The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Nowadays, anyone who lectures on the Christ runs into quite a variety of viewpoints. These fall roughly into two main groups, and a speaker must take them into account, especially if he plans to talk on the subject in the sense intended for this evening's lecture. That is, in the same sense in which other questions and other problems have been dealt with here before. I am referring, of course, to the spiritual scientific or anthroposophical viewpoint.

The first group of views is one that bases itself firmly on the premise that Christ is a real force in life. This might be called the religious viewpoint, which all the Christian confessions share in common. We will find on closer study however that no matter how liberal and tolerant it may seem in some respects, it has little use for any but its own view of the Christ. The various proponents of the religious standpoint are simply unwilling to grant that any progress in thinking about Christ is possible.

The other viewpoint is also one held by thoroughly dedicated modern searchers after truth. In accordance with a certain scientific trend, it maintains that a study of the Christ event, of what is reported to have taken place in Palestine at the beginning of the Christian era, if pursued with the same reliable historical methods that are applied to the study of other events, does not bear out the assumptions made about the Christ.

We realize that this way of looking at things has long been gaining favor. We also know that in the course of recent centuries increasing emphasis has been laid on comparing the Gospels, and that the discrepancies people have discovered in them have forced them to conclude that the Gospels could not be taken as historical documents. After a long period of trying to distill a somewhat reliable picture of Christ Jesus from the Gospel accounts, there have come to be many people today, both in Germany and elsewhere, who cannot reconcile speaking of a historical Jesus or of a historical Christ Event with their scientific consciences.

So we find present day positions ranging all the way from a separating out of those facts in the Gospels that can be historically proven, to out-and-out rejection of the historical Christ Jesus. This has given rise to the opinion that, though Christ may still live today for religious-minded people who feel that their faith lifts them to Him, for an ever more rigorously developing science the Christ idea, the concept of Christ, must vanish entirely. Many people are presently convinced that the Christ force will not continue to play any role at all in future, though these same people do not by any means believe that the day will ever come when religion will be lost to humanity.

Certain facts of the time, however, make it seem unlikely that the belief I have referred to will be proven true, for we can note a strange phenomenon. In our day, it is by no means only the religious-minded and people of feeling, for whom the Gospels have shown themselves a source of uplift and of schooling, who speak of something in the nature of a Christ idea. Earnest, educated, truth-loving men are putting their whole souls into pointing to something that can only be identified as Christ. It is characteristic that the modern American freethinker, Ferguson, voicing what many of his contemporaries feel, can say that Christ is again “the pioneer of a new age” who will unite Europe and America and look with profoundest understanding into the soul of every human being—that He is the one and only right man for the present. Ferguson, a person otherwise famed for his free-thinking views, speaks of Christ exactly as though He went about from one man to the next wielding direct influence upon us. Freethinking spirits are thus beginning to feel the Christ Being directly related to modern humanity. Even though little attention is paid to it as yet, we will find that this tendency, this searching for a force that can only be called the Christ, will make sure headway. John Fiske, a man who did his utmost to further Darwinism in America, stated that all religions assert two basic truths. The first is that all things are related. This is a truth proclaimed by every religion, one that no thoughtful person can deny. The second truth is that what we call good and evil derives from forces external to the human spirit.

I quote these men expressly because they are both personalities whose whole thinking and feeling are firmly rooted in the present, but they do not rest satisfied with an external view of things. Instead, they have worked their way through to deeper forces of existence. The forces at work in the world are not just physical and chemical: they are also spiritual in nature.

For one who takes his stand on a spiritual-scientific view of the world, the concept of Christ just characterized appears to be merely a first dawn glimmering, a preparation for something quite different still to come. I hope I will not be misunderstood in speaking as I have of this preparatory, Twentieth Century form of the Christ concept. Spiritual science has to steer clear of any taint of sectarianism and other such attitudes because they simply do not belong to this age. The spiritual scientist takes the same attitude in speaking of what is to come in human evolution as does the natural scientist who predicts an eclipse of the moon or a transit of Venus: he is not assuming a prophetic role. There are forces in life that can be spiritually investigated in exactly the same sense that natural forces operative in the physical world can be investigated.

It will be helpful to gain a perspective on the past history of the Christ idea, which has indeed undergone tremendous changes through the centuries. If we follow it back to its origin, we come upon a strange fact of the early days. We find popular Christianity spreading through the regions ruled by Rome in a way that enables us to say that, while the old Roman culture developed among the upper levels of the population and then grew decadent, we see those on whom life left its mark, those whose lot it was to suffer, slowly and gradually finding their way into popular Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth is increasingly idealized, to the point that he is looked on as divine. The various confessions that made up this popular Christianity tended more to feeling than to thoughts and concepts. But alongside this popular form we find those most enlightened spirits of the time who concerned themselves with Christianity devoting their loftiest ideas, their most significant concepts, to answering the question, “Who, actually, is this Christ?”

Let us single out, from the abundance of answers given by these illumined spirits, one or two for consideration here.

In Gnosticism, a form of thought to which anthroposophy by no means advises returning but simply studies as a phenomenon of past history, we find many different shadings of certain lofty concepts, all centering in an attempt to grasp the Christ idea. In the main, it can be characterized by saying that this Gnosticism, this longing to grasp the Christ idea with the help of the Ioftiest concepts, is a most marvelous form of spiritual development. Of course, those who adopt the modern view that every last facet of humanness gradually evolved from nature's lower orders, from animals, and rose by stages from the most primitive to ever higher animal forms, are bound to consider the Gnostic doctrine a fantastic dream. But Gnostics, too, traced evolution back even further than does the modern natural scientist. They said that we find a period in ancient times in which all animals, even the highest, were present on the earth, and man could have seen them if he too had been there at that time. The Gnostics, however, had in mind a period of evolution in which the human kingdom had not yet appeared, but they did not conclude from this that men developed out of animals, but rather that they descended later from the spiritual world. They maintained that animals. plants and minerals had also descended from the spirit. had materialized out of spiritual realms, so that we have to ascribe a spiritual origin to animals, plants and minerals as well. But there was a period when man had not yet taken on physical form, a time when he was still waiting in the spiritual world for the moment when the earth provided certain other conditions such as would make human life possible here.

This does not mean that man was not in existence at that time. Man did exist: not, however, as a visible entity, but as a spiritual one. He lived in the spiritual environment of the earth, but had not yet descended onto it, for the conditions of that ancient time were not such as would have made human development possible. Thus, the Gnostics assumed that there was a most important moment, later than that of the descent of the other kingdoms when titan descended to the earth. It was the Gnostic conviction that if man had incarnated with the other lesser kingdoms, one all-important facet of his being, that is the capacity we know as free, independent human thinking would not have developed. In short, man would lack his true human ego that works front a central focus outward into the world and develops between birth and death. The animal's development is kept within certain limits, but man is capable of progressing in an entirely different way as a result of education and experience. In order to achieve this, said the Gnostic, man entered into a more intimate connection with the element of matter than he would have done if he had remained an unfree being, dependent, as the other creatures around him were on his endowment at birth. Man plunged more deeply into matter in order to become less dependent on what he brought into existence with him. Gnosticism held that this deeper involvement in matter took place at a certain moment in very early times, that is, the moment the Bible pictures as the Fall, meaning thereby the fall into matter just described. But by no means every impulse inherent in human nature was believed to have joined in that descent; instead, something of a superhuman element remained in the spiritual world. While mankind was experiencing all this, something that was part of man but did not accompany him in his descent because he plunged so deeply into physical embodiment stayed on in spiritual worlds. Thus, there was still present in the world above a part of man that had dwelt there when all humanity still lived as one in realms of spirit.

On the basis of these assumptions the Gnostics then proceeded to study the Christ Event. A certain moment, described in the Bible as the baptism by John, was of special interest to them. They felt that the human being whose development brought him to that baptism was indeed a most extraordinary man, but nevertheless just a human being. After he had been baptized, something occurred that is hard for modern minds to grasp. Perhaps we can think of it in the sense that many a person has had something happen to him at a certain moment about which he could only say that his whole life was changed in consequence. Many people date their lives from such a moment, feeling it to have been one in which they were spiritually reborn. This is something that can happen to any and every human being. If one pictures this experience raised to a unique and ultimate peak, one understands how the Gnostics felt about the baptism by John in the River Jordan. That element of humanness that had been part of man front the earliest beginnings of his race but which had been waiting in the spiritual world, now left that realm and made its way down to earth, to take up its abode in the unique human being, Jesus of Nazareth. For the next three years Jesus of Nazareth was not just a changed human being. He was one in whom that reserved element of humanness, held over from the very beginning of man's earth life, had come to dwell for the eventual fructification of humanity. In other words, Jesus of Nazareth became the bearer of the superhuman being, Christ for the three years of His earthly life. So the Gnostics held that what had hitherto dwelt in the spiritual world had come into a human body, like a seed planted in the earth. Like a planted seed, which must decompose in order to germinate, this spiritual impulse entering the earth had to pass away in order to spring, seed-like, into hundred-arid thousand-fold fruitfulness. This spiritual element had to pass through death exactly as a seed dies. Far from failing to bear, it poured itself into earth's spiritual-evolutionary stream, where it will be found living on in many kinds of fruiting.

So we find in the Gnostic doctrine a pre-history of mankind leading up to the moment of Christ's coming and a post-history following upon the Event of Golgotha. It is history centered in the living action of the Christ impulse as Christ enters into human souls. To the Gnostic, the Christ impulse was history indeed history's whole content and the source of its ongoingness. If this view sounds alien to the contemporary mind, it must be stated that precisely modern natural science, whose ideas are colored by materialism only now at the outset, will press forward ever more vigorously to an understanding and eventual grasping of the reality that underlay the Gnostic concept.

In order to show how close the present is to taking up again what Gnosticism offered, let me just point out the following—something that is of course only an elementary first step. Science has thought for a long time that it stands on a solid footing. Basing itself on a truly impressive Darwinism, it felt impelled to assert that everything human developed out of animal origins, and that the driving force behind that development was the “struggle for survival.” It said that all the various creatures were launched into life together, but fell to fighting, with the not too surprising result that, as time went on, the more perfect species got the better of the less perfect. Man was the final product of this perfecting process. “The survival of the fittest” became the slogan of the Darwinists. Now, however, researchers are finding themselves forced to adopt quite a different concept in their honest searching of facts. They are now saying that as we study man afresh and compare him with the most developed animals, we can by no means assume that he evolved in straight-line descent from these species. Instead, we have to trace him back to a primeval form no longer to be found upon the earth. These researchers now believe that such a primeval form once existed and that while man and animal both evolved front it, they did so in two different directions. Outstanding investigators have brought forth a further fact. They put the question: How could man develop as differently as he has when all the while animals, too, were evolving? Strange to say, they have not hit upon a “fight for survival.” They assume that man and his form were in a specially protected place where he could continue under the same conditions which originally brought forth that form, whereas all other creatures were caught up in a downward trend. Thus, man today is being traced back to an invisible primeval form that developed as it did because it was protected in a realm where man did not have to take part in a struggle to survive. These researchers subscribe to only one remaining fiction. They believe the protecting realm to have been a physically perceptible locality.

Gnosticism, too. assumes just such a primeval form. But instead of picturing it as having existed on the physical plane, it assigns it to the spiritual world, which was, in fact, able to afford it protection.

If one can conceive the idea that man was a late-corner to the earth, one can also conceive the following thought. Tracing the course of history, we find that a hitherto undivided human race split up into various nations and races and that many different confessions came into being, each shaped in accordance with the feeling of a particular group. In earlier times humanity was so constituted that a person could develop only what was implanted in him by virtue of belonging to a certain tribe. The spiritual force, however, the spiritual being that made man human in the first place, enables him to find the human being in his fellow man instead of what heredity has made of him. Man had to have this capacity restored to him. It was an impulse that could be taken up again only when humanity grew ripe for it.

So we encounter lofty and remarkable concepts of evolution in the first Christian centuries. It must be said that what we are witnessing in present-day natural science as the beginning of something that must eventually outgrow the Chrysalis stage, was already anticipated by the Gnostics in the grandiose conceptions reached by them as they thought about these matters. This could happen only because there is such a thing as evolution in man's history.

If we look back to a period that lies still closer to the time of man's descent to earth, we come upon a wholly different kind of soul life. Comparing it with the soul life of the present we must say that the latter is oriented toward a sense-based and brain-conditioned way of experiencing, whereas earlier times brought us a marvelous heritage of knowledge in the form of pictures. The fact that this heritage exists proves what spiritual scientific research also discovers to be true that human souls did not always perceive their surroundings as they do today, but were once clairvoyant. At that time man did not feel himself so involved with his own ego. Instead, he felt that he was part and parcel of everything around him. A dreamlike state of consciousness brought him into profound contact with the world about. Primeval man's way of knowing things was through a dreamlike clairvoyance that revealed their mysteries to him. His was an experience akin to dreaming as we know it today. Thus, it was possible for a humanity recently descended from spiritual heights to experience the secrets of the spiritual world in what may be called a clairvoyant dream-state.

Evolutionary progress meant, however, an ever-deepening descent of man into physical existence, accompanied by an ever further loss of that ancient clairvoyant capacity, though this need not be thought of as a tragedy. For if man had not lost his old clairvoyance he could never have advanced to the stage of free self-awareness that alone provided the basis for conscious personal experience.

The loss of the old clairvoyant insight that once gave access to secrets of the spiritual world came about gradually. Even when mankind had become thoroughly at home in the physical world, clairvoyant knowledge was still kept alive in sanctuaries that preserved the heritage of the ancient Mysteries, the treasure of wisdom that had come down to them through the ages. After the Christ Event had taken place and entered the stream of earth-evolution, the Gnostics still hoarded that age-old treasure of wisdom won by humanity's clairvoyant insight, and they formed their idea of Christ in accordance with it. Their concept may, therefore, be described as a reminiscence of knowledge gleaned in olden times, not as the product of free, conscious selfhood. They simply applied what men of ancient days had known to explain the Christ phenomenon. The period during which Gnosticism flourished coincided with the dimming of clairvoyant insight. This made it impossible for those who followed after. in the Middle Ages, to go on working with the heritage of Gnostic wisdom as a means of understanding Christ.

Instead, something else took the place of Gnosticism. We find people who lived in the centuries after its demise just as eager to grasp the Christ phenomenon, but wanting henceforth to rely on their own human powers of understanding, on a scientific approach. And we see the most enlightened spirits of the Middle Ages turning from Gnosticism to the teachings of Aristotle for the basis of their understanding of the Christ.

They found themselves forced to say that Aristotle's world conception brought them to a standstill at a certain point, that true spiritual understanding of the Christ was out of reach of human knowledge.

In one respect, however, the view of the world held in the Middle Ages rests on one of Aristotle's main ideas. Aristotle would never have thought of going as far as modern materialism has gone. When we look into his idea of the way soul and body work together, we do not find him subscribing to any such belief as that a man's inner life is conditioned by the heredity that comes to him from parents, grandparents, etc. His view was rather that every person born into the world is given a drop out of the ocean of divinity to unite with his body, that a soul-spiritual core always detaches itself front the universal spirit and enters human beings at their birth. But Aristotle, who was distinguished by a quality seldom met with in our day, that is, the habit of drawing the real consequences of his musing and investigating, does not stop at this point. He goes on thinking, and comes to believe that when a soul passes through the gates of death it does so as a now well- established entity, and as such ascends into the spiritual world. Though prior to birth it did not exist as a separate being, after death it lives on in the world of the spirit as an individual.

What kind of after-death experience does this soul now undergo, as Aristotle sees it? None whatever, since it lacks a body to make that possible. Now its sole content is the memory of its life on earth. It lives on in eternity looking back on its earth-life with the good and evil it has done, wholly given up to memory pictures.

Here, in Aristotle, may be found the origin of the doctrine of eternal punishment in hell. lt began in his concept and made its way into Catholic dogma during the Middle Ages. But let me say at once that it was not possible for Aristotle as a man of his time to do other than picture the soul as an unchanging entity doomed to gaze forever at its earthly deeds.

Modern spiritual science, anthroposophy, recognizes, of course, that the soul can do more after death than just look back as though in memory-pictures on its previous earth-life. It knows that the soul does not have to stay forever in that state. Instead, it sees man taking with him into the spiritual world as the finest fruit of his earth experience the possibility of transforming or building further on the good and bad deeds he committed here: nor does he stay forever in the spiritual world. Rather is he born again into a new incarnation and has opportunities to work out some karmic compensation for what he did or failed to do in previous lives. The soul passes through the gates of death taking with it the impulse to seek further incarnations for the sake of working out a balance. Aristotle could not accept such an idea because he had always thought that every birth meant a detaching of spiritual substance to form the soul. But spiritual science bears witness to the fact that our present lives derive from past incarnations.

So Aristotle may be said to have stood in the way of his own insight. He whom wise men of the Middle Ages called “the precursor of Christ in understanding nature,” did not get as far as the reincarnation concept. We see how he stopped short of the mark in regard to the question of immortality and how for him life's fruit was just eternal contemplation. The inevitable outcome of this was that people could not see into the spiritual world or gain any understanding of the nature of the Christ. For the thinking of the Middle Ages, Christ disappeared into the realm of belief which is closed to knowledge. The age-old tradition of Gnosticism was finally lost. Aristotle could not serve spiritual understanding of the Christ. Thus, a line came to be drawn between what can be known and what must remain a matter of belief. One consequence of Aristotelian thought that lived on was the idea of eternal suffering in hell.

It remained for people of more recent times to take the third step in a gradual weakening of faith. They have come to rely more and more on what can be grasped with the physical senses. The effect of this on the Christ concept has been to make Christ an ever less important figure and to render the prevailing idea of Christ more and more materialistic. Where Gnostics once assumed a spiritual principle, and where the Middle Ages in their turn experienced Christ in a mood of purest faith and devotion, the present sees at the beginning of the Christian era not a human being ensouled with a cosmic element but, increasingly, “the simple man of Nazareth,” a man more or less like any other human being. Nobody remembers anything of what the Gnostics had divined. People want to think of Christ in the same materialistic way they think about other historical events. The fact that they regard Him as a mere human being makes it necessary to apply the same methods to the study of His appearance that are generally applied in ordinary historical research.

It might have been recognized that the historical approach to the whole question is the easy way out because what could possibly be easier than to take the Gospels and show how they contradict each other! This reduces things to simplest terms. But then wouldn't the researchers have had to assume that their predecessors were the greatest dunces ever for having failed even to notice such obvious contradictions?

At any rate, the Gospels were certainly not taken as a schooling, a schooling that enables the soul to lift itself to spiritual perception of the Christ. So it is not surprising that history was pressed into service as a yardstick and that a movement has grown up, associated here in Germany with the theologian, Drews, that denies Christ completely. This happened at the very moment when spiritual science entered the contemporary scene.

Spiritual science bears witness to the fact just referred to, that human beings and what they carry within them are not products of a single life, but of many past lives. Man once lived wholly in the spiritual world. Then he left it to descend to earth, but he was to have more than one life in a physical body. When he had digested the fruits of an incarnation during an interval spent in the spiritual world, he descended again into physical embodiment. The law that pertains here has often been the object of our study. It teaches us how deeply involved man is in the whole ongoing process we call history. Life only begins to make real sense when we assume that we have all been living on the earth in order to take what was given us in the beginning, make it our own, and then go on developing with the march of the centuries toward ever greater perfection. A closer study of these matters brings something quite remarkable to light, to be described here as man's mission on the earth.

I must stress again today, as I have so often done before, that the consciousness that man has thus far developed has by no means reached its final form. Man can really take his development in hand: the right spiritual training can lift him to spiritual perception. That is quite within the realm of possibility if he schools his soul in meditation. Just as one can put oneself, by staring intently at a shining object, into a state where one is aware of nothing else (though this is not a recommended practice!), so do we achieve a single-minded, but in this case quite free condition, when we deliberately concentrate all our attention on some soul-spiritual content to the exclusion of all else. Then forces begin to ray out in our souls through which we attain what may be called a body-free condition. Such a person is then really able to say from experience, “I am no longer perceiving with my eyes or thinking with my brain. I am experiencing as a spiritual being, independent of a body, I perceive what lives and has its being in the spiritual world.”

This elevation to the level of spiritual perception can be achieved with proper schooling. The rigorous discipline that leads to it has been described in several of my books.

It is easier to enter the spiritual world if one has trained one's feeling life to avoid all sorts of over-excited and emotional states and reactions. A person who confronts the world with calmness and equanimity keeps unsquandered reserves of feeling alive within him. The spiritual light, which meditation kindles in us, radiates into such reserves. A person full of selfish demands will never make a disciplined spiritual investigator. But those who achieve real empathy with their fellow-men, who know what selfless love is, who are not absorbed exclusively in their own feelings, have a soul-surplus that can be charged with forces garnered from spiritual schooling. The light of clairvoyance is engendered in feeling that keeps itself free of egotism.

When a person has progressed to the point of being able to live in the spiritual world he can gradually learn to clothe his experiences in ordinary concepts. Handed on in that form, any healthy mentality can grasp them. It is no more necessary for everyone to be a spiritual investigator than for each of us individually to make laboratory tests to see whether what science says is true or not. Those charged with communicating the results of spiritual-scientific research do not shy away from commonsense thinkers. Really healthy minds readily see the truth of statements made by the spiritual investigator. The only people who dispute his findings are those who approach them filled with prejudice. This holds true in the case of spiritual science, which is the fruit of clairvoyant research. It enables human beings to gain access to a world of spiritual experience.

The insight that spiritual scientists can presently achieve by means of a heightened consciousness will—to some degree at least, and in certain fields f be attainable by all men in future. It will fall to the lot of Twentieth Century humanity to realize that the soul develops, that it passes through life after life in the course of earth's evolution, and in so doing absorbs from the various cultural epochs what each such epoch has to offer.

If one looks nowadays with a more than ordinarily perceptive eye at the human race all over the earth, one becomes aware that it possesses two human qualities that were simply not present in antiquity. This is a fact susceptible of proof. The two new qualities are commission and conscience, and they will go on developing more and more fully as man submits his soul-life to spiritual schooling. Compassion and conscience were new acquisitions at a certain point in evolution.

Much that is called compassion is not worthy of the term. True compassion is the capacity to forget oneself and enter another's being so completely that one feels his suffering as he feels it. One's own ego is quite forgotten in such fellow-feeling; one lives entirely in the other's experience. Suppose for a moment that nature were so to arrange matters that at the moment when a person freed himself from narrow self-concern he had the same experience morally that comes to him every day when he falls asleep. When he can no longer maintain control of his body and his brain ceases to serve his soul as its instrument and he goes to sleep, consciousness disappears. A person can, of course, also fall unconscious from compassion. But that would be egotistical in the extreme, for then he could not surrender himself wholly to another's feelings. In that sense, falling unconscious would amount to a moral failing, whereas compassion is one of the two means whereby a person breaks free of himself without losing consciousness. Conscience is the other. It speaks to our innermost being; the listener follows the bidding of a voice that penetrates to where his ego lives. He subjects the self to something larger than itself. Compassion and conscience are thus forces that man is presently engaged in developing. Consciousness will build further on the foundation of the forms that compassion and conscience have thus far taken, going on to develop the spiritual vision that was previously attainable only in abnormal states of consciousness. To say this is not to make a prophecy but to state a fact determined by strictly scientific means.

As he realizes what effect compassion and conscience have upon the human soul. Twentieth Century man will have a certain direct experience in a perfectly ordinary state of consciousness. He will understand something that might be put in the following way. We see that at birth man inherits something from his ancestors. Spiritual being though he is, he must incarnate physically in a given family and clothe himself in hereditary qualities. Long before we had such a thing as science, people were familiar with heredity, but they gave it an entirely different name. Their term for it was “original sin.” Anyone who understands what the Old Testament meant by original sin knows that the term conveyed a much fuller meaning than science has as yet ascribed to it because it applies to moral as well as physical qualities. Those in whom compassion and conscience have borne fruit will say, however, that although birth saddles us with predispositions that cannot be thrown off, we are also endowed with something that is not bound up with matter and that enables us to rise above ourselves and enter the spiritual world. There is one realm—the realm of one's own soul—where there will be direct spiritual vision. Human beings will affirm that although they are tied on the one hand to physical matter, on the other the soul harbors a radiant helper capable of lifting us beyond ourselves, it is a feeling that suggests the following comparison. Suppose there were someone who found it hard to believe that air everywhere surrounds us and fills every empty space. All he has to do to convince himself is to create a vacuum and observe how the air rushes into it. Just such an empty space is created in the soul by compassion and conscience, both of which detach us from our ego. Into that vacuum streams the spiritual entity whom we know as the Christ. This gives us personal experience of the fact that we can receive Christ into ourselves. Christ Who is present in the spiritual atmosphere just as air is present in the physical atmosphere and flows into every Space it finds empty.

On this high level, normal consciousness can indeed become spiritual vision, and no one who has this experience will consider it subjective. He will instead recognize that there must be such a possibility. He will realize that there was a time when it was still unknown and a moment when it became possible for the first time. He will be aware that what he is experiencing made its way down to earth from spiritual realms and united with it as the Christ impulse. This Christ impulse will inevitably come to be looked upon by Twentieth Century man as a force that entered earth evolution at a particular moment in time as a real historical event. That will usher in a period when it will no longer make sense to say that Christ is merely an idea. Instead, people will say that the Christ experience can be conceived as taking place only in this or that individual soul, just as philosophers maintain that there could be no such thing as color without eyes to perceive it. But colors do not owe their existence to perceiving eyes; the truth is rather that eyes are created by the light-world. The fact ought therefore to be stated thus: “No eyes without light.” It is equally true that without the historical Christ human beings could not experience Christ or the Christ-power within them. So they will know Christ to be a spiritual being and realize that this Being once actually lived on earth as a fact of history and sacrificed Himself to become one with the earth. They will be able to make their way into the spiritual world and discover Christ there.

Goethe often found just the right way of putting some fact or other, and perhaps we might borrow one of his sayings to express what we have been discussing here; it can serve us as a pointer. Goethe said that the eye was built by light to perceive the light: the eye was conjured forth by light from organs that were originally indeterminate. He goes on to make a further statement that calls attention to the impulse we harbor to discover God within us:

“Were not our eyes profoundly of the sun
How could they behold the light?
Were not our strength from God's own being won.
How could we feel so in Things divine delight.”

Just as the eye is conjured forth by light, so man's power to see God is conjured forth by God Himself as He lives and moves within and all about us. Those whose own Christ-likeness enables them to experience the Christ in beauty of feeling and insight will know that this is possible only because Christ once descended to earth and lived here, an historic figure. Just as the sun's light conjures forth eyes in human bodies so does the historic Christ conjure forth Christ-life in the souls of men.

“Unless the soul of man were Christ-like, how indeed could it experience the Christ? lf Christ had not lived as an historic figure how could man's soul ever come to know that most glorious feeling: feeling for the Christ?” Such will be the tenor of Twentieth Century comment. At the very moment when orthodox science reaches the point of denying Christ any historical reality, spiritual science will say without relying on documents that because man can experience Christ he knows that Christ did indeed live historically as a life-giving force, as the sun in that spiritual realm whence human evolution draws its nutriment.

Today I would like to address myself to a subject specifically requested by our friends here, a subject having great significance for modern spiritual life. It shall be considered from the standpoint I have often taken when speaking of things of the spirit. As a rule, it is difficult to speak of such a unique and deeply significant subject unless it be assumed that the audience keep in mind various things explained in other lectures given on the foundations of spiritual science. This science is neither widely recognized nor popular; in fact, it is a most unpopular and much misunderstood spiritual stream of our day. Misunderstandings can easily arise especially with a subject like the one chosen today, because the opinion is far too widespread that anthroposophy might undermine this or that religious creed, thereby interfering with what someone may hold precious. Anyone willing to go into anthroposophy in any depth sees that this opinion is completely false. In one sense, spiritual science aims to develop further the way of thinking that entered human evolution through natural science. By strengthening the human soul, it seeks to make this kind of thinking fruitful. The way spiritual science must proceed differs significantly, however, from the way taken by natural science. Anthroposophy takes its start, not from the world perceived by the external senses, but from the world of the spirit. Questions pertaining to the spiritual life of the soul must therefore be considered from the standpoint of spiritual science. Undoubtedly for many in our time the most important question in the spiritual life of humanity pertains to the subject of today's lecture, that is, Christ Jesus.

To ensure that we shall understand each other at least to some extent, I would like to make a few preliminary observations before moving on to any specific questions. Spiritual science, though it is the continuation of natural science, makes entirely different demands on the human soul. This fact accounts for the misunderstanding and opposition spiritual science encounters. The kind of thinking derived from natural science is tied up with a problem that more or less concerns human souls today when they consider higher aspects of life. This is the problem of the limits to knowledge. Spiritual science in no way belittles the most admirable attempt of philosophers to ascertain the extent of human thought and knowledge. Thinkers who judge on the basis of what can ordinarily be observed in the soul easily conclude that human knowledge can go so far and no farther. It is commonly said, “This fact can be known; that other cannot.”

On this issue spiritual science takes a completely different stand because it takes into consideration the development of the human soul. Granted, in ordinary life and science the soul does indeed confront certain limits of knowledge. The soul, however, may take itself in hand, transform itself and thereby acquire the possibility of penetrating into spheres of existence radically unlike those usually experienced.

Here I can only indicate what in earlier lectures and in such books as An Outline of Occult Science and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, I have already explained, namely, that the soul can completely change itself. Through practicing certain exercises, the soul may bring about an infinite enhancement of its inherent forces of attention and devotion. Ordinarily, the soul-spiritual life uses the human body like an instrument. Just as hydrogen is bound to oxygen in water, so is this life closely connected with the body, within which it works. Now, just as hydrogen may be separated from oxygen and shown to have completely different qualities from water, so may the soul, through the exercises described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, separate itself from the body. By thus turning away from and lifting itself out of the body, the soul acquires an inner life of its own.

Not by speculation or philosophy but by devoted discipline can the soul emancipate itself from the body. To live as a soul-spiritual being, apart from the body is the great experience of the spiritual investigator. Here I can only indicate things I have elaborated elsewhere.

Today my task is to show how the spiritual investigator must regard the Christ Jesus Event. Statements of religious creeds concerning this event are derived from experiences of the soul in its life within the body. The statements of the spiritual investigator come from clairvoyant experiences of the soul as it lives independently of the body in the spiritual world. In this condition the soul can survey the whole course of mankind's evolution.

What the spiritual investigator thereby learns of Christ Jesus calls for a certain way of speaking, because the investigator acquires his knowledge in immediate spiritual vision while living separated from his body. Yet he can communicate this knowledge only indirectly by turning his attention to the things of this world. His description, however, must convey what he has experienced in spiritual vision. Thus, what follows in way of explanation of certain processes in man's external life is not meant to be taken metaphorically. It is intended rather to express something in which spiritual science must come to an understanding with natural science. In respect to one point in particular it is most important to come to terms with present-day thought.

In natural science it is admitted that a mere descriptive enumeration of single events in nature is inadequate. It is recognized that the scientist must proceed from a description of natural phenomena to the laws invisibly animating them. These laws we perceive when we relate phenomena with each other, or when we immerse ourselves in them. In this way they reveal their inner laws. In the treatment of historical facts, however, this natural scientific method is not easily applied.

Now, as a rule, I am disinclined to speak of personal matters, but in the following case I can speak of something objective. The title of my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, which was first published many years ago, was not chosen without due reflection. It was selected to indicate a certain way of observing things. It was not entitled The Mysticism of Christianity because I did not intend to deal with this topic, nor was it entitled Christian Mysticism because I did not intend to write on that theme, the mystical life of the Christian, either. What I sought to show was that the Christ impulse, the entrance of Christianity into mankind's development, can be comprehended only by perceiving how the super-sensible plays into the development ordinarily described in history. As these facts are accessible only to spiritual vision, they can be called mystical. They are mystical while at the same time having occurred on earth.

The origin and development of Christianity can be understood only when we realize that facts in history arrange themselves as do facts in our solar system, where the sun has the major role and the other planets less important parts. This arrangement can be recognized when facts are seen from a natural scientific standpoint. In the field of history, however, facts are rarely so viewed. Here, the succession of facts is easily described, but the fact that the way of contemplating the historical facts differs from the way of contemplating scientific facts is lost sight of.

There is a law in natural science whose validity is more or less acknowledged by all, despite this or that detail of it being open to dispute. This law, first formulated by Ernst Haeckel, has become fundamental to biology. It states that a living being recapitulates in its embryonic life, passes through stages of development that resemble those of the lower animals such as the fishes. This is a law recognized in science.

Now there is another law, which can be discovered by spiritual vision, that is of great importance in mankind's development. Because it is valid only in the sphere of spiritual life it presents a rather different aspect than the law just mentioned, but it is as true as any in natural science. It enables us to say what is undoubtedly true, that humanity has passed through many stages in its development, and that as it has passed from one epoch to another, from one century to another, it has taken on various forms. We need only assume that the epochs known to history were preceded by primeval ones. At this point we may ask if the life of humanity as a whole can be compared with anything else. Of course, any comparison concerning mankind's development must be the outcome of spiritual-scientific observation. External facts must be used as a language, as a means of communication, to express what the spiritual investigator perceives. What he perceives is that mankind's development as a whole may be compared with the life of a single man.

The experiences of mankind in ancient cultures—in those of Egypt and China, Persia and India, Greece and Rome—were different from those of our time. In those ancient epochs man's soul lived in conditions different from those of today. Just as in the individual human life the experiences of childhood are not the same as those of youth or old age, so in these cultures mankind's experiences were not the same as ours are today. Human development passes through various forms in the various ages of life.

The following question now arises. What stage in the individual life of man may be compared with the present epoch of humanity? This question can be answered only by spiritual science. Anthroposophy stands upon such a foundation that it can say that when man enters his life on earth he does not inherit everything from his mother and father that belongs to his being. We can say that man descends from a life in the spirit to an existence on earth, and that the spiritual part of his being follows certain laws whereby it connects itself with what is inherited from the parents. Further, we can say that the spiritual part helps in the whole growth and development of the human body. We see how the soul and spirit takes hold of and works upon physical substance. The wonderful mystery of man's gradual development, the emergence of definite traits from indefinite, capacities from incapacities, all bear witness to the sculpting power of these spiritual forces. Through spiritual science we are lead to look back from this present life to former lives on earth. We see that the way our soul-spiritual being prepares the bodily organization and the course our destiny takes depend[s] upon what we have elaborated and gained for ourselves in former lives.

Exact spiritual-scientific investigation shows that during the whole ascending course of our lives, up to our thirties, the fruits won from former lives on earth and brought with us from the spiritual world still exercise an immediate influence upon our physical existence and destiny. Our soul, being connected with the external world, progresses as we experience life on earth. From these experiences a soul-spiritual kernel forms itself within us. Up until our thirtieth to thirty-fifth years we arrange our lives in accordance with the spiritual forces we have brought with us from the spiritual world. From the middle of our lives onward the forces of our soul-spiritual kernel begin to work. This seed, containing what we have already elaborated, continues to work within us for the rest of our lives.

Even after a plant has faded away, the forces capable of producing a new one survive. These forces are like the soul-spiritual forces we gain for ourselves in the first half of life and that predominate in the second. When, in this second period of life, our senses weaken, our hair turns gray and our skin becomes wrinkled, our external life may be compared with a dying plant. Yet, in this period what we have prepared since our birth, what we have not brought with us from a preceding life but have rather elaborated in this life, grows ever stronger and more powerful. It is the part in us that passes through the portal of death, that casts off life as something faded. It is that part in us that passes over into the spiritual world. At an important moment in our life, when the fresh forces of our youth start to wane, we begin to cultivate something new on earth, that is, a soul-spiritual seed that passes through death.

We may now ask ourselves what period in human life can be compared with the present epoch, considering the whole development of humanity. Can our present age be compared with the first part of human life, with the first thirty to thirty-five years, or with the latter part. Spiritual-scientific observation of the present age reveals that our existence in the external world can in fact be compared only with the period of human life lying beyond the thirtieth to thirty-fifth years. Human development on earth has already passed the middle part of life. We need only compare the experiences of mankind in our present culture with experiences undergone in the Egyptian-Babylonian or Greco-Roman cultures. We need only point to our mighty and admirable technical and industrial achievements to show that man has now severed himself from what is directly and instinctively connected with his body.

Men in ancient cultures faced the world as a child does. The child's life is an ascending one, completely dependent upon the body. Mankind's life today, in contrast, is mechanical, cut off from the body. History, science, philosophy and religion all show that mankind in its evolution has reached a point lying beyond the middle of life. Modern pedagogy, with its efforts to be established on rational lines, especially bears out this fact. Modern pedagogy differs markedly from ancient pedagogy. Children growing up under our artificial education become severed from the direct impulses of humanity. An earlier education, one in an epoch lying before mankind's middle life, was derived from intuition and instinct. Observation of the riddles of education strongly confirms the fact that humanity has now passed beyond the point of maturity. We may now ask ourselves what point in humanity's evolution corresponds to the point in the individual life of man that lies between the thirtieth and thirty-fifth years.

When the spiritual investigator, objectively observing the evolution of humanity, turns his gaze on ancient times, he finds a trend that culminates in the Greco-Roman epoch. He finds that then humanity as a whole reached that age corresponding to the thirtieth to thirty-fifth years in the life of an individual man. The individual man may use a surplus of vital forces in his body to live beyond the descending point in his life and to cultivate up until his death a soul-spiritual kernel. In the life of humanity as a whole, however, things take a different course. When the youthful forces of humanity cease to flow, as it were, a new impulse is needed for its further development, an impulse not lying within humanity itself. Even if we know nothing whatsoever of the Gospels or of tradition, we need only look at mankind's historical development to discover in the Greco-Roman epoch the entrance of such an impulse. There, at a certain moment, the turning point of man's whole earthly development occurred. A completely new impulse entered the course of man's evolution, when its youthful forces were on the wane. An examination of the ancient mysteries will throw more light on this historical fact.

These mysteries, which existed in every culture and which to some extent have reached our knowledge through literature, were functions performed at centers that served both as schools and churches. Through cultic rites intended to transform the everyday life of soul, these functions enabled men to attain to higher knowledge. These mystery schools took different forms in different countries, but at all centers those souls whom the leaders of the schools believed capable of development received training.

In the mysteries man's soul life was not regarded as it is today. In this ancient viewpoint, which anthroposophy must renew, the soul was deemed unfit in its ordinary state to penetrate into those spheres where its inmost being flows together with the very source of life. The ancients felt that the human soul had to prepare itself for knowledge by undergoing a certain moral and esthetic training. They thought that through this inner training the soul could transform itself and thereby acquire forces of knowledge surpassing those of ordinary life. The soul then became capable of perceiving those mysteries that lie behind external phenomena.

There were basically two kinds of center[s] where pupils were trained to acquire spiritual wisdom and a vision of life's mysteries. Pupils of the first kind, under the guidance of the centers' leaders, especially developed the psychic life. During spiritual vision they could free themselves from the body. The Egyptian and Greek mysteries offered this kind of training. The other kind existed in the Persian mysteries of Asia Minor.

Pupils of these Egyptian and Greek mysteries were trained to turn their senses away from the external world and thus eventually to enter the condition man ordinarily falls into unawares when he is overcome by sleep, when sense impressions cease. The soul of the pupil was led completely into his inner self, and his inner life was given a strength and intensity far surpassing that required to receive merely sense impressions. After pursuing his exercises for a long time, the pupil reached a certain stage in his inner life when he could say to himself, “Man learns to know his real being only when he has torn himself away from his body.” The strange but distinct mood evoked in the pupil's soul gave rise to an experience he could characterize with the words, “In everyday life, when I use my body to connect myself with the world of the senses, I do not really live within my full human nature. Only when I have a deeper experience of myself within my own being am I a man in the fullest meaning of the word.” This experience impressed on him that man can know his spiritual essence by penetrating into his innermost soul. He thereby could draw near to God, the primeval source of his being. Within himself he could feel that point where his soul life united with the divine source of existence.

It must be added that this type of training resulted in an increase of egotism, not a decrease. The leaders of the mysteries thus set great store upon a schooling in human love and unselfishness. They knew that through the wisdom of the mysteries a pupil could indeed unite with his god even though he were insufficiently prepared, but they realized that he could do so only at the price of increased egotism. By withdrawing from the sense world and entering the spiritual world he could experience the human self, the human ego, far more strongly than is usually the case. The men in these mysteries who, by strengthening their inner lives perceived God, remained useful members of human society only if they had first passed through a spiritual development grounded in a sound preparation of the moral life. This, the Dionysian initiation, led man to experience within himself what lies at the base of all human nature, that is, Dionysos.

In the other type of initiation, practiced mainly in Asia Minor and Central Asia, man was led to the secrets of life by an opposite method. He had to subdue all his inner soul experiences, to free himself of the cares and troubles, the passions and instincts of his personal existence. He could then experience the outer course of nature far more intensely than is normally done. Whereas we normally experience only winter and summer, the disciples of these initiation centers had to experience, in a special way, the change from one season to another. Even as our hands share in the life of our bodies, so did the disciple have to share in the life of the earth. When the earth grew cold, when its plant covering began to fade, he had to feel within his soul its life of sadness and desolation. He had to share in these experiences as a member of the whole organism of the earth. Too, he could share in the rising life of spring and of the earth's awakening at midsummer, when the sun stands at its highest point on the horizon. He felt those forces of the sun in union with the whole earth.

In this kind of initiation the disciple's soul was drawn out of his inner being, whereby he could participate in the events of the cosmos and raise himself to the soul-spiritual essence permeating the universe. His experience differed markedly from ordinary contemplation of nature because he felt he lived within the very soul of the universe. In not a bad but a good sense, he was beside himself. He was, though one hesitates to use this word because it has taken on an unpleasant connotation, in ecstasy. Upon achieving this union with the cosmos he could say to himself that through living in the universe and through experiencing its most intimate soul-spiritual forces, he had come to realize that everywhere the final goal of the cosmos is the creation of man. Did man not exist, the whole creation could not fulfill its end, because he was the meaning of the cosmos.

It is one thing to say this; it is quite another to experience it. The disciples of the mysteries felt this fact because they entered into the life of the universe with an enhanced selfconsciousness. Indeed, this proud sense of self was indispensable to their experience of the cosmos. Whereas egotism resided in man's penetration into his spiritual being, pride lay in his union with the soul-spiritual essence of the world. Therefore, those who prepared the disciples for such an experience took care that they did not completely fall prey to pride.

In ancient times, all the truths constituting man's knowledge were acquired through the mysteries on the one or the other path. Humanity's course of development was then on the ascent. Man was unfolding fresh forces and lived in the stage of childhood, as it were. He had to learn through the mysteries how to reach the spiritual worlds. Ancient civilizations always revealed one of these two sides: that derived from man's strengthening his inner life, and that derived from his surveying the whole universe, which enabled him to say that all this pointed to the human being, to the soul-spiritual part he bears within him. Such a disciple of the second kind of initiation could also say when he looked out into the world's spaces, “There, in the wide reaches of the universe, something lives that must enter into me if I am to fully know myself as a human being. But when I live on the earth, unable to look out into the wide world, the spirit cannot come to me, and I cannot really know myself as man.”

Humanity then entered an epoch in which its youthful forces became exhausted. The whole human race reached an age corresponding to the thirtieth to thirty-fifth years in the life of the individual man. In this epoch the ancient mysteries, which existed to help humanity in its youth, had lost their meaning. Furthermore, something happened that is most difficult to understand even now. When man attempted to rise to the soul-spiritual essence of the cosmos, this essence no longer drew near him; he could no longer experience the god within himself.

When the ancient Persian surpassed his ordinary state of consciousness, he could feel how God descended upon his soul, how his soul became permeated by the God of the universe. Humanity always had this possibility so long as it possessed its youthful forces. But in the Greco-Roman epoch this possibility ended. Then, everything prescribed in the ancient mysteries to bring inspiration to man became ineffectual, because humanity was receptive to this inspiration only in the time of its youth. Something else now arose. What man could no longer receive because individual human nature had lost the capacity of receiving it even with the help of the mysteries, now entered into the whole evolution of humanity. One human being had to come who could directly unite the two initiation paths.

Purely from the standpoint of spiritual science, apart from all the Gospels, we now see Christ Jesus entering the evolution of the world. Let us imagine someone who knows nothing whatsoever of the Gospels, knows nothing of traditions, but who has entered modern civilization with a soul permeated by spiritual science. Such a person would have to say to himself, “There came a time in the evolution of the world and in the history of humanity when man's receptivity for spiritual life ceased.” But humanity has preserved its soul-spiritual life. How can this be? The soul-spiritual essence that man once took into himself must have entered the evolution of the earth in some other way, independently of man. A Being must have taken into himself what the mystery disciples once received through the power of a most highly developed soul life. In sum, a human being must have appeared who inwardly possessed what the one mystery path enabled the soul to experience directly, namely, the spiritual essence of the external world, the spirit of the universe.

Spiritual science thus regards Christ Jesus as one who inherently possessed those strengthened powers of soul formerly acquired by disciples of the one mystery path. With these powers of soul he could take into himself from the cosmos what the disciples of the other mystery path had once received. From the standpoint of spiritual science we can say that what the disciples of the ancient mysteries once sought through an external connection with the Godhead came to expression in immediate form and as historical fact in Christ Jesus. When did this happen? It happened in that age when the forces that were already exhausted in humanity as a whole were also exhausted in the life of the individual human being. In his thirtieth year of life Jesus had reached the age humanity as a whole had then attained. It was in this year that he received the Christ. Into his fully developed, inwardly strengthened soul he received the spirit of the cosmos. At the turning point of human evolution we discover that a man has taken into his soul the divine-spiritual essence of the universe. What was striven for in the ancient mysteries has now become an historical event.

Let us proceed, bearing in mind indications of the Gospels concerning the life of Christ Jesus from the Baptism in the Jordan to His Resurrection. Spiritual science enables us to say that in this period something completely new entered the evolution of humanity. In the past, man made a real contact with the divine essence only through the mysteries. What was thus experienced in the mysteries went out into the world as revelations, to be accepted in faith. In the event we are now considering, the contact with the spiritual-divine essence of the cosmos happened in such a way that within the man Jesus, Christ entered the stream of earthly life for a period of three years. Then, at the Mystery of Golgotha, a force that formerly lived outside the earth poured itself out into the world. All the events through which Christ passed while living in the body of Jesus brought about the existence of this power in the earthly world, in the earthly part of the cosmos. Ever since that time this power lives in the same atmosphere in which our souls live.

We may term one of the two types of initiation sub-earthly and designate the other, in which man took up the spirit of the cosmos, super-earthly. In either case, man had to abandon his human essence to make contact with the divine essence. The Mystery of Golgotha, however, concerns not only the individual human being but the whole history of man on earth as well. Through this event humanity received something completely new. With the Baptism in the river Jordan something formerly experienced by every disciple of the mysteries entered a single human being, and from this single human being something streamed out into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth, enabling every soul that would do so to live and be immersed in it. This new impulse entered the earthly sphere through the death and resurrection of Christ. Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha man lives in a spiritual environment, an environment that has been Christianized because it has absorbed the Christ impulse. Ever since the time when human evolution entered upon its descent, the human soul can revive itself; it can establish a connection with Christ. Man can grow beyond the forces of death that he bears within him. The spiritual source of man's origin can no longer be found on the old path; it must be found on a new path, by seeking a connection with Christ within the spiritual atmosphere of the earth.

The Christ Event appears to the spiritual investigator in a special light. It may be of interest to describe what he can actually experience after he has so changed his soul that he can perceive the spiritual world. The spiritual investigator can behold a variety of spiritual processes and beings, but he sees them in a special way, depending upon whether or not he has experienced the Christ impulse during his physical existence. Even today one may be a spiritual investigator without having made any inner connection with the Christ impulse. One who has passed through a certain soul development and attained to spiritual vision may thereby investigate many mysteries of the world, mysteries lying at the foundation of the universe; yet even with this vision, it is possible that he still cannot learn anything of the Christ impulse and of the Being of Christ. If we establish a connection with Christ while in the physical body, however, before the attainment of spiritual vision, if this connection is established through feeling, then this experience of Christ that we have gained while in the body remains with us like a memory when we enter the spiritual world. We perceive that even while we lived in the body we had a connection with the spiritual world.

The Christ impulse thus appears to us as the spiritual essence given to man at a time when the ancient inheritance no longer existed in human evolution. What the individual human being experiences after his thirtieth to thirty-fifth years, the whole of humanity experienced at the beginning of our era. Humanity, which unlike the individual human being does not possess a body, would have lost its connection with the divine-spiritual world had not a superearthly Being, a Being who descended to the earth from the cosmos, poured out his essence into the earth's evolution. This act enabled man to restore his connection with the spiritual world.

I realize that I am presenting things that are even less popular with the public than are the principles of spiritual science. Today I can give but a few indications, which in themselves cannot produce any kind of conviction. In regard to the Christ impulse I can only point out the direction taken by spiritual science, which seeks to be a continuation of natural science. The thoughts I have just presented must gradually enter into human evolution, which they will the more spiritual science enters into it. Unlike many other things being advanced today, spiritual science is not easy. It assumes that before attaining to certain definite experiences the soul must first transform itself.

In respect to the Christ experience in particular, spiritual science points out the significant fact that in the ancient mysteries man could find a connection with the divine essence only by going out of his own being. To experience the divine essence he had to abandon his humanity, become something no longer human. After the turning point of human evolution, however, the wonderful and significant possibility arose that man no longer needed to go out of himself in the one direction or the other. Indeed, man lacked the strength to do so. Nor could he in his youth anticipate a time when this would be possible since humanity had already reached a definite age.

The Mystery of Golgotha enabled man to transcend his ordinary human essence while still retaining his humanity. He could now find Christ by remaining man, not by increasing his egotism or pride. It now became possible for man to find Christ by deepening and strengthening himself in his own being. With Christianity something entered human evolution that enabled man to say to himself, “You must remain a human being; you must remain man in your inmost self. As a human being you will find within yourself that element in which your soul is immersed ever since the Mystery of Golgotha. You need not abandon your human essence by descending into egotism or by rising into pride.”

Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha the quality that each human soul now needs, the quality that in past epochs could be found only outside humanity, must be found in humanity itself, within the evolution of the earth. This deepest and most significant human quality is love. Man in his development must no longer follow the course of strengthening his soul on the one mystery path that leads to egotism, because ever since the Mystery of Golgotha it is essential that man acquire the capacity of transcending egotism, of conquering egotism and pride. Having done this, he can experience the higher self within him. A path of development must now be followed that does not lead us into egotism and pride but that remains within the element of love. This truth lies at the foundation of St. Paul's significant words, “Not I, but Christ in me.”

Only after the Mystery of Golgotha did it become possible to objectively experience Christ as that element enabling man to unite with the divine essence. A pupil of the ancient mysteries may indeed have anticipated St. Paul's words, but he could not have experienced their fulfillment. The mystery disciples and their followers could say, “Outside my own being is a god who pours his essence into me.” Or else they could say, “When I strengthen my inner being, I learn to know God in the depths of my own soul.” Today, however, each human being can say, “The love that passes over into other souls and into other beings cannot be found outside my own being; it can be found only by continuing along the paths of my own soul.”

When we immerse ourselves lovingly into other beings, our souls remain the same; man remains human even when he goes beyond himself and discovers Christ within him. That He can be thus found was made possible by the Mystery of Golgotha. The soul remains within the human sphere when it attains to that experience expressed by St. Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me.” We then have the mystical experience of feeling that a higher human essence lives in us, an essence that enwraps us in the same element that bears the soul from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation. This is the mystical experience of Christ, which we can have only through a training in love.

Spiritual science shows how it became possible for the human being to have this inner, mystical experience of Christ. By way of comparison, we find in Western philosophy the thought expressed that had we no eyes we could not see colors. Our eyes must be so built that they can perceive colors; there must be an inner predisposition to colors in our eyes, so to speak. Had we no eyes, the world would be colorless and dark for us. The same reasoning applies to the other senses. They too must be predisposed for the perception of the external world. From this argument Schopenhauer and other philosophers have concluded that the external world is a world of our representations. Goethe has coined the fine motto, “Were the eye not sun-like it could never perceive the sun.” We might say further, “The human soul could never understand Christ were it not able so to transform itself that it could inwardly experience the words, ‘Not I, but Christ in me.’”

Goethe had something else in mind when he expressed the truth that were the eye not sun-like it could not see the sun, namely, that our eyes could not exist had there been no light to form them from the sightless human being. The one thought is as true as the other: There could be no perception without eyes and also no eyes without light.

Similarly, it can be said that did the soul not inwardly experience Christ, did it not identify itself with the power of Christ, Christ would be non-existent for the soul. How can the human soul perceive Christ unless it identifies itself with Him? Yet the opposite thought is just as true, that is, man can experience Christ within himself only because at a definite moment in history the Christ impulse entered the evolution of humanity. Without the historical Christ there could be no mystical Christ. The assertion that the human soul could experience Christ even if Christ had never entered the evolution of mankind is a mere abstraction. Prior to the Mystery of Golgotha it was impossible to have a mystical experience of Christ. Any other argument is based on a misunderstanding. Just as it would be impossible for us to have the mystical experience of Christ without the historical Christ, even though the historical Christ can be discovered only by those who have experienced the mystical Christ.

Through spiritual science we are thus led to a vision of Christ not based upon the Gospels. Through spiritual science we can perceive that in the course of history Christ entered the evolution of humanity, and we know that He had once to live in a human being so that He could find a path leading through a human being into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth.

Spiritual research thus leads us to Christ, and through Christ to the historical Jesus. It does this at a time when external investigation, based upon external documents, so often questions the historical existence of Jesus.

The thoughts I have here presented may of course meet with opposition, but I can fully understand it if some say my statements appear to them like a fantastic dream.

From a spiritual contemplation of the whole evolution of humanity we can, through spiritual science, come to a recognition of Christ, and through Christ's own nature we can recognize that He once must have lived in a human body. Spiritual-scientific investigation necessarily leads to the historical Jesus. Indeed, it is possible to indicate with mathematical precision when Christ must have lived in the man Jesus, in the historical Jesus. Just as it is possible to understand external mechanical forces through mathematics, so is it possible to understand Jesus by regarding history with a spiritual vision that encompasses Christ. That Being Who lived in Jesus from his thirtieth to thirty-third years gave the impulse humanity needed for its development at a time when its youthful forces were beginning to decline.

In recapitulation, I can say that a new understanding of Christ is a necessity today. Spiritual science not only tries to lead us to Christ; it must do so. All the truths it advances must lead from a spiritual contemplation of man's development to a comprehension of Christ. Men will experience Christ in ever greater measure, and through Christ they will discover Jesus.

Thus, I have tried to day to take my start from the evolution of humanity, directing your gaze from Jesus, upon whom many look with skepticism, to Christ. In future, Jesus will be found on that path we may characterize with the words, “Through a spiritual knowledge of Christ to an historical knowledge of Jesus.”

When people pay attention to the interests of their soul, then the question to which our today's reflection is dedicated - the question of life and death - is certainly a recognized important and meaningful one, and the answer to this question must meet deep needs of the human soul life. Nevertheless, it is difficult to talk about such things in our present time, because it is difficult to strike a chord in the soul, because the concepts, views and ideas that our time has gained from seemingly established scientific concepts contradict what must be said from spiritual scientific research; and it is difficult to bring an unbiased approach to bear on these scientific concepts.

Now it could be that those who are trying to answer these questions today should be met with an unbiased approach, but one only has to pay attention to what is presented to us in the [contemporary scientific] literature and one will recognize how little healthy thinking, how few healthy concepts there are and have a broad audience.

The concept of “life” - let us take the “physiology” of one of the greatest naturalists of modern times, Huxley: here we have an exemplary book in terms of [contemporary] science, and in this book we find an examination of the concept of life. First, he talks about humans, and it is said that human life depends on the brain, lungs and heart, and if any of these elements do not function properly, then life is endangered. And then a curious transition is made. It is said that if you can, so to speak, deprive a person of his brain but artificially maintain the lungs and heart in operation, then life will continue. From a certain point of view, which is so popular today, this of course makes sense, but from the point of view of a world view that encompasses the whole human being, it does not make the slightest sense, because one would be grateful for a life that is not aware of the things one experiences. The true death occurs where this consciousness ends. Thus, the greatest naturalist of the present day is not at all capable of grasping the concept of “life” in the right way.

[In today's science, it is extremely easy to define life.] It is thought that life is the same in humans, animals and plants – everything is mixed up, while we should be clear about the fact that we have to consider each being in relation to this question at its [own level]. The most essential thing in the world view is ignored, because Huxley has become accustomed to looking at that in man which is most indifferent to human life and nature: the material of the body. And so he quotes Hamlet's saying quite seriously - and it is fitting for Hamlet, in his melancholy mood, to make such a statement and, looking at the material of the body, to pursue this material after the great Caesar has died, and to say:

The great Caesar, dead and turned to clay.
Might well plug a hole from the raw north;
Oh that the earth, to which the world has trembled,
Might wall up a wall against wind and weather.

And Huxley points to an [imaginable] “Negro slave Caesar” or a “chained dog Caesar” and says: Even in this slave or in this dog could be the atoms of the great Caesar. In this way, one pursues that which is most indifferent to human life, and is not aware that one should pursue that which shapes the substance in such a way that it conforms to humanity. Physics will soon abandon these fantasies about atoms – radium research has already shown that atoms disintegrate in the hands of man.

So you see: even at the heights of knowledge, one does not form any real concepts about what life and death are. But science is at an important turning point today, and those who do not work from buzzwords, but rather approach scientific knowledge and observations, see that science is already beginning to grasp the spirit.

It cannot grasp the concept, and perhaps it cannot do so because it has no proper concept of life. The biologist Weismann says: Only the experience that death occurs can convince of the same; one cannot grasp it from life itself. There is talk of the immortality of single-celled organisms. It is said that one such organism splits into two, continues to live as two, and this goes on and on. One speaks of a multiplication in number, and these innumerable beings are the same as the first being. One cannot speak of death in this case. But the fact that Weismann sought a definition of death in this way has led to a calamity, which is characteristic of the way it is understood in the present day and which has turned out strangely. He says that the essence of death is that a corpse is present. Contemporary natural science is only able to speak of life when it is no longer there, and wants to recognize the relationship between life and death by the dead, by the corpse. Verworn, Haeckel's student, says that the individual living beings die, but that life persists. They have resorted to all sorts of things to solve the riddle of life and death, but the confusion has only grown.

Spiritual science does not have it so convenient to be able to throw everything together - [end of transcript; continued after second transcript].

First of all, it should be noted that death in plants and animals is quite different from that in humans. It is a characteristic phenomenon of many plants that they die when they produce a new being; at the moment of fertilization, they pass over into a different form of existence. Until that moment, they were permeated by the etheric body. It is not difficult to make fun of such things; however, it has been shown time and again that anyone who is deeply involved in observing life phenomena cannot get by without the assumption of the etheric or life body. The dying off and withering is based on the fact that the plant follows the physical and chemical laws. Through the etheric body, the plant is withdrawn from the effect of the physical and chemical laws. Where does what is taken from the plant go? It passes over into the new plant; it is the stream of life that passes through the ranks of plants. Even more lives in the animal than the etheric body: in order for consciousness to arise in it, it is provided with an astral body, which is the builder of the organs of consciousness. — In humans, the I is added.

The difference between animals and humans can easily be determined; one must not look for the differences where they are not. The desire to completely erase the difference, as materialistic monism is doing now, did not yet exist in the last century. But the difference in the lower jaw was emphasized with pathos - [so] Kant. Goethe did not like this approach because he was able to think spiritually. He studied anatomy and physiology in Jena and proved that it was nonsense to claim this difference. He demonstrated the small ankle bone, [the premaxillary bone], also in humans, and showed that it was only fused. These things will be dealt with in more detail in the forthcoming booklet on anthroposophy. We should look for the difference in the spiritual realm. In animals, the scope of their abilities is tied to their organs and to what they inherit through birth. In humans, various activities remain open, for which they must first develop the ability. Animals have certain abilities that humans must first acquire through intellectual effort. The monkey has a predetermined equilibrium; humans must first learn to walk and stand. Equilibrium is not innate in them; only the mind gradually works on it. Goethe says:

The ancients said that animals are taught by their organs; I would add that human beings are likewise taught by their organs, but they have the advantage of being able to teach their organs in return.

Today, efforts are being made to trace all human abilities back to heredity, and then the help of far-back ancestors is enlisted. But what interests us about the individual person, what determines his or her particular position, his or her task in the world, cannot be explained by the line of ancestors. The unbiased educator can even recognize a clear boundary between inherited traits and those inner forces of the person that arise from previous lives. The fact that animals can also be trained is not a valid objection for someone who is able to see the essential. We ascribe to animals a group, species or generic soul. It is a fact, however, that we take just as much interest in the individual human being as we do in an entire species of animal. In the case of animals, the spiritual individuality does not come into existence in the individual being, but in the whole species. One can compare the individual feelings of a human being with those of an individual animal and the whole human being with the animal species. The animal lives as long as the group soul has not lost interest in the individual specimen. Weismann cannot find the reason for the death of an animal because he overlooks this fact. In the case of man, something comes into existence through birth that is not found in animals, plants or minerals.

There are thinkers, however, who have overcome the opinion that man is only composed of inherited forces. They recognize that an individuality precedes physical existence and shapes it, but they do not find the solution by assuming repeated lives on earth; see Immanuel Hermann Fichte, “Anthropology”:

Parents are not the producers in the full sense: they provide the organic material, and not only that, but at the same time that middle, sensual-comfortable, which shows itself in temperament, in the peculiar , in a particular specification of the drives, etc., as the common source of which “imagination” has been shown to exist in the broader sense that we have demonstrated. In all these elements of personality, the mixture and peculiar combination of the parents' souls is unmistakable; to explain this as a mere product of procreation is perfectly justified, especially if, as we have to assume, procreation is understood as a real soul process. But the actual, concluding center of the personality is missing here precisely; because with deeper penetrating observation it turns out that even those cozy peculiarities are only a shell and a tool to grasp the actually spiritual, ideal facilities of the human being, suitable to promote them in their development or to take, but not capable of letting them arise from themselves. [...] Each preexists according to its basic spiritual form; for, spiritually considered, no individual resembles another, any more than one animal species resembles any of the others.

Francesco Redi was the first to claim that living things can only arise from living things. Only an inaccurate observation could lead to the belief in earlier times that hornets arise from rotten oxen, bees from horse carcasses and wasps from donkeys. Just as today's natural science protests against such superstition, so the spiritual researcher must protest against the fact that the spiritual soul can be explained by the line of inheritance. Human individuality points back to itself in earlier earthly lives.

A well-known objection to this is: If a person does not remember, then the earlier experiences have no value. But there is also a time between birth and death that is not remembered: the first years after birth – and yet one was there; the sense of self was just not yet strong enough. The point in time at which self-awareness first arises is also the limit for remembering back. Thus this being-in-it of the self forms the possibility of remembering. When a person learns to remember, he will remember. It is not easy to grasp this; only through a very specific mode of perception, absolute equanimity, and no fear of fate: with this, our self makes a leap forward. The theory of inheritance has produced strange results, for example that a genius is at the end of an inheritance line and not at the beginning. This is no more surprising than a man who has fallen into the water being wet when you pull him out. We all know Goethe's joke:

From my father I have the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful disposition,
and the desire to tell stories.
[...]
What then is
original about the whole creature?

Well, what is original about the “creature” is something that humanity already knows. Our body is built up from the powers that we have acquired from previous embodiments; but the soul abilities that we acquire now in this embodiment create the conditions for the next life. In this body a soul has developed that has greater abilities than in the previous life; and we feel a sense of gratitude that this body dies, because when the senses become dull, the soul is already building itself another body and can discard what is not up to the further development of the soul. Modern natural science is already very close to this assumption. It has already been found that we only tire from activities that involve our consciousness; that is something. A modern naturalist, Thomson, says: The soul is to the body as the rider is to his horse. That is the thought that ancient art expressed with the centaur. There are, of course, people who claim that the ancient peoples of the East saw the wild peoples riding through the mists as if they were one with their horses, and that this inspired their imagination to create the centaur.

The spiritual researcher does not look at the corpse, but at what the corpse leaves behind:

The smallest man on earth
A son of eternity,
Will conquer death in new life
.

I have often had the opportunity to speak to you about subjects of spiritual science, or, as one is accustomed to saying, of Theosophy. Naturally, this leads to the question: What paths must the soul take to attain knowledge of the spiritual world?

These paths differ greatly from what we are accustomed to calling scientific. It is all too easy to dismiss these methods as unscientific. Today, we understand something quite different by the word “scientific”. Therefore, it is necessary to first examine what “scientific” is.

What does the scientist of today demand of a method in order to call it “scientific”? In answer to this question, today's man has developed the attitude that what is to be scientifically provable must, firstly, be researchable by every person at every moment and, secondly, it must be completely independent of what is called “subjective”.

These requirements are met by experiment and, for the most part, by everything that is done in the laboratory. The experiment is independent of sympathy and antipathy and so on, in short, of everything that depends on what is subjectively going on in us.

The situation is different with research into the spiritual world. We must choose the path that is completely independent of the world of the senses, that is, of what today's science is based solely and exclusively on. We need precisely what is to be excluded from today's science. When we speak figuratively of spiritual science, we want to apply a word from Fichte. He says: “What I have to say to you cannot be explored with the ordinary mind, because a special, higher sense is needed for that.” It would be like someone born blind suddenly being given the ability to see colors and light, if one attained this special sense, the “spiritual eye,” as Goethe says.

If a person must first have a new sense in order to recognize a new and different world, then it is already indicated that this is not possible in every place, at every time, by every person and so on, as external science demands.

If we take the ordinary human life, this inner experience differs greatly from one person to another. But this should be excluded in the case of external science; after all, there can be no agreement in what people experience within themselves about the spiritual world. But this judgment is a very superficial one.

However, all this can be easily refuted. I have given a method of refuting Theosophy in the appendix to Seiling's 'Theosophy and Christianity'. But this easy refutation is possible only so long and only insofar as this soul life does not proceed with the strict regularity of which I will speak in a moment. As long as the soul life still flows along in an unregulated way, as long as one stops at that, one is not a spiritual researcher. If this soul life advances methodically enough, it will eventually reach a point within. If we now disregard everything that comes to life in us as pleasure and suffering through the impressions of the outside world, what actually remains in the normal soul life? One fact sheds light on this: sleep, when all external tools are tired and relaxed and no longer supply us with anything (no sensory impressions).

No one will admit that a person ceases to exist in the evening with their inner being and begins again in the morning. But this core of our being is unconscious from the moment our experiences cease, when, figuratively speaking, it dies.

Is it not conceivable that the human soul can create something out of itself [to maintain consciousness] when this soul, which is too weak in the ordinary person during sleep, is made strong? It is indeed conceivable that the soul no longer needs impressions from the outside. We would have to learn to distinguish between a person's unconsciousness during sleep and an arbitrary withdrawal of this core of being, where life is drawn from the soul itself. The impressions of external life are bound to the external sense organs. The soul must withdraw from these external sense impressions artificially. Yes, how can it do that? We are left empty-handed if we do not have external sensory impressions, since our entire soul life only receives nourishment through these impressions.

If we want to sustain our inner life only through these external impressions, we will never come to a broader experience. We must, in order to experience this, not only use the external sense impressions to gain knowledge of the world around us, but also learn to see them as symbols.

For example, we see the plant: it takes root in the soil, green sap courses through it, chaste, without drive or instinct, it stands there. And if we compare it to the human being: the human being is permeated by drives, desires, instincts; he is permeated by blood. The red blood carries the life of the instincts. Thus the green sap can emerge as a symbol for the chaste life, the red blood as a symbol for the life of instincts and drives. The human being must become like the plant, which is free of drives. Let us take a look at the rose, for example, which has transformed the chaste green sap into the color of the instinctive blood. The rose is then a symbol for the human being who has transformed the instinctual life of the blood into chastity. This is expressed in Goethe's words:

And so long as you have not
this:
Die and become,
you are only a dull guest
on the dark earth.

“Stirb und Werde” (die and become) – that is what matters. We should not want to achieve this in an ascetic way, but in full power. Why can we hit something with a hammer? Because we are objective towards it. So our body should become [a powerful tool] for us, [which we put at the service of the higher worlds]; the body, the life of the senses, should die for us. The “Stirb und Werde” must be taken seriously. The Rose Cross is a symbol for Goethe's “Stirb und Werde”. We have the “die” in the dead black cross of the wood, our blood that has died to instincts and lower desires, and in the roses we have the “becoming”. Yes, man can “become” something. The sprouting red roses are the symbol for this. Now one can say: Yes, these are after all images taken from the world of sense. But roses will never grow out of black wood. — The black wood and the red roses are indeed taken from the world of sense, but the combination is formed only as a symbol for the soul.

[The staff with the snake is also a supporting symbol. We can compare life with a staff; the higher life leads straight up, the snake-like lines are the external impressions through which the human being winds upwards.

No scientist would set up such a symbol. What scientists say is all true, as if you could see it everywhere in space. What the spiritual scientist sets up as such symbols, on the other hand, is arbitrarily put together.

But these symbols have a remarkable effect on our soul. We imagine that we close all our sensory organs and immerse these symbols deep, deep into our soul. These symbols will not initially convey any truths to us, but they do have an effect on our soul as a living force. When a person repeatedly allows such symbols to take effect on them, they experience something. But it is important to let them take effect on you again and again. You have to be patient. You have to do such an exercise fifty times and then fifty times again. Constant dripping wears away the stone. Not one, nor fifty raindrops on a stone are enough, but again and again we have to awaken our will, not just let external impressions get to us, but let such symbols live with our will, in us, again and again. We are inwardly invigorated by this, so that we can eventually revive them at will within us. When a person has been active in such practice, then eventually one wakes up in the morning in such a way that one sinks into the physical body, can make use of one's organs again. One experiences that one can live outside one's body, can be active outside one's physical body. Through such practice one learns to recognize that one can, as it were, leave one's body and be active, spiritually active. This is how this state differs from sleep. One can think, one can feel without one's body. One comes to this realization after undergoing such exercises. This is annoying for some people today, but it is nevertheless so.

Our physical body acts as a mirror. Our consciousness is the reflection of our soul life in our physical body. But [today's scientists] say that the brain has to be completely intact for our consciousness to be real. — Yes, that is quite true. Likewise, we also see ourselves quite differently, whether we look into a smooth mirror or into a concave mirror. Such exercises have torn our consciousness away from the ordinary external reflection of the body, and it is only as such a spiritual being that the human being perceives that he experiences, that he lives together with other spiritual beings.

This first step is “imaginative knowledge”. Here we are dependent only on these combined symbols, combined from elements taken from the world of the senses. We must let go of these, we must let go of the cross and the roses. We must let go of these external impressions, and now we think: What was your activity in this combination, when you combined the snake staff, the cross? What we then have is something that is no longer stimulated from the outside. The external world does not stimulate anyone to form symbols; man does this out of the depths of his soul. He reflects on the inner soul activity; this process is not influenced or even stimulated by the external world, it is purely spiritual and soul-based. This is called meditation. Then real inner powers arise that bring us into contact with the spiritual worlds. We call such spiritual knowledge “inspired knowledge”. We have experienced that there is a world independent of the physical. Now we get to know this world itself. It is like when you come to a coast that emerges on the distant horizon, and you gradually get to know it. This is how it is with the knowledge of the spiritual worlds.

We have to go even further after this inspired realization. We also have to let go of the activity of the soul. It can be described as a conscious sleeping – it can occur, can occur quite consciously. But it can also occur that we get to know the spiritual world in such a way that we become one with it, flow into it. This is called 'intuition'. This should not be confused with what is today called “intuition”, when something suddenly occurs to you. This is something quite different. The greatest effort of the soul is needed for intuition. All subjectivity should be eliminated from the soul, just as scientists demand, so that it is truly scientific. The soul is a place of vision in the intuitive world. All subjectivity is eliminated, even the activity that brought us here. (The soul becomes a place where things express their essence.)

The way described here seems very abstract, but in reality it is not, and those who want to go this way have to go through very, very difficult struggles. Renunciation and struggles are on this path. Our inner soul life takes hold of us as if with tentacles when we have given up external stimuli. The moral and immoral urges, as far as they are in the soul, come up there. Then what we actually are comes before our soul. Self-knowledge arises. The mystics have written about this, about the moral trials and temptations when they become aware, when they want to descend into the soul: You were a person of a certain nature, regulated by convention, custom, tradition, but now the truth of the soul comes up. People swear by the most opposing worldviews, they have morally examined everything. The monist accepts his view out of feeling, and so does the spiritualist. Only now does man recognize the reason for accepting this or that view; now we see what illusions we had when we thought we were being logical.

It can fill one with a certain irony when people come and say that the spiritual scientist is a fantasist and so on, and such people have no idea how little they themselves have looked behind the scenes of fantasy and illusion. One can only overcome what one has had within oneself. This cannot be achieved without pain. Not only with one's thoughts, but also with one's happiness one has become attached to what one sees sinking as an illusion, and not only the illusion, but the source of this illusion, both must be given up with heroic strength. If the human being also wants to overcome inspiration, it happens to him that he finds himself very 'light'. Logic doesn't help here; you can't fight impotence with logic. You can't achieve anything, even the surrender of happiness is of no use – you end up thinking like that. You enter the realm of doubt and despair, and all the doubts of the external world are nothing, they are inferior compared to the doubt at this level. The only way we can overcome this terrible region of ice is not to arrive there unprepared. Instead, we must gain strength beforehand.

It is difficult to get there, very difficult. It is only outlined, but it is not impossible, and no one should be deterred by that. There are ways to overcome the difficulties. To explore and experience the spiritual world, it is necessary to penetrate the spiritual world, but to understand it, unclouded logic is necessary.

However, it is difficult to apply unclouded logic today. What has been proven is not always believed. It is important that the evidence be believed. Everything that spiritual researchers say can be proven, but often people do not accept this evidence at all. Anyone can become a spiritual researcher, but a healthy sense of truth and unclouded logic are sufficient in advance. The most beautiful prospect for us is that spiritual nourishment is given more and more to people, and people give it more and more to physical life. And that is the mission of spiritual science: to bring down this spiritual life, this spiritual sap, and let it flow into what the senses convey, and what we can summarize in the words:

It presses to the human soul From the depths of the world, mysterious The rich abundance of matter. It flows into the depths of the soul From the heights of the world, full of content The clarifying light of the spirit. They meet in the human interior To a reality full of wisdom.

Question and Answer

Question: Isn't it pride to want to know about spiritual worlds in this life?

Rudolf Steiner: On the contrary; it is humility when one does not want to remain as one is. It is pride when one does not want to use the powers that lie within us. One surrounds oneself with the mask of complacency, which does not want to ascend into spiritual worlds.

When we discuss the questions and riddles of life in the sense of modern spiritual science, as has been the case here for several years, it is always good to remember that great man in the developmental history of humanity, namely Copernicus, and [also] many other men who, in the same sense, contributed to the revolution in intellectual life with him. In doing so, one must remember what is rarely thought of today: what it must have meant for a thinking person of that time, when the ground literally trembled under his feet, even moved , so that it seemed as if the earth was no longer at the center of the world, but rather, as a rotating body, also orbiting the sun, while he had clung to the earlier opposite assumption with all his thoughts and ideas. Copernicus now presented a world view that reversed everything that had been believed before. Just as people gradually came to accept the essence of his proclamation, so they used to believe in the constellation of the visible stars on a moon bowl, a sun bowl, on individual planetary spheres up to the seventh, the fixed star sphere. In addition to this, they believed that there was an eighth sphere, which was supposed to form the conclusion of the spatial world. This was what Giordano Bruno already considered to be erroneous, saying that what the eye perceives as the blue vault of heaven is nothing more than what appears to be caused by the limited perceptive ability of the eye; rather, instead of such limited spheres, unlimited worlds are to be thought of, that is, infinite distances and an infinite number of worlds.

But what was it that was expressed in multiple ways? Through such views, Copernicus and Giordano Bruno, as well as their followers, pointed out that knowledge is not exclusively promoted by the perception of the senses, but that one must move beyond the sensual result to a view that is based on the supersensible element of thinking. But at that time these minds, which had passed over to a view beyond the tangible observation of the world, had to fight against many parties who wanted to hold on to the traditional and therefore rejected what the new science could offer them against the meaning of this (traditional).

The same applies to what is presented here as spiritual science. This also coincides with the world of external contemporary phenomena, insofar as the events of our own soul life take place in it and relate to the most important questions and riddles that are incorporated in the two words “death” and “immortality”.

We must be clear about the fact that only a serious striving can achieve knowledge about these two enigmatic words, because this is not possible in idle curiosity or with the so-called thirst for knowledge, but only if we lives within ourselves; for man can only fulfill his tasks in the world - whether they be of greater importance or merely those of the recurring everyday life - when he can consciously work and proceed with what essentially rests within him. This is why the question of death and immortality develops into a question about the nature of the human soul, so that in answering it we gain strength and certainty for our work in life, for life in general.

A German philosopher has rightly said: Immortality does not begin only after death, but must be able to be found at all times in the life of the soul, even during our lives. But to do that, it is necessary to get to know the nature of the soul. If we follow the progress of human spiritual development before and since Copernicus, we can see that its successes were slowly prepared. Something similar can be observed here in the questions about death and immortality in the past period of time, although it is only recently that the research methods by which such questions can be discussed and answered have become known in wider circles. In doing so, however, spiritual science must look at a comprehensive law, namely that of human development, which is fully in line with the developmental concept of modern natural science, and with all its consequences. The compulsion of Western intellectual life has long since led important minds in this direction. I would like to refer you, for example, to Lessing: when he was at the peak of his intellectual development, he wrote his 'Education of the Human Race'. He wanted to present a common concern of the entire human race, to show how a law runs through all developmental epochs of mankind, in which not only cause and effect follow one another in a pedantic sequence, but the course of development of humanity is at the same time the education of humanity. He indicated how humanity needed an elementary education in the past, and referred first to the Old Testament period, calling the “Old Testament” the first elementary book of humanity. To grasp the truth in a higher form, humanity was given the “New Testament” in the Christian era, in order to lift it up to further epochs of human development. Thus the education of humanity was carried out by a guiding divine being.

But now the question arises as to whether it makes sense to call the development of humanity an education when the individual souls completely disappear again to make way for souls born later; it only makes sense if the same souls come back for a new development, to be reborn on earth as human beings at a higher level. This is where Lessing's idea came from that the human soul does not live only once, but comes back again and again to take part in the education of the human race anew at a higher level; this is why he speaks of repeated earthly lives of the human soul. Lessing also raises objections to himself and anticipates the easily occurring thought that the soul, for example, does not remember previous lives, by saying, “What useful purpose could such a memory serve?” When the soul has become mature enough, then the memory of earlier earthly lives will also awaken; and he transforms these thoughts into a feeling by saying: When we are filled with the idea of repeated earthly lives, then we can look forward calmly to the future, where the souls will unfold in ever higher earthly lives.

Is not all of eternity mine?

It is clear to see that Lessing has emerged from Western development; his train of thought is different from that of Buddhism, which is related to his. Therefore, his, as a modern conception, must not be confused with that of the latter; because in Buddhism one asks oneself: How should the individual behave in order to reach Nirvana as soon as possible? In Lessing's work, the idea arises from a Christian motive; he regards the whole of humanity on earth as a single, unified family, connected by eternal bonds, destined to develop gradually and together, and to gradually perceive and consciously promote this as a common affair. When so-called enlightened minds speak of Lessing today, they do recognize most of his achievements, but as soon as they come to his thoughts on the education of the human race, they consider him an aging man who had set down these thoughts in his weak time. But one does not follow the necessity in the development of great minds, but only wants to accept what suits oneself.

Hebbel once wrote in his diary: “Let us assume that Plato were to return in a new life and attend a modern secondary school, where he would also have to read his own works again, then it is possible that the reincarnated Plato would understand these old writings the worst.” This is the best way to express the idea that great minds can contribute to the idea of development.

The idea of repeated lives on earth has resurfaced in the educational life of the nineteenth century, being brought to our attention by the psychologist Droßbach, who had taken it up again for scientific reasons. And when, in the in the fifties of the last century a prize was offered for an answer to the question of death and immortality, a paper was awarded in which this idea was developed in the sense of successive earth lives. It is indeed remarkable that around the middle of the nineteenth century a mind like Widenmann answered the question of the life of the soul in this way, from which one then later, out of the necessity of thinking, as one thought, one departed.

Research in spiritual science shows that these repeated lives must be a fact of life, so that it now stands on the standpoint that the human core of our being has been here before, that it once took on a beginning and will often be here again will be, so that his human life will proceed in an earthly life between birth and death and in a spiritual way between death and a new birth, in which part of life our innermost core of being continues its existence in supersensible worlds.

If we now want to see how life everywhere provides us with the results for the affirmation of this view, we must observe the beginning in the independent development of the human being from birth onwards, how gradually the hazy features and awkward body movements develop into more definite features and more purposeful movements, and after a few years the human being is increasingly able to make better and better use of his brain, the noblest tool. Then, on unbiased observation, one must admit that all this is not the result of a self-developing physical power, but that a supersensible entity is working on the striking development from within. But let us look further to see if and how we can also capture the supersensible existence of the soul through external observations. We can observe how the life and events of the soul impress themselves vividly on the physical exterior and the whole being of the human being. If, for example, a person has been eagerly occupied with questions of knowledge for ten years and his soul has been surging up and down in the most diverse moods in the struggle for certain results, then the effects of this cannot simply vanish into nothingness. This is particularly noticeable to anyone who meets someone who has been working hard in this way after quite some time: how the features of the face have changed, shaped by the efforts of the struggling soul. In this way, we can perceive the unique shaping of the soul in the body. Something else also presents itself to us here, which makes this observation a scientific experience; for everyone who struggles in this way can notice in himself, and without any contradiction, that from a certain point on he sees the fruits of his struggle ripening more and faster, as the answer to the questions he wants to answer comes down upon him like a grace. When his soul has arrived at the expression of its struggle in its ultimate consequences in the bodily, then his bodily nature no longer changes, and this is because these struggling forces now emerge fully into consciousness, whereas before they also poured into the bodily and transformed it. When the transformation reached its limit, the forces changed in order to be consciously utilized in accordance with the intention of the developed human being. We can therefore be convinced that everything that forces its way into consciousness and thereby blesses us has worked in the dark depths of the subconscious to develop the organs we needed so that the soul could be completely master of itself and its body.

Once we have directed our attention to the development of the human being, we must still point out something that everyone knows even without clairvoyant abilities, namely, when our life that lies beneath our daytime consciousness shines up into our consciousness during our dreams, which we cannot grasp firmly, however often we have experienced them, even if we experience them according to inner laws, not in random dream figures. The following dream experience may clarify this: a rather zealous, conscientious young person, who also enjoyed drawing in his other lessons, was given a difficult template to copy in his last year at school; he needed quite a long time for his precise, somewhat laborious work and therefore did not finish it by the end of the school year; it did not harm him in the judgment of his teachers, since he had worked diligently and efficiently. Nevertheless, during every lesson, especially towards the end of the school year, he was seized by the fear of not being able to finish his work, and this oppressive sensation haunted him even in his dreams. Even after many years, as an adult, the experience would still come up in his dreams, making him feel like a schoolboy again and, with intense fear, much more than in his daily life, he felt that he would not be able to finish his work, as this had once so often disturbed his school life. This repeated itself for weeks, temporarily ceased, only to recur later. If we want to examine this scientifically, we have to go back over the entire previous life. As a schoolboy, he developed his talent for drawing and also made progress, but this only manifested itself periodically, in leaps and bounds. Each such leap was already preceded by such a series of inner experiences in the schoolboy's life; when these then failed to materialize, he sensed that he had made progress. It remained the same in the development of other abilities in his later life. Now consider whether it is unreasonable to claim that the inner core of the human being was working to bring progress to this person. Before this progress occurred in his soul life, everything took place in the subconscious, but he kept pushing further and further into the physical, and shortly before the breakthrough, before his organs were developed for the external activity of the heightened mental ability, that is, before the last steps, it became apparent in the dream life described that the soul was almost finished with the development of the bodily organ, and then finally, without an accompanying dream experience, to emerge as a product of the spiritual core of the being, externally completely usable in its configured and transformed form.

From this point of view, we can gradually proceed to all the everyday events of life in their alternating states of waking and sleeping. From this point of view we can gradually proceed to all the everyday events of life in their alternating states of waking and sleeping. Through the sensory observation of sleep, one can come to such a realization. How does the moment of falling asleep occur? The person feels how all the senses become duller, the sharp contours of the images fade, everything becomes hazy. If someone who is trained observes this stage, then he comes to an idea about what he did the day before; he feels in a vivid feeling whether he can be satisfied or dissatisfied with himself. In the former case, this feeling is accompanied by such bliss and by the wish that this transition and these thoughts would not end, which fertilize him and flow through his limbs like a new invigoration. But then there is a jolt with which the spiritual and mental core of the being, as a reaction on the body, moves away, and sleep sets in.

It has been pointed out before that those who have to learn a lot soon realize and know from their own experience how good it is to be able to indulge in a revitalizing sleep. Physiologically, sleep and the refreshment it provides can be understood as a state or a process in which what has been worn down during the waking state of the day is rebuilt, and new strength is generated by the spiritual and soul core of the being working into the sleeping body during the state in which it is physically free, as indicated earlier.

When we look at a child as it gradually develops, it is a well-known fact that it lives into the existence of the later waking day life in a formal dream existence, in a sleep life that is only briefly interrupted, especially at the beginning. Everyone knows that it is only from a certain point in time that they can say “I” to themselves, and thus only from that point on that they have become aware of themselves. Anyone who recognizes the principles of physics and chemistry must admit that the mental and spiritual powers with which the child can say “I” to itself after the first years of development must have been there earlier, at a time when they developed the most important and noblest organ of the human being, when the human core formed the brain and worked it out in ever greater detail. The fact that the materialistic science cites that the left cerebral convolution is the speech center, that man cannot speak if these brain parts are not well developed, may be countered only briefly by the fact that a person cannot learn to speak if, for example, he lives on a deserted island, whereas other physiological processes, such as teething, would occur without further ado. Therefore, the mental capacity in the child must be developed to such an extent that the development of speech is initiated and the brain is trained for this purpose; therefore, speaking is not the consequence, but the accompanying and constantly effective cause for the development of the speech center. The soul and spirit must always first have an effect on the physical, working on it so that the organs can develop that are later to be used in the physical world in the sense of conscious thinking. If we summarize these individual thoughts, we are thereby shown everywhere that the process of development takes place in such a way that the whole human body is built up from a supersensible core of being. We can never come to understand this supersensible being if we only remain with its product, the physical body organization. We must always go back to what takes possession of this organization at the beginning of its formation; observation always teaches us this.

Now, in natural science, it is always particularly emphasized that in order to establish conclusive proof, the results of observation must also be obtained in an experiment. The possibility [to do so] is also present here, even if this test is not always necessary. But how [can this be done]? Man must prepare and use his own soul, himself in the fullest sense, as an instrument for grasping the spiritual world. You will find a more detailed account of how this is possible in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. Today, I would merely like to point out that man can also experience the onset of sleep while fully conscious if he makes himself capable of doing so by concentrating on his innermost soul life and through long continued meditation on suitable thoughts. If we hypothetically assume that at the beginning of sleep the spiritual core of the being steps out of the person falling asleep and, figuratively speaking, enters a higher world, then the sufficiently trained person can directly observe this core of the soul through real, experimental observation of the spiritual world. This core of being very easily eludes ordinary perception when falling asleep, since usually too little energy is present in the person to become aware of it when experiencing the soul's separate state. These latent energies must be strengthened, developed; the person must practice discarding all the hindering conditions and try [to achieve a state] in which, so to speak, physical hearing and seeing passes away. Of course, this is only possible gradually and must be initiated by first achieving lasting control over one's earlier emotional movements; grief, anger, and agitation of all kinds must be balanced out, and we must pour calmness over ourselves. When we have worked in this way for a while with sufficient success, we can begin to devote ourselves to certain thoughts of the good, the beautiful, and the true, thoughts that are not borrowed from the world of the senses, and to cultivate symbolized thoughts that express nothing external. If we are willing to move and experience enough within ourselves, then after long and strenuous devotion, we will achieve that our soul becomes an instrument of observation in the sense indicated, in that the powers that previously proved to be too weak to arrive at self-conscious perceptions when falling asleep, now push their way to ever-increasing clarity, instead of leading to a blurred consciousness in the indefinite depths of the soul. Organs are incorporated into the soul organism, which allow us to gain new possibilities of perception. Then the person developed in this way is able to perceive vividly what was previously unconscious and to suppress anything that disturbs him, thus making the soul empty and suitable for the finer impressions of the spiritual world; he will then perceive that the tired person can gather new strength in the spiritual world, which he enters when he falls asleep.

It is also possible for a person to experience a state equivalent to the generally known fatigue in this sense, [but] without the disturbance of the former, during concentration of thought, in such a way that the latter state allows one to remain fully awake and conscious, thus making an effort to ensure that all experiences occur in conscious forms and thus continue completely. Then the person will perceive that he cannot use his body and also his brain, but feels outside of them and cannot chisel into them what he experiences outside of the body. With continued practice of the appropriate exercises, the feeling and the possibility will gradually arise to influence the physical body with the inner soul processes, so that it becomes more and more docile and pliable to the demands and impressions of the soul, until it is generally so prepared and particularly the brain is so formed that it is able to express what is experienced outside of it, to communicate it to others.

This experiment can therefore be done to observe the hypothetical workings of the soul on the body itself; there is no difference in terms of the evidence of these processes compared to the method of natural science. Then we are faced with the possibility that we can say: When a person is born into earthly physical life, his supersensible core of being emerges completely from the supersensible world, and so the human being will also have emerged into life for the first time. As educators, we can observe that young people bring nothing unknown to our world into the earthly world that could never have been connected to our world. Rather, they come equipped with powers that they have already gathered at an earlier time in the physical world, in earlier stages of cultural development. If we look at life more broadly, we are immediately confronted with the fact that every morning, when we wake up, we feel confronted by our past life. When, as mentioned earlier, the human being struggles with his body and this struggle of the soul finds an end in the formation of wrinkles and furrows, the soul ceases the physical transformation, and the soul's powers then become consciously perceptible. Every morning, the soul meets the body at this boundary and can lead it further, as far as it allows with its inherent elasticity. We also see from this that we experience and learn more than we can utilize in our body, because it is, after all, largely fully formed; nevertheless, it continues to have an effect on our spiritual and soul core.

All this can be observed in everyday life, and if it is applied in healthy educational principles, the good effects will be maintained throughout the whole of life. It will be felt that the human being always feels like a student during his life, never loses the bliss of constantly letting new things take effect on him, while a wrong education makes one blasé. When the body has reached the peak of its development and maintained it for a while, but then slowly begins to degrade again, which occurs in the second half of life, we feel that the soul can no longer work on the body as it once did, but that our spiritual-soul core of being, in constant connection with the outer, physical body, now really grows in the emotions and sensations. With the destruction of the brain, the soul life of the person concerned will only cease in the physical, since it is not the brain itself that thinks and so on, but with the help of the brain, thought takes place in the physical. But what is not directly connected to the brain, we feel with increasing age and perceive the decline of the physical, which can no longer be further developed, as a relief.

Finally, the human being passes through the gate of death. The spiritual and soul essence has been enriched in many ways during earthly life and is now working on the preparation of those forces that bring about a repetition of life, in which a new life material is given to a person who has been reborn as a child.

The memory of the previous life is interrupted in an immediate way, especially the memory of details, because the physical body is completely given over to the physical world as a corpse; even that which has only superficially impressed itself on the soul is, as it were, thrown off like a second corpse, since the soul can no longer use it. Only that which the soul can use to achieve new abilities is retained, as formative powers for a new life, which are suitable for building a new body. Thus the idea of repeated earthly lives is justified in itself, and the idea of development that lies at its heart follows as a logical, necessary consequence of what the natural sciences have achieved. In this connection, however, the fact must be taken into account that not all courses of life are to be understood in the sense of a continuous ascent, but despite many fluctuations, whether rooted in man or not, the sum total of repeated lives is an upward climb, a gain.

Sleep can be delayed or even prevented altogether by vivid thoughts that arise in a person as soon as they relate to emotions, joy, fear, worry, or concerns of any kind; for these connect the spiritual and mental core of the being with everyday consciousness and therefore do not allow it to penetrate into supersensible worlds. The person can only fall asleep when this state is finally numbed by excessive tiredness, or when it is distracted from the earlier thoughts by returning to calmer thoughts, especially those of a more ideal direction in life. Similar conditions also apply to the building of a new life. This will be achieved in a downward sense if the forces for this have to be taken from selfishness, or if those who cling to it have to be drawn upon. This also makes the ascending and descending nature of the individual courses of life understandable, so that in this respect, too, life can provide us with evidence for the views presented. The spiritual soul essence enters the germinating body of the child and forms it as the builder of this body. And whoever encounters man uninhibitedly in his natural conditions of origin and growth will find such conditions confirmed as facts. We have been able to verify this, for example, in the case of a man who attained a particularly high level of clairvoyance, namely Michel Nostradamus (Notre-Dame), born in St. Remy in Provence in 1503 and died in Salon in 1566. He was a doctor who worked with the greatest devotion as long as he was left in peace. He was banned from practicing medicine and withdrew to a kind of spiritual observatory, where he studied nature and astronomy. Here he allowed the constellations in particular to take effect on him spiritually and in doing so became aware of some inner abilities of his soul that had previously remained hidden from him. He saw these as a divine gift bestowed upon him for his seclusion. Particularly when he devoted himself to the macrocosm in full tranquility, without being affected by the surging and surging of his soul life, his clairvoyant gift emerged, with which he also achieved great results in his prophecies for the future. We see how the spiritual-soul core of his being broke through the natural conditions of existence, after the forces he had previously used as a physician could no longer be expended; they asserted themselves in the way indicated, because it was not possible to to let them disappear without further ado, and entirely in line with the scientific view of the “conservation of energy”, those forces that had previously been channeled into external activity were transformed into clairvoyant powers, which in turn evoked further inner soul energies. This can also be achieved through meditation and concentration, under the influence of which the human being is prepared to overcome space and time with his perceptions and to see differently than is possible when seeing in physical everyday life. On this occasion, I would like to draw attention to the book “Das Mysterium des Menschen” by Ludwig Deinhard, which explains the complete harmony of external methods with those of spiritual science.

Thus we can look back from our time, in which spiritual science can once again draw new courage for further success, to those upheavals in world and life views, as they were indicated in the introductory words of our lecture, where new elements entered into the sphere of human feeling, just as humanity today, when observing the development of soul and spirit, is in a similar situation to that when Copernicus removed the ground from under our feet and applied thinking instead of observation. If we look only at the sciences, such as astronomy, biology and so on, which have grown not through observation alone, but mainly through thought, just as in Copernicus' time he and still Giordano Bruno Bruno dissolved the narrow-minded views of humanity into seemingly immeasurable atmospheres and spaces, breaking through the eighth sphere created only by the world of the senses.

From this point of view, spiritual science stands today when it sees people who, until now, limited their environment according to spatial-material perception and their own soul nature between birth and death according to temporal perception. However, since these living conditions could only be limited by misleading observation, this self-imposed limitation can also be broken through. Just as astronomical science, for example, must also have a future in the same sense, so must spiritual science expand the firmament of the limited soul life beyond the limits assumed by most people, and indeed beyond this life, beyond birth and death, into an eternity. Then spiritual science will open up to the world the infinity and immortality of the soul. Once Giordano Bruno was condemned to death by burning at the stake by his opponents and burnt in Rome. Perhaps some people would like to see the same thing happen to the representatives and followers of spiritual science. If this is no longer permissible today, then they try to ridicule and belittle spiritual science as much as possible. But those who cannot get enough of it will thereby pass judgment on themselves instead of on those on whom they believe they can carry it out. But that world view will also receive its judgment, and that through the further development of spiritual science, just as the time has come for the recognition of the scientific view of nature, in the face of retrogressive efforts. But spiritual science will also prove to be particularly capable of giving people real life and not just a theory, blessing them more than the natural sciences, not in opposition to them, but by expanding their healthy principles on new paths of development for humanity. Those who can then see that the world is advancing in this way will not condemn spiritual science, but will march with it to victory.

[Man's yearning to answer the question of eternity does not arise] only from a [fearful] desire for existence, not only from a [petty] yearning for one's own immortality, but, [as a deeper look into the human soul teaches us, it] corresponds to the soul's need for eternity, [it arises from] a deep [spiritual], moral need for human perfection. [There is no moment in the soul when it does not have to be filled with the striving for perfection.] The question about the nature of eternity corresponds to the question of all deeper reflection. It is one of the fundamental questions of all deep human research.

But there was also a certain shyness in the human soul to approach these questions.] Hence the belief in immortality: Only through religious feeling one comes [to a conception of eternity], to the feeling of the immortality of the human soul.

The task of Theosophy is to show that research, [real science], is also possible in the realm of the spirit. [For decades, it has always endeavored to awaken the consciousness in certain circles that research in spiritual spheres is possible.] This contradicts today's habits of thought, people's perceptions [yes very much; it is only too understandable that Theosophy must still be considered fantasy, wild reverie]. But the completely logical way of proceeding in spiritual research, [the basic methods] meet the strictest requirements of natural science, even if it is not admitted.

[All this comes to us in a very special way when we raise the fundamental question of the eternity and nature of the human soul, which is connected with it.

The soul and spiritual core of the human being is already manifest in ordinary life and will do so more and more in spiritual science. [Spiritual science must point to what actually governs human life [...], what the soul and spiritual core is like, how this core relates to the realm of transience.

The idea of repeated lives is a spiritual-scientific idea, as is the developmental principle of the human soul and spirit. [Most of you are familiar with these facts, which should be considered from the perspective of ordinary life.] Goethe said: “Consider the ‘what’, more consider the ‘how’.” The 'what' is known, but what can enlighten us arises from the 'how'. It is believed that the human soul is exhausted in conscious thinking, feeling and willing. [One does not sufficiently take into account the factors that are constantly taking place in the depths of the soul. How little man can say about his temperament, disposition.]

But just as the depths of the sea are unknown to him who only observes the play of the waves on the surface, so the subconscious, in which the ordinary life is rooted, is unknown. [A fleeting glance at life reminds us how unconscious factors are constantly playing into life.] An injustice, for example, experienced as a child and repeated in the student, can lead to suicide. [The student had been reproached and so on by the teacher. Now, that also happens with other children. It is only with this child that it leads to suicide. It is the experiences of the fifth year that had so stirred his soul in hidden depths that they led to the act.) The conscious part of the soul points everywhere into hidden depths of the soul. Where consciousness fades, darkness surrounds you – in sleep or in dreams. [If we eavesdrop on human consciousness, we can find many things.] There is an extensive science of dreams, even if it is not known. An example: a student was given a difficult drawing assignment. After a whole year, he still hadn't finished it. This caused the pupil to become anxious towards the end of the year when the drawing was still not finished. Later in life, the following happened: he kept having a very specific dream in which he saw himself as a pupil with the same fear; but each time it was followed by greater manual dexterity. The latter is only an expression of the abilities developing in his whole being. First it worked in the lower depths of the soul life, and as a transition comes the presence in the half-consciousness of the dream consciousness. It is not enough to say: there is a transformation of natural processes. Humanity will have to come to terms with the fact that there is also a transformation of forces in the spiritual realm. Before they become conscious, they live in hidden depths of the soul in the subconscious. Man would have destroyed these soul forces if he had consciously submerged himself before. At first the soul force works in the subconscious, in the soul core; it is not exhausted by the work on the soul, it works in the subconscious on the human body. The body thus shows the effect of the soul-spiritual shaping.

In a child, we first find untrained movements, an expressionless gaze, and so on. However, the soul-spiritual works into the physical, and gradually the physiognomy changes. Memory only comes from the third year onwards. [Jean Paul's word is true]: There - [in his first three years, of which he has no memory] - the child has learned more than in three academic years, and has also done much more intimate work in the brain. [When we come into existence through birth, our brain is in many ways not yet differentiated.] Consciousness is still dull, still asleep, dreaming. Thus we find the work of this dream-conscious soul-spiritual in the whole human being first in the lower parts of the bodily organization, then in the finer shaping of the human body. Does this activity ever stop? As long as the human being is physically present, from conception onwards, the physical is shaped by the spiritual. From the moment that the subconscious achieves its goal, it can penetrate into the consciousness of the person. It must first work in the subconscious of the organization, on the fine shaping of the human body.

In this way, we can follow the activity of the core of our being in its own physicality by methodically observing our mental life.

The first thing that spiritual research teaches is that the spirit connects with the line of inheritance. Two cases are possible here: that the spiritual soul is doing this for the first time or for the umpteenth time. [Now it will be a matter of finding out whether what is working on the person was already there, whether it provides us with evidence that it was present in previous lives.

A person would have to see himself as a mayfly if he had no memory of previous days. [How does a person recognize himself as a unified being throughout his life, since his consciousness breaks down every day? Without memory, this would not be possible.] He does not have memories of previous earthly lives, but he does have an inkling of them.

[We have to develop the ability to observe how this works in a person's physicality from year to year.] The most important educational problems are solved when we recognize how the abilities that the child brings with them can be adapted to what is already on earth. This is how temperament develops. In a person with a distinctly melancholic disposition, life shows the keynote of a certain sadness. How does this person come to this? A mourning experience looks quite different for a melancholic than for a sanguine person. This basic mood goes to the depths of the soul. [The soul lives in the aftermath of the grief it once went through, which can sometimes be seen even years later. The soul's mood is the consequence of previous grief. In the melancholic, we find grief in the most hidden depths of his being.] The mood of mourning was already imprinted in the body because it was brought from the core of the soul. This cannot come from experiences on earth, it was brought from previous lives on earth. [The spiritual core of the human being worked the mood of mourning into the structure of the human body.] For the mood of mourning could only be brought from there, not from the spiritual world, where there is no mourning. Here it is shown with all clarity what a person has acquired in previous lives. It is just as accurate as the results of science. So that is what ordinary life reveals.

Only through an instrument can a person see into the spiritual world; that is the person himself, as he stands before us in his spiritual and soul life. Through concentration and meditation, he can work his way up into the spiritual world. Another soul life is to be developed. A radical transformation of the soul life in order to gain this instrument is necessary for higher knowledge. Then the human being feels: You are something other than what you were before, when you only thought you were in the physical body [because your feeling ran parallel to certain external or physical processes]. Now he realizes: Now you experience yourself as a real being outside of the physical body; you can completely free yourself from the physical body.

In a spiritual sense, such a person carries out an experiment as in a laboratory. The first experience is a kind of idiocy. One experiences oneself as a new being. No concept can make this clear to a person. It cannot be grasped in concepts, it seems “idiotic” because the brain cannot grasp these experiences, [because there is nothing in the physical world that can provide clarity about them]. At a higher level, [when the soul powers are getting stronger and stronger, then concepts arise]; there the brain, [which appears as a rough block], must now be consciously worked on, as unconsciously in the case of a child. Then we look at what we can only grasp logically in ordinary life.

[Humanity would be paralyzed in the future if it did not receive knowledge about its spiritual and mental powers.

In the thirty-fifth year of life, the ascending line is transformed into the descending line. On the descending line, the forces from earlier lives are exhausted, but forces from new experiences are accumulated, [which we have acquired in this life]. These never attain the strength to work into the bodily organization. One will accumulate body-forming forces, but one's own physical body stands as an obstacle.

[But at the same time, the person will feel forces entering him that can shape a new life for him.

For many people, the joy of life fades by the age of thirty-five because they have not kept the sense of the richness of life open in their youth, but in the depths of the soul, forces develop, a feeling that one carries within oneself, forces for a new core of being, then no sadness of old age follows.

In the education of the child, one should never lose the sense of the school of life. An open, healthy mind will develop the human soul from an early age in such a way that the person remains open to spiritual science. The feeling is to be developed that the human being carries within himself a spiritual-soul core of being that freely builds itself a new body after death. [Through spiritual science, we gain security and confidence through the moral forces it gives us.]

In this way, we can experience the victory of the immortal, the victory of eternity over mortality. All creations are mortal, but what lives to eternity is immortal, as Giordano Bruno says. [The spirit is the creator of the mortal, and we thereby recognize its immortality.] Immortality does not begin only after death; man can already experience it now.

Ladies and Gentlemen! The subject of today's lecture must interest every human being. Not only is it interesting to ask what happens to a person after they have crossed the threshold of death, but they also have a profound moral obligation to know something about the essence of the human being. Man feels what can be called the urge for perfection in the noblest sense. This striving can never be completed. With this realization, the endeavor arises to know something about how man can succeed, what the possibility is to satisfy the striving for perfection. This raises the question of death and immortality.

Our time with its habits of thought is not favorable [for such questions]. Therefore, a new school of thought, spiritual science, is trying to approach this question. It has to be so alien to today's life that it seems strange. Therefore, some people who are here tonight will not be immediately convinced. Those who have never heard of it before will perhaps only shake their heads, be ironic, or perhaps even just scoff. I realize that I will face all kinds of resistance. I will only give one example of logical thinking, which is entirely in line with genuine scientific thinking. If one wants to penetrate to the essence of the human heart, one must be made aware of the saying of a philosopher, to the effect that the immortality of the soul, if it exists, cannot begin only with death, but must already be linked to ordinary life.

How do you come to the realization of a thing, being and the like? This is what science asks. Combining hydrogen and oxygen to form water is quite different from considering each of these two substances on its own (for example, separating the oxygen and examining it on its own).

Just as we have our soul in our daily lives, it lives in the body like oxygen in water. The soul perceives through the ear, the eye and so on. All expressions of the soul are only possible because the soul is connected to the organs – like hydrogen with oxygen in water. If there is no way to separate the soul, then one would despair of not being able to recognize the basic nature of the soul.

Is there a state in life where the spiritual-soul life separates from the physical being? It can be said that something different occurs during sleep; the bodily functions take place differently [than in the waking state]. Is it not much more likely that the soul separates and leaves the body alone? Can the content of our soul, our emotional experience – joy and suffering – be logically explained, can this soul-being have an existence separate from the body?

There is a logical thinking that cannot escape this. Let us assume that a person would indeed undergo a change in such a way that only the body is still active; all soul, on the other hand, is extinguished. When the lung activity is maintained, we cannot recognize the nature of oxygen, [that is] of what enters the lungs, but the lung life activity remains in itself - it is something other than the oxygen itself.

Thus we must seek to recognize the nature of the soul as something different from the organization of our body. The independence of oxygen from the lungs is therefore the independence of the soul from the life activity of the lungs.

In the moment when the soul leaves the body during sleep, consciousness becomes deeper and deeper, and the independent life of the soul thus begins.

Today we want to take a closer look at dream life. A boy with a talent for drawing was given a particularly difficult drawing task that he was unable to complete in time for the school exam. He therefore had a fear. Nevertheless, even though he had not completed the task, his grade was not worse for it.

Periodically, a dream now returns as a state of fear in this person's life, but much stronger than before, so that he often wakes up trembling from it. Then days go by without him dreaming like that. However, it becomes apparent that his drawing ability is improving. At the end of such an intermediate period, the fearful dream always returns. Before this greater ability flowed into the hand, it roamed in the subconscious; the states of fear appeared in dreams. And when the increased abilities showed themselves, when they were there, then the dream stopped. These abilities first work in the organism – in materialistic terms, on the nerves, the organs. Before they enter consciousness, the soul prepares the physical organization, it works on the organs.

Here we approach the soul; we catch the soul at work in the organization of the body. The soul works on the organization from conception to death – or, to put it more precisely, [still] somewhat differently. We can remember back to a certain point in our lives. In the years before our memory, the soul works in a completely different way on our organization – without our consciousness. Even before we become conscious, the soul must have been there, and consequently before it was active in the body. Down in the organism, these forces are at work preparing the organization, just as in the example mentioned earlier, the drawing skills, the soul work, presented itself in dreams. In this area, materialistic views are absolutely insufficient.

That a human being gets false teeth happens in any case; that a person can speak is not so obvious. Without other people, he will never learn to speak. So the ability to speak cannot just be due to the speech organs, but the life and weaving of language within us works out this ability.

Since the human being is a coherent being, it must be assumed that there is something spiritual about him from the very beginning, even before the physical work.

[Here is another comparison:] How can one assume that a person who has had trouble all day will be in a different frame of mind in the evening? This is how the spiritual always works. The state of mind can be compared quite well with what the person has experienced before. [So one must assume:] Not from supersensible worlds, but only from living with people can the state of mind arise with which the person enters life through birth. Such trains of thought are entirely in line with the way of thinking of today's natural science. So the idea of repeated earth lives is something that arises by itself.

Only two hundred years ago it was assumed that animals, worms for example, could develop out of inanimate mud. But Francesco Redi formulated the now irrefutable sentence: “Living things can only come from living things.” It was only with great difficulty that he was able to escape the fate of Giordano Bruno because of this sentence. However, the sentence “Spiritual-mental can only arise from spiritual-mental” will initially be ridiculed and mocked, but then gradually accepted and finally taken for granted in the future.

What happens in this life affects later lives; these are only logical conclusions - but experiments [in this field] are also important and possible. Ludwig Deinhard has written a book about this.

But everyone can only use their own soul as a tool to investigate the soul. Not everyone can become a spiritual researcher, but just as anyone can educate themselves about astronomy, chemistry and so on, the same is true here, as will be briefly explained. People make themselves a tool for exploring the spiritual world.

[Let us take another example:] Nostradamus. - In the book by Kemmerich about prophecies there is a whole chapter about Nostradamus. Nostradamus was a doctor, he was a doctor by nature and did an infinite amount of good, especially during the plague in Provence. But] it was said that he was a Calvinist, which undermined his reputation. The powers that he otherwise gave to humanity with all his soul were transformed into prophetic gifts – visionary gifts, like the power of thought into warmth, warmth into movement and so on. The visionary gifts could only take place under certain conditions. Nostradamus created a laboratory for himself, that is, a room with a glass roof where he stayed at night. When the soul had become completely calm, the stars were then observed, and this triggered sayings that Nostradamus recorded. All worries and concerns ceased. This state of mind was inherited from his fathers. The modern-day seer must artificially create this state of mind. He has to bring special impulses to the forefront of the soul. Symbols are best for this, those that stimulate our soul, shake us up inwardly. The forces slumber beneath – these slumbering forces are awakened by this. Then the person is as if asleep, but not unconscious. We then no longer perceive anything through the [sense] organs. We have the soul as we have oxygen when it is separated from water. We then say to ourselves: You are experiencing another world. At first the experience is such that one cannot put what one has experienced into words. However, spiritual science could never be taught if it remained that way. The spiritual researcher must go further and further, especially when he has experienced something that he cannot express. One knows: one experiences something, but one cannot think it. If one continues the exercise, one also learns to speak about it. One experiences what one experienced as a child when learning language. We learn to use our brain. We can only experience this in pain, so to speak.

If one has triumphed over one's organism, then one has also explored it experimentally.

Once our culture has been permeated by spiritual science, it will be possible to approach the education of young people quite differently. People can then have different, inner soul experiences than in today's spiritual culture.

In the second half of life, when the soul no longer has a constructive effect on the bodily organization, these soul-spiritual forces, which one acquires through schooling in life, accumulate and have reached their greatest tension at the moment of death. The energies to work in the [physical] organization again must be sought in the soul-spiritual life.

These spiritual-mental powers that build the body are beyond decay and becoming. These powers arise precisely because of death. This realization gives us courage and strength.

Two questions, which undoubtedly touch the interest of every human soul in the most significant sense, will be dealt with in the two lectures today and tomorrow. This evening, more from a general point of view, and tomorrow, the consideration of certain individual questions will be introduced. There is no doubt that the questions concerning the nature of death and what may be hidden in the word “immortality” must truly arouse the deepest, most sincere interest in every human soul, and one may say, must still be the greatest conceivable interest, if we disregard all the wishes and desires that attach themselves to the event of death and to the question of immortality for the human soul.

But all idle curiosity, even all that is called curiosity in ordinary life, can be set aside when considering these two questions. We can refrain from doing so because in every profound moment of our lives we are constantly stimulated – sometimes more consciously, sometimes more from the deepest, most hidden parts of our soul – by two things: the strength and confidence, the certainty of hope in our lives, to want to know something about these questions. There are two things. The first is everything that is included in the idea of human destiny. This destiny not only raises theoretical questions for us, but vital questions, and we know that if we cannot receive any information that can somehow satisfy us, this must mean a weakness, doubt, belittling of our soul. Human destiny mysteriously and enigmatically intervenes in human existence. One person is placed, seemingly through no fault of their own, in a position that can hardly give them satisfaction, a place where it is impossible for them to develop any significant powers for the good of others and their work. On the other hand, we see how, seemingly without merit, the other stands in a place that not only makes a rosy existence possible for him, but also allows him to develop the best talents for the benefit and good of others. Man, with his theories, asks for the causes when external facts occur, and there is a certain reluctance to search for the causes of human destiny.

When we look at our emotional life, with all the mysterious things that can happen in it, we realize that it is precisely the most intimate depths of our soul that raise the questions about the causes of our destiny. Perhaps the individual does not ask: What are the causes of this or that happening in my life – that would be a theoretical coloring of the question; but what we feel calls us to contentment or despair, to hopeful work or to dejection in the face of all activity. But the most important questions in this area are those that perhaps cannot even be formulated in theoretical terms, but which express themselves in satisfaction, in depression, in a feeling of abandonment and loneliness; they are questions that, only half posed in the soul, remain stuck before an open formulation, but constitute the happiness and suffering of our entire existence. If fate could intervene in our lives in such a way that we could say it promotes our abilities here or there, our actions, [or] hinders our progress, then the questions would not be so burning. But if we look more deeply, we find that everything we are in the innermost part of our being – how we live, how our value, our ability presents itself – is the result of our fate. Man says to himself that the whole being, the whole inner configuration of the being, is not so dependent on what appears to approach life from the outside and shape and form this life.

So it is the anxious question to fate, which, perhaps only half raised, goes to ask: Where does our whole existence actually come from? What is it that is mysteriously enclosed within us and is so dependent on what we have to experience as our outer destiny? We need only think of two facts, in addition to the countless individual cases: there we will find how our whole being, our innermost nature, is dependent on destiny. The first fact is that the human being is placed in some linguistic area, in a national context. Who knows how much of our intimate soul life overflows from the way language penetrates us. Or how much of our sense of confidence in life and our hopes depends on how our parents, our environment and our teachers respond to us in our early youth. How a rough treatment can harden our whole being throughout our earthly existence! One need only think how mysterious the connections of fate are in this area in particular. A case taken directly from life can teach us about this very area: a child who, in his seventh year, experienced a strong injustice at the hands of those around him, due to the way his destiny placed him in a community. Sometimes the child forgets it, seemingly on the outside, but in the depths of the soul it lives on and continues to have an effect in the deep layers of the soul, which has taken root as injustice in the soul. The child then becomes a middle school student. Something special happens in his sixteenth year. A strong effect comes from his teacher in the sense that the student has to experience a new injustice. If he had not experienced the injustice in his seventh year, the matter might have passed by without effect, as it did for his fellow student. But because the old impression continued to work in the depths of the soul, while it was forgotten for the outer being, it joined together with the experience of the seventh year, and a student suicide resulted. Thus we see how our whole being, the way we enter into life, is more deeply connected with the question of our destiny.

The second thing can be seen by reflecting on how one's life unfolds, how one gathers one's life experiences, how one becomes more and more mature as the years go by. This may be more or less the case for one person or another, but this maturing is evident from a close examination of life, and it is usually the case that we have to say to ourselves: we have matured in those things that we did imperfectly, from the point of view that we have to take after we have gained experience. If we were allowed to do them a second time, we would do them better. We learn things in life, but we learn precisely by doing imperfect deeds in this life. The most intimate life experiences result from making our imperfect actions our teachers. Then we look back from a point in our development and say to ourselves: We learn many things, we have become more mature, and this knowledge is within us. What happens to this experience when we pass through the gate of death? Does it disappear without a trace in the floods of nothingness? Yes, we do not always have to take such a life experience, we can say: What we do, learn to refrain from, has an effect that other people experience through it, either as support or perhaps as harm. We know that our value as a human being depends on whether we have harmed or helped other people. From this arises the other life experience, which is concentrated in the overall feeling, in basic sensations, in the need to do many things differently than we did in the past life. So we feel as if we have the sensation of having many debts that we can no longer repay. This is because we have created the debts in such a way that we have the actions in which we committed the debts behind us. These are the most intimate, deepest experiences of the soul. Does everything we have acquired, everything that makes us different from what we were at the beginning of life, does all this end in an indefinite nothing? That is the second thing. No matter what a person's nature may be, no matter how unexpressed it may remain, it remains a question of feeling and of life within him.

Now we can say: in our time, a period of human development lies behind us in which the noblest, most moral people, who were also scientific materialists and yet clung to moral ideas, came to terms with such soul questions in a very peculiar way. If one takes the standpoint of spiritual science, which is to be represented here, an attitude is required that is never unjust, even towards opponents. For it must be said that it was nothing short of heroic how materialistic thinkers found their way, especially in regard to a question such as the one that has now been touched upon. They said to themselves: With death, our inner soul life extinguishes, like the light of a candle when the fuel is used up. But then we have the awareness that what we have experienced lives on in the process of human historical development. Everyone gives to posterity what they have worked for, even if it has only been conquered and worked for in the smallest of circles. Many such thinkers have said to themselves that it is selfish to demand that human beings have their own personal immortality. But it is selfless in the highest sense to die in the full knowledge that the personal self perishes and what one has done passes into the process of humanity. One may say: this information is heroic; compared to much religious egoism, this heroism of materialism appears great, but it cannot stand up to a deeper understanding of the question, for the reason that when everyone looks at life, they must say to themselves: The most intimate part of our life experience is such an innermost good of your soul that you cannot simply give it to the outside world. We can give much for the outside world, but what we give does not belong to the most intimate part of our soul. The best we have learned is so tied to our individuality that it cannot possibly be handed over to the world. So the question remains: how do we cope with the sight of that which the soul has experienced, which has given it value in the way described, which makes it necessary that life is not closed off if this value is to be lived out, which it does not give up when a person passes through the gate of death?

These are the two things: the contemplation of fate and the contemplation of one's own development. These questions are to be answered in such a way that the answer can be called logical and scientific in the same way. To give answers, as answers are given in today's external science, is the goal of the endeavor that can be called spiritual science, which is entering into the culture of the present and through which something of this culture is to be incorporated as an insight into much of what life needs in order to become strong and powerful. It cannot be demanded that the suggestions given today and tomorrow be more than mere suggestions. Those who believe that scientific answers are only those that tie in with external events, with what can be seen with the eyes and grasped with the hands, will naturally not accept the answers as scientific. Only suggestions are to be given, but these are intended to show that the whole way of thinking, the whole way of looking at spiritual life, is the same as the ways of research in today's science. Modern man also demands information about the questions characterized in such a way that this information can stand up to strict scientific scrutiny. Thus, the answers will appear to be different from science in the usual sense, but anyone who delves deeper will see that the way of thinking in Theosophy is such that the scientific needs as well as the heartfelt needs of modern humanity can be satisfied.

The starting point must be that of real, true self-knowledge. Because fate shapes the essence of our “self” and because our “self” becomes more and more mature, we are confronted with these questions and can therefore hope that a true knowledge of our innermost being, of what we call our “self”, will lead to an answer. But it is difficult for the modern man to recognize what can be called self-knowledge. There are formidable obstacles to the contemplation of one's own nature. Only by overcoming these obstacles can he enter into self-knowledge, and from self-knowledge, through the connection of his own ego with the world, pass into knowledge of the world.

If we want to examine a substance in science, we cannot recognize its essence under certain conditions. Although oxygen is contained in water, we cannot examine it in water; we must first separate it from the water by a physical process, only then can we examine its essence. How different it is when it comes to us in water! It must be something similar if we want to examine our self so that this examination can satisfy us. Our self is, like the oxygen to the hydrogen, bound to the outer body in ordinary life. What we call our soul body, that in which we find ourselves as in our most intimate inner being, we always experience in such a way that we look at the outer world through our bodily organs, so that we learn to understand it through the human brain. Just as oxygen is bound to hydrogen to form water, so is the life of the soul bound to the life of the body, to what we have before us as human beings, as ourselves. So there arises the necessity that we first detach the life of the soul from the life of the body in order to truly examine it.

How can we do this? How can we present our soul life to ourselves in such a way that we can contemplate it in its truth? Now, according to the results of spiritual research, everyday life detaches the soul from the body during the night in the course of twenty-four hours. Let us accept this for the time being as an assertion; we will come back to it later. When a person falls asleep in the evening, the full human being is not contained in the body; what continues the external soul functions, as happens in the waking state, but not the actual soul life, which we recognize as our innermost being, as suffering, affects, drives and passions, is truly set aside during the night's sleep and in the morning reenters and submerges into the body, in order to use the bodily organs, the senses and the brain, the instrument of the soul. If we start from scientific prejudices, we will say that it is possible that the entire spiritual life, with all its sensations and feelings, with everything that takes place within, is nothing other than a result of physical life, just as the flame is the result of processes in the candle. But this does not hold up under deeper examination. It must be clear to us from common sense that there is something to it.

In the state that a person goes through from falling asleep to waking up, the processes that we can only understand as life processes take effect on his body. What flows from within as organic activity into the brain and other organs continues to have an effect. A comparison suggests a logical thought, which cannot be escaped on deeper reflection. If we compare our sense organs with the lungs, we find that our lungs, like our sense organs, are nourished from within and sustained by the organism. What we see flowing in as a life activity can be compared to what flows into the brain and other organs from within the body during the day and also during the night as a nutritional activity. But can something be identified that takes place within the body and supplies the activity of the lungs from within, through the nature of the air that must flow into the lungs? Could the activity of flowing into the lungs from within ever reach the lungs' goal if the air did not flow in from the outside? Does this inner life activity have something to do with the nature and composition of air? We cannot learn anything about air from within. It is the same with the soul. Just as the essence of the air that flows into the lungs is not connected with the activity that flows into the lungs as organic activity, so the content of our soul, which flows in in the morning and leaves the body in the evening, has just as little to do with what our inner bodily activity is, with what flows into our soul organs from our organism as nourishment.

If you look deeply into this comparison, try to think it through – you will not escape the logical thought that what we live in as our soul life, what flows into us, is just as foreign to the inner bodily activity as the air is to the inner bodily activity, so that the independence, the inner essence of our soul life appears well-founded. A person truly does not live with their soul life in such a way that they say: I live in my muscles, my brain. That is not their soul life, but rather: I live in my feelings, affects. That in which they live in this way enters their body in the morning like an inhalation process and leaves it in the evening like an exhalation.

In response to this thought, logical thinking can now raise the question: How can we observe soul life, which is so independent of bodily life, in itself? If we could observe it during sleep, we would be helped. But in normal life, although the soul separates from the body, we cannot examine the secret nature of soul life, because at the moment it separates, it becomes unconscious and eludes examination. But there is another way to penetrate to this soul life, which can be encountered by every person, and that is through a psychic experiment by the spiritual researcher who has obtained the instrument to artificially separate his soul life from the body; this is clairvoyant observation.

The first observation that can arise for anyone is the following. It starts from the question: What prevents us from observing our soul life separately from our bodily life? There are two reasons. Firstly, the moment we wake up, a connection is made through the senses and the thinking bound to the senses with the sensual outside world, so that we do not have our soul life to ourselves, we are not in our soul life, but in what is around us as a luminous, sounding world. The experiences of our soul flow together with what enters us through eyes and ears. Whenever we enjoy a sound, we always have, so to speak, the sound that enters from outside and the joy within us as two things that flow together. But we merge with the outer sound. We do not separate our soul life so that we lose ourselves in the outer sensory world. When we look up at the magnificent starry sky and contemplate the wonders of the rising and setting sun, everything that affects us from the outside, we feel it flowing together with what is happening in the innermost part of our soul, what uplifting and devotional experiences we have in our soul, what strength flows to us. We have never chemically separated our inner being from what penetrates from the outside world. That is why some philosophers say that there is no such thing as an inner soul life, even denying the inner soul content and allowing it to merge with those images that ebb and flow on the horizon of our soul life. For the more intimate observer, Goethe's words come true: What gives the numerous stars, all the glories of the celestial space, their true value? But only that everything that lives outside in the wide world is reflected in the human heart, is expressed, so that something is experienced that goes beyond ordinary expression. And if one proceeds to a thorough self-observation, one will find: The soul feels what is happening outside, it knows that it is experiencing inner things in outer events, that it has gradually progressed, that inner soul events have followed one another and a continuous stream has arisen from the present moment to the moment until which we can remember back, that this stream is something different than what merely affects us from the outside. The independence of our soul life seems convincing, and we wonder whether our soul life can detach itself from its surroundings when we are directly confronted with the external world and flow together with it. But when we look back on what we have not only seen but also experienced in terms of elation and despondency, and what we can remember, we find a stream of inner soul life.

This stream is precisely what was mentioned earlier. It is the experience of life. With this we stand at a certain point in our lives. No matter whether our life is short or long, when we pass through the gate of death we will find ourselves in the same situation. We will see the stream of evolving life, see what has welled up in this soul from the outer world, and we will ask ourselves the question when we take the great leap through the gate of death: Where to put what has developed as a continuous stream in our soul? So there is one obstacle: our growing together with the outside world.

Therefore, it is essentially a developmental success if we learn to isolate ourselves through a review, through an examination of the interior. But one thing comes to us when we isolate the soul life, that we say to ourselves: It is coherent, what flows there step by step. We look back to our first memory; what lies before, we can not remember ourselves, but older people can tell us about it. We remember what happened from that moment on, and we will make an effort to have moments like that again, where we artificially induce the state of sleep, but only on that side, whereby we exclude the external impressions.

When we close ourselves off from the splendor of the outside world and from the other stimuli of the outside world at such moments, then we secrete the inner life, as we separate oxygen from water. This is a matter of experience for which no theoretical proof can be provided, just as one does not need proof that whales exist if one has never seen one. If we always keep this inwardness in mind, we can say that the soul life lines up step by step, and we come to the point at which external memory reaches back. We can conduct a kind of experiment with our entire inner experience. If we see that this stream of soul life flows from the point just characterized and the later is added to the earlier, what is added to the point up to which the first memory reaches? We see how our soul life strives forth; but what caused the first moment that we recall? Now it is possible to evoke something within the soul life that only works in the soul experience, that can give something completely new, never before seen, to the human soul.

To characterize what this new, never-before-seen thing looks like, I would like to point something out. Hydrogen is a gas, oxygen is a gas; these two gases give water, something completely new from two different things. Just as something new and unlike anything in the world is created through the interaction of external things, so too, if we turn our gaze ever further into the stream of our soul life, all the way back to the starting point in this reminiscence, something entirely new can arise. Someone who had never seen that two gases produce liquid would not believe it. What provided the initial impetus in our lives? What we experience as our destiny presents itself to us as if of its own accord. Our destiny presents itself as an answer to this question. Why did it start from precisely this starting point? Why did it turn out this way? This question is answered by looking at our destiny and considering only that we have to consider destiny not with an idea, but with something completely different. What do we want to consider our destiny with? What we want to look at our destiny with, arises from the second obstacle, namely that we usually do not look at our destiny as we do now, when we have come to this point. The second great obstacle is self-love, self-will.

This self-will is a strange thing. Let us try to characterize it. What it is that makes us feel content with ourselves, that gives us satisfaction in our lives, does not need to be characterized. But this self-will has something peculiar about it: it breaks through something in our soul life. This will, it may accomplish whatever deeds, wishes, desires – if our reason is to remain true to us, we must admit that it cannot readily intervene on its own in the way that life experience has formed itself. We let life teach us, we go to the school of life and let life dictate what we have to believe. Whether we consider something to be true or false does not depend on our own will. It is precisely that which makes us mature in life, that which gives us knowledge, from which the will must be excluded! We may not summarize our experiences arbitrarily, but as common sense, the logic of the facts, dictates.

But this will is bound to our corporeality as a power of the soul in a different way than our ideas and perceptions, on which our experience depends, and in which we cannot distinguish between inside and outside. Our will is bound to our corporeality differently. We see very clearly how it continually intervenes in our corporeality. Let us consider what we learn in the normal course of life as fatigue. It comes from the fact that muscles or other organs are worn out. Nothing seems more obvious to the superficial impression than this. It seems credible that physical organs wear out, and yet it is not true. The physical organs that live in a very specific way in our organism do not wear out. How would it be if organs like the heart had to recover through sleep? The organs that are not influenced by the conscious will always remain active and do not wear out. Consider the lungs, heart, diaphragm, and even the inner workings of the nervous system; these forces are always at work. What wears out is what emanates from our conscious will. When we work to make our muscles move through our will, we become tired. No work tires us that comes from the organism itself, but remains within the organism itself. As long as the will is active, active itself, it does not wear out the organism.

Another fact also shows it. It is the same with the thought process: if we give ourselves up to the day's musings, we do not get tired, but we do when we intervene in the thinking with our will, in that consciousness, as an expression of our soul life, intervenes from the outside in our bodily organization, which we see works independently. The human will can only work as self-will by allowing itself to be stimulated from the outside, by feeling compelled by some coercion; this will wears down our organism, so that we can say: Everything that is the wear and tear of life, that consumes our body, springs from the will, which is forced by something, which does not remain in the being of the human being or within the soul's being, which is stimulated and determined from outside, which, as self-will, is in opposition to what must be from outside, which is a destructive force for our organism.

What is the opposite that builds up our organism? What actually brings it into its configuration? It cannot be a thought, not ideas, not feelings; it must be something that, like the will, intervenes in our organism. Our own will must not feel forced from the outside; it must be able to be completely as its own will. It can be when our destiny presents itself to us in such a way that we do not imagine it in ideas and concepts, but with the will, so that our own will does not come into conflict with itself. This can only happen if, however much we may quarrel and struggle with our destiny, we imagine that we would have wanted this destiny, as if we had ordained it ourselves. This can be carried out as a decision of the will. In this way we remove the obstacle of self-will. The will that regards fate as if we ourselves had placed ourselves in the community of language, in the family, has made a decision of the will, even if of a reverse nature.

These are not assertions, but so far we have only evoked certain moods of the soul. Then, as if we ourselves had willed it, our destiny wanders back to the first moment we can remember, like hydrogen wandering to oxygen. Then we have something in our soul that stands before us with certainty, as certain as we know that the flame is hot. Now we are really experiencing something new: the addition of our soul life. Our destiny enters into our soul life, and we have the answer to the question: What gave the first impetus? What we have set up as our self-willed destiny has given the first impulse, and only in this way do we come to a real insight into what we were when we began our present existence on earth, when we understand destiny as something self-willed and connect it with our soul life, which we get to know through self-observation. But then, when we have gained this inner experience, which removes the two obstacles, the outer world - Ahriman - and self-will - Lucifer -, through self-observation, then we penetrate to the realization that it is we ourselves who have shaped fate. The moment – and anyone can experience this moment – can be compared to the moment when we wake up, when we do not say to ourselves: You came from nothing, but: You are what you are now because you fell asleep last night. Those who seriously recognize their soul life in an observation that disregards external observation and destroys self-will come to an experience that is like waking up and remembering earlier lives on earth. His inner core comes across from previous earthly lives and has put together his own destiny; we come to a memory that we have gone through previous earthly lives. It is not an ordinary memory, but our life itself appears to us as a great memory. We come to the assumption of repeated earthly lives. This earthly life, which we go through between birth and death, is the result of previous earthly lives. A person has lived many lives on earth, and it is a given that, based on how the person is now, they will go through further lives on earth. We are dealing with an essence that penetrates into a spiritual world after death and then returns again to another life on earth.

What we can hope for in the time between death and a new birth also arises from introspection. You cannot intervene with your will. Your will and your thoughts, feelings and what you have conquered in the school of life are separate in your soul life. How strange the will is: we move our hand, but what happens from the moment of willing to what we then see as movement, we do not know at first in normal life. We see the will as it expresses itself in life in outer movements, gestures, deeds, but we lack any possibility of seeing how the will passes into movements and deeds. What lies before us, what we have acquired through our life experience, we have to keep at a distance in this life, because if our will were to interfere, it would be falsified by our will. But in the course of life we experience that we cannot let our will work. We cannot influence the way we are placed in this life. When we are somewhat outside of life, then our will need not be hindered from penetrating purely and powerfully through what we experience inwardly. When our body no longer forms the barrier between our will and our life experience, when these outer experiences can no longer form the barrier, then the will can grasp, penetrate and permeate our life experience. We do this between death and a new birth. Our will will permeate everything we have experienced so that we can give the first impetus in a new existence, which we have seen that we have grasped at the beginning of our life on earth.

Thus we see how, by establishing the connection with our ideas, the forces are formed that call us to a new earthly existence. Spiritual science thus arrives at the view of repeated earthly lives, which has become a matter of course for thinkers of modern times, so that they could not help but let their thoughts flow into this world of ideas, for example Lessing, who gave us the 'Education of the Human Race' as the fruit of his life. Then you realize what led Lessing to say that this view is the only way to understand death and immortality. This thought is perhaps despised because people knew about it from time immemorial, because in the past people were not yet confused by the events of the outside world and by what has taken place within human culture, as they are in this time. The soul of man has absorbed what India, Persia, Egypt and Greece have offered, what can be called the stream of human development. Does it make sense for a soul to die forever after absorbing all this? No, it makes no sense. When the soul carries over everything it has acquired into later times and new experiences are added, it is the souls themselves that carry the old cultural achievements over into modern times. Even in the nineteenth century, despite the fact that external scientific conditions were as unfavorable as possible, people came up with this.

But how spiritual science itself comes to an irrefutable conclusion through spiritual experiments by the spiritual scientist can be discussed tomorrow. It should only be explained how it comes about that such an insight is gained by processing the inner soul life. But through this it also has an effect on the inner soul life. On one side we look back at how we have placed ourselves in this life according to our deeds, thoughts and feelings from past lives. We feel that we also have to go through this life with everything that fate brings us, so that our school of life can continue. Feeling this, we say to ourselves: our life, as it unfolds in and around us, is the effect of previous causes that we ourselves have set in motion. This is the doctrine of karma, which for the new spiritual science is not an old law from Buddhism, but is derived from the modern soul itself, educated by science.

This life itself falls into an ascending and descending line. In youth, many forces from previous lives work in such a way that our physical organization can ascend. Our powers develop, becoming richer and richer, until the peak is reached, which gives us satisfaction. Then comes the descending life, where the face wrinkles and the body becomes tired. It is certain for everyone that it will come, and they need thoughts that give strength. But anyone who looks at human life in a spiritual-scientific sense, not just theoretically or rationally, will see that spiritual science gives strength, that it works almost like an elixir of life when we recognize its truth. We feel what flows into our confidence in life, our hopes, our life's work, and people will always feel it once our culture is placed in the light of spiritual science. There we feel how, in the descending life, that grows and must grow, which does not disintegrate in death, but is grasped by our will and, when the greatest resilience is reached, has the strength to enter into the spiritual and, after it has drawn the forces from the spiritual world, to build a new life.

We do not just theoretically consider the questions of immortality; we live and learn and feel the immortality of the soul by feeling the richness of our soul through an intuitive understanding of spiritual science, which tells us: Towards the end of life, you develop ever stronger powers that do not perish any more than the physical powers, which not only transform but are eternal and immortal. In the growth of your powers, in the real existence of your powers, you feel your immortality. Immortality does not begin when we are dead, but already during our lifetime. It is because the human soul is there and because a person can feel it during their lifetime in the body. Spiritual science is not theory, but lifeblood, and if we understand it correctly, it becomes vitality. Thus it does not drive us to speculate, but rather, immortality is something that the soul can feel as something substantial, physical, that enhances our powers and bears within it immortality as its deepest essence and [its deepest] quality. To feel and sense immortality as the source of one's confidence in life, that is what must spring from spiritual science. And so we may summarize in a variation of words how the insights of spiritual science become an elixir of life:

The human senses speak to
the things in the vastness of space,
they change in the course of time
at the deepest core of their being.
The human soul penetrates, recognizing
the vastness of space, unlimited
and unperturbed by the passage of time
into the realm of eternity.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak to you about two important questions from a general point of view, about death and immortality from the point of view of spiritual science. This evening I would like to be allowed to go into some special things that may shed light on these questions. Just as it was possible yesterday, in view of the two major questions discussed, to point to two important experiences of the human soul, which actually always raise these questions more or less explicitly or implicitly from the hidden depths of the human soul, so we can also today we can start from two experiences of our inner being, from two experiences which the human soul constantly points to that idea, which must actually make the mind dizzy when it tries to grasp it in any particular way: the idea of eternity. And when the human soul is often inclined to say that it has something to do with eternity in contrast to the transitoriness of the outer form of the body, it might seem as if such questions arise rather from the longings of the human soul, which desires to have a different fate from the one between birth and death. But here too we can disregard all wishes and desires, even all curiosity, and point to two experiences of the human soul that direct it towards the idea of eternity. These experiences are of the deepest, most inner sense of morality. For what could the human soul feel more deeply and earnestly than the invincible striving for everlasting perfection? One need only, as it were, truly and without prejudice delve into one's own soul and one will have to say that one would have to be dishonest with respect to what the soul wants to be if one did not want to say: an invincible striving for perfection, for a more meaningful existence, dwells in this human soul. That is one experience.

But the other experience, which can assert itself just as strongly, is that at no moment in our lives, even if we reach a very old age, can we deny how far we are from what can shine before us as the ideal of perfection, how much we feel imperfect compared to what we actually want to be according to the innermost being of our minds. The striving for perfection and at the same time the necessary confession of imperfection awakens in the human soul the longing for an eternal striving, for a striving that is unhindered by those external laws of arising and passing away, which we seriously cannot imagine as being able to offer any limits, inner limits to our striving for perfection. Thus we see that man, not out of any greed or desire, but out of the yearning to serve the highest moral order that he has in mind, to strive for the highest moral ideal of perfection, which he must present out of this highest moral desire, raises the question of the immortality of the human soul – but that is the question of eternity.

Yesterday, it was mentioned how the German philosopher Hegel said in a beautiful way: immortality of the human soul as a property that is related to the nature of this soul cannot begin only when man has passed through death; if there is something in the human soul from which one can recognize that this soul has a claim to an immortal existence, then this must also be announced in the life of the soul within the physical existence. Immortality cannot begin only after death; it must also be present in life - in this physical life. So then the question of the nature of eternity also points us to the investigation of the nature of the human soul, in order to recognize from this nature of the human soul to what extent it is conceivable, indeed necessary, to think of the soul as being lifted out of the laws of the perishability of the body. And if we want to examine this nature of the human soul, then, as was also hinted at yesterday, if we want to meet the real, if not the prejudiced demands of modern science, we have to separate this human soul from its connection with the body. For we were able to point out yesterday that it is also impossible, for example, to examine the nature of hydrogen as long as it is bound to water; we have to separate hydrogen from its connection to water if we want to examine its own nature. And so we know that in ordinary, external, normal life, the soul is connected with all that we can call the bodily organization, in that we feel through our body, look outwards, observe things through the external bodily sense organs, in that we think things through that thinking which is bound to the instrument of the brain, and, when we feel and want, we are also bound to our corporeality. Just as hydrogen is bound to water and cannot be recognized within water, the nature of the human soul cannot be recognized in the way it appears to us in normal life, where it is firmly bound and not detached from external experiences and those inner experiences that arise from physicality.

Now, as we said yesterday, basically every night when a person sleeps, a detachment of his soul experiences from the outer bodily life is evoked. In the course of today's lecture, however, we will be able to prove what was only asserted by spiritual science and logically proven yesterday, so to speak, by approaching it from the so-called spiritual scientific point of view. For the time being, however, we will accept it as it was stated as an assertion or logically proven yesterday, that the life we experience in our innermost soul is not something that, like the flame of a candle, , but something that, as an independent entity, emerges in the morning when we wake up, enters into the life of the body when we fall asleep and leaves it again, and thus relates to this bodily life as air relates to the lungs. But it was already mentioned yesterday that something, one could say with joy, makes it “literally” impossible for us to examine the independent soul life, when we have it before us or in us, from falling asleep to waking up. It is impossible because where the detachment occurs, unconsciousness also occurs. So we cannot do the examination in this normal life. We could only become independent of the physical if we became aware of the soul, when it flows away, when it withdraws from the physical.

But there is a possibility to consider an intermediate state, which is not discussed here in the sense of a superstitious dream science, but in the sense of the strictest science: it is the dream state, that strange state of dream life, in which we live in such a way that, on the one hand, we feel that ideas are being conjured before our soul, but on the other hand, the course of these ideas is completely different from the life that the ideas lead in their context in normal, waking daytime life. The dream state is an intermediate state between the waking state and deep, dreamless sleep. Perhaps we can – let us express ourselves in this way for the time being – learn something from the strange illusions of dreams about the nature of the human soul. In order to do so, however, we must proceed according to the same strict, logical and scientific laws of research in the study of dreams as are otherwise applied in the study of life. And so, in order not to extend this consideration too much, we would like to draw your attention to a very specific dream, from which we want to recognize, as it were, how strangely the dream life can have an enlightening effect on what actually goes on inside the soul. I just want to say in advance that when such examples from life, for example from the dream life, are told here, they are not made-up things, but things that have really happened - because only in this way can conscientious research proceed. The dream in question is as follows: There was a student at a secondary school who had a particular talent for drawing. As a result, in the last year of secondary school, he was given a very difficult drawing to copy. Everyone else was given easier templates. It had now become the custom at that secondary school for several such copies of drawings to be handed in at the end of the year. And it so happened that this particular student, precisely because he had a special talent for drawing and was given that difficult template, did not finish the whole year and also by the end of school. This made him very anxious, and this state of anxiety increased towards the end of school. And although the humane administration of that school fully understood that this was natural and did not harm the student, he still had this experience behind him, he had gone through the anxiety attacks. It is interesting to follow this person in the further course of his life. Of course, he continued to show his special talent for drawing. And, recurring periodically, a very specific dream occurred to him, which always lasted several nights and then passed. The dream was that he always felt transported back to the last middle class, where he felt he was trying to draw and draw and could not finish. And the anxiety he went through, so that he always woke up trembling, was so strong in the dream that it could not be compared to the anxiety he had actually experienced. After a break of several years, the dream always returned periodically. This will not be understood unless this strange dream experience is considered in the context of the rest of that person's life. The strange thing was that every time he had recovered from such a dream experience, this person felt that his drawing skills had improved in some way; he could draw better lines, could express what he imagined better, he had become more skilled. So it looked like a gradual perfection of his drawing skills, and each stage was initiated by the characterized nightmare.

You will not find it unnatural if spiritual science now attempts the following explanation of this dream. It is natural that something like an increase in drawing ability cannot suddenly occur in a person's nature, but it appeared as if it always occurred suddenly after that nightmare. This can easily be explained: first certain inner, bodily processes had to take place, finer rhythmic-physiological processes, because we have bound everything that relates to the outer world to the instruments of the body. Changes had to take place in the instruments of the body. These changes took place slowly and gradually through those periods in which consciousness had no inkling that increased abilities would show themselves. For a while, one experiences it in consciousness as if the same intensity of ability were present. But what was needed was being prepared from below, in the depths of the entire human organization, and then, as the heightened drawing ability rose up into consciousness, it became available to the person concerned. And how did what was fermenting and working down there show itself? It showed itself in that it first, in the moment when it was able to break through into consciousness, took place in the half-consciousness of the dream, lived itself out in images of the dream. Before the will was even able to make use of the abilities, it conjured itself up out of the hidden depths of the soul in the dream experience, which basically only bears an external resemblance to what develops in the depths of the soul. We can see two things: the transition from a working process in the subconscious or, let us say, unconscious bodily organization to a process of awakening, first to half-conscious ideas of the dream and then to an entry into full consciousness. Who could doubt that the same forces that later appear in consciousness as an increase in drawing ability are only the transformed abilities that previously worked below in the body's organization? They showed themselves, so to speak, in their half-transformation in the dream images. That is one thing that we have clearly and distinctly before us: the possibility of thinking in this field of spiritual science in the same way as a natural scientist thinks. Every physicist will understand that pressure turns into heat. It is part of the same way of thinking to say that what later appears in the consciousness as drawing ability has first worked in another form below, has itself first prepared the organs, and only when the organs were there could the ability be increased – as when a person must first work at the machine in order to then use the machine. What finally emerges as a usable instrument must first be prepared by the same spiritual power. What finally emerges as a result is itself, having first prepared the organs in the depths of the soul's organization.

The other thing is this: how the dream works in a remarkable way – and this is perhaps even more interesting for a deeper consideration of human nature. What does it have to do with what happened there with the transformation of soul forces at work in the depths of human nature into conscious ones, what is being lived out as states of fear in strange images that belong to a long-gone lifetime? One thing is certain: the emotional context is at work in this person, not the life of imagination. What the person has gone through, what he has experienced in his mind in terms of anxiety, is a force that is much more intimately connected with the soul, with the innermost self, than the powers of imagination, which in ordinary life are borrowed from the external world. But the dream shows itself to be more intimately connected to the life of the soul than the conscious imaginative life of the day, because it presents itself in images in such a way that we, so to speak, place images before us that are reminiscent not of an act of imagining but of an inner experience, of the life of the feelings. We can see that at all, how our emotional life works in its strange seeming connections, as in dream images. Everywhere the images that are conjured up in our dreams are the indifferent ones; they live and weave themselves out in a seemingly arbitrary way – arbitrary in comparison to the regular connections that we see outside.

For example, we may experience the following. A person in the distant past did not like another person because he could not particularly appreciate that person's activities, and had formed a certain feeling, a certain emotional experience about that person. Now he had long since forgotten those things that were connected with that person. After many years he dreamt again of that person, but now that person was not a person, but a little dog that barked unpleasantly, but then changed the barking to a language whose sound was reminiscent of that person's language. And in the dream the little dog could fit into a context quite arbitrarily. But there was something that turned out differently than one wished. One wished that this person was not completely offended. And so one said something to the puppy, and the puppy barked in such a way that it said: It was bad what you did to me, but it doesn't matter, it will be okay, it was just a misunderstanding. What does the little dog have to do with that person? If we consider logical thinking, all thinking that is trained on the outside world, then the little dog really has nothing to do with what is really going on. But if we consider the state of mind of the person in question, the way he related to that person, we see that it faithfully recurs in a much later “dream”. But in terms of the way we shape our imagination, our mind is free to transform what it feels into the symbol of the little dog, transforming dream consciousness into seemingly arbitrary images. But only what we call the logical causal connection, a connection that we have from the outside world, is arbitrary; but the interweaving of the perceptions, however different they may be from the outside world, with what our mind, our inner being, carries forward from the events of life, is entirely lawful. Thus the soul shows us in dreams that it is more in its inner being than when it is connected with the limbs of the body. When it looks outwards, when it is connected with its bodily organs, it lives with everything external, with everything we can learn from the school of life. In dreams, the soul does not adhere to what it experiences from the outside; there it forms its emotional states only in images, and these bear the exact seal of the emotional life. From this we can see that what we call our emotional life and then our will life is more intimately connected with our deepest soul than the mere life of imagination. And now let us apply what has been shown to us by observing the dream world of the person with the anxiety dream to a consideration of the whole human life from birth to death. There we see something remarkable: that in our coherent memory, in what we regard as the actual content of our soul life, we go back in ordinary life to a certain point in our childhood. Beyond this point, we cannot remember ourselves. What happened before this point can only be told to us by other people, parents, older brothers and sisters and so on. Without doubt, all that we know later was already there. It is the conscious content of our soul; it is the content of what we can think like the continuous stream of soul life, what is at work, weaving and living within, already present before. The fact that we become aware of our self from a certain point in time is no proof that it was not there before, that it has only developed from this point on. That we know something has nothing to do with reality. The fact that we only become aware of our self from a certain point in time has nothing to do with the fact that this soul life was already present before.

But now, when we look at the life of a child in a very special way, if we only look at it closely, we realize how it was present before. Is it not the case that we can say about the life of a child that sleeps and dreams that it has something in common with what we feel in the vague darkness of our conscious soul life? The human being sleeps or dreams, so to speak, into earthly existence: the way a child engages with its surroundings, how it carries over what it experiences into later moments, how it forgets things and lets new ones penetrate, this whole way of life of the child has a similarity to the life of sleep and dreams. The human being sleeps his way into life, the human being lives his way into this earthly life with a diminished consciousness, with a soul life that has been tuned down. But how much he owes to this tuned-down soul life! Jean Paul's saying that we learn more in the first three years of life than in the three 'academic' years is deeply true. But something else is also true: in the first years of life, when we have no possibility of calling our soul life to consciousness, we can observe how thoroughly work is done, first in the shaping and organizing of our physical body. The more delicate organs of the human bodily life are still indeterminate, as even the hard-nosed natural sciences have to admit. Indeed, for anyone who can perceive such things, it is a truly mysterious thing how a child learns the most important things in the first years of life. In a wonderful way, the child rises from one who cannot walk to one who walks uprightly, from one who cannot speak to one who is able to speak. But all this is connected with the preparation of our bodily organs, with their chiseling and plastic shaping. Is this not something similar on a large scale to what we see in our dreamer, who dreams his fearful dream?

As we were able to say in the case of the dreamer: During the dream period, what first emerges later in consciousness first worked in the organs, so the dreaming child soul first works on the shaping of the body, on the development of the life of the body - it is a transformation of what later occurs consciously into those forces that work in the unconscious on our bodily organization, so that we have to say: Everything that we experience later, that is the content of our soul, is consciously present in our memory as a continuous stream. It is subdued because it has other tasks than to evoke consciousness; it has to work on shaping the body. If we follow this in the sense of modern thinking, we see that we must regard the soul as the original: not as a result of the body's organization - as the flame is a result of the candle - but as that which works on the body's organization, which first shapes this body's organization.

Yesterday I already mentioned that it is only natural that today's scientists and those who blindly follow them do not admit this. But a truly unprejudiced consideration of modern findings shows that spiritual science is right in its assertions and that we are heading for a time when the results of spiritual science will be recognized. Today it is easy to say: Does this not show, in relation to spiritual science, that a certain area of our brain, for example, draws our attention to the fact that we are dependent on a material structure in our brain for our speech and language? But it is precisely this thought, when formulated correctly, that shows the independence of the soul life, so that we can recognize how it is the soul that works on the body, not the other way around. We just have to separate in the right way what lies in the mere line of inheritance, what appears in us as directly inherited. What we have inherited occurs in us even without our coming into contact with the outside world. We could transfer a person to a distant island; they would certainly get dentures because this is based in heredity, but everyone knows that if we separate them from human language, they will not be able to speak and think through their inherited traits. This can only be accessed from the outside by speaking the thought into the environment. So, the other way around: those brain convolutions that later become the tool basis for speaking are only formed through the influx of language as an instrument.

Thus, the fact that is expressed by the materialistic or, to put it more modernly, monistic world view can serve precisely as a pointer to spiritual science. Thus we arrive at the idea that the soul works in the body and that we have no right to regard this soul-life as a mere function of the bodily. And the deeper we go, the more we realize that this soul-life must work in life from the very first atomic or cellular formation of the body. This means that the soul must confront us as something that must have existed before the first atom of the body began. We look back on a life of soul, because it must be there before the physical life, must be there in a purely soul-spiritual life. We grant the eternal use of the soul, we see how we cannot think of the soul-spiritual as emerging from some physical-bodily, but from a spiritual, and must assume that our soul, before it enters the body, existed in a spiritual existence, lived through spiritual lands. This was the conclusion of all who were able to reflect on the matter without prejudice. And everything that leads to this conclusion is to be found, only differently expressed, in Aristotle. But Aristotle makes a remarkable leap here: the soul comes directly from a divine existence, detaches itself, as it were, from a divine existence, enters into human existence, from which it detaches itself again at the moment of death. This idea, that in every individual life a special soul has been wrenched from God, founders when confronted with an unprejudiced observation of life.

Let us consider how our soul develops in earthly life. No one will deny that our soul life, especially in its emotional content, in its moods, in its entire basic state, is always as it can be on the basis of previous experiences, as, for example, people who have been annoyed all day, then become grumpy in the evening for their surroundings, and the latter can often already recognize from the facial expressions, from the way the person enters, what has affected the person during the day. In this way, we see how our mood is connected to what we have experienced before. But when we look at our soul life, as we enter it into our present earthly existence, it turns out that there are, so to speak, already existing moods and wills of the soul. They are so distinctly marked that even a philosopher, Schopenhauer, who was wrong about this, believed that these moods and wills, the whole character of a person, are given at birth and remain unchanged throughout life. This is not the case. An unbiased observation shows that we can also progress in terms of our will and character formation. But Schopenhauer's error could only arise from the fact that man shows us a certain mood, which is expressed in the basic nuance of his character, which we do not find at all different if we only look at it properly, a mood that we acquire through the events of ordinary life. We enter the world in such a way that this character, this mood, is already evident, that we carry this mood with us through our present existence. It is impossible, if one does not fantasize but relies on real facts and serious observation, to think of the mood with which the soul enters earthly existence as anything other than a mood that we have acquired in life. When we look at a child, we see that it does not yet have a life of ideas, but in the way the child rejects something, feels sympathy or antipathy, how it moves and so on, we already see the basic mood that we also encounter in later life and of which we cannot think otherwise than that it does not cut itself off from a beyond, not from an immediate divine existence, but that it is the result of earthly life - just as it is a mood on a small scale - so that we can say: From the way we look at the soul, we can see that there is a concept of repeated lives on earth, of a law that says that, although we belong to ourselves at the innermost core of our being, we go through life on earth with that innermost core from life to life and that, between each death and a new birth, our soul is embedded in a purely spiritual existence. So the entire life of a person is such that on the one hand it is in the physical body between birth or conception and death and again in a spiritual world between death and a new birth.

These things could now be explained in detail, but that is not the important and essential thing today. But what is more important is that it is also shown how, so to speak, through spiritual experiment, it can be confirmed that the soul is an independent being that works on its bodily organization. However, this experiment cannot be done in the same way as external laboratory experiments. What Goethe prophetically said applies to this to a particular extent:

Mysterious in the bright day
Nature cannot be robbed of her veil,
And what she may not reveal to your mind
You cannot force out of her with levers and screws.

Those who would like to reinterpret Goethe emphasize the “not” as if it were not possible to reveal what lies behind things. So the spiritual experiment cannot be that we use our physical tools, but that we actually transform our own soul life, our own inner being into a tool. A more detailed account of this can be found in 'Knowledge of Higher Worlds'. Today, we shall merely sketch out how the soul makes itself an instrument for looking into the spiritual world.

We must be clear about the fact that the soul must first turn to its inner life and become independent of all outer life. For this to happen, it is essential that the human being should artificially reproduce what otherwise takes place naturally when falling asleep. Everyone knows that at this time the soul loses the power to use the bodily organs, can no longer see or hear, and so forth, but at the same time, in normal life, it sinks down into the darkness of unconsciousness. We must achieve the one thing and prevent the other from happening. The spiritual researcher must, through a special training of the will, which is possible, be able to truly enter into that inner calm of the mind, where, as in the moment of falling asleep - but voluntarily - he silences all that speaks to him through the senses, he also makes the ordinary thinking that he has developed through external observation fall silent. We must also suppress all that we can remember, insofar as our life is stimulated from the outside, through joy and suffering. We must suppress all of this artificially, to make the soul pure and free from all external impressions. And then we must be able to push something into the soul through our mere will, through our strong will, on which we focus our entire soul life in strict inner concentration or meditation. In this way, the soul is transformed into an instrument of the spiritual world. What can we put into the soul? Not ordinary ideas – they have the task of depicting the truth as it is outside. If we only acquire images of what is going on outside, we cannot properly detach them, we cannot make them the actual property, the inner content of the soul. We must therefore form ideas that are connected with life, but are put together in such a way that they arise purely from our own will.

Let us assume that a person who wants to make their soul an instrument of spiritual life says to themselves – and what is said here is feasible, and those who carry it out will see the success in their practical life: I will imagine what love is in the deepest moral sense. – Here we have to tie in with external processes, but we cannot actually see through the external. So we will not be able to think through the concept of love, but we can think of a quality of love. We will not just think of a quality of love, but we will make an image of a loving action, an image that appears to be arbitrary but is in a certain emotional context with what is present in us as an experience of love. We form the image of a glass of water that is not completely filled; we pour out the water in small portions, but each time the water does not decrease, but increases. An image that is fantastic, dreamy, almost crazy in relation to the external world – but we are aware that for us it is only a symbolic image. We cannot grasp what love is, but we can feel this one quality in love. The person who loves gives, and by giving, he becomes more and more capable of love. We give our best, but love makes us richer and richer. Precisely because we give more and more completely in love, it multiplies.

This abstract idea does nothing for the education of our soul. But by consciously doing what the dream does unconsciously, by transforming the human being into a puppy, and by placing this idea at the center of our consciousness in such a way that we now focus our entire conscious activity on such an idea, then such an idea reaches us. Such an image has something quite different about it than when we give ourselves a definition of love in abstracto. This is already noticed by the person who forms this image. It is precisely such images, which do not have the task of depicting the external, but which work through what we feel about them, through what they are to our mind, where the one is connected with the other not according to the laws of the course of the image , but of the life of the mind, [...] through the mediation of feeling, they must now live in our consciousness as representations, as images that fill our soul, and we must devote ourselves to such representations to the exclusion of all other life. This is often a long, inner life's work, but if we carry it out, then we become spiritual researchers and in no other way. The objection could justifiably be made: Yes, if it is often necessary to practice this unchangingly for many years and with great energy, then not everyone is able to become a spiritual researcher and convince themselves of the reality of the spiritual researcher's statements.

But how many people today are convinced of what is going on in the observatories? Outside, one only gets to know the external appearance; the essentials are fathomed by those who work in the laboratories, and from this the others form a world view. One can indeed carry out these things in every life, but depending on one's disposition, one will only get to certain degrees. But the spiritual researcher must, by means of such exercises, tear the soul away from the body. This brings him into a state that is similar to sleep and yet quite different, in that all the outer world is silent, all worries and concerns are silent, extinguished as if by sleep, but we are not surrounded by the darkness of consciousness, but experience something that we have not experienced before , of which we had no idea before; yes, we experience it so clearly that we now experience something within our soul, something without our bodily organs, yes, outside of them, so clearly that we go through an intermediate state that is even uncomfortable, that when we have taken it to a certain extent, we feel: Now you are experiencing your soul, now you are so within yourself that you experience what you do not experience from the outside, but now you experience what only arises in the soul – to use this expression of Jakob Böhme – what only exists in the spiritual. But one only experiences it and at first one cannot conceptualize it in the way one was accustomed to conceptualizing external perceptions. Why not? The inner experience shows us clearly how it is outside of the body; the brain has been formed only for the representations we are accustomed to. Now we are experiencing something new; the brain is not prepared to conceptualize this. We therefore experience it in such a way that we feel like fools, like a child who cannot yet express in words what he is experiencing.

And if you then continue such soul exercises in energy and with inner moral strength, with self-built energy, you first feel resistance after resistance, but now our brain itself, our whole body seems like a block that cannot keep up. And only by continuing, by continuing with great moral strength, do we feel how it gradually comes about that we can think what we have experienced ourselves; we can then also see it. We feel and see how something happens in us again during the spiritual exercises, which otherwise only happened in the first years of childhood. We form the tool of our soul in a plastic way, so to speak, we reshape our body, and when we feel: Now we have made the great effort that the child makes while playing with the awake body, now we have done something similar, we have worked on our body - then it happens that we can also tell what we have experienced, and only if it is told, it is spiritual science. And when it is told, then everyone can see it, as in life, through their common sense. This is the way to experience the soul in its independence through genuine spiritual experiment, so that we know: It is this soul that, out of its spiritual and soul content, always works on its bodily organization in the same way that we become aware that a child works on its bodily organization with the formative forces it has brought with it from its previous life.

And now we survey our life between birth and death once more, and we see it in an ascending and descending line. We see how the inner forces that we see coming over from a previous life gradually work their way up, how the indeterminate features form distinct features, and clumsy movements transform into skillful movements: We see this as emerging life. Then one part is released into consciousness, while another continues to work until we feel that life is moving in a descending line, until we feel that this tool of ours is moving in a descending line. Now, however, we feel that this life has continued to enrich itself, that we have taken in new things. So we feel that what is primarily shaping our present life, what our life puts into the basic lines of our character, comes from a previous life, but that we are powerless – because our life, our interaction with the outside world, comes from a previous life, because this life is given from before – to directly energize into life what we have received as enrichment. We then feel that it forms and forms as strength. If only our mind, our will, can grasp what we have gained, then when we go through the gate of death, we will be able to prepare our future life. We just need to grasp something correctly, namely that what we acquire in one earthly life is basically only what the intellect has, but that the basic direction of our mind, as it enters into life, must come from previous earthly embodiments. And so we see the confirmation of Lessing's statement that the life of imagination cannot enter from a previous life. Nothing we imagine can come from a previous life. This is because our ideas are expressed in language, and for many people, all imagining is just a daughter of language. However, we acquire language in this life, and language has to be learned anew. In any case, high school students would have to acknowledge that even if they were embodied in ancient Greece, it does not make learning the Greek language easier for them. That has to be learned anew. Only the basic direction of the disposition, the will, the character is the result of previous incarnations, is what is saved from the imaginative life of previous lives.

Friedrich Hebbel once wanted to write a drama, for which he wrote the first draft. In it, the re-embodied Plato was to appear as a student who cannot understand Plato. This could have shown how something that was direct imaginative life is not carried over from an earlier existence into a later one. What Plato experienced back then is transformed into emotional life, into emotional direction, into soul mood, and is thus carried over into a new existence. Therefore, it must be clear to us that the objection that one does not remember one's past lives in ordinary life cannot be accepted either. One remembers them in such a way that one's present life appears in its emotional content as a repetition of the past, but not in the way one remembers earlier events in one's mental life. For the mental life is what distinguishes the present memory in the one embodiment. Thus we see that especially in the face of a true contemplation of life, that which we must say the most enlightened minds have been driven to acknowledge appears to be confirmed: the fact of repeated earthly lives. One can, of course, argue with Lessing that he wrote The Education of the Human Race in the weakness of old age. One argues against greater minds, even when a work like The Education of the Human Race presents itself as the final result, as the ripe fruit of a rich life. Such minds then believe that the spirit of such a person has weakened. They just don't assume that they can't keep up with the point of view that they still recognize, to the point of view that the spirit of these people has risen to. But this excuse does not hold up in the face of another assertion made by Lessing in the full power of his life, in the “Hamburg Dramaturgy”, and which contains something that connects to what spiritual science must lead to if it continues to pursue the thoughts developed today and yesterday. The contents that we have in the soul between death and a new birth lead an independent, purely spiritual existence. But this is the recognition of the existence of a purely spiritual world. What modern enlightened thinker does not shudder when he hears that a spiritual world beyond the material one is assumed? And who would not declaim: Have such enlightened minds as Lessing and others worked to such an extent that we should go back to the old superstitious view of the existence of a spiritual world? But one could hold up the following saying of these same enlightened minds to them: for example, Lessing's saying:

We no longer believe in ghosts? Who says that? Or rather, what does it mean? Does it mean something like this: We have finally come so far in our insights that we can prove the impossibility of it; certain irrefutable truths that contradict belief in ghosts have become so common knowledge, are so constantly present even to the meanest man, that anything arguing against it must necessarily seem ridiculous and absurd to him? That cannot be what it means. We do not believe in ghosts now, so it can only mean: in this matter, about which almost as much can be said for as against it, which is not decided and cannot be decided, the currently prevailing way of thinking has given the reasons against it the upper hand; a few have this way of thinking , and many seem to have it; these make the clamor and set the tone; the greatest multitude is silent and indifferent and thinks one way now, another then, hears by daylight with pleasure mocking the ghosts and by dark night with horror telling about them.

This is certainly an uncomfortable passage for modern materialistic natural science. But we could also cite many a spirit in the course of the nineteenth century who, through an inner necessity, even if not yet on the basis of all considerations that have been cited today from spiritual science - because this was not possible at the time - came to the only possible assumption of repeated earth lives for the human soul. That is why Lessing emphasizes so strongly that this is the only possible assumption about the life of the soul beyond arising and ceasing. But with this we rise to a truly meaningful idea of eternity, because now life is not just a void into which we are placed by something outside of us, but now we feel: What we have brought into this life, we have brought with us from previous lives, we have worked for in previous lives. But what we experience now is transformed, it is processed when we go through the gate of death, so that we acquire the powers by which we can shape the later body again. We see that growing in this embodiment, which will be shaped alive in us in a next embodiment. Thus we see how eternity comes together as something concrete. We do not feel eternity as an infinite void from the beginning to the end, but rather, we experience what eternity will become as the soul lives into eternity, she repeatedly feels: “This is what I carry over from earlier stages of existence; this is how I utilize in later lives what I have acquired in earlier ones – it is what creates the form for me; and in the same way, through the present life, I can acquire an entitlement for the future.” And from these individual claims on the future, a concrete, real idea of the nature of eternity emerges. Because where we add future-proof work to future-proof work, we expand into eternity in terms of our hopes for life. We feel the real, true idea of eternity, not the empty idea that is so often presented to us. And the only way we can feel it is by looking at this whole inner life, not only in terms of ideas, but also in terms of the whole state of mind, the moods of the soul, and the life of the will. If we consider the threefold nature of the soul, how these forces transform into one another, how that which matures in the life of ideas passes over into moods of mind, in order to appear as such in the next life, to appear as a life of will, then we grasp the whole life of the human soul as a whole.

We need only fulfill one thing in order to lead what spiritual science can give us not only to a reasoned hope for eternity, but to one built on genuine knowledge. We need only look at the soul not in one of its aspects, but in its totality, and then we come to feel how true it is when we say: In thinking, in feeling and willing, in the whole nature of the soul, the world reveals itself to us insofar as we are grounded in it, insofar as we will be grounded in it for all future. What - let me add this once more - does not live in us as a theory, not as an abstract science, but pours like an elixir of life into our entire being, so that we not only fathom eternity but experience it - experience how it is built up from its individual building blocks , is expressed in the verse of the second mystery drama, where it is expressed what the soul can feel when it feels its own life, when it feels what it must carry over from one earth life to the next as a claim to eternity. Thus a true knowledge of ourselves, of our soul life, calls out to us when we grasp this soul life in true self-knowledge:

In your thinking live thoughts of the world,
In your feeling weave world forces,
In your willing work world beings.
Lose yourself in world thoughts,
Experience yourself through world forces,
Create yourself from will beings.
Do not end with what is far from the world
Through the play of thought
Begin in the vastness of the spirit
And end in the depths of your own soul:
You will find divine goals
Recognizing yourself within yourself.

When a Greek philosopher was asked about the purpose of philosophy, he replied [in the following way]: Imagine there is a fair. Some people have various things to sell; others are there to look at everything; [manifold interests, interacting] – that is life at the fair. Not the most ignoble task is that of the philosophers, who look at everything without themselves participating in the fair. But sometimes mere exploration of things might not seem useful; pangs of conscience might arise from such knowledge, from knowing for the sake of knowing. [Should playing the “gawker” really be the noblest task? Does life justify knowing for the sake of knowing?] Such a thing seems to concern the few. But it is a general human concern. Every human being feels the urge to know something [about the things of life] without a principle of utility. Why should man, as he lives, have something beyond mere knowledge? [This is a question that has been asked at all times.] There is a higher world, [underlying reality of the external world], a supersensible world, and man has certain relationships to this world, which is cognizable to him if he rises to this world, which is possible through religious faith. The religious need, the longing, is no less now than it was in the past. But this world, in which one believes, can also be explored through knowledge. [So there are no limits to knowledge.] The prejudice that one can only believe in it is no longer justified today. Other prejudices are found in those who think monistically, [they think that human knowledge can never penetrate into these worlds. It should not say anything about them]. But man must then humbly acknowledge that there is a supersensible world. Part of this is the subject of our evening meditation today: [to show the relationship between man and the supersensible world].

The external world approaches man from two sides. Firstly, through the perception of the senses, and secondly, when man tries to look into his own inner being: suffering, joys, urges, raptures and so on. In everyday life, this is often much closer than the external world. Life forces us to look at it. But on closer reflection, it becomes clear that we have formidable obstacles on both sides. There is, as it were, a boundary in forms and colors in the outer world; but we can think them up. We come up against a wall when we turn our gaze out into the world; we are in a difficult position when observing the outer world. For it is difficult to eavesdrop on ourselves in this observation. We are especially hampered in separating ourselves from the outside world. We grow together with the outside, can no longer distinguish between the external and the internal, for example, at a beautiful sunrise. It is hopeless to want to separate: this is us and this is the outside world. Or with compassion that you have for someone - [all the strength of your soul is taken away] - with devotion or indifference to others. We know that something arises from the depths of the soul, but it is hopeless to try to separate the inner sense from the outside world, [from what presents itself externally and from the supersensible within].

Within oneself, objective knowledge of one's own being is difficult, much more difficult. Self-love is a constant obstacle. In this respect we are a good person, in that a bad one. Self-love confronts us like a second wall, preventing us from formulating it as: “We are such people.” Semi-conscious states show us quite clearly where we end up when we do not control ourselves from the outside world - [in the dream world]. There is a lawfulness when falling asleep; dream images are to be judged impartially. It is characteristic: someone dreams that they are with several people; these people have various very specific relationships with him, for example, antipathy. But the dreamer does not see this as people, but as a little dog that barks, the barking turns into bickering. The little dog says something like, “Oh, it was a misunderstanding, everything is fine again.

The logical character leaves the person. What prevails when you imagine a person as a puppy? You are emancipated from the control of the outside world. The state of mind transforms [into an appropriate image] of how [the unloved person] lives in the mind of the person. That is the real law, [the characteristic] of the dream world. People imagine that they are painters. That would be pleasing to the person concerned. Every imagination is subject to a mood of the will. What is valid in the dream is our self-will, our self-love, that is the determining principle. In the waking state, this self-will must be able to be controlled, [must be broken. Our entire organization depends on how our will works in our external life.]

[Let us consider fatigue.] Fatigue – what is it, why does it occur? It is not the muscles or the organs that tire. If the heart muscle had to rest, things would go badly for the human being. They do not tire, nor do we tire when we let our thoughts wander. [Everything that follows from the human organization does not tire.] But when we are thinking about a calculation or something like that, we tire; even when a muscle is not determined to be active from within, but by the conscious will of the person. The unconscious will, the power that makes the heart, lungs, diaphragm, etc. work, does not tire when the impulse comes from within; only when self-will, self-love, self-life are at work, then they interfere with the organism. These three are in constant struggle against the rest of the world; they have to submit to the general world order – and fight against it. Self-will [self-love] prevents us from recognizing ourselves; self-will must be broken in order to understand what it is. If a person could look inside themselves, they could discover the spiritual and psychological. Dreams show us how we build ourselves through self-will. (When we are awake, we are merged with the outside world. When we submit to our own will, we become tired. Tiredness is a constant rebellion against the workings of the organism.

The relationship between the human soul and the outside world must be established elsewhere. [A saying of Goethe's is:

When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels in the world as a large, beautiful, worthy and valuable whole, when the harmonious comfort grants him a pure, free delight, then the universe, if it could feel itself, would reach its goal, exult and admire the summit of its own becoming and being. For what is the point of all the effort of suns and planets and moons, of stars and milky ways, of comets and nebulae, of becoming and becoming worlds, if not, ultimately, a happy person unconsciously enjoys his existence?]

How can we find what lives within us if we cannot detach ourselves from the external world? It becomes possible when we go beyond the ordinary, [when we rise above our immediate surroundings], when we devote ourselves to the contemplation of how the human being has come into being, when we reflect on ourselves, on the ego, on the enduring in change. But we must have pangs of conscience when we consider that the ego is repeatedly extinguished. Fichte, the ego philosopher, wants to construct an entire world out of the ego. Does the creation of the world stop for hours when we are asleep? [We must realize]: During the day we do not have the ego, but the image of the ego, like a figure in the mirror. The mirror image indicates that there is something that we only perceive in the mirror. Where is the activity of the I itself? How we have grown from epoch to epoch, our particular development is due to the particular coloring that the I has. Then there is getting over the extinguishing of the I. The idea is extinguished, but not the activity of the I. The core of the I is there in waking and sleeping, [there it shows itself to us in its reality]. We must ascend to the real grasp of the ego; our soul life will grow and become richer. The ego is to be looked at as if in a chemical laboratory some process. We must learn to feel. The task is difficult, but in the end it can lead to grasping the ego. It is difficult to get beyond imagining, to gain an impression of ourselves. Then there is the second thing that must guide us: Up to a certain point we remember; we cannot go back beyond the beginning. But it is absurd to believe that the I is not there [before]. Life, the character of the soul, is laid down in the child when it comes into the world Schopenhauer. The child will immediately push away, attack; the fundamental nature of the child remains even beyond the point where one remembers. How can the I be found as it was before?

We go to this point with our ideas. But we have to leap beyond those ideas. With our mood and our will, we go beyond our own will. We are placed in a certain ethnic and linguistic community. This is to be accepted as if I had not placed myself there. It is not based on knowledge, but on the decision of the will. Thus, with our retrospective view, we are led even further back. Then something strange happens, as if one had two glasses and poured water from one into the other, and the glass from which it was poured would never become empty – [or like gases that then result in water]. Something completely new arises. [Feeling and will come together and say: You have made your own destiny. Through a decision of the will, one has to accept one's fate, “in which I am stuck”, a feeling that one is stuck in one's fate. There one comes to the feeling of one's remaining, there we step out of ourselves behind the physical, sensual world, there we are permeated, souled by our I itself. Thus the wall is removed. In the world of imagination, it is like a wall; but our destiny is built by our I itself, out of the supersensible world. Today, the most important thing is not to look at the outside, but to experience within ourselves the feeling: “You are.”

[While a person surrenders to their will in a dream, they are guided by a world of images. There are symbols that affect the soul, not out of their own will, but out of certain necessities:] The imagination of love is like pouring from one vessel into another, whereby the one from which one pours is never empty. That is how love is. It does not help much to imagine it in the abstract. Not through definitions, but through comprehensible, symbolic images, [triangle], our soul continues to progress. If one allows such images to take effect, one comes to a separation from the external world. In this way, one grows together inwardly with the supersensible world, builds a bridge to it, and receives the assurance: “It is.” This has an immediate effect on life.

It also becomes clear through further reflection that earlier lives are [necessary, in which causes were laid for later lives].

Heroic natures will say to themselves: What we work for, we give to our descendants. [That would be] the most intimate thing we can experience; [if we were to] pass it on to the [next] generations, it would be lost [to us].

As the physical declines, the spiritual grows stronger, and it becomes tangible that something is growing within us that will give rise to a new life. Man experiences the spiritual and soul core within himself. Through this, man experiences eternity. [It is like an] elixir of life. He draws strength and confidence from such contemplations. Destiny is the supersensible law of karma. Man experiences the supersensible world and feels that he connects with these thoughts inwardly and then becomes useful in a new life to be built up, thus will not be a “gawker”. These are forces that move people forward - like the steam in the locomotive. Our thoughts are living weaving forces in the universe. The soul, which understands itself as living in the whole universe, feels its connection with it.

Answering questions Question: About Nietzsche.

Rudolf Steiner: [One should] not let one's own judgments flow when one wants to talk about certain personalities. As a cultural phenomenon, he is particularly interesting, growing up with Schopenhauer, Wagner, [with] Greek culture. Nietzsche is not a creative spirit. He loaded the fate of culture onto his own soul. He suffers from the positivism of the time. The fate of the heart will make him see others as mere [i.e., other than mere?] theory. Darwinism: ditto — applied to Nietzsche's life.

The life of ideas must be fertilized from within. Nietzsche tries; [he] does not come to the path of knowledge, seeks the supersensible in man in the contemplation of [?] the will. He is captivating because of the tragedy of his life. How one relates to spiritual science – objectively – is how one should relate to Nietzsche.

Question: [not handed down].

Rudolf Steiner: Surrender to a higher being without egoism promotes soul development. The same applies to prayer or meditation; this must be imbued with the original mood: “Not my will, but yours be done”.

[The] folding of the hands: It causes a promotion when the thought is serious. It is a kind of togetherness, according to human physiology. Naturalness - unvarnished - already causes the movement of the hands of the speaker.