The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I think you have seen that the momentous challenge that arises from the flood of human events and that we call the social movement is treated externally according to the peculiar forces of the time, treated from the point of view as if there were actually only a physical, a sensual world, precisely where it is most intensively considered and felt. The social question has indeed become effective as a proletarian demand. It lives in the proletarian demands in a certain, one might say abstract-theoretical way, and the danger exists that the abstract-theoretical way, which should never become an external fact, can become an external fact, or at least that it is demanded that it become an external fact. But this proletarian consciousness, from which the social question asserts itself today, is thoroughly imbued with a belief only in the material world, with its ethical addition of mere ethical utilitarianism, of mere utilitarian morality.

This is a fact that anyone today can actually grasp: that the ideas for the social movement are drawn from a certain belief only in material existence and the usefulness of human life and the useful powers of human life. But for those who see through life, it is especially significant that the actual enlightenment about the social question, namely about the ideas that are necessary for this social question in the present and the near future, cannot be obtained from any, even the most scientific, consideration of the external, physical-material world.

This is something that the present must know, that people of the present must penetrate. They must penetrate that the social question can only be solved on a spiritual basis, and that today its solution is sought without any spiritual basis. This expresses something tremendously important for our time. You see, the ideas needed for the social movement cannot be formed in the whole field that can be surveyed with the mere faculty of sense and the mind that is bound to this faculty of sense. These ideas, if they are to be seen in their direct effectiveness, lie entirely beyond the threshold that leads from the physical-sensual world to the supersensible world. The most necessary thing for the present and the near future, in terms of the development of human destiny, is to bring in certain ideas from beyond the threshold. The most characteristic phenomenon in the present is that such a bringing in from beyond the threshold is downright rejected. And all work in this field must be imbued with the will to overcome this reluctance to bring in socially effective ideas from beyond the threshold of physical consciousness.

Of course, there is an extraordinary difficulty in this undertaking, a difficulty that simply presents itself when one considers that, since we are living in the age of the consciousness soul, so everything should or must actually be striven for more or less consciously, that it is necessary, necessary for an important contemporary demand of the present time, to become acquainted with truths that lie beyond the threshold of physical consciousness.

Now, of course, one can say that very few people at the present time have a proper appreciation of what lies beyond the threshold of consciousness. Very few people today have a proper appreciation of initiation and the wisdom of initiation, as it must actually prevail or must become prevalent in the present day. Those abilities that lie in every human soul and that bring in certain ideas from the supersensible, people of the present time, out of the often characterized comfort, do not want to make use of them. And it is also the case that one must say: there is a definite objective difficulty in this field. You must not forget: I might say, in their original form, the things and entities that lie beyond the threshold can only be observed by the one who has crossed this threshold. But this crossing of the threshold is indeed one of the most important events in one's personal life. It is also an event in one's personal life that is thrown into a special light when, as I have just done, it is brought into such close relation to the social question. The social question, as its name already indicates, is a matter of groups of people, of human contexts; the secret of the threshold is a matter of individuality. One could say that no one is actually in a position to communicate the secret of the threshold directly to another person if they know it. One could even say that it signifies a certain crisis in the human soul when the secret of the threshold becomes clear to one inwardly, out of certain contexts in which one has otherwise received it.

You, or rather those of you who have been involved for years in spiritual scientific contemplation, insofar as it is anthroposophically oriented, have all had the opportunity to find your way to the secret of the threshold. When you approach the secret of the threshold, you will definitely receive the consciousness through the thing itself, that one can speak well about the paths that lead to the secret of the threshold, but that one cannot make a direct statement about the secret of the threshold. Thus, in a sense, the secret of the threshold is an individual matter for each person, and yet it is necessary to bring from beyond the threshold precisely the most important ideas for social development. Today, the secret of the threshold is a very special matter, because today there is little trust from person to person. That is something that has terribly diminished among people, the trust from person to person, and it would be quite different for our social life if there were just a little more trust from person to person. Thus it is that today, when anyone knows the secret of the Threshold, knows it through becoming acquainted with the Dweller of the Threshold, a trust is established that is much too weak, or one that is wrongly directed, wrongly oriented, wrongly adjusted.

As you can see, this would be a rather hopeless situation if something else were not to happen. For one could say: Thus, for example, the social question can only be solved by initiates. — But the initiates will simply not be believed due to the lack of trust that people today have in each other. People will not believe that they have an insight into life. This can only be perceived in a certain area, namely, beyond the threshold, which they cannot speak of directly from person to person, at least not at all times and under all conditions. If, for example, someone were to carelessly communicate his experiences with the Dweller of the Threshold to another person who absorbs them emotionally or, let us say, in such a way that he does not place himself in the region of his soul in which he has practised a certain degree of self-discipline, and might even become one who, having received the secret of the Threshold in this way, would divulge it further. This would indeed be a transition of the secret of the Threshold into social life, but it would have a very bad consequence. It would cause the same thing that sometimes results from merely communicating the way to the secret of the threshold: people would be divided more or less into two camps, and people would be set against each other. For while the ideas coming from beyond the threshold, when they work in their true power, in their purified spiritual power, are likely to bring about social harmony among people, if they are scattered among people unrefined, they are likely to cause quarrels and wars among people.

You see, then, that there is something very peculiar about the Mysteries of the Threshold. And if something else did not intervene, the hopelessness of which I have spoken would be justified. But since something else does intervene, it must be said that the path which the future must take can be clearly characterized. Today it is the case that socially fruitful ideas can only be found by a few people who can make use of certain spiritual abilities that the vast majority of people today do not want to use, even though they lie in every soul. They not only consciously do not want to use them, but mostly unconsciously do not want to use them. But these few will have to set themselves the task of communicating what they extract from the spiritual world with regard to social ideas. They will translate it into the language into which the spiritual truths, seen in a different form beyond the threshold, must be translated if they are to become popular. They can become popular, but must first be translated into a popular language.

In view of the general character of the times, people will naturally not believe those initiated into the mysteries of the Threshold who speak about social ideas, because the necessary trust among people is not there. In today's democracy-crazed times – I should say democracy-addicted times – any social idea that is actually not a reality, as you can see from the above, any social idea that is directed towards the sensory world with the ordinary mind, will of course be In our present-day democracy-crazed age, one would naturally consider such a purely intellectually-derived social idea, which is none, to be democratically equivalent to what the initiate brings out of the spiritual world and what can really be fruitful. But if this democracy-craving view or feeling were to prevail, we would, in a relatively short time, experience social chaos in the most dreadful sense. But the other is precisely what is present and applies to an outstanding degree to the social ideas that are brought from beyond the threshold by initiates. I have emphasized it again and again: anyone who really wants to make use of his sound understanding, not his scientifically tainted understanding but his sound understanding of human nature, can always, even if he cannot find what only the initiate can find, test it in life and understand it once he has found it. And this is the path that socially fruitful ideas will have to take in the near future. There is no other way to make progress. Socially fruitful ideas will have to take this path. They will emerge here and there. At first, of course, as long as one has not examined, as long as one has not applied one's common sense to it, one can confuse any kind of Marchist thought with a thought of initiation. But when one will compare, reflect, and really apply common sense to the things, then one will indeed come to the distinction, then one will indeed realize that it is something different in reality content, what is brought from beyond the threshold from the secrets of the threshold, than that which is taken entirely from the sense world, such as Marxism.

In this way I have not characterized just any program, for in the near future humanity will have very bad experiences with programs; I have characterized a positive process that must take place. Those who know something about social ideas from initiation will have the obligation to communicate these social ideas to humanity, and humanity will have to decide to think about the matter. And by thinking about it, just by thinking about it with the help of common sense, the right thing will come out. This is so extraordinarily important that what I have just said now should really be seen as a fundamental truth of life for the near future, starting right from the present! It is not the demand that one should believe that one can do this or that from any arbitrary idea, but the demand is that one should believe: people must work together. Direct personal collaboration between people is necessary so that those who have the relevant ideas from the other side of the threshold are also among those working together. So you see, what is important for the present is not something to be trifled with. It is an extremely serious matter that confronts people from the present. And one can say: in the wide circle of human consciousness there is still little sense for the tremendous seriousness that applies precisely to these things.

There is a further difficulty, which at least those who can start from certain spiritual-scientific considerations in these matters must know. The social problem of the present day is international in its effects. Herein lies a fatal error, which has recently found practical expression in the fact that a man like Lenin, who was entirely oriented towards the West, towards England and America, was driven in a sealed car under the protection of the German government, to Russia in a sealed car, in order to bring about a situation there with which the German government, namely in the person of Ludendorff, believed it could make peace and maintain itself. This is based on the fallacy that something truly international, applicable everywhere, can actually be achieved. And precisely Leninism in Russia shows how impossible it is to graft something that originated entirely in the West onto Russian national identity, something that the West does not want at all.

When social harmony is sought in the near future, it will not be a matter of abstractly coming back to the fact that all people are equal with regard to their fundamental nature, but rather it will be a matter of people having to learn to understand each other in their individuality, also in the great, eternal forces that pass through human individuality. Today, it is still something extraordinary and exciting for some people to hear the things that are meant to help people learn to understand each other better. Today, you can experience it when you tell someone: the German national character is such that the national spirit speaks through the ego, while the Italian national character is such that the national spirit speaks through the sentient soul. You can experience it today when someone is able to say: well, the Italian is less valued because the sentient soul is less than the ego, for example. That is what people say. It is, of course, complete nonsense, because these things are not about establishing values, but about providing something that allows people all over the world – and today, people's destinies cannot be ordered in any other way than across the globe – to really learn to understand each other. From a certain point of view, nothing of this kind is more valuable or less valuable, but each has its task in the development of humanity. And then, of course, there is something in every human being that is connected with the mystery of the threshold, whereby he stands out from such a group-like nature, which is characterized by the fact that one says: there the sentient soul is at work, there the I, there the spiritual self, and so on. But today we need to know these things, otherwise people will always miss each other and yet not know much more about each other than at most two things: firstly, that most people have their nose in the middle of their face, or that what journalists know when they travel the countries is correct. Both are truths of roughly equal importance.

That is what it is about: not an abstract, general humanity, but a real connection between people based on an interest in the particular individual design that a person acquires by being placed in a specific national character. The time has come when such things, which are not only perceived as uncomfortable but sometimes even as hurtful, must become popular. We cannot move forward without such things becoming popular. This must be properly considered. But all these things are such that they are truly accessible to common sense. And if only this self-confidence would arise in a large number of people, this self-confidence that does not always say: Yes, I cannot see into the spiritual world after all, I just have to believe the initiate – but which says: Now, this or that is being claimed; but I want to apply my apply my common sense to understand it. If this self-confidence, but effective, energetic, not just abstract or theoretical, were to enter into a larger number of people, then it would be good and then an enormous amount would be gained, especially for the path that must be taken with regard to the social problem. But that is precisely the harm, that through human education in the nineteenth century, people have lost this self-confidence in their common sense, more or less. The harmful characteristics through which this self-confidence and thereby the use of human judgment has been forfeited, these harmful characteristics were also present in earlier times, but they were not so harmful because man did not live in the age of natural science, which necessarily demands of him that he really applies a unified judgment, that he applies his common sense completely. But that is precisely what has been most lacking in recent times.

The examples that can be given for this are not taken seriously at all. But I will give you an example that I could not only multiply a hundredfold, but a thousandfold. I have a treatise here; this treatise is called: “On Death and Dying from a Purely Scientific Point of View.” This essay is a speech, the reproduction of a speech that was held in the auditorium of the University of Berlin on August 3, 1911 by Friedrich Kraus. He wants to talk scientifically about the problems of death and dying and says a lot on 26 pages. This speech, which was held in memory of the founder of the Berlin University, King Frederick William III, was always held, and such speeches also happen at other universities. This speech, of course, also has a beginning, and I will read this beginning to you. It was a treatise on death and dying, delivered in a strictly scientific sense, at least in the opinion of the lecturer, in the opinion of the deans and senators standing around the magnificence and the other illustrious gentlemen of science, and this speech begins: “Honorable Assembly! Dear colleagues! Fellow students! The University of Berlin celebrates today its founding and its royal benefactor. The speakers who take the floor at this hour each year, in remembering our origin, usually recall the difficult times, out of which adversity this university emerged, and the truly royal word of the replacement of lost physical by intellectual strength. Today, in a time of powerful prosperity, when the Emperor's strong arm protects our peace in honor, we can calmly consider that even the life of a nation with the strongest heartbeat runs in waves of ups and downs."

Well, today events provide the correction of these things; today events provide the correction of a sentence like: “Today, in a time of powerful prosperity, where the emperor's strong arm protects our peace with honor”! But what should common sense say in such a matter? Common sense should say: A person who is capable of saying this, which is nothing more than a great folly, must also be regarded as saying foolish things about everything else concerning death and dying. But who decides to use such common sense? So you see, the issue is not that common sense is incapable of making a decision, but that, for certain fundamental reasons of the present day, the use of common sense is out of the question. These things must be clearly understood.

The Berlin Academy of Sciences was founded by the great philosopher Leibniz. That is one example. One could cite other examples, which would have to be characterized similarly, from Munich, from Heidelberg, if you like. I will omit one country out of a certain courtesy – well, one does not say that today, so out of a certain feeling. I will say this: one could find similar things in Paris, in London, in Washington and so on, in Rome of course, in Bologna and so on. Leibniz undertook to found the Berlin Academy of Sciences under the Elector Frederick. Well, it was a good intention. But it could only be realized if Leibniz the great philosopher condescended to compare the elector – who was nothing like Leibniz said he was – to King Solomon and to call him the Prussian King Solomon. Yes, he even had to compare the electress with the Queen of Sheba. But this Berlin Academy of Sciences, which the great Du Bois-Reymond called “the intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern,” did not fulfill its tragicomic destiny with this fate. Because one day Frederick William I found that Professor Gundling was getting too much salary, namely because he was too clever. So he was deprived of his livelihood, was chased away, and Professor Gundling was forced to perform something vaudevillian in all sorts of taverns, to use his special talents to fool people into a kind of vaudeville show. King Frederick William I heard about this, and Gundling, whom he had previously chased away, began to interest him. So he made him a court jester, and now he gave him a salary again. But he said: “The court jester can also do something else for us.” So he made him president of the Academy of Sciences. And so Professor Gundling indeed became president of the Academy of Sciences. But this is not just a single fact that arose from a single quirk, but Frederick the Great, who then wanted to appoint Voltaire to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, heard about the salary that Voltaire was demanding for his admission to the Academy of Sciences; he said: This salary is much too large for a court jester. So, the issue was to treat the entire Academy of Sciences in terms of the attitude that one is dealing with fools.

You have to be able to point out such things if you want to draw attention to the discrepancy in events, that from a certain royal house the scholars are put on the same level as the court jesters, in reality, and that the scholars then dismiss them as they did the one example I just told you about from the year 1911. The point is that you cannot arrive at a healthy understanding of people if you do not have the will to look at reality without embellishment, to pursue the things that are accessible to you. And pursuing things in one area or another is actually something that can train every person with regard to a sense of reality, with regard to everything that gives you a healthy understanding of people. If you have – of course you have, naturally, I would not be so rude as to deny anyone common sense, because I believe that every person has it – but if you have the ability, the will to use common sense, then you can only do so by approaching things in any field completely without prejudice and with an open mind. Just try to realize that this is a difficulty, but one that can be overcome. Try to think how much of national or other human prejudices there is in you that prevent you from approaching things impartially and without prejudice. You have to have the good will to engage in this self-reflection, otherwise you will never be able to say a rational word when it comes to deciding which ideas are socially fruitful for the present and the near future and which ideas are not socially fruitful.

Having established this, I would like to say, more as a characteristic of the attitude than as a characteristic of any theoretical basis. From this point of view, let us consider rhapsodically, aphoristically, some details that may be important to us for understanding and for our actions in the present and in the near future. I will start with one of the basic ideas that is truly and intensely rooted in the modern proletariat. From Marxism, this modern proletariat has absorbed the notion that in the real progress of humanity, the opinion of the individual human being, the opinion of the individual individuality, actually has no significance. The opinion of the individual has significance only for those things that are his private affairs – at least, that is what the modern proletarian world view believes. But everything that becomes historical happens out of necessary economic foundations, as I characterized them the day before yesterday. The very opposite was the impression I made on the modern proletariat through my Philosophy of Freedom, in that it demands that everything be built precisely on human individuality, on the content and energy of human individuality, to which these modern proletarian ideas attach no importance at all, but which only want to accept man as a social animal, as a social being. Society brings about everything that has any developmental character in history, that is in any way fruitful in history. Whatever a minister or a factory owner or anyone else does out of his individuality – so the proletarian thinks – has a meaning within the four walls of his house or at his card table or wherever he is a private person, it has a meaning for his amusement, it has a significance for the personal relationships that he forms with this or that person; but what comes from him as a member of humanity does not come from his individuality, but from the whole social class context, and so on, as I have characterized it to you.

This idea is firmly rooted in the modern proletariat. It is intimately connected with the modern proletariat's disbelief in the individual human being and his insight. It is of little help to the modern proletariat when the individual communicates some knowledge to this proletariat, because the proletariat then says: What the individual thinks is of private value only to him; only what he says as a member of a class, as a member of the proletariat, and what anyone can say has real external social value. In connection with the ideas of the modern proletariat, there is a terrible leveling with regard to human individuality, an absolute disbelief in this human individuality. From this you will see how tremendously difficult it is for him to penetrate to what comes from the most individual, namely to the truly fruitful social ideas. But in our time, the course of events itself is such that such great world-historical prejudices – for when millions profess them, one can speak of world-historical prejudices – are refuted by the facts, by reality. There could be no stronger refutation for proletarian theory, which wants to derive everything from the impoverishment of the masses, in short, from social phenomena, from the economic crises that necessarily occur from time to time and so on – from this, it says, the development of things arises, not from what people think or recognize – There could be no stronger refutation of this principle, this world-historical prejudice, than the fact, given by the latest events, that ultimately – I say ultimately, but this “ultimately” has a great significance for this world catastrophe – the decision of this world catastrophe depended on very few people. By a very few people. What has become of it ultimately depended on the thread of the fears, the suspicions, the aspirations of a very few people. And one can say: like flocks, millions of other people have been driven into this catastrophe by a very few people. — This is unfortunately the sad truth that presents itself to anyone who looks at the conditions of the present from a realistic point of view.

It is true that now people are beginning to realize a little what all depended on Ludendorff's will, which was extraordinarily narrow-minded in so many respects. Just think how easily something like this could remain hidden! It is conceivable, absolutely conceivable, that it would not have come to this terrible catastrophe of the present with all its terrible consequences, and that Ludendorff's strange way of acting would not have come to light. But it has come to light. Other statesmen, who do not belong to the Central Powers, may be voted out of office at the next election or may retire from public life. This event will be discussed, but no one will think of them as having done as much harm to humanity as Ludendorff. This is also a chapter that belongs to the education of common sense, because it is easy to ignore common sense out of adoration of success or for some other reason. Those who have common sense will not be persuaded to look upon Woodrow Wilson, no, I mean those people who today fawn over Woodrow Wilson – and after all, how few do not! – those people who today fawn over Woodrow Wilson, any differently than they would upon Professor Kraus, who in 1911 spoke the words that I have read to you. That is what one would like: to encourage people to use their common sense. Of course, this is closely related to the will to face facts. It is an enormous detriment to the present that the most impractical people today feel precisely that they are the strongest practitioners. How much the Central Powers have felt themselves to be practical, let us say in the field of militarism! They felt tremendously practical and were the greatest illusionists, were the greatest fantasists, and made not only incorrect but grotesquely incorrect judgments about almost all the things that have happened in the course of the last, well, I will say, two and a half years, and acted on the basis of these grotesquely incorrect judgments.

It is difficult when you see how people who are actually good people, often in the sense of what is commonly referred to as good people, cannot even be reached by common sense. In this respect, one could have the most terrible experiences over the last four years, when one saw, for example, what happened in Germany in recent years with officers who wanted to lead the people's education, who wanted to hammer into the people how they had to think so that everything would go right, so that the people behind the front would also “hold out”, as it was so beautifully called. It was terrible. When you then had a more precise insight into what was to be drummed into people, and what those who drummed it into them often presented with the very best of intentions – it was probably, in reality for my sake, the thing in its own way honest, but they did not want to make use of their common sense. And that is what matters. And that is of the greatest importance for the present, because this common sense must look at reality everywhere, and must not reject it because it finds something unpleasant out of prejudice. Is it not true that in our time we have witnessed the grotesque combination of the monarchical principle, which almost borders on absolutism, with Ludendorffism – with Leninism in Russia, with Bolshevism, because Bolshevism is actually a creature of Ludendorff. Bolshevism was created by Ludendorff in Russia because Ludendorff believed that he could make peace with no one in Russia except the Bolshevists. Thus not only did the German people, but also that the misfortunes of Russia are in many respects connected with the grotesque errors of this one man. These things show the colossal error of the proletariat, that the opinion of the individual has no significance in the social organization of conditions. These things must be seen quite objectively with common sense.

If we start from this attitude, we find in particular a sentence that I ask you to take to heart, because this one sentence can, among other things, have a guiding force for social thinking in the future. This one sentence is: It is enough to have no ideas in times of revolutions and wars, but it is not enough to have no ideas in times of peace; for when ideas become rare in times of peace, then times of revolutions and wars must come. — For wars and revolutions one needs no ideas. To maintain peace, one needs ideas, otherwise wars and revolutions will come. And that is an inner spiritual connection. And all declamations about peace are of no use if those who are called upon to guide the destinies of nations do not endeavor to have ideas, especially in times of peace. And if they are to be social ideas, then they must come from beyond the threshold. If an age becomes poor in ideas, then peace itself fades out of that age.

One can say such a thing; if people do not want to examine it, they will simply not believe it. But the terrible fate of the present depends on disbelief in such things. This is one of those principles that it is extremely important to take on board for the present and the near future. You will find another principle in the essay on “Theosophy and the Social Question”, which I published years ago in “Lucifer-Gnosis”. I am convinced that very few people take this principle fully to heart. I tried to draw attention to something that should work as a social axiom. I pointed out that if the relationship arises that a person is paid for his immediate work, nothing beneficial can come of it in any social structure. If a prosperous social structure is to emerge, it must not be the case that people are paid for their work. Work belongs to humanity, and the means of existence must be provided to people by other means than by paying for their labor. I would like to say, as I have already done in that essay: If the principle of militarism, but without the state, were transferred to a certain part — I will speak of this part in a moment — of the social order, then an enormous amount would be gained. But the underlying principle must be the realization that there is trouble on the social plane when people are in society in such a way that they are paid for their work, depending on how much or how little they do, that is, according to their work. Man must have his livelihood from a different social structure. The soldier receives his means of subsistence, then he has to work; but he is not paid directly for his work, but for being a human being in a certain position. That is what it is about. That is the most necessary social principle, that the proceeds of labor be completely separated from the means of subsistence, at least in a certain area of the social context. As long as these things are not clearly understood, we will achieve nothing socially. As long as this is the case, amateurs, who are sometimes professors, like Menger, will speak of “full labor income” and the like, which is all wishy-washy. For it is precisely the labor yield that must be completely separated from the procurement of the means of existence in a healthy social order. The civil servant, if he does not become a bureaucrat due to a lack of ideas, the soldier, if he does not become a militarist due to a lack of ideas, is in a certain respect – in a certain respect, do not misunderstand me – the ideal of social cohesion. And not an ideal of social cohesion, but the opposite of social cohesion, is when this social cohesion is such that man does not work for society, but for himself. That is the transference of the unegoistic principle to the social order. He who understands egoism and altruism only in a sentimental sense understands nothing of the matter. But the person who, practically, without sentimentality, with pure, healthy common sense, realizes that every society must necessarily perish because man only works for himself, that is, purely what is egoistically shaped in the social order—that person knows the right thing.

This is a law, as surely effective as the laws of nature work, and one must simply know this law. One must simply have the ability to apply common sense in such a way that such a law appears as an axiom of social science. Today we are still far from realizing this. But the recovery of conditions depends entirely on the fact that just as someone regards the Pythagorean theorem in mathematics as something fundamental, he takes this sentence as the basis of the social structure: all work in society must be such that the labor yield falls to the society and the means of existence are not created as labor yield, but through the social structure.

Of course, there are a number of such social axioms, because social life is naturally complicated. But today we are faced with the necessity of somehow considering how the social structure of human development can be put on a healthy footing. Above all, we must have a healthy eye for the parts, for the components of social life. One must be able to distinguish in a healthy way the different links of social life. You see, with all the things at stake today, it is not so much a matter of listening to the buzzwords that come from the Bolshevist or the Entente side , because today they are almost opposites, aren't they, but what is important is to realize what is needed by humanity, to acquire a sound judgment for the structure of social life. Of course, social life must be there. And precisely because social life must be there, that is why people are so attached to the Mongolian – well, excuse me, it is only meant to be symptomatic – to the Mongolian idea of the state, to the omnipotence of the state, because people imagine: what the state does not do cannot happen for the benefit of the people. – Incidentally, this view is not that old. For it was quite a while before the nineteenth century was over that an insightful man wrote the beautiful treatise: “Ideas for an Experiment to Determine the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State.” He was a Prussian minister, Wilbelm von Humboldt. This essay was particularly close to my heart because in the 1890s and even into the twentieth century, my Philosophy of Freedom was always categorized as a work of “individualist anarchism” – not by me, but by others. Wilhelm Humboldt's essay on the limits of state effectiveness was always categorized as the first work, while my Philosophy of Freedom was usually always categorized as the last, in chronological order. Well, you see, it was possible to be registered under “individualistic anarchism,” but at least together with a Prussian minister!

Social organization, social structure must be there, but it cannot be uniformed. It cannot be done in such a way that everything is, as it were, brought under one roof. What is needed today, what is important, could have been done in a certain way a long time ago, could have been done during this war catastrophe, and it can be done now, but it is always modified. For you must not forget that in the last few weeks the world has become a different one for Central Europe, and that one has an effect on the other. Now, for years I have endeavored to awaken understanding here and there for the form that is to be effective from Central Europe to Eastern Europe, for example — for the Entente is not teachable, of course, and should not be taught — I have endeavored to make that valid. The point is that if you want to assert something like that, you have to structure the lives that people have to lead together in the right way. When these ideas were presented to statesmen, let's say, I can only sketch these ideas out for you briefly; the point is that they have to be increasingly individualized. When these ideas were presented to a statesman some time ago, when it was already quite too late for the form I had given them at the time, but I told the gentleman that if he was thinking of approaching these ideas in any way, I would of course be willing to rework them in an appropriate way for the time that was then the present. Today, of course, they would have to be reworked again for the particular circumstances. In this context, it is important to really appeal to common sense when presenting such ideas. Then it is important that someone can see that social and other human coexistence is properly structured. The question arises as a main question: How must one differentiate in what people lead as a communal life? — And here it is important to distinguish between three aspects. Without this distinction it will not work, and no forward development from the present into the near future will come about without this threefold distinction being made. The first point is that, whatever the social group in question may be, small or large, it is essential that some social group should be so constituted that order prevails within it in terms of security of life and security towards the outside. The security service, conceived in the broadest sense – I must use such sweeping words – is one element. But this security service is also the only element that can be directed into the light of the idea of equality. This security service, everything military and police, if I may speak in the old sense, is also the only thing that can be treated in the sense of a democratic parliament, for example. Every person can have a say in this security service. So there must be a parliament, however the social group is constituted, in which deputies can be elected, for example, by universal, secret, direct suffrage, who have to form the laws and everything that is intended for this security service. Because this security service is a link in the chain of order, but it must be treated separately from the rest and then harmonized with the others only from a higher point of view.

A second aspect, however, must be kept entirely separate from all that concerns the security service, internal and external security. This aspect, which cannot be treated according to the idea of equality, is the actual economic organization of the social groups. This economic organization must not be directly related to what I have mentioned as the first link, but must be treated separately. It must have its own ministry, its own people's commissariat – today we say people's commissariat – which must be completely independent of the ministry, of the commissariat of the security service. It must have its own ministry, which is completely independent and which is chosen according to purely economic criteria, so that there are people in this economic ministry who understand something of the individual branches, both as producers and as consumers. This second link in the social order must be governed by completely different considerations, both in parliament and in the ministries. The first link can, let us say, be adjusted to democracy; if it suits us better, it could also be adjusted to conservatism. That depends entirely on the circumstances; if it is done properly, it will work, and the rest is a matter of taste. What is important is this trinity. For in the sphere of economic life there must prevail brotherhood. Just as everything in the sphere of security service must be subordinated to the principle of equality, so in the sphere of economic life the maxim of brotherhood must everywhere prevail.

Then there is a third area, which is the area of spiritual life. To this I count all religious activity, which must have nothing to do with the security service and economic life; to this I count all teaching, to this I count all other free spirituality, all scientific work, and to this I also count all jurisprudence. Without including jurisprudence, everything else is wrong. You will immediately arrive at a threefold structure that makes no sense if you do not structure it in the following way: security service according to the principle of equality, economic life according to the principle of brotherhood, and the areas that I have just enumerated: jurisprudence, education, free spiritual life, religious life, from the point of view of freedom, absolute freedom. And out of this absolute freedom must arise the necessary administration of this third link in the social order. And the necessary balance can only be sought through the free interaction of those who guide and determine these three links. In the sphere of intellectual life, to which jurisprudence also belongs, we shall not find anything like a ministry or a parliament, but something much freer. The structure will be quite different.

Of course, there must be transitional forms in addition to what is being striven for. But this should be clear to people. And we will not arrive at a healthy state until it becomes clear to people that this threefold order, of which I have spoken, must underlie everything, that we must think in such a way that we cannot maintain a uniformed state. For the idea of the state can be applied directly only to the first part, to the security and military service. Whatever is placed under state omnipotence, except for security and military service, stands on an unhealthy basis, because economic life must be built on a pure basis, whether it be corporative or associative, if it is to develop healthily. And the spiritual life, including jurisprudence, is only built on a healthy basis if the individual is completely free. He must be free in relation to everything else. He must also be able to appoint his judge, in my opinion from five to five, from ten to ten years, who is both his private and his criminal judge. Without that it does not work, without that you will not achieve an appropriate structure. These national questions could have been solved without territorial shifts! This is said by a man who has studied the difficult Austrian conditions, where there are thirteen different official languages or at least languages in official use, and who has been able to study these Austrian conditions, which is particularly necessary in the field of jurisprudence. Suppose two countries meet at some border, let them be divided by nationality or something else. Here is a court and here is a court, there is the border. The man here determines himself: I will be judged by this court in the next ten years – the other determines himself: I will be judged by this court. The matter is absolutely feasible if it is carried out in detail. But all the other things are ineffective unless there are things like this. For everything must indeed work together. But it only works together when the things are presented in such a way that they are made with a real understanding of what is there.

I have had the opportunity to present these things to a wide variety of people in the past, because I was sure, and still am today, that the circumstances of the last few years would have taken a completely different turn if this program had been countered by the Wilson program. And this program would have been the only real program that would have been effective if it had been presented before Brest-Litovsk. Of course, Brest-Litovsk would never have happened if such a program had been understood. Things would have had to take a completely different course. For I had worked it out in those years as a guideline not only for an internal policy but also for an external policy; internal politics seemed superfluous to me when everyone was busy manufacturing ammunition. All the talk of three-class legislation and its amendment seemed wishy-washy to me, but it seemed necessary to me to have a real impetus – not a program – a real impetus that would have been able to give things a different turn. I can only give you a few points of view here, as I have done. But the matter can be worked out in such detail that it is absolutely effective precisely for solving the most important questions. One has indeed had painful experiences in the process. I gave the elaboration to a man - not just one, but many, but I will tell you about one case as an example - who wrote to me after months. That was a good sign, because he had really studied the matter, had put a great deal of honest effort into it, and had also discussed it with me. Both in his letters and in his conversations with me, two objections came up, for example, that are very characteristic. I have heard such objections over and over again in the most terrible way over the past few years, objections of that kind. One objection was this: Yes, it is well known that most of the wars to date are hidden, masked resource wars, that they are mostly states of war that arise from resource interests, from international, that is, mutual resource interests. But if you look at what you have done, then there could no longer be conflicting resource interests. “Yes,” I said, ”Privy Councillor, if you would tell me that to confirm what I have written to you, then I would understand; if you thought that what I have written would be good, because then the terrible masked wars for raw materials would finally be over in the world through the final solution of the tariff relationships, which in this second part of the economic program, if I may call it that, are thus solved. If you tell me something that corresponds to the reality of life, I would understand; but that you tell me this as a refutation, I cannot understand.

The second objection was this: he wrote to me after having studied the matter for months: Yes, I cannot imagine how, if you were lucky with something like that, a social-democratic policy could still be pursued, because your economic program would no longer make a social-democratic policy possible. — Yes, you laugh. I did not laugh, because I have learned from these things, which I could duplicate for you in great numbers, and which you can find everywhere today, how bad the selection is that is practiced today by the circumstances in determining those people who are to be the responsible leaders in this or that field. I spoke to you here a long time ago about the fact that today we suffer from the selection of the worst, who always come out on top. This is also something that belongs to a healthy sense of reality and thus also to a healthy human understanding: to see this selection of the worst.

In this way, I have given you, I would like to say, guidelines. The recovery of the situation for the future is based on this threefold nature. All the mischief is based on the confounding of these three links. What actually applies only to the first link, to security and military service, is applied to economic life, where it cannot possibly bring about any healthy conditions, but it is even applied to spiritual life, including jurisprudence, where it is quite impossible. Oh, if only people would want to get a little closer to what follows from the secrets from beyond the threshold, they would be able to see so very easily that just such truths as I have told you about the threefold nature of social life must be taken from the supersensible world, but can be grasped here by the senses. That is just it. I have given you guidelines, but they are not guidelines that represent some abstract program. Rather, they are guidelines of which I could say, for example, when I handed over the matter to a man who had a very important position (I will not say what an important position in the past and for whom it would have been an enormously significant act if he had made a manifesto in this direction. Yes, I told the man: you have the choice of either doing one thing or experiencing the other. What I have worked out here is not based on ideas that arise from, well, women's clubs or pacifist societies or the like, but from the study of the development of humanity in the next thirty to forty or fifty years. That is the content of what wants to and will develop in Central and Eastern Europe, and you have the choice of either promoting it through reason or expecting it to materialize through revolutions in a roundabout and extremely painful way. But you see, people have to believe such things, believe them by applying their common sense to verify them. People must have the insight to recognize that reality has to be examined. Because what develops in humanity develops according to certain impulses that one must study and of which one can say: they want to take shape. If you go against them, you govern badly, regardless of whether you are a socialist or a monarchist, a republican or a prince of Monaco or whatever.

But it is precisely the courage to do such things that people have been unable to muster in recent times, because they lacked precisely that trust of which I have spoken in these days, and that is based on the Fichte proposition, that is, on the attitude that comes from the Fichte proposition: Man can do what he should; and when he says, “I cannot,” he means “I will not.” People who had understood to some extent what I wanted came together; but those who had the courage – which only comes from the real use and handling of common sense – to implement something like this did not come together. And one can only hope that now that the forces of scrutiny have become even stronger, people will gradually come together. But one should not believe that what was formulated here years ago does not now need to be reformulated to fit the new conditions that have arisen. One must think so realistically that one knows: at every point in time, when things are to be thrown into reality, things must be thought of somewhat differently. — And so one could truly have very tragic experiences in the last years. For example, one of the monarchs who has now also passed away, when he saw what was coming, once again demanded these ideas and had his advisor come to hear them from him because he had forgotten the things and wanted to hear them again. He couldn't understand them quickly enough, so he said to the advisor in question, “So write these things down for me again briefly!” Yes, but I don't know how I am supposed to get the letter? How am I supposed to get this letter that you are supposed to write for me? It has to go through the ministry or the Cabinet Office, doesn't it? — This matter was never resolved because it went through the ministry, where everything was rewritten.

I am telling such things today – and I will tell many more in the future – because it is necessary that we learn a great deal from the recent past. Unless we learn from the past, we will not be able to move forward on a fruitful path. It is not enough to consider only the immediate situation; it is essential to have the will to look into the underlying causes that lie behind the mere symptoms. And one cannot look into them unless one develops a sound understanding of how symptoms arise and acquires the will to really assess them. Today, things are urgent. One would like to say again and again: If only they were not grasped drowsily, but if they were grasped with the full seriousness, which also includes having a sense of how much things have gone wrong due to the selection of the worst, and how inclined people are to let their judgment go astray, to be pulsed by false impulses! We must find a way to ensure that the continuity of economic life is not disrupted until ideas that can be used to further develop economic life have been introduced into people's minds in a certain way. We must gain the possibility of putting something realistic in the place of the economic nonsense that is produced by university economics professors in all countries today. We will not make any progress if we are not able to tackle education in the broadest sense first. Because we need understanding. Everything that the existing educational institutions provide about the necessary organization of social life or the social body is useless. But that is also what social democracy has inherited, and it is useless. Firstly, it is necessary to bring sensible ideas into people's heads. Therefore, it is necessary that anyone who wants to participate in social life at the present time should first find the possibility of such a transitional state that best satisfies what can best be satisfied. That is: security and public order. Why not give the people a parliament, which is something the democratic element, in particular, is now, well, yearning for. But the point is that the economic really acquires an independent position alongside the other things. This must first be carefully transformed into a complete set of provisional arrangements. Only the first link can be tackled radically today; the rest must be transformed into a series of provisional arrangements. And the spiritual life is the one that should be attacked immediately. The third link is the one to start with. And if someone were to come up with the idea that the universities, above all, would have to be cleaned out, and he does not want that, then, then there is simply no talking to him in this area. However, they must be cleaned out first!

I wanted to talk to you about this in the context of the important issues of the present.

My dear guests!

I must ask you to excuse me for speaking in German and not in Dutch; however, I will have to show you a number of photographs to illustrate today's lecture, and they will not be in German, but international.

The anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement from Dornach has been working on this for the last twenty years or so. In the early years, however, the Anthroposophical Society was a member of the general Theosophical Society, but I never put forward anything other than what I currently represent. And when, after this anthroposophy had been tolerated for a while within the Theosophical Society, it was then found to be too heretical and was to a certain extent expelled, the Anthroposophical Society was founded as an independent society.

The anthroposophical movement definitely wants to reckon with the scientific attitude of the contemporary civilized world, it does not want to be anything sectarian or the like, but it wants to have a serious stimulating effect on the various sciences of our time, on the religious consciousness and also on the artistic and social life of the present.

By around 1909, the anthroposophical movement had grown to such an extent within Central Europe that it was impossible for it to work without its own building, and so a number of long-standing members came up with the idea of erecting their own building for anthroposophy. And when I was approached with the intention of erecting such a building, a very specific impulse immediately arose from the nature of anthroposophical work. Otherwise, if one had been forced by some spiritual movement to construct a building of one's own, one would have gone to some master builder and had him construct a Renaissance building or a Gothic building or a Greek building or something similar.

It would have been impossible for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to proceed in such an outward manner. For this is not something that merely seeks to spread a theoretical culture, but anthroposophically oriented spiritual science emerges from the source of the full human being. I have taken the liberty of explaining how it emerges from this source of full humanity in the two previous lectures here in this hall. But because this is so, because anthroposophy is not merely a one-sided theoretical science, but because it is something for the whole of human life in all its forms of activity, this anthroposophical movement also had to create its own architectural style out of its sources at the moment when it was faced with the necessity of erecting its own building. And we have succeeded in creating such a building. It is not yet finished, but it is already finished to such an extent that courses were held in it last fall and will be held again at Easter. We have succeeded in erecting such a building on the Dornach Hill near Basel in Switzerland.

I said that the style of this Goetheanum, the attempt at a new style of building, was also formed from the same sources from which spiritual science was born, naturally with all the dangers, with all the shortcomings with which such a first attempt at a new style must be associated. Anthroposophy really emerges from the sources of being, not from thoughts or mere experimental and intellectually extended investigations, from the sources of existence itself. Therefore, in all its work, it must connect itself with the creative forces that are active in nature itself, for example, because the ultimate creative forces in nature are, as I have explained in the previous lectures, themselves of a spiritual nature.

I may perhaps use a comparison. Take a nut. It has a nut kernel; this nut kernel is formed in a lawful way. But there is also the nutshell; it could not be otherwise as it is, since the nut is as it is. The same force that shapes the nut kernel also shapes the nutshell in a unique way. Just as the nut kernel is shaped by natural law, so is the nutshell.

In Dornach, anthroposophical spiritual science is taught from the podium. The results of anthroposophical spiritual science are explored. Artistic representations are offered which are an outward expression - artistic, not symbolic or straw allegorical, but artistic - of that of which spiritual science itself is the expression. Therefore, around all this, around the kernel, so to speak, the shell must also be formed, which is [formed] precisely out of the same laws.

Therefore, an architecture has been cultivated in Dornach that is [designed] from the same sense, from the same spirit as anthroposophical spiritual science itself. Sculpture is done there out of exactly the same spirit, painting out of the same spirit. When someone stands on the podium and speaks in ideas, it is just another form of expression of what the pillars speak, what the paintings on the walls speak, what the sculptures speak. Everything is, if I may put it this way, cast from a single mold.

People are so afraid that nothing artistic would be created in this way, but only something symbolic or allegorical. Well, ladies and gentlemen, in Dornach there is not a single symbol, not a single allegory, but everything is attempted to be given in artistic form. The aim is not to somehow embody the ideas that are presented through images, that would be inartistic. Rather, the one spiritual life that underlies it can be shaped artistically at one time, and at another time it can be shaped ideally, in thought, scientifically. Art in Dornach is not a didactic expression of a science, for example, but it is one representation, and science is the other representation of the same great spiritual unknown from which anthroposophical spiritual science draws everything it wants to give humanity.

The entire external design of the Dornach building had to be accordingly. Anyone who looks at this Dornach building will see a double-domed structure, with two circular cylinders standing side by side, but interlocking, and two hemispherical domes above them, which are joined together in the circular segment by a somewhat difficult mechanical construction. Since in Dornach what can be researched through spiritual science is to be brought to the world, this must be reflected in the building itself. The small domed building is a kind of stage in which mystery plays and the like are performed. Eurythmy is also performed, but many other things are planned. The podium for the speaker is located between the small and large domed rooms. The large dome room is the auditorium or audience room for almost a thousand people. This double-domed building expresses the fact that anthroposophical spiritual science has something to say to the world of the present and the future in spiritual, general human and social terms, which I took the liberty of discussing in the two previous lectures.

If you approach the building from the west [and] come towards the main portal, which is oriented to the west, you will first see the following view (Fig. 5). The bottom of the building is made of concrete; at the top is a terrace that leads around the building in a stylized curve. This wooden structure stands on this concrete foundation. The domes are covered with that wonderful Nordic slate that is found in the slate quarries that can be seen on the journey from Kristiania to Bergen, from the Vossian slate quarries. This slate fits in wonderfully with the main idea of Dornach. Concrete and wood are both processed in such a way that an architectural style emerges which can be characterized as the transformation of the existing geometric, symmetrical, mechanical, static, dynamic architectural styles into an organic architectural style. Not as if any organic form had been imitated in the architectural forms of Dornach, that is not the case, but rather I tried, in the sense of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, to become completely integrated into the natural creation of organic forms and to obtain organic forms which, by metamorphosing them, could then form a whole in the Dornach building; organic forms which are such that each individual form must be in the place where it is.

Imagine the nature of organic forms. Think of something seemingly quite insignificant in the organic form of the human organism: an earlobe. You will have to say to yourself: This earlobe, in the place where it is, could not be otherwise, as it is, if the whole organism is as it has just revealed itself. The smallest and the largest thing in an organic context has its very specific form at its place in the organism. This has been carried over into the building concept of Dornach.

I know very well how much can be objected to this organic principle of building from the point of view of the old architectural styles. But this organic building style was once coined in the Dornach building concept. It may be rejected from the old point of view, but after all, everything new was rejected from the old point of view. In any case, however, if one can make friends with the transformation of static-dynamic, geometric building forms into organic ones, then one will find that all transitions from one organic form to another - not organic [natural] forms, for nothing is naturalistically imitated - [can be experienced] with the same inner regularity as, say, the plant leaf that is at the bottom of the stem, metamorphoses when it appears further up the stem, always [is] the same form, but alternating with the greatest variety.

So in Dornach you will find certain organic forms carried into the building concept everywhere, as they are carved out of the wood here, as they appear here on the entrance pillars as capitals. Here on the side windows (Fig. 4, 12) you can see the same motif, on the windows of the side wing (Fig. 13) too, apparently no longer similar, but nevertheless the same metamorphosed, just as the motif of the green leaf reappears in the flower petal.

If you look at the building from the inside and the outside, you can get the impression: If any motif is near the gate, it is worked differently, so that you can see that the motif has less to bear against the gate, while it has to brace itself against the whole weight of the building. All of this, as it is taken into account in nature in the formation of the bones and muscle shapes, is definitely carried out in Dornach's building concept. Take a look at the bone form within the formation of the knee, it is designed in a wonderfully natural and ingenious way so that certain bones, which form the foundation bones, carry what lies on them. They are expanded and retracted in the right place. Feeling one's way into the forms of organic formation, of carrying, of weight, that was necessary in order to build Dornach.

Here (Fig. 5) you enter. Here is a room to put down your clothes, here is a staircase inside, through which you walk up. You can walk around this terrace and at the same time have a distant view over the countryside, the Swiss Jura.

The same picture, slightly shifted and closer (Fig. 6).

Here (Fig. 7) you can see the building as it presents itself to you from the southwest. Here the gallery, below the concrete building.

The building as you see it when you approach it from the north (Fig. 1), so that you have the large dome in front of you, [here] the small dome. Here the two domes are joined together.

From a point in the north, the building (Fig. 2). Here you can see a strange structure. This is the one that is most criticized. It is the building that stands near the building. I started by looking at the lighting and heating machines as if they were the kernel of a nut, and constructing a shell over it out of concrete, which is extremely difficult to work with artistically. Those who still criticize this building today don't consider what would be standing there if no effort had been made to create something artistic out of the artistically brittle concrete material: there would be a red chimney. I would like to ask people whether that would be more beautiful than what is certainly a first attempt to stylize something out of concrete, which has some shortcomings, but is nevertheless a first attempt to create something artistic in these things.

Here (Fig. 3) the building seen from the northeast. Here is a house that was already standing when we were given the building plot. A house that we very much hope we will be able to buy one day. You can imagine for what purpose we would like to acquire it; of course it disturbs the whole aspect of the building.

Here is the interlocking of the domes (Fig. 17). Here the main wing, here the main entrance (Fig. 10).

Here is the studio where the stained glass windows were made (Fig. 103). It was listed as a studio for grinding the stained glass windows.

Behind it is the boiler house again (Figs. 106, 107). In a neighboring village, Arlesheim, there is a particularly tastelessly built church. I have nothing to say against it, but it is honestly tasteless. Nevertheless, the Swiss Association for the Beautification of Swiss Buildings has managed to say that this [our] building disfigures this part of Switzerland: just take a look at the beautiful church in Arlesheim.

The ground plan (Fig. 20). Main entrance, organ room, auditorium. Here is the lectern. The stage area. Here are the two side wings with the individual rooms for the performing actors and other artists. Here you can see seven columns on both sides. Here in the curve six columns. These seven pillars are not formed out of some mystical urge in the number seven, but purely out of artistic feeling. Just as the violin has four strings, so the artistic feeling here has resulted from inner reasons that a certain artistic development and in turn an artistic conclusion can be achieved by developing just seven motifs. With these pillars, the risk was taken not to design the capital and architrave motifs as repetitions, but in a lively development. When you enter from the west portal, you come across the first two columns. However, they are symmetrical. But if you move on from the first to the second column, the capital of the second column, the base, the architrave above the second column is designed in a way that must be organic. It is designed in such a way that one had to live into the creation and creation of the forces of nature if one wanted to artistically shape the second pillar motif out of the first, the third again out of the second and so on, until a certain conclusion was reached in the seventh pillar motif.

Many visitors come to Dornach and ask: What does the individual chapter mean? You can't ask that at all about art. The essential thing is that one pillar emerges artistically and formally from the other pillar. Whereas in the static architectural style we are actually only dealing with symmetry, with repetitions of the same motif, here we are dealing with a living evolution from the first to the seventh column. I will show the columns later, then you can see this.

Section through the building (Fig. 21).

Original model, cut vertically in the middle (Fig. 22). I originally had to work out the whole building as a model, so that even the building plan, ground plan and elevation, as they were based on, were formed according to this model. This whole model is precisely the embodiment of the Dornach building concept, is conceived in the same way as spiritual science itself is conceived, is to a certain extent another expression for that for which the one expression is spiritual science itself.

Right next to the main entrance, the main portal in the west (Fig. 15). The pictures were taken at a time when construction was still in full swing.

A little further on from the main entrance (Fig. 12). Here the part containing the stairs to go up. Here is a house nearby. This house was built in a very special way. After all, we built the entire structure through the understanding of our anthroposophical friends. The fact that the Dornach hill was used to build this house is explained by the fact that a friend in Basel, near Basel, bought this building plot a long time ago to build a summer house for himself; he then gave us this plot as a gift. We were then able to build there. The friend also wanted to have his house here. And that's when I was given the task - various conditions made it necessary - to stylize a house, a family home with fifteen rooms, out of concrete material. It was a bit of a gamble. There are certainly still flaws in this house, which is formed out of the artistic nature of the brittle concrete material. But such things have to be done for the first time.

A side wing (Fig. 17). These two side wings are inserted like a crossbeam. Here the main motif is again metamorphosed. Everywhere the same and yet again something different, one could say, is contained in the building forms.

Front façade of a side wing (Fig. 14). Here again the motif that is at the main entrance, very widened, designed with rich material, here once more sparingly designed in the same metamorphosis. A certain law of symmetry is observed everywhere, but this is combined with asymmetry. This asymmetry gives the building an artistically pleasing effect and great variety.

Taken somewhat larger, the motif of the façade of one such side wing (Fig. 11).

We enter through the concrete entrance in the west, imagine (Fig. 23). Then we first come to the stairs leading up here. This would be the room where you put your clothes. Then you go to the front, here you enter the auditorium. Here I have dared to make the column shape organic.

[Then] for example this shape here (Fig. 24): There are three motifs standing perpendicular to each other. How did this form come about? Not through any kind of philosophizing, but purely out of feeling. You can say to yourself: anyone who has first entered through the main portal and then wants to come into the auditorium must be able to move in a certain way towards the thought and feeling of what he wants to hear in Dornach from an anthroposophically oriented spiritual view: Here you may enter for the security of your soul, to gain a firm foothold within yourself. Here you may enter in such a way that no illusions of life shall beguile you; that no kind of wavering shall come over you. This has been sensitively expressed here in this motif.

Then you see here a pillar supporting the staircase (Fig. 25). The staircase motif itself is designed in such a way that it is organically braced against the building, in this case against the exit. Here it is carried by a column that does not imitate organic motifs in a naturalistic way, but is just as organically shaped as the forms of living creatures in nature are shaped by the creative forces of nature. How this pillar stands up, how it supports something on one side, where the load to be carried is lighter, how it braces itself against this side, where the main load of the building lies, is expressed in the smallest things in the same way as the earlobe shape expresses the affiliation to the whole human organism. Every form in Dornach must be perceived as a necessity in its place.

Here (Fig. 26) is a motif that I have executed in the various metamorphoses. Here it is made of concrete, in the upper section of wood. It's a front piece for a radiator. As I said, in Dornach the individual forms emerge from each other in a metamorphic way, and there are no abstract forms that are merely appropriate to the underground art, but everything is realized in a strictly organic artistic way.

Here (Fig. 27) you can see the room that you enter when you climb the staircase that has just been built. This is a wooden building. Here is a pillar supporting the ceiling. Everything that immediately follows in the interior is handcrafted by a large number of our friends. It must be emphasized again and again that a large number of friends have gathered in Dornach over many years, all of whom have worked out these individual sculptural forms, which were given to them in the model, by hand. In a sense, the entire wooden structure is the handiwork of the anthroposophical friends. And that is something that could have been exemplary at the same time for the loving cooperation of a group of people.

If you now enter and look backwards in the auditorium, you can see the organ loft here. This is the model (Fig. 30). The idea is not to place the organ in a cavity, but to take the organ and shape the architecture accordingly. Additional motifs were then added during the elaboration.

Here is the interior (Fig. 29). When you enter the interior, you can see the organ porch where the singers stand. Here are the first three columns. I will explain the picture of the column formation in a moment. Above the columns are the architraves, which also show progressive motifs.

Here is the organ loft (Fig. 28).

Here is the space above the organ, sculpted out of wood (Fig. 33). Please take a look at the chapter. It is composed of simple forms. We will make the transition to the next and next capital and architrave forms. You don't have to think about how one capital emerges from another, but it is simply perceived like a leaf on the stem of a plant from which others now emerge metamorphically. Thus the next motifs here are always formed quite sensitively from the previous ones.

Here you have the simple capital motif of the first column (fig. 34).

The first column and the second column (Fig. 35). If you think of the simple motif from top to bottom, from bottom to top, you can imagine how it grows. The drops from above grow into this form, and from below the forms grow to meet them in more complicated shapes. It is the same with the architrave motifs.

Second column motif (fig. 36): already more complicated.

Second and third columns together (fig. 37): Again organically metamorphosed, the third column is obtained from the second column.

The third column on its own (Fig. 38).

Third and fourth pillars together (Fig. 39). What is still simple here has become more complicated. You make very special discoveries in the process. I simply let one motif emerge from the other according to artistic feeling. In doing so, I realized that it is only through this artistic approach that one can really understand the essence of evolution in nature. One usually imagines that the first forms in a developmental process are the simpler ones, which then become more and more complicated. This is not the case. If you work artistically, allowing one to emerge from the other, then you end up shaping the simpler into the more complicated, but when the complication has reached a certain level, things become more harmonious, but simpler again. This is how evolution works: from the simple to the complicated and then back to simplification. This discovery is surprising at first. You create something like this from the purely artistic and then find that it actually corresponds fully to the artistic creation of nature.

Consider the human eye: it is the most perfect, but not the most complicated. Certain organs of lower beings, the fan in the eye, the xiphoid process, are absorbed by the human eye. You come to that by yourself if you shape purely artistically.

Something very strange also happened to me. I said I had to form seven pillars, really not out of any mystical inclination. The seventh pillar turned out to be the end; you couldn't go any further, the motifs had been fulfilled. But later I discovered that if I took the convex shape of the seventh pillar and reshaped it a little artistically, it went straight into the concave, hollowed-out shape of the first pillar. I wasn't looking for that. It was the same with the sixth and second pillars, and also with the third and fifth pillars. I discovered that the capitals and the pedestal figures were something that emerged naturally from the work in the sense of an evolution. This is not something I was looking for. Even in nature itself, such surprising formal relationships arise. When you create artistically, you get these things that confront you from the individual forms, and you come to a deep respect for the mysterious working and weaving firstly in nature, but secondly in the world of forms itself, which you can penetrate imaginatively and artistically and by looking at it.

A column on its own has become relatively complicated (fig. 42). But you will see that by thinking of this motif in such a way that it grows from top to bottom, from bottom to top, something emerges that I did not aim for; but when people look at it, they will say: He has formed the staff of Mercury. I didn't want to form that, but it came out like that.

It spreads out, grows, thus creating this complicated motif (fig. 41), then the motifs become simpler.

Here you can see this motif (Fig. 43). Now I couldn't go any further in the complication. By thinking of it as growing and perceiving it as growing, I created this simpler motif.

The last two columns with their architraves above them (fig. 45). The column directly in front of the stage entrance (fig. 46).

In this way, you can see how the individual capitals came about, how the entire column motifs developed artistically in their evolution.

Here we are in front of a plinth (Fig. 48). I wanted to show these pedestals in turn, one after the other, how they develop apart in the same way as the capitals.

All pedestals (figs. 48-54). First becoming more complicated, then simpler again.

Here you can see from the auditorium into the stage area (Fig. 57). Here you can see the painted interior of the stage dome. Here the architrave above the columns of the auditorium. Here the auditorium closes off the stage area. Still in progress is the gap that connects the auditorium with the stage area (Fig. 56).

Another view from the auditorium, whose last columns you can see, into the stage area (Fig. 55). Here the painted stage dome. With regard to the painting of the two domes, however, I cannot give you such pictures, or rather I cannot give you pictures that speak as clearly as I can about the other. For with regard to the painting of the Dornach building, what I once described as the essence of modern painting has been very seriously striven for and followed, at least in the small dome room. Everything that is created in painting must be extracted from color.

The world of color is a world unto itself. The person who immerses himself in the world of color learns to recognize the creativity of each individual color; he learns to recognize the creativity that lies in the harmony of colors. Those who know how red affects human perception, how red speaks from within, those who know that blue has a formative, creative effect, come to shape the painterly world out of the colors

This is roughly what they tried to create when painting the small domed room in Dornach. The essential thing is always, if I may put it this way, the spot of color in a certain place. Although the figurative is born out of color, everything is originally conceived out of color. Light, dark and colors are actually the only things that are justified when you depict something painterly with the help of the surface; drawing is actually a mendacity. Take the horizon line: the blue sky above, the greenish sea below. If you paint it like this, then the horizon emerges by itself as the creature of the color encounter. And so it is with all lines in real painting. In painting, form is the work of color. This is what was attempted in Dornach.

There (Fig. 64) you first see what is under the dome, the architrave motif, directly above the group that is to be placed in the east of the building as the sculptural center of this building, so to speak. A motif from the small domed room (Fig. 66). I ask that these motifs be judged in the same way as those of the large domed room, except that six columns are intended on both sides; thus the whole shapes and designs are “ben other.

A capital motif of the small domed room (fig. 58-63).

The first thing in the painting of the small domed room when you enter it (Fig. 73). Of course, you will only get a real sense of what I can show you now when you feel this [photographic] reproduction in its defects, when you say to yourself: What is this actually? There should be color! Of course it is also color, everything is taken out of the color.

Here is a child flying towards a kind of fist figure (fig. 69). The child is red-yellow, the fist figure in blue.

Here fist (fig. 70), [here] the child (fig. 69). This fist figure roughly represents the civilization of the fifteenth, sixteenth century, in which we are actually all still immersed. However, that which takes shape from that civilization in external theoretical science is basically only a surface. The person who lives into the world view that has emerged through the newer natural sciences with his whole human being feels death strongly on the one side and budding, germinating life on the other. These two polar opposites confront us precisely from the present-day view of nature. Just take the following: The way we describe nature, we use terms that are basically taken from the dead, the mineral. Our natural scientists see an ideal in thinking of plant and animal life along the lines of the mineral, perhaps even being able to work experimentally in this direction. The idea of death is very strong (Fig. 71). On the other hand, if we delve into our self-consciousness, there is that life which is polar opposite to death, which we feel in particular when we allow the life of a child to affect us uninfluenced by knowledge. It is entirely in keeping with the feeling that a fist figure appears here, painted out of the blue.

[Here] the only word you will find in the entire structure: ICH (Fig. 72).

It is at this time, when this fist figure enters modern civilization, that we first really get to know the ego as the abstract content of self-consciousness. As you know, older languages still have the I in the verb. In this age, the ego is peeled out, set apart, when at the same time this culture appears, the political contrasts of which I have just described. This is the first motif that confronts us in the painting of the small dome.

Here Faust (fig. 70), here Death (fig. 71) as the contrast to the child. It is precisely the most modern cognitive and spiritual life that is to emerge in this motif, but out of the color, out of the yellow-reddish tone of the child, the blue tone of Faust, the brownish-blackish tone of this skeleton.

An angel-like figure above Faust (fig. 74). In a sense, everywhere below is a figure representing the more human, above it a spirit figure, the inspirer, the inspiring figure.

Here (fig. 75) is an image born out of the sensibility of Greek culture, i.e. more in the past. The fist figure was conceived out of modern culture, which we are still part of. Here is a kind of Pallas Athena figure, perceived from Greek culture, with the inspiring figure above it (Fig. 76).

Also such an inspiring, spirit-like figure (fig. 77).

Here (fig. 78) going further back an initiate of the Egyptian culture, above him the inspiring figure, so that everything worked out of the color is really intended here as figurative, which even represents the successive cultures and their evolution.

Here again two figures (fig. 79), and below them the figure that I will show you in larger size later. This is a kind of man of more recent times, a man of the present Central European culture. That which is ambivalent in this man of the present is expressed in his inspiration, which is above him. Here is a Luciferian figure. In this Luciferic figure there is to live all that which lives in that human nature, that through which man wants to go beyond himself, through which he falls into the rapturous, mystical, theosophical. The other, the Ahrimanic, through which he falls into the philistine, the intellectual-materialistic. These two opposites are in every human being today. Man seeks a balance between this duality. Everything in him that leads pathologically to fever, to pleurisy, is in this Luciferic form; everything that leads to sclerosis, to calcification, is in this Ahrimanic form.

Here (Fig. 81) you see one thing, in a sense the human being with those forces that age him, drive him towards sclerosis, drive him mentally towards intellectuality, towards materialism. Man would be like this, despite the fact that no one desires it so much, so Mephistopheleanahrimanic, if he had no heart, if he were merely a man of intellect. He is in all of us, but we also have a heart.

This (Fig. 80) is the one who represents us if we only had a heart and no mind. The Luciferic figure: rapturous, mystical, theosophical, everything that wants to go beyond the human being. Here is the human being who, with the help of these two again polar, contour-like opposing effects, really feels duality and can only bear it if the child is placed by his side. The man of the present in his ambivalent nature. Here (fig. 82) still somewhat larger, the same man who feels conflict within himself.

Here (figs. 83, 84) we come somewhat closer to the center. Here two figures, one painted more light, the other more dark. I have always taken the view that the Russian people's soul contains the man of the future. Today, only in the East is everything distorted. Today, through Lenin and Trotsky, the East is working towards the death of culture, towards the most terrible destruction. For all that which is at work in the East as forces of decline in the most terrible way can only lead to the destruction of all culture. But that is not what corresponds to the Russian national soul. And if nothing else would bring down Lenin and Trotsky, the Russian people's soul would one day bring them down. But the Russian people's soul is such that every Russian has his own shadow next to him. There is not only the ambivalent man as in Central Europe, who carries Lucifer and Ahriman within him, the enthusiastic and the materialistic, there is a man who has a second man beside him. This shadow must first be absorbed by the man of the future, but then he will also become the man of the future.

Here (Fig. 83) the inspiring angel, above it a centaur figure. When the man of the future will have attained his maturity, this figure will be that which may be put forward as the actual inspirer next to the angelic figure; today he is still centaur-like.

Here (Fig. 84) this centaur figure, the starry sky in between, so rightly sensing that evolution in the spirit which hovers between the angelic and the animal. Man stands, as it were, between the animal, which has assumed a human form in its passions and instincts, and the angelic, in which the ahrimanic is transformed into the spiritual and thereby receives its cosmic justification.

Here (fig. 85) from the other side, symmetrically situated, the angel, the centaur figure, carved out of the yellow.

Here you can see what is painted in the middle: a kind of representative of humanity (fig. 86). Anyone who sees this representative of humanity may feel as if it were an embodiment of the figure of Christ. This Christ figure in the middle is shaped as I had to place it according to my supersensible view of the Christ figure, which I believed, as this being really lived in Palestine at the beginning of our era. The traditional figure of Christ with the beard was only invented in the fifth or sixth century. Today we have to go back through spiritual scientific research to the time when Christ lived in Palestine in order to be able to discover his form through extrasensory vision. I make no claim to be believed authoritatively that this is the true figure of Christ, but I see it this way and I hold from the depths of my being that this is the figure of Christ. Below it, carved into a rock, is the figure of Ahriman. From the right arm of the

The figure of Christ emanates lightning bolts that snake around the ahrimanic figure. The Ahrimanic figure is everything that man would be if he had only reason, only intellect, only a materialistic attitude, not a heart. Above it is the figure of Lucifer, carved out of the red, all that which in man tends to rapture, to fantasy, to one-sided theosophy, to mysticism.

Here (Fig. 87) you see this figure of Lucifer, the face painted entirely out of the red, above the figure of Christ.

The Ahrimanic figure (fig. 88), the countenance - the wings are bat-like in the Ahrimanic figure - bound by the lightning bolts emanating from the hand of Christ. Of course, it all depends on how you perceive it from the color.

Here is the head of the Christ figure (fig. 90). This is what is painted into the dome at the very east end of the small dome room. Below this painting - Christ, Lucifer, Ahriman - is a nine and a half meter high wooden group (Fig. 93); again in the middle is the representative of humanity, who can be perceived as Christ. Twice above it is the Lucifer motif, twice below it the Ahriman motif. And then out of the rock an elemental being, which looks at the Christ in the midst of Lucifer and Ahriman like a natural being.

Here (fig. 91) the first model of the Christ figure in profile, as I made it in order to base the wooden group, the sculpture on it.

En face the first model; it is somewhat defective (fig. 92). A model of the Ahriman figure (Fig. 99). A Lucifer figure (Fig. 101), at the side of the wooden figure in the middle.

Another Lucifer (Fig. 98). Above it, carved out of the rock, an elemental being bending its head, as it were, and looking at Christ in union with Lucifer and Ahriman. I have dared to form a face quite asymmetrically, so that it is carved out of the composition. This is usually done in such a way that the composition is made up of the individual figures. Here in the wooden group, the individual figure is always created from the meaning and spirit of the whole composition, hence this asymmetry. It is a completely asymmetrical face, but it has to be like this at the point in the composition where it is in the group.

Here you have the heating and lighting house (Fig. 106) standing on its own, the rear front completely adapted to the machines that are inside. The whole thing is only finished when the smoke comes out of the top. Then these extensions will also be perceived as justified. Artistically, one creates from the form and cannot give an abstract explanation as to why it is this way or that. Some people think they are leaves, others think they are ears. That's not the point, it's the form that matters, which adapts on the one hand to growing out of the boiler house and on the other hand to what happens in the boiler house.

The glass house in which the glass windows have been cut (Fig. 103). These windows are located in the auditorium. They are cut out of monochrome glass panes, i.e. glass panes tinted with a single color. They have a certain history: We had first ordered glass panes from a factory near Paris in the spring of 1914, but the shipment was so delayed that it simply disappeared on the battlefield; we never saw anything of it. We had to buy the panes a second time.

The idea is that the motif is now cut out of the single-colored glass pane using special machines. The pane is then inserted and the work of art is created in the sunlight that passes through. This is connected with the whole idea of building in Dornach. In buildings everywhere else, you have to deal with walls that close off the room. In Dornach you have walls that don't evoke the idea at all: You are closed off. Everything I have now shown you is actually designed to make the walls artistically transparent. The viewer or listener has the feeling in the building that the wall is transparent, artistically transparent through its form, and that he is in contact with the whole wide universe. This is expressed artistically and physically through these glass windows, which are actually only a kind of score, as they are worked out as glass etchings. They become works of art when the sunlight shines through them. In other words, what is inside the building expands into the outer, sunlit nature. The glass cutting had to be done in this studio, which now serves as the building office.

The door to the glass house (Fig. 104). Not even philistine door handles, but completely new door handles (Fig. 105).

[Now] a small sample of the stained glass windows. All kinds of motifs cut out of the single-colored glass pane, but they only make sense to enjoy when you are standing in front of them.

Here (Fig. 112) a pair of people, the feelings of this pair of people carried out in what is around them.

Another window motif, scratched out of the glass (fig. 110). The glasses are not all of the same color, but one color is always followed by another. So that when you enter the building, you can see the different colors from the various windows. The whole room is then illuminated with a symphony of colors, which is artistically perceived as being composed of the most diverse colors. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have taken the liberty of presenting to you the architectural concept of Dornach in the eighty pictures I have shown you. I have also taken the liberty of explaining to you how this Dornach building concept aims to replace merely static, geometric, symmetrical building with organic building. This had to happen because this spiritual science, as I have represented it here in my lectures, is not merely a one-sided science, but full of life; because it wants to draw fully from the source of world and human life. Therefore, it is not merely a phrase when it is said that religion, art and science and social life should be united with one another, but that the building in its new architectural style simply had to express the same thing out of the whole essence of this spiritual science that is expressed in the spiritual science itself through thoughts or laws.

My esteemed audience, through the willingness of a large number of understanding friends to make sacrifices, we have brought the building so far that last fall we were able to have about thirty experts, people of practice, hold courses in this building, and shorter courses are to be held again at Easter. However, the building is not yet finished. We can only express the hope that we will be able to complete this building, from which a spiritual-scientific movement, which will also bring the social liberation that is necessary for the people of the present and the near future, will emanate. For this, however, it will be particularly necessary to have the international understanding that I described yesterday as the basis for a world school association that works towards the liberation of spiritual life as one member of the tripartite social organism. It will be necessary for this spiritual life to be promoted and supported by the World School Association in an international way.

With regard to the building of Dornach, I know very well what can be objected to from older points of view, from old architectural styles. But if we never dared to do anything new, the development of humanity could not progress. And the impulse to move forward has to do above all with that which wants to emanate from Dornach as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Forward in the development of humanity, according to the goals that I indicated yesterday at the end of the lecture.

We know, in that we have also formed this outer shell of anthroposophical spiritual science in the building of Dornach, the Goetheanum, what all can be criticized about this building, what all can be objected to it. We have only one justification for ourselves, which is ultimately decisive for everything new: we must dare to try this new thing. And we always remember what is true: that what is justified will work its way through against all resistance if it is justified. If it is not justified, it will be eliminated and will do little harm to humanity. In the face of all opposition, it will become clear whether the building idea of Dornach is justified as an outer shell for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. We can only say: we think it is justified, and that is why we dared to do it!

What makes it difficult to fully understand spiritual science, as it is meant here, is that it not only has to think in a different way than ordinary consciousness about certain life riddles – about life riddles that very many people believe to be inaccessible to human knowledge altogether, some even believe to be outside of the real. But spiritual science comes to a way of thinking that is different in its kind, in its whole form, than the thinking of ordinary consciousness. Spiritual science comes to a thinking that, in the way it was indicated in the last two lectures I gave here, must first be unfolded out of ordinary consciousness, just as the blossom must be unfolded out of the plant that is not yet flowering. It can be said, however, that the development of human spiritual culture in the nineteenth century and up to our time has given rise to many ideas and conceptions that are on the way to this spiritual science. Even if the corresponding endeavors within the modern development of the spirit radically differ from this spiritual science, they nevertheless make demands for the knowledge of certain life and world riddles that are on the way to spiritual science. And here particular attention may be drawn to an idea which has been much discussed lately within certain circles, not only those circles in which it has been popularized by Eduard von Hartmann, the well-known philosopher, but also within other scientific circles. I am referring to the idea of the unconscious or, as one might perhaps better say, the subconscious in human mental life.

Let us see what is actually meant by this unconscious or subconscious. Even though it is interpreted in the most diverse ways by the most diverse people, what is meant ultimately comes down to the fact that in the depths of the human soul there is something that actually constitutes the basis of this human soul, but which cannot be reached with the ordinary consciousness of the day, nor with the ordinary consciousness of science. So that one can say: Those who speak of the subconscious or unconscious in the human soul speak of it in such a way that one can see that they are convinced that the actual essence of the soul cannot be grasped with everything that the human being can bring into his ordinary thinking and feeling, into the penetration of his will impulses into everyday and also into ordinary scientific consciousness. It may be said that, in so far as this conception has been characterized here, spiritual science can fundamentally agree with it. But it is the fate of spiritual science, as it is here meant, to agree with many a direction in world-conception from a certain point of view, but to have to take the paths indicated by these world-conceptions in a different way from that in which they do so. And here we come to something that the representatives of the subconscious or unconscious believe, but in which spiritual science must fundamentally differ from them. These representatives of the unconscious believe that what lies unconsciously for ordinary consciousness down in the depths of the soul and constitutes the actual essence of the human soul must remain unconscious or subconscious under all circumstances, and can never rise up into ordinary consciousness. This is why Eduard von Hartmann, who, as I said, has made the unconscious most popular in the last half-century, is also of the opinion that one can learn just as little about the nature of the soul as about the nature of nature itself through direct knowledge, through experience, through observation. He believes that one can only draw conclusions about the unconscious or subconscious and only hypothesize about it, that one can draw such conclusions from observations arising from the ordinary world, from everyday experiences or from science, and then hypothetically form ideas about what the world of the unconscious or subconscious looks like. Spiritual science cannot go along with this. And that it cannot do so, those revered listeners who were at the last lectures will have been able to deduce from them. For it was characterized there how spiritual science comes precisely to the realization that this unconscious or subconscious does indeed rest in the depths of the soul for ordinary knowledge, but that it can be brought up under certain circumstances. It can be brought up when that consciousness comes to development in man, which, as I have shown in my book 'The Riddle of Man', can be called the seeing consciousness, in the further development of Goethe's words 'contemplative judgment'. With these words about the 'contemplative judgment', Goethe gave a significant, a momentous suggestion. This stimulus could not be fully developed in his time simply because spiritual science was not as advanced as it is now. But spiritual science regards it as its task not to create all kinds of fanciful images in a nebulous, enthusiastic way, but to develop on serious scientific ground precisely what Goethe stimulated with his very significant words about the power of contemplative judgment. The way in which the human soul comes to this power of judgment or to the consciousness of direct perception is described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” or in other books of mine to which I must refer here. But what underlies this power of judgment will, I hope, emerge from a certain point of view, especially in today's lecture.

If spiritual science is compelled to follow the paths taken by the representatives of the unconscious in a different way from them, on the other hand it is in complete agreement with the scientific results of modern times. And here too, it is in a position to follow the path that this scientific research takes, but in a different way than the research itself; precisely because it is more in harmony with nature than the scientific view often is with itself.

As for the question of the actual nature of the soul, the scientific view is that this soul, as the human being experiences it in his ordinary consciousness, is entirely dependent on the human bodily organization. And as I have often indicated here, it would be a futile effort to resist this view of the dependence of the soul life, as experienced by man, on the bodily organization, from whatever point of view. Nothing seems clearer, even if natural science still has a lot to go through in this way, than that it has shown in a subtle way, even if the main points were known long ago, how the course of all human life clearly shows this dependence of the soul in its development on the bodily organization. One need only point out the many delicate facts, and it can be seen how, from childhood on, the human being develops organically as a living being, and how the development of the soul goes hand in hand with this development, how the soul life grows along with the development of the organs that natural science, with a certain justification, attributes to the soul life as its tool. And if we add the fact that the soul life is undermined by undermining the health or the organic connection of certain parts of the body, it becomes clear from all this how right the scientific world view is in this area. It can also show us how, with the gradual decline of the forces that permeate the human body, with aging, these soul forces decline in exact parallel to the bodily organization. Only dilettantism could, in principle, raise any objection to this view, which is put forward by the scientific world view. Those who believe that spiritual science does not reckon with the results of natural science do not judge this spiritual science, as it is meant here, in itself, but the false image that they build of it out of their imagination, and which they then find to be little in agreement with the natural scientific results of recent times, which rightly appear true to them. Spiritual science is therefore entirely based on the results of natural science. But I would like to add that spiritual science is in harmony with these results in a much deeper sense precisely because of its insights, than natural science itself can carry out. This can be seen in particular when one looks at a school of thought about the soul that is confused by many people with what is meant here by spiritual science. All kinds of unclear mystical ideas and experiences of people have to be pushed aside when one criticizes spiritual science, and one then confuses this spiritual science with these unclear, confused mystical ravings.

When one studies in depth, especially from the point of view of spiritual science, what has been called mysticism through the ages, something very remarkable emerges, not in all cases but in many. One can come to the most esteemed mystics and clearly see in them how the newer natural-scientific world view is right when they often do not attach much cognitive value to these mystical endeavors for the actual riddles of the soul and humanity. What is interesting and extraordinarily attractive is certainly what mystics have experienced when properly observed. And it is not the study, the objective, good consideration of mystical experiences of different times that should be objected to here, but rather the principle of the matter; that should simply be characterized. Mystics try, which is again a correct way in the sense of spiritual science, as I just characterized it, through what they call “union of the soul with the world spirit or with the divine” — as one wants to call it — to undergo a deeper experience, an experience that leads them beyond the reality of the senses, allowing them to be one with the spiritual-divine, and thus, as it were, elevating them out of the transitory into the sphere of the eternal. But how do they usually try to do this? Well, if you really study mystical development, you find that they try to do it by refining their ordinary everyday consciousness, by deepening it in a certain way, warming it through and glowing through with all kinds of inwardness, but by remaining within this ordinary consciousness. Now, spiritual science knows precisely from its insights that the scientific view is correct, that this ordinary, everyday consciousness is entirely dependent on its tools, on the life of the body. So if you delve into the ordinary, everyday consciousness in the mystical sense, however inwardly and finely you do it, but you stop at it, then you achieve nothing more than something that is dependent on the bodily organization. There are mystics who, through great poetic beauty, through wonderful flights of fancy, through a remarkable intuition for all kinds of things turned away from the world, can uplift the human heart and refresh the human soul to such an extent that I might say they amaze one through these things. But in the end one must always awaken from this amazement with the feeling: yes, what is the whole thing after all, if not a more intimate, often, one might say, refined imagining and thinking that is bound to the bodily organization; only now it is not bound in the same way as man is bound to it in everyday life, but is connected with the finer, more subtly developed powers of the bodily organization. One can find amiable, respectable mystics, of whom one must nevertheless say: their mystical experiences are nothing more than refined, or let us say spiritualized passions, affects, feelings, which are, however, similar to the passions, affects, feelings of ordinary life. Such mystics have only brought their bodily organization, through all kinds of ascetic means or through all kinds of predispositions, to the point that this bodily organization may express itself in quite different ways than is the case with ordinary people, but in the end it is still the bodily organization. Often one can see from the most sweeping expositions and effusions of such mystics that although they have turned away from the ordinary life of the senses of the day, from standing in the outer world, they have brought into this life of the senses, into the ordinary life of passion and affect, only what their imagination is able to experience. Therefore, the scientifically minded person will, with a certain right, call the experiences of such mystics abnormal, because they differ from ordinary experience. He may call them unhealthy, but he will also be right in saying that they prove nothing against the dependence of the human soul-life on the bodily organization, even if it occurs in a mystically refined way. In a sense, the bodily organization has only been trained so that what would otherwise appear in brutal sensuality is expressed in the soul in spiritual images, in metaphors, in symbols, behind which images, metaphors, and symbols, however, the connoisseur can find nothing but a refined expression of the ordinary life of passion.

In contrast to this, spiritual science says, and it is in complete agreement with the advocates of the subconscious or unconscious: however mystically refined ordinary consciousness may be, however much this ordinary consciousness 'spiritualized' - as it is often called - so that it brings a feeling of union with the spirit, within this ordinary consciousness one does not enter into that sphere which one actually seeks when one wants to speak of the deeper soul mysteries of man. In particular, the trained observation of the spiritual researcher shows that everything that a person can have and store in his soul in his ordinary experiences, which he makes into a memory, is tied to the physical organization. So that with everything that a person experiences within himself when he delves into his memories, he does not come out of this bodily organization, and one may say: a real spiritual scientific self-observation shows precisely that the more faithfully the experiences are retained by the memory, the more the activity of the memory is bound to this bodily organization. Therefore, spiritual science must resort to completely different methods than those used to develop ordinary consciousness. Even if this ordinary consciousness can summon up particular fidelity for memory in that the bodily organization functions well and experiences can be faithfully recalled even after a long time, spiritual science must take different methods than those known to ordinary consciousness. And I have already pointed out in the last lectures what arises as an observation of thinking itself, and I will only repeat it from a different point of view.

Ordinary thinking, I said, is indeed the starting point for all spiritual scientific research, and only he finds this starting point who, through a true observation of this thinking, already realizes how true and real it is that this thinking already leads beyond the sensual-physical, that it itself is already a spiritual thing. But one cannot stop at this point. One cannot stop at the recognition that this thinking, as it arises in ordinary life, is a final thing. Even then it is not a final thing when it has apparently spiritualized itself the most, namely in the memory representations. That is why I said: All that a person can think, feel and want in ordinary life does not lead to a knowledge of the nature of the soul when it is observed, when it is experienced. Rather – and this is only one of the many measures that must be taken in the intimate life of the soul, others can be found in the books mentioned – the human being must develop his thinking and unfold his imagination in such a way that he is no longer present with his personality, or let us say with his subjectivity, in this thinking; for he is present as long as consciousness is ordinary, and there his physical organization is involved. If we only develop ideas and seek out ideas that can be retained and reappear with our thinking, we only achieve what is accomplished through the tools of the bodily organization. Therefore, as I have said, one must develop this thinking in such a way that one is no longer present during this development. But for that one needs patience and persistence, not the belief that the great questions of the world can be decided in the twinkling of an eye, that one only needs to approach them in order to get behind these world riddles or to form an opinion about them; something quite different is needed for that. To do that, we need the secrets of the entire human life. We need patience to develop such inner methods, the life of which cannot be taken in an instant, but which can only develop if we leave them to the development they can experience in the course of human life.

I have indicated that this is called a “meditative life”: when one introduces certain ideas, preferably ones that one can survey precisely so as to avoid any unconscious or other reminiscences of life from emerging, into one's soul, into one's consciousness, and really lives through these ideas on all sides with a calm consciousness. If one does not merely observe how, in ordinary consciousness, these ideas, as they are, can be brought into memory again, if one does not merely pay attention to how they remain, as one might say, true to their own form, but if one reaches to let these ideas out of ordinary consciousness, so to speak, by no longer being present during their development. For if one has only enough patience and persistence, one will always find that the images descend into the depths of human consciousness, where, to put it trivially, one no longer knows anything about them; then one will be able to experience how they emerge again into one's memory. At first spiritual research cannot do anything with all this. But another thing takes place. For the one who develops his inner soul life in the sense of the books mentioned, it shows that the ideas on which consciousness has rested in a corresponding way do indeed emerge as memories again after months or years, just like the others. but these ideas are encountered again in a way that a faithful memory does not show, but rather in such a way that they have now shaped not his physical but his mental life, in such a way that they have made it different in a certain area. These images do not resurface in the same form in which we let them down into the subconscious, but they do resurface and announce themselves in such a way that one must say: they have not worked in what is your personal, but in what is below the conscious personal, they have unfolded their power there and now appear in a substantially different form. Therefore, one can say: When the idea that one has had, that one has kept faithfully, that one has faithfully reawakened, once again encounters what has become of it, without us being there with our consciousness, what has resulted from it through working in some hidden sphere without our knowledge, this encounter between the ordinary consciousness and the images that arise from the subconscious, transforms the former so that one can see its effect on the human soul. This encounter shows how man is involved in a completely different sphere of life than that of physical-sensory reality, how truly unconscious or subconscious things live in the depths of the soul life, but how it can be brought up through appropriate methods, and how it penetrates into consciousness differently than it does in ordinary memory.

Spiritual science therefore takes the view that through appropriate treatment of our soul life, the unconscious can move into the conscious, but should only move up when it has achieved its work, its development, in the unconscious. But in this way spiritual science comes to what is called the seeing consciousness. For here a real experience is undergone that may be compared to the transition from ordinary dream-life to waking consciousness. In dream-life, what do we experience? We experience the subjective pictures of the inner man, which, while dreaming, we take for reality. When we wake up, we know from our direct contact with external reality that the dream has only brought us images, and these images – as closer observation shows – arise from our organic interior, showing this organic interior in symbols, but arising from us. And no one will be tempted to believe that in a dream one can become aware of what a dream actually is; no one can dream what a dream is. On the other hand, if one moves out of the dream into ordinary consciousness and tries to explain the dream from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, one comes to its fantastically chaotic pictorial nature. It is the same when one moves up from ordinary consciousness to the seeing consciousness in the way described. In the same way as one comes out of a dream into physical-sensory reality, one passes from external physical-sensory reality into what might be called — the word is debatable — higher spiritual reality. One awakens into another world, a world that now throws light on the ordinary physical-sensory world just as the world of ordinary consciousness throws light on the world of dreams. In this way, spiritual science not only comes to think differently about the riddles of the world and the soul, but above all it comes to the realization that in order to enter the spiritual worlds, a different consciousness from the ordinary consciousness must first be brought out of the depths of the soul. Today I can only present certain results and their consideration, but in many lectures here, a great deal of justification has been said about these results and it can be found in the relevant literature.

With reference to, I would like to say, the most immediate science, just as it agrees with natural science, this spiritual science must now also again differ from mere natural science. This spiritual science, as it wants to appear today, stands fully on the basis of the same scientific conscience, the same scientific attitude as natural science of modern times. But it cannot stop at the kind of thinking that natural science develops. Therefore, as things stand today, the spiritual scientist will have a good foundation above all if he has developed his thinking, his imagination, his feeling about the world based on the most rigorous scientific ideas, and these are today those that are permeated as much as possible by mathematics, the ideas of the physical, the chemical, and even the mechanical. One day it will be different when the biological sciences, physiology, will have progressed as far as the inorganic natural sciences have. But the spiritual researcher cannot stop at thinking about the world as natural science does. He can only discipline his thinking by training it in the strict thinking of science. And when he has trained himself, I might say, to allow himself nothing in his thinking but what can stand the test of the scientific attitude of mind, he will have created the best foundation for himself as a spiritual-scientific researcher. It therefore turns out that this spiritual science must in many ways be compared with what has occurred with the rise of the newer scientific way of thinking. I have often pointed out how, with the Copernican world view, people had to learn to think differently with regard to the external world, how what Copernicus asserted must initially have seemed absurd to people because it contradicted the statements of the external sense world. When objections are raised against spiritual science, in particular, on the grounds that it contradicts the statements of the external sense world, then it must be pointed out again and again that, for example, astronomy has made great strides through Copernicus precisely because it did not stick to what the external senses show, but boldly transcended them by taking what the external senses show to be mere appearances. If the inner nerve of such a change were recognized in the field of natural science, then people would be much less likely to raise unintelligent objections to spiritual science, as still happens quite often today. But today I want to bring up another point in which spiritual science must recognize itself as similar to the progress of natural science in the Copernican worldview. Copernicus had to turn thinking about the planetary world, one might say, completely upside down, in order to take account of what had to be taken into account. Here the earth stands still, the sun revolves around it – so the ordinary sensory consciousness told people. Even if the Copernican world view must undergo some revision if we are to make progress, we cannot think in such a way as to imagine the Earth at the center of the planetary system and the Sun orbiting around it; rather, we must turn the fact, which presents itself as an apparent fact to the senses, completely upside down: we must place the Sun at the center of the planetary system and let the planets orbit around the Sun. It is well known how certain circles did not accept the Copernican world view for a long time. Just because it has become so customary today, one no longer reflects on the grotesque that it must have appeared to many people to whom it came from other points of view. One had to develop completely new ideas; one had to get used to having different ideas than those that one had had for centuries for ordinary thinking.

Now it is somewhat more difficult in the field of spiritual science to see the analogy in its own field, but only because it is today in the same position as the Copernican world view was at the time of its appearance. The ideas that spiritual science must develop are quite unfamiliar today, and they must take a similar path with regard to a certain point in human soul life, I would say, to the path taken by the Copernican world view. What appears to be clearer for the ordinary soul life, for ordinary observation – as clear as the fact that the sun revolves around the earth is for sense perception – than that the human being is born with his soul, goes through his life, that his soul or its ego changes gradually in the course of this life, accompanying this life, that when the person turns 7, 13, 15, 18, 20, 25 years old, it has accompanied the person through the years of this life. In a sense, as if it were walking through life from birth to death, one sees the soul being as if it were accompanying it. Spiritual science shows it completely differently. Spiritual science shows the remarkable fact - which will be further explained in the following lectures - that what we call the soul, to which the idea of immortality is linked, does not at all undergo the course of life in the usual sense. Just as the sun does not move in the usual sense in its heavenly course around the earth, so the human ego or the human soul does not travel the path from birth to death. The matter is completely different. It only looks different because we are not accustomed to observing it in this way. The matter is completely different:

We remember ourselves in later life back to a certain point, which lies a few years after our birth. Up to this point, the I or soul-being accompanies its development alone. Then it remains — if I may use the expression, it is correct — in time, remains in time like the sun in space, and the course of life does not take the I with it, but moves on, just like the planets around the sun, while the I or soul remains at rest at the point I have indicated. The course of life radiates that which flows in it back to the soul that remains dormant. The only reason the idea is so difficult is because it is easier to imagine rest in space than in time. But when one considers that for certain circles the Copernican view of the world only became acceptable in 1827, one can indeed also assume that spiritual science can take its time until people are able to imagine that resting in time is just as possible as resting in space. One can say: the soul remains in itself, and life continues until death, in that the experiences only reflect back onto that which remains at the aforementioned point in time. But there is something else connected with this: that what we actually call the soul does not emerge at all in those events and facts that are related to the life of the body, that the soul in its actual essence remains within the spiritual. It does not enter into the ordinary course of life because this course of life flows into the sensual-physical event. The soul remains behind, holding back in the spiritual. Now, in the ordinary course of life, with the ordinary course of life between birth and death, consciousness proceeds in such a way that it appears in accordance with the physical tools. But the deeper, the true soul essence does not pour into this physical being as such, but remains in the spiritual. But this already indicates that knowledge and understanding of this soul-life cannot be acquired in the ordinary course of life, dependent as it is on the outer world. Such knowledge and understanding can only be attained when, in the manner described, the consciousness is set aside, when — to repeat this example once more — the thought that has remained in the consciousness now encounters the thought that is working subconsciously. But then the significant thing happens that gradually this subconscious work pours out over the entire human life, insofar as it has been lived through, and that the person, in his inner experience, really knows himself at the starting point of his life on earth, at the boundary up to which his memory reaches, knowing himself as standing within the spiritual life, but raised out of the time in which the ordinary consciousness runs. Therefore, no mysticism that is as I have characterized it, and that seeks to bring about a deeper experience than the ordinary into the consciousness that runs in time, can reach the soul being. Rather, this soul essence can only be reached when time itself is transcended, when the soul moves up into the realm that emerges before memory takes hold, or perhaps it is better to say: when the human being, with his inner experience, moves up beyond this point in time, develops the soul in order to find the soul there, as it is in its inner essence.

All these are difficult ideas, but the difficulty does not lie in the fact that the human soul could not carry them out, but only in the fact that people have become accustomed to thinking differently over the centuries. Therefore, man must not seek union with the spiritual through the ordinary consciousness, in the sense of ordinary mysticism, when he wants to develop spiritual-scientific methods. Rather, what he seeks must be the object itself. He must approach it with the awareness that it is actually something foreign to ordinary life, that it remained standing before this ordinary soul life occurred. Then, when a person recognizes his inner soul being in this way, then basically he only has the soul in such a way that he now knows: this soul has cooperated by passing through the birth with the powers that it already had in the spiritual, in the shaping of the entire life down to the bodily organization, by combining its power with what the person has attained through physical inheritance. In this way, the human being arrives at the immortal soul.

For spiritual science, the question of the riddle of immortality changes in relation to the form that one otherwise gives to this question. One always thinks, when one raises this question, that one can answer it if one puts it this way: Is the soul, with its ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, such that it retains any of it as something immortal? The way this thinking, feeling and willing is in ordinary life is precisely because it has to make use of the bodily instruments. When these bodily instruments are discarded as the soul passes through the gate of death, the form of thinking, feeling and willing naturally ceases to be an inner experience that can be reached by ordinary consciousness. On the other hand, there is something in every human being that is hidden from ordinary soul observation, just as things are hidden that can only be explored through natural science about nature, but which can be achieved in the manner outlined above, and which remains, so to speak, at the gateway of memory. It can absorb the events of the ordinary course of life by reflecting them back. And when what is contained in this ordinary life, what is bound to the bodily tools, is taken from the person when he passes through the gate of death, that which has never left the spiritual world will also pass through the gate of death. That which carries itself through has not developed within the ordinary consciousness, but has developed in the subconscious, and can only be brought up in the way described.

Thus the question for spiritual science changes in such a way that the spiritual researcher shows, above all, the way to find the true soul being, and by showing this way, its true nature reveals its immortality as a truth. Just as there is no need to prove that the rose is red when someone has been led to the rose and is looking at it, so there is no need to prove by means of all kinds of hypotheses and conclusions that the soul essence is immortal when one shows the way by which man finds the soul being so that he sees: the mortal works out of itself, it is the creator of the mortal, the mortal is its revelation – if one can show immortality as a property of this soul being, just as one shows the blush as a property of the rose. What matters is that the question changes completely when spiritual science in its real form approaches this mystery of the soul.

What has only been hinted at here will, one might say, be clarified a little by sidelighting if one takes a look at something that plays such a significant role in human life, but which, as has been said many times, seems completely inaccessible to most philosophers of thought and scientific observation: if one takes a side glance at what is called human destiny. In the succession of events that befall man, human destiny appears to many as a mere sum of coincidences; to many it appears as a predetermined necessity, as a necessity of Providence. But all these ideas approach the riddle of destiny from the point of view of ordinary consciousness. And no matter how mystically deep these ideas are, one does not come any closer to such riddles through them. That is why I showed last time, with reference to the question of fate, how one prepares oneself in the right way to approach this question of human destiny. It must be repeated once more from a certain point of view, so that the question of the forces of fate can be discussed more precisely. I said: When a man, as a spiritual researcher, devotes himself inwardly to certain developments, one kind of which I have shown in the development of thinking, this inner development means for him a real raising of himself out of ordinary consciousness; not merely a mystical deepening of this ordinary consciousness, but a raising of himself, an ascent to that which does not enter at all into ordinary consciousness. Then much patience and perseverance is needed to carry this inner development further and further. It need not in the least impair the outer life. Those people are poor investigators of the spirit who, through spiritual research, become useless and impractical for ordinary life. They show that they are basically still materialistic natures. For anyone who is torn out of the ordinary life, who is torn out of the firm footing he has in life, out of life's duties and tasks, in short, out of the practice of life, by some kind of spiritual research, shows that he has not grasped the essence of true spiritual research; for this proceeds in the spiritual, in that which cannot at all come into direct conflict with ordinary life. And anyone who believes that he can, let us say, starve himself up into the spiritual world, or can enter the spiritual world through some other external, material means, shows that, despite seeking the spirit, he is steeped in materialistic ideas. But when a person follows the path of true spiritual research or even just true spiritual science, by penetrating and absorbing into his soul what spiritual research brings to light, then at the right moment what the person experiences inwardly gradually becomes for him an inner question of destiny, an inner turning-point of destiny. He experiences an inner permeation that carries him into the spiritual sphere so vividly and intensely that this experience, which takes place without any impairment of the outer experience, becomes a turning point in destiny that is greater and more significant than any other turning point in destiny, no matter how significant it may be. Indeed, the significance of being inwardly absorbed in spiritual science is precisely this: that it can become a turning point in a person's destiny. This does not mean that a person needs to become indifferent to other fates for his soul; a person can fully feel what happens as outer destinies, not only for himself but also for others, when he has also experienced the higher turning point in destiny, which happens purely inwardly. He who becomes indifferent to outer life and outer fate, and who would dull his compassion and sympathy for the outer world and men, is not on the right path. But for those who, as may happen in the case of good education, find themselves standing in a spiritual world while fully immersed in social life, it may happen that a point in time comes when, having inwardly found the way to that which does not enter into the sensual world, perceives this inner experience as a turn of fate that is greater and more intense than the most terrible fate or the most joyful turn of fate that can otherwise befall him in life. But the fact that such a turn of fate can occur deepens the mind and internalizes the human soul; it equips it with powers that always rest in the soul but are not usually brought up.

Above all, the soul is prepared in one way: when the soul has experienced a destiny purely inwardly, so that it now faces this destiny only with the inwardly experienced powers of the soul, the human being becomes so intimately acquainted with the greatest twist of fate that he gains a measure of knowledge for outer fate. We need a yardstick for everything in life. The yardstick for judging fate is acquired not by looking at the dark course of fate through all kinds of speculation and fantasy, but by looking at a clear course of fate, such as one experiences when one has developed one's inner soul life step by step to such an extent that one has seen it all. One sees: This is how it has become over the years. We have gradually created for ourselves an inner, true, self-disclosing conviction of the spiritual world in which we live and weave and are. When we are present at the turning point of fate, it does not confront us as something that remains dark and in which we can only rejoice or suffer, but it confronts us in bright inner clarity. And when we have developed in our soul the forces that confront us in bright inner clarity, only then are we able to illuminate with inner light that which remains dark, and then we are also able to look at the course of external fate. These events of outer destiny are dark for ordinary consciousness. But ordinary consciousness has become a seeing consciousness for the study of the question of destiny precisely by allowing such a turn of destiny to occur. For the question of destiny, this consciousness has made itself a seeing consciousness. Only through this does one acquire what is necessary to approach the fateful question in such a way that it can receive a certain enlightenment in the sense in which it is meant to be. But this shows that, however much one observes fate with the ordinary consciousness, all statements about this fate remain, so to speak, hypothetical or an empty, fantastic assumption. For it is precisely shown that fate, as it appears externally to the ordinary consciousness, only appears in its revelation, in its penetration into the ordinary consciousness, but that this fate works on the human soul in the subconscious, so that this human soul, which never steps out of the spiritual world, as I have indicated, lives in the subconscious in the stream of fate. It lives in the stream of fate in such a way that its entanglement with fate is no more apparent to the ordinary consciousness than what surrounds a dreamer as physical reality in the outer world is apparent to him.

When the observing consciousness trains to develop the powers of consciousness that are necessary for this, then one is able to look at the question of fate with completely different spiritual eyes – to use Goethe's expression. The soul then comes to look at the connections that are entangled in what we call a turn of fate quite differently than one looks at them in ordinary consciousness. One only recognizes what one must direct one's attention to in the question of fate when one is prepared for it by being inwardly moved by a purely spiritual turn of fate. Let us take any turn of fate that may easily confront us in our outer life. As a typical example of what happens in our outer life, one could tell the following story, which may well have happened in this way: A person is fully prepared, let us say, for some outer profession, for some outer work. His abilities show that he could fully rise to this work, that he could be of great use to the world, to humanity, by doing his outer work. Things have, so to speak, progressed so far that the position to which the person in question is to be appointed has already been chosen. Everything is prepared, the person himself is prepared, those people who can give him the appropriate position have become aware of what he can achieve; everything is prepared. There, just, I would like to say, before these people meet the document that he is transferred to the position, some accident occurs that makes him incapable of filling this position. — There we have a typical twist of fate. I am not saying that the person in question must die immediately, but in the ordinary course of life he would be unable to achieve what had been well prepared from all sides. A blow of fate strikes this person.

Now, when you look at the human course of life in the ordinary consciousness – even if you think you are doing it differently – you do it in such a way that you look at what preceded some fact in the course of life. You look at the world in such a way that you always string together effect and cause and again effect and cause, that you always go back from the later to the earlier. Now, when a person is prepared to recognize this turn of fate that can teach us something, it now shows that we are dealing with a confluence of two series in this turn of fate. Here in the cited typical example, on the one hand we are dealing with the fact that a person has become something through which he has also forced events in the external world to be directed towards him. Another series of events comes, which crosses this first series of events. When one observes such processes of fate, one learns to recognize that it is right and excellent in the highest sense to regard the human course of life in the same way as natural processes, by seeing how the later follows from the earlier. But one also learns to recognize that this consideration is only a highly one-sided one. One learns to recognize that if one wants to consider existence in its entirety, one cannot and must not consider only the continuous, growing, ascending currents of events, but must also consider the descending current, the current that always intersects, crosses, and destroys the ascending current. Then, through the meeting of the two currents, one arrives at the point where the spirit reveals itself. For man has not become another by experiencing a crossing of what he has become on the one hand; two currents of life have come together, but man has not become another. And precisely this, that one encounters with one's soul powers this crossing of the two streams of life, shows one how, at the moment when something is to work on the human soul in accordance with fate, it must withdraw precisely from the outer life. In this way one enters into the inner life of the soul, which does not, however, arise out of the outer life of the senses. By seizing existence where it not only reveals itself, but where it disappears from outer manifestation, one finds the way into the realm from which the soul never emerges, and in which fate works on it.

And now, when you have taken your meditations this far, you realize that it is absolutely in the nature of the soul that fate should relate to the soul as I have just shown. For let us assume that the human soul, in full consciousness, with fully developed ideas, would approach the chain of fate in the same way as it approaches external sensual reality and explains it in scientific terms. What would be the consequence? It would follow that the soul would remain inwardly dead, that it would inwardly face fate, I would say, so calmly, not to say indifferently, as it faces the statements that science makes. But that is not how the human soul faces fate. I am not merely developing ideas of expediency here. Anyone who goes into the methods of what is presented here will realize that I do not fall back into teleological or purposive ideas, but that I pose the question this way: What is necessary for the nature of the soul? —, as one might ask: How is the root necessary for the entire life of the plant?

Insofar as the soul is involved in fate, it does not experience this fate through cognitive ideas, but rather it experiences it in such a way that affects, sensations, feelings of joy, feelings of suffering arise in this soul, and that not so clear ideas hover over these sensations as one otherwise has in cognition. But if such clear ideas were to hover above it, they would be ideas that operate only in the sphere of ordinary consciousness, that is, in the sphere that is bound to the body. Precisely because the experience of fate is set apart from these ideas, which are bound to the body, because the experience of fate is driven by sensations and feelings, by the progressive or conflicting impulses of the will, this experience of fate remains in the subconscious or, better said, is guided down into the subconscious. In this way, the experience of fate works on the soul outside of consciousness, just as the experiences of the external world around the dreamer take place without them penetrating into his consciousness, at least not directly.

The way in which a person experiences his sufferings and joys is what causes his fate to be channeled into the deeper subconscious regions of the soul life, into those regions from which the soul life never emerges at all. So that in the course of life, a person is driven by his fate below the threshold of ordinary consciousness. But down there, where consciousness, which is in the ordinary life and directed towards the ordinary life, does not reach, there is order; down there the experiences of fate shine back onto the soul, which has remained before the boundary of feeling. There, fate itself is continually working on our soul, so that the way in which man is involved in his fate can be understood just as little by ordinary consciousness as what is happening in the room in which one is dreaming can be understood by the dreaming consciousness in terms of external, sensual-physical events. Fate connects with the soul below the threshold of consciousness. But then it becomes apparent how this fate may be constituted, that it is intimately connected with the soul, that it is precisely the worker on the shaping of our soul life. One of the workers is the one who ensures that what we go through in the course of our lives between birth and death is carried over to the soul, which goes through birth and death in repeated lives on earth, so that this soul is carried through this entire life, which goes through repeated lives on earth, through accomplishments, through forces, through effects that do not reach into ordinary consciousness. There we see the connection between human destiny and the human soul. There we arrive through destiny itself at the subconscious, eternal foundations of the human soul. And only where immortality reigns, there does destiny also reign in its true form. And it is carried there by the fact that in ordinary life we are so at its mercy that we do not penetrate it cognitively. Because we live through it emotionally, fate itself is carried to the region where it can work on the immortal part of the soul.

In this way, fate proves itself – and this may sound pedantic, almost philistine – as the great teacher throughout our entire life. But it is so. Fate carries us forward. And what individuals who have been prepared by a particularly predisposed course of life feel about the coherence of the human destiny is true. I would like to read you an example of this verbatim. In his later years, Goethe's friend Knebel was led to ideas about fate that truly did not arise from speculation or philosophical fantasies, but that, I would say, radiated up from what otherwise takes place in the subconscious life of the soul when fate works on the soul. Knebel says:

This did not come about through speculation, through philosophy about fate, but is a result that the soul itself has brought up from the region where fate works on it. Therefore, as a rule, only people who are fully involved in the events of life, not only their own lives, but who also live with compassionate sympathy for the fate of many people at a certain point in their lives, will see such an insight into fate shining forth from the depths of their soul.

Now, questions of science, including spiritual science, do not depend on any external events – questions of science, questions of knowledge follow their course. Rather, the outer life, in many of its peculiarities, is guided by what science brings to light. But on the other hand — and this can also be observed in natural science — certain external circumstances contribute to the fact that insights can only be properly appreciated and accurately observed by people. One need only recall how the transits of Venus, which only occur twice a century, have to be awaited before they occur, how the external circumstances have to arise for a particular insight to arise in a certain field. The same may be true of questions of spiritual science as they relate to the life of the soul. And although this does not properly belong to spiritual science, the intuitive perception of our fateful time can be directed to how our time in particular, in the deepest sense of the word, brings to people in their soul what spiritual science is able to give.

The old Heraclitus, the great Greek philosopher, from whom individual but deeply significant rays of his research have been penetrating through all times since his life, once said, pointing to the dream life: In relation to the dream world, every human being has his or her own world. The most diverse people can sleep in one room, and each can dream the most diverse dreams; there everyone has their own dream world. The moment they wake up, they are all in a common external environment. This common environment evokes a large soul picture, they are in unity. In spite of everything that can be said against it, for that is only seemingly, what can be said against it, people are in an even greater, more meaningful unity when they look at what the seeing consciousness brings out of the spiritual world. People come together here, and it is only an illusion if one believes that one person asserts this and the other that. One may calculate correctly and the other incorrectly, but the method of calculation remains correct. In a higher sense, people find unity when they advance into the realm of intuitive consciousness and enter the spiritual world. But external circumstances can also lead people to a certain unity in life. Then these experiences can be a stimulus for that which strives towards the unity of life: for spiritual science. And in our time we are living in a fateful event that unites people in a completely different way – let us say now, because it is of immediate concern to us – the people of Central Europe, when they are united from outside in a different way. Shared experiences of fate, which one person experiences in one way and another in another, flow over human souls, flow over human bodies, flow over human lives. This can be a stimulus, and hopefully will be a stimulus, to steer people out of the difficult, fateful time and also towards the difficult paths of spiritual science. And one may think: Even if spiritual science always has an important message for people in relation to the eternal questions, in our time, when so many destinies are being decided, when fate is so terribly questioning before the whole soul of time, the questions of fate and soul arise in a particularly profound way. Spiritual science, because it appeals to that which not only stands in life but, because it remains in the spiritual world, carries this life through the human course of life, spiritual science can give people special strengths, special powers, to all twists of fate, with the awareness of what fate means for immortality, for eternal life, to find oneself through life in an appropriate way, to await what will be born out of this fateful time. If one learns to understand fate, then one also learns, when necessary, to confront fate with true, not with deadening, calmness of soul, with that calmness of soul that is strength. And the soul often works more powerfully in its calm than it can when it is carried on the waves of external life, itself rocking up and down with these waves.

And perhaps it is precisely this awareness of the stillness of the soul in our life cycle, however abstract this idea may still seem today, that is capable of merging with the fundamental forces of the human mind, and there it can become a great, not blunting, but invigorating motivator for this human mind. For, as the present study of the question of immortality and fate shows, it is just as incorrect to say of someone who has a magnet in front of him: this is a piece of iron in the shape of a horseshoe and nothing else, and you are a fantasist if you believe that there are special powers in it, as it is incorrect to call someone who cannot immediately demonstrate the powers by attracting iron, but only asserts them, a fantasist. if you believe that there are special powers in it, just as it is wrong to consider someone a fantasist if they cannot immediately demonstrate the powers through the attraction of the iron, but only assert them. It is therefore wrong to consider someone a fantasist who speaks of the outer life that takes place in the physical senses in such a way that this life is not only that which it appears to the outer senses, but that it is permeated, illuminated and glowing with the spiritual in which the soul is rooted and moves. For the word of Heraclitus remains true – let me conclude with this – affirming, if correctly understood, that which is the innermost nerve of spiritual science, affirming that only he knows the world who is able to see through the spirit in the light of the mind:

“Eyes and ears bear witness to what is going on in the world, witnesses to people. But they are poor witnesses to those people whose souls do not understand the language, the true language of the eyes and ears.”

Spiritual science seeks to speak the true language of the eyes and ears and thus to find the way into that which the ordinary consciousness of eyes and ears is unable to show; into that from which life itself springs and weaves. Therefore, the human being will work best when they are aware that they, as an eternal being, not only come from this eternal source of life, but are always within it.

Basel, April 9, 1915

Dear attendees! It is impossible to convince someone directly or to want to convince someone with a consideration in the field of spiritual science, as it is to be undertaken this evening, and it would be naive to assume such. For spiritual science as such, as it is meant here, is in the early stages of its development, and it only wants to gradually become part of the cultural development, of the spiritual life of people. Today, the ideas put forward by spiritual science completely contradict the usual conceptions of the widest circles. And it is much more natural, I might say much more to be expected, that objections arise against things as they had to be said this evening, that these things are seen as fantasies, as dreams. This is much more to be expected than if the things were immediately approved. In particular, anyone who has become familiar with the field of spiritual science or its results will not assume that they can easily convince anyone. Rather, what is the result of spiritual science must very slowly and gradually, as has always been the case with spiritual progress in the world, become part of our thinking habits, our whole way of conceiving of time.

And so it is only too understandable, even self-evident, that from many sides – and many more sides could be cited than can be mentioned in this introduction – objections and contradictions, even ridicule and mockery, must be raised against the results of spiritual science today. Above all, the most obvious objection is that spiritual science contradicts the well-founded achievements and ideas of natural science, which has made such great and powerful advances in our time. Today's lecture will perhaps be able to shed some light on this objection in particular. But objections also arise from other quarters, and as will hopefully become clear in today's and tomorrow's lectures, I would say understandable but unfounded objections.

The religiously inclined person, the adherent of this or that religious community, easily thinks - and I say again: understandably - that spiritual science could somehow behave in a hostile or antagonistic manner towards the religious deepening and religious life of the human soul. And in particular, there will still be many people today who are convinced that spiritual science - in that it wants to lead the soul to a world that is not the world of the senses and not the world of the ordinary mind, to a world of spiritual entities and spiritual activities - must fall into all sorts of superstitious beliefs and somehow spread them among those who want to become followers of spiritual science.

In particular, I might say that certain contemporary views must be ridiculed when spiritual science asserts its most fundamental tenet, namely, that man in his totality , in his totality, is not merely that which meets our external senses, that which he appears to himself for his external senses and that which he appears for the intellect, which is bound to the brain, to the nervous system. It is quite natural that from certain points of view today not only this is seen as a reverie, but that it is also ridiculed when it is said that this physical human being, as studied by ordinary science, this physical body, as it must be considered by many today as the only real thing - I must say - is not the only thing that can be recognized in a human being, but is, this physical body, only one limb of the entire human being.

Supernatural and invisible, as it were, - that is one result of spiritual science - in this physical body and underlying it, there is a fine, spiritual human being, who, in a certain way, as we shall see, is even the actor, the producer, the originator and activator of the physical body. And when spiritual science speaks of calling this second, supersensible, invisible body the etheric body, it is, as I said, quite understandable that such a result is presented as a blind assumption, ridiculed as a fantasy. And if spiritual science cannot be satisfied unless it establishes, in addition to this physical man, the spiritual man just mentioned, but must assume a higher link of human nature in addition to this, and if from some quarters this higher link of human nature is called the astral , for reasons that we shall return to today, then, as I said, it would be almost naive to believe that such assumptions would not be ridiculed from the point of view that is often considered the only scientific one today.

In the course of our present study, we want to create a little foundation for such supersensible members of human nature by presenting to the soul's mind the way in which spiritual science can arrive at such assumptions, what the spiritual scientist has to do in order to be allowed to present such assumptions to human knowledge.

True, real spiritual science is entirely in harmony with natural science as it has developed with its wonderful results. Indeed, it not only harmonizes with it, but it even wants to be a true, genuine successor to natural scientific research for spiritual phenomena, for the phenomena of the spiritual world. And when today, with regard to the life of the soul, the radical natural scientist says: Do we not recognize that this life of the soul, as it lives and develops in man, stands in intimate connection, in relationship, with the physical phenomena? Or does it not follow from this that this life of the soul is absolutely materially dependent, like the light and warmth of the flame, on the physical, material life? When the scientist of today, I say not out of a certain irreligious feeling, but out of his most fundamental conviction, presents this, then it must be said that true spiritual science, as it is beginning to develop today, for that, what natural science really has to say in relation to what has been hinted at, does not contradict natural science. On the contrary, it is entirely in agreement with natural science on all that is the legitimate result of natural science.

If we look at the soul as it initially presents itself in life, as we go through this life between birth and death, if we look at this soul life when we see through ourselves through self-knowledge with regard to our inner soul life, we can say that this soul life takes place in thinking, feeling and willing. And basically, in these three activities of the soul life, in thinking, feeling and willing, we have the scope, the horizon of the soul life before us. And if someone who does not yet stand on the ground of spiritual science, but would have the need, I would like to say, to understand something of the human being, to assume something that goes through the gate of death and after death dwells in a spiritual world, when such a one looks at the ordinary thinking, feeling and willing that presents itself in the everyday life of man and then, for some philosophical or other reason, would say: This thinking, feeling and willing is something that has nothing to do with the material processes in the human body, and if someone wanted to save the soul of man from physical destruction or from physical nature in general , the scientific researcher would come and say: But just look, it only takes a slight injury to the nervous system for this thinking, feeling and willing to be undermined. So, just as light and warmth depend on the flame, on the fuel, so does thinking, feeling and willing depend on physical processes. If these are interrupted in any way, then thinking, feeling and willing cannot take place in the right way.

In a plausible way, physiology, psychology and medicine know how to cite all sorts of reasons to prove that thinking, feeling and willing are entirely bound to these material processes of the nervous system, to the physical body in general.

Furthermore, it is pointed out: one can see how, in youth, with the development of the physical body, the soul life also develops; how in old age, when the activity of physical processes diminishes, thinking, feeling and willing also diminish. Does the scientifically minded person rightly say: “Can't we see that what we call the soul life is only an effect of physical and material processes?” The natural scientist may ask: “Is there anything left that could be said to enter the spiritual world through the gate of death as a living inner being?”

Again and again, the natural sciences draw our attention to an age-old contradiction in the explanation of the human soul, which we encounter in Plato's wonderful dialogue on the immortality of the human soul, which is linked to the death of Socrates. There we see how Socrates objects to Simmias, to the one who says: Ah, this whole soul life of man, we can grasp it as something like a game, the sounds of a lute, and the lute is the physical human body. When the forces of physical human life unfold, it is as if the strings of the lute unfold and produce a sound and give the context of the sounds. The physical activities and material processes of the human body give rise to the soul life, and when the lute is destroyed, the harmonies of the lute also cease. But the moment that which brings about material processes in man is destroyed, that which results from the sounding of human activities also ceases, and so does the soul life.

And it may even be said, my dear attendees, if one does not start from the subjective need of human life, from the longing for a life free of the body, then it is very difficult to escape if one only has the necessary feeling for the supporting forces of present-day scientific ideas, it is very difficult to escape from what science has to say from its point of view in the direction just mentioned. It is difficult to escape from it because the reasons that have to be given for the fact that the life of the soul, as it is known, as it takes place in everyday thinking, feeling and willing, is really demonstrably dependent on physical processes. The reasons to be presented for this are weighty for anyone who is able to see through the supporting forces of these reasons, who is at all able to enter into what present-day natural science has to give for general knowledge of the world, what it has to say.

But spiritual science stands - and this must be particularly emphasized - with regard to everything that has been said so far, completely on the ground of contemporary natural science. And there is - I cannot, of course, really mention the whole range of what would have to be mentioned now - there is nothing that can legitimately be brought forward in the indicated direction from the side of natural science that true, genuine spiritual science would contradict. Genuine, true spiritual science must fully admit that this thinking, as it confronts us in everyday life, that this feeling and willing, as it confronts us in everyday life, are the results of physical and material processes of the body and must therefore be extinguished the moment the body ceases to function at death. Everything that natural science has to say about this everyday life of the soul – and that alone is what it has to say – must also be a valid premise for true, genuine spiritual science.

But now, for the first time, true and genuine spiritual science is emerging, leading to paths of spiritual research that go beyond ordinary thinking, feeling and willing and that know how to cite yet another essence of the human soul. Yes, spiritual science says that what a person experiences in ordinary life as his thinking, feeling and willing is entirely dependent on bodily processes. But behind this thinking, feeling and willing are other soul forces, soul forces that are invisible and imperceptible to the ordinary soul life and that are independent of the physical, and that go through the gate of death when the body undergoes dissolution.

Ordinary thinking, it is carried out in such a way that, in our everyday lives, we perceive things through our senses and connect our thoughts to this perception. What we do, especially in spiritual science, must be admitted in the most serious sense that all of this is bound to the material processes of the nervous system. The actual soul does not come at all in everyday life, not even to the thinking consciousness. This soul life, as we shall see in a moment, also lies behind ordinary thoughts and ideas and it is this soul life that brings about the material processes. And because the material processes take place in the nervous system, images are created by the true soul life. These images are our thoughts. These images are, so to speak, no different from the mirror image that we see when we stand in front of a mirror.

As human beings, we stand before a mirror – this is meant to be a comparison, but it should mean something more than a mere comparison – if we cannot see ourselves, we see our image. The image is only there as long as the mirror stands before us; it depends entirely on the nature of the mirror. Dearly beloved attendees, with our soul life, with our true soul life, which spiritual science is only now discovering, which does not consist of ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, we stand like the person in front of the mirror who cannot see himself; and what this person does is that he causes processes in his nervous system in the unconscious. But this is what makes the nervous system a mirror, and thoughts and ideas are reflected back from this mirror. Thoughts and ideas are only there as long as the nervous system is able to function. Just as the mirror image has no reality of its own, so what we usually call our thinking has no reality other than as an image, a real image. It depends on the soul life being mirrored in the material processes of the nervous system.

Now, that which lives in thinking, the actual soul power, which can be compared to the person standing in front of the mirror and to whom his thoughts only appear as an image, this actual soul power must first be found through spiritual science. And in earlier lectures, I have already indicated from this point how the real, underlying soul life can be recognized in the mere pictorial existence that we experience in everyday thinking and imagining; I would like to say that which is present in thinking as the underlying soul power of thinking.

I have pointed out – you can read more about this in my books, in “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in the second part of “Occult Science”. I can only hint at the principles of these things in the short time available to me here. I have already hinted at what then has to happen within the soul, so that what is reflected in thoughts and images in the picture becomes aware of itself, so that the life of the soul is truly grasped in that element which remains completely unconscious to it in ordinary, everyday life. What the soul has to accomplish within itself are intimate inner processes and experiences of the soul itself. If we only apply the thinking and imagining that we have in our ordinary daily experience, then we will never discover the real, supersensible soul that dwells in us and that passes through the gate of death even when the body is destroyed. For this, we have to undertake certain inner, intimate processes in our thinking, in our everyday thinking, which are called meditation and concentration of thought. I can only briefly hint at this.

While we usually follow the ordinary laws - imposed on us by the world - and let one thought follow another, in meditation and concentration, in the inner exertion and effort of thought, we try, through inner arbitrariness, to place certain thoughts, which we ourselves form or which we receive from somewhere, at the center of our attention. We try not only to let ourselves be guided by the world in terms of thinking, but to inwardly concentrate the soul's powers in such a way that these powers of the soul are directed towards a single series of ideas over a longer period of time. We endeavor to develop an inner activity of thinking, which one otherwise never develops in life, and to look with all the inner strength at a single thought; this is called meditation, concentrating on a thought.

It is not important that you merely think a thought, but that this thought is not prompted by any external stimulus, but arises from within, coming to the center of your consciousness and remaining in your soul for a long time, so that you can, as it were, survey this thought inwardly, so that your soul is directed towards it. It does not depend on what this thought says or whether it is true in relation to external appearances, but on the soul's inner focus. What matters is the soul's inner experience, what it experiences in its inwardly strengthened thought activity. It does not depend on what the soul presents. Therefore, it is better to focus on an allegorical idea that does not depict anything external. So it is important to use inner forces that one would not otherwise need for this presentation. It is then, however, necessary to have a great deal of patience and perseverance, because it sometimes takes years to develop an inner habit of thinking, so to speak, that is developed in this concentration, to such an extent that what is hidden, which lies behind thinking, which is active in thinking, as it were, but does not appear to ordinary consciousness, that this comes to consciousness. If you, and indeed often for years, in patience, energy and perseverance, I am now not just saying his thinking, but his inner powers, which underlie thinking, from the hidden, deep foundations, then you realize what it means not just to think, but to form in thought, to strengthen your inner experience in thought. What comes out of this, ladies and gentlemen, is an absolutely new experience of life, something that a person cannot have if they have not strengthened their thoughts in the way described. As I said, you can read more about this in the books mentioned; I can only give the basic principles now.

What does one find when one experiments purely in the realm of the soul and spirit? Well, dear listeners, what one finds can best be characterized by the following words: Where does ordinary thinking actually get us? If we really look at this ordinary thinking, as it develops in the human being in everyday life, with an open mind, we have to say: it gets as far as what we call remembering, as far as recollection, as far as the unfolding of memory. We have been able to point out that what actually lives in thinking stands before the bodily as before a mirror, and that what the ordinary thoughts are is reflected back by the body. But then this thinking, this imagining develops such thoughts, such ideas, which, as one usually thinks, so to speak, become ingrained in the soul life, remain there, so that later one can look back again and, without an external experience being present, what one has experienced earlier finds an echo in one's own soul life. Basically, all philosophy and all science is based on the fact that man can develop memory, that he can look back on that which is no longer present. And it is precisely with regard to that which one can call memory that the truly correct scientific conception of the world is in complete harmony with the spiritual researcher. However, one must not believe – and progressive natural science will prove this, it will prove what I will now have to explain as a result of spiritual science – one must not believe that something like a photographic image of an experience remains in the soul when it is recalled in memory. Nor should we believe that something remains in the nervous system which, when it becomes active again, has a similarity to the experiences we had years ago or even yesterday. Indeed, the ideas that people working in the field of natural science have today are still inadequate, to a certain extent. But it is precisely the direction of natural science that leads to what I am about to say.

What actually remains when we have an experience and then days or years pass and we later recall what we have experienced from the well of our memories? What remains then? Does an image remain? No.

Dear attendees, natural science in particular will prove that what remains in the body when we remember something looks, so to speak, no more like what we are remembering than the letters on a piece of paper. And we read what we remember as we read these letters. Natural science will prove that this memory bears a similarity to subconscious reading, that what remains in our memory is nothing but signs that must first be interpreted by the deeper soul life. Just as someone who would describe: There is a letter that has a vertical line, an upward line, a curve, there is a letter that has the curve ahead, then vertical lines and so on – how one does not read, but how the one who has learned to read does not describe what he on paper, but rather, through his ability to read, forms certain ideas that have nothing to do with what is on the paper, so it is with what remains as a sign in the bodily organization in relation to what we then have in the actually experienced memory. This memory is an inner reading. As I said, science will prove this, especially from its point of view. It will increasingly move away from the adventurous ideas it currently has. You will soon see that spiritual science can come to such an insight, as it has just been expressed, when other types of spiritual scientific ideas are discussed.

In this way, the human being's thinking comes to a point where it goes beyond mere perception of mirror images, to a kind of backward reading, to a subconscious backward reading. This too is a kind of mirror; but what is mirrored are only signs, not an actual image, but signs that we later evoke through what we have within us as soul power, to what the resurgence of memory then is. Let us note from this that when we weave and live in our memories, we are actually weaving and living in a truly spiritual realm. At the moment when thinking passes over into memory, a deeper, purely spiritual-soul power is already at work in this thinking; one just does not want to admit it in the ordinary way. For when we remember, we cannot conjure up the process that remained in the brain — that would be nothing more than a description of the letters. We live and weave in a real being. In a real inner experience, we are in remembrance. It is through memory that man ascends from thinking, feeling and willing, which are still bound to the body in the broadest sense, to the spiritual. And when man trains his will sufficiently, he becomes aware that when he lives in memory, he lives in the soul, in the soul that is independent of the body, in that only the signs are in the body.

When, through meditation and concentration, thinking is strengthened and enlivened in the manner described, one comes to transform this thinking itself into what it is not in ordinary life. This thinking then gains in inner activity. It is just the same with this thinking as when one stands before a mirror and makes it so active that one thereby wipes out the mirror image and then becomes aware of oneself as standing there in one's own soul-power. So it is with thinking in concentration. You extinguish the ordinary thoughts, but you awaken in the power of thinking, and then you realize: You are awakening in something that no longer has anything conditional in the body; you become aware of something completely new. You also notice the difference, which consists in the fact that ordinary thinking is completely bound to the body; if the body does not reflect the thinking back as a mirror image, it is not there. But now one becomes aware that there is a thinking that is independent of bodily experience. As I said, it is still difficult today for a person to readily admit, without the usual ideas and habits of thinking, that there really is an inner soul force that underlies thinking, and that this force becomes so aware that the person, by having this inner experience, becomes completely independent of the body. So that one can say: The thinker, by experiencing himself in the power of thinking, in his own thinking, slips out of the body and becomes independent of the body. Now he can also judge that this inner power of thinking is really something that is independent of the body. With concentration, a real process has been achieved, a soul has become something else, has become that which can know itself independent of the body.

And now, just when you have patiently and persistently and energetically done such exercises, through which you have become more and more powerful inwardly and have come to an experience, something significant occurs; an inner tragic experience occurs. I would like to say that it is like this: basically, everyone who seriously undergoes these methods of spiritual research must experience these processes. It is the case that, by concentrating and developing the soul forces on which thinking is based, we do indeed feel more and more alive inwardly. But this is only possible up to a certain point. There comes a point in the inner experience when the inner strength comes to an end, when, without exaggeration, one can say that the whole burden of an unknown world weighs on the soul. And then the possibility of experiencing this strengthened thinking disappears. One feels how this inner experience is extinguished by an unknown power. If one were to do only the exercises that I have listed so far, one would indeed come to a point through these exercises where, as if in a kind of inner, tremendous strain, one feels as if one's soul has dissolved into nothingness.

Therefore, no true spiritual scientific method can recommend for the path into the spiritual world only what has been presented to you now. Rather, other exercises must be done at the same time as this meditation, this concentration. For you have been able to see how the practice discussed so far develops and draws on the soul forces on which thinking is based. We would really enter into phenomena that would tear us apart like a tremendous resistance from an unknown power if we wanted to do this exercise in a one-sided way. In addition to this thinking, the human will must be developed, which is more the active soul power. When a person begins not only to deepen his thinking through meditation and concentration, but also to seek inner strength for this thinking, which otherwise lies hidden in the deep well of the soul life, only then does he arrive at the right thing.

Now it is of course possible - I refer again to the books mentioned - that one can also make one's life of will more and more calm and serene through intimate, inner soul-searching, that one can extract from it more and more of what the human soul's ordinary egoistic drives and passions are. But I would like to mention those exercises through which one can most surely come to an inwardly developed soul life in the same way as one comes to the development of the thinking life in the other way. There we must approach something that enters human life in such a mysterious, often terrible, but always unfathomable way for ordinary experience. This is what we call human destiny. Not that we can develop our will only in the face of fate, as it is now being presented. But it is, in a sense, a position in relation to human fate that is to be characterized now, the next way in which we can achieve this inner cultivation of the will in us.

This fate, how does it approach man in ordinary life? Well, it is often said: the blows of fate fall upon us. Something happens, and we can either be touched sympathetically or antipathetically by what happens to us; we can undertake this or that against the blows of fate, but in this life between birth and death we will feel fate as a power that shapes our lives, but to which we can only relate as to an unfathomable, mysterious power.

But if you look at this human life without prejudice, you will come to a different view of fate in ordinary life. Let us try to understand how we are what we are in this moment of life – not in the abstract, but in reality. Let us try to understand how we are what we are in reality. We can do this or that; we do this or that; we are capable of applying this or that strength, of rejecting this or that in ourselves. Let us think about how we can do this, how we have become the whole human being that we are now, how we are this. We will find that if we look back over our lives, something happened so many years ago that intervened in our lives as if by chance. If it had not happened to us, we would not have done this or that, we would not have developed this or that strength, we would not have acquired these or those inclinations. The way we are configured today is the result of what fate brought us at that time. After years, we see it quite differently. We see that fate has forged us. We couldn't even write today if we hadn't lived in the second half of the nineteenth century, when we were taught how to write.

What is it, then, that we call our self? What is it other than the result of our destiny, the result of what has flowed into us, what we now want because we want to do it, if fate had not shaped our will, forged our will, in life between birth and death? When we confront our destiny in this way, we realize that we ourselves, our ego, our self, are actually a product of this destiny, that this destiny has coagulated in our self, in our ego, just as the mass of a mineral coagulates in a crystal. We are formed out of our destiny. What we want now has coagulated out of everything that has formed our destiny.

If you live abstractly in these thoughts, they do not mean much, dear attendees, but if you look at your entire inner soul life, with the totality of your feelings and sensations, you might say, as if at something very substantial, at a fixed point, then you begin to develop certain feelings, certain sensations towards this fate. You may develop gratitude to this fate for having shaped you into what you are now, even if it has inflicted terrible and painful blows on you. But all the feelings that arise can be characterized by one common trait: you grow together with your destiny in the life between birth and death; you learn to recognize how you are a result of this destiny, how destiny is inherent in what you are. As a result, you grow together with your entire stream of destiny. What you have within you as a sense of your own identity is what you tear out of yourself and identify with intimately in the stream of fate. However, this must not remain an abstract thought, but a deep, inner experience must again be that the soul frees itself from this corporeality and now no longer feels itself as I just in its skin, but really feels itself in its stream of fate. One looks at one's destiny and says to oneself: That is you yourself; you would not be what you are if it had not been for your destiny.

Just as the power of thought frees itself from the body, as described earlier, so such contemplation - but it must take hold of the mind, the feeling, the will - frees the human being from the body and flows out into destiny.

But it does not stop there, that is the peculiar thing, but by doing the one exercise of the power of thought, which I have mentioned, and doing the other exercise, which tears him out of himself and identifies him with his destiny, he comes to stand before a truly new world. If we were to do the thinking exercise alone, we would come to the point where we say: it is as if the whole development of the world were waiting for us. But if we do the whole exercise at the same time, which relates to the will and through which an outlook on destiny can be formed, then the thinking exercise is also stimulated.

The two exercises stimulate each other and make something completely new out of the soul, tearing the soul out of the body. And while in the ordinary memory the human being must still live in his body for the images to emerge, the images of the memory of past experiences - there must indeed be signs in the physical -, we are able to develop a world of images; a completely new world that was previously unknown to us emerges. This exercise of the will must go hand in hand with the thinking exercise.

Why do I call this exercise, which is related to destiny, an exercise of the will? Because the human being comes to truly say to himself: this destiny has not just happened to me, but I have wanted it. As true as the will I develop is won from destiny, so true have I shaped my destiny out of my will. By practicing this exercise of will, the human being is able to tear his will out of himself and identify with his destiny. And so, by deepening his thinking and thereby discovering a new power of soul, a new power of thinking, and by tearing his will out of himself and developing it into a new power, the human being is able to have before him not just a world himself, but to have a world before him that he experiences in such a way that he knows, by experiencing it, that he is independent of his body, that he lives in the merely spiritual-mental.

To make us better understand each other, it should be said that man, in a certain way, knows what I have now described as a world of images that appears before man when he discovers a hidden power within himself through meditation and concentration. Man knows what I am talking about, but he knows it in a merely chaotic way, in chaotic images, in scraps of imagination. When a person sinks into sleep every day, dream images can arise from this, as is well known. But what do we have in front of us in these dream images? Now, you see, when a person lives in their dreams, as is the case in ordinary life, there is nothing special in these dreams. But when one gradually comes to discover the power of thought as a deepened power within oneself, then one knows that with the soul, with which one steps out of the body, one is now also out of the body in sleep, only one remains unconscious in the process.

One is not in one's body during sleep, one has gone out of the body with what one has discovered in the described way. But one has not developed the powers initially, so the soul remains unconscious when it is outside the body. But the dreams can emerge. They arise from the fact that the human being is bound to the body by an inner force. During waking life, the body reflects the soul life in thinking, feeling and willing. Dreams are formed from the body mirroring the soul life. In this state, the human being does not understand what is happening. Only as a spiritual researcher can one understand that during sleep one is really outside of the body. Only a spiritual researcher can understand that the body is an object for the sleeping soul outside of it. Because the human being does not yet have a full understanding of these things, they interpret everything in the context of ordinary life. Only when one's soul life deepens, as I have described, one does not come to a dream life only, not at all to a dream life only, nor to something morbid, somnambulistic, but one comes to a life that also takes place in images, but in images that one knows mean something real, that they are not mirror images.

What do these images mean? By developing the soul power on which thinking is based, one encounters something that is like a memory power that is no longer bound to bodily signs but develops freely in the soul-spiritual. It is not at all like the kind of thing we know as somnambulistic clairvoyance, but an inner life comes to meet us, which, in terms of its configuration, is the same as the power of remembrance. And now one can learn to decipher that which one recognizes as belonging to oneself, but which was within oneself without one consciously feeling it; that is this world of images. From this one gradually realizes that it is the world from which our physicality, our physical life, was first formed. One recognizes from what one is aware that it has connected with what has come to one as physical from father and mother through inheritance, what announces itself to us within this physical as our self, what has descended from the spiritual world and permeates and shapes us inwardly. We come to recognize ourselves as coming from a state that existed before our birth, a state in a spiritual world. An imaginative world comes towards us. But this imaginative world contains everything that unites with the physical materiality that we have inherited from our father and mother. This world contains the eternal soul, which now works in the physical body, which is mirrored in thinking, feeling and willing; the real soul life, which cannot be investigated by scientific methods, which lies behind all that is known as soul life in ordinary life. It is this that now also passes through the portal of death into a spiritual world. And our life is thereby directly included in the life that takes place in the spiritual world, in a spiritual existence. This becomes an experience for true spiritual research, a real inner experience.

And when the spiritual researcher has progressed so far as to apply this art of inner experimentation, he experiences not only what he now knows as his spiritual and psychological experience; he does not merely experience something that can so easily be ridiculed. he truly experiences that there is an ethereal, a finer existence, that he finds a finer body underlying his physical body, which descends from the spiritual world and returns to the spiritual world. He not only experiences this, but, just as we not only have eyes and ears, but also experience the things of the world ourselves, which stand outside of us, so we can, in the moment when we enter into our own spiritual being, come into contact with the spiritual being that underlies all being. We enter into an elementary world, into a world where spiritual experiences and processes take place that we have not known before and that underlie all physical experiences and processes. This is not philosophical speculation, it is not something imagined, of which spiritual science speaks; it is the result of the most serious research. It is true that this research is not carried out in the laboratory with external objects and instruments in external activities, but it proceeds in direct inner, intimate experiences of the soul itself. The soul-spiritual must be explored through methods that are applied to the spiritual-soul in man. Of course, great harm is being done to spiritual science by people who believe that they can already stand in this spiritual science, talking about all sorts of foolish things that can be attained without renunciation in one's soul, without work in one's soul that is much more difficult, much more renunciation than work in the outer natural sciences.

If it is repeatedly believed that someone who has applied this spiritual-scientific method to his soul can proclaim anything about the spiritual world, then one has a naive idea about these things. The work that needs to be done to explore the slightest thing in the spiritual world requires real inner exertion of the human soul. The soul must first tear itself away from the physical for the particular area it wants to explore spiritually, in order to place itself in the spiritual. And one cannot say that one can write down the rules by which the soul rises to a body-free realization in a small booklet and then say: Follow these rules and you will enter an area that leads into the spiritual world. Rather, one must say: what has to happen there changes according to the preconditions one brings with one. It cannot be grasped in individual rules, but one must recognize inwardly through direct experience: Now you are facing a real new world, a completely real new world, not a world of fantasy.

When we have reflected on our own soul and spirit and are able to see that, with our soul and spirit, we also enter a spiritual and soul world of supersensible processes, we can ask again: What happens when we then also develop our will using the example of fate? Where does the human being end up when he says to himself: My will is in the whole stream of my destiny; I say “Yes” to everything that has affected me; I myself have flowed out of what is the stream of my destiny; I am not in myself, but in the stream of destiny? When one really makes the experience of becoming one with destiny, then one comes to experience something even higher in human nature. We do not just experience what I have described, that I said it is there before birth. Rather, by developing our will, we experience a core of our being that lies very deep in our soul. And we gradually learn to recognize: Yes, this destiny, it is really the case that only the person who identifies this destiny with his or her being can truly grasp this destiny. Just as someone who has never heard of natural science cannot unravel the why when he sees lightning and thunder and other forces of nature outside in nature, as it stands before such a person quite incomprehensibly before the soul, but these processes can be explained by someone who has studied natural science, so it is with destiny using the spiritual scientific method. Something comes into fate that we ourselves are in our deeper essence. We flow out into our fate. But by flowing out into fate with our whole being, we get to know our inner soul core.

However, you then have to learn to use the knowledge you have gained to dissect this fate. Just as natural phenomena were only deciphered over centuries and centuries, you have to learn to decipher fate in order to find an inner order. Then we find that what presents itself as our destiny when we identify with it represents what we were in previous lives. And by getting to know the inner order of our destiny, we learn that this destiny is connected with earlier lives on earth. In this way, our knowledge of our life is not composed of an overview of our present life on earth, but we recognize that our destiny contains what was once or repeatedly present for us as an earthly life, which has now formed that which we have imaginatively recognized in images as our core being, so that it is revealed as it stands before us now. That which we explore through the power of deepened thinking, we learn to relate to our supersensible life before birth and after death. And that which we explore by deepening our will and destiny, we learn to understand in such a way that it refers us back to earlier earthly lives and points us to future earthly lives. As this fate melts together with the world of inner images, we know that this world of images is like a core that takes hold of our fate and carries it over into a life between death and a new birth, and in turn leads us into a new earthly existence.

In this way, we get to know a part of human nature by deepening our thinking. We learn to recognize, as it were, our etheric being, that which, as a supersensible body, underlies our physical body, as soul power. When the spiritual researcher speaks of an etheric body, this etheric body is found by a method that is just as reliable as the method used by the chemist to separate hydrogen from oxygen. Just as it cannot be seen from water that it contains a substance that burns, hydrogen, while water does extinguish fire, so too, when a person is standing in front of you, if you just look at the person with your ordinary mind, you cannot see that a supersensible person in this physical man lives and can extend his life beyond birth and death; but who can be investigated by just as certain, even if inward scientific methods, as it is the just mentioned method, through spiritual science, which rises with it to the rank of a real science. That which underlies man as an ethereal being — not speculation, not some kind of fantasy leads to this, but a real experience, an experience, however, that must first be developed.

By going even further and deepening our will, we come to grasp the astral human being – it is easy to ridicule the word, the 'astral' human being, but this word is justified, as we shall see presently, we come to take hold of the astral man, the human being who develops from life to life and who then becomes aware that he is no longer bound to his body but is connected with the whole world. In this way, the human being comes to recognize himself in his astral body, in that he is dependent on the whole cosmos, in which the laws of the stellar world prevail. Therefore, in a comparative expression, one can call this human being, who is not bound by the laws of what we experience between birth and death, but by the laws of the whole world, the astral human being.

You can see that anyone who approaches spiritual science can truly live in the belief that, with this spiritual science, we are at the end of a spiritual development. The spiritual scientist, as I have already mentioned here, is unconcerned when he is told: Yes, you are claiming something that you cannot claim at all if you use your five senses. You are well aware that this is also how it was said when Copernicus tried to make people understand that the Earth does not stand still and the Sun revolves around the Earth, but that, conversely, the Sun stands still, so to speak, and the Earth revolves around the Sun. This also went against the five senses, and it took a long time for people to adapt their way of thinking to what was a better truth than the earlier one that corresponded to the five senses.

That which is being researched from the depths of being must first become established in the understanding of people, despite the resistance of the world. The spiritual researcher is unconcerned that this will happen, but it takes time.

And in the same way, one can say: Yes, what the spiritual researcher has to present as a world that stands above the ordinary world of the senses is very different from what a person perceives in this world. It has to be different. For with regard to everything that the ordinary life of the soul contains, this thinking, feeling and willing, which science can only speak about when it becomes psychology, the spiritual researcher is in complete agreement with the natural scientist. He will not speak in a dilettantish way of an immortality that merely lives out in images, which must disappear with the mirror of the brain, with physicality in this form. But that is precisely the peculiarity of spiritual science: it agrees with natural science in all that it contains, and it never says that spiritual science must turn against natural science, because the spiritual researcher fully admits all the justified criticisms of natural science. He only discovers through his methods that which cannot be present in ordinary life, and which is nevertheless what is to be regarded as the eternal, immortal essence of man, who goes through births and deaths and through repeated earthly lives and who bears within him the character of the eternal.

When the natural scientist comes and says: From my way of thinking I must reject this, — then the spiritual researcher must say to the natural scientist: So give your reasons. Then the natural scientist gives the reason: The soul life is dependent on the brain. The spiritual researcher will say: You are right. He will agree with the natural scientist on all points. But he will say: Only then, after one has entered your territory, does the investigation of the spiritual-soul life begin, which has to do with completely different forces than those for which natural science is fully justified. Therefore, it is indeed a thoroughly understandable misunderstanding when one or the other objection is raised against spiritual science from the point of view of natural science. Spiritual science knows very well what it has in natural science. And it would be dilettantism in the field of spiritual science if it were to oppose natural science. And nor can it be said that the spiritual researcher cultivates superstition in any way.

This spiritual science leads into a real spiritual world. By discovering the real spiritual world - not the spiritual world that is dreamed up by those who only want to dream up a spiritual world but cannot find one - it actually confronts superstition. Spiritual science is precisely that which can and will heal all superstitious beliefs. Superstition flourishes where spiritual science is not accepted, yet people still want to enter the spiritual world. Spiritual science leads people into the spiritual world in a fully satisfying way and shows them the real course of a spiritual event behind the world of the senses. It shows the human being that his soul, as a spiritual being, is part of this spiritual world and that it formed the body itself out of this spiritual world before birth, with which it is part of this earthly life. But by discovering a real spiritual world, an unjustified spiritual world, as it underlies superstitious beliefs, is counteracted.

And as for the standpoint of spiritual science in relation to religion, here, too, one very often encounters misunderstandings. I will have to deal with this in more detail tomorrow in my lecture, which is intended to provide information about the building that we are constructing as a place of care for this new kind of science, spiritual science. Today, I have only allowed myself to speak to you about some of it, to stimulate your souls, certainly not with the intention of convincing you, but only to give you some food for thought.

The subject will be how spiritual science must be cultivated in a building that, in its artistic design, can truly serve as an environment for this spiritual science, and to show what is meant by the building, what is meant by placing spiritual science in the artistic endeavors of our time. In doing so, a spotlight will also be thrown on the extent to which it is unfounded when religious minds believe they have to address spiritual science as something hostile to religion. Today I would like to say only this much about it: While it is true that natural science with its ideas leads people to stray from religion, to become alienated from religious ideas, spiritual science, by showing people how the spiritual world is a reality, how the spiritual world really exists, will stimulate people's minds in such a way that even those who may consider themselves enlightened can in turn find a religious deepening.

Spiritual science cannot replace religion. It cannot dissuade anyone from their religion. This is because the task of religion is different from that of spiritual science. Religion must be cultivated alongside spiritual science. But by presenting itself as a science of the spiritual world, spiritual science does not, like natural science, lead people who want to be enlightened away from religion, but rather leads them to religion. And so those who are sincere about religious life must welcome spiritual science as the movement that can lead enlightened people to a deeper religious experience, to religious contemplation, to a true, genuine faith.

But I would like to talk about that tomorrow in connection with what I will have to say about the place of care that is to be built for spiritual science over in Dornach. But what I have tried to develop before you today as the basis of spiritual science should be something that can ultimately be summarized in a basic feeling of the human soul. For that is the peculiarity of spiritual science, that it does not merely stimulate our intellect, which is bound to the brain, but that it speaks to that which lives in every human soul, independently of all diversity. One should not think that one must become a spiritual researcher, but anyone can become one. I would ask you to read up on this in my books.

You don't have to be a spiritual researcher, but the spiritual researcher speaks to what is in every person, what lives in every human soul. He speaks to that in man which passes through births and deaths; to that which is eternal in the human soul. And what the spiritual researcher says can be understood by every human being, who just clears away the debris and obstacles in themselves that have arisen through today's habits of thinking. And that will, in a sense, be the spiritual scientific development of the future, that there will be individual spiritual researchers, as there are individual chemists, who will put what they produce through their research at everyone's disposal. There will be individual spiritual researchers who will be guided into the spiritual world by what has been described as the spiritual scientific method, and they will be able to speak about this spiritual world. But what they will say about this spiritual world will be able to be inscribed in every soul with understanding when the many prejudices that still exist today have been removed. But that will then be able to engender a new life in the soul, a life that the soul needs in the face of the ever more complicated and complex conditions of the outer world, which in the present time everywhere, wherever we look in the non-neutral countries, present such a sad picture. But even apart from such aspects: we can recognize that the soul will need these strong life forces in the face of ever more complicated and complex circumstances. Spiritual science wants to give the soul these strengthened life forces, which will stimulate an inner fulfillment and strengthening in it that can cope with everything that will flow into the soul, more than has ever been the case in the past.

And so I would now like to summarize, not in a rational judgment, but in a sentence of feeling, what I have tried to suggest to your souls through these reflections. For it is not what we intellectually retain and know of spiritual science that matters, but what is awakened in the soul as direct experiences of feeling, emotion, and mind, that is what matters.

And what should be stimulated by the words of the lecture, I would now like to let it flow together into an overall feeling that, like a result, should summarize the lecture and conclude it:

The senses of man speak to
The things in the vastness of space;
They have an effect on the human soul,
Changing in the course of time.
Experiencing itself, the soul seizes
The boundlessness of space,
The boundlessness of time,
The spirit's realm of being
In its eternal uniqueness.

Basel, January 12, 1916

Dear attendees!

In earlier lectures on spiritual science that I have been privileged to give here, I have repeatedly indicated that anyone who is grounded in this spiritual science, as it is meant here, is well aware that, from the present habits of thought, from all that one is accustomed to regarding as truth research, much, much can be objected to, and that it is quite understandable to the spiritual researcher himself when what he has to present is initially seen as fantasy, reverie or perhaps worse. Nevertheless, today, since it is possible to continue the reflections the day after tomorrow, I would still like to arrange what I have to say today as if the very obvious objections that can be raised against spiritual science from a scientific, religious and so on point of view were initially disregarded. This evening, I would like to consider the spiritual science, the essence of the research into the supersensible worlds, without taking any of these objections into account. The day after tomorrow, I will address these objections, which can be described as objections and apparent refutations from a wide range of perspectives.

In fact, dear attendees, all of humanity's deeper thinking and research has always been aimed at recognizing the essence of the human being itself as a supersensible one, because in the study of the essence of the human being, it becomes clear to the observer, let us say, to the philosophical observer, for example, that it is a matter of course that one which one is accustomed in the sensual world, one cannot approach the real essence of man; or at least - if one believes that in all that the senses can see, what the mind bound to the brain can explore, if one also believes that one can grasp the essence of man in this way, as the more or less materialistically inclined monism believes, then it always turns out – that for a deeper reflection of the thinker or researcher, what can be said from such sides about the nature of man, leaves the deeper needs of knowledge unsatisfied, and that one still has the feeling, the sensation, that something must be able to come from some side that shows the essence of man outside the sensual world.

I would like to draw attention to one of the very first thinkers in the development of human thought who endeavored, through the most strenuous thinking, to point out to his students at the university, to his listeners in the lecture itself, how one can immediately emerge from what does not allow the being of the human being to be recognized, to what one can find it in, in the inner life of the soul. This thinker is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. And in a way that one might say was paradoxical, he tried to show his listeners how the soul should move, as it were, in order to find its way from the sensory into the supersensible. For example, at the beginning of lectures he would say to his listeners: “Try to think of the wall.” Now, of course, that was easy. The listeners tried to put themselves in the state of mind in which they thought the wall. So after he had let his listeners think the wall for a while, he said: “So now try to think the one who thought the wall.” And that had the immediately convincing effect that Fichte knew how to achieve: it amazed his listeners, so much so that we contemporaries, who have recorded this scene, can describe how amazed the listeners actually were, how you could see that they were now making an effort to think the one who had previously thought the wall – how thinking slackened in a certain way, how it did not venture to go to the point to which it was being pointed.

Goethe, who approached the questions of knowledge primarily from a very human point of view, namely from the point of view of fruitful life, once made the statement that – one might say – is illuminated precisely that one refers to Fichte's claim in such a way as it has just been done – Goethe made the statement that he had behaved wisely in a certain way by avoiding thinking about thinking. He, who in everything he did for the soul wanted to sense direct life, felt very particularly that with this attempt to think thinking, man is led first of all to a kind of impossibility if he only sticks to ordinary thinking. And yet, anyone who begins to research the supersensible worlds can only initially rely on thinking, because they soon realize that what the senses can teach them or what can be combined from sensory phenomena still raises questions that, to a certain extent, lead the human being outside of their actual being. In thinking, he is with himself, and he can hope, at least, that if he really gets into the inner movement of thinking with the power of his soul, something may perhaps reveal itself to him that leads to the actual being of the human being.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is a peculiar phenomenon that the further one gets in thinking, as it exists in ordinary life, the more one struggles with this thinking, the more intense the doubts become, with this thinking somehow to find a gateway into the world in which the actual essence of man is. Yes, from what one experiences inwardly in thinking, one really does come, in the end, to the conviction that one can actually — let me use the trivial comparison — one can actually think thinking just as little as one can wash water.

And yet, the real methods, the real way to penetrate into those worlds in which the essence of the human being can be recognized – or, as we shall see later, can actually be experienced – they nevertheless lead through thinking. Only it leads to thinking in such a way that this thinking is not accepted as it presents itself in everyday life or in ordinary science, but that it is developed in such a way that, through this development, it basically becomes a completely different kind of soul power than it was before. And basically, all understanding of the study of the supersensible worlds depends on first learning how thinking can become something quite different in the human soul through a certain inner treatment than it is in outer life and in ordinary science.

Now, I have often had the opportunity here to point out the essential thing that has to be done in the treatment of thinking, so that this thinking becomes a completely different soul force than it is from the outset; and so today I do not want to point out again, in principle, what thinking must now accomplish in order to, so to speak, come out of itself and become a completely different soul force. I will only mention a few things that characterize what is actually achieved when thinking is treated in a certain way, purely inwardly, in a soul-like way, so that it becomes something quite different from what it is in the first place. You can find a detailed description of the methods by which thinking can be treated in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” You can find it in the second part of my “Occult Science.” Today I want to emphasize only the fact that certain inner activities are indicated that thinking can undertake, but which are purely of a soul nature – a certain way of taking perceptions into one's consciousness and relating to them, taking perceptions, connections and to relate to them and so on - that the soul becomes capable of doing this by interspersing the thinking with something that is unusual for ordinary thinking, that one thereby experiences something within the thinking, I would like to mention this first. And these experiences, which one brings about, are a first step in the exploration of the supersensible worlds. What one experiences precisely by strengthening and inwardly reinforcing one's thinking through meditation – and the types of meditation and concentration are mentioned in the books mentioned – is that one comes to realize that the thinking one applies in ordinary life and in ordinary science is, as it is, unsuitable for exploring the supersensible worlds. One notices, in particular, that when one devotes oneself to this ordinary thinking, one does not, in this thinking, become aware of the forces that can lead into the supersensible worlds. And even more than the mere materialistic theorist, through such mental exercises, through the actual inner experience of thinking, one gains the full conviction that the thinking one does in ordinary life, between birth or, let us say, between conception and death, that this thinking everywhere requires the bodily tool, the bodily organization. And because the bodily organization is necessary for this, because this thinking proceeds in such a way that everything it accomplishes makes use of the bodily tool, this thinking cannot free itself from being within the sensual world, and therefore one cannot enter through this thinking into any other world than the one in which one cannot find the essence of man. And precisely by commanding silence to all outer perception in meditation, by switching off the senses arbitrarily, so to speak, by commanding the inner affects, the inner feeling and sensing to stand still and by devoting oneself purely meditatively, inwardly, to certain thoughts in order to concentrate all soul powers on these thoughts and thereby strengthen thinking, one notices that it is the attachment of thinking to the physical tool that prevents one from entering the supersensible worlds. This is precisely what one attains through meditation: one realizes, one perceives exactly how one makes use of the body in order to think. One becomes, so to speak, more convinced of this through experience than the theoretical materialist can prove through it. One lives with this thinking within the bodily, the physical organization. But one also notices that, by living within the bodily, physical organization, this bodily, this physical organization makes something specific possible that would not be possible without it, that it, this bodily organization, gives thinking something that thinking would not have without this organization – if I may first express this paradoxical sentence. It will already prove true in the further considerations of the evening. Namely, what one notices is that, in the process of thinking, something must remain of the thought in healthy mental life. Everyone knows what must remain. It is the memories. It must be possible that, alongside thinking, something arises in our mental life that we call 'memory'. He who would lose what he thought the moment he thought it would not be an ordinary man for our external physical world. The fact that we can store thoughts in memory is the basis for this. And now, through the inner methodical treatment of thinking in the indicated direction, one notices that one's physical organization is necessary for memories to remain of the thinking. And with that, one also notices that one can, in a certain way, detach thinking from the physical organization. One can only not detach the thinking that becomes memory.

What I have just said leads the spiritual researcher down a very specific path. It leads him to recognize that memory, as we initially have it as human beings, is a force that is only significant for the physical-sensory world, and that this memory must first be detached, so to speak, from the activity of thinking, from the actual process of thinking. I would like to say: Just as the chemist uncovers the secrets of material nature by separating substances from one another in the laboratory, so too must the spiritual researcher proceed with the individual soul processes. Only that his analysis, his spiritual scientific analysis, consists of purely inner soul processes, and the synthesis, the reassembling of what has been separated, is all the more so. Thus it turns out to be necessary to detach in thinking that which leads to ordinary memory, to ordinary recollection, from the actual thinking activity. But how can one do that? This question now arises: how can one, so to speak, treat certain substances physiologically in such a way that substances dissolved in them are made to fall out of them through certain processes, leaving the dissolving substance behind – how can one bring out of thinking that which leads to memory, to recollection, so that something remains? This happens, dear honored attendees, by repeatedly and faithfully repeating it over long periods of time, even if only for very short periods during the day, to dwell on it within thoughts or images, or whatever it is , and that one actually attaches importance to paying attention in the soul, not to remembering it, but to paying attention in the soul to what one is doing, by becoming absorbed in the thinking activity. Then one notices that in this thinking activity something is alive, which one actually always has in one's everyday life and in ordinary scientific research, but which remains unconscious, which does not penetrate into consciousness. I can make myself understood by saying the following: Let us assume that we carry out an external activity that is related to our business, our profession. In doing so, we repeatedly produce this or that. After all, people have to choose a profession that, so to speak, leads them to the same activity every day. In this way, the main thing is taken for granted in our outer life, namely that what can be brought forth through our work is brought forth. The result is the main thing. But in addition to this, something else very often comes along, and we can very well regard it as something important and essential in our outer life, even if it relates to our outer work. By practicing the same occupation every day, we become more and more skillful; our hands, our other actions become more and more alive in us, so that we not only produce the result, but also an increase of activity takes place in us. We may often not pay attention to this increase in activity. But it can be observed.

What I have mentioned here for the outer life, where it naturally has a completely different meaning, must now be transferred by the spiritual researcher to the inner experience of thinking, and indeed of the thinking that he is carrying out in meditation, when he, so to speak, completely immerses himself in it, forgetting his entire surroundings and the actual experiences he has otherwise undergone, when he immerses himself in what can be called meditation or contemplation. And there he will find, if he does not overdo the individual meditations – I will also talk about this later – he will find that if he repeatedly and again and again and intensely pursues such inner thought development, he will learn to observe, not the thoughts, but the activity of thinking. From the increase, he realizes that there is an activity of thinking. And by experiencing, by grasping, so to speak, his own activity of thinking, by strengthening this activity of thinking in order to feel it in such a way that it enters his consciousness, whereas in ordinary life and in ordinary science it remains unconscious, he gradually gets into his soul that which he can now detach from the memory work of thinking. For the continuation of such exercises, as they have been described, they yield a very definite result. They yield that man gradually lives himself into the moments, which he himself can evoke, that man gradually lives himself into a new activity, which thinking now performs, that for this new activity memory actually falls away and only an experiencing in the thinking activity is there. One could describe it as follows: when a person develops his thinking in the way indicated, he experiences it, he experiences his thoughts disappearing, and he lives and moves in the activity of thinking, in the inner activity at first. The strange thing is: once one has grasped this point, where one lives in inner activity, then one notices: for this kind of inner soul activity, what is memory in ordinary life is not there at first. Something else is there. And I would like to point out, by way of comparison, how the whole inner soul life has now been changed out of thinking.

A certain experience of the poet Grillparzer is known from his biography. I do not mention this experience because Grillparzer's capacity for knowledge was from the standpoint that is being advocated here, but because — I would like to say — a beginning of what Grillparzer experienced was present in what — I would like to say — must be artificially brought about in order to effect the investigation of the supersensible being of man. Grillparzer had conceived the whole idea of his “Golden Fleece”. He had thought out the plan, the individual events and how they were connected. In short, he had grasped his drama, The Golden Fleece, in thought, in the life of imagination. The remarkable thing was that he forgot it as he had grasped it in a later period. He could not remember it at all. And lo and behold, one day, when he played the same piano pieces that he had played at the time when he had conceived the idea of the Golden Fleece, the memory came back to him; the whole thing was before his soul again. How did that happen? Well, this indicates to us that through the inner activity, which was the same now as it was earlier, through this inner activity he was led again to look inwardly at the whole content of thought. As I said, this is on the way to what is actually to be considered here – but it is just on the way. This path just has to be followed further.

For that is the peculiar thing that the meditant, the spiritual researcher, comes to, that he, as it were, finds himself dying within himself - but only, of course, at the times when he is engaged in spiritual research. The ordinary memory dies away and, as it were, can arise again and again - not now in memory, but through other activities - the activity in which he has once lived can arise. This activity occurs again and again. And lo and behold, once you have gotten used to it for a while - that is, to separate the activity of thinking from the thoughts that can remain as memories - then you notice that the whole mood of your soul life has changed under the influence of these exercises. You do notice something, though, when you get to a certain point in this development of soul exercises. You do notice something that can, in a certain way, have a disturbing effect on the soul: One notices that one can have experiences that do not leave memories behind, and because they do not leave memories behind, [but] are like flowing and weaving processes of experience, they are, so to speak, real dreams, but dreams that exercise a great deal of control over our inner soul life. And so one notices very soon that one's consciousness has become empty, I would say, and can no longer store memories of what one is immediately thinking, that they arise not through the same thinking activity of remembering, of straining to bring thoughts up, but that one's own experiences come from outside, just as sense objects come from outside. One gets an impression more or less of one's life on earth back to the moment up to which one usually remembers. The thoughts appear like realities. The thoughts appear like something alive. They come to you like living beings; not as they appear in memory, but they come to you like living beings.

In fact, thinking takes on a completely different character under the influence of the exercises. It really becomes a completely different soul power. And I would like to point out, by way of comparison, how surprising this change in thinking activity can be. Imagine that you have a statue, a sculpture, in front of you; it is formed. Imagine that the moment could come when this statue, this sculpture, begins to walk, to live. Then you would initially find something that violates the laws of external nature. Of course, that cannot happen. I only wanted to mention this as a comparison because something occurs in the life of the soul that can indeed be compared to it. In the thoughts that one otherwise has in ordinary life and that lead to memories, one has the impression, in one's own inner experience, that these thoughts must be passive images that depict the external, that they do not, so to speak, live inwardly. And if they led a life of their own, then the life of the soul would express itself through the inner life, through the independent life of thoughts, in fantasy, in dreams, if not in something worse, if not in hallucinations. In the ordinary life of the soul, thoughts really have something that can be compared to the forms that a column has. Of course, nothing should be said against the value of sculpture. That would, of course, be foolish. But in a certain way, what takes place as the logic of thinking in the ordinary activity of thinking can be compared to the dead statue, where we are not aware of the actual activity in thinking, of what connects the thoughts, what brings them together and what separates them again. While the statue cannot merge into activity, into life, the inner logic, the inner weaving and life of thoughts can now merge into consciousness, can become inwardly alive; the statue “logic” can, as it were, become an inner living logical being, which one now feels as if one were living into a completely different world. From this moment on, one knows: That which one first peeled away from memory, that is, thinking activity itself, has become detached from its dependence on the bodily organs. As I said, I will discuss all possible objections from the point of view of science the day after tomorrow. But what the spiritual researcher experiences at this important point in his development of the soul forces is that he now knows: You have detached the thinking activity from the physical-corporal; you have emerged with your soul, insofar as the soul moves in thoughts, from your physical organization; you are no longer in your body.

As paradoxical and strange as it may seem, it is a reality. It is possible - but only through inner experience - to observe this separation of the spiritual soul within us from the physical body. What the spiritual researcher experiences has been described at various times with one word, which has also been mentioned here in earlier lectures, but which may be mentioned again and again because it represents something that has an infinitely shattering effect on the soul when it has arrived at the point of which I have just spoken. Because, indeed, the development that the spiritual researcher undergoes, dear attendees, is such that the individual stages are connected with inner shocks, with inner conquests, of which we must also learn some. This has no objective value. But when one speaks of the paths and methods by which one researches the supersensible entity of man, this must also be mentioned. But now it must be said: in the way I have shown it, spiritual research can actually only arise in our time. All that arises in the ongoing culture of humanity must, after all, occur at a certain time. Just as the newer scientific way of thinking arose three to four centuries ago, as it was made possible by external circumstances, by the inner developmental circumstances of humanity as a whole, so such a treatment of the soul forces as has been described was not possible before our time. This could only come about after centuries of scientific training of humanity, so that thinking in general would acquire the strength within human development to be able to undertake something like this. In earlier centuries and millennia, however, there were always people who, on other soul paths and out of other developmental forces of the soul, also penetrated into the spiritual worlds, on developmental paths that are no longer appropriate only for today's advanced humanity. These paths must be changed, just as the way of looking at nature has also been changed in the course of development. But in their own way, spiritual observers of the most diverse millennia have also come to the point that is meant here, where they were seized by something living in the world, which is, so to speak, a living, weaving power of thought, an objective power of thought that flows and weaves through things. They realized that when the soul comes to this point, it is so moving that they said: “The soul arrives at the gate of death.” And indeed, one knows something about this coming to the gate of death, which, precisely because it comes before one's soul inwardly, has a harrowing effect; one knows: by having pushed the activity of thinking so far that this activity has transformed itself in the indicated way, one enters into such a coming to life of thinking. But one faces an inner - not a physical - danger. Not a danger that has something to do with the [gap in the transcript], but one faces a danger.

One faces the danger of not being able to carry into the world, purely inwardly, the soul, that which is otherwise ordinary everyday self-awareness, into the world that one is now experiencing. One faces the danger of entering a world in the face of which one is powerless, spiritually, purely spiritually powerless, to carry one's self-awareness into it, in which one seems to lose oneself at first, so that one actually comes to stand at the gate of a world, but by standing there, it is as if one had to leave oneself behind. This losing of oneself, this no longer having oneself, that is initially a harrowing experience. And this experience, fully lived through, really experienced inwardly, so that one has it in one's soul, that allows one to experience something else now, that allows one to experience that one knows: Yes, this self-awareness that you have there, this self-awareness that once arose in this life occurred in this life, at the point in time up to which one otherwise remembers back, where one started to call oneself an ego - this self-confidence is in the most eminent sense, even more than the other soul powers, bound to the physical body organization. And now that one has emerged from the physical body organization, one is faced with the danger of no longer being able to say “I” to oneself, of losing oneself. One learns to recognize what is snatched from one when one passes through the portal of death, when the soul-spiritual separates from the physical-bodily in reality through death. One really comes to - I would like to say - experience vividly in theory what death is in the soul-spiritual sense, is objectively.

That is the harrowing experience. And that is why those who knew something about it described this experience as approaching the gate of death. But one must go through the path that has been described to this significant experience. Only when you follow the exercises described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science”, when you go through these exercises in your soul, will you develop the way in which these exercises are formed from the experiences of the soul. Alongside this path, which has just been described, a parallel path develops, which, as it were, runs parallel to it and prevents one from really losing oneself when one's consciousness has reached the threshold of death. So the spiritual researcher, the meditator, has to go through something else so that he does not lose himself at the point in question, but can carry himself into the world that he has now entered. Just as one needed a development of thinking, a separation of thinking, of the power of thinking, of the activity of thinking, from that which leads to memory in thinking, in order to arrive at the point described, so one needs for the other path a very definite development of the activity of the will, of the will, which again is to be achieved through inner soul exercises.

And here it must be said that this development of the will is based on the fact that one now separates something from the will that one has used in ordinary life, something that is connected with it in ordinary life, as it were – if I may use this chemical comparison – something falls out, is separated from ordinary will activity. In our ordinary volitional activity, especially when one observes this volitional activity in a scientific way, then one knows that one never experiences the will in ordinary life, never, even in the most ideal activity, that one never experiences the will in ordinary life and through ordinary consciousness other than in that it is filled with inner emotions, with affects, with what the motives of the will are. They have to be inside, otherwise the will would not work in ordinary life.

Now, in order to be able to complete the other path that runs parallel to the first one, the spiritual researcher has to do such exercises that enable him to separate the will, [that enable him to have the experience of] separating the will from everything that must be connected because motives must live in the will that come from our physical, from our ordinary soul life and so on, to separate the will from everything that makes up the essence and value of this will for ordinary life. Of course, this separation should not be made for ordinary life – otherwise the person would be unsuitable for ordinary life, or perhaps even worse – but only for those moments, for those times when the person wants to explore the spiritual worlds, when he must create the possibility for himself to experience a will that is free from the ordinary will. And there are again exercises that are now applied to the will, so that the will breaks free. You will find this described in the books mentioned.

Above all, these exercises aim – while the thinking exercises aim to strengthen thinking, to put oneself in the place of experienced thoughts, which one moves to the center of consciousness – these will exercises aim to get more and more arbitrariness over switching off the ordinary will activity, to command calm, inner peace of mind over the whole inner soul life. The ordinary life of the soul is traversed by the remnants of the motives of the will, by worries, by all other feelings, in short, by whatever surges as living power from the ordinary life of the soul into the mind. The exercises are aimed at learning to suppress all this at will. And then the spiritual researcher is able to bring about something that otherwise can only be brought about involuntarily in ordinary life.

To describe this, I must refer to something that occurs cyclically in everyday life, that which one always experiences in a twenty-four-hour period if one leads a somewhat regular human life, namely the alternation of waking and sleeping. Today we need not go further into what happens in the human being as the transition from waking to sleeping takes place within him. But everyone already knows this from trivial, from ordinary observation of life, that at first the activity of the senses involuntarily fades away - in a certain sequence that could be described, the description has no particular value here - that then also that which remains at last, the inner feeling of oneself, the inner living through of oneself, that this also fades away. And then the human being remains in a state that can truly be called unconscious in the most eminent sense.

Now the spiritual researcher comes to the conclusion that when a person is asleep in this unconscious state, his soul essence is nevertheless still within it. And he comes to the conclusion that he can learn to bring about a state through a certain development of the will, which on the one hand is similar to the state of sleep and yet on the other hand is so radically different from it that one can say: It is the opposite state of sleep. The development of the will ultimately aims to switch off all sensory activity and to bring about the same thing with sensory activity that is otherwise achieved in deep unconscious sleep; similarly, to bring this about with all thinking activity, with all feeling activity, with everything that lives in the motives of the will, to suppress the whole sensual and ordinary life of the soul through arbitrariness. And then one notices – when one has acquired the powers to achieve this – that one is really able to induce a standstill of physical, organic life in the same way as it would otherwise occur involuntarily in sleep – one does not need to remain unconscious, one does not really enter into sleep, but one experiences this transition in a conscious state. The power that leads one to suppress this organic activity also leads one, at the same time, to raise the soul-spiritual consciousness out of the body by a different path, now as a volitional activity, so that you are now really not unconscious as in sleep outside of your body – I do not need to explain these statements today because nothing depends on them – but you are consciously asleep and know: you are no longer in what lives in you. But consciousness has not disappeared. Consciousness is intact, along with self-awareness, along with the possibility of knowing yourself as an ego.

This state is radically different from that of sleep, because when you are asleep you are unconscious, but now you are fully conscious when you step out of your body, you can see your body as you would otherwise see a table or an external object in front of you. In this way, one consciously leaves the body and knows that one is outside because one observes the body now as an external object, as one can otherwise observe external objects.

This appears self-evident to someone who has not yet received any messages about such things or cannot acquire an understanding of them, as something quite paradoxical and dreamy. Nevertheless, it is a real process, much more real than any process that the soul can otherwise evoke, and through which the soul now comes to bring the experience of itself in the will to full consciousness.

But now, dear readers, you will experience something that, when described, must at first be taken for granted, as if you just wanted to express yourself figuratively, as if you just meant a mere thought, something symbolic, perhaps even something allegorical. But that is not the case; instead, one experiences something quite inwardly real. One experiences that in this will, which is detached from ordinary mental activity but is now conscious, one experiences something that is always within one, but not as something dormant, not as something substantial, but as a spiritual-soul life of consciousness: One experiences a second person within oneself, who is always in every person, but who cannot be brought to light only through ordinary consciousness. Of course, when people in ordinary life say that a person carries a second person within them, they often mean something figurative, something imaginary. That is not meant here, but what is really meant here is that a person comes to realize: You carry a second person within you, a second person who really has consciousness and who watches you in everything you do in ordinary life in terms of will activity. We are never alone. In the depths of our being there is a true being that develops and is a spectator of us, a being that is in constant activity and that we get to know more and more intimately if we continue such exercises as they have been described. Yes, one first gets to know it in such a way that, before one can really get to know it, one has to overcome a harrowing inner soul experience. I have described the other soul experience, which spiritual researchers have called and call reaching the gate of death. But now one reaches a soul experience that can be described by saying: Only now does one experience in a comprehensive way, spiritually and soulfully – and spiritually and soulfully is, of course, meant to include everything – one experiences in a comprehensive way, spiritually and soulfully, what actually exists in the world, permeating and interweaving this world, in pain and suffering. In a sense, one experiences the foundations of the suffering and pain that lives and weaves through the world. Only now do we learn to recognize what mental pain and suffering is. And we have to, because it is only through experiencing this pain, through experiencing this pain that we develop the ability to grasp, to grasp, to experience this inwardly conscious being that sits within us, directly inwardly, spiritually and mentally. One can say: the person who has an open heart, an open mind for that which surrounds him in the world, will feel that which surrounds him in the world in many respects as something beautiful, as something sublime, as the flowering of the world. The one who undergoes what has been described knows that out of the soil of the pain that flows and weaves through the world, the flower of all beauty, all sublimity, all glory in the world arises.

Of course, dear attendees, there could be people who, in their human wisdom, say: Yes, something like that could make you despair of the wise guidance of the world, of the wisdom of God even; because why didn't God arrange it so that the beautiful, the magnificent, the sublime would appear without the basis of pain? Such people raise objections based on human wisdom, without being able to feel and experience the iron necessities of existence in their depths. The one who asks, “Why is there no sublimity, beauty, or bloom in the world without the basis of pain?” is in a similar position to someone who demands of a mathematician that he draw a triangle whose angles do not add up to 180 degrees. There are necessities. These necessities do not contradict the wisdom-filled guidance of the world. Just as the plant's blossom must develop from the root, so everything that is sublime and beautiful in the world must develop from what one now experiences at the bottom of one's soul as suffering. This leads to a deeper understanding of life and the world; this shows us in which basic element of life beauty, sublimity, and wisdom are rooted, and that this could not be there, that the strength to experience it could not be there at all, if the strength were not acquired by growing out of suffering.

But now the question arises: why do we experience suffering at the very moment when we are inwardly experiencing this inner observer, this inner conscious soul being? Why just then? It begins with this – and I would like to describe these things in detail, although this may make me more difficult to understand – it begins with the fact that, through the development of the will, one really experiences inwardly, as if weaving and living in the newly developed will activity, what is there inwardly as a spectator. By experiencing it first, one experiences it as if it were contradicting everything one has otherwise experienced in one's soul life, in this life, since one can think. The person who experiences it in this way has an intensely heightened sense of what it might be like to have done some kind of careful thinking and then to have someone come along who thoroughly refutes that thinking, presenting it as something that cannot stand up. I would say: one feels what emerges from the depths of the will as an experience in a living refutation. At first it is a very strange, very peculiar experience! Precisely that something comes into the life of the soul that begins like the pain of a refutation of one's own soul life, precisely that which begins like that, which is experienced in such a way, gradually becomes such that one really experiences what one can call: one feels oneself in the stream of pain that flows on the mother soil of existence. But then it is precisely this experience of suffering that makes what arises out of the will, I would say, more and more concrete and concrete, more and more essential and essential. And then one experiences what is actually there, what comes out of the will. One gradually learns to understand why it appears in the form of pain, because one learns to understand: You are now actually experiencing that which you otherwise cannot experience in your everyday life in thinking and willing; what underlies it, what has basically developed in the depths of your soul throughout your whole life, what you have now grasped at the stage when you began to become a spiritual researcher. You experience that which is otherwise hidden in the life of the soul, that which remains when everything in the life of the soul that is bound to the instrument of the outer body falls away. One experiences that which passes through the gate of death, that which, when we die, enters into a purely spiritual world, and because that which now enters into a purely spiritual world is initially suited to live in a spiritual environment, which is not adapted to the life that we have developed, which is now in this life, without being adapted to it. That is why it initially appears in a sorrowful form, in the form of suffering and pain. It is something that develops so that it is intended for a different kind of experience. And now we know what is present in the soul that passes through the gateway of death when our body decays, what the soul really possesses as an immortal. One experiences it now, but through inner experience, just as a plant would feel if it could experience how, in its growth, it gradually prepares the forces that then, in the flower, lead to the germ, which, after going through another life, through the soil of the earth or something similar, can develop into a plant of the same kind. One feels a germ of life, a new germ of life within oneself. And just as the germ of the plant develops out of the forces of the plant and can become a new plant, so one experiences now that this germ of life, which one can initially experience embedded in pain, goes through a spiritual world and can become a new human life, a repeated life on earth. One experiences only that, while the plant germ can be destroyed by the outer circumstances that take place in space and time, so that not every plant germ develops into a new plant, that in the spiritual world, which applies when a person has passed through the gate of death, no such obstacles exist, but in what has just been described the spiritual world and must reappear as a new life on earth, must again seek a body to which it adapts, which it forms, in which it joins with that which comes from father and mother, which lies in the hereditary current, which it thoroughly organizes and leads to a new life on earth.

The spiritual researcher, esteemed attendees, comes, by walking the path that I have described, so to speak, to two inner soul elements, to the one soul element where he feels the danger: you can lose yourself; but he also comes to the other soul element, which gives him a consciousness of the otherwise unconscious thinking in him. The consciousness that he is otherwise aware of is in danger of being lost. But with the consciousness that arises out of the stream of will, one can now enter the world, through it one can lead oneself into the world, which one thus experiences. And here it becomes apparent that, while if one were to experience only that which lives in the will as a new human germ of life, one would feel only pain, it becomes apparent that, when one does the exercises in the right way, these pains show themselves to be something that reveals to one the reveals the secrets of the world, but that in reality it happens that one now carries this consciousness at the bottom of one's soul into what one would otherwise feel as an emptiness, in the face of which one would become powerless if one felt it. There it ceases to be painful, there it awakens to such a life as our senses otherwise awaken to when they have matured from their embryonic state and can behold the sensual world.

As the two elements I have described unite, they now become a new sense, what Goethe calls the “eye of the mind” and the “ear of the mind”, but which is now present in reality. The thinking, which has been further developed to the point that has been described, unites as an activity with the new consciousness, and a fully developed spiritual person, who is now completely outside of the physical within the person, experiences the soul within himself, with whom he lives together, and this spiritual person is now inside in the spiritual world. Now, this spiritual person, by being in the spiritual world, receives something that I have already hinted at, which is like a higher level of remembering, not a remembering that arises from thoughts occurring again, but from what is present in the spiritual world coming before one as a living entity. Now, what has been lived through in the time that we have lived through before we united with a physical earthly body, that which has passed between our last death and our last birth - or let's say conception - also appears as a living entity. Experiences of previous earthly lives arise. A higher kind of memory arises. As paradoxical as it seems, it is the kind of memory that can be developed just as truthfully as other abilities are developed in the course of life from the childlike state of mind, which then become effective in the physical life and one day become aware of themselves as a spiritual being within the spiritual world. He experiences himself as a spirit in the spiritual world. And just as he is surrounded by physical beings of the same kind as his physical organization here in the physical world, so he is now in the spiritual world as a spirit man among entities that are of a spiritual nature. Such spiritual beings, which never enter into physical life, which have their task in the spiritual world, such beings, which, like human souls, lead alternately a spiritual life between death and a new birth, or a physical life between birth, or let us say, conception, and death, all this now becomes, I might say, a spiritual-objective world. However, one must not imagine that this spiritual-material world is somehow a mere repetition of the physical world. More precise things in this direction will be discussed the day after tomorrow; today it should only be mentioned that the whole way in which one experiences the spiritual world is different. For example, by am giving an example, I must, of course, since today, to a certain extent, one compromises oneself with truths about the spiritual world, I must compromise myself even more than is already the case with the way of thinking that is customary today. Let us assume that, with regard to the spiritual experience in this person who has developed out of the other person, we are dealing with a soul, with a human soul that passed through the gateway of death years ago. It may well be that in the way the spirit can perceive the spirit, one feels the soul of the dead person taking effect on oneself. But it is not as some might imagine – as I said, this will be discussed the day after tomorrow – it is not as if one were to see a refined material image; it is not as if one were to see a nebulous in the sense in which trivial superstitious clairvoyance believes – but in a completely different way, the spiritual enters our consciousness, which has been born out of the stream of will. And to characterize the way in which the spiritual is now experienced, I have to say something like the following: Let us assume that we, as human souls, have thoughts. The thoughts live in us. Let us assume that the thought could experience itself; then the thought would say: I am in the human soul. The thought would not depict an external world to each other as we do, but it would know itself in a world, it would know that it is in a world. I could also say: instead of looking at it, it experiences being looked at, that it itself is being experienced. That is what it experiences. So being together with the spiritual world is now much more real than being together with sensual things, but in a different way. That which lives in the spiritual worlds enters into our consciousness, so that the consciousness, which we ourselves have only just brought into the spiritual world in the way described, now knows of other consciousnesses that come together with it; the consciousness knows that it is experiencing spiritual beings.

It may therefore happen that a soul from the spiritual world that wants to help or lean towards ours – it can be a human soul, or also any other soul that never embodies itself in a physical body – that this is experienced by us as living in our consciousness. Then you realize that in ordinary life on earth we actually always have the spiritual world living in our consciousness. But because we are not aware of this, our ordinary consciousness does not contain these spiritual beings. However, one can learn to feel when one has to perform a spiritual task, for which one needs inspiration. Such experiences can be had.

It is self-evident – and it is not out of immodesty – that one has personal experiences, personal research experiences, so to speak, to indicate what has been researched. But it has happened, for example, that a soul who died years ago, who had a very special artistic inner ability, carried this artistic inner ability through death and now helped with certain artistic endeavors. The one who has acquired spiritual perception in the manner described knows how to distinguish what is his own, although it could flatter his pride and vanity more to attribute it all to his own genius; he knows what is alive in him and what is coming from the spiritual world and its beings.

And if someone then says – as I said, more will be said about this the day after tomorrow – if someone says, esteemed attendees: Yes, all this can be an illusion, all of it can be a hallucination – then for today the only thing to be said in reply is that there are also certain philosophical schools of thought that say: Everything you see with your eyes is actually only a creature of your eyes themselves. One need only recall Schopenhauer's writing: the world is only an illusion – which was so exaggerated by a man who once stood before Goethe that this man expressed the conviction to Goethe: “If I have not opened my eyes, then the sun is not there!” A more recent naturalist, who is not at all averse to including borderline areas of natural research in his research area, said: Well, yes, but it has been established that the man has long since died and can no longer open his eyes – but the sun is still cavorting around in space.

I myself know what objections can be raised against this; but essentially it is still true. But precisely [gap in the transcript] justifies these philosophical objections. Man learns to grasp what in the real world is real and what is merely imagined, merely experienced in his soul. Just as man can learn to distinguish between what is real in the external world of the senses only through life, so too, with regard to spiritual and psychological experiences – which have developed, as has been described – only one's own soul can justify itself and, if I may use these expressions, perceive entities and events as real. Once you can do that, then all the objections that can be raised are as futile as the objections of the philosophical idealist – in the technical sense, that is meant – against the reality of the external world. In the external world, reality can only be experienced. There is no proof that can be logically derived; only in life itself can one learn to distinguish the real from the dreamed, from the hallucinated. And how the soul life remains healthy and learns to distinguish the hallucinated from the experienced will be discussed the day after tomorrow. This is how one learns to distinguish the dreamed from what is real. And so also in the spiritual world.

So today I wanted to take these considerations only to the point where it shows how man, through an exploration of the spiritual world, can come to the knowledge of his own spiritual being, which belongs to this spiritual world. This particular consideration of the spiritual world, which is based on an inner development of the soul, could only arise in the period of modern science, which, in relation to the education of the soul of humanity, was, so to speak, the preparatory school for it. And it is quite understandable that, having familiarized itself for a while with the very thing that constitutes the greatness of the newer natural scientific way of thinking, humanity has strayed from even considering it possible that the soul can really come to a knowledge of the spiritual world. How every person, even if he is not a spiritual researcher, can absorb knowledge of this spiritual world and recognize its truth, just as one can, without being a chemist, utilize chemical products and chemical truths for ordinary life - I will talk about that the day after tomorrow. And today I will merely point out that it is quite understandable to the spiritual researcher that those who have become immersed in mere external natural science and have become acquainted with the soul forces that are involved in this external natural science, who have learned to use these soul forces and their development into a research method, those who have fully recognized the splendor and the heights and the great successes and achievements of modern natural science, which has brought about all this, [to the spiritual researcher it is quite understandable] that those who have come to know these soul forces could, for a while in the development of humanity, come to believe that there can be no science at all beyond that which is based only on the development of sense perception and of thinking bound to the brain, that is, to the physical organization.

But what can really be experienced, dear honored attendees, testifies that the field of real knowledge can be extended into the spiritual world, that man can truly explore his spiritual-soul being, which goes through births and deaths, in repeated earth lives. And when a brilliant nineteenth-century natural scientist rightly emphasized that the contemplation of those cognitive powers that have brought about success in natural science cannot lead beyond the realm of sense-perceptible nature, but nor can it enter into the reasons for existence – when this brilliant naturalist, Du Bois-Reymond, therefore proclaimed his Ignorabimus, therefore his “not knowing” – it was precisely because he had become accustomed to those powers of knowledge that are only able to fully see through and penetrate the outer sensual world. And he said that if one wants to undertake something in order to know something other than outer nature, then, as he says, 'supernaturalism' begins, that is, becoming familiar with the spiritual world. Only, he says, where supernaturalism begins, science ends. He does not yet know – and quite rightly could not know – that those powers of cognition that have just been sharpened and strengthened by observing the external world cannot lead into these spiritual worlds. It is only when these powers of cognition, as we have them, are transformed that thinking and will must develop in a different way than they do in ordinary science. Then they must be enlivened, invigorated, to penetrate into the spiritual world.

And so one must say: There is a certain one-sided correctness to the ignorabimus, to what Du Bois-Reymond says – one cannot penetrate into the spiritual world with the powers of knowledge that have made natural science great. But one can develop those powers of cognition, exactly the same powers of cognition, through an inner spiritual-soul method, so that one can then strive up into the spiritual worlds through the thus developed powers of cognition, can penetrate up - [and that is] when knowledge does not remain merely the passive knowledge that contributed to the greatness of external science, but when knowledge becomes a living one - in the transition from the statue to living logic, to inner life - when, so to speak, the soul itself becomes living, living logic, and this logic can be permeated and experienced with what it finds in the current of the will. For that which the spirit is - dear honored attendees, allow me to conclude with these words - can only be experienced by awakening knowledge to life and living as LIVING knowledge in the living spiritual world, by leading life itself, which the human being otherwise leads bound to the sensory and physical organs, by leading life itself to knowledge, to living knowledge! Through knowledge becoming living knowledge, through a new person, an inner person being discovered in the person, the person lives their way up into the world in which they are as a spiritual being among spiritual events and among other spiritual beings; through this they live their way up into the world in which their true origin, their true task, their true meaning lies. More on this the day after tomorrow.

If one wants to understand Goethe's world view, one cannot content oneself with listening to what he himself says about it in individual statements. To express the core of his being in crystal-clear, sharply stamped sentences did not lie in his nature. Such sentences seemed to him rather to distort reality than to portray it rightly. He had a certain aversion to holding fast, in a transparent thought, what is alive, reality. His inner life, his relationship to the outer world, his observations about things and events were too rich, too filled with delicate components, with intimate elements, to be brought by him himself into simple formulas. He expresses himself when this or that experience moves him to do so. But he always says too much or too little. His lively involvement with everything that comes his way causes him often to use sharper expressions than his total nature demands. It misleads him just as often into expressing himself indistinctly where his nature could force him into a definite opinion. He is always uneasy when it is a matter of deciding between two views. He does not want to rob himself of an open mind by giving his thoughts an incisive direction. He reassures himself with the thought that “the human being is not born to solve the problems of the world but is, indeed, born to seek where the problem begins, and then to keep himself within the limits of what is comprehensible” A problem which the person believes he has solved takes away from him the possibility of seeing clearly a thousand things that fall into the domain of this problem. He is no longer attentive to them, because he believes himself to be enlightened about the region into which they fall. Goethe would rather have two opposing opinions about an issue than one definite one. For each thing seems to him to comprise an infinitude, which one must approach from different sides in order to perceive something of its entire fullness. “It is said that the truth lies midway between two opposing opinions. Not at all! It is the problem that lies between, the unseeable, the eternally active life, thought of as at rest.” Goethe wants to keep his thoughts alive so that he could transform them at any moment, if reality should induce him to do so. He does not want to be right; he wants always “to be going after what is right.” At two different points in time he expresses himself differently about the same thing. A rigid theory, which wants once and for all to bring to expression the lawfulness of a series of phenomena, is suspect to him, because such a theory takes away from our power of knowledge its unbiased relationship to a mobile reality.

If in spite of this one wants to have an overview of the unity of his perceptions, then one must listen less to his words and look more to the way he leads his life. One must be attentive to his relationship to things when he investigates their nature and in doing so add what he himself does not say. One must enter into the most inward part of his personality, which for the most part conceals itself behind what he expresses. What he says may often contradict itself; what he lives belongs always to one self-sustaining whole. He has also not sketched his world view in a unified system; he has lived his world view in a unified personality. When we look at his life, then all the contradictions in what he says resolve themselves. They are present in his thinking about the world only in the same sense as in the world itself. He has said this and that about nature. He has never set down his view of nature in a solidly built thought-structure. But when we look over his individual thoughts in this area they of themselves join together into a whole. One can make a mental picture for oneself of what thought-structure would have arisen if he had presented his views completely and in relationship to each other. I have set myself the task of portraying in this book how Goethe's personality must have been constituted in its inner-most being in order for him to be able to express thoughts about the phenomena of nature like the ones he set down in his natural scientific works. I know that, with respect to much of what I will say, Goethean statements can be brought which contradict it. My concern in this book, however, is not to give a history of the evolution of his sayings but rather to present the foundations of his personality which led him to his deep insights into the creating and working of nature. It is not from the numerous statements in which he leans upon other ways of thinking in order to make himself understood, nor in which he makes use of formulations which one or another philosopher had used that these foundations can be known. From what he said to Eckermann one could construct a Goethe for oneself who could never have written The Metamorphosis of the Plants. Goethe has addressed many a word to Zelter that could mislead someone to infer a scientific attitude which contradicts his great thoughts about how the animals are formed. I admit that in Goethe's personality forces were at work that I have not considered. But these forces recede before the actually determining ones which give his world view its stamp. To characterize these determining forces as sharply as I possibly can is the task I have set myself. In reading this book one must therefore heed the fact that I nowhere had any intention of allowing parts of any world view of my own to glimmer through my presentation of the Goethean way of picturing things. I believe that in a book of this kind one has no right to put forward one's own world view in terms of content, but rather that one has the duty to use what one's own world view gives one for understanding what is portrayed. I wanted, for example, to portray Goethe's relationship to the development of Western thought in the way that this relationship presents itself from the point of view of the Goethean world view. For the consideration of the world views of individual personalities, this way seems to me to be the only one which guarantees historical objectivity. Another way has to be entered upon only when such a world view is considered in relationship to other ones.

For those who care to reflect on it, music has always been something of an enigma from the aesthetic point of view. On the one hand, music is most readily comprehensive to the soul, to the immediately sensitive realm of human feeling (Gemüt); on the other hand it also presents difficulties for those wishing to grasp its effects. If we wish to compare music with the other arts, we must say that all the others actually have models in the physical world. When a sculptor creates a statue of Apollo or Zeus, for example, he works from the idealized reality of the human world. The same is true of painting, in which today (1906) only an immediate impression of reality is considered valid. In poetry also an attempt is made to create a copy of reality. One who wished to apply this approach to music, however would arrive at scarcely any results at all. Man must ask himself what the origin is of the artistically formed tones and what they are related to in the world.

Schopenhauer, a luminary of the nineteenth century, brought clear and well-defined ideas to bear on art. He placed music in an unique position among the arts and held that art possessed a particular value for the life of man. At the foundation of his philosophy, as its leitmotif, is the tenet: Life is a disagreeable affair; I attempt to make it bearable by reflecting on it. According to Schopenhauer, a blind, unconscious will rules the entire world. It forms the stones, then brings forth plants from the stones, and so on, because it is always discontent. A yearning for the higher thus dwells in everything.

Human beings sense this, though with greatly varying intensity. The savage who lives in dim consciousness feels the discontent of the will much less than a civilized human being who can experience the pain of existence much more keenly. Schopenhauer goes on to say that the mental image or idea (Vorstellung) is a second aspect that man knows in addition to the will. It is like a Fata Morgana, a misty form or a ripple of waves in which the images of the will—this blind, dark urge—mirror themselves. The will reaches up to this phantom-image in man. When he becomes aware of the will, man becomes even more discontent. There are means, however, by which man can achieve a kind of deliverance from the blind urge of the will. One of these is art. Through art man is able to raise himself above the discontent of will.

When a person creates a work of art, he creates out of his mental image. While other mental images are merely pictures, however, it is different in the case of art. The Zeus by Phidias, for instance, was not created by copying an actual man. Here, the artist combined many impressions; he retained in his memory all the assets and discarded all the faults. He formed an archetype from many human beings, which can be embodied nowhere in nature; its features are divided among many individuals. Schopenhauer says that the true artist reproduces the archetypes—not the mental images that man normally has, which are like copies, but the archetypes. By proceeding to the depths of creative nature, as it were, man attains deliverance.

This is the case with all the arts except music. The other arts must pass through the mental image, and they therefore render up pictures of the will. Tone, however, is a direct expression of the will itself, without interpolation of the mental image. When man is artistically engaged with tone, he puts his ear to the very heart of nature itself; he perceives the will of nature and reproduces it in series of tones. In this way, according to Schopenhauer, man stands in an intimate relationship to the Thing-in-Itself and penetrates to the innermost essence of things. Because man feels himself near to this essence in music, he feels a deep contentment in music.

Out of an instinctive knowledge, Schopenhauer attributed to music the role of directly portraying the very essence of the cosmos. He had a kind of instinctive presentiment of the actual situation. The reason that the musical element can speak to everyone, that it affects the human being from earliest childhood, becomes comprehensible to us from the realm of existence in which music has its true prototypes.

When the musician composes, he cannot imitate anything. He must draw the motifs of the musical creation out of his soul. We will discover their origin by pointing to worlds that are imperceptible to the senses. We must consider how these higher worlds are actually constituted. Man is capable of awakening higher faculties of the soul that ordinarily slumber. Just as the physical world is made visible to a blind person following an operation to restore his sight, so the inner soul organs of man can also be awakened in order that he might discern the higher spiritual worlds.

When man develops these faculties that otherwise slumber, when, through meditation, concentration, and so forth, he begins to develop his soul, he ascends step by step. The first thing he experiences is a peculiar transformation of his dream world. When, during meditation, man is able to exclude all memories and experiences of the outer sense world and yet can retain a soul content, his dream world begins to acquire a great regularity. Then, when he awakens in the morning, it feels as if he arose out of a flowing cosmic ocean. He knows that he has experienced something new. It is as if he emerged from an ocean of light and colors unlike anything he has known in the physical world. His dream experiences gain increasing clarity. He recalls that in this world of light and color there were things and beings that distinguished themselves from those of the ordinary world in that one could penetrate them; they did not offer resistance. Man becomes acquainted with a number of beings whose element, whose body, consists of colors. They are beings who reveal and embody themselves in color. Gradually, man expands his consciousness throughout that world and, upon awakening, recalls that he had taken part in that realm. His next step is to take that world with him into the daily world. Man gradually learns to see what is called the astral body of the human being. He experiences a world that is much more real than the ordinary, physical world. The physical world is a kind of condensation that has been crystallized out of the astral world. In this way, man now has two levels of consciousness, the everyday waking consciousness on the dream consciousness.

Man attains a still higher stage when he is able to transform the completely unconscious state of sleep into one of consciousness. The student on the path of spiritual training learns to acquire continuity of consciousness for a part of the night, for that part of the night that does not belong to the dream life but that is wholly unconscious. He now learns to be conscious in a world about which he formerly knew nothing. This new world is not one of light and colors but announces itself first as a world of tone. In this state of consciousness, man develops the faculty to hear spiritually and to perceive tone combinations and varieties of tone inaudible to the physical ear. This world is called Devachan.

Now, one should not believe that when man hears the world of tone welling up he does not retain the world of light and colors as well. The world of tone is permeated also with the light and colors that belong to the astral world. The most characteristic element of the Devachanic world, however, is this flowing ocean of tones. From this world of the continuity of consciousness, man can bring the tone element down with him and thus hear the tone element in the physical world. A tone lies at the foundation of everything in the physical world. Each aspect of the physical represents certain Devachanic tones. All objects have a spiritual tone at the foundation of their being, and, in his deepest nature, man himself is such a spiritual tone. On this basis, Paracelsus said, “The realms of nature are the letters, and man is the word that is composed of these letters.”

Each time the human being falls asleep and loses consciousness, his astral body emerges from his physical body. In this state man is certainly unconscious but living in the spiritual world. The spiritual sounds make an impression on his soul. The human being awakens each morning from a world of the music of the spheres, and from this region of harmony he re-enters the physical world. If it is true that man's soul experiences Devachan between two incarnations on earth, then we may also say that during the night the soul feasts and lives in flowing tone, as the element from which it is actually woven and which is the soul's true home.

The creative musician transposes the rhythm, the harmonies, and the melodies that impress themselves on his etheric body during the night into physical tone. Unconsciously, the musician has received the musical prototype from the spiritual world, which he then transposes into physical sounds. This is the mysterious relationship between music that resounds here in the physical world and hearing spiritual music during the night.

When a person is illuminated by light, he casts a shadow on the wall. The shadow is not the actual person. In the same way, music produced in the physical world is a shadow, a real shadow of the much loftier music of Devachan. The archetype, the pattern, of music exists in Devachan, and physical music is but a reflection of the spiritual reality.

Now that we have made this clear, we will try to grasp the effect of music on the human being. This is the configuration of the human being that forms the basis of esoteric investigation: physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego or “I.” The etheric body is an etheric archetype of the physical body. A much more delicate body, which is related to the etheric body and inclines toward the astral realm, is the sentient body¹ .Within these three levels of the body we see the soul. The soul is the most closely connected with the sentient body. The sentient soul² is incorporated, as it were, into the sentient body; it is placed within the sentient body. Just as a sword forms a whole with the scabbard into which it is placed, so the sentient body and the sentient soul represent a whole. In addition to these, man also possesses a feeling or intellectual soul³ and, as a still higher member, the consciousness soul. The latter is connected with Manas, or spirit self.⁴ When the human being is asleep, the sentient body remains in bed with the physical and etheric bodies, but the higher soul members, including the sentient soul, dwell in the world of Devachan.

In physical space we feel all other beings as outside of us. In Devachan, however, we do not feel ourselves outside of other beings; instead, they permeate us, and we are within them as well. Therefore, in all esoteric schools, the sphere of Devachan and also the astral realm have been called “the world of permeability.”

When man lives and weaves in the world of flowing tones, he himself is saturated by these tones. When he returns, from the Devachanic world, his own consciousness soul, intellectual, and sentient soul are permeated with the vibrations of the Devachanic realm; he has these within himself, and with them he penetrates the physical world. When man has absorbed these vibrations, they enable him to work from his sentient soul onto the sentient body and the etheric body. Having brought these vibrations of Devachan along with him, man can convey them to his etheric body, which then resonates with these vibrations. The nature of the etheric and the sentient bodies is based on the same elements, on spiritual tone and spiritual vibrations. The etheric body is lower than the astral body, but the activity exercised in the etheric body stands higher than the activity of the astral body. Man's evolution consists of his transforming with his “I” the bodies he possesses: first, the astral body is transformed into Manas (spirit self), then the etheric body into Buddhi (life spirit), and finally the physical body into Atma (spirit man). Since the astral body is the most delicate, man requires the least force to work on it. The force needed to work on the etheric body must be acquired from the Devachanic world, and the force man needs for the transformation of the physical body must be attained from the higher Devachanic world. One can work on the astral body with the forces of the astral world itself, but the etheric body requires the forces of the Devachanic world. One can work on the physical body only with the forces of the still higher Devachanic world.

During the night, from the world of flowing tones, man receives the force he needs to communicate these sounds to his sentient body and his etheric body. A person is musically creative or sensitive to music because these sounds are present already in his sentient body. Although man is unaware of having absorbed tones during the night, when he awakens in the morning, he nevertheless senses these imprints of the spiritual world within him when he listens to music. When he hears music, a clairvoyant can perceive how the tones flow, how they seize the more solid substance of the etheric body and cause it to reverberate. From this reverberation a person experiences pleasure, because he feels like a victor over his etheric body by means of his astral body. This pleasurable feeling is strongest when a person is able to overcome what is already in his etheric body.

The etheric body continuously resounds in the astral body. When a person hears music, the impression is experienced first in the astral body. Then, the tones are consciously sent to the etheric body, and man overcomes the tones already there. This is the basis both of the pleasure of listening to music and of musical creativity.

Along with certain musical sounds, something of the astral body flows into the etheric body. The latter now has received new tones. A kind of struggle arises between the sentient body and the etheric body. If these tones are strong enough to overcome the etheric body's own tones, cheerful music in the major key results. When music is in a major key, one can observe how the sentient body is the victor over the etheric body. In the case of minor keys, the etheric body has been victor over the sentient body; the etheric body has opposed the vibrations of the sentient body.

When man dwells within the musical element, he lives in a reflection of his spiritual home. In this shadow image of the spiritual, the human soul finds its highest exaltation, the most intimate connection with the primeval element of man. This is why even the most humble soul is so deeply affected by music. The most humble soul feels in music an echo of what it has experienced in Devachan. The soul feels at home there. Each time he listens to music man senses, “Yes, I am from another world!”

From an intuitive knowledge of this Schopenhauer assigned the central position among the arts to music, and he said that in music man perceives the heartbeat of the will of the world.

In music, man feels the echoes of the element that weaves and lives in the innermost core of things, which is so closely related to him. Because feelings are the innermost elements of the soul, akin to the spiritual world, and because in tone the soul finds the element in which it actually moves, man's soul dwells in a world where the bodily mediators of feelings no longer exist but where feelings themselves live on. The archetype of music is in the spiritual, whereas the archetypes for the other arts lie in the physical world itself. When the human being hears music, he has a sense of well-being, because these tones harmonize with what he has experienced in the world of his spiritual home.

• 1. Empfindungsleib
• 2. Rudolf Steiner distinguishes here between the sentient body, which is the container, as it were, and the actual individualized human soul, the content. The latter consists of sentient soul, intellectual soul, and consciousness soul. See Theosophy by Rudolf Steiner for details. Frequently the term “sentient body” refers both to the container and the content.
• 3. Gemüts-oder Verstandesseele
• 4. Manas (spirit self), Buddhi (life spirit), and Atma (spirit man) are still-higher members of man's organization that come into being as man's “I” works consciously on the purification and transformation of astral (sentient) body, etheric body, and physical body. Sentient soul, intellectual soul, and consciousness soul were prepared by man's “I” in an unconscious state.

The object about which I will talk here is certainly one in which all people are interested. Who could say that he is not interested in the question of immortality with all his thoughts? We need only to realise that the human being thinking of death feels a horror. Even the few people who are weary of life and look for rest in death cannot get through this horror completely. One has tried to answer this question in the most different way. Remember, however, that nobody can speak about anything impartially in which he is interested. Will he be able to speak then impartially about this question which is of the deepest interest for his whole life? And, besides, you must take something else into consideration: how much does depend on it for the culture. The development of our whole culture depends on it how this question is answered. The standpoint of somebody to the cultural questions is quite different if he believes in the eternal of the human being.

One hears saying that it was wrong to give the human being this hope of a next world. The poor man would be put off until the next world and would be thereby prevented from creating a better life here. Others say that only in this way existence can generally be endured. If with such a matter the wishes of the human beings are considered so strongly, all the reasons are looked out for it. It would have mattered a little to the human being to prove that two times two are not four if his happiness had depended on this proof. Because the human being could not omit to let his wishes have a say in this question of immortality, it had to be put over and over again. Because the subjective feeling of happiness is involved in this question.

However, just this fact has made this question so suspicious to the modern natural sciences. And rightly so! Just the most significant men of this science expressed themselves against the immortality of the human being. Ludwig Feuerbach says: “one thought immortality first and then proved it.” Thus he suggests that the human being tried to find arguments because he wishes them. David Friedrich Strauss and recently Ernst Haeckel in his World Riddles express themselves in a similar way. If now I had to say something that violates the modern natural sciences, I would not be able to speak about this question. But just the admiration of Haeckel’s great achievements in his fields and for Haeckel as one of the most monumental spirits of the present time lets me take a stand in his sense against his conclusions. Today, something else than fighting against the natural sciences is my object.

Theosophy is not against the natural sciences, but goes with them. But, besides, it does not stop. It does not believe that we have gone so wonderfully far only in the 19th century; while during all centuries before unreason and superstition would have held sway, now truth has been brought to light only by the science of our time. If truth stood on such weak feet, one could have little confidence. However, we know that truth formed the core in the teachings of wisdom of Buddha, of the Jewish priests et cetera. It is the task of theosophy to search for this core in all different theories. But it also does not spare the science of the 19th century. Because this is in such a way, we are certainly allowed to deal with the question also from the standpoint of science. It can form the basis that way from which we start if we search for the eternal in the human being.

Feuerbach is certainly right with his remark quoted before if he turns against the method of the science of the last fourteen centuries. However, he is wrong concerning the wisdom of former times. Because the way to guide the human being to the cognition of truth in the ancient schools of wisdom was totally different. Only during the later centuries of Christianity the faith was demanded to which then the scholars produced the proofs. That was not the case in the mysteries of antiquity. That wisdom which was not disseminated just like that, which remained a possession of few people, which was delivered to the initiate by instructions of the priests in holy temple sites, had another avenue to lead their pupils to truth. They kept the knowledge secret to those who were not prepared. One would have regarded it as profaned if one had informed anybody without selection. One only regarded somebody as worthy who had developed his cultural life by means of long exercise to understand the truth in higher sense.

One tells in the traditions of Judaism that when once a rabbi pronounced something of the secret knowledge his listeners reproached him: “O old man, had you been quiet! What have you done! You bewilder the people.”—One saw a big threat betraying the mysteries if they were in everybody’s mouth and would be desecrated and distorted that way. Only in holy shyness one approached them. The probation was strict which the pupils of the mysteries had to go through. Our time can hardly imagine the severe probations which were imposed on the pupil. We find with the Pythagoreans that the pupils called themselves listeners. For years they are only silent listeners, and it is according to the spirit of this time that this silence extended up to five years. They are silent in this time. Silence, that is in this case: renunciation of any discussion, of any criticism. Today where the principle applies: “test everything and keep the best”—where everybody believes to be able to judge about everything where with the help of journalism everybody forms his judgment quickly also about that which he does not understand at all, one has no notion of that which one demanded from a pupil at that time. Every judgment should be quiet; one had to make oneself able only to take up everything in oneself. If anybody passes sentence without this precondition, starts practicing criticism, he rebels against any additional instruction. Somebody who understands something of it knows that he has to learn for years only and to let a long period pass. Today one does not want to believe this. But only somebody who has understood the matters internally gets to a correct judgment of his own.

At that time, it was not the task to teach faith to anybody by lessons; one led him up to the nature of the things. The spiritual eye was given him to behold; if he wanted, he could test it. Above all, the lessons were purifying ones; the purifying virtues were required from the pupil. He had to take off the sympathies and antipathies of the everyday life which are only justified there. Every personal wish had to be eradicated before. Nobody was introduced to the lessons who had also not taken off the wish of continual existence of his soul. That is why the sentence of Feuerbach does not hold good to this time. No, at first the confidence in the profane immortality was eradicated in the pupils, before they could progress to the higher problems. If you see it that way, you understand why the modern natural sciences turn against the teaching of immortality with a certain right. However, only so far.

David Friedrich Strauss says that the appearance would be contradictory to the idea of immortality. Now, a lot is contradictory to the appearance what an approved scientific truth is. As long as one judged the movement of the earth and the sun according to the appearance, one got no correct judgment about that. One recognised them correctly when one did no longer trust to the eye only. Perhaps, just the appearance is not at all this to which we have to keep in this question.

We have to realise: is it the eternal in the human being what we see being passed on or transforming itself? Or do we find it outside? The single flower blossoms and passes, but only that remains and lasts which leaves its stamp on every flower of the genus again. Just as little we find the eternal outside in the history of the states. What once constituted the external forms of the state has passed, what presented itself as a leading idea has remained.

Let us test how transient and eternal come to the fore in nature. You know that all substances of your bodies were not in you seven or eight years ago. What formed my body eight years ago is scattered in the world and has to fulfil quite different tasks. Nevertheless, I stand before you, the same which I was. If now you ask: what has remained of that which made an impression on the eye?—Nothing. That has remained what you do not see and what makes the human being a human being. What does remain of human facilities, of the states? The individuals who created them disappeared, the state has remained. Thus you see that we are wrong if we take the eye for the essential part which only sees the changes, while the essential part is the eternal. It is the task of the spiritual to understand this eternal. What I was fulfils other tasks. Also the substances which today form my body do not remain the same; they enter other connections and are that which constitutes my physical body today. The spiritual holds it together. If we retain this thought, we recognise the eternal in the human being.

In a different way the eternal appears in the animal realm, plant realm, and mineral realm. But also there we can look at the permanent. If we crush a crystal to powder, for example cooking salt, dissolve it in water and allow it to crystallise again, the parts take on their characteristic shape again. The creative power being inherent in them was the permanent; it has remained like a germ to awake to new work if the cause is given to it. We also see from the plant countless seeds originating, from which new plants arise if they are sowed to the fields. The whole creative power rested invisibly in the seed. This force was able to wake the plants to new life.

This goes up through the animal and human realms. Also the human figure comes from a tiny cell. However, it does not lead us to that which we call human immortality. Nevertheless, if we look closer, we also find something similar. Life develops from life; the invisible stream goes through. However, nobody is probably content with the immortality of the type. The principle of humanness goes in it from generation to generation. But it is only one of the ways to preserve the permanent. There are still other types where the interplay comes to the fore. We take an example from the plant realm to illustrate this.

Hungarian wheat which was brought to Moravia and sown there becomes soon similar to the indigenous one there. The law of adaptation comes into force here. Now it also keeps the once acquired qualities in future. We see how something new happens: the concept of development. The complete world of organisms is subordinate to this law. An idea of development forms the basis after which the imperfect living beings transform themselves to more perfect ones. They change their external constitutions; they receive other organs, so that that which remains preserved develops progressively.

You see that we come to a new kind of the permanent. If the naturalist explains a form of life today, he does not give himself the answer of the naturalists of the 18th century who said: there are as many types of living beings as God created once.—This was an easy answer. Everything that had originated was brought to life by a creation miracle. The natural sciences of the 19th century freed us in their area of the concept of the miracle. The physical forms owe their origin to the development. Today we understand how the animals transformed themselves up to the monkey to higher forms of life. If we consider the different animal forms as temporal sequence, we recognise that they were not created as those, but came into being developing apart. However, we see even more.

The flowers of some plants possibly experience such substantial changes that one would not believe that they belong to the same type. Nature simply makes jumps, and thus it also lets arise one type from the other under given circumstances. But in every type something remains that reminds of the preceding type; we understand them only apart, not from themselves, but from their ancestors. If one pursues the temporal development of the types, one understands what stands in space before us. We see the development through millions of years and know that in millions of years everything looks differently again. The substances are exchanged perpetually; they change perpetually. In thousands of years the monkey developed from the marsupial. But something remains that connects the monkey with the marsupial. It is the same that holds the human being together. It is the invisible principle that we saw as something permanent in ourselves which was active millennia ago and works on among us even today. The external resemblance of the organisms corresponds to the principle of heredity.

Now, however, we also see how the shapes of the living beings are not only hereditary, but also change. We say: something is inherited, something changes; there is something transient and something remains preserved in the change of times.

You know that the human being corresponds to the physical qualities of his ancestors. Figure, face, temperament, also passions go back to the ancestors. I owe the movement of the hand to an ancestor. Thus the law of heredity projects from the plant and animal realms into the human world. Can this law be applied now in the same way also to all fields of the human world? We must search for own laws in every field. Would Haeckel have done his great discoveries in biology, would he have limited himself to examine the brains of the different animals only chemically?

The great laws exist everywhere, but in every field in own way. Transfer this question to the human life, to the field in which the human beings particularly believe in miracles still today. Everybody knows today that the monkeys developed from more imperfect forms of life. However, people have an exceptional belief in miracles concerning the human soul. We see different human souls; we know that it is impossible to explain the soul by means of physical heredity. Who may explain, for example, the genius of Michelangelo from his ancestors? Who may explain his head form, his figure? Who may get good explanations from the pictures of his ancestors? What points in them to the genius of Michelangelo? This does not only apply to the genius, it applies to all human beings in the same way even if one chooses the genius to prove clearly that his qualities are not to be owed to the physical heredity. Goethe himself felt in such a way speaking in the famous verses for what he has to thank his parents:

From the father I got the stature
And the serious way of life,
From mummy I got my cheerful nature
And the desire of telling stories.

These are, even the gift of telling stories, basically external qualities. However, he could not derive his genius from father or mother; otherwise one would have to sense this also in the parents. We may have to thank our parents for temperament, inclinations, and passions. We cannot search for that which is the most essential of the human being which makes him his real individuality with his bodily ancestors. Our natural sciences only know the external qualities of the human being and try to investigate them. Thus they come to the belief in miracles of the human soul. They investigate the constitution of the human brain. Are they able to explain the human soul from the physical constitution of the brain et cetera? Is that the reason why Goethe’s soul is a miracle? Our aesthetics wanted to regard this point of view as the only correct one which one is allowed to take concerning the genius, and think that the genius would lose all magic by explaining. But we cannot be content with this view.

Let us try to explain the nature of the soul in the same way as we investigated the botanical and animal species; that is to explain how the soul develops from lower to higher levels. Goethe’s soul stems also from an ancestor like his physical body. How did anybody want to explain, otherwise, the difference between Goethe’s soul and that of a savage? Every human soul leads back to its ancestors from which it develops. And it will have successors who come into being from it. However, this advancement of souls does not coincide with the law of physical heredity. Every soul is the forefather of later soul successors. We will understand that the law of heredity which holds sway in space cannot be applied to the soul in the same way.

However, the lower principles last beside the higher ones. The chemical-physical laws which hold sway in space determine the external organism. Also we are spun in a web with our bodies in this life. Being in the middle of the organic development, we are subject to the same laws like animal and plant. Regardless of that, the law of the psychic refining takes place. Thus Goethe’s soul must have been there once in another form and has developed from this soul form, regardless of the external form, as the seed develops to another type, depending on the law of transformation. However, like the plant has something remaining which outlasts the transformation, also that which remained preserved in the soul has entered into a germinating state, like the grain in the top soil to appear in a new form, when the conditions have come. This is the teaching of reincarnation. Now we understand the naturalists better.

How should that remain which was not there once? But what is the remaining preserved? We cannot consider that which constitutes the personality of the human being like his temperament, his passions, as the remaining preserved; only the actually individual which was before its physical appearance and remains preserved, hence, also after death. The human soul moves into the body and leaves it again to create a new body after the time of maturity again and to enter in it. What has descended from physical causes passes with our personality at death; we have to look at that for which we cannot find physical causes as the effect of a former past. The permanent part of the human being is his soul which works from the deepest inside and survives all changes.

The human being is a citizen of eternity because he carries something eternal in himself. The human mind feeds itself from the eternal laws of the universe, and only thereby the human being is able to understand the eternal laws of nature. He would only recognise the transient in the world if he were not himself a remaining preserved one. That remains from that which we are today which we incorporate into our imperishable being. The plants are transformed under given conditions. Also the soul has adapted itself; it has taken up a lot in itself and has improved itself. We carry into another incarnation what we experience as something eternal. However, if the soul enters a body for the first time, it resembles a blank sheet, and we transfer on it what we do and take up in ourselves. As true as the law of physical heredity holds sway in nature, as true the law of mental heredity holds sway in the spiritual realm. And as little the physical laws apply to the spiritual realm, as little the laws of physical heredity holds sway over the continued existence of the soul. The old sages, who did not demand belief, before they had founded it by knowledge, were fully aware of this fact.

How is the relationship of the soul in its present condition to its former condition?—This question, which could suggest itself upon you, I would like to answer to you in the following way. The souls are in perpetual development. Differences thereby arise between the single souls. A higher individuality can only develop if it experiences many incarnations. In the usual state of consciousness the human beings have no memory of the former conditions of their souls, but because this memory is not yet attained. The possibility of that is given. Nevertheless, Haeckel speaks of a kind of unaware memory which goes through the world of the organisms and without which some natural phenomena were inexplicable. Hence, this memory is only a question of development. The human being thinks consciously and acts accordingly, while the monkey acts unconsciously. As he has risen gradually from the condition of consciousness of the monkey to conscious thinking, in the same way he remembers the former incarnations later with progressive perfection of his consciousness. As well as Buddha says of himself: I look back at countless incarnations , it is true that in future every human being has the memory of a number of former incarnations if this ego-consciousness has developed with every individual human being, as well as it is sure that it exists with single advancers already today. Becoming more perfect in the course of time, more and more human beings will have this ability.

This is the concept of immortality as the theosophist understands it. This concept is new and old at the same time. Once those have taught that way who did not want to teach faith only but knowledge. We do not want to believe and then to prove, but we want to make the human beings able to search for the proofs independently and to find them. Only somebody who wants to co-operate in the development of his soul attains it. He walks from life to life to perfection, because neither the soul came into being at birth nor it disappears at death.

One of the objections which are often made against this view is that it makes the human being unable to cope with life. Let me still go into it with some words. No, theosophy does not make unable to cope with life, but more capable, just because we know what the permanent and what the transient is. Of course, somebody who thinks that the body is a dress which the soul only puts on and takes off again as it is sometimes said becomes unable to cope with life. But this is a wrong picture which should be used by no researcher. The body is not a dress, but a tool for the soul. A tool the soul uses to work with it in the world. And he who knows the permanent and invigorates it in himself uses the tool better than somebody who only knows the transient. He strives for invigorating the eternal in himself by means of constant activity. He carries this activity over to another life, and he becomes more and more capable. This picture lets the thought disappear to nothing that the human being becomes unfit to cope with life because of knowledge. We are able to work even in a more competent and more permanent way if we recognise that we work not only for this one short life but for all future times.

The strength which arises from this consciousness of eternity I may express using the words which Lessing put on the end of his significant treatise about The Education of the Human Race: “is not the whole eternity mine?”

There exist within the sphere of Esoteric Science different principal ideas, which then run as leading-threads, leit-motifs through the entire Esoteric Movement. Such an idea, is that of Rhythm in Numbers; and another is that of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. The secret of Number expresses itself in the fact that certain phenomena follow each other in such a way that the 7th in a series of events reveals itself as a kind of conclusion, whereas the 8th may be designated as the beginning of quite another series of events. One finds this fact reflected in the physical world, in the relation of the octave to the Key-note.

For those who endeavour to penetrate in occult spheres, this principle becomes the basis of a very comprehensive view of the cosmos. Not only are tones, sounds, arranged according to the Law of Number, but also events in the course of time; events in the spiritual world are also so arranged that one finds in them a relationship, just as one finds in the Rhythm of Sound.

Still more important is the relationship between the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. We find a physical image of this at every touch and turn. Let us consider the relationship of the whole plant to the seed. In the entire plant we see a Macrocosm, in the seed a Microcosm. In a certain sense we find compressed in the seed, as in a point, the forces which are divided later over the entire plant. In a similar way we can look upon the development of each individual human being from childhood to old age as a Microcosm, whereas the evolution of a race, a people, is to be conceived as a Macrocosm. Every nation has its childhood in which it absorbs important elements of civilisation,. An instance of this is to be seen in the Romans, who absorbed into themselves the Greek civilization. As a people grows, it draws out of itself the necessary forces for its own further evolution. Therefore it is so important that each member of a nation should experience what his whole race undergoes, because each single member of a race relates himself to the whole nation as the seed to the whole plant. In the highest degree we find the relationship between Macrocosm and Microcosm existing in man as he meets us in the world of sense and the cosmos surrounding him. As man stands before us in the world of sense, he has concentrated into his being the forces of the Universe, just as the forces of the plant are concentrated in the seed or germ.

Now we must ask ourselves:—Are these forces distributed in some way over the Macrocosm, just as the plant-forces of the seed are distributed over the entire plant? Esoteric Science alone can give us an answer to this question, for in his earthly life man only learns to know himself as a Microcosm; but he lives not only in the Microcosm, but also has a life within the entire Universe. To state, that in his experience from waking to sleeping man oscillates between a life in the Macrocosm and a life in the Microcosm, at first appears to be merely an assertion. When he sinks into slumber, his consciousness ceases to work, his feelings and emotions cease to exist for him, and external science will bestir itself in vain if it endeavours to find within the sleeping human being that which constitutes his soul life in the waking condition. Even logically it is impossible to conceive that man's soul-life is destroyed when he goes to sleep and that when he awakes it arises again as if out of nothingness. External science in no very distant future will have to admit that one can just as little recognise the soul-life by external, material facts, as one can recognise the lungs by studying the laws of oxygen. In addition to studying the laws of oxygen, we have to learn to know the lungs in their organic functioning. In the same way we learn that in our external laws there is nothing of the physical life which we draw in with our breath on waking in the morning, and which we expire when we go to sleep. To the occultist going to sleep and waking up is nothing but a kind of breathing:—Every morning man draws into himself with his waking breath his spiritual, psychic nature, and he breathes that out again on going to sleep. Where is the spiritual, psychic part of man when he is asleep,—that part which corresponds as it were to the air in space which he has breathed out of his body? Occult science shows us that it is surrounded by the atmosphere of the spiritual world, just as we are surrounded by the atmosphere of the air; the only difference being that our atmosphere extends only for a few miles, whereas the spiritual atmosphere fills the entire cosmos.

Consider the quantity of air which man inspires in his body, in comparison with the entire atmosphere. The same quantity which, after inspiration exists inside the human body, is added, after expiration, to the atmosphere around one. Thus in the sense of occultism, we can say that after an inspiration the same amount of air is in the Microcosm which after expiration is in the Macrocosm. It is just the same with that psychic spiritual life which is actually present within our body; from waking to going to sleep that is in the Microcosm, but from sleeping until waking in the morning that is in the Macrocosm.

Just as an external physical science teaches us concerning the existence of a physical atmosphere, so Occult Science speaks of a spiritual Cosmos, which takes up into itself our souls when we sleep. Spiritual Science can only be attained through spiritual methods, the methods of initiation. Daily experience reveals to us the life of the soul in the Macrocosm, but life within the spiritual, psychic Macrocosm we only learn to know through initiation.

So we must speak first of the Science of Initiation whenever that transition from the Microcosm to the Macrocosm is to be discussed, and this science of Initiation is of special significance, because we enter that spiritual world after death. That crossing of the Threshold of Death signifies a definite forsaking of the body by the soul.

The methods of Initiation give an intimate exercise for the soul; just as in everyday life we work on our bodily environment, so we must train our souls to work in a spiritual psychic way on the Macrocosm and receive impressions from it. We must endeavour to release those spiritual, psychic forces which are bound up with our physical life, to set them free from the body. Three Soul-Forces are bound up with the body in ordinary life, which can be made free through Initiation. The first of the Soul-Forces is the power of thought. In ourordinary life we use it for shaping our thoughts, for forming ideas about the things around us. Let us attempt to enter into the nature of this Thought-Force. What happens when we think and form concepts? Even physical science will admit that every time we grasp a thought which relates to anything sensible, a process of destruction takes place in our brain. We have to destroy the finer structures of the brain, and this destruction is very evident in the signs of fatigue.

What the everyday-thinking destroys in this way is replaced in sleep; but through the methods of initiation we attain a condition in which our thinking-power is set free from the physical brain, and then nothing is destroyed. This we attain by Meditation, Concentration and Contemplation. These are certain processes in our souls which are to be distinguished from the ordinary life of the soul. In order to speak quite concretely, an example shall be given. Those ideas and soul processes which fill our ordinary life are but little adapted to kindle meditation in our souls. We must choose quite different ones. Suppose you have two glasses of water before you; one empty, the other half full. Now suppose we pour water out of the half-full glass into the empty one, and imagine that the half-full glass becomes fuller and fuller be cause of what we are doing. The materialist would consider this kind of thing foolish; but, my dear friends, with a concept suitable for meditation it is not a question of its reality but of whether it is one which will form ideas in the soul. Just because it relates to nothing real, it can direct our senses away from reality. It may be a symbol especially for that soul-process which we describe as the mystery of love. The process of love is something like that half-full glass from which man pours into the empty one, and which thereby becomes fuller and fuller. The soul does not become more empty, it becomes fuller in the same measure in which it gives; and in this way that symbol may have great significance.

Now, my dear friends, if we treat such an idea in this way, so that we apply all our soul-powers to it, then it is a meditation. We must forget everything else in the presence of that idea, we must even forget ourselves; our entire soul life must be directed to that one idea for a long period, say for a quarter of an hour. It is not sufficient to perform such an exercise once, or even a few times. It must be repeated again and again and then according to the endowment of the individual there will gradually be revealed a change in our soul-life. We notice that through this we gradually develop a power of thinking which no longer destroys the brain. Anyone who goes through such an evolution will find that this meditation evokes no fatigue, and that the brain is not destroyed. That appears to contradict the fact that beginners in meditation so often fall asleep, but that is because when we first begin to meditate we are still connected with the external world, and have not yet learned to free our thoughts from the brain. When after repeated efforts, we are able to meditate without fatigue, then we have freed our thought from the physical brain, and then a transformation appears in the whole of our human life.

As formerly, when asleep we were outside our body, without consciousness so we are now outside it and are at the same time conscious. And, just as in ordinary everyday life we think of our ego as being within our skin, so after meditation we experience ourselves outside our body. The body becomes an
object on which we look down. Now, however, we learn to know it differently than in sleep we learn to know it as the sum of magnetic forces which chain us to our body. It is something into which we wish to dive down. And we recognise that these are the same forces which draw us each morning to our physical body, and which before birth we drew fur ourselves from the spiritual world when we sought a stream of heredity in which tofind a new physical body. We then learn why we felt drawn to our parents and ancestors.

Let us take one idea, one soul-experience, which is different from that we have, on passing from the Microcosm into the Macrocosm. When we look from the Macrocosm to our body, we say on confronting each of our experiences: “This is outside us.” But if we have developed the Pauline experience, we have already developed an element of soul which is something within us, yet external to us; and when we are outside our bodies we feel the Christ-experience as an inner experience. This may be called the first meeting with the Christ-Impulse in the Macrocosm.

But now we must discuss a second kind of Initiation-Force. Just as we had to release the power of thought, so we have to release that force of which we make use of in our speech. Materialistic science says that our organs of speech come from our brain centres. But my dear friends, it was not the Brocha-organ in the brain which developed speech, but the contrary; speech built up the Brocha-organ in the brain.

The power of Thinking works destructively, but speech, which comes from our social environment, works constructively. Now we can also take the force which built up this Brocha-organ in the brain, and release it. We do this when we permeate our meditation with feeling. When I meditate on this sentence: “In the Light radiates Wisdom”, that reflects no external truth; but it has a deep meaning, a deep significance. If we permeate our feeling with the following; “we will seek to live with Light that radiates Wisdom”, then we feel that we gradually grasp that power which generally comes to expression in words but which now lives in our soul. You have heard of ‘golden silence’, that refers to the fact that we have in our soul a force which creates the word. We can grasp this force, just as we can grasp the power of thought; and in so doing, we overcome Time, just as through grasping of the power of thought we overcome space. The memory, which in ordinary everyday life extends back to one's childhood, then extends into the pre-natal life. That is the way to get experiences of our life from the last death until the present birth, and is also the way to perceive the evolution of humanity; because we then perceive those forces which guide the development of the history of man. Then we learn to know life from birth right up to death. If we but develop the force of the Silent Word, we learn to know the spiritual basis of our life on earth. And here again it is the case that we come to an historic point, to the Mystery of Golgotha; because this is the path along which we come to the ascending and descending development of man, the point when Christ incarnated. We then recognise Christ as He is, in His very own forces. A special light then falls on the first lines of the Gospel according to St. John.

As through the freeing of our thought we unite ourselves with the Christ as He was on earth, so through the freeing of the Word we unite ourselves with the Mystery of Golgotha.

And then a third force can become independent through meditation. Meditation can not only affect the brain and the larynx, but the blood-circulation in the heart. We feel this working in a weak form in such processes as blushing and turning pale. There a psychic element affects the pulsing of the blood and reachel to the heart. Now this soul-power can be drawn away from the pulsation of the blood and be made an independent power of the soul. This happens through Meditation, when the will unites itself with one's meditations. Again we meditate: “In the Light radiates Wisdom”; but now we form for ourselves the resolve of uniting our Will with it, so that we will to accompany this radiating wisdom right through the evolution of humanity. Now if we carry out such a Meditation, we reach the point when the forces of the all stream into the soul.

My dear friends, these forces can be grasped, one can draw them out of the blood, though not entirely; but they build a clairvoyant force through which we can transcend our Earth. We then learn to know the Earth as a reincarnating planet, which will incarnate anew and we human beings with it. In this way we grow through the spiritual, psychic world, right out into the Macrocosm.

In a certain way we experience how life between death and birth must be opposed to the life of the one incarnation; for what man experiences after death when free from his body, is experienced here by the Initiate. Let us take the chief characteristic of what offers itself in a condition free of the body, for that is the same as the life after death.

Living in the Microcosm we perceive through the physical organs of the senses; after death we look down on to the body as do the Initiates, but we cannot then perceive what the sense organs perceive. The Initiate can learn about the life between death and rebirth, because he has found here the transition from the Microcosm to the Macrocosm. We cannot converse, with the dead in our ordinary human speech, but if we have learnt to set the power of speech free from the body, then we learn to recognise in what way we can be together with the dead; and if we set free our power of thought, we can speak with those who are living between death and rebirth. In this way a seer could speak with the soul of one who had gone before. He had been an excellent man, but in a material sense had only concerned himself about his own people. He had lived without religious or Anthroposophical ideas. And so the Seer could experience from that man who had died: “I know that I lived with my family, with my own people, and they were the sunshine of my life. They are still living. I know it, but I can only see them up to that point of time when I left the earth. I can establish no connection with them now”. My dear friends, conditions are indeed complicated after death. The seer could see the following: The wife still showed in her being, something like the results of the influence of her husband. The husband could see these results, not as one person sees another, but as if reflected in a mirror. There certainly was a power of seeing but only as if one looked into a mirror and saw an image. That affects one in a terrible way, because one cannot see people as they really are; but just as we can see the physical body in existence, in the same way after death we must learn to see the soul.

A connection however, is still possible between the dead and the living on earth, if only the latter will permeate themselves with spiritual life, on this rests the benefits which we can show to the dead. If anyone has gone through the Gate of Death with whom our interests were bound up,—we can read to him;—we can imagine him standing before us. We read to him in a low voice, or we can send him thoughts, but he will only receive an impression if we send him ideas and concepts containing spiritual life.

Now the task of Anthroposophy will be understood when we realise that in this way we can wipe away the abyss which separates us from the dead. Even a soul which was at emnity with Anthroposophy can feel a benefit through such reading; for there are two sides to be distinguished in the life of our souls. There is what we have experienced there consciously, and the sub-conscious depths, which make their way up, like the dpeths of the sea, it only expresses itself in waves. For instance, there may be two brothers—one an Anthroposophist and the other an enemy. This can only be a fact in the outer world, because the inner process is, that a deep longing for what is religious exists in the soul of the second and he only seeks to deaden it by opposing Spiritual Science.

His conscious idea is a kind of opiate, the object of which is to help him to forget what is going on, in the depths of his soul. Death does away with all that, and we hunger especially after those sub-conscious longings of ours; so these readings of Anthroposophical writings is especially beneficial, because gradually there will come from that the consciousness of union with the dead. But even before we have that feeling the only risk we run is that the dead may not listen to us when we read eo them.

So we see that through the living grasp of Anthroposophical teaching the dead and the living in Microcosm and Macrocosm come into relationship. This occurs in yet another sphere; when the seer observes sleeping souls he sees that some souls go through the portal of sleep who have no spiritual interests; others souls go through the portal of sleep who during the day have taken in spiritual thoughts. A distinction can be seen between them, for sleeping souls are like seeds in a field; and the dead nourish themselves on that which is brought by the sleeping souls in the way of spiritual ideas. If when we go to sleep, we do not carry up into the spiritual world spiritual ideas and concepts we deprive the dead souls of their nourishment. With our reading we can give them spiritual stimulation; with the spiritual ideas we carry through with us on going to sleep we give the dead their nourishment.

And so, through what man creates in his own soul in this way, he throws a bridge across from the Microcosm to the Macrocosm. What we take into ourselves is as a grain of corn; the living mission, not merely the theoretic mission of Anthroposophy. I might represent as theory transformed into the elixir of life. Because immortality then becomes an experience; just as the seed is a guarantee for another seed, so do we develop spiritual, psychic powers which are the guarantee for our coming again. Not only do we understend but we experience immortality in ourselves. Thus from the time we grow grey-headed we experience that part of us which goes through the Gate of Death. In this sense Anthroposophy can become the elixir of life, can permeate us, as the blood permeates our physical body. Only then are Theosophy and Anthroposophy what they ought to be.

If we seek to recognise this and to gather it into the basic feeling that the human soul is just as much connected with the spiritual world as our physical bodies are connected with the physical world, then we may experience the feeling:

The Beings in the worlds of Space
Who alter in the course of Time,
Speak to the minds of Men.
The Soul of Man experiencing,
Presses beyond the boundaries of Space,
And, undisturbed by Time,
Enters the Realm of the Eternities.

It seems to me that our studies of what I have allowed myself to call the “Fifth Gospel” will have helped us to form a closer conception of what has so often been said regarding the evolution of humanity on the Earth and the influence of the Mystery of Golgotha upon this evolution. From very many angles we have also tried to elucidate what came to pass at the baptism by John in the Jordan, when the Christ being united with Jesus of Nazareth, and this has brought home to us the vital significance of the Mystery of Golgotha in the evolution of mankind. But now, having heard the story of the youth of Jesus of Nazareth as it is revealed to spiritual-scientific investigation, we may be able to picture how Jesus of Nazareth makes his way to John the Baptist when the Christ is to descend into him.

With the knowledge gathered from these detailed studies of the Fifth Gospel, we will now try to enter more deeply still into all that is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. To-day we will think, primarily, of the figure of John the Baptist and of certain aspects of his mission. To understand John the Baptist and Christ Jesus' relation to him (there are indications of this, too, in the Gospel of St. John) it will be necessary to think of the character of the spiritual life from which John the Baptist had issued. It is, of course, the world of ancient Hebrew culture. And now let us consider once again all the essential features of this culture. It had, as we know, a special mission in the evolution of humanity. We remember that Earth-evolution has proceeded from the Saturn-, Sun- and Moon-evolutions and that during this Earth-evolution the Ego, or “I” is added to those principles of man's being—physical body, etheric body, astral body—which came over from the earlier stages. The “I”, however, cannot unfold as an active principle all at once. Indeed the purpose of the Whole of Earth-evolution is to enable the “I” to develop in such a way that man may find his place in the stream of Eternity. Realising this, we must regard the Earth as the theatre in the Cosmos that is allotted to man for the development of the “I”. Ancient Hebrew culture venerated Jahveh or Jehovah az the Being of the higher Hierarchies under whose influence it had been established. The biblical story of Creation shows very clearly how the first Elohim—Jahve or Jehovah—issues from the sevenfold Elohim, the sevenfold host of the Beings of that Hierarchy. By way of comparison lot us say that just as the whole human organism develops into its highest expression in the head, so are the seven Elohim represented in one of themselves, in Jahve or Jehovah who becomes the leading Being in Earth-evolution. Ancient Hebrew culture recognised this and worshipped Jehovah, seeing in him that Being of the higher Hierarchies with whom man must be related in order to unfold the “I”. Ancient Hebrew culture represented a definite stage, in the process of the development of the “I”' in mankind and the influence of Jehovah was felt to be such that by establishing relationship with him, the “I” could gradually be awakened. This is connected with what I said in the lectures at Leipzig. (Lecture-Course XXXI. Christ and the Spiritual World)

What is the nature of the being Jahve or Jehovah? We must conceive hi as a Being who is most intimately connected with Earth-evolution. He is the Lord, the Regent of the Earth, or better said, he is the Being whom Hebrew antiquity regards as the Lord of Regent of the Earth. The whole of ancient Hebrew culture looks upon Jehovah as the God of the Earth, conceives the this Divine-Spiritual Regent is interwoven with the Earth and that men who aspire to be conscious of their connection with the Universe as beings of Earth must cleave to Jehovah, the God of the Earth. The ancient Hebrew conception that Jehovah had made man out of Earth is expressed by the very name given to the original man—“Adam”—that is to say, the ‘being who was created from Earth’. And whereas the aspirations of neighbouring religious systems were directed to that which does not derive from the Earth but comes into the Earth from higher worlds, whereas these neighbouring religions sought in the higher worlds for the Gods they worshipped, the ancient Hebrews sought and worshipped their God Jehovah in the realm of the Earth and its Elements.

Certain peoples of antiquity looked to the stars—their religion was “'astral” religion. Other peoples observed the forces manifesting in thunder and lightening and asked: How are the Divine-Spiritual Beings expressing themselves here? The religions of the peoples around the ancient Hebrews took their symbols from phenomena connected with the stars or the atmosphere beyond the Earth; they sought in these spheres for the signs indicating man's connection with the super-earthly reality. It was inherent in the nature of the ancient Hebrews to think of themselves as connected wholly and entirely with what comes from the Earth. This is a point to which far too little attention is paid. All the indications show that connection of the ancient Jews with the Earth, with what originates from the Earth. If in a phenomenon produced by the forces of the Earth. If in certain volcanic districts of Italy a piece of paper is lighted, clouds of smoke at once come out of the ground. We must conceive the pillar of fire to be a phenomenon produced by the forces of the interior of the Earth. In the same way the column of water or mist must by thought of as originating in the wilderness, not in the upper atmosphere. We must also look for the origin of the Great Flood itself in forces which surge in and through the Earth; the Flood was the result of tellurian, not of cosmic causes. This was at the bottom of the protest put up by the ancient Hebrews against the neighbouring peoples—for the God of Hebrew antiquity was the God of the Earth. The ancient Hebrews felt that everything coming from above, from outside the earth, did not really belong to the mission of Earth-evolution; they conceived it as having been preserved in Earth-evolution by the Being who had remained at a backward stage during the Old Moon-period, namely, Lucifer. In the other religions men felt: We must look away from the Earth, out in the Cosmos; we must revere and worship that which has its origin in the forces of the Cosmos... But the ancient Hebrews said: We worship the one true God and the one true God is connected with the Earth.—Far too little notice is taken of this because at the present time people assume that a word like “God” must always imply the same. Because, after nearly two thousand years of development under the influence of the Christ Impulse, humanity now rightly looks upwards once again, it is thought that the ancient Hebrews, too, looked upwards. On the contrary! The ancient Hebrews felt that what came from above was symbolised in the Serpent of Paradise.

But the Jews absorbed a very great deal from the neighbouring peoples. This too is comprehensible. Of all religions in antiquity, theirs was the subtlest. They believed—and this is well-nigh incredible to the modern mind that Jehovah is an Earth God, who works in the Moon-forces that are connected with the Earth and who is therefore also a Moon God, as described in the book Occult Science. It seems incredible to-day that men can ever have looked towards the centre of the Earth when they spoke of their God, but it was indeed so. Nevertheless the impulse to look upwards was, in the nature of things, not entirely absent from the Jews, above all when they saw the neighbouring peoples worshipping what comes from above. But the great difference between those who had knowledge of the Jewish secret doctrine and those who had not, was this.—The former knew that it was a temptation to be obedient to laws other than the laws of those forces which work from the Earth as far as the Moon-sphere. (Certain elements that come to light again to-day in our own spiritual-scientific teachings were present in ancient Hebraic wisdom). But as the time of the Mystery of Golgotha approached, Hebrew culture was veering more and more from its original direction and looking upwards for the Gods.

Then came one who felt it his mission to point to the path which the Jews ought, in reality to follow. This was John the Baptist. He felt it his mission to bring home to the Jews, where their true strength lay. And perceiving what the religion of the Jews had become, he spoke the significant words: “You call yourselves children of Abraham! If you were Abraham's children you would know that your God Jehovah who is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is a God of the Earth—as witnessed by the fact that he formed the first man out of the Earth. But you are no longer children of Abraham; you have allowed yourselves to be led astray by what other peoples believe; you have been led astray by those who look upwards by what belongs to the Serpent. Ye are of the brood of the Serpent.

These words of John the Baptist are of deep significance. If only people to-day would be a little more candid and admit that they do not really understand what they read! What is the expression “generation of vipers” taken to mean to-day? That John was heaping abuse! But if it is desired to make a deep appeal to human souls, no particular purpose is served by invective. Neither can it be said that John the Baptist's words gave vent to a divine wrath within him—for others too may voice their divine wrath. The meaning here is that John the Baptist was striving to bring home to the Jews: “You no longer understand your true mission; you no longer call upon the forces of the Earth but upon the forces of the Serpent, upon what has been made known to you as the Serpent.”

And now let us try to understand the attitude of John the Baptist. Had he not his reasons for speaking in this way to those who came to him at the Jordan? (This is not derived from the Fifth Gospel for in speaking of the content of the Fifth Gospel we have not yet come to the figure of John the Baptist, I am speaking now from other sources). He had his reasons for speaking as he did to those who came to him at the Jordan, for he observed that they had adopted certain customs of the heathen; the very names they gave to these customs were abhorrent to him. In the region where John the Baptist was preaching, certain ancient teachings were prevalent—somewhat to the following effect.—At the beginning of the evolution of humanity, man and the higher animals were endowed by Jahve with the power of breathing air, but in consequence of the deed of Lucifer, this power was contaminated. Only those animals which do not breathe air have remained uncontaminated, namely the fishes. Many people went to the waters of the Jordan (indeed it happens to this very day) at a certain season of the year and shook their clothes in order that their sins might be cast to the fishes and carried away. John the Baptist had witnessed such customs which had been adopted from the heathen peoples and this was in his mind when he cried: “You have understood more of the Serpent than of Jehovah; you call yourselves unlawfully the children of Jahve, the children of Abraham. I say unto you that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob could return to his original mission and produce from the stones, that is to say, from the Earth, a race of men who would understand him better.”

Let us think of such words in the Bible as:“God is able of these stones to raise up children of Abraham.” In the language of those days many words had more than one meaning and were used with the deliberate purpose of indicating a deeper meaning lying underneath. But we cannot really understand these things, my dear friends, unless we connect what has here been said with the mission of Paul. I have spoken many times of the mission of Paul. Why was it that Paul, who had not allowed his experiences in Jerusalem to convince him of the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha—why was it that the Event at Damascus convinced him of the truth of Christ's Resurrection? We must here consider the manner of Paul's preparation, and his background. Schooled as he was in the wisdom of the Jewish Prophets, he knew that up to a certain point of time the evolution of humanity involved adherence to the God of the Earth; but he also knew that a time must come when the “Above”, that which comes into the Earth from super-earthly worlds, would again assume significance. It is of the utmost importance to realise that before Christ entered into the Aura of the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha, He dwelt in supersensible regions of the Cosmos. We can study the religions whose worship was directed to the Powers of super-earthly worlds and discover how the Christ worked in those spheres before He passed into the Aura of the Earth through the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Paul knew that this time would come; but before the Event at Damascus he had not perceived Christ's actual presence in the Aura of the Earth. He was, however, prepared for this, and in Corinthians II., Chapter 12, verses 1-5, he says: It is not expedient for me to boast: I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ above 14 years ago... and so on. Paul is, of course, referring to himself. What does he really say in this passage? Nothing else than that 14 years before (chronologically this would be about 6 years before the Mystery of Golgotha) he was already able to look clairvoyantly into the spiritual worlds. He says that there is in him a man who can look into the spiritual worlds; it is of this man he boasts, not of himself. Paul realises now that formerly he had seen Christ while He was still in the spiritual world. The Event at Damascus had revealed to him Christ had now passed into the Aura of the Earth and was living in the Aura of the Earth. That is the great truth concerning which so many who lived in the early centuries of Christianity uttered such strange words. They said: Christ is the true Lucifer. They understood: In former times it was right to adhere to the Serpent; since the Mystery of Golgotha He Who is the Conqueror of the Serpent has come and He is now the Lord of the Earth.

Now all these things are part of the evolutionary process of mankind. For what is the meaning behind the protest put up by ancient Hebrew culture against “astral” religion, against religions which have clouds, lightening, thunder, as their symbols? The meaning is that the human soul must so prepare to receive the “I” that the revelation of the Spirit is no longer received through the starry script, no longer through the forces manifesting in lightening and thunder, but through the Spirit itself. In former times when men strove to look upwards to the Christ, they could only do so by gazing, as Zarathustra had gazed, at what may be called the physical sheath of Christ, the “Ahura Mazdao”, the physical Sun and its forces. Therein dwelt the Christ. But now the Christ had departed from the realm of the physical forces of the Sun, had passed into the spiritual Aura of the Earth. After those who worshipped Jehovah had prepared the way, Christ was able to permeate the Aura of the Earth. In this sense and in this sense only are the words of John the Baptist to be understood.

And now, as the time of the Mystery of Golgotha drew near, Christ Jesus and John the Baptist came face to face.—I shall now speak rather more abstractly.—Bearing in mind what has just been said, we shall understand this meeting between Christ Jesus and John the Baptist. Christ stands before one who knows what it signifies to worship the Spirit of the Earth. The Jews, and others too—for there were others as well as the Jews—were endowed with faculties which enabled them to worship the Spirit of the Earth in the right way. Whence were these faculties derived? Prior to the Mystery of Golgotha these faculties were bound up with physical heredity! What I am going to say will, of course, be considered utter foolishness by modern science, but it may be the kind of foolishness that can be wisdom before God.

Prior to the Mystery of Golgotha, the faculties of knowledge as they are called, were dependent in a certain way upon heredity conditions. And the progress of human evolution is constituted by the fact that intellectual knowledge becomes independent of the factor of heredity. In certain Mysteries therefore, it was a true and right principle to allow an office to pass from father to son. But as evolution progresses, knowledge becomes an affair purely of the soul. The innermost core of the human soul becomes an affair of the soul itself, no longer depending upon the external factors of heredity. Now by what means did it become possible for man to keep intact the innermost core of his being? Let us realise what is meant by saying that man can no longer, in the real sense inherit his faculties from his forefathers.—Certainly many people think that they inherit their faculties and talents from their forefathers—but it is not so, in reality. Goethe was one among countless others whose genius was not transmitted to his descendants. But if man had not derived spiritual power from another source, what would have been the inevitable result? Their faculties of knowledge would have been orphaned! The position of the human being on the Earth would have been such that each according to his karma would have been obliged to wait for what the Earth bestows for the impressions bestowed by the Earth upon his senses. But this would have been of essential or lasting value to him and under such circumstances he would have been glad to slip away from the Earth. Buddha's teachings emphasise this very clearly for they draw man away from the realm of sense-perception and from all connection with the Earth.

Christ, in Jesus of Nazareth, could speak concerning Himself somewhat as follows.—At the Baptism by John something came down from the supersensible world which can be a quickening power in the “I” that has now been left to its own resources, and hereafter the human soul will contain within it forces that are not merely inherited. Whatever knowledge was formerly available to man, came to him through heredity, was transmitted from generation to generation by physical heredity. And the last man who unfolded higher faculties from the soil of heredity is John the Baptist, “the greatest of these born of woman.” This is an indication of how the ancient times are to be distinguished from the now. In ancient times man spoke truly when he said: ‘If I seek for the power which ought to live in my soul and lead me to the heights I must remember Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, for the faculties through which the heights of human existence are attained came down to me in the line of heredity from these ancestors.’ But now these faculties must be derived from regions beyond the Earth. No longer to look to the Earth alone and to find in Christ the God of the Earth, but to be conscious of the inflow of the Heavens—it is this to which Christ points when he speaks of John the Baptist as “the greatest of those born of woman.”

Here, my dear friends, we have the answer to a question of paramount importance for our age. At the time when the Third Epoch began to re-emerge in the life of our Fifth Epoch, the consciousness of men began to turn again to what can be revealed to the earthly human being as super-earthly reality. Men could not, however, experience this re-born “astral” religion as the ancient Egyptians or Chaldeans had experienced it. In this later age it came to them in the form in which it was experienced by on well-qualified to speak. In 1607, the following words were written... (Here followed a long extract from one of Kepler's works. See also: Günther's Kepler und die Theologie. 105-111.) Thus in the 17th century we again find evidence that the soul is gazing upwards, but now the experience is permeated with the Christ Impulse. These words were written by a profoundly spiritual man. By whom were they written? By the one who was the founder of all modern astronomy, without whom our modern astronomy could not have existed, namely, John Kepler. Is there a single Monist who will not sing the praises of Kepler? The attention of those who profess to be Monists should be called to the words just quoted for so much of what is said about Kepler is... well, something to which I prefer to give no name.

These words of Kepler are an indication of the new tendency, the new way of gazing upwards to the heavens, of that reading of the starry script to which we aspire in Spiritual Science. The question indicated at the beginning of the lecture is thus answered, namely:—How can we draw near to Christ? How can we understand Him? How can we make our life of feeling worthy to receive Him? By learning to speak with the same ardour the same depth of feeling as did an ancient Hebrew, when he said: ‘I look up to Abraham, the primal Father when I speak of the foundation of whatever is valuable in me.’ ...but to-day, with the same intensity of feeling, we must look upwards to the Being Who quickens us spiritually—to the Christ! When we ascribe our faculties and gifts, all that makes us truly Man, not to any earthly power, but to Christ, then we enter into living relationship with Him! Just as a Jew in ancient times spoke of being carried by death into Abraham's bosom, so do we truly express the nature of the age after the Mystery of Golgotha when to the ancient “Out of God we are born” we add the “In Christ we die.” Therefore when we understand the Mystery of Golgotha we can enter into a living relationship with Christ, just as in the age of Hebrew antiquity men felt their living relationship with the God who was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This relationship was expressed in the avowed belief: ‘I return to Abraham, the primal Father’—In those who live after the Mystery of Golgotha there must live the consciousness; “In Christ we die.”

What we have really been endeavouring to do in our talks together here is to delve a little more deeply into Waldorf School pedagogy, in order to find in that pedagogy the kind of education with which we can approach the so-called abnormal child. It will have been clear to you from our discussions that, if you want to educate an abnormal child in the right manner, you will have to form your judgement and estimation of him in quite another way than you do for the so-called normal child—and of course differently again from the way he is regarded in ordinary lay circles, where people are for the most part content merely to specify the abnormality and not trouble themselves to look further and enquire into the causes of it. For there is no denying it, the man of today is not nearly so far on (in his study, for example, of the human being), as Goethe was in his study of the growth and nature of the plant. (And, as we saw, Goethe's work in this direction was a beginning, it was still in its elementary stage.) For Goethe took a special delight in the malformations that can occur in plants; and the passages where he deals with such are among the most interesting in all his writings. He describes, for example, how some organ in a plant, which one is accustomed to find in a certain so-called normal form, may either grow to excess, becoming abnormally large, or may insert itself into the plant in an abnormal manner, sometimes even going so far as to produce from itself organs that would normally be situated in quite another part of the plant. In the very fact that the plant is able to express itself in such malformations, Goethe sees a favourable starting point for setting out to discover the true “idea” of the archetypal plant. For he knows that the idea which lies hidden behind the plant manifests quite particularly in these malformations; so that if we were to carry out a whole series of observations—it would of course be necessary to make the observations over a wide range of plants—if we were to observe first how the root can suffer malformation, then again how the leaf, the stem, the flower, and even the fruit can become deformed, we would be able, by looking upon all these malformations together, to arrive at an apperception of the archetypal plant.

And it is fundamentally the same with all living entities—even with beings who live in the spirit. More and more does our observation of the human race lead us to perceive this truth—that where we have abnormalities in man, it is the spirituality in him which is finding expression in these abnormalities.

When once we begin to look at the phenomena of life from this aspect, it will at the same time give us insight into the way men thought about life in olden times; and we shall understand how it was that education was regarded as having an extremely close affinity with healing. For in healing men saw a process whereby that in man which has received Ahrimanic or Luciferic form and configuration is made to come nearer to that in him which, in the sense of good spiritual progress, holds a middle course between the two extremes. Healing was, in effect, the establishment of a right balance in the human being between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. And then, having a more intimate and deep perception of how it is only in the course of life that man comes into this condition of balance, of how he needs indeed to be brought into it by means of education, these men of an older time saw that there is something definitely abnormal about a child as such, something in every child that is in a certain respect ill and requires to be healed. Hence the primeval words for “healing” and “educating” have the very same significance. Education heals the so-called normal human being, and healing is a specialised form of education for the so-called abnormal human being.

If it has become clear to us that the foregoing is a true and fundamental perception, we can do no other than carry our enquiry further along the same road. All the illnesses that originate within the human being have, in reality, to do with the spiritual in him, and ultimately even the illnesses that arise in him in response to an injury from without; for when you break your leg, the condition that presents itself is really the reaction that arises within you to the blow from without—and surgery could certainly learn something by looking at the matter in this light. Starting therefore from this fundamental perception, we find ourselves ready to approach in a much deeper and more intimate manner the question: How are we to deal with children, having regard to the whole relationship of their physical nature to their soul and spirit?

In the very young child, physical and spiritual are intimately bound up together, and we must not assume—as people generally do today—that when some medicament or other is given to a child, it takes effect physically alone. The spiritual influence of a substance is actually greater in the case of a very little child than it is with a grown person. The virtue for the child of the mother's milk, for example, lies in the fact that there lives in it what was called in the archaic language of an earlier way of thought the “good mummy” in contrast to the “bad mummy” that lives in other products of excretion. The whole mother lives in the mother's milk. Mother's milk is permeated with forces that have, as it were, only changed their field of action within the organisation. For up to the time of birth, these forces are active in the region that belongs in the main to the system of metabolism and limbs, while after birth they are chiefly active in the region of the rhythmic system. Thus they migrate within the human organisation, moving up a stage higher. In doing so, the forces lose their I content, which was specifically active during the embryonic time, but still retain their astral content. If the same forces that work in the mother's milk were to rise a stage higher still—moving, that is, to the head—they would lose also their astral content and have active within them only the physical and etheric organisation. Hence the harmful effect upon the mother, if these forces do rise a stage higher and we have all the abnormal phenomena that can then show themselves in a nursing mother.

In mother's milk we still have therefore astral formative forces that work spiritually; and we must realise what a responsibility rests upon us when the time comes to let the little child make the transition to receiving his nourishment directly for himself. The responsibility is particularly great for us today, since there is now no longer any consciousness of how the spiritual is active everywhere in the external world, and of how the plant, as it ascends from root up to flower and finally to fruit, becomes gradually more and more spiritual—in its own nature and also in its activity and influence. Taking first the root, we have there something that works least spiritually of all; in comparison with the rest of the plant, the root has a strongly physical and etheric relation to the environment. In the flower however begins a life which reaches out, in a kind of longing, to the astral. In a word, the plant spiritualises, as it grows upwards.

Then we must carry our study a stage further, and enquire into the place of the root within the whole cosmic connection. Its part and place within the cosmos is expressed in the fact that the root has grown into the soil of the Earth, has embedded itself right into the light. The truth is that the root of the plant has grown into the soil in the same way as we have grown with our head into the free expanse of air and into the light. We can therefore say that here below

we have that which in man is of the head nature and has to do with perception; while here above we have the part of the plant that in man has to do with digestion, with nourishment. The upper part of the plant contains the spirituality that we long for in our metabolism-and-limbs system, and is on this account related to that system in us. One who is able with occult perception to regard first the mother's milk, and then the astral which hovers over the plant and for which the plant longs and yearns, can behold—not indeed a perfect similarity, but an extraordinarily close relationship between the astrality that comes from the mother with the mother's milk, and the astrality that comes from the cosmos and hovers over the blossoms of the plants.

These things are said, not in order that you may possess them as theoretical knowledge, but in order that you may come to cherish the right feeling towards what is in a human being's environment and enters thence into the sphere of his deeds and actions. As you see, we shall have to take care that we find the right way to accustom the little child—gradually—to external nourishment, stimulating him with the fruiting part of the plant, fortifying his metabolic system with the flowering part, and coming to the help of what has to be done by the head by means of a gentle admixture of root substance in his food. The theoretical mastery of these relationships will serve merely to start you off in the right direction; what should then happen is that in the practice of life the knowledge of them flows into all your care for the child, not as theory but more in a spiritual way.

In this connection we cannot but recognise how extraordinarily difficult it is in our day to “behold” a human being as he really is. Again and again, in every field of knowledge into which we enter, our attention is drawn away from that which is essential in man as man. Modern education and instruction is not calculated to enable us to see man in his true being. For it is a fact that in the course of the first half of the nineteenth century the power to behold what is essential in man died right away. Up to that time, and even still during that time, an idea was current which survives now only in certain words that have remained in use—lives on, here and there, so to speak, in the genius of language. We might describe this idea in the following way.

Surveying the whole human race, we find it subject to all manner of diseases. We could, if we chose to be abstract, write these all down. We could take some plane surface and write upon it the names of the various illnesses in such a way as to make a kind of map of them. In one corner, for instance, we might write illnesses that are inter-related one with the other; in another corner, illnesses that are fatal. In short, we could classify them all so nicely as to produce in the end a regular chart or map, and then it would not be difficult to find the place on the map where a child with a particular organisation belonged. One could imagine how some special pre-disposition in regard to illness could be shown in a kind of diagram on transparent paper and then the name of the child be written in on the region of the map where he belonged. Let us suppose, then, that you regarded illnesses in this way and made such a map as I have described. In the first half of the nineteenth century people still had the idea that whenever the name of an illness had to be written in, they could always write in, for that illness, the name of some animal. They still believed that the animal kingdom inscribes into Nature all possible diseases, and that each single animal, rightly understood, signifies an illness. For the animal itself the illness is, so to speak, quite healthy. If however this same animal enters into man, so that a human being, instead of having the organisation that properly belongs to him, is organised on the pattern of that animal, then that human being is ill.

It was not superstitious people alone who continued to hold such conceptions in the first half of the nineteenth century; this idea of the nature of disease in man was held, for example, by Hegel—and a very fruitful and productive idea it was. Think what a light can be thrown upon the nature and character of a particular human being if one can say: he “takes after” the lion, or the eagle, or the ox; or again, he gives evidence of being wrenched away in the direction of the spiritual—the spiritual works too powerfully in him. Or, let us say, carrying the idea a step further, suppose the ether body of a certain human being is too soft and flabby and shows obvious affinity to physical substance, then that would be for one an indication of a type of organisation that generally occurs only in the lower animal kingdom. These are fundamental conceptions of a kind that it is important for you to acquire.

And now I would like to go on to speak of what you as educators must undertake for your own self-education. You can take your start from certain given meditations. A meditation that is particularly effective for a teacher is the one I gave here two days ago. Meditating upon it inwardly with the right orientation of heart and mind, it will in time bear fruit within you. For you will discover that as you are carried along in your feeling on the waves of an astral sea, borne hence away from the body, you will begin to find yourself in a world—you can liken it only to a world of gently surging billows—where you are given the possibility to see around you the very things that provide answers to your questions.

But here, I must warn you that if you desire really to make your way through to the place where such things are possible, you must comply with the conditions—I do not mean merely knowing them in theory, I mean faithfully fulfilling in real earnest the conditions that are necessary for development on the path of meditation, and that are described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. [Now published by the Rudolf Steiner Press as Knowledge of Higher Worlds—how is it achieved? ] You will remember how mention is made there of egoism as a hindrance on the path of development—egoism in the sense that man centres his attention upon his own I, values his I too highly. What does it mean when we hold our I in such high esteem?

We have, as you know, to begin with, our physical body, which derives from Saturn times and has been gradually formed and completed with such wonderful artistic power in four majestic stages of development. Then we have the etheric body, which has undergone three stages of development. And we have besides the astral body, which has undergone only two. These three members of man's being do not fall within the field of Earth consciousness; the I alone does so. Yet it is really no more than the semblance of the I that falls within the field of Earth consciousness; the true I can be seen only by looking back into an earlier incarnation. The I that we have now is in process of becoming; not until our next incarnation will it be a reality. The I is no more than a baby. And if we are able to see through what shows on the surface, then, when we look at someone who is sailing through life on the sea of his own egoism, we shall have before us the Imagination of a fond foster-mother or nurse, whose heart is filled with rapturous devotion to the baby in her arms. In her case the rapture is justified, for the child in her arms is other than herself; but we have a spectacle merely of egoism when we behold man fondling so tenderly the baby in him. And you can indeed see people going about like that today. If you were to paint a picture of them as they are in the astral, you would have to paint them carrying each his child on his arm. The Egyptians, when they moulded the scarab, could at least still show the I carried by the head organisation; but the man of our time carries his I, his Ego, in his arms, fondling it and caressing it tenderly. And now, if the teacher will constantly compare this picture with his own daily actions and conduct, once more he will be provided with a most fruitful theme for meditation. And he will find that he is guided into the state I described as swimming in a surging sea of spirit.

Whether we are able to get in this realm the answers to our questions will depend upon whether we have in our soul the inner peace and quiet which we must seek to preserve in such moments. If someone complains that things are constantly happening that prevent him from meditating, the complaint will of itself afford a pretty sure indication as to whether or not he is in a fair way to make progress in this direction. For you will never find that one who is genuinely undergoing development will complain that this or that hinders him from meditating. In point of fact we are not really hindered by these things that seem to come in our way. On the contrary, it should be perfectly possible to carry out a most powerful meditation immediately before taking some decisive step, before doing a deed of cardinal importance—or, on the other hand, to carry out the meditation after the deed, in entire forgetfulness of what has been experienced in the performance of the deed. Everything depends, you see, upon having it in our power to wrest ourselves away from the one world and live for the time being completely within the other world; and whenever we want to summon up our inner spiritual powers, right at the very beginning must come the ability to do this.

Watch for yourselves and observe the difference—first, when you approach a child more or less indifferently, and then again when you approach him with real love. As soon as ever you approach him with love, and cease to believe that you can do more with technical dodges than you can with love, at once your educating becomes effective, becomes a thing of power. And this is more than ever true when you are having to do with abnormal children.

Wherever people have the right feeling about their activities, these activities do work together in the right way. Just as in the physical organism heart and kidneys must work together if the organism as a whole is to have unity, so must the Constituents work together for the great end they all have in view, while each of them fosters within itself that element in the whole for which it is in particular responsible. And anyone who then sets out to undertake some new task in the world, must bring what he is doing into co-ordination with what emanates from the Constituents.

Suppose you have the intention of undertaking work with backward children. The first thing you have to do is to study and observe the pedagogy that is followed in the anthroposophical movement. That whole living stream of activity must flow into all that you do and undertake. For within this educational stream is contained that which can heal the typical human being, and enable him to take his place rightly in the world. And then you will find that the Medical Section is able to give you what you need in order that you may deepen this pedagogy and adapt it to the abnormality of the individual in question. If you set out in all earnestness to accomplish this, yon will soon realise that there can be no question of expecting simply to be told: This is good for this, that is good for that. No, what is wanted is a continual living intercourse and connection between your own work and all that is done and given in the educational and in the medical work of the [Dynamic] movement. No break in this living connection must ever be permitted. Egoism must not be allowed to creep in and assert itself in some special and individual activity; rather must there always be the longing on the part of each participant to take his right place within the work as a whole.

Curative Eurythmy having come in to collaborate with Curative Education, the latter is thereby brought into relation also with the whole art of Eurythmy. Here too it should be evident that you must look for a living connection. This will mean that anyone who practises Curative Eurythmy must have gone some way towards mastering the fundamental principles of Eurythmy as an art. Curative Eurythmy has to grow out of a general knowledge of Speech Eurythmy and Tone Eurythmy—although the knowledge will not necessarily have been carried to the point of full artistic development. Nor must we lose sight of the importance before all else of human contacts. If Curative Eurythmy is being given, the one who is giving it must on no account omit to seek contact with the doctor. When Curative Eurythmy was first begun, the condition was laid down that it should not be given without consultation with the doctor. You see from all this how closely, how livingly interlinked the different activities have to be in Anthroposophy.

It will thus be necessary to take care that the work you are initiating at Lauenstein—a work, let me say, that I regard as full of hope and promise—is carried on in entire harmony with the whole Anthroposophical Movement. You can rest assured that the Anthroposophical Movement is ready to foster and encourage any plans with which it has expressed agreement—naturally through the channels that have been provided in accordance with the Christmas Foundation Meeting. And conversely you should keep constantly in mind that whatever you, as a limb or member of the movement, accomplish—you do it for the strengthening of the whole Anthroposophical Movement, for the enhancement of its work and influence in the world.

This then, my dear friends, is the message I would leave with you. Receive it into your hearts, as a message that comes verily from the heart; may it go with you, and may its impulse continue to work on into the future.

If we who are in this spiritual movement are constantly thinking: how can this spiritual movement be made fruitful for practical life?—then will the world not fail to see that it is verily a movement that is alive.

And so, my dear friends, let me wish you all strength and good guidance for the right working out of your will.