking lives. For example, dream images can make us commit crimes that we would never commit in ordinary life. The images show you in a moral condition that would be severely condemned, that you could never get into in ordinary life. The succession of images shows that they do not contain what is called the application of ordinary logic. Logical connection of the dream images is something that rarely occurs in these dream images, and when it does, the logic of the dream is in turn only a dreamt one; we remember something in a dream-like way that we have already thought through logically, and the logical only appears to us as coming from memory. But it is shown to those who can observe dream life that they are not able to apply logic to the dream during the dream itself.

A peculiarity – I just want to emphasize the things that can lead us to understand the essence of dreams from a spiritual scientific point of view – a particular peculiarity of dream life is actually also philosophically in science or otherwise deal with it, far too little appreciated, and we will see that we can appreciate it even more when we consider other phenomena of life that belong to the unconscious realm of life. It is the fact that in our dreams we do not actually emerge from the overall state in which we are during sleep, in relation to the outside world and our own body. I have, however, indicated that dreams occur that arise from external sensory stimuli, and it seems as if we relate to the outside world in our dreams, while we are unaware of it in our dreams.

This is only apparent. We do not perceive the sensory impressions as we do when we are awake, but in a symbolically transformed way. Something must happen to them first, they must be transformed into an image. We cannot absorb the sensory impression itself. We have no relationship to the external world when we dream; we have no relationship to the external world with our senses, we are cut off from the external world in our dreams, even though our dreams ebb and flow, just as we are cut off from the external world in dreamless sleep.

And again, the other area of life in the sense world, the area of action, the area of bodily movement, of activity through bodily movement, is excluded from normal dreams. It is already an abnormal dream when someone goes from dreaming to sleepwalking or the like. In a normal dream, we have the image of doing this or that. But this acting out of an action or an activity is not something we carry out through our locomotor system; we do not establish any kind of relationship to the outside world. All of this remains locked within us, just as we ourselves are locked within us when we are asleep in the dream life. Thus, when we dream, we have a real relationship not to the sense organs, not to our locomotor system, but to our own body. The normal dream is something that draws into the life of sleep, that flows through the life of sleep, but it does not bring the dreamer into any other relationship or state with respect to the outer world than he is in dreamless sleep.

This area, which can be defined as I have now defined it, this area of dream life, must be clearly distinguished – and we will then go into the important differences in the essential consideration of dream life – from everything else that occurs in human life in such a way that, so to speak, the unconscious, not belonging to human consciousness, enters this human life. There are good researchers who believe that the dream image as such, the image of a normal dream, should be considered the same as a hallucination. A hallucination is also something that, like visions and the like, rises from the subconscious into human consciousness; a hallucination is also an image.

But, dear readers, anyone who compares a hallucination to a dream image is very much mistaken. Above all, it must be emphasized that a person who dreams does not fall into a state through dreaming over which he is powerless with his waking consciousness. The hallucination must be characterized by the fact that the person is powerless against it with his waking consciousness. The hallucination intrudes into the ordinary consciousness, and one must become aware that the reason why this is so is a change, albeit a hidden change, in the human body itself; it is some part of the human body that gives rise to the hallucinations.

The soul and spirit of man are initially powerless in the face of changes in the human body. Only from the body can that which man faces powerlessly arise. The dream enters into human life and leaves the bodily constitution, the bodily structure, unchallenged, so that when man returns to waking life, he finds himself in the normal bodily constitution. And then he will be able to have, I would say, the right state of consciousness towards the dream, if he does not place it in ordinary life, which the hallucinator does with this hallucination.

Already the observation of the hallucination clearly shows that one is dealing with something very different from the dream image and that it is connected to the human body. But then one can also clearly see from the hallucination, the obsessions and the like, that they arise without any stimulus from the external world, that they arise, if indeed they arise from the nature of the body, then at least from the inner nature of the human being; and this is what the hallucinations have as their peculiar feature, this is what the visions have as their peculiar feature, the obsessions as their peculiar feature that this physical nature of man works without the organs that bring man into connection with the external world of reality, without the organs that are involved in the way they usually are in waking life, in the production of hallucinations, visions, and obsessions. This is no longer the case when that state of human nature occurs which is designated by the word “somnambulism”.

It can be said that through somnambulism, through mediumship, human nature is incited to transfer the irregular bodily constitution, which is experienced by the healthy person through inner perception, to the relationship of the human being to the external world. The senses, and also, in a sense, the human locomotor system, are infected by the inner irregularity of the bodily organization when a person acts as a somnambulist or medium. This can lead to the somnambulist not perceiving what is experienced in the world in a normal, regular way, but rather, because he does not activate his senses as they are formed by the world, but rather infects them from the nature of the body, so that he perceives the environment in such a way that he does not perceive it through ordinary sensory activity.

This is where we enter a realm that has a sensational effect on people and that is a dangerous and seductive realm. It seduces people into seeking out all kinds of mysteries in order to find answers to anything they want to know that does not present itself in normal life. We can see that even people who think well in terms of natural science, out of their natural scientific view of the world, repeatedly and again and again come to an inner dissatisfaction, that they come to a higher yearning for knowledge in relation to the spiritual and that they then somehow try to satisfy this yearning for knowledge precisely in the field that is now under discussion. It can be seen that great naturalists can be completely taken in by what appears to them as 'wonderful revelations' in this field. Many examples could be cited from history and from present-day life where natural scientists, who are extraordinarily important in their own field when they want to explore the spiritual, repeatedly fall back on the phenomena related to somnambulism in order to find out something about a spiritual realm.

Among the many cases, I will mention only one of the most recent ones, which happened to the English philosopher and scientist Sir Oliver Lodge. Sir Oliver Lodge lost his son at the French front. Even before his son was sent to the front, a friend of his in America had written to him that something would happen to his son, but that when it did, the soul of a person who had already passed through the gates of death, who had died a long time ago, would stand by his son's side and help him. At first, of course, this friendly hint was kept rather vague. One could think that the son would be in danger in the war and that the soul of the long-dead personality would intervene from the spiritual world to protect the son. One could also think quite differently. In short, the son fell on the battlefield.

Now the person who had written to Sir Oliver Lodge from America thought that he could, of course, turn the matter around so that, since the son had died, his soul would now be in the spiritual world and that this soul in the spiritual world would be fetched by the friend's soul that had been there for a long time. At the same time - I can say this after a close study of this case - at the same time, so to speak, mediumistic persons were played into the environment of Sir Oliver Lodge. And Sir Oliver Lodge, who wrote a detailed book about the whole situation, which really comes across as a strictly scientifically written book, like a book written by someone who is not only familiar with the scientific way of thinking, but is also familiar with all the conscientiousness that must be peculiar to a scientific researcher, Sir Oliver Lodge was placed in an environment of mediums. He carefully recorded what these mediums, as a manifestation of the soul of the Son, had revealed from the beyond.

The whole course of the apparitions was such that Sir Oliver Lodge, in observing what was going on, I would say, proceeded like a chemist, with the same conscientiousness. Now much is being enumerated. The following was decisive for Sir Oliver Lodge and for others – because this case has been discussed a lot, caused a lot of sensation, and convinced journalists who, from the outset, were rather unapproachable to such things due to their attitudes – the following was decisive: Through one of the mediums, a message came from the son, supposedly from the spiritual world. This message stated that the son had himself photographed on the battlefield where he fell, with a group of other comrades. It was also said that several pictures had been taken, as is usually the case. It was described which hand position was shown by the son when taking the pictures, in one picture and in another picture, where it was slightly different. The photographs were one thing that the whole of society in London knew nothing about, the photographs were simply not there.

And lo and behold: after two or three weeks – the post takes a long time these days – the photographs themselves arrived, two or three weeks after the experiments had been carried out, and it turned out that the descriptions made by the medium were correct. This was astounding for Sir Oliver Lodge. This was what is called in natural science research an “experimentum crucis”. The medium and all the people who were present could not receive anything by thought transference either. They knew nothing about these photographs, which only arrived later. Nevertheless, the photographs were correctly described by the medium's manifestations. In this particular case, which was certainly close to him due to the death of his son, Sir Oliver Lodge was tempted to look at such a thing with a certain prejudice; on the other hand, however, to have the cross-proof, so to speak, provided by a meaningful experiment, that without any knowledge in the earthly realm, something from the spiritual world came out through a somnambulant person.

I cite this case, which I judge in the same way as the other case I want to discuss today, for the reason that it shows how the longing to recognize the spiritual arises particularly in serious, great and important natural scientists, but how even in a man like Sir Oliver Lodge, who would be far from accepting the path that is described here as the true path of spiritual research, how such a person feels the need to seek something in certain abnormal phenomena of human life, such as somnambulism and mediumship, that provides information about the world of the spiritual.

In the case of somnambulists and mediums, certain phenomena that occur in connection with them are reminiscent of dreams. But, dear attendees, above all, in the case of the somnambulistic personality, the contagion that I have spoken of, which goes from the inside of the body to the senses, can also pass over to the locomotor system. Then, in particular, rhythmic movements easily occur, movements that are difficult to control and through which all kinds of seemingly spiritual connections are carried out by the medium, such as table turning and so on. I can only hint at what I want to discuss here today.

The third area, which you are well acquainted with, is that which flows from artistic creation, and we value it as a manifestation from the other world precisely because we know that when a person devotes himself to abstract concepts and abstract ideas, he almost disturbs his artistic creation and also his artistic enjoyment. Something indeterminate flows in, both into the creative process and into the enjoyment of artistry. And for many who would otherwise not be able to cope with the spiritual, the way in which the artist's work appears will at least be something that teaches them the conviction that a spiritual element extends into human life. For it will take a very stubborn, materialistic mind to say, like Ingersoll, the famous materialist, that Hamlet, Shakespeare's Hamlet, is actually the product of the metabolism in Shakespeare. This saying is well known. But it really does not take much to be able to say: That which projects into human life through artistry is such that it cannot be directly explained from the body, nor can it be derived from ordinary consciousness because it is disturbed by it.

And a fourth area, dear attendees, that is particularly important for this consideration, is the area that I characterized yesterday as the path leading to the path that, in the sense of the spiritual science meant here, leads into the spiritual world. I already hinted yesterday, and you can read about it in the books I also mentioned yesterday, that only by directing his soul life consciously, actively, and willingly in a certain direction can a person elevate this soul life to such a sphere that this soul life itself can encounter the spiritual phenomena of the world as a spiritual being.

Of course, I cannot repeat what I hinted at yesterday, but what I want to say is that it is particularly important, on the one hand, to follow the course of external phenomena through the world of ideas to which one is otherwise accustomed, and to allow oneself to be guided by it, and, on the other hand, to introduce the element of will into it, so that the power of thought, the inner life of thought, is permeated by will. And I have characterized that through this the human being enters into a state of soul through which he stands out from the ordinary life of the body, that through this he encounters a spiritual world as he otherwise encounters the physical world. I have shown that stepping out of the body is promoted by learning to understand and develop self-observation, by learning to develop not just anything as a spiritual activity, but by becoming its spectator at the same time.

Through all these exercises, which you can read about in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science” and “The Riddle of the Human Being”, the human soul is able to develop certain dormant powers to such an extent that the soul itself becomes something completely different, and a spiritual world comes face to face with it, just as a sensual world comes face to face with the senses. However paradoxical it may appear to many people, such powers lie in every human soul, and they can be brought forth from every human soul, even if this requires patient and energetic work.

I would like to speak about this area, which I call the area of the seeing consciousness, because if one calls it clairvoyance, as it would have to be called in reality if the term were not misused; but it is very easily confused with what arises from somnambulism and the like, and it is of great importance, in order to avoid misunderstandings, that true spiritual science is not confused with it I would therefore call it, instead of “clairvoyance”, the “visionary consciousness”, as I have called it in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man), in which I have also characterized the field of this visionary consciousness, where the soul has found the spirit in itself, so that man as spirit-soul faces the spiritual-soul of the external world and is able to observe this spiritual-soul.

As I said, with regard to the development of the seeing consciousness, the development of that which I would like to call, in a certain figurative sense, with Goethe's words, the development of “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears.” The specific description of how one achieves this, I must leave to my books for the special description of how one arrives at this, but before I characterize dream, somnambulism, artistic creation and artistic enjoyment as unconscious human life phenomena, I would like to characterize this field of true clairvoyance, this field of the seeing consciousness itself a little. Because, dear ladies and gentlemen, those phenomena that we have now summarized in certain groups can only be truly observed from the point of view of spiritual research. Therefore, I must first explain what the peculiarity of the mind of the spiritual researcher is.

I said yesterday: What the spiritual researcher can investigate presents itself differently in many respects than one would expect when the spiritual researcher travels the path into the spiritual world. It is precisely through this that objectivity and reality are demonstrated: that one does not allow a fanciful preconception to apply within oneself, but that one is confronted with a spiritual reality. But the fact that things turn out differently is not only evident in what one researches in the spiritual worlds, but even in what one develops as previously hidden powers of knowledge, as the powers of the seeing consciousness in one's soul. The way in which the human soul relates to the spiritual is quite different from what one might initially expect. When one describes the way in which the human soul relates to the spiritual world in a cognitive way, it resembles what the human soul knows from the sense world.

At first this sounds paradoxical! Above all, one thing must be said: a defining moment in all life in the physical world is that one encounters certain events in life, that one lives through them, takes them up into the soul and that one later remembers the events in one's waking consciousness. The events can be recalled from the life of imagination, from memory. The strange thing is that when the soul, which has developed the seeing consciousness within itself, is able to see a spiritual fact, a spiritual being, to observe it, it cannot easily remember this soul experience, although it is usually only perceived as an inner soul experience. It passes. This does not produce memories in the usual sense.

This is how truly spiritual observations, which also only seem to exist in the life of the imagination, differ from the phenomena of ordinary imaginative life: the latter can be remembered in the normal way, but not the spiritual experience. They pass by. Now you will say: Yes, if they pass by and cannot be remembered in later life, then one cannot actually know anything about them! If you are unable to take what you have experienced spiritually and incorporate it into your imagination, as you would an external sensory phenomenon or a being of the senses, if you are unable to transform what you have observed into an idea yourself, into an ordinary idea as you have it on the physical plane, then you cannot remember.

Therefore, to research in the spiritual world, it is necessary to be able not only to experience what you experience spiritually, but also to translate it into ordinary ideas; then you can remember the idea. You can remember not the spiritual experience, but the idea into which you have translated the spiritual experience. In this respect, the spiritual experience has exactly the same peculiarity as a sensual experience. One can remember the idea that one has formed from the sensual experience. But if I have passed a tree and no longer have it in front of me, I cannot see it in reality; I have to go back to see it. So I have to face the spiritual experience again if I want to have it a second time. But it is precisely this that guarantees its reality. When one becomes a spiritual researcher, one gets used to facing spiritual reality as one faces sensual reality.

One peculiarity is that the spiritual experience as such does not evoke any memory. It is a fleeting moment. And another thing that occurs as a peculiarity in the spiritual experience is that the way in which the spiritual experience works is different from the way in which the events and activities of ordinary life work on people. When we perform some task over and over again, we become accustomed to it; we perform it better and better. Otherwise we would not be able to learn anything, to acquire any skill, if it were not the case that we would do what we do with difficulty at first, then habitually.

This is not the case with spiritual experiences. They occur when they are repeatedly sought. Then they occur less and less strongly, and it takes more and more effort to summon them to mind. One does not acquire a habit by merely repeating an experience, but by repeating it one becomes less and less able to acquire it. To their surprise, some who seek the way to the spiritual world have to be convinced of this.

By doing such exercises, some people relatively soon experience certain phenomena that are purely spiritual. They occur after the person has only done such exercises for a short time. But after they have occurred hardly two or three times, or perhaps only once, the person loses the ability to see them again. He is then unhappy. The true spiritual researcher must learn, must learn again through careful exercises, to create new conditions so that he can have the experience again in a renewed form. It cannot be achieved by mere evocation in the old way. This is another way in which the seeing consciousness differs from the ordinary experience of the ordinary consciousness: nothing is produced habitually, but on the contrary, the more often we have an experience, the less habitual it becomes for us to have it.

And a third thing that occurs in this observing consciousness is that the person must acquire the ability to quickly grasp an event – I am, of course, talking about spiritual events. Because what prevents us from looking into the spiritual world is that, when we observe, we are usually so slow in starting the observation that the event has already passed by the time we want to observe it. I would say that the exposure time, the time during which the event occurs before us, is so short that you have to be quick to observe what you can call presence of mind. Therefore, one prepares oneself well if one strives to develop presence of mind in one's physical life, if one tries to overcome what is so characteristic of human nature: that one muddles around until one can make up one's mind.

When you develop the ability to make a decision quickly that is appropriate to the situation when you are faced with something, in short, when you gradually develop presence of mind as an inner quality, then this leads to the fact that you can really develop that presence of mind in your soul as well, which is necessary to really face the spiritual world in its manifestations. The spiritual researcher absolutely must be able to make an observation with the same lightning speed as certain subordinate phenomena occur in the outer life. If a fly tries to alight on your eye, you quickly close your eye, as they say, by reflex action, without thinking about it. If someone had to think as long to close the eye as he usually thinks, he would have already fallen prey to the fly before the eye is closed. The spiritual researcher must develop something that comes as close as possible to this involuntary, unconscious activity. One returns to certain primitive activities of life, only in a spiritual way.

Another peculiarity of this spiritual perception is that in such representations, as one is accustomed to applying in the physical world, the spiritual world cannot appear before the searching soul, but it appears in pictorial representations. And when one describes the spiritual world, what one expresses it with is a translation into ordinary language. When you read my book 'Occult Science', you must not believe that the way in which things are expressed is an immediate reproduction of the vision itself, but it is translated into ordinary language and must be translated into ordinary language. For that which presents itself directly to the spiritual researcher is the same as what he puts into words, into concepts, into ideas, but it appears in a pictorial way. Hence one can also say: Consciousness is not the ordinary logical, rational consciousness, but an imaginative one that arises first. I could still bring out many more characteristics of the seeing consciousness. Above all, however, I must discuss the other phenomena, which I have listed in groups, precisely from the standpoint of this seeing consciousness.

One can discover what a dream is, what somnambulism is, what the other phenomena are, one can discover them from the moment one regards them from the point of view of the seeing consciousness. For just when one regards a dream in intimate beholding, one finds that it becomes ever more wondrous. Above all, it becomes more and more wonderful for the simple reason that one is not in a position to compare what one encounters in a dream with any other experiences. The dream enters into the life of consciousness as something that completely falls outside of this life of consciousness and everything that one can understand in relation to the life of consciousness. Just think of what occurs in the waking consciousness when a dream occurs! It would break through the whole consciousness. If you had to remember the dream, you would have to feel insane. You cannot compare the dream with anything that the waking consciousness understands.

The seeing consciousness is primarily familiar with the pictorial experience of the human being. And so the seeing consciousness can compare the dream with what occurs in the soul when one encounters the spiritual world through the seeing consciousness as a spirit. One can compare the pictorial nature of the dream world with the world that can be grasped in imaginative consciousness. Then one will find that the dream world is indeed fantastic at first, that the imaginative consciousness leads one into spiritual reality, that it differs like fiction from the truth, from the imaginative world, but that on the other hand one has a possibility for comparison. Because one has this, one can, by observing the 'dream, arrive at what this dream actually is.

Dear attendees, you cannot say anything about dreams through research if you cannot observe the dream with a seeing consciousness. But if you can observe the dream with a seeing consciousness, then you can describe its nature and essence through the seeing consciousness. Then one knows, above all, to say about the dream who is really the dreamer, who is actually dreaming. One does not know this in the ordinary waking consciousness, who is actually dreaming, then one has images before oneself. But to live in these images as one otherwise lives as a human being in the experiences of the day – one does not know this in the ordinary waking consciousness. One comes to know it when one can compare the images of the dream world with what one experiences in the seeing consciousness. Then one experiences that what actually dreams in us is really the spirit-filled human soul; that the body as such has nothing to do with the dreaming process in subjective terms, in terms of activity; that it is not the human body that dreams, but the dreamer himself is really the spiritual soul of the human being.

If one learns to recognize through the observing consciousness what the spiritual-soul is, then one can also know through comparison that one acts in dreams as the same as one acts in the observing consciousness. Here again is an important difference. With the seeing consciousness, one sees into a spiritual world that has nothing to do with the ordinary physical world. With the seeing consciousness, one sees with the eternal that is in oneself, into the eternal of the world.

The eternal beholds the eternal. This is different in dreams. In dreams, it is the same spiritual-soul person who dreams. But what he beholds, what he can behold, is not the spiritual world that lies beyond physical experiences, but rather it is pieces, parts, and links of his own personal life. The eternal in him beholds the temporal in him. He looks at what he can inwardly experience between birth and death in any way. But he does not look at it in the way he is otherwise accustomed to looking at the external world with his body, but rather, so to speak, he looks at his transitory human nature from the spiritual-soul point of view.

That is the essence of the dream, that is also what clarifies the dream. In dreams, one sees oneself as an eternal human being. And it is really the case that in the world of dreams, the eternal human being, who goes through births and deaths, places himself in the ordinary human reality, but that the human being is not aware of the eternal world itself, but rather looks back at his temporal world; looks at temporal objects from the eternal point of view. The world of dreams, when observed correctly, gives the certainty that from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, the human being is outside of his physical body with his actual being, is outside of his corporeality altogether. Only that which takes place in the body, which cannot be seen at all with the ordinary senses in the ordinary bodily state, that which lies deeper, that which is hidden in the memory, that which expresses itself not in the sense stimuli but in the sensual-supersensory individuality, which has become more involved in the bodily, that is what the human being observes in dreams.

Now the spiritual researcher, simply by being able to see into the spiritual world, knows from his stay in the spiritual world, from his knowledge of the spiritual world, that it is completely wrong to say, for example: Man is a spiritual-soul being, and earthly life is life in a vale of tears, a life of imprisonment perhaps, to which one is condemned, while one is in truth called to a higher spiritual life. Of course one is, but in the cosmic process everything is in its right place, and the spiritual researcher in particular learns to recognize, by getting to know the supersensible life, that the sensory life has its good meaning. If man were to live only in the spiritual and soul world, if he were a human being (it is not the case with other beings as it is with humans), if man were not led into the sensory world through birth or conception, then man would not be able to incorporate into his being that which he, as a human being, can only incorporate into this being in the sensual world.

Above all, there are two things: first, as strange as it sounds, as strangely as it contradicts all possible philosophical worldviews – these philosophical worldviews know nothing about this spiritual world – logical thinking, the ability to link one's thoughts in a logical, conscious way, is only acquired by man by going to his senses in the teaching. In this sense, logical thinking is the least spiritual. It is what we abstract from the sense world. The senses are the teachers of our logical thinking, and if we were not in a sense world, we would not be able to learn logical thinking. That is one thing.

The other is that by being active in the sensory world, we carry out actions and are present with our human nature in these actions, that by living in the sensory world we acquire that which belongs to the realm of morality, the realm of moral judgment of the world. Man must be placed in the sensory world if he is to implant in his nature what is the moral conception of life. Other things that belong to the human being, the human being incorporates or, if I may coin the expression, the human being ensouls himself in the spiritual-soul world when he passes through the gate of death, in the spiritual world. But this life in the physical world has its good significance. The human being, when he stands as a spiritual researcher in the physical world, gets to know the great weight of the physical world; he gets to know that the wise order of the world has, so to speak, placed him in this world so that he can acquire the logical and the moral to the other qualities of his being.

By recognizing the essence of the dream, by knowing that it is the same being that dreams and that he is, by looking into the spiritual world, the spiritual researcher also learns to recognize those qualities of the dream that I have enumerated; that we do not think logically in dreams and that we carry out all sorts of things in dreams that we ourselves morally condemn. Because we are lifted out of the physical-sensual world in which we acquire logic and morality, we cannot develop logic in our dreams, nor morality.

In this way, things reveal themselves that would remain enigmas if we only looked at the phenomena, if we were unable to observe these phenomena from the point of view of spiritual research, if we gained the right insight into them. In purely scientific terms, by numbering all the different parts of the brain under the cerebral cortex, we do not get to know the essence of these things. Now we can also understand why: because only the soul is grasped in dreams, because the human being is removed from the body, he has no relationship to the external sense world in dreams, as to the actions of the body. If the body were involved, it would have to show.

But we must not put forward hypotheses. We must, so to speak, perceive as a mystery why man has no sensory perceptions in relation to the external world and why he has no movements in his dreams. We then experience through the observing consciousness that the person as a dreamer is really in the spiritual world, that is, the sensory world, and has also been transported beyond his own physical body, that he is in the spiritual, in the supersensible. Therefore, he cannot perceive a sensory world, nor can he perform actions in it. Thus, the human being is completely immersed in the soul when he dreams, and does not touch his physical self as such with the events of the dream. Only by the fact that he, I might say, comes up against this physical and also against that which is higher than the physical in the physical body, only by that does resistance present itself to him, only by that is his activity as a spiritual-soul being called upon, and only by that does he observe from the point of view of the eternal that which is temporal in him.

The case of somnambulists is quite different. Of course, spiritual research must also ask: What is it that is active in the somnambulist? What is happening to this person? So the spiritual researcher must also ask: Who is it that actually carries out the actions of the somnambulist? Here one must say: When one learns to recognize what it is in us, when one researches the spiritual world, one can compare it to that which acts on the somnambulist personality that the ordinary consciousness has tuned down. Here one must say: in a sense, it is also the spiritual that is active in the somnambulistic being. But this spiritual does not directly intervene in the soul, as it does in dreams, but rather, as in the case of hallucinations and visions, it directly intervenes in the body.

Now the real, full human life consists in the fact that the spirit in man, even one's own spirit, does not intervene in the physical without this intervention being mediated by the soul, that which I called the true soul yesterday. This is the peculiar thing about somnambulism, that a spiritual being directly intervenes in the physical. The soul is eliminated. The somnambulist thus becomes a physical-spiritual automaton, and as such he appears. In this way he has eliminated from himself that which, although bound to the body between birth and death, has, however, a connection with the forces that draw it out of the body - the connection with the true spiritual world from which man comes, in which he is rooted with one's own eternal being, this connection is interrupted when one becomes somnambulistic, and one has only a spiritual connection with that which exists as a spiritual being in the ordinary physical world; after all, this too is directed by the spirit. Man is indeed a spiritual-soul being, but still an automaton. The spiritual that can emerge in him is a limited spiritual, and is above all not the spiritual in which man is rooted in his own being. His own eternal being, although it is active in the somnambulistic body, remains completely in the twilight darkness of the unconscious, even when the somnambulist is active. The consequence of this, honored attendees, is that the somnambulist cannot enter into a spiritual relationship with the spiritual world.

The true mediator for the human body in the spiritual world is the soul. But because the true soul is excluded and only the soul-like effect of the body occurs in the spiritual-soul automaton, the person only comes into contact with a limited spiritual world as a personality. The consequence of this is that what the somnambulist experiences through this or that revelation, through automatic speaking, automatic writing or the like, are only fragments, scraps of what is spiritually buzzing around in the physical world itself, what is spiritually active there, but that the somnambulist cannot bring down any revelations from the real spiritual world. Everything that comes from somnambulists in the broadest sense, and also from mediums, can never come from the real spiritual world in which the person finds himself when he has passed through the gate of death, or from which he emerges when he enters physical life through the gate of birth or conception.

As long as one does not see through this, one can be the greatest naturalist, one can be a conscientious scientist, one can have the greatest yearning for the eternal, for the supersensible, one can be deceived by the facts themselves. It is characteristic, after all, how the great naturalist Sir Oliver Lodge was deceived by the facts themselves. He was dealing with a medium. He wanted to obtain communications from the spiritual world through the medium. What did he obtain? He obtained a cross experiment. It caused a great stir throughout England, especially in this war time, when so many long for knowledge of the spiritual world as a result of external events, in this war time when so many of our loved ones are passing away. What could be more tempting than a message coming through a medium that gives something completely unknown to society, where it could not be a matter of thought transfer, which one could otherwise assume?

So what was it that was going on? Well, anyone who is familiar with the relevant world of somnambulism knows what it was. And it is nothing short of miraculous that a conscientious natural scientist is open to these things and does not try to learn for himself what can be known in this field. Anyone who knows these things is well aware that through the infection I have described, when the spirit has such an immediate effect on the physical that it turns a person into a spiritual and soul automaton, that a person works under the influence of the world around him as a clock works according to spiritual laws that the clockmaker has implanted in it, everyone knows that the senses are infected, that one can perceive things that the outer senses do not perceive; that one can perceive things in such a way that these perceptions are not bound by the ordinary laws of spatial and temporal perceptions, everyone knows that, without looking into a spiritual world, one can nevertheless see to a certain extent when the senses are infected by the spiritual-soul automaton – that one can see that which is not present but future.

One does not see into a spiritual world, but one simply sees through more refined senses than those through which the ordinary sensory life proceeds, according to different laws. And in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge, the medium acted in exactly the same way as a somnambulist in another case, who saw how he would ride once in three weeks and fall off the horse; who thus saw a future event against the ordinary laws of temporal succession, but nothing but that.

Thus, in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge, the medium saw nothing other than what actually took place in the future, namely, that photography came before the eyes of society and the family, which arrived later and was not yet there at that time. And in such a case, no proof has been provided that a manifestation has come from the world through the medium, in which the soul of the son was. Of course, it is extremely useful, especially in the scientific sense, to become acquainted with such extraordinary phenomena, and it would be good to thoroughly investigate these phenomena in order to educate oneself about the truly spiritual.

But it must also be clear that the soul does not reveal itself by leaving it inactive and turning man into a physical and mental automaton, but it speaks to the human soul that has awakened the slumbering forces within itself, through which one can come into contact with the spiritual world. There is no other way from the so-called living to the so-called dead, who have passed through the gate of death and live in the time that one spends between death and a new birth, than through the correspondence between the soul itself, in the silent interior, but which becomes inwardly speaking, and the soul that no longer carries a body. That which comes from the concrete spiritual world can already speak into the soul itself, but not in a roundabout way through some physical-mental automaton. This, most honored presence, must be emphasized in relation to somnambulism and mediumship, because it is precisely through the recognition of this pure, true spiritual that it is put in the right light.

And on the other hand, somnambulism also leads to action. It leads them out of their spiritual and mental automatons. Whatever should be done logically, whatever should be done through the body in which the soul dwells, the body of the somnambulist does in an automatic way. When the somnambulist acts, what happens then? He performs actions, be it speaking or something else. He performs actions that, according to the laws of the world, should only be performed by the human body in the sense world. For we have seen that spiritual research shows us that man does not have his sensual existence for nothing. He acquires a moral conscience and moral judgment. That which should be conveyed through the sensual body is realized with the exclusion of the soul.

Thus the somnambule is in the same situation as someone who is given material to distribute among crowds of people; he does not distribute this material, but keeps it for himself to adorn his own existence. This is how the somnambulist acts. What should only take place in a social environment with other people, from human body to human body, what a person should only develop in a human community, the activity here in the physical world, the somnambulist claims as an activity that only originates from his own being. He effectively withdraws what belongs to the commonality of people from this commonality.

As strange as it may sound, this is the reason why – because the somnambulist, in a field where morals apply, automatically acts out of the spirit and does not enter the field where man should acquire morals should acquire morality. The somnambulist, when he habitually indulges in somnambulism, can very easily go astray morally, and it is basically quite rare for mediums not to go astray into fraud. It is very interesting to occupy oneself with the phenomena that arise from a person becoming a mental and physical automaton, but at the same time it must be clear that the spiritual can only be sought and found in a spiritual way, that it cannot be found in this external way that resembles nature.

The third area, which accompanies people like a faithful companion, is artistic creation, artistic feeling and artistic enjoyment. This artistic creation, artistic enjoyment – we know that, in a sense, it flows out of the unconscious. We also know that this artistic feeling, artistic enjoyment and artistic creation comes entirely from the soul. It is also known that insightful people have always considered the process of the great philosopher Plato, the poetic power of man, poetic enjoyment, and the whole artistic process to be akin to dreaming – and rightly so. Why? Because the dream is pictorial, because the dream comes from the spiritual and soul life.

Now the dreamer, as I said, is judged with his entire being, although he is in the eternal, in the temporal, in his personal temporal experiences and possibilities of experience. I would like to say that the artist, the true artist, turns with his soul to the other side. The dreamer stands in the spiritual-soul realm, but is turned towards the side of the body; the artist stands in the body, but looks into the spiritual world. But what he now experiences in the spiritual world does not immediately come to his consciousness. He cannot look into the spiritual world in such a way that he sees the process that takes place in his spiritual environment while his soul and spirit stand face to face with this spiritual environment. The process must already be over before the result of the spiritual experience enters into the ordinary waking consciousness of the day.

Therefore, what the true artist presents, even artistic enjoyment, which is based on similar foundations, rightly gives the impression of the unconscious. It is experienced unconsciously; from the unconscious, after it has happened, it enters into what man can know, what man can experience. Therefore, to those who have a feeling for such things, the manifestations of true art do indeed appear as manifestations from the spiritual world. Therefore, it is right that the artist's creative work appears to be affected when the artist mixes ordinary imagination, ordinary conscious logic, ordinary observation of the physical world into that which is actually supposed to be a message from a spiritual world. The fact that true artistry has such an origin is connected with everything that can be said as a valid judgment about real, genuine art.

The fact that a materialistic time has gone astray through so-called artistic naturalism and wants to bring everything else today as messages from the spiritual world will only be put right in judgment when it is recognized through spiritual science what true artistry is. True artistry is the penetration of a spiritual experience into consciousness, but one that is itself experienced as a spiritual experience in the unconscious. True artistry is, in the truest sense of the word, a revelation of the unconscious. Every time ordinary conscious life forces its way into artistic creation, art is, in a sense, destroyed. That is why Goethe, who was a true artist in this respect, so often compared his work to dreaming, because he could not bring into ordinary consciousness what he had already experienced in his unconscious when he had it in his ordinary consciousness, the experience itself of the spiritual world.

If you take stock of what we have considered, you will say to yourself: True clairvoyance, true insight into the spiritual world, which I have taken the liberty of calling “the observing consciousness”, looks at that in which man, with his own eternal, faces the eternal, with his spiritual-soul nature, the outer spiritual-soul nature. And the spiritual researcher brings into the conscious world from the great realm of the unconscious nothing but what lives in every human being. In every human being who merely walks about on earth, there takes place in the realm of the unconscious what the spiritual researcher attempts to illuminate only with the light of spiritual insight. While the artist, after experiencing something in the spiritual world, still brings a relatively individual experience into consciousness that not everyone can experience, the one who is a spiritual researcher brings from the spiritual world what every soul actually experiences in truth, but only leaves in the unconscious.

Therefore, a true spiritual insight is a true revelation of an unconscious that really lives in every human soul and is really active there. Again and again, I have to say what I have already said here in earlier years: It is important to realize that one does not just glimpse a generally hazy spiritual realm through spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, as one looks into and listens to the physical world through physical eyes and physical ears, but rather that one beholds a concrete spiritual world through spiritual insight.

When you say that, you encounter prejudice. In the physical world, we distinguish four realms, and no one in the physical world would think of saying: Oh, quartz, amethyst and so on, everything is nature! But when it comes to the spiritual, people find it more convenient to speak vaguely of pantheism, to view the general spirit pantheistically, as if one did not look at individual minerals and plants and animals and just always say: nature, nature, nature. Real spiritual research looks into the realms of the spiritual soul, spiritual research looks at those beings who, just like us here as humans, are structured into body, soul and spirit, who do not descend into the physical body but remain spiritual-soul, but belong to higher realms, just as animals, plants and minerals belong to the lower sensual-physical realms.

You can become familiar, dear attendees, through real spiritual vision with those entities that, just as our animal nature here mediates that we can live physically in the physical world, mediate that nature to us that we can acquire when we enter through the gate of death into a spiritual world. Just as we have to acquire the animal nature here, so we have to acquire an essential spiritual nature there, and just as we are surrounded by animal creatures here as subordinate beings, so in the spiritual world there are such beings that stand above man as animals stand among men. As we enter the world of animals, plants and minerals through birth, so we enter the spiritual world into the realm of those beings with whom we are related when we pass through the portal of death.

We enter the realm of those entities of the kingdom to which we belong through having a vegetative nature within us; but we also have the mineral nature within us. We enter the realms of concrete spiritual entities. And while we are here between birth and death with the beings around us from the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms, we are there together with the beings to whom we are related, and we experience with them the life between death and a new birth in that world, through which that which is the eternal self passes as it passes through the physical world here.

But then, when we get to know what the concrete, real spiritual world is like – I am not afraid to say it, because I want to give you real results of spiritual research and not just beat around the bush – then the outer nature will also appear to us as the outer body of a spirituality, just as our own body appears to us as an expression of a spirituality. Just as we see through our own body, through its lawful processes, into the spiritual and soul life that reveals itself through the body, so we learn to see through natural phenomena into a spiritual world. Spiritual research thus truly opens up the spiritual world to man, broadening his field of experience. Man is raised above the possibility, which unfortunately otherwise presents itself to him, of regarding the outer world only as material, with the consequence that he must then regard himself as if he arose only as material substance from a material world.

The fact that, over the centuries, humanity has increasingly approached a state in which it does not see the spirit has led to people having a true, genuine longing for the spirit, a true, genuine longing for the spirit - who also have an inkling that external nature is not merely the body, but that it is the body of a spiritual world —, that such people could not find their satisfaction in what has emerged as seemingly true science in recent centuries.

How has this science developed? It is well known – I have emphasized it here several times in previous years – it is well known what is called the Kant-Laplace theory: our whole earth is said to have developed out of mere material fog, which then coalesced into all that is peculiar to us as humans, to animals, to plants; the material is said to have arisen from the material alone. It would be as if we believed that we had developed as material human beings from the material environment, that a spiritual element from the spiritual world had not been involved.

Just as our being descends from a spiritual world, so the whole universe descends from the spirit. How does something like the Kant-Laplace theory develop? It has been calculated how the beings on earth change over time. So one can calculate how they were formed 1000, 2000, millions of years ago, the beings of the earth. This gives us a calculated idea, a truly correctly calculated idea, of what the earth was like millions of years ago. It is as if we calculated from the change of the heart, the stomach, how these changes, [these organs] were two, six, ten years ago, and then draw a conclusion as to how these changes brought about a condition 200 years ago. This is just as scientific as the Kant-Laplace theory. Or the so-called geological changes of the earth can be calculated in this way. You can find out what the human body was like 300 years ago, according to the observed changes, only the person in question had not yet lived. The same mistake is made when developing the Kant-Laplace theory, when geological hypotheses are formulated that are common practice today. One comes back to the state that can be calculated - only the earth did not yet exist at that time, but it went from a spiritual state into the present state much later.

Spiritual science also leads us back to a spiritual view with regard to the cosmos. And people who, based on their sense of knowledge, have always felt that a merely materialistic approach is insufficient, could speak as an outstanding man of the nineteenth century spoke about this Kant-Laplace theory. Hermann Grimm says about this theory:

Long ago, in his – Goethe's – youth, the grand Laplace-Kant fantasy of the Earth's origin and former destruction had taken hold. From the rotating nebula – as children learn at school – the central drop of gas forms, which then becomes the Earth, and, as it solidifies into a sphere, it goes through all the phases, including the episode of habitation by the human race, , only to finally plunge back into the sun as burnt-out cinders: a long process, but one that is perfectly comprehensible to today's audience, and one that requires no external intervention other than the effort of some external force to maintain the sun at the same temperature. No less fruitless a prospect for the future can be imagined than the one that is supposed to be imposed on us today as scientifically necessary in this expectation. A carrion bone that a hungry dog would go around would be a refreshing, appetizing piece compared to this last excrement of creation, as which our earth would finally fall back to the sun, and it is the curiosity with which our generation absorbs it and believes it, a sign of a sick imagination, which the scholars of future epochs will one day spend a lot of ingenuity explaining as a historical phenomenon of the times. Goethe never allowed such bleakness entry.

This is how a healthy soul feels about what must deny the spirit. True spiritual science will lead mankind back to what it must long for in the present: to the knowledge of the spirit. And just as what is presented as spiritual science as a whole has been sensed by people at the height of human education, even though spiritual science can only arise today, so too have the individual parts, the individual links, above all the spiritual-scientific attitude, always been sensed. And in a spirit such as Goethe's, the mood of the human soul has also been recognized, which must always announce itself as a fulfillment of [longing], as Goethe said in his beautiful writing about Winkelmann:

When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole, when harmonious comfort grants him pure, free delight, then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as having reached its goal and admire the summit of its own becoming and being.

Goethe, after all, spoke with a sense of anticipation, as does the intuitive mood of spiritual science. For that which Goethe sensed is a reality in every human soul. The universe exults in the subconscious in the human soul, in that in the depths of the human soul the universe as spiritual encounters the eternal-spiritual in man himself, the universe as spirit confronts the spirit of man, who is able to spiritually contemplate this universe as emerging from his own being and weaving. What Goethe has presented as the exultation of the universe at its goal in the human soul, as something worthy of admiration, is really recognized by spiritual science as the greatest unconscious in the depths of the human soul. And spiritual science is there to bring this, which is directly connected with the human being, with the eternal in human nature, from the realm of the unconscious into the realm of the conscious. Spiritual science wants to be the revelation of this spiritually unconscious greatest secret in human nature.

Yesterday I tried to show how the confusion in dreams arises from the fact that during sleep a man crosses the so-called Threshold unconsciously or half-consciously. Leaving the physical world of the senses, he enters the spiritual world and there encounters three worlds—a memory of the ordinary physical world, the soul world, and the real world of spirit. Events both inward and outward, experienced in our ordinary earthly life, are gathered together from what these three worlds reveal. But they are split apart when in sleep we enter the super-sensible world, and what we experience is not then related to the world where it belongs. That is why, for the usual memory-consciousness, deceptions and illusions arise in dreams. Imaginative consciousness does not see the dream merely in this way, but makes it an object of observation, just as we look towards a distant point in physical space—though now, with Imagination, we look towards something distant in time. We do not simply remember what is dreamt; we look at it, and so for the first time we arrive at a true conception of what a dream is. Thus we find how a dream is interpreted rightly only when we do not relate it to the physical, naturalistic world, but to the spiritual—above all, in most cases, to the moral world. The dream will never tell what it is expressing if its content is given a physical interpretation, but only when the interpretation is in accordance with the spiritually moral.

To illustrate this, let us turn to the confusion of the dream I told you about yesterday—the dream in which someone going for a walk is suddenly overcome with shame at finding himself without clothes in a crowded street. I remarked how the whole mood of soul in dream-consciousness is due to our confronting three different worlds. Looking at a dream of this kind in the right way, however, we see that although its content appears to belong to the realm of the senses, yet through this medium the spiritual-moral is seeking to reveal itself. Hence, anyone having such a dream ought not to look at the immediate, symbolical course it takes, but should ask himself: Haven't I sometimes had a tendency in daytime consciousness not to be completely truthful about myself with others? Haven't I perhaps been too fond of following the fashion in what I wear—altogether too apt to take refuge in convention? Is it not a characteristic of mine to give people a false impression of what I really am?

When anyone lets his thoughts take this course, he gradually arrives at the moral, spiritual interpretation of the dream. He says to himself: When during sleep I was in the super-sensible world, I met with spiritual beings there—they told me that I should not be present in a cloak of falsehood, but as I really am inwardly, in soul and spirit.

When we interpret dreams in this way, we come to their moral, spiritual truth. A whole host of dreams can be interpreted thus.

People of an older chapter in history, who even in the dreamy symbolism of sleep were conscious of the Guardian of the Threshold, took to heart his warning not to carry with them what belongs to the physical world of the senses when they enter the spiritual world. Had these men dreamt they had no clothes on in the street, it would never have occurred to them that they ought to have been ashamed; this is something that holds good for the physical world, for a man's physical body. They would have given heed to the warning that what holds good for the physical does not hold good in the spiritual world, and that what appears in the spiritual world is being said to human beings by the Gods. A dream, therefore, had to be interpreted as an utterance of the Gods. Only during the course of human evolution have dreams come to be interpreted in a naturalistic sense.

Or let us take another common dream. The dreamer is going along a path that leads him into a wood. After a while he realises that he has lost his way and cannot go any further. He tries to do so, but the path comes to an end and trees block the way. He begins to feel uneasy.

Now in ordinary consciousness this dream is easily taken at its face value. But if on thinking over it we forget all naturalistic associations, the spiritual world will say to us: This confusion you have met with is in your own thoughts. In waking consciousness, however, people are often loath to admit how confused their thinking is and how easily they reach a point where they can make no progress but only go round in a circle. This inclination is particularly characteristic of our present civilisation. People consider themselves enlightened thinkers, but in reality they dance around in a circle with their thoughts—either about conventional trivialities or about atoms, which are intellectual constructions of their own. In ordinary consciousness, naturally, they are not disposed to admit this.

In a series of symbolical pictures the dream brings out a man's true nature, and it is spiritual beings who are speaking through it. When anyone takes his dream experience in the right way, his self-knowledge will be greatly enhanced.

Another common human characteristic is that people allow themselves to be led by their instincts and impulses to do what is most congenial to them. For example, they find pleasure in doing something or other, but they are not ready to admit that they are doing it for their own satisfaction. They invent some way of interpreting it differently for their ordinary consciousness—they say perhaps that they are doing it for anthroposophical or occult or esoteric reasons, connected with a high mission or something of that sort. With this kind of self-justification they cover up—and this occurs with extraordinary frequency—an endless amount of all that rules and rages in the depths of our animal life. A dream—which wishes to reveal through symbolical pictures the forces which really hold sway even in the soul and spirit of the dreamer—may present a picture of the man pursued by wild beasts and trying vainly to escape. We shall interpret truly the moral significance of such a dream, not by looking at its outward events, but by accepting the self-knowledge it offers us. We have to recognise it as a warning to search for the inner truth about our own nature and to consider whether this does not resemble—if only slightly—animal instinct rather than what we ideally conjure up.

Hence it is possible for dreams to warn people in countless ways and to set them right. When a dream is related in the true way to the higher world, it can have a guiding influence on a man's life, and then, when the stage of conscious Imagination is reached, one can see how the dream, which at first naturally offers even to Imaginative knowledge pictures drawn from the sense-world, is metamorphosed entirely into moral-spiritual happenings.

Thus we see how the dream can be said to lead ordinary consciousness into the spiritual world, if only it is taken in the right way. But I have said also that on raising ourselves through Imagination to the spiritual world, we are not in the same state of soul as during our life here on Earth. In this life, I stand here, the table is there outside me; there is a physical gap between me and the table. The moment I enter the spiritual world, this separation ceases. I no longer stand here with the table over there; it is as if my whole being were spreading out over the table and the table were taking me into itself. In the spiritual world we sink right into whatever we perceive. Hence our experience, either in dreams or consciously in Imagination, should not be related merely to our inner life, but we can speak in a spiritual-scientific sense if we say with the poet that the whole world is woven out of dreams. It is certainly not woven out of the play of atoms, which is a dream of the scientists, but out of what I have described as the “chaos” of the Greeks, out of the weaving of our dreams and of our conscious Imagination. I have called it both subjective and objective, for the world is not woven purely subjectively; but we have to explain certain aspects of the world as being woven out of dreams.

For example, if we are looking at a seed, we should not be content to explain it by the laws of physics and chemistry. A scientist who sees nothing more than those laws in a seed, or in an embryo, cannot possibly explain them; for nature is dreaming in seed and embryo—their very essence is the weaving life of a dream. Take the seed of a plant—in it a dream is living and weaving. You can never enter into this with the intellect, for that is limited to nature's laws; you must approach it with the human faculty which lives otherwise in a dream or in conscious Imagination.

The same kind of dreaming that lives thus in the seed is active also in our whole organism throughout our life on Earth. Hence we should not look in our organism merely for the working of chemical and physical forces. When a man is there before us physically, we have to look upon him in his external physical form as a being who is living just for a time in the physical world of the senses. Behind him lives something else, invisible to the eye, inaudible to the ear, in so far as these are physical. But it can be perceived in Imagination, and also in what can be experienced in the unconscious Imagination of a dream. In the whole of a man's body nature is dreaming. Nature's way of thinking is not like man's intellectual thinking—it is a dreaming. Out of this dreaming the forces of our digestion and of our growth are guided, and everything is given form.

When we look back in earthly existence we generally start from this age—what shall we call this age of ours? We could take one of its symptoms and call it the age of the typewriter. Thus we go back from this age of the typewriter to the time when printing was first introduced; and going still further back we come perhaps to the time of the Romans, to the time of the Greeks, and then we arrive at the age in the East from which the Vedic records come. We are then left with no external documents. Many treasures have been excavated from the tombs of the Egyptian kings, but we still come at last to a time with no records, where we have to rely on Imaginative and Inspired spiritual knowledge. There we meet with a frontier beyond which, for ordinary consciousness, the past is vague, very much as sleep lies beyond the dream. By going back in this way through the temporal evolution of the world, we come in fact to that dream-veil we can experience every night.

If we reach that point with conscious Imagination, the further past lights up in a spiritual way. But it appears different from the world we learn about intellectually and from ancient records. This remote past in world-evolution, lying behind a veil of dreams, reveals man in direct connection with divine Spirits. He is himself still a divine soul-being; and the divine-spiritual Beings, whose destiny does not include entering an earthly body, meet together with him while he awaits his incarnation on earth.

When, therefore, we look back through history to this veil of chaos, to the dream-veil of which we have been speaking during the last few days, we see the divine Spirits foregathering with the still spiritual souls of men destined to dwell on Earth.

Moreover, we shall see how these things, connected as they are with human evolution, are at the same time connected with cosmic evolution. Where in a remote past this veil appears to Inspired Imagination, we see, too, how within cosmic evolution—of which we shall have to speak more precisely—the Moon, previously united with the Earth, detaches itself and goes out into cosmic space, there to circle the Earth. Thus we gaze back on a dream-veil, a veil of Imagination, and looking through it we find the Earth united with the Moon, and human beings in direct contact with divine-spiritual Beings. When this dream-veil appears to the retrospective gaze of Imagination, we perceive the momentous cosmic event of the Moon, in a quite different form, sliding out of the Earth and going forth into cosmic space as a separate body. So we look further back to the evolution of the Earth, of mankind, and of the world, when these were all united with the Moon. Man was already there, but as a being of soul and spirit only.

As we gaze further and further back, we find no epoch in cosmic evolution when man was not there, at least in some primal form. So that, from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, we cannot say that for millions of years the Earth was evolving merely inorganically or with creatures of a lower order, with man emerging only after that. We find man in a different form connected at every stage with that cosmic evolution to which we look back when, behind the veil of chaos and the dream, we can rise through conscious Imagination to that which appears to us as the divine-spiritual essence of the world.

As I have said, when we look at a seed or anything in an embryonic state, Imaginative cognition reveals in it the weaving of a dream. We see how something real, though expressed in dream-pictures, holds sway over the material part of the seed. Anyone able to perceive the spiritual in the world will find it everywhere, though in a great variety of forms. It is precisely the spiritual that goes through the most varied metamorphoses. And when we have thoroughly grasped how in the seed of a plant, in the embryo of an animal, this real dream-weaving prevails, we are justified in asking: How is it, then, with the apparently dead world of the minerals? If here we look out of the window or go along the street, we see the bare hills, a world that seems entirely lifeless, and the question at once arises: If in any plant seed we pick up there is a dream-picture ruling, how is it with these rocky mountainous masses, and with all the lifeless substance that forms the ground we tread on in the physical world? If in the plants we see the ruling of spirit, which in the weaving of a dream seizes with comparative ease upon the material element, so in the same way through Imaginative cognition we find the spiritual in these rocky masses, but here the spiritual consists of individual spiritual beings.

These spiritual beings, however, are in a state not of dreaming but of deep sleep. When you look at these rocks and hills you must not think of them as permeated by a slumbering amorphous mist; you should think of individual spiritual beings sleeping there. Presently we shall see how these spiritual beings have come into existence through having been split off from higher beings with a higher consciousness. We shall see how they themselves, having in their present state only a sleep-consciousness, are the result of that separation, and how these elemental beings are asleep everywhere out there in the inanimate world. When we walk over this mountainous mass of rock, we should be aware that all around us there slumbers the creative weaving of the spirit in concrete form. And when we enter further into the sleeping of the spirit-weaving forms in the lifeless world, we become aware in these elemental beings of a certain mood. Imagination shows us these beings, but it is Inspiration that teaches us about their mood. In these elementals of the mountains, the rocks, and the soil, there lives what we can discover in ourselves when we are waiting for something with justified expectation. The weaving and creating of soul and spirit in the seemingly lifeless rocks is permeated by this same expectant mood.

In fact, these beings are waiting to awake from deep sleep into a state of dreaming. We learn this through Inspiration, and more particularly when we enter right into these beings through Intuition. All that confronts us out there, in those hills, is expecting that one day it will be able to dream, and so with dream-consciousness to take hold of earthly substance that is ground down into lifeless matter, and from these rocks and hills to conjure forth once more as embryos, as seeds, living plants. It is indeed these beings who bring before our souls a wonderful magic of nature, a creating from out of the spirit.

And so, as we go about here among these rocks and look at them in the physical light they reflect, they can reveal to us, not in any symbolical sense but as real knowledge, how they are now sleeping, how in the future they will be dreaming, and how, later still, they will come to the fully awake life of elemental nature-beings, who will one day become beings of pure spirit.

The physical material in a plant is still in a condition accessible to the dream-weaving of the spirit. In the rocks, matter is crumbling away. Looking back with Imagination and Inspiration, we realise how everything lifeless has arisen from the living. It is when the living becomes lifeless that the sleeping spirituality can sink into it. This sleeping spirit waits in the lifeless until it can wake into dreams and lead over the lifeless into cosmic embryonic life.

Now the various parts of the Earth show in different ways this sleep of spiritual beings in the mountains, in the firm crust of the Earth. It might be said: The sleep of beings awaiting their future is different in regions such as this from their sleep in other parts of the Earth. Here in Penmaenmawr we find that the particular configuration of the Earth, and the historical character of the rocks, enable these sleeping beings to rise to the aeriform, to interweave even with the light, while in other parts of the Earth this has long ceased to be so. Thus it is that here, if we look on the weaving as due not to the aerial atmosphere alone, but to the prevailing soul-atmosphere, which permeates the air just as the human soul permeates a man's body, then in Penmaenmawr we find that this soul-element in the atmosphere is different from elsewhere. I will give just one example to make this clear.

Suppose that in a certain region Imaginative cognition exerts itself to call up an Imagination of what is really going on there. This Imagination may be more or less easy or difficult to hold on to, for the possibility of retaining an Imagination in consciousness varies in different regions. Here we are in a region where Imaginations continue for a remarkably long time and so are able to become very vivid.

The wise men of the Druids, or others of that kind, sought out regions for their temples and sanctuaries where the conditions were such as to allow Imaginations to remain and not immediately to vanish away like clouds. Hence we can understand how it was that such centres for the holy places of the Druids were still sought for up to comparatively recent times. In this region it has always been felt that the difficulty of holding an Imagination is not so great as in other places. Everything, of course, has a light side and a shadow side. When an Imagination remains, Inspiration is made harder, though it gains in strength. Because of that, whatever the spiritual world has to say in this place streams down with—one might say—greater intensity, but in words which are weightier and more difficult.

Therefore, even where the spiritual is in question, differentiations are to be found throughout the Earth. A map might be drawn indicating the places where, for Imaginative consciousness, there is no difficulty in holding Imaginations. Those regions where they soon pass away could be given a different colour, and we should get an extraordinarily interesting map of the Earth. For the prevailing character of soul-atmosphere here, we should need a particularly strong colour—a sparkling, shining colour, full of life.

Hence I fully believe that those taking part in this lecture-course will be able to perceive here something of what I would call the esoteric mood of the elementals. It looks in at the windows, meets us on our walks, in fact is present everywhere in a quite special way. I am particularly grateful to the organisers of the course for having thus chosen a spot where the esoteric may be said to meet one at every turn. It does so indeed in other places, but not with the same ease and directness. So I am especially thankful for the choice of this place, out of many possible for the holding of a course such as this. From the point of view of the subjects discussed, this course may be said to take its place, in a wonderfully beautiful way, in the whole evolution of the Anthroposophical Movement.

It will be clear from the descriptions I have been giving you that between the physical world of the senses and the spiritual, super-sensible world, there is a barrier which with a certain rightness we call the Threshold of the spiritual world.

I have already pointed out in various ways how necessary it is that we should be able to cross this Threshold, and we have still to speak about it in greater detail. But you will have gathered already from my lectures that in older periods of human evolution this crossing of the Threshold was a rather different matter from what it is at the present day. In those ancient times people were able to cross in another way because even by day their consciousness was dreamlike, but for that very reason more alive to the super-sensible. Thus, in the way I have pictured, they passed the Guardian of the Threshold half-consciously, dreamily, both on going to sleep and on waking.

Here we can see a transition from men of an older type, with little freedom, to those who were becoming increasingly free. This former determinism was bound up with the fact that on going to sleep, and on awaking, men had some perception of the Guardian of the Threshold, who stood there giving warning. Now, in place of this unfree situation, we have the incapacity of present-day consciousness to see into the spiritual world, which signifies an increasing freedom: herein lies a principle of human progress.

Hence we can say that, looked at from the spiritual world, people have lost a great deal precisely because in the course of their evolution they have had to be led towards freedom. What has been lost, however, must be regained, in the way that Anthroposophy, for example, would show. And now is the historical point of time when a striving to regain what has been lost must begin.

But everywhere, among people of very various kinds, there still rises up something inherited from an earlier age, when man's relation to the spiritual world was different. So that to-day, in the consciousness of those given up to intellectualism, there is a strict frontier set up, as a rule, between what they experience in the world of the senses and what lies beyond in the spiritual world. The frontier is in fact so rigorously maintained that even enlightened spirits are unwilling to admit the possibility of crossing it.

In my brief sketch of the way into the super-sensible world, I have indicated that it is possible to cross the frontier and to enter that world in full consciousness. But as a relic from the time when a man entered the spiritual world in a more instinctive, unconscious way, and even in his day-consciousness had more in him of the spiritual world, there still rises up into his evolution to-day a certain heritage from the past. And this is something we must imperatively understand through conscious spiritual cognition. For, if not rightly understood, it manifests itself in many deceptive ways, and in these matters such errors can become very dangerous. Hence in the course of these lectures, intended to describe the evolution of man and of the world, I must speak about this question of a boundary, where what was natural and taken for granted among the people of former epochs re-appears to-day, and can lead to dangerous illusions in those who have not the requisite clear knowledge for dealing with it.

Among these phenomena, situated for ordinary consciousness at the frontier between the sense-world and the super-sensible, are visions. I mean the visions where, in a state of hallucination more or less controlled by the person concerned, pictures arise which have quite definite forms and colours—they may even seem to speak—but correspond to nothing external. For normal perception, the object is outside; the image, in a shadowy way within; and a person is perfectly conscious of how the shadowy, conceptual image is related to the external world. The vision arises of itself, claiming to be a reality on its own account. A person subject to such visions becomes incapable of estimating rightly what reality there is in the pictures which appear before him without his initiative.

How, then do visions come about? They come about because the human being still possesses the capacity for carrying over into his waking world what he experiences during sleep, and of bringing it into conceptual form just as he does with his sense-perceptions. Whether, after perceiving a clock that exists physically for the senses, I make an inner picture of it, or whether, after experiencing in a dream the form and inner reality of an external object, I wake up and make a picture of my experience, the only difference between the two processes is that I am in control of one of them—hence the image of it is more shadowy and flat—while the other process is outside my control. In the latter case I carry nothing of the real present into my conceptual life, but something experienced when the soul was outside in a past—perhaps long past—sleep, and out of this dream-experience I build up a vision.

In an earlier age of human evolution, when the relation of people both to the physical world and to the spiritual world was ruled by instinct, such visions were perfectly natural; it is human progress that has made them the uncontrolled, illusory things they are to-day. We must therefore be quite clear that modern man lacks something: when he has some experience in the spiritual world during sleep and is returning to the physical world, he no longer hears the warning of the Guardian of the Threshold: “All that you have experienced in the spiritual world you should note well and carry back to the physical world.” If he does carry it back, he will know what is contained in the vision. But if the vision appears to him only in the physical world, without his realising that he has brought it back from the spiritual world, so that he fails to understand what it really is, then he is without guidance, and at the mercy of illusion where his visionary experience is concerned. So we can say: Visions come about because a man carries over unawares his sleep-experience into his waking life, and in his waking life he then forms conceptions of the experiences—conceptions which are much richer in content than the ordinary shadowy ones, and these he builds up into vivid visions complete with colour and sound.

Another thing that comes about is this. A man carries over into his life of sleep the feelings and perceptions of the kind he has in physical life. Then, when he is in the act of carrying this over into the open sea of sleep-life, he is warned to be careful not to do anything foolish. If the sleep is very light—a far more common condition in ordinary life than is realised, for we are often just a little asleep when walking about quite normally, and we ought to be more aware of this—we may then, without noticing it, carry over the Threshold our everyday faculty of perception. Then arise those obscure feelings, as if one were inwardly watching something happening in the future, either to oneself or to someone else, and we have a premonition. Thus, whereas a vision comes about when experience during sleep is carried down into waking life and the threshold is crossed unconsciously, premonition comes about when we are in a light sleep without realising it and, thinking we are awake, carry over the Threshold, again ignoring the Guardian, our daytime experience. This, however, lies so deep down in the subconscious that it is not noticed. We are, of course, at all times connected with the whole world; and if we could draw this knowledge up out of the subconscious, we should be able to draw up much else also.

You will now see how, because these legacies from the evolutionary past can still be experienced, visions arise on one side of the Threshold, premonitions on the other. But a man may also halt at the Threshold and still not notice the Guardian. There may then be moments when inwardly, in his soul, he is as if he were enchanted. But the word “enchanted” does not quite meet the case, for he is not enchanted in the sense we generally associate with the term—it is rather that his attitude of soul undergoes a change. When he comes to the Threshold in such a way that he still perceives what is in the physical world while already perceiving what is in the super-sensible, he experiences something which is widespread in certain regions of the Earth—second sight, a half-conscious experience at the Threshold. Hence to sum up these legacies from the past, these phenomena in a man's life when his consciousness is dimmed, we have those appearing on this side of the Threshold as visions; those appearing beyond the Threshold as premonitions; those actually at the Threshold as second sight.

To-morrow I shall have to speak in greater detail of the characteristics of these three regions, going on from these to describe the worlds dimly indicated by vision, premonition and second sight—worlds which new knowledge will have to bring into the full clarity of enhanced consciousness.

Let us now continue to try to elaborate on the things we have discussed in recent times. I told you more or less in general terms how the spiritual and soul life of man actually relates to the sensory and physical life. Now today I will elaborate on this further. I have already pointed out to you that if you want to know something about these things, you cannot say: Yes, the intellect that I have once and for all must decide everything, and what it cannot decide does not exist. One must always bear in mind that one has also undergone a development in ordinary life. Just imagine what it would be like if we had remained at the level of a three-year-old child! We would look at the world quite differently. A three-year-old child sees the world quite differently than an adult. The three-year-old child can be taught all kinds of things. After all, in terms of life, he is still asleep. The three-year-old child cannot even speak properly; he can be taught language. In any case, the three-year-old child is modest and not snooty. It is willing to be taught. It would probably not be so modest if it were not half asleep and said: Why should one learn? We already know everything! But today's man says: We already know everything; and since we cannot understand the spiritual soul with our minds, there is no such thing as a spiritual soul.

Now, if I were to say as a three-year-old child: I don't want to learn anything more; if I say: Dad, Mom, and a few other things, like apples and so on, that's enough – that would be a child's point of view. But once you have acquired the common sense of an ordinary person, you can really develop something within yourself. And if you now further develop the ordinary powers of cognition that you have, then it comes about that you undergo just such a leap, I would say, as the one from a small child to an adult human being. All this depends, of course, on gaining insight and on incorporating it into the whole process of human development. Today, people cannot help but be snobbish in this regard and say: I already know everything, and what I don't know is none of my business. Today, people cannot help but say this because they have been educated from elementary school on to ascribe everything to reason, and to say of the other: Well, yes, one can believe in that, but one cannot recognize it.

You see, you just have to be very clear about the fact that there really is such an awakening from ordinary everyday life to real knowledge, just as there is an awakening from sleeping and dreaming to ordinary life. You just have to realize that you can only really know something about the world when you see through what is happening from a higher point of view, just as you have to see through the dream from a waking point of view. One only realizes that a dream is not reality, that a dream is something that depends on waking life, when one can wake up. I told you the other day that if one could never wake up, one would consider what one dreams to be the only reality.

But now let us see what a dream actually is. You see, gentlemen, people have thought an awful lot about dreams. But actually, everything that is said about dreams is basically just drivel. It really is drivel, because people can say: well, if the brain just vibrates a little, then the person is dreaming. Yes, but why does the brain only vibrate a little? — Well, what is said about dreams is actually a kind of proof. But if you are clear about the fact that the human being not only has this physical body, which you can see and touch in life, but that he also has the other aspects of his nature that I have drawn to your attention, that the human being also has an etheric body, an astral body and an ego, and if you then say to yourself: this very ego and this astral body are outside the physical body and the etheric body when you are asleep, then you can first of all explain to yourself why a person does not walk when they are asleep. They do not walk because the ego is not inside the physical body. You can also explain to yourself why a small child does not walk. Because the ego has not yet awakened in a small child. So you can explain to yourself why a person walks: he walks because the I slips into his physical body. You can also explain to yourself why a person does not think when asleep. He does not think because the astral body is not within his physical body.

Doesn't that show you that you have to distinguish, so to speak, between the physical body and the etheric body, which are in bed, and the I and the astral body, which are outside during sleep.

Now imagine what it is like when you wake up or fall asleep. When you fall asleep, it is the case that the I and the astral body are just going out. So there is also a state where they are half inside, half on their way out. Only later does the state come when the I and the astral body are completely outside. So there is also such a state where they are still half inside and already half outside. That is when you dream.

Otherwise, you only believe that you are dreaming during the night. Actually, you only dream when you are falling asleep and when you are waking up. And what do you dream about then? Yes, you see, gentlemen, people believe that you dream because you use your brain when you are awake – so today's scholars say – but when you are asleep you only use your spinal cord. That's what people think.

But these people are not able to observe at all! Take a real dream, for example. Take the dream of a fire. You dream of a whole fire; you dream of all kinds of things. And you wake up – someone yells outside: “Fire!” In reality, you perceived nothing else – you didn't know anything about fire and so on – so you heard this “Feurio!” half and half because your ear was open. Because you are accustomed to it, you associate this with fire, but it is half and half obscure. And what you dream about fire can be something completely different than what you see. For example, you may dream that the fire is coming from a volcanic eruption. You may dream something completely different. And when you dream about something that happened many years ago, you will know how confused the dream is. Perhaps as a small boy you had a small quarrel with someone. Now, years later, you dream about this quarrel. But you dream about it as if you had been beaten to death, or as if you had beaten the other person to death. The dream confuses everything. And you can perceive this confusion everywhere in the dream.

Now, when we dream while falling asleep, the story remains confused. When we dream while waking up, it corrects itself because we really see what is there. We dreamt that someone is murdering us. He puts a ball in our mouth; afterwards he comes and works on us with some instrument – we wake up and unfortunately have a corner of the bedspread in our mouth.

You see, the dream takes a small cause, adds a lot to it and confuses the story. For example, if the air is bad in the room where you sleep, you will experience what is known as the Alpdrücken. But you do not say to yourself in the dream: “The air is bad there, I can't get a good night's sleep there,” but you get the impression that an evil spirit is sitting on your chest and pressing down on you. You all know the legend of the Trut. This is based on the fact that one has got bad air into the lungs. The nightmare is based on this.

What, then, is dreaming based on?

Well, gentlemen, now let us take the waking dream. It is the case that the ego and the astral body are just slipping in and are not yet completely inside. These are the dreams of which we know the most. When you are completely inside your physical body, you look out of your eyes. But when you are not completely inside, you do not look out of your eyes. You have to imagine that when you enter your physical body, you turn around, as it were, and look out of your eyes. But if you are still half outside, you pass through your eyes, slipping through your eyes, and you see everything indistinctly. You then attach all kinds of confused fantasies to them. But when we enter our body during the night's sleep, we have nothing but these confused fantasies. And how do we sort them out? We can't sort them out. Only our body sorts them out for us. Otherwise, we would see the fire-breathing volcano Vesuvius every time we heard the word 'Feu' (fire) outside. Our eyes are so wonderfully constructed that we can only see the right thing through them. That is to say, we would only devote ourselves to all kinds of fantastic things throughout our lives if we were our body for the whole of life. It is the body that makes it possible for us to see life properly.

So you see, when we look at ourselves outside of our body, we are actually inside our ego and our soul; we are fantasists who have all kinds of confused ideas in our minds, and all we need to do is realign ourselves in our body every morning when we wake up. It is thanks to our body that we see things in order. Actually, we are fantasists in our earthly lives. The dream shows us how we really are in our earthly lives.

If you then come to really understand things, in the sense that you have awakened in a certain way with regard to your knowledge, you see even more clearly: in his life on earth, man is what he dreams. He is actually a fantasist, and he must always allow the body to correct him. And when he is completely asleep, he is actually quite unconscious. He cannot perceive anything of the world at all. Only when he has a piece of his body does he perceive the world fantastically.

But just when you know that, you say to yourself: What is the dream then actually? What does the dream actually show us? The dream shows us that we actually know nothing about our body; because if we knew something, we could also see properly what is outside. We could recreate the eyes in our thoughts and in our spirit. But we cannot do that; we are dependent on our body giving us the power of the eyes. So the dream shows us how little we know about our body.

But now you remember that I said the other day that we have to make this body ourselves. Inheritance is nothing. What is present when a person begins his existence on earth is, as I have explained to you, matter ground down to dust. First the soul-spiritual must enter into it. Man must first build up all his matter himself. When he understands the dream, he knows that he cannot do that. And when one comes to understand the dream, one learns something else.

Think about how difficult it is to put yourself back in the first years of your childhood. Suddenly you remember an event that you know your mother didn't tell you about, but that you saw for yourself. For one person it falls in the third year, for another in the fourth year, and so on. Yes, gentlemen, before that you were really asleep, really asleep. But when you look at a three-year-old child who can actually still sleep properly – because you don't remember it, just as you don't remember ordinary sleep – when you look at this three-year-old child in relation to life, you can do something that you can't do later.

I have already told you that the brain continues to develop until the permanent teeth have come through, until the seventh year. Look at the brain of a child who has just been born and the brain of a seven-year-old child. Something has happened to this seven-year-old child, something has worked on this brain. The brain itself cannot do anything. The brain is like a dynamo. A dynamo develops magnetism, and the whole factory movement depends on it. But the electric current must flow through it, otherwise the dynamo stands still. The brain stands still if the current of soul-life does not flow through it. In childhood the current of soul-life flows through the brain with much greater power, for the child works out the whole brain until the second change of teeth, and most of all in the very earliest years of life. That is why I told you that Jean Paul, who was a very clever man, said: A person learns much more in his first three years than in his three years at university. It is much more artful than what one ever has to work on externally later.

We say to ourselves: Yes, we had that; we have lost that. Just when we became conscious, we lost this inner soul work. We no longer have that. And the one who comes to this realization notices that he can do it less and less. When you later gain the gift of looking back on life, it makes you feel quite dizzy about what has happened. Because when you were a fourteen-year-old boy, you might still have been able to do some of the things you did in abundance when you were a three-year-old child or even just when you were born. You could do the most when you were a three-year-old child; at fourteen you could do a lot less of it. When you turn thirty, you can still digest enough, but you can no longer work out anything. When you turn fifty or sixty, you have become a real donkey when it comes to the work of working out the human body. You only realize how big an ass you become in the course of your life! It is necessary to realize that you lose some of your wisdom during the twenty to thirty years of your lifetime. If you go through the period of thirty to forty years, you lose a lot more. And afterwards, you are already a terrible donkey in relation to everything you have to process internally.

But when you start to realize this, when you acquire the ability to look back on your life, you are actually filled with respect for what a clever being you were as a very young child. You were once terribly ugly; but you can change everything if you were an ugly fellow. At fifteen, you can no longer make yourself beautiful. As a small child, you can do just that. All small children can do that.

So it is important to realize what kind of donkey you have become in the course of your life. That is an important side of life. You don't become immodest, but a terribly modest person. You realize when you see it correctly: when you were a little child, you actually sat on the donkey and drove the donkey yourself. Now that you have become an old man, you have turned into a donkey yourself. — You see, you have to put it so drastically, otherwise nothing comes of it.

In this way you also arrive at the meaning of the dream. You will have experienced it yourself; in a dream you can even think that you are the Emperor of China or something else. There are many other dreams. You can dream anything. But what does the dream show us? You just have to follow the dream to see how it changes in the course of your life.

Infant dreams are quite wonderful. Infant dreams still show you that the child still has the powers within itself to shape its body. They are truly cosmic. The child dreams of what it has experienced before descending to earth, because these powers are still within it. It needs them to develop its brain. When you have this wonderfully designed brain, which is located in the upper skull (see drawing on page 152), then it has the eye, but here are the nerves that are needed to see. All this must be worked out in detail. It must be worked out in detail. Yes, gentlemen, you cannot work that out with earthly knowledge. With earthly knowledge you can work out machines here and there; but with earthly knowledge you cannot work out the brain. In the dreams of small children you can still see exactly: in their dreams they work out how their brain functions. Later on, dreams also become very strange if a person does not lead an orderly life; they become increasingly disorderly. And the fact that the dream is confused actually stems from the fact that one knows so little about one's physical body because one is not inside it.

So that is the reason why we know so little about our physical body: because we have lost, transformed into foolishness, what we have received as wisdom when we descended into earthly life. When you wake up and say to yourself, “Well, if you believe everything you've dreamt now – that you're the emperor of China – then of course you're an ass.” But we ourselves can't do anything other than develop ass-like behavior because we don't have the body. Not being inside, we can't help but be confused by the dream. We have completely lost the ability that we had as small children to build up our body properly. It has to come to us from outside. When we wake up, it comes to us from outside. But when we come back down to earth, it doesn't come to us from outside. Then we encounter destroyed matter in the egg from outside. We have to build it up piece by piece.

Yes, gentlemen, we have to learn all this between two earth lives. Between two earth lives we have to learn what the dreaming human being cannot do. You see, there are enemies and opponents of anthroposophy who say: Oh, they are just people who want to dream; they make all kinds of fantastic things up about the world. Yes, but anthroposophy consists precisely in the fact that we no longer rely on dreams, because dreams show that we cannot do what we can do when we enter into earthly life, when we enter with this dark, unconscious knowledge that we have as a small child. There we are clear about the fact that we have acquired this in a world that is not the world on earth, because in the world on earth we can only educate ourselves to become fantasists with regard to our actual self. However beautiful this world is, we can only educate ourselves to become fantasists with regard to our actual selves. We have to acquire our relationship to our body, our whole relationship to our body, in another world.

Now I want to tell you that the one who sees through the whole thing and thus also sees how becoming an ass advances further and further knows: it is easy to lose this knowledge. Well, it is not much different than when someone takes an exam. When someone takes an exam, it often takes two years to pass it. But they forget it quickly, terribly quickly. This is also the case with the knowledge we need to build our body: we can forget it quickly. Only here the “quick” is somewhat different than with an exam or a test. The “quick” is our whole life on earth. When we have died, we have forgotten approximately what we brought down into physical life at our birth. Our lifetime is approximately the forgetting time.

Now imagine that one of you has an experience of which he is aware: you are growing up as a child; you first remember something that happened, let's say, when I was four years old. Suppose he has already turned sixty and he remembers an event from when he was just four years old. Now it took him fifty-six years after those four years to forget, to forget inwardly. For fifty-six years, the forgetting became stronger and stronger. For fifty-six years, he became more and more of an ass. So how much more time did he need to forget what he still had until the age of four? Well, it took him so much more time than 4 in 56 contains: he needed fourteen times his first childhood to forget. When he reaches the age of sixty, it takes him fourteen times as long again to regain in the spiritual world what he has forgotten there. So he needs 60 times 14 years, 840 years. Then, in the spiritual world, he has acquired the ability to have something similar to what the small child had in its first four years, in order to build up. That means that after 840 years he can come to earth again.

You can only calculate this with full responsibility, as I have written it on the board for you now, if you are really clear about it, if you can examine what lies in dreams, how dreams distance you more and more from the spiritual world.

And you see, if someone walks around and at a certain time cannot enter his physical body at all, then he is a medium. If someone enters his physical body at the right time and uses it again, well, then he is a normal person. But if a person goes around in this state all the time, without the ego having entered the physical body – you can even walk around as a sleepwalker; you can even speak as a sleepwalker, or when you are lying in bed – then you need not be surprised; because if you, let us say, throw a ball, and everything is flat, it will roll on by itself. So under certain circumstances, when a person is not quite healthy, when everything goes easily for him, when his body is not quite firm, the activity that is otherwise conscious can still have an effect. But then the person is an automaton. A sleepwalker is not a human being, but an automaton. And one who speaks from sleep does not speak humanly either. Just try it: when someone speaks from sleep, you can hear the most stupid things, because he becomes an automaton and his ego and soul are not in his body.

But if this is only half the case, if a person is only half an automaton – the inward movement happens from behind, so that the person moves in from the back of the brain to the front – if a person only moves in halfway, then he can close his eyes, and then, because the optic nerves are at the back (on the right), he perceives something, but it is fantastic. And then he can also talk you into all kinds of fantasies, because, right, he doesn't see, but he gets images there. The sense of hearing is located there (center). And the sense of language is located there (left). He can talk you into anything there. The mediums speak from there, but they are not in the world. Therefore, nothing that the mediums say can be trusted, because they are half inside their physical body. Nothing at all is to be given to it. What the media say is just what man in his - I must use the expression again and again - in his donkey-like behavior perceives.

Yes, gentlemen, but I have also heard of mediums who say really wonderful things. That is also true, the mediums also say wonderful things; but that is no wonder at all. Because, you see, when, for example, a strong earthquake strikes somewhere, the animals are the first to leave; the people stay and are destroyed by the earthquake. Animals are prophetic from the very beginning because the intellect is everywhere; they have not yet choked the intellect into themselves. So the medium is something that descends to the animal. It can do wonderful things, it can even say verses that are more beautiful than Goethe's verses — well, because it descends to the animal intellect.

For someone who is to attain knowledge in the anthroposophical way, the opposite is the case. He must not only enter halfway, as in his dreams, but he must know everything as the other person knows it, and in addition, what one can know when one wakes up a second time. When one wakes up a second time, one gets an idea of what it is like. You say to yourself: Yes, if you have spent a little time getting to know people during your life on earth, it will help you after death. Then it will be easier for you after death to get to know the human body again. But what you have to get to know between death and a new birth is the inside of the human body. And here you must be clear about one thing: getting to know the world is a lot of work. Students sweat profusely when they have to get to know the external world, when they have to learn to calculate how the stars revolve and so on; when they have to learn to calculate what the Earth looked like when there were no present-day crabs and so on. There is a lot to learn. But, gentlemen, what has to be learned on earth about what lies outside of man is nothing compared to what has to be learned within man.

Now you will say: Yes, but you do learn inwardly from the human being when the human being is dead; you learn everything from the human being. You cut up the human being and you learn from the corpse what the human being looks like internally. — But there is a big difference. With all the knowledge you gain from the corpse, you can never create a living human being. Of course, in order to create a living human being, conception is necessary. But at the moment of conception, the human being who has only just learned in the spiritual world between death and a new birth is also involved. One can only acquire knowledge on earth about that which is dead. One cannot acquire knowledge about that which is alive, or even about that which feels and thinks.

And I would not have dared to write these figures down for you if it had not been for the higher knowledge that one can see how man during his life on earth moves further and further away from the spiritual world. When he grows old, he has gone furthest away. When he is still a child – let us assume that he dies at the age of sixteen – yes, then it is different when he remembers back to the age of four. He may die at the age of sixteen, remembering back twelve years, that is three times four, and if he has reached the age of sixteen, he actually only needs forty-eight years to reappear. It is true that you can do that in the calculation!

But now we come across something very strange, gentlemen. This is this: you know, since ancient times, the patriarchal age has always been counted as about 72 years. When a person has reached the age of 72, the years beyond that are actually considered a gift. Isn't that right, that is the patriarchal age, 72 years. Now let us assume that such a patriarch was an excellent person, as there were some in ancient times. We, who are so inattentive today, remember very little from our childhood. But these people remembered things from the age of three or two. And then they had 70 years to forget their childhood wisdom, their extrasensory wisdom. That includes 35 times 2. So they go through a period in the spiritual world when they are 72 years old, remembering much further back than they can now, which is 35 times 72 years, or over 2000 years.

You see, gentlemen, if you observe the sun in spring, it rises in the constellation of Pisces. Once upon a time, it rose in the constellation of Aries. The calendar still shows Aries as the point of sunrise. But that is not correct. The sun rose in the constellation of Aries until the 15th century. Then it was correctly stated that the sun rises in the constellation of Aries. And since then, astronomers have become lazy and they continue to do so, even though the sun no longer rises in the constellation of Aries, but in the constellation of Pisces.

Let's assume that the constellation of Pisces has a certain size. There are twelve such constellations. When the sun rises next year, as I said, it will be somewhere in the constellation of Pisces on March 21. And when you observe it next year, it will have moved a little further, no longer coming up in the same place, and last year it was a little further back, also not coming up in the same place as this year. The sun takes a certain amount of time to pass through the constellation. At first it was at the very beginning of Pisces, and later, in the future, it will be at the end of Pisces. Then it will have advanced so far that it will no longer come out at Pisces, but at Aquarius. So now it passes through the constellation of Pisces, then later through the constellation of Aquarius, and even later through the constellation of Capricorn, and so on. For the sun to pass through such a constellation takes about as long as it takes a person, on average, when they have become very old, to come back.

This means a great deal that the sun advances once from one constellation to another. I have explained in my “Occult Science” that this is connected with the way the sun behaves when man returns. And we may therefore assume that knowledge shows us that when a person dies now, he receives what he has to learn to rebuild his body from the effects of Pisces. And then he comes again when he can no longer learn from Pisces, but must learn from Aquarius. And then he comes again when he must learn from Capricorn. Then again from Sagittarius. And then again he comes when he must learn from Scorpio. And then again, when he has to learn from Libra; then Virgo, then Leo, then Cancer, then Gemini, then Taurus, then Aries. Then he comes back to the beginning. But of course he has learned a lot by then. He has gone around once in 25,815 years and has gone through about twelve earth lives, eleven to twelve earth lives. Someone might say: Yes, you are telling us that a person always learns what he needs on earth from a different constellation, a constellation that looks quite different. If you look up at the constellation of Pisces, it looks quite different from Aquarius or Capricorn and so on.

Yes, but, gentlemen, imagine you were there, say, 800, 1000, 1500, 2000 years ago. It was quite different on Earth then. You would have led a completely different life. Perhaps you would have been some small, contented farmer, fattening up a paunch and becoming a very contented fellow. Now you are in the industrial labor movement. That is what you learned from the fish. Back then, when you would have fattened up your tummy and been a contented farmer, you would have learned that from the ram. So man learns what he goes through on earth precisely from the constellations.

You see, now we are getting to the point where we can say that people gradually come around. So if you had been there in 825 AD, for example, in the 9th century, you would have been that little farmer with the big belly; now you have returned under the influence of Pisces. But if you go around, you will arrive at Pisces again after 25,815 years. But now you have learned so much that you no longer need to become what you were before, but you are now at a much higher level as a human being. You have to realize that after 25,815 years, when we want to go back to Earth, we will no longer have to go down to Earth like that, because we have learned everything in a corresponding constellation.

And you see, this is where what I have already pointed out to you comes into consideration. Those who have learned geology in a very scholarly way today tell you: 25 million years ago, it was like this on Earth. Now, how do people come to the conclusion that 25 million years ago the Earth was a hot liquid body? I have also spoken to you about similar things, but not about such long periods of time. How do people come to this conclusion?

They examine Niagara Falls, for example. The waterfall rushes down. Now they take the stone over which it has rolled and calculate how much of it is washed away in a year, and then they calculate how much of the stone has been washed away in a year, when the water was not yet bottled but was still present as vapor. And from that they get these 25 million years.

It's just like when I examine a person's heart. Today is April 9. Let's examine the heart today, then again in a month, it will have changed a little bit; then again in a month, it will have changed a little bit again. And from these small changes, we calculate and come up with what the heart was like 300 years ago. But it hadn't existed yet. The calculation is correct. That is often the case with scientific calculations: the calculation is correct, but the things were not yet there. And so it is with what the earth looked like 25 million years ago. The calculation is exactly right, but the earth was not yet there. And so one then also calculates what the earth will be like after 25 million years. One just calculates in the other direction. But the earth will no longer exist then. Just as with the heart, which gets a little worse and worse every day, you can calculate what it will be like in 300 years, except that you will no longer be there as a physical person in 300 years. The calculations are quite correct. That is precisely the dazzling, the deceptive thing, that the calculations are terribly correct; but the human being does not last as long as the calculations indicate. When you reappear after 25,815 years, the Earth will have disintegrated in the meantime, and you will have had to find your way into the Earth in your successive lives anyway. The Earth is no longer there; you are freed from the Earth. You have ascended to a higher life.

And so, if you really get to the bottom of it, you can scientifically penetrate the time when old legends still tell that man goes through a series of earthly lives, but then no longer needs to return to earth. Then he must have learned so much that he can now endure it without a physical body. But then man must gradually have come to no longer have such crazy dreams as today, and must no longer have distanced himself so far from the spiritual world.

But you have come up with a very important result, gentlemen. You have to say to yourself: those people who resist becoming acquainted with the spiritual world do not want to let knowledge approach humanity. They want man to remain an ass on earth and not be able to return. Because he has already acquired something about man on earth, and something living at that, not just knowledge attached to dead matter, he is increasingly able to see through consciously after death what he has to go through.

Then, when a person, as certain dark forces want, because he must become a donkey on earth, should also remain a donkey, then these dark forces tempt him to lose his spiritual existence altogether. They persuade him to believe in eternal bliss. But just as they persuade him to believe in bliss, they take away from him what is allotted to him. That is how one has to talk; it is something terrible!

Therefore, anthroposophy must show man how he really is according to knowledge, so that he may gradually become able to enter the spiritual world again. You see, that is it, that anthroposophy is already a great human task and has a great social significance. Because all understanding will indeed go away. And because the intellect only wants to remain within, because human wisdom serves up what comes from the corpse, that is actually how it came about – not from something else – that humanity lives in such darkness and has no idea what to do. For example, in order to get out of the eternal congress image and so on, in order to get to something again, you have to really wake people up. But people hate to wake up. Because, when people sit down at meeting tables, it is not just about sitting down together, but about talking about something sensible; whereas people today are such that they do not even admit that they first have to wake up, have to make something of their minds flexible, so that they can also get a feeling for the social question again. Therefore, everything else is basically just a sticking plaster. But what is necessary is that people really come to an understanding of their inner being already on this earth, that they are prepared for what they have to do in the spiritual world. That is already so.

It does not occur to anthroposophy to convert individuals. Individuals cannot achieve anything, but many people can; and anthroposophy only wants to help many people acquire the right knowledge. Then it will be possible to bring about better times on this earth.

I wanted to tell you this too, gentlemen. Now I have to go to Zurich, St. Gallen and Winterthur. When I come back, I will continue with these lectures. Perhaps you can think of some questions you would like to ask.

I took the liberty of pointing out yesterday that there is some antipathy on the part of the ordinary scientific outlook toward the nature and the entire method of the science of spirit which can and must be placed alongside ordinary science. I pointed out further that there is a certain subjective prejudice at the present time which makes it difficult for people really to go into and acquire an understanding of the science of spirit, that is, for people who think they stand on the sure foundation of science—on which, of course, the science of spirit also stands—but who are of the opinion that it is not possible to bridge the gap from this kind of foundation to a real science of spirit. However, a fact about the soul-life of present day humanity emerged from my exposition yesterday, the fact that it is joist in immersing ourselves in the scientific knowledge of the present time that we are bound to long, and indeed, do long to acquire knowledge about the human being that goes beyond the ordinary everyday life of the soul, which, of course, of necessity is tied to the observation and experience of the physical sense world.

Now it is naturally possible to say that the views of the world generally held, that have arisen through the influence of scientific ideas, are proving to be increasingly incapable of dealing with methods of research other than those which are concerned with what is physically present in the world. And so now it is intended to investigate what lies beyond normal consciousness with the same kind of sense perception—providing we really do want to investigate it, and not just drop it—as science uses to investigate nature. For this reason the existence of one border area at least in human experience has found recognition recently among people who want their work to remain on a scientific basis but who, on the other hand, desire to penetrate the mysteries of human soul life, inasmuch as this lies within the conscious sphere that is, as I have said, more or less tied to the world of the senses. People have gradually become convinced that it is not possible to investigate the mysteries of soul life, that there is much that rises up into the soul life of the human being out of unknown depths, or one could also say, out of unknown heights, that is well suited to provide information about what the core of man's being really is, rather than what is to be found within our ordinary consciousness. But because, generally speaking, the science of spirit is regarded as something not sufficiently tangible, as something that leads one away from the real world—so many would say—an attempt is made to investigate a kind of border area by ordinary scientific means.

The science of spirit has therefore every reason from its point of view, to refer to this border area and to deal with it. It is the region that we have more recently become accustomed to call the unconscious. There is also another reason why it is especially important for the science of spirit to offer some thoughts about this area of the unconscious, and that is because some of the things that are said in this connection are misunderstood, so that the science of spirit is confused with what is said about this border area, more or less justifiably, by those representing other approaches to the problem. By “unconscious” one usually means what rises up from unknown regions and flows into one's conscious life. It would of course take a very long time if I were even to give an outline of all that science over the whole world has had to say about this region of the unconscious. In the cultural life of Central Europe the expression “the unconscious” has of course become well known since the 1860's through the popular philosophy of Eduard von Hartmann, who sought the reasons for all that the human being experiences consciously in a spiritual unconscious, whether it be below or above the conscious.

If I may be allowed, by way of introduction, to make a personal remark—the way in which Eduard von Hartmann approaches spiritual life, which is supposed to remain unconscious for ordinary consciousness (although he is dealing with something spiritual and although he sees a revelation of the unconscious, of the spiritual unconscious, in the physical sense world), his approach and outlook are in a way diametrically opposed to the view which I am putting forward. And through being personally acquainted with Eduard von Hartmann I tried already in the 1880's to thrash these things out with him personally and in correspondence. I tried to show the difference between the anthroposophically orientated science of spirit and an outlook founded on the unconscious like, for instance, that of Eduard von Hartmann. I discussed this difference recently in a rather personal way in the February number of the second year of the magazine Das Reich. I shall now indicate in a few words what is discussed more fully there:

Eduard von Hartmann points out that everything the human being is able to reveal in his ordinary life rests on something spiritual and unconscious. He maintains the view that this unconscious can be reached only by means of the power of logical thinking; it deduces something unknown that abides, that can be reached only conceptually and grasped in hypotheses from what is perceptible in the sense world. And he points out that this unconscious is not in itself conscious in the same way that the human being, for instance, is conscious.—In these two respects the science of spirit is radically different from this view of Eduard von Hartmann: firstly the science of spirit is founded on the fact that—I described this more fully yesterday and named the books which provide the necessary basis—it not only seeks to penetrate the spiritual spheres by means of hypotheses and logical deductions, but by bringing out of the soul certain forces that slumber in it which remain unconscious for our ordinary consciousness, forces that are raised into our consciousness by means of a strengthening and intensification of our soul life. These unconscious forces in the soul are able to enter into the consciousness of the human being, so that he can tread the path from the sense world to the super-sensible world in full consciousness by means of spiritual observation, so that he can observe this super-sensible world in a spiritual way, just as he can observe the sense world. The science of spirit, therefore, does not describe a hypothetical path from the sense world into the super-sensible, but a real path that can be experienced. And on the other hand, the science of spirit has to emphasize that something spiritual that is unconscious, in which no consciousness can be found, is really of no more value than the great unconscious sphere of purely material atoms and their processes, the purely physical foundation of existence. What would be the point of something spiritual that is supposed to underlie the sense world, if it is unconscious? For then the human being would be the only conscious being to raise himself out of a world, which, as far as consciousness is concerned, would have no more value than the unconscious world of purely material phenomena?—The science of spirit, therefore, does not deal with this unconscious, which in itself is devoid of consciousness, but is concerned with spiritual beings existing behind the physical world and which are just as conscious as human beings, and in some respects even have a higher consciousness than the latter.

This is what differentiates the view of the anthroposophically orientated science of spirit about the unconscious from such a view as Eduard von Hartmann's, which is actually held by many people today in the same sense as he held it, even if they do not intend getting away from the scientific viewpoint.

Today we shall have opportunity to show in what way the science of spirit can really penetrate into the sphere of spiritual life, and we shall do this by taking into consideration the unconscious phenomena in human soul life which enter into our consciousness in a less complete way than does the science of spirit.

But I must take certain things for granted, which were described yesterday—that by means of inner processes in the soul (if we wish to be particular, we should call them “exercises”) our ordinary soul life, even if it is only a mystical soul life, can be treated in such a way that the human being can rise from this soul life to the spiritual, just as from another aspect he can descend from soul life to the physical by means of scientific observation. Having acquired this perception of the spiritual or—to use Goethe's expression once more—the eyes of the spirit and the ears of the spirit, we are then in a position to view what normally appears in our conscious soul life from unknown depths or heights from our newly-won viewpoint in a quite different way.

Now of course the border areas with which we are concerned cover a wide field. Today I shall select only a few of them, but they will shed light on everything else in our unconscious soul life and its manifestations. I shall take something which is well known to everyone, but which remains an enigma in human existence: our world of dreams. I shall then deal with a subject that more recently has become the child of all those who seek to penetrate into the spiritual super-sensible world, but who shy away from practicing the real science of spirit; and that child is what is called “somnambulism” and also “medium-ship,” which is related to it. I shall then proceed to another aspect where it is certainly sufficiently well known that it arises out of the unconscious depths of soul life, and this is the whole sphere of artistic enjoyment and creation, which I shall deal with briefly. Then I shall come to a subject which perhaps many people do not consider belongs to the unconscious and its manifestation, but which at least can be seen—by those who are reasonable about it—to be something that plays into our semiconscious life, and this is the sphere of human destiny, which will be considered from the viewpoint of the science of spirit, the real and true clairvoyance. I am not fond of the word clairvoyance because it is mixed up with all sorts of amateurish and other nonsense, but the way I use it today will perhaps be justified, and should be self- explanatory. I shall indicate what is the sphere of the science of spirit itself, for this science feels itself called upon to raise what is spiritually unconscious into consciousness.

I would like first of all to describe one or two characteristic properties of the real experience the scientist of the spirit has of the super-sensible, spiritual world. This will then form the basis for what I have to say about the other phenomena of the unconscious, which I have so far only just mentioned and which I shall describe later from the viewpoint of the science of spirit. As we have not much time, I shall not be able to go into the ordinary scientific view of these things as well.

When the human soul has reached the point with the scientist of spirit of being able to approach a spiritual world in the same way that we approach the physical sense world with our physical eyes and ears and the other sense organs, then the human being perceives the spiritual world and can grasp its connection with the physical sense world.

I pointed out yesterday that it is quite unjustified to object that what the science of spirit describes is really only put together out of the physical sense world and then transferred to the spiritual world. And I also pointed out that anyone who has conscientiously used the methods of the science of spirit for several years knows that he often finds himself in the position that what he experiences in the spiritual world looks quite different from anything that can be experienced in the transitory physical sense world. Even in the experience of the spiritual world, the whole mood and constitution of the soul is radically different from normal soul life. And so I would like first of all to describe one or two characteristic properties of this experience in the spirit.

If one has only a superficial understanding of what we mean by the science of spirit it is easy enough to say that the scientist of spirit lives in a kind of self-deception:—he puts things together in his mind and thinks that the resulting idea is the revelation of a spiritual world, having overlooked or forgotten how he really gained the idea through sense perception in the first place.—Of course, it is true that if the scientist of spirit were to experience spiritual perception in the same way he gains ideas from the sense world, then he would naturally become suspicious of the science of spirit. But this is not the case. One of the most fundamental characteristics of what we are able to perceive in our thoughts of the sense world appears quite different when compared with real spiritual experiences. The ideas and images we form through contact with the sense world are impressed upon the soul, and we are able to recall them after a while; they can be raised up out of the treasure of our memory. The spiritual experiences which the scientist of spirit has are different, for it is not possible to recall them in this way. What the soul experiences when it approaches spiritual perception is not just an idea. For an idea can be incorporated into the memory, but a spiritual experience of this sort cannot be directly incorporated into the soul. A spiritual experience or perception disappears, just as our view of a tree that we have looked at for a time disappears when we turn away from it. When the perception comes to an end, it can no longer be experienced by the soul—we have to approach it again in order to see it as it really is. The image or idea we keep in our memory, but to see the actual tree we have to go to where it is. Just as we no longer see the tree when we have gone away from it, so the spiritual perception is no longer experienced by the soul when the perception itself has ceased. From this it follows that with experience of a spiritual nature we are not dealing with a mere combination of ideas, thoughts and images, for they can be remembered.

But then one could object that if this is in fact the case, it would never be possible to report such spiritual experience if it could not be remembered—nothing could be said about it, for it would disappear from our soul life as soon as it had been experienced.—But actually it is not like this at all. The scientist of spirit can formulate ideas about what he has experienced spiritually, just as we are able to formulate ideas about things, beings and processes in the sense world, and these ideas can be retained. It depends on the scientist of spirit being able to differentiate actual experience from the images and ideas which arise out of it, just as in ordinary life we distinguish our sense perception from the idea which arises from it. We can look at this in another way. If we wish to have a spiritual experience in the same way a second or third time, it is not sufficient just to recall the image or idea of it. For in this case it is clear that we do not then have the full experience, but only a pale image of it.

If we want to have the experience again, we have to reawaken the slumbering forces of the soul and to enter into the experience afresh. With certain characteristic phenomena of the spiritual world we can only remember the way we approached the experience—this can be recalled, and the experience attained a second, third or fourth time. But then it is certainly not a case of the experience following the same laws that underlie the normal way of imagining and thinking.—This is the one aspect. You can see from this that the scientist of spirit is no dreamer, but that his own inner self- perception enables him to be absolutely clear about what leads him to real experiences.

The second aspect is that an experience attained through the science of spirit has a relationship to our soul life quite different from an experience that takes place in our normal consciousness in the physical sense world. What would be the use of our physical life if we were not able to acquire certain skills, certain habits, if we were not in a position of being able to try and do something better a second time, when the repetition of an action would serve no purpose? The repetition of an action is incorporated into our normal experience as a habit. But spiritual experiences cannot be incorporated into our soul life in the same way. Many—those who are beginners in spiritual experience—find this out, to their surprise. It is comparatively easy—I say comparatively easy—to achieve certain initial experiences of the spiritual world if one carries out the exercises described in my book How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds, and beginners are always overjoyed when they have their first experiences of a spiritual nature. But then they are all the more surprised when these experiences cannot easily be repeated, or when they cannot be repeated at all. And one can feel very miserable because an experience which one has had cannot be recalled; one does not seem to get any better at it. It is not possible to turn what has been experienced in the spirit into a habit. On the contrary, with repetition it becomes increasingly more difficult to do the repetition. Thus, as a matter of fact, a large part of the exercises that have to be done if we wish to bring about a repetition of certain experiences, consists of doing quite different things the second or third time. Experience of a spiritual nature has therefore a quite different relationship to the physical, since it works against habit.

There is a third aspect of what is characteristic in spiritual experience, and that is, however odd it may sound, that real spiritual experience—which has absolutely nothing to do with anything concerned with the body—is something that is over in a split second. In fact, this is even a reason why so few people today attain spiritual experience. In ordinary life people are accustomed to take a certain time to assimilate something that appears on their horizon. If the experience is a spiritual one, it is over before the person has been able to notice it. What is therefore necessary above all in order to have real spiritual experience, is what one could call presence of mind. If we want to have spiritual experience we have to get used to situations in ordinary life which demand quick decisions, where the situation must be summed up immediately, and where there is no time to delay by changing our minds. People who have no wish to make any progress in this kind of self-education, to make quick decisions in certain situations, to see quickly what has to be done, are not suited to gaining the necessary control over their own souls in order to achieve spiritual experience easily. The kind of person who can tackle a situation, not by looking at it from every possible angle and fussing about, but by making a decision immediately upon being confronted with the situation and then also sticking to it, has a good foundation for spiritual experience. For spiritual experiences within us have to be gone through just as quickly as we have to grasp some situations in life and make decisions, which if they were not made quickly would perhaps lead to misfortune and ruin.—I am not saying that spiritual experience can lead to ruin, for in this case it will not have existed. This attitude toward it is necessary.

And now there is a fourth characteristic—that spiritual experiences are always individual. In the physical world we are accustomed to dividing everything into particular classes or categories, in fact we divide the whole of life in this way. We speak of the famous—if not notorious—“Scheme F.” Everything has to belong to a certain category, to be put in its particular place. People believe that law is to be found in the world of phenomena only when everything is fitted into various categories. We should imagine for once how we should deal with nature, which we quite rightly divide into categories, if everything were individual. And we should imagine what human life would be like if it were not, for instance, possible in every single instance to turn to a book of laws, if it were not possible to fit a particular case neatly into a ready-made compartment, but if we had to face it with individual judgment. People are accustomed from experience in the physical world to making everything fit into patterns. All this putting things into categories, classes, determining a particular order with particular laws, all this has to be given up, though not in connection with the physical world, for this would make one unfit for the latter, but for the sphere of spiritual experiences. What is experienced in the spiritual world is always portrayed as something individual. This is why people so often take a stand against the science of spirit. If we speak about what has been discovered by the science of spirit—and having given lectures for so many years now, I do not hesitate to present concrete examples about this science of spirit—let us say, for example, that I describe how the sudden death of a person has the effect in the spiritual world of his experiencing spiritually in the single moment when his physical body is destroyed through an accident, as much as he would have been able to experience in twenty or thirty years in life. If such a thing as this is described, then it can be related only to a particular case. Of course, someone else comes along and says,—Sudden deaths have this and that effect. He would like to make a law of it. Such laws, if I may put it this way, are the enemy of the true way of knowledge of the science of spirit, because in spiritual experience each single case represents something individual and unique, and because one always has to be surprised how something can always appear—and in life people like so much to stick to the old. One can write down the most subtle experiences of the physical world in a notebook and can put it in one's coat pocket. Such a procedure is impossible with knowledge derived from the science of spirit. This is why there are so many different kinds of descriptions that the scientist of spirit must give. Those of you who are here now and who have often been present at the lectures which have been given here for many years, will have heard me deal with similar subjects, never in the same way, but always varied in one way or the other, individualized. Last winter, for instance, I spoke on the same theme in many German cities, sometimes for several days in succession, but each time in a different way, describing the same things differently. Knowledge derived through the science of spirit makes a claim upon the spirit which we can describe as the mobility of this spirit. We conclude therefore that the important thing is not the content, the actual content of the words, but that this content is drawn and spoken out of the spirit itself.

You will see from this that it is always necessary to become accustomed to a quite different kind of mood and disposition of soul when we rise from the transitory to the intransitory, when we approach the part of man that belongs to the intransitory world, the eternal core of his being. It is therefore understandable that the science of spirit is not only considered to be difficult to understand, but is attacked, misunderstood and confused with all sorts of other things. As someone said recently (someone who prefers to hear only what he has heard before)—it is irritating. Of course it is irritating to someone who only wants all his old dogmas warmed up once again.

Thus it is not only that what the science of spirit has to say about the eternal, the spiritual, is different from what is to be found to be real in the physical sense world, but also that the attitude of the soul toward the spirit is different from its attitude toward the physical sense world. With the kind of attitude of soul I have just described in its characteristic properties, it is possible to approach the part of man that goes through births and deaths, the eternal core of the human being, which as a spiritual entity belongs to the spiritual world just as man as a physical, bodily creature belongs to physical nature and its kingdoms.

What the science of spirit finds in this way is at first something unconscious for our normal consciousness, but it can be drawn into our normal consciousness. This is the essential thing about the method of the science of spirit—that it sets out to reveal what in normal life is generally hidden in the unconscious of the human soul. For the science of spirit brings nothing new to light and does not invent it, but the eternal core of the human being goes through—to use yesterday's expression—a spiritual digestion, just as the physical body has a material digestion—this exists in every human being. The scientist of spirit only brings to light what functions and weaves within every human being. It is his task to bring to consciousness what otherwise remains unconscious. All he talks about is nothing other than the foundation out of which everyone speaks and thinks and acts. Only it so happens that the sphere of the spirit is either subconscious or superconscious—i.e. unconscious—for our normal consciousness.

Now, seen from the viewpoint of our normal soul life, something iridescent and vacillating enters into the sphere of this soul life. What is meant here belongs to the border areas which I have spoken about. Everyone is familiar with this border area which appears so ordinary and which yet is so mysterious: the remarkable sphere of our dream life. This dream life with its pictures that enters into our ordinary soul life, gives the investigator quite different problems from the person who just lets it pass him by, or at the most approaches it with a few superstitious ideas.

A lot could be said just to describe some of the more outward characteristics of our dream life, but here I only want to give a sketch of this dream life as seen by the science of spirit by calling special attention to a few of its characteristic properties—those properties which will serve to enable us to come to know the nature of it.

Presumably everyone knows—and many philosophical approaches to dreams have recognized this—that many of our dreams are stimulated by a sense impression. The world of dreams that we experience is very much connected with the world of our unconscious sleep. When a person is deep in unconscious sleep he is completely cut off from his environment, both by his senses and his limbs. If we are really in unconscious sleep there is nothing in the room, whatever may be there, that can affect our senses. We cannot think about anything that is around us, and in really dreamless sleep we are not able to do anything either. We can establish no relationship at all to our environment—in a sense we are isolated from what surrounds us.—What is characteristic of our dreams is that we really remain in a dreaming state in this isolation and even if the isolation appears to be broken by a sense impression, it is really only in appearance. What are such dreams? Everyone knows them. Someone dreams, for instance, about horses trotting by; he wakes up, and after waking knows exactly where the sound has come from—the ticking of a watch that he had put down nearby. He had heard this ticking because of a particularly sensitive functioning of his ears which must have started at that moment. But now what goes through the mind, the perception, does not work in the normal way as it would in the outer world, but in a dramatized form. Therefore we do not establish a relationship with our environment through our senses, but remain in an isolation which sleep has brought about, and what affects the senses is transformed in the soul. We dream, for example, of a red hot stove, we hear it roaring.—The beat of our heart has become stronger, and becomes the symbol in us of the roaring hot stove. We even have the same relationship to our body as we have in dreamless sleep; the soul simply transforms the impression that comes from the body. Thus we maintain the same relationship with our body when dreaming which we have in dreamless sleep—isolated even from our own body.

We all know that we go on whole journeys in dreams, journeys we could never undertake in real life, journeys where we fly with wings. But at the same time we know that all this does not change our relationship to the outer world, as it would do in real life. Even regarding what we experience as a relationship of our being to an environment in our dreams, nothing changes our relationship to the outer world.

So we can say that what is characteristic of dreams is that in an important respect they do not alter the relationship the human being has to his environment and to himself by virtue of his spirit-soul-body constitution operating through his senses, movements and his own physical body. This also distinguishes dreams from all the other unconscious regions I shall characterize today. It also distinguishes them from everything based on a change in the relationship of the human being to his environment. Even ordinary observation bears out the fact that dreams may not be confused with anything abnormal in soul experience, that they are quite normal and healthy, and are not abnormal in the way they appear in normal human soul life.

A peculiarity of dream life that is particularly important for what I am going to say is that the course of our dreams shows that we cease to join the sequence of dream images in a logical way. We are no longer connected to normal logic. We cannot be logical in dreams. There is one objection to this, however.—The scientist of spirit always knows the objections that can be made. Of course, the unfold-ment of some dreams is such that we can say that the pictures are joined together in a logical sequence. But, in fact, it is different, for exact observation reveals that as long as a dream appears logical, it consists only of reminiscences of life, which had a logical sequence before. Whatever has a logical sequence in life can be dreamed again, but it does not become logical in the dream. The logic that is normally present in our soul life is therefore not present in the action of our dreams. Moral feelings and attitudes concerning human actions are also missing. We all know the many things we are capable of doing in dreams. We all know that in dreams we achieve things and ascribe them to ourselves, that we would condemn in ordinary life. Not only does logic come to an end in dreams, but our moral outlook as well.—These are two important characteristics that we must hold on to if we are to investigate the nature of dreams.

It is of course true that much can be said about dream life from the ordinary physical viewpoint, but we do not want to touch upon this today, for a merely outward scientific method of observation cannot get at the real nature of dreams—for the simple reason that there is nothing with which our normal consciousness can compare dream life. Dreams enter into our normal conscious experience as phenomena that cannot be compared with anything else. And if something cannot be compared with anything else, if it is not possible to incorporate it into a particular scheme, if it portrays something individual through its own particular nature, it cannot be studied by an external scientific method of observation. Only from the point of view of the science of spirit is it possible to gain a true picture of dreams and their nature, for the simple reason that by means of the development of the soul, which I have outlined today, the scientist of spirit attains a pictorial or other kind of spiritual experience which, while radically different from dreams, nevertheless in its form, experience, its intensity of experience, is somewhat similar to dreams. We can leave aside for the moment the question of how dreams are related to reality. We do not wish to go into this now. But the scientist of spirit knows that in what he experiences, which at first is pictorial, he stands before a real spiritual world, he experiences a spiritual world. He can therefore look at the world of dreams and describe it from the world he experiences. This is the one thing. By means of this he acquires a view given to him by his actual observation of what dreams really are in the human soul. Seen from the viewpoint of ordinary consciousness, it is not possible to know what dreams are. Dreams rise up in our soul life, surge up like unknown waves out of the depths, but we do not know what it is that is active, that is dreaming in our souls. But now the scientist of spirit, in practicing the activity necessary for spiritual investigation (as described yesterday), experiences another self, the same self, but in another form, the true ego—he experiences the spirit-soul nature of man independently of the bodily nature. However great a horror it may be for many people, it is nevertheless true that spiritual experiences are achieved outside the body. The scientist of spirit therefore knows what it means to be outside the body, and he can now compare this with the world of dreams. In seeing the world of dreams on the one hand, and knowing spiritual experiences on the other, he knows that the same thing that normally dreams in the soul is experienced spiritually when practicing the science of spirit. It is one and the same thing: what dreams and what is active in the science of spirit, only in investigating the spirit we stand before the real region of the spirit, and in dreams—and this is what is important:—What is it that we stand before in dreams? The difference between standing before the reality of the spirit with our own self in the investigation of the spirit, and in our dreams, is that the scientist of spirit has prepared his soul beforehand to enter into the spiritual world, in which he then perceives in the same way that we normally perceive with our eyes and ears in the physical world, and through his investigation he discovers that in sleep the human being leaves the body. But because he lacks the necessary organs to perceive there, his consciousness remains dull and unconscious from the moment of going to sleep to waking up. Now when a human being has fallen asleep, his spirit-soul nature lives. The scientist of spirit can compare what he perceives in the spiritual world with what the unconscious spirit-soul nature experiences from the moment of going to sleep to waking. He experiences the spirit-soul nature unconsciously in the spiritual world, draws himself again into the physical body on waking, and then makes use of the physical body in order to establish a relationship to his environment.

Now it is not sufficient simply to describe what happens to the body between going to sleep and waking, and what sort of organic physical processes take place in it. For significant things also happen to the spirit-soul nature at the same time. The soul is quite different when it awakens and returns to the body from when it leaves the body. And in entering the body once more it can happen—as in ordinary life—that the spirit-soul nature simply submerges into the body and makes use of the body, and having penetrated it like a fast moving arrow it becomes active and uses the body as a means of perception. But it can also happen that the forces, the content that the spirit-soul nature has acquired from the moment of sleeping to awaking, are—if I may use the expression—for a moment too intense to enter into the body. What the soul upon waking has acquired since the moment of going to sleep, does not fit into the configuration of the picture that the body has of the soul, and so what then happens appears to be a reflection of what the soul has experienced unconsciously during sleep. Something like a mirror picture is reflected back upon waking, because upon waking the soul cannot at first be adapted to the body. In this way the soul clothes these quite different kinds of experiences of the spiritual world, which it has gone through during sleep, in pictures borrowed from our memory, from ordinary life, or which are transformed sense or bodily impressions. It is the eternal that dreams in the human being, just as it is the eternal in the human being that investigates the spirit, but it is clothed with the events of everyday life.

Thus we can say that in dreams the eternal in man perceives the temporal. It is the eternal in man that perceives what takes place in time. And in this respect dreams, despite the fact that the content of their pictures, which is taken from temporal life, is nothing special, even for the scientist of spirit, if it is a normal dream, are a real revelation of the unconscious eternal-spirit nature living in man, of the super-sensible. The scientist of spirit is in the position to be able to distinguish between what dreams present in pictures, and what they are really based upon.

I have recently spoken about the various phenomena of human soul life from a different viewpoint in another city—a city where a great deal of work has been done on Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis deals among other things with the world of dreams. There were some gentlemen present who, as so often happens with the science of spirit, completely misunderstood what I said. In relation to what I said about dreams they thought they were very much more clever. They said: This person and his science of spirit, he speaks about dreams. We psychoanalysts know that dreams only have a symbolical meaning. We know that dreams should only be handled as a matter of symbolism, but he takes dreams to be something real! He is on quite the wrong path.—As I said, they thought they were very clever. But the matter in which they thought themselves clever, in fact, arose only out of their own lack of understanding. For the scientist of spirit does not take the content of dreams to be symbolical or anything else. The scientist of spirit who is accustomed to observing such things knows that what really happens in the soul during sleep can be the same with ten people, but when these ten people relate their dreams, all ten are different. The scientist of spirit knows that although the ten people have dreams, all with a different content, the same or at least very similar spiritual and unconscious experience is the basis for all of them. Moreover, the scientist of spirit would never simply take the content of the dream by itself, whether symbolically or not symbolically, for he knows that the same dream can be clothed in ten, a hundred or a thousand different ways, because the eternal regards the temporal in such a way as to clothe itself with it. The scientist of spirit therefore studies the course of the dream, the way in which tension is released, whether a rise or a fall follows. It is the inner drama, the type of rhythmical sequence, I would even say, the musical nature, that comes to expression in the most varied ways in the pictures of a dream. That is what he studies. Dreams are the witness of real spiritual experience; their content is a garment which clothes the experience. But when one is experienced in such things it is possible to see through the content to what can be experienced. This is the one aspect of the nature of dreams that the science of spirit points to.

The other aspect is the following. When the scientist of spirit progresses and comes to have experiences in the spiritual world, he notices that his dream life changes. Among the many who have already had practical experience with ways of the science of spirit are some who acquire a convincing idea of the science of spirit and feel that it means a lot to them by seeing how their dream life is transformed. They see that what normally happens in dreams is that there is a succession of quite arbitrary images, but then they see how it becomes increasingly full of meaning, and that finally they are able to direct the dream in certain respects. In short, the most varied people entering into the science of spirit notice that the changes which take place in dreams take dreams in the same direction as the first stages of real spiritual knowledge. In fact, it is by means of this transformation of the world of dreams that the scientist of spirit is able to get at the actual nature of dreams. He raises his dreams out of their temporality through what he has become as a scientist of spirit. Dreams then no longer have the tendency to clothe themselves with temporal things.

It is a great moment when the scientist of spirit has progressed sufficiently to dream not only the outer pictures that have symbolical value, but in his dreams to enter into the sphere which normally he would only enter arbitrarily.—It is a great moment when he learns how the spiritual world sends him experiences in his dreams that penetrate like an act of grace into his normal experience, and which really are no longer dreams, although in certain respects they may appear like dreams. Thus the science of spirit shows that dreams flow out of the eternal spirit-soul sphere, but that the human being who has not managed to be conscious of this eternal spirit-soul sphere clothes the events which happen between going to sleep and waking up with his memories, with his impressions of everyday life.

Whether dreams are subconscious or unconscious events, or whether they are grasped by the scientist of spirit, they can be regarded as something healthy and normal. This is more than can be said of the other border areas. It is remarkable that there are philosophers, Eduard von Hartmann among them, who compare dream pictures, the origin of which we have just recognized, with hallucinations and visions. Whereas dream pictures originate in the spirit-soul sphere, and only come into being in coming into contact with the bodily nature, visions and hallucinations are very much connected in their origin with the bodily nature. And whereas dreams in their essential experience flow out of the spirit- soul sphere and the bodily nature only provides the cause of their appearance, the bodily constitution is the cause of everything in the way of hallucinations, visions, somnambulism, mediumism and everything abnormal of this sort that enters human soul life. You can see a characteristic of human experience purely from the viewpoint of the science of spirit, to which the scientific viewpoint can easily be added, when you understand that it all depends upon looking at man as a being with body, soul and spirit, that he has a relationship of the spirit to the body only indirectly through the soul. The soul takes its place in the center. Even when dreaming, a human being cannot simply establish a relationship of his spirit to the body, but only indirectly with the help of the soul. In normal life the soul is an intermediary between the spirit and the body. What happens in the human organism when certain abnormal phenomena in spirit-soul life are produced, is that the normal relationship of the spirit to the body through the soul, where the spirit first works upon the soul and then the soul upon the body, is broken because of temporary or permanent illnesses in the organism, which then blot out the proper functioning of the soul. This elimination is not occasioned by the outer sense organs, but rather by the inner organs. If certain organs are diseased, then the spirit-soul nature cannot get hold of the whole body by means of which it establishes a relationship to the outer world, but it often has to make use of the body without the diseased organs. Then instead of using the soul, the spirit enters into a direct relationship with the body. In a sense, the soul is by-passed. This brings irregularities into the consciousness; the consciousness is broken through. If something spiritual is experienced without being mediated by the soul because a particular organ of the brain or the nervous system or the circulation is diseased, if a spiritual experience is not received so that the soul can use the body in the right way for the experience to be digested properly in the soul, then the spirit has an immediate effect upon the body, and does not work through the mediation of the soul. The immediate experience of the spirit—for it is an experience of the spirit, even if it is such that it penetrates the human constitution in an abnormal and unhealthy way—turns into hallucinations and visions. The science of spirit has nothing to do with this sort of thing.

The aim of the science of spirit is not to break down the relationship existing in normal life between body, soul and spirit, but to make the life of the soul richer, so that the relationship of the spirit to the body is brought about by a rich soul life. A poverty-stricken soul life can come about, however, when by illness a human being is prevented from using his whole body to establish a relationship with his environment. These kinds of experiences—visions and hallucinations—that do not have the same relationship to spiritual life that dreams have, must be regarded from the viewpoint of the science of spirit as being spiritual experiences, but not such as have more value than our ordinary sense perception; in fact, they have less value. For in this kind of irregular spiritual experience like hallucinations, visions, somnambulistic speech and action, mediumism, (which is an artificial kind of somnambulism) the human being is less connected with his environment than he is in his sense perception. This is the important thing. This is what must be realized.

In order not only to perceive his environment but also to arrive at a reasonable and logical understanding of it, a human being needs what one calls an ability to make judgments about the world, and for this he needs the use of the whole body. If the body is formed abnormally, he cannot form a sensible judgment about what is presented to him spiritually. Whereas the human being, when awake, can grasp with reason what he experiences in dreams, he is not in a position to transform what he experiences in hallucinations and visions into the normal experience of his waking condition, and to understand it.

Now the significant thing is that when the body, viewed outwardly, reveals such abnormalities, there are apparently spiritual experiences—this the scientist of spirit admits—only they should not be induced. If they appear naturally, they are the evidence of disease; if they are induced artificially, they lead to disease. Even good and important scientists go astray in these things which are, after all, phenomena of life itself, when they investigate them in an external way in the laboratory, and seek to explain them according to formulas of the scientific method. I would like to cite an instance, which I have mentioned before, because it is a typical example of how much scientists long to penetrate into what they call the super-sensible sphere but at the same time do not want to approach the science of spirit, preferring to stick to their own normal scientific methods. I am not discussing this case because I wish to take a stand on its truth or untruth, but only to show how an irreproachable and outstanding scientist of the present time acts in relation to the sphere of the spirit and super-sensible.

It is the case which Sir Oliver Lodge describes at considerable length in a long book, and which has aroused so much attention for such things do not often reach us from the front-line of battle. The events are as follows. The son of the famous scientist was at the battle-front in France. The father received a letter in London written from America, informing him that a medium has said that something important and decisive was about to happen to his son, but that the soul of a deceased friend of Oliver Lodge would take the son under his wing at this decisive moment.—Naturally this is a message that can be taken in various ways. All sorts of things could have happened and, outwardly at least, the message could have been true. The son could have been in danger of his life and have been saved and the writer could have said—Of course, Myers, the soul of the friend, stood by the son and so he was not killed. But now the son was killed. So the argument then was that the soul of the son had passed over and that his soul was helped on the other side by the friend who had already been there for many years. Whatever had happened it would have been possible to interpret it in the light of the message, because the latter was so vague.—Sir Oliver Lodge, however, is a person who describes the events from a conscientious and strictly scientific viewpoint, so that the case can be understood by anyone on the one hand working conscientiously according to scientific method, and on the other knowing what conclusions can be drawn. It is therefore quite possible to glean information from the book about what really happened.

Now after Sir Oliver Lodge had lost his son, various mediums were sent to him.—In the case of a famous person there are always ways and means of sending mediums and somnambulists to him. Sir Oliver Lodge only wanted to go into this conscientiously, observing the utmost care imaginable. He then describes how the mediums bring messages, either in speech or writing, which purport to originate from the son. There is a lot in this that makes no particular impression upon the reader, as is so often the case with spiritualists, but one thing did make a deep impression on Sir Oliver Lodge. Even the skeptical journalists in the widest circles were impressed. And this is the crucial experiment that Sir Oliver Lodge carried out. It is the following: The medium said: A message is now coming from the deceased son; Myers soul is also present. Both make themselves known. But the son indicates that there is a photograph which was taken at the battle-front in France, shortly before he was killed. He is in the photograph with a number of his friends. The picture was taken several times. In one picture the son rests his hand upon the shoulder of a friend, in another his position is different, and so on. Good! The pictures were described exactly. But they were not there. No one knew about them, no one could know about them, neither the medium nor anyone else. It appeared at first to be nothing but a fraud. But the important thing is that after, I believe, two weeks a letter arrived with the photographs, which had still been in France when the medium had spoken. The letter arrived two weeks later in London and it was possible to convince oneself that the pictures tallied exactly with the description. The photographs were there—a crucial experiment.

Of course this was sufficient to convince Sir Oliver Lodge's and many other people's scientific conscientiousness. One can understand it. But as a scientist of spirit one approaches the matter from quite different viewpoints. Just because Sir Oliver Lodge has described it all so exactly, we can discover the true facts of the case. If we are only a little familiar with the relevant literature we can only be surprised that such a person as Sir Oliver Lodge does not compare such a case, which, however odd it may be, can always be convincing if obvious points are not always rejected, with the countless cases which are known with somnambulists as—if I may use the expression—an infection of the sense organs with judgments of the understanding.

Who has not heard of a case, if he is familiar with literature, of someone who has a vision having the impression—in three weeks' time when I am riding I shall fall from my horse. He sees the visionary picture exactly before him. He even tries to avoid it, but this only helps it on. Such things can be found frequently in literature. They are called up by disturbances due to disease, when the body is not fully under control, so that what remains unconscious in a normal organism rises up in a refined form into the consciousness enabling a person to have long-distance view into space or time of things that belong to human culture.

Now upon reading through Sir Oliver Lodge's book it is clear that what the somnambulistic medium saw was nothing other than such a long-distance view in time. The photographs arrived two weeks later. The medium foresaw the photographs just as the other person foresaw his falling off a horse. This has absolutely nothing to do with a revelation from the super-sensible world, but is only a refined perception of what is already present in the sense world.

In such matters we must be sure of distinguishing where the spirit has an immediate effect on the body. This is not something that leads us into the super-sensible. It is just because the science of spirit sets out to lead the human being into the true super-sensible world that it has to stress the necessity of understanding the nature of abnormal cases, in which a refined life of the senses experiences something which is only a message from the ordinary physical world, only that it is experienced in an abnormal way. I could say much about what comes to light by means of this kind of intensification of the senses, and which is based upon something diseased in the human being. What characterizes this second sphere of the unconscious is a predominance of the animal functions over the soul functions. The spiritual, it is true, is involved, but what Sir Oliver Lodge wanted,—insight into the super-sensible world,—could never come to pass in this way.

If we wish to form a bridge between someone who is here and someone in the super-sensible world as a so-called dead person, we have to do it with the methods of the science of spirit. We have to develop our own souls to find the way and not do it by allowing a dead person to speak through a somnambulistic medium. It is just such things as these that must be observed. Because the science of spirit keeps its feet firmly on the ground—one can enter the spiritual world not only in a general but also in a concrete way—it has to reject everything that is gained without the development of the soul, that is gained by means of hallucinations, visions and a refined life of the senses, which does not lead beyond the sense world and which says nothing about the eternal. Although the spiritual reaches into the human body, nothing can be found out about the super-sensible except by raising the spirit-soul nature of the human being into the super-sensible world.

For the science of spirit, therefore, the visionary world, the somnambulistic world, the world of artificial somnambulism, the mediumistic world is a subsensible world, not a super-sensible world.

The time is pressing, and I cannot go into this any further, for I must turn to another aspect which can be discussed briefly, and this is the way the super-sensible world appears in human life when we consider real art and artistic enjoyment. The science of spirit can follow the soul of the real artist or the soul of a person receptive to real art. What the soul experiences and later fashions into poetry or other kinds of art is just as much experienced in the spiritual world as what always remains unconscious in sleep or at the most becomes conscious for our ordinary consciousness in the temporal pictures of our dreams. But the poet, or artist generally, is able to bring what he experiences unconsciously in its immediate form while in the spiritual world, into the physical sense world, though still unconsciously, and to clothe it in pictures.

It has been quite rightly pointed out that it is not in its content but in its cause, its origin, its source, that real and genuine art has its roots in what the artistic soul experiences in the super-sensible. Therefore true art, and not naturalism, has been rightly regarded by humanity at all times as a message brought into the sense world from a super-sensible world. The difference between the poet and the seer, the person who perceives the super-sensible consciously, is only that the seer raises his consciousness into the super-sensible world for the time he has experiences in the super-sensible world, and transforms with complete presence of mind what he has experienced there into images and ideas, so that the whole process is conscious. With the poet, the artist, the process remains unconscious.—He certainly lives in the super-sensible, but because it does not come into his consciousness he cannot compare it with the spiritual world. After he has experienced it, he brings it down and clothes it in pictures which then became messages of the super-sensible. The whole process which is conscious in the seer is, in its origin, partly unconscious in the poet and artist. What reaches into the world as revelation of the unconscious is what graces human life with beauty, and we shall appreciate its real value when we are convinced that true art is a messenger from the world of the eternal, that true artistic enjoyment brings the human being near to the super-sensible world, even if unconsciously.

We experience our destiny semi-unconsciously. How do we normally understand our destiny, which accompanies our lives from birth to death? Most people—quite rightly as far as our ordinary consciousness is concerned—regard the individual acts of destiny as something that comes to them from outside; they just come. This may be quite right and is right from the normal viewpoint. But there is another way of looking at it.

Let us assume that as a forty year old person or younger, as one who has a tendency to reflect, we consider what we really are in our souls and compare this with our destiny. And then we ask what we would have been if we had had a different destiny, if different things had happened to us. We would then make a remarkable discovery. We would discover that if we speak of what we really bear in our inner nature, of what we really are, and not about an abstract self, that we are nothing more than the result of our destiny.—If destiny were only a series of things that happen to us, a series of chances or coincidences we should only be the sum total of these chances. What we have suffered, the things that have given us joy, what has come to us in life that we have assimilated and has become part of our ability, wisdom and habits in life, this is what we are—but it arises out of our destiny; we are this destiny ourselves.

The science of spirit also tries to study destiny, and tries to do it in such a way that its observation of it follows the same course as our normal conceptual life, without the human being doing anything about it. I say this to make clear the significant factor I wish to express. Imagine that you remember something that happened a long time ago, that you experienced when you were ten or seventeen. The memory has a particular characteristic. When the experience took place you were present with your whole mind, you did not only experience what you recall as an image, but you were wholly present. Consider how very different it is to remember how you felt and to remember the image of the experience. The feeling, the condition of soul, cannot be brought back. The memory-image can recall a kind of feeling, but pain that you experienced twenty years ago cannot be recalled. The image or idea can be recalled, but not the condition of soul, the pain. And it is just the same with joy.

In our normal memory of life our experiences are incorporated into the memory, but the feelings are not taken in and the image alone remains. We can therefore experience again later in images what we have experienced earlier. But now, what the human being does of his own volition in life in separating the feelings off from what is incorporated into the memory, can also be carried out in relation to the experiences of our destiny. In describing it, it appears easy, almost trivial. Should it be undertaken, then it belongs to the kind of preparation of the soul that I have been describing yesterday and today, and it consists in stripping of feelings all the things that come to us as acts of destiny. What is so characteristic of ordinary life is that we find some things in our destiny sympathetic, others not; that we willingly take to some things, but wish to reject others. Imagine that we would succeed in getting rid of this so that we could look at our own destinies as if they had not affected us, as if we were describing the destiny of someone else, or as if we could feel someone else's destiny as our own.

Let us get rid of it all for the moment—and only for this one moment, or we would become unfit to live properly—and consider our destiny! We have to look at destiny in such a way that everything connected with the feelings plays no part, as if we stood outside our destiny. Then, like a thought rising up, giving back to us in our individual personal lives an experience out of the past, our destiny, when looked at in the right way, stripped of its personal, subjective character, will of necessity and with the utmost conviction be seen as the expression of earlier experiences in life, which we have gone through and which are connected with the whole life of the human being and are the expression of the fact that we live through repeated lives on earth and lives which are spent between death and a new birth.

By means of this true view of destiny and of several other things, we can perceive how what we experience over the years as entering into our real and personal experience of our destiny, what is derived as a germinal force from earlier lives on earth and becomes a seed for future lives,—how all this has an effect upon our lives. What the science of spirit has to say about repeated lives on earth is not something made up by a fanatical mind, but is a result of conscientious observation of life itself, a different observation of life from what is usual, because it raises what enters semi- unconsciously into our lives and is revealed as our destiny—thus also a revelation of the unconscious, the unconscious raised into the consciousness.

Unfortunately I have only been able to describe to you a few aspects of the world which remains unconscious to our normal consciousness, and to show how the science of spirit approaches such things. I have only been able to give an outline. But it is just a consideration of the border areas that shows how the science of spirit is in a position to point out the region of the eternal, in showing how the spiritual is revealed in ordinary life in dreams in both a normal and abnormal way, and in showing just from its particular viewpoint how the unconscious is revealed in human experience. In studying the border areas in this way it becomes clear for the science of spirit that the human being is certainly able to reach into the sphere of the super-sensible when he goes beyond the normal limits of his senses, that he can penetrate from the transitory to the intransitory, that he can establish a relationship to the eternal spiritual world through his own spiritual nature so that his spirit-soul nature, his eternal nature, can feel in harmony with the spirit of the whole world.

In describing such things as these one notices that the science of spirit can only be taken in the way I mentioned yesterday—that whereas it can appear in the world today because of the particular configuration of present day spiritual and cultural life, its content is true for all times—just as the Copernican outlook had to appear out of a particular configuration at a certain time. But there is, nevertheless, a difference between the nature of what appears in ordinary science and what appears in the science of spirit. Today for the first time the science of spirit is expressed in clear and well-defined concepts and ideas. But it has always been divined and desired in both universal and quite definite forms by those who have undertaken a serious study of the great mysteries of existence. One feels as a scientist of spirit, therefore, at one with those who throughout the history of humanity have been able and have wanted to give something to humanity.

Of all the great number of personalities who could be mentioned here, I will choose only one. I do not do this to prove what I have said, for I know quite well that in citing Goethe the objection can be rightly made that it is always possible to quote the opposite from his writings, to cite passages where the opposite view is proved. But this is not the point. A person like myself who has devoted more than thirty years not only to the content of Goethe's outlook, but also to the way in which Goethe approached the world, can only sum up what he wanted to say in such a discourse as today's in a few words which express a kind of intellectual joy in finding again what has only now been revealed by conscientious investigation in a tremendous presentiment of a human being, a presentiment which must have appeared before him when he wrote:

“If the healthy nature of the human being functions as a complete whole, if he feels his existence in the world as belonging to a great, beautiful, worthy and valuable whole, if this feeling of harmony gives him a pure and true joy, then the universe, if it could feel itself, would shout for joy because it would feel it had reached its goal, and it would be amazed at the culmination of its own evolution and being.”

I believe that in expressing the harmonious accord between the inner being of man and the universe, Goethe wanted to say what the science of spirit sets out to formulate in clear, well-defined scientific terms—that man can experience in his inner being in various ways how his spirit-eternal nature exists in relation to the spirit-eternal nature of the outer world, and that the great harmony between the human individuality and the universe is actually present in the human soul.—For what makes the science of spirit into an absolute certainty? It is that the human being can take hold of his eternal nature by approaching the spirit of the world in all sincerity and truth as a spiritual being, the eternal spirit of the human being can take hold of the eternal spirit of the world.

In the last lecture I was trying to show you how the thinking of the present day, which tends to the formation of abstract concepts, is not really a gift of the outer physical world but a gift of the spiritual world. I tried to show you how at bottom this abstract thinking enters man's soul in exactly the same way as the revelations of the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. The point then is this, that in our most ordinary life we really have something in us that is already of like nature to clairvoyant perception. Now we have something else in us as well, which is even more akin to clairvoyant perception even though in a more hidden way. I mean that consciousness that appears between our ordinary waking state and our sleeping—our dream consciousness. We cannot become familiar in a practical way with the ascent of the soul into higher worlds without trying to get a clear idea of the peculiar life that the soul leads in the twilight consciousness of dreaming. What now is a dream in reality?

Let us begin by considering the dream pictures we have around or before us, which in general are more fleeting, less sharply outlined than the perceptions of ordinary life. These pictures seem to flit past our souls. When, afterward, we come to analyze them objectively we can be struck by the fact that in most cases they have some kind of connection with our life on the physical plane. Of course, there are people who are only too ready to see something high and wonderful in their dreams, or to interpret them at once as revelations of higher worlds. There are those who really believe that a dream has given them something altogether new, something that has never been there before. In most cases we shall be mistaken in interpreting our dreams in such a way. In our careless haste we fail to recognize how, after all, some experience or other we have had on the physical plane more or less recently, or perhaps even many years ago, has reappeared in the changing, weaving pictures of our dreams. For this very reason it is quite easy for the materialistic science of our age to reject the idea that there is anything remarkable in the revelations of our dreams, and instead point out that dreams are simply copies or reflections of what has been experienced in external life. If you are acquainted with the present-day science of dreams you will realize that it is always at pains to prove that a dream contains nothing more than the reflections of the physical world that the brain carries in itself. It must be admitted that such an attitude can easily reject any higher significance in our dream life, showing that the higher revelations many people claim to have are pictures characteristic of the age in which they live, pictures that could not have been seen at all in any other age. So, for example, people today often dream in images derived from inventions and discoveries only made in the nineteenth century. It of course is easily proved that images derived from external life steal their way into the ever-changing play of dreams.

A person who would gain a clear idea of his dream experiences, learning something from them to help him in entering the occult worlds, must therefore be exceedingly careful in this realm. He must make a habit of carefully following out all the hidden connections. If he does so, he will realize that most of his dreams give him no more than he has already experienced in the outer world. But it is just when we become more careful in analyzing our dream life—and every aspiring occultist should do so—that we shall gradually begin to notice how one thing or another wells up before us that we could not possibly have experienced in our external life during this incarnation. One who follows such indications as are given in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment will notice that his dream-life gradually begins to change. His dreams do actually begin to assume a different character. One of the first experiences he can have may be the following.

Perhaps he has been thinking for a long time about some perplexing problem and has at last concluded that his understanding is not yet equal to solving it, nor is all that he has been able to learn from external sources adequate for solving it. Now it will not generally happen that he is immediately conscious of having a dream in which this problem is solved for him. Even so he will be able to have a certain higher consciousness at a comparatively early stage. As if awaking from a dream he will seem to remember something. He can say to himself, “I have not been dreaming about this problem, nor was I conscious of a dream I have had before. Yet a kind of memory is arising in me. It is as though some being had come near to me who solved this problem for me by giving or suggesting a solution.”

One who gradually widens his consciousness by following the indications I have given will have this experience fairly easily. He will recall something he has lived through as though in a dream, and will know that at the time he was not aware of experiencing it. Such an experience will seem to shine upward from the depths of his soul and he will say to himself, “When I was not there with my intelligence, my cleverness, when I was protecting my soul from the suggestions of my intellect, then my soul had greater power. My soul could come freely in touch with the solution of the problem, before which I was powerless with my intellect and understanding.”

No doubt scientists will often find it easy here too to give a materialistic explanation for such an experience. But one who has had it knows full well that what has appeared to him, emerging like the recollection of a dream experience, reveals something quite different from a mere reminiscence of ordinary life. The whole mood of his soul afterward tells him he has never had such an experience before. It brings him into a wonderful feeling of bliss and elation to realize that in the depths of his soul something more is active than is present in his ordinary consciousness. This recognition can become still more distinct, and it happens in the following way.

If we carry out energetically the exercises given in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and if we continue to do so for a long time—even perhaps for several decades—then an experience may arise in our soul quite similar to what I have just been describing. For example, one which is mixed up with the recollection of an experience in everyday life we had years ago, perhaps a most disagreeable experience that we felt as a hard blow of fate and could never recall without pain and bitterness. Now something like the memory of a dream arises in our consciousness but it is a strange dream. It tells us that feelings live within us that drew this bitter experience to us with irresistible force and welcomed it gladly. Something lives in us that felt a kind of delight in bringing about all the circumstances that led up to this stroke of fate. When we have had such a dream remembrance, we know full well that while in our usual consciousness, which regulates our external affairs, there has not been a single moment—not one in the whole course of our present life—when we did not feel this stroke of fate with bitter pain. Yet, deep down within us there is something that stands in quite a different relation to this blow of fate. It used all its power and magnetic force to draw together the circumstances needed to bring about this misfortune. We did not know it at the time. Now we notice that behind our everyday consciousness another, deeper layer of our soul life was wisely at work.

If we have such an experience—and we shall have them if we earnestly carry through the exercises I have indicated—from then onward we have an extended area of knowledge and conviction. In ordinary life we feel ourselves in a certain relation to the outer world and the events that come to us in the course of our destiny. We meet these events with sympathy and antipathy. In the case mentioned this particular blow of fate was felt as a bitter and hateful experience. We did not know that all the time our soul had another wider life that had longed to live through what we felt to be so unwelcome. This feeling is quite different in its quality from any recollection out of ordinary life, for in our innermost being we are very different from what we imagine. It is just this difference that now becomes evident in our soul. It enters in such a way that we know it has brought us revelations from realms into which our everyday consciousness cannot penetrate. It widens our whole concept of our life of soul. We know then, by experience, that our soul-life contains something far more than its content within the limits of birth and death. If we do not penetrate into these deeper regions we have no idea that beneath the threshold of consciousness we are quite different beings from what we imagine ourselves to be in everyday life. When a new, significant feeling thus arises, the horizon of what we call our world expands into a new region. We realize why it is that in ordinary life we can enter it only under certain conditions.

In attempting to describe to you what may be called the occult development of dream-life, I have set before you two quite different conditions. Our ordinary dream-life, that most people experience continually at the border of sleeping and waking and that is nourished by images of everyday life, and an altogether new world of inner life that can arise on going through a certain training. We have the power to plunge into the regions of dream-life in such a way as to find a new world dawning upon us, one in which we have actual experiences of the spiritual worlds. One condition must be fulfilled, however, if we would have these new experiences between sleeping and waking during the night. We must be able to exclude the recollections and images of our ordinary life. So long as these interfere in this realm of dreams, so long do they make themselves important in it and block the way to real experiences of the higher worlds.

Why is it that the images from our everyday life thrust so insistently into this higher realm? Because, whether we confess it or not, we have the liveliest interest in all that concerns our particular selves in the external world. If some people imagine that they no longer take any special interest in their life, that makes no difference at all. No one who realizes how in this connection people can give themselves up to the grossest illusions, will be misled by such imaginings. After all, man is closely attached to the sympathies and antipathies of his everyday life. If you really try to carry out the exercises I have given for soul development you will soon realize that it all comes to this, that you must detach your interest from your everyday life. People carry out the directions given in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment in all sorts of ways. The book is read by many different people, and for many different reasons, and one's reason for looking into it will determine one's attitude to it. Thus, someone begins reading perhaps with the most beautiful feelings of how he may gain insight into the higher worlds. Then his curiosity is aroused—and why indeed should we not be curious about this realm! Curiosity often begins to stir even if one begins with the most holy feelings. That will only carry through for a little while, however, for all sorts of inner feelings begin coming in and make us stop, so we give it up.

But these feelings that we do not wish to recognize clearly, and generally interpret wrongly, are just those connected with sympathies and antipathies. We have to free ourselves from them in quite another way if we really mean to carry out these exercises. In fact, we do not free ourselves from them. That is why we stop doing the exercises. Though we say we want to break free of them we do not do it, but when a person is really in earnest about doing the exercises the effect they can have is seen very soon. His sympathies and antipathies toward life change a little. I must say this does not happen very often. When it does happen the change is of very great significance because it means we are struggling against the very forces that allow the images from our everyday life to arise in our dreams. They can no longer find their way in if we have come so far as to alter our sympathies and antipathies in any sphere of life, no matter which.

This alteration in the forces of sympathy need not occur in a high realm of life, but in some domain it must be carried out, perhaps in the most everyday affairs. There are people who say they do their exercises every day, morning and evening, and for hours at a time, and cannot go even one step into the spiritual worlds. Sometimes it is difficult to explain to them how easily one can understand that. In many cases they only need to realize this fact, that they are still grumbling about the same things they were grumbling about twenty, even thirty years ago, although they have been doing exercises all the time. The very language of their grumbling is still the same.

Then there are those who try to apply external means that can have certain effects in occultism. For example, they become vegetarians. In spite of all their endeavors to break away from a liking for meat, however, they attain no results from continued exercises. They may ascribe it to quite other reasons, thinking for instance that they need meat for their body, their brain, and therefore return occasionally to the flesh-pots of Egypt. Let us not imagine that it is an easy thing to transform one's sympathies and antipathies. To quote a passage from Faust, “Easy it is, yet is the easy hard.” This is an apt expression of the situation of the evolving soul that is trying to rise into higher worlds.

It is not a question of changing this or that particular sympathy or antipathy but of changing any whatsoever. If we do, then after certain exercises we can enter the domain of dream life in such a way that we bring nothing into it of our everyday sense experiences. Thereby in a certain sense new experiences have room to enter. When, through an occult development, we have really gone through such experiences in practice, we become aware of a certain layer of consciousness present in us that lies behind the everyday consciousness with which every person is familiar. In ordinary life our dreams take place in this second layer of consciousness, “dream-consciousness,” but it only becomes such through our carrying into it what we experience from our waking consciousness. If, however, we hold back all our everyday experiences from this region then experiences from the higher worlds can enter. These higher experiences are present in our surrounding world here every day. When they first arise we begin to realize that our everyday consciousness itself seems like a dream compared to the reality of those experiences. We find that reality only begins on that higher level.

Returning to the example of suffering a blow of fate that subsequently caused such bitter feelings, let us try to understand how one actually comes to realize the beginning of higher consciousness. Along with this bitterness we notice that there was something in us that sought out this misfortune, even feeling the need of it for our development. Now for the first time we realize in practice what karma is. We entered this incarnation with an imperfection in our soul. We felt it deeply, and thus were drawn by a magnetic power toward this blow of fate. By fully experiencing it we have mastered and done away with the imperfection. That is something real, and important. How superficial then is everyday judgment in creating a feeling of antipathy toward the misfortune. Here rather is the higher reality: Our soul goes forward from one life to another. How short is the time in which it can feel antipathy toward a blow of fate! When it looks out beyond the horizon of this incarnation, it feels one thing only to be necessary, to become ever more perfect. This feeling is stronger than any we have in our ordinary consciousness. Ordinarily, if it had been confronted previously by this blow of fate it would have slunk past it like a coward, would not have chosen the compensating necessity. But the deeper consciousness of which we know nothing does not do this. Instead it seeks its destiny, and feels it as a process of growth toward perfection. It says, “I entered into this life. I was aware of an imperfection that has been in my soul since birth. If I would develop my soul this imperfection must be remedied, but to do this I must go on to meet this misfortune. I must seek it out.”

There we have the stronger element in the soul, compared to which the web of ordinary life with all its sympathies and antipathies is like a dream. There beyond we enter into that life and feeling of which we can say, “It knows us better, is stronger in us than our ordinary consciousness.”

Now we notice another thing. If we really have the experience just described, if we do not merely know it in theory but truly experience it, then of necessity at the same time we have another experience. While we feel we can already enter into those regions where everything is different from what it is in ordinary consciousness, a feeling arises in us, “I do not want to enter.” This feeling is very deep. As a rule the curiosity that impels people to enter the spiritual worlds is not nearly strong enough to overcome the feeling of revulsion that says, “I will not enter.” The aversion we feel at this particular stage arises with tremendous force, and all sorts of misunderstandings about it are possible.

Suppose that someone has even received personal instructions. He comes to his instructor and says, “I cannot get on at all, your instructions are of no use.” Indeed he may honestly think so. If the instructor gives him the answer due him, however, he would not be able to understand it at all. This answer is, “You can enter perfectly well but you do not want to.” The pupil honestly believes he has the will to enter because his reluctance remains hidden in his subconsciousness. Indeed, the moment he begins to realize his reluctance he lessens it. The idea that he does not want to enter horrifies him so, he immediately begins to damp down his unwillingness.

This reluctance is a subtle and insidious thing. We feel that we cannot enter with the ego, the self, that we have acquired in this world. If a person wants to evolve to higher things he feels very strongly that he must leave this self behind. That, however, is a difficult thing to do because man would never have developed this self if he did not feel in his daily consciousness that he has it in order to develop it here. His ordinary ego has come into this world in order to evolve. Thus, when man wants to enter the real world he feels he must leave behind what he has been able to evolve in the ordinary world. Then there is only one way. He must have developed this self more strongly than he needs for his ordinary consciousness. As a rule he only develops it as far as he needs it in his ordinary life.

Now if you observe the second point in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, you will find it amounts to this, that the self must be made stronger than is necessary for the purposes of daily life. Only then are we able to go out of our body at night and still retain something that we have not used up. It is only when we have fortified our ordinary self by our exercises, and have an excess of self-reliance in us that we no longer want to shrink back from the higher worlds. But then a new and considerable danger arises. We no longer perhaps bring the recollections of ordinary life into our dreams but we bring something else—our expanded and strengthened self-consciousness. It is as though we filled that realm with it.

Anyone who carries through such exercises as given in my book and thus comes to have experiences like the inner soul experiences of Arjuna, enters the realm of dream-life with an expanded, strengthened self. The result is the same whether done by special training or whether we were destined to expand it at a definite period in our life. Arjuna is in this position. He stands at the boundary between the everyday world and that of dreams. He lives his way into that higher region because through his destiny he has a more powerful self in that realm than he needs in his ordinary life. This point I shall have to elaborate still further, showing why Arjuna has this more powerful consciousness, because now, as soon as he penetrates into that realm, Krishna at once receives him. Krishna lifts him out of the self he has acquired in ordinary life, and thus he becomes a different man from what he would have been if with his expanded self he had not met Krishna. In that case he would certainly have said to himself, “Blood relations are fighting against one another, events are taking place that must ruin the ancient holy caste-distinctions and the service to our ancestors—events that must corrupt our womankind, and conditions that will prevent us from kindling the fires of sacrifice to our forefathers.” All these things were part of Arjuna's everyday consciousness. By his destiny he was torn out of it. He must stand on ground where he has to break with all these accustomed feelings connected with old traditions. Thus he would have to say to himself, “Away with all I hold sacred; with all the traditions that have been handed down to me. I will hurl myself into the battle.” But that is not what happens. Krishna appears, and utters what must appear to Arjuna as the most extreme unscrupulousness, as egoism driven beyond all bounds. The excess of force that Arjuna would otherwise have experienced, that he would have used to live through his own life, Krishna uses as a power whereby he makes himself visible to Arjuna. To make this thought still more clear we may say that if Arjuna had simply met Krishna, even though the latter had actually come to him, he would have known nothing of him, just as we would know nothing of the sense-world if we had not received something from the sense-world itself that formed our senses for perceiving it. Similarly, Krishna must take from Arjuna his expanded and strengthened consciousness. He must in a sense tear his self out of him, and then by its help make himself visible to Arjuna. He makes a mirror, we can say, of what he has torn from Arjuna, so that he may be able to appear to him.

We have sought out what in Arjuna's consciousness enabled Krishna to meet him. There still remains unexplained how Arjuna came to it at all. Nowhere do we see the statement that Arjuna had done occult exercises. In fact he had not done any. How then is he able to meet Krishna? What was it that gave Arjuna a higher and stronger self-consciousness? We shall start from this question in the next lecture.

Dornach, April 14, 1923

While this course is taking place for teachers and those interested in education, I will give the lectures that are taking place simultaneously with this course as special anthroposophical courses in such a way that they can also be understood by those personalities who have only recently found their way to anthroposophy, or who are at the very beginning of it. Therefore, some of what I will be presenting here in these lectures in the course of this week will be a kind of repetition for the “enlightened anthroposophists”. But I think that such a repetition can also be quite useful from one point of view or another.

What I am presenting today is first of all intended to be a kind of further elaboration of what I presented in the public lecture that I had to give last week in various places in Switzerland. It is intended to follow on from that lecture and expand on some of it.

When we look at human life in its entirety, we find that this life is divided into two strictly separate life contents: one life content, which we always go through in the time between waking up and falling asleep, i.e. in ordinary daytime consciousness; the other part of life, which is the shorter one in normal people, is the one we go through between falling asleep and waking up. It is that part which is immersed in unconsciousness and only shines forth into consciousness by allowing the colorful diversity of the dream world to flow into it. So that, when we speak from the point of view of human consciousness, we must say: This consciousness is filled during the waking hours with the content that our senses provide us with. What is made known to us of the world through our senses is, let us say, present in our consciousness in a pictorial way. We experience this. Whether in ordinary life or in science, we link our ideas, our thoughts, to what the senses deliver to us; that is, we combine the sensory perceptions and try to find laws in the world of sensory perceptions.

We do all this with our faculty of thought. We connect the thoughts, the ideas that we can obtain through our faculty of thought, to the sensory impressions. But then we develop something else within our waking life. We are pleasantly touched by one event, by one impression of the day, and unpleasantly touched by another; we sympathize with one impression, the other impression is antipathetic to us. This sympathy and antipathy exists in the most varied ways and in the most varied gradations. And we describe what we experience in things, I would like to say, according to our human inner being, in such a way that they give us pleasure, that they cause us pain, that they uplift us, that they make us upset, we describe this as our feeling with things, and we distinguish clearly between our feeling and our thoughts, which represent something external to us. Our thoughts do not merely live within us, they represent something external to us. Through our ideas we gain something about the external world. It is already in the word “imagination” that we thereby gain something about the outer world. That which we imagine, we do not place within, but we place before us. Thought therefore points us outwards. Feeling points us inwards. We have the clear experience that what we feel is experienced inwards, and that it does not have anything to do with the outside to the same extent as thought or imagination.

But we experience something else in the world. When it happens to some people that they encounter, say, a vicious dog here or there, they run away. Some people run away when they see a mouse; but something similar also happens under other impressions of the outside world. In this case we say that our will is aroused. While feeling proceeds in such a way that we remain calm, we set our whole organism in motion in relation to the outside world through our will, roughly speaking.

This is how we speak when we want to talk about our consciousness as it develops during waking hours. From this consciousness we clearly distinguish the unconsciousness, which also belongs to our life, and which we spend between falling asleep and waking up. But it is from this unconsciousness of sleep that the colorful diversity of the dream world streams forth.

Now let us enlighten ourselves a little about what has a certain value for the ordinary human consciousness. We can say: For this ordinary human consciousness, the dream world plays out of the unconscious. It shines into the conscious mind. And then thinking, feeling and willing emerge in consciousness from the experiences of the day, from the experiences of the waking state.

How can we first of all, I would like to say in a popular, external way, indicate this difference between the unconscious state of man, out of which dreams shine, and the fully awake state?

Well, you will not need to think about it for long, you will find that in the waking state man feels involved in that which he calls his physical organism.

Take the world of dreams. It runs before you in pictures. You must say to yourself that while the world of the dream runs in pictures before you, you are not switched into your physical organism. When a person wakes up, he feels above all that his will is penetrating his physical organism. We also need our senses when we are awake because we control them through our will. So we can say: The sleeping state, from which the dream emerges, passes into the waking state by switching the will into the physical organism, so to speak.

So let us now look at this physical organism. Even as I say: Let us look at the physical organism - I am actually appealing to your sensory faculty of perception. I am appealing to what you know through this sensory faculty of perception. First of all, you cannot know anything about this physical organism of the human being other than what the senses convey to you, what you can think about the physical organism. Even no anatomy, no physiology knows anything about this physical organism other than what the senses teach us to recognize and what can be grasped by man through thinking, combining the sensory perceptions.

This, however, draws our attention to the fact that it is first of all the senses - we also become aware of this in the use of our consciousness - to which we must turn if we want to know something about the world in general and about the physical organism of man - the senses and thinking.

Let us take a look at the senses and examine in a very popular way what we have through the senses in relation to the two characteristically differentiated states of waking and sleeping.

Man thinks all too little about what comes into consideration there because, if he is not exactly blind, the lion's share of what he is conscious of in his experience comes from the eyes, and the eyes are precisely those organs that are closed in the human sleeping state, whereby the external impressions are kept out. But think of the other senses. Can you believe that your ear, if you do not block it, gives you different experiences during sleep than during the day in relation to the physical body? If you keep the physical body properly in mind and do not block your ear at night, you cannot possibly think that something different happens through the ear in your physical organism when you are asleep than when you are awake. There is no reason for it. The fact that you don't know that is quite another matter.

Or let us ask in relation to the sense of warmth. We perceive warmth and cold. Yes, do you believe that the warmth you perceive during the day stops at your skin when you are asleep? It will of course have the same effect on your skin. So during sleep, with the exception of your face, you are exposed to exactly the same impressions that you are exposed to when you are awake.

If this were not the case, you would have to assume that during sleep you have a mantle of warmth around you that keeps the heat out. You would have to think that a good spirit is plugging your ears so that the processes that are otherwise caused from the outside are not brought about. When you think of all this, you will come to say to yourself: Well, the eye is so sensitive that the human organism has adapted itself to use its will to hang the curtains of the eyelids over the eyes during sleep.

However, the outside world does ensure to some extent that the sensory impressions are absent during sleep time. But even if we read in the newspaper the other day that it would be more pleasant for those people in Basel who want to sleep and live near pubs if the concerts were to end at half past ten instead of eleven, this clearly indicates that people want to protect their ears, but they have to be protected from the outside. Even if all this is the case, it must be said that just as the outside world is shaped as it is during sleep, so it affects our senses with the exception of our eyes.

And then we must ask ourselves further: what about our thinking, our thoughts? You see, in order to answer this question, one could start from many different points of view; but for today's man, modern science has become popular, and therefore modern man knows that from every sense there is a continuation to the inside of the organism, namely the nerve cords, and that because the nerve cords go inwards as a continuation of the senses, thinking, imagining, follows on from sensory perception.

Yes, if you now hear, even if it is only the relative silence in the night - and it is quite natural that you hear it, because your ear is open, what is in your surroundings is audible, that causes the same processes that it would cause if you were awake - why should that stop before the nerves, that is before thinking?

So you must say to yourself, through your physical organism you - as I said, always with the exception of the eyes - do not stop the sensory impressions. But you do not keep thoughts out either. And you can even imagine - it remains hypothetical for the time being for external observation - that even if there is a relative calm during the night for certain senses due to the social facilities, it is certainly not present for other senses; certainly not for the sense of warmth and cold, for example, and certainly not for the sense of touch either, because, isn't it true, when you press your thumb on the blackboard, you perceive the pressure. Why should the perception of pressure not be the case when you lay your back on the bed? You must of course perceive this pressure, which is conveyed by the sense of touch, throughout the night. Likewise, if you place something on your hand, you will feel it. Why shouldn't you be aware of the comforter you put on yourself throughout the night and so on? But not only that, but the continuation inwards, the formation of ideas and thoughts, why should we stop at them? Because they are mediated by the organism.

So that if we look impartially at what is actually there, we must say to ourselves: Even when the physical body lies in bed during sleep, it has the usual impressions through the senses. It also has the usual experiences that appear to us as conscious ideas when we wake up during the day. Just as we know nothing of sensory impressions at night and yet they can be there, so we know nothing of our thoughts; but they are there.

A person does not usually realize that when he is asleep he is constantly thinking. But he knows nothing about it. Just as he knows nothing of the pressure of the blanket that lies on him, so he knows nothing of the thoughts that go on continually in his sleep. They are there. Man thinks the whole time of his life, not only during the day. Even if he does not consciously have thoughts, he still thinks, but these thoughts are in him. So that we are guided to how man is permeated by a world of thoughts from the moment he falls asleep until he wakes up.

Now take the person who wakes up. He wakes up. He wakes up from his dreams, we say. By studying certain dreams one can very easily perceive how quickly the dream runs its course, so that it has actually taken place immediately upon waking. You need only remember that you can dream - of course I don't want to put anyone through this, every individual is exempt, but it could happen to someone - that you get into a heated exchange of words with someone which degenerates into a brawl. You know that sometimes people are much naughtier in their dreams than during the day. It degenerates into a brawl; the other person smacks you down, as they say, and lo and behold, you wake up: You realize that a raindrop has fallen on your cheek. It even woke you up, the raindrop. The whole dream, which looks as if it has lasted a long time, is only caused by this raindrop at the moment of waking up.

You can experience this with countless dreams. They actually happen in a flash, caused by something, and have a very dramatic content. So we can say: you wake up with a dream. You will find, if you really go to work properly, that the dream gives you something that you could otherwise have thought according to your experiences, but you would have thought it differently when you were awake. We know that dreams clothe what they bring to experience in a certain fantasy.

Take the example I have just given. If a drop of rain falls on your cheek during the day, you have different images of the whole process than the dramatic process where you get into an exchange of words with someone and begin to scuffle; the exchange of words can perhaps last a very long time, the scuffle also a relatively long time, and then comes, let's say, the cheek strike, and that's the end, that's when you wake up. During the day you would have had a very simple experience, a sensory perception and an associated idea. When you wake up, you have a very dramatic experience. It is embellished. But you see, you will hardly dream anything other than what is made up of sensory experiences that you have somehow already had or could have had, or inner bodily experiences and the like. That's what you dream.

If you look at the whole process, the more dreams you observe, the more you will realize what dreaming actually consists of. When you are awake, you see colors through your eyes - light, dark; you hear this or that, you perceive warmth and cold. You combine this through your mind. You have the clear feeling that when you do all this, you are working from the inside out. You have the will inside with which you penetrate all of this. You work from the inside out. Let us leave untouched for the moment what is working from the inside outwards; but you have the feeling that you are seizing your sensory impressions, that you are somehow bringing them into order through your ideas. You combine these sensory impressions and so on. But you do it all from the inside. Yes, when you dream, just think about it once, you have similar images to the sensory impressions. You only need to remember a vivid dream and you will say to yourself: there are similar images. You see colors, you see someone moving and so on; images are there just as they are in the sense world. Only that in the sense world these images are, so to speak, superimposed on the hard objects; in dreams they float freely, these sense images. And ideas are also present in dreams, even cause and effect, of which natural science is so proud. One does not merely dream images, one dreams connections. It's all in there.

Only if you look closely at the dream, you will have to say to yourself: Yes, what I experience in dreams is actually the opposite of what I experience when I am awake. It is the other way around. When I am awake, I know that I am receiving sensory impressions, I control them through my thoughts. When I am not dreaming, the sensory impressions assail me first, and then a kind of connection lives within the sensory impressions, as it otherwise lives through the thoughts. Just as if the context were behind the sensory images, so it is in dreams. And if you think about these things properly, you will find that this dreaming is actually the other way round. It is as if you first encountered the sensory perceptions and then could not quite grasp the thinking. That is why the sensory images are so inconsistent, so illogical. You cannot grasp thinking. When you are awake, you have more or less, depending on whether you are more philistine or more imaginative, the sensory images in your power, in your strength. You know that thinking is within you, and with thinking you control the sensory images that are somewhat further away from you. In dreams, you encounter the sensory images. Thinking is now further away, you cannot catch it. In short, if you look at the matter rationally, you get the impression that when you are awake, you live from the inside out, the sensory images are on the outside (yellow arrows), and thinking is on the inside (violet arrows). This makes itself felt.

When you dream, it is the other way around (red arrows), then you first approach the sensory images, but cannot catch the thinking behind them; you cannot get to it properly. This is why the thinking inside the dream is so colorful.

You can distinguish between dreams and sensory reality through proper observation. In ordinary waking sensual reality you live from the inside out. You are quite intimate with your thoughts. Thinking is closer to you. With this thinking you combine the sensory impressions.

When dreaming - it follows from observation - you have to be outside, because you cannot properly approach thinking. That is why dreams have such a curious logic, because thinking is beyond. So when you are awake, you are there, and when you are dreaming, you are out there (see drawing). But you have just come in, because this then passes over into the ordinary waking state, where you are intimate with thinking. Just feel that when the dream runs its course, it runs into ordinary daytime consciousness. You rush into your ordinary thinking, you pass through the surface of your body. You pass through your eyes, but from the outside. You do not yet have the optic nerve. You have the eyes, they pass through you. And the optic nerve, which works from the other side, from a kind of beyond, is still playing around with the images when you slip in; then you are intimate with the nerve, which makes an orderly world out of the images. It is the same with all the other senses.

So you can see, simply by stating the facts, how awakening really consists of slipping into the body. So what must sleep consist of? You only need to place these facts properly before the eye of your soul and you will say to yourself: I must somehow be outside my body.

And now let us go through the ordinary consciousness of the day. The “enlightened ones” will only have a repetition of what I have to say now. If we go through the imaginations, we will find: In the imagination we are really awake, there we are intimately together with our thinking, there we are really awake. So we are intimately together in waking with that which sits within us as our thinking, with reference to which we are really awake.

But now let's take feeling. If you observe properly what you experience, you will not be able to say to yourself that feeling is just as intense as thinking. You will have to say to yourself: Feeling is already less logical than thinking. One allows oneself much less logic in feeling than in thinking. We allow ourselves much greater freedom and arbitrariness about what we like or dislike than about what is mathematical. It is clear that if it were a matter of feeling, housewives would prefer to take two francs and two francs again, that would be five francs instead of four, and not only housewives, but I think all people would probably prefer it. However, in thinking it is not indeterminacy but determinacy that matters.

In short, even if we see how different feeling is from dreaming in terms of the content of experience, feeling is not inferior to “dreaming in terms of indeterminacy. When we feel, we are in the same state as when we dream. Only that dreaming gives us images, whereas feeling gives us that peculiar content of life which we call feelings. In its state, feeling is definitely a waking dream.

We also know that if we want to immerse our logical ideas in the artistic, we have to use feeling. Without feeling there is no artistry. We have to immerse it in feeling. We feel, we have to give it an element that is similar to dreaming. In this way we create something similar on the inside to what the dream world creates on the outside. We do not create logical ideas internally, but images of the imagination. And this has been felt at all times, how dreams from the outside are filled with all the unfamiliarity and all the astonishing things that come from the outside, but are nevertheless similar to the fantasies that go inwards.

And let's move on to the will - well, let's just be very clear about this: the waking consciousness knows nothing of the will. It first has the thought that you want to go there or there. Even if we have to speak of wanting just then, when we wake up, because we feel that we are then taking possession of our body, we still know nothing about wanting. We have a thought: you want to go here or there. How this now shoots down into the organism and moves the legs so that it becomes will remains unknown. You only see in yourself how you move. What passes between the thought and the manifestation of the will is unknown to the consciousness, as unknown as what you sleep through. In fact, by developing a will, you sleep into your organism.

We can therefore say: Feeling is dreaming during the waking of the day; willing is sleeping during the waking of the day. With regard to the will, one does not wake up at all with the ordinary daytime consciousness. This also takes place in sleep during daytime consciousness. So that we can say: If we are decent people, we sleep on average only a third of our lives - quite seriously - some more, some less. But on the other hand we are compensated by the fact that we also carry sleeping within us while we are awake, namely in our will. And if you add this up, you will get something other than a third.

And the feeling, that is the dreams that arise out of the will, that is again out of sleep, and arouse the imagination. Just as dreams reveal themselves out of sleep, feeling reveals itself out of the will. You can also observe this in a certain way. Just think for a moment that you have, say, a flower in front of you. If you are able to pick it and take it with you, then you have it. You have applied an impulse of will. If you are not able to take it with you, then you are content with the fragrance, with the pleasantness of the fragrance, with the pleasantness. You only experience the flower internally, in your emotional life. But you could almost say: what is a pleasant feeling? A pleasant feeling is the inner, attenuated experience of that for which the strong experience you are actually striving is a decision of will. One wants to have what is pleasant to one; if one does not come to have it, it remains merely pleasant to one. So feeling is a weakened will. Dreaming only comes about in a different way during waking hours than during sleep. Dreaming during sleep is a restrained sleep. Feeling during daytime waking is a will that has not fully materialized.

If we did not have inhibitions within us, we would want everything that is pleasant to us, we would push everything away from us, even an expression of will that is not pleasant to us. We only hold on to the will when we feel. We merely dream of wanting instead of really wanting when we feel.

Now, we can say: If we draw the boundary between sleeping and waking with an ordinary line, then we have thinking during waking. We have nothing for it during sleep; that is gone. During sleep we have dreaming. Feeling corresponds to this during waking. During waking we have the will. The real sleep, the sleep state, the dreamless sleep corresponds to this during sleep.

Now take a look at this. We have found out: Feeling and dreaming, willing and sleeping actually live in the same element. In a way, dreaming is what we do at night and feeling is what we do during the day. It is the same, the same state. So that which feels by day must dream, and that which wills by day must sleep dreamlessly. So in order for me to feel and want during the day, to dream while sleeping and to live out this sleeping state of wanting, it must be inside the body. So you get an idea of a human being that can be inside and outside in relation to the body. If it is outside the body, it sleeps dreamlessly or lets its dreams arise; if it is in the body, it wills or feels. Only when it enters the body does it encounter thinking. You cannot see thinking externally. It is therefore something that is in man throughout life, as we have said, but as something invisible. Now, because it is an invisible thing - we shall see that it can also be called so for another reason - let us call that which thinks, in addition to the physically visible, the etheric body. This etheric body remains asleep and awake in the physical body throughout life.

That which feels does not remain in there; it wanders out during sleep and gives the possibility of dreams. We call it the astral body.

And that which wants, and which remains in dreamless sleep, we call the ego. And so we get these three invisible parts of the human being through mere observation: etheric body, astral body and ego. We need not doubt the physical body.

Now it is a matter of this: we see the physical body with the physical senses. What else is in the human being cannot be perceived with the physical senses. Can it somehow be made visible, perceptible, visible? This can be done by bringing about the following in the human being.

I told you that if you live awake, you live from the inside out. Now imagine that for my sake you have the eye or some other sense organ. That's where the nerves come from. They end inside the eye, they have ends somewhere. Now let's look at this waking state. We live intimately together with our thinking, that is, in the physical body with the nerve. We live together with this nerve. But we not only live in thinking, we live in the sensory impression. The nerve radiates, so to speak, into that which is the sensory image. It can also be expressed physiologically: The nerve comes into contact with the blood circulation, and through this it enters the sensory image. There we perceive the outside world.

But remember, we do not perceive the outside world, we merely develop life in the nerve itself and only reach the end of the nerve. We do not go into the blood circulation of the eye, but we stop where the nerve has its stumps; we only go to the end of the nerve. There we have an idea of a sensation, thus also a thought. The thing remains a memory. It is therefore shadowy because it does not reach the blood.

You see, in ordinary life, you do it in such a way that you have perceptions. They pass into the nerves. The nerves end inside the body. Then they are experienced in the memory up to the final state of the nerve. That's where the imagination starts, that's where it becomes memory-imagination. If it penetrates to the end of the nerve, it becomes perception; if it only reaches the stump, if it does not penetrate, it becomes memory. But at first one can remember nothing other than what one carries within oneself. Now imagine that through certain exercises you not only bring what you carry within you to the end of the nerve, but also what you take in from the other side, from outside. Imagine that you not only push to your nerve endings what you first let into your head, but that what you take in from the world without perception, or what you take in through your spinal cord nerve without perception, then the experience enters the nerve on the other side. It hits here. (See drawing.) That does not go to perception. Then you get those images that we call the content of the imagination. And then you perceive this etheric body, which contains the activity of thinking within it.

And in the same way, as we will see tomorrow, you can also take into feeling that which does not first come from outside and is reflected, but which you take into the body from backwards, so to speak. Then comes the inspiration. It does not go into the nerves, it goes into the breathing process and the circulation process. In this way one understands the astral body. And when one finally develops intuition, when one not only feels what one has learned in life as walking, but when one feels oneself as the other person who works and is, when one passes completely over into the other person, then intuition comes. And through this one understands the ego and the will. So that one can say:

The etheric body is grasped through imagination,
the astral body is grasped through inspiration,
the ego is grasped through intuition.

In ordinary life one does not have the ego, but the ego sleeps. One only knows something of one's I, which is asleep, just as one knows in the dark that it is dark. But one does not have the objects that are there. So the I is also asleep.

In the most intense thinking you can find, so to speak, those things that you find described in my “Theosophy” from the beginning: Physical body, etheric body, astral body, I. And then you can point out how these members of human nature can also be grasped in a visible way through imagination, inspiration and intuition.

Translated by Luise Boeddinghaus

At present there is a general opinion that there are certain limits to human knowledge, not only temporary knowledge owing to the fact that one had not achieved everything in the time that has already passed, and one would have to leave some things for the future, but in quite a general sense one speaks today of limits of perception, limits to knowledge for humanity. One thinks that man is constituted in such a way that he can only know about certain things, while other things are above his ability to know about them; and that it is mainly the facts of the so-called supersensible world which man is supposed not to be able to perceive and for which he has to be satisfied with what is called a belief, an assumption arising out of obscure feelings and such like. Particularly the endeavours of the past centuries and of the present time, which have yielded the greatest successes in the field of natural science and which have also brought about the greatest practical results, are considered proof by contemporary humanity that one has to come to a halt at that which can be observed by the senses, which can be proved by experiments and so forth, namely the sense perceptible real world. This is, when one speaks of man, only that world which man traverses between birth and death, or conception and death.

Now it cannot be denied that natural science owes its great successes to the fact that it has limited itself to the exploration of every aspect of the sense world and does not in any way draw any conclusions from the sense world to the supersensible world. But on the other hand there is connected with this, as one believes, fully proven acceptance of limits to knowledge altogether, something inwardly immeasurably tragic for the sensitive human being, something tragic which today does not yet come to the consciousness of many people, but which lives in many human souls in vague feelings, in all sorts of subconscious sensations, making them unsure in life, even unsure and unable in outward actions, in relationships to their fellow human beings and so on. For it is gradually felt more and more that the limits at which one wants to stop in this way are not only those of an outward supersensible world, but that with these limits to knowledge, if rightly perceived, there is still something quite different involved. Man gradually feels that his own true being must be of supersensible nature, that his true being which as man gives him his value and dignity must be found in the spiritual, in the not-sensible. If one calls a halt to all knowledge before the supersensible, then one calls a halt before human self-knowledge. Then one renounces insight into the most precious, the most valuable in the human being himself.

But thereby one also undermines one's real inward self-confidence. Whereby does man feel himself to be part of the natural world which today has been so successfully explored? Only because he bears this world of nature within himself in his outer physical body. Everything that exists in our surroundings as natural substances and natural laws we carry within us, at least most of it. Through this we can feel connected with physical nature. We would not feel that we existed in this physical nature if we were not part of it with our own body, or if we could not explore ourselves as physical beings. But in the same way it is with the supersensible, with the as truly felt spiritual inner being of man, even though men do not as yet bring it to full consciousness. If we cannot feel ourselves as belonging to a spiritual world, as beings who take into themselves and bear within themselves the forces and substances of the spiritual, then we cannot accept ourselves as spiritual human beings at all. But then we must lack the self-confidence towards that which after all we feel to be our most precious, our most dignified, that by which we actually are human beings, indeed want to be human beings. This has another side to it. We feel that that which we call our moral impulses, which we call the content of our moral-spiritual forces, does not flow out of natural life, certainly not out of what takes place in muscles and bones. We feel them to be coming from a spiritual world, but we experience uncertainty about this whole spiritual world if we have to call a halt before the supersensible with our perception.

And in this way present day humanity cannot really build a bridge between that which in outer nature is to it a brutal - as I would like to call it—fact, and that which flows to it out of the most intimate spiritual inner life as the content of the moral world order. One does not have the courage to bring to full clarity what it is that the human soul has to contend with here. Natural science has worked thoroughly towards being able to say something, albeit hypothetically, about the present day creatures out of which man is supposed to have developed. One describes, at least hypothetically, how once upon a time our present world is supposed to have developed out of the world mist. Hypotheses are also made about the end of our planetary system or the system altogether to which we belong. One imagines this whole system which exists in time as somehow contracting, constituting itself out of natural substances and natural forces. One imagines physical man then emerging out of a part of these forces at a certain time. Electricity, magnetism, warmth and so on, they can be outwardly observed, there the thinking human being feels safe with the content of his consciousness. But when the need arises in him to think of that which does not come from his physical nature, the moral spiritual impulses as working in the world, when he must think of as working in the world what he brings about out of a spiritual elemental force, what now must also be in the world, when he must have experiences in the world which must not pass away together with that which passes away with the physical—then man has no stand to say to himself out of that which is accepted by the limits to knowledge: these moral forces are just as valid as that which comes out of the brute forces of physical nature.

From this there come to man today not only theoretical doubts but insecurity of the whole soul life, insecurity apparent everywhere even though people deceive themselves about this. For this is the very character of present civilization that one deludes oneself about the deepest questions of civilization. But in the subconscious these questions are nevertheless active, they express themselves—albeit not in theories, but in the whole tenor of soul, in the confidence and capability of the soul life. That is the inner tragedy which can actually be noticed in the depths of every soul, even of the most superficial. And this is where then that arises which can seem paradoxical in the present time, there arises the longing in many people just for supersensible knowledge! One might say in the spiritual realm it is just the same as with hunger and thirst. One doesn't long for food and drink when one is satisfied, but one longs for them when one is hungry. And from an inmost need present humanity longs for the supersensible because it doesn't have it. While on the one hand philosophers and natural scientists today want to prove more and more that there are unsurpassable limits and borders before the supersensible, we see on the other hand an insatiable thirst of already many human souls for supersensible knowledge, and the number of these people will get ever greater.

To come to this supersensible perception there is a point of view, or I could rather say a method of investigation of which I would like to speak to you today. But I do not want to speak to you of a method of investigation of the supersensible which today one often wants to achieve in a very easy way, but I shall speak to you of a method of perception which, although it is an absolutely intimate matter of the human soul, but in this just as scientific, indeed as exact, not only as an outer scientific result, but as the mathematical or geometric results of science itself.

But while one is striving towards such knowledge and just comes to a knowledge of that which is the supersensible in man, one immediately enters something which right from the start causes all kinds of doubts, causes uncertainties right from the start.

When we look outside we soon notice that the natural scientists and philosophers who speak of limits to knowledge are right as concerns the immediate outer perception. So we must look inside. But when we look inside and we remain within the ordinary consciousness, with that which we have in ordinary life and also in the usual science, then in the beginning nothing confronts us either than a kind of thought picture of the outer world again. When one is completely honest in one's striving for self-knowledge and asks oneself: What is there, when instead of looking out into the world you look back into yourself, what is there actually inside you?—Then one will have to realize that one finds the world inside again, albeit in a picture. What one has experienced has imprinted itself onto our life of concepts, of feeling. We experience as it were a thought picture and feeling picture of that which is outside as well. We have only directed our gaze backwards. This gives us at first nothing new, but only in a dimmed down way in picture form that which is outside too. Only as a general feeling man senses that he is present in these weaving thoughts, ideas and sensations as an I, as a self. But that is so general and undefined, that initially he cannot do much with it.

That is why in the Middle Ages, in the times when one approached self-knowledge, knowledge of the human soul, in a more intensive way, one didn't initially pay much attention to that which one can gain by a merely backward directed self-observation during the ordinary consciousness, but one tried to achieve knowledge of the soul in a different way. This different way is actually interesting, and I must start from this different, often much desired way of knowledge of the soul, so that we can understand one another about the knowledge of soul which I actually mean. But I mention beforehand that I only start from this other knowledge of soul in order to explain what I want to bring, but that I don't want to attribute a special value to it. Therefore nobody should believe that because I start from the dream I already give it value for knowledge. However, this dream life is immensely meaningful.

Those who at some stage have sought knowledge of soul through the dream life, will have noticed that in a certain sense the soul life appears much more characteristically in a dream than when one merely looks into oneself and, as one often says, wants to observe oneself. You have observed the dreams and have initially found two types of dream. As you know, the dream conjures up weaving pictures of a fantastic reality which is initially not as abstract as the thoughts we have in our day consciousness.

But the dream creates initially something which appears enigmatical, on the one side by its composition, on the other side by its content.

There are two things which man experiences as pictures in a dream. Initially pictures of experiences which we went through during our life on earth, reminiscences from life. This arises and shows us the one or other thing which we experienced many years ago. But what there asserts itself rises up next to other things in a connection with was not supplied by life. Occurrences which took place ten years ago are tied together with others which took place the other day. The most removed from one another comes together. By putting together fragments of life, dreams create impossible pictures, chaotic pictures. Everything which outer life gave to us by way of occurrences which we experienced is conjured up to us in dream in a chaotic fashion. That is one kind of dream. The other kind is that in which our own bodily condition is conjured up before us in a kind of symbolic image. Who would not have dreamt of suffering from the heat of a boiling hot stove? He has seen the flickering flames; he awakes and has strong palpitations of the heart. Or we dream that we are walking past a fence. We see how one or two poles are damaged and then we wake up with toothache. In the one case, when we dreamt of the boiling hot stove with its heat, it was a picture of our heart which was palpitating strongly. In the other case, when we dreamt of the fence, it was a picture of our row of teeth which somehow gave us pain. And someone who can penetrate more deeply into these things knows that a certain area of dreams is characterised by inner organs being shown to us symbolically in the dream. However, one must be quite knowledgeable about all the facts which come into play, if one wants to recognise in the symbols what actually expresses itself of the inner being of man in them. Then one will find that there is hardly an organ or an inner process which cannot be conjured up for us inwardly by dreams.

Now former psychologists who have worked with dreams have developed a very valid view about the relationship of man to dreams. They said to themselves: that which we bear within us, we can only feel, but we do not see it, we don't have it in front of us like an outer object. But when we have our own heart beat in front of us in the picture of a boiling hot stove, then we have at least a picture in our consciousness that we make for ourselves, that looks like the picture of an outer object. We have to be separated from the outer object if a picture of it is to arise in us. That which one is oneself, even if it is one's own body, one feels, one feels it sometimes painfully when something organic is not in order, but one does not look at it. When one looks at something in picture form one must be outside of it. And so the former psychologists, which still existed in the 19th century, argued: If I am dreaming in symbols about my own body and its processes, I cannot be in my body, for then I would not experience it. Therefore I must be outside my body in such a case. The picture in any case shows me something of an independent soul-spiritual life over against the body. And furthermore they argued: When I dream in any, however hidden way, of reminiscences of life, then the outer natural existence as it is would have to present itself to me. But there something is constantly changing; there the dream conjures up for me the most fantastic relationships. There again I must be inside, for nature as it usually surrounds me would not be able to show me the occurrences which I have experienced with it, nor the occurrences of human life which I have experienced, in quite a different order.

In this way something was put together of which one could say: It was a valid conviction for these former psychologists, that there they caught something of the soul in a condition where it is separated from the physical body. For firstly man cannot be united with his body if the occurrences of the body, even though only in symbols, in the dream appear to be separated. He must then be outside his body. But again, we must also be inside the reminiscences of our experiences, be together with them, when we have the second kind of dream, for nature does not alter the connection in which experiences have occurred. That we must alter ourselves. Therefore we must be outside, outside our body, when we have the first kind of dreams, and in the same way we must be inside our experiences in the second kind. That means we must actually be outside our physical body with our experiences of soul when we dream. In so far that which former psychologists said to themselves is absolutely indisputable, one cannot say anything against it.

But something else has to be said. The dream cannot give me any sure knowledge about the self. It can lead us to the way of how one can come to such a certainty. Because what we are inside during the time between going to sleep and awakening when we are outside the body: that, which the dream is showing us there, that we certainly are not; for those are on the one hand pictures of our bodily interior, even symbols of this bodily interior, thus that again which is taken from our bodily interior. How can we, when sleeping we are outside our body, be the same which we are in the interior of our physical body? So something else must be the case. We must be something outside our body, but that does not assert itself. We are initially not able to lay hold of the actual nature of the soul in the sleeping state. That conceals itself and masks itself at first; it surrounds itself with pictures of its own bodily nature and shows itself in relationship to its own life in arbitrary compositions of its experiences. The former psychologists have rightly deduced that we are outside our body when we dream, but that the dream shows us something about this being which is outside our body, that is not the case, although they believed it. Because it doesn't show us anything except what we have formerly experienced within the body, and our own body in symbols. Therefore if we are something outside our body, then this is masked in the dream, then the dream is wearing a mask in respect of this. If we want to discover our own being, then we must be able to take this mask off the dream, that is off the soul—for the dream is this mask.—Up to here a more intimate view of the dream leads us onto a path. As former psychologists realised that the dream ultimately doesn't show anything besides what it takes out of the sense world, they of course also had their doubts. And just as one could not believe to have certainty by means of an ordinary backward looking self-observation, so one was also not satisfied with that which the observation of the dream world could give one. Over against this there now appears that which I always call the anthroposophical world view or anthroposophical way of investigation. This initially maintains: If the dream shows us that we are something outside our body, then it proves itself to be too weak by itself to show, to reveal its own being. To reveal itself it uses bits and pieces of reminiscences of life, of symbols of its own bodily nature. Therefore we have to strengthen the soul life so that we come to that which in the soul life stands masked before us in the dream. This one can do. One can do it by copying the dream in full consciousness by a systematically exact so-called meditative life as I have described it in my book “Knowledge of Higher Worlds” and other writings. But not copying it by artificially creating dreams, but awakening in the soul in full consciousness that which in dream arises spontaneously from the subconscious. One comes to this by accustoming oneself to proceed in the same way as the dream proceeds spontaneously—to proceed by imagining things which one knows well symbolically in inner meditation. The dream conjures up symbolically for us our own bodily nature.

One now practices—as neither our own inner being nor outer nature give us symbols—strictly systematically to imagine symbolically. In this way concepts are by force of will brought into a symbol by us, just as the dream conjures it up or us spontaneously. It must be created by inner activity, but that means, the dream must be strengthened.

In outer life we give ourselves over to passive observations and perceptions. Then the inner activity is shadowy. Everyone really senses how shadowy the abstract concepts are, how the thoughts are given over to the outer world and then proceed in a shadowy way. Everyone speaks of the shadowy thought compared to concrete reality. But when one now rises to imagine symbolic things, one has to create these symbols.

And when one is a fully conscious human being and no fool, then one knows that one makes them oneself. Then one is by no means a dreamer but a normal waking person, nay even more than a normal waking person. To the dreamer the symbols come spontaneously, to the waking person the conceptual images come through outer stimulation. The waking person who makes alive within himself that which dreams give, who places before the soul symbols with all inner strength and imitates the dream in full consciousness, awakens himself as it were to a higher activity of thinking and imagining and with this to an altogether higher activity of soul than one has in ordinary consciousness. That however must then be really practiced quite systematically.

And likewise the other side of dream can be imitated. We take experiences from our life that can be separated from one another by years. We can combine them in such a way that the one stands next to the other, but now not chaotically as in dream but from a point of view which may perhaps be from fantasy, but which we quite consciously determine, which is not imposed on us by our inner being, but which we ourselves create inwardly. And in this way we gradually educate ourselves to remain in an inner life of soul; to remain strongly in a life of soul which proceeds totally from the inner activity.

Today one usually underestimates what actually happens there with the human being when he does such exercises, because one does not love the inner activity of thinking, because one already finds it very active when one lives in thoughts induced by outer observation. But he who in all seriousness becomes a true imitator of dream in full consciousness, experiences that he strongly intensifies his inner mobility of soul, that he definitely strengthens it. But he is, if he is no fool but a sensible human being, fully conscious that he himself is making all these pictures and life associations, that is, that he is living in illusion. With a dream one first has to wake up in order to realize the illusion of the dream from the point of view of waking life. The dream can only be unmasked from the point of view of waking; the dreamer imagines the content of the dream to be reality, although his feeling for reality is not such a fictitious one. He who becomes an imitator of dream becomes aware of how a living inner being, something active, quickening is awakened in him, but how he has a content which is absolutely self-image, illusion. Therefore he comes to the point of not bothering with that which is present in him as content, but to concentrate on that which works within him, is active within him. In short, that which we usually only have as a general feeling of ego or self becomes a strongly felt inner activity. If one wants to become a spiritual scientist and not a vague mystic, one must remain conscious and exact. But if one persists in this one will also come more and more to experience the nature of the illusionary. One knows: You imagine nothing, but you have an imagination. Through this one will also the possibility one day to develop the capacity of soul with which one truly doesn't imagine anything and is yet as active as one has learnt it in the imitation of dream.

I point you here to an activity of soul which must absolutely be cultivated by the investigator of spirit. One usually believes, and those who judge things superficially often say it: spiritual investigation is something where man gives himself up to his thoughts and fantasies—that is easy, while to do research in the laboratory, the clinic and the observatory is difficult, something where you have to renounce things.—But this is not so. Because that which one has to acquire as such an inner capacity of soul requires at least just as much time, nay sometimes much longer time of inner work than any outwardly acquired scientific ability as is common in natural science today. Those who want to gain knowledge about that which is here called spiritual investigation should not raise the objection: In natural science one must not be a dilettante if one wants to have a say, there one must really understand something.—What the spiritual investigator alleges is usually regarded as though it were gained effortlessly compared to that which in natural science is reached with much trouble. But it is only the path which is different. In natural science outer observations and facts are used to come to a conclusion, while the spiritual scientist must first develop his own inner capacity for observation. He develops it as an imitator of dreams but in such a way that in the meditative activity that which in dream is conjured up is overcome by him. In dream we do not become conscious of an activity, the images of the dream conjure it up for us; but on the first step of supersensible knowledge the illusion is totally perceived. One knows: you don't imagine anything—but one notices the inner strengthened, empowered activity and in the end learns by a lot of practicing how one can call up this activity without first needing an illusionary activity for this, without first having to imitate the dream. So it is in imitation that one develops this capacity of soul. Once the capacity is there, one knows what one can do with it. Because then one is in a state where one has an empty but very much awake consciousness, but also inner activity. After one has discarded the illusion of this activity, one has initially no content. But the state in which one lives just as one gets to the point of developing the capacity of inner activity without initially also having a content, this state demands a strong inner struggle. And actually this struggle which one needs for this is the touchstone and test whether this spiritual investigation is an honest and true one. For at that moment when one just gets ready to live with empty consciousness, with normal waking consciousness without this waking consciousness having a content, at this moment an unspeakable pain, an unlimited privation spreads itself over the whole soul life. All that one can otherwise experience as pain in the world is really insignificant compared with this spiritual soul pain which one experiences at this moment of cognition. And one has to overcome this pain. For it is this pain which is the expression of a force which has its physical counter image in all sorts of forms of deprivations: in hunger, which instructs us to eat, in thirst, which forces us to drink and so on. Now we feel something in the soul which has to come towards us and we feel it as an unspeakable pain. But when we live for a while in this pain, when we feel our inner being itself as one filled with pain, that is, when we are for a while pain, when our own human being is for our consciousness for a while nothing else but a conglomerate of pain, then this consciousness no longer remains empty, then this consciousness fills itself, and it now fills itself not with sense content which we receive through eyes, ears and so on, but it now fills itself with spiritual content. And we receive as the first thing which comes to us as spiritual content in this way our own spiritual being as a unified spiritual organisation—but living in time, not in space—as it extends from birth or conception up to the present moment to which we have lived the earthly life. Just as we can look into a spatial perspective and see objects which are far away again in perspective, so we can learn to look from the present moment of our life into our own past. We don't see the bodily at that moment, we only remember it, but we have to remember it, otherwise we are destroyed in our consciousness. But he who wants to become an investigator or spirit may not become a person inclined to fantasy nor a confused mystic, he must use his consciousness and his good sense just as a mathematician would for a mathematical problem. But just as we normally see objects of space in perspective, so we now look into a time perspective.

Everything that we have experienced in our existence now stands before us in a time tableau, but in a living time tableau. But not only that which we ourselves have experienced now stands before us thus, but also that which shows us how we have come into being, how inner spiritual soul forces have built up our body from birth or conception, how the sculptural forces are which have worked on our body. We see ourselves outwardly. But that which we see there, through which our own soul life stands before our soul, that now also differs qualitatively from the experience of this time tableau.

When one looks back on one's life in the usual way, one experiences the happenings as they come towards one: one experiences for instance how a person has come towards one, how he has approached one, lovingly or with hatred, how he did this or that as he came towards one. One experiences oneself in this memory picture in the way the outer world has come towards one.

In this other memory picture however, which now stands there in real pictures of which one knows that they reflect the own spiritual nature of the human being just as the usual memory pictures reflect the outer nature, in this other memory tableau is reflected to us how we have approached the outer world. There is shown how one was oneself when for instance one approached another personality. How in our soul forces unfolded which found their satisfaction, their delight, their happiness just through that personality. One really looks at oneself how one was as earthly human being. And then one sees how now in the reality both sides in which the dream was masked flow together.

Now the dream becomes a fully conscious reality. It even becomes more than the ordinary consciousness sees. One initially sees the spiritual entity which lives inside the body, which during sleep is independent of it, indeed which is the creator of the body. This one sees. And then one realises, this spiritual entity also contains, but in a spiritual way, metamorphosed, something like the laws of nature but—you are already protesting against it—in a spiritual existence. Into that which one here experiences the moral world is already entering. In this the moral laws are already present in such a way that one now knows: in the same way in which one's own spirituality works, the moral laws are working. There the moral laws begin to stand with equal validity next to the laws of nature.

But with this one only gets as far as the experience of man's own spiritual existence in earthly being. If one wants to go further one has to develop still other capacities in the soul.—The particulars about this you can read up in the above mentioned books, for this can only be achieved by the practicing of many details. Here only the principle shall be described.—Imagine that at a certain time of day you are remembering back to the morning when you got up, or woke up. If you try hard, the course of the day up to this moment can stand before your soul. Now if you don't place the course of the day in such a way before your soul that you start with the morning, then go on to the experiences of the forenoon and so on, but if you place the course of the day backwards before your soul, so that you start at the certain time and now trace it backwards, then you can also say that you get up to the night when you have slept. But there you then don't add anything, there something remains empty, and that which connects again with the backwards imagined happenings is the last experience before going to sleep, and then you can again place the course of the previous day before your soul.

In short, when the human being remembers in this way in ordinary life, there always remain gaps between the conscious experiencing—the gaps which we lived through unconsciously during sleep. Now in order to go further with the exercises which can link up with this backward experiencing, it is necessary to develop a very strong sense of reality. Such a sense of reality is initially not very prevalent among present day people. It is even something which is not all that easy to achieve, because in relation to remembering people usually remain with that which in some way is closely connected with their personality. In their thoughts they do not connect the threads towards the outer world so strongly, that these threads to the outer world connect with their memories. The human being usually has no inclination at all to live in the outer world, in reality in the outer world, with his memories. How much this is the case, of this one can convince oneself in daily life. I have known people who for instance have seen a lady in the morning who had interested them very much, and when one asks them: What colour was the lady's dress?—they don't know it. Therefore it is as though they had not seen the lady at all, for if they had seen her, they would surely also have seen the colour of her dress. How tenuously is one thus connected with the outer world, if in the afternoon one doesn't even know what colour the dress of a person was whom one had seen in the morning! Indeed, I have even known people who had been in a room and who didn't know afterwards whether there were pictures in the room or not.

One can have the most unbelievable experiences in this regard. Therefore he who wants to acquire a sense of reality must first train himself to live fully also in the outer sense reality, so that that which he passes by stands before him as it is out there in the real world. Truly, the investigator of spirit does not become a man of phantasy; he must acquire a sense of reality to the point that it cannot happen to him that he doesn't know in the afternoon what dress the lady was wearing to whom he was speaking in the morning. He must really be able to live with a sense of reality already in the sense world.

Only when one trains oneself to connect that which one remembers of things to the outer world of reality, then one develops the sense which can achieve a fruitful remembering back for such a spirit knowledge. Because for human beings' usual capacity of remembering the memory picture before the last going to sleep can very easily be joined to that after the last awakening. Without any difficulty people simply leave out that which lies between these two pictures as a night-abyss, they tie the picture of the first happening after waking up directly onto the last happening before going to sleep. They usually don't even notice with a lively consciousness that something lies between the two. But if one wants to acquire such a consciousness that one connects that which one has experienced inside with the picture which is there from the outer world, then one must realise that that which one experiences in the morning after waking up is connected with the whole of nature which makes an impression on us, is connected with the rising sun, with all the impressions one has through the rising sun and so on—and that which one has as the last happenings before the last going to sleep is connected with something which in nature doesn't belong together, namely with that which one experienced after the last awakening. There one will notice with the pictures that are standing next to each other: there is something missing!—But by practicing this, by awakening again capacities of soul that don't exist in ordinary life, one gains the strength that as one looks back to where one now has the first picture after the last awakening and wants to proceed to the last picture before the last going to sleep, one now does not see a stretch of darkness in between, but sees that this darkness is beginning to light up spiritually, that something places itself into this darkness.

Just as in the day waking states one only follows that which one has experienced, so there suddenly comes something in between the first experience after the last awakening and the last experience before the last going to sleep of which one now says: you remember something—only something which you haven't known before. It is just the same as in normal remembering, except that one hadn't known anything before of that which now surfaces. Now one begins to remember that which one has previously missed by sleeping through it, even while sleeping through it in dreamless sleep. The empty time which one is conscious of between the last experience before going to sleep and the first after waking up, this is now filling up. And just as our ordinary consciousness is filled with the experiences of natural existence, so our consciousness is now filled with that which surfaces like a remembrance, but of a remembrance of which one now knows that one has experienced it in the unconscious.

Our consciousness is now filled with the soul content which hasn't taken part in the outer experiences but has withdrawn from the outer experiences, has gone asleep. Now one learns to recognise how the sleeping soul is in reality when it doesn't have the strength to bring its experiences which it has during sleep in the spiritual world to consciousness in such a way as man in day waking life brings to consciousness the happenings of physical life. Now one really gets to know the inner being of man as spirit and soul, and at this moment one sees beyond the earthly life. And one will only now be able to connect that, which one sees in the described way like a great but concrete memory tableau of one's earthly life up to this point, to that which one was as a soul-spiritual human being in a purely spiritual world before one descended into this physical world through birth or conception.

And in the same way another experience joins this one. If one develops another capacity together with all this during one's practicing, a capacity which normally is not seen as a capacity of knowledge but which is one too, if one develops that which is love of soul, full devotion to that which meets one, so strongly that this love remains with one even when one now looks at one's own self, that one can love that which appears as something new in the soul with a truly devoted love—then the possibility develops to free oneself in the waking state in full consciousness in one's inner experiencing from the bodily. But at this moment when one has freed oneself from the bodily in one's inner experiencing, one knows how it is with the human being when he lives his life without his body. And in a picture the fact of the passing through the gate of death, of dying, stands before one's soul. If one has once realised what it means to experience oneself free of the body in one's spiritual forces, then one also knows what one is in the spiritual existence after one has left the body and has passed through the gate of death. And one also gets to know the environment which will then be there for man. One learns to know how together with the body when it has been laid aside that falls away which connects us to the sense world. But that remains, which formerly has fashioned us as a human being, the soul-spiritual of man.

In this way one gets to know the experiences which one has had with other people. But that which was within these sense experiences, how soul has found soul, what happened in the relationships with other people, those that were closer to one and those who were more distant, that which happened in space and time—the eternal-spiritual one gets to know, how it rids itself of the earthly form of experiencing.

And more and more the soul now experiences that which was spiritually present within it as relationships to other people. And that which otherwise is only the object of belief, certainty of knowledge. This human beings experience when they themselves have passed through the gate of death. That which the human soul usually longs for as immortality, only enters real human knowledge in this way. But only by recognising the truly eternal in man by exercising our forces to such an extent that we recognise this eternal in our existence in the pre-earthly, spiritual-soul existence, we also gain that for ourselves which gives us certainty about life after death. There is no longer a word for the pre-earthly as something eternal in the human soul in today's civilisation because we only know the one half of eternity, we speak of immortality. Older languages had the other side, the not-yet-being-born, that is, our existence before we entered earthly life. But only both sides—not-yet-being-born and immortality constitute eternity. And it is a fact that man has to pay for his longing for immortality, that it becomes a mere belief if he wants to forgo knowledge of not-yet-being-born, because he will only understand eternity when he recognises both sides of eternity, the not-yet-being-born as well as the immortality of his being in unity. With this then man has advanced to a real taking hold of that which he is, to a real self-knowledge.

I have to emphasise again and again on such occasions that such a spiritual investigation can indeed only be made by someone who has acquired the relevant capacities by exercising or in another way through destiny, but when the results of such an investigation are made known, they can be as plausible to everyone as for instance the results of astronomy. And just as one doesn't have to be a painter in order to experience the beauty of a picture—for if that would be necessary, only the painters would be able to experience it—just as little does one necessarily have to be a spiritual investigator oneself in order to take up the knowledge of spiritual investigation, although one can become one up to a certain degree, because man wants truth and not confusion and error. Just as one can stand before a painting and admire its beauties with one's healthy judgement, so one can experience that which is presented by spiritual investigation, if one does not oneself put obstacles in one's way, such as prejudices and the like. One can understand it when one dedicates oneself to it with one's sense of truthfulness, and the accusation of those who say of the adherents of spiritual science that they only believe blindly is absolutely unjustified. Especially in the present time Anthroposophy will be able to give human souls if by using their sense of truth or by investigation in the indicated way to come to a self-knowledge of the human being, that for which they pine as I have said in the introduction to today's lecture. Even though this demand of the times does not yet come to consciousness in many people, even if it only shows itself undefined or even just in unfitness in life—it is there in that which expresses itself so clearly in the civilization of the present time. Natural science and many philosophical word views speak of insurmountable borders of knowledge. With this the border which leads to man himself is insurmountable. But man cannot in perpetuity do without true self-knowledge.

In tomorrow's lecture I shall continue where I have left off today and depict the ethical-religious life, how it is enriched and made more inward within the human being. With this I shall then tomorrow give the application to the immediate practical life. In today's lecture I wanted first to show how this demand of our time, which as a demand of heart and soul appears in ever more and more people in the present civilisation with its boundaries to knowledge, can be met by a real spiritual knowledge, by a knowledge of that which man wants to know about his own immortality and that which is connected with it, nay must know, because only in this way a true self-knowledge can be achieved, and only with this true self-knowledge a getting hold of oneself and a feeling of self can be connected. Because only through this man will be able to stand before his own soul with its eternal nature, that he acquires knowledge of how he as spiritual-soul being is woven into the spiritual-soul sphere of the world, just as he has his existence in the physical world a physical being. Only when he has acquired a knowledge of himself as spirit amongst spirits, will he also be able to acquire true inner security. Only when the human being knows his worth and dignity in the world, he stands in the world with that consciousness of himself as man, which out of an undefined feeling he can acknowledge as the only right human consciousness. And only because human beings will seek again for such a light of self-knowledge and spiritual knowledge of the world, only through this the hunger of the present time for a true penetrating of the own human nature will be able to be satisfied. For humanity will not be able to manage with all the demands of the progressing civilisation unless it realises: self-knowledge of man cannot be anything else but knowledge of spirit, for man can only feel himself as true man if he recognises himself as spirit amongst spirits, just as he can feel himself in his transient earthly existence as physical being amongst physical beings.

You will have gathered from yesterday's study how important it is to develop a feeling of fellowship, which means overcoming all regard for your own Ego if you wish to penetrate more deeply into the spiritual life. For example, anyone who aspires to occult development must among other things get rid of the following form of egoism. He must not say: “What good is it for me to hear about occult things from others when I cannot see them for myself? That implies a lack of trust. He must trust a person who has reached a certain stage of development. People work together, and if someone has achieved more than others, he will not have achieved it for himself alone but for all the others, and they are called upon to listen to him. By this means his own powers are enhanced, and his hearers, through the very fact of having first given him their trust, will gradually become able to gain knowledge for themselves. You should not want to take a second step before the first.

There are three paths of occult development: the Eastern, the Christian-Gnostic and the Christian-Rosicrucian, or simply the Rosicrucian. They are distinguished above all by the extent to which the pupil surrenders himself to his teacher. What, then, happens to a man who enters on occult development? What are the necessary preconditions for it?

Let us first consider the life of an ordinary man nowadays. From early till late he is occupied with his work and his daily experiences; he makes use of his intellect and his outer senses. He lives and works in what we call the waking state. But that is only one state; between waking and sleeping there is another. In this state he is aware of pictures, dream pictures, passing through his soul. These pictures are not directly related to the external world and ordinary reality. We may call this the dream-state, and it is interesting to study how it takes its course. Many people suppose that dreams are nonsense, but this is not so. Even with people today dreams have a meaning, but not that of experiences in waking life. When we are awake, our mental pictures always correspond to definite facts and experiences; in our dreams they do not. For instance, you may dream that you hear the clatter of horses' hooves, and when you wake up you realise that you were hearing the ticking of the clock by your bedside. Dreams are symbolic pictures. You may have a dream which tells a whole story. A student, for instance, may dream about a duel and all its preliminary details, from the request for pistols to the report of the shot which wakes him—and then he realises that he has knocked down the chair that stood by his bed. Or again, a peasant woman may dream that she is on her way to church; she enters; she hears the priest utter lofty sayings, with his arms moving; suddenly his arms turn into wings and then the priest starts to crow: she wakes up and hears the cock crowing outside!

You can see from these examples that in dreams we live in a very different sort of time from that of our waking consciousness. The actual cause of the dream I have quoted was the last event in point of time. The reason is that such a dream flashes through the soul in a moment and has its own inner time. You must picture it in this way: when you wake up and remember all the details, you extend this inner time yourself, so that the events seem to have occurred in that extended period. This will also help you to get some idea of how time appears in the astral world. A small experience thus creates a long dramatic course of events. The dream flashes through the soul in a moment and in a flash arouses a whole series of pictures. In this way you yourself transpose time into the dream.

Inner conditions may also be represented symbolically in dream: for instance, you may have a headache and dream that you are in a cellar with a lot of cobwebs. Or the beating of your heart or a feeling of being hot may be represented in a dream by a fiery stove. Some people who possess a particular inner sensitivity may have a different experience: they may dream, for instance, that they are in an unhappy situation. Here the dream is prophetic—a symbol of some latent illness which will come out in a few days' time. Many people even dream of the remedy for such an illness. In short, our manner of perception in dreams is quite different from that of ordinary life.

The third state is that of dreamless sleep, sleep without consciousness, when nothing comes before the soul. Now if you begin to be aware of higher worlds as a result of inner development, the first indication you will notice is that your dreams become more regular and meaningful. Above all, you will gain knowledge through your dreams, provided only that you pay careful attention to them. Later, you may notice that your dreams become more frequent, until you come to feel that you have been dreaming all night through. Again, you may notice that your dreams are concerned with things which do not exist at all in the outside world and which you cannot possibly experience physically. You will find that in your dreams you no longer see things which originate in the outer world or symbolic conditions such as those I described above, but, as I have just said, you will experience pictures of things which have no existence in the sense-world, and you will then notice that your dreams are saying something important. For instance, you may dream that a friend of yours is in danger from fire and you may see him getting nearer and nearer to the danger. The next day you may learn that this friend was taken ill during the night. You did not actually see him falling ill; you saw a symbolic picture of it. Thus your dreams may be influenced from higher worlds, so that you experience something which does not exist in the physical world; that is how impressions from higher worlds pass over into dreams. This is a very important bridge to higher occult development.

Someone might say that all this was only dreamt—how can any significance be read into it? But that is a wrong approach. Take the following example: it is said that Edison³⁷ once dreamt how to make an electric light bulb; he remembered the dream and made the light bulb in accordance with it. Suppose someone had then come along and said: “The lamp is no good—it was only a dream.” You can see that what matters is not the mere fact of dreaming but whether the dream has significance for life. Quite often dreams of this sort go unheeded because we fail to notice them. That is wrong; it is just these delicate points that we should attend to; then we shall make progress.

Later comes a stage when the nature of reality is disclosed to the pupil in dream, and he can then test the dream by the reality. When he has advanced so far that he has the whole picture-world present before him in daylight and not only during sleep, he is then able to analyse with his intellect whether what he sees is true. This means that it is wrong to use dream-pictures as a foundation for wisdom; the pupil must wait for them to enter into his daytime experience. If he exercises conscious control over them, a stage is soon reached when the pupil not only sees what is physically present but can truly perceive the astral element in a man, his soul and his aura. He then learns to understand what the shapes and colours in the astral body signify—what passions, for example, they express. So he learns gradually to spell out, as it were, the soul-world. But he must always realise that everything there is symbolical.

Here it might be objected that if you see symbols only, some particular event might be symbolised by all sorts of images, and you could never be sure that a given image has a consistent meaning. But when you reach a certain stage, one image always does stand for one thing, just as in the ordinary world one object is always represented by the same mental concept. For instance, you will find that a given passion is always represented for everyone by the same image. The important thing is to learn how to read the images correctly.

Now you can understand why the sacred books of all religions tend to speak almost entirely through symbolic images. Wisdom, for example, may be described as light: the reason is that to anyone who is occultly developed the wisdom of man and other beings always appears as astral light. Passions appear as fire. The ancient religious documents do not tell only of things on the physical plane, but also of events on higher planes; they owe their origin to seers and are concerned with higher worlds; hence they have to speak to us in pictures. Everything narrated from the Akashic Record³⁸ has for the same reason been presented in pictures of this kind.

The next condition experienced by the pupils is called “continuity of consciousness”. When an ordinary person is completely withdrawn from the sense-world in sleep, he is unconscious. This is no longer so with a pupil who has reached the stage just mentioned. By day and by night, with no interruption, he lives in a state of fully clear consciousness, even when his physical body is at rest.

After some time the pupil's entry into a new but quite specific state of consciousness is marked by the fact that sounds and words are added to the images. The images speak to him in an intelligible language. They tell him what they are, without any possibility of deception. These are the sounds and speech of Devachan, the Music of the Spheres. Everything speaks forth its own name and its relation to other things. This comes in addition to astral sight, and it marks the seer's entry into Devachan. Once a man has reached this Devachanic state, the lotus-flowers, the Chakrams or wheels begin to revolve at specific places in the astral body, turning like the hands of a clock from left to right. These are the sense-organs of the astral body, but their mode of perception is an active one. The eye, for example, is at rest; it allows the light to enter and only then perceives it. The lotus-flowers, on the other hand, perceive only when they are in motion and take hold of an object. The vibrations caused by the revolving lotus-flowers bring them into contact with the astral substance, and that is how perception on the astral plane occurs.

What are the forces which activate the lotus-flowers, and where do they come from? We know that during sleep the exhausted forces of the physical and etheric bodies are restored by the astral body; by its inherent regularity it can make up for irregularities in the physical and etheric bodies. It is these forces, normally used for overcoming fatigue, which animate the lotus-flowers. When a man enters on occult development, he is thus really withdrawing certain forces from his physical and etheric bodies. If these forces were to be withdrawn permanently from the physical body, the man would fall ill; he would find himself utterly exhausted. If therefore he does not want to injure himself, morally as well as physically, he must find something to replace these forces.

He must remind himself of the general rule: Rhythm restores power. Here you have an important occult principle. Most people today lead lives devoid of any regular rhythm, especially as regards their thoughts and their behaviour. Anyone who allowed the distractions of the outer world to gain a hold on him would be unable to avoid the dangers to which his physical body would be exposed in the course of his occult development by the withdrawal of these forces of renewal. Hence he has to strive to introduce a rhythmic element into his life. Of course he cannot arrange his days so that each day passes exactly like another. But he can at least pursue certain activities regularly, and indeed anyone who wants to develop on the occult path will have to do this. Thus he should, for example, do certain exercises of meditation and concentration at a chosen time every morning. He can also bring rhythm into his life if in the evening he reviews the events of the day in reverse order. If he can bring in further regularities, so much the better: in that way his life will take its course in harmony with the laws of the world. Everything in the system of nature is rhythmical—the course of the Sun, the passage of the seasons, of day and night, and so on. Plants, too, grow rhythmically. It is true that the higher we go in the kingdoms of nature, the less rhythm we find, but even in animals a certain rhythm can be observed: for instance, animals mate at regular times. Only man now leads an unrhythmical, chaotic life: nature has deserted him.

Man's task, therefore, is deliberately to infuse some rhythm into this chaotic life, and he has available certain means through which he can bring this harmony and rhythm into his physical and etheric bodies. Both these bodies will then gradually develop such rhythms that they will correct themselves when the astral body withdraws. If they are forced out of their proper rhythm during the day, they will of their own accord regain the right kind of movement when they are at rest.

The means available consist in the following exercises, which must be practised in addition to meditation:

I. Thought control. This means preventing, at least for a short time every day, all sorts of thoughts from drifting through the mind, and bringing a certain ordered tranquillity into the course of thinking. You must take a definite idea, set it in the centre of your thinking, and then logically arrange your further thoughts in such a way that they are all closely linked with the original idea. Even if you do this for only a minute, it can be of great importance for the rhythm of the physical and etheric bodies.

II. Initiative in action. You must compel yourself to some action, however trivial, which owes its origin to your own initiative, to some task you have laid on yourself. Most actions derive not from your own initiative but from your family circumstances, your education, your calling and so on. You must therefore give up a little time to performing actions which derive from yourself alone. They need not be important; quite insignificant actions fulfil the same purpose.

III. Tranquillity. Here the pupil learns to regulate his emotions so that he is not at one moment up in the skies and at the next down in the dumps.³⁹ Anyone who refuses to do this for fear of losing his originality in action or his artistic sensibility can never go through occult development. Tranquillity means that you are master of yourself in the most intense pleasure and in the deepest grief. Indeed, we become truly receptive to the joys and sorrows of the world only when we do not give ourselves over egotistically to them. The greatest artists owe their greatest achievements precisely to this tranquillity, because through it they have opened their eyes to subtle and inwardly significant impressions.

IV. Freedom from prejudice. This, the fourth characteristic, sees good in everything and looks for the positive element in all things. Relevant to this is a Persian legend⁴⁰ told of Christ Jesus. One day Christ Jesus saw a dead dog lying by the wayside; he stopped to look at the animal while those around him turned away in disgust. Then Jesus said: “What beautiful teeth the dog has!” In that hideous corpse he saw not what was ugly or evil but the beauty of the white teeth. If you can acquire this mood, you will look everywhere for the good and the positive, and you will find it everywhere. This has a powerful effect on the physical and etheric bodies.

V. Faith. Next comes faith, which in its occult sense implies something rather different from its ordinary meaning. During occult development you must never allow your judgment of the future to be influenced by the past. Under certain circumstances you must exclude all that you have experienced hitherto, so that you can meet every new experience with new faith. The occultist must do this quite consciously. For instance, if someone comes up to you and tells you that the church steeple is crooked and at an angle of 45 degrees, most people would say that is impossible. The occultist must always leave a way open to believe. He must go so far as to have faith in everything that happens in the world; otherwise he bars the way to new experiences. You must always be open to new experiences; by this means your physical and etheric bodies will be brought into a condition which may be compared with the contented mood of a broody hen.

VI. Inner Balance. This is a natural outcome of the other five qualities. The pupil must keep the six qualities in mind, take his life in hand, and be prepared to progress slowly in the sense of the proverb about drops of water wearing away a stone.

Now if anyone acquires higher powers through some artificial means without attending to all this, he will be in a bad way. In ordinary life today the spiritual and the physical are intermingled, somewhat like a blue and yellow liquid in a glass of water. Occult development sets going a process rather like the work of a chemist who separates the two liquids. Soul and body are separated in a similar way, and the benefits of the mingling are lost. An ordinary person, because the soul stays in close relation to the body, is not subjected to the more grotesque passions. But as a result of the separation I have been talking about, the physical body, with all its attributes, may be left to itself, and this can lead to all manner of excesses. Thus a man who has embarked on occult development, but has not taken care to cultivate moral qualities, may manifest certain traits which as an ordinary man he had long ago ceased to exhibit. He may suddenly become a liar, vengeful, quick to anger; all sorts of characteristics which had previously been toned down may appear in a violent form. This may happen even if someone who has neglected moral development becomes unduly absorbed in the teachings of Theosophy.

We have seen that a man must first pass through the stage of spiritual sight and only then comes to the stage of spiritual hearing. While he is still at the first stage he has of course to learn how the images are related to their objects. He would find himself plunged into the stormy sea of astral experiences if he were left to fend for himself. For this reason he needs a guide who can tell him from the start how these things are related and how to find his bearings in the astral world. Hence the need to find a Guru⁴¹ on whom he can strictly rely. In this connection three different ways of development can be distinguished.

1. The Eastern way, also called Yoga. Here, an initiated man living on the physical plane acts as the Guru of another, who entrusts himself to his Guru completely and in all details. This method will go best if during his occult development the pupil eliminates his own self entirely and hands it over to his Guru, who must even advise him on every action he may take. This absolute surrender of one's own self suits the Indian character; but there is no place for it in European culture.

2. The Christian way. Here, in place of individual Gurus, there is one great Guru, Christ Jesus Himself, for everyone. The feeling of belonging to Christ Jesus, of being one with Him, can take the place of surrender to an individual Guru. But the pupil has first to be led to Christ by an earthly Guru, so that in a certain sense he still depends on a Guru on the physical plane.

3. The Rosicrucian way, which leaves the pupil with the greatest possible independence. The Guru here is not a leader but an adviser; he gives directions for the necessary inner training. At the same time he takes good care that, parallel with the occult training, there is a definite development of thinking, without which no occult training can be carried through. This is because there is something about thinking which does not apply to anything else. When we are on the physical plane, we perceive with the physical senses only what is to be found on that plane. Astral perceptions are valid for the astral plane; devachanic hearing is valid only in Devachan. Thus each plane has its own specific form of perception. But one activity—logical thinking—goes through all worlds. Logic is the same on all three planes. Thus on the physical plane you can learn something which is valid also for the higher planes; and this is the method followed by Rosicrucian training when on the physical plane it gives primary attention to thinking, and for this purpose uses the means available on the physical plane. A penetrative thinking can be cultivated by studying theosophical truths, or by practising mental exercises. Anyone who wishes further training for the intellect can study books such as Truth and Science, and The Philosophy of Freedom, which are written deliberately in such a way that a thinking trained by them can move with certainty on the highest planes. Even a person who studies these books and knows nothing of Theosophy might find his way about in the higher worlds. But, as I have said, the teachings of Theosophy act in the same way.

Here, then, the Guru is only the friend and adviser of the pupil, for by training his reason the pupil will be training the best Guru for himself. But he will of course still need a Guru to advise him on how to make progress in freedom.

Among Europeans, the Christian way is best suited to those whose feelings are most strongly developed. Those who have more or less broken away from the Church and rely rather on science, but have been led by science into a doubting frame of mind, will do best with the Rosicrucian way.

• 37. Thomas Alva Edison, 1847–1931.
• 38. “Everything that has been recounted from the Akasha Chronicle”. The reference is to the communications “From the Akasha Chronicle” published by Rudolf Steiner in his journal, Lucifer-Gnosis, from July 1904 to May 1908. Collected edition, Dornach, 1964. English translation published in America with the title: Cosmic Memory: Prehistory of Earth and Man.
• 39. “at one moment up in the skies and at the next down in the dumps”. From Klärchen's song in Goethe's Egmont, 3, 2.
• 40. “a Persian legend.” See Goethe: Notes and comments for a better understanding of the West-Östlichen Divan, “Allgemeines”.
• 41. Guru. In oriental Initiation, he who guides the pupil's occult development; leader on the path of knowledge.

The topic of this lecture should be a kind of supplement of that about which I spoke here four weeks ago, a supplement on the topic Theosophy and Spiritism. Today I want to explain something more exactly that I could note at that time only indicating. In particular I want to speak about the phenomena of somnambulism which lead into mysterious fields of the human nature and into fields which are interpreted most differently from different sides.

You probably know what somnambulism is. This word should point to certain conditions of the soul which appear in the human being when in his everyday states of consciousness a certain change has happened, above all when the usual everyday consciousness, that consciousness with which we perform our everyday actions with which we get used to nature is not in full activity if it is eliminated, as it were, and the human being still acts emotionally, is still within certain conditions of the soul. We understand as somnambulism any soul activity without full activity of the everyday waking consciousness, as it were from the depths of the soul which are not illuminated by the daytime ego-consciousness. The human soul acts then from this dark depth, and it brings up actions from these depths which differ very substantially from those which the human being accomplishes, otherwise, in the course of his life. We also know that not any person is suited to carry out soul actions with such effacement and elimination of the usual waking consciousness. We know that only those persons whom we call somnambulists who can be transported into a kind of trance or dream state are able to show such phenomena. These persons are in a kind of unconscious condition, while such phenomena arise from their nature, and one has interpreted these conditions in the most different way at different times.

If we transport ourselves once to the ancient Greece, we see which interpretation such actions of somnambulistic persons found in the ancient Greece at that time about which normally the Greek history tells to us. There we meet the priestesses, the so-called oracle priestesses who wanted to make known—from the depth of their souls under effacement of their daytime condition of consciousness—all sorts of things which went beyond the usual human knowledge. Events of the future should got out from such deep souls; whether important state actions whether important legislations are justified or not, these oracle priests should decide about that; briefly, one ascribed that which they made known to a divine inspiration. One believed that the soul when the usual daytime consciousness is extinguished stands under divine influence and conveys the volition of the godhead itself. Not only those human beings enjoyed divine devotion who could be transported into such somnambulistic condition, but above all the revelation the priests made known.

If we go from this time of ancient Greece towards the end of the Middle Ages, we find another view and interpretation of such somnambulistic persons. We see that such persons were understood as being in alliance with all sorts of bad, diabolical, demoniacal powers. We see that that which they made known was considered as something reprehensible, as something that can bring in only damaging, bad influence to the human life. We see that these persons were prosecuted as witches that they were prosecuted because of their devil alliances. Some of the dreadful cruelties towards the end of the Middle Ages are to be attributed to this interpretation of the somnambulistic condition.

In newer time on the other hand when in the outset of the 19th century, in the last third of the 18th century one began to study conditions of the human soul, there were some people who believed that one could gain higher explanations of the human soul studying these conditions; because our usual brain consciousness is eliminated and the senses are not receptive to the outside world, they assumed that the human being is able to find out something about spiritual processes and beings which one cannot perceive with the usual senses. Others looked at these conditions as only pathological ones and understood them merely in such a way that one must eliminate them from everything that can be considered as justified for the normal human being. In the beginning in particular it was science which rejected any interpretation, any explanation of these phenomena in its materialistic confidence and regarded them as symptoms, related to insanity in any way, not at all as anything else than quite abnormal matters. These are some interpretations which one has given of the phenomena.

For us the question must be at first: how can be such phenomena caused?—Because we know that some people get completely by themselves to such a condition where their usual waking consciousness is extinguished where they behave towards the outside world completely as sleeping where they understand nothing of that which takes place in their surroundings with their regular senses where they do not hear if in their nearness a bell sounds where they do not see if in their nearness a light shines where they are receptive, however, in strange way to a particular influence, we say, for example, to the words of a certain person. They see and hear nothing around themselves; they are only receptive to that which a single person says to them or to impressions of certain kind. Yes, they often are even more receptive to the thoughts of a particular person in the room in which they are. These are such phenomena which appear with certain people completely by themselves every now and then. Then we say: such persons are somnambulists; they think, act, feel, perceive in a kind of waking dream, in a kind of sleep which is, however, a particular sleeping state that cannot be compared with the usual sleep to which the human being abandons himself every now and then to get over the tiredness of the day.

We also know that with such somnambulists not only the perception, the sensitivity to certain states can appear, but that such somnambulists can move on particular actions that they carry out actions which they could never carry out in their usual daytime consciousness. We experience that they carry out rationally appearing actions to which, however, more belongs than the sense of direction of the usual daytime consciousness. We see them climbing on roofs, jumping over abysses without anticipating any danger in which they are, over abysses over which they would never jump, otherwise; we see them carrying out actions which they would not be able at all to carry out if they are in their usual waking state. These are only indications of such states at first. Such conditions can appear without any reason, but they can also appear because a person exerts a particular influence on another person; they can appear because the usual daytime consciousness is extinguished in a person with the help of particular manipulations of another person that the concerned person is then transported into an artificial somnambulistic condition. Then such artificial somnambulists show the same phenomena as the natural ones. One calls—we do not consider expressions as especially definite—that person who can transport another person into the somnambulistic condition a mesmerist if the somnambulistic condition is light, and one calls the person magnetised; one says that it is transported into a magnetic sleeping state.

Now the question arises: what do such phenomena mean to the spiritual life, which role do they play in the whole interrelation of the spiritual life, and what can we experience by such phenomena and what do they explain to us about the being and the nature of the human soul and mind? We must ask ourselves: are such phenomena actually such an abnormal matter which does not resemble to the other phenomena of the everyday life? Then, however, the view could take place which simply sees abnormalities in such phenomena; then the view of our doctors could take place, and we would not receive particular information from them.

The dream is often interpreted as something that flits only fantastically through the dream consciousness, as a kind of empty imagination and one is hardly inclined to scrutinise the strange phenomena of the dream world really. But, nevertheless, there were also finer spirits who were inclined to scrutinise these flitting pictures of the dream consciousness, and then one thing appears above all: indeed, it is for the most dreams correct that in the dream an enormous irregularity and arbitrariness prevails that we deal mostly only with snatches of the waking consciousness, of the recollections and pictures which have passed our consciousness during the day, and perhaps of other things which are due to our physical condition during sleep, or also to certain symptoms and the like. This is the lowest kind of dreams, these flitting pictures, subject to complete arbitrariness, which pass through the dream consciousness irregularly.

But the attentive viewer cannot escape that already the most usual personal consciousness, if it is in the sleeping state, also has other dreams beside these irregular and arbitrary dreams, dreams which show a particular regularity. I want to draw your attention only to single examples, which intensely illuminate this regularity which we already find within the usual dream consciousness. You have a watch lying beside yourselves. You do not perceive the ticking of the watch during sleep; you dream of a regiment of soldiers passing outside your window and hear the clatter of the horses exactly. You wake and discover that you have heard the ticking of the watch at this moment; since this continues in your consciousness. You have heard it, however, not as a ticking as your usual ear hears it, but it has transformed itself, has symbolised itself to the scatter of the horses of a passing cavalry regiment.—Or a dream which has really taken place: a farmer's wife dreams that she would go with another woman to the city on Sunday morning. They go to the church and see the priest ascending the pulpit and starting to preach. They listen longer time. There something quite strange soon becomes apparent: the priest transforms himself, he gets wings, he changes into a cock, he crows!—This is a real dream which has happened. The farmer's wife who dreamt this wakes and really hears the cock crowing outside.

You see again what has happened: the ear has heard the crowing cock, but it has not heard the real cockcrow at first, but the dream consciousness has made a symbol of that which it has heard; it has transformed the cockcrow symbolically into this whole story which I have told to you. The dream consciousness spins out such stories quite dramatically. You see that the sensory impressions are not perceived immediately by the dream consciousness, but they are transformed to symbols, and the especially typical is that this dream consciousness really dramatises.

I would like to mention another example—a dream which has really taken place; today I want to mention the right examples only which have been experienced: a student dreams that he is at the door of the auditorium. He is bumped by another. There develops a verbal exchange which leads, in the end, to a duel. The student experiences any preparations of the duel—a long story! The duel really takes place at the arranged place, everything is there, the seconds are there, the first shot is fired, and the dreaming student awakes. He has upset a chair beside his bed; he has heard the chair toppling over, but not in such a way as it is, but this event has transformed itself like lightning into a quite dramatic action. This sleeping dream consciousness is a symbolising one which could be lighted up in its peculiar symbolising activity by countless examples.

Now we ask ourselves: how does this everyday consciousness relate to that which takes action in the human soul, while it dreams? Our everyday consciousness does not immediately take part of these dream actions; for if the consciousness appears in the dream, a kind of another ego appears, a kind of dream-ego; because the dreaming person can see himself, so to speak, he can face himself in the dream. We retain at first that a kind of splitting can happen between the dream-ego and the real ego that really the dreaming person can observe himself quite objectively among the different percepts which he has in the dream. The situations in which this dream appears are determined by the dream consciousness and completely transported to the symbolic-dramatic action that takes place.

A higher level of this dream consciousness happens if we experience conditions of our own physical inner life symbolically in the dream. Again I mention particular examples. Somebody dreams that he is in a musty cellar. Webs are in the ceiling and eerie beasts crawl about. He awakes with headache. Headache has expressed itself symbolically in this cellar. Or another example: somebody is in the dream in an overheated room; he sees a red-hot stove, wakes and has violent palpitations. All these dreams which I tell you are really substantiated. Particular organs of our inside, particular feelings for our inside symbolise themselves in the dream as particular events. Yes, one can say: for the one and same person—who is able to observe on this field knows this—a particular organ takes on a stereotyped appearance which always remains the same. Somebody who suffers from palpitations, has always the same dream, namely the dream which he has had once, let us assume that he saw an overheated stove and the like more. So not only events and facts of the outside world, but also our own physical body express itself allegorically in the dream.

This is only a step to that strange phenomenon where dreamers have illnesses before themselves symbolically by which they are infected or by which they are infected only in a few days. They perceive their own conditions during the dream consciousness. That happens, indeed, only with particular persons who already belong to the somnambulists in a certain respect. From there up to the other phenomenon it is again only a step that a peculiar kind of human instinct points out a remedy or a necessary performance to the full somnambulists. So the dream can really work as a doctor, it can point to the illness and to the remedy at the same time. However, this happens only with particular persons who already have somnambulistic dispositions in a certain respect.

So you see that we deal with a sequence of conditions: from the arbitrary dream up to such quite regular dream perception controlled by particular laws. Everything that I have shown up to now is more or less dream perception; but from there a further step leads to the dream actions.

The most usual dream action is speaking in sleep. We know that it is a very frequent phenomenon that sleepers speak. Yes, we know that they sometimes give striking answers to particular questions, sometimes also answers from which we see that they have not exactly understood what we have spoken to them, or that that is more or less allegorically, symbolically transformed which one has spoken to them, and that is the reason why the dreamer answers that way. One will observe this behaviour if one knows to observe systematically.

A further step leads us then from dream speaking to the dream actions as I already said in my introduction. The dreaming person, in particular if he has a somnambulistic disposition, moves on actions, he rises from his bed, sits down, we say, if he is a student, to his desk and opens his school books. But it also happens that stronger inclined persons sit down and really keep on writing what they have written in the evening or at least copy something and the like more. These matters show us that a transition has taken place from the mere perception to the real action, from the mere feeling to the willing. There are persons who—even though they can be transported into a very strong somnambulistic condition—get to percipience only, and there are those who progress relatively little with regard to perception, but can carry out fearless actions of that kind I have mentioned in the introduction.

Such sleeping actions of somnambulistic persons are carried out with a necessity which has an automatic character. We only need to remember that we often carry out such automatic actions in the everyday life. If any special light impression works on our eye, we automatically close our eye. Our everyday life delivers numerous other actions of this kind about which we do not think further. Everything that we accomplish within our so-called vegetative physical life, our digestion, our breathing, and our heartbeats are actions which we carry out without having a consciousness of them. In similar way we carry out reasonable actions during the somnambulistic state, and such actions result from particular external stimuli with absolute necessity.

Now we must ask ourselves: how have we to understand such phenomena? You know perhaps that there are many people who are really of the opinion that we can eavesdrop on the soul independently of the body in such actions that we have to regard such actions as proofs that the soul can perceive independently of its physical organs like eyes and ears, can act independently of conscious reflection. A lot of people believe that we have to regard such actions as a much more immediate expression of the soul which is detached there as it were from the physical and acts and perceives directly from the spiritual. We want to ask ourselves how we have to consider such phenomena in the light of our theosophical view.

Theosophy shows us that the human being is not this single, isolated being which usually appears to us, but that he is connected by means of countless threads with the universe. Theosophy shows us above all that the human being has various things in common with nature that he has various things in common also with the other worlds which our everyday senses do not perceive, and we can understand the actions, about which we have spoken, best of all if we look at the entity of the human being in the theosophical light. Let me, therefore, briefly indicate what theosophy teaches about the entity of the human being.

Theosophy can consider the physical body with all its organs, including the nervous system, the brain and all senses, according to its observation only as one of the members of which the complete human being consists. This physical body contains substances and forces which the human being has in common with the whole remaining physical world. What takes place in us as chemical and physical processes is nothing else than what also happens outside our body in the physical world. But we have to ask ourselves: why do these physical and chemical processes take place within our body in such a way that they are combined to a physical organism? No physical science can give us information about that. Natural sciences can teach us only of that which takes place in physical and chemical processes in us, and, indeed, it would not be appropriate if the naturalist called the human being, therefore, a strolling corpse because he as an anatomist can discover nothing but physical in the human body. Something must be there that holds together the chemical and physical processes, and arranges them as it were in the form as they take place within the human body. We call this next member of the human being the etheric double body in theosophy. This etheric body is in any human being. Somebody who develops a certain clairvoyant capacity can behold this etheric body; the clairvoyant can behold it the easiest.

If a person stands before you and you are a clairvoyant, you are able to put the usual physical body out of your mind. Just as you can do it in the everyday life with things which are before you and to which you do not direct your attention, you are able as a clairvoyant to not direct your attention to the physical body. Then, however, there remains in the space, which the physical body has filled, still the whole physical appearance in the form of the double body which resembles the external physical body very much. It has a very luminous colour which resembles the colour of peach-blossoms. This etheric double body holds together the physical processes. At death the etheric body leaves the physical body with other higher members which we get to know. The physical body is handed over to the earth and carries out nothing but physical processes. The etheric double body causes that this does not happen during life.

Within this etheric double body, even towering above it at different sides, is the third member of the human being, the so-called astral body. This astral body is a kind of image of our impulses, our desires, our passions, our feelings. In this astral body the human being lives like in a cloud, and he is very well discernible for the clairvoyant, whose spiritual eye is opened for such appearance, as a luminous cloud within which the physical body and the etheric double body are. This astral body is different with a person who always follows his animal-like drives, his sensual propensities; there it shows other colours, other cloud-like formations than with a person who has always lived spiritually; it is different with a person who indulges in egoism, from that of a person who devotes himself in unselfish love to his fellow men. Briefly, the life of the soul finds expression in this astral body. But it also passes on the real sensory perception. You can never look for the sensory perception in the senses themselves. What happens if the light of a flame meets my eye? The so-called etheric waves move from the source of light in my eye, they penetrate into my eye, they cause certain chemical processes in the background of my eyeball, they transform the so-called visual purple, and then these chemical processes spread in my brain. My brain perceives the flame, it gets the light impression. If another could see those processes which happen in my brain, what would he perceive? He would perceive nothing but physical processes; he would perceive something that happens in space and time; however, he could not perceive my light impression in my brain among the physical processes. This light impression is something else than a physical impression which forms the basis of these processes. The light impression, the picture which I only must create to myself to be able to perceive the flame is a process within my astral body. Somebody who has a visual organ to be able to perceive such an astral process sees exactly the physical phenomena within the brain transforming in the astral body into the picture of the flame which we experience.

Within these bodies, which I have mentioned to you, within the physical body, the etheric double body and the astral body, is our real ego; what we call our ego in which we become conscious saying: we are it. This ego has higher parts again about which I do not want to speak today. This ego uses the other members of the human being as its tools.

If we understand this composition of the human being, this can also give us a particular view of the phenomena which we find with somnambulists. What takes action then if we are in our usual waking consciousness? A light impression is caused because oscillations of the ether come to my eye and are transformed by the astral body into a picture of light, and one understands this picture as a mental picture; that is why I realise this picture. Now, however, we assume that my ego is eliminated; in the usual sleep such an elimination of the ego is to be noticed.

Today I do not want to tell where this ego is to be sought for; but if we have a sleeping person before ourselves: what do we have before ourselves? In the true sense of the word only somebody whose spiritual eye is opened can give information about that; he exactly beholds the ego together with the astral body being lifted out of the physical body and the etheric double body. But everybody has this as a phenomenon before himself; everybody knows that during sleep the everyday ego, the ego of reality is eliminated, and that the physical body and the etheric double body, which hold it together, are left to their own resources. During our usual day life our ego, our consciousness is always present when we receive the impressions of the outside world; the daytime ego always controls these impressions of the outside world. If this ego is eliminated, we also receive these impressions of the outside world perpetually. Or do you believe if a bell sounds beside you, while you are sleeping, that then this bell causes no oscillations in the air which penetrate into your ear? Do you believe that your ear is differently constructed at night than during the day? This is not the case. Everything that takes place in the physical body during the day also takes place in the sleeping human being. But what is missing? The ego-consciousness does not penetrate the human being, this is missing.

We can show, so to speak, experimentally in natural way which conditions prevail between the single members of the human being, which I have stated. I would like to give you a simple example which one can make easily with every somnambulist. Imagine that a somnambulist gets up at night, sits down to his desk, kindles a candle and tries to write. Now you do the following: you illuminate the room quite brightly using ten lamps for instance—the experiment was done—and the person concerned keeps on writing calmly. Now you extinguish one flame, the small candle flame which he has put beside himself, and he does not keep on writing, he feels as dark; he takes a match, kindles the candle, then he feels it again as a light and can go on working. The other lighting around him does not exist for him, only the flame is there for him which he has taken up in his dream consciousness. The whole remaining sea of light does not exist for him. You see that it is necessary that the human being penetrates his organs of perception from within in a particular way, infiltrates them, so to speak, so that the external sense-perception can take place. It is not only necessary that we have eyes and ears, but it is necessary that we enliven that from within which eye and ear deliver to us that we oppose something from within that transforms it into pictures, into mental pictures and that is why it exists for us.

In the everyday life it is our ego, our bright, waking consciousness which offers resistance of own accord, as it were, from within to the outside world. We need that to lift out the impressions and to make them our impressions of consciousness. Imagine this consciousness being extinguished. What is then still in activity? Then the physical body, the etheric double body and the astral body are still in activity. Now, indeed, this astral body can transform what it receives from without into pictures but not into mental pictures, is not taken up into the waking consciousness. Thus the astral body of the human being transforms such impressions into pictures which surround him, either in irregular way or in regular way if the ego is present, so to speak, at this whole process.

In such a contact with the outside world is the astral body, the soul of the person who is in a somnambulistic state; yes, in a similar state is already the soul of a dreamer. We have only to make a distinction between both kinds of dreams which I have stated: the irregular dreams which mostly penetrate the dream consciousness of the human beings, and the nice, dramatic, symbolic dreams. With the irregular dreams it will be the etheric double body which is above all active and conveys the contacts with the outside world; with the dreams, however, which run in symbolic, dramatic way, it is the astral body of the person which symbolises the outer impressions, expresses them allegorically and transforms them into a quite dramatic dream. Only because in the present level of development our daytime ego is minded more realistically because we rely in our daytime consciousness above all on our deducing, calculating reason, therefore, any single sensory sensation appears to us to be linked with the others as just this is the case in the waking consciousness. However, we can imagine other states of consciousness; we can imagine that the human being looks deeper into nature. Then this purely rational view also comes to an end. This is just again the case of the higher kinds of soul-life. These should concern us less today; but what must occupy us today above all is the question: how is it possible that the human being shows regular actions, certain psychic phenomena in the somnambulistic state, which is an increase of the usual dream state? One can understand that only if one does not consider the human being as an isolated being, but in connection with the whole remaining world according to the theosophical world view; that one realises above all that outside us in the remaining world not only dead matter exists, but that in the outside world higher forces are active.

The human being normally does not put the question to himself: why do we find the laws, the concepts and ideas in the outside world which we have excogitated in our mind in a lonesome twilight hour? The human being mostly does not get the most significant phenomena clear in his mind, phenomena which throw the brightest light on the nature of the human being. However, think only once about the fact that the mathematician sits in his room, mulls over the question what is a circle, an ellipse that he finds this law of the ellipse, of the circle without observation of anything outside him and illustrates them on paper, and then after he has produced these laws out of himself, he finds these laws in the orbits of the planets and in other phenomena of the outside world. It is that way wherever one goes in our spiritual life. The laws which our mind thinks up in the loneliness are the same laws which also control this outside world. If we call that which the human being thinks up wisdom, so we must say: wisdom becomes apparent in the human ego and outdoors in the world we find that the things are built in the same way in which the human being can recognise them using his thinking. But we find if we more exactly look at the world that this wisdom of the world excels even a lot of that which the human being can think up and concoct.

I give some extreme examples: take the performances of the beavers. The performances of the beavers are of really astonishing kind, not only that their dens are true creations of an instinctive architecture which could not be more perfect if one erected them according to all rules of mechanics and engineering. No, they deliver something else: they protect themselves in their hiding places by means of dams with which they keep the water away, accelerate or slow down it in certain way. These dams are built in such a way against the power of the water that an engineer who has learnt long to get to know the mechanical principles according to which one must make such an arrangement best of all could not make them better. Yes, they are built in such a way that one can calculate from the inclination of these dams and from the angles which speed or power the flowing water has. They are constructed in such a way that the engineer could not calculate them better in his engineering firm using his science which a lot of human thoughts and endeavours has produced.

Now another example: consider a usual human femur. This femur is, if you look at it with the microscope, no compact structure like a piece of mortar, but the bone seems to be fragile, a composition of delicate formations which are built up like a quite delicate frame and scaffolding. A network of fine bone trabeculae is built up; these are interwoven and support each other; and if one study this whole network of bone trabeculae, one perceives a strange wisdom of nature with the construction of such an organism. If one wanted to build, for example, a scaffolding which should support the single parts of a frame in such a way that one achieves the greatest possible effect with the slightest expenditure of energy, one could not make better than nature in its wisdom has constructed such a femur from countless small bone trabeculae which hold and support each other. You find the wisdom that the human being can invent after many mental efforts in any single part of nature.

If we could study nature, we could pour out our mind over nature, so that we could perceive in nature outside, then we would perceive nature not as a product by chance, but as the result of infinite wisdom. Imagine instead that the calculating reason perceives the impressions of the outside world through the gates of the senses and can only think about that which it perceives from without, imagine instead that you would have no senses, but the reason would be poured out as it were over the whole nature. You would not perceive the effects of the things on our senses but the being of the things themselves, then you would stand in the wisdom of nature, then you would be a part of the wise nature. One can attain this really, if our waking consciousness is eliminated. One attains that with somnambulists as I have suggested now. I said that one may imagine that our reason, our consciousness forces its way from our brain and penetrates the wisdom of nature in any of its performances and facts.

Because we have such clear, waking consciousness, we are secluded from the remaining nature; that is why we must receive the impressions of nature through the gates of our senses. Here is the flame, it makes an impression on my eye; the eye is the gate through which the impression gets to my consciousness. My consciousness causes the mental pictures from within. I am secluded from the outside world because I have sensory gates, and this outside world must enter through the sensory gates into my consciousness first. I am in the situation in my consciousness compared with the remaining world like somebody who stands on a meadow and has a view in all directions and then enters a small house and takes note of everything that is on the meadow only through the windows of the small house.

Thus is the wisdom of the whole nature which we perceive in every bone, in every plant which appears from the starry heaven down to the microscopic smallest particle of the body. This wise nature has entered as it were into our consciousness as in a single point and has erected the shell of our organs with their sensory gates round us. Our consciousness is secluded from this being outside and can take up the being outside only through the sensory gates.

However, if you eliminate the consciousness, then you get contact, then you live really again connected with the outside world; because the astral body is not separated from the remaining world like the ego, your immediate consciousness. No, everywhere astral threads run out in all directions, so that you witness the life of the whole outside world and not only that of the physical nature, but also the astral and spiritual processes which are perpetually around us. We perceive them if our consciousness is eliminated. What we remember, think up and deduce appears in the somnambulistic state immediately as a phenomenon which the outside nature leads in. As well as you see no star in the sky during the day with the bright sunshine, while, nevertheless, the whole sky is covered with stars because the bright sunshine outshines the light of the stars, it is the same with our bright waking consciousness. What exists in our physical or astral bodies is a weak light, are weak processes which the bright waking consciousness drowns out. If we extinguish this, it will become visible what takes action in the lower bodies like the stars become visible if the sun does no longer shine. In such circumstances are somnambulistic persons and, therefore, we have to realise that the person is in a closer, more immediate connection with the remaining nature if a somnambulistic state happens. It is in such a way to use a nice expression of the German thinker Stilling who characterised this circumstances wonderfully at the end of 18th and outset of the 19th century: “if the sun of the bright daytime consciousness sets, the stars shine in the somnambulistic consciousness.”

Nevertheless, we have to ask ourselves: can we rely on these phenomena which appear during the somnambulistic state? They are true phenomena, they concern a reality; but this reality approaches us with exclusion of the organ which the human being has developed gradually, so that he can orientate himself in the world, with exclusion of his bright daytime consciousness. A state is really caused in the human being which reveals something to him that remains, otherwise, concealed but which downgrades him from a level which he got once. Because we know as theosophists that the states which the human being reaches this way and which should allegedly be “higher,” are really states which he has gone through before he attained his present full human consciousness.

I cannot explain that to you today; but just as the scientific theory of evolution shows us the purely physical evolutionary processes, theosophy shows us that the human beings gradually got to the level which they have today. This consciousness, through which we orient ourselves in our environment, only appeared after we had gone through other states of consciousness in millions of years of slow development. The human being had a kind of dream consciousness before he developed this bright daytime consciousness in himself. At that time he was really a being which did not perceive the processes round itself in the way as we perceive them with our bright daytime consciousness, but everything round us was symbolised, as well as the dream symbolises even today.

A big number of the legends which are still preserved come from such times in which the human beings were still near this dream consciousness and formed these symbolic legends. About that you can find more precise information in a very interesting book of my deceased friend Ludwig Laistner who collected the different forms of legends of the world and showed how these legends were worked out from a symbolising human consciousness not yet awoken to the daytime consciousness. There some legends are really attributed to such states of the somnambulistic consciousness.

If we go back even farther, we get to lower and lower states which were, however, closer to nature and to the starting point of the physical evolution at the same time. When the human being began as a wish of the divine being at first, he was generally in a kind of deep trance. At that time the whole humankind was in a kind of deep trance, in a similar trance in which today those somnambulists can be who can be transported into the deepest, so-called magnetic sleeping states. The human being has gone through all these states once, and now we are in the period of the bright waking consciousness. This is even a transitional state which leads us to that ability within the waking consciousness that the human being had in former times but without the waking consciousness, because it was not yet developed.

This is the future course of human development: again pouring out the spirit on nature directly to become clairvoyant with full waking consciousness. Some among us who have developed their inner organs using certain methods which theosophy gives are already ahead of the development and able to look really with full waking consciousness into this world of the beings and the spiritual life which surrounds us. Today certain individualities are already among us who are, so to speak, again free of the gates of the senses who are in immediate contact with the spiritual environment. On account of their clairvoyant ability they experience the higher facts with full waking consciousness which are closed to the usual consciousness as we go through between tables and chairs, where they perceive the spiritual world round themselves, which surrounds us at every moment. The theosophical teachings flowed from such views. The somnambulistic consciousness delivers similar teachings in certain respect, and what a somnambulistic person can see after elimination of the bright waking consciousness is often the same that the clairvoyant sees with his bright waking consciousness. But the somnambulist can never control what she/he sees; the somnambulist never is able to control what she/he tells you about spiritual processes in the environment what she/he tells you about percepts which one cannot see by means of the senses. He/she cannot even control whether that which he/she perceives is really true, as she/he perceives it.

The strangest delusions may happen to the somnambulists. You can stand before this somnambulist and can say to her/him that you are a person living at another place. The somnambulist will believe this absolutely, will have the true impression that you are that man as whom you pose. The somnambulist believes it, and this becomes the danger. If the somnambulist informs us not only about such easily controllable matters, but if the somnambulist informs us about the higher world which we cannot perceive with the senses, about the so-called astral world or about the higher spiritual world, then it can happen that the somnambulist says to you that she/he perceives any deceased person. Indeed, the somnambulist perceives a spiritual fact, she/he perceives a being; but it does not need to be right that this being is the deceased person in question. This can be another being, a being which generally has nothing to do at all with a usual earthly being. It may be a being which lives in the astral world and has never entered into an earthly world. Briefly, the somnambulist can never convince her/himself because he/she does not have the controlling consciousness whether the impression which he/she had is the right one.

This is a danger for the somnambulist, above all a danger which the astral world immediately offers if one enters it. This astral world has—I can say this only by way of a hint—quite different concepts, for example, of good and bad, Our earthly world has concepts of good and bad which are adjusted to our sensuous states. The astral world has another good and bad. If now the somnambulistic person perceives in the astral world, his concepts of good and bad are shaken very easily, and this is the reason why somnambulistic media that inform you in the beginning really only about true matters out of this somnambulistic state of consciousness can be ruined thoroughly in time, so that they can impossibly distinguish deception from reality.

It is a matter of course for somebody who knows these higher realms that he does not presuppose that the medium has cheated, even if the facts are not correct. A mediumistic woman may go, for example, to the next best corner shop—this is a case of whose truth I have convinced myself, she is in such a somnambulistic state, that her ego-consciousness, her waking consciousness is extinguished; she buys a small picture of a saint which she puts in her pocket. Then she gets out of this somnambulistic state and has no notion where she got the small picture from. Later she gets—the somnambulistic states are of very intricate kind—again in the trance state and produces the small picture as something that she has brought in from the super-sensible world to this world. The somnambulistic woman, the medium, never has a notion of the fact that she herself bought this small picture or in which way she got it. She is absolutely honest in the usual sense, although the fact is a feigning. Thus the case can happen because of the influence which is exerted on such a somnambulist after the elimination of the waking consciousness that a deception takes place; however, the medium needs not to be a swindler, but she may be completely intact and honest.

This shows you that we can do nothing but to position ourselves on the theosophical point of view if we consider the question of somnambulism Theosophy and the theosophical movement are of the determined view that one should enter the higher spiritual world, which can also be made accessible to us by somnambulists, only in the presence of a clairvoyant with a waking consciousness who knows how to get used to the spiritual world, who knows a lot about the spiritual world like about the physical one.

Therefore, theosophy demands that if experiments with media should be done—and, indeed, conditions may happen where this is recommended—that they take place only in the presence of a perfect expert, of a clairvoyant working with waking consciousness who can have an overview of everything that happens there really, while the medium and normally also those who experiment with the medium are not able to have an overview of this. Such mediumistic phenomena do not involve a danger at any rate; but we have seen that this danger may result because the sense of direction is missing. Every clairvoyant who works with waking consciousness knows at any single moment what takes action and what a somnambulist sees really, even though she/he pretends to see something else; he knows which influence really takes place, even though the somnambulist pretends that this or that influence takes place. This is just the difference between spiritual science and other similar attempts. I would not like to doubt the truth of the other attempts in any way, but its reality also applies, of course, as well as it applies to other attempts. Because such experiences cannot achieved in one go, because it is impossible that a complete ideal is realised at every point in time, therefore, theosophy does not regard as its task to combat other spiritual attempts like the experiments with somnambulists, because one knows that these experiments produce the same result in the end: the conviction of a spiritual world round us.

But the theosophical movement itself tries only to perform under the ideal of the conscious clairvoyance what it has to do in accordance with other spiritual movements. In accordance with other spiritual movements it wants to work, it wants to look at the other spiritual movements as its brother movements. It is ready any time, if it is asked for advice whether this and that is real and true in this or that sense, to give this advice. However, it will let all spiritual attempts be carried out only under the aegis of the expert clairvoyance. This applies to the spiritistic like other spiritual attempts. Occult researches are to be carried out for the purposes of theosophy only under the influence of individualities who can have an exact overview, in conscious way what it concerns. Also one is allowed to heal spiritually only in such a way as one heals physically: with full conscious overseeing the concerning circumstances.

Theosophy looks at the somnambulistic phenomena that way. You see that the theosophical view defers somewhat from the superficial external view which sees in the somnambulistic phenomena nothing else than pathological, abnormal phenomena to be rejected, and it also has somewhat different views of these phenomena than those have who believe only on account of them to get to know the higher spiritual life. Theosophy knows where these phenomena come from. It can inform of these phenomena using its clairvoyance. It considers the other attempts and movements, however, which are related to these phenomena in the sense that they regard them as manifestations of the spiritual life as brother movements, with which it strives for the same goal: to give a spiritual, a really idealistic world view, a true knowledge of the spiritual world to the present materialistic humankind.

This is a deep truth which a German seer about whom one normally does not know that he is a seer, namely Goethe, expressed that we cannot unveil the secrets of nature with the help of our tools, not by mechanical, physical tools, but that the mind has to search for the spirit everywhere

Nature, mysterious in day’s clear light,
Lets none remove her veil,
And what she won’t discover to your understanding
You can’t extort from her with levers and with screws.
Faust I, verses 672-675

But Goethe did not doubt the manifestations of the spirit around us; because he realised clearly what he expressed in his Faust in the nice words from which he said that a sage spoke them:

The spirit world is not sealed off –
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Go, neophyte, and boldly bathe
Your mortal breast in roseate dawn!
Faust I, verses 443-446

Since it is our task to-day to continue following, man's destinies in the spiritual world, it will be advisable if we first form some idea of what we designate as a world, in the spiritual-scientific meaning.

We are conscious of the world round about us, because we have certain capacities and organs which enable us to perceive it. If we had other organs, this world would present an entirely different aspect. For example, if a man had no eyes enabling him to see the light, but an organ enabling him instead to perceive electricity, then he would not see this room flooded with light, but he would perceive electricity in every wire, flashing, streaming through it.—The world round about us, what we call our world, is therefore dependent upon our sense-organs.

The astral world, too, is nothing but a sum of phenomena, which the human being experiences in his environment , when he has severed himself from his physical body and from his etheric body, so that he can use forces enabling him to see what he cannot otherwise see. This is the case, when he has discarded his physical body and his etheric body. The perceptive organs for the astral world are the organs of the astral body, analogous to the sense-organs of the physical body.

Let us now contemplate the astral world.

Through methods which will be discussed later, a man endowed with spiritual vision can perceive the astral world even here, in his physical body. The astral world differs greatly from our physical world. You may obtain some idea of what is round about you in the astral world, if you summon up before your soul the life of dreams, which is the last trace of that early clairvoyance which man once possessed in times gone by. You all know this life of dreams from your own experience, as world of chaotic images. How does it come about that man dreams at all? We know that while we dream, the physical body and the etheric body lie on the bed, while the astral body soars above them. In a sound, dreamless sleep, the astral body is completely lifted out of the etheric body; but in a sleep filled with dreams, certain tentacles of the astral body still reach into the etheric body, and this enables man to perceive the more or less confused pictures of the astral world.

The astral world is as transparent as the dream-pictures; it is, as it were, woven out of dreams. But these dreams which constitute the astral world differ from ordinary dreams, for they are the images of a reality, just as “real” a reality as the physical world. We perceive this reality in the same way in which we perceive dreams, for the astral world, too, is perceived symbolically. You all know that the world of dreams is a symbolical world. Everything from the world outside which enters our sleep, takes on a symbolical aspect in our dreams. I will give you a few typical examples of dreams, which will show you how a simple impression from outside constitutes the foundation of a dream's symbolical image.

For example, you may be dreaming that you have caught a frog. You feel its slippery body, and on waking up you find that you are holding the cold end of the sheet in your hand. Or you may dream that you are in a cellar, in a dark hole full of spiders' webs: You wake up ... with a headache. Or you may see snakes in your dream, and when you awake you will find that you have abdominal pains. Or another dream: An academician has a long dream of a duel, beginning with some insult and ending with the pistol-shot: He hears the shot, awakes, and discovers that a chair has fallen.

The whole course of this last dream can also show you that the conditions of time are quite different in dreams. Not only does time run backwards, so to speak, but the whole conception of time loses its meaning in a dream. During a dream, we may pass through a whole life in the fraction of a second, in the same way in which our whole life passes before our soul's eye during the moment of drowning, or crashing. The point to be borne in mind in all these dream-pictures is that the cause which gave rise to them appears in the form of IMAGES.

This is the case in the astral world. Its images can be interpreted. The same astral experience always appears in the form of the same image; there is always regularity and harmony in these pictures of the astral world, whereas our ordinary dreams are chaotic. In the end, we can find our way about in the astral world just as well as in the physical world.

The astral world is woven out of such pictures, but they are the expression of soul-beings. After death all human beings are enveloped in such pictures, which are in part very rich in colour and form. Also when we are asleep the astral body can be seen in the midst of streaming, changing forms and colours. If we have the astral power of vision, we can perceive these astral beings in a surging sea of colours.

The astral world has, however, one peculiar quality, which appears strange to one who hears this for the first time. In the astral world everything exists, as it were, in the form of a picture reflected in a mirror, and a pupil of spiritual science must therefore get accustomed little by little to see things in the RIGHT way. For instance, you may see the number 365, but this really corresponds to 563. This applies to everything which we see in the astral world. There, everything that goes out of our own being appears as if it were coming towards us. It is most important to consider this fact.

When astral images arise, for instance, in pathological conditions, we must know how to deal with them. They often appear when people are delirious; a delirious person often sees all kinds of faces and forms rushing towards him, for the astral world becomes accessible to him in this pathological condition. Although these astral pictures seem to be rushing towards him, they are in reality streaming out of him. Progressive doctors should bear this in mind, for in future such symptoms will be more and more frequent, arising out of a concealed religious longing. The subject of a painting such, as for instance, the well known “Temptation of Saint Anthony” is based on such astral experiences.

If you think these things through to the very end you will no longer find it strange that time too is reversed in the astral world. An echo of this may be found in dreams. In this connection you should remember the above-mentioned example of the duel in a dream. In the astral world everything is reversed; even time. When we observe the development of a tree astrally, we first perceive its fruit, then its blossoms, and so on backwards to the seed.

After death, during the time in which we must lose our earthly habits, our whole life in the astral world runs backwards. But this process of living through our whole life once more backwards, concluding it ,with our first impressions of childhood, is faster than the one on the physical plane; it lasts about one third of the duration of our life on earth. Thus we live through our life again in a reversed order, but we experience many other things too.

Let us suppose that you were eighty years old when you died, and that now you live through your life backwards as far as your fortieth year. At that time you may, for instance, have boxed someone's ear, thus causing him pain. In the astral world this sensation of pain also appears as if in a mirror, i.e. YOU now experience the pain felt by the other person when you boxed his ear. But this also applies to every pleasant experience.

Only when the human being has thus passed through his whole life backwards, is he ready to enter the heavenly world. Religious traditions should always be taken literally. If you bear in mind what I have just now explained to you, you will easily understand that the human being can only enter the spiritual world—and the spiritual world is the one which the Bible designates as “Kingdom of Heaven”—when he has lived through his whole life backwards as far as infancy. This lies at the foundation of Christ's words: “Unless you become as little children you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven”. For on reaching the stage of childhood in his reversed passage through life, the human being discards the astral body and enters the spiritual world.

Now I must give you a description of the spiritual world. The Kingdom of Heaven differs from the physical world even more than the astral world. But since it is only possible to describe the spiritual world with expressions taken from the physical world, it should be borne in mind even more than for descriptions of the astral world, that everything I say about the spiritual world should only be taken comparatively.

In the Kingdom of Heaven we also find a triad, as here on earth. Even as upon the earth we find the three aggregate states of solid, liquid and gaseous, and accordingly divide the earth into continents, oceans, and atmosphere, so we may also distinguish three similar spheres—but, as stated, only as a comparison—in the spiritual realm. The continental sphere, however, consists of something which differs from our rocks and stones. What constitutes the firm ground of the spirit realm, are the archetypal images of the physical world. For everything physical has its archetype, even man. The clairvoyant seer perceives these archetypal images as a kind of negative, that is to say, he sees space as a kind of shadow-form, and round about it radiant light. But corresponding, for instance, to the blood and nerves, these shadows are not uniform. But a stone, or a mineral reveal in their archetypal images a uniformly empty space surround by raying light.

Even as you walk, on firm ground here on earth, so in the spiritual realm you walk on the archetypal images of physical things. This forms the continents of the spiritual world.

When the human being first sets foot on these continents, a definite aspect always presents itself to him: It is the moment when he first has a clear perception of his own body lying before him. For he himself is spirit. Normally this takes place about thirty years after death, and this is connected with the fundamental experience: “This is you.” The Vedanta philosophy based one of its fundamental teachings on this knowledge, the “Tat twain asi”—this is you. All such expressions are drawn out of a deep spiritual knowledge.

The second sphere of the spiritual realm is the oceanic sphere. Whatever is life here in the physical world, i.e. everything that possesses an etheric body, exists in the spiritual realm as if it were a liquid element. Streaming, surging life flows through the spirit-realm. It even collects like the waters of the ocean, in a kind of ocean-basin, or to be more precise, like the blood streaming through the veins and collecting in the heart.

And thirdly we have the atmosphere of the spirit realm, consisting of all the passions, instincts, feelings, etc. You have all these sensations up there as an external perception, resembling the atmospheric phenomena here on earth. All this blows through the atmosphere of Devachan. As a clairvoyant, you can perceive in the spirit-realm all the sufferings and joys experienced on earth. Every passion, every feeling of hatred and such like, appears in the spirit-realm as if it were a storm. A battle, for example, appears in such a form that in the Devachan world the seer experiences a tremendous storm. The whole spiritual world is thus permeated with wonderful joys which pass through it, but also with terrible passions.

In the same way it is possible to speak of spiritual ears. When you have advanced to the stage of having an insight into the Devachan world, you may both see and hear these floating phenomena, and what you thus hear is the HARMONY OF THE SPHERES.

We have thus characterised the spiritual region up to this stage. But there is a fourth region in Devachan. Up to now we have found in it:

1. The prototypes of all physical forms; as the continents
2. The prototypes of all life, as the oceans
3. The prototypes of all soul-life, feelings, etc., as the atmosphere

Now there is something in human life which cannot have its origin in the external world, and its spiritual content constitutes the fourth sphere of Devachan. There we find every original idea, going as far as the creative productions of genius. All that is original, that is to say, all that man puts into the world, thus enriching the world, the prototypes of all these creations form the fourth sphere of Devachan. This concludes the description of the lower parts of Devachan.

Beyond this there are three higher spheres, but during his physical life man can only reach them through a higher initiation. They are only accessible to an initiate, and after death, they can only be perceived by more highly developed individuals.

What does such an advanced initiate experience when he penetrates into the next higher sphere of Devachan? At first he experiences that which is designated in Occult Science as the Akasha Chronicle. Everything that occurs in the world and that has ever occurred in it in the past, is preserved as an impression in a fine substantiality, which is imperishable.

Let me illustrate this through at example: Now I am speaking to you, but you would not hear me if my voice were not able to produce vibrations in the air. Thus every word which I utter exists in the air in the form of fine movements. These fine movements of course vanish, but everything which occurs here on earth becomes impressed in that fine substantiality which we experience when reaching the spiritual world. This impression is everlasting. Every word, every thought, everything which has ever taken place in humanity, can be read in the Akasha Chronicle. This entails either initiation, or that moment after death when the human being enters the higher devachanic sphere, that is to say, when he has developed so far as to perceive this high sphere of Devachan after death. In that case he is able to look into the past.

The Akasha Chronicle is a writing which preserves everything that has ever occurred. But it is not really a writing in the ordinary physical meaning, for it consists of images. You see, for example, Caesar in every situation of his life,—you do not see what he has done, but the inner impulses which led him to his deeds. These Akasha pictures possess a high degree of life, and if we cannot interpret them in the right way, they can give rise to great delusions. The source of many spiritistic aberrations is, for example, the appearance of an Akasha picture at one of these seances. If you summon Goethe, and the Akasha picture of November 25th 1797 appears before you, giving you information concerning some question, this picture will reply as Goethe would have replied had he been asked that question on November 25th 1797. Only those who really know the spiritual world can judge whether they are dealing with a reality or with a shadow. These descriptions can show you what aspect the higher spheres of the spiritual world present.

The first experience is therefore the perception of one's own body, and this experience is the starting point for all other experiences. The human being feels strongly that he has emancipated himself from his bodily involucres, for the most blissful of moments is the one in which he discards the last body, the astral corpse. Even as a plant wedged in the fissure of a rock would experience it as bliss to be freed, so this feeling of blissfulness becomes a fundamental sensation of the human being. It permeates him and transfigures the other feelings which were once experienced in an earthly manner, for instance, feelings of friendship, which may perhaps undergo certain transformations here on earth, but which are deepened and purified in the spiritual realm.

Also a mother's love for her child undergoes such a purification, and viceversa. The originally animal feeling of belonging to one another, which even here upon the earth took on a moral character, unfolds a still higher moral-power in Devachan, Every tie on earth becomes deepened in the spiritual realm, and all connections interpenetrate.

Through love man works his way up from the narrowness of egotism to the encompassing experience of cosmic life. There, nothing, is divided or severed; each one works for the others, for even in the spiritual world activity and work constitute the element which carries, furthers and unites the souls. But Love is the inexhaustible source of all life.