The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, its Results and its Scientific Justification.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen! I have often had the opportunity to speak here in Basel about the nature of anthroposophical spiritual science. Since I last did so, in September and October, courses were held at the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach, the place to which this anthroposophical spiritual science is dedicated. The aim of these courses was to show how this anthroposophical spiritual science, which is the subject of this talk, can have a fruitful effect on the individual sciences. About thirty personalities from the fields of science, art and practical life have tried to present what they could present from the spirit of their particular subject and from the whole sense of anthroposophical spiritual science in these university courses. The aim was to show how, precisely when one proceeds in a strictly professional manner, this anthroposophical spiritual science can reveal itself in its significance.

Now, admittedly, these college courses have touched many in a very strange way. I would like to highlight a remarkable one from the last few days from the series of judgments that have been passed. A German university professor of education and philosophy has now felt impelled, as a result of these university courses, to take a book of mine and read it, which was first published in 1894, my “Philosophy of Freedom”, which I have already mentioned here on the occasion of earlier lectures. He came to this conclusion after decades of neglecting this “Philosophy of Freedom”, that what the efforts set as their goal for a revival of science and public life - as was expressed in the university courses at the Goetheanum in Dornach, that this requires first of all a thorough revision of the ethical foundations, which are illustrated in a questionable way, as he believes, by this philosophy of freedom. There we have - I just want to report - a judgment from one side.

Strangely, this judgment is juxtaposed with another. One could say that recently the brochures that were initially written against spiritual science, as it is meant here, have grown into quite respectable books, and in the last few weeks such a book has appeared, with 228 pages. It cannot truly be said that the author of this book, the theology graduate Kurt Leese, is in any position to understand spiritual science, nor can it be said that he is a follower of it, because the whole book is written — at least apparently — with quite good will, but despite this good will, it is not at all imbued with any understanding of anthroposophical spiritual science. But even this opponent feels compelled to say the following in the preface. I must point out that the book, which is called “Modern Theosophy”, is only about “Anthroposophy”; the author also expresses this by saying here:

When the following remarks speak of Theosophy and Theosophists, they always mean Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophical School. The terms Theosophy and Theosophist have been retained only because they are more familiar to the general consciousness than the terms Anthroposophy and Anthroposophist.

So when Kurt Leese speaks of Theosophy, he really means only Anthroposophy. Now, from his opponent's point of view, he says:

If Theosophy were just a collection of random ideas from some obscure sect fishing in troubled waters, it wouldn't be worth the trouble to pay it any attention.

In particular, it wouldn't be worth writing books about it! And then at the end of this paragraph, he said that Anthroposophy

... contains the foundations of a comprehensive and powerfully ethical worldview.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, on the one hand we are told that the ethical foundations need to be revised, and on the other hand we are told that the ethical foundations already exist! Kurt Leese reinforces this in his final remarks by saying:

There are also various ethical recommendations scattered throughout Steiner's writings. These could be separated out from the context of clairvoyant insights and used as practical wisdom. The value of this wisdom would not be affected.

He therefore believes that if one were to throw overboard everything that comes from the supersensible world and only select the ethical and moral wisdom, there would still be enough left for him. I think it is clear from this how unsuitable the judgments of the present day are for really saying anything about the value of what is meant here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. One of them, who is an academic, virtually denies its ethical basis, while the other, who is also an academic, emphasizes that even if it were worthless in all other respects, there would still be a residue of ethical wisdom that should not be dismissed out of hand.

Now, however, it is precisely from this latest book, “Modern Theosophy” — as I said, it should be called “Modern Anthroposophy” — one can see what the discord that emanates from our contemporaneity is actually based on when judging anthroposophy or the anthroposophical worldview. Kurt Leese, as he himself says, does not try to take an external point of view, but has actually read everything that has been published by Anthroposophy, and he even tries in his own way to judge this Anthroposophy from within. But at one point he betrays himself in a most remarkable way. He does talk about how confused this anthroposophy is and the like in a number of places, but at one point he betrays himself in a remarkable way, calling what anthroposophy brings “annoying and unpleasant”. Now, it is certainly not a point of view that one takes within science when one speaks of “annoying and unpleasant”. When one becomes annoyed, something inside one rears up, as it were. One does not want what is confronting one there, not out of logic, but out of one's feelings, because otherwise one would not become annoyed, otherwise one would refute it, otherwise one would present logical counter-arguments and the like. One may well ask: why does an opponent who claims to want to be objective become annoyed, yes, why does he even call anthroposophical spiritual science “unpleasant”?

I believe that if one takes the essentials of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as I will explain again today, one can understand why certain people become annoyed by it, because this anthro posophically oriented spiritual science, on the one hand, departs completely from all present-day scientific habits and aims to carry these scientific habits into the knowledge of the spiritual, of the supersensible. On the other hand, however, this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is pushed to start from a completely different, at least seemingly different, state of mind, from completely different conceptions and ideas than this ordinary science. In this way, the thinking habits of a great many scientists are broken in the most eminent sense by anthroposophical spiritual science. It can hardly be doubted by anyone who looks impartially at the more recent spiritual development of civilized humanity that the most significant thing that has emerged in this spiritual development is the methods and results of natural science research. These scientific results have transformed our whole life. These scientific methods of investigation – anyone who can compare them with the so-called scientific views of the time, say still from the 12th or 13th century – these scientific methods of investigation have brought about a certain methodical discipline of all research, of all investigations of knowledge, a scientific discipline that basically no one today should violate if they do not want to be accused of dilettantism.

With this fact, my dear audience, with the importance of scientific thinking, scientific attitude, scientific conscientiousness, anthroposophical spiritual science is reckoning. But precisely because it is reckoning with this, it cannot possibly remain on the ground on which, externally, science still stands today in its investigations, in its observations, in its experiments. Anthroposophical spiritual science cannot remain on this ground. For if it wants to incorporate the supersensible, the spiritual, into human knowledge in the same way that natural science investigates the sensible, then the spiritual science in question, when it moves in its very own field, in the field of spiritual facts, the spiritual entities, precisely because it wants to be a genuine child, a true successor of scientific conscientiousness, must proceed in a completely different way than natural science does in its field, in the sensual field.

And so, in order to be true to it, spiritual science must broaden the concept of knowledge in a very essential way, and we will see that it is essentially this broadening that annoys people who would like to stop at what is there, who find it uncanny. If one is to characterize that by means of which anthroposophy wants to penetrate into the spiritual world as a real science, then one must say: it relates to what is offered in ordinary science as a real thing to a mere formal thing. When a person has reached a certain level of maturity, that is, when he has developed his innate qualities and what his human environment can offer him through his education and studies, when he has thus developed a certain degree of intellectual and observational skills, then he can become a scientist. He can also, as is desired today, extend this scientific thinking to the historical and social fields. But it is always only a formal progression. You continue your work as you began it. You observe, you logically dissect what you have observed, and then you reassemble it.

The process of acquiring knowledge of anthroposophical spiritual science is different. This is something that really intervenes in the development of the human being when it is applied to the human being himself. To begin with, one can say comparatively: the researcher certainly gets further if he researches for five years, he also becomes more adept at handling the methods, but he does not come to use a different kind of cognitive faculty within these five, ten, fifteen years; he always uses the same cognitive faculty. The anthroposophical researcher cannot do that. It must be said of him: just as a child, when it has reached a certain age, has some power of judgment, some ability to observe, how it develops this judgment, this ability to observe, when it is five years older, how it then relates quite differently to the things of the environment - both in terms of thinking and in terms of the power of observation , then anyone who becomes a researcher in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must not merely maintain their cognitive ability like the natural science researcher, making it somewhat more skillful or meticulous or the like, but they must further develop their inner soul abilities in the same way in real terms, they must make something different out of them.

The method of anthroposophical spiritual science demands that a person does not stand still, that he continues to develop in relation to his cognitive abilities. In this way, the person himself attains a completely different inner soul disposition. And just as a child, after five years of development, sees the world differently than before, so the spiritual researcher, after applying the method of spiritual knowledge to himself, sees the world differently than before , that is to say, he sees it spiritually, supersensibly, whereas, as is generally admitted, the methods of natural science see only the sensual facts as such, and, if one watches closely, only want to see these sensual facts. But the fact that man, when he believes he is finished, is now being asked to develop further, is something that annoys many people who believe that they have achieved everything that can be achieved in science; they find it intolerable, because they face it in the same way that a child faces someone who is five years older.

You see, you only have to say this, and you will understand that it annoys contemporaries tremendously, because it is a challenge that first confronts these contemporaries. This challenge, however, why does it confront contemporaries? Here too, one need only look at what scientific research has achieved. It is enough to point out that these natural scientists emphasize everywhere - and their most important representatives admit this - how they are reaching the limits of their knowledge. But beyond the limits of this knowledge lie precisely the great questions that concern the human soul, that concern the human spirit above all. Science does not lead us any further than to an understanding of what lies between birth and death. But the riddles that lie at the depths of a human being's nature confront us with tremendous force: What lies beyond birth and death? What is eternal in the human being in contrast to the transitory? What is the basis of that which we call human destiny, which appears so mysterious because, with regard to this destiny, inner human feeling seems to harmonize so poorly with the outer course of the world, so poorly harmonized that someone who is good inside can be severely affected by fate, and someone who perhaps does not bring any particular goodness to it is initially treated very well by it. These are, however, only the important, the decisive questions of the human soul, those questions that reach into every feeling human heart. Time and again, natural science, which has indeed achieved such tremendous conscientiousness, must confess time and again how it has to stop before that boundary, behind which solutions to these questions can perhaps be sought.

Spiritual science now stands on the following ground in relation to this: precisely because it professes the scientific spirit of modern times in the truest sense, it considers the boundaries of scientific research to be correct. It says: with the ordinary abilities of man, as they are developed in accordance with the present state of human development, one cannot but stop at these boundaries. But these limits are not invincible. Man is capable of developing beyond these limits of knowledge.

First of all, two soul abilities should be mentioned which are capable of a higher development according to a very special, supersensible kind of knowledge. First of all, we should consider what we must have, so to speak, as a fundamental faculty for our healthy life between birth and death: it is human memory, it is the human ability to remember. From other points of view, I have already pointed out in spiritual scientific lectures the special development of this ability to remember through spiritual scientific methods. If only something in this ability to remember is not intact, then the whole human interior is actually torn apart. If we feel that what we have experienced since childhood, up to the point where we can remember back, is interrupted, then our I is, so to speak, not healthy. We feel disoriented within ourselves; we cannot find our way around within ourselves. We do not really know what to do with ourselves inwardly, spiritually. This ability to remember preserves what we experience in our existence for the time between our birth and our death. What we experience in the moment gains permanence through the ability to remember. This is where one of the methodological endeavors of spiritual science begins, in that it takes up, so to speak, the power of the soul that leads to memory, but then develops this power of the soul differently than it develops by itself, so to speak, when the soul is left to its own devices. What spiritual research applies here is what I have called meditation in my writings – an intimate process of the human soul.

But, dear listeners, you must be aware that the paths into the supersensible worlds are intimate soul paths. Anyone who, in the Schrenck-Notzing way, believes that one can see the supersensible by imitating the external method of experimentation, who believes that one can see the supersensible in the sensual as something sensual, will naturally find any interest in the spiritual science referred to here, for this spiritual science must start from the premise that it is absurd to want to get the supersensible into the sensory, that it is absurd to want to make the supersensible sensual. The question cannot be to apply the ordinary scientific method of experimentation in order to experiment with spirits in the same way as one experiments with substances and forces in the laboratory, but it can only be a matter of moving towards the supersensible in intimate soul paths.

Meditation is such an intimate path of the soul. If you would like me to describe it, I can do so briefly in the following; you can find it in detail in my books, especially in my “Occult Science” and in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” Briefly, I would characterize this meditation in the following way: it consists in not merely formulating one's thoughts as they follow from external observations or ordinary life, but in taking in images, thought connections, through willpower, that one either lets a knowledgeable spiritual researcher advise or that one brings to oneself in some other way. While otherwise we only think a thought for as long as our own perception lasts or for as long as our inner organization holds it in our memory in our present soul life, while in the ordinary course of thought we thus surrender to the involuntary, in meditation we bring the thought into our soul through the arbitrariness of a real development of the will, and we then dwell on this thought. One holds fast to this thought in the soul. What I mean here cannot be experienced quickly; it requires years of practice in such holding of the thought if one wants to achieve something. But it must be emphasized that the methods that are recommended by anthroposophy alone in this direction, they certainly keep the soul processes within a certain sphere. And one must actually be well prepared for this sphere before one can develop any kind of useful spiritual scientific method, and that for which one must be well prepared can be attained only through conscientious training within modern scientific research. There one first learns to stick to the objective, not to interfere with arbitrary sympathies and antipathies in the objective. But one also learns to adhere to the pure intellectual context, to a certain logical sequence of thoughts, in that these thoughts follow the external observations at the same time. What one can gain from this ability to follow a thought logically must be preparation, because nothing may be brought up from the subconscious or unconscious, but the whole process must proceed as consciously and deliberately as anything that is done deliberately in a laboratory through experimentation.

When one has struggled through to logical thinking, to thinking that could hold an account with the strictest mathematician, to use Goethe's expression, when one has struggled through to such thinking, when one can dwell purely in the element of thinking, then one can present such thoughts to oneself, in order to now - without the help of memory, without the help of external observation, without any involuntary action - to hold on to this thought through inner arbitrariness. What happens when we continue such exercises over and over again? We continue within the soul-spiritual that process which we have unconsciously allowed to run its course in ourselves by developing the faculty of memory. The child grows up, and as it grows up physically, it develops the faculty of memory at the same time. The spiritual researcher, so to speak, reproduces this process of making the presentation permanent in the pure soul by holding such thought-elements in mind. In so doing, he continues in reality this process, which has developed to the point of the ability to remember. And by continuing this process more and more, one arrives at inwardly feeling how something stirs that was not there before. Just as inner powers are awakening in the fifteen-year-old child that were not yet present in the ten-year-old child, so inner powers awaken through such exercises that were not there before. Before, one only knew how to live in memory with the help of one's body. Now, through a new experience, one knows how to live in the purely spiritual-soul realm. One grasps inwardly, in inner activity, the spiritual-soul, and the result is that the ordinary power of recollection develops further into a special power, the origin of which I will now describe.

There comes a time for the spiritual researcher when something quite different is added to ordinary memory through such exercises, something is added that no longer requires memory, with regard to which memory is basically no longer possible. By inwardly grasping oneself in this way, what is added is that from a certain point in one's life onwards, one has one's previous life since birth, or at least since the point in time up to which one would otherwise remember, as a whole, unfolding in pictures. As if the stream of time were, so to speak, running simultaneously, the tableau of life stands before the spiritual researcher.

But something special has been achieved with this, dear audience. The fact that the spiritual researcher then sees what otherwise only wells up from his inner being in individual memories means that he is confronted with an entity – albeit now his own entity as it has developed since his birth – that he has not previously faced in this inner unity. That from which the memories emerged, like, I would say, individual waves from a sea surface, that stands there like a closed current. But as a result, one's self is outside of this being, which one is otherwise oneself. Consider what is actually happening in the human soul that is so significant. The human soul is, after all, this being from which the memories emerge. Now the consciousness remains completely intact, but one's own being appears objectively, appears separate from oneself. One first surveys that which, as an enduring being, permeates us from birth to death. But the one who now really wants to devote himself completely to spiritual research must continue on this path, which I have now called meditation.

Above all, he must now develop another ability, which is also already present in the soul, but he must develop it in order to progress: the ability to love, to love the world and the world's entities. This is something that is almost annoying for many of our scientific contemporaries, when one has to point this out. Let us take a look at love as it manifests itself in ordinary life. It is the devotion of the soul to another being, to a process or the like. What is love when it occurs in life? We may say: it is an intensified unfolding of attention. Where does love begin? It begins when I turn my special attention to an object as the world passes by me. I single out an object; I concentrate on this one object. By concentrating on an object, as it were, I allow my soul to flow increasingly into the essence of that object, so that selfishness fades away. By becoming absorbed in the other being, attention then turns into love. This love must be developed from an ordinary everyday quality into a true quality of knowledge. This can be done by still further increasing the power of concentration, by becoming more and more aware of the will, just as one has previously introduced duration into the life of the imagination. Before, one applied the will in meditation; now one does not just see to it that one meditates at will, but now one watches oneself unfold this will. One pays special attention to the will. You see how this will concentrates on this or that, which you have brought into consciousness. And by increasing this inner soul activity – it is again an intimate, inner soul activity – you now come to have a new inner experience. One arrives at this by bringing to consciousness what is otherwise immersed in the twilight of the unconscious or subconscious, namely, the interrelationship between waking and sleeping.

Man walks through the world. From waking to falling asleep, he unfolds his consciousness, which represents external objects to him, which he then processes inwardly through his thoughts. He interrupts this consciousness through the unconsciousness of sleep, from which at most the images of dreams emerge. By concentrating in this way on the will and its development, by surrendering, by surrendering in love, one's power of concentration to something that has been brought into consciousness, this inner soul life has gradually strengthened to such an extent that now, by putting himself in a certain state, a person knows that he can consciously repeat the same process that he would otherwise repeat when he falls asleep. And now a person knows, he knows through direct insight: When I fall asleep, I leave my spiritual and soul self with my physical body. From the moment I fall asleep until I wake up, I am a spiritual-soul being outside my body. But before a person has undergone such exercises as I have described, he remains unconscious of the state from falling asleep to waking up: this undifferentiated, initially still quite unorganized spiritual-soul - which in ordinary life is only organized that it is in the body and receives its forms and inner forces from the body. Through the kind of activity I have described, through this human activity, through meditation and concentration, the soul and spirit become inwardly organized in a way that otherwise only the body is. Just as the body with its senses can see within the sensual world in which it is, so the soul-spiritual, when it has organized itself through inner strength, will come to consciously leave the body in the same way as it otherwise leaves it unconsciously when falling asleep; it will come to the point that it can consciously return to the body, as it otherwise only returns when waking up. And one now gets an idea of where one actually is between falling asleep and waking up; because one has awakened to inner activity, one gets an idea of this soul. Now, however, one faces it in a different way from what previously seemed like a panoramic picture of life since birth.

By developing the spiritual and soul life through meditation, one first gets a review of the life since birth, but one does not yet know one's way around in the review. It has become more objective, but one does not yet consciously face it. If you concentrate on the work of will, as I have described it, you are so active that you can now hold that which otherwise can only be outside the body during sleep outside this body. Then you see a process according to its true reality, which you otherwise cannot see because the powers through which you can see it have not yet been developed. Then one sees the process of the incorporation of the spiritual-mental into the physical body and the other process of the re-expulsion of the spiritual-mental from the physical body. If one comes to understand, consciously understand, what falling asleep and waking up means, then with this knowledge one also comes to see and understand what being born and dying means. For just as little as the soul, which begins to unfold in the morning, is reborn when we wake up, it does not perish when we fall asleep. But just as little is born with birth or with conception what is the human being's soul, and just as little does it perish with death. This can be decided by really looking.

If one learns to recognize in inner activity that which really underlies the human being, then one learns to recognize it as that which rises above birth and death. Then one learns to recognize it as that which connects itself with the physical body through birth or conception, in that it simultaneously organizes the physical body and connects itself with it in the same way as otherwise - though now not by reorganizing, but only partially, I might say mending the organization - the spiritual-soul element enters the physical body upon waking, for an existence that continues with its experiences from morning to morning. In this way one learns to recognize that which actually organizes the human being as something that in turn goes out into the spiritual world at death. In this way, through the unfolding of the soul to seeing, one learns to really see clearly the eternal that exists in man. One cannot speculate or philosophize about this eternal - one will only ever come to sophistries. But one can receive an enlightenment about this eternal by recognizing what is otherwise unconscious as eternal, what lives as unconscious without the body from falling asleep to waking up. If one has done this, then one recognizes at the same time that [which is otherwise unconscious] as an eternal.

This shows you how spiritual science actually understands the real development of the ability to know. It is not a matter of us standing still and only continuing logically or experimentally, at most becoming more adept, but rather of us really, as it is with the growth of the body itself, bringing our spiritual and soul life to grow, to unfold anew, so that it grows into the supersensible world and experiences the eternal. By experiencing this supersensible realm, by gaining an overview of life as one might on a day and recognizing what precedes and follows this life, one comes more and more to — especially if one now tries to from the concentration; one can push the concentration so far that one is completely absorbed, but still retains the strength to withdraw again and again; one must not lose consciousness. One comes more and more to the point that one is completely absorbed in what one is concentrating on. Then you also get to know the person in terms of their essence in that state when they are just outside of their body. I have said that you first learn to recognize the life since birth in a kind of pictorial review. You then learn to recognize what becomes this life, what descends from spiritual worlds to be embodied, what passes through the gate of death to return to the spiritual world. But by immersing oneself in this, one learns to recognize: Yes, the ordinary perceptions are not present in this eternal realm; the perceptions that we have in ordinary life are only produced in the physical organization.

One only becomes clear about what this bodily organization actually is for the human being when one gets to know the significance of the outer, bodily organization for the spiritual-soul. Only then does one learn to recognize that in order to form ideas in the ordinary world, one must return to one's body. But he takes the power of thinking, he takes the power of the ability to form ideas with him into the spiritual-soul realm, and he takes, by developing a new imagining for a higher, supersensible consciousness, only a part of what is in his body, I say, only a part of feeling and of will; he does not take the ordinary imagining with him. He must develop a completely new concept for existence outside of the body. But he takes with him from his ordinary existence, which fills him between birth and death, a part of feeling. And the will in its true form, this will, it is indeed something extraordinarily dark, something like what can be experienced in sleep; one need only think of what the ordinary soul teachings and psychologists have to say about this will. This volition is indeed something dark in life. It becomes light when the human being rises in the appropriate way to see, but at the same time it is recognized that it is connected with the eternal. And when one succeeds, through loving concentration, in removing even this last remnant of egoistic individual feeling – that is to say, what still holds one to the body – and thus, as one has developed a new conception in the purely spiritual-soul, to develop now also a pure feeling outside of the body, still remaining is the volition as it is in the body. But now one gets to know it through the new feeling and new imagining; one learns to recognize it in such a way that one must give it a name, perhaps using the word desire. One gets to know the will as a desire, as an ability of desire, as a power of desire. But now, outside of the body, it appears as a power of desire, but what is now desired? It is the existence in the body itself that is desired. One thus now learns to recognize the power by which one actually penetrates from a prenatal life into this life in the body.

One learns to recognize this desire as something that belongs to the world and that permeates us before we become an earthly human being, and that remains with us as we pass through the portal of death. And now one learns to recognize how this desire is something that rules in man and what the content of the desire has to do with becoming human itself; one now gets to know something strange, one gets to know within oneself the desire for becoming human as such. One gets to know this life between death and birth; one gets to know the eternal in it. You get to know the desire to live another life, and you get to know the will that you have discovered as the one that has brought you from the human life of the past, which you yourself have accomplished, into this [present] life. You get to know the will in its spiritual form.

Dear attendees, when you look at the will as such, which you have brought out of the physical body, then you learn to recognize the fact of repeated lives on earth, then you learn to recognize how the content of a life passes through the time between death and a new birth, developing purely spiritually, then one learns to recognize how that which develops purely spiritually again and again generates out of itself the desire to become human. That which we develop here in life between birth and death as desire, whereby we desire external things, is recognized by supersensible vision as a faint reflection of the desires that live in us and carry us over from one earth life to another. That which makes us human, that which organizes us from one earthly life to another, appears in a faint reflection when we desire this or that out of our physical body.

I have only been able to sketch out for you how a person grows into the spiritual and soul world through an intimate development of their spiritual and soul life, how they first become aware of what they are between birth and death, how they becomes aware of his eternal self, which lies beyond birth and death, but also how he becomes aware of how that which lives in him between birth and death includes an eternal element that goes beyond this shell, passes through death but has a desire for a new life. I would have to speak not only for hours but for weeks if I wanted to elaborate on what I have now outlined in detail. It can be described in detail, but the only thing that needs to be shown here is how anthroposophical spiritual science arrives at its results and what those results are. It arrives at them by developing the human capacity for knowledge beyond itself, to results about the nature of its own being, about the eternal, about the repetitive nature of its earthly existence.

One can imagine that what I have just described is unusual compared to today's thinking habits. Above all, people do not want to admit that they still need to develop in order to recognize. They want to stop at what they have already achieved, at most they want to state the limit. But in this way the truth about the highest matters of the human soul cannot be discovered. It can only be discovered if a person has the intellectual humility to say to himself: I must still go further, I must bring the supersensible to consciousness within myself if I want to develop a consciousness of the supersensible and see through my belonging to the supersensible world.

When these things are mentioned, people come and say: Yes, this anthroposophical spiritual science, it wants to overcome materialism, but it is not scientific itself. Because what it describes as images of life since birth, what it describes as inspirations through which the eternal is recognized, what it describes as intuitions that take hold of the desire of the will, which works from life to life, that - so some people say - that cannot be objectively justified, that could just as easily be hallucinations. And strangely enough, it happens that precisely those who, on the one hand, say that anthroposophical spiritual science is trying to overcome materialism — and thus actually express a sympathy for overcoming materialism — that precisely those who, in wanting to refute anthroposophical spiritual science, reduce it to a materialistic level.

So, just recently, here we could read – I cannot speak from my own experience, since I was not present when the matter was discussed, only from a newspaper report: If it does not exactly match what was said, then it refers to what was reported, but one can also speak about what was reported in the sense in which I will now do so. It is claimed that what is now called intimate development is in fact nothing more than the inhibition of mental images, their inward accumulation, so to speak, their initial suppression, so that nervous energy and that then through these suppressed, through these inhibited and suppressed mental images, the spared nerve energy would arise in these images, of which the spiritual researcher speaks as of his seeing.

Now, follow exactly what I have objectively and truthfully described today as the processes that the spiritual researcher really undertakes with his soul in successive states: Has there been any mention of inhibiting and restricting the images of thought? No, the opposite was mentioned. It was mentioned that the images are not suppressed, but that they are precisely raised, that they are precisely placed in the consciousness full of light. The opposite of what is being objected to in order to demonstrate the unscientific nature of anthroposophy has been mentioned. It is simply thoughtlessly asserted that the experiences of the spiritual researcher are the result of restricted, suppressed, inhibited images of thought. No images of thought are inhibited at all; on the contrary, they are brought into the full light of consciousness and unfold. If it were a matter of these images being inhibited, of something being dammed up, of nervous energy being saved, as it were, and then of that which the spiritual researcher has in his visions unfolding, then the same would have to be present in the spiritual researcher as occurs in pathological hallucination or illusion. But the opposite is the case. Pathological hallucination or illusion is linked to the suppression of ordinary consciousness. But what is present in the spiritual researcher is not linked to the suppression of ordinary consciousness. This ordinary consciousness remains fully intact. Therefore, the spiritual researcher can always think with this ordinary consciousness just as the person who fights him, if he wants to be scientific, thinks with this ordinary consciousness. How can the person who faces this fact claim that it is a matter of inhibited nervous activity? The person who is said to be working under the influence of this inhibited nervous activity is not merely working afterwards, but at the same time in exactly the same way as his opponent works with the supposedly uninhibited nervous activity.

What happens here is no different: the person concerned becomes annoyed because, in order to penetrate the spiritual world, he is now expected to bring his own supersensory abilities to consciousness, and he therefore says: These spiritual researchers are all very well to fight materialism, but... - now the man, who is so terribly sympathetic with the fight against materialism, becomes the most blatant materialist, in that he drives down into the subconscious that which the spiritual researcher expressly emphasizes as being entirely within the sphere of the methodical-logical. The spiritual researcher knows exactly where the subconscious begins. The fact that he brings his will into it everywhere is precisely the essential point.

The fact is, therefore, that here a fight is being waged against anthroposophically oriented spiritual science without worrying about what really underlies this spiritual science. One would only have the right to say that it is based on stored nervous energy, one would only have the right to fight against it if anthroposophically oriented spiritual science were to rebel against ordinary science. But that is precisely its starting point. It does not rebel against ordinary science. In the field that ordinary science deals with, it thinks, observes and researches in the same way as ordinary science, it only penetrates what ordinary science can research with what can be spiritually perceived by it. It takes nothing away from ordinary science, it only adds something. And so the opponent must not claim that it takes away from the spiritual abilities, that it dams up, limits, inhibits ideas, because it works with the same uninhibited ideas as he does, only it adds something different.

You see, my dear audience, the point is that people simply do not want to enter the path of spiritual science; they say, “I don't want to, I don't like it” – everyone has the right to do that. But to say: I don't want to, therefore the other person shouldn't either, and therefore nothing about this spiritual science should be said to anyone at all [you don't have the right to do that.] You stand in front of an audience, fight this spiritual science, but you don't know it, you fight it by attributing to it a materialistic structure, from which it is far removed according to its entire method.

Now, while the opponents have at least already come so far as to write books and say that anthroposophy is not a matter of “arbitrary ideas of a fringe sect fishing in troubled waters,” but rather of something to which one must “pay attention,” that it provides “foundations for a comprehensive world view powerfully imbued with an ethical spirit”. The course will be that, although they become “annoyed”, the opponents, out of the depths of their being, will have to make an effort to at least recognize the seriousness of this spiritual science. So the time will also come when all those who fight this spiritual science out of apparent science will disintegrate into nothing. Until now, basically nothing else has happened but that one continually accuses spiritual science of something that one has just invented oneself, and then fights one's own caricature - not what spiritual science really gives.

What, then, can it actually be when there is talk of such a “scientific explanation” that contemporary science alone claims to provide, even for the humanities? If we consider the misunderstandings that prevail from the outset, then we can also come to terms with the matter a little. One cannot demand that the ordinary way of seeing should be scientifically justified, otherwise it should not be used; and in the same way one cannot demand that the higher way of seeing should be scientifically justified, otherwise it should not be used. Nor can anyone demand that the vision through imagination, inspiration, intuition, as I have described it today – imagination gives the lasting of earthly life in images since birth, inspiration gives the eternal, intuition gives the repetitive earthly lives – nor can anyone demand that this vision through imagination, inspiration, intuition first be scientifically justified before it is applied. No, just as the eye does not allow itself to be scientifically justified before it sees, so imagination, inspiration and intuition cannot allow themselves to be scientifically proven before they are applied. That is simply a matter of course.

It is a different matter when one speaks of the scientific basis of anthroposophical spiritual science. Here it is only a matter of trying to investigate the essence of hallucination, the essence of vision, the essence of illusion, the essence of ordinary sensory perception, the essence of memory, the essence of thinking, in the same way that one seeks to understand the physiological basis of the human organism. Here one must say – one could speak even more physiologically, but here I want to put it more popularly: Anyone who studies hallucinations, for example, knows that they are imaginations of images, an imagination of images in the face of which the faculty of will is so strongly suppressed that the person is not aware of himself in what he is hallucinating, therefore considers the hallucination to be an objective, whereas it is not related to any objective at all. The point of anthroposophical spiritual science is that the person is oriented within himself. If he is oriented within himself, he will suppress at the same moment what wants to occur as a hallucination by opposing it with inner activity. This inner activity is what matters. This inner activity is developed precisely in the spiritual research method of anthroposophy. But the person who has an unbiased overview of the soul life also knows that there is always a residue of hallucination. This residue of hallucination comes to light precisely in the act of remembering; in the act of remembering, only the pictorial quality of the hallucination is expressed. There are still residues of hallucination in the act of remembering, only they are imbued with activity. We would have no memory if we did not, to a certain extent, have the capacity to hallucinate and could stop this hallucination in the right way. If, without what is supposed to remain subordinate to the human organic soul capacity, this ability to hallucinate predominates, then it becomes pathological, then the person emerges from the sphere where he has a certain balance between body and soul – in the ordinary imagining that becomes memory – he emerges into the corporeal; he becomes more material than he otherwise is. He descends into the corporeal and thus becomes hallucinatory. Likewise, the illusion arises from a descent into the corporeal.

Everything that leads to imagination, inspiration, intuition, does not descend into the physical, but rises up out of the physical. Therefore, one cannot use any kind of blocking of mental images, any kind of inhibition of mental images, but one must move the mental images up into the bright consciousness in the same way that one otherwise moves the mathematical conception into the bright consciousness. There can be no more question of hallucinating than there can be of hallucinating when imagining mathematically. One learns to distinguish between immersing oneself in the physical world as a human being, as is the case when hallucinating, and rising up from the physical world, as occurs when imagining, when being initiated and so on. These things present themselves to spiritual research with just as much scientific objectivity as any laboratory experiment presents itself to the senses.

Thus one can say: it is precisely the physiological, the psychological knowledge of something like a hallucination that leads to an understanding, to a purely physiological understanding of the imagination. Just as one wants to understand vision, so one can want to understand imagination, inspiration and intuition. That is then real scientific reasoning. On the other hand, it has nothing to do with any kind of science when people say that before imagination or inspiration is used, it should first be 'scientifically proven'. What scientific proof is, one must first know in general. And those who today demand of spiritual science that it should “prove” are only showing that they have not really understood the nature of proof at all, otherwise they would know that one can only prove something if one can trace it back to other, simpler facts. Even in mathematics, one proves something by tracing something complicated back to simple, unprovable axioms. That from which the proofs are taken must first be examined. But the spiritual can only be examined when we first become aware of the supersensible, the spiritual in ourselves.

Now, spiritual science, as it is meant here, is often treated with hostility, especially by scientists. But then again, these scientists complain that spiritual science does not address itself exclusively to them, but, as they say, to the “educated laymen”. And precisely such men as Kurt Leese find this incomprehensible and say - I will translate it for you again, as he himself wants it translated, “Theosophy” into “Anthroposophy”:

But are all those who consider anthroposophical propaganda to be a swindle that does not require psychological clarification and is not worthy of epistemological treatment aware that anthroposophy undertakes a remarkable examination of the history of philosophy, in particular of Kant, Schelling and Hegel, and seriously seeks an epistemological foundation for its teachings? If philosophy considers itself called upon to lead intellectual life, it cannot be indifferent to what is happening outside the field of its specialized research, how and for what purposes philosophy and philosophers are used to profoundly affect the world of educated laymen. The philosophical side of anthroposophy has so far been far too neglected, if not completely unknown.

The man says, then, that researchers cannot be indifferent to what is made of their philosophy – and he admits that anthroposophy dominates it – by educated laymen. There is a kind of lament in the fact that what anthroposophy is does not first turn to the university chair and from there, in the jargon concerned, only speaks to those who are considered authorized to do so from some particular side.

Now, in response to this, one thing must be said: what is now available in my Anthroposophy, albeit in a more extensive and detailed form, is something that I began to describe in spirit and attitude at the beginning of the 1880s; in fact, in terms of its direction, it has been in place for forty years. I first carried it out by applying it to an interpretation of Goetheanism. At that time I wrote my “Introduction to Goethe's Scientific Writings”, steeped in this anthroposophical spirit.

What happened? I was not treated as badly as I am now by my contemporaries. These writings, which are based on Goethe, were largely recognized, but they were understood as something that some literary historian or some modern historian writes about Goethe. They were understood as something that is written about Goethe. That there should be something in it that is directed to the time as a renewal of human thinking in the spiritual was not seen. Why? Because the scientific world had lost its drive. It was true that they still wanted to rise to the level of acknowledging that Goethe had thought this or that, but they lacked the courage to recognize truths that had to be grasped directly in the spiritual, in the supersensible, and to deal with these truths themselves. They felt justified in saying: Goethe believed this or that — but one did not have the courage to recognize such truths directly. And so all that was said about the further development of Goetheanism at the time faded away. And finally, my “Philosophy of Freedom” — those who study it as “educated laymen” will know that they have a tough nut to crack. It is written in such a way that it can be presented to those who deal with specialized philosophy.

Anthroposophy did not address itself to “educated laymen” until it had become clear that those who would have been called upon to deal with it had simply ignored it, had not taken an interest in it. For that is the gratitude of scholars towards anthroposophy: at first the scholars, the scientists of the present day, did not care about it; one had to go to the “educated laymen”, because truth must prevail, no matter by what means. And now that they see that among the “educated laymen” there are some after all who could cause their own learning to falter a little, now that they see that these “educated laymen” even go to Dornach to hear scientific lectures by thirty lecturers thirty lecturers speak differently from the way they speak at the other educational institutions. Now they feel - but without having studied the matter, for which they would have had decades of time - now they feel, without knowing the matter, called to refute it.

Well, there will have to be other things. But this may be said: When spiritual science has turned to the “educated laity”, it was because it is necessary for the truth to be done right. Truth must seek its own way, and if those who are called to seek it do not take care of it, then it must turn to those who are perhaps considered “uncalled” by the former, but who can show precisely by doing so that they are the truly called. And so the urge for supersensible knowledge must come from the educated laity, which did not want to come from those who had to deal with the search for truth professionally.

Dear attendees, from what I have presented to you today in a more conceptual way and by showing the observed methods, by showing what can be experienced supersensibly, I will show tomorrow what value it can have for direct human life, for human morality, for human satisfaction, for human understanding of fate, for human peace of mind in the passage through birth and death. And I will show how the spiritual world that reveals itself in spiritual research can work in art and how it, penetrating into the human heart, can truly make man religious. Today I wanted to show only what the paths of this anthroposophical spiritual science are and how one has to think of its relationship to science. I wanted to show that man must, as it were, develop the strength within himself to grow together with the truth that permeates the world.

For only in this way – let me emphasize this once more – only by awakening in himself that which is supersensible in him, by raising it to consciousness, does he rise to behold the supersensible, and not only integrates himself as a body into the sensual world, as is otherwise the case, but integrates himself as spirit and soul into the spiritual-soul world. But man has the urge to recognize himself as spirit, as soul, out of the dark feeling that he himself is spiritual-soul. In man, spiritual-soul truth seeks spiritual-soul truth. And the one who can thus understand the relationship to truth can and may be reassured that this truth cannot be destroyed by its opponents. For truth must triumph in the course of time just as surely as human development itself must advance. Man needs the development of truth, because only out of this truth can he develop his own true nature.

Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, its Value for the Human Being and its Relationship to Art and Religion

Dear attendees,Yesterday I took the liberty of speaking during the lecture about one of the most recent critics of the anthroposophical world view, about the book by the licentiate of theology Kurt Leese, who, as I said yesterday, strangely enough, speaks about anthroposophy from beginning to end, but explicitly says that he retains the term “theosophy” in order to accommodate the general consciousness, but that he always means Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophical direction.

Now, today, I would like to start with something that, to a certain extent, is one of the results of Kurt Leese's investigations into anthroposophy. After this man, who, as I also remarked yesterday, has read pretty much everything of mine that has been published, after he has illuminated anthroposophy and what belongs to it from his point of view, he comes to record a strange sentence on one of the last pages of his book. I will read this sentence first:

What is all the talk about the worship of knowledge, about the riddles of life and their solutions, what is all the soaring of knowledge into primeval depths and primeval heights, if the Theosophist...

— that is, the anthroposophist —

... is unable to say why it is better to be an ego than a non-ego, and why, then, seven world ages are so important for the becoming and the perfection of this ego!?

Now one could initially believe that the man means that only the anthroposophist does not know how to say why it is better to be an ego than a non-ego, but actually it is clear from the following that he means something completely different, that he actually believes that no one can somehow figure out why it is better to be an ego than a non-ego. Because he goes on to say:

In the face of such mysteries of the world and life, even the theosophist...

- that is, the anthroposophist —

... nothing more than a positivist who no longer explains, fathoms, solves, but who accepts the ethical-individualistic fate of Western-Christian cultural development as a matter of course that can no longer be justified because he simply cannot escape it.

This, ladies and gentlemen, actually means nothing less than the following: No one really knows how to say anything about the great question of life: Why is it not just as good to be a non-I as an I? And since the author of this book obviously concedes that one should simply take it for granted that one is an I, without brooding over it, he thinks that anthroposophy has nothing to say about it either.

Now, let us recall some of what emerged from what was said yesterday, and then allow me to add, in more of a lecture format, some of what you can find in the already extensive literature on anthroposophy.

As a human being grows up, emerging from unconsciousness into ever greater consciousness, awakening, as it were, from childlike slumber and dreams to a more conscious life, he feels confronted by the world. It is fair to say that this confrontation with the world is initially one that presents a truly human mind, a humanly spiritualized mind, with riddles, the solutions to which must be sought from within. As the human being grows up, the riddles of the world itself are revealed to him. At first, he feels, one may say, in a very vague way, as an ego. He feels, so to speak, this I as an inner point of life, to which everything he can experience flows, from which he also knows that everything he can do flows out. But he comes to realize, and he must gradually come to realize, that this is precisely the great question of life: How does this I relate to the whole environment that presents us with such a vast number of life and world riddles? This question, “How does the I relate to the whole human environment?” basically contains everything else that is there in the way of life and world riddles.

Now one can say that in a certain way, something of the relationship between the I and the environment is already evident in ordinary existence, in that this I grows together with the environment in a certain way. We develop from childhood on, which does not just show itself at some later age in the form of us awakening to full self-awareness, but we develop, above all, our inner life through memory, which was characterized in its significance yesterday, that connects our experiences, that allows our life to appear to us as a whole when we look back to the point in time up to which we can remember. We can say that by holding still and looking back on our lives, we feel our selves connected to all our experiences. We have gone through these experiences, we have taken them into our ideas, into our thoughts, we have experienced joy and suffering through them, we have experienced happiness and pain through them, we have been inspired to do this or that in our actions, which then flowed out of our strength into the strength of life. But when we stand still and look back, we also feel connected to what our experiences were in this form, and we cannot say that there is a moment in our lives when we are not fundamentally what we have been left with in our memories of our experiences, of the suffering and joy that we experienced in these experiences, the happiness and pain that we experienced in these experiences, the satisfaction or dissatisfaction that came to us from the fact that we were able to accomplish this or that from these experiences. We are what we have experienced. It becomes pathological when this thread of thought of memory breaks somewhere in a person. In medical literature, cases are well described where such pathological conditions occur, where a person's coherent awareness of memory for this or that breaks down and he feels, as it were, hollowed out, no longer able to fully experience his being.

You see, here life presents itself to us first as an expansion of our ego over that which our existence has brought us since our birth; life presents itself as an inward growing together of our ego with that which has come to us. Yesterday I showed how the human being awakens his supersensible nature by unfolding that which can be developed in him beyond the ordinary powers of knowledge and perception into the supersensible worlds, and thereby comes to an even broader overview of the world. And yesterday I was able to hint at some of the results of the anthroposophical world view. I was able to say that by rising to imaginative knowledge, the human being first comes to perceive his life not only towards birth as a sea from which individual memories emerge, but as a life panorama, as a large tableau, so that he can see the lasting in this earthly life. But I was also able to point out how, through a further development of the supersensible faculty of knowledge, man comes to the contemplation of that which goes beyond birth and death, that which is eternal in him, that which thus connects him with a world that is more comprehensive than that which he can experience between birth and death. And I then showed how this knowledge can continue to ascend to the contemplation of repeated earthly lives. There we have already seen how this I now grows beyond the ordinary contemplation of the I, how the I, which otherwise feels connected in ordinary life with the life events flowing to it, how this I expands its consciousness to include a broader world.

If you now add to what I was able to hint at yesterday the anthroposophical literature, you will see that by developing this cognitive faculty it is also possible to grasp the connection of the I with the whole rest of the cosmos. One may scoff at what Anthroposophy has to say about worlds and world transformations, as indicated, for example, in my “Occult Science”, but only someone who cannot put himself in the method by which such things are found can actually scoff. The essential point of today's reflection, however, is that anthroposophy finds nothing in the cosmos but what is connected with the nature of the I. The essential point is that anthroposophy teaches us to look at the whole cosmos, to see the whole cosmos in such a way that the I is connected in some way with everything in this cosmos, with this whole macrocosm as a microcosm, in the same way that in ordinary life the I is connected with its experiences. One is tempted to say that anthroposophy succeeds in expanding what is otherwise only a 'small' memory in our experiences into a world memory, into a world overview. Thus, through anthroposophical knowledge, we feel expanded, standing within the whole universe, the whole cosmos, we feel the I in its consciousness expanded beyond this cosmos, we feel this cosmos itself as spiritual and the I spiritually connected to this spiritual cosmos.

Those who cannot feel how such an expansion of consciousness affects what a person can actually long for in the world cannot judge the value of anthroposophical world knowledge for the human being either. What Anthroposophy can give, and what these ideas can then be for the perception of the world soul, for the longings of the human soul, must be inwardly experienced by each individual. And this can be experienced in such a way that it is felt as the solution to precisely this fundamental riddle: How does the I, which initially exists only vaguely like a point within us, how does this I relate to the world as a whole? How does that which we ourselves are for our consciousness confront us from the entire world?

The fact that, as this line of inquiry shows, no one can really say why it is better to be an I than a not-I, is answered by showing that such a question is not really posed correctly. What we want is not to answer this question from some abstract point of view, but what we really want is something that belongs directly to life, to growth, to the whole development of the human being. One could just as well ask: Why does a child want to become a great person, an adult? It becomes an adult. But it is not self-evident that one becomes an adult; rather, one must develop that which belongs to the adult. The child has consciousness within it, as it were, asleep; the adult expands consciousness over himself. The person who awakens to consciousness expands consciousness, this I, throughout the spiritual cosmos. In this way, the human being grows into the world in a way that is in keeping with nature. For his feeling, this gives rise to the question of the value of the I, because this value of the I is felt in relation to the value of the world. And anyone who does not want to know about what is far removed from the world and about world development will never be able to develop a true feeling for his ego, because this ego is rich within; it emerges from the whole content of the world. And only if one has a feeling for what is far removed from the world and for world development can one also feel from these what the ego has as its deepest longings. But one must have an inwardly fresh and courageous mind in order not to find it too uncomfortable, so to speak, to send one's mind into world distances and into world developments, so that one can have the rich, inward perception of the I and thus also of the value of the I. And it is a remarkable question that Leese asks: Why are seven world ages necessary to develop this I? If you look at the development of these seven world epochs, you will find everywhere how they contain forces that are connected with the development of human egos. You will find that you are grasped by the world, you feel, you grasp, you also find the forces for your actions from what will arise from the consciousness of your connection with the cosmos.

My dear audience, it is very strange when people judge everything that is to be recognized through anthroposophy, as they must judge it according to what they already have, when they do not engage with it, and then, having basically understood nothing of anthroposophy, say: Yes, what is it worth? What does it explain to you? What is not understood does not explain anything, but that is the fault of those who do not want to understand. But those who are open to what the anthroposophical worldview can be, who enter into the far reaches and the vast expanses of the world with their soul and their spirit, will find a complete answer. In the course of these contemplations, he finds a full answer to the riddle of the value of the human ego, for the whole world answers him. But nothing but the whole world is suitable to answer the question about the value of the I, and anyone who does not want this answer from the whole world will always come to a speech like this critic of anthroposophy, who says: What use can all this be to us, since it does not decide the question of why it is better to be an I than a non-I. But what is expressed here with a certain generality is then expressed in detail when such critics as Leese approach the specific tasks of anthroposophical science. For example, within anthroposophical science it must be said that when the human being observes that which, as it were, holds together as a reality, that which appears in thoughts, feelings and will impulses, anthroposophy speaks of the the carrier of thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will, regardless of whether or not it calls this carrier of the soul the astral body - as I said, words are not important, no special value need be placed on them. Now the same critic, the licentiate Kurt Leese, comes along and says: Why is it necessary, when one is already observing and describing the soul, the thoughts, the feelings, the impulses of the will, why is it necessary to assume a special vehicle?

Now, at this point, the complete inability of the approach that leads out of ordinary life into the truly supersensible life of the soul to follow what is going on becomes apparent. First of all, taken in the abstract, it can seem rather superfluous whether I stop at describing the life of thoughts, feelings and will, or whether I also speak of a vehicle. But one never comes to a real essential insight into what lives in the soul if one does not pass from what merely appears as thought, feeling, will, to the carrier. For, my dear audience, as I was able to show yesterday, when the soul becomes aware of its supersensible abilities, it becomes aware of what it is in those times when it is otherwise in an unconscious state between falling asleep and waking up. And the one who becomes a spiritual researcher experiences how this soul relates to the bodily life just as it otherwise relates during sleep, except that now it is not unconscious but conscious. Thoughts, feelings and will can only be observed during waking life; from falling asleep to waking up, no one can observe this except as after-images, often distorted images of the imaginative life in dreams; no one can observe what is of the soul without the spiritual-scientific. One comes to the reality of the soul precisely by observing the soul in the states where it stands out from ordinary thinking, feeling and willing. If one remains within the ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, one does not grasp the essence of the soul. What then is meant when the anthroposophist says that one passes from imagining, feeling and willing to a “medium”? It means that the anthroposophist wants to suggest that we free ourselves from what never sheds light on the nature of the soul, that we should make an effort to grasp what life of the soul is.

And so it shows here what I mentioned yesterday, when such a critic says as a result: Anthroposophy is actually annoying and ill-tempered. He finds it annoying and ill-tempered because it makes a certain demand of him at every moment. He is supposed to go beyond what he has in his thinking and soul habits of ordinary life – he does not like that, he perceives it as an unreasonable demand that should not be made of him. And so he says: Why are you talking to me about a 'vehicle'? If he were to make this effort and speak of this vehicle, then he would find the way into the spiritual world.

You see, what at first appears to be mere mental games — something like the combination of thinking, feeling and willing in the bearer of this thinking, feeling and willing — is something that wants to achieve something real, that wants to provide an impetus for the development of the higher abilities of human nature, through which the essence of the human being is recognized. Thus, even what appears to be a mere intellectual game in the anthroposophical world view is actually meant as something very real for the value of human life. But another passage from this same book shows even more what the value of anthroposophical world view for the present and future life of science is to consist of; I will speak first of the life of world view and science.

In the appendix to my book Von Seelenrätseln (Mysteries of the Soul), I pointed out that for several years I have been speaking about how the human soul is actually connected to the human body. I have pointed out that it can really be seen that our thinking, our feeling and our willing are connected with three different aspects of the human being: that our thinking is connected with the actual nervous activity, but that what we develop as feeling is not is not directly but only indirectly connected with this nervous activity, what we develop as feeling is directly connected with the rhythmic activity, especially with the rhythmic activity in breathing and blood circulation, but that our will activity is connected with the metabolism. I only mention this here in a reporting way. I stated in my book “Mysteries of the Soul” that I had only been studying this subject for thirty years before I dared to publicly express the results of my research. It is commonly believed that the entire life of the soul is connected with the nervous system. The new aspect of this view is precisely that in reality the three aspects of the life of the soul are connected with three different activities of the human organization. Now, however, I was obliged to set something apart in this presentation that is completely foreign to today's habits of thought. In order for me to make myself understood about what is actually meant here, I would like to preface the following.

You see, today, especially in the field of philosophy, one often has a very negative judgment about what is presented in the development of spiritual life as medieval scholasticism. Despite the fact that anthroposophy and my own personality are attacked in the most nonsensical way by certain church authorities, this cannot prevent me from saying what can be said about a certain field, purely objectively, even if this field is linked, or at least seems to be linked today, to current church life. Those who are able to really delve into the blossoming of medieval scholasticism, namely the heyday of this scholasticism, the time of Albertus Magnus, of Thomas Aquinas, know that this scholasticism - it is so little recognized today - that this scholasticism has one thing that basically made it greater than any period in the development of human thought to date. It developed in those who belonged to it a gift for subtle thought development, for the finest dissection of thought. And this gift, which was developed in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, as an ability for the finest development of thought, would be very useful to us today, especially in the pursuit of science. For if, for example, a philosopher like Wundt had had a real inner understanding of the fine distinctions of scholasticism, his investigations would have produced different results from those which they have produced. For only a thinking that really has the will to enter into the finest distinctions, only such thinking can also delve into the foundations of reality, for this reality is complicated, and with a rough thinking one does not enter into reality. When one has to throw light on one or other of these subjects from the standpoint of spiritual science, one is obliged to arrive at such fine distinctions of thought.

And so I was obliged to say in my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (Soul Mysteries) in order to characterize what underlies the threefold human being, the nerve-sense human being, the human being with the rhythmic organization, the human being with the metabolic organization: One cannot get along with this threefold human being if one imagines, for example, that these three parts are arranged spatially next to each other, the head at the top, the circulation human being in the middle, and then the metabolism human being at the bottom. I have shown how even in the nerve there is rhythm and metabolism, but that in the case of the activity of imagination in the nerve, rhythm and metabolism are not taken into account, but another activity, whereas in the case of the activity of feeling or of the activity of the will, rhythm and metabolism in the nerve are also taken into account. I had to make the subtle distinction that what one has to highlight, so to speak, in order to understand the human being, one sees interwoven in outer reality. A man like Kurt Leese reads through this and finds it to be a tour de force of thinking. And precisely because he finds it to be a tour de force of thinking, he says: It is precisely at such a point that anthroposophy becomes annoying and intolerable.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, the value of the anthroposophical world view will consist precisely in the fact that it cultivates not only clear but also highly discriminating thinking, thinking that reaches into the finest structures of reality. People do not want that; they become angry and ill-tempered, and that is why they say: Anthroposophy is annoying and unpleasant. But precisely this training of thinking to follow reality, which carries the finest distinctions and which cannot be followed with such coarse thinking as is so beloved in the present day, will be the value of the anthroposophical worldview for modern science and thus for modern man.

What should be cultivated through the anthroposophical worldview – and with this I will find the transition from what comes from anthroposophy for the value of the human being in an intellectual relationship, in a purely scientific respect — that which should be cultivated through the anthroposophical world view, that which really comes to the soul's eye through this anthroposophical world view: that is the transition to the moral. As the I expands more and more in its awareness of the content of the world, as the I feels itself as a member of the cosmos, having grown out of this cosmos, it feels its great responsibility within its world existence. The self knows that the thoughts and feelings that develop within it are part of the entire, immeasurable cosmos; the self learns to be responsible for what goes on within it by recognizing itself as having been born out of the entire cosmos. When one feels this responsibility towards the whole world, then one stops carelessly speaking over what the world is supposed to explain.

Such careless talk comes to mind when a critic like Kurt Leese, for example, says that anthroposophy tries to understand the world as developing, but that it does not take what he now understands by development - and he understands this to mean only the emergence of the later from the earlier — but that it is said of anthroposophy: in the course of development, in addition to what is the emergence of the later from the earlier, there is an inflow of something that comes from a completely different side. To his horror, says Kurt Leese, I would even talk about entities that develop in certain world ages being inoculated, and he particularly criticizes the fact that I say in The Education of the Child that the etheric body of the human being is born at the age of seven, just as the physical body of the human being is born at the time of physical birth. That is not development, he says, because it does not show that the etheric body develops out of the physical body.

Ladies and gentlemen, consider what is actually at issue here. Someone comes along and makes an abstract concept of development – the following must arise from the earlier -, he criticizes that I would not show how the etheric body arises from the physical body. But the etheric body does not do that, it does not arise from the physical body at all! If the person in question were to understand what is being presented, he would realize that the process is much more complicated in the development at hand. But when I now speak of the moral, I must nevertheless point out that for the real natural scientist of today, the development is by no means as simple as Mr. Leese now imagines.

You only need to read the first pages of Oscar Hertwig's book, which is truly leading in this respect, about a correction of Darwin's theory of descent, and you will see that Oscar Hertwig is obliged to include the concepts of natural science: firstly, evolution, the emergence of the later from the earlier; secondly, panspermia, that is, the coming into effect of that which is in space alongside the organism; and thirdly, epigenesis, that is, the emergence of completely new effects. Thus the concept of development in science today is such that it is constantly developing, that is, it itself is in a living development. What appears in anthroposophy as the idea of development is precisely what most conscientiously takes into account the idea of development in science. And people who come from such a side to criticize have simply not gone along with scientific development, but have only taken a few scraps out of it and criticize from these scraps. And they then call what is working with the full science “unscientific” because it does not agree with their prejudiced assumptions, which, however, do not coincide with the full science. In this respect, anthroposophy will have a great educational effect on a person's inner conscience and lack of prejudice. It will release forces in people that are particularly lacking in people today. Therefore, this spiritual-scientific worldview can find the courage to intervene directly in practical life, because it wants to develop a way of thinking and a whole human behavior that can be immersed in practical life.

We wanted to show this in the most diverse fields, for example in the field of education, in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt and established by me. It has existed for more than a year. In this Waldorf School in Stuttgart, it is shown how the anthroposophical worldview wants to have a practical effect on pedagogy and didactics. This Waldorf School is truly not about raising children in anthroposophy – the Waldorf School does not want to be a school of a particular worldview – but rather about the fact that anthroposophical spiritual science, because it is directly immersed in reality, can be pedagogically skillfully applied so that the pedagogical as such is created by spiritual science in a certain way as a pedagogical-didactic art. And in this respect, without wishing to boast, the first school year at this Waldorf School has already achieved something that can be talked about. Above all, we do not have the usual system of reporting at the Waldorf School. In some classes we had quite a large number of pupils last year, but nevertheless we do not need the strange relationship between teachers and pupils that arises from the fact that the teacher wants to find out, let's say, among twenty, thirty, fifty pupils, whether one or the other deserves an “almost sufficient”, “half almost satisfactory” and the like in this or that subject. We were able to avoid all of this, which was reduced to an abstract scheme. Instead, I would like to emphasize this: at the end of the previous school year, we were able to give each child a report card in which the child found something very remarkable: a life saying that was completely and utterly felt for the child's soul, spirit, and physical organization. Even in classes with fifty or more pupils, teachers were able to find a way of penetrating and immersing themselves in the individuality of the pupils so that they could write a core saying of life in the report that was completely individual and appropriate for the individual child. This report should not be a dead piece of paper on which one assesses this or that individual with “almost satisfactory”, but it should be something that the child remembers with a certain strength because it contains something that, when it works in his soul, can become life in him. I just wanted to emphasize this point. I could also speak of much that has been attempted, especially in practical application of anthroposophical spiritual science in the didactics of this Waldorf school.

Now, I have often mentioned here how anthroposophical spiritual science at a certain point in time found itself compelled to draw the social consequences from what emerges from its practical thinking. These social conclusions were first drawn in my book 'The Core Points of the Social Question'. They are now being drawn for practical institutions. People today complain a lot about these practical institutions because they have no idea how the apparent practice, which lives in a world of illusions, has led precisely into today's crisis, and how a real practice of life must flow out of a renewal of all thinking. It could actually be amusing if it were not distressing on the other hand, when today the schoolmasters of practice come and remind us that you cannot manage with idealism and belief in the future. They do not know that this economic activity is really not about idealism and faith in the future, but about direct practical intervention with a way of thinking that is more practical than that which the last decades have been able to produce. Through that which, in connection with real life, brings about a life-based grasp of this reality, it will be practically confirmed what Anthroposophy is, because reality is spirit through and through. And if we want to master reality in practice, we must connect with the spirit of that reality. We will succumb to illusions if we do not want to immerse ourselves in the spirit of reality. Therefore, anthroposophy will have to reveal itself in its value for people by making the spirit effective in practical life.

But the central question of life – and it is this that makes anthroposophy particularly relevant to human life – is the big question: how are the moral impulses of the human being, how is what the human being builds up inwardly in the moral world connected to the world of external reality? Let us look at what modern world view has produced: a universe conceived in such a way that at the origin there is a planetary nebula from which suns and planets have formed through circular motion. In the course of time, I would say purely mechanical events arose from this, agglomerations, which then developed into the human being, into the impulse of morality in the human being, which is felt by the human soul as the most valuable thing. But then our gaze is directed to the physical end of the world, when, as it were, what has come together sinks back into a frozen state, when a world grave will stand, and what man has developed within himself in his valuable moral ideals will be buried in this world grave.

One need only visualize this image to see how this modern world view has been unable to bring about harmony between what man feels to be most valuable within himself, his morality, and what surrounds him in the external world and what he seeks to understand in a mechanical-materialistic way. We have only to look back at what I was able to say yesterday, even if only in the most general terms, to see how anthroposophy builds a bridge between what is spread out in space and the world of morality within. There we grasp ourselves first on earth, so that we learn to recognize ourselves in the course of our awakening as the physical-sensual human being, born out of the physical-sensual universe; within us we unfold our supersensible will. Yesterday I showed how this supersensible will contains precisely that which is not accessible to ordinary sense perception, which only becomes accessible when the soul frees itself from the body and experiences the will outside the body. In this will we have something that is thoroughly spiritual. But at the same time this will contains as a power that which constitutes our moral will, our moral feeling, our moral ideal and which remains in the future. We know that in this future our own existence develops in such a way that our body falls away from us, that the elements of this physical body initially disperse into the physical world, but that, as I indicated yesterday, what is contained only as spiritual desire in the will passes through the time that lies between death and a new birth; this builds a new physical body in the future. We see into the future and see our physical body arising again, but out of the spiritual.

If you then turn to the rest of the anthroposophical literature, you will find that this also applies to the worlds. We look at the external worlds, we see light and color in them, we hear sounds in the external world, we hear a whole range of sounds in the external world; we see the three realms of nature. We look at the past in spirit, we see spiritual beings in the past in spirit. We know that what is physical here now has been formed out of spirit. But this physical of the present, this present beauty of the earth, carries spiritual in its lap, and when it will once have solidified as physical, then the spiritual will emerge from it. But the spiritual now only exists in that which is volitional. Future worlds will be built from present morality, just as the present physical world is built from the moral forces of past beings. We see that which shines towards us as stars, that which appears to us as the sun, as the results of that which was once moral. We see in what is moral now the germ of what will shine as worlds in the future, what will appear as worlds to the beings that will inhabit these worlds in the future. By looking at the moral with the insights that only arise when one develops the supersensible powers of the soul, a bridge is built between the moral and the physical. This bridge cannot be built if we look at the world only through the lens of today's natural science: in that case, the world falls apart into the world of mechanical-materialistic events and the world of morality, which then dissolves into illusions, whereas in the anthroposophical worldview, the moral contains the germ of the cosmic, and in this way that which we can call responsibility grows. We know that the outcome of our moral deeds and impulses is not due to some arbitrary assessment of guilt, but is rooted in the laws of the world themselves. And if we look at the starry worlds that affect our eyes, we recognize in them the physical consequence of moral impulses from the distant past. We feel that we are not only in a physical world with moral illusions, we feel that we are in a world of physical and moral realities, where the physical is the metamorphosis of the moral, and the moral is the metamorphosis of the physical.

This, esteemed attendees, gives strength to the human being by steeling his sense of responsibility by placing him with his ego in the whole world. Thus, by opening our view into the spiritual and by showing the physical in connection with the moral in relation to the spiritual, this anthroposophical spiritual science can meet the deepest needs of the present day in the field of art. Anthroposophical spiritual science wanted to achieve this in the field of art, as far as possible at the beginning of its existence. In my four mystery plays, entitled 'The Portal of Initiation', 'The Soul's Trial', 'The Guardian of the Threshold' and 'The Awakening of the Soul', I myself have tried to show how one can artistically embody, from a spiritual-scientific world view, what arises from supersensible observation. And in our Goetheanum outside, everything that this Goetheanum presents - in terms of its external architecture, in terms of its sculptural and painterly design - is shaped from this spiritual-scientific perspective.

Do we not see in the artistic development of the last generations how art longs for new impulses? Today, we need only look back to the time of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Dürer to see how that ancient conception of art, which strove upwards out of the physical-sensual, had indeed developed to the greatest heights, to depict the physical-sensual in such a way that the physical-sensual reveals the spiritual. One need only think of how human figures are first depicted in the Sistine Madonna, surrounded by the natural world, but how the spirit that embodied this image conjures up spiritual secrets from what it could see with its senses, and how it elevates the sensual so that this sensuality can reveal spiritual secrets to man.

In an age of scientific thinking and scientific research, we have ceased to have the intuitive perceptions that a Raphael or a Michelangelo had, in that they conjured up from the sensual-physical reality that which appeared like a reflection of the spiritual from this physical-sensual reality. Thus we see that in the naturalistic age, art also wanted to become naturalistic. But what is naturalistic art supposed to achieve if it does not unconsciously contain some idealistic factor? Do we still need to somehow transfer what nature presents to us outside onto the canvas or otherwise embody it, for example in drama? Can we really depict the secrets that nature holds in a naturalistic way? No, we cannot. Anyone who has traveled throughout Italy and been exposed to even the most beautiful and greatest works of art and then comes from Italy, let's say, to the top of the Rigi and watches a sunrise, knows immediately that what speaks out of nature is greater than what any painter, any sculptor, any artist could gain from nature. Only when artists, like Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo, could not stop at nature, but conjure up the spiritual from the physical and sensual, is this artistic endeavor justified. But precisely those artists who are perhaps to be taken most seriously in the present have within them the deepest yearning for a new source of art. They feel that the impulse has been exhausted, which consisted of conjuring up the spiritual out of the physical-sensual. When we look back to ancient times of human cultural development - wherever the human gaze looked, it saw the spiritual in natural things, the nymph of the spring in the spring, the spirits of the air in the air. Thus it is a final, I would say a certain human ascent, when now the artists have conjured up a spiritual out of the physical-sensual existence.

Today we stand at a point in the development of the world where the longings of the most serious artistic natures of the present point to the fact that new sources must be opened for the artistic. And so the opposite must enter into the development of human civilization today. The old artists have demystified the spiritual from the physical-sensuous. The spiritual must be revealed by looking at the spiritual world, as anthroposophical spiritual science intends. But just as the artist, if he has artistic feeling, is compelled to reveal the spiritual in the physical-sensuous, so the man who beholds the spiritual has, if he has artistic feeling, the direct, naive need to shape the spiritual into forms, to translate the spiritual into material. The old school of art idealized the sensual; the new school of art will realize the spiritual. This will not be a creation in symbolism. Those who find only one single symbol in it are slandering the Dornach building. There is no symbol in it, but what is directly contemplated is poured out into forms. Everything should work in artistic forms. Those who speak of the symbolism of the Dornach building only show by doing so that they have not really grasped the characteristic style expressed in the way the whole artistic aspect of this building is managed. They have not seen have seen how the artistic spirit of nature herself was sought to be joined with the creative spirit of nature herself in the artistic work of this Dornach building, and then to express oneself artistically in forms towards which this spirit strives.

What was idealizing in the development of art in ancient times will be realizing when it is based on such a spiritual view as is meant by the anthroposophical world view. And this artistry will be naive in the best Goethean sense. As the spiritual researcher looks into the universe, he senses the secrets of existence, and he deeply feels what Goethe expressed from his artistic vision: “When nature begins to reveal her manifest secrets to someone, that person feels a deep longing for her most worthy revelator, art. He to whom the world reveals its secrets in the mind cannot leave these secrets in the mind as they are, just as a child cannot remain at the age of three or five; it must grow older. What is seen in the spirit wants to take shape. What art creates out of spiritual vision is not didactic, it is not symbolic, it is not in straw-like allegories, it is a real standing within life. And this standing within the spirit brings the human ego together with the whole cosmos. Today I have pointed out how those forces in man that lead to his actual human existence are feelings of responsibility towards the world, I could also say feelings of responsibility towards social existence. And I could list many other ways in which these feelings are aroused, by developing those ideas that initially lead the human being into worlds far away and worlds wide, that present him with all the development that the world must undergo in order to reach the summit, the summit of the self. Those who take such ideas into themselves, by incorporating them into their souls, do not merely absorb cold ideas; they take in something that seizes the feeling and the will, something that warms the feeling with that which flows out of the immeasurable greatness of the world. From these ideas, they take what each individual action that they perform places under the responsibility of the world's wisdom-filled guidance. Summarizing all this, one can only say: religious sentiment flows from what is handed down in anthroposophical spiritual science as images, as ideas, from all of this.

From the outset, spiritual science did not want to be something that would stand alongside any religion as a modern religion, especially not alongside Christianity. From the very beginning, it was asserted within anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that Christianity is the religion that encompasses all others, and that for anthroposophy it is important to explain the mystery of Golgotha in the sense in which it is necessary for modern humanity. But through Anthroposophy nothing religious should be placed beside it, other than what is the meaning of the earth itself, coming from the Mystery of Golgotha. Only those who, in a spiritually tyrannical way, want the world-wide mystery of Golgotha to be interpreted in only one sense - namely, their own - can defame anthroposophically oriented spiritual science as something that would be detrimental to Christianity.

But is it not necessary, my dear attendees, that although not in the essence of the mystery of Golgotha, new elements are included in the understanding of Christianity? One looks at the way in which the knowledge and the realization of this Christianity has developed in the course of the 19th century. One need only look back to earlier centuries. Those who can look at history not only in the abstract, but also with feeling, know that Christ Jesus was regarded as something that poured out of higher, supersensible worlds into the physical, sensual world. A connection between the spiritual world and the physical world has been established through the mystery of Golgotha. In older times, this mystery of Golgotha was understood according to the cognitive abilities of those older times. But as the modern age dawned, with its scientific advances, the old understanding gradually became impossible for those who conscientiously want to take the progress of humanity seriously. And so we have witnessed the strange spectacle of precisely the most advanced theologians of the 19th century having lost the Christ as a supersensible being and having arrived at the mere description of the simple man from Nazareth; because of naturalistic thinking, they could not see the Christ in Jesus. For the most modern theology, Jesus became an outstanding human being, perhaps the most outstanding, but that something took place in Jesus through Christ that cannot be grasped merely with the senses has been shown in the entire theological development of the modern age. We need a path back to spiritual science in order to spiritually comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha and the Christ-secret.

What natural science has taken from Christianity for those who conscientiously want to take in this natural science, spiritual science will give back to Christianity for those who need an understanding of this Christianity from the depths of their soul. Just as little as all the progress of natural science could take away from man of the post-Christian era the mystery of Golgotha, just as little will spiritual-scientific progress be able to take away from man that which, out of the religious mood, but illuminated by spiritual-scientific ideas in accordance with the demands of the new time, flows to the divine, to that which is also given through Christ. The modern human being needs a spiritual view as the basis for his art and for his religion. Those who have lost the Christ through modern science have lost him because modern science was not initially a spiritual science. And I would like to remind those who today often slanderously claim that Anthroposophy wants to deliver something detrimental to Christianity: Is it courageous to say, in the face of the greatness of the Mystery of Golgotha, which towers above all other earthly forces and events, that those who seriously endeavor to understand this Mystery of Golgotha, in accordance with this or that science, in accordance with the progress of humanity, are anti-Christian? Is it courageous?

No! Again and again, I see before me that Catholic theology professor, who was my friend in the 1880s and 1890s, who, as a professor of Christian philosophy at a theological faculty, gave a speech about Galileo that fully lived up to Galileo by said at the time: No progress in science should be challenged by those who want to be truly Christian, because in truth everything that science can find of worldly secrets only serves to make people more aware of the magnitude of the wonders of divine guidance in the world, not less. Those are fainthearted who believe that Christianity can be shaken by any scientific progress. No, my dear audience, spiritual science knows: Even if millions of insights come in physical or spiritual fields, the event that gives meaning to the earth will stand in ever greater splendor precisely before spiritual-scientific contemplation.

But here it can also be seen how little impartiality there is in the world today. While one should understand - and if one were impartial, would also understand - that the spiritual-scientific world view is what certain people need in order to be led today to the mystery of Golgotha, anthroposophy, the spiritual-scientific world view, is being slandered. But perhaps this is only because there is too little religion in those who want to take on religion. Should it not be the case that one recognizes in particular the religiousness of the soul mood by the fruits, by the way the people concerned appear in life? Should there not be some phenomena today that show in the most intense way how an elevation, how an internalization of the religious mood is also necessary? Let me give just one small example.

Among the many recent refutations of anthroposophy, there is one in which there is a sentence to which I would like to draw your attention here. I will read it out loud:

Because the consciousness of the mind is lacking, ...

— namely, among anthroposophists, one might think.

... in theosophy there is also no savior of sinners. Despite all the praise and despite the exaltation of Christ to the “Sun-I”, Dr. Steiner's Christ is a completely alien personality to us. Here, too, a certain pantheistic tendency is disconcerting. Anthroposophy starts from the human being, and its goal is the ideal human being.

I have just shown how all of anthroposophy strives for the opposite; but the author of this brochure continues:

This and God apparently coincide. A nine-meter-high statue of the ideal human being is currently being carved in Dornach: with “Luciferian” features at the top and animalistic features at the bottom.

Now, my dear attendees, what is being carved out of wood in Dornach has been seen not by hundreds but by thousands of people. The one who has seen that something is being formed that has 'Luciferic traits above and animal features below' — I cannot do other than recall to the one who has seen this the anecdote that contains an instruction on how someone who comes home in the evening can tell whether he is drunk or sober. The advice was to go to bed and put a hat on the bed. If he sees the hat once, he can consider himself sober; if he sees it twice, he can consider himself drunk. Now, the person who sees the hat twice reminds me of the person who sees that something is being chiseled in Dornach - in reality it is carved out of wood -; the person sees something that is not there at all, because at the top is a completely human face, nothing of Luciferic features, a purely human face, below, there is nothing done at all yet, there is still a block of wood, there will also come human features, but below, there is nothing done at all yet. And then someone comes along who does not say that someone told him this – then one might believe that someone has told a tale – no, someone comes along who claims this as strict truth: a nine-meter-high statue of the ideal human being is currently being carved in Dornach, with Luciferic features at the top and animalistic features at the bottom. Thousands of people have seen that this is an objective untruth, and that it is not even just an objective untruth, but that it is one of the most incredible, idiotic distortions of what is intended. And, my dear attendees, what is more:

“This ideal human being...”, Steiner said to the observers present, “...must necessarily be the true image of Christ.”

Not one of the thousands of onlookers who were there will be able to say that I ever said these words. There are enough witnesses here in this hall who know that I have always said nothing but, carefully weighing my words, that the one I am forming here appears to me, according to spiritual vision, as the one who walked in Palestine. I cannot describe him any differently than he appears to me. I do not force this view on anyone. - Never, ladies and gentlemen, has it been said that what is here in quotation marks: “[...] must necessarily be the true image of Christ”.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is how one approaches the truth - that must be said. The name of the author of this brochure is preceded by the ominous “D.”, which stands for Doctor of Theology. So apparently, here too, as everywhere else, something like this arises from religious sentiments of the present time. Is there not a need for a renewal of people's religious sentiment when something like this can arise from religious teaching today? Can anyone seeking a spark of truth in such a work find such an example of objective untruth?

Oh, my dear assembled guests, what is leading to the fight against the anthroposophical worldview must be sought where one perhaps does not want to seek it: in the comfortable habits of thought and feeling of the present. I must say, quite apart from how one feels about the fact that the attack is directed against one's own cause, it can hurt, really hurt, when books are written today that are inspired by such a sense of truth. We need an increase of the sense of truth, of the sense of truth, and with it precisely an increase of the religious sense of people today.

And finally, my dear attendees:

Are people of such a nature allowed to claim that anthroposophists indulge in illusions?

Well, no one will find such an illusion in me. Above, one will find a human head, which has absolutely nothing of Lucifer, which is preserved from everything Luciferian; below, a block of wood that has not yet been worked at all. Anyone who looks at this with such an illusion that they see Luciferic features at the top and animal features at the bottom, anyone who can indulge in these illusions, should truly not ascribe to the anthroposophically oriented spiritual scientists a tendency towards illusions. The illusions may lie precisely with those who, out of these very comfortable illusions, would like to fight anthroposophy today.

Ultimately, everything that arises from such foundations is ultimately connected with what has been drawn upon as the materialistic view of the world. And we must go beyond this materialistic view. No matter how imperfectly anthroposophically oriented spiritual science may be today, it only wants to be a beginning, but a beginning that has within it the germination of vigorous further work in the fields of science, art and religion, a vigorous continuation that will be able to bring to people, precisely in these three fields, that which is demanded from the deepest longings of the human soul in the present, which will be demanded more and more in the future, and which ultimately also underlies the core of the burning social question. We must enter into true reality. The materialistically conceived realities that have formed the content of the world views of the last centuries and especially decades are not the true realities.

The true realities must be sought in ways such as those that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science at least attempts; however imperfect it may still be today; for the reality in which man wants to immerse himself when he wants to create something real, he does not find it if he only strives materially, if he does not strive spiritually. But he strives spiritually only when he does not allow a spirit hostile to human knowledge to be placed at the boundaries of so-called knowledge of nature, which says: No entry to the spiritual worlds. No, when he courageously fights his way out of his own strength to see the true inscription at the boundaries of knowledge of nature. This true inscription comes from the spirit to which man actually belongs, and it reads: Welcome the entry into the spiritual world at the boundaries of the knowledge of nature. For it is true, as it sounds from an important work of poetry to him who does not want to see the spiritual depth of the world: Your heart is closed, your mind is dead. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants nothing more than to find those counsels for the human soul and spirit that will lead to the heart being opened and the mind being enlivened, because through the closed heart, through the dead mind, we only enter into the material world. We can only enter into true reality through the spirit, when the mind is illuminated by the light of the spirit, when the heart opens to the true love of the world that comes from spiritual knowledge, and which brings the I into connection with the whole whole universe and thus brings together the human spirit in cognition, feeling and will in right responsibility, in right love for the universe with the whole of being in the universe - in cognition, in the life of the beautiful, in social life.

“An interview with Dr. Steiner” from the report on the fire in the Basler “National-Zeitung” of Tuesday, January 2, 1923.

We are sitting in the secretariat of Villa Friedwart, which is the center from which contact is established with anthroposophists all over the world. Our Swiss poet Albert Steffen enters the room, and as we had expressed the wish to speak to Dr. Steiner himself, he has already picked up the telephone. We hear his affirmative reply, and a few minutes later, under his guidance, we enter the house of the much-debated man, whose work, at least the visible part of it, which took ten years of tireless labor to create, was destroyed in a single night. He receives us in his small room, whose unadorned walls are painted a deep violet blue. We sit down at the round table made of old walnut. The lined face of the man, who is probably in his sixties, shows energy and self-control. “I will only tell you facts,” he replied when asked about the questions.

The cause of the fire.

I am not mentioning all the rumors and the threats. What is important is that the fire, which had probably been developing behind the wall in the interior construction for two hours, was not caused by a short circuit or any kind of carelessness. The fuses were intact throughout. The lights continued to burn unchanged. The cables were laid in fireproof armored steel conduits. There were no cables at the exact point where the fire was. But we did find out that at 7 o'clock the lady who used the adjoining room had found the mirror that was hanging very close to the later site of the fire, thrown down and smashed. It was easy to enter this room without being noticed, all the easier because an auxiliary scaffold on the wall made it easy to climb in from the ground. The facts presented point to arson from outside.¹This suspicion was expressed by many people around the Goetheanum in Dornach and Arlesheim.

In answer to our question:

“How do you intend to continue the work?”

Dr. Steiner replied: “The work accomplished in ten years by my co-workers in and outside the Anthroposophical Society, and at enormous sacrifice, has indeed been destroyed. But the work continues undeterred. This evening at 5 o'clock, the Three Kings play will take place in the lecture hall of the carpentry workshop, followed by another lecture for the course participants. As far as the building is concerned, we are now as far as we were ten years ago, only richer in experience.

“Do you plan to rebuild?”

Absolutely. As far back as I can remember, the building is insured for 3.5 million with the Canton of Solothurn's fire insurance. Of this, 2,600,000 francs are for the wooden superstructure and 900,000 francs for the concrete substructure. In addition, there is the insurance with “Helvetia” for the valuable furniture, organ, harmonium, pianos and very precious Persian carpets. Of course, the sum is only a quarter of the cost, especially if you include the artistic work of the many who had been members of our community for years. So I will have to build differently and more modestly, and no longer out of wood. But the basic artistic tendency remains.

“Will you also get the volunteers back?”

When it becomes known what happened here and that we are building again, people from all over the world will come back of their own accord and stand by my side.

• 1. On May 25, 1924, Rudolf Steiner said in Paris: “But it is an officially recognized fact that the Goetheanum was set on fire by opponents.”

and the 1st ordinary general assembly of the Johannesbau-Verein Dornach

[...]

Christian Schuler: It may be felt to be missing that nothing has been said about whether the construction project can be taken in hand in such a way that it will be completed next year. From what we have heard today, the available funds are very modest. It will not be easy to raise money for the building site in Munich. It was assumed earlier that the funds would come together easily. Dr. Noll got the ball rolling at the time, but in my opinion the question of the funds has not yet been sufficiently resolved to allow construction to begin quickly. I also find the number of 294 contributing members to be very low. In my opinion, every member of the Anthroposophical Society should also be a contributing member of the Johannesbau Association. It will only be a small contribution of 1 mark per week. Workers have often done this. I don't know why money is not flowing at all in our society. If we want to build, we must have money. The land in Munich is dead capital. We are very pleased that the Swiss have taken the matter so energetically into their own hands, but in view of the great responsibility we have, we must vigorously seek ways and means to get things moving, so that we do not have the feeling, as we do in Munich, that a paralysis has set in.

It has been asked whether we have no members who could do something themselves [in construction]. That is a question of “building on our own account”. Nothing has been said about that today. All those who have come here would like to hear something [concrete]. It has been said that the whole thing has to be ready by next year. That has been said for several years. If it has to be done so quickly, the [necessary] means and ways must also be found, and this must be done more energetically than before. Until now, I have not been too enthusiastic about building on one's own initiative, because it is usually too expensive. But now I have changed my mind, because a lot of it can be done in wood. So it might be quite good if one or the other could be said, so that suggestions are given on how to continue the work.

Everything that can be done with the means of the physical plan should be energetically implemented to get things moving and to finish quickly. Perhaps the individual lodge boards could be persuaded to do something more on the matter. Or the board of the Johannesbau Association should address the individual boards in short circulars so that they are repeatedly reminded of the construction. This does not in any way constitute coercion. If we communicate that we are now planning to do this or that, one or other of them will still feel that it is necessary to do what is to be done as soon as possible.

[...]

Rudolf Steiner: Mr. Schuler should be informed that the Johannesbau is not being built with the funds that have been read here today. It could never be built from that, but rather that the actual capital for building the theosophical-artistic fund is at stake, and that the Munich property is basically the very least that will be used to carry out the construction. The Munich property is out of the question because it only belongs partly to the Johannesbau-Verein. Only about 100,000 marks would remain.

Rudolf Steiner: If someone wants to write this information [about the progress of the work], it can be included in the reports.

[...]

Alfred Meebold: Could we learn a little more about the symbolism that is to be expressed in the building? It would be particularly desirable for foreigners.

Sophie Stinde: Talking about the different types of wood to be used in the construction, I would find that a little indiscreet.

Rudolf Steiner: This is not a matter of discretion or indiscretion. But the question that has been raised here is one that basically cannot really be answered in certain abstract words and concepts. If something were desirable, it would be that, once we have reached the point where photographic images are taken from different sides and perhaps also from points inside. But we would like to get rid of the kind of occult interpretation that is based on the abstract discussion of symbols. The things are not such that they can be given out in this way. They can be looked at. They are intended to be artistic-occult, not theoretically occult. This mistake should be avoided in this building, which has always been made in abstract theoretical occultism in recent decades. You just have things that you can't talk about, but that you look at and let take effect on you as you look at them. All you can say about the things are poverties.

Let us take a slightly different example: You see, one of the main objections raised by a man who should know or at least be able to judge was that people said: You want good acoustics, and you build the form that experience has shown to have the worst acoustics. A specialist who is also close to us, whom I happened to speak to in the railway carriage, says – I will just quote this saying, as we already know the reality and do not need advice from left or right, I just want to quote it as a historical moment – he said he could not believe that a specialist would say this; at most we can have too much acoustics, but never too little.

It is not considered that the columns are connected by a kind of decorative architecture that has not existed before. According to occult principles, a column architecture is decoratively applied, which in turn represents occult wave currents that are related to the movement of sound in space, so that the line is not just shaped because of the reasons that have been given in construction so far, but because the word takes a certain path, and these lines follow the word. This expresses what is meant in an infinitely poor way, because such a line fulfills a whole range of other demands as well. Today it would not be possible to clarify what is meant without writing entire libraries. But the thing is not there to be theorized about, but to be tasted, to be looked at.

Perhaps when we are ready in six to eight weeks, we will be able to photograph individual parts that can be delivered to the lodges in ten to twelve weeks. It might be good if we could provide photographic images. That would be an explanation in pictures, but not in words. Talking about the matter would be like making lines with black ink where one should paint with colors.

Marie von Sivers draws attention to imitations of the building impulse in other sections of the TG (England, France), which will be published in Vahan, and warns against the distribution of photographs of the building.

Rudolf Steiner: This also needs to be taken into account. It is really the case, we have to take it seriously. After the last various events, what is now known as the Theosophical Society in the world is really more or less a farce. It really needs to be taken into account that an infinite amount of falsehood is cultivated there. You see, it is unpleasant to discuss this. They [the Theosophists] have no idea of what is to happen here, because an architectural style is to be born with the temple. They have no ideas of their own, and when they imitate, they imitate foolish things. Consider that the fact that we are building in Dornach has put us in a position to build in wood. This brings an artistic law to bear. It is only now coming into play, as we hold back and keep it in flux.

The abstract thinker believes it makes no difference whether the building is made of stone or wood. The columns are now, because they are made of wood, angular; they would be round if they were made of stone. One could experience it now, if one only imitates the symbols in the abstract and does not know that the wood must be angular and the stone must be round, that one imitates our angular columns in wood in stone and also makes them angular, which would of course be a mistake.

But it could well happen that we would be deprived not only of the form but also of the idea and that it would be executed in the wrong way. We really do depend a little on the confluence of feelings. As long as the building is not finished, we cannot work with concepts, we have to work with feelings. We must have the opportunity to keep things flowing. There can be no explanation that defines the matter. Things that are considered in the broadest sense can still change their form. Just yesterday I told someone that we are only now quite certain that a unified whole will emerge. Because the dome structure, as it was originally designed, the dome structure fits into the environment. If the building had come to Tyrol, the form would not have been retained. These things are extremely complicated. It is difficult to put things into words. Much of what we want becomes most beautiful when we are forced as little as possible to have the unpleasant feeling of having to put it into words artificially. When you press such things into words, your tongue gets stuck in your teeth and there is an extraordinarily bitter taste in your mouth.

My dear friends!

On Saturday we laid the foundation stone of our building in Dornach, and with the permission of the Johannesbau-Verein I would like to take this opportunity to say a few words about this act. I would like to do this for the simple reason that one must feel that this act was a very responsible one. And in a way, we can say that this act spoke a clear karma. A karma that may only gradually come to light. Among other things, a conversation that took place this morning may have revealed that the laying of the foundation stone took place exactly seven years after the branch here in Basel was inaugurated. You can already sense that, in a sense, many forces are at play in all these matters that can only be discovered or, better said, named, little by little.

This laying of the foundation stone must be perceived as a responsible act for the simple reason that we were indeed right to remember last night - if, as I said, not in arrogance, but in humility and humility and modesty - to have also laid the cornerstone for our awareness that what we want fits - to put it very modestly - into what we feel is our mission on earth. And then, what we have done really does grant that seriousness and dignity that I tried to draw attention to at the laying of the foundation stone the day before yesterday.

We associate the stone we have been handling with the symbol of our soul, which we entrust to the earth mission, so to speak. And it was also right to emphasize on this occasion that what this stone is to be the cornerstone of must truly be our answer to a general cry that is currently going through the spiritual life of humanity. This cry is like a question from a frightened humanity. It is not always understood, my dear friends. But it can be understood, my dear friends, in the most diverse symptoms, which need only be viewed in their true light.

Take something like this in your hands – I am just saying in other words what I said at the laying of the foundation stone – like the little book of one of the currently most famous researchers, Dr. Eucken, that book: Can We Still Be Christians? you will hear from such a little book not only the soul of a single person, but the anguished, ignorant soul of humanity today, which thinks it knows. The anguished soul, which is afraid of the true answers and yet ignorant of humanity. The whole book, which is boring enough as it is, is full of talk of spirit and spiritual striving, and at the same time, the book is characterized by the clear trait that is typical of our time: the author does not know what he is talking about. It can be painful, but one finds that the call for truthfulness is necessary for humanity. People read the beautiful phrases, which sometimes sound quite theosophical, but one must read such things a little more deeply if one wants to understand their significance for spiritual life. And there I would like to suggest with a few words how one can read them. The call for truthfulness in the face of the lying culture of the present is raised in a way that disturbs people. But one passage of this book must be compared with two other passages.

For example, at one point in the book we find the same Rudolf Eucken saying that contemporary human consciousness can no longer endure the fact that certain religious circles speak of demons. The fact that demons are spoken of is accepted as a matter in relation to which contemporary human consciousness can only shrug its shoulders. Of course, it has long since gone beyond that. We no longer talk about demons; that is childish. Let us now compare this with another passage in the book, which is not far removed, only so far removed that the learned, who think they know, can forget what is said in the first passage. This second passage says: Demonic powers arise through the touching of the divine with the soul of man. This is said by the person who has been awarded the Nobel Prize, the greatest honor that can be given for achievements in the field of soul research.

Today's science does not pay attention to the infinite inner hypocrisy that lies in saying on the one hand: We have long since gone beyond demons, and on the other hand: Demonic powers arise when the divine touches the soul of man. The profound dishonesty, the unconscious profound dishonesty of our entire thinking, feeling and willing is expressed in this. And then in a third place the author cries out for the truth and the shaping of the truth in our culture.

One must enter a little into the intimacies, then one will realize what is meant by the words that the cry of the human soul is present in the unconscious depths of the soul, but that an answer can only be given where the spiritual life is really present, where writing is done concretely from the spirit, but not where it is only written about the spirit in general, as it still is by the best of our contemporaries.

There one will feel for what the cornerstone has been laid for our truthful construction. One must say: One wonders how the human souls of the present, who are searching for understanding of the consciousness of the present, are not dismayed when they perceive these things. But they do not see it, even when they pick up a widely read weekly magazine and a doctor in this magazine of the present talks about how such things as Spinoza's intellectual life should be depicted in a film so that it becomes clear to people, and how it should be grouped in the film. It is impossible to deal with abstract concepts in film so that humanity can finally get a vivid picture of Spinoza's world view!

These are things that only cause consternation in those souls who understand the course of intellectual life. But I do not see this, and we will not see the consternation that we must have when we get used to taking in the most serious thing for which the cornerstone should be laid! Then we shall grasp the feeling that with this stone we have made a symbol of that which the present time so urgently needs: an answer to the cry of the human soul, which shrinks in fear from knowledge. Only then shall we feel this seriousness, which is called for.

We know what we have to do and why this stone, which is to signify knowledge, love and strength, must also become a stumbling block and an offence for many opponents. Let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that the days of difficulty are over; I do not want to evoke that belief. On the other hand, let our confidence in the souls grow that we will overcome the difficulties. The toad-like natures will emerge from all sides, and this building will be a stumbling block and an offence to them. Therefore, we will need proper vigilance and stand bravely at our post!

Perhaps this laying of the foundation stone will only be the beginning of what we have to achieve for the truth and for living out the truth. That is why I wanted to express in words, my dear friends, what I was able to share with you for the first time at this laying of the foundation stone, which could be called the macrocosmic echo of that prayer that can be addressed as the most important event of the fourth period of our post-Atlantic development. Then, little by little, the fifth gospel will be discovered from the mysterious writing, which must be added to the other gospels in the fifth period.

Then the eternal prayer that resounds in the microcosm as the Lord's Prayer and that is included in the Gospels will reach us from the fifth gospel as the Lord's Prayer of Knowledge in contrast to the Lord's Prayer of the Agony of Redemption. Yes, what the agony of redemption is in the fourth period, that is knowledge in the fifth. If humanity in the fifth period had to wither away the realization that in the place of faith, the satisfaction of the spiritual, comes unbelief, emptiness. And this Lord's Prayer of knowledge is expressed in the words of our language:

Amen!
The evils prevail,
Witnesses of dissolving egoism,
guilt of selfhood incurred by others,
experienced in our daily bread,
in which Heaven's Will does not prevail,
since man has separated himself from your kingdom
and forgot your name,
you Fathers in the heavens.

It sounds as if it is resounding from the past to the future, but transposing the sound to the macrocosmic level, that which, as the Lord's Prayer of Knowledge, must enter into our souls. Just as inner bliss arose in the fourth period from the Lord's Prayer, so that which humanity needs from the present point on will be able to flow from this Lord's Prayer of Knowledge, which shows us in the structure of its individual sentences why the evils prevail, why man needs to rebuild his body.

What do evils mean in the face of eternity, through which man builds up his physical body from the daily bread? We know that he has descended into these deep spheres, and we must try to understand how a person works his way out in the course of earthly evolution - works out as an ego - in the way that must be out of freedom, in order to once again gain an understanding of the divine spiritual powers that are weaving through the world.

Because I wanted to point out the seriousness of the times in this way, and because I want to draw attention to the fact that we are only at the beginning of the difficulties and want to start our work with seriousness and dignity, but also with firm confidence in the spiritual victory, I have therefore asked the Johannesbau-Verein once again today asked the Johannesbau-Verein to repeat what I tried to write on Saturday in the face of the ruling elements in the open air to our assembled friends, so that this seriousness and dignity live in the souls, and so that we take it with us in this time as something we do not want to forget.

A soul who sees the things that our outer movement is going through and that tend to make one criticize can ask: How is this criticism compatible with the development of the positivity that we're supposed to develop as a basic exercise?

In earlier times they didn't have as many pupils cultivating the esoteric life as we do now. Various forces are combating our kind of esoteric life. Pupils must take esoteric life seriously and worthily. We should realize how tremendously important the step from the exoteric life into the esoteric one is. An esoteric must gradually see exoteric life in an entirely different light.

For example, we can all remember that we played as kids and that we took this play seriously. Let's ask ourselves: If we adults wanted to play with kids how would we do it? Of course we could play with kids and maybe even better than they, because we can use our intellect for this. But we would have to put ourselves in a different soul state to really be in the playing activity.

An esoteric has a relation to outer life that's quite similar to the one that an adult has to the play of children. When he returns to outer exoteric life from esoteric exercises he'll gradually look upon the former as if he wanted to play with children as an adult. And just as an adult must put himself in another soul state, so an esoteric feels that he's put into another soul state when he goes over to exoteric life. An esoteric won't be less capable in everyday life, but will stand in it in a more capable and vigorous way than he did before he got into esotericism. Thus the transition from exoteric to esoteric life is a unique incision into human life, and esoteric life can't be taken seriously and worthily enough.

Let's take a closer look at esoteric life. We know that various changes take place in our soul life through the exercises we received. For instance, the passions that a man had before get stronger. Old inclinations, drives and passions one thought one had overcome and put aside reemerge from the dark shafts of soul life and assert themselves vehemently. Or an esoteric often thoughtlessly does something which he would have been ashamed of before the start of his esoteric training or wouldn't have done at all. His antipathies and sympathies for people become stronger than before; his whole soul life becomes stirred up. In short, a man gets to know what he's really like in his soul depths so that he has real self-knowledge. Therefore strict and strong self-control is indispensable for an esoteric pupil.

If the exercises are continued energetically and patiently the changes in an esoteric's soul life can be about as follows. At first he may be that nothing special results from the exercises in concentration and meditation. But one should realize that the first experiences can be so fine and subtle that they can only be noticed by the use of a certain attentiveness. For instance, it could be that an esoteric in the midst of his everyday life suddenly has a thought that seems to spring out of his other thought life, that obviously doesn't belong to this everyday life—a thought that's about his own being. Such a thought flits by unnoticed if there isn't enough attentiveness there. The important and necessary thing is to become attentive enough to notice thoughts that seem to fall out of one's ordinary thought life, and that we become aware that possibly grotesque thoughts rise in our soul without our ordinary waking ego-consciousness being involved. Thereby we become aware that something lives behind our ordinary ego that we hadn't known previously, that something is active behind this ego which weaves thoughts. If we direct more and more attentiveness towards these thoughts that fall out of everyday life, they'll appear with increasing frequency, and eventually we'll be able to experience them at will. Then a pupil sees as through a door that this weaving on what one what one is used to calling the thought body, is going on continuously. Every pupil will someday experience this is he works on patiently and energetically. But he won't arrive at such experiences if he stops doing exercises. Hindrances of the outer and inner life may induce a pupil to stop doing his exercises. Difficulties that oppose esoteric life can arise outwardly, and resistance to it can also arise from weakness and laziness. If a pupil succumbs to these and doesn't continue on the path, the fruit of his previous esoteric striving remain for him, but he can't get any further. Such weakness can't develop if esoteric life is cultivated rightly, for firmness and perseverance are enveloped therein which prevent one from giving up on one's original resolve.

So if a pupil does the exercises that were given him energetically and patiently and then creates the quiet in which his consciousness is quite empty, this will eventually lead to experiences from the spiritual world. The attitude of soul with which a pupil receives revelations is also quite important. He should be thankful to the divine, spiritual hierarchies for every thought and experience form the super-sensible realm. He should develop such thankful feelings ever more intensely; an honest cultivation of them may give him more revelations and it brings him forward. A pupil must put himself into a prayerful mood that prepares him to receive revelations rightly. If an experience presents itself from the spiritual world he should realize that something was given through grace.

In the last ten years the masters' grace has brought a great many spiritual truths into exoteric and esoteric theosophical life. An enormous spiritual treasure has been entrusted to us during this time, so that for instance, it may be hard for some souls to assimilate everything that's been said about the four Gospels. Some souls even have a negative attitude to this treasure, and they express their dislike for it. Such an attitude is understandable, for one has to admit that it's hard to master the given teachings. But after all, it's our task to work our way through to an ever more comprehensive understanding of Christ and to penetrate ever deeper into the Mystery of Golgotha. All statement of Krishna or Elijah and all wisdom of past times flowed into this. Therefore we shouldn't slacken but should pull ourselves together, work willingly, learn and learn again. We must master page after page of a lecture cycle and we should never let up.

However, the earth is a battlefield for Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers who can take over human beings. What do these powers tell each other? They say: There are lazy souls who don't want to go along with what flowed down from spiritual worlds. We can work on them and capture them.

And so these beings take possession of such souls and draw them away from the path by leading them into illusions and errors and making them into agents for their adversarial work. Whereas, if we work hard and steadily, our path is the straight line from Krishna—if we don't want to go further back—to Buddha, Elijah, John and Christ. If we strive seriously and apply thought power, effort and time to understand everything that was and is being said about Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha, we'll be equal to the attacks of the adversarial forces that are trying to stop esoterics' development. But all those who slacken and don't want to keep up succumb to the attacks of the adversarial powers. They're the ones who become opponents of our movement and who create the increasing number of hindrances that we've noted over the years.

Another thing that esoterics should especially cultivate is a feeling for truth. Nothing should ever hinder us from saying the truth freely and openly. Every attempt to deviate from the truth must be paid for at some point … But there's one thing we can do, and this shall be the answer to the question we asked at the beginning: Even if we must condemn a man's deeds, we shouldn't criticize the man himself, but love him. Whether or not we really love him will become evident in the moments of our meditation. Take none of the sympathies and antipathies and the little worries and so on into the spiritual worlds—this will open them for us and let us get into them in the right way.

The example of playing children showed us how an esoteric pupil is related to exoteric life, and that he can play better than kids because he connects himself with the latter, rather than with the toys. The important thing is his soul attitude and his connection with the children, and not the toys. That's the way things are on the esoteric path also. There, the pupil gets into a different relation to his surroundings. He looks at the latter differently than before. In a way, he's outgrown them and yet he understands them better. We shouldn't lose interest in things in the outer world, although an esoteric training tends to make one lose interest in what formerly interested one.

A man out in life likes some men more than others. He, of course, tends to either ignore the defects of someone he likes or to excuse them much more easily than in someone he doesn't like. This attitude must be changed in an esoteric. His relation to his fellow men must become more impersonal. This shouldn't happen overnight; that wouldn't even be right, for karmic connections could be torn thereby. But he must gradually get to the point where he also wants to help people he doesn't like. This makes him see others' defects—also those of loved ones—more clearly than before, but that doesn't do any harm; it gets evened out again through esoteric training.

Our soul mood really becomes different. Taking another look at what happens to us in the moments when we end our meditations it's not indifferent whether this playing in of the spiritual world happens right after the meditation or only later on in daily life, and also whether this is the result of meditation or whether it's only atavistic clairvoyance, clairaudience or a reflection of visions.

It's best for our soul life if these transitions only play in fleetingly and are easily forgotten. The main thing for an esoteric is to learn to pay attention to this brief lighting up of the spiritual world. Through esoteric training our thinking becomes finer, more spiritual and more independent of the brain. Look at how important the concepts of time and space are for human feelings. And yet time and space are maya in the spiritual world. An esoteric pupil in the midst of exoteric life may suddenly get the feeling that it's not he who's thinking at this moment but that he's perceiving his thought body and the thoughts that are weaving and working in it. He'll have the intense feeling: Something is thinking in me. This weaving and working of thoughts is always present in our subconsciousness, but we only become aware of it at special moments. The feeling that something spiritual wants to think, feel and will in us must increasingly awaken. Someone could ask: Isn't that a contradiction when we're told to receive everything with full consciousness, and now we hear that the I and thoughts work in our subconsciousness? Such questions arise from today's brutal logical thinking—not only brutal with respect to men, but also brutal with respect to thinking. However an esoteric must learn to think subtly and he must be aware that everything becomes transformed in esoteric life.

In sensory life a man is aware of his three soul forces—thinking, feeling and willing—through which the soul works; sentient, intellectual, and consciousness souls. These three soul members seem to mingle when one goes into higher worlds, and yet they're separate. This seems contradictory. But one should know that the three soul members are never completely separate, although each seems to exist by itself.

All of a man's desires, passions and drives surge in his sentient soul. But a man had to have something as a counterpole for his egoity. The powers who led human evolution saw this, and so they placed fear in man's sentient soul. A man had to have fear, otherwise he would have grabbed everything in sight and his egoity would have become too strong. Ancient pedagogues were well aware of this, and the telling of fairy tales and ghost stories were part of the education. Children aren't told ghost stories in school today, but this is necessary for a child's soul to a certain extent so that amazement is aroused in it, because reverence for something unknown develops from this. A child who was never told about something unknown and great can never feel devotion in later life. An esoteric must consciously transform fear into reverence, piety, devotion and an ability to sacrifice. When one goes into spiritual worlds, fear must be transformed into reverence; that's why it's good to cultivate it on the physical plane. But if the feeling of fear in man is exaggerated and the ego isn't strong enough to keep the fear from taking hold of not only the soul but also of the physical body, violent rages can arise, among other things. This can always be ascribed to a weak ego. People who have these are afraid of water and other things that don't hang together. This is a wrong working in of spiritual forces upon the soul and body.

The basic condition for the intellectual soul is cleverness, which is often crossed through by sympathy. It is odd that these poles confront each other in the intellectual soul. The intellect is often crossed through and influenced by sympathy. A placing of oneself into other beings, a feeling of sorrow and joy as if it were our own, is something that should be attained through conscious meditations. We must arrive at the feeling that we're all a unity, and we must learn to feel that time and space become something separate. For instance, a mother will have different attitudes towards her child's pains at the ages of one, three, and twenty. She also feels differently about her own child than about someone else's. A mother feels differently because she's connected with her child, is a unity with him or her, just as we're a piece of the unity of spiritual worlds. One also sees that maya changes through time and space and that thereby one's soul sympathy changes.

We'll find that with such sympathy we often feel a tremendous bliss. But we shouldn't give in to this mood. This should just be the main feeling when we become free of the body, that is, that we don't feel in the physical body but in meditation; and then enjoy the tremendous bliss of working creatively in the world.

This blissful feeling creates the greatest egoity, and that's why it's only beneficial through meditation. In physical existence we should bear everything that destiny places on us with equanimity, and we should learn to feel as if all of this didn't concern us at all, and take it as calmly as if our body was foreign to us. We must always awaken the feeling in us that we can be just as glad about the progress of others as about our own, and that it's not as if we were specially chosen to make progress. It's immaterial for world evolution who make the progress, but for us the combating and transformation of egoism is the important thing.

The one pole of the consciousness soul is the feeling of being able to exclude oneself, and the other pole that projects in from the spiritual world is conscience. This keeps us from doing things that disagree with moral laws. We must let ourselves be guided by our conscience, and not act according to the principle of the statesman of whom one says that although he seemed to let himself be led by his horses, he nevertheless directed these horses where he wanted them to go.

We must see to it that we develop conscience in the right way on the physical plane; it's only what one has acquired that one can take into spiritual worlds. Conscience changes through our meditations. The hardest stage for an occultist is the one where he's bereft of conscience. A man must have advanced a great deal here, must have cleared ambition and vanity out of his soul—those worst of all soul forces that can always drag him down again; he must have transformed them completely.

Being “without conscience” is a feeling of being completely free of one's body in the sense of higher self-knowledge, in order only then to be able to feel like a center for the reception of truths from the spiritual world. We must learn to lead a double life, to have the feeling that we're carrying our physical body around like a piece of wood. An esoteric must learn to feel that his whole body is an organ for thinking, feeling and willing.

He must get to the point where he is not only thinking with his brain that's encased in a hard skull, but with all parts of his body; for instance, hands are better organs for thinking than the brain. He must gradually spiritualize the physical to such an extent that everything becomes a mere instrument for him. He must get to the point where he looks at his etheric or physical hands without seeing them, just as he now sees neither his eyes nor his brain. Just as we feel that an ax that we take in our hand is something external, so the hand must also be felt as something that does not belong to us. We must be the driving factor that directs the hand as an instrument with which we work.

We must develop everything in us beyond the corporeal and spiritualize ourselves so much that we become like our archetype.

In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
The eyes of sense,
That through them I may see
The lights of bodies.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
Reason and sensation
And feeling and will,
That through them I may perceive bodies
And act upon them.
In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.
And I will incorporate into my spirit
The super-sensible eyes
That through them I may behold the light of spirits.
And I will imprint in my spirit
Wisdom and power and love,
So that through me the spirits may act
And I become a self-conscious organ
Of their deeds.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.

Our exercises are suited to bring us into the spiritual world. We're also in the spiritual world at night, but not consciously. Why not? Because we are in the habit of perceiving through physical senses, and we're too weak to develop consciousness without this. What are these sense perceptions really? They also contain what we can attain with a higher consciousness: imaginations or pictures of higher reality, inspirations through which spiritual beings disclose themselves to us and the intuitions through which we become united with divine beings. All of this is contained in the percept, but it doesn't go into us, and when we investigate why this is so we find that it's Lucifer who burns it with the fire of our passions, drives and desires. Lucifer has made his home in the heart, and that's where the burning of the imaginations, inspirations and intuitions that underlie sensory things takes place, for pictures of spiritual beings press into us with every breath, with every perception. At the beginning of the Lemurian epoch when what the Bible describes as the battle between the Elohim and Lucifer took place, the latter mixed himself and his fire into man's heart.

But the heart had been created by the Elohim to be their dwelling. Something can be small in the physical world and be big in the spiritual world and vice versa. Thus the heart is only a small thing physically, and anatomists think that it's still the same thing when it's taken out of the body, but in reality the heart is something that's very big in the spiritual world, and it was supposed to be the Elohim's dwelling. But when Lucifer moved into the human heart the Elohim kept a place for themselves in it, they can still live in it and this becomes manifest in human life as the voice of conscience. Where this speaks something is speaking that doesn't belong to Lucifer with his consuming fire; a direct inspiration of the Gods still gets to men in it. And we see that this voice of conscience became objective for men at important points in human history and stood before them. That is how it was with Moses, on whose soul the destiny of his whole tribe pressed. He climbed up Mt. Sinai; he heard the voice of his God in the burning thorn bush (in the fire that Lucifer kindled), who later gave him the commandments on Mt. Sinai that became the foundation of all later human laws.

After Lucifer had taken over the human heart in this way the Elohim had to place a counterweight on the other scale pan of the cosmic world order. This happened in the Atlantean epoch when Ahriman with all munitions was entrenched in man's brain by the Elohim to bring his cooling effect against luciferic fire to bear there. And the part of the fire that burns the imaginations, inspirations and intuitions of percepts that Ahriman cools down becomes thoughts and ideas in men.

Lovelessness is a particularly good fuel for Lucifer. Ancient initiates always knew that Lucifer with his fire thrones in our heart and that Ahriman in the head cools this fire, and a last remnant of this is in Aristotle's statement that warmth goes from the heart to the head and is cooled there.

Now one could object that it's rather strange that both Lucifer and Gods live in our heart. It sounds as if there was only one heart in the world, and yet there are just as many hearts as there are men. We run into a riddle here that's one of the smallest ones an occultist encounters, and that is: How have many arisen out of one? We don't intend to give the solution to this riddle here, but one can try to press ever further into it through meditative reflection.

(The verse in the lesson from March 5th 1914 in Stuttgart, is included here for reference.)

To things I turn myself
I turn myself with ray senses;—
Sense existence, you deceive me!—
What flees existence as nothing:
For you it's existence and reality;
May what must seem like nothing to you
Be disclosed to my inner life.—

(I must attain this: it's the taking of a position towards the new, outer world.)

Spirit light warm me
Let me feel myself volitionally in you.
Well thought, truly known things
How does shining I experience you
May weaving of error, badly thought things
Show itself to shining soul
That I may be weaving in myself.

(That's a questioning and experiencing in the new existence within.)

Shining I and luminous soul (- oneself -)
Floats over real developing being
What was thought, what was known
Now becomes dense spirit existence
And what seems like existence to the senses
Lives in the ocean of divine reality
Like aery existential bubbles.

(In anticipation of truth. It's a guessing, a feeling of the new self.)

When elaborated each of these strophes contains the same thing that's successively compressed in our rosicrucian verse in the ten words:

Ex Deo nascimur,
In Christo morimur,
Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus