The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! In the field of spiritual research, which was discussed here yesterday, it is even more necessary than in any other field of knowledge of life to search for the sources of error. It is especially necessary for the reason that on the paths of truth, of which we spoke yesterday, error lurks at every turn, so to speak, and because the nature of error in relation to the exploration of the spiritual worlds is quite different from that in the exploration of the sensual world in which man lives. It may be said that, to a certain extent, an old saying of the great philosopher Aristotle can serve as a motto for the seeker of truth on his way into the spiritual worlds. This saying sounds simple at first, but it is quite difficult to follow. It reads:

Only he can know the truth who has ceased to love his own opinion.

This saying applies to all of life's experiences and wisdom, but it applies to a particularly high degree in the field we are dealing with here. In our external life, what is contained in this saying is disregarded everywhere, so to speak. What do we hear people emphasize more often than: This is my point of view on any given matter, this is my opinion. And particularly in our time it is emphasized again and again that it is justified, and only justified, if every human being asserts his point of view, so to speak, his opinion about some matter. Of course, one can admit such a demand of life up to a certain limit, but to the real truth, namely to the truth in the spiritual field, such a point of view cannot lead. For one's own opinion – one has formed it in life entirely according to one's personal education, the personal circumstances in which one has lived, according to the part of the world that has just come across one; and it does not actually take much to realize that this opinion, which an individual personality has formed, can at least have only a narrow validity under all circumstances.

Now, in the realm of intellectual life, the fact that we bring our opinions, our view of life, our point of view with us when we engage in research intervenes in a completely different way than in any sensual realm. In ordinary life, where we are dealing with external things, we can say that error corrects itself at every turn. If we form a false opinion about this or that being or this or that process in the sensory world, we only need to let the appearance of this being or this fact itself affect us, and the incorrect judgment is, so to speak, eliminated. We cannot approach a matter with an incorrect judgment without the matter itself proving us wrong. In the spiritual realm, it is quite different. There it is a matter of course that all beings, all facts receive their very special coloration from that which we bring with us as our own soul constitution, as that which lives in our soul. And we carry a wrong opinion into the spiritual world with us; it lays itself like a veil over the corresponding observation. And if we want to hold on to this wrong opinion, then the spiritual fact, which is veiled by our opinion, cannot convict us of lying. It wraps itself in the garment of our wrong opinion and appears to us in a completely false form.

If, on the other hand, we want to point to mediumship as the antithesis of true spiritual research – without recognizing it as justified for spiritual research and without expecting to gain anything from it – then this is only for the sake of explanation. Those people who, in the manner already discussed yesterday, want to receive messages from the spiritual worlds through mediums or somnambulists are usually very concerned that their medium does not pick up, let us say, spiritual-scientific truths or any convictions from certain points of view about the spiritual world. For the people who make use of mediums are justifiably afraid that in the event that the medium has absorbed certain thoughts about the spiritual world into the ordinary consciousness and soul life, the fact that when the medium is put into his sleep-like state, what he has absorbed comes out again in his revelations, that, so to speak, the personal interferes with what the medium is supposed to reveal. And such people believe that they can only come to real, factual revelations of the spiritual world that stands behind the physical world when they have eliminated all personal feeling from the medium, when there is, so to speak, no predisposition at all to put anything personal into his revelations.

What do such people strive for? [They strive] to eliminate the personal, everything that comes from elsewhere than from the subconscious depths of the medium. That is why most is given to such revelations of mediums of which one can be certain that the mediums have not been in contact with the matter concerned in any way. If the medium speaks in a language of which one knows that it is unknown to him, then most is given to such revelations, and rightly so. What such persons strive for, who make use of mediums, can serve as an explanation. For even if spiritual research does not use anything that comes from this side, it is still true for the true spiritual researcher, who makes himself an instrument to penetrate into the spiritual worlds, that he must strip away the personal, that is, that which is only attached to his own soul life and is peculiar to his own soul life.

This is a more difficult task than is usually believed, because it requires something that is, so to speak, extremely difficult for ordinary consciousness to understand. It is necessary [that which] is called in spiritual research “the encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold”. The threshold here refers to that which demarcates the realm of the sense world from the spiritual world. What is this “Guardian of the Threshold” if we start from ordinary life and its relationship to truth? Because basically, this Guardian of the Threshold is the sum of those forces and powers that prevent people from true self-knowledge in their ordinary lives and that lead them to this self-knowledge if they want to become a spiritual researcher. But in everyday life, self-knowledge is not an easy thing, and precisely because the human soul clings to what it has formed from its experiences, from everything it encounters. And this is precisely how the various points of view arise, the struggles of opinions, where materialism and spiritualism, realism and idealism, and many other points of view, which people advocate with devotion, but which make it impossible for people to understand each other, especially with regard to the most important things.

What is the actual situation regarding these points of view? Anyone who considers the human soul in relation to the rest of existence will be able to see, when he delves into the matter, that idealism, materialism, realism and so on arise as human opinions because man always has only a limited and then forms his opinion from this; and he loves this opinion of his, and it is actually love that inspires him for this opinion and makes him think that this opinion is the only possible one and fights against other points of view. This love is basically self-love. That which we have achieved, which is so closely connected with us that we actually become the thing itself - it is understandable that we love it. If we give it up, we give up ourselves. That is the significance of clinging to certain points of view in life: everyone feels that if they give them up, they give up themselves, because their whole self has taken on the coloration of the point of view. A person cannot but affirm this point of view.

There are people who, through their lives or the direction of their science, through their preoccupation with purely external things, which live in their ideas, people who are accustomed to only fix their eyes on what is material about things, become materialists; their attention is diverted from everything that is not material, and they are materialists, not because idealism is wrong. For anyone who really understands the arguments will soon see that materialists have good reasons for their assertions. But idealists also have good reasons for their views, and only someone who is biased in his materialistic direction actually sees bad reasons for idealism. Man only opposes idealism and insists on materialism when he adopts the habits of thinking that he only has to do with material things. Other people are, so to speak, less affected by the hardness and density of matter. They are more directly pointed to the struggles and victories of human life through their abilities and circumstances. Such people become idealists. They see the reasons that speak for idealism, and since they have never learned to pay attention to the reasons that speak for materialism, they regard materialism as the great error that must be fought.

And so one could characterize all spiritual directions; one would always have to lead them back to what the people have in the way of abilities and circumstances. But those who have come to a broader horizon, like Goethe, knew, and this is known by anyone who can look at the different worldviews impartially. Goethe knew that all points of view have a certain one-sidedness and that basically, for and against each point of view, much can be argued. Some people, however, also realize this, and then they easily come to the conclusion that the truths lie between the different points of view, so that a balance can be found, so to speak. But anyone who wants to know the truth in this area can be compared to a person who sits between two chairs. But the right thing would be to use both chairs, depending on the circumstances. To this end, he who is able to relate human opinions to their relationship to the all-encompassing world will come.

[Goethe says]: Truth does not lie between the different points of view, but between these lies the task, the path to truth. What does that mean? It means that when considering the individual world views, one must say that materialism is fully justified in the material realm, and that those who want to explain the material world with spiritualism will not uncover anything. Concepts of materialism belong in the world of materialism, and the mistake of materialism is not that materialism is used to explain the material, but that one also wants to explain the spiritual realm with materialism. It is the other way round for spiritualism. The enthusiastic idealist will speak everywhere of the spiritual and spiritual forces; he is like someone who looks at a clock and does not want to explain the mechanism of the clock in a mechanical way, but seeks a demon inside it that moves the hands forward. This is what one comes to and must come to if one wants to come to the truth about the different worldviews, which are only opinions after all: that one is able to see the justification and limitations of the different views.

What prevents man from doing this? Depending on the field of the world and of life, man loves his point of view with true self-love; he cannot get out of himself, cannot put himself in the place of another point of view. That is why it is so resented when one looks at Haeckel and puts oneself in his mind and does not everywhere have the tendency to fight Haeckel from a spiritual or ideal point of view, and when one turns to other minds and looks at them just as objectively. The true spiritual researcher must be able to put himself in the shoes of the positive and negative aspects of the various points of view. For it is a peculiarity of human nature that when a person applies such a method to his soul, as was discussed yesterday, then his opinions and points of view change with him. We can observe this very well, especially with the opposing points of view - idealism and materialism.

Someone who rejects everything spiritual, who is a strict materialist, will not apply any method to his soul as described yesterday; all of this is nonsense and folly to him. From his materialistic point of view, he is right. But the one who, as a spiritual researcher, not only sees the material effect in life, but can look into the whole mechanism of life, into the spiritual forces that stand behind the sensual, knows that it is not the material opinion that prevents this person, who rejects all methods of spiritual research, from coming to it. Man can deny the spiritual world if he wants. But this spiritual world does not only exist in a separate spiritual realm; this spiritual world is also present everywhere in the sensual, material world. Even in the matter that the materialist alone observes, spirit is present everywhere. But this spirit, which only lives in the material, is the spirit, the power that, when it works through man – and it does so when he has the thinking habits of moving only in the material – causes him to be incapable of directing his soul's reflection, his soul's direction, to the spirit at all. There is something in all material existence that has such an effect on us that it draws us away from the spirit, distracts us. There we see how error works.

In our studies of spiritual research, as they now try to engage in the spiritual cultural life of the present, we call this spirit, which lives in matter and works there as a force that darkens man's view of the spiritual world, the Ahrimanic spirit. This spirit is the same one that Goethe portrays in Faust as Mephisto, who accompanies Faust, who accompanies every human being, because every human being has to deal with the material world. This, then, is the power that darkens our view of the spiritual world. Materialists can indeed deny the spirit with their concepts, but it would be a serious mistake to believe that they can do any harm to the reality of the spirit. It takes revenge on them and obscures their views. This is the peculiar effect in the soul of the materialist, that this spirit erects a wall, that man cannot see the spiritual world; so the materialist denies the spiritual world because the spirit of matter inspires him to do so. You can deny him, but you cannot escape him, and what is buzzing around in the world as materialism is actually the inspiration of the [Ahrimanic] spirit. Goethe was right when he has Faust confront the mothers in such a way that Mephisto presents the spiritual realm as a nothing. But Faust says: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.” – The materialist should admit to himself that he belongs to a certain group of people about whom Mephisto says:

The devil this little group never sees

And even if he had them by the collar.

It is precisely the material spirit that the little people do not feel and that inspires their materialism. In this way, if we go deep enough, we see how materialism cancels itself out, because it is itself a product of the spirit.

Let us now take the idealist's point of view. He wants nothing to do with materialism; he has formed ideas and feelings that only lead him into spiritual spheres. It would certainly not occur to him to apply what has been said to himself, but the one-sidedness of the idealistic point of view is evident precisely in these points. If the idealist, who rejects matter, applies the method mentioned yesterday to himself and gains access to the spiritual world, his way of thinking and feeling, his whole attitude, confronts him there; he carries it into this world, and the result is that this person can enter the spiritual world, but he sees everything through the spectacles of his opinions and ideas, and [he sees] that there are a great many such beings in the spiritual world that are called demonic natures, which do not appear in the external world but live in the spiritual world. These beings are too insignificant for our world – and who distract man from the world to which he nevertheless belongs, since he is born as a human being in a physical body; so the idealist, if he is narrow-minded, is very easily driven into certain methods in the world that we call demonic. He is so firmly rooted in this that, whereas he used to understand nothing of matter, so to speak, he now shuns it. People then end up in all kinds of false ascetic directions. He wants nothing more to do with matter, and his error leads him to an estrangement from the world to which he really belongs. He falls into loneliness.

This example shows us that errors in the spiritual realm are more disastrous than in the sensual realm. In the sensual world, errors are corrected; in the spiritual realm, however, errors are like realities that confront us, although these realities themselves are brought in by us. We cannot get through them. All errors [in the spiritual realm] affect our personality like realities. In the sensual realm, one can become free of errors through refutation; in the spiritual realm, there is no way but through struggle, for one must fight against that which appears as real. In the field of spiritual research, therefore, the fight will not be a mere logical one, but an ongoing spiritual work, a fight against the powers of error, for there are the powers of error.

The question now arises: How can we find the way to become efficient fighters against error in the spiritual field? We can do this through true self-knowledge! How do we go beyond the one-sidedness of materialism, spiritualism, idealism and realism in our [ordinary] lives? By making the decision once in our lives to see how we actually came to our opinions. This is a momentous decision, less difficult to grasp than to carry out. When we trace our lives back in strict introspection and ask ourselves how we came to this or that school of thought, when we examine how our attitudes and opinions arose, then we, so to speak, put ourselves together, then there comes a point where it can become difficult for us, where our minds feel great resistance. Whether one was a materialist or idealist or insisted on some other opinion that one thought was the only right one – then one feels: one has only received this opinion through one's own experience. Then comes the moment when one first feels what opinions and worldviews actually are.

As long as you interact with the world without prejudice and carry your views with you, you don't even notice how much you love your opinions; but once you withdraw from the world and realize how you have become a materialist, how you have become a spiritualist, then you come to the point of saying to yourself: Yes, basically, when you no longer have these or those thoughts, what remains of you? Then you become completely empty? You feel how you gradually cut yourself out of yourself. What then comes is that terrible moment in life when you see yourself disappearing, when you turn your gaze to the formation of your opinion. But no one can come to a worldview who does not practice self-knowledge. Then you stop insisting on your opinion, only then do you understand the saying of the old wise man Aristotle:

Only those can recognize the truth who have ceased to love their own opinion.

Then you really start to love your opinion when you have to give it up, just as you really feel love for a being when you lose it. The moment you recognize the origin of your opinion and learn to give it up, that's when you really love it. That is what our mind experiences.

If you now come to the realization that all these points of view are valid, you feel for a while as if you are floating in the air between the different points of view, standing without a floor in the world with your soul's existence. It exercises self-knowledge if you look at it as worldly wisdom without crossing the threshold. But there is a direct path from this self-knowledge, if it is energetically carried out, really into the world, to which attention was drawn yesterday. For the one who is left with no play on words by what has been described, who experiences it inwardly, with inner pain, who experiences it with all his energy, who has warmth for what happens in the world, who cannot stand coldly before the world, such a person, in this self-inspection, will experience one of the meditations that were pointed out yesterday. Because such introspection is an important kind of meditation. If it is done often, then something arises that is similar to the imagination that was shown yesterday, but such an imagination that refers to ourselves. And what then arises as a result of the introspection of ordinary life, if one takes introspection that far – what then arises is: one sees how one is in one's own being. Before, you only knew your opinion, but now you see how far you have brought each part of the soul that lies below your conscious life, that goes from life to life, in the present life.

This then arises from the spiritual world itself. You come to realize what you actually are as a human being; you never came to this realization in ordinary life. We only rarely occupy ourselves with ourselves, but when we descend into ourselves, we spiritually face ourselves. This self-knowledge is what we have called “the encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold”. For that which rests in the part of the soul that goes from life to life does not show itself in ordinary life, and as long as it does not show itself, we cannot enter the spiritual world. In ordinary life, our own nature veils the spiritual world from us; at the moment we want to enter the spiritual world, we have to have the aforementioned encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold, we have to objectively face our own being, which we now face in a reincarnated being.

Then we come to see the depth of our own being, which we were spared in life, and it may be said: This world institution is beneficial, that this guardian of the threshold hides himself for ordinary life, because you can easily imagine that a person is not always strong enough to give up that which he must love most; a fear and terror of himself, so to speak, would overtake the unprepared and unripe person for true self-inspection to such an extent that it would have to bring irregularity into his inner soul life. Therefore, all true schooling for the path into the spiritual world is such that the disciple is made ready for the encounter with the “Guardian of the Threshold”. The mere enunciation of what has just been said can never be intimidating. It is only when one has one's own beingness before one that one feels that it is that which, if not faced and recognized, would prevent one from ever entering into truth into the spiritual world. We only see the spiritual world clearly when we have placed this Guardian of the Threshold within us, when we contemplate him as another being, that is, when we have been reborn. Only then can we judge how what we have been up to now is the source of all error.

Then the great, powerful fact arises before us, which can be formulated in the question: Where do the errors of spiritual research come from? They come from what we personally are; that is mixed with truth and error. We can only separate these when we can look at ourselves objectively. Only when we have ourselves in the world we are looking into, can we find a way to fight the powers of error. But there is still another difficulty, because the feeling of facing nothingness increases when one enters the spiritual world. As long as one is connected in some way with the external world, that external world is always the cause that one still loves one's own individuality too strongly. But when you look at yourself, when this peculiarity has become something like an object of the external world, then the evil temptation approaches us, that we are seized by an infinite love for our self - and never is the spiritual researcher more in danger of falling into error than now. Therefore, it takes all courage to tear all self-love out of the heart from this moment on; one must tear it out of the heart if one wants to fight errors.

So we can say that basically moral courage is the deciding factor at a certain level of spiritual realization when it comes to overcoming errors, and then we see how it becomes possible to fight the errors when we feel the source of the errors, our personal self, standing before us. If we can do this, then we will also be able to turn a healthy gaze back into ordinary life; then we will find that both those demonic powers and those Ahrimanic powers that inspire materialism, and also the enthusiastic powers, that all these spiritual powers and spiritual entities are the revelations of the spiritual world. Only then do we face the full reality. Only then do we gain a sound judgment of those who fall into errors of spiritual science, that they do not want to believe in real spiritual powers in the historical course of human development, but speak of ideas that guide the course of history.

In the nineteenth century, historians appeared who spoke of ideas in history. Those who understand the facts in this area know that ideas live in people, but that they cannot work to understand them. These ideas can no more work in history than a painter can paint a picture. And when in our time a doctrine arises that seeks to replace a historical and personal Christ, saying that one can believe in the idea of Christ, this doctrine is based on the view that ideas can have an effect, that ideas are not merely the expression of real beings. But only when we recognize the spiritual Powers standing behind them, can real life be understood.

When one accepts such a world-view, one need not be a spiritual researcher oneself to see whether his teachings are true. Man must pass through self-knowledge, for the assurance and elevation of his life. It is absolutely true that when the spiritual researcher forms and fashions what he has researched into human ideas, then everyone who is unbiased enough can understand these images. And that is why it must be emphasized that the true path of the listener to the spiritual researcher is not to devotedly surrender to the authority of the spiritual researcher, but rather the true relationship of the listener to the confessor is one that arises out of the free judgment of the listener. The spiritual researcher can only come to a correct judgment about what he sees if he applies his common sense, his healthy thinking, and if this thinking is morally and intellectually sound. But this brings us to the point where we can not only speak of the errors themselves, but also of the errors that arise in the dissemination of spiritual research, and these are very important. It is not possible to specify individual errors and how to avoid them. Rather, it can only be said that whoever advances more and more conscientiously to true spiritual research will avoid the errors that lurk everywhere. We will fight error when we recognize ourselves. Errors also arise when there is not the right relationship between those who profess and the spiritual researcher himself. Here too we have all kinds of points of view. A large number of our contemporaries reject everything that comes from spiritual research. The spiritual researcher can understand such points of view. That is why he finds so much opposition, because spiritual research is something that is new to our culture and that thinking is not yet attuned to. That is one way in which spiritual research is encountered today. A number of these people do come, however, when they realize the errors of materialism and gradually approach the results of spiritual research. It is different with the confessors. Just as much as criticism of the spiritual researchers, they experience, on the other hand, false confession, which recognizes authority and does not see that everything can be tested. The spiritual researcher does not shy away from a close examination, only from those examinations that arise from a superficial scientific approach, but not from a thorough one. It is the right approach to take what the spiritual researcher offers, to be inspired and then to examine it with the mind through which it can be examined. But besides the dismissive people, there are many who find it easier to simply believe instead of examining. And it is from these people that the kind of confession comes that leads above all to error after error in the spread of spiritual research. Because one does not check, but accepts what the spiritual researcher gives, the spiritual researcher is considered something of a higher animal by such a believing confessor. Because he looks into the spiritual world, he is considered a higher being.

It is correct to not see such a spiritual researcher as a special being. The value of a spiritual researcher does not depend on his ability to see into a spiritual world, but on his moral and intellectual qualities. This is, so to speak, an area of purely human research, because its results are connected with all the hopes and longings of man, and just as one is not held in higher esteem for pursuing mathematical or geometrical science, so one should not be held in higher esteem for being a spiritual researcher. When one peers into the spiritual world, one does not yet need to have a judgment about what is seen; one can look in and see many things and tell the greatest nonsense and the greatest errors from this world. Only then, when one regards the spiritual researcher, so to speak, as nothing more than an instrument through which spiritual truths flow into the world, and then checks for oneself, only then does one have the right relationship to the spiritual world. Otherwise, how could charlatans so easily set themselves up alongside the real spiritual researchers? But those who do not want to examine cannot distinguish between what has been conscientiously gained and what has been gained by false and even fraudulent means.

The spiritual researcher can only save himself from his confessor by not being tempted to become overconfident in the faith that is placed in him. There are natures that, when they see that they are being regarded as something special, communicate all kinds of things that have only been obtained by false means. That is why charlatanry and humbug are often indistinguishable. And much less harmful in terms of the dissemination of spiritual research are the critical opponents, as long as they are not driven by their longing than the blindly faithful followers. In no other field is belief in authority worse and more harmful than in the field of spiritual research, and in no other field is this belief so at home. A healthy dissemination of spiritual research and spiritual science in our time, which wants to avoid errors within what it disseminates, must above all be concerned with eliminating blind faith from all dissemination of spiritual science.

However, we are still far from this ideal in many respects because of the complacency of the many, because they no longer check whether what the spiritual researcher says is justified. If they like what is offered, they accept it on blind faith in authority. It is always possible to apply common sense to what is presented in spiritual science, and when one sees that the spiritual researcher is endeavoring to place the results of his research in such strict [gap in the transcript] images, when does not tend towards enthusiasm on the one hand or carelessness on the other, but when one sees how he treats all matters of spiritual research in the same logical way as external matters, only then is he a true spiritual researcher. Then, when he sees more and more souls of the present and the future incline towards spiritual research in this way, then the objection cannot be raised that [Jelder should be a spiritual researcher. Just as not everyone needs to become a botanist to understand botanical research, not everyone needs to become a spiritual researcher either – although anyone can become one.

But the ideas of spiritual research must spread more and more, because we live in a time when souls long for what only spiritual science can give. Its facts are what souls long for today and will long for more and more. He who can grasp the spirit of the time knows that certain needs of the soul can only be satisfied if spiritual science finds its way to the hearts and souls. But since the time itself will ensure that there will be enough spiritual researchers, and since one only needs logical mind and a sense of truth [to see the results of spiritual research], then through these spiritual researchers one will find the way that open up the perspective for everyone to enter the spiritual worlds, that spiritual world from which man can come security, joy, hope for the life in which he is, and that which opens up when the gate of death closes. That security, which can develop with the approach of wisdom towards old age, when our body decays, to prepare to go through a spiritual existence, to come back to this earth to continue its work - that security, that certainty will these souls, these personalities find in the spiritual world.

This perspective will arise for more and more souls of the present and the future: the opportunity to look into this spiritual world. And a time will come when truly every single person, not just the spiritual researcher, will stand there in such a way that [he] will take a very simple stand against all denial of the spiritual world. These people will become so great as the force of the reasons for spiritual research [for the same] continues to grow. Such secure souls will behave towards the deniers of the spiritual world as Goethe once behaved when the philosophy that came from Greek thought, which could not come to terms with the laws of movement, came before his soul. They said that there was no movement, that it was only apparent, that when a body moves, it is actually at rest in every moment; but movement is not composed of rest, so there is no movement. There was such a school of philosophy! Goethe, when he heard about this philosophy, said:

They may see what they want,

You remain calm, remain silent;

And if they deny you movement,

Walk around in front of their noses.

In this way, movement is proven by the evidence of walking in front of their noses.

If one could delve a little into the certainty of the souls that must come, which will gradually feel the force of the spiritual-scientific proofs, such souls will then confront the deniers of the spirit just as surely as Goethe confronted the deniers of the movement. Such souls will then perhaps say to those who disdain to regard as foolishness the science of the spirit:

Adversity may arise,
but you remain calm, remain cheerful,
and if they deny the spirit,
do not brood over it.
Yes, in the end even agree with them,
their spirit is in a bad way.

Question and Answer

Question: Is the soul of the deceased aware of the life just concluded?

Rudolf Steiner: In “Occult Science”, we have attempted to characterize the nature of consciousness. Those who want to inform themselves must let the presentation given there take effect on them. [One can answer the question] with an absolute “Yes”, but this “Yes” needs to be explained, and that is only possible through a detailed presentation.

Question: Why are new embodiments always necessary, in other words, why is there never any rest?

Rudolf Steiner: The questioner probably regards rest as something desirable, which underlies the question. What can be meant by the concept of rest here? Rest that is the rest of death or some other kind of behavior? It is impossible to find out what is meant by 'calm' here. Of course, not all of life's mysteries can be solved in a lecture, and many things must remain unsaid. Of course, the embodiments do not continue uninterruptedly from eternity to eternity; they once took a beginning from a purely spiritual existence, and at the end of the earth we will be in a different spiritual state, no longer returning to the earthly existence. But in the meantime, we have to undergo incarnations. Repeated earthly lives are necessary because only in this way can a person approach the all-round development and realization of his potential, approaching his goal in an ascending and descending wave. That is precisely the course of earthly development; the earth never remains the same after a certain number of centuries; consider all that has changed, not only in culture, since the founding of Christianity! One experiences great intervals, not short ones, between two successive earthly lives. The soul is therefore in a position to always experience something new.

Question: In which incarnation will we be resurrected on Judgment Day, in the first or in the last?

Rudolf Steiner: Incarnation is not fixed; one must be clear about how the word “incarnation” is meant here: how “resurrection” is meant. One must first understand St. Paul's teaching on the spiritual body. This has nothing at all to do with the physical body. Only then can an answer to this question be given.

Question: What dreams at night, the soul or the brain?

Rudolf Steiner: This is easy to answer from what was said yesterday. The soul is in the astral world during sleep, and the human being experiences his dreams inwardly; of course it is not the brain that dreams, but the soul.

Question: What consolation can a person who is not clairvoyant find in the doctrine of reincarnation, since only the spiritual researcher can see his past incarnations and the other person would have to despair because he cannot see for himself?

Rudolf Steiner: In the lecture it was said: It does not depend on doing research in the spiritual worlds oneself, but rather, when these things are expressed in concepts, everyone can understand them and the spiritual researcher himself has no more from them than what he gains from his clairvoyance by expressing them in concepts. The doctrine of re-embodiment is something that gives life security and content. So this question is already answered in the lecture. One should also read the booklet 'Reincarnation and Karma'. Then one will find what can give the soul security and comfort, and that it has been ensured that the non-spiritual researcher also has the opportunity to understand it. Question: I have already taken part in two introductory courses, but I still do not understand how it is possible that some people are doing badly, some are doing well; often highly developed people are doing badly, while the rich libertine finds no punishment, but still lives a joyful life.

Rudolf Steiner: The latter does not follow from the doctrine of reincarnation, because it is not the case that life always advances, but [that] it ascends and descends, as [it] just [the] causes [it] yield. That a rich libertine would find an even more joyful life, such a question arises from a complete misunderstanding of the overall course of human life. If someone observes another person or themselves and finds another person noble or themselves quite noble, or afflicted by suffering and misfortune, the judgment they make in the given moment is by no means always decisive.

I will give you a comparison: Let us imagine a young person who has lived off his father's pocket until the age of eighteen, let us assume that it was not a bad life. When he is 18 years old, his father loses his fortune. He was not doing badly before, but he gets into this bad situation; now he has to learn something proper when he has not learned anything proper before. Now, at this time of his life, he will consider this stroke of fate as something quite difficult, quite undeserved. When he is 50 years old, he may look back and say to himself: If that hadn't happened back then, I would now be a good-for-nothing and would know nothing about the world. At 50 years old, he will judge [it] quite differently than at 18 years old.

We are usually not the right judges of our own clumsiness. Later, however, we will judge more objectively, especially from the spiritual world in the time between death and birth, or in subsequent earthly lives, when one can already look back; because everyone will achieve that; humanity is developing; everyone will be able to look back, which now only the spiritual researcher can do. Then one will say: That which seemed inexplicable at first, that was precisely the reason why I had to strongly resist, why I released forces that became the most important for further development, for ascent. In ordinary life one will see that already; one experiences many things. Many a person who, as a prospective spiritual researcher, looks at life more intimately and in more depth, will know how to tell about it. Then you look back on what brought you joy, pleasure and many other things, and you look back on the struggles, evil and pain you went through. You look back on all kinds of things. You will say to yourself: I am grateful to fate for the many joyful experiences I have had. But would you rather give up your joys or your sufferings? Then you may perhaps come to the realization: I would rather give up my joy and bliss, because I owe my pain and suffering my realization. You first have to know what becomes of the causes.

In short, one should not make the judgment of such a question so easy. Spiritual science has a deeply satisfying answer to all such questions.

Question: Would the same result be obtained if, for example, the astral body were perceived in the same way by several spiritual researchers?

Rudolf Steiner: This question cannot be answered meaningfully with a simple “yes” because what the spiritual researcher perceives in a kind of imaginary vision is only to some extent based on complete objectivity. What applies in the sensory world, that one can look at things from a different point of view, applies to a higher degree in higher worlds. If two people write a travelogue about the same area, there will still be a great difference. But one need not doubt altogether that these areas exist. And if we look into the ever-flowing, fleeting astral body, then it is understandable that the external image is different, even though the reality is quite the same. Therefore, one can answer this question in the affirmative, even if the external images are different, but no more different than when two people form an image of a physical-sensory object; seeing and representation are different in a certain way. Everything depends on the objectivity of the observer; it is always assumed that real spiritual researchers describe things.

Question: Must not the stripping away of the standpoint be taken so far that even what is peculiar to the human species is eliminated? [...]

Rudolf Steiner: The first question concerns the generic. What exactly is the generic? When we speak of the generic, we often imagine something quite abstract. But the concept of 'generic' can only be applied in the right sense to the realm of nature that is below the human being. Within the animal kingdom, the concept of the generic is fully justified because it cannot be a mere concept for a one-sided observation. For when people who are full of whims and fancies find that there are only individual dogs, and thus no such thing as “dog nature” or “wolf nature”, the retort is that if one only allows the individual being, for example the individual being “wolf”, to count, and not what reigns in it supersensibly, thus only recognizes the material, then the refutation is easily given. If a wolf only eats lambs, it shows that it does not become a lamb just because it eats lambs. But in the animal kingdom, we are interested in what lives in the species, just as we are interested in the individual, the ideal, in the human being. Therefore, only humans have a biography.

Some will find this strange because one can also have a biography of animals. It should not be denied that a mother dog can give a biography of her dogs, a mother cat a biography of her cats. But that is not the point. A teacher can also ask children to present the biography of their pens. But what is biographical in the individual is only found in humans. The concept of the species only makes sense in the case of humans if one lives in an abstract philosophy. On the other hand, the ideal in the human being is not exhausted in the species. What adheres to the human being through the people, the tribal characteristics, belongs to him in a different direction than to the animal. This species-like quality is even stripped away from the ideal; in the true sense of the word, one cannot even speak of it. At the beginning of the development of the earth, man was entirely a generic being, but in that lay the idea that individuals would all become ideal, so that the generic aspect plays a secondary role in man.

Question: Without doubt, the one who is to face the Guardian of the Threshold has to overcome great dangers that he does not know in advance; how can he protect himself, or is there no protection?

Rudolf Steiner: The path is followed in a concrete way if one follows what is given in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Through this, the qualities are also implanted in the soul to enable one to pass the encounter in the right way. There are still great difficulties, but one has also acquired stronger forces.

Question: What can be said about Mohammed and his mission? Why did he have to come 600 years after Christ?

Rudolf Steiner: It is not possible to answer this question briefly; it would lead to the greatest misunderstandings. The answer would have to be given from the fundamentals. 600 years after the Christ Impulse, Mohammed gave content to such a human community, which was predisposed, on the one hand, to the sometimes fantastical mind and, on the other, to the fine elaboration of the intellect. Compared to the Christ impulse, it was something of a setback, an atavism. This shows how development generally occurs: in advances and setbacks. The nature of this Mohammedanism must be understood from the whole nature of development: the Christ impulse, the greatest religious impulse, which must gradually become part of the evolution of the earth, while the Mohammedan impulse had to oppose it before.

Question: Are the Theosophists in favor of cremation? Rudolf Steiner: Theosophists do not take sides for this

or that party, but these things are a matter of knowledge. One says what is true and right, and then everyone can build their own view of what they want to take up into life as impulses of will.

Such questions cannot be answered in absolute terms. The various stages of human development are different, and the same is not best for all times, but people change, and with that, the emergence or lack of emergence of human institutions changes. On the whole, for the time that has passed, and for a large number of people in the future, cremation is not an important [right?] thing, although the propagandists of cremation are, so to speak, pioneers of the future. But people have to mature, everything has only relative validity, so also the question: bury or burn for one age or another. For spiritual contemplation, many things appear different than for external perception.

Question: How do you reconcile the view that all people have already experienced life on earth with the fact that the earth used to be less and less populated?

Rudolf Steiner: This is a mere mathematical calculation, and it will be seen that what has been said is simply a bold assertion. The question comes up almost after every lecture. The intervals between two lives are not the same for all people. Sometimes there are many more people embodied in one age than in another shortly before. Let us assume that in the seventeenth century 100 souls were incarnated and in the sixteenth century 100 as well, and the intervals between their embodiments were different, then in the nineteenth century the 100 from both groups may have incarnated again, so there are 200 in the nineteenth century. Because the intervals are different due to the entire karma of the souls, there is an increase in certain periods of time. The conscientious person cannot speak of anything else. The time since the last incarnation is on average longer than the time that separates us, for example, from the discovery of America. But if it is claimed that the number of people is increasing, then one must first ask: How can this be proven by external things? For example: Who has studied the increase for China; so what is the population of the whole earth; or what worlds have perished; or what was before the discovery of America, and long before America was discovered? So with conscientious research, this claim cannot be made in the physical world.

Question: What does the speaker say about Adventism, where the world history is explained from Daniel and Revelation of John, and now the time is coming when Christ promises his return and the world will change socially and politically?

Rudolf Steiner: It is a well-known phenomenon that the sects today take the “viewpoint of all viewpoints” and are completely in love with their point of view, to a much greater extent than is the case with other people. And to give someone who belongs to a sect an explanation for this or that symbol, or to dissuade them, or to make something understandable, is usually a pure impossibility for this incarnation. But anyone who fully grasps the Aristotelian principle that 'only by disregarding one's own opinion can one arrive at the truth' has the right point of view. Anyone familiar with spiritual science knows that when you look at things more deeply, they cannot be taken quite so literally and in quite such a way as they often are from such a point of view. Nevertheless, nothing should be said against the piety and the cozy intimacy of the souls who are caught up in such a point of view, and one can have the highest respect for it. But in such sects one does not go beyond the point of view, which narrows the truth. Those who look back at the development of mankind will find that there have always been sects that have said the same thing. They said: In fifty years the return of Christ will be here. He did not come, but that did not refute the teachings; and however often the refutation occurred through the facts, it did not harm the point of view. It was no means a means of somehow refuting such a “point of view of points of view”.

Question: Is there any contradiction between spiritual science and positive Christianity?

Rudolf Steiner: The questioner usually understands positive Christianity to mean what he understands by Christianity. I cannot go into this further, I would have to talk a lot about the Christ impulse, the Christ presence.

Question: How can the doctrine of rebirth be understood empirically or philosophically?

Rudolf Steiner: I must refer you to the literature, “Occult Science” and so on; because one lecture would not be enough to answer this question; even if I would be able to give some lectures this very night, some listeners might not be able to; I do not want to boast!

Question: Is there a third cognitive faculty?

Rudolf Steiner: Imagination, inspiration, intuition; I am a little surprised that questions are being asked as if it were a fact that the lecture had not been listened to at all; after all, my answer was a detailed response to this question.

Question: Is there a real and practical difference between soul and spirit?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, it follows from Theosophy that they should not be lumped together. This lumping together happened quite recently in history; a council decreed that soul and spirit are not two different things, lumped them together; since then they have no longer been distinguished, not even in science; although science is not aware that it is following an ecclesiastical dogma. There is a real difference in the relationship to the body. The relationship of the spirit to the body is different from the relationship of the soul to the body and vice versa.

Question: Should not someone who grows up in the theosophical view, who first gets to the bottom of the view of this view, become free of it?

Rudolf Steiner: That is as if someone who has just eaten had to eat again immediately, because outwardly nothing has changed in this person, at least not in many cases, because he has just eaten. One attains self-knowledge when one stands outside of one's personal self; that is, one attains freedom through self-knowledge. If you now want to become free again, where you have already become free, this is even less justified than with the meal. But then you have already achieved liberation; there is no need to become free a second time after you have just become free. The point of view cannot be compared with mere materialism or individualism, because spiritual research uses all the different points of view, but not to stand on them, but to characterize them. And the truth is not in the middle, but by the reasons that can be given for it, these points of view appear to illuminate the real truth from different sides. Only those who get stuck in abstractions can apply what is applicable to one thing to another. But just as in real life you don't just have the general human characteristics, but are first a child, then a man, then an old man, and can't ask whether you have to shed the stage of childhood again, so the question of self-knowledge is there once, but not again. There is then knowledge in the world within, and from that point on, self-knowledge begins for the human being; that is the conclusion of self-knowledge, the self-knowledge that is acquired selflessly by the individual and thus has a selfless character.

If the question of truth and error is a deeply significant one in every area of human life, it may be said that in the field of spiritual research this question takes on a very special significance. This is probably because what spiritual research wants to give people and be is connected with those vital questions that not only approach the soul in the same way as the questions of one or other science, but approach the soul, one might say daily, and ultimately make up the interest of this human soul, make up everything that can give the soul consolation and hope on the one hand, and security and strength in life on the other.

The field of spiritual research is wide. It extends, so to speak, to the entire field of development of every entity with which man can be thought to be connected in any way, for everything that comes to man in these fields of spiritual research, one might say, is condensed into significant life riddles and life questions. A question that really confronts us every hour is contained in the momentous words of human destinies. On the one hand, we see the human being entering into existence, already surrounded by hardship and misery from the cradle, and we can predict that hardship and misery will perhaps accompany him throughout his life. If we find him endowed with few abilities in childhood, so that we can know in a certain way that he will initially be only a little useful member of the human community, so that is perhaps mysterious on the one hand; on the other hand, we need only compare how many others enter life blessed with goods of fortune or endowed with significant abilities, so that one can know he will become a useful member of humanity. Outer science is not at all in a position to raise such questions, for outer science with its presuppositions proves itself from the outset incapable of answering such questions. Finally, there approaches man the other, which so to speak spiritual research combines: the question [of immortality], which finally approaches the incomprehensibilities of the human being.

Perhaps it may be said, especially in our time, that this question does not approach man at all in the manner of scientific questions. How many desires, hopes and feelings, which must not intrude into a scientific question at all, are mixed up in this question. There have been and still are enough people in our time who do not believe in the survival of the human soul when the gate of life has closed, and who deny such a survival of the human soul after death, and it may be said that a materialistic way of thinking must come to this view. Noble natures in particular may say that it is selfish to want to live only on condition that this entity passes through the gate of death and then has another form of existence, while it is selfless to give up what one has gained to the general public. From this point of view, many truly noble natures have found the necessity that materialism presents here to be more unselfish than an egoistic need for survival after death.

If only human desires and longings, fear and the dread of life after 'death were decisive, then one could easily assume that one would have to come to more materialistic views precisely out of noble sentiments. But if one approaches the question more deeply, it develops as an eminently scientific question, even if science does not have the means to provide an answer. One need only be a connoisseur of the human soul to say that the most significant thing a person can achieve for his soul is a very individual life. The subtlety, the uniqueness that serves our powers best, that furthers most what we can achieve for ourselves, cannot be given away to anything; and if the soul had to give it away with death, it would have to be lost. From this would follow that significant riddle: it would be against the world order for such a loss to happen, that the best that the soul can achieve should disappear into nothing. Not that this is an answer to the question that has been raised. But it is necessary to raise this question. These are questions that cannot be called scientific in the usual sense, questions that may also be of little concern to some souls who live their lives indifferently.

But apart from whether we can answer these questions or not, the question of where the sources of truth and error can be found in this area is closely related to our inner soul life and destiny. I have often had the opportunity to speak here about the subject of what spiritual research has to offer. Of course, it is not possible to talk about any of them, not even in an introductory way, and it is not my job here to talk about what can be heard in other lectures or is available in the literature. I want to talk about how man comes to such questions, what the insights are, then what the sources are and how man can come to errors.

Because there is a certain necessity to spread the knowledge of spiritual science, it should not only be spoken of truth and error in the field of spiritual science, insofar as these lie on the path of the spiritual researcher himself, but also in relation to the dissemination of the knowledge of spiritual science. The fate of the human being cannot be known if we only look at what the world of the senses reveals, and anyone who is not very familiar with our science also knows that the intellect cannot explain the reasons why a soul is destined for this or that fate. He also knows that the intellect can tell us nothing about the soul's fate after death, because the soul dwells in the supersensible, invisible realm, if it still exists at all as such. The ordinary powers that man has at his disposal to know the world, these powers are not sufficient to answer these deepest questions.

This is where the question arises: Are there forces in the human soul that can penetrate beyond the ordinary senses, that are not dependent on the mind alone, which is bound to the human brain? If we come to the conclusion that the soul not only goes through one life on earth, but that this life repeats itself between birth and death, and that what the soul meets as fate is what it has earned in past lives, and that what we do now creates causes for a future life . It must be said: What enters through birth into physical existence carries with it the forces that it brings in through birth into the external worlds, and knowledge of these supersensible worlds can answer questions about why a soul comes into very specific life situations. Everywhere we are pointed to the necessity of such questions, to the necessity of investigating everything with the powers of the soul that our science cannot investigate.

But do such powers exist in the human soul? It will be easiest to understand how such powers can prevail in the soul if we start from everyday phenomena, which admittedly do not approach man in the same way as the dismaying, surprising event of death, for example, but which approach without man thinking much about them. It is well known that man only reflects on what surprises him; he reflects less on what falls within his daily habits, and yet it is precisely these that can point to the deepest depths of human life. One such phenomenon that occurs daily is the state of waking and sleeping. The state of sleep is mysterious. Every day we are forced to pass into unconsciousness, into a state that spreads darkness around us. This is a significant mystery.

Let us first consider this state purely externally. We see when we fall asleep how our physical body, so to speak, falls away from us, how we gradually become unable to direct our limbs as we do during the day. Finally, we see how our senses cease to be awake to us, how our minds become paralyzed, as it were, and then we pass into an unconscious state. It would be impossible for everything that takes place in the soul from morning to evening in the form of affects, suffering, drives and desires, to disappear when we fall asleep and then arise anew every morning. It must be there, even if the person is not aware of it.

Let us first hypothetically assume what spiritual research shows. It can only be pointed out now; it cannot be shown in detail. So let us hypothetically assume that in what we see with our physical eyes, in what we can grasp with our hands, there is a supersensible spiritual element, a spiritual-secluded supersensible element. This is the source of difficulties, of incipient passion and so on, and this spiritual-supernatural goes out of the dormant state into a spiritual world, so it is present. It should be explicitly stated that this is initially a hypothesis. We will see through our considerations that it has a certain justification. If this is the case, then we have to say that the soul and spirit are also present in sleep, but are unaware of themselves when they enter that world; after all, they use the brain to perceive and appropriate the external world.

We can therefore assume that the soul and spiritual aspects are not strong enough to lead a conscious life when separated from the physical body, that they are too weak for this. If this is the case, then there must be a way to strengthen these powers. It would have to be possible for a person to artificially induce a kind of sleep, so that a state of mind would arise that, on the one hand, resembles ordinary sleep but, on the other hand, is essentially different. The induction of such a state is indeed necessary, and only in such a state can real spiritual research take place. The question is therefore whether the soul and spirit in man can be made so strong that man can, as it were, put himself into a kind of artificial sleep that is not sleep. Then the human being should be able to bring about what is brought about in sleep, that his spiritual-soul life has nothing to do with the body, that the intellect is silent, that the human being is also outwardly physical as in sleep. During sleep, the human being is in a state in which his inner being is silent, subdued, and shrouded in darkness. If, however, a person can voluntarily free himself from his own soul forces, so that he can have experiences free of the body, as if disembodied, then he experiences in the spirit, but initially he can only remember himself as a spiritual being through inner experiences.

What today appears to the broadest sections of humanity as foolishness should be feasible. There can be no proof against its feasibility. People believe they have proof against it, but such people can only claim that with their present powers they cannot know about such things. However, one can only claim that something is known, but not that something is not known. Otherwise, such a worldview makes a logical mistake. But first of all, the strong development of will must be learned, to free oneself artificially from all sense impressions, to effect silence, to dampen all color and light impressions, to want to know nothing of all this, and likewise nothing of hearing impressions and all other impressions; thus to bring to a standstill the ordinary thinking and so on. All this must be brought to a standstill by exercise of the will, just as it is in sleep. Man must now make strong what is otherwise so weak in sleep. This is done through meditation and the like.

What kind of purely mental activities are these? For they are purely mental activities. A meditation is a kind of mental-spiritual experience; but it differs from everything else that a person is used to. Let us consider how this mental activity is perceived. It differs from all other human activities in that these are there to form concepts, ideas and feelings in order to inwardly perceive something external, to depict something external. Man seeks images and expressions in ordinary life. Only in this way can ordinary life be sustained. But the whole purpose of such institutions, which exist for ordinary life, cannot be decisive for the development of the soul, which has been spiritually demanded. For this development of the soul, everything that can be spiritually thought, imagined, felt, desired, is only there for inner self-education, to help the soul to progress, to equip the soul inwardly with forces, so to speak. not what one feels, what one recognizes as outer truth through one's thinking and feeling, that is what matters, but what this thinking, feeling and sensing brings forth in the soul, what it makes of the soul.

This brings us to a completely different level than that of ordinary life, of science. In a sense, the human being must become free of the meaning of his concepts, of the content of his feelings, and must devote himself entirely to some practice with his soul. It is best if the person does not take for meditation ideas that represent something external, because in doing so one feels dependent on the external world. Best for meditation are ideas that can live entirely in the soul alone.

An idea that will seem foolish to the external, material thinker: Imagine that someone has two glasses in front of them, one with water and the other empty. Now imagine that they pour water from the first glass into the second, and the partially filled glass does not become emptier, but rather fuller and fuller, and the more they pour, the fuller the glass becomes.

This is not an actual external process. Nor is that what is important here, but rather what it can evoke in the soul. It can be a symbol for the following: It points us to an area of life that, on the one hand, leads us again and again into its depths, and on the other hand, repeatedly presents us with life's riddles, that which we summarize as “love,” starting with passionate love and rising to the soul form of love. Enormous human suffering can be summarized in this idea, and love has one property: the property that when a loving person does something for another out of love, gives up his spiritual wealth, he does not become poorer and emptier, but fuller and fuller.

It is not so foolish to form such images and symbols. In other areas, people are accustomed to forming such symbols [like a] medal. The medal is circular. We need not worry about it, but draw a circle. All the properties of the circle apply to the medal.

It is not important to recognize an object in order to perhaps fathom the essence of love, but rather to have an idea that is emancipated from external reality. Consider what happens when you manage to empty the soul of all mental judgments, of all external impressions, and to concentrate the full extent of the soul's power only on such an idea, which you have brought into focus. Otherwise in life, we distribute the most diverse powers of the soul that we have within us among the most diverse ideas arising from the behavior of human beings. We often have the soul occupied with many things at the same time. We now empty the soul completely of them and concentrate completely on one such idea, for example, of goodwill, of kindness. We must concentrate exclusively on it, live in it, and if we have enough patience and persistence to do such exercises over and over again, then we will actually bring it about that dormant forces in our soul are awakened. We learn to transform ourselves from a usually suffering, passive being into an active being, and thus we first take hold of ourselves. It is not enough to do just a few such soul exercises, but it all depends on having the patience to prepare the soul so that it always feels active.

Then there comes a time when the soul feels as if it has been reborn, because it no longer needs to form such images, to present such ideas to itself, but these then arise as if from the depths of the soul itself, and the person then indeed lives as if in a new world emerging from the hidden depths. When man has reached this stage, then the actual schooling of the spirit begins, for then a new world appears before him. But what is this world? In order to understand what this world is, we want to point out that today's materialistic man, when it comes to the imaginative world, believes that these are illusions, fantasies, and that they are the same as what emerges in a sick, pathological soul.

When we realize that we are only at the beginning of spiritual research with this imaginative world, then we compare what the spiritual researcher has attained through meditation with what can be experienced in an unhealthy soul. We encounter a trait in sick people that you are well aware of: the trait that such people have the unshakable belief that they are facing an objective world, and it is in vain to try to talk them out of it. They put forward everything with the greatest ingenuity, things that have not even been thought of, and thus they master the thinking mind. If the spiritual researcher were never able to distinguish truth from error here, he would not differ from such a sick soul. The question is how to deal with this.

From this alone you can see that initially we are dealing with nothing more than images that arise from within, which therefore need not be anything other than reflections of what the person has within himself. The person has activated forces, awakened inner life that was not there before, but he has not lived in anything other than himself. What stands before him is initially nothing more than a reflection of his own inner being. Because this reflection is experienced by the human being in this way, it is extremely difficult to make the decision that the true spiritual researcher must now make. It is necessary to realize that one is dealing with nothing but the reflections of one's own inner being, of what one carries in one's soul. But it is not enough for the spiritual researcher to know that everything is only a reflection of one's own inner self; it is also necessary that he actually has the strength to suppress the whole imaginative world so that it is no longer there.

There is also the possibility that people come to such experiences without training. Such people are then usually in love with such experiences. A person is usually extremely happy when such a world arises in him. It is therefore only through strong will training that a person, if he wants to become a spiritual researcher, suppresses the whole imaginative world so that it is no longer there. He actually suppresses his own being, for which he has trained himself. Only then do you realize how much you are in love with yourself.

It takes one of the strongest volitional efforts to suppress these reflections. Man already lives in self-love in the outer life, and this intensifies when this inner life begins. Now one should suppress what one has striven for. But it must be done. Then, however, when you have completely suppressed these reflections by developing the strong will to extinguish them, you have replaced the imaginations and must wait until they come back. Then they will come back in a new form, so that it is then impossible to mistake them for anything other than the objective world. Anyone familiar with such things finds it understandable that many people simply deny this process, for the reason that it is not easy to carry out. But then, when a new world has emerged after the person has suppressed the first imaginative world, then one knows how to distinguish between fantasy and reality in this new world as well. For many, the world is our imagination. And if such a philosophy claims that one cannot get beyond imagination, then it would be all the easier to say: How can one then distinguish between imagination and reality? This sentence is easily refutable. It is a banality that I will say, but that does not matter. The taste of lemonade on the tongue with mere imagination - but that does not quench thirst.

There is no logical proof as to whether a thing really exists or is only an idea. Proof can only be provided by life. But experience also makes a precise distinction between idea, mere fantasy and what is real; or should a person be able to distinguish between a hot iron that is imagined and a real hot iron? The same applies to Kant's sentence that three real thalers contain no more or less than three possible thalers. You can pay a debt with real thalers, but not with possible ones.

You may say that it is different with spiritual things, that what you see could really be self-suggestion. Real life makes the difference. But one must first be in real life. Life alone decides on reality, and so it is also in the spiritual realm. The practice of the soul, the evocation of the power of knowledge in the soul, teaches us to distinguish between imagination and reality. In this way, man is able to evoke the state that is indeed similar to the state of sleep in that man does not use his body. Then, when man has reached this imaginative knowledge, it goes up to higher levels, where man actually begins to have what is called a spiritual world around him, and not only in the way between death and a new birth, but in such a way that it enters into his thoughts, which he remembers. Man comes to know truths about the world beyond. How the characterized questions are to be solved through meditation can be read in the literature. The point is that when man tries to gain knowledge in this way, error does not occur as it does in relation to external knowledge, but error then springs up everywhere. In the outer world we are corrected by many things to which we are accustomed. In this area, correction does not come so easily. The human being is dependent on himself.

There are two things that must be considered. Today they can only be presented as an empirical rule. These are two things that the human being carries into the spiritual world, because he carries his entire soul condition into it, the nature of his power of judgment, his moral condition. What does the human being bring into these spiritual worlds? What the human being develops as good or bad judgment contributes to whether the human being receives stimulation in the right way. A healthy power of judgment will stir his soul in the right way. What must live in his soul will be developed regularly, like our normal eyes and ears. Just as badly constituted senses relate to the world, so does what is cultivated in the soul when a person does not endeavor to maintain sound judgment. Those who want to enter the spiritual world must start from sound human understanding.

The second thing we have to bring with us is a healthy moral state of mind and soul, a soul mood and soul disposition that has, in a sense, managed to be free of soul moods. If a person brings immoral moods into it, then the effect is not one of unhealthy judgment, but rather the immoral mood has a numbing effect, not obliterating, but evoking bad images, untrue images. Mere deception of the soul world would be merely corrected by the power of judgment; what is evoked as a work of deception by an immoral state of mind is there and one believes in it if moral drive is not set in at the same time as spiritual training.

For in the training of the spirit, it must be taken into account that man must free himself from many things, which he can only free himself from with difficulty if he wants to search objectively. We want to start from ordinary life. There we find a phenomenon that can actually be studied everywhere. We find people who are materialists and believe only in nature and law. Such people think that anyone who believes in something other than nature is a fool, and that anything that cannot be explained in materialistic terms is nonsense. On the other hand, there are idealists who are less accustomed to dealing with matter. They are more accustomed to and respect more people with a pronounced soul life. They are therefore better suited to recognize the world and its immaterial conditions. There is realism and spiritualism, and the biggest mistake in ordinary life is that everyone swears by their “ism”. What is this “ism” other than what they have imagined: the expression of their own self. They therefore love it. The idealist loves his ideas, and so on. More far-seeing minds than Goethe's are not really in the mood to say, “I am an idealist, from my point of view things are like this.” Rather, we can see in Goethe's case how he is convinced of something that is actually considered foolish by the true materialist.

The world of material phenomena lives out itself before us, and one must study matter and the law – and one will realize that what matter grants has its justification. Thus, one must also explain that which belongs to the world and its material phenomena through these material phenomena. One can very well engage with the explanations that the materialist gives for matter. Goethe says: “Between the various one-sided directions, the path into truth opens up.” One must recognize that the world is an extremely diverse one and that one must grasp the various fields through the most diverse forms of thought and imagination. So one will always find that matter must be explained in a materialistic way. If you want to become a spiritual researcher, it is necessary that you already find your way in ordinary life. You get beyond that by practicing self-knowledge, which is often quite difficult. If you try to practice self-knowledge objectively, you soon realize what point of view you are taking. This has no further significance except in our soul life. One is then more inclined to also allow others such a point of view. Such ideas are necessary.

The spiritual researcher must recognize that points of view are there for areas of the world, and that one must, as it were, have the opportunity to grasp the world as a whole, to approach it from different sides with different points of view, just as one recognizes the shape of a tree by photographing it from different sides. A materialistic and an idealistic world view can both be correct. This insight must be gained through self-knowledge. Through self-knowledge, one seeks to overcome one-sidedness.

In practice, many things turn out differently than in theory, if one takes the trouble to carry them out seriously. You have conquered a point of view, and when you realize the limitations of it, you feel the ground shaking beneath you. The point of view we have conquered is our own self. And that is why you have to go through such feelings, otherwise you will not get away from your own self, otherwise everything remains subjectively formed. It is this “getting away from oneself” that is important. When we talk about misconceptions, we cannot say: these are truths and those are misconceptions. We become free of misconceptions through self-education, when we can let go of ourselves, when we can give up our point of view. There is nothing that people are more infatuated with than their point of view.

But he must go further. He must not only get away from what we call point of view, but get away from the subjective of his thinking and feeling. One must practice self-knowledge, but that comes naturally if the spiritual training is done in the right way.

When we are confronted with the spiritual world, we are outside of our ordinary life, in which we otherwise stand. We stand before ourselves, have become a thing ourselves. Otherwise we live ourselves, now we stand before ourselves as before an external thing. The spiritual researcher joins the spiritual things when he strives into the spiritual world. We compare ourselves with the spiritual world. This comparison is usually not favorable. This is easy to understand, because when a person begins to know himself, he then knows everything that is missing in him. Man shrinks back from self-knowledge. It is indeed true: self-knowledge is what we snatch from what we have loved. We are in the air. We have felt in a certain way so far; we have to see that as a narrowly limited personality. We have thought in a certain way – narrowly limited personality. Only now does a person realize how in love he is with himself. Self-knowledge is not only difficult because it is so hard to achieve, but also because it requires moral courage, because you put yourself out of yourself, put what you were aside; because you enter into a new state of mind that you are quite unaccustomed to.

To have experienced this mood is what is necessary to avoid error in the field of spiritual research. The errors come from within us. We must always be able to renew this impression, to place ourselves beside ourselves, then we know what to eliminate; then we know how to eliminate the errors. In the field of spiritual research, repeating an error is not the same as in the ordinary world. We have to fight errors at every turn; they are realities. In the spiritual realm, truths have to be gathered at every turn, because only when we understand all this can we agree on the value of insights into the spiritual world. After all, the objection can be raised that the spiritual world is only relevant for those who can see into it. This is not the case: only those who want to explore the spiritual world must be able to see into it. Any unbiased person can understand it.

How does the spiritual researcher relate to the ordinary state of mind? A painter must learn much before he can create a picture. When contemplating the painting, one person may see only the color combinations, while another looks for what the painter has put into it, and the person who experiences most deeply would be disturbed if a theorist came along and explained how colors are mixed, or if someone were to discuss art history and so on. You stand before the picture: if you can grasp what has been put into it, then you grasp it, and you need not be a painter. It is the same with what the spiritual researcher brings to light.

Then the spiritual researcher must express what he has researched in terms that are familiar to people of his time, that can be penetrated by a healthy mind; and then the other person, as listener or reader, receives it, only the person must not approach what the spiritual researcher has to say with prejudices. Then he will understand through a sound mind what the spiritual researcher has brought down. It is not the case that only what the spiritual researcher brings can be understood when one applies this power of judgment; what moves the soul is given in a sufficient way, even if she is not a spiritual researcher herself.

The spiritual researcher himself gains nothing from his research if he only stays there and looks at things, if he does not bring down what he sees so that he can communicate it to other people. In what can be given through spiritual research, the spiritual researcher and the person who only takes in things through a healthy sense of truth are exactly the same. Because this is so, a fruitful dissemination of the knowledge of spiritual research can only take place if this peculiarity of truth and error is taken into account. It must be emphasized here that the truth of what spiritual research has to say can be proclaimed by the spiritual researcher, and that everything can be understood by the ordinary mind if one is unbiased enough. The whole scope of science can be used to verify what is said through spiritual research, but not half-baked science. If it is true on the one hand that the natural sense of truth can always be convinced by what the spiritual researcher brings forth, it must also be said that this sense of truth must also be applied to the spiritual researcher, and here we are faced with the error in the dissemination.

One can understand those who reject spiritual research. These are not even the people who worry the spiritual researcher. They sometimes feel the obligation to test and the time will come when they will see from their feeling of having to test what many have already seen. The spiritual researcher is not worried about his opponents of this kind. He is much more concerned about some of his supporters.

As true as it is that some people reject without reason, it is also true that many people make themselves followers without reason, simply because of what is called belief in authority. That is why many do not apply common sense at all. For such people, there is no way to distinguish between a charlatan who talks about all kinds of things he doesn't really know much about, and someone who knows how to research conscientiously. For people of sound mind, these two phenomena are always known. It is known that the two have always gone hand in hand and that people have been little inclined to distinguish between them. People who are not morally stable are therefore exposed to a certain danger, because they are subject to temptation. This is because the spiritual researcher and anyone who can see into the spiritual world is seen as something very special. This is an unhealthy judgment in the dissemination of spiritual research, because by looking into it, he is nothing more than a researcher in this field, only what can be learned here is much more important than what can be researched in other fields. But a person is no different or higher or better because of this, and if you consider that the fool carries his follies and the clever man his cleverness, you will not consider someone who has something to share from spiritual research to be a higher being. You can judge him by what he has in common with others. The value of a person lies in his moral state of mind.

Those who recognize the life of the soul in a spiritual sense will know how the human soul's longing, human nature's urge, is directed towards the solutions that can actually only be provided by spiritual science. It is all the more necessary that this knowledge be spread in a healthy way, because it is intended to give people the opportunity to understand their destiny, but also the opportunity to experience their destiny in an appropriate way, so that they do not stand in life without a foundation.

What spiritual research has to offer is wisdom that strengthens and fortifies us for our existence. Those who lack the strengthening and fortifying effects of spiritual science will gradually find that they lack strength and power to live in general. Spiritual research is increasingly becoming a necessity in our time. It is all the more necessary to recognize its sources, truths and fallacies. When man opens himself to such directions and thoughts, as they could only be outlined today, then he arrives at that which will more and more be able to be this spiritual research for spiritual culture, and that will strengthen him inwardly in the acknowledgment of this research, in being penetrated by the truth of this research, and he will remain calm in the face of those who do not want to engage in this research. He remains calm so that this calmness of his appears to us as a sign of the evenly attained conviction through spiritual science. Then, when he has looked into and thought about the things himself, he understands the words with which we want to conclude today's reflection as a conclusion in line with our feelings, because the best with which spiritual science can conclude is what can be combined into a feeling; truth and error are rarely viewed in this way, as opposed to everything that can shake spiritual science and its power. We must face it as Goethe, for example, faced a matter that can be compared with the way the spiritual researcher relates to spiritual research. He once had to deal with a great philosophical school that denied movement, so that people said there was actually no movement.

Goethe, who was imbued with the insubstantiality of such views, found words that aptly expressed the refutation from a healthy sense of truth. He said:

Enemy powers may eye each other,
You remain calm, remain silent;
And if they deny you movement,
Go around in front of their noses.

Those who understand spiritual research in the right way can behave in a similar way to Goethe here in the face of the refutations of spiritual research.

The hostile attitude, the resistance against the spiritual movement, is most understandable to anyone who stands on the ground of our spiritual research. Schopenhauer also says: “Thus it is the fate of the poor truth that at the moment it appears it seems paradoxical at first, and yet it cannot help it; it has such great and wide flapping of its wings that individuality dies because of it.

Today, spiritual science has natural science as its opponent, but not the real natural science. In 1909, Charles Eliot gave a speech about the future of religions, in which he said: People have within themselves and must always have within themselves a physical and a spiritual core, which they can only explore with the knowledge of the soul-spiritual.

Two existential questions arise again and again: firstly, about man's destiny, which elevates man by crushing him, and secondly, the question of the nature of the human soul. These two questions gnaw and torment in the depths of the human soul. The hopelessness of finding an answer makes man sick right down to his physicality.

Two different circumstances arise at the birth of a human being: one is richly endowed, full of promise, while for the other it is hopeless. Such is the diversity of fate. And then there is the question of immortality. This gives rise to fear on the one hand and the desire for life to take a certain course on the other.

One can believe in immortality for selfish reasons, and not believe in it with the morality of sacrifice. But the individual, the personal, is the most valuable. Does it disappear with death? It would be a violation of the world economy if something were brought to the highest tension and then lost. External science is bound to the senses and the brain; the soul-spiritual cannot be researched with it. Spiritual science stands on the same ground as natural science. The plant consists of innumerable individual cells, [says Schleiden]. The human eye must use the microscope and the telescope for the stars. Man cannot penetrate the body of life. The essence of the human soul cannot be reached by such external means. Human knowledge comes to certain limits. It cannot fathom the actual existence of the soul. With the power of thought and other things, one cannot penetrate the essence of the soul after death and before birth.

However, the inner life of the soul can be strengthened and armed. It should just not be done with external methods, such as spiritualism. Some researchers try to get to the bottom of the soul with external experimental methods. Rochas, the serious researcher, examined the human being in whom the external aspects of the soul's life can apparently be demonstrated. He used a medium for this. A medium is like a human automaton. The active soul life is erased by magnetic lines. It can then relive another state of mind, for example, when it was ten years old, then the first experiences when it was just learning to write, then when it was an infant. Then it can be transported into a state before birth; a result as dark as chaos. One can go further and further; it can feel like an old man, then like a young child. In this way the researcher of the present wants to explore the spiritual when he has the object before him.

But the spirit cannot be brought down by external means, but only through pure soul experiences. Getting to know the soul is purely inward, and only possible through inward methods. One's own thinking, feeling and willing can be strengthened by intensifying the power of thought, which is bound to the outer senses in the waking state. This can be sharpened by means of meditation and contemplation. First, it is to be applied to the power of thought when one concentrates, out of one's innermost will, on thoughts that do not arise from external stimuli. These thoughts have a self-educating effect in that they strengthen our power of thought, through symbolic images – such as two glasses – to strengthen our soul life. This is so, even if it is called crazy, nonsensical. But there is something in life to which it relates: love. It is like geometry. This also works with symbols, symbols – [as with a] medal.

For some, it takes effect quickly, for others it takes many years. Through effort, the organs are made stronger; all soul power is concentrated on one point. This draws forces from the soul. You don't jump from one to the other as you usually would. Fifteen minutes or longer [is enough]. Every waking thought destroys a fine structure in the brain, which is restored by sleeping. Science already speaks of assimilation and dissimilation. The destructive process, when we think with the brain, reflects our thoughts to us. The materialistic thinker believes that our brain thinks. But it is an internal process. The brain is destroyed during ordinary thinking. Thought is reflected back by the brain and thus destructively intervenes in our brain. Through concentration, meditation, contemplation, one does not become sleepy. Only beginners complain about it. This is because it is difficult for the human mind to detach itself from the brain. Then we perceive the brain as something that is not being used. If a person wants to experience the mind as such, they have to free it from the brain. Then the person senses how the mind becomes a purely spiritual being. These experiences are the most unsettling.

When we are awake, we feel as if we are inside our skin. Now a feeling arises of being outside the body, of looking at it. What one previously called “I” becomes an object, its outer corporeality. This is connected with the feeling of being drawn to one's body with a hundred and more forces. Once this has been achieved, one knows two things: what one is in human life as a sleeping human being and what draws one to the body. Du Bois-Reymond, as he said, only understands the sleeping human being. But the nature of the air cannot be known through the life processes of the lungs. Waking up into the spiritual and soul life is taking oneself in; falling asleep is when the spiritual and soul life passes over into our surroundings, as when one breathes out air. The amount of air we have inhaled belongs to the atmosphere, and so does the spiritual-soul life of the spiritual-soul world. The spiritual researcher knows what happens outside the body, as if the air could look down on the lungs. The human being gets to know the connection of his soul-spiritual with the body, gets to know it in its independence from the physical body, gets to know it before birth that it previously lived in the spiritual world, how he even goes to the bodily embodiment, to a pair of parents, gets to know himself in the prenatal state, all through the independence of the power of thought.

The next soul power that can become independent is the power of speech, which flows outwards in truly spoken words. The human being has Broca's organ; speech prepares it so that it becomes what it is. Cause and effect are confused by science. Through motor forces, the larynx is set in motion when speaking, something reaches into the vibrating larynx, and from there the air is set in motion. Just as the power of thought is separated from the brain, so the power of speech is separated from Broca's system [organ] by allowing meditation to be imbued with feelings and sensations during meditation “In the light, luminous wisdom flows” [...].

This is not an external sensual effect, otherwise one would be considered a fantasist, but a fool. In this meditation, one would now like to unite oneself in enthusiasm with the shining, ruling wisdom, then the power of speech breaks free from the body. One lives in it silently and tacitly, keeping something inside, breaking off, experiencing in the soul what leads even further down than the first. One looks not only into one's own past life on earth [...] but one looks back on past lives on earth. This makes it certain that life on earth will be followed by a purely spiritual life, and that another life on earth will follow. The consciousness expands in repeated lives on earth. This is how the spiritual researcher, like the chemist, comes to his results. These are not arbitrary means, but means by which one arms one's soul life, just as the eye is armed by the microscope. Then another soul power is armed and strengthened: that which expresses itself in blood circulation and heart movement. In the ordinary life, shame and fear are spiritual-soul processes that intervene in the blood, in such a way that our blood must be released and made independent.

What happens when we add the element of will to meditation? “In that light the ruling wisdom rules and weaves.” With willpower, too, we must completely immerse ourselves in such meditation, then we release soul forces that reach into the entire cosmos and allow us to glimpse the origin and destiny of our earth. Then one sees: the successive earthly lives once had a beginning; the earth was once there for the first time. The earth was once born out of the spiritual state, and will again pass into a spiritual state. There are also many other methods to achieve such results. One must become a spiritual researcher in this way, which is briefly outlined here. But to make a painting, you have to be a painter; you don't have to be a painter to enjoy it. It would be a shame if it were only for the painters. To fathom spiritual truths, you have to be a spiritual researcher; to understand them, you just have to apply common sense, even though they may be considered heresy or fantasy.

But errors are also possible. One attains higher organs by training them as described. Thus, by awakening, one attains higher senses: spiritual eyes and spiritual ears - [as] Goethe [says]. But how do you attain healthy organs? With diseased eyes, one sees inaccurately, with an inclusion in the eye or in the twilight. One person saw incorrectly, saw what was in his own eye, in which he had an inclusion, and shot at it with a revolver. The freed thinking, feeling and willing must be healthy. This happens because the starting point is healthy, namely, that one applies a healthy power of judgment, without enthusiasm and reverie or fantasy. Otherwise, the released power of thought and speech will see ghostly things that belong to our own soul like an inclusion in the eye. A freethinker's calendar has said that children should not be taught religion because they do not come up with religion on their own. But that is not logical, because a person does not learn to speak on their own if they are placed on an uninhabited island. It depends on a perfectly sound understanding of human nature. Otherwise one faints, or it is like under anesthesia when consciousness does not function properly. It depends on a healthy moral constitution of the soul, on the moral strength of life. Otherwise man does not love what arises in spiritual life, but spiritual impotence. Otherwise we want to have everything in the spiritual realm [as we do] in the physical life. Then one perceives ghosts, like spiritualists or similar people.

The soul brings with it the soul forces from previous earthly lives, not from a previous generation. The present earthly life comes from previous earthly lives. We then understand our destiny when we understand our previous life: misfortune has made me the person I am now. The Alpine plant thrives only where it corresponds to its environment. This is how the questions of fate and immortality are solved. We grasp immortality in development; we experience development. A sound mind and sound morals lead to spiritual research. Giordano Bruno expanded the blue vault of heaven; so spiritual research expands the boundaries of human life through birth and death. Away with the firmament, which is limited by birth and death. It goes from transformation to transformation. When spiritual science intervenes in education, the human being will feel when he grows old that something lives in him that is arranging his next life; he will experience immortality, the germ and core of the following existence.

Finally, I would like to express a feeling, based on a saying of Goethe's about movement. It already occurred in Greece and has recently reappeared. It was said: Movement does not exist, the arrow is always in one place, then again in one place, again and again, but always at rest. Goethe refuted this theory as not logical, just as squaring the circle cannot be mathematically proven. It can be proved, but differently. Goethe says:

Enemies may eye each other,
You remain calm, remain silent;
And if they deny you movement
Go around in front of their noses.

Or you can also say:

Enemy events may occur,
but you remain calm, remain cheerful,
and if they even deny the spirit
you do not brood about it further.
In the end, even agree with them on that point,
their spirit may be in a very bad state.

Spiritual science does not want to be a new religion and is not a sect either. The relationship to science is expressed by an image: the spiritual scientist relates to ideas and concepts in the same way that a farmer relates to his harvest; he takes some as seed and consumes the rest. One can think the modern scientific concepts and ideas or, in another case, also live them. If you live with a part of what science gives, taking it as you take physical nourishment, then you come to emphasize spiritual science. Natural science demands spiritual science. An example from water for the question: Is there a spiritual element in nature? It is in it like hydrogen in water. You are completely grounded in spiritual science when you call it spiritual chemistry; spiritual science wants to separate the spiritual and soul from the physical.

Anyone who is interested in the things that concern them will notice that they retain them, that they develop a good memory for them; the health of the soul depends on memory. Whether we can see ourselves clearly back to our childhood depends on our attention; this seems easy, “but the easy is difficult”. This attention can be increased to the limitless; the art of driving this attention further and further is part of what the spiritual researcher has to do. This is called the concentration of soul power. The objects of reflection must be placed at the center of the soul life through one's own power and activity. This concentration must be carried out with the utmost energy and patience. The only apparatus is the human soul, and the only experimenter is the spiritual researcher himself. A spiritual researcher must first develop concentrated thinking within himself; the whole person must become an observer of self-selected ideas, and that is why the spiritual scientific current is like a continuation of the natural scientific one.

In reality, it is concepts and ideas that science has brought. They must be elevated to a symbol. In this way, the human being achieves that the spiritual-mental is lifted out of the physical-corporal, like hydrogen out of water. I then no longer imagine in my body, but in the spiritual. Then you know what it means to think outside of your brain. It is a feeling of yourself outside of the body, initially outside of the brain. You then feel your body like an external object. Ordinary thinking is robust and wears out the brain; but usually you do not pay attention to it. Re-immersing yourself in the physical brain brings a certain fear. By applying inner forces, the spiritual-mental can be separated from the physical-bodily. The act of separating from the body becomes an inner play of expression, a facial expression. Something active, something energetic is the separated part. This inner play of expression has a meaning; otherwise it only shows hints when one makes a face.

The second step is complete surrender. A person must completely extinguish and submerge everything that is thinking, feeling and willing in them into the stream of world events. This devotion must be increased to the point of no return; to the point where the person commands a complete standstill in his or her other mental life.

Then he experiences himself not only in the soul-spiritual, but he comes to perceive in the spiritual-soul world and is in the midst of spiritual beings. In the spiritual world, one must immerse oneself in every being one wants to recognize. One must be able to carry one's own being into these beings. I must experience the spiritual process as my own, and that comes from cultivating real devotion, taken to the point of immeasurability. You have to mimic what is going on in them with your expressions. You have to experience what the beings experience with them. You cannot experience passively; in recognizing you have to imitate them. This is then expressed in the facial expressions of one's own spiritual life.

Something else is developed through concentration and devotion; one separates again the spiritual-soul from the physical. What one uses for speaking in ordinary life, one can keep in the soul, not use for speaking. In the spiritual body, one can learn to speak inwardly, outside of the physical body. One must not even stir up what is stirred up in the brain, let alone what is stirred up in the rest of the speech apparatus when speaking. A person always thinks in such a way that speaking resonates; even when he only thinks, the hidden speech movements take place inwardly. Certain will impulses are associated with the ideas; for example, one concentrates on the idea of a luminous circle. One imagines that the luminous circle is the symbol of the wisdom that reigns in the world. One must not only concentrate in thinking, but also participate with one's affections. Then one learns to speak inwardly and one can immerse oneself in spiritual beings - and only then can one immerse oneself in one's true own spiritual being. With the spiritual-soul power separated from the power of speech, one can immerse oneself in what the soul is. Now this occurs: an expansion of the ability to remember beyond birth and death. One then stands before the teaching of repeated lives on earth.

A third thing can be excreted from the body as soul-spiritual. The child cannot yet walk, has not yet integrated into the cosmic existence. Herder has pointed out how human soul life in its intimate essence depends on the human being coming into the vertical position and directing the face towards heaven. This happens through an inner power, through the human being himself. One can find the powers in the human soul through which man makes himself into a true, heaven-gazing earthly human being, through which man gives himself his moral and intellectual character. These forces can be found outside of a body; when you experience them separately, you experience the spiritual beings; then you experience that there are also beings in the spiritual world that do not come into the physical. You only experience them by using the power that makes you an upright human being. The separate directing power of the human being experiences the human being like an inner physiognomy. He experiences being in other spiritual beings through this. By extracting himself from his body, he pours himself into a spiritual world, into a region that was previously only penetrated by faith.

Can anyone become a spiritual researcher today? No. Just as not everyone can or should become a chemist. - The spiritual researcher can speak the same language as another natural scientist. One must not merely believe what the spiritual researcher says - only inspiration can come from such a lecture. Understanding is based on understanding the language that is spoken. Just as one can understand the scientific world, so the spiritual researcher describes it. What seems paradoxical need not be untrue: little by little it is raised to general understanding. The spiritual researcher faces the real spiritual goals of the present day. Science has lost sight of the spiritual goals of our time.

Wilson, the president of the North American Union, says in his various writings and reflections again and again, and this runs through many writings like a common theme: If you look at the present, you always notice how quickly the whole of life has changed. The laborer may not get to know his employers in his entire life. What people once established in terms of laws and relationships and considerations between employers and employees is outdated, and our time has moved on. — He considers it most necessary to catch up on this: what people have thought about living together has lagged behind what time has brought. Human souls have changed significantly, especially in the nineteenth century. Those who keep saying, “We do not need to rise to the spiritual world in a new way, we only need to rise to what once was,” must take this into account. Such people do not want to have their goals set by the tasks of the time. Humanity cannot be harmonized by renewing old beliefs. New inner longings, new life riddles are given to the soul. The souls live in world riddles that are no longer solved in the old way, even if this old way is brought to the souls in the most perfect way.

We can penetrate into the spiritual world using the model of natural science. But spiritual science makes demands on people that are still uncomfortable for them today, it presupposes an increased activity of the soul. Today, people prefer to observe things rather than participate. A modern philosopher literally said the following in a magazine: When I immerse myself in Kantian and Spinozian philosophy, I feel that my concepts are becoming confused. How does he want to remedy this? Through the cinematograph, through film! He wants to demonstrate how two concepts unite in a higher one. The editor of this essay in the journal takes it very seriously, because he adds a footnote in which he says that it would be praiseworthy if age-old human yearning could be satisfied by it. So we should not be surprised if, in the near future, a cinema is described as follows: “Spinoza's Ethics is being ‘filmed’ here!”

People do not want to reign in the invisible in order to rise to the spirit, they do not want to work inwardly; they just want to look. Spiritual science makes the opposite demands. It demands that the soul is inwardly active, that it seeks to experience the concept. Inwardly creative, you must participate in the creation and creation of the world spirit. Modern life demands that the soul of each individual develops inner activity and liveliness, otherwise the soul will be crushed by modern life. Only such a soul will be able to do justice to life in the future. The counterpole to the external must lie in what lives in the soul through the exploration of the spirit. Thus spiritual science is connected with the aims of our time.

From what point of view is our time a time of transition? The saying once occurred:

You shall be as God and distinguish between good and evil!

What man has achieved in the way of freedom is also connected with this. There is something paradoxical in the analogy for our time. It depends on the impulse that lives in the following words: If science alone remained, what kind of idea would man absorb into himself? If we were to stop at the level of natural science alone, at what many people today want to believe is natural science, then we would say that human beings are only at a higher level of the animal kingdom, that they have only developed animal instincts to a higher level. But if human beings were only the most highly developed animal, then the quoted word would be transformed into the other: “You will be like the beast.” If our moral sense is nothing but heightened instinct, then the only thing left is the monon: “You will not distinguish between good and evil.” That would be the reverse Fall of Man. This is what we are facing. The effect of nature remains neutral with regard to good and evil and should not be lumped together with it, otherwise morality would be nothing but convention.

We need an elixir of life, inner harmony to prevent the loss of the soul, inner health, inner mood, inner strength of soul, which should come, that is the main thing. This must come from a new realization, from a new love for the deeds that earthly existence demands of us. The goals of the development of the earth are those that spiritual science has in mind.

Despise reason and science alone,
Man's supreme power, [...]
So I have you already unconditionally.

Mephistopheles certainly acknowledges external science, but spiritual science is affected. He is called “tempter” in the Bible. He may be called such who not only tempts, but wants to drive into the slave yoke of mere natural effect, who wants to rob man of the freedom to enter into the spiritual.

Spiritual science may be ranked with the best that has been expressed in earlier times as a presentiment by the best. The soul can feel strong and loving and dutiful through spiritual science because it knows itself in the spirit; it gives the soul the consciousness of eternity. What one of the spiritual scientists has expressed is emotionally summarized in the following. What Herder expresses in his “Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity” is how the lecture concludes, in terms of feeling: “If I step through the gate of death out of life into the spiritual world , I may look upon the change of my life as I pass through death as something that I await as calmly and confidently as I experience the course of being in the experience of passing from waking to sleeping.

Question & Answer I

Question: What is absolute good or evil?

Rudolf Steiner: Evil consists in an increase of selfishness. The person concerned does not know how to harmonize his actions with the course of the world. Where this selfishness comes from is shown in the writing “The Threshold of the Spiritual World”. In the spiritual world, selfishness is an organ through which the human being can perceive. The possibility of evil is based on the fact that man carries down into the physical world that which, like the eye, must be connected to the human being in a higher world, where it does not belong. Evil in the sense world arises from the fact that human spiritual powers are abused. Through earthly fate, man will be educated for the good in repeated earthly lives. Mineral, plant and animal cannot be evil in the moral sense. Man can transform his lower instincts and passions into noble powers. The lion's rage, on the other hand, cannot be easily transformed. Death means something completely different to an animal than it does to a human being; the focus must be on the fact of death and not on concepts and ideas. The fact that it exists in a certain place is what makes it what it is in the world; but it must not be placed elsewhere. Question: What are the spiritual beings that the thinking, separated from the body, submerges itself in?

Rudolf Steiner: Eliot at Harvard University said something like this in June 1909: At all times, it would have been natural for the human soul to recognize that it is something distinct from mere corporeality.

Recognition of the spirit is not yet knowledge of the spirit, because this is knowledge of the individual entities. You get to know nature when you get to know it in individual entities, for example individual flowers: violets, cowslips, lilies of the valley and so on. Likewise, there are individual entities that do not descend to the physical body, but which appear to be a continuation of the entire sensory world. We speak of concrete spiritual entities. A child who has not yet seen a live horse would claim: “A horse must always be made of wood.” As soon as one delves into the individual entities behind history, behind natural beings, one does not want to believe it; one says: “That does not exist.” What the best of humanity has always felt becomes truth through spiritual science. Herder says in his “Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity”: Man is a creature between the sensual and the spiritual world. He grows with death into the spiritual world with the powers he has gained in the physical-sensual world.

Question & Answer Session II

Question: What is absolute good and evil?

Rudolf Steiner: This question has nothing to do with the conclusion of the lecture. It is a completely different question. What is good and evil must be determined from the spiritual world, not from mere natural effects; one cannot speak of absolute good and evil there. One cannot get by with good and evil if one only wants to speak of a sensual world, not of a spiritual world that stands behind the physical-sensual world, but of course permeates it, forming a unity with it. Man's evil actions, which can justifiably be called evil, are always connected with an increase of selfishness. If man does not want to bring himself into harmony with the whole of the world, but only wants to follow himself, then he will increasingly fall into evil. In the spiritual world, egoism is a higher sense organ; there it does not lead to evil; otherwise one would extinguish, not even come to perceive in the spiritual world, because through egoism one perceives in the spiritual world, there it is something completely different. One should not transfer a concept from one to the other without further ado, this is how so many misunderstandings and errors arise. For example, for a human being, death is something completely different than it is for an animal. A knife is not just a knife; it can be used for shaving and not for cutting meat. You have to approach the facts everywhere and not the concepts and ideas. A quality is not absolutely good or evil, but only in that place this and that. For example, if you are asked: Is the lion's power of rage good or evil? - the answer must be: If this rage occurs in other beings, it can be used for the noblest of actions, whereas in the lion it wreaks havoc. In nature, the lion's power cannot be transferred so easily to a noble being, but man can do that, he can transform the powers into noble powers. What Schiller wrote to Goethe must be applied: It is necessary to take all of nature together to gain clarity about what is at stake. This also applies to the spiritual world. Mental powers must be misused to be evil. The stone cannot be evil, nor can the plant, if one does not want to speak symbolically. Through earthly fate, the human being is to be educated precisely for the good.

Question: How can the power of the soul be increased through concentration?

Rudolf Steiner: In the previous lecture, reference was made to my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. I would have to read my whole book to you here, which would be too long even for the most willing listeners.

Question: What is disembodied thinking, in which the soul immerses itself? Rudolf Steiner: Well, then you are released from the body!

Question: How should we imagine spiritual entities?

Rudolf Steiner: By imagining spiritual things at all. It is the same as with the sentence: Living things can only come from living things. Three and a half centuries ago, no one had yet thought of recognizing this. The feeling for the spiritual can initially glow out of the thought. Acknowledgment of the spirit is not yet knowledge of the spirit. If someone were to say about all phenomena, “That's nature, nature, nature, nature, nature”; would he know it? To doubt the possibility of spiritual knowledge is like a child saying: My horse was always wooden; no horse made of muscle meat can exist. Always, even in the most diverse variations, one hears the same refrain: There is no such thing, because one cannot even imagine such a thing.

Spiritual science is theosophical in nature because it leads man back to his original source. People today fight against theosophy and are therefore anti-theosophical in their thinking.

The entire soul and spiritual being is engaged in the first years of childhood in order to develop the physical organization, especially the nervous system; all forces are consumed in this work. From a certain point on, the human organism has become harder and more determined. This is the moment when self-awareness arises in the child. The spiritual and mental powers are reflected back upon themselves; before that, he [the human being] threw them all into the organism. Now the spiritual and mental is thrown back upon itself. At first we see as through a pane of glass, but then the organization becomes like a mirror that reflects the spiritual and mental life back upon itself. Then he says to himself “I”. From then on, life proceeds in self-awareness.

The fact that in early childhood our physical organization is transformed into a mirror and our spiritual and soul life is reflected back into itself is how the human being owes his entire earthly destiny and essence. The forces he has brought with him from his previous lives he has worked into his physical organization. In life, the forces are poured into the organization. At first, the child has no self-awareness because the spiritual and soul forces are still flowing into the physical and material organization; this must face us like a mirror. Man would be born a theosophist if he could see this working into the physical organization himself. A new germ is also forming in man, as in plants, that future life demands.

The child would have to remain stunted if it were conscious, because then the spiritual-soul forces would not all pour into the bodily organization. In the spiritual-soul forces, through which we raise our self-awareness, germinal forces for our next life are formed. These, however, must not rise up into our self-consciousness; they must remain asleep, for they are constructive forces and may only unfold their character in our next life. If man were aware of these germinal forces, he would have to fall into a dream or sleep; if we knew of these germinal forces, we would know ourselves in the divine, we would be born theosophists.

The forces that can develop our self-awareness ever more strongly must be formed out of the soul-spiritual world. During our earthly life, we must swim through a stream, on one bank of which lies the transition from theosophical to self-awareness and on the other, the transition from self-awareness to theosophical consciousness. It is precisely from our being set apart from our divine-spiritual mood that we draw the forces of our self-awareness. Our earthly mood must be anti-philosophical.

After the preparations, he [man] can penetrate to these germinal forces, as was explained in the previous lecture. The human being would believe that his self-awareness would be endangered, undermined, and therefore the human being is afraid to let the germinal forces arise for his next life, hence the anti-sophistic mood. The human being has a revulsion for the fact that the germinal forces could overwhelm his self-awareness and throw him into world consciousness. The human being has a secret fear of letting the connection emerge from the foundations. The soul must first become strong and energetic before it can confront the deeper forces, just as a self-confident person confronts this mirror. Man can make his future into a mirror to see his spiritual self, just as we have a mirror in the physical body through which our self-consciousness arises.

By having the secret human being within himself, the spiritual researcher has a guarantee that he is immortal, that he is preparing a life in immortality; just as the germinating powers of the plant guarantee the emergence of a new plant.

We must cultivate those forces most strongly that lead us away from our divine spiritual connection; we cultivate an anti-sophical mood. Humanity has to develop between opposites. Just as man oscillates between freedom and bondage, so he also oscillates between theosophy and anti-theosophy. But there are moments when man becomes aware of his original source, and this mood can grow and lead him to theosophy. Our present culture in its complexity was favorable for the anti-sophical mood. When life was much less complicated, the time was favorable for the theosophical mood. King Leon of Phlius, as Cicero tells us, once asked Pythagoras what he considered his life's work. “I see myself as a philosopher,” he said. ”I can express it in a comparison. I see life as a kind of fair. People come from everywhere to enjoy the festivities, to buy and sell things, for the sake of profit. But there are also those who come just to watch and see everything.” He feels the same way about the fair of life. He leads an inner life that is of no external use to anyone, that exists for its own sake; Pythagoras, a philosophos, was considered such a person.

Now a strange philosophical worldview is coming over from America to Europe. James, Schiller and so on are its representatives, and it is called the pragmatic worldview. This wants to say: What people acquire in ideas that go beyond sensory observations has no basis in truth. One only forms the ideas that are useful; what is useful for life is seen as truth. We form the concept of breath because it is useful to imagine something like this; one cannot perceive it. It is useful to imagine life in terms of ideals and to organize life according to ideals, which is why ideals are true. For our view of the world, it is useful to imagine a God and to bring order to the world. The “Philosophy of the As If” is the European edition of the American one. After its author ceased to be a professor, he published this philosophy. You can't find security, so you act as if there is a God, as if there are ideals, not that they are there in any way. This philosophy is also called fictionalism. Under the ownership of the former and the current religion, it was possible for a “philosophy of as if” to arise, and no matter how much this old religion is renewed, it will continue to develop as a “philosophy of as if”.

In his Ignorabimus speech, Du Bois-Reymond, the great physiologist, sought to define the field that science is capable of grasping. He shows that it is impossible for this science to comprehend sensation, the simplest psychic phenomenon. Regarding everything that is spiritual and mental, Reymond says: We will never recognize it. This attitude makes people materialistic and monistic. At the end, Reymond says: Science must limit itself to what exists and happens in space and time, and therefore must remain incomprehensible to everything that looks beyond spatial and temporal events, because only supernaturalism could know about that, but that is where science ends. If this sentence were true, then no logic could exist, no speech could be there. Spiritual science seeks to explore the question: How do people come to say: Where the sensory ends, science must end?

The soul is greater than consciousness. Many people cannot give clear reasons for their actions, and this is recognized by psychology. The unconscious reasons can be imaginative or affect- and drive-like. The hidden person in us still has power, still beats; man is under his influence.

So man is under the influence of fear; it can be conscious or unconscious, he acts accordingly. The Danish scientist Lange has written a paper “On the Expression of Emotional Movement”. Under the influence of fear, a person turns pale and their eyes become cloudy. The person cannot find a way to find their footing. The vessels contract and with them the muscles. Then the person cries: Where is something I can hold on to, or I will fall over? Thinking directed outwards brings the person into the same state in his nervous system, in his vascular system, as fear. This fear does not come to the consciousness, it remains subconscious. On the one hand we see the timid person who is too weak to stand on his own, who needs external support; on the other hand, the thinker who, through his outward-looking thinking, comes into the same situation. All materialism is an unconscious fear; its clamor for matter is a result of its subconscious fear. They need the material world to support them. When I enter the supersensible world, I fall over; may something hold me – so they unconsciously call out to the material world out of fear. What Reymond said last was an expression of horror of thinking.

Today the human pendulum is swinging in the direction of anti-Sophian sentiment. The consequence will be that Theosophy will also grow strong. Anti-Sophia is one-sidedness; the whole soul must do justice to the consciousness of self and of God. The soul finds rest only where its power is bound to the divine power. The best people, those who have advanced humanity, have sensed Theosophy. Goethe was imbued, aglow and warmed by the theosophical mood. Once, an anti-theosophical mood met him; anti-theosophists can also be great minds. One of them was Albrecht von Haller. He said:

No created mind can penetrate the innermost nature,
Happy the man to whom she shows only the outer shell.

To remain in the shell is anti-philosophy in the most eminent sense of the word. Goethe's answer is well known:

Nature has neither core nor shell, [...]
Only thou, thou, examine thyself,
Whether thou art core or shell.

Fichte says from his theosophical mood: Whoever recognizes himself in his real self is already standing in the spiritual world. - In his lecture on “The Destination of the Scholar,” Fichte expresses himself as follows:

I raise my head boldly to the threatening rocky mountains, and to the raging waterfall, and to the crashing clouds floating in a sea of fire, and say: I am eternal and I defy your power. Break down on me, all of you, and you earth and you sky, mingle in wild tumult, and you elements all - foam and rage and grind in wild struggle the last sun dust of the body that I call mine call mine; my will alone with its firm plan shall float boldly and coldly over the ruins of the universe; for I have seized my destiny, and it is more enduring than yours; it is eternal, and I am eternal, like it.

To those who are anti-Sophian, he says:

That ideals cannot be represented in the real world is something we others perhaps know as well as they do, perhaps better. We only claim that reality must be judged by them and modified by those who feel the strength to do so. Even if they cannot be convinced of this, they lose little by doing so, once they are what they are; and humanity loses nothing by it. It merely makes it clear that they are not counted on in the plan for the ennoblement of humanity. The latter will undoubtedly continue on its way; let kind nature prevail over the former, and give them rain and sunshine, beneficial nourishment and an undisturbed circulation of the fluids, and, in due course, wise thoughts! Question

Question: Can reincarnation be linked to facts, or does it have to be accepted as dogma?

Rudolf Steiner: It is no more a dogma than memory is. After all, memory is also an inner fact. You can't pump out and look at what you need to remember. Thus, we cannot prove past memories of previous earthly lives other than by experiencing them.

This is how it is with all supersensible truths. To understand them, only an unprejudiced contemplation of life is necessary; to investigate them, one needs clairvoyance. Between death and a new birth, the decisive point of view is the striving to perfect oneself and also the whole world, not the question of whether it is pleasant or unpleasant or causes pain. One can come to an understanding of reincarnation if one behaves as if strokes of fate are not random, but [as if] one has inflicted them on oneself. These are soul proofs, so we must be there ourselves.

Question: [What about the] seven-year periodicity, and what deeper causes [does it] have? [What about] suicide?

Rudolf Steiner: Regarding the question of suicide, the [Schopenhauer] saying applies: “It is easy to preach morality, but difficult to explain it.” One should do good because it is absorbed into one's soul. (?)

Question: Which is the best prayer? Is it the Lord's Prayer?

Rudolf Steiner: The Lord's Prayer is indeed a universal prayer for the most primitive and the most developed mind. It has this power in itself, even if one does not know its laws, just as a plant grows according to laws that it does not know. Every prayer must be carried by a devotional mood, otherwise it can also be of evil. “Not my will, but Thine, be done.” It is only through this mood that every prayer becomes a true prayer.

Question: The point where man simply feels the connection with the higher worlds, how does he express himself? Please give me more details.

Rudolf Steiner: This is similar to the question: How can I imagine the spirit? - Just spiritually. No spiritual materialism! In the Theosophical Society one could hear such expressions [as]: Today there are wonderful spiritual vibrations in the room. The spiritual researcher would simply say: There is a good atmosphere in the room today. In the theosophical books, the spirit is described as follows: First there is matter, then it becomes thinner and thinner, but matter never actually ends. You should imagine the spirit without leaning on anything material. Feeling is something that has its center within itself.

For many years now, almost every winter I have had the privilege of speaking here about one or other topic from the field of spiritual science, as it is meant in tonight's reflections. And just on the occasion of my last lectures, which I was allowed to give here, I allowed myself to make the remark that when one speaks of spiritual science today in our present time in the sense in which it is meant here, one then by no means talking about anything in our time that is well known or even popular in wider circles; on the contrary, with this spiritual science one has to talk about something that is widely unrecognized and, above all, misunderstood. Indeed, this spiritual science has to fight against misunderstanding upon misunderstanding. One person may be informed about this spiritual science from second or third or sometimes even seventh or eighth hand reports and come to the conclusion that it is something like a new sect entering the world or some new attempt to found a religious community or something similar. The other comes to the opinion that this spiritual science has fantasy and 'dreaming' at its sources. Above all, it contradicts in the most eminent sense what today, as a worldview, wants to establish itself, as they say, as genuine, true science.

Perhaps I may, just on the occasion of this lecture, conclude with a few words about the misunderstandings that are currently close to us here, and may I first devote the greater part of the lecture to our topic and to that from whose field I have already been able to bring some details here for discussion, today in general, in order to then consider some special questions in the lecture on January 27 of next year.

Above all, it may be said that spiritual science wants to place itself in the spiritual life of the present, precisely as this spiritual life of the present has developed from the scientific way of thinking that has taken hold of the spiritual life of humanity for three to four centuries. And it may be said that the most serious misunderstanding is the assumption that this spiritual research can somehow come into conflict with the legitimate claims of true scientific research. From its point of view, this spiritual science will admire and fully recognize this science, and must do so if it wants to stand on the ground of true and genuine observation of humanity and the times. It will admire and recognize the great scientific achievements of our age where it is justified, will acknowledge what science has done for the transformation of our entire cultural life, will acknowledge how it is a scientific way of thinking, what is at work at every turn today and lives in our cultural assets and, in particular, what has virtually transformed all external areas of the rest of life in the course of the nineteenth century.

To what extent this spiritual science is fully included in the natural scientific series of development on the one hand, but on the other hand must go beyond its final conclusions, precisely because it draws the last and most genuine conclusions about what today is often called natural science thinking, I would like to explain this first by means of a kind of comparison, by which we simply want to communicate, but by which we do not want to prove anything special about what spiritual science has to say.

I do not want to talk about what science has achieved in terms of commercial and industrial aspects of contemporary cultural life; I want to talk about what scientific thinking has achieved. Apart from the fact that it has influenced the various cultural fields, it has contributed to a certain education of all human thinking, it has transformed the nature of the habits of thought, of the life of imagination and the cognitive needs of the human soul to a much greater extent than is usually realized. For this transformation has not only taken hold of those who have been drawn to science directly through their profession, their inclination or their interest, but of all souls; people simply think differently today than they did five or six centuries ago. We are accustomed to holding very different ideas about what we might call the reign of a sense of existence than we had in earlier centuries.

This is not something that has been arbitrarily brought about; rather, it is based on that inner necessity that had to take place in the history of mankind, just as human life must be different for an old man of sixty than for a man of thirty. These things correspond to historical laws of life, and anyone who wants to deny them must deny the inner truth of things. Those people who today are not yet seized by this change in thinking will be seized by it in the future, in difficult times, in the very near future. Thus, if we may say so, centuries of scientific education have transformed the innermost part of human thought and feeling. We may say so.

How does that which wants to shape cultural development as spiritual science relate to this transformation of human thinking over the last four centuries? I would like to illustrate this to you through a comparison. Let us look at the farmer who harvests the fruits when they are ripe. The greater part of the harvest is used as human food. But a part must be used, if life is to continue, to be sown as seed again, so that a harvest can ripen again next year.

We can compare this process in the life of nature with what has been achieved in recent centuries through scientific knowledge. The greater part of this must be used to allow human cultural life to flow broadly; it is incorporated into the important industrial achievements, into commercial life, into external social coexistence, into the individual sciences; and the individual branches of this culture flourish because the scientific way of thinking flows into them all. This part of human thought can be compared to the part of the seed that is used for human food.

But a part – and certainly not the least valuable part – of thoughts that have entered the human soul only in the last century, a part of these inner acquisitions, of what we have learned about the secrets of the existence of the world precisely through the natural sciences, can be used like the seed that goes into the field to produce new fruit. This is the part we use for what is referred to as meditation, concentration of thought. We can process this part of scientific thoughts and ideas inwardly with the soul, allowing them to take effect in our soul, to germinate there, so to speak. Under the influence of these thoughts, to which we devote ourselves in meditation, which we practise in the very innermost, most intimate soul work, we can allow precisely these scientific ideas to work on our soul in such a way that they work, weave, and bring forth sensations and feelings within it, that they practise this soul life so inwardly that this soul life not only expresses the word 'development', which is so popular today, but also comes into development itself. It is precisely the scientific way of thinking, when meditatively processed, that transforms our soul, makes our soul into something else. And it will soon become clear how, from this point of view, spiritual science is the correct continuation of the scientific way of thinking. But with regard to this spiritual science, when such considerations are employed, as is the case today, only suggestions can be given, only communications about the method of research, through which the spiritual researcher himself can devote himself to contemplation, the means by which everyone can be convinced.

Therefore, I would first like to draw attention to some of the results of spiritual science and then show how the spiritual researcher arrives at these results. These results are so at odds with what people today believe and suppose to be truth that they seem quite paradoxical, like something fantastic, like a flight of fancy for some. The spiritual researcher in particular knows how alien these results must be to many a soul of the present time, and he is least surprised when someone who wanted to be his friend walks away from him with the impression that he was talking to a fanatic. The spiritual researcher is fully aware of every reaction, even hostile confrontation, because he knows where such antagonism can come from.

Above all, spiritual research is a unique discipline in that it seeks to connect the human soul with its spiritual source in a way that is based on scientific thinking. It shows that what man carries in his soul as the deepest, innermost part is spiritual , a spiritual core; and that this spiritual core is connected with an all-embracing spiritual life of the world that lies beyond the life of the senses, and that it cannot be perceived or recognized by the ordinary human senses or by the intellect that binds itself to these human senses. But in this method of research, a tremendous difference between spiritual science and all other sciences immediately comes to light. Every other science works with the same means of thinking and looking at things, which are otherwise peculiar to man in everyday life. Just as man is, just as he develops in the normal way from childhood to later age, as he develops a certain capacity for knowledge, so he also approaches the scientific research objects of the present. And everything that such a normal person has to say forms the content of the sciences in the various fields of life.

It is quite different in spiritual research. It takes development seriously. It is based on the fact that with the powers of knowledge, with the soul faculties, which are initially inherent in people in their everyday lives, these boundaries cannot be crossed, which separate the sensual from the supersensible, the material from the spiritual; but it is based on the fact that a person's powers of knowledge, a person's soul powers, can be developed. It is serious about the word “development”. And today we will be speaking about intimate inner processes and activities of the soul, through which the soul elevates itself beyond itself, comes to develop powers of knowledge that are not those of ordinary life, but that, within this soul, which can be addressed in the soul as the true, immortal, spiritual core of the human being.

In a sense, spiritual research is not as comfortable as other forms of research; it cannot accept people as they are, but must make uncomfortable demands of them. If you want to become a spiritual researcher, you have to transform your soul so that it is guided beyond the ordinary level through its own activity and conducts research with powers that are not present in everyday life. This is the language of spiritual research. Only these powers lead to the regions of the spiritual world and to its beings.

But then, when the soul is led out so that it grasps its own essential core as a soul, then it first comes to a truth that, in the truest sense of the word, represents the continuation of the findings of natural science, but which is still everywhere looked upon as fantasy wherever it has not been studied in detail. One comes to the truth about repeated lives, the truth that can be expressed in a nutshell by saying: What we experience and work for in this life between birth and death, we do not experience and work for only once. As we see our life, when we look back into childhood as far as we can, and as we hope for our life in relation to the rest of the life before death, we do not live only once. We go through the gate of death and live in a purely spiritual world, which can only be seen with the spirit, a life between death and new birth, and then enter with the fruits of this life, also with those that we gather between death and new birth, into a new life on earth, to which we can look in the future just as we can look back into the past on the already expired earth lives of the individual human. So we always look forward to life on earth - between birth and death - and to life that passes between death and new birth in a purely spiritual world. The way we present this truth in today's spiritual life, it seems quite naturally fantastic to the vast majority of people. But all new truths in the world have seemed as fantastic as they have appeared. It will always be the fate of new truths that at first they seem like fantasies, then they become something that can no longer be seen as different; they then become a matter of course. Then, when man beholds himself as in an extended memory, then he can also explore the connections of this spiritual-soul core, which goes from life to life, with the spiritual worlds, through which the divine-spiritual, which interweaves and lives through this life, also passes. But from that which the spiritual researcher has so fully brought to life within himself, it springs forth for man that which he needs more and more for the cultural development of our earth, especially in the present and in the future.

Thus I have presented some of the truths of this spiritual research. It now remains for me to show how the spiritual researcher arrives at these truths, that is, how the spiritual world is investigated and researched. One must not believe that this spiritual world can be investigated with the senses that we can apply to the sensory world. It is a spiritual world precisely because it cannot be perceived by the senses. It is necessary for the study of this spiritual world that man himself should make himself the instrument of investigation. All other sciences have their external instruments. Spiritual research has as its only instrument the human organism itself, which is, however, the most wonderful instrument we can find on earth. But this organism must undergo a certain transformation if it is to acquire, to use a phrase from Goethe, “spiritual eyes and ears” in order to see what is always around us in spiritual form, but which cannot be seen unless a spiritual eye and spiritual ear are developed in the human soul, which would otherwise remain dormant.

How does one develop the spiritual organs through which the spiritual world becomes visible, audible and perceptible to man? Not tumultuous external processes, not experiments that can be carried out in the same way externally as in laboratories or clinics, bring about this change, but inner soul processes that the spiritual researcher can carry out with himself if he wants to gain insight into the spiritual world. What I have to say in this description may appear to many people to be extremely mundane. But it must be said: however mundane these things appear, in their execution they are among the most difficult that a person can undertake on this earth, including all his other activities. But we are not speaking of special wonders, of some things that in their simplest form not every person would know, when one has to speak of what the spiritual researcher must develop in his soul if he wants to come to the real exploration of the supersensible. The soul forces that the spiritual researcher has to develop are always there in the soul, but only in their beginnings, as they are needed for everyday life. The spiritual researcher has only to develop these qualities to an unlimited degree. Here I must call attention to something that is not only present everywhere in everyday life, but is also necessary in the most eminent sense. It is what is called attention: the attention of the soul to these or those things, the turning of interest to these or those things, as we have them in ordinary life.

We need to pay attention to two things. Many people need to reflect – but usually they think about these things when things are no longer going well – they need to reflect on why their memory is getting worse in life. Why does memory get worse at all? If you delve deeper into the question of memory, you come to the conclusion that it is actually a question of attention. What we grasp intensely with our attention remains in our memory.

You could say something quite mundane as an introductory remark when you want to point out the importance of attention. Many a person is quite annoyed in the morning when they cannot find this or that thing that they put here or there in the evening. They have completely forgotten it. For example, they cannot find their cufflink. Why does this happen? Well, they have forgotten where they put it. He can remedy that. A sure way to help himself is to resolve not just to lay it down thoughtlessly, but to think: I am putting the button in this place, I am laying it down with will. If you also pay attention to the act from your inner arbitrariness, you will not forget it, you will surely remember the place where you put the button. This can be extended to all other memories. If only people realized that they also take into their memory everything they take into their arbitrary attention, then they would combine the attention problem with the memory problem, and a training of the memory can be summarized in a training of attention.

And there is another point to which attention must be drawn, which seems even more important. It is necessary for a healthy mental life that we are able to recognize the experiences we have had back to the point of our childhood as ours in memory. If we are incapable of this, if, let us say, at the age of thirty a person's soul life is such that he cannot recognize certain experiences that he had at the age of five as his own, then a perforation of the ability to remember occurs that is somewhat unhealthy. Only then are we healthy when we can follow our entire present self as a continuous thread. This depends on our being able to experience the events that happen to us in such a way that they line up on a thread of memory through which, as it were, our ego runs. And a person - this happens in certain mental illnesses - can, as it were, come to have a double ego in that he can have the opinion that someone else has experienced what he has actually experienced. Such things happen. Then his healthy soul life is destroyed, torn apart. Much could be achieved for the education of people in whom one can recognize in many cases that such a perforation of the ego is taking place, much could be achieved for education if one were clear about the fact that the ability to remember is intimately connected with the way we pay attention to and are interested in the things of the world. Nothing but attention — that is what belongs to the imaginative soul forces.

It is this attention that must be developed to infinity by the spiritual researcher in what is called concentration of thought. To do this, however, an ordinary, everyday soul force must be driven with tremendous inner energy and resignation to an extent that it is otherwise never driven in external life. The human being must bring himself to explore the state of mind in which he is when he is attentive; he must become aware of it when he is attentive in ordinary life. His attention is aroused by external impressions, by sensational things that have a strong effect on him. But the spiritual researcher must transform his attention so that he does not allow himself to be forced by anything external, but is able, through inner arbitrariness alone, to unfold the activity of the soul that would otherwise only be unfolded in attention.

The safest way to achieve this goal is one that is highly inconvenient for many people. In order to achieve something very safely, you have to force yourself to turn your attention to something that is as uninteresting as possible in ordinary life; something you would like to run away from, that is completely uninteresting. If you can bring yourself to treat that from which you otherwise run away with your soul in such a way that you place it at the center of your spiritual life, that you concentrate all the powers of your soul on this one thing, but in relation to the rest of your soul, through inner arbitrariness, through training of the soul, you come to be as in sleep, so that no eye, no ear perceives anything externally, that all the worries of life fall silent: Anyone who has silenced their entire being in this way, as is otherwise only achieved in sleep, but then does not fall asleep but focuses on something that they have deliberately placed at the center of their mental life and now turn their soul's attention to in an unlimited way, will awaken forces in their soul that would otherwise remain dormant in their soul.

This brings about what could be called – I do not particularly value the expression – a spiritual chemistry. Because when you develop your imagination and thinking, you are doing something in your own soul life that can be compared and only compared with the separation of hydrogen from water in the chemical laboratory. When we have water in front of us, it is liquid. If we separate the hydrogen from it, we have a gas that has very different properties than water. No one can see the properties of hydrogen and oxygen in the water. And no one can recognize the spiritual destiny in the person who stands before us every day. To do this, the spiritual and mental must be separated from the physical and bodily. This does not happen through external processes, but through the increase of that which may appear so ordinary to man, into the immeasurable. So that one can indeed say: “Although it is light, the light is heavy.”

There are many details that need to be observed. Here, only the principle can be stated. If the soul then increases its attention, as required, it is able, through the concentration of forces that are otherwise unconscious, to tear everything of the soul and spirit away from the physical, just as hydrogen is torn away from oxygen in the laboratory.

If you continue such inner exercises of the soul life, then the day will come when you can connect a meaning to the words that are otherwise just a phrase: Now I know that I can think even when I am not thinking with the brain; now I know that I can think and visualize even when I am not using my body; now I know what it means to leave the body and to feel and experience the soul and spiritual realm. And when someone leaves the physical body with the soul and spirit, he has completely different qualities and experiences in his inner life than a person has within his body. Just as someone says that hydrogen can be extracted from water, then hydrogen has the properties of a gas that burns, so from the point of view of an everyday materialist, one can laugh at what the spiritual researcher experiences when he reaches the point of lifting his spiritual soul out of his physical body through long, energetic exercises. It sounds like empty phrases when he talks about it. And yet I would like to describe the progress, at least in detail.

What the spiritual researcher experiences when he continues the exercises is indeed so completely paradoxical that from a certain moment on he feels: Yes, your thinking used to be such that you had to use your brain to think – but now you feel that you are actually thinking outside of your brain. He feels as if he can move like a sun in the spiritual with his present thinking, emancipated from the brain. He experiences himself in such a way that he now even knows: the way he thinks otherwise now runs almost automatically, it is bound to the brain. From a certain moment on, one acquires a very definite knowledge about it: When you are in your present state, you have to slip back into your brain if you want to use your brain again. You perceive your brain as something external to you, like you would perceive an external object, a table, a chair, next to you.

Then comes that significant experience, which makes such a significant, such a shattering impact on the spiritual life of the spiritual researcher. It must be repeated several times in life, but when it occurs for the first time in life, it is the most harrowing event that cannot be compared to anything else in life. It can occur, for example, as the following: one wakes up in the middle of sleep as if to a dream, but it is not a dream, but a spiritual reality that outshines all the rest of the reality of the day. The experience can also occur in the middle of the outer life of the day, but it does not disturb it, because true and correct preparation will never make a person fantasize. In the life of the day as well as in the life of the night, the moment may arise, which I would characterize in the following way. But it can also occur in hundreds of other ways; I will give only a typical example. Something of what is attempted to be described with words will present itself to every person who becomes a spiritual researcher. He will communicate what happens in such a way that he says: It is like a room in which he finds himself. Lightning strikes the room; he follows the lightning as if speaking to himself inwardly, he feels the elements striking his body in a flash, as if his body were being destroyed. From that moment on, he knows that he is united with the spirit without the body, he knows that man carries a spiritual and soul element within him; this is the direct experience of every person who can have the experience if he wants to. Only from that moment on do you know what the human essence is in the truest sense of the word; what lies beyond birth and death.

This experience can only be made in a spiritual way, not through external experiments. Those who demand that the spiritual be established through external experiments should also demand that some experience they had fifty years ago be extracted with some kind of powder so that it can be prepared and made visible externally. Spiritual facts are not established externally. That which spiritual researchers of all times have called “approaching the gate of death”, that is, experiencing death in the image, that is, what a person experiences in real death when his eternal core detaches itself from the physical body, is experienced in the image in the serious experience, which so absorbs the soul of the person who has already had it once, imprinting on the soul that seriousness that can be expressed and felt with the words: You were connected to the deepest core of your being, to that which, as the eternal, spiritually permeates, lives through and interweaves the world. However, this seriousness is to be lived through painfully and not without making the greatest efforts to which man is unaccustomed. Not without surrendering what is otherwise considered pleasure and joy; what one otherwise likes in life, not without giving up what one otherwise strives for in life for certain moments, one attains this purest experience, which has been spoken of and points to light in the spiritual world. Then one attains something further when one adds the following to what has just been said: One must also give up everything that one perceives as desirable in everyday life, and one must give it up in such a way that one completely renounces everything that one otherwise desires, everything that one otherwise likes, that one gives up everything that gives one pleasure, and one must not give it up in such a way that one has only a very specific self-awareness in the devotion, but in such a way that one really renounces during this devotion all such activity that we otherwise call our complete devotion to the world, which one otherwise does not really know, that one gives up no compulsion and nothing that otherwise calls us to devotion in life. This must be added, and the spiritual world, into which we have entered, senses this with what we call the spiritual state.

One should not imagine this perception in the spiritual world as being the same as the perception in the external world. The external world is presented to us in such a way that we can say: there is an object out there that I see with my eye or perceive with my other sensory organs. One can only experience spiritual states if, after devotion, one becomes one with the states. We do not experience these states from outside ourselves, but in such a way that they enter into us. We have to immerse ourselves, become one with the spiritual states that come to meet us. Therefore, when a person increases his inner thinking through attention, and when we make this thinking an organ of perception for spiritual states through devotion, then we perceive these spiritual states.

What one experiences inwardly can be called spiritual mimicry. Just as in ordinary life one unconsciously expresses one's spiritual states in facial expressions, so too, through the processes described, one becomes one with the spiritual world because one feels at one with it. As the soul experiences, it is driven to a facial expression, it becomes very active, very active, as it lives into the conditions. By experiencing the spiritual world, it undergoes something similar inwardly in a spiritual-soul way, as it is the facial expression of our face. A reliving is the perception of the spiritual world, an invisible, supersensible reliving. This reliving is attained, as it were, through this spiritual chemistry, through this detachment of the life of ideas from the instrument of the brain.

Likewise, one can detach the faculty of speech from the tool that otherwise serves language. When we speak, a certain part of the brain is externally active, which we have to use as a tool of our body, the one that specifically leads to the larynx. The one who studies the secrets of human speech knows that, even when one is thinking, finer movements take place internally than the coarser external speech movements. Now, as a spiritual researcher, one must be able to grasp the inner activity of the soul, which one otherwise expresses in speech. The mental researcher must detach it from the sound and the word; he must keep it as an inner activity, not allowing it to become a word, not shaping it into words, and he must keep it so inwardly that not even the parts of the brain that are otherwise active when speaking are used. He detaches the power of speech from speaking. He learns to keep something inwardly in his soul that otherwise vibrates inwardly when speaking. Then he does not speak, but what otherwise floods and pulses through the soul in the word is a strong power, a power through which he not only performs inner facial expressions, but also what can be called inner gestures, inner gesticulation, signs. Then not only intermediate states of the spiritual world, intermediate processes of perception, come to light, but the spiritual world itself is revealed, revealed in us, when we can imitate it in inner gestures. And only through the power of language will it be possible to imitate the processes of the spiritual world.

You can put yourself in the shoes of the beings and actions of real spirits around us. Only by living in their gestures and becoming one with them can you perceive the spiritual beings; this is how you gain knowledge of the spiritual world, but you also gain knowledge of your own sojourn in the spiritual world. When the ability to speak has been chemically detached from speaking, so to speak, the moment has arrived when memory can be extended beyond the previous life on earth, when it is realized that these are not theories; when it is known that our life did not begin yesterday, but that it is the continuation of many previous lives. From the moment we can imitate the spiritual world through the power of speech in an inner gesture, we know that our present life on earth is part of a whole chain of lives. In an inner gesture, we come to the spiritual essence that represents the eternal.

Something else has to be separated from our activity. But this is more difficult to understand. I would like to express what I mean in the simplest way. When we remember our childhood, we have to say: In our childhood we were all four-footed creatures. We walked on all fours. We straightened up through our own inner activity, which was certainly practiced, but which left no memory of its inwardness to the human being. And just imagine what the human being, as a cultural being on earth, is because he looks up into the heavenly sphere with his face! That has changed his entire direction in space. The human being has only made himself into the being that he is. To experience again in later life that inner urge that inspired us when we made ourselves into an upright being and thereby formed ourselves into a human being, that is what we should activate in our soul.

This leads us to a third power of the soul, which we separate from our bodily life. We have already used this power in the past of our present life. We no longer need it in later life, because then we can straighten ourselves up. But now we bring out the strength with which we straightened ourselves up; we apply it, we become aware of it. At that time it worked without us having caught up with it in our soul; we were content with becoming upright beings from crawling beings through the inner application of this strength. The spiritual researcher learns to recognize a wonderful soul power in this power. Through this power he is able not only to experience the spiritual through the state of thought and the gestures of spiritual beings through the detached power of speech, as in the state of thinking, but he is able to experience the spiritual beings themselves, to become one with them, as it were, to become one with the spiritual worlds, to work and weave in them. With them one learns to recognize that the human being has come to earth as a spiritual being, and by bringing these forces with him, he has become what he is as an earthly being. He has become a human being by bringing the body from a horizontal to a vertical position. Only man uses this power in the universe to change from a quadruped to a biped. If you discover this power inwardly in the soul, then you enter into the inner being of other spiritual beings that permeate and live through the world. These are beings that have different tasks to perform because they have a different purpose in the world than humans do. One gains insight into earthly conditions by concentrating one's attention, recognizing spiritual beings with their co-experiences, by unfolding in the spiritual world precisely that which gives the human being his spiritual physiognomy as a human being. Through inner physiognomy, one becomes one with the spiritual beings. Inner gestures and movements lead to the perception of processes in the spiritual world; but spiritually motivated physiognomy, as it gives the upright physiognomy to a person, leads to the knowledge of that which people can only experience and experience in the spiritual world, in association with other spiritual beings.

The paths that lead the spiritual researcher into the spiritual worlds are briefly indicated. These ways cannot be particularly popular. Today they are such that one must say that they go against one of the characteristics of the human soul: its love of comfort. This love of comfort goes so far today that the human soul only acknowledges the existence of something when it can simply passively devote itself to it. If one demands of this soul that it should first be active itself, that it should itself experience that which previously meant nothing to it, and through which it should then recognize the object in its own experience, then this goes against the complacency of today's soul, which wants to be passive, which does not want to conquer truths for itself, but wants to be given them.

Therefore, spiritual research is so aligned with the goals of the present that these goals of the present do not want to know about spiritual science, because, especially in the most spiritual sense, these goals are directed towards passivity. Spiritual science demands the development of soul powers that are based on activity and that, in their further pursuit, lead into the higher, supersensible worlds; because the spiritual can only be experienced through inner activity.

But today's man often imagines the spiritual to be mere fantasy. He imagines it to be like an external object that commands him: “I am here, you have to recognize me.” In this way, he is very far from the right understanding. The following was explained quite philosophically in a newspaper: When you immerse yourself in Kant or any other philosopher, all the concepts are so intangible that you have to think about them for a long time before you can understand them. Can our time provide a remedy for this? And precisely because of the spirit of our time, he [the author] finds that they can be made tangible. Everything should be made tangible, including the spirit. Yes, even that which every human being can know is not visible, human thinking, the thought should become visible. And how should that happen? Well, Spinoza, for example, who is said to be difficult for people to understand, who want to make everything vivid, should be approached in such a way that the cinematograph is used. Why not? You could do the following, says the person concerned. This has not been suggested as a fairy tale, but as a serious proposition based on the aims of our time. It shows how Spinoza arrives at seemingly difficult thoughts. Through the idea of the expansion of thought, it shows how the whole of ethics, up to God, are juxtaposed, culminating in the higher ideas. Cinematography could be used to illustrate Spinoza's entire ethics from individual forces. That is one of the aims of our time. And the editor of this journal, who is taking up the treatise, makes the following comment: “So we could finally hope that the ancient masters of humanity can be brought closer to people in a way that corresponds to the present day through what most people today obviously see only as a game, namely the art of film.

In this way, however, spiritual science cannot keep pace with the goals of our time. These goals of our time are geared towards passivity, and even if we were to talk for hours about the goals of our time, this passivity of the spirit is the necessary correlate in relation to what could be said about these goals in intimate terms. This much can be said.

If you look closely, you will see that the spiritual life of humanity is no different from the rest of nature. What is gained on the one hand must be taken away on the other. One has to admire the boldness of the inventions of the mind that are used in technology. Man will even conquer the unruly air; but all this is achieved with the most profound spiritual passivity.

But precisely for this reason our time is also so ripe for developing the spirit itself in its activity. Indeed, more than that, our time has the necessity of making the spirit inwardly active. The innermost moral, intellectual and emotional powers are brought forth through the habits of thinking and feeling that are gained through spiritual science. On the one hand, as a result of the education that humanity has already acquired under the influence of what is truly admirable in itself, spiritual science is seen as something paradoxical, something fantastic, perhaps even something quite different; but as a result, this opposition locks itself onto the other side. Opposition is necessary. Just as when you press an elastic ball for a long time, it finally develops that strength, which is perceived as an elastic counterforce against the pressure, so the soul must come to strong and ever stronger passivity precisely through the admirable achievements of thought, so that it longs for inner activity. Unconsciously, it already longs for this activity today. And all activity can become a power through which the soul is liberated and redeemed when spiritual research is allowed to work in the fabric of contemporary spiritual culture.

With just these few remarks, I wanted to show today how spiritual science wants to engage with the whole spiritual fabric of the present.

Looking back at what has just been discussed, it will be fully understood that spiritual science faces opposition from all sides. One of these oppositions comes from those who believe that religions or something else is endangered by spiritual science. They will not appear incomprehensible to the observer of history. For the time of Copernicus, the fact that the earth orbits the sun was just as fantastic as the fact of repeated earth lives is for our contemporaries. At that time, people believed that religion was endangered by Copernican astronomy; just as people today believe that religion is endangered again by the teaching of spiritual science about repeated earth lives.

We can be more reassured about such beliefs if we consider that when an outstanding scholar-philosopher, who was also, admittedly, active in the [cosmological] field, came to the realization that truth is invincible, he was talking about Galileo. He said that today the Church has learned to see in Galileo, in Copernicus, no longer those whom she once saw in them; but today she has learned to point out that through discoveries in the field of science, the glory of divine revelations is revealed to mankind all the more brightly. Science in the true sense of the word is to the praise of religious life, not to critically do something detrimental to true, religiously understood life.

That it is not so widely understood, that was made clear to a large number of our friends who want to start building a relatively small structure in the near future that will provide a home for spiritual science and a variety of studies. Many of these voices were instructive, which certainly sometimes spoke from a point of view that is so thoroughly imbued with what fantastic stuff, what a reverie this spiritual science actually is. Yes, it was interesting from a cultural-historical point of view when the remarks that had been made about the building in the most diverse places were also presented to me. It was interesting to look at things from this point of view as well. Indeed, one could admit that the humanities or their adherents have a little imagination, but they don't have as much as those who have occasionally written these articles.

At most, they can measure up to the article that I also received, about a spiritual researcher who is quite close to me and which states what he expresses in terms of fantasies. You can't get enough of his fantasies, and then you move on to the second section, where you are then really told, probably from the elbow, the very worst fantasies about birth, kinship, descent. Truly, even if he had some imagination, if he were inclined to fantasize par excellence [...], he would never dream up so much fantasy, especially not a fantasy about external descent, about kinship and so on.

The strangest things can be read. For example, it is said that a Buddhist temple is to be built on the site. Just as modern chemistry is far removed from what was once practiced as chemistry in distant Asia centuries or millennia ago, so too is modern spiritual science far removed from what Buddhism is. It takes more than a little imagination to talk about Buddhism. Today I have tried to explain, albeit insufficiently, what the adherents of spiritual science actually want. Perhaps some of the ideas will be able to be gained from it after all. But that will have little to do with what these spiritual researchers are supposed to be, according to the newspaper reports. One remark, which has appeared in at least thirty newspapers, has particularly caught my attention. We learn of a remarkable ability of the spiritual researchers: they can make it rain. It was emphasized everywhere that the foundation stone was laid in the pouring rain. What kind of people must the spiritual researchers be that they can order rain so that they can lay the foundation stone protected by the rain? If that were the case, they would certainly be very dangerous. But if you get to know those who make the Dornach building their own, you will recognize that they like sunshine just as much as you do; that they did not order the rain at all and did not shy away from the day. It would even have been daytime when the foundation stone was laid if some of the members who would have liked to have been there had not come on a later train. That is a more trivial explanation, which cannot be made much of, but it looks a little better if one says: These people must have certain reasons for working at night and in the rain. That was not said, but it was still in the subconscious and can be interpreted from the words. But reality is not that interesting. As for the rest, the future will show how little foundation there is for the fantastic ideas that have been spread in the outside world about this place, which is said to be a place of activity in the sense indicated in this lecture. This lecture was not given to talk about this place, but because it is being given, I may refer to it with these few words, because, so to speak, spiritual science has made an unwanted sensation in this area.

If you want to say what this building is for, yes, isn't it true that stations are built so that people can travel by train? They are built so that the machines, the trains, can drive in and out. For this, the stations must be usable. We must see as the characteristic quality of this building nothing other than that which is useful for the purposes of spiritual science, which is capable of stirring the soul when the word of spiritual science is spoken, as is necessary to bring the soul into contact with the spiritual world. To evoke the mood of the soul that is necessary in our time, to prepare the soul to receive the spiritual world, it is necessary to speak not only through the word, but also through that which is around us. What otherwise can only be expressed in words should be poured into the architecture. In the form of symbols that are truly artistic, a building should be created in the interior design that can serve the cultivation of spiritual culture in a spiritual way, just as a train station serves its material purposes in the right way. Even if the comparison is a trivial one, it is still apt.

It will be more and more recognized that what spiritual science can achieve from the human soul is connected with all the goals of the present. By appealing to the active element in the soul, to that which can only be awakened through activity in the soul, spiritual science speaks at the same time to the most important activities of the soul through the results of its research. More and more, those souls who can be active in the truest sense will desire spiritual science in the spirit. Spiritual science will appeal to soul powers that can only be taken into account from the present time onwards, but which also have to intervene in all the aims of human culture; above all in artistic life, so that just as in ancient times spiritual science developed on the one hand and art on the other from the common source of spiritual life, so here too artistic activity will go hand in hand with the current of spiritual science. And a weak beginning for this is to be given in the architecture of the site that will be built in Dornach. The architecture should speak to those who, in the longings of the soul, feel drawn to it, through the form of the same spiritual secrets, of which otherwise only in words can be actually stammered. Spiritual science has a hope. How many opponents it can grow up with in the present, that it corresponds to a necessity of the heart and the human soul, that will be seen from what it has inserted into culture. Just as scientific and religious prejudices were unable to stop Copernicanism, so the truths of spiritual science will not be hindered by the prejudices of these opposing sides. That which lies in the organism of human becoming and happening will happen with the same inevitability with which a young person matures and ripens according to an inner law. Just as this natural property is inherent in humanity, so too will this spiritual science mature. And just as natural science intervenes in and transforms the outer material life, so too will spiritual science intervene in the social, moral and spiritual conditions of the soul life. Just as we travel differently today – by rail – than we did two centuries ago, so too do longings live differently in the soul today than they did two centuries ago.

These longings must be satisfied; we can also see this from the following remarkable matter, which may be recalled again, even if something external is compared with something internal: When the first railways were to be built in Germany, the Medical College was consulted. The college replied that no railways should be built, otherwise people would suffer severely from nervous disorders when traveling on them. And if some people still want to travel, then the railways should at least be fenced in with boards so that the other people do not become dizzy. That was the judgment in 1837. The railways run all the same. That is how it is in life. And spiritual science will run through spiritual life, just as the obstacles of antagonism will want to assert themselves. Spiritual science will show precisely in those in whose hearts it is to take root how unfounded all the prejudices against it are. Science will see how in spiritual science it finds its best ally, how science, limiting itself to external matters, cannot achieve what spiritual science must give it. It will recognize that spiritual science contradicts natural science just as little as there is a contradiction for healthy thinking in the following. We can have three people standing in front of us, one and two others in front of him. The question arises: Why does the one live? Well, because he has a lung inside and breathes air in and out. Nothing to be said against that. But the other says: I know he also lives for another reason. I found him hanged eight days ago; because I cut him down, he is alive today. Everyone is right. The natural scientist is fully justified in saying that when certain qualities appear in life, we have inherited them from our parents, our ancestors and so on. He has the merit of pointing to what is given in the line of inheritance. The spiritual scientist says: what develops in the wonderful mystery of growth, that is brought by the person from previous earthly lives. There is no contradiction in this; both are true.

And with the religious concerns it will be as with the concerns about Copernicanism. The one who stands on the ground of revelation nevertheless feels united with all those minds that have grasped the truth from their point of view; what spiritual research is supposed to be, that it will become, and when spiritual research is an achievement of our time, then the people blessed by this cultural progress will have counted these spiritual goals of spiritual research as their own; as spiritual beings, they will have felt united with spiritual research, they will have grasped its point of view in relation to the spiritual world.

As with all other honest minds connected with human progress, spiritual research also feels at one with Goethe, and with his words I would like to summarize today's reflection from this point of view. To all those who are prejudiced against spiritual research, I would say this: if people believe that religion or something else is endangered by spiritual science, then the spiritual researcher, whose soul has been touched by spiritual science, knows that he is walking through the world and knows that Goethe's words are true, and that they that the one who truly allows himself to be penetrated by science and art, enters in such a way that his soul is truly religiously moved; and that only the one who lacks the gift for science and artistry in the right sense will not be religiously moved in the true sense of the word. Therefore, allow me to characterize the position of spiritual science in relation to the goals of all times and also of our time with Goethe's words, by saying with Goethe:

He who possesses science and art
also has religion;
he who does not possess those two
shall have religion.

Dear attendees, for a number of years now I have taken the liberty of speaking from this place about the subject of spiritual science, as it will also be meant in tonight's reflection. May I be allowed to present the foundations of this spiritual science in a certain way, I would like to say, in a clear way, and then to speak in more detail about some special subjects of this spiritual science in the next reflection the day after tomorrow.

It is - and this has been mentioned frequently over the years - fully understandable to anyone who stands on the ground of this spiritual science, as it is meant here, that in our time, from the most diverse sides, not only the most manifold objections, but, one might even say, hostilities against this spiritual science are asserting themselves. Not only does this spiritual science present itself to the rest of contemporary spiritual life as something still foreign to this spiritual life today - it has that in common with everything that has been incorporated into it as a new acquisition of human spiritual culture in a certain respect - but precisely in relation to the spiritual goals of our time, this spiritual science must appear on the one hand as something quite incomprehensible, fantastic, dreamy, although on the other hand it represents something that arises from the deepest longings and, one may say, from the most urgent needs of the soul life of the present day. With this I would like to have defined, so to speak, the theme of this evening.

Spiritual science, as it is meant here, differs from the outset precisely from that in a fundamental way, the continuation of which it wants to be, and it is only too understandable that it experiences hostility after hostility from that side. I am referring to the scientific school of thought of our time, because basically, spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants to be a continuation in the truest, most genuine sense of scientific thinking for the spirit and its secrets, its laws - a continuation of the scientific way of thinking that has left its mark on the spiritual life of the West for three to four centuries.

Nevertheless, although precisely because of this characteristic spiritual science is in no way obliged to confront the justified claims of natural science, it nevertheless differs in a certain respect from what is actually called science today from the point of view of the natural scientific way of thinking. It is just as much a science as natural research, but because it considers the objects, entities and processes of spiritual life, it must necessarily develop the scientific methods in a different way than natural science, which is limited to the senses and to the intellect (which has the senses as its basis), must do today. And so, let our attention be drawn to this fundamental difference between spiritual-scientific research and natural-scientific research.

What we usually call science today starts from that state, from that mood of the human soul, which is present in normal life, in everyday human life. We speak of what man can do by virtue of his soul, by virtue of his body, by virtue of his mind applied to the observations of the senses and to experiment, what man can do by virtue of all this, where the limits of knowledge for what has been indicated; in short, it is perfectly right to say that this scientific direction takes the human soul as it is, observes the environment of this soul and from this gains the laws of sensual-physical existence. The most important work for this science is therefore done in research, always within the activity of working itself, and what comes out of this activity is science, is a scientific result.

Spiritual research is different. Spiritual research, as it is meant here: Although, as we shall see in a moment, it is the same processes in the life of the soul that spiritual research has to undertake, which also govern external science, external scientific knowledge, but these activities of the spiritual researcher are for him preparations for his research, are for him there to prepare the soul for it, so that it can arrive at what can be called seeing. Of course, everything is meant spiritually, but if one assumes this spiritual meaning, then one can say: outer science presupposes the human soul, and these observations are based on the observation of the senses, on what the intellect has to say about the laws of existence.

Spiritual research uses all human soul powers, whether they are powers of understanding, will or feeling, to prepare what could be called the senses – in a figurative sense, of course – which then lead to direct perception , to prepare for the spiritual researcher to devote his work and efforts to preparing himself, so that he can then, as it were, access the impressions of perceptions from the spiritual world through himself.

Now I do not want to speak, not in this reflection, of abstractions, of concepts, of speculations, of a philosophy of ideas, but I want to lead directly into the facts of the soul life, which is suitable for spiritual research. All spiritual research is based on the fact that the human soul can apply to itself what is always on everyone's lips today as a scientific buzzword, that the human soul can apply to itself what lies in the word 'development'. Spiritual research starts from the premise that the human soul can undergo an inner development that brings about a transformation, a change in these soul forces, so that these soul forces become different in a certain sense. So everything that is the result of this spiritual research is not gained by simply accepting the soul in its abilities, but only comes about when, through careful preparation, the soul has transformed itself in such a way that it no longer has the sensual world around it in its direct spiritual perception the sensual world around it, but that it has another, a higher, a spiritual world around it, just as it has the sensual-physical world around it in ordinary life, which is viewed through the senses.

Now one could easily believe that some very special preparations are needed to transform the soul in this way. That is not the case, basically. What the soul has to undertake is based on things that are actually always present in everyday soul life, that belong to the most essential powers of this soul life, but which, in order to become suitable for spiritual research, must be developed into the infinite, one might say.

I will now show from a different angle, than I have often done in the past years, how the human soul, as it were, goes beyond itself, beyond its everyday point of view, in order to become an observer of the spiritual world. What it has to undertake in the intimate inner life has, as its elements, as its starting point, precisely the forces that are necessary in the most everyday life. One of these forces can be touched upon by using an easily understandable term that refers to something that is absolutely necessary in everyday life. It is what we call in this everyday life attention, interest in the things of the environment. This attention – I have already spoken about it from a different perspective in these lectures – consists in our focusing on some object in our environment, so that through this focusing it remains, as it were, in our soul life, living on in memory.

How necessary this attention is for everyday life can be seen from a very ordinary way of looking at things, which focuses on the connection between this attention and memory. Many a person will complain that their memory is either weakening or that it is in some way faulty or deficient. If one were to study – to the extent that such study is necessary for ordinary life – the connection between attention and memory, one would get over many of the things that one so often notices as defects in oneself.

I will start with a very trivial matter. Many a person cannot find an object in the morning that they still had in the evening. They have put it down with half-consciousness, not with attention. A cufflink that we put down in the evening in such a way that we harbor the arbitrary thought: You are now putting this button in this place - maybe we even think about the surroundings - in this environment. You will see, if you let these thoughts pass through your mind in the evening, that you will go directly to the place of the button in the morning, and it turns out that there is a connection between our ability to remember and what can be called attention. To a certain extent, the memory problem is an attention problem, and if we could get used to arbitrarily paying attention to things that we know need to be remembered, we would contribute an infinite amount, not only to the memory of the things in question, but we would also see that our memory is really strengthened by frequently practicing such activity, which means that the forces behind our memory would also become strong. Just as it is true that, to a certain extent, a good memory is part of an outwardly healthy mental life, it is equally true that observing what we call attention is very necessary in everyday life.

But there is another way to convince oneself of the connections between the human mental life and attention. Everyone knows – and especially those who are a little familiar with the literature on contemporary psychology – how a healthy psyche must be a coherent psyche, so that when we look back to the point of childhood that we usually remember, we must recognize the events that have occurred to us as our own. It would be unhealthy if the memory were so full of holes that we see our own experiences as those of a foreign being, when we would not recognize them as our own. In the case of diseased souls, these experiences emerge as if they were another ego.

Much could be done if, through spiritual science, one had trained oneself to be attentive to these things – one can recognize them – to be attentive to souls that show a tendency towards such holes in, let us say, their ego, their continuous memories, and one would then intervene in such a way as to strengthen and systematically strengthen interest. Much of the harm done to such souls could be averted by a certain education if one considered the connection between the life of memory, the life of the soul as a whole, and what we call attention.

What we might call attention is not attention to this or that, but the activity of attention, the activity that unfolds in the soul life while we are paying attention. For the purposes of spiritual research, this must be strengthened, increased, in intensity and without limit. This happens in what we might call the concentration of human thinking, feeling and willing, or, in general, the concentration of the entire soul life.

In our outer, everyday life, we develop attention by being stimulated by impressions from outside, by what, I might say, has a more brilliant, outstanding effect on our soul than anything else. This challenges our attention. We very rarely succeed in producing this attention through pure arbitrariness; but spiritual research must prepare for this: increasing attention to an unlimited degree through inner arbitrariness, through training of the soul, through intimate practice - one may say - into the unlimited.

An increase in attention is brought about in this way: If we have stimulated certain ideas, perhaps ideas that do not correspond to an external fact, but symbolic ideas that we can survey precisely, so that we know that no supernaturally conscious ideas are involved; that we take the same , quite arbitrarily, without any process forcing us, into the center of our consciousness, and then bring about such a life of consciousness as only develops in normal human existence during sleep.

During sleep, all external senses fall silent, all movement ceases, and the human being lies still in relation to his corporeality. Even the worries and concerns of life fall silent in sleep; only in normal life during sleep does unconsciousness occur. Again, I can only describe the principles here, not everything. You can find more details in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my “Occult Science”. But the soul can, through training, through years of exercises, produce such a mood in itself that its inner self arbitrarily silences everything in itself that otherwise only remains silent during sleep. The soul is, so to speak, in the same state in relation to outer activity and perception as in sleep, except that it is awake and thus detached from all outer life. The soul focuses solely and exclusively on the self-chosen idea with the most intense attention of all its activity. As a result, everything that the soul would otherwise use up of its energy to absorb and process the manifold impressions of the day, everything that the soul expends in energy, is now used to push itself towards this one goal of the idea. The soul life is concentrated, and something is now being created with that which even the most significant minds of human development have always regarded as the most worthy apparatus for all world exploration. What is needed now is what can be compared with the apparatus of the human soul, but I do not attach any particular importance to the comparison, with something like spiritual chemistry.

To understand why a person carries out an experiment on the soul, which is not just an inner process of imagination but a real process in the soul that actually brings about something in reality, I will use the comparison with chemistry to help us understand each other. Something is done with the soul that could be called spiritual chemistry. When we have water in front of us, its components are not necessarily recognizable externally. The chemist breaks this water down into hydrogen and oxygen. He separates the hydrogen from the water. Hydrogen has very different properties than water, properties that cannot be suspected in water as such. Just as one can only assume the properties of hydrogen in water, so too can one only assume the properties of the soul and spirit in the human being standing before us in everyday life; for just as hydrogen is bound to water, so too are soul and spirit bound to the physical body in everyday life. What I have characterized as an unlimited increase in attention to an arbitrary idea or sensation or concept concentrates the soul's powers so that this soul stands out from the physical body. Now it must be said, though, that when the soul wants to prepare itself, it must do so with patience and energy and often for years – that varies from person to person – but then the one who prepares his soul really does achieve connecting a meaning with something that can justifiably appear nonsensical to many people in the present. The spiritual researcher attains to connect a meaning in direct inner experience with the word: I now experience, I now feel in the pure spiritual-soul realm and know that in what I experience and feel, nothing lives that is connected to the physical-sensual. The spiritual researcher now knows the meaning of this word, which in ordinary life seems nonsensical, because he experiences this meaning through the direct power of the reality of what it means to have emerged from the physical body with his spiritual soul. The soul and spirit are as independent and endowed with other properties as hydrogen is endowed with other properties when it is removed from water. It is not an external process that can be compared experimentally with any external process, but it is a process that leads to the soul and spirit being drawn out. Only then does it prove its true independence, only then does it show itself in what it is in its true, own nature and what connects it to the physical-sensory for everyday life, which it uses to perceive the external world and to carry out the tasks of the external world.

The first thing that a person can experience from their physical senses is thinking and imagining. Since I do not want to speak in abstractions, but rather in the concrete facts of the inner experience of the , I do not wish to shy away from pointing out this experience, even at the risk, which I fully understand, of not being taken seriously by some people who believe they are standing on the firm ground of science. When the spiritual researcher, after years of hard work and sacrifice, has come to the point where he associates a meaning with the words: You experience and perceive things outside of your body, then at first he experiences this only in relation to thinking, which, as one can already suspect in ordinary life, one knows through spiritual science. That one must use the brain for thinking, that stops. One feels that one is inside the imagination, and one does not feel with this inner experience of the brain and nervous system, but one feels - as I said, I say this at the risk of not being taken seriously by some - that one what one is experiencing now, one feels oneself like an external object, like an inner self circling around a body located outside of oneself, if one has given it independence, and one experiences oneself circling around one's own body, one's own brain, and an important experience then occurs. One learns to recognize how ordinary thinking occurs, because in order to make progress in real spiritual research, one has to advance in stages. At first it is often a dull experience. But when you have progressed to the point where you can connect a full meaning with the word: You now live in a thinking that happens outside of your brain, human life is indeed between birth and death – so you have to return at a certain time.

You can only develop the thoughts you have outside the body with your brain when you return. This gives a very different feeling than the usual one, because you perceive the process with your brain. You start to use your brain as an instrument, you know that you have something in your brain that offers resistance, that you have to forcefully push into. A strange feeling arises when the imagination moves outside the brain and the brain begins to imagine, a feeling that can only be compared to a certain fear of now having to think again through the instrument of the brain, because one is now facing life outside oneself. You have, so to speak, got to know yourself from the outside for the first time, have learned to look back at your physical body from the outside, and the immersion imposes the necessity of working with heavy matter, plastic, so to speak, so that those experiences that you first undertook outside of this brain can now be expressed within.

In this way, a kind of emancipation of intellectual life from physical life can occur, so to speak. When this emancipation occurs, one no longer has the physical-sensory world around one. This physical-sensory world disappears at the same moment as the emergence from the physical body occurs. One has a new world around oneself, a world that can be described as the world of spiritual states. Only now can one see through what spiritual states are through direct contemplation. Something occurs that I would like to mention at this point, because I always want to progress from the abstract to the concrete in these considerations; one imagines this entering into the spiritual world wrongly if one imagines it according to the pattern of external perceptions. Here the observer stands there and the object stands there. When a spiritual researcher begins to perceive spiritual states, after having prepared himself, he must, in a certain sense, immerse his entire being in the object or being he is perceiving. Just as, in everyday life, when we experience something in our own soul, we experience this or that mood, this or that inner [affect ], how one expresses this in what is called the development of one's outlook, so one can only experience what states of mind are by imitating, as it were, with the spirit freed from the body, immersing oneself in what one perceives, really imitating in an inner play of expression the states of the spiritual outer world.

It is therefore an inner play of expression that one lives into, and one cannot say, when speaking correctly, “I have perceived an object or being of the spiritual world as if it were a being of the sensory world.” Rather, one can only say, “I have experienced in this being that which, in me, causes me to express myself with my soul and spirit in such and such a way.” In my inner expression, I emulate the peculiarity of the being in question. One becomes acquainted with an inner play of expression, in the reception of cipher-like ideas, and in a certain sense one becomes one with the being of the spiritual world. But it requires the spirit to be so sensitive within itself that the spirit expresses its own states as one otherwise expresses the states of one's own soul. An experience, in contrast to mere perception, is the beholding of the spiritual world, a becoming one with its states. This is precisely how this living into the spiritual world differs from the experience of everyday reality, which is ultimately something passive, something that one stands by, as it were, while that which allows itself to be led upwards by the will, to live into the spiritual phenomena, must certainly be in action, in activity - this inner activity, which in itself creates expression, forms. The soul must transform itself for the conditions of the spiritual world if it wants to penetrate into the spiritual world.

In this way, one experiences the conditions of the spiritual world, as one experiences forms in the physical-sensual world. But one can experience not only the conditions of the spiritual world, but also the processes, the events of the spiritual world. This happens when one leads other powers of the soul upwards from the physical body. Not only the power of imagination can be led upwards, but also another power. But then another everyday activity of the soul must be increased to infinity, and that is what can be described with a word that is a necessity in everyday life, the word “devotion”. If one succeeds in consciously developing this devotion, as it were, in the general world process, which we otherwise only develop unconsciously in sleep, when one is, so to speak, completely devoted, without doing anything oneself, to the general happening, as in sleep, when one so learns to be devoted, fully consciously while awake, to the spiritual world, then one comes to tear out, as it were, yet another soul activity of our inner life, out of the physical-sensual. This activity is the one through which we - as strange as it may sound, but it is true - experience the fruit in the outer physical: speaking, the power of speech. This power of speech, as is well known, is rooted in the activity of the brain, in the activity of the organs that ultimately lead to the larynx and so forth. This power of speech plays a completely different role than is usually believed. Most human thinking is expressed in words, so that the words run through the mind, so that, as modern science admits, for those who look more closely at things, all speechless thinking in humans also runs in such a way that they vibrate inwardly in a subtle way. The body is actually in a state of perpetual inner activity when it thinks. This activity silently repeats, so to speak, what would otherwise be expressed more robustly in the movements of the speech organs and the nervous system.

If, through careful practice, increased attention, that is, through concentration, increased devotion, that is, meditation, one arrives at the activity that the soul must expend when it speaks in everyday life, if one arrives at this activity without living it out in external speech, then one has raised a second soul power from the physical body. This elevation is somewhat more difficult than the other, but it can be attained through robust, energetic practice.

When I speak to you, my soul is spontaneously active, and that which is carried out in this activity is expressed in the outer word. If we now succeed in holding back the activity that would otherwise fade away in the word, so that it is carried out without a word and without that vibration, purely inwardly, in the soul, if, so to speak, the word “strength” is experienced inwardly in the soul, then the soul life is strengthened and invigorated the soul life inwardly strengthens itself far more than in the mere operation [separation?] of the thought from the physical-sensual, and then, through a similar spiritual chemistry, so to speak, one draws the ability to speak, the power of speech, out of the physical body, experiences it only in the soul. Once again, you know what it means to be outside of your physical body in your spiritual and mental experience and to now experience, where you cannot use your larynx to speak, where you develop these activities outside of your body, as you usually do when speaking, you now experience the ability to speak inwardly. You now experience the inner word. You experience the inner word purely spiritually.

This experience of the inner word is very closely related to the experience of the power of memory. Of course, when I say the experience of the power of memory, I do not mean what is expressed in the ability to remember, but rather what stands behind this ability to remember, what does not consciously live in everyday life, what works and remains half unconscious. When we incorporate a thought into memory, we are exercising soul activity, and this is related to speech power. This is therefore something we call the lower-soul power of memory, just as we can say the lower-soul power of speech, which we draw from ordinary speech and in which we then live as spiritual researchers. We live purely in the spirit and soul in the word, in the power of remembrance, when in ordinary daily life the memory is transformed so that we remember the everyday experiences, those where all memory is silent, as in sleep. What is left, so to speak, is what is otherwise used for memory. In everyday life, something is always used for remembering; inner strength is used to make what is happening take root in the soul life. Now that we have brought about a soul life that erases ordinary memory, this strength, which is otherwise used for remembering, is used purely spiritually, it pulses in the inner purely spiritual, recognizing literally.

So when we raise the power of speech from the physical-bodily, we not only experience states, but we can immerse ourselves in the essences of the spiritual world so that we experience what happens in them. We now develop not only a play of facial expressions, but what could be called an inner spiritual power of the gesture, [an inner gesture]. This must always be emphasized - that on which activity as a spiritual experience is based. If you want to experience a spiritual being, you have to immerse yourself in it and experience its processes, just as we accompany our own inner experiences with gestures, expressing in the gesture what is going on in our soul itself. Many people - myself included - use far too many gestures to express what is inner soul life. Just as the soul life, flowing out, branches out, so it must lead to inner gestures of spiritual and soul experience. Then one experiences processes, not just states; these are experienced through the thoughts that are raised up, the processes through the ability to speak and remember that is raised up. Then, when one experiences conditions of the spiritual world, one also experiences one's own inner conditions, and this leads deep into the nature of the human soul.

As the spiritual researcher begins to experience inner states, he connects the following with a meaningful concept: He knows why the materialistic view of the present is so difficult to refute from a purely idealistic point of view. This is because, as the materialistic way of thinking correctly asserts, everyday thinking does indeed arise from the nervous system, from the brain. For what one has in ordinary consciousness as content, as something experienced by the soul, is basically only an image of the soul.

There is not enough time to go into the arguments regarding pictoriality in detail. I will merely suggest that it is quite clear to the spiritual researcher who has come this far what ordinary feeling, will and imaginative life want. They take the form of images that emerge from the body. They emerge like the reflections of our own self when we stand in front of a mirror. The body forms what could be called a mirror for spiritual and psychological experience. However, like every image, the image is not actually complete. The image would only be complete if, when we step in front of a mirror in our ordinary lives, we had to send out forces from ourselves to shape the mirror in such a way that its material composition becomes such that it sends the images back to us. For we actually accomplish this in our body, that we first place this body with our deeper spiritual-soul in the ability to reflect back to us what we call our everyday life. We first make it a mirror in truth, it must be said, and that is the secret of the human soul life.

The spiritual researcher is led to a spiritual-soul experience that stands outside and behind the physical body, and he observes how the truly true spiritual-soul aspect first works on the body so that the contents of everyday soul experience then emerge from the body. It is as impossible for the spiritual researcher who sees through it to think that the spiritual-soul experience is only a function of the brain as it would be to think that the image we have in front of us rises up out of the mirror as a reality. With the same right one could claim: When one sees oneself in the mirror, what looks out comes out of the mirror – so that the spiritual-soul comes out of the nervous system. The reality of the soul and spirit lies behind the physical, and in truth the body is between the truly spiritual, which is its active agent, its plastic creator, and the everyday, limited to sensory experiences that in reality only take place in images. In this way one arrives at what is truly spiritual and soulful and stands behind the physical. When one arrives at this, then what one experiences as a state is quite different from what one would like to describe as the spiritual-soul through external speculation, because one is confronted with direct vision, with what the I is spiritually and soulfully in human nature. Then the doctrine of repeated earthly lives ceases to be mere theoretical knowledge. Then an expansion begins, one might say, of memory, which can then extend beyond repeated earthly lives. The complete human experience is seen through, how it unfolds not only between birth and death, but through many earthly lives and through the spiritual experiences between death and birth. That which can be called repeated earthly lives becomes an immediate experience. By developing the memory and power of speech, by transforming them into a power of knowledge and experience, past earthly lives emerge from the floods of spiritual life as reality, and the certainty emerges that the present one is also the cause of the following ones, and that between death and a new birth there is a much longer life than earthly life.

By pushing back the ordinary power of memory, the higher power of memory is awakened. When the power of memory, which otherwise only allows us to look back to birth, is eradicated, it awakens to an increased power that now extends to an understanding of repeated earth lives! This realization does not need to take on a modern spiritual truth from old religious systems. People who know nothing about the methods of spiritual research and who have superficially absorbed something of it, that this spiritual science must speak of repeated earthly lives, can very easily come to believe that some old Buddhist truth is being recycled. Such a claim is no more useful than if one wanted to claim that today only one person could prove the Pythagorean theorem by going to the [gap in the transcript].

Spiritual science has nothing to do with anything historically handed down, but only with what the mind can explore within itself at any time through the stated means. Just as one arrives at the results of science through external experimentation, so one arrives at the results of spiritual research through inner experimentation. That the results of spiritual science may appear fanciful today is hardly surprising to anyone who knows the nature of this spiritual science and how it can be applied to the spiritual life of the present time. In this sense, it must be emphasized time and again: Just as the Copernican view seemed strange, so the results of spiritual science may seem paradoxical to the modern mind. But just as the Copernican world view has become part of modern culture, so will the results of spiritual research. Certainly, the way people today approach this spiritual research is the same way they approached the Copernican worldview; and if someone back then had planned to give a lecture to present something like the Copernican worldview, which at the time also had to appear as something quite fantastic , one would perhaps have announced such a lecture back then: the Copernican world view as a surrogate for Christianity; especially because one could have believed that the Copernican world view endangered Christianity. It took a long time before people began to realize that the matter is different, and in our time one can actually have a different experience from the genuine aims of the present.

Compared to the experiences I have here, one must be touched in a pleasant way, as one could hear a Catholic theologian, who is a deeply feeling philosopher, said: Certainly a prejudiced world once opposed the Copernican worldview as if it could endanger religious life; today - and it is not I who says this, but this Catholic theologian - today the true Catholic will even know that what is being explored in the secrets of existence, what is being of the greatness of the world, can never contribute to the satisfaction of religious life, but only to the greater admiration for the greatness of the divine Creator, the more one gets to know his deeds in the development of the world. - The time will also come when one will recognize in repeated lives on earth a promotion of the Christian point of view, as today in the Copernican worldview a promotion of the Christian view. Thus I have spoken to you, as it were, of two soul powers that can be led upwards from the experience with the physical body.

There is still a third soul power that must be spontaneously led upwards on the path to spiritual research, and through this third soul power one now attains not only to the states and processes, but to the entities of the spiritual world itself, so that this spiritual world becomes, on another level, something like the natural world — not something that is spoken of in generalities, but rather as one speaks not in generalities about nature, but about individual animals, plants, stones, individual clouds, mountains, rivers, and so on.

Where the spirit does not appear before the eyes as a sum of real spiritual beings, something else must indeed be brought up from this human truth as it stands before us in everyday life. We must remember how we entered life as human beings. What distinguishes us as human beings from the other sensual phenomena on earth is that we must, in the early days, make of ourselves that which most beautifully characterizes our destiny. We enter the world as quadrupeds, so to speak; we first acquire the ability to stand upright and walk. I want to make it clear from the outset, to avoid any misunderstanding, as I have done elsewhere, that I am aware that other creatures also walk on two legs, such as chickens, for example, but the difference is that they are designed to do so from the outset, whereas humans overcome gravity by the application of an inner force that acts purely in the material world. In the first years of his physical existence, the human being makes himself into an upright being, into that being of whom those who are more deeply attuned have always known what it means to stand upright, to be able to direct one's gaze out into the universe. But the human being makes himself into this. An inner strength is applied, through which the human being actually becomes what he is destined to be.

This power does not come to our consciousness again in the course of life. In a time when our consciousness is still in the realm of dreams, we experience what, so to speak, gave us our position, our equilibrium in the world, whereby we are human beings. But we can rediscover them, and the spiritual researcher must rediscover them, these powers. These powers remain in the soul. In normal life they are only used to maintain the upright position of the human being, but then they rest. They are again brought up, and this inner soul power, when it is experienced, is something that is revealed by a will that is also being led upwards, permeated by that will, which allows our spiritual and mental experience outside of the physical body to bring us into different situations regarding the various truths of the universe. In this way one attains the following: Just as man in the physical world makes himself what he is only through his upright balance, as he, so to speak, grasps his I-being in his inner activity and power of preparation for the earth, so he grasps, when he grasps this inner activity through which he human being, when he grasps this activity in its organization, he grasps the inner truth of other spirit beings, grasps the inner essence of real spirits, experiences how other beings make themselves into their essence, as he makes himself into an essence on earth through what has been stated.

However, all these things can only be attained through a certain resignation, through a certain inner tragic mood. Much has to be overcome, and in a sense these surmountings are a kind of suffering. But if the spiritual researcher courageously goes through this suffering, then he will succeed in detaching from this suffering the inner activity that is now able not only to educate us, that gives man on earth his true outer purpose, that makes man can turn his gaze out into the universe, but also to delve into other beings, to grasp their destiny by living it, and to experience how they become what they are in their worlds in a different way from human beings on earth. Now one experiences not only conditions and processes, but the inner life of the spirit beings themselves. One enters into it by becoming one with these truths through inner mobility, through the right inner strength. Now it is a certain, but inwardly mobile physiognomy. Just as a person acquires his overall physiognomy on earth, so he emerges into the physiognomies of the other truths on this third level.

In this way one ascends to the spiritual co-experience of the spirit beings through inner play of features, through inner gestures and postures, then through inner physiognomy, through knowing the inner being of other spirit beings. In this way the spiritual world gradually becomes a true reality, and it always shows that this becoming of the spiritual world a true reality differs from the experience of the outer physical world. This is experienced in passivity. A spiritual world can only be experienced in activity, and this brings us to the point that really shows us how this spiritual science must be introduced into the spiritual cultural life of the present.

As I said, I wanted to show today how the spiritual researcher comes to his experiences. I will develop special experiences the day after tomorrow. But what can emerge from today's is that the spiritual researcher appeals to the activity of the soul, to that which the soul can only lead up from the physical-bodily in un- [gap in the transcript] activity, can experience purely spiritual-soul activity. In the immersion, which is purely spiritual-soul, in the other truths, the states, processes and the essence of these truths themselves are experienced.

All these things cannot be experienced without extending to the entire soul what is otherwise only experienced in the moral. When a person experiences inwardly in the moral sense: 'You want to do this, that is good', then the experience of one's inner duty, which must become an outer deed, is indeed the experience of the highest morality. This experience is an inner one, and it is such that the person must disregard himself, because basically all immorality comes from selfishness. Morality, however, comes from disregarding the narrow-mindedness that man places in the foreground. Just as man, through his feelings, becomes free in the moral, at least from that which he otherwise uses in everyday life, so in the life of the soul as a whole he becomes free in the experience of the higher worlds. In a certain respect, the moral life is the dark model for the higher life of knowledge.

I did not want to show by words, but by describing soul processes, what spiritual science consists of and what the relationship between spiritual life and spiritual science is. If, on the other hand, we look at contemporary life, we can truly say that this experience is not geared towards the inner life of the soul. In particular, when a person is supposed to recognize the world, he is passive today. One could substantiate with almost grotesque examples how much man likes to be passive today. It is very gratifying that you have appeared today in such large numbers, even though [gap in transcript] are connected with light images. But you will all admit that the presentations that are linked to light images are preferred to those where such promises are not made. The spiritual researcher appeals to the supersensible, the invisible, and if he also makes use of the light pictures, it is only to make something extraordinarily sensible. But humanity today is to a great extent not disposed to be won over to the spirit or to something that can be explored by appealing to the activity of the soul, but to contemplation.

Of course, in the spiritual fields that have produced the most admirable achievements, this beholding is necessary; but the spirit cannot be grasped in external contemplation. What is sensual is not spiritual. This is trivial, but it is not understood. I am not telling fairy tales. It could happen that an otherwise very meritorious contemporary philosopher recently said or presented a [monistic] idea. In an introduction in which he wanted to write about an evolution in philosophy, he said that if you read Kant and so on, you read into concepts, but that could be remedied, because today – and again, it should be noted that nothing should be said against the technical achievements of the present time , these technical achievements have their significance, their justification; but what has been said is characteristic – the philosopher says that if you want to immerse yourself in Spinoza's Ethics, it is difficult to live into the intangible concepts. So you use the movie to help! You depict how Spinoza sits there spontaneously when a thought occurs to him, how the thought expansion then occurs to the same. Then you depict the force on the one hand, which represents the expansion, then you depict the remaining orderly concept, as concepts are generally formed.

The person in question has set out to do nothing less than present Spinozian ethics through film. Thus, one might hope to see a complete cinematographic adaptation of Spinoza's Ethics, or Kant's “Pure Reason”. As I said, I am not criticizing the arts, although it seems strange when the editor says that in this way ancient metaphysical longings of the human soul can be satisfied by an art that the superficial mind usually regards as something playful. Thus, ancient metaphysical longings could be satisfied by the application of this cinematic art.

I wanted to mention this because it shows how man today has the need not to put his soul into action, not to appeal to what, out of all passivity, must go into the fullest activity, as well as what man today wants to be offered everything, that is, how he does not boldly want to achieve existence in his own activity, does not want to prove existence to himself by leading this activity in his own activity to a proof of existence, but wants to have existence proved to him from outside. The reasons why one assumes something to be must be forthcoming. This is there for the thought habits of the whole of philosophy: increasingly imaginable from the standpoint that all thinking that cannot prove that it is based on foundations of something, to which nothing has been added, that all this thinking is understood as mere fantasy.

Gradually, the goals of the present tend to declare all thinking to be fantasy that cannot prove that it has been sucked out of the material existence that presents itself from the outside. I have indicated this basic character in the goals of the present. This basic character was necessary, because only through the fact that man has enjoyed an education through the natural sciences have the great, powerful explorations of natural science come about, which has commercially and technically transformed the globe, and has also greatly increased knowledge. For this to happen, it was necessary for man to be passively confronted with the outside world. The boldness that man must develop for his inner experience is, so to speak, incorporated today into outer activity.

It is a law of human life that whatever grows on the one hand must, in a sense, wither on the other. The last three to four centuries have brought it to the point that humanity has been able to undertake such tremendously bold things as the achievements up to aeronautics. The fact that boldness was developed for the external achievements has resulted in an education in humanity that has provided inner boldness for a certain period of time, where it is necessary to grasp a spiritual that cannot be grasped if one surrenders positively, but only if one is able to surrender to this spiritual with its activity, so that one stands on the point of view: What you experience in yourself is not reality. One can never come to a real knowledge of the spirit, because the spirit only lets us actively enter into its spheres.

So, what is the basic requirement for the recognition of spiritual science is, of course, spontaneously opposed to the goals of the present. However, this too turns out to be the case for the process of becoming as a whole: just as an elastic body, when sufficiently compressed, exerts its counter-force, so too, when something is pushed to a certain point, the opposing force, the reaction, asserts itself. Anyone who can observe our age knows how in our time, already quite thoroughly in souls, without them knowing it themselves deeply, that opposite longing is present - after education in external natural science has brought it to a certain high point - the soul, as I said, longs, without often knowing it itself today, for a knowledge of that which is present behind the senses as the actual basis of all human life. To use the same comparison again: spiritual science today is at the same point in relation to the aims of our time as natural science was at the time of Giordano Bruno, who, in his insights, broke through what had been thought of as a blue celestial sphere, as a blue vault. What was significant was that Bruno said: What is up there is not a real boundary, it is only caused by the boundary that man sets for himself. What the human being recognizes must set as a boundary, that extends there. In those days, the limited world was broken through, the view was expanded into the unlimited distances of space.

But such a firmament – now a temporal firmament – is there for mere natural science, and when it asserts it from its standpoint, it is justified; only it should recognize its limitations. Such a temporal moment is what asserts itself for the external world in birth and death. Just as the physical firmament is only set in space by man himself and knowledge could be newly expanded in relation to spatial infinity, so spiritual science will do the same for the spirit, [as] what was once the temporal firmament [has been broken through] for birth and death, and teaches us to look into a temporal infinity, that is, into the eternity, into the immortality of the human soul. The opponents will still have to find the newly expanded view of the spirit today.

But just when you are considering the goals of the present, you see that on the one hand there are people for whom it seems completely outrageous and nonsensical that such things can be said as they are said in spiritual science. On the other hand, however, it can be perceived how the soul always thirsts to really get to know the world as spiritual science recognizes it as its task to explore. Much of what later emerges clearly in the soul is first present as a dark urge. The spiritual researcher sees it and knows that the very near future will find souls who will come to recognize spiritual research as the path to spiritual science.

So superficially everything speaks against spiritual science. But if one considers what is taking place in the depths of the soul, then there is a guarantee that spiritual science will truly win the hearts and souls of people. Today, people only draw from what they often say is based on the true goals of science; they do not draw the right conclusions, otherwise they could come to something that is to be said now for our understanding through a kind of metaphor.

I do not want to deal with the meaning of the great significant word that stands at the beginning of the Bible. To what extent it corresponds to a fact in human life on earth can be dealt with on another occasion. But with a tremendous view of the development of human experience, this Bible word stands before us, this Bible word, which is put into the mouth of the adversary of humanity, so to speak:

You will be like the gods, knowing good and evil.

And this indicates to both the religious person and the scientifically discerning person, when the matter is only considered in its depths, how man has been tempted in certain respects to go beyond the measure allotted to him in primeval times. Here too, it has already been discussed how this word, or rather what lies behind it, is connected with the possibility of evil and the fact of human freedom.

Thus one could say that a world view that is hallowed by tradition, which spiritual science certainly recognizes as much as anyone, that such a world view sets the word at the beginning of human development of the temptation to want to go beyond human beings in inner experience. One can say of every time that it is a transitional time. It is often said in a trivial way, but it is important, even if every time is a transitional time, that one characterizes the transitional moments in the right way, and that he who tries to penetrate into the goals of the time recognizes them even where they still remain unconscious to the souls. But whoever reveals them, whoever penetrates them, notices that today, in fact – if nothing superstitious is meant – something like an evil spirit lurks at man's side. Allow me to say what I want to say with a strong expression. [Gap in the transcript.]

The saying may seem paradoxical to some; but it is intended to express as clearly as possible, by means of an apparent [paradox], what is to be said. If we consider the transitional moments of our time, it becomes clear that much of what is believed today is a kind of seducer, not meant in the superstitious sense. But when you say something like that, using extrasensory words, you have to remember the word:

The little people never feel the devil,
And if he had them by the collar.

Again, there is something like a tempter, and it is difficult to become aware of him because one does not draw the consequences from what lies dormant in the goals of the world. Because one does not draw this conclusion, it seems paradoxical when [one] shows you the conclusion. If it were true what some materialistically minded people draw from current science, then one would have to say: Man is placed in the mere animal kingdom by what is today understood as the theory of evolution. Today, one only feels quite clever, and one thinks that one can consider the lower classes stupid when one can say: what man experiences in terms of morality and intellect is only a higher education of what appears in the animal kingdom, and the more one can associate man with the animal kingdom, the more one believes today to be scientific.

Even if a philosophy today makes the somewhat weak attempt to come up with a value system alongside it, this itself is something imperfect, because it must be said that if the consequences were really drawn from what is regarded today as a genuine scientific way of thinking, then it would consist in the fact that distinguishing between good and evil would amount to the same thing that we feel towards the laws of nature. Good and evil would arise from the human soul with the necessity of natural law. Since, if one wants to base oneself on the ground of science, as one often does, one wants to base oneself on the narrowly defined science, it is inconsistent not to draw the conclusion that man should actually be understood merely as an animal transformation, and that the moral should be classified in what is recognized as natural laws, as natural necessity. But then it follows that, just as there is no distinction between good and evil in the law of nature, there is no distinction between good and evil.

As I said, it sounds paradoxical, but it is true nevertheless; the tempter is standing there again, only due to inconsistency we do not see him, the tempter who now says the opposite of the tempter who is put at the top by the Bible. Now he says: You will be like the animals and no longer distinguish good from evil. This may seem ridiculous to some people today; it only seems ridiculous to those who do not understand the consequences that lie in some purely materialistic views of the present. So one could say that today the tempter speaks the opposite of what he did then. Back then he said:

You will be like the gods, knowing good and evil.

Man was to be elevated above himself. As a result, he stands there today, saying: You will be like the animals, you will also recognize as animals and no longer distinguish good from evil. - Just as that was a tempter's word, so is this a tempter's word, even if it is not spoken out of inconsistency. The more one will recognize – it rests in the goals of the present – how the soul, when it becomes aware of this temptress word, that the soul will then develop the longing to recognize the spirit again in its immediate form, which lifts it out of what the [gap in the transcript].

On the one hand, it [spiritual science] may be perceived as a dreamer, as something nonsensical. One can understand that. But on the other hand, it can also be seen as being called for by the deepest goals of our time, which rest in the souls. Because it is so intimately connected with all the goals of the human soul, when one stands on its ground one feels how one is in harmony with what spiritual science wants to express with clarity, how one is in harmony with the intuitions of the spirits who have always worked for spiritual science. These spirits of the past, because spiritual science is something that is only to be bestowed upon our time, have not yet tried to express in a clear way what spiritual science has to say today. But as what can be clearly expressed in a time [gap in the transcript], so the leading spirits have always felt what spiritual science is.

I had to express clearly some things that had to follow today from what is often called science, which is not followed because people are not consistent enough; the soul, familiar with the spirit and its development, has always felt this. Even if development is fully recognized as the continuous pole of our lives, something enters into this human experience with the human soul that goes beyond everything that can be observed externally as external development. And spiritual research only shows, one might say – if I may use the may use the word, which sounds dry and pedantic in the face of these things, only shows through spiritual experiment that what we call the immortal, the eternal, the truly spiritual human soul can really be experienced in detachment from the physical.

Thus, through spiritual science, man will always look at what man's dignity and man's destiny in earthly life really is. We feel when the tempter approaches, however unconsciously, however unacknowledged, and wants to tell us: Development shows man only as the last link in animal development - when he says: You will be like the animals and no longer distinguish evil from good. In the face of this temptation, spiritual science will stand united in the good with the personalities of all times who are striving towards the spiritual light. It will hold up as knowledge to this tempter what Schiller said out of deep poetic intuitions and in which what has been considered is to be summarized. When Schiller became aware of how the similar idea emerged through Herder and Goethe, that man [is] placed at the pinnacle of the animal organization, it was clear to Schiller that such a teaching could only be properly grasped if at the same time the spirit is fully recognized in its independent significance, separate from the physical. That is why Schiller does not say what so many say today, and which, when taken to its logical conclusion, gives the tempter language, but rather, Schiller said the following – and at the same time saw humanity's true destiny – he said the following about the incarnation of man on earth, at the moment when man comes into existence:

Now dullness has lifted from animality
and humanity steps forward with a clear brow
and the lofty stranger, thought,
leaps from the wondering brain.

It goes without saying that there is opposition [to spiritual science or theosophy is widespread], which is why [this] topic [was chosen] for today's lecture. Spiritual science [it is called] in relation to the constitution that the human soul must have in order to be theosophically minded. This mood is called theosophical in the same sense as it has been for centuries. [It is] that mood of the human soul through which it experiences the conviction that there is an inner core of being that can be reached by man, which is linked to the divine-spiritual that pervades and permeates the world. The theosophical mood gives a very general characteristic of knowing oneself as one with the cosmos.

[Gap in the transcript. What is spiritual scientific research?] There are certain soul activities through which the soul itself undertakes the experiment, whereby something like spiritual chemistry is brought about. This makes one so detached in soul and spirit from the physical and bodily that one connects a meaning with the words: I live, I feel myself spiritually independent of my body, so that I look at this body from the outside. Just as inorganic chemistry separates hydrogen from water, so spiritual chemistry separates the soul-spiritual from the physical-bodily. In this way, the human being experiences himself as having been emancipated threefold in the soul-spiritual. What is otherwise experienced in sleep, unconsciously, the spiritual researcher experiences consciously; for he works consciously, from outside, on the physical-bodily.

We can call this a conscious sleep experience. The physical body is like a mirror. The spent forces of the physical body are in a state of constant disintegration during wakefulness. The growth forces are depleted, hence [comes] sleep. The researcher consciously becomes acquainted with what then occurs during the replacement. A kind of reproduction occurs, a reawakening of pure growth forces.

The second thing is the wonderful mystery of the onset of physical life. The first periods of childhood appear to us like a dream. Our powers of consciousness are still as in dream life. We only remember back to a certain point in childhood, [to] where full self-awareness sets in. We can then say “I”. In these early days, the same powers and abilities are already present that will later break out. How are these powers present in the child? In such a way that they are used for the plastic development of the physical body. Only the formal, the form-like, has been inherited by the human being. He himself refines these plastic powers into individual talents. One can see this in the physical organization of a being who works plastically. One observes how this spiritual core descends from above and works into the inheritance from father and mother. I have said before that this core is the fruit of previous earthly experiences. A moment comes when the physical organization is, so to speak, hardened, to use a rough expression, so that the spiritual soul can no longer work plastically on it. This is comparable to standing in front of a mirror. If we can stand in front of it, we cannot go through it, but the reflection that arises in front of us is reflected back. The process just described can be compared to that. What has been flowing in earlier is now reflected back into itself. This is the emergence of self-awareness.

These forces are the same ones that work on our body. The spiritual researcher is in the spiritual world, knows that he is within the Divine-Spiritual that permeates the world. This spiritual-soul experience is the fruit of a soul practice full of renunciation that lasts for years and years. Thus, in what is reflected in the hardened organism, the spiritual scientist is absolutely on the ground of a theosophical view. We could not live this life without the soul-spiritual emerging from the soul's subconscious in its reflection. But at that moment it is only the part that is not allowed to penetrate into our work and creativity. It is the non-creative part. That remains with us for our everyday life. With this, we must turn our attention to what [gap in the transcript]. This is how it presents itself to the spiritual researcher at the moment of our life when we remember a later existence on earth; our spiritual and soul core is there, but it is covered by what can only experience itself in its self-reflection. We do not see what lies behind the reflecting surface as our spiritual and soul core.

Then it becomes clear that our spiritual and mental core is hidden within the physical organism, which acts like a mirror that covers everything. All diligence is based on developing this self-awareness. Our organism has to create something to cover the spiritual and mental core in order to be diligent in the world. This is the anti-osophical mood. It is no wonder that it is so. The spiritual researcher also has to make sure that this is intact in him. He has to forget his theosophical mood and behave exactly as if he were an anti-osophist.

Now it is always the case that abilities develop in a one-sided way. It is natural for most people to let the pendulum of their soul life swing according to the anti-sophical mood. This is rooted in human nature in the deepest sense. Life itself produces this; there is no need to be surprised. We may extinguish our consciousness of the spiritual for external purposes, But there are moments when every human being experiences a kind of yearning, a dawning of consciousness of his spiritual core. Then he is apt to let the theosophical mood enter into the anti-Sophical mood. In itself it is so understandable that this theosophical mood can be overgrown by the everyday mood. We therefore see the two currents: earlier the scientific, antisophical, now the theosophical longing of the soul in our time. The consequence of this is that the antisophical mood has taken hold in another current. You are probably familiar with the beautiful story of Pythagoras, who, when asked by Cleon why he was a philosopher, replied: “Human life seems to me like a fair, full of people who are supposed to buy and sell or enjoy games. But I am like someone who wants to see everything.” In our time, this saying can no longer be used in this way. But what is the meaning of the words? What did Pythagoras want to say with them? His saying is based on the feeling that man achieves something particularly valuable with knowledge that cannot be readily applied in outer life. To let the soul rule freely is a kind of theosophical mood. In our inclination, born of the theosophical mood, towards that which leads man away from the physical, we now transcend centuries.

But now the opposite of the above is coming from America: pragmatism in the form of many brilliant aphorisms. This attitude says: whether there is truth in a perception is not important, but whether what is perceived proves useful. For example, immortality: there is no need for objective reasons to prove it. But it makes life more secure, and a person becomes useful if they perceive it to be true. So we act as if a god et cetera were there. This attitude has found a kind of companion in the “Philosophy of As If”. The book is already in its second edition. While the author wrote the preface as a young man, he only completed the work itself after his retirement. This philosopher claims that whatever can be said about transcendental things can be regarded as if they were there. It is therefore the direct opposite of the theosophical sentiment of Pythagoras and Socrates, because that philosophy of “as if” knows no objective truths in the transcendental. The anti-Sophian mood is dominant today among certain leading minds, and it is to be found in the broadest scope of human mental life. I would also like to refer to some other significant minds, but I do not want this reference to be taken as a disparagement of intellectual capacities. I only mention the opponent because a certain acknowledgment can lie in the mention. I would like to remind you of the famous speech by the great physiologist Du Bois-Reymond about the limits of knowledge of nature. According to this attitude, the world is to be regarded only as an enormous mass of interacting atoms.

Where does a science based on such arguments end up? It says: we can understand the mathematical processes underlying the visible world, but not what matter is, not what consciousness is. What lies beyond the realm of the sensually perceptible is not only “ignoramus”, but “ignorabimus” – we will never know. It is characteristic that Du Bois-Reymond assigns a strictly defined area to science. But beyond that, there is supposedly nothing more to be known. Then, at the end of the speech, we find the following striking statement: “There are limits to our knowledge of nature. Supranaturalism would have to be applied to that which haunts space as matter. But here is how Du Bois-Reymond expresses it: Where supernaturalism begins, science ends. — This statement is eminently anti-sophistic. It virtually forbids man to penetrate to the spiritual core of his being.

As one searches in the broadest periphery today, one encounters this anti-sophistic mood everywhere in leading science. It is characteristic of our time. But the strange thing is that, despite all the great logic with regard to external science, despite all the education of human thought when it comes to the theosophical mood, an assertion pops up like a shot, a counter-assertion that is not even attempted to be justified. Is this justification omitted out of affect or out of antipathy towards the spiritual world? Where does this antipathy come from? Where it begins, it penetrates from the depths of the soul as an impulse with a certain passion.

I must mention here that there are subconscious depths of the soul life that are much greater than we suspect. Many things emerge from the subconscious that give impulses. Our entire, so mysterious, soul condition depends largely on the subconscious soul activity. Is the spiritual researcher able to explore this? He can explore it and substantiate it with expressions of the conscious soul life. We have many kinds of subconscious urges. One can clearly feel that a sentence like the one just mentioned by Du Bois-Reymond about supernaturalism emerges from the subconscious soul regions. [gap in the transcript]

Consider someone who is overcome by fear. There is great tension in their soul life; certain subconscious soul powers are vividly active. I would like to refer here to the excellent research by the Danish physiologist Lange. These phenomena can be scientifically proven. Fear affects the organic body down to the vessels, so that certain irregularities occur in the organism. When someone is in fear, it is very easy for him to get into the mood that can be described with the words: Above all, give me something to hold on to, otherwise I will fall over.

Let us observe a scholar who occupies himself only with science. His organism develops in such a way that a mood is awakened in him by his stay-at-home thinking, which can express itself like a sudden shock, like fear in increased measure. This mood of fear sits deep down in organic processes. What happens there are instinctual, subconscious forces.

The spiritual researcher must now move from the passive to the active. If one is primarily concerned with sensory perception, then it is precisely out of a subconscious mood of fear that one can come to such a conclusion: Give me something material that I can hold on to, otherwise I will fall. Materialism breeds fear. It breeds the belief that you are only in front of a reality when you are in front of something you can hold on to in space. So the anti-sophical mood, as a mere belief in sensual quality, is basically nothing more than a mood of fear. You will have to get used to the fact that this is true, however paradoxical it may sound. The “Ignorabimus” has the same reason: fear. The anti-soph falls over when it has nothing to hold on to as reality. This shows us what we have to hold on to if we want to explore the reasons for the anti-sophic mood.

Never can it be missing [...] that this soul of mine, like a compressed ball, suddenly springs open and feels the longing for the home from which it comes.

These explanations should lead us not to disdain anti-philosophy, but to learn to understand it. The achievements of our time, especially the great technical ones, all that in a certain sense signifies the greatness of our time, needs an anti-philosophical mood as its correlate. But anti-philosophy will produce the theosophical mood as a natural reaction.

All those who have delved deeper into the knowledge of the world with all their soul have had the theosophical mood. The human soul cannot do without it. One must recognize that anti-philosophy may well produce efficiency in the outer life, but that in the long run man cannot be satisfied with it. The core of the soul proves to be the reality of human life and asserts itself from the deep sources of the soul. There will always be moments of celebration in life when the theosophical mood arises and rises. Then man is at one with all that is great and sublime in all times. Goethe, for example, was such a spirit. He, in particular, expressed the theosophical mood in many places.

Not a lesser man next to Goethe, but a great man, the naturalist Albrecht von Haller, who deserves the highest respect, made the following statement out of an anti-theosophical mood:

No created spirit can penetrate into the innermost nature
. Blessed is he to whom she only
The outer shell shows.

This is anti-philosophy. Only the shell, not the actual core, which is connected to the cosmic soul! Goethe sensed this as an anti-philosophical sentiment and, speaking from his theosophical perspective, said:

“Into the innermost part of nature,”
O you philistines! —
“No created spirit,“
May you and your brothers and sisters
Not remember me of such a word.

We think: Place by place
We are within.
“Happy the one to whom she only
Shows the outer shell!”
I hear this repeated for sixty years,
I curse it, but furtively;
Tell me a thousand, a thousand times:
She gives everything abundantly and gladly,
Nature has neither core
Nor shell,
She is everything at once;
You, above all, prove yourself,
Whether you are core or shell.

Dear attendees! After having repeatedly spoken about various individual areas of spiritual science in this city over the past few years, allow me this evening to present some fundamental principles from the field of spiritual science to you, and then, in tomorrow's lecture, to present some of the consequences and benefits of spiritual science for practical and spiritual life.

Spiritual science, as it is meant here, is by no means something that can be said to be popular or even recognized in wider circles in our present time. On the contrary, from the most diverse sides and points of view, one will have to hear again and again the most diverse objections of the opposition to this spiritual science. Wherever one wishes to advocate it, one must be prepared for the most diverse misunderstandings that are brought against it.

As on previous occasions, I would like to take this opportunity to emphasize right at the outset that anyone who is grounded in this spiritual science will not be surprised, but will consider it quite natural, that the points of view from which we are starting here will meet with opponents and be misunderstood. Indeed, anyone who is familiar with this subject will be quite clear about the fact that, according to the habits of thought and imagination of the present time, according to the general, one might say generally recognized or believed, aims of our present time, this spiritual science must still find opponents for the time being. In this respect, it is no different from the one whose continuation for our time it seeks to be. However strange it may seem to some, it must be said that this spiritual science is the continuation of, or at least seeks to be, what has emerged with regard to nature through the newer natural science at the dawn of modern spiritual life.

Just as in those days, by elevating and rising above traditional views and received ideas, one went directly to nature itself, so in our time spiritual science wants to go directly to the world of the spiritual, to the processes of the spiritual. And one can say: Nothing is more unfounded than when it is asserted from any quarter that spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants to be opposed to natural science. On the contrary, anyone who has a clear insight into spiritual science will fully recognize and correctly assess the significant advances and the great blessings that the scientific view and way of thinking have brought.

Spiritual science cannot, as it were, follow the example of natural science in the realm of the spiritual, and apply the methods and way of thinking that are common in natural science, for the reason that a correct adherence to the natural scientific attitude requires something different for the study of the spiritual.

But before I proceed to our actual consideration, I would like to explain how this spiritual science is the continuation of scientific thinking by means of a kind of parable. This parable is not intended to say anything in particular, but only to express the relationship between scientific progress and what spiritual science seeks to be.

If we cast our soul's eye on the activity of the farmer who sows his grain at the appropriate time of year, we find that this grain rises, that by far the largest part of this grain is used for human nutrition. Only a small part of the sown seed is used to be returned to the element of the earth and to become grain again. So let me look at what scientific thinking has brought us over the centuries in the light of the demands of spiritual research. Science has brought us, one might say, a complete transformation of the face of our earth. It has intervened in all of human life, right down to our everyday lives. For all around us we can see the fruits of modern science. But in addition to all this, we also owe it an insight into the connections between world phenomena, into the realm of the senses, which mankind would hardly have dreamed of before. But we also owe it something else: a sum of ideas, concepts and perceptions has emerged; they have become established over the last three, especially the last century. People's minds had to come to terms with these ideas. They had to answer the often puzzling question: How can the soul come to a state of harmony within itself when it has to come to terms with the ideas and concepts that scientific thinking has brought forth, and with the feelings that follow from this scientific thinking?

I would compare the new ideas, concepts and notions that have been instilled into our souls in just a few centuries with the relatively few seeds that are sown to bear fruit the following year; compared to what is used from the harvested fruits for human food. In the realm of scientific thinking, we can compare what is used for human nutrition with what is spread into our external cultural life, what is used for human benefit and for the knowledge of the connections in the sensory world. But what has been raised in new ideas, concepts and perceptions sinks into our soul, and is entrusted again to the element from which it emerged. We should live with this, and try to bring our innermost soul powers and soul harmony into connection with it. In contrast to this, we should ask: How is it possible to have security, hope and joy in our work in life?

Not only what is given to us theoretically through scientific ideas and concepts should be considered, but also what the soul experiences through them. For it is precisely these scientific ideas, when used as indicated in the following consideration, that give the soul the most beautiful direction to the spirit through themselves. They lead the life of the soul directly into the realm of the spirit. Although this is a result of life for all those who have studied spiritual science as it is meant here, it must seem strange to those who have not done so when it is said that this spiritual science wants to be a true successor to natural science. For precisely because it enters the spiritual realm, the scientific method must take on a different form in order to remain true to the scientific spirit.

And to bring this form to mind, I would like to compare spiritual science with spiritual chemistry, to make myself understood, with reference to the way it gains its results. Not that I want to say anything special with this comparison, but the comparison can lead us to understand what will be meant by the following remarks. If we have water in front of us, we cannot see what components it has in the sense of today's chemistry; that it consists of hydrogen and oxygen cannot be seen from the outside. With the means of chemistry, we can come to know: water has a completely different property, a completely different characteristic; it is liquid, it extinguishes fire. The hydrogen can burn itself, is gaseous. That this water contains something like hydrogen can only be known by separating this hydrogen from the water.

In a very similar way, but with the help of spiritual methods, something must be done with the human being himself for the purpose of spiritual science. Just as he appears to us in the outer world, he cannot be recognized in his components, just as water cannot be recognized in its components. What the human being is in spirit and soul, what every soul longs to know, is bound to the body in ordinary life as hydrogen is bound to water, and cannot be recognized in its very nature within the body, just as hydrogen cannot be recognized in water.

Now the methods by which we separate the spiritual and mental from the physical are not as robust, not directed towards handling in the sensory world as the chemical method by which hydrogen is separated from water. But that does not make them any less to be taken in a strictly scientific sense. These are methods that take place entirely within the life of the soul itself. They are delicate, subtle processes of the soul's life. It is not by external manipulations that one can arrive at the riddles of the spiritual life. The only instrument available to man to penetrate into the spiritual world is man himself, and that is his spiritual-soul life.

How is it that we, hypothetically speaking, separate this spiritual-soul life from the physical life with which it is connected in everyday life? The methods used are not ones that resort to anything particularly miraculous; they are extensions of mental activities that every person is familiar with in their daily life; only these mental activities have to be extended into the realm of unlimited strength. But this requires a resignation, a devotion in the soul life, for which one must first prepare oneself. You can find a more detailed description of the method by which the soul can penetrate into the spiritual world in my books “The Secret Science in Outline” and “How to Know Higher Worlds?” To begin with, there is an activity of the soul that is familiar to everyone, that is needed in everyday life, that is needed for the health of the soul, and that is therefore applied by the soul in ordinary life. For the purposes of spiritual science, however, it must be intensified to an unlimited degree. It is what can be called: turning one's attention, one's interest, to something. We all know that in order to get along in life, in order to find our way in the world, we cannot just go along indifferently, but we have to turn our attention to the most diverse things. And the more we do this, the more it becomes, in our minds, our own, the more we carry a sign of it through our further life and have connected with it.

And attention is intimately connected with another soul ability, the significance of which for life everyone must recognize, namely with what we call memory. And one can even say: in a sense, the question of a good memory in the human soul is the same question as that of the activity of attention. An object to which we only fleetingly turn our attention fades from our memory. An object to which we turn our attention, and repeatedly at that – repetition is often important – becomes our mental property.

Everyone can see for themselves the importance of attention for memory in the most mundane of everyday life. Let me give you a trivial example: Who hasn't woken up in the morning and not found things that they put down the night before? If you practice it, let's say, not just putting your cufflinks down, but paying attention to the act of putting them down, linking the thought to it: Now I'm putting this object down - then tomorrow you will go straight to the place where you put the object down. That is, the power that inscribes in our memory what is to be inscribed, that is attention.

And anyone who has taken a little look at the inner life of humanity will often notice at least echoes of that unhealthiness of the inner life, or have heard of it, which consists in the human soul not being able to remember what it has experienced as if the experiences were its own experiences. We then speak of a split in the ego in the face of such an unhealthy inner life. It may happen to such a soul that things it has experienced itself, so to speak, belong to another self. This radical case is less common, but it does occur.

However, the ego's full context, its continuity, is disturbed with regard to a clear insight into one's own past, and this happens more often. This could be prevented if the good pedagogical principle were more introduced into life, to awaken attention, interest in what is going on as important in our environment, as in general the connection between attention and a healthy spiritual life should play the very greatest role in pedagogy.

Thus we see that attention is something we need for our ordinary lives. The spiritual researcher must develop this attention, that is, the activity that is exercised by directing the soul power to a specific object, by drawing it away from other objects at that moment and concentrating it on a specific object. The soul researcher must develop this activity of the soul life, which and slight in everyday attention, to an unlimited strength; that is, he must take it upon himself to do such soul exercises again and again, which are an unlimited intensification of what would otherwise be active in the soul life as attention and interest. This is called, in a technical expression of spiritual science, the concentration of thinking or feeling. All soul forces can be concentrated again and again, drawn together to one point. This must be repeated again and again, because it often takes many, many years to make the soul a true instrument of spiritual research. To achieve this, one must repeatedly and repeatedly concentrate the soul forces on an idea or a feeling that one has moved into the center of one's soul life only through one's own will. It is best to draw into the soul life an image that one has really put together, for example, a symbolic image, a symbol; what one has borrowed from the outer life, to that one is too accustomed used to; a greater effort is required if one contracts one's mental life, all the forces that one otherwise disperses, to the mental processes, to an arbitrary compilation that one always returns to the center of one's mental life. In this way, a state gradually becomes possible for the human being, which allows his spiritual-soul, which is otherwise poured out into the physical-bodily, to be grasped by the same power that is concentrated there, and finally set free from the physical-bodily. There is no other way to be convinced in practice that there is really a second person in us, a spiritual-soul person, just as hydrogen is in water, if you do not grasp this soul-spiritual person by he is permeated by what is the unlimited amplification of the activity of ordinary attention, and in doing so, he is so strengthened in himself, this soul-spiritual human being, that he stands out from the physical-bodily. He is lifted out of the physical-bodily in this way, as hydrogen is lifted out of water through chemical processes.

If everything that has now been discussed in principle is undertaken by the soul, as indicated in the books mentioned earlier, we can extract the spiritual-soul from the physical-bodily through purely soul-related activities.

If this is really successful, then a great change occurs in the inner life of the person. One receives completely new inner concepts of life. One is seized, so to speak, by something within oneself, of which one had not even had a correct idea before. Above all, in this way one is brought to a certain concept, to an idea, with which one can now connect a sense of what it means to be outside one's body and yet still lead a fully conscious life; to be able to grasp oneself inwardly, to take hold of oneself inwardly, without doing so through the tools of the senses, through the physical tools of the brain.

The next thing to happen to the spiritual researcher on the indicated path, when he has come far enough, is that a state comes over him that can only be compared in ordinary life to something that occurs involuntarily. The human being reaches a state in which, just as the external sensory world fades away when falling asleep, so too does this sensory world now, as it were, lift itself away from the human being, as it does when falling asleep. But the human being also experiences this: he feels his physical body passing over in complete calm, in complete inner serenity, and now fully consciously, as it otherwise happens unconsciously in sleep. Nothing of what can otherwise stir in the body through everyday activity then stirs. The human being, with his soul-spiritual, has emerged from the physical-bodily.

For the first time, the human being now has an idea of what it means to face my body as I would otherwise face an external object. In ordinary life, one only has an idea of what it means to experience oneself when one is, as it were, inside one's body; in this way the body is connected to oneself; one relates to it quite differently than to other things. But now one's own body becomes an external object, which one faces as one used to face other external objects. But one does not face it as it appears to us physically as long as we use the tools of the physical world. How it appears to us, how we face this body, turns out to be a harrowing event that man can undergo on the way to spiritual research.

What I am about to describe can be experienced in many different forms and in many different ways. In a small book, 'A Path to Self-Knowledge of Man', I have attempted to describe a typical form in which it can occur. From this description, one can get an idea of what the spiritual researcher has to experience at a certain stage. But, as I said, it is only a typical form, it can always be different. Let us say that a person is directly involved in their outer life, or even asleep during sleep. This event can occur during sleep or during wakefulness; it will never disturb the healthy life of the soul in any way if it happens correctly. In the midst of waking, in the midst of sleep while sleeping, in such a way that it is more than even the most vivid dream – it can overtake us, this event, so that we feel something like what [I] would like to express in the following words – one can only stammer what is experienced by the soul: What is happening to me? It is as if lightning, as if fire, were flashing through the air; as if the room in which I am were illuminated by lightning; as if my own body were being struck by lightning and destroyed by the elements. It is not just a matter of what I can describe in words, but of what kind of inner experience one has at this point in one's soul development. What matters is that one knows from now on: one has experienced in one's mind what it means to live in one's soul and spirit in such a way that one is lifted out of the physical body; that the image of the physical body presents itself to one. But it is an image that cannot help but represent the physical body in a state of destruction.

And then you realize what you are actually experiencing when you can really immerse yourself in what you have felt. You come to realize: yes, when you are in the midst of life, your spiritual and soul self is indeed an independent being. But the way you experience everyday life is bound to your physical body. Throughout life - even science admits this - the spiritual and soul destroys the physical and bodily. From the moment we wake up in the morning until we fall asleep at night, we use our physical body as a tool for what arises in our soul, in our ideas and feelings. Fatigue expresses the destruction of the soul life. Sleep is the compensation. The fact that we experience the soul life depends on the fact that, basically, we carry out a continuous work of destruction on our body, which ends with death. This is evident from the image that shows us: the moment you become aware that your soul and spirit are independent and can emancipate themselves from the body, you experience your body as if it were destroying itself before you.

Spiritual science – not as it should be considered in our time according to the scientific education that humanity has enjoyed for centuries, but as it has gone through the various epochs – spiritual science has always existed, only very few people have known about it. But those who knew about it also knew the harrowing moment in the spiritual researcher's life that I have just described, and they called it by saying the words: I have come to the gates of death. — That is, one has come to know in the image what death is; one has come to know how, in death, the spiritual-soul triumphs in its independence from the physical-bodily. From the point where one has experienced this, one knows what it means to live independently in one's spiritual-soul. One knows that this spiritual-soul life, in its separation from the bodily, is something that has completely different qualities from the bodily.

But it is true in a certain way that what gives progress towards the spirit is linked to difficulties of the inner life; it can even become a kind of inner martyrdom. Above all, patience is needed to concentrate the soul's power in such a way that the soul-spiritual, emancipated from the physical, can grasp itself in its independence. I wanted to describe this to you as it happened because I do not want to speak in general terms, but because I want to tell of the living experiences of the spiritual researcher himself.

From that moment on, you know what it means to live outside your body, especially in terms of thinking. You now associate a certain sense, a sense full of reality, with it when you say: I now know that I think, that I can form ideas not as in everyday life; I now know that I can form ideas with the soul that has left the brain, purely in a spiritual and mental way. And because I don't want to speak in general terms, I don't want to shy away from something that, when viewed superficially, can appear very vulnerable: in the moment when you have the described experience, you experience yourself in your thinking, which, for the moments when you leave your own body, is no longer tied to the brain; you feel as if you are living outside the brain, in the environment of the brain. And you know: if you want to think again as you do in everyday life, you have to submerge yourself in your brain again. You begin to see it as something external that you have to submerge into.

One thing is necessary if you have progressed to this point. And what I will mention here as necessary can also refute the objections of those who do not know spiritual science and, from the point of view of today's science, would like to push what the spiritual researcher experiences into the category of hallucinations. They are talking about something they have no idea about. For it is precisely the spiritual researcher who knows how to distinguish at every moment what the difference is between a hallucination, an illusion and what he really experiences as something spiritual. In ordinary everyday life, too, it is no different than learning to distinguish reality from mere imagination through life itself. In ordinary life, one can easily distinguish the idea of a hot iron and the actual perception of a hot iron when one touches it. It is the same when you really immerse yourself in the spiritual world in the way described.

But what is necessary is that you feel what you are experiencing now so inwardly, imbued with this inner strength, that you are immersed in it with your will. For let us not mistake: what one experiences as a world of ideas that is outside of the body must arise as an experience in such a way that one does not feel it at first as an external being, but one must feel it as one feels one's hand, one's foot, one's eye; one must feel it as a spiritual sense organ. You must first know exactly: what you have developed within you is a part of your spiritual-soul being; it is something within you that you must use in the same way as you would use your hand to grasp something or your eye to see by looking into it.

In this way, one first develops the organs. One does something within oneself that is as subtle as a web of dreams in relation to external reality, but whose reality one experiences. One does something with one's spiritual-soul being; one is involved with one's will. One must experience something in the new being that one has drawn out of one's body, which one can describe as an inner play of facial expressions. Just as one is able to express one's thinking and feeling with the muscles of one's face, and to express one's soul experiences in one's gaze, so one must now develop the ability to have a clearly conscious inner handling of the spiritual-soul being that has been raised out of the body. One must be able to express oneself through this being. In short, one must have the feeling: In what you have made out of yourself, you are involved with the will. Not like in dreams; the dream presents images to us, but these images occur without our will. It is different when we bring ourselves, through genuine spiritual development, to experience something outside of our body. There we ourselves are the actors who make an image, which arises to the highest intensity, disappear, and bring it from one place to another. We are so immersed in this world of images that we can control it, that we can whirl it around.

In the same way that we have become familiar with this through the exercises we have performed, which, after all, are basically only the training of our external attention to an unlimited degree of mental and spiritual concentration, we initially only manage to make ourselves mentally and spiritually independent beings. We do not yet perceive other spiritual processes and spiritual entities that are around us. In order to do that, we have to add other categories of exercises to those that fall under attention, so to speak, that are completely opposed to attention.

But spiritual progress depends on not just practicing one-sidedly, but on alternately exerting our soul in practicing in one direction or the other. We have to do the most intense exercises in increasing our attention. But at the same time, we have to do inner exercises that are exactly the opposite. We must also do the opposite of what happens in ordinary life. For example, when a being loves another so devotedly that he feels absorbed in that being, or when any being is completely devoted to something that concerns him in prayer or in other religious sentiments. Devotion, which we also have in ordinary life, as we have attention, but again increased to infinity. We must really, quite arbitrarily, through a strong volition, bring about the suppression of all external sensory perception, as it otherwise only happens in sleep. One gradually acquires the ability to suppress, so to speak, everything that is necessary for everyday sensory life, right down to the involuntary muscles and other organic tools; completely, with the exclusion of what is ordinary sensory life, to devote himself with his soul to that which is most immediately presented by us as the Divine-Spiritual, which stands beyond all concepts, permeating and flowing through the world. In particular, we must try to suppress everything that otherwise occupies us in our judgment. We must accept the arbitrary faculty of everyday activity and, in the innermost serenity and devotion, live consciously of nothing but the expectation: What comes to you when you suppress everything arbitrary that otherwise made an impression on you, and when you are devoted to what you will come to know? This devotion must be increased to the point of infinity, then the moment will come when we can use what we have developed in terms of spiritual and mental being, emancipated from our self.

Then the images that we have placed within us will become us in such a way that we connect spiritually with a spiritual world; but in such a way that we now connect with this world not passively, as in everyday life, but actively. In the everyday world, we are outside of an object that we look at. If we want to penetrate the spiritual world, we have to immerse ourselves in the object and merge with it, become one with it, as one as we were before only with our own soul.

And just as we express through our facial expressions what lives in our soul, so it is when, after sufficient devotion, we immerse ourselves in a real, a spiritual world, that we recognize in it, that we live in the activity of our spiritual soul, that we express states of the spiritual world within us. We experience them through inner facial expressions, by immersing ourselves in the spiritual world, which we can only grasp by actively immersing ourselves in it. We have to acquire a spiritual facial expression in the spiritual world; we have to acquire the ability to express ourselves.

Then we know that a spiritual world is always around us, just as, for example, the world of a language is also around a deaf-mute child, but he knows nothing about it; he does not get to this world of language, even though his speech organs are quite healthy. He is unable to imitate in speech what he does not hear, to express it in facial expressions. Just as the world of words is also around the deaf-mute child, so the world of spiritual entities and spiritual processes is always around every human being.

And just as the human being only has to open up to the outside world and imitate the words in language, so the human being, as a spiritual and soul being, has to open up to the spiritual world through devotion in order to express through mimicry what he experiences, through the means he has cultivated within himself. For the spiritual world is only received through active engagement and not passively. What we do not experience in ourselves through the spiritual world, as if through an inner mimicry, cannot reveal itself to us. We must become one with the spiritual world so that we can develop the spiritual mimicry in what we are revealed, by immersing ourselves in the spiritual world. This mimicry then brings us to the awareness through our own experience: You are now experiencing conditions of the spiritual world. What I have described can be experienced by detaching the power of thought from the physical tool, from the brain.

But there is another power in us that can be released from the physical tool, namely what is called the human power of speech, and, related to this, the power of memory. Both belong to the same kind of soul activity. Just as we have drawn our thinking out of the bodily tool, so we arrive, by continuing our exercises, at being able to grasp the spiritual-soul power by which we otherwise speak. When you think about me as I speak to you now, my spiritual-soul life is active. But this activity is first transmitted to the brain, then to the speech organs, and then to the air. First, it is a spiritual-soul force that then flows outwards. If, by continuing our intensified devotion, we succeed in excluding everything that is connected with speech in the body, but in developing in the soul and spirit that which is otherwise poured out into speech, if we succeed in doing so without speaking, even without making that inner, fine vibration, which even in ordinary thinking sounds like a soft, inaudible speaking, and which is also admitted by modern science, if we succeed in doing so, we exclude everything that is connected with speech in the body, but in the soul and spirit we develop that which is otherwise poured out into speech, if we thus leave the power of speech inwardly, if we inwardly leave that which is expressed in speech, then we can, through the power of our soul and spirit, make ourselves heard in the air. body is bound to speech, but in the spiritual and soul life, develop that which is otherwise poured into speech, so if one leaves the power of speech inwardly, if one is silent with regard to what is expressed in speech, but still applies the power inwardly, then one reaches a further stage in spiritual research. One reaches the point where one experiences not only that as

something external, which one can call one's body; one now comes to recognize: You are an independent entity that can lift itself out of its inner soul life of everyday life. One separates oneself, just as one used to separate from the body, from what is ordinary thinking, feeling and imagining. And the same thing that you develop in speech, you also develop in memory, as you accumulate external stimuli and impressions in the course of your life. The soul power that inspires speech is active in memory.

But now, when you experience yourself outside of your everyday mental life, you have another harrowing event. For now one experiences, as in a review, the whole past life up to the point where one can normally remember back, a point in childhood. What one has lived through comes to mind in distinct images, in ever clearer and clearer images, but not as one's ordinary memory is, but quite differently.

I would like to explain this with an example. Let's assume we have done something morally objectionable. You look back on it. It appears in the picture and it shows you: By doing this, you have strayed from the true image of a human being that you are supposed to represent. That is how far you have fallen in becoming human. — It stands before you as a warning, so that you cannot say otherwise than: Until I have overcome, through a further life, through corresponding good actions, what I am overlooking here, I must always look at it when I experience myself outside of my own soul life.

This is the case with good and bad, with all experiences that one has gone through. One's past life trails behind one like a comet's tail; but now so changed that it shows one what one has to do in order to balance out what should not have been done, and so that one can make appropriate use of what one has done in the world. The experiences of one's own life are grouped together in such a way that they become an externally complicated overall experience. It is permeated, as it were, by an inner power that one perceives, of which one is now aware: it was always in you, you just did not perceive it, the power to extinguish a deficiency; a real power, something that you have achieved as an ability to apply fruitfully. Now you get a full idea with inner reality: a plant develops from the soil. It unfolds leaf by leaf, draws its life together in a narrow germ. But in this germ, life is so concentrated that it contains the possibility of a new plant developing. Just as there is physical force in this seed, so we realize that, owing to what we have lived through and which we only recognize in its true form when we survey it, we have within us a force like a germinating power that must continue to work on the basis of what we have experienced. From now on you know: When death comes upon you, there is a spiritual-soul germ in you that passes through the gate of death and lives on, as surely as the germ of the plant lives on. An ever-victorious spiritual germ springs from your inner being. From that moment on you know: When your body falls away, your soul and spirit will pass through death into the spiritual world.

When one studies a life that enters the world, a child's life, which basically represents the greatest mystery for the spiritual researcher, when one studies a child's life with this knowledge, or one's own childhood – because from now on one can look back further into one's life – or when one child, then it becomes clear to you how ability after ability unfolds in development, how the child's features become more and more defined, more and more certain, how talents emerge. It becomes clear to you: just as the plant grows from the germ, so what sprouts from the spiritual world comes out of it. It is the same thing that we recognized earlier as conquering death. It comes back into the world, and our spiritual and soul life develops out of what we have carried through death. Now we know what it means to repeat life on earth. We know that we live alternately; that we live between birth and death in a physical body, that we then pass through death and live in a spiritual world. We know that every birth means: something from the spiritual world descends and connects with what comes from the father and mother. It works through the fruits of a previous life, which project into this life in one's destiny.

By emancipating the power of speech within us, by developing that which we waste in life, so to speak, in language, in special moments of practice within, so that it remains in the soul, we thus become immersed in the spiritual world in which we find ourselves, going from life to life, because we now experience not states but processes of the spiritual world. In this way we ascend from conditions to processes.

In practice, the spiritual researcher first reaches out like a spiritual tentacle to grasp what is outside of him, where he had previously only perceived conditions. But now the spiritual researcher experiences that he, with his emancipated soul life, which has also taken in the power of speech, emerges completely from himself and immerses himself in the other beings in such a way that he knows: you are now moving from being to being in the spiritual world; you are immersing yourself in the spiritual world. Most of the time it will be like this: Until one has a complete skill in coming to an experience of conditions, one must try to give oneself so far; then one feels as if awakened to another state.

In this way, one experiences events by really living them inwardly, by emerging and submerging with them. One could say that one now experiences events in the spiritual world not through inner facial expressions but through inner gestures. Just as one experiences events in the outer world through movement, so in the spiritual world one must take part in the movement; one must go along with the events. So you move up from inner facial expressions to inner gestures, and gradually you perceive not only conditions but also processes in the spiritual world.

And finally, if you practice this more and more, if you really develop it systematically, as described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, if you continue with the two categories of inner practice, what falls under the category of attention and what falls under the category of devotion, we also call it concentration and meditation, then, my dear audience, then one finally arrives at a third, at a third, which I must hint at in the following way.

Something is reserved for man – I know that this is open to criticism from the point of view of superficial external science, but it is nevertheless true; I just lack the time to prove it now, but it can be proved – man has an advantage over the other creatures on earth in that he actually only becomes himself in the course of life, compared to the beings that stand in the world as he does. For when we come into the world, we have to crawl on all fours. Other creatures, the animals, are not dependent on the outset, but they are different from the human being, they have incorporated forces that give them the position they should take in life. Man must rise in the course of life to that of which one can say: it actually makes him a human being in the physical sense. Again and again, great thinkers have pointed out what man is by rising from the ground and directing his face outwards. But man only makes himself into that by directing his willpower. He has an inner directing power through which he brings himself into alignment with the cosmos, through which he is human in the physical sense. This is what inner spiritual-soul forces are for. But in ordinary life they are poured entirely into the physical.

Now, dear attendees, just as one can emancipate the power of thought from the physical body, so too can one emancipate the powers through which we first make ourselves human in the world in the physical sense. And just as one can allow what would otherwise pour out through speech to remain in the inner life of the soul, and thus arrive at an inner gesture, so one can inwardly emancipate the powers of uprightness through practice. Then, through the use of these inner forces, one comes to understand beings in the spiritual world that are different from human beings. The fact that we only know human beings in the physical world comes from the fact that we have used the forces that are the directing forces to make human beings what they are. If we practice emancipating these forces inwardly, we get to know beings that are somewhat different from human beings. This leads to an inner study of physiognomy. One imitates the forms of the other beings with which one then comes into contact. In short, one now enters into a living relationship with the spiritual world. One takes on the physiognomy of the beings with which one comes into contact. I would like to repeat what has been said: through inner mimicry one comes to states; through inner gesture one comes to processes; through inner physiognomy one comes to really get to know the spiritual world as such.

I have tried to show you in real terms how true spiritual research becomes immersed in the spiritual world, how man really comes to grasp a spiritual world. Spiritual science is just as much a science as chemistry, physics and so on. What can be presented to humanity through this spiritual science needs to be accepted just as little on authority as the results of other sciences. Tomorrow I will describe how this spiritual science can become part of a person's life.

When we consider the aims of our time, we may say to ourselves: precisely the great, the admirable progress of natural science has accustomed people to accepting what is to be accepted as true only when the truth is presented to them in such a way that they can remain passive. Every step in spiritual research, however, shows us that we have to actively familiarize ourselves with the spiritual world; that we first have to create the expression for what we want to perceive. Spiritual science is to natural science as activity is to passivity. One need only glance around at our contemporary circumstances to see that people are inclined to say: “That's fantasy!” if something does not confront them in such a way that they can remain passive. In this way, spiritual science is fundamentally opposed to the currents of the time.

But on the other hand, it happens in life that where something has soared to the highest power, its opposite is done. For anyone who can search the souls of the present, it is quite clear that in the depths of the souls of people today there lives a longing to experience something of that activity through which man can also cognitively grasp his eternal, his immortal, his connection with the divine. It is only natural that on the one hand opposition after opposition is directed against spiritual science, because education in natural science has led to passivity. But in the depths of the soul there is a yearning, a yearning that awaits fulfillment. Many souls live in the present, unaware that their insecurity, their not knowing what to do with themselves, simply comes from the fact that they have the longing to come together with the spiritual, and that they cannot do so. They long for spiritual science.

Therefore, one can say: No matter how much what appears on the surface to be approaching the souls is opposed to the aims of our time, in truth the souls long for the aims that spiritual science sets itself. One could show from many things that confront us in the present how man at the present time wants to be completely passively devoted to the outside world; how he wants to receive everything that he is to accept as true from outside. People are happy to go to a lecture that is advertised as including “slides”. No claim is made other than to surrender passively, to look, to receive sensations that are at most supported by words. It is different where a lecture without slides demands that one work in one's soul.

And so it is basically in the broadest scope of our lives. After all, one thing has been able to take hold in our time: A very popular magazine recently published an essay that contains the following: the author has a respected name as a philosopher; he is also rightly admired for many things. I would also like to take this opportunity to mention that I always make it a point to only quote opponents that I can also respect; and I would like to mention a respected man to you now. But this man has come to a strange idea. He says: When you read Kant or Spinoza, it is difficult to read; the concepts are all over the place. But couldn't it be made easier? Today we have slides, film, and the cinema. You could show people Spinoza sitting there grinding lenses. That would be the first image. It transforms itself. The thought “substance” appears in his mind. The thought of substance appears. In the next image, “Thought and Expansion” and so on. Spinoza's “Ethics” - that is the name of the work I have just mentioned - it will be a nice future prospect to be able to walk past a movie theater and read on the posters: “Spinoza's Ethics” or “Kant's Critique of Pure Reason”.

Dear attendees! I only mention such things because they grotesquely show you where the goals of our time are heading and how they are opposed to the goals of spiritual science, in which everything is activity in order to strengthen activity in the human being, to make the human being more and more independent and independent. The person who reprinted the aforementioned essay in his newspaper said that one would have to have great hopes if something like this could be realized; it would fulfill the metaphysical yearning of human beings. The spiritual researcher, however, cannot hope for this fulfillment. He must therefore accept being scolded for being “superficial” because he cannot hope for much from Spinoza's “Ethics” and Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” in film.

I need not go into the individual goals of our time any further; I need only present the general character of passivity that was bound to arise from it, because through the wonderful deepening of external life, man has become accustomed to being active in that to which he can add nothing. But the more people of the present time wrap themselves in such passivity, the more the longing will awaken for that activity of the soul through which man can feel himself as an eternal, as an independent, as a being independent of the body beings that conquers death because it has powers within itself that have nothing to do with birth and death, but that point back to earlier lives on earth and point forward to a later and eternal existence.

I only wanted to characterize; I did not want to hint at the details of what I would like to call a glimpse into the future of human development.

What is the purpose of this activity? We will look at tomorrow at what spiritual science is intended to be as a way of life. But what can it lead to?

Now, let us take a look at the basic character of our time, at the world view that seeks to create a world picture only from materialistic-sensory facts. This is not very consistent, otherwise one would have to say: according to this world view, as it is beginning to emerge in the sense of a misunderstood Darwinism, the human being is said to have arisen purely, without any spiritual-soul element connecting to his physical body, which has arisen out of animality, man is supposed to have arisen out of animality; and the qualities of thinking, feeling and willing, the quality of religious deepening and so on, are supposed to be only an intensification of what appears at a lower level in animals.

It is superficial to speak of living in a transitional period with regard to certain things. Every time is a transitional period. But one may say, and that is what matters: with regard to such things, this time is a transitional period. And I would like to ask your permission to suggest, perhaps somewhat grotesquely, but thereby particularly clearly, how spiritual science wants to relate to the goals of our time. We have only not been consistent enough, otherwise we could say the following, precisely from the materialistic way of thinking: Whatever is meant by what is stated in the Bible at the beginning of human development with the appearance of the spirit, which is symbolized by the serpent; what word resounds from this symbol?

You will be like the gods, knowing good and evil.

However you may feel about this symbol, it is a significant saying, a saying that is connected with everything we call “freedom” in human beings. A great saying that goes deep into human nature: “You will be like the gods, knowing good and evil.” If one were as consistent as the snake was consistent, if one is a materialist or a monist, then one would not, inconsistently, veil what one would actually have to say with this composition: everything that man can immerse himself in is an intensification of what comes to light in the animal's instinctual life. It is as if the tempter were standing before us and calling out to us: “You will be like the animals, no longer distinguishing good from evil.” For when everything is harnessed to the objective-physical law of nature, then everything proceeds as animal life proceeds. Thus, the tempter's words stand before us as the goal of our time: “You will be like the animals, no longer distinguishing good from evil.”

Between these two extremes lies the true progress of the human being. Spiritual science is intended to lift humanity above what it can only gain from the contemplation of sensual reality, to which it may only passively surrender. Instead, spiritual science is intended to intervene in the cultural world and give it goals that lie in the activity of the soul, which places man in the world in such a way that he can better find his progress in the development of freedom and all that is human in the right middle between divinity and animality.

With these true goals of spiritual science, one is certainly in harmony with all those personalities who, in the course of human development, have tried to gain a feeling and a sense of the true essence of man through deep soul contemplation. Even in ancient times, spiritual science was able to express clearly what it can express today, although it could not be expressed as clearly as it is possible in our time because we have the model of natural science before us. It was felt and sensed by all those spirits, all those personalities who took genuine human progress seriously. They were far, far from allowing the direction of their thinking to be confined to a goal that must be characterized as follows: You will be like animals and no longer distinguish good from evil; your thoughts will be no more than the highest activity of your brain, just as magnetism is the highest activity of that which can take place in the material processes of iron.

How many great minds from centuries past could resound in our poetry and thought! Let us mention just one, in whose words I would like to summarize what I wanted to present here today. Let me quote a saying of Schiller, who also wanted to realize how it is with the relationship of man to the developing animal world; how it was in the formation of the earth, when man appeared, in addition to the other beings. Truly, even deeper than he could feel, we would like to express Schiller's words from a spiritual scientific point of view, as a feeling summary of their most important result, knowing that the correct position of man in the universe is expressed in such a word:

Now the dull barrier of animality fell,
And humanity stepped out of the cloudy brow,
And the lofty stranger, Thought,
Leaped from the wondering brain.

Dear attendees! After yesterday's lecture, which I was allowed to give here, some of the listeners may perhaps be astonished that one can speak of spiritual science or theosophy as a way of life. For what I tried to explain yesterday, as the fundamental, the basic principle of the study of the spiritual worlds, presupposes a vigorous, patient, long-lasting exercise of the human soul. Only through this can what was spoken of yesterday be achieved: that the soul becomes so strong and powerful within itself that it can feel itself to be a spiritual being and actually leave the physical body, thus living in such a way that, in the true sense of the word, the soul itself becomes a spiritual being among other spiritual beings in its experience, that it enters a new world in this spiritual world.

That was the purpose of yesterday's paths. If we allow ourselves to be guided very briefly once more by the soul, what has emerged is that the human soul is capable of doing spiritual chemistry; that it is capable of extracting itself as a spiritual-soul being from the context in which it stands in everyday life with the body, just as one is capable of extracting hydrogen from water. And we have seen that by vigorously continuing the exercises we characterized yesterday, the soul really does come to know its physical body first as something external, like the other things, but to know itself as being lifted out and transferred into a spiritual world. And in the further progress of the soul's practice, it turns out that the soul also leaves what it experiences in a soul-like way in everyday life – which only brings back the memory of its life to the point where our ordinary memory, as at a point in our childhood, emerged before our self-awareness – but that then this inner content of the soul changes and that what comes out can be called the spiritual core of the human being , which, when it is experienced, contains the eternal part of the human being, which passes through the gate of death and of which one can then know from real knowledge that he [the human being] goes through repeated earthly lives, that he leads a life alternating between a life on earth that runs between birth and death, and a life in the spiritual world that runs between death and a new birth.

Now it could be said: Is it not in the nature of things that this leaving of the physical body, this experiencing oneself as a spiritual-soul being in a completely different world, which can only be achieved after great efforts, that it is perhaps suitable for few people in the present, [that] therefore not everyone can become a soul researcher? Is it therefore not unnecessary to make that which only a few can really do, that which only a few can know, into common knowledge? One could object: How can someone who does not become a spiritual researcher themselves have any understanding of the messages that are given to them by the spiritual researcher about processes, conditions and entities in the spiritual world? For individuals, for a few people, one might say, the attainment of spiritual science may be a life asset; but for those who do not want to go this way, who do not reach a certain point on the path described yesterday, for them spiritual science cannot be a life asset. And yet! Even to the abstract thought it must appear as if that which can be attained in the indicated way must be a real inner good.

In today's lecture, the term “theosophy” is used. One could say that spiritual science is a theosophical world view. For this has always been understood to mean a world view that gives the human soul certainty and knowledge that the deepest, innermost core of our being can be reached, and thus it turns out that in its essence we experience that as the root of our existence, is connected with the root of all existence in the world, with the divine-spiritual existence of the world. Through our essential core, we ourselves are rooted in the divine-spiritual. This is what is meant by the term theosophy. And a theosophical world view does not just want to say that one can sense and believe that the human being is connected in his nature to the divine spiritual world, but it wants to say that the human being can also recognize this connection, that he can penetrate to this point within himself where he is connected to the divine spiritual that permeates and interweaves the world. And from the consciousness of this cognizable connection, a theosophical world view wants to create strength and hope for life.

Thus, a theosophical world view should actually be a true asset in life. But even if someone has gained the conviction through the path of the soul described yesterday that one can recognize how our soul is connected to its source, it might still seem as if only those who are able to undertake such research of the soul themselves can have a real awareness, a consciousness of this connection. But it is not so. This must be emphasized again and again: the conditions, processes and beings of the spiritual world can only be investigated by the method described yesterday. Only by going out of our physical body ourselves through the application of the described method and being among spirits, can we recognize the spiritual foundations of the world. But once they have been recognized by the spiritual researcher, the person to whom they are communicated need not be a spiritual researcher himself to find them understandable and comprehensible, to apply them in the fullest sense in life, to permeate life with them.

To be able to research something in the spiritual world, one must be a spiritual researcher, just as one must be a painter to be able to paint a picture. But once the picture is there, it would be sad if only the painter could understand it. And so it is with what can be found through spiritual research. If it is presented in the right way, then the human soul is attuned to truth and not to error. And just as we can understand the picture that the painter, who can paint, has painted, so we can understand and grasp everything that the spiritual researcher has to say and put it at the service of life, without being a spiritual researcher ourselves.

However, in our present time, it is still a long way before this can be achieved for a wider circle of people. For there is much that stands in the way of the modern soul if it wants to understand what the spiritual researcher has to say to the world. Today, people come from an admirable scientific culture. It has equipped him with habits of thought directed towards the external. Today, man is not accustomed to living in the very different concepts that the spiritual researcher brings out of the realm of the spiritual world.

But this will change when people's habits of thought have recognized that what stands in the way of spiritual research is prejudice. Then people will find that the descriptions of spiritual science can be understood by everyone. Just as chemistry, physics and any other science cannot be used to benefit life, even though not everyone can become a chemist, physicist or whatever, and people use what comes from chemistry and physics without being chemists and physicists, it is certainly true that what the spiritual researcher has to say can be put into the service of life, can become part of our soul, can penetrate the soul.

But then the concepts and ideas that the spiritual researcher has to give directly from the spiritual world have a different effect on the soul than the external concepts and ideas. And only when one has considered what spiritual research can be as a theosophical world view does one come to realize what a valuable asset this spiritual science is. Of course, one might say: When the spiritual researcher speaks of a vital good, this spiritual science cannot give bread and external goods at first. But what it has, it gives; and what it gives is food for the soul, but such food for the soul as it gives is more and more needed by souls due to the particular configuration that our life has taken on in our time.

Now, in order to understand the essence of spiritual science, we must first think of one thing. That is, spiritual research differs from ordinary research in the sensory world in that the human being allows himself to be passively impressed by the truth through the other sciences; that the human being must devote himself and the world transmits the truth to him from the outside. In spiritual research, however, the soul must be active from the very beginning, developing inner energy.

We have seen how the soul must ascend in three ways to the purely supersensible states, processes and entities. By placing itself in these states, it develops an inner facial expression, a purely spiritual mimicry. One cannot merely let what the states of the spiritual world are shine in from the outside. One must unite with it; one must become so one with it that one expresses it in oneself, but expresses it in one's soul, emancipated from the body. Thus, as a spiritual researcher, one enters the spiritual world. As long as one remains passive, it says nothing. Only when one expresses what it has to communicate, when the inner spiritual expression is an expression of what one experiences, only then does it speak. And the gesture, the movement of the soul, it enters into the spiritual world, but again actively, not by living into it as in the outer science, by speculating, but by letting thoughts live within you, you grasp the processes of the spiritual world. Only by imitating them with your own spiritual being can you become aware of them. And the third way was that the human being penetrates through spiritual physiognomy by immersing himself in the spiritual being and raising up the forces in himself from his depths that make him similar in his spiritual and mental state to the moments when he wants to immerse himself in a spiritual being, this spiritual being.

Thus the spiritual researcher enters the spiritual world in three ways: through spiritual facial expressions, through spiritual gestures and postures, and through spiritual physiognomy, but always actively, always in activity. And what he brings forth from the spiritual world must be formulated in concepts. And here we arrive at the point where it turns out that it is actually more difficult to communicate the insights of the spiritual world than it is to communicate the insights of the physical world. A person in our time claims that spiritual science also expresses itself externally in exactly the same way as external science expresses itself. Now, external science expresses itself in such a way that it presupposes the object it wants to recognize. And only afterwards does it want to give the concepts about it. And it does right from its point of view. The spiritual researcher actively immerses himself in the spiritual world and he must himself become an expression of what he experiences in the threefold way as described; and his concepts are formed in such a way that they arise within him vividly, and testify to their truth not as an image, but through their content and their power. The external researcher communicates what he has seen, what he has observed. The spiritual researcher is different: He gives conceptual expression to that which he has experienced, that which has become a part of himself, that which he has struggled to understand; these concepts must be fluid and must illuminate each other so that the concepts are like living beings. But they are such that they arise out of what the deepest essence itself is.

When the spiritual researcher forms his concepts and presents them to the public, these concepts contain information that he can only experience by bringing together the depths of the human soul with the foundations of the world, insofar as they are accessible to us, with the spiritual foundations of the world, so that his concepts are drawn from the depths of the soul. And these depths of the soul are present in every human soul. The spiritual researcher speaks of something that is present in every human soul. When he has researched it and expresses it, he expresses it in such a way that he lets a sound ring out with which the strings of the soul can resonate, to which it can bring full understanding because it is precisely the sound of one's own being.

But these concepts, these ideas, these feelings, in which the spiritual researcher must clothe what he experiences, have the effect of impressing the innermost part of our soul so that it feels drawn to them, because the concepts are active and lead to activity. One cannot understand spiritual science with a casual mind that does not want to be alive within itself. It can only be understood by trying to follow it with the living life and activity of the concepts. Thus spiritual research arises from the activity of the soul and at the same time challenges it to be understood, the activity of the soul.

From this we see that when we respond to spiritual research, we awaken the active power of the soul. It appeals to everything in our soul that wants to be active. The centuries-old scientific education of people has, however, pushed this active power of the soul into the background. But when a force is stretched to its highest degree, the counterforce asserts itself. And anyone who can look into the depths of today's souls knows that the souls long to get out of mere looking and observing, to do what calls for the innermost activity. In this way, the human being learns to feel and experience that he is in the midst of the spiritual world, but not as an understanding being that participates in its life.

Thus, the concepts and ideas and feelings of spiritual science are themselves the educators of the soul, which they seek to guide to participate in the reasons for existence in which we are rooted. First of all, this is realized in the fact that our thinking is oriented – and we can truly speak of an inner soul-good that permeates us through the understanding we bring to the ideas of spiritual research – that our thinking habits, our way of understanding, our soul mood is seized. And while it is otherwise possible to experience that in our presence, especially with well-meaning thinkers, there is something about the orientation of thinking that leaves much to be desired, spiritual science, the messages of spiritual research, can really bring people to orient his thinking in such a way that he imbues this thinking with habits that have a certain natural tendency towards truthfulness; that have a tendency not to get involved in the contradictions of life; to notice how thinking must penetrate into external things. The education of our thinking, the sharpening of our thinking, is what will emerge first when spiritual science enters into our cultural life.

I would like to give an example that can really show what the sharpness of thinking is like in our time. Let us assume that a very important thinker of the present day, who is regarded in the broadest circles today as an astute mind, has done many things that are noticed by those who have trained their thinking in what thinking must not do. There is a recent book by a thinker in which two assertions are found, separated by thirty or forty pages. The thinker in question wants to explain in what sense people today can still be Christians. And one approaches the soul of today's free-thinking people in a pleasing way when one says – and he says it –: Today we must go beyond the demon stories told in the Bible. All right, he may be of that opinion. Thirty pages later, however, one reads the remarkable sentence in the same book: When the spiritual and the physical touch in the soul, then demonic powers arise. You tell that to someone, and he can say: Well, the second time he didn't mean it like that, then he meant it figuratively. Yes, my dear audience, that is precisely the point: people are allowed to use such phrases and are not aware of the grotesque way in which they contradict all orderly thinking.

But people do not notice this today. And we are only on the way to our thinking being corrupted by mere passivity in this direction. This is how it is for those who can see through and observe things. In another famous book, you can read today - there is talk of combating a certain philosophical school of thought - that an author uses the image: This philosophy moves like a clown who pulls up the ladder he has climbed up to him and falls down. The book is quite witty, but I would like to ask you how the clown is supposed to pull the ladder up to him. You only think and write something like that when your thinking is disoriented. But today we are only at the beginning; such books are full of impossible thinking.

But since external culture is, as it were, the imprint of what people think, our culture must gradually be permeated by disordered thinking, unless this thinking is educated in such a way that it can respond with a fine feeling for what can and cannot be said. What can be said must be felt as connected with the essence and weaving of reality. Through orientated thinking, we can become familiar with reality, and this will be the fruit of spiritual science. Everyone will notice that this fruit of spiritual science harmonizes our lives; that it pours something into the soul that is able to bring this life into harmony with reality. In this way, spiritual science already has an educational and training effect on our thinking, making it inwardly active and alive.

And something else results from this. Those who gradually absorb what educated thinking in spiritual science can form in them will feel within themselves the independence of their inner being, the wisdom, the spirituality of their actual core. And there would be no materialism and no monism if one were to really engage in truly trained, energetic, inwardly self-gathering thinking. The strengthening and invigoration of our soul is the fruit of what we have for our thinking from spiritual science.

But spiritual science also brings forth as a second fruit of life that which belongs to the field of self-knowledge. Just as a diseased organism sometimes cannot endure the freshest air, but it can be seen from this that the organism is not healthy, so it can also be seen by some people in relation to spiritual science that they cannot tolerate it, that it makes an impression on them, this spiritual science, that it is fantasy, illusion. One will gradually come to realize that this is a form of self-knowledge; that from it one can see how one should struggle upwards in the soul in order to be able to understand what the spiritual researcher can obtain from the depths of the world.

How far you are from self-knowledge can be recognized by measuring yourself against the demands that the spiritual researcher places on the soul. Therefore, no one should be deterred if they notice that, through spiritual science, their thinking is at first somewhat numbed, disturbed, or their memory no longer seems as coherent to them as it used to. All these are transitional phenomena. We must recognize ourselves in this and say to ourselves: We must struggle to bear the stronger demands in the soul. But then this spiritual science will communicate its healthy spiritual life to us all the more.

And if we go further, we may find that perhaps even today spiritual science is not universally respected as a valuable possession because its value is not so immediately apparent. Nowadays, material goods are of course valued much more than spiritual goods because people do not really understand how material goods depend on spiritual goods. But if many a person could really ask himself out of a certain realization of things – and we can hear this question in our time from many souls who do not quite know how to begin with this or that, who lack a healthy direction in life, who lack the ability to give themselves direction and strength out of a powerful inner being – if many a person could ask himself: Where does all this come from?

These things affect even our physical well-being. Today more than ever, we have to speak of the nervousness of our age, of how unbalanced people are, how they lack balance. Where does this lack of balance come from? Ultimately, it is rooted in the soul. An example of this: that which can most lead to an external feeling of unease, to all possible symptoms of nervousness, to everything else that makes our social life so difficult, what can lead to this is spiritual barrenness, emptiness of the soul, a non-connection of the soul with what spiritual research wants to give, what spiritual research wants to fill the soul with.

Of course, there are some people today who say they have no need for the concepts of spiritual science. That is certainly true. But that is only in their conscious mind. In the depths of the soul there is always a longing for the sources of existence. And what we do not give to the soul asserts itself in it as emptiness, desolation, doubt. And, not overnight, but over decades, what is missing in the soul, what is present as chaos in the soul, pours out into the physical organization. We are no longer up to life. We can no longer pour the soul's strength into the physical because the soul is empty. Because people have become accustomed to paying attention to outward appearances in a natural way over the centuries, they have become estranged from that which can permeate the soul with spiritual content. A great many unhealthy symptoms, which go as far as the physical body and make people unable to cope with life, stem from this. And it will get worse and worse if spiritual science does not intervene and give the soul what it craves without knowing it with the higher consciousness.

Have we not seen that in our time – I do not want to say that there is pessimism in general, but that it has been examined in a peculiar way? If one speaks of pessimism in general, one would have to mention all sorts of misunderstandings. One could mention that some older religions also contain pessimism. But that is not the point, but rather the way in which one tries to support pessimism in our time. This support shows something very peculiar. Perhaps some of you will see what I am about to say as a curiosity. In our time, Kant has found followers. And one of these followers has written Studies in a Psychology of Pessimism. He undertook a strange investigation that takes a completely objective, passive scientific approach to the human being and seeks to examine whether life contains more suffering, more unpleasantness than pleasure, happiness, etc. This professor [Kowalewski] first tried to determine whether this is really the case by asking schoolchildren. He had the children write down what they call happiness in life and what they call suffering in life. They wrote down the following as suffering: illness, death, flooding. As for pleasure, they wrote down: ice cream, playing, gifts. We should not be surprised at the quality of this zest for life. But for the positive researcher, it depends on numerical relationships, and Kowalewski did indeed not just come up with ordinary numbers, but difficult integral terms. His reasoning about pessimism is therefore not easy to read. He was able to determine that in 39 cases suffering was emphasized, in 25 to 27 cases pleasure. So one can conclude from the children's minds that life offers more of the painful than of the pleasurable. And he thought: That doesn't quite go into the positive, you have to do it differently. He also used the diary of a well-known contemporary philosopher. He always wrote down when he felt pleasure and when he felt suffering. And when Professor Kowalewski looked through this diary, he found that suffering outweighed pleasure. So he had the second piece of evidence. But he went further, he was looking for something more certain. He observed people who walk quickly and people who walk slowly. When you are sad, he says, you walk slowly; when you are happy, you walk quickly. That is the professor's premise. And lo and behold, it turns out that there is a far greater number of sad, slow walkers. And so a book has been written in which these numerical relationships have been expressed in mathematical integral forms, and one can say, so to speak, equipped with these: Well, if you examine the external life, the pessimistic world view turns out to be justified, because the external life contains much more of the fatal, the sorrowful, than of the beneficial, the pleasurable. Science has now proved that!

Now there is no need to smile at such ideas. I am not going to talk about the value of such research, in what way it characterizes certain sciences. I just want to ask: What is actually being looked at here? Well, it is what touches man from the external world, what makes an impression on man, for nothing else can be investigated with such methods. No attention is paid to what man is capable of opposing to the impressions from outside, in the way of the unity and self-contained nature of his inner being.

I would like to quote something else that Mechnikov said in his 'Contributions to Optimism'. He talks about someone who was a friend of his, a person who was very nervous, who experienced the disinclination of life in the deepest sense. He could no longer hear a carriage rattle. He could not hear that someone was ringing his bell. He could not see that many people were coming to meet him. And many other things as well. You can imagine what was unbearable for this person. In the end, he knew of no other way to save himself than through morphine, in order to have a sense of stability within himself. Often he was close to taking such a large morphine dose that he could find death. He was also close to death more often, but was saved again and again. Then Mechnikov continued: So that was the man, but it got better and better with his pessimism. And actually Mechnikov says quite rightly why this is so: his external perception, so to speak, became more and more dulled; the outside world no longer made such a strong impression on him as it had done before.

Now we ask ourselves: What led to a greater balance of the soul in this person? That he became duller to the impressions of the outside world, that he was able to close himself off to these impressions. But throughout his life, his inner being was weak. But it can never be a matter of weakening us for everything beautiful and sublime that may come from the world, not to become nervous, but only for what I would like to express as follows: Could not man have had the same earlier, if a strong inner being, permeated with soul substance, had opposed the perceptions of the outer world? But that is precisely what spiritual science strives for: to make man strong within himself against the changing impressions of the outside world; so that we need not become dull to the world, and yet stand securely in the world.

Then it will no longer be necessary to examine the questions of a better or worse life according to purely external things. Kowalewski has done an even more precise experiment and a careful analysis has shown that we have every reason to approach the outside world when we are confronted with it as being much richer in suffering than in pleasure. He did the following. He says: Let us assume that we are examining the sense of taste. Now he has established – in external science you need concepts; where the spirit is absent, you need concepts and words – he called what makes a taste impression in us in the smallest amount of any substance the 'gustie'; and so he established what the gustie is of quinine, which makes an unpleasant impression; sugar makes a pleasant impression. And so he had a number of people take quinine and sugar together to see how much of each was needed to balance it out. And lo and behold, he found that almost twice as much sugar gusti had to be used than quinine gusti if the sugar gusti was to balance the quinine gusti. That means that, in terms of taste, we have to double the pleasant if we want to eliminate the unpleasant.

What I am reflecting on is that we cannot measure something that has an impact on our lives. And the mistake is that one does not take into account that one is actually not at all suited to assess the sugar level in the right way in relation to one's outer life. We take it for granted, but we estimate the quinine level quite strongly. As is well known, we are very much affected by the disease, but we rarely feel the full extent of our desire for health. And this is connected with the mistakes that are made in such investigations.

But we can also fill our health, which must gradually become boring to us when the soul emptiness remains, with what comes to us from the spiritual world, and we can hold out, so to speak, what flows in from the spiritual world to us, which can always hold and carry us, against the obviousness of the disaffection of the outer world. One should not treat a pessimistic mood by asking: Is the world good or bad? but in such a way that one says to oneself: The person who does not find the strength to stand securely in the world has not drawn enough from the spiritual world. What the person of whom Mechnikov speaks acquires through the deadening of his outer organization flows into our soul as a true asset of life when we take up spiritual-scientific concepts and ideas. Just as the most important things for the development of the soul of the spiritual researcher himself flow from the soul's harmony, so the soul's harmony and balance flow out again as a vital asset from the communications of spiritual research.

And we can cite another thing. We have now spoken of the influences of spiritual science on our thinking and imagining, on our minds. We can also speak of an influence on our will, on the initiative of our actions. The fact that we receive such concepts from the spiritual researcher, which are brought down from the spiritual worlds, means that these concepts also penetrate into our soul in such a way that they are suitable for pointing our soul to what is independent in it from the external sense world.

But now, how much arises in our will as a result of external stimulation? I see something that stimulates me. Perhaps I see a flower, I pick it; I am stimulated by it. I do something in life in one way or another. Once the educators taught me something; as a result, the skill arose in me for this or that. If we examine our will, we find external stimuli everywhere. This is precisely what characterizes the will in everyday life: it is stimulated from the outside to a greater extent than is usually believed. Even people who believe themselves to be the freest are dependent on this or that stimulus. They believe they act freely, but they only act according to what has been exerted as a stimulus from the outside world. In particular, we can often see that when people resist this or that in the name of the freedom of their soul, they are in fact resisting because of their stubbornness, their lack of freedom, and not because of the freedom of their mind. In short, the will is rooted everywhere, so to speak, in the external world.

When we take in spiritual science, what flows from its insights has a strengthening and invigorating effect on this will in particular. It works in such a way that this will in the soul becomes independent. But when it does that, we feel it as a force in the soul, as something that can only receive stimulation from within. We are enriched in our soul when we strengthen our will in this way. The external causes no longer affect that part of our inner being that we have acquired through our own will. We withdraw from external causes with our will. When someone becomes more and more deeply involved in spiritual science, they feel their will growing stronger. They can say: “I can now want more than I could before.” But this can only be achieved through devotion to spiritual science.

But if there is no external stimulus for the will, where must impulses come from? Again, what arises as new will not remain in rest, in inactivity, if it receives impetus from within. There is only one thing that no longer compels: what we call love in the broadest sense. This means that the motives of our will must be warmed through by love through the influence of spiritual science. We learn to recognize more and more the deep meaning of the word:

[duty]: where one loves what one commands oneself,

where that which leads us to action leads us entirely through our love for the task at hand, and we strive to accomplish it with the strength of soul with which we strive to accomplish everything that arises from love. With this, we have gained a beautiful fruit of spiritual science as a treasure for life. We have achieved the transformation of our will into the will to love. The treasure of the will to love grows ever greater when spiritual science becomes our life's treasure. Again, it is not something that provides us with material goods. But this will to love is a strengthening, valuable good for our external security in life, which we will see grow and grow as we properly penetrate into spiritual science through the concepts and ideas of spiritual science.

And again, a piece of self-knowledge can be linked to it. We often hear that people think highly of themselves when it comes to their will to love. But this is not the case. For when people, in wise self-observation, become aware of how the ideas and concepts of spiritual science make them aware of the selfishness and lack of love that still exists in them, spiritual science is once again the beautiful corrective, the genuine guide to self-knowledge. On the one hand, it gives us the will to love; on the other hand, it makes us aware of how much we still lack of this will to love. Thus, spiritual science is also the highest form of life, which can be described by the word self-education.

And further, spiritual science leads us beyond what the concepts borrowed from the external world can give us. It leads us to what the spiritual researcher finds by going out of his body with his soul and connecting with the roots of the world from which he, spirit from spirit, is taken. It thus leads us to what is deepest in our soul.

More and more one will see, as I also tried to explain yesterday - through the parable at the end - that science, which is built according to the pattern of external science, must stop at a certain point if it wants to become a worldview. I could explain this for many ideas that are important life ideas. I will explain it for only one idea now. Let us suppose that some philosopher, who at first wants nothing to do with spiritual science, Lotze, a man of spirit - I will stick to my habit of quoting those whom I consider worthy of opposition, those whom I regard as authorities - Lotze, who has written a book, 'Microcosm', which contains many significant works on philosophy, has also tried to present a philosophy of religion. But he arrives only at a conception of truth, at a recognition of such a conception of truth, which is won according to the pattern of those conceptions and ideas that are far removed from outer reality, that are won passively. Lotze therefore attempts to win a philosophy of religion by building it up in the sense of outer science. And, lo and behold, Lotze goes as far as is humanly possible. From his presuppositions he arrives at the assumption of a spiritual being, a divine being, that permeates and pervades the world, that is creatively active. He arrives at being able to conceive of the laws of nature as shaped and spiritualized by a unified divine essence. But every time a religious philosophy of this kind seeks to show how that which is shaped according to the pattern of external truth, like a natural law, is connected with the moral commandments, with that which, as inner impulses, inspires us in life, then it must come up against a duality for which it knows no connection. On the one hand, there are laws that operate with rigid, cold necessity. Where, in this whole system of natural laws, does that which lives in us as our moral impulses arise, as that which drives us to be noble in our human existence, that which permeates us with morality? Where does it spring from out there? If philosophy is to become a way of looking at life, then this question becomes relevant. It takes on significance. If philosophy is to become a regulator of our view of life, pointing out that on the one hand there is the world of necessity, and on the other the world of moral commandments, which, however, lives in us as if cut off from the world - how is it rooted in the world? As long as we remain with the passive concept of truth, we will never be able to bridge this gap, because there is a relationship between necessary truth and its legitimacy and moral truth and its legitimacy that cannot be seen in the external world, that cannot be passively grasped. The relationship between the natural order and the moral order cannot be grasped any more than the relationship between a mother and her child can be grasped through natural laws alone. The father could be there without the child being there. If the child is there, the child emerges from the father, but the father could be without a child. There is no necessity in the father, yet the father leads to the child. Perhaps one of the most significant conceptions and ideas of Christianity is that the relationship of the one God to the God who is to permeate our innermost being is presented in our morality as the relationship of the Father to the Son, the Christ. Theosophy or spiritual science shows us that there is a relationship between the moral world order and the natural-law necessity and world order, such as that of the Son to the Father.

But this relationship can only be understood by going beyond what can be given in passive terms to what can be grasped in the spiritual world; which stands before us in such a way that Goethe can coin the words - he looked to Kant, who tried to set limits to human knowledge, who wanted to regard as mere belief that which is moral world order ; he called it an “adventure of reason” that should not be undertaken. Goethe, who had to reject the kind of world view that Kant represents; he said that if one could truly rise to the upper regions through virtue and faith in the moral order, then one should bravely endure the adventure of reason and also go up with the whole soul to a higher world.

Then, at the same time, something is poured into the natural order as well as into the moral order that is as communal as that which exists between father and son, because nature, if we look at it as it is, could exist without morality, like the father without a son. Only when we look at what has really happened do we find the right relationship between father and son.

So we have to go to what has really happened in the world, and there we come to the very core of Christianity.

I wanted to give you an example of how religious concepts, which the human mind needs to feel its connection with what pulses through the world as divine-spiritual, how the human being can be strengthened in his religious life through spiritual science. For spiritual science shows him that one can really still grasp and understand that which, according to a great philosopher such as Kant, one should only assume and only be able to believe.

Our time, however, is living into an epoch in which it is once again quite clear to the spiritual researcher how souls are increasingly longing not only to accept religious deepening based on the authority of faith, but also to be able to recognize as we recognize nature, that which binds people together with the Divine-Spiritual in the cosmos outside.

Another asset for life will be that the newly awakening religious needs - for they will awaken, the religious needs appropriate to our time - will give these spiritual scientific concepts of inner support, of being set within, again.

The spiritual researcher himself is familiar with all the objections that can be made. If someone wants to say, for example: Now you have presented spiritual science as a special bringer of love. Doesn't Christianity do that for itself? — Yes, of course. The person who says that is fully convinced of it, and perhaps from his point of view he is quite right. But one could give him an answer, which I once had to give to a clergyman who said to me: Yes, what spiritual science says about Christianity, at least in many respects one can certainly go along with that. But one thing strikes me. The way you speak, you only speak to a few educated people who fulfill certain conditions. But we speak to all people. And that must be a true teaching that speaks to all people. I replied, “Pastor, have you found that all people go to church with you?” He could not say that. You see, I said, I want to speak to those who do not go to church with you, because they also have a living yearning for an understanding of Christianity. The fact shows that you are not speaking for them. So you are not speaking correctly for all people. And we do not have the right to say: something is right because we like it; we have to observe the facts. You may think you can dress your teaching in words that will appeal to everyone, but what we think is not always right, the facts must speak. For those who do not go to church but still long for an understanding of Christianity, we must also speak.

Of course, Christianity also speaks of love, but the point is not just to talk about the way to love; the point is to find the way that is the right way for a particular time. You must not be so selfish as to say: I want nothing to do with such a way to love, because the old way is good enough for me. That is egoism, which does not want to pay attention to the longings and tendencies of the souls that are touched by what will touch more and more souls in the future. But it is these souls that need the new paths, and the number of these souls will grow. The spiritual-scientific worldview wants to inspire them. It wants to give life goods of the kind that have been discussed here.

I could speak about many other life goods that can flow from spiritual science, but the principle is how spiritual science creates life goods, how spiritual science brings forth that which is immortal in us. But through this, what consciousness evokes in us is awakened and activated: You are an independent being; within you is a source through which spiritual life can bubble, which empowers you, which can give you strength, which can give you everything you need for your life.

Spiritual science is indeed gradually transformed into feelings and sensations. We not only experience immortality theoretically. From the whole structure of my lecture, you could see that the concepts of spiritual science bring to life and resonate within us what the spiritual researcher explores. This is particularly the case with one of the most important questions in life, the question of immortality.

If you delve deeper into spiritual science, you will receive a spiritual doctrine of immortality, a teaching about the core of the human being that can be clothed in concepts and ideas so that we not only know about immortality, but feel within us what is immortal in us. We become like a plant that could feel how the germ grows within it into a new plant. We feel what passes through the gate of death; we learn to experience it. And the time will come when principles such as those set forth in my book 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science' will be applied to the education of the child, when the soul will be so stimulated that it will live on in us, that we will have acquired a feeling through the concepts we have absorbed, that we will know: by living towards death, you develop more and more what your eternal part is. In the second half of life, when we see wrinkles forming on our skin and our hair turning gray, we will feel how all this is like the fading blossoms of plants, but how there is something in us that is emerging ever stronger, overcoming what fades away in us. And as we live towards a new life, we will feel that life. Old age will not be filled with an empty hope, but with the experience of what is felt within as a reality, which will be carried through death into the realm of the spiritual. This, however, will give certainty in life. It will dispel all superficiality, all incoherence of the spirit, all chaos in life. Thus, in addition to the other possessions of life, there will be a particularly intimate possession for our soul.

Just as I have pointed out that with the insights of spiritual science from the depths of human inner and outer perception, one can feel in harmony with all those who, in the right sense, have sensed the significance of human soul life and its relationship to the whole spiritual world through the whole development of humanity, so I would like to conclude by speaking of a thinker who is often forgotten today; a sincere, courageous thinker who, in a small booklet, which is really what is written on its title page, a “Dietetics of the Soul” - I would like to remind you of this dear connoisseur of the human soul, of Feuchtersleben.

The human soul cannot deny that ultimately its happiness consists only in the expansion of its innermost being and possessions.

Yes, the soul's true happiness and, we may add, the soul's true spiritual possessions consist in the expansion of the soul's inner being and possessions. And if spiritual science is what I tried to present yesterday and today, then it is indeed entirely that which, with all its impulses, strives for the expansion of the soul's inner being and possessions. And truly, with what spiritual science gives, one feels oneself standing within what the best minds of humanity have longed and thirsted for, because the soul needs it for its inner spiritual nourishment. Therefore, one is in harmony with such a fine, delicate soul as Feuchtersleben, one that nevertheless thinks and feels on a grand scale. And to sum up, if one wants to collect together in a general feeling what spiritual science can give as its best, one may say: spiritual science gives life's goods; it promotes the genuine, true happiness of the soul. It is held in the sense in which Feuchtersleben's saying is meant:

The human soul cannot hide the fact that its happiness ultimately consists only in the expansion of its innermost being and possession.

Question & Answer: Question: Can you slap children on the hand?

Rudolf Steiner: That is not so easy to answer. Such questions take on a new significance and importance in our time. There is not always a simple answer to a simple question. Simplicity is convenient, but even a clock is not simple. The universe is even less simple, with less power in it than in a clock. Spiritual science does not make things more comfortable, but through it one sees into areas that are indispensable for shaping life. Then one finds that simple things are complicated. Spiritual science gets one used to taking things more precisely, taking things more seriously. Farm children are quite properly tapped on the knuckles, with proper taps, decorated with an iron ring, but they have not become nervous. City children, who have never been tapped on the knuckles, are often nervous. Life is complicated. What is achieved in one nature through something is not always achieved in the other nature through it.

Goethe is right when he says, “One thing is not suitable for all”; we must take people as individuals and not judge abstractions. We cannot say that one thing or another is generally harmful or useful. Spiritual science will lead us from the abstract to the concrete, to an immediate understanding of immediate, concrete life. Then one will find that the question of nervousness will not have much to do with it; but much more important is the question of education from the spiritual-scientific point of view. Then one can completely dispense with what is indicated here. But this education requires much more of the activity of the soul of the educator, who is able to find his way into every soul.

Beating is usually required by the nature of the educator, not the person being educated. In general, it can be said that corporal punishment is not particularly recommended as a means of education, regardless of whether it is on the fingers or elsewhere.

Question: Is clairvoyance possible while awake? [...]

Rudolf Steiner: As a rule, one cannot see the physical-sensory world and the spiritual world at the same time. The physical world is then like a sinking, and simultaneous seeing is usually caused by bringing something like a having [raising?] of the soul into the spiritual vision. What matters is not the state, but the fact that one is so present in the spiritual vision with one's ego, with one's consciousness, that one does not experience it as if in a trance, but consciously. Only then can one seek the connection between the two worlds. It is said that matter does not appear to be present when this state occurs. Yes, it was said yesterday that one has a picture in front of oneself and that one must first learn to read these pictures. You cannot relate them to reality as in the physical world, but must first learn to read them.

Question: Is the concept of God actually set aside in Theosophy, or at least not emphasized as it is in the Christian religion?

Rudolf Steiner: That is a strange question, because theosophy is named after the concept of “God” or “Theos”. It is as if one speaks of Selters water, from which the watery, liquid part has been completely removed. Such objections can only be made if one has not studied the subject. We do not have the immodesty to constrict God into a limited concept; in him we live and move and have our being, and so do our concepts. One can only gradually become familiar with the divine. Most of the time, such a question only wants to say: I do not want any other Christianity than I have always understood. Question: Should flawlessness be achieved?

Rudolf Steiner: That is an abstraction. Questions are often asked about the beginning and end of the world and so on, but the human being can only gradually ascend to understanding. The concepts that are usually brought up are usually as unsuitable as possible. Spiritual science places us in life and keeps us from abstract speculation. Through theosophy, morality is also led into the concrete.

Question: Is there not a danger for the theosophist of being withdrawn from his fellow human beings by the cult of the ego?

Rudolf Steiner: Where there is strong light, there is also strong shadow. There must be a transformation into the will to love, so that the ego is sought much more outside than inside.

Question: Christ's suffering and death is only an archetype for us, since we have to atone for our mistakes later anyway.

Rudolf Steiner: I first have to familiarize myself with this question. It is based on a misunderstanding of the idea of karma. One then says: Why should I help a person who is in need and misery? One should help him first, that is written on his karmic account and has a further effect. How I can help one person, I can help two, three, five, fifty, a hundred, a thousand, and a mighty being like the Christ can help all people in karma.

Question: How can I be released from a sin of thought that I cannot make amends for because the person concerned has since died?

Rudolf Steiner: This must be balanced out in the further course of life. One must not judge this from a merely earthly point of view. We are not dissatisfied with our fate from a higher point of view. Between death and birth, we would be very dissatisfied if we did not have the suffering that flows from our deeds; we do not feel it as suffering at all, but as a relief to be able to balance it out; we strive to balance it out. There is a completely different state between birth and death than between death and a new birth.

Question: What influence does anesthesia have on the finer bodies?

Rudolf Steiner: Wherever it is possible to avoid anesthesia, it should be avoided. Normally, the soul and spirit leave the body during sleep; with anesthesia, they are forced out, that is, they are subjected to force. If it is necessary, it should be used, of course. Question: Does a stillborn child have an ego?

Rudolf Steiner: No more than a corpse. It may have been an attempt at incarnation of the ego before it died in the mother's body.

Question: We have often heard about the effects of karma. What about the cruel punishments in the Middle Ages?

Rudolf Steiner: It is like an account book. The punishment is, so to speak, on the debit side and balances with the other side. There is no need for an absolute balance to be there immediately when a punishment occurs. The soul would not even be satisfied with that after death, because it wants to balance.

Question: Some of the Theosophists look unusual in their hairstyles and clothing. A stranger can feel uncomfortably touched!

Rudolf Steiner: This is certainly not a result of the spiritual current! One must be tolerant of the tastes of others; this is perhaps one of the assets of Theosophy. If you want to wear what you like, why shouldn't others be allowed to do the same? Hopefully it doesn't happen too often that Theosophists become Theosophists through hairstyles and clothing. And, ladies, wearing what you like is something that other women do too, and the Theosophists don't say anything, even if they don't always like it.

Question: [Is there a] sense of self after death?

Rudolf Steiner: Self-awareness is rooted in what remains after death. Only after death we have other tools for perception. Eyes and ears fall off. The soul produces other tools. [The] sense of self is preserved, indeed with a much more intense character. Other theosophists are said to have stated that after death there is only consciousness but no self-awareness? This may be stated in some books, but it has nothing to do with the spiritual science referred to here.

Question: On the other hand, the seer of Prevorst: the people she speaks of still show remorse.

Rudolf Steiner: This does not exclude self-awareness.

The other questions are not of a nature that would be suitable for answering here.