The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In our present civilization we need, above all, a new knowledge of Christ. This new Christ knowledge is to be gained increasingly through the effects upon us of the science of the spirit. Much, however, that today bears the official seal of Christianity is antagonistic to this new knowledge. It must come to be realized that a school of unselfishness is needed in our present culture. A renewing of responsibility, a deepening of man's moral life, can come only through a training in unselfishness, and under the conditions of the present age only those can go through this school who have won for themselves an understanding of real, all-pervading selflessness.

We can search through the entire evolution of the world without finding a deeper understanding of selflessness than that offered by Christ's appearance upon earth. To know Christ is to go through the school of unselfishness, and to become acquainted with all those incentives to human development that fall gently into our souls, warming and animating every unselfish inclination within us, arousing it from passive to active soul life.

Under the influence of materialism the natural unselfishness of mankind was lost to an extent that will be fully realized only in the distant future. But by contemplating the Mystery of Golgotha, by permeating our knowledge of it with all our feeling, we may acquire again, with our whole soul-being, an education in selflessness. We may say that what Christ did for earthly evolution was included in the fundamental impulse of selflessness, and what He may become for the conscious development of the human soul is the school of unselfishness. We shall best realize this if we consider the Mystery of Golgotha in its most inclusive connection.

This mystery, as we know it, took place once in the physical evolution of the earth. The Being whom we acknowledge as the Christ clothed Himself once in a human body, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. But this act was preceded by three preparatory steps. Three times earlier something of a similar nature occurred, not as yet on earth but in the spiritual world, and we have in a sense, three Mysteries of Golgotha that had not yet been fulfilled upon the physical plane. Only the fourth took place in the physical realm, as related in the Gospels and in the Pauline Epistles. This greatest of earthly events was prepared for by three supramundane acts, one taking place in the old Lemurian period and two in the Atlantean. Although these three preparatory events occurred in the supramundane sphere, their power descended to the earth; we shall try to understand the effect of these forces upon human evolution.

In relation to our moral life, our understanding of the world, and in relation to all the activities of our consciousness soul, we must first become selfless. This is a duty of our present culture to the future. Mankind must become more and more selfless; therein lies the future of right living, and of all the deeds of love possible to earthly humanity. Our conscious life is and must be on its way to unselfishness. In a certain connection, essential unselfishness already exists in us, and it would be the greatest misfortune for earthly man if certain sections of his being were as self-seeking as he still is in his moral, intellectual and emotional life. If the same degree of selfishness could take over our senses, it would be a great misfortune because our senses now work in our bodies in a truly unselfish manner.

We have eyes in our body; through these eyes we see, but only because they are selfless and we do not feel them. We see things through them, but the eyes themselves are apart from our perception; it is the same with the other senses. Let us assume that our eyes were self-seeking. What would happen to men? We should approach the color blue, for example, and because our eyes would use up the color immediately within themselves instead of letting it pass through, we should feel a sort of suction in the eyes. If our eyes were as selfish as we are in our moral, intellectual and emotional life, and they wished to experience the effect of red in themselves, we should feel a sharp stab. If our eyes were self- seeking, all our impressions would give us sucking or stabbing pains. We should be painfully conscious that we have eyes. Today, however, humanity is aware of color and light without having to think of the seeing process. The eye is selflessly extinguished during perception. It is the same with the other senses.

In our senses unselfishness reigns, but they would never have reached this unselfishness if Lucifer, even in the old Lemurian age, had been left to his own devices. The spirit who said, as related in the Bible, “Your eyes shall be opened,” made it necessary to transfer man to a sphere of earthly life in which his eyes, if they had developed as they would have done under Lucifer's influence, would have become self-seeking. With every impression—and it would have been the same with the other senses—man would have cried out, “Oh, it stabs me here!” He would not have perceived red in his environment. Or he would have said, “Oh, something sucks in my eyes!” He would not have been aware of the color blue, but would have simply felt the suction. This danger to humanity was averted in the Lemurian age by a Being Who later, through the Mystery of Golgotha, incarnated in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. In this earlier age, however, He ensouled Himself—I cannot say incarnated—in one of the archangels.

While the earth was working through the Lemurian age, a Being living in spiritual heights became manifest—one might say, as a sort of prophecy of John's baptism—in an archangel who offered up his soul powers, and was thus permeated by the Christ. Through this means a force was released that acted within human evolution upon earth. Its effect was a quieting and harmonizing of our senses so that today we can use them and find them selfless. If we, understanding this, have become grateful to the world order, we shall say, looking back to these ancient times, that what makes it possible for us as sensory beings to enjoy without pain all the splendor of surrounding nature is Christ's first sacrifice. By ensouling Himself in an archangel He brought forth the power to avert the danger of the selfish senses in man. That was the first step leading to the Mystery of Golgotha.

The human being will gradually learn to develop this deep, significant and religious feeling when he is confronted with the beauty of nature, when he looks up at the starry heavens and at all that the sun illumines in the animal, mineral and vegetable kingdoms. He will learn to say, “That I am so placed in the world that I can look at it around me, my senses being instruments for the perception of its splendor rather than sources of pain, I owe to Christ's first sacrifice in preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha.” In perspective we see before us a time in which all observation and enjoyment of nature will be permeated by Christ; when men, refreshing themselves in an invigorating springtime, in the warmth of summer, or in any of the other delights of nature, will say to themselves, “In taking up all this beauty into ourselves, we must realize that it is not ourselves, but Christ within our senses Who enables us to experience it.”

In the first period of the Atlantean evolution selfishness tried—this time through Lucifer and Ahriman—to take possession of another part of the human organism; that is, the vital organs. With this in mind, let us consider what is intrinsic in our life-organism. What is its essential nature? You need only think what it is like when injured by organic disease. Then man begins to suffer from the self-seeking of heart, lungs, stomach or other organs, and the time comes when man knows that he has a heart or stomach, knows it by direct experience, because he has a pain. To be ill means that an organ has become selfish and is leading its own independent life within us. In ordinary normal conditions this is not the case. Then the single organs live selflessly within us. Our everyday constitution holds us up securely in the physical world only when we do not feel that we have stomach, lungs, etc., but have them without feeling them, when they do not demand our attention but remain unselfish servants of the body.

On some other occasion and at some other time we shall consider the reason why illness results from the selfishness of our organs. Today we will confine our discussion to normal conditions. Had it depended upon Lucifer and Ahriman, quite a different state would have existed as early as the Atlantean period. Every single human organ would have been self- seeking, and the results most extraordinary. Assume, for example, that the human being looked at a fruit or something else in the outer world that can be eaten, or that stands in some sort of relation to his vital organs. Someday these relations of the outer world with our organs will be the subject of genuine scientific study. If the other sciences allow themselves to be aligned with spiritual science, it will be known that when a human being gathers cherries from a tree and eats them, something enters with the cherries that is related to a particular organ; other fruits are related to other organs.

Everything that enters the human organism is in some way related to it. If Lucifer and Ahriman could have carried out their designs during the Atlantean period, then, when we picked cherries, for example, the related organ would have felt an inordinate greed. The human being would have felt, not the self-seeking organ only, but all the other organs also, striving against it with equal selfishness! Let us take a different case. Suppose something harmful were present, for while certain things in the world are related to humanity in a beneficial way, others affect it injuriously. Suppose someone were to approach a poisonous plant, or anything else harmful to this or that organ; he would then recognize that he was confronting something that gave a burnt out feeling to one of his organs.

Now let us consider not what we eat, but the air surrounding us. Every element of the atmosphere is related to our organs. If we had become what Lucifer and Ahriman intended and had been thrown upon our own resources, we should have been chased about the world by animal desires for what satisfied one organ or another, or by terrible disgust for all that was injurious. Just imagine how we could possibly develop ourselves in this world if we had such physical organs that we were tossed to and fro like a rubber ball, a plaything for every agreeable odor that we would run after, or were forced by nausea to flee from. That this did not happen, that our vital organs were subdued and harmonized resulted from the great event in the first Atlantean epoch when, in supramundane spheres, the second step was taken toward the Mystery of Golgotha. The Christ Being ensouled Himself again in an archangel, and what was accomplished by this deed shone down into the earth's atmosphere. Then that harmonizing and balancing of the vital organs took place that rendered them selfless.

In our connection with the outer world we should be continuously exposed to severe illnesses and we could not be at all healthy but for this second Christ event. We see in perspective for the future that the human being will acquire, when he is able to imbue himself with a true understanding of the spiritual world, a feeling of gratitude toward the spiritual beings upon whom humanity depends. He will say in true piety, “I realize that I am able to exist as a physical man with unselfish organs because not I alone have developed myself in the world, but Christ in me, Who has so conditioned my organs that I can be a man!” Thus we come to learn so to regard all that makes us human, fundamentally and in the most comprehensive sense, that we say, “Not I, but Christ in me.” In His three preparatory steps, taken before the actual Mystery of Golgotha, Christ provided for the complete evolution of humanity.

In the last part of the Atlantean period humanity faced a third danger. Thinking, feeling and willing were threatened with disorder through the entrance of selfishness. What would have been the result of this? Well, the human being would have intended this or that, and followed this or that impulse of will, while his thinking would have impelled him in quite a different direction, and his feeling in still another. It was necessary for human evolution that thinking, feeling and willing should become unselfish members of the united soul. Under the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman they could not have done this. Thought, feeling and will, becoming independently self-seeking, would have rent asunder the harmonious working of the Christ. In consequence, toward the end of the Atlantean evolution, the third Christ event occurred. Once more the Christ Being ensouled Himself in an archangel, and the power thus generated in the spiritual world made possible the harmonization of thinking, feeling and willing. Truly, as the rays of the physical sun must act upon earth to prevent the withering of plant life, so must the Sun Spirit be reflected upon earth from supramundane spheres as I have just explained.

What would have become of the human being without this third Christ event? As if by furies, he would have been seized by his unruly desires, by the activity of his will. He might have gone mad even though his self- seeking reason might have thought with scornful mockery about all that the raging will brought forth. This was averted by the third Christ event when Christ took for the third time the soul of an archangel as an outer vehicle.

Mankind has preserved some memory of how human passion and human thinking were harmonized at this period by forces that descended from supramundane worlds, but the sign of this memory is not rightly understood. St. George who conquers the dragon, or Michael who conquers the dragon, are symbols of the third Christ event, when Christ ensouled Himself in an archangel. It is the dragon, trodden under foot, that has brought thinking, feeling and willing into disorder. All who turn their gaze upon St. George or Michael with the dragon, or some similar episode, perceive, in reality, the third Christ event. The Greeks who in their wonderful mythology made copies of what happened in the spiritual world at the end of the Atlantean age, revered the Sun Spirit as the harmonizer of man's thinking, feeling and willing. “Thou Sun Spirit,” so said those who knew something about it, “Thou hast ensouled Thyself in an etheric spirit form,” for such is the form of those we call archangels today; “Thou has brought thinking, feeling and willing, which might otherwise rage through us in confusion, into order with Thy lyre, sounding upon it harmoniously the tones of the human soul!”

So the Sun Spirit became the guardian of the wild, stormy passions when they, as it sometimes happened, gushed forth in the fumes that rise from within the earth and break through its surface. If a human being should expose himself to them and allow only these vapors to work upon him, then thought, feeling and will would rage madly within him. The Greeks placed the Pythia over those vapors, which, in rising out of the earth, bring the passions into disorder through Lucifer and Ahriman. But Apollo shone upon the Pythia, conquered the unruly passions and she became a sibyl. For the Greeks, Apollo, the Sun Spirit, represented the Christ at the stage of His third sacrifice, and the results of Christ's deed were discerned in the attuning of men's passions under the power of the Pythia, conferred upon her by the god Apollo. In this connection Apollo was to the Greeks what is expressed in the victory of Michael or St. George over the dragon.

We see also the meaning of the extraordinary pronouncement of Justin Martyr, a saying which, since it emanated from him, we must regard as Christian, although many representatives of Christianity today would consider it heretical. Justin said, “Heraclites, Socrates and Plato were also Christians, the only kind of Christians possible before the actual consummation of the Mystery of Golgotha.” Theologians of today no longer realize it but in the first centuries of Christianity the Christian martyrs still knew that the old Greek sages, although they did not use the name of Christ, if asked about Apollo, would have answered out of their Mystery wisdom, “The great Sun Spirit, Who in the future will live as a man on earth, appears to us in Apollo as though ensouled in him in the form of an archangel.”

Then came the fourth, the earthly mystery, that of Golgotha. The same Christ Being Who had ensouled Himself three times in archangelic form incarnated through what we call the Baptism by John in the Jordan in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

I admit that it may seem strange when I say that this great Being was ensouled three times in an archangelic form, and then incarnated in a human being. It would seem a more orderly progression if between His ensoulment as an archangel and His human incarnation He had taken an angelic form. So it may seem to us. Yet, even though it is claimed that the statements of spiritual science are fictitious, truly it is not so. You may gather this from corroborative evidence. If you ask me how it happens that Christ did not descend from hierarchy to hierarchy and only afterward to man—if you were to ask me that, I could only answer that I do not know, for I never make theoretical combinations. The facts adduced by spiritual research are that Christ chose three times an archangelic form, leaving out the angelic form, and then made use of a human body. I leave it to future research to determine the reason, which I do not yet know, though I do know that it is true.

Then came the fourth step in the Mystery of Golgotha, and this averted another danger, that of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences upon the human ego or I. In the Lemurian age the sense organs would have become disordered through Lucifer; in the first Atlantean period the vital organs were threatened with disorder and disharmony, and in the late Atlantean era the soul organs, the organs that underlie thinking, feeling and willing. In the post-Atlantean period the human ego itself was endangered.

Because the ego or I at this time was to take its place as a living factor in human evolution, an effort was made to establish harmony between this ego and the powers of the cosmos lest it become their plaything. This might have happened. The ego might have so developed that it could not keep a hold upon itself, and had it been delivered to these forces, everything that came from the soul would have been overpowered by all sorts of elemental forces that arise from wind, air or water. They would have driven the human being violently in all directions.

Michelangelo painted it. In the Sibyls he showed what had threatened mankind. With wonderful skill he made them express the human types of those who felt the coming derangement of the ego, so that although all possible wisdom might come forth, human beings could neither manage nor direct it. Look at the way in which Michelangelo has painted the different degrees of derangement in egos given over to elemental beings.

Upon the other side, however, he gives us something else. In the same space he has painted the musing figures of prophecy whose aspect shows the illumination of what preserves the integrity of the ego toward the cosmos. It touches us deeply when we see in the prophets the urgency, the pressure toward the ego and, on the other side, human beings suffering disorder through the ego itself. Then, standing in this space, is the Christ, incarnate in a human body, Who had to bring into order and harmony the ego that was to come into the world.

Yes, the science of the spirit will impress upon us ever more deeply that this human ego, through the fourth Christ event, the Mystery of Golgotha, can come to true unselfishness. The senses have said, “Not I, but Christ in us.” The vital organs have said, “Not I, but Christ in us.” In his moral and intellectual life man must learn to say, “Not I, but Christ in me.” Every step into the spiritual world shows us this.

I wished to explain this today in order that upon another occasion in the near future we may offer certain occult proofs of these facts in order to show that what we call spiritual science will pour itself into our moral and intellectual lives in such a way that human beings may become students of selflessness, that Christ may live within us so that we may feel Him vitally in every word that is uttered in discussions of spiritual science.

One more thing, my dear friends. You know that since 1909 we have been producing our Mystery Dramas in Munich. What we presented on the stage there may be considered good or bad; that is not the present question. What was done there, however, required a certain spiritual power, a power that does not approach the human being simply because of his existence upon earth. Since we can now work in Dornach and carve our different kinds of hard wood, we need muscular strength. We cannot say that we can give this strength to ourselves consciously. It comes from our bodies, from our souls' capacity; it is not under our control. Equally, we have not under our control all that we perform in the spirit and for which we need spiritual power. That is not entirely dependent upon our natural ability, just as what we do physically is not dependent alone upon our talents but also upon the muscular strength of our bodies. We need spiritual powers that are as much outside ourselves as our muscular strength is outside our souls. I know that superficial critics may say, “You are a fool; you believe that spiritual powers come to you from without, whereas they simply rise from your own inner being.” Let them think me a fool; I regard them as belonging to the clever men who cannot distinguish hunger from a piece of bread. I know how spiritual powers from without flow into human beings. The idea that hunger creates the bread that satisfies it—believed only by a crazy man—is as false as that the power of our own soul can create the forces needed for our spiritual activities. These forces must flow into us. Just as we know clearly that our hunger is within us, and that bread comes from without, does one who lives in spiritual worlds know what is within himself and what comes to him from without. Since 1909 I have felt personally, more and more, the spiritual power that came from without whenever there was occasion to develop, in stillness and calm, what was necessary for the Mystery Plays. I knew that a spiritual eye was resting upon what had been accomplished, and I relate this as a direct experience.

In the early days, when we were working at spiritual science in Germany, an acquaintance came to us who accepted with enthusiasm what we were able to give at that time. She accepted what it was possible to give out concerning human evolution, cosmic mysteries, reincarnation and karma, not only with devotion and enthusiasm but added to them a wonderful aesthetic sense. Every experience with this person, whether of teaching or conversation, was steeped in beauty. We were few at that time. We had no need to crowd ourselves into such a room as this, and what we now say to a large audience was then discussed by three people—two others and myself. One of these, the person mentioned above, left us upon the physical plane in 1904, and entered the spiritual world. Such people go through a development after death. When we produced Schuré's reconstruction of the Mystery of Eleusis at our Congress in 1907, no spiritual influence was perceptible. In 1909 it began, and has come more and more frequently since then. I have accurate knowledge that it was the individuality of our friend whom, objectively and because of her originality, we all loved. Removed to the spiritual world, she acted as a guardian angel to all that we accomplished in the combining of the aesthetic and esoteric elements in our Mysteries. We felt well protected, and looked gratefully upward, realizing that what penetrated us and flowed over into our earthly activities was an expression of the watchfulness of a spiritual personality. But then when it came to conversation with this personality—one may call it conversation since there was a certain reciprocal action—she asserted that she found the way to us easier the more we were permeated with the thought of Christ in the evolution of the earth. If I were to put into earthly words what she reiterated, I should say, expressing symbolically, of course, what is quite different in the spiritual world, “I find the way to you so easily because you are finding evermore the way to make spiritual science into an expression of the living Word of Christ.”

The Christ impulse will become for us the living bridge between earthly life and life in superphysical worlds. From the spiritual world Christ three times conditioned for the human being the spiritual constitution that he needed in order to live rightly. Christ intervened three times, making the human sense, life and psychic organs unselfish. It is now man's task to learn unselfishness in his moral and intellectual life through his understanding of the saying, “Not I, but Christ in me.”

The world will recognize that the message of the science of the spirit is the Word of Christ. He said, “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” The mission of the science of the spirit in our age is to open doors to the living Christ. The dead, who know that Christ has found the passage from heaven to earthly activities, unite with the understanding of the living. If the dead, as their nearest protectors, bend to the earthly living, they will find those souls most intensive who are penetrated and spiritualized by the Christ impulse. Christ, as the great Sun Spirit, descended from superphysical worlds through the Mystery of Golgotha in order to find a dwelling in the souls of men. Spiritual science is to be the message, telling how Christ may find that dwelling in human souls. If Christ will find His abode in men's earthly souls, then the Christ power will stream back from the earth's aura into the worlds that He forsook for the salvation of mankind, and the whole cosmos will be permeated through and through by Him.

We can work up gradually to such a deep understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha as this by completely imbuing ourselves with spiritual science. If we thus consider this and, in addition, think of it as a school of unselfishness for the intellectual and moral life of future humanity, we shall realize the necessity of the spiritually scientific proclamation of the Mystery of Golgotha! Then we shall know the meaning of the spiritually scientific impulses that are striving to enter our present life. Then that Christ impulse will penetrate humanity that all men can, indeed, accept, for Christ did not appear to one nation only but, being the great Sun Spirit, He belongs to the whole earth and can enter all human souls, regardless of nation and religion. May many gradually find the way to such an understanding of the Christ impulse and of the Mystery of Golgotha! Then, perhaps, that will appear the most Christian that today is stamped as unchristian and heretical.

If we strive, not for a mere intellectual understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, but for the ability to grasp it with our whole souls, we then need the science of the spirit and, as members of our spiritual stream, we shall belong to those souls who are permitted to know and understand the necessities of mankind now and in the immediate future.

I am very glad that we can meet here today and take a break, so to speak, for a while from the work on our new building in Dornach.¹ But I thought it would be impossible to gather here so near our building without also discussing anthroposophical matters. I hope we can do this more often in the course of the year; otherwise our friends working on the building will not have as many opportunities to attend such meetings as they do when they are not working on our building.

Let us start with some thoughts on the life of the spirit that might be useful in considering what meaning spiritual science and living with anthroposophy can have for us, for our soul. People new to anthroposophical thinking, feeling, and perception may think we should not worry about the life of the spirit, about the spiritual world, since we enter the spiritual world anyway after death (even a materialist might say this) and will there learn all we need to know about it. Why should we not be satisfied in this life between birth and death simply to do what is necessary for life in the physical world; why is it wrong when we just fulfill our duties in the physical world, and leave matters concerning the spiritual world in the realm of the uncertain and indefinite? One could hear these words often during the time when the tide of materialism engulfed human development, especially in the last third of the nineteenth century. And it was by no means the most morally reprehensible souls who said: While on earth, let us concentrate on our tasks here and leave the rest for the world we enter after death.

Now, let us talk about something that can be grasped immediately by anyone who begins to concern himself with—I do not even want to say spiritual science—but with truly logical thinking. We actually spend only part of our time between birth and death in the physical world, namely, our waking time. And even people who have not yet thought much about the spiritual world, but who can think logically, would have to admit that with our conscious mind we know as little about life in sleep as we do about life after death. And certainly no one can deny that we continue to live in sleep—unless such a person were prepared to accept that we really die every evening and are created anew each morning. That is unlikely, but the truly logical person will be equally unable to accept that the whole human being is really present in a sleeping body lying in bed.

The fact that we sleep regularly should at least make people think. And then they will be motivated to reflect on what spiritual science has to offer. In particular, the natural sciences will more and more realize that our soul is not present in our physical body when we sleep. In fact, they will reach this conclusion on their own before the end of this century of scientific development. Then they will look to spiritual science for answers to their questions. They will be forced by their own conclusions to realize that our soul-spiritual being is really not connected with our physical body when we are sleeping. It will then become ever more important for people in the twentieth century to know something about sleep. Therefore let us begin today and get an idea of what people in our century will have to know about the nature of sleep.

We know from our studies in spiritual science that when we fall asleep, two members of our being, the ego and the astral body, leave the physical and etheric bodies. Where are the ego and the astral body when we are asleep? To begin with, we can say they are in the spiritual world. Of course, we are always in the spirit realm, because the latter is not separated from the physical world, but surrounds us just as air envelops us everywhere. We are always in the spiritual world, even when we are awake.

However, we inhabit it in a different way when we are asleep than when we are awake. Now, it may be sufficient for the immediate needs of spiritual science to describe this situation by saying that in sleep our ego and astral body are outside our physical and etheric bodies. But then we would actually be telling only half the truth. It is the same as saying the sun sets here at night; because the sun in fact sets then only for us in Europe. We know this does not apply to all the inhabitants of the earth. Fundamentally, the ego and astral body leave our physical and etheric bodies properly, we might say, completely, only after death. In sleep they actually leave only the blood and nervous system. But when the “sun” of our being, namely, the ego and astral body, sets in relation to our blood and nervous system, which they penetrate during the day, it rises for the other half of our being, that is, for the other organs.

Our ego and astral body do just what the sun does, which shines here during the day and when it sets for us, it rises for the people on the other side of the earth. When ego and astral body “set” for our blood and nervous system, they rise for the other organs and are linked all the more strongly with them.

These other organs, to which our ego and astral body are connected when we sleep, have been constructed out of the spirit, as has everything else in the world. And the remarkable fact is that while we are sleeping, we strongly influence these other organs of our body with our ego and astral body. During the day, our ego and astral body work strongly upon our blood and nervous system, but they influence our other organs, all those not part of the blood and nervous system but which affect the blood from the nerves, when we are asleep.

From this follows that it is of some consequence how we enter sleep with our ego and astral body. Materialists will not care much about what happens in sleep to their ego and astral body, which they never mention anyway. However, those who understand these things will know that the organs that are not part of the blood and nervous system and do not manifest in our conscious existence are dependent on those aspects of our ego and astral body that are active in sleep.

Let me illustrate this with an obvious example. As we know, people today are haunted by a fear we can compare with the medieval fear of ghosts. It is the fear of germs. Objectively, both states of fear are the same. Both fit their respective age: People of the Middle Ages held a certain belief in the spiritual world; therefore quite naturally they had a fear of spiritual beings. The modern age has lost this belief in the spiritual world; it believes in material things. It therefore has a fear of material beings, be they ever so small. Objectively speaking, the greatest difference we might find between the two periods is that ghosts are at any rate sizable and respectable. The tiny germs, on the other hand, are nothing much to write home about as far as frightening people is concerned. Now of course I do not mean to imply by this that we should encourage germs, and that it is good to have as many as possible. That is certainly not the implication. Still, germs certainly exist and ghosts existed also, especially as far as those people who held a real belief in the spiritual world are concerned. Thus, they do not even differ in terms of reality.

However, the important point we want to make today is that germs can become dangerous only if they are allowed to flourish. Germs should not be allowed to flourish. Even materialists will agree with this statement, but they will no longer agree with us if we proceed further and, from the standpoint of proper spiritual science, speak about the most favorable conditions for germs. Germs flourish most intensively when we take nothing but materialistic thoughts into sleep with us. There is no better way to encourage them to flourish than to enter sleep with only materialistic ideas, and then to work from the spiritual world with the ego and the astral body on those organs that are not part of the blood and the nervous system. The only other method that is just as good is to live in the center of an epidemic or endemic illness and to think of nothing but the sickness all around, filled only with a fear of getting sick. That would be equally effective. If fear of the illness is the only thing created in such a place and one goes to sleep at night with that thought, it produces afterimages, Imaginations impregnated with fear. That is a good method of cultivating and nurturing germs. If this fear can be reduced even a little by, for example, active love and, while tending the sick, forgetting for a time that one might also be infected, the conditions are less favorable for the germs.

These issues are not raised in anthroposophy merely to play on human egotism, but to describe the facts of the spiritual world. This concrete case demonstrates that in real life we cannot avoid dealing with the spiritual world, because it is the basis for our actions between going to sleep and waking up. If people were given thoughts that lead them away from materialism and spur them on to active love out of the spirit, it would serve the future of humanity better. Then infinitely more productive work could be achieved than through all the preparations now being developed by materialistic science against germs. In the course of this century, the insight has to spread more and more widely that the spiritual world is by no means irrelevant to our physical life, but is of essential importance to it because we are in the spiritual world between going to sleep and waking up, and continue to affect the physical body from there. Even if this is not immediately obvious, it is nevertheless true.

Now, we will have to get used to the fact that the direct healing powers of spiritual science have to work through the human community if we are to see these matters in the right light. What does it mean that some individual here or there enters the spiritual world in sleep with thoughts turned toward the realm of the spirit, while all around other people nourish and nurture the germ world with their materialistic thoughts, materialistic feelings, and with fears, which are always connected with materialism? What is the real nature of germs? Well, here we come to a subject essential for human life. When we see the air around us filled with different species of birds and the water filled with fishes, when we observe the life forms that creep along the earth and others frolicking on it and revealing themselves to our senses, we are looking at beings we can correctly describe as creatures of the developing Godhead in one form or another, even if they are occasionally harmful. But in the case of germ-like creatures resident and active in other living beings, in plants, animals, or humans, we are dealing with creations of Ahriman. To understand the existence of such creatures correctly we must know that they express spiritual facts, namely the relationship between human beings and Ahriman. This relationship is established through a materialistic attitude and purely egotistical states of fear. We see the conditions allowing the existence of such parasitic beings correctly if we realize that they are a symptom of Ahriman intervening in the world.

Clearly, then, it is not a matter of indifference whether we take materialistic or spiritual ideas with us into the spiritual world when we fall asleep. As soon as we realize this, we can no longer claim it is irrelevant whether or not we know of the spirit in this world. We have to start at a specific point if we really want to understand the great importance of spiritual scientific research for our life between birth and death.

It will become increasingly clear to us how this earthly life is connected with spiritual life. We rely on nature, which is on a lower level than we are, for our nourishment. For some time after death, the dead derive their nourishment from the ideas and the unconscious emotions that we here on earth take into sleep with us. Those who have died perceive a tremendous difference between people who in their waking life are filled only with materialistic feelings and ideas and also take them into sleep, and others who are wholly filled with spiritual ideas while awake and who continue to be filled with them in sleep. The two types of people are as different in their effect on the dead as a barren region where no food can grow, where people would starve, and a fruitful area that offers nourishment in abundance. For many years after death, the dead draw a vitality from the souls sleeping here on earth filled with spiritual content, a vitality that is similar, only transposed into the spiritual realm, to what we draw in our physical life from the beings of the kingdoms of nature below us. We literally turn ourselves into fruitful pastures for the dead when we fill ourselves with the ideas of spiritual science. And we turn ourselves into barren ground and starve the dead if we take only materialistic ideas and attitudes into sleep.

It is not out of the enthusiasm that leads to the establishment of many other associations and societies that we speak of spiritual science in these times. Rather, the urge to speak about it comes out of necessity and the heartfelt realization that in the twentieth century people will need it. Regardless of outer circumstances, those who fully understand how much the world needs spiritual science cannot help but talk about its results and share it with their fellow human beings. The power of the words at our disposal seems much too weak to meet the necessity of making spiritual science ever more available to those who would otherwise sink deeper and deeper into materialism.

Let us think about the nature of our relationship to the dead we were connected with in life, whom we can clearly visualize, and of whom we often think. What is our relationship to those who have died, apart from offering them spiritual nourishment by taking spiritual thoughts into sleep? What is our relationship with the dead in waking life?

If the dead draw nourishment from the content of our souls in sleep, then every thought that enters the spiritual world and is concerned with it and its beings can be perceived by the dead. On the other hand, if we do not cultivate such thoughts, the dead are deprived of them. Ideas related only to the material world, to things in nature, live in our souls in such a way that the dead cannot perceive them. These ideas, however scholarly or wise, are meaningless for the dead. As soon as we have thoughts about the spiritual world, not only the living but also the dead have immediate access to them. That is why we have often recommended that our friends read silently to an individual with whom they were closely connected and who has passed on to the spiritual world. One forms an image of the person and then, while thinking about him or her, one reads on a subject related to the spiritual world. The dead can then participate in the process, which is important. Although the dead are in the world we know through spiritual science, thoughts about the spiritual world must be produced on earth. The dead must perceive more than the spiritual world around them; they need the thoughts of those who live on earth, thoughts that for them are like perceptions.

The most important and the most beautiful thing we can give the dead is to read to them in the way I have just described. We can give something to the dead by reading on a spiritual subject. And if you doubt that this is useful, since the deceased is in the spiritual world anyway, just think that we can be surrounded by things and beings in the physical world, yet may not understand them. The understanding has to be acquired. Thus, although the deceased is in the spiritual world, thoughts from earth have to flow to him. Illuminating thoughts must flow up to those regions where the dead dwell, just as rain streams down from the clouds as a blessing to the physical world.

All these examples show that it is infinitely important even for the physical world to experience the spiritual world in thought. Obviously, we cannot wait until after death for knowledge about the spiritual world. In truth, a thorough study of the spiritual world shows us that we are not on earth for nothing; we are here to learn something that can be learned only on earth—a possession of such value that the living can give it even to the dead.

The close connection between our earth existence and life immediately after death also manifests in many other respects, but it is difficult to talk about this connection in concrete terms, because the words can so easily be misunderstood. People are greatly inclined to prejudice, and whenever a subject, such as the spiritual world and its beings, is discussed, certain motives of the heart provoke misunderstandings. When I tell of an individual case where there is this or that connection between a person's life here on earth and after death, people all too easily jump to the wrong conclusions out of a very understandable self-centeredness and apply the description of a particular case to themselves. They are tempted to think that things are quite different in their case; therefore, they will not experience something this beautiful after death. Instead of deriving satisfaction from the events described, the listeners out of egotism feel that their experience will not be equally exceptional after death.

As soon as we do more than just speak in general terms and deal with specific cases, we must develop selflessness so we can observe someone else's destiny without drawing conclusions about our own life. Then we will not worry that if the same does not happen to us, we are missing out on what is being described. These and similar reactions provide grounds for misunderstandings, which I want to avoid.

A short time ago, a very dear friend of ours died, and many of us attended his cremation.² He would have celebrated his forty-third birthday tomorrow, on May 6. In the final years of his life, he suffered much. I would like to tell here, parenthetically as it were, a wonderful story from his last years as his wife told it to me.³ During his great suffering, our friend fought not against admitting to himself that he had to suffer, but against saying that he was ill. He was not ill, he said. He suffered, yes, but he was not ill, and he was adamant that such a statement should not be taken as quibbling but as something meaningful. This definition, “I suffer, but I am not ill,” arose from his awareness that what he carried within him as spiritual science, what supported and carried him inwardly, defeated all attacks of illness. He was aware that he suffered, but the health of his soul is so great that, when he compared it to his physical condition, he could not call himself ill. This definition is very important and well-suited to permeate our soul as a feeling.

Anyway, we saw how the person concerned spent his last years on earth in a sick body, in a suffering body. Yet he did not see himself as sick but only as suffering. If we compare that with the spiritual life that has now begun for our friend, we will have a worthy image of what connects our earth existence with life after death. It is a fact of the spiritual world that a series of Imaginations was prepared in his body, a body that showed the symptoms of illness. A series of Imaginations, powerful Imaginations, lived, so to speak, in the sick limbs. He was completely filled with the content of the spiritual worlds. They lived in him in such a way that they worked on all those organs we are usually not as aware of as we are of our brain and nervous system, that is, organs we experience on a more subconscious level. These powerful Imaginations lived in these organs, and all the more so, the more outwardly ill these organs became. They prepared themselves and now face the soul of the deceased as a mighty tableau of the spiritual world. Now he is living in the images that were trapped in his sick organs, especially in his final years. They prepared themselves in such intensity that they now surround him as his spiritual world.

It is impossible to see more beautiful worlds, or to see the spiritual cosmos more perfectly and more beautifully, than those that blossom and unfold in spiritual art, which cannot be observed better anywhere else than through such a situation. Here, on the physical plane, an artist can create in beauty a piece of the world, so that the image on canvas or in marble lets us see more of the world than we do on our own. All of this, however, pales into insignificance in comparison to the spiritual world seen as it is and also as it arises and blossoms forth from the soul of the deceased who has been prepared by his karma in the way I have described. How he was prepared will be clear from his poetic works, which are now being printed and will appear soon.⁴ His poetry reveals that this kind of spiritual life and passage into the spiritual world after death are intimately connected with what we have for many years called the Christ-Impulse. The Christ-Impulse, in the sense spiritual science speaks of it, is beautifully alive in our friend's poetry.

In this connection I want to add something that can truly lead us to feel the relationship between the world of our earthly life and the one we pass through between death and a new birth. I will not present this connection with abstract thoughts, but so you can grasp it at the level of feeling. You see, one can be either stupid or clever here on the physical plane; one can even be a scholar—in the life after death it is of little importance whether one was stupid, clever, or learned if all these qualities relate only to the things of the physical world. Our thoughts about the material world may be ever so clever; they will be of no use to us once we have passed through death. They will then no longer have any meaning. After death we need thoughts, ideas, and feelings that do not relate to the physical world, because only those have meaning then.

Now, I would like to put this in a somewhat grotesque, paradoxical way. Do not be put off by the paradox; what I want to say will become clear immediately. Let us assume that someone refuses to have any thoughts that are not called forth by sensory perception. As soon as anything impinges on him and thoughts begin to develop, he says: I do not want you. I proceed only on the basis of what my eyes see and my ears hear. That is what I want to think about. Stop bothering me with anything else; I will not bother with it ... Such a person does not accumulate any strength that can be used after death. He is blind when entering the world between death and new birth.

Let us assume now that someone else has a lively imagination, but cannot be bothered to approach spiritual science and learn things slowly and gradually. He finds it much easier to develop ideas about the spiritual world from his imagination, to fantasize about the spiritual world. This person has ideas concerning the sense world as well as all kinds of fantasies about the realm of the spirit. Such an individual would not enter the spiritual world as a blind person, but will have soul forces that will enable him to see in the spiritual world. However, such people will be as we are when our vision in the physical world is impaired and we see things inaccurately as a result. Such inaccurate vision is a lot worse in the spiritual world than on the physical plane because there it leads to confusion at every turn. What I have just said, even if it seems grotesque at first, shows us that we need ideas reaching beyond the life of the senses if we really want to become citizens of the spiritual world, as we must. And unless we get our bearings from beyond the sense world, we will live in the spiritual world in a crippled state, as do those who take in only ideas related to the sensory realm and those who allow their imagination to run wild.

Various founders of religions appeared throughout history to prevent people from having thoughts triggered purely by physical objects or by fantasies about the spiritual world. If we look at these personalities and the teachings they gave humanity, we find that the aim of all these religious founders was to offer people ideas about the super-sensible world that would allow them to enter it healthy and whole, not crippled. The founders of our religions provided ideas that met the needs of their particular time and culture.

Our age is different from the past and requires us to grow up into mature human beings. Please do not take this in a superficial, merely external sense, but in a deeply inward one. We have to reach maturity and find the path into the spiritual world through our souls. The ancient founders of our religions spoke to a humanity that was not yet mature. They addressed people at a stage through which all our souls have also passed. These ancient religious leaders knew their times, and also knew that they could not speak in the same way to a humanity moving further toward the future. For humanity must develop toward maturity and independence.

If people of ancient times had either restricted themselves to sense impressions or had reached for the products of their imagination, in both cases they would have entered the spiritual world crippled or at the very least in a confused state. At that point a leader appeared, bringing true ideas from the spiritual world. People then said that they themselves did not gain access to the spiritual world through sensory perception or use of the imagination, but rather through Zarathustra, Buddha, or Krishna, who stimulated thoughts in them that allowed them to enter the realm of the spirit.⁵ In our time human beings must come of age, regardless of whether the ego causes confusion or blindness. The Mystery of Golgotha took place so that we can find the way into the spiritual world as independent beings. Religious leaders no longer appear in history as they did in earlier times.

Those who compare Christ to the ancient religious teachers do not understand anything about him. In the first place, Christ worked through a deed, the ancient religious leaders through their teachings. To describe him merely as a teacher of humanity means not knowing at all who Christ is. The essential thing about him is the deed he performed, which began as a consequence of his baptism by John and ended with the crucifixion on Golgotha. What was done there for humanity is spiritually all-important. What happened there is what can permeate human souls ever since then, namely, the experience St. Paul described as “Not I, but Christ in me.” Indeed, Christ has become the path into the spiritual world because he brought it into this world. He brought us the spiritual world we need if we are not to be crippled or blind after death.

It is quite possible these days to deny Christ and claim that there is no evidence that Christ lived in the physical world in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, people have even produced evidence showing there was no historical Christ. But with that they merely prove that they missed the point. If Christ had chiseled into a rock for all future generations, “I was here,” then those future generations would have known he existed from the sensory world, and they would not have needed to believe it. His deep significance, the possibility of redemption, is precisely that this was not the case, that we cannot comprehend him through our senses but have to accept him with the forces of the spirit. Seen in this light, we find Christ intimately connected with those things that even here on earth lift human beings beyond the sense-perceptible world into the spiritual realm. None of this exists for those who cannot raise themselves to the spiritual world, because they cannot escape their doubts.

In this context it can be a great relief for someone fully involved in modern culture, in science and art, to come across a view of Christ that is appropriate to our modern civilization, namely the anthroposophical view of Christ presented in spiritual science. Much can be learnt from it, for example, how to view the physical world correctly. Oh, the physical world—where is it headed these days? I hinted at some of these things recently in a public lecture, but now I can be more explicit.⁶ Of course, we have to admire materialist civilization and all the achievements of technology, industry, and so on. An immense amount of intellectual energy has flowed into these things; they have taken up a great deal of human energy. But who benefits from these intellectual efforts? Insofar as they satisfy the material needs of modern humanity, they serve Ahriman. Christ Jesus experienced the temptation by Ahriman. Ordinary human souls could certainly not survive the sudden shock of such an experience. For us the temptation has to be diluted. But as a consequence of this dilution of temptation, Ahriman can say to us: Yes, think only with the power of your science, with all those things you can discover through science applied to technology, industry, and so on. Use only those things for your thinking and apply them to nothing but physical experience; that suits me fine. It fits in well with my aims, says Ahriman, if you are unable to see me. You might well despise reason and knowledge, the supreme achievements of human beings; thus you are absolutely mine—at least as long as you do not see me. I will instill the drive in you to use reason and knowledge only for earthly things!

Something else is required to counterbalance the service we render Ahriman. It is therefore important that we gather everything modern technology and so on can accomplish to build something with it that is not to serve our outer existence, but only our spiritual life.

In ancient times, people presented sacrifices to the gods, the first fruits of the field and of the herd. I do not intend to talk about the meaning of sacrifice today, but you can see what it could signify presented in a form appropriate to modern times. When the first fruits had been sacrificed to the gods, the people partook of the remainder. Spiritual science is certainly not based on false asceticism. It will not be guilty of the absurdity of ranting and raving against modern culture with all its material blessings. On the contrary, it recognizes their value. But if it wants to avoid serving only Ahriman, it has to sacrifice something of the first fruits of this external material culture to the gods.

So you see, there is a profound thinking underlying the building that is growing outside on the hill at Dornach: We want to offer the first fruits of modern civilization to the gods. Everything is different now from the way it was in the times our souls passed through in previous incarnations. And we have to understand the nature of our current task just as we understood what we had to do in our earlier incarnations when we were guided by spiritual luminaries. That is especially difficult now because we have to take into account not only the nature of our time but also our soul qualities. In addition, we can no longer rely on the external authority that supported the founders of religions; we have to work with quite different forces. Christ was the Word; in the same way true spiritual science wishes to work only through the word and must not use any other means.

Such reflections give us an insight into the connection between the spiritual world and our world here on earth. And no matter where we begin, we see the Mystery of Golgotha radiating toward us as the heart and soul of such reflections. But we must not forget that we have to become mature, truly mature, so that we can understand what spiritual science is meant to be. We must never forget that it must exist because humanity must come of age.

It is completely true that humanity descended from higher spiritual regions and has moved away from the old atavistic clairvoyance by developing a world view based on reason and systematic thinking. We have to take this progress in evolution seriously. We must realize we live at a time when it is our mission to develop our thinking, to advance through our thinking, and to learn through studying. Spiritual science is our basis, our point of departure. We must try to immerse ourselves in these ideas so that they stimulate within us what our souls need in the future. What spiritual science offers can be understood by everyone. Those who claim one cannot understand the contents of spiritual science, but must believe it, speak without knowing how these things really are.

We must not be misled when we meet people who have not advanced by means of intellectual understanding, but have certain psychic abilities that seem to appear spontaneously. Based on our understanding of the mission of spiritual science, we know that souls can now think only because the clairvoyance of an earlier age has been suppressed. People with natural clairvoyance, which was not acquired through inner effort, must be seen as persons who have remained at an earlier evolutionary stage and who should therefore receive special care in our Society, rather than be considered particularly advanced. It would be an incorrect judgment if we were to consider such souls particularly mature, as having experienced particularly high incarnations. People with a natural gift of clairvoyance have gone through far less than those who are thinkers nowadays. These things have to be properly understood in our Society. Then it would be possible (and it is my duty to say this) for our Society to be a place where such souls with psychic powers can find care and be guided on the right path. Our Society could give them what they cannot get anywhere else: order in their soul. But to make that possible most of the members of our Society must have a profound inner knowledge of the mission of true spiritual science in the present. If that happened, then the case that so saddened us in recent days could not recur. I am referring to a member, who joined in the belief our Society would care for clairvoyant psychic forces, but then found here a captive audience and took on the role of a prophet. Such an event opens the door to all those things that, if they were to prevail, would turn our Society into the exact opposite of what it should be according to the intentions of the spiritual forces supporting it.

Unfortunately, we have had to suffer the case of ..., who came from a country in the north. He might have become a good member if he had worked quietly on developing his psychic powers. Instead, he was immediately surrounded by a kind of aura. He presented himself everywhere as a healer in a way we can only consider regrettable. It became necessary to announce that he could no longer be considered a member of our Society. For it would be turned into the exact opposite of what it should be if we failed to carefully draw attention to psychic phenomena that are not imbued with true spiritual power, which, after all, is the true power of Christ. Christ, not psychic powers, must work in us. These circumstances must be handled so as to make it clear that our Society will have nothing to do with this. It knows no other sanction than the one used in the last few days. Unfortunately, a step had to be taken we otherwise oppose in principle: a member had to be expelled.

This cannot be separated from a serious and worthy concept of the mission of the Anthroposophical Society. And certainly you will understand that it is only with great sorrow one lives through the events that had to be lived through here in the last few days. We are in principle opposed to all expulsions and yet could not avoid expelling someone in such a case. It will happen less and less frequently if our dear friends continue to take to heart the things that have been said so often and that were also the subject of tonight's talk. With that I will conclude my remarks, my dear friends, and entrust them to your souls.

• 1. Work on the construction of the first Goetheanum in Dornach. Started in 1913, it was destroyed by arson on New Year's Eve 1922/23.
• 2. Christian Morgenstern May 6, 1871 – March 31, 1914. See Lecture Two, note 8.
• 3. Christian Morgenstern, Alles um des Menschen Willen: Briefe, (Munich, Germany: Piper, 1962), letter of January 22, 1914, to a young girl, p. 398.
• 4. Morgenstern, Wir fanden einen Pfad. See Lecture Two, note 9.
• 5. Zarathustra, 628–551 B.C. Persian religious leader. Buddha, Siddharta Gautama, 563–483 B.C. Founder of Buddhism. Krishna, Indian deity, appears in Bhagavad-Gita as teacher of Arjuna.
• 6. Rudolf Steiner, “Homunkulus,” public lecture, Berlin, March 26, 1914, in Geisteswissenschaft als Lebensgut, vol. 63 in the Collected Works, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1959).

"Were Christ born a thousand times in Bethlehem, and not in thee, thou art lost eternally."

There are two aspects of this beautiful saying of the great Mystic Angelus Silesius. The one is the declaration that the true Christmas must be celebrated in man's inmost heart, that any outward celebration of Christmas must quicken the impulse whereby in the Holy Night of winter, the very deepest forces of the soul are drawn forth from the darkness prevailing within as the darkness of winter prevails without. These deep forces of the soul are aware of their union with the Being Who pervades all earthly evolution, giving it meaning and purpose. Within us we find some thing with which Christ is united if with conscious devotion to the Spiritual Powers working in the world we penetrate deeply enough into our life of soul.

And the other aspect of the words of Angelus Silesius is that the human being in earthly evolution to-day can become conscious of the fact that true manhood, assurance of true manhood, depends upon the soul feeling inwardly united with the essence and substantiality of Christ Jesus.

In the course of years our studies have brought it home to us that as earthly evolution proceeds, consciousness of Christ deepens, that human beings passing from incarnation to incarnation attain greater and greater understanding of the real nature of Christ. And we have tried to intensify this knowledge by drawing upon a source which enables us to celebrate the Holy Night of Christmas, the Festival of the Birth of Jesus, in a deeper and more worthy way.

What this implies will become clear from the lecture to-day.

A famous modern historian was once asked by a man interested in world events, why no mention is made in his writings of happenings which are the outcome of the Mystery of Golgotha, nor of the influences of Christ Jesus in the course of human history. The historian was asked why his books speak of the influences exercised upon history by popes, monarchs, military campaigns, governments, even by happenings in nature, but have no single word to say about the forces that have poured into mankind from the Mystery of Golgotha and since then have been at work in all human life and human affairs. After a long pause and deep deliberation, the historian answered: The method I have adopted for the exposition of history must remain as it is; for the Christ-forces that stream through happenings in the world belong to a primordial realm into which the human mind is incapable of gazing. The effects and influences of the Mystery of Golgotha—yes, certainly they can be discerned; but to describe the intrinsic, essential nature of these deeds of Christ is not possible in the writing of history.

This is only one of the many examples that could be given in proof of the fact that the most distinguished and enlightened minds of modern times cannot claim to celebrate the Christmas Festival in an inner sense. For in the soul of this historian, Christ Jesus as a living Figure, a living Being, had not become such intense reality that he could feel His presence in all human evolution from year to year, from week to week, even from hour to hour. It is possible for a really learned scholar to-day to survey the whole course of history without perceiving that since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Power of Christ has been working everywhere. There are many causes to account for the fact that the Festival of the Holy Night, the Festival of the Christmas Mystery, is not yet celebrated in the souls of the vast majority of human beings.

A certain illumination is given by one who has spoken of these things out of a deep and true feeling for the Christian Mystery. This was Goethe, who so beautifully recounts the life and travels of Wilhelm Meister. Wilhelm Meister comes to a stately building and is conducted around it by its owner. He is shown the gallery which contains a series of paintings of the most important historical occurrences among various peoples of antiquity—notably among the early Hebrews—from the time of Paradise, the Fall, and on through the later epochs. History is portrayed in impressive scenes, ending with the destruction of Jerusalem ... but there is no single picture of a scene from the life of Christ Jesus, although the series continues beyond the Crucifixion as far as the destruction of Jerusalem. Wilhelm Meister asks: Why does nothing in this picture-gallery portray the life of the divine Man who has brought such blessing into the evolution of humanity?—These are his words:¹ "In your historical series I find a chasm. The Temple of Jerusalem is destroyed and the people dispersed, yet you have not introduced the divine Man who taught there shortly before; to whom, shortly before, they would give no ear." The answer made to Wilhelm Meister is: "To have done this, as you require it, would have been an error. The life of that divine Man whom you allude to, stands in no connection with the general history of the world in his time. It was a private life; his teaching was a teaching for individuals. What has publicly befallen vast masses of people and the minor parts which compose them, belongs to the general history of the world, to the general religion of the world, the religion we have named the First. What inwardly befalls individuals, belongs to the Second religion, the Philosophical: such a religion was it that Christ taught and practised, so long as He went about on earth."

These are deeply moving words. Every human being on the earth is related individually to the Christ. Folk-history, as it may be called, is woven by the affairs of the several peoples, for it is concerned with human affairs in general, within the orbit of general human destiny. But what Christ Jesus has brought into the world penetrates deeply and inwardly into the experiences of every human heart, every human soul—belonging to no matter what part of earthly evolution—in so far as it feels itself truly Man. We must realise that this ‘feeling of oneself as man’ arose for the first time from what came into human evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha.

And now to continue. The owner of the palace leads Wilhelm Meister to another gallery that has been kept closed, where the events of the New Testament are portrayed. Wilhelm Meister is therefore not permitted to see the events of the New Testament in a place where external happenings and actions in the world are presented, but only in an esoteric sanctuary, for the sight of which the soul must have been prepared, have withdrawn from things pertaining to the worldly history of the peoples. The basis of the soul's activity must now be esoteric and individual: then it may cross the Threshold leading to the pictures of scenes from the New Testament. Here again the pictures go no farther than the Last Supper. Wilhelm Meister asks: "As you have set up the life of the divine Man for a pattern and example, have you likewise selected his sufferings, his death?" The answer he receives is full of significance; it is an answer which indicates what reverent awe accompanies the experience of the mystery fulfilled on the earth by the Being dwelling in the body whose birth is celebrated in the Holy Night of winter. Wilhelm Meister has been conducted as it were to the first level of esoteric truth, where he witnesses the delineation of scenes as far as the Last Supper; but then comes the most esoteric portion of all, referred to with deep and holy awe: "We draw a veil over these sufferings, because we reverence them so highly. We hold it a damnable audacity to exhibit that torturing Cross and the Holy One who suffers on it, exposing them to the light of the sun." (Travels of Wilhelm Meister. Part II.)

This is an example of the feeling for esotericism to be found in the 18th century. The feeling was sound and true, for we ourselves shall readily agree that pictorial representations of Christ's sufferings, unless they are from the hand of a supreme artist, drag down the Mystery of Golgotha to the human level. And we can understand that one who in the 18th century had a deep, deep feeling for the Mystery of Golgotha was averse from looking at the many distorted portrayals of this sacred Mystery, preferring to draw a veil over these things, because he felt that only the inmost forces of the soul can be united, supersensibly, with what is connected with and follows the Last Supper.

But what is it that underlies these esoteric feelings and experiences? The hearts of men were yearning for a vista, a conception of the Christ Mystery greater than any that was possible at that time. With all humility, with a humility deeper than that with which we approach any other matter presented by spiritual science, it may truly be said that for long ages the best human souls have been yearning, pining for the knowledge of Christ that can be imparted by occult science. And to-day we may be assured that when the time is ripe, the souls of men will behold as reality, what hitherto could only be known in a different form.

The consciousness that such knowledge will one day be within the reach of the human heart, and the longing for it, has been one of life's great riddles to the best souls. Men have been reaching out for an understanding of Christ that will enable them to grasp the import of the mighty Deed accomplished on Golgotha which can be revealed to the eye of soul when the veil is lifted. In the lecture yesterday I explained why a knowledge of Christ once enriched by the old clairvoyance was bound to recede, how it was received in the earliest periods of Christendom but then gradually waned and faded away. I will read, again to-day, an ancient Gnostic hymn from which it is clear that in the old, clairvoyant form of knowledge the consciousness was alive that the Christ Who came into the world through the Child born at Christmastime, is a Cosmic Being, increasing in majesty and greatness, the higher the soul's vision soars into the realms of spirit—for through these realms He descended. It was inevitable that in later times, when the springs of this knowledge had run dry, a veil should be drawn over the great Event, because men were no longer able to explain that in the secret represented by the Child, the highest wisdom is enshrined. In this Child was born a Being Who traversed the heavenly worlds before His appearance on earth.—

Behold, O Father, how, distant from Thy Breath,
This being upon earth
(this ‘being’ is the human soul)
Wanders, the target and victim of all ill,
Lost and perplexed, it flees the deadly chaos—
How shall it find its way?

In converse with the Father God, Jesus is speaking of the descent through the cosmic spheres, of how his eyes turn to the human soul to whom he would fain bring salvation, wandering in chaos but yet longing for Christ.—

Therefore send me, O Father,
Descending, I bear the seal of heaven,
Traversing all the Aeons ...

The spiritual worlds are ranged one above the other in the heavenly spheres and the higher we ascend the more do we find that the older worlds are still living realities, the most ancient being present to this day in the highest spheres of all. What was once connected with the Saturn evolution is to be found in the very highest spiritual spheres, and these successive spheres, related to the flow of time, are called ‘Aeons.’

Traversing all the Aeons,
Teaching all sacred knowledge;
Thus may God's image be made manifest;
And thus to you I give
The deeply hidden knowledge of the sacred way:
‘Gnosis’ it shall be for you.

Mankind has very largely lost consciousness of the Christ as a Cosmic Being. This loss was inevitable, for the old clairvoyance had to disappear and an intervening period—an Aeon devoid of spirit—to come, in order that eventually a new form of clairvoyant vision may arise. But this new vision must again be directed to the spiritual worlds, must not characterise in forms such as are presented to men's outward sight, the Being Who in the Holy Night entered into the evolution of humanity. This new vision must reveal how the Christ Being descended from heavenly sphere to heavenly sphere and thence to the earth, giving the earth meaning and purpose.

Behold, O Father, how, distant from Thy Breath,
This being upon earth
Wanders, the target and victim of all ill,
Lost and perplexed it flees the deadly chaos—
How shall it find its way?
Therefore send me, O Father,
Descending I bear the seal of heaven,
Traversing all the Aeons,
Teaching all sacred knowledge;
Thus may God's image be made manifest;
And thus to you I give
The deeply hidden knowledge of the sacred way:
‘Gnosis’ it shall be for you.

What, in reality, is the earth that surrounds us, when we perceive its essential being? If the corpse of one whose soul already dwells in spiritual worlds lies before you, will you ever say: This is a man? Will you ever say: This is still, in the full sense of the word, a man? The higher members of human nature are no longer in the corpse from which the soul has departed. But since the middle of the Atlantean epoch the earth has been gradually becoming a corpse devoid of soul. The earth around us, despite its manifold beauties, has been approaching the state of a corpse since the middle of Atlantean times and is becoming more and more corpselike. Standing before the huge rocks, one can say no truer thing than that here is the skeleton which the earth has been in process of becoming ever since that time! In the rock-strewn earth we perceive the dying part of the earth-organism, which was a living organism only until the middle of the Atlantean epoch. Geology itself realises that when we walk over the earth or guide the plough through the soil, we are walking over the corpse of the earth, guiding the plough through the corpse of the earth. Geologists have acknowledged this and external science itself, when it begins really to think, cannot do otherwise. And so, inasmuch as we are surrounded by the earth, we confront death; we are spectators of the gradual dying of our earthly globe.

And now let us imagine that the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, that the Cosmic Being Whom we call Christ had not entered through the two Jesus boys into earth-evolution.² Earth-evolution would then be no more, would already by to-day have been overcome by death. But through the two Jesus boys the Christ did enter earthly evolution and then, living in the one for three years, consummated the Mystery of Golgotha, whereby a new seed of life was imparted to the earth. Therefore when the time is fulfilled, the earth will not remain a corpse in cosmic space—the soul having become the prey of Ahriman and Lucifer! No—that is what would have happened had Christ not come into the earth as a living, fertile seed. Because He has come, the earth will not fall into dust, the soul will not be in the sole possession of Lucifer and Ahriman, for the Christ Seed has infused new life into earth-evolution! Just as the earth once separated from the sun and has become a child of the sun, so will earth-evolution, imbued with a new impulse, be fraught with the meaning and purpose imparted by Christ.

Thus spiritual science turns our eyes with awe and reverence to the Mystery of Golgotha and because it points to realms beyond the range of material vision, we feel that it is for us to lift the veil ... since we are resolved to see behind this veil not only what comes before the eyes of an age destined to grow into materialism. Therefore it is again beginning to be possible for those in whom the impulses of spiritual science have come to life, to look up to the Christ as a Cosmic Being. Again and again let it be repeated that the infinite devotion we can feel towards the Child born in the Holy Night of Christmas is not thereby diminished. Rather is this devotion deepened when we can feel the reality of Christ as did Christian Morgenstern when there sprang from his soul a poem which seems like a resurrection of ancient and holy Gnostic thoughts pervaded alike by the Christ-Love and cosmic wisdom. And so a new Christmas is celebrated when in the dark night of materialism, voices ring out that are not the voices of the Gnostics of olden times but are quickened and enriched by dedication to the Living Being of the Cosmic Christ.

Licht ist Liebe ... Sonnen-Weben
Liebes-Strahlung einer Welt
schöpferischer Wesenheiten—

die durch unerhörtte Zeiten
uns an ihrem Herzen hält,
und die uns zuletzt gegeben

ihren höchsten Geist in eines
Menschen Hülle wahrend dreier
Jahre: da Er kam in seines

Vaters Erbteil—nun der Erde
innerlichstes Himmelsfeuer:
dass auch sie einst Sonne werde.

(Light is Love ... the rays of sunshine are the weaving radiance of a world of loving Creator-Spirits. Who, after hiding us in their heart through endless ages, at the last surrendered to us their sublimest One. Wrapped for three years in the body of a Man, He came then into possession of His Father's estate—and is now the innermost heavenly flame of Earth herself, that she too may one day be a Sun).

"Were Christ born a thousand times in Bethlehem, and not in thee, thou art lost eternally."

May there be celebrated in our souls an inner festival of the Holy Night; may our souls be filled with the realisation that a new knowledge of Christ must be born in our time. This new knowledge of Christ links the inmost core of man's being with primal innocence, links the state of childhood, not, as yet, that of mature life, with the very heights of cosmic being. When, in the Holy Night of winter our minds turn to the Christ Child, there is enacted before our souls the greatest of all festivals of consecration, the festival that rings through all the Aeons—and we know that the deepest realities of man's being and nature are indissolubly connected with all cosmic evolution.

Those whose hearts are kindled by spiritual science feel and know that victory over all death can be achieved when the soul is united with the Christ Being. I spoke of this to-day at the funeral of one taken from us so tragically by the war. Realisation of how the heights of cosmic being are connected with the inmost nature of man was impossible as long as the human mind was unable to conceive that the very quintessence of history lies in the Mystery of Bethlehem. But this insight will dawn in those who understand the secret of the two Jesus boys. In the one boy there was present the power of the wisest of all men in pre-Christian times, namely Zarathustra. This boy represents the flower of the previous stages of human evolution; the aura of the other boy was illumined by the forces of the great Buddha. The body of the one boy springs from the noblest blood of the ancient Hebrew peoples; the soul of the Jesus boy described in the Gospel of St. Luke leads back to the earth's beginning.³ The soul of this Jesus boy was kept back, when, in the age of Lemuria, man came to the earth; this soul was guarded by the Mysteries until it was sent into the body of the Jesus whose birth is described in the Gospel of St. Luke. It is said that immediately after birth, this Child uttered words intelligible only to the Mother, in a language unlike any other language, and which the Child himself forgot directly earthly consciousness awoke in him. A mystery was voiced immediately after birth ... And indeed, much of what we have to reveal concerning the Christ Mystery is an exposition of what was uttered by the Jesus boy of the Gospel of St. Luke directly after his birth.

And so spiritual science enables us to understand the Christ Impulse in the deeper aspect of human evolution—in the evolution of pre-Christian times too—for the differences disappear and the voice of the Initiates can still be heard. When once the magnitude of what poured into the evolution of humanity at the Mystery of Golgotha is grasped it will be possible for these forces to be brought to even greater fruition. But men must know Who the Christ was before they can speak truly of Him—in history, for example. If within our movement there are individuals—in greater and greater numbers—who resolve to kindle the light that can be kindled in those inner depths which since the Mystery of Golgotha have been within men's reach then the Christ Light will shine out in every single soul. This Christ Light becomes the Christmas Tree that will illumine all evolution in ages of time to come. The soul will behold an earth again made living, will find Christ everywhere within this new earth.

Those who have allied themselves with spiritual science can receive its tidings of Christ with such depth of feeling that the Christmas Festival will one day be celebrated in every individual soul. It is the Festival which represents the birth of that knowledge of Christ which comes from Christ Himself and is therefore a birth of Christ within us, True, indeed are the words: "Were Christ born a thousand times in Bethlehem, and not in thee, thou art lost eternally." But to this beautiful string of Angelus Silesius we can add: We are secure eternally if we seek the experience belonging to the Holy Night of winter, if we seek to bring Christ to birth in the depths of our souls!

• 1. The translation of the quotations from Wilhelm Meister is that of Thomas Carlyle.
• 2. See: The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind; also the Lecture-Courses on the Gospel of St. Luke and the Gospel of St. Matthew by Rudolf Steiner.
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner's Lecture-Courses on the Gospel of St. Matthew and the Gospel of St. Luke.

The yearly celebration of the physical birth of the Being Who entered earth-evolution in order to give that evolution its meaning, has for many people become a matter of habit. But if, conformably with the task of our spiritual-scientific movement, we are not content with celebrating a festival of mere custom—as is so general nowadays—it will be opportune at this grave time to turn our minds to many things that are connected with the physical birth of Christ Jesus.

We have often pictured how in Christ Jesus, so far as human comprehension goes, two Beings merge as it were into one: the Christ Being and the human Jesus Being. In the evolution of Christianity there has been much conflict, much conflict of dogma, about the meaning of the union of Christ with Jesus, in the Being whose physical birth is celebrated at the Christmas Festival. We ourselves, of course, recognise in the Christ a cosmic, super-earthly Being, a Being Who descended from spiritual worlds in order, through His birth in a physical man, to impart meaning to earth-evolution. And in Jesus we recognise the one who, as man, was predestined after thirty years of preparation, to unite the Christ Being with himself, to receive the Christ Being into himself.

Not only has there been much strife, much conflict of dogma, about the nature of the union of Christ with Jesus, but the relationship of Christ to Jesus contains a hint of significant secrets of the earthly evolution of mankind. If, in the endeavour to understand something of the union of Christ with Jesus, we follow events up to the present day and reflect upon what has still to take place in the evolution of humanity before this relationship can be rightly understood, then we touch upon one of the deepest secrets of human knowledge and human life.

At the time when Christ was about to enter the evolution of humanity, it was possible, through faculties that were a heritage from the days of the old clairvoyant wisdom, to form certain conceptions of the sublimity of the Christ Being. And at that time there existed a wisdom of which people often speak nowadays in a way that is almost blasphemous, but of which they are scarcely able to form any true idea. There existed something which up to this day has been completely exterminated from human evolution, rooted out by certain currents running counter to the deeper Christian revelation: this was the Gnosis, a wisdom into which had flowed much of the ancient knowledge revealed to men in atavistic clairvoyance. Every trace of the Gnosis, whether in script or oral tradition, was exterminated root and branch by the dogmatic Christianity of the West—after this Gnosis had striven to find an answer to the question: Who is the Christ?

There can be no question to-day of reverting to the Gnosis—for the Gnosis belongs to an age that is past and over. True, its extermination was caused by malice, ignorance, enmity towards knowledge and wisdom ... but for all that it happened out of an underlying necessity. When anthroposophical spiritual science is accused of wanting to revive the ancient Gnosis, that is only one of the many expressions of ill-will directed towards it to-day. The accusation is, of course, made by people whose ignorance of the Gnosis is on a par with their ignorance of Anthroposophy. There is no question of reviving the Gnosis, but of recognising it as something great and mighty, something that endeavoured, in the time now lying nineteen hundred years behind us, to give an answer to the question: Who is the Christ?

Before the inner eye of the Gnostic lay a glorious vista of spiritual worlds, with the Hierarchies ranged in their order, one above the other. How the Christ had descended through the worlds of the spiritual Hierarchies to enter into the sheaths of a mortal man—all this stood before the soul of the Gnostic. And he tried to envisage how the Christ had come from heights of spirit, how He had been conceived on earth. The best way to get some idea of the knowledge then existing is to reflect that everything produced by the world after the extermination of the Gnosis was paltry in comparison with the grandeur of the Gnostic idea of the Christ. The Mystery-wisdom behind the Gospels is infinitely great—greater by far than anything which later theology has been able to discover from them. To realise how paltry and insignificant compared with the Gnosis is the current conception of the Christ Being, we have but to steep ourselves in the ancient Gnostic idea of Him. Picturing this, one is filled with humility by the grandeur of the conception of the Christ Being entering into a human body from cosmic heights, from far distant cosmic worlds.

This majestic, sublime concept of Christ has fallen into the background, but all the dogmatic definitions handed down to us as Arian or Athanasian principles of faith are meagre in comparison with the Gnostic conception, in which vision of the Christ Being was combined with wisdom relating to the universe.¹ Only the merest fragments of this great Gnostic conception of Christ have survived.

This, then, is one aspect of the relationship of Christ to Jesus: that Christ came into the world at a time when the wisdom capable of understanding Him, yearning to understand Him, had already been rooted out. People who speak of the ancient Gnosis as oriental phantasy that had to be exterminated for the good of Western humanity, have always believed themselves to be good Christians, but the real cause was that the mind of the age lacked the strength to unite earthly with heavenly concepts. One must have a feeling for the tragic if human evolution is to be understood.

How long after the Mystery of Golgotha was the Temple at Jerusalem, the sanctuary of peace, destroyed? The Temple of Solomon was within the precincts of the city of Jerusalem. What the Gnosis contained in the form of wisdom, Solomon's Temple contained in the form of symbolism. Cosmic secrets were presented in symbols and pictures. And it was intended that those who entered the Temple, where the pictures all around them were reflected in their souls, should receive something through which alone they became truly man. The purpose of the Temple of Solomon was to inculcate the meaning of worlds into the souls of those who were permitted to enter it. What the Temple revealed was something that the earth as such did not reveal, namely, all the cosmic secrets that ray into the earth from the cosmic expanse.

If one of the old Initiates possessing real knowledge of the Temple of Solomon had been asked: Why was the Temple of Solomon built?—the answer would have been somewhat as follows: ‘In order that here on the earth there shall be a beacon light for those Powers who accompany the souls seeking their way into earthly bodies.’ Let us try to grasp what this means, realising that these old Initiates of the Temple of Solomon knew that when men were being accompanied into earthly bodies in conformity with all the signs of the stars, then particular souls must be guided to bodies in which the great symbols of Solomon's Temple could be mirrored.

This, in the nature of things, might give rise to arrogance. If the knowledge was not received with humility, with the humility of the Essenes, it led men into Pharisaism! But at all events, this was the situation: The eye of earth looked up to the heavens, beholding the stars; the spiritual eyes of those who were guiding souls from cosmic worlds to the earth gazed downwards and beheld the Temple of Solomon with its symbols. The Temple was like a star whose light enabled them to guide the souls into bodies which would be capable of understanding its meaning. It was the central star of the earth, shining out with special brightness into the spiritual heights.

When Christ Jesus had come to the earth, when the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place, the great secret that was intended to be mirrored in every single human soul was this: "My kingdom is not of this world!" It was then that the external, physical Temple of Solomon lost its significance and its destiny was tragically fulfilled. Moreover at that time there was no living person who would have been capable of apprehending the full compass of the Christ Being from the reflections of the symbols in Solomon's Temple. But the Christ Himself had now entered earth-evolution, had become part of it. That is the all-important fact. The Gnostics were the last survivors of the bearers of that ancient, atavistic earth-wisdom which was comprehensive and powerful enough to make some understanding of the Christ possible.

That, then, is one aspect of the relation of Christ to Jesus. In those days the Christ Being could have been understood through the Gnosis. But according to the world-plan it was not to be—although the Gnosis teemed with wisdom concerning the Christ. And it may truly be said that the path now taken by Christianity through the countries of the South, through Greece, Italy, Spain and so on, led more and more to the obliteration of insight into the essential nature of Christ. And Rome, sinking into decline, was destined to bring about the final extinction of understanding.

In regard to this relation of the Christ to Jesus it is strange that on the one hand we find lighting up in the Gnosis a sublime conception of the Christ which died away as Christianity passed through the Roman system, while on the other hand, when Christianity encountered the peoples from the North, the concept of Jesus came to the fore. In the South, the concept of Christ flickered out. The form in which the concept of Jesus emerged was by no means very sublime, but it gripped men's hearts and feelings in such a way that something wonderfully absorbing stirred in their souls at the thought of how the Child who receives the Christ is born in the Holy Night. Just as in the South the concept of Christ was inadequate, so in the North was man's feeling for Jesus. But for all that it was a feeling that stirred the very depths of the human heart. Yet in itself it is not quite comprehensible. For if we contrast the immeasurable significance of Christ Jesus for the evolution of humanity with all the sentimental trivialities about the ‘dear little Jesus’ contained in many poems and hymns commonly used to move the human heart—for in their egoism men believe that these trivialities kindle emotions capable of storming the heavens—then we have a direct impression that something is striving to make its home but is not fully able to do so, that one element is mingling with another in such a way that the deeper meaning, the far deeper significance, remains in the subconsciousness.

What actually is it that remains in the subconsciousness while the Jesus-thought, the Jesus-feeling, the Jesus-experience, is coming to the surface? The process takes a strange and remarkable course. The understanding for Christ sank into the subconsciousness and there, in the subconsciousness, the understanding for Jesus began to glow. In the subconsciousness—not in the consciousness, which was dim—the consciousness of Christ that was flickering out and the consciousness of Jesus that was beginning to stir were destined to meet and counter-balance each other. Why was it, then, that the peoples who came down from Scandinavia, from the North of present-day Russia, received Christianity without the Christ-idea which, to begin with, was wholly foreign to them? Why was it that they received Christianity with the Jesus-idea? Why was Christmas the festival which above all others spoke to the human heart, awakened in the human heart feelings of holy bliss? Why was it? What was present in this Europe which in truth received from the South a completely distorted Christianity? What was it that kindled in men's hearts the idea which then, in the Christmas Festival, created such a deep, deep fount of experience?

Men had been prepared—but had largely forgotten by what they had been prepared. They had been prepared by the old Northern Mysteries. But they had forgotten the import and meaning of these ancient Mysteries. And we have to go very far back into the past to discover from the source and content of the Northern Mysteries the deep secret of the penetration of the Jesus-feeling into the soul-life of the European peoples.

The principles underlying the Northern Mysteries were quite different from those underlying the Mysteries of Asia Minor and of the South. The experiences underlying the Northern Mysteries were more intimately and directly connected with the existence of the stars, with nature, with earthly fertility, than with the wisdom represented in symbols within a Temple. The Mystery-truths are not the childish trifles presented by certain mystic sects to-day; the Mystery-truths are great and potent impulses in the evolution of mankind. Present-day Anthroposophy can no more revert to the Gnosis than mankind can revert to what the ancient Mysteries of the North, for example, signified for human evolution. And to believe that such Mystery-truths are now being revealed because of some kind of hankering to go back to what was once alive in them, would be a foolish misunderstanding. It is for the sake of deepening self-recollection, self-knowledge, that mankind to-day must be made aware of the content of such Mysteries. For what linked the Northern Mysteries with the whole evolution of the universe, arose from the earth, just as the Gnostic wisdom, inspired from the cosmos, was connected with happenings in the far distances of the universe. How the secret of man, linked as it is with all the secrets of the cosmos, comes into operation when a human being enters physical existence on the earth—it was this that, with greater depth than anywhere else at a certain period of earth-evolution, lay at the root of these ancient Northern Mysteries.

But we have to go very far back—to about three thousand years before Christ, perhaps even earlier—to understand what was alive in the hearts of those in whom, later on, the feeling for Jesus arose. Somewhere in the region of the peninsula of Jutland, in present-day Denmark, was the centre from which, in those ancient times, important impulses went out from the Mysteries. And—let the modern intellect judge of this as it will—these impulses were connected with the fact that in the third millennium before Christ, in certain Northern tribes, he alone was regarded as a worthy citizen of the earth who was born in certain weeks of the winter season. The reason for this was that from those places of the Mysteries on the peninsula of Jutland, among the tribes which at that time called themselves the Ingaevones, or were so called by the Romans—by Tacitus²—the Temple Priest gave the sign for sexual union to take place at a definite time during the first quarter of the year. Any sexual union outside the period ordained by this Mystery-centre was taboo; and in this tribe of the Ingaevones a man who was not born in the period of the darkest nights, at the time of greatest cold, towards our New Year, was regarded as an inferior being. For the impulse went out from that Mystery-centre at the time of the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Only then, among those who might believe themselves united with the spiritual world as became the dignity of man, was sexual union permissible. The characteristic virility—even in its aftermath—marvelled at by Tacitus, writing a century after the Mystery of Golgotha, was due to the fact that the forces which enter into such sexual union were preserved through the whole of the rest of the year.

And so those who belonged to the tribe of the Ingaevones (and in a lesser degree this was also true of the other Germanic tribes) experienced the process of conception with particular intensity at the time of the first full moon after the vernal equinox. They experienced it, not in wide-awake consciousness, but as it were heralded in dream. Yet they were aware of its significance in regard to the connection between the secret of man and the secrets of the heavens. A spiritual being appeared to the woman who was to conceive and in a kind of vision announced to her the human being who, through her, was to come to the earth. There was no clear consciousness, but only semi-consciousness, in the sphere experienced by souls when the entry of a human being into the physical world is taking place; subconsciously men knew that they were under the direction of the Gods, who then received the name of the Wanen, connected with wähnen, that is to say with what takes its course, not in clear, intellectual, waking consciousness, but in cognitive dream-consciousness.

What was once in existence and fitting for its own epoch, is often preserved in later times in symbols. Thus the fact that in those ancient times the holy mystery of the generation of a human being was wrapped in subconsciousness, and led to all births being concentrated in a particular period of the winter season, so that it was regarded as sinful for a man to be born at another time—this was preserved in fragments which passed over to a later consciousness as the Hertha or Erda or Nertus Saga. No erudition, as scholars themselves openly admit, has hitherto been able to interpret these fragments, for actually all that is known externally of the Nertus Saga, with the exception of a few brief notes, comes from Tacitus, who writes as follows about the Nertus or Hertha cult:

"The Reudigni, Aviones, Anglii, Varini, Eudoses, Saurini and Nuitones—Germanic peoples living amidst rivers and woods" (that is, roughly the several tribes who belong to the Ingaevones) " specially revere Nertus, that is, Mother Earth, and they believe that she intervenes in human affairs, makes journeys to the peoples." (Germania 40).

In the ancient cult of the Wanen it became known in dream-consciousness to every woman who was to give a citizen to the earth that the Goddess worshipped later on as Nertus would appear to her. The Divinity was, however, represented not exactly as female, but as male-female. It was not until later, through a corruption, that Nertus became an entirely feminine principle. Just as the Archangel Gabriel drew near to Mary, Nertus on her chariot drew near to the woman who was about to give a citizen to the earth. The woman concerned saw this in the spirit. Later, when the Mystery-impulse in this form had long since died out, echoes of the happening were celebrated in symbolic rites which Tacitus was still able to witness and of which he says the following:—

"On an island of the ocean is a sacred grove and in it there is a consecrated chariot covered with a veil. Only the priest may approach it."—This priest was taken to represent the ‘Initiate’ of the Hertha-Mystery—"He knows when the Goddess appears in the sacred chariot. He becomes aware of the presence of the Goddess in her holy place, and in deep reverence accompanies her chariot drawn by cows. Then there are days of joy and feasting in all the places which the Goddess honours with a visit. Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts. At those times no war is waged, no weapons are handled, the sword is sheathed. Only peace and quiet are at those times known or desired, until the Goddess, tired of her sojourn among mortals, is led back into her shrine by the same priest." (—This was actually the form taken by the vision—

"Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts." In such ancient records the descriptions are accurate and exact, only men do not understand them. "Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts. At those times no war is waged, no weapons are handled, the sword is sheathed." And so it was in very truth at the time which is now our Easter, when human beings believed in their inmost soul that the time of earthly fruitfulness had come for them too; it was then that the souls who were born at the time that is now our Christmas, were conceived. Easter was the time of conception. The experience was regarded as a holy, cosmic mystery, and it was this that was symbolised later on by the Nertus cult. The whole experience was veiled in the subconscious region of the soul, might not rise up into consciousness. This is hinted at in the description of the cult given by Tacitus: "Only peace and quiet are at those times known or desired—until the Goddess, tired of her sojourn among mortals, is led back into her shrine by the same priest. Then the chariot and the veil and even the Goddess herself are bathed in a hidden lake. Slaves perform the cult, slaves who are at once swallowed up as forfeit by the lake, so that all knowledge of these things sinks into the night of unconsciousness. A secret horror and a sacred darkness hold sway over a being who is able to behold only the sacrifice of death."

Everything that comes into the world calls forth a Luciferic and an Ahrimanic counterpart. The event which—as experienced by the Ingaevones—was part of the regular, ordained evolution of mankind was connected with the time of the first full moon after the vernal equinox. But owing to the precession of the equinox, what had remained from olden days as a dream-experience was transferred to a later date and therefore became Ahrimanic. When the experience that had arisen in ancient times in the true Hertha cult was advanced about four weeks, it became Ahrimanic. This meant that the union of the woman with the spiritual world was sought in an irregular way—at the wrong time. Here lies the explanation of the institution of the Walpurgis Night—between the 30th April and the 1st May. It is nothing but an Ahrimanic transposition of time. Luciferic transposition of time goes backward; Ahrimanic transposition of time runs in the opposite direction, being connected with the precession of the equinox. Thus the Ahrimanic, Mephistophelean form of the Hertha cult, the perversion into the diabolic, later became the Walpurgis Night; it is connected with the most ancient Mysteries of which only faint echoes remained.

Much of the content of the ancient Northern Mysteries lived on—if the matter is rightly understood—in the Scandinavian Mysteries. There, instead of Nertus, we find Friggo, a god who, according to the symbolism associated with him—but this can become intelligible only through spiritual science—turns into the very betrayer of what lies at the root of this Mystery.

One more thing must be mentioned in regard to these Mystery-practices. You can see that if the human seed was ripening from the time of the vernal full moon to winter time, one such human being would be the first to be born in the ‘Holy Night.’ Among the Ingaevones the first to be born in the Holy Night—the Holy Night of every third year in the most ancient times—was chosen as their leader when he reached the age of thirty, and he remained leader for three years, for three years only. What happened to him then I may perhaps be able to tell you on another occasion.

Careful investigation reveals that not only are Frigg, Frei, Freiga, merely additional designations for Nertus, as is the Scandinavian ‘Nört,’ but the name ‘Ing’ itself, whence Ingaevones, is another name for Nertus. Those who were connected with the Mystery called themselves "Men belonging to the God or the Goddess Ing"—Ingaevones. Only fragments of what really lived in this Mystery survived in the external world. One such fragment consists of the words of Tacitus already quoted. Another fragment is the well-known Anglo-Saxon rune of a few lines only. These famous lines are known to every philologist of the Germanic languages, but no one understands their meaning. They are approximately as follows:

"Ing was first seen among the East Danes. Later he went towards the East. He walked over the waves, followed by his chariot."

In this Anglo-Saxon rune there is an echo of what lay behind the old Mystery-customs of the Easter conception with a view to the Christmas birth. What happened then in the spiritual world was known best on the Danish peninsula. Hence the rune correctly says: "Ing was first seen among the East Danes."

Then came the time when this ancient knowledge fell more and more into corruption, when it was to be found only in echoes, in symbolism. This was the time in the evolution of humanity when what originated in the warm countries spread abroad. And what comes from the warm countries is something that is not connected—as is the case in the cold countries—with the intimate relation between the seasons and man's own inner experiences. From the warm countries came the impulse which resulted in the distribution of conceptions and births over the whole year; this of course had already happened in the South even in the days of the old, atavistic clairvoyance, although it was still to some extent pervaded by the old principles, the principles which prevailed in the times when in the cold regions the Women held sway and in the South the Temple Mysteries had long since superseded the old Nature-Mysteries. The Southern practice spread towards the North, although an intermixture of the old still remained at the time when the Wanen gods were superseded by the Asen gods. Just as the Wanen are connected with wähnen, so are the Asen connected with the German sein (being)—that is to say, being or existence in the material world which the mind tries to grasp externally. And when the men of the North had entered into an age when individual intelligence began to assert itself, when the Asen had supplanted the Wanen, the old Mystery-customs fell into decay. They passed over into isolated, scattered Mystery-communities of the East. And one Being only—he in whom the whole meaning of the earth was to be made new, he in whom the Christ was to dwell—he alone was destined to unite within himself what had once been the essence and content of the Northern Mysteries.

Hence the origin of the account in St. Luke's Gospel of the appearance of the Archangel Gabriel to Mary, is to be sought in the visions of spiritual realities once reflected in the Nertus-symbol of the ancient Northern Mysteries. The symbol had moved eastward. Spiritual science discloses this to-day and this alone explains the meaning of the Anglo-Saxon rune. For Nertus and Ing are the same. Of Ing it is said: "Ing was first seen among the East Danes. Later he went towards the East. He walked over the waves, followed by his chariot,"—over the waves of the clouds, that is, just as Nertus moved over the waves of the clouds.

What had once been general in the colder regions, here became singular, individual. It occurred as a single, unique event, and we find it again in the descriptions given in the Gospel of St. Luke.

But whatever has once existed in the world and has taken root, whatever is anchored in the heart's understanding, remains a possession of the soul. And when knowledge of Christianity was received in the North from the Roman South, men felt—not in clear consciousness but in the subconsciousness—it had some connection with an ancient Mystery-custom. Hence in the North, men were able to develop a particularly intense feeling for Jesus. The reality that had lived in the old Nertus Mystery had already sunk into the subconsciousness, yet in the subconsciousness it was present, it was sensed and dimly experienced.

When in those long past times in the far North, when the earth was still covered with forests that were the home of the bison and the elk, families came together in their snowcovered huts and under their lantern-lights gathered around the new-born child, they spoke of how with this new life there had been brought to them the new light announced by the heavens in the previous spring. Such was the ancient Christmas. To these people, who were one day to receive the tidings of Christendom, it was said: In the hour that is especially holy, one destined for greatness is born. It is the child who is the first to be born after midnight in the night designated as holy. And although men no longer possessed the ancient knowledge, when the tidings came that such a one had been born in far-off Asia, one in whom lived the Christ Who had come down from the world of the stars to the earth, something of the old feeling came alive in them.

It is incumbent upon the present age to understand such things more and more deeply and thereby grasp in concrete reality the meaning of the evolution of earthly humanity. Truths of mighty, awe-inspiring significance are contained in the Holy Scriptures, not just the trivialities of which we so often hear in religious teachings to-day, but sacred truths which thrill through the very fibres of our being, stirring our hearts to the depths. These are truths which flow through the whole evolution of humanity and resound in the Gospels. And as spiritual science reveals their deep, deep source, the Gospels will one day become a precious treasure, prized at their true worth. Men will know, then, why it is recounted in the Gospel of St. Luke:

"And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria).

And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David).

To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for him in the inn."

It was for Him, the first-born among men in whose souls true ego-hood was to awaken, that the holy Mystery-power of ancient days had passed over from the Danish peninsula to the distant East.

"And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid."

Nerta too, moving across the land, had announced to the old Wanen-consciousness, that is to say, in the subconsciousness of atavistic clairvoyance, the arrival of human beings on the earth.

"And the angel said unto them, Fear not; for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying ..."

And now the heavenly Powers proclaimed what the Nerta-Priest in the old Northern Mystery-cult had proclaimed to the woman about to conceive.

"The revelation of the Divine from the Heights takes place at the time when there is peace among men who are of good-will."

As Tacitus narrates: "Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts. At those times no war is waged, no weapons are handled, the sword is sheathed."

The great goal for which man must strive is the attainment of the power to gaze into the course of the evolution of humanity. For the Mystery of Golgotha, too, through which earth-evolution received its deeper meaning, will become fully comprehensible when its place in the whole evolution of humanity is understood. In future times, when, with the disappearance of materialism, man will know, not in abstract theory but as a concretely real experience, that he is of divine origin, the ancient, holy Mystery-truths will again be understood; then the intervening time will be over, a time in which the Christ, it is true, lives on earth, but can be understood only by the awakened consciousness. For the Gnostic conception of Christ faded away; understanding for Jesus developed in connection with the old Nertus cult, but in unconsciousness. In the future, however, humanity will have to bring both the unconscious streams to consciousness, and unite them. And then an ever greater understanding of the Christ will take foothold on earth, an understanding that will unite the Mystery-knowledge with a great and renewed Gnosis.

Those who take the anthroposophical view of the world seriously, and the movement associated with it, will see in what it has to say to mankind no child's play but great and earnest, soul-shaking truths. And our souls must submit to this because it is right that we should be shaken by greatness.

Not only is the earth a mighty living being; the earth is an exalted spirit-being. And just as the greatest human genius could not stand at the height he reaches in later life if he had not first developed through childhood and adolescence, so the Mystery of Golgotha could not have taken place, the Divine would not have been able to unite with earth-evolution, if at the beginning of earthly days the Divine—in a different manner but in a manner still divine—had not descended to the earth. The form taken by the revelation of the Divine from the heavenly heights was not the same in the ancient Nertus cult as it was at a later time, but for all that it was a true revelation.

The knowledge contained in this ancient wisdom was, it is true, atavistic in character, but for all that it was infinitely more exalted than the materialistic view of the world which, in the sphere of knowledge, so brutally reduces humanity to the level of the animal.

In Christianity we have to do with a Fact, not with a theory. The theory is a necessary consequence and of importance for the consciousness that has had to develop in the further course of human evolution. But the essence of Christianity as such, the Mystery of Golgotha, is an accomplished Fact. The impulse entered, to begin with, into subconscious currents, as was still possible in Asia Minor at the time when the union of Christ with the earth took place.

Shepherds, men bearing a similarity with those among whom the Nertus cult flourished, are also described in the Gospel of St. Luke. I can give only very brief indications of these things. If we were able to speak of them at greater length you would find that there are deep foundations for what I have told you to-day. The human being has descended from spiritual heights ... hence the revelation of the Divine from the heavenly heights ... The revelation had to be expressed in this form to those who out of the ancient wisdom knew the destiny of man to be united with the secrets of the stars of heaven. But what must live on earth as the result of Christ's union with a man of earth—that can be understood only very gradually. The message is twofold: ‘Revelation of the Divine from the heights’—‘Peace in the souls on earth who are of good-will.’ Without this second part, Christmas, the Festival of the birth of Christ, has no meaning!

Not only was Christ born for men; men have also crucified Him. Even behind this lies necessity. But it is none the less true that men have crucified the Christ! And it may dawn upon us that the crucifixion on the wooden Cross on Golgotha was not the only crucifixion. A time must come when the second part of the Christmas proclamation becomes reality: ‘Peace to the men on earth who are of good-will.’ For the negative side too is discernible. Men are very far indeed from a true understanding of Christ and of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Does it not cut to the very heart that we ourselves should be living at a time when men's longing for peace is shouted down?³ It seems almost a mockery to celebrate Christmas in days when voices are raised in outcry against the desire for peace. To-day, when the worst has not actually befallen, we can but fervently hope that a change will take place in the souls of men, and a Christian feeling, a will for peace supersede these demonstrations against the desire for it. Otherwise it may not be those who are struggling in Europe to-day, but those coming over from Asia, who will one day wreak vengeance on this rejection of the desire for peace; it may be they who will have to preach Christianity and the Mystery of Golgotha to humanity on the ruins of European spiritual life. And then the indelible record will remain: that at Christmas time, nineteen hundred and sixteen years after the tidings of peace on earth to men of good-will, humanity came to shout down the desire for peace.

May it not succeed! May the good Spirits who are at work in the Christmas impulses protect luckless European humanity from such a fate!

• 1. Arius: "The Son was once created out of nothing by the Divine Will, was the first creature and the creator of the Universe, hence to be called God, though subject to the Father," This was declared heretical by the Council of Nicea in A.D. 325, and replaced by the Athanasian principle of faith. "The Son of God is from eternity, not created, but begotten out of the Being of the Father, and is of like nature to the Father.
  
  Streams of blood were shed in consequence of these doctrines, impenetrable as they are by the human mind (Weber: Lehrbuch der Weltgeschichte, 1875).
• 2. Mannus had three sons, after whom the people nearest the North Sea are called Ingaevones, those of the centre, Hermiones, the remainder Istae. (Germania 2).
• 3. A reference to the agitation against the German proposal in December, 1916 for peace negotiations.

Dear attendees! Anthroposophy, as it is to be cultivated at the Goetheanum in Dornach, still finds the most diverse opponents today - opponents who stand on the ground of church theology with their views, even from the artistic side many opponents have shown up, especially opponents who do not always start from thoroughly objective points of departure and come from the most diverse party directions and from the most diverse areas of social life. I will not deal with all these adversaries today, my dear audience, but what I would like to do today is to deal with the misunderstandings and antagonism that anthroposophical research has encountered from the scientific community. For it is my conviction that, although it seems absolutely necessary to oppose the various other opponents, these will gradually disappear of their own accord once the debate between anthroposophy and science has been brought into the necessary forms so that present-day official science and anthroposophy can really understand each other. At the moment, the situation is such that it is precisely from the scientific side that anthroposophical research is met with the greatest misunderstandings.

But first of all, I would like to emphasize that the anthroposophical research method that I represent – for that is how I would actually like to call it – definitely wants to stand on scientific ground and that it would like to set up all its arguments in such a way that this scientific ground becomes possible, excluding any kind of dilettantism and so on. The starting point for the anthroposophical research method is such that the scientific requirements and the whole scientific attitude of modern times have been taken into account. Anthroposophy does not place itself in opposition to modern science. On the contrary, it seeks to take up what has emerged over the course of the more recent development of civilization in the way of scientific conscientiousness and exact scientific methods, especially in the field of natural science, over the last three to four hundred years, but particularly in the nineteenth century and up to the present. Although it must go beyond the results and also the field of actual natural science, as it is usually understood today, it would like to include what underlies it as scientific discipline, as scientific methods, in the inner education for the anthroposophical method. Today I will not be able to give a fundamental lecture, but will only touch on certain points, in order to then be able to draw some connecting lines to the scientifically recognized fields of today.

What is initially claimed by anthroposophy are special methods of knowledge - methods of knowledge that differ from what is generally considered to be the usual methods of knowledge today, but which nevertheless grow out of them quite organically. Today, it is generally assumed that one can only conduct scientific research if one is grounded in knowledge as it arises in ordinary life, after having undergone a normal school education and then approaching the various fields of external natural existence, including that of man, by experimenting, observing and thinking in a materialistic sense.

Anthroposophy cannot be based on this, but rather it assumes that it is possible, that just as one first develops one's mental abilities from early childhood to what today is called a normal state of mind or what is regarded as such, further cognitive abilities can be developed by taking one's soul life, if I may use the expression, freely and independently, starting from this so-called normal state of mind. And through these cognitive abilities, one is then able to gain deeper insights into the nature and human existence, into world phenomena, than is possible without such particularly developed abilities. These abilities are not developed by an arbitrary handling of the soul life, but they are developed in a very systematic way, only that one is not dealing with the training of certain external manipulations, with the application of the laws of thought recognized by ordinary logic, but with the development of the intimate soul life itself.

I can only hint at the methods used to develop such supersensible soul faculties. In my various books, especially in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science”, I have given detailed descriptions of how a person can proceed in order to soul-life to such abilities by means of which one can — if I may express myself trivially — see more than one can explore with ordinary intellectual thinking, with experimentation and observation.

I have already mentioned imaginative cognition as the first step towards such knowledge. This imaginative cognition does not mean that one should develop the ability to cultivate illusions or phantasms in the soul, but rather that it is a pictorial cognition, as opposed to ordinary abstract cognition, which is simply needed to explore the real secrets of existence. This pictorial knowledge is acquired, as I said, by way of long soul-searching. It depends on individual ability: one person needs a long time, another only a short time, to try to apply a meditative life to the point of enhancing one's inner soul abilities. This meditative life consists, for example, as already mentioned, and described in more detail in the books mentioned, of easily comprehensible ideas, that is, ideas that one either forms in the moment, so that one can grasp them in all their details, or that you can have them given to you by someone who is knowledgeable in such matters, that you can have such ideas present with all your strength in your ordinary consciousness, that you can, so to speak, concentrate all of your soul abilities on such easily comprehensible ideas.

What is achieved by this? Well, I would like to express what is achieved by this through a comparison. If someone uses the muscles of his arm continually, especially if he uses them in a very definite, systematic way, then he will grow in strength for these muscles. If someone applies the soul abilities in such a way that he concentrates them on a self-appointed goal, on a self-appointed inner soul content, then the soul powers as such will grow stronger, will gain strength. And by doing so, one can achieve – as I said, it takes a long time to do these exercises – one can achieve, inwardly, without paying attention to external sense impressions, a strength of soul that is otherwise only applied to the external sense impressions themselves.

The outer sense impressions are concrete, pictorial. Everyone who has a certain self-contemplation knows that he develops a greater intensity of his soul life when he lives in the outer sense impressions than when he lives in abstract ideas or in memories, when he lives in that which remains for him when he turns his perceptive abilities away from the outer sensory life and limits himself only to his soul as such, as it arises, I might say, as an echo, as an after-effect, through the lively, saturated outer sensory impressions. What is important, ladies and gentlemen, is that the inner life of the soul is so strengthened that one can have something in this inner strengthening that one can otherwise only have in the present human life between birth and death when one is given over to the strength of the external sense impressions. One arrives at a pictorial imagining, an imagining that actually differs from the usual abstract imagining – let us say, if we want to speak scientifically, from that imagining by which one visualizes natural laws on the basis of observation and experiment. One comes to develop such inner strength that one has not only the kind of thinking, the kind of inner soul life that is present, for example, in grasping the laws of nature, but also the kind of inner soul life that is present in grasping outer pictorialness. One attains an inner pictorialness of thinking. One comes to live, not merely in thoughts of an abstract kind, but in inner pictures.

In the moment when one characterizes such a developed inner vision, it is immediately asserted: Yes, anthroposophy wants to develop something that is actually known as subordinate soul abilities, as soul abilities that play over half or completely - as one now wants to take it - into the pathological. And further one says: Those who strengthen their inner vision to such an extent that they develop the ability to see inner images without taking these images from the external sense world are surrendering themselves to an ability that is the same as the hallucinatory ability, to the ability to imagine all kinds of pathological phantasms and the like. And indeed, representatives of today's science have repeatedly objected that what anthroposophy claims as its inner vision in images must be traced back to suppressed nervous forces, which then, at the appropriate moment, arise from the inner being through the intensified inner life, so that one actually has nothing other than a suppressed nervous life in these images. Those representatives of science who confuse anthroposophical vision with hallucinations, as they are called in the trivial life, have simply not thoroughly studied what anthroposophical vision really is. Firstly, one could counter such objections by pointing out that anthroposophy insists that it proceeds in exactly the same strict way as the external natural sciences with regard to what the natural sciences deal with, and that it takes recognized scientific methods as its most important preparation and that it rises only from these, so that one should not really speak of the fact that someone who stands on the true ground of anthroposophy would show signs of indulging in a vision like some random medium or some random fantasist. We will not see any medium or fantasist placing themselves firmly on the ground of scientific research and taking this as their starting point, and then wanting to let what is to become a vision emerge from these strict scientific methods. But I do not want to talk about that at all. Instead, I would like to point out that anthroposophy demands a more thorough and exact method of thinking than is usually evident or applied in such objections.

The main point here is that, above all, such objections do not yet arise from a truly thorough knowledge of the soul or psychology. Our knowledge of the soul still leaves much to be desired today. It is by no means commensurate with the exact methods of external natural science. In many respects, it is actually a chaos of ideas handed down from ancient times and extracted to the point of mere words, and all kinds of abstractions. It is not based on real observation of the life of the soul, on exact empiricism of the life of the soul. Above all, such exact psychological empiricism must ask itself the question: What is the actual state of our sensory perception? What actually works in our sensory perception?

In our overall soul life, there is imagination, feeling and will. But our soul life is not such that we can separate imagination, feeling and will from one another other than in abstraction; rather, imagination, feeling and will are involved in everything that our soul is capable of in some way. We can only say that when we are in the life of imagination, feeling and willing play a part in it. When we form an affirmative or negative judgment within the life of imagination, our soul life is oriented outwards, but the affirmation or negation is carried out by an impulse of the will. This impulse of the will plays a definite part in our life of imagination. And only he can get an exact idea of the soul life and its various expressions who is clear everywhere about what is the part of feeling in willing, or, conversely, of imagining in willing, and so on.

Now it is relatively easy to see that the will plays a role in our imaginative life. I have just drawn attention to the process of judging, and anyone who really studies judging will see how the will plays a role in imagining. But also – and this is important, dear readers – the will plays a role in our sensory perception. And here I must draw attention to something that is usually not even known in today's psychology, or at least not sufficiently characterized. Will most certainly plays a part in our sensory perception, in all our seeing, hearing and other sensory perceptions. What actually takes place in sensory perception?

In the act of perceiving, we are inwardly active in every act of the soul, even in those in which we appear to be passively confronting the outside world. In what we bring to the outer world through inner activity, that is, expose ourselves to some kind of sensory perception, the will certainly lives – albeit, I would say, diluted and filtered – but the will lives in it. And the essence of sensory perception is that this will – I could go on for hours explaining this in detail, but here I can only hint at it – that this will, which we expose from the inside out, so to speak, is repulsed by the various agents. And we shall only comprehend the nature of the stimulus, the nature of the total sensory perception, when we can visualize this play of the will from the inside out and the counter-strike of the natural agents from the outside in. become aware of how in every act of sensory perception there is a reaction of the will and how everything that remains of sensory perception in memories or other forms of perception is actually a withdrawn will impulse. And so we can distinguish, by exposing ourselves sensually, that which plays in such a way from the will, from that which, starting from the whole act and following on from it, then continues in the life of imagination.

In the life of the imagination, as I have already indicated, the will also lives, but it lives in such a way that the inner man has a much greater share in this unfolding of the will into the life of the imagination than in the unfolding of the will into the life of the senses. First of all, our will remains much more active, much more subjective, much more personal in imagining than in sensing. You see, dear Reader, everything I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” for the development of supersensible knowledge, aims to raise to full consciousness the will that plays into sensory perception and that must therefore be applied, even in the most exact natural research. And now one must organize one's inner life of imagination in such a way that in this life of imagination not the subjective arbitrary will - if I may express it in this way - lives, as it otherwise lives in imagining, but the same objective will that lives in sensory perception. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as I understand it, does not aim to bring up all sorts of things from the depths of the soul in a nebulous, mystical way, in order to force a subjective will into the life of ideas. This subjective will is already present in ordinary life, but it must be released from the life of imagination precisely through the exercises for attaining higher knowledge, and the will that one carefully trains oneself to see through, and that lives precisely in sensory perception - and only in sensory perception - must discipline and permeate the life of imagination.

If I may express it in this way, something tremendous has been achieved. The entire life of the imagination has acquired the character that otherwise only sense perception has. This is something that each individual must make as his personal discovery. Man knows, he can imagine all sorts of things; the will can play a part in this by turning the judgment one way or the other. What a wealth of life there is in the imagination! But when a person uses his senses, the external world imposes the discipline of the will on him – in the way that the will can be applied to sensory perception – and then it is impossible to bring inner subjectivity into play in an arbitrary way. I would remind you that anthropological psychology has already shown how the will comes to life in sensory perception – I need only remind you of Lotze's local signs and so on. But only when one comes to bring this will, which leaps into objectivity, into the life of the imagination, does one shape the life of the imagination in such a way that it becomes imaginative cognition, that it participates in objectivity in the same way that sense perception otherwise participates in objectivity.

You see, dear ladies and gentlemen, in the face of what I have only been able to hint at in a few strokes, in the face of what is meant in the most exact sense, but which is not meant in such a way that one indulges in all kinds of fantastic ideas about the development of the soul – as is also the case with clear-headed mystics – all the objections, even those raised today by official science, are basically extremely amateurish for anyone who is familiar with the subject. For in comparison with everything that can ever flow into hallucinations, dreams, and everything that arises subjectively only from the human being's organization, in comparison with that, that is, where the person lives without objective orientation, where he is completely devoted only to his inner being, in comparison with that, an imaginative life is developed that is modeled on the outer sense life with its objectivity. In a sense, then, the objectivity of sensory perception is extended inwardly through the life of imagination. In all that is present in mediumship, in all that is somehow present in pathological clairvoyance, on the other hand, what leads to pictorialness, to hallucinatory life, is brought up from within the human being.

But that is not at all the case with those methods that are used for anthroposophical research. Here one does not proceed from the inside outwards, as basically every mysticism has done so far, but one proceeds from the outside inwards. Here one does not learn from one's inner mystical feeling, but one learns precisely from external sensory perception how to relate objectively to the world. And then you discover that by learning in this way through sensory perception, you are able to shape the life of imagination in a way that is just as concrete and just as internally saturated as you would otherwise only have with sensory perception. And when one comes to such an inwardly saturated imagination, which now, just as sensory perception, flows into something objective – that is, it is not merely subjectively oriented – only then is one in a position to ascend from a certain stage of knowledge of nature to another stage, which I will characterize in a moment.

But first of all, I would like to say that the anthroposophical spiritual science, as I understand it, has made a sincere effort to create clarity on all sides regarding the position of such imaginative knowledge. And allow me, ladies and gentlemen, to make a brief personal statement, which is not meant to be personal at all, but is entirely objective and related to to how I myself came to not only develop such anthroposophical methods, but also to truly believe in such anthroposophical methods, to see in them a right to knowledge. For do not believe, ladies and gentlemen, that anyone who takes these things seriously is uncritical, that he does not want to thoroughly examine the most thorough and exact methods of critical knowledge of the present day. As I said, allow me to make a personal remark.

I was about thirteen years old when I came across a treatise that – as was particularly prevalent in the 1770s – was primarily concerned with the exact mathematical investigation of external natural phenomena and actually only accepted as natural laws what could be calculated. This essay endeavored to expel even the last mystical concepts from the knowledge of nature. This essay viewed the force of gravitation, the force of attraction in the sense of Newton, as one such mystical concept. This essay was called “The Force of Attraction Considered as an Effect of Movement”. And the mystical concept of attraction was not to be used, in which two material bodies somehow attract each other through space, but an attempt was made to explain attraction in an extraordinarily exact mathematical way: Ponderable matter is in a world gas, and thus a certain number of impacts between, say, neighboring material bodies can be calculated. If you now compare the number of impacts coming from the inside with the number of impacts coming from the outside, you arrive at a pure, mysticism-free explanation of gravitation.

I mention this for the reason that, as I said, this treatise fell into my thirteenth year. In order to understand this treatise - you can imagine that this is not exactly easy for a thirteen-year-old boy - I had to make an effort to master differential and integral calculus at the age of thirteen, because only by doing so can one really master these ideas. And in doing so, I had the opportunity to gain a starting point for everything that followed, which is actually needed to come to terms with such ideas, which have always lived in me with an indeterminate certainty, in a critical way. You really have to get an idea of how you actually use mathematical laws or laws of phoronomy in all your sensory observation, how you actually proceed, what you bring of yourself to the outside world, and so on. In short, for me that was the starting point for exploring how far this strange inner realm of the soul, which we call mathematics, can actually govern external reality.

Heinrich Schramm, the author of this essay - I still consider it extremely important today - was thoroughly convinced that you can go anywhere with mathematics, that you simply have to assume matter, space, motion and that you can then go anywhere with mathematics. He was convinced that the most diverse properties of natural phenomena in ordinary mechanics, in thermodynamics, in optics, in the field of magnetism and electricity, that one can grasp all these different phenomena with mathematics, that one can correctly arrive at all these different phenomena if one only applies mathematics correctly. So, if you apply this mathematical research to a hypothetical material process, the magnetic application springs to mind; if you apply it to a different process, the electrical application springs to mind. In short, all natural phenomena are explained as an effect of motion. One becomes quite free of mysticism; one limits oneself to the concrete, which one can grasp in purely mathematical presentation. This struggle, one must have gone through it once, this struggle with a knowledge that proceeds mathematically in relation to the external world and now wants to grasp the sense perceptions mathematically, because the external world must be grasped somehow, no matter how mathematically one proceeds.

But now another one presented itself to me in this way. I immersed myself in what is called the probability problem in mathematics, where you try to calculate the probability that - let's say, for example - you get a certain throw with two dice, where one, two, and so on, is on top, so you calculate probabilities. This mathematical field, this probability calculation, plays a very important role in the insurance business. There, probability calculation has a very real application. From the number of deaths within a larger number of people, one calculates the probability that any given person, let's say a thirty-year-old, will still be alive at the age of sixty, and then one determines their ability to take out insurance and also their insurance premium. So here we are calculating something, and in doing so we are using calculation to place ourselves in reality in a very strange way. You can see from the fact that, in theory, anyone can calculate their lifespan in such a way that it is fully sufficient for the insurance industry that calculation places us in reality. For example, I could have decided to insure my life at the age of thirty. It would have been perfectly possible to calculate how long my probable lifespan would be and therefore how much I would have had to pay. But no one will believe that they really have to die when this probable lifespan has expired.

We have here a field in which mathematics is valid for what it wants, but where the individual life as such does not fit into the mathematical formula, where life as such is not included in the mathematical formula. In this way, in certain areas of natural science, we have an inner satisfaction of knowledge when we start from the assumption that what has been mathematically understood is adequate to what appears externally in the sense world. But precisely in those areas where probability theory plays a role, there is something where we have to say to ourselves: Mathematics is sufficient for the outer life, for what takes place in outer observation, but one can never be convinced that the inner life is mastered by it.

I would have to tell a great deal more about the intermediate links if I were now to show how, starting from such ideas, I came to the chapter in my “Philosophy of Freedom” (the first edition of which appeared in 1893) on the value of life, on the value of human life. There I was dealing, above all, with a fight against pessimism as such. At that time, this pessimism dominated the philosophical outlook of certain circles much more than was the case later. This pessimism originated in principle with Schopenhauer, but it was systematically founded by Eduard von Hartmann. Eduard von Hartmann now started from the point of view of calculation with reference to the sphere of ethical life, of socioethical life. If you look up his calculations today, they are extremely interesting. He tries to calculate how, on the one hand, everything that brings people pleasure and joy, happiness and so on in life can be positively assessed, and how, on the other hand, everything that brings people suffering, pain, misfortune and so on can be negatively assessed. And he subtracts and actually comes up with a plausible conclusion that for most people the unhappy things, the painful things predominate, that the negative positions predominate.

You can think what you like about such philosophical “trifles”; for those who want to get to the very foundations of knowledge, these are not trifles, and they must not remain so if we want to escape from the misery of today's knowledge. This became a very important problem for me, because I said to myself, a person does not feel it the way it is calculated here. That is nonsense — you can see that the moment you ask people: If you were to add up your happiness and unhappiness, you would come out with a larger number on the negative side. Would you therefore consider your life a lost one? Would you therefore consider yourself ripe for suicide, as Eduard von Hartmann suggests, that every person should actually do so if they were reasonable? For Eduard von Hartmann, the calculation says yes, but life never says yes. Why not?

Now, in my “Philosophy of Freedom” I have shown that this subtraction, which Eduard von Hartmann carried out, simply cannot be carried out. if one wants to apply an arithmetic operation at all, one must apply a completely different one. you have to use a fraction or a division: the numerator or dividend contains everything that is fortunate, pleasurable, everything that brings satisfaction, and the denominator or divisor contains everything that brings suffering, unhappiness, pain and so on. If you apply the division calculation, then you would have to have an infinite denominator if you want to get a number that means zero as a life conclusion. If you can only divide a finite number of suffering and pain through it, then you will never get a life conclusion that is zero. The human being does not commit suicide as a result of subtraction. And when I showed that here one cannot just subtract, but instead divide, or that a fractional approach must be taken, I was also able to show that for mathematics in a certain case one is obliged to start from life, that one must therefore gain access to life, gain an immediate insight into life, before making a mathematical approach.

Here I have the three points together: on the one hand, in natural science, the mathematical approach, which in probability theory can adequately describe the external facts, but which is nevertheless insufficient when it comes to reality. Then there is reality itself, as it is grasped in its real individual form, and finally there is reality itself, which is directly observed as the master of the mathematical approach. There we have the limit of what is mathematically possible, insofar as we start from mathematics itself. And when one recognizes in this way that it is necessary to go beyond the mathematical when wrestling with this problem, then, on the other hand, when one has gained that conception of which I have spoken today, one finds that one has now made this leap in reality, where one has gone beyond the abstract thinking that we encounter most purely in mathematics and entered into direct reality. And only from there did the possibility arise – one might say in an epistemological way, which Goethe himself could not yet have given – to grasp Goethean morphology in the first place and, secondly, to deepen and expand it. For now, once you have gained that imaginative conception, you begin to grasp what Goethe actually meant when he developed his primal plant, that is, an inwardly and spiritually conceived form that underlies all the various outwardly diverse plant forms. Once you have grasped this archetypal plant, he said, you can theoretically invent plants in the most diverse ways with the possibility of growth, that is, you can inwardly recreate the natural process. We have an inner soul process by which we can, anticipating the natural process, allow the most diverse plant forms to emerge from the one primal plant, to recreate them inwardly, just as nature creates the most diverse plant forms from the one typical primal plant. There Goethe has already made the transition from pure abstract thinking to what I would now like to call 'thinking in forms'. That is why Goethe arrived at a true morphology.

This thinking in forms – perhaps I may still characterize it that way. What do we actually do in geometry? There we are dealing with forms, especially in plane geometry as well as in stereometry. But actually we are trying to master the forms through numbers, because measurement can, after all, be traced back to something numerical. So we try to force the forms into the abstraction of numbers. But the mathematical, as I have just explained, is limited. We have to leave it if we want to get out into reality. And we can also find the transition from merely reducing the geometric forms to numbers to directly grasping the geometric form. Once we have taken this serious approach to an inner grasp of geometry, we can also find the transition to other forms – to those forms that Goethe meant when he spoke of the primal plant, which then develops inwardly in the most diverse ways into the most varied plant forms. Just as a triangle can have one angle greater and the other smaller, thus creating the various special triangles, so too the most diverse plant forms arise from the primal plant once its law has been grasped. I would like to say that Goethe arrived at his morphology in a subjective way and only developed it to a certain degree. But that which one develops in a systematic way, by driving the will, which otherwise only lives in sensory perception, into the life of thinking, what one develops there as imaginative thinking, that is thinking in forms.

And we come to the point where we can now survey the stage of knowledge of nature where we have natural laws that can be grasped in abstract thoughts - we can apply this thinking to the inorganic, to the inanimate world. At the moment we want to ascend into the organic world of plants, we need thinking in forms. Dearly beloved, let no one rail against this thinking in forms; let no one say that real science can only progress in a discursive way, can only advance from one thought to another, that is, according to the method that is recognized today as the logical method; let no one say that only this is true science. Yes, one may decree for a long time that this is true science – if nature does not yield to this science, if nature, for example the plant world, does not allow itself to be molded into this science, then we need a different science. If purely discursive thinking, purely abstract thinking, is not enough, then we need thinking in forms, in inner pictorialness. And this thinking in inner pictorialness makes the plant world understandable to us on the outside, and makes the unity of our entire life between birth and death understandable to us on the inside.

I have often stated in my books and lectures that in those moments when one has truly developed this imaginative thinking, it turns out that life from the time one has learned to say “I” to oneself, when the ability to remember begins, to the present moment shows itself as if unfolding in a single tableau. Just as one normally regards one's external physical body as belonging to oneself and looks at it at any given moment, so one also has one's previous life on earth in the course of time before one, as in a panorama of images. This is the first achievement of truly anthroposophical science: to survey one's inner life as a tableau right up to one's birth, so that one now really has an overview of this time organism. What is called the etheric body of man or the body of formative forces in my various books - what is that other than what is achieved through imaginative visualization? We come to survey our life between birth and the present moment, presenting itself as a unity in the immediate present, at the same time as the impulses that carry us beyond the present moment into our further life on earth. And when we have achieved this, the second step of supersensible knowledge presents itself: it is difficult even today to find a name for this step; inwardly, as a method I have called it inspired knowledge. Do not let the term bother you. It does not refer to anything handed down by tradition, but only to what I have just hinted at in my books and what I will also hint at here in principle.

I have said that imaginative visualization is achieved by placing certain easily comprehensible ideas at the center of our consciousness and that this strengthens that consciousness. Just as we, in a sense, recreate memory when we place such ideas at the center of our consciousness, we must now also develop forgetting as an act of the will in our lives. Just as we can concentrate all the powers of our soul on certain ideas, which we place in our consciousness in the way I have characterized, we must also be able to drive these ideas out of our consciousness whenever we want, through inner arbitrariness. We must therefore also reproduce forgetting just as we artificially reproduce, if I may express it this way, remembering.

If we do these exercises, we will see that such an idea, which we bring into the center of our consciousness in this way, initially attracts all kinds of other ideas – like bees, they come in from all sides, these other ideas. We must learn to exclude them; in fact, we must learn to exclude all imagining. We must learn, so to speak, after we have developed such images, to be able to make the consciousness empty without falling asleep in the process. Just try to imagine what that means! This must be practiced, because as soon as a person, with only the usual strength of consciousness, tries to empty his consciousness - especially after he has first concentrated on a particular idea - he inevitably falls asleep. But that is precisely what must be avoided: empty consciousness after imaginative ideas, that is, initially without subjective content. And at that moment, when this has been achieved, the spiritual world streams into the soul life thus prepared. At this moment one is able to see a world that is not there for external sensory perception, but which is the world that we now see not only as part of our earthly life, as in imaginative knowledge, where we see up to birth, but we see the world that contained us as beings before we descended into earthly life. There we get to know ourselves as spiritual beings in a purely spiritual world. There we get to know that within us that has created this organism that lives here in the earthly world. There we get to know through knowledge the immortal part of the human being.

And from there it is then - I just want to mention this - one step to intuitive knowledge, to also gain the insight that the earthly lives of human beings repeat themselves. But you will have gathered from what I have only been able to hint at that it is a matter of using strict systematic schooling of the inner being to prepare the consciousness, not to create any world out of the inner being, but on the contrary, to free the consciousness after prior imagination for the contemplation of the spiritual world. Just as we encounter the outer world with our outer senses, in that the will lives in these outer senses and enters into a relationship with objectivity, so, after we have completely freed our inner soul life from the physical, we prepare the soul to see the spiritual world as it sees the physical world through the senses. There we get the opportunity to see what being has built us, in that we are built out of individuality, not out of the cosmos, and how this being lived in the spiritual world as a pre-existent being before we accepted the physical body through the hereditary stream through generations. And then we learn to recognize that which, in turn, passes through the gate of death and enters the spiritual world when we discard this physical body. We learn to recognize what builds up this physical body, what undergoes a certain transformation in this physical body through birth, what is rekindled through the experiences of life and then, through death, enters the spiritual-soul world again. So we are not striving for a fantasy, not for philosophizing, not for speculating about the immortality of man, but we are striving for a real insight into what lives in us as immortal. And when we deepen our spiritual life in this way, then we are standing in a spiritual objectivity, and it cannot be said that this standing in a spiritual objectivity can in any way be compared with hallucinations arising from the mere inner life or with any subjective fantastic creations.

Now I would like to show – albeit more comparatively – how one can arrive at not only an anthropology, but also a cosmology, in this way. Time is pressing, so I can only hint at it.

How does our ordinary life between birth and death unfold? We see, my dear attendees, how we have external experiences through our sensory experiences, how these sensory experiences trigger and develop ideas, and how, after the ideas have been developed, these ideas can in turn be evoked by the powers of memory. So we see, when we survey our soul life, that in what we carry within us we have, so to speak, the images of what we have experienced in the outside world. I am seeking a particular mental image from the very depths of my soul life. This mental image brings something to my mind in the present moment that I may have experienced fifteen years ago: an objective event experienced completely subjectively. But if my entire inner soul life is healthy, if what I am imagining as a memory is in a healthy connection with the rest of my soul life and, in particular, if I am able to orient myself properly through the senses at all times , then I am also able to tell myself what the external objective experience was like fifteen years ago from what I currently have in front of me – by drawing on everything with which it is related.

Between birth and death, we initially carry the world of our experiences within us in our soul. But, esteemed attendees, we also carry other things within us. If we only look at our lives as we usually survey them in our soul life, we are only aware of what I have just mentioned. But we carry other things within us, and through what I have described to you as supersensible knowledge, we look deeper into ourselves - not through nebulous mysticism, but through exact methods related to mathematics. We carry organs within us, the organs of our inner being. They are built out of our pre-existent being; they are built out of the spiritual world.

Those who, with the help of such exact anthroposophy as I have described, not only survey their soul life, which they have gathered together between birth and the present moment, but who learn to recognize the nature of the forces that prevail in the inner organs, he comes to know the world in its development through his organs, which he spiritually understands. And it is not, my dear audience, some reminiscence of some old superstition, of some old star belief or the like, when today anthroposophy speaks of a world development, but it is based on an insight into the human being that recognizes the inner human being in such a way that the mere life of the soul is recognized as an image of the events experienced since birth that are connected with us.

In this way we experience a connection with the whole world. Just as our memories are inner images of our experiences since birth, so our whole inner being - when we learn to understand it - is an image of the whole development of the world. This is what it means to “read the Akasha Chronicle” - not all the confused ideas that are held against anthroposophy. It means that we can gain knowledge of the world from true knowledge of the human being. However, we must not simplify matters, as is often the case today, when we believe that we can grasp something that is contained in a precise process of knowledge with a few concepts that have been pinned up. Nobody today would dare to grasp or even criticize the system of mathematics with a few pinned-up concepts. On the other hand, what is acquired in a much more complicated way, but with true striving, is today casually tried to be characterized with a few concepts. He who takes care to use all inner precautions in order not to fall into subjectivity but to completely immerse himself in objectivity — that is, to first shape the consciousness so that it can immerse itself in spiritual objectivity — is, I might say, slandered in such a way that it is claimed that only suppressed nervous energy is brought up at the appropriate moment and that all kinds of hallucinations arise from this. can immerse itself in spiritual objectivity – is, I might say, slandered in that it is claimed that only suppressed nervous energy is brought up at the appropriate moment and that all kinds of hallucinatory images are developed.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, without wishing to lapse into a counter-criticism, I will merely characterize how it is currently being done, and at the end I will show you this by means of a small example. A pamphlet appeared recently in which the author seeks to show that what the anthroposophist finds can, to a certain extent, be readily admitted, for the simple reason that today's science also finds that the strangest experiences of the soul can arise from the subconscious. And so, as the author of this work believes, it is quite possible to admit to the anthroposophist that he experiences all kinds of things as they are experienced by mediums, as they are experienced when people are put under hypnosis or taught suggestions, or even when they create suggestions for themselves. In particular, what is most essential about anthroposophy is traced back to self-suggestion.

And now something very worthy is being done. It is shown how the most wonderful effects are possible from the soul, how one can develop remarkably extensive healing processes for tuberculosis, metritis, fibroids and so on from the soul life, how even tuberculous deformations of the spine can be balanced out by the soul life: Why should it not be possible to admit that an anthroposophist also draws all kinds of things from his soul life, especially when he first puts himself into self-suggestion? And now it is shown that such subjective life exists, and such subjective life, especially of autosuggestion, of self-suggestion, the anthroposoph should also be devoted. And there is, for example, the following claim:

By means of his....

- that is, by means of the spiritual and soul development as I have described it

... self-aware action, that is, self-reflection in a trance, is made possible.

Now, dear attendees, I had not spoken of trance. I had only told you that consciousness comes to clearer, brighter levels, not that it is led back into darkness and gloom as in trance!

And self-contemplation, in turn, is the prerequisite for supersensible seeing. In other words, the so-called transcendental experiences are products of methodically generated self-contemplation in a trance state under the simultaneous effect of systematic suggestion. The actual agent here is self-suggestion. Proof of this is, among other things, Rudolf Steiner's explicit assurance that “to attain higher knowledge, one must force the will into the imagination.”

So, here it is claimed that I said in a lecture in Bern on July 8 that to attain higher knowledge, one must force the will into the imagination.

Now, first of all, something that shows how curiously exactly today's scientific papers are written! For example, on the same page it is said how such suggestions can actually be carried out, how something can be suggested to someone so that an idea is taught to him, and how he then becomes completely absorbed in this idea and even creates all sorts of things out of himself as a result of this absorption in this idea. And now the author says:

These successes are mainly based on the fact that Coue once understood suggestion as an independent, will-independent (ideo-dynamic) force.

– “ideo-dynamic” is in brackets, this is very important! –

... and that he has recognized the significance of this subconscious power.

So, we are dealing with an ideodynamic force that is independent of the will. Nevertheless, this ideodynamic force, which is independent of the will, is to be utilized by me, by saying that one must drive one's will into the imagination. Now, let us take the sentence first of all as the author claims I said it in Bern: One must force one's will into the imagination.

Today I also spoke about how one must develop the will, which one first gets to know through sensory perception, into the life of the imagination. In this way one fights precisely those influences that are merely suggestive. In this way one works in precisely the opposite sense. This application of the will is precisely what destroys all suggestive possibilities of influence. What I have described takes place in the opposite direction to suggestive influence. This is actually already evident from the fact that these suggestive influences are called “ideo-dynamic impulses”, i.e. not impulses of the will, but ideo-dynamic impulses. And yet, the author has a presentiment that he is not yet able to express properly: One must indeed summon up one's willpower when one wants to introduce subjective ideas into the ideas, but this happens without the person to whom it happens, who experiences the suggestion, applying his own will.

Everywhere I have described that the person who wants to become an anthroposophical researcher applies his will, thus standing out from the possibilities of suggestion. Therefore, I could not say - I read this in this brochure and said to myself: Did I really let my tongue be paralyzed in Bern on July 8, 1920, did I really say that in order to gain higher knowledge, one must force one's will into one's ideas? For anyone can do that, for suggestion can also happen without any activity on the part of the one to whom something is being suggested.

Now I have taken the trouble to look at the shorthand notes of my Bern lecture on July 8, 1920, which I fortunately found today. And now see what I really said in Bern at the time. Everywhere I tried to show how the opposite approach to suggestion should be taken. And then I said:

We must apply ever greater and greater strength. And it is the application of this strength that matters; it matters that we drive the will, with all our might, into the life of the imagination, into the act of imagining, that we actually grow stronger in this driving of the will into the life of the imagination.

That is something else. You can only drive ideas into the images. When one speaks of driving the will into the life of the images, it means precisely not allowing the images to be influenced by suggestions, but taking control of the free life of the images and the nature of the images, which is ruled by the will. You see, it is quoted in quotation marks, and the opposite of what I really said is said in quotation marks.

But this is only one example, ladies and gentlemen, of the way in which anthroposophy is often discussed today, especially from a scientific point of view, and how it is misunderstood. This is extremely characteristic, and the whole brochure actually has this tendency. My dear audience, as for what mediumistic phenomena are, what hallucinations are, what kind of visions arise from within – I have always strictly excluded them from the field of anthroposophical life and explained that I consider all of this to be pathological, that it goes below the level of the sense life, not above it. And I have done this everywhere, in many places in detail, as what Anthroposophy wants, what Anthroposophy gives as descriptions of spiritual-soul worlds, arises from completely different foundations than what is asserted here. And now there is a strange tendency for precisely that which I reject, that which I regard as morbid, pathological, to be seen as the justified thing about anthroposophy! That is, they reverse the facts. They make people believe that I am describing something that is hallucinations or the like. Well, they do exist, he says, so we will readily admit that to the anthroposophist, he is entitled to that. But he must not talk about higher worlds, for there he enters a philosophical realm that is to be valued only as theosophical doctrine, as imagination conditioned by theosophical doctrine.

But something highly characteristic, my dear audience: the man who crystallizes out here first of all, who wants from anthroposophy - although it is the opposite of what anthroposophy really gives - says: What I concede to anthroposophy, we know today; telepathy, clairvoyance, teleplasty and so on are known. But all that belongs to the pathological field, perhaps also to the therapeutic field – the things are connected, after all. I would have to go into what I have repeatedly said in medical courses: how a pathology and a therapy can certainly be derived from anthroposophy that legitimately go beyond what today's merely materialistic view can give. But by first distorting what anthroposophy can give, and then by acknowledging this distortion, it is said: Yes, you can suggest all kinds of things to people, but you have never experienced people experiencing something like astral or mental fairy-tale lands in a trance.

But that is precisely the point! He calls it fairy-tale land because he passes it off as fantasies. That, he says, cannot be experienced by suggestion. Yet it is experienced. A strange polemic! First, what one believes one can understand is selected from the anthroposophical results, although one does not understand it at all. This is then categorized as hallucination and so on; that is accepted. But the other part is dismissed as fairyland, yet it is said that it cannot be suggested. It cannot be suggested either, but must be conquered by exact inner methods as inner knowledge. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I do not blame anyone for misunderstanding in such a grotesque way what anthroposophy can give. I do not blame this respected (and rightly so) collection of scientific, medical and other essays, published in Munich and Wiesbaden by J. F. Bergmann, for including such grotesque criticism of anthroposophy, because the whole booklet by Albert Sichler is actually well-intentioned. He wants to do justice to the matter. He cannot do so because, for the time being, there is still an abyss between what is recognized as official science today and what is needed to really make progress, because ultimately there is an inner connection in spiritual life, between our entire civilized life and the scientific life in modern times. And the bridge must be built over to ethics, to social life. This cannot be done by a science that gets stuck only in the material or at most makes hypotheses about the non-material. This can only be done by a science that truly penetrates into the spiritual, because it is in the social that the spiritual is active, and social laws can only be found by someone who also finds laws, forms, transformations of the spiritual in nature.

Now, in the short time available to me today, I have only been able to give a few points of view, my dear audience. I wanted to show you how anthroposophy strives to work in the spirit of true science, how it takes its scientific and epistemological seriousness very seriously indeed in its quest to arrive at a method modelled on mathematics. On the other hand, however, it still faces many prejudices today, even though it is actually needed by our civilization as something tremendously necessary, because it alone is capable of providing man with a real, satisfying elucidation of his own nature in terms of knowledge.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, as I said, I believe that the antagonisms will disappear once an objective basis is gained for creating harmony and mutual understanding between today's science and the anthroposophical research method. We must wait for that. Until this is achieved, opponents will come from all sides, from political parties or from religion, theology or other fields, who will operate on purely subjective ground. But anyone who is familiar with this anthroposophy, anyone who is serious about it, serious about everything that has its source in Dornach, will say to himself, because he knows how seriously research is conducted within this anthroposophical field, ic field, he says to himself: however great the misunderstandings may be, a balance, a harmony must ultimately be found from the seriousness of modern scientific methods and attitudes. And this is a consciousness that one can have when one is on one's own ground, that in everything one seeks in anthroposophy, one first presents the conscientious demands for examination that are otherwise applied in science today. And that is what makes one expect the external balance. If one proceeds seriously, one can be convinced that from today's science and from what anthroposophy has so far endeavored to achieve - at least for those who know both, contemporary science and anthroposophy - the balance, the harmony can certainly be found today. And this awareness gives confidence that the scientific understanding will come about. And then the other antagonisms against Anthroposophy will disappear by themselves.

There are no requests to speak.

Rudolf Steiner: My dearest attendees! It is of course only possible to consider a few guidelines in a lecture, especially one that is intended as an introductory lecture to a whole series of lectures on Anthroposophy. And so I was unable to consider one thing in particular that would have been very close to my heart: to show the bridge that leads from the cognitive side of anthroposophy to the social, practical-ethical and religious side of it. And about that - we only have time until 10 o'clock - allow me to say a few words. If we consider the scientific world view – I am not saying the natural science, but the scientific world view – as it is widely held today, especially among laypeople, but also among people who do not believe they are laypeople, but who, as members of various monist and other associations, today embrace the scientific ideas of thirty years ago as a religious confession, if one considers what has emerged as a kind of worldview that is more or less materialistic. There is no bridge from what many people today consider to be the only possible way of researching to the reality of ethical ideals and social ideals.

Today, seeing all that science gives us, we are faced with the necessity of forming ideas for a worldview, for example, about the beginning and end of the earth. I can only hint at these things as well. We have the Kant-Laplace theory of the earth's beginning from the primeval nebula, which is presented according to the laws of aerodynamics and aeromechanics. One imagines how the planetary solar system formed out of a primeval nebula, how the earth split off. The question of how living beings could have come into being is, however, continuously critically treated – whereby one will reach the limits of knowledge – and then it is treated how organic life now also sprouts from what was initially only present in the primeval nebula, how man then emerged from this and how he experiences himself today in the self-confident ego.

Now I have met people – and basically life is the greatest teacher, if you only know how to take it correctly – I have met people who took this scientific worldview seriously. I remember one person in particular who is typical of many others. The others often do not realize it, but they set up an altar of faith, an altar of knowledge. Those who take the scientific ideas seriously cannot do this; they come to such hypothetical ideas about the beginning and end of the earth, for example from thermodynamics and entropy theory, which leads to imagining how everything finally merges into a heat death. One meets only few people who have the inner courage to admit from a fully human point of view, in which situation man is placed with his inner being today, if he takes these things seriously as the only ones that apply.

Herman Grimm, for example, says – forgive the somewhat drastic saying that I am quoting – from his feeling, by realizing what is to develop on earth between the Kant-Laplacean primeval nebula and the state to which the theory of entropy is supposed to lead us: A carrion bone round which a hungry dog circles is a more appetizing piece than this world picture, which is already presented to people in schools today. And future ages will struggle to explain how a particularly pathological age once came to form such ideas about the beginning and end of the earth. It will be impossible to understand how something like this could be taken seriously.

Well, my dear audience, the science that stands before us today as natural science – as I said, anthroposophy does not in the least find fault with it – fully recognizes it in its field. Anthroposophy is based on a scientific attitude, because scientifically conscientious methodology and inner discipline, as they have developed, must be recognized as a model, only they must be further developed in the sense that I have characterized today.

But this also leads to a true knowledge of man. This knowledge of man is not as easy to gain as the one we gain today from physiological and biological views. This knowledge of man finally shows us how man is actually a being that is organized quite differently internally according to the head and the metabolic-limb system - these are the two poles of the human being. What I am now briefly hinting at, I have explained in great detail in a series of lectures. But I want to show right away how wrong it is to say, for example, that our thinking arises from processes in our brain. That would be just as if a car were to move along a road that has become soft and were to make its impressions there: you can follow the path of the impressions of the car in the road that has become soft. But consider, someone comes and says: You should explain these impressions by forces that are down there in the earth; you must explain these configurations from these underground forces! — It is the same with the methods used today to explain the brain convolutions, the nerve structure, from the forces of the organs. The nerve structure can be explained by the effects of the spiritual and soul, just as the furrows in a softened road can be explained by the car driving over them.

It is only an image. But in a perfectly exact scientific way, anthroposophy leads us to recognize how thinking and imagining is a spiritual and soul process that only has the brain as a basis. And it has the brain as a substrate because it is not based on the brain's growth processes, on organic processes, but precisely on the brain's slow dying processes. The nervous system does not actually have a life, but rather the opposite of a life, a decline in life. Space must first be made for thought. The nerve centers must die away, and a continuous dying, a constant clearing out of the material processes, must occur so that the spiritual-soul processes can take hold. This must always be compensated for by the limb metabolism system during sleep or other processes. What arises in this way, the consciousness-paralyzing processes, those processes of which physiology speaks today, do indeed abolish imagining, extinguish it. Precisely when these processes are toned down, passing over into a kind of partial dying, then imagining, thinking arises, so that we continually carry life and dying, being born and dying within us. And the moment of dying, it is only, I would like to say, the integral of the differentials that make up life, of the differentials of a continuous dying that make up human existence.

If we continue this train of thought, we come to recognize something that is virtually denied in today's accepted science, but which lies in the real continuation of this science: that the human being has real processes of decomposition and continuous processes of dying within him. The ethical ideals develop in the context of these dying processes, so that these ethical ideals are not dependent on the continuation of organic processes, but on suppressed, regressing organic processes. But this in turn leads to the following: When our Earth reaches a state, whatever its mineral-biological state, when the Earth - for my sake, let's take the hypothesis as valid, it is not quite, but in a certain sense it is - when it reaches heat death - when no other processes are possible because everything has formed according to the second law of the mechanical theory of heat as the remnants that are always there when heat is released into the environment, when heat is converted, when this state has occurred, then what has lived in man as ethical ideals has come to its greatest expression of power. And that carries earthly existence out to new planetary formation.

We discover in our moral ideals the germs for later worlds, for later worlds based on our present-day morals. This gives our ideals a real value. Contemporary philosophy is obliged to speak of mere values. But what is there for a possibility when one speaks of values that arise in man as mere ideas, but which are not the germs of future realities, what is there for another prospect than to say to oneself: We come from the Kant-Laplacean world nebula, and somehow the moral ideals emerge in our self-awareness, but these moral ideals live in us only like haze and fog. That was the personality I was talking about earlier, who accepted the modern scientific development as a law and said to himself: Man is cheated in the world. Natural scientific development has brought him this far, then the moral ideals arise as foam, dissolve again, and everything enters into the heat death, into the great cemetery, because the moral ideals are indeed experienced, but have no possibility of becoming reality.

By following the regressive processes in which moral ideals have been at work, anthroposophy shows us that these moral ideals have only an ideal existence in us, but that, as they develop in the human being, they are seeds for the future. Just as we see in the germ of the plant that will develop in the next year, so anthroposophy allows us to see in moral ideals the germs of future worlds. And we see the idealities of the past as the seeds of the present world, behind the Kant-Laplacean primeval fog. The present world is the realization, the actualization of what was once only thought, just as the present plant is the realization of last year's seed. And what is currently experienced only as moral value is the real seed of future worlds.

We are not only part of the cosmos through our natural organic processes, we are also part of the cosmos through what we experience as moral and social values within us. We are acquiring a cosmology that does not only include natural processes and laws as its agents, we are acquiring a cosmology in which our entire moral world is also a reality. Anthroposophy builds the bridge from the natural to the ethical and religious world.

This is what I wanted to mention in a brief closing word, because it was no longer possible in the lecture.

Basel, January 12, 1916

Dear attendees!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear attendees!

In the lecture I had the honor of giving here the day before yesterday, I tried to explain how the concept of spiritual science, as it is used here in this lecture, comes about, and I pointed out that in that lecture I would like to pay less attention to the objections that may still be raised against the recognition of spiritual science in our time, particularly from the natural sciences.

Today, I would like to address these various possible and, as you will see, quite understandable objections. The day before yesterday, I tried to show that the spiritual researcher does indeed come to the conclusion that the human soul can be penetrated into the spiritual world, but that this conviction develops in such a way that it is simultaneously connected with the insight that it cannot be the same soul forces, the same cognitive abilities that lead into the spiritual world and those that lead the human soul to penetrate into the sensory world and everything that belongs to it in a sensory way; that it is rather necessary for the spiritual researcher to first develop and develop out of the ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, as they and ordinary science know and control, to first develop and evolve other soul abilities and other soul events through which the soul is then enabled to carry itself alive into the spiritual world and in this way to receive something that can be called spiritual science. I have pointed out that it is first necessary to practise what is called thinking and what is called imagining in a very specific way, so that something arises out of ordinary thinking and out of ordinary imagining that is no longer the same as this ordinary thinking and imagining, but has become something different, which, above all, differs from ordinary thinking and imagining in that it experiences itself, comes to life, in order not just to rise up in images like this ordinary thinking, but to experience itself in reality. This transition of the soul's rising in images, as is the case with ordinary thinking in ordinary life and in ordinary science, this rising in images must be transformed into a living in real being. In this way, when one has attained this, one actually discovers something that the soul could not previously know, of which it could not even form a concept; for it cannot be grasped by any ordinary concepts, but must be directly experienced if it is to come to consciousness, even though it is continually present in every soul. As a result of this - I said the day before yesterday - the soul, through the strengthening of its power, through the intensification of its thinking, on the one hand, manages to lift itself out of the body, to become independent of the body and to experience itself in a reality, so that it knows: You have now stepped out of your body with your thinking.

On the other hand, I emphasized, these exercises of thinking, through which thinking frees itself from the body, must be accompanied by an exercise of the will, of the powers of the mind in general, so that the will also frees itself from the body. Then one does not enter into such a sphere of experience as through the elevation of thinking, but one comes rather to recognize that something real lives in our will current, which works through the organs of the physical organization in ordinary life, but which, when these exercises have brought the will so far, in turn lifts itself out of the physical. But now it becomes consciousness through consciousness, as the human being continually carries within himself as a different consciousness from his ordinary one, but which can only become truly inwardly vivid in this way. And then I showed: When, on the one hand, everything that is bound to the physical, such as ordinary memory, is driven out of thinking, when thinking is experienced freely in its own activity, and, on the other hand, this other consciousness is, as it were, crystallized out of the will, then the two can combine, and a new person is created in the human being, who can now know himself in the spiritual world, who can also perceive spiritually in the spiritual world - a spirit-soul being among spirit-soul beings, as the physical person is a physical being among physical facts and entities.

That was roughly what I explained in the lecture the day before yesterday. It is self-evident that the assertion of such insights in our present time must, one might say, meet with opposition from all sides. For what is being said here contradicts the habits of thought that must, quite understandably, dominate the thoughts of the vast majority of people today, and one might even say, when looking at the history of the last few centuries. In particular, there is initially a complete contradiction from the scientific side. Now the spiritual researcher does not see this contradiction, this opposition from the scientific side, as being due to human limitations or a very dry logic, but he understands very well that such opposition is possible. The spiritual researcher can, precisely because he views the world from a spiritual point of view, can fully empathize with every kind of contradiction, especially those raised from the natural science side. And above all, the opinion should not be entertained that the spiritual researcher despises the natural science point of view. On the contrary – and I have emphasized this time and again in earlier lectures here – on the contrary, the spiritual researcher acknowledges the great, the tremendous achievements for all human work and for all human knowledge that natural science has incorporated into human development over the last few centuries since the dawn of modern times. Indeed, the spiritual researcher even views his relationship to natural science in the following way. Speaking in the abstract – it could be presented here in detail, but that is probably not necessary today – speaking in the abstract, I say, one recognizes that in a certain time that which today is called natural scientific knowledge of the external material world had to arise. Anyone who delves into the history of natural science, connecting with the great names of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and so on, will realize how different what was called natural science before these names came about was from what we now call the scientific approach to the world. This scientific approach has now, over the course of three to four centuries, provided humanity with a wealth of knowledge that has had a profound and far-reaching impact on all of life. And it is easy to see, if you just take a little understanding look at this life as it has developed over the last three to four centuries, the significance that scientific achievements have for the ideal and material side of life.

Now the spiritual researcher continues: We are now living in a time when the human soul must be able to look into the spiritual life in a similar way to the way people were able to look into the processes and entities of the purely natural three to four centuries ago. Spiritual science would like to penetrate into the spiritual realm in the same way that natural science has penetrated into the realm of nature in recent centuries, in the same way of seeking truth, in the same spirit of research. And one can say: spiritual science shares this conviction with many personalities, but in such a way that precisely with many personalities, who also understand the tremendous turnaround brought about by the scientific approach, this relationship between spiritual contemplation and natural science is viewed differently than the spiritual researcher must view it. Thus, for example, one can see how philosophy, which also wants to penetrate into the spiritual realm through the same conceptual world - not through the spiritual-scientific conceptual world of which I spoke the day before yesterday, but through the conceptual world that is applied in ordinary life and in ordinary science -, which wants to penetrate into the spiritual realm through this conceptual world , this philosophy has often been forced in modern times, under the influence, I might say, of the splendor of natural scientific observations, to take the path of simply taking the truths that the natural scientist has discovered about the essences of nature and the facts of nature. And then, through all kinds of conceptual connections, through reflection on what natural science has discovered, one tried to penetrate more deeply into the essence of the phenomena. One felt, as it were, no longer as philosophically sovereign as before in the face of nature and the world; one felt that one had to reckon with the findings of natural science. The peculiarity of many personalities who wanted to appreciate the scientific way of looking at things in this way lies in the fact that these personalities say to themselves: one must accept the results of natural research; one must simply process philosophically what natural research reveals about nature and its events. Then one will recognize that which can be fathomed more deeply about the world.

The spiritual researcher does not say this directly. Rather, the spiritual researcher is fully aware that, although science has not yet fathomed every mystery in its field, and that much remains to be done before the scientific approach has reached its ideal, the spiritual researcher is also aware that the scientific methods as such have developed, at least up to a certain scientific attitude, in such a way that natural science itself has provided information about what can be deduced from nature, and that further reflection, following on from natural science with the same means of thought that natural science also applies, can lead to nothing more. Natural science is, as it were, something that is so constituted that, as it develops, it leads to a totality, not to something that could be taken and philosophically expounded upon. It is not by taking the results of natural science, combining them and speculating on them that spiritual research intends to proceed, but spiritual research stands in a different relation to natural science. Spiritual research says to itself: Because of the fact that the transition has been made, we say, through Copernicus, through Kepler, through Galileo, with a special way of looking at nature, the soul forces have also entered into a special relationship with natural events. Under the influence of this newer natural science, the human spirit had to relate to nature in a completely different way than it did before. This has given rise to completely different methods of thinking. A completely different kind of relationship to nature has arisen. In the last three to four centuries, people have thought and felt differently about nature than they did before. And by directing the powers of the soul towards nature in a different way, humanity has, so to speak, inwardly exercised these soul powers. The soul forces themselves have thereby carried out a different inner activity than they did before.

Spiritual research does not take the starting point of taking the facts of natural science directly, but it builds on what the soul forces themselves have acquired over the centuries through a different exercise of the soul forces. A person who has gone through the process of scientific thinking, through physics, chemistry, biology and physiology, thinks differently from someone who has not gone through these sciences as they have developed in modern times, because they have acquired the methods and forms of thought of these sciences. Spiritual research first looks at the way in which thinking has been practiced in recent times. And spiritual research becomes clear about this: the way in which thinking is practiced must gradually lead, through what is experienced in this exercise, to what was described the day before yesterday as a special exercise of thinking and will. Thus it is not what has been investigated by natural science that is placed in a relationship by the spiritual researcher to spiritual research, but rather what inner consciousness of these activities one has acquired, that is what is particularly emphasized; how one has learned to think differently, how one has learned to feel differently in nature, how the soul forces have been stimulated. And then the spiritual researcher says: This stimulation is just the beginning of a path; because if you follow it up - he himself has led to what was described here the day before yesterday - you can see from it that you are really led to grasp something in the soul through the exercise of thinking, feeling and willing, which can detach itself from the physical organization.

In this context, dear attendees, it is important to note that the spiritual researcher must, in a certain respect, actually be a true believer in the scientific way of seeking truth and knowledge. And this is also the case with the one who has recognized the true nerve of spiritual research; he sees what it actually means for the spiritual development of the world that such profound and exact scientific methods have emerged in the course of recent times, methods that are so suitable to eliminate all that may be illusion about the world, all that may be fantasy about the world, simply by developing a certain sense of fact, which can only lead to spiritual research if a sense of fact becomes a fact [fanaticism]. That inner discipline of the soul that humanity has been able to acquire by bringing thinking so close to the external objective course of facts, this inner discipline of the soul is highly recognized by spiritual research as something exemplary. For in this way something enters into the whole structure of thinking by which the soul says to itself: You must not follow as truth that which lives subjectively in you, that which you would like to believe to be true, that which you like; you must refrain from all that which speaks in you out of your liking, out of your sympathy, out of your affections: you must let purely the world of facts itself speak for itself. In particular, by moving from mere observation in natural science to experiments - whereby nature expresses its secrets in compiled facts and one is only a spectator - in particular, by doing so, humanity, which has gradually absorbed the scientific attitude into its world view, has earned a certain respect for the fact - and, connected with that, for the inner discipline of truth-seeking.

However, this is very often opposed by those who do not enter into spiritual research with a thorough knowledge of the soul, but who engage in such spiritual research with dilettantism and superficiality. And the disaster, I would say, in relation to the assessment of spiritual research, can arise in particular from the fact that those who want to form an opinion do not form it according to what true spiritual research has to give, but form it according to what all kinds of spiritual research dilettantes offer the world. It is very often the case, however, that a certain contempt for scientific methods and also for scientific results comes to light in these presentations. This contempt is usually in direct proportion to what is actually not known about this science. The true spiritual researcher will always take the trouble to discipline himself in the good discipline of truth and research of the scientific way of knowing. And often the contempt for the scientific way of thinking is enormous, especially among those who have never actually learned anything useful from science.

What I have just said in this sentence need not be said, dear attendees, if practical life does not show that very often one does not approach what is serious spiritual knowledge that measures itself against natural science, but that one adheres to all the excesses of spiritual-scientific dilettantism, which suffers from the mistake I have just described. If misunderstandings arise, they are very often not the fault of those who indulge in such misunderstandings about spiritual research, but in the vast majority of cases they are the fault of those who glorify spiritual research dilettantism and give the world a miserable image of all kinds of talk. The only guilt that lies with those who call this talk nonsense, fantasy and reverie, is that they allow themselves to be convinced by this amateur spiritual science and disdain or find it too inconvenient to approach real spiritual research. But that's it.

Understandably, misunderstandings arise from many, many other things as well. I would now like to point out a misunderstanding that is bound to arise in a perfectly understandable way. As we saw the day before yesterday, the spiritual researcher has to speak of how, through what he does with his own soul, the soul powers are changed, that a different kind of soul activity from that of ordinary life and ordinary science occurs in his soul. And so someone who is grounded in natural science must say to himself: Well, if a different soul life can be distinguished from the soul life that we can call normal — we are familiar with that; these are all the abnormal phenomena of the soul, which are known under the most diverse names, and which can only be distinguished by the self-deception that the spiritual researcher arbitrarily wants to bring about with his own soul. Then the naturalist shows us how certain soul processes of normal life are closely bound to a normal brain; he shows us, by the very sure and conscientious scientific method, how spiritual processes cease when certain parts of the brain are switched off, and he shows us how spiritual processes, how the whole soul life, the whole soul mood, can be changed by a physical change. The natural scientist can then reply to the spiritual researcher: Yes, is nothing more achieved by those strange exercises, which you speak of as a strange enthusiast, than a change in the physical organization, albeit one that cannot be proven externally or anatomically? And is not, after all, what you call spiritual research methods with other soul powers nothing more than a special kind of disorder of the soul life in general?

I would like to emphasize, dear attendees, that it is a perfectly possible view from the point of view of someone who is firmly grounded in natural science, if they do not know exactly the spiritual scientific methods. It is a perfectly possible view, which expresses itself in this way, and in particular it is a possible view when one then looks from the natural scientific point of view at the nature of the soul forces, which many who now also call themselves spiritual researchers have, and who possess the opposite of what can indeed be described as a healthy soul life. Now the natural scientist also repeatedly points out something to us that I would say is trivial, but which is no less striking when viewed from the perspective of the scientific way of thinking. It is striking when one wants to refute the observation of particular, completely free forces and experiences of the soul that go through births and deaths. The natural scientist says, precisely on the basis not of mere prejudice but on the basis of careful observations by physiological science, the natural scientist says: One can see how physical life develops slowly from childhood on, and how the development of soul life goes parallel with physical development. One really sees how closely bound the soul life is to the bodily life. One then sees how the body must have attained a certain formative maturity at a certain age in order for the soul life to develop in a way that can be described as normal. And again, one sees how, with the decline of physical strength in old age, with the demise of the organs, the spiritual-soul life recedes. And objections to an independent spiritual and mental life have repeatedly arisen in the course of the nineteenth century, which - I would say - were based on this ground.

Now the spiritual researcher is by no means opposed to the natural scientist in this field, but on the contrary, with regard to the positive statements of the natural scientist, the spiritual researcher fully agrees with him. The spiritual researcher says: Yes, if one looks at the thinking, feeling and willing that is taken for granted in ordinary life and in ordinary science, then what physiology has to say is fully justified; for this thinking, feeling and willing is closely bound in this form to the physical organization of the body. But the true spiritual researcher does not stand on the ground that, for example, by merely observing ordinary thinking, feeling and willing - as it presents itself in everyday life and in ordinary science - one can thereby arrive scientifically at the immortality of the human soul. Rather, the true spiritual researcher says to the natural scientist: You are quite right when you claim that the forms of thinking, feeling and willing that reveal themselves in ordinary life and in ordinary science are bound to the physical-bodily organization, that they are so bound to the physical-bodily organization that they could not and should not be thought of at all without this physical-bodily organization. But it is precisely through the spiritual research method that it can be seen that there is something in this thinking, feeling and willing: the thinking of which I spoke the day before yesterday, or rather the thinking activity and that being that is contained in the stream of will, that they are so intrinsic that they cannot be grasped by the consciousness of ordinary science and ordinary life, and that they are what preceded our present life on earth in the spiritual world and will follow our death in the spiritual world. What is eternal in the human soul must first be sought. And it cannot be sought if one stops at ordinary thinking, feeling and willing. So says the spiritual researcher. If today there could even be any philosophical worldviews that believe they can contradict science by looking at ordinary thinking, feeling and willing and mentally deriving all kinds of things from this thinking, feeling and willing - they could contradict by saying: If you look at this thinking, feeling and willing through the usual scientific method, you can see something that reaches beyond death. When philosophers speak like this, the spiritual researcher says: No, these judgments will increasingly disappear from the world. Rather, with what is indicated here, the natural scientist will be proven right more and more. And that is why spiritual research is actually in complete harmony with the justified results of the scientific way of thinking in this field.

But now natural science is making progress and says, for example: Yes, but if you develop your thinking through spiritual research, if you say that this thinking can be brought to life in a completely different way through such exercises as those mentioned the day before yesterday, then it experiences something that it has not experienced before. If you say that, then you are actually deluding yourself; for you do not know how much unconsciousness there is in the life of the soul, how much dependence there is in the life of the soul on mere – well, let us say, if we speak in terms of more recent natural science - nerve dispositions, bodily dispositions, and how much has entered into these nerve dispositions without the consciousness noticing, but which now comes up when - as the natural scientist might easily think - one maltreats one's thinking as described the day before yesterday. So that the natural scientist says: Yes, the spiritual scientist is deluding himself, he is creating a pure illusion. While he believes he is finding something that leads him out of his body, something that is independent of his body, he is only bringing unconscious dispositions, the numerous unconscious mental dispositions, into his consciousness, and he actually has only life and perception processes, and naively believes that by bringing up his unconscious soul life, he has something new that leads him out of the whole sensory world and into a spiritual world, while in truth he is only immersed in the bodily life that he has otherwise not known.

As long as one is confronted with what one can grasp in thinking, feeling and willing in ordinary life and in ordinary science, this objection on the part of science is completely understandable. It is also entirely appropriate to the facts. It is so appropriate to the facts that, even today, because spiritual science, as it really is, has not yet found much entrance, it is still the case in very many instances that some person believes that through special soul exercises he has recognized something that goes far beyond the sense world, that is rooted in the spiritual world , while he brings forth nothing but the bodily dispositions that would otherwise remain unconscious, all kinds of illusions that arise, which he does not recognize only because he does not have an overview of his soul life, all kinds of things that are transformed from bodily dispositions into hallucinations and the like. It must be all the more understandable that the natural scientist, who strictly adheres to the facts, also looks at spiritual scientific research in this way, because amateur spiritual scientific research is often nothing more than what the natural scientist quite rightly criticizes.

On the other hand, however, it must be said, dear attendees, that by developing thinking as it was presented the day before yesterday, by taking thinking so far that it does indeed come to a point where it shows itself to be something very different from what it was before, that the spiritual researcher is just learning to recognize what comes up from the subconscious, that he is learning to distinguish, to carefully distinguish, everything that comes up from the physical body. That which does not come from the physical body, but which has an effect from a spiritual world, can only be acquired through experience.

But this distinction is acquired through differentiation. And precisely because one becomes familiar with this distinction, for everything that is not investigated through the right path of developing thinking out of the spiritual world, one must basically agree with the natural scientist. Dearly beloved, there is a great difference between what can be regarded as a morbid, abnormal manifestation of consciousness and what the true spiritual researcher attains in order to enter the spiritual world. And this must be emphasized, because the right method of spiritual research, as you will find it indicated in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” or in the second part of my “Occult Science”, because this right method of spiritual research actually leads to the result that it does not present itself as a change in the ordinary life of the soul, but leads to the new life of the soul, which is now attained through the altered soul forces, taking its place beside the earlier life of the soul in such a way that both are embraced and comprehended by the full consciousness of the human being. Indeed, one could even say that an incomplete consciousness has been achieved in spiritual research if the ordinary consciousness merely changes, if it becomes different, so to speak. The right thing has been achieved when this ordinary consciousness in man remains in such a way that he now also develops the ordinary logic that he had developed before, that he is just as reasonable as he was before, that he further develops and oversees the same impulses of will as he actually is as a simple, straightforward, reasonable person in ordinary life; and in addition to that - but alongside it - has the consciousness through which he can see into the spiritual world. If you compare what is achieved through the correct methods of spiritual research with what arises from a morbid mental life, you can say to yourself: In the case of a diseased soul life, it can be seen everywhere that the abnormal state of consciousness takes the place of the normal one and develops out of it. You cannot imagine that a person who has become a little foolish can at the same time, while being foolish, understand and practise his normal human state. You cannot be insane and rational at the same time. That is the essential feature of the pathologically altered consciousness: it develops out of the ordinary normal state, and when the pathologically altered consciousness is there, the normal consciousness must have gone away. Of course, the normal state can return, naturally; but at the same time, in the trivial sense, they cannot be simultaneous. But the consciousness that the spiritual researcher develops in the way described the day before yesterday must be completely identical to the normal consciousness, so that the spiritual researcher is confronted with what he was before, just as the ordinary person is confronted with an external object; that is to say, what one is as an ordinary normal person, one sees through the attained consciousness of spiritual research as something that one can look at, just as one looks at an external object with ordinary sense consciousness. One has become an object to oneself with one's ordinary organization. But this object continues to function; it remains completely intact. [...] And anyone who applies the methods described in the books in the right way and right style will achieve nothing other than to do the same with the newly acquired consciousness.

But there is one thing in particular that must be considered, dear attendees, which, I would say, is of particular importance for the beginner in the methods of spiritual research. It is of particular importance that the beginner does not allow himself to be tempted to change his ordinary life immediately, to transfer it immediately to a different one - something that can very often correspond to a person's inclinations. Rather, it is necessary and good, at least advantageous, for the beginner in spiritual research, in the performance of the life, in the reasonable conduct of life, which he has previously pursued from his education or from other circumstances, remains as far as possible, and that which he wants to develop as a spiritual consciousness, really develops alongside. Otherwise, a kind of bondage must usually befall the person. Certainly, esteemed attendees, one really does not have to go so far as to grow long hair in order to become a spiritual researcher, or, if one is a lady, to cut one's hair very short or to seek to remove oneself from ordinary life by other extravagances; one does not have to take it that far. But even if you do not go that far, you can still have the belief that if you are to become a spiritual researcher, you have to step out of the ordinary routines of life, create some kind of colony where you live in completely new circumstances, and you even have to arrange these living conditions in a certain way. This will not be particularly beneficial for the beginner in spiritual research, because it encourages the mistake of introducing the previous way of life into another, and one does not have the advantage of having the previous way of life alongside, like an object to hold on to.

So one can say: The objection from the point of view of the natural sciences, the objection of thorough, careful physiological science, that the consciousness of spiritual research could also be based only on illusions or the like, one can fully understand it. But it does not apply if the consciousness of spiritual research is developed in the right way. And here it will also be of particular advantage if the spiritual researcher is not, I might say, partly too proud or too lazy to get involved in what natural science now gives, not only in theories but also in practical instructions, in order not to lead the soul life into all kinds of extravagances. And one can even say: the more spirit-scientific education strives to apply the beautiful, the careful results of justified natural scientific practice, the better it will be for this spirit-scientific education. What spiritual research strives for - precisely because it strives into the realm where mere natural science can never enter - that which spiritual research will always carry with it will be: complete respect for the legitimate claims of natural science itself and of that which arises for life from natural science. That will have to be striven for between the two, which can be described as complete harmony. And for someone who, I might say, is familiar with the nature of the soul behavior in healthy natural science on the one hand and in healthy spiritual research on the other, it is only now that complete harmony is revealed. But he will also realize that, seen from one side or the other, objections and antagonism can arise in a completely understandable way. Opposition also arises from the side of one-sided spiritual science, which believes it can fight natural science without knowing its actual core. So, for example, one hears - of course I do not blame it when someone who knows the scientific methods speaks of an unjustified materialism - and knows how a one-sided criticism of spiritual science is directed from these scientific methods. And indeed, we see that many who want to be scholars of the humanities speak about the materialism of the natural sciences from one or other point of view, from a point of view that they consider “sublime”, and believe that, without knowing what the natural sciences achieve in terms of methods and intellectual discipline, they are hitting the nail on the head when they reproach materialism in some aspect of the natural sciences. Natural science has developed its methods over the centuries and has developed these methods by not exceeding its limits. It has developed these methods by strictly adhering to material processes.

However, this has also led many to believe [- and this is the other side -] that what they had been working on, the “be-all and end-all” of all existence, was matter, which had to be adhered to in order to explore natural facts. Matter finally became an adored god; it entered the human field of vision so completely and so stunningly that they were led away from everything spiritual. But natural science itself, when working in its field, must adhere to material facts. It acquires its objectivity precisely by adhering to material facts, and it can be said that a materialism has legitimately found its way into scientific methods. If it is only applied as far as one wants to observe nature, then one even has to respect this materialism, then one has to have the greatest respect for it. For only by not speculating in a confused way about everything that is not the result of material processes, but by adhering to what observation of processes or experiment reveals, only by proceeding scientifically, can we bring to light the great achievements of scientific facts, which can then also be applied to practical life. And what this materialistic method of natural science has brought in particular in terms of soul discipline, what it has brought above all in terms of soulful devotion to the happenings, to the events of the world, to the essence of nature, must also be exemplary in spiritual research.

Spiritual research is now very likely to evoke not only justified objections against itself, but also, I might say, justified prejudices. This comes about in the following way. The natural scientist, because he has to adhere to the facts of material events with a certain healthy materialistic method, very easily comes to regard the spiritual completely as something that is either not there at all, or at least cannot be recognized. And so science gradually becomes not what it could be – I would say: an external revelation of profound inner facts of spiritual life itself – but science becomes something that is only pursued in such a way that one gets stuck in material life. Then this theoretical standstill in the material world is very easily transferred to practical life; and the consequence may be that one actually comes to the conclusion that all spiritual has no value after all or at least cannot be recognized; that science is a guide for human benefit. So that science has in many cases become a mere servant of social and also of individual egoism in the course of time, that it has entered into the service of egoism, that instead of seeking truth like a goddess in science, in many cases only that which can serve material human development in one field or another is sought. Those who see this material development of humanity as the only one that matters must, if they are consistent, also view the science of nature in such a way that all knowledge gained from nature ultimately finds an application in the material progress that humanity is undergoing. Yes, one can see how - I would like to say - a scientific direction that serves practical, purely material interests appears threateningly before the soul's eye. Man is very easily inclined, when he devotes himself to natural scientific methods without feeling and sensation for the reality of the spirit, man is very easily inclined to then respect only the material, the material use at all.

A similar mistake, albeit, I would say, in a certain respect, the opposite, can easily arise when one engages in spiritual research in a similarly incorrect way. That which is externally researched in the field of matter can easily be seen as being placed solely in the service of man's material progress. That which is investigated by spiritual research can easily serve the immature soul, which is less concerned with truth than with its preference, its sympathy, the satisfaction of certain desires and longings. It can easily serve the soul to promote a certain inner complacency, a certain inner vanity. And so it happens that just as utilitarians – those who want to apply science only to material processes – are becoming very common in the field of external materialistic science, so very often in the field of spiritual research or the life that spiritual research wants to bring, one sees a mirroring in the vanity, in all possible delusions of the human soul, because one does not proceed by seeking to bring the soul to the truth, but takes what spiritual research gives in such a way that one takes pleasure in it, that one feels, so to speak, uplifted in one's soul powers and in one's vanity, especially through what spiritual research has to give.

Just as natural science can very easily lead to materialism when a person becomes accustomed to its material aspects, so spiritual research can lead to all kinds of enthusiasm and to a complete detachment from the external rationality of life if a person does not want to follow the path of truth but instead wants to devote himself to what seems plausible to him according to his subjective needs and desires. Natural science deals with nature – this can easily lead to material things; spiritual science deals with the human being and his soul. As a result, it is particularly easy for a person to take himself very seriously, I would even say out of pleasure, out of pleasure from his soul. And by feeling, “You belong to the spiritual with your soul,” he repeats this to himself again and again, and it is not only the case that the great, all-encompassing truth of repeated earthly lives easily leads such voluptuaries of the soul that they then endeavor above all to brood over whether they themselves could actually have been Alexander or Caesar or Marie-Antoinette or someone else in historical life, or are still searching somewhere else in previous earthly lives. But I will not speak of such aberrations myself. Fanaticism - I would say - inner need, being connected in vanity with the spiritual life, that characterizes very many as not standing on the ground of truth in spiritual science, but standing on the ground of vanity and fanaticism, on that ground on which one is detached from the complete connection with life. True spiritual science does not lead away from this ground of true life, but on the contrary, it leads closer to life. Those who have no inclination to take life with full interest, with full seriousness, but to a certain extent in their soul are inclined to a kind of soul vagabondage, can easily come to even more triviality, to a casual attitude towards life, by being immersed in spiritual science. And very many who cannot bring themselves to fulfill something sensible in life through their hands, through proper diligence, you see them talking about a higher mission that has been given to them from the spiritual world and that they have to fulfill above all things. Speaking in truth, one would often have to say: laziness and carelessness in life appears translated into a strange language as a spiritual mission. Then one can no longer be surprised, dear audience, when those who are accustomed to inner soul discipline, which follows from the scientific world view, look with a certain contempt at those who now, in turn, despise science and often look down on life itself and talk about all kinds of spiritual stuff just because they don't want to understand life scientifically and don't want to apply themselves to ordinary life with the appropriate diligence, seriousness and attention.

But the moment you see through these things, when you see the nerve of spiritual science, its legitimate lifeblood, you find a complete harmony between natural science and spiritual science. One will find that the spiritual scientist, in every moment, finds that which natural science has to offer positively, right up to its justified materialistic method, completely justified and admits that by admitting this, he simultaneously shows how one can enter the spiritual world with soul abilities other than those justified in natural science and in outer life, in order to truly explore them.

Misunderstandings regarding spiritual research will not be dispelled unless people become more and more familiar with what is actually active and alive in spiritual research and how that which lives and is active in spiritual research must, through an inner necessity in the development of humanity, be carried into the spiritual impulses of humanity from now on, just as scientific thinking has been carried into them for three to four centuries. Therefore, one need not be surprised if this harmony between natural science and spiritual science cannot yet be found everywhere. On the contrary, it must be fully understood when spiritual research is simply taken by many as a fantasy. And those who are firm in spiritual science, who are thoroughly grounded in it, will find this misunderstanding to be something quite understandable. Of course, this does not exclude the need to seek to clear up the misunderstandings and to establish harmony between knowledge of nature and knowledge of the spirit.

And also in the external, dear attendees — what can come into the world through spiritual science, it is indeed little, relatively little —, and also in the external, misunderstandings are bound to arise and are basically understandable. In this regard, I would like to say a few words again today – I already tried to do so from this same place last winter – about the external symbol of spiritual scientific research, the Dornach building, which has not yet been completed. It is understandable, completely understandable, that this Dornach building is still met with many, many misunderstandings today. Because basically, It is just as true that it is based on purely artistic principles and not on anything symbolic or similar as it is true that it enters the world in such a way that it basically presents itself as something quite different from what we have been accustomed to seeing as a building or as an artistic presentation. In many respects, it contradicts the habits of feeling of previous artistic views in the same way that spiritual science contradicts and must contradict the habits of thinking of previous scientific views. Why is this the case? Yes, dearest ones present, as was shown the day before yesterday, spiritual science, in accordance with its methods, leads to a different way of thinking, or rather, to a transformation of thinking, leading to such an activity of the soul that arises from thinking, which lives much more in reality than the ordinary pictorial thinking, which wants to give nothing other than a reproduction of external reality. While ordinary thinking must see its value precisely in the fact that the ideas it awakens are faithful replicas of an external reality, nothing directly experienced itself, but only something relived from external reality, that which develops from thinking through the spiritual research method must be something that the soul experiences directly. The soul should not have to rise into an image, but into real life, into the objective thought-being of the world. And so it is also with what develops out of the will. But through this, the soul also comes to immerse itself more in what otherwise emerges instinctively as the artistic, as the stylistic, as the artistic formation - in which it can immerse itself even more. That is the essential thing in the soul's activities that come to light through spiritual research, that the soul becomes more immersed in spiritual reality. And by becoming immersed in spiritual reality, it also immerses itself differently in the world of forms, in the world of shaping. But through this it is led not to replace art with something other than art, but to approach art in a different way. While the other art must start from what presents itself to the senses, and what presents itself to the senses can be elevated into the spiritual, so that art appears as something elevated out of the sensory world, into which is poured that to which one has ascended in a spiritual quest. What can be called 'the artistic being grasped by spiritual science' is something that takes the opposite path to the external sensory reality. The human being is first within the spiritual. He lives vividly the weaving and living of spiritual events, he faces the spirit as spirit. And when now the possibility of artistic activity is present in him, when art is to come into being, then the sensuous element is not led upwards until one can give it the splendor of the spiritual, as it happens in other art, as it has happened in art up to now, but the spiritual is led down into the material.

This, above all, is the essential thing that should be striven for in the architecture of the Dornach building, for example. The first question that arose was: What has to happen here? And in the light of this thought, the question was not: how to create a building out of the previous architectural style, out of what is otherwise common practice or can be learned in architecture. Instead, a completely different question arose, a question – I would say – whose practical answer shows how one must stand with spiritual science in the immediate reality quite differently than with ordinary logical or soul-life activities.

When a fruit forms a shell around itself, then that which separates itself as a shell has emerged and grown out of the same life forces as the fruit itself with its individual formations. And anyone who observes how the fruit is formed in its core and in its shell, how, for example, I might say, the core of the nut forms the shell around it with all the fine veins, with all that arises from the same forces, how the core itself arises in its individual structures, anyone who observes this says to themselves: the nutshell comes from the same forces as the core itself. This nutshell is not formed in such a way that one could somehow have conceived a style to give a shell around the nut; the whole is one. So what is done in the Dornach building had to become one: the forces that will prevail in what will be presentations, representations from the spiritual scientific world view, what messages will be from the spiritual world, what thoughts, ideas will be developed: all that is, so to speak, the core life. But the same forces that prevail in this core life must also be used to form the shell. It must be a unity, as in every fruit of nature, the shell and the core are a unity and are formed out of the same forces. The question could never arise: Which architectural style can be applied here? Rather, the fact that a spiritual thing was to be done in the building gave the building its entire form; the two-dome form, which encompasses everything, really came about in this way. It had to be a unity.

And so, I would say, in a certain sense, the walls also had to become something other than what walls had been up to now. I have already mentioned this here. But it is significant, especially for grasping the peculiar art that is to be developed there—still quite primitive in the beginning—that this be taken into account. Walls, even those that are artistically designed – and especially these – have signified closure in art to date. Even in Greek architectural works of art, walls signify closure; they close off the outer world.

Spiritual science should lead spiritually into all expanses through what it is. Therefore, forms must be created on the walls, as sculptures and the like, which - I would like to say - cause the walls to destroy themselves when looking at the forms, so that one has the feeling: by living in the building and directing one's gaze to the forms, one has something in the forms that leads out into the world.

And yet, in context, one had to be with all of reality. Therefore, such window artworks, as they have existed in the past or still exist today, could not be created from the old art of windows, but rather a kind of window etching, if one may call it that, was used. Different glass panels, different colors, but each one in a single color. The figurative is now worked into this, and it is worked in in such a way that only thickening and thinning achieve what is artistically intended. And then the sunlight shining in will interact with this, that is, that which works and weaves in nature itself, to make art complete. There, nature and art will intertwine into a single work of art.

And so new approaches had to be taken in the most diverse ways. In painting, which will fill the domes, the aim was to treat the colors in a very specific way.

Dear attendees, I can of course only touch on these things in a very fragmentary way. Precisely for that which is important in the treatment of colors for the figurative, something should be attempted that is not usually attempted with color. One should try to experience color directly. Everything that the soul engages in through spiritual research should be experienced inwardly there. The color should not be just a surface that reveals something that is underneath, but the color should have an inner life and develop this inner life itself; so that from the corresponding color and color composition, life itself arises; so that one looks at the pictorial work of art in such a way that one has the feeling directly in the interaction of the colored and that which lives from the color into the form: You live in what is alive in the color, what is alive in the color lives in you. You grasp reality in the color, not through the color, but through the reality behind the color. Colors should express themselves, forms should express themselves – not something through colors, not something through forms. For this is precisely what leads to life with the spiritual world, the colors and forms, when they are to be depicted pictorially, to depict them only as we really have them artistically in every moment, that one does not immediately stick to some model, but that one brings what life and weaving is in the spiritual fact and in the spiritual essence into the weaving of the colors and into the life of the forms, which one then brings onto the surface. And this other had to be striven for, for the reason that the whole of the structure, like the shell, which results from the same forces, should be like spiritual science itself. There had to be a departure, for example, from the principle of placing columns, each of which is always the same as the one before, columns with capitals that are all the same. A certain development had to be followed from the first pair of columns with their capitals to the second and so on. This results in an inner design, an inner development, as nature itself does, by developing the other tones, the second, third and so on from the fundamental, from the prime. And just as it is not superstition, just as it is not some kind of mystic madness, when one sees seven tones in the scale and in the eighth tone the repetition of the fundamental, so it is not something mystically mysterious when one seeks to find a progression in the inner motives of the capitals, and thereby a sevenfold number of columns is quite automatically brought out, because one is standing inside the creation of the world with the spiritual, just as the creative element in nature lives inside the creation itself. Thus a parallelism emerges between what is present in nature in a primitive form, such as the seven tones, the seven colors in the rainbow, and what occurs in the spiritual realm. The strange thing is that it could happen that people looked at this building in Dornach and thought that seven columns had been chosen here out of some superstition about the number seven. These same people might say: What a grotesque superstition it is that the rainbow has seven colors or that the musical scale has seven tones! - It would be the same logic, the one as the other. The one as the other is required by the nature of the facts.

If someone comes and says: Well, yes, with what is there at the construction, one would like to come to an agreement. But that you do such superstitious things or do such mystical things as seven pillars, and made of seven different woods at that - where again only the artistic, which is connected with the differentiation in the wood, is actually meant - anyone who speaks like that is like someone who says: I don't understand why every string on a violin has to be different; they could all be the same and so on, and so on. It is a matter of recognizing that what leads from spiritual science to art is, so to speak, in agreement with the whole purpose of spiritual research work.

Natural science has made enormous progress in recent times. Spiritual research in particular recognizes this. But it is as if someone starts drilling a tunnel from one side – as indeed happens – and works towards it from the other side. Now, spiritual science is working towards natural science from the other side. They will meet one day. Natural science works conscientiously where it is actually working properly. It comes [up], I would say, to the point where life is to be grasped. The materialist therefore denies life altogether as a special element. He sees life only as a combination of the other forces of nature. Natural science works from the bottom up to life. Spiritual science works consciously against natural science, and in its own way comes to have this consciousness not only as such consciousness, as it is in ordinary human life, but to expand this consciousness to the point where reality is grasped in consciousness. While science cannot grasp life, the spiritual researcher often cannot grasp reality in consciousness. But both work towards each other in order to grasp the life that natural science is working towards with a different consciousness that is developed out of the ordinary human consciousness. The two work towards not only harmony but also the inner interpenetration of life and consciousness: spiritual research and natural science. And if we look at it this way, we also see in the art that begins today, and which works from the other side than the other art, something that meets this other art.

What cannot be understood, however, is how people can enter the lecture hall in Dornach and say: “Everything inside is mysterious, full of symbols, full of special signs.” There is not a single sign, not a single symbol inside. Rather, an attempt has been made to answer the question, “How should the thought be if it were to flow into artistic forms?” The nonsense that is otherwise often indulged in, let us say, in theosophical circles, the search for all kinds of mysterious signs, to which everything imaginable is attached and in which something artistic or an artistic surrogate is sought – all that has been avoided in this building. And everything is dissolved into artistry. That is precisely what has been attempted. Nowhere should the mere thought be effective. And this could happen all the more since the thought, which otherwise seeks the allegorical, the symbolic, when it strives out of sensual reality, cannot, after all, get out of the pictorial, the unreal, the merely conceptual. When this thought often seeks the symbolic, the allegorical – the living thought that becomes one with the [gap in the transcript], it can express itself directly in art, so that art in forms, in colors and so on, lives out in external reality. That which was to be depicted [in this building] was not depicted in all kinds of artistic surrogates such as allegories and symbols and the like. It is therefore surprising when people look at the things and, although they cannot see a single symbol, talk about all kinds of mysteries, all sorts of signs and the like that can be seen in this Dornach building.

But there is no need to be particularly surprised at these things, when it can even be said that what has been characterized here as spiritual science has something to do with the citation of the dead. If this can be said in all seriousness, as it has been, then the other can also be said, and can be said all the more easily.

If we really look at the work of the natural sciences on the one hand and the humanities on the other, we will find how the two work into each other, how the two work quite contrary to each other, and then the misunderstandings will disappear. Yes, dear attendees, they will disappear as they have disappeared in another area. I have already pointed this out. Today, there are still many who believe that they are standing on the firm ground of natural science and that they must object to spiritual science in this or that way. We have seen how this is understandable. Exactly the same applies when we look at the matter in the right way, which emerged when people had to get used to the fact that the earth does not stand still in space, but moves at a tremendous speed, that the movement of the heavenly bodies or even the standing still of the sun cannot be explained as it was in the past, but in the Copernican way. At that time, the new natural scientific world view contradicted the habits of thought. And people, especially those of a religious persuasion, believed that they had many, many objections to raise against this newer scientific way of thinking. It was even believed that religion was endangered by this newer natural science. As a result of this newer scientific way of thinking, with which science was intimately connected over the centuries, many things have changed. Those who today engage with the objections raised against Copernicanism and Galileo in the past find it historically interesting, but today it no longer makes any particular impression. The habits of thought have changed. What was once vigorously opposed is now taken for granted by many. And the following example, which I already mentioned here in a lecture last winter, can be repeatedly brought before our souls.

At a university in the nineties, a priest gave a lecture about Galileo; he gave this lecture about Galileo as a rectorate speech. He gave an excellent lecture about Galileo, despite the fact that he took up the rectorate of his university as a theologian. He did not speak about a theological topic, but he spoke as a Christian, as a true Christian about Galileo. And he pointed out at the time that times had changed so much that one could say: back in the days of Galileo, there were many who believed that Galileo's findings were somehow endangering religion or Christianity; that what people had previously known was somehow being endangered. But now, said this priest, we have come to the point where we have realized that No kind of scientific progress could ever really endanger religion, but on the contrary, the more is discovered of the glory of creation, the more one will learn to admire that which lives as divine in the world.

Habits of thought have changed, and this is particularly evident in such an occurrence as the one mentioned. There will also come a time when people will realize that neither any other Christian principle nor the principle of redemption is in any way endangered by what spiritual research has to discover about repeated earthly lives and the like, just as people have learned to see that Copernicanism cannot endanger Christianity. On the contrary, one must say: How fainthearted are those who think that the tremendous power that lives in Christianity could be endangered by anything that is discovered, be it in the field of natural science or in the field of the spirit. No, esteemed attendees, those who are spiritual researchers do not have such little faith in the religious, in the Christian, but they have the strong awareness that in Christianity, in the greatest impulse of earthly existence, lives that which, through no discovery in the field of nature or in the field of intellectual life, could ever be weakened in its power, but that everything that can ever be investigated in the field of the intellect will be there [precisely to reinforce] that which, as the greatest impulse on earth, lives and reigns in religious life.

And so it was that at the time when the Catholic priest gave his rectorate speech about Galileo, something very strange happened.

Anyone who delves into Haeckel's various writings will find in Haeckel a human being who, in his “Welträtsel” (World Mysteries), even went so far as to vilify and insult what can be found through pure spiritual research. He is a human being who always emphasized that there is a “law of substance” and that this is life, which one must seek. Now he has written “Eternity Thoughts”. They are no less material than his “world puzzles”; but now he is instinctively led to something very strange. He says: He recognizes - right at the beginning of these “eternity thoughts” - he recognizes the eternity of matter, the eternity of forces and the eternity of the psychoma - the eternity of the world soul - as he translates it.

Well, dear attendees, what does Haeckel do? Does he always only talk about this: You chemist, you physicist, you should declaim: eternity of matter, eternity of forces? - No, Haeckel allows the chemist to study the individual substances, the individual relationships between substances. Does Haeckel demand that one should only declaim eternity of forces? No, the individual perceptions of forces – electricity, magnetism, and so on – are studied concretely in their mutual relationships. Only with regard to the psychom, to the soul, does Haeckel for the time being stop at saying the one word – or the three words: “eternity of the psychom”.

Spiritual science wants nothing more than to study the psychoma in detail, that which, as spiritual and soul-like, spreads in reality just like matter and forces. Those who work from their natural science will truly intensify their penetration into spiritual science, if they still have the strength for it, which Haeckel, of course, already lacks today. But something will become clear: that, dear attendees, in the future people will look at nature and let what science has to say about nature take effect on them. Today there are still many who believe that what science has to say are results that only need to be summarized, and then a worldview is formed; and that is where it must stop. Those who believe this call themselves monists and so on. But the time will come when what the natural sciences give will not be regarded as mere results, but when it will be recognized that what the natural sciences give leads to further questions, indeed only to the right questions, where every scientific book studied for the purposes and goals of knowledge will not seduce people into remaining vainly in what science gives, but will lead them to questions, to a higher need for knowledge. The time is approaching when the study of science will raise questions, not seduce people into remaining with the results of mere science. The need will arise from the study of natural science to approach the study of the spirit. Natural science will create a need in the human soul, and spiritual science will satisfy this need. Just as needs arise in the human soul and are satisfied by what the course of the world gives, so natural science and spiritual science will work together like the creation of needs and the satisfaction of needs. Natural science will provide that which organizes itself as a sensual reality and develops need; spiritual science will provide that which serves this need. Just as the plant grows out of the earth, out of the substance of the earth, leaning towards the light, having the need for light, just as the light meets it, warming and shining, the power of the sun penetrates into the plant and makes the plant's life possible in the first place as a unified, harmonious life, so in the future, the needs that develop from natural science will appear as what grows out of the soil of the earthly, and what spiritual science is able to offer will be what illuminates and warms this earthly. Matter will seek the light, the light will seek the matter. Natural science will stand by itself as a higher, more refined material. Spiritual science will be there to warm and illuminate this material world.

Thus, let me say in conclusion, natural science will become like a body, and spiritual science like a soul. Together they will form the organism of human striving for knowledge and insight in full harmony.

Moritz Benedikt, the criminal anthropologist and well-known physiologist, found that the posterior cerebral lobe of criminals is relatively small, as in higher apes; he established atavism in this case. In this way, crime is attributed entirely to the physical constitution. Even the soul life is controlled quite mechanically by modern school psychology, the speed of absorption of sensory impressions, strength of memory and so on. The human being is treated like a machine. This has been happening increasingly for 50 years. Even social life should be shaped in this way, as it is through the sentence [...]: Act so that your motive can become the norm for all people. It's like saying, “Wear a skirt that fits all people.” It is Kant's categorical imperative. But even if one achieves excellence in the natural sciences, it does not follow that one could (transfer their results) to the moral field. So it is with Oscar Hertwig, who so brilliantly refuted Darwinism; in the social field, he has not only produced inadequate but also harmful results.

Spiritual knowledge is necessary to gain insight into the possibility and essence of human freedom; knowledge of what man's true nature is leads to love of the human being and is the only basis for true morality and social life of the future, based on brotherhood. Generalized morality, as we have it now, leads to the opposite of what is desired, as current events prove; moral preaching is like telling the stove: get warm without heating.

Thinking, feeling and willing find their correlate in the nervous system, in breathing and rhythm, for example in the blood circulation for digestion or metabolism, for reproduction. The nervous system is degenerative, leads to death, just as thinking in waking consciousness always destroys something. It must merge with imagination if it is to become viable. Volition, the metabolism, leads to life, to being born, when it is connected with intuition. The essence of intuition is love. Feeling in the middle then maintains the balance so that the pendulum does not swing in one direction or the other.

New religions no longer arise since the synthesis in the Christianity of all religions. Anthroposophy should not be confused with all kinds of obscurantism, but is common knowledge and should become more and more so, even if it is currently being rejected. From it will be born a realistic, benevolent socialism, in which all is salvation. Because people today are asleep, it has been possible for a few people to bring about these catastrophic events.

You hear repeatedly if one talks about anthroposophy that it originates from the fantastic inspirations of single personalities. Many people at least judge that way who fancy themselves as capable. However, one has to say from the start that this anthroposophic spiritual knowledge wants to cover a research field that contains the most important interests of the human life generally. Hence, isolated attempts were done repeatedly at all times to cultivate this field. But one must say that these were mostly only light flashes in our time which were cast on this field by this or that outstanding personality who contemplated the human spiritual life. These light flashes with which one always has the sensation that they come from quite different origins of the human being than the knowledge that refers to the outside sense perception.

Unsurprisingly, an unaware cognitive instinct makes the human beings illuminate this field by such light flashes repeatedly, because on this field there are the most important soul riddles which the human being has to face over and over again with his feeling, thinking and willing. The human being has to feel: if he does not take a position to these questions, it has an effect on his soul that you can compare with a kind of bodily illness. The soul life becomes banal; it feels exposed to all kinds of “addictions”—I would like to say—if the doubts, the uncertainties emerge concerning these questions. However, in our times the human beings were less eager to satisfy their desire for knowledge, which arises from such impulses, with spiritual food. Who did not know the fashion of those who could afford it to visit the most different sanitariums where, actually, for many people nothing was extinguished but that desire for knowledge of which one liked, actually, to be unaware in the usual life. What the human beings searched in sanitariums and similar institutions, were, strictly speaking, only suggestions with which they did not want to be present, so to speak, with their souls and which should meet those mysterious desires about which I have just spoken and which one does not want to satisfy spiritually.

A picture repeatedly emerges to me if I have to contemplate such questions. When I was—to visit somebody—in a sanitarium just at a time when the different guests were passing and when I found out for myself after the conversation and the sight of single patients that that who mostly needed recovery of his nervous system was the doctor in charge. The others needed much less recovery of their nervous systems than the doctor in charge needed.

On this field, single persons who dealt more intensely with questions of the spiritual life have cast single light flashes that arose to them from the depths of their souls. Besides, one thing always became known that would run like a red thread also today through the considerations of this evening. The fact that in the human being, as he walks on earth today, another human being sleeps and rests who is not perceived due to the conditions of the usual life because he sleeps quieter in the usual human being than dream images exist in him which emerge and disappear.

However, one thing always struck just spirited persons when they found out for themselves how this second human being rests in the usual human being: they could not conceive this sleeping human being without bringing him together with death in any way. More or less instinctively, the one or the other personality recognised that just as the phenomena of the outer sense perceptible physical life are associated with the laws of existence, of growth, of birth and so on, this second human being sleeping in the first is associated intimately with death, with fading. You notice that it is a great, important moment for persons of knowledge if they have to think the higher human being in the usual human being associated with the forces of death.

Such a personality is the philosopher and psychologist Karl Fortlage (1806-1881). I want to take an important statement as starting point that he did in a course of eight psychological lectures in 1869. In these lectures, you can find the following, quite important place:

 “If we call ourselves living beings and attribute a quality to ourselves which we have in common with animals and plants, we inevitably understand by the living state something that never leaves us and always continues in sleep and in the wake state in us. This is the vegetative life of nourishing our organism, an unaware life, a sleeping life; it is outbalanced in the breaks of waking by the life of consumption. The brain makes an exception here because this life of nourishing, this sleeping life, is outbalanced in the breaks of the waking by the life of consumption. In these breaks the brain is exposed to prevailing consumption and gets consequently into a state which would bring about the absolute weakening of the body or death, if it extended to the other organs.”

After Fortlage has come to this strange statement, he continues this consideration with the following, profound words: “Consciousness is a little and partial death, death is a big and complete consciousness, an awakening of the whole being in its innermost depths.”

You realise that such a light flash, emerging from the depths of the soul, illuminates the coherence of death and consciousness what accompanies us during our wake life always and makes up, actually, the human being. Fortlage gets to an idea of the relationship of death and consciousness, realising that that which seizes all human beings at once at the moment of death works in microcosm if we unfold our consciousness during the wake life. Every conscious act is in microcosm the same as death is on a large scale. So that—as to Fortlage—the real death if it occurs is the emergence of an enclosing consciousness, which puts the human being into a supersensible world, while he is put into the physical world if his soul needs the physical body between birth and death.

Fortlage wrote many volumes on psychology. However, such light flashes appear only now and again in his writings. The remaining contents of his writings even deal with that which one finds so normally today in psychology: the association and course of mental pictures, the emergence of desires and so on, briefly, with all those questions on which one ventures solely in psychology and which are far away from that what, actually, interests the whole human being in psychology, which are far away from the main questions of freedom and immortality.

The considerations of this evening deal with the question of immortality while in some weeks here I hold a talk about freedom from the same viewpoint.

Even if Fortlage is concerned with the subordinate questions in his vast psychological research, and in such a way that this kind of activity cannot lead to the highest questions, at least, such light flashes are found with him. However, one reproved him for it. Eduard von Hartmann reproved Fortlage sharply that he would have left the path of science introducing such a coherence into the strict science as that of consciousness and death.

Well, one may say, not only Fortlage but also many personalities produced in single light flashes something of knowledge that refers to this characterised second human being sleeping in the sense-perceptible human being. However, these were isolated light flashes.

Anthroposophy has the task now to systemise, to make methodical that what has come up instinctively in single light flashes like manifestations of higher knowledge from the depths of the human soul, so that that which originates from it can place itself as a fully valid science beside the modern natural sciences. However, it is necessary that that who wants to form an opinion about anthroposophy casts off some prejudices that easily result from certain advantages of modern science.

I had to say, the human being whom spiritual science considers is something sleeping in the normally waking human being. From it, however, it is explicable that everything that refers to this second human being is generally drowned as it were at first in our consciousness by the sensory experience and the needs of our personal life. If in this usual life now and again such light flashes appear, they disappear faster than a dream does. No miracle, hence, that most people once say to themselves after the absolutely entitled judgement of our time: indeed, what emerges there from the soul and will manifest of this low sounding sleeping human being, this does—if it appears with those who call themselves spiritual researchers—the impression of something dreamish, fantastic. Our time does not want to get involved with such phantasms. It has rapidly finished its judgement: nonsense, this is something that has arisen from the imagination of single ones.

However, something else could be right. How would it be if it were right that one could get such weak images as they exist in dream of that what lives in the human being beyond birth and death what is the everlasting of the human nature compared with the transient? If this held true, one would have to renounce either any knowledge of the everlasting in the human being if one did not want to recourse to images of imagination or dream life, or one would have to bring the logical discipline into this world that usually seems to be fantastic, the sense of methodical research that one applies to the sense-perceptible world. One has to raise the images with certain soul forces, so that they do not only scurry like dreams, but also become as distinct and impressive as the images of the usual consciousness are.

Is anyone able to do this? Today it is difficult to bring home to a human being that one is able to do it even in scientific sense because today one regards natural sciences as the only science that has a strictly reasonable methodology. If one distinguishes other sciences, one accepts them, actually, only as far as they are founded methodically after the pattern of natural sciences. One has to say for certain fields: what natural sciences have brought up in modern times as mental pictures, showed that it must be that way if they want to control the area which is assigned to them. However, one must also say that one cannot approach the everlasting life of the human being with these mental pictures.

These images cannot be appropriate to the same extent to solve the riddles of nature and the riddles of the human soul. To the latter one has to add something else. Which means must be applied to make the soul so strong that it can bring up the mental pictures which rest sleeping below in our consciousness and can apply the strict discipline and methodology of thinking to them, about which I have spoken in particular in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. As in former talks, I want again to emphasise some viewpoints of these writings. One gets no idea of the approach of the spiritual researcher what he has to do, actually, to behold into the spiritual world with his soul if one does not realise what one can experience as a whole human being with the suitable desire for knowledge at certain limiting points of knowledge to which just the modern natural sciences lead.

Modern natural sciences give that who dedicates himself to them not only explanations, which nobody admires more than the spiritual researcher does, of the outer physical course, of various things which have an impact on the practical life, but natural sciences give that who dedicates himself from certain viewpoints an inner education of the soul life. More than one was able in former stadia of scientific cognition, today one is prepared to spiritual research cognitively, actually, just by natural sciences. One should not be restricted by that what natural sciences have to say about the outside world in their own field.

One should rather be able to soar an inner discipline of the soul life by the way one does research in nature. The mental pictures that natural sciences deliver can explain the outer nature only; after their contents, they have nothing to say about the spiritual life. But while one applies them devotedly, they educate that human being by the way who is able to take care of that what goes forward in him, of certain inner living conditions which bring along him to receive a concept, an inner experience of that soul life beyond the body.

I know very well that this concept—living with his soul beyond the body—is for many people the summit of nonsense today. However, this never minds. Everybody can convince himself that the inner experience gives him the certain insight of the life beyond the body if he goes through such soul exercises as I have indicated them in my writings or as I want to pronounce them, in principle, here.

One can experience especially important things if one just arrives at that boundary area of cognitive life to which natural sciences lead so often. You know, many people speak of the big boundary questions of cognition. One speaks of the fact that the human soul comes to a border if it wants to know about whether the world is infinite or limited spatially or temporally, if the soul wants to know whether it is subject to an irresistible constraint in all its actions or whether it is free.

Indeed, these are the highest boundary questions. Du Bois-Reymond put such boundary questions in his famous speech about the limits of the knowledge of nature, about the seven world riddles. You can experience the deepest impression if you feel out of the pain of a person longing for knowledge how such a person stands at such a boundary place.

I could bring in many examples. Such an example is contained in the writings of the famous aesthetician and philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887). If one reads his writings, one has often to stop with that what he experiences at such boundary places of cognition. He wrote a nice treatise on a book that the philosopher Johannes Volkelt (1846-1930) had written about the dream fantasies.

In this treatise that reproached Vischer that he had mixed with the spiritists, Vischer states such a place where he shows what he had experienced at the boundary places of cognition. He said, it is most certain that the human soul cannot be in the body; however, it is also most certain that it is not beyond the body. Here we have such a boundary question, which is paradoxical, because it has an entire contradiction in itself, as those are which one meets just always then when one delves devotedly in strict natural sciences, in life generally. The soul cannot be in the body; however, it can also not be beyond the body!—Why does one get to such contradiction?

At such border places where such contradictions appear, the scientific cognition is not at all helpful and it is most annoying if one believes that it helps something. Then, however, most people are soon ready with their judgement. They simply say in such a case, well, up to here just the human knowledge reaches; we are not able to get further.—However, it is not that way. Because Vischer had the prejudice, he experienced the contradiction only. However, he did not experience what one can do to get further with his soul at such border places. Here the usual cognition must stop and a particular experience of the soul has to begin. Here you must be able to forget as it were what the images of the usual life are because they lead you just to this border place only. You must be able to experience this here. Here you must be able to struggle with that what faces you if you let yourself in for such a contradiction. One should experience such contradictions with the whole soul. Then something new faces the soul like from spiritual depths that it cannot experience without this experience of such contradictions.

One has formed mental pictures of how, for example, lower animals that still have no senses develop senses in contact with the outside world. An inner life existed; it is confronted with the outer world, adapts itself to the outer world, and experiences the impulses of the outer world. While before the life pulsates in the organism and then everywhere stumbles against the sensory outside, it develops, we say, a sense of touch. First, it is a kind of internal tunnelling, then bumping against the borders of the externally spatial. Nevertheless, the being learns in the contact with the outside world to adapt itself; it forms a kind of picture of the outside world by the sense of touch; by the collisions with the border, this sense of touch develops.

One can compare to this image of that what develops the outer senses in the lower organisms what the soul experiences if it gets to such border places of cognition. There the soul really experiences in such a way, as if you bump against anything in the darkness that you have outside at first. Then that differentiates itself, which you experience there in such contradictory mental pictures that one forms at boundary places of knowledge. As the sense of touch arises as a physical sense from the undifferentiated cells, a spiritual existence arises from the mental, while the soul bumps against the border of the spiritual world. You really bump against the spiritual world. However, you also adapt yourself to it. You experience the significant that you have the soul first as it were as an undeveloped soul organism, which the outside spiritual world faces, then however, this soul develops spiritual senses of touch and spiritual eyes, spiritual ears in the further process to perceive that with which it is confronted at first.

I gladly believe that today those people who feel the urge to experience something of the spiritual world would prefer if one could teach the ability of perceiving the spiritual world while one imposes them mystically or as the case may be. Some people believe this. Nevertheless, it is not that way. What opens the spiritual world to us is inner soul work. This inner soul work really leads to that which I have indicated. The human being who changes his soul into an organised soul knows that his soul gets free from the body, when pushing against the spiritual and perceives the spirit. Getting free from the body is a result of inner perception. Since also that which I have explained just now appears repeatedly with persons of knowledge.

It is strange, how the course develops which I have described spiritual-scientifically with those who have worked through the longings for knowledge.

Let me bring in an example of Vischer once again, the example of a quotation by him by which he shows how he felt placed repeatedly at those boundary places of cognition where one cannot help perceiving contradictions, but contradictions that cannot be solved while you solve them logically, but while you settle down into them and develop your spiritual organs.

In particular, the following contradiction appeared to Vischer over and over again: the brain should be the organ of the soul, should produce mental pictures as it were; but if one becomes engrossed in the being of the mental pictures, one cannot regard them as cerebral products. This is such a boundary place of cognition; Vischer says referring to it:

“No mind, where no nerve centre, where no brain, the opponents say.”—Vischer himself does not say it—“No nerve centre, no brain, we say if it were not prepared from below on countless levels. It is simple to jibe at a spirit rumbling about in granite and lime—it is not more difficult than if we ask mockingly how the proteins in the brain soar ideas. The human knowledge cannot measure the level differences. It will remain a secret how it appears and happens that nature behind which the spirit still must slumber is such perfect counterblow of the spirit that we get bumps from it. It is a diremption of such apparent totality that with Hegel's alterity and exasperation, as witty as the formula may be, nothing is said; the asperity of the imaginary partition is simply covered. One finds the right recognition of the cutting edge and the thrust of this counterblow with Fichte, but no explanation of it.”

This portrayal is very strange. Friedrich Theodor Vischer feels facing a limit of knowledge; he describes his experience. How has he to describe it?

He gets to the expression: “we get bumps from it.” He gets to the expression: “cutting edge and thrust of the counterblow.”—One sees the soul that wants to differentiate to develop internal spiritual organs by which it can experience the supersensible outside world, in which it lives.

For a long time in the history of humanity, it was an obstacle to soar spiritual organs in the right way because one believed only the human thinking that takes the sense impressions as starting point could solve certain questions, just the questions of God, freedom and immortality.

Well, thinking is important, because strictly speaking a big part of those exercises that one must do to attain spiritual organs consists of a higher development of thinking than the thinking is which one uses in natural sciences. However, if you only abandon yourself to the usual thinking, that originates from the usual human being not from that second human being sleeping in you. This thinking does not lead into the spiritual world; this thinking can only realise that it is in the spiritual world. However, no unbiased person concedes that thoughts are something that lives in the sensory world; however, these thoughts contain nothing but impressions of the sensory world if they are taken from the usual human nature. People with deeper inner life have always felt like in flashes of inspiration where to the human thinking leads if it is left to itself, emancipated from the outer sense perception.

You can find—if you have experience of the spiritual-scientific literature—such light flashes with numerous personalities which sometimes are, however, darkness flashes. With them, one has to stop and observe to which cliffs the human cognitive life leads if this life is sincere and honest to itself and does not fool itself with all kinds of prejudices, and does not apply all kinds of methods taken from other, verified fields to the soul life itself. Again an example of many:

A man who really struggled with knowledge problems and riddles is Gideon Spicker (1840-1912) who taught philosophy at the University of Münster until few years. Gideon Spicker took the education for the spiritual as starting point. The deepest knowledge questions arose to him from theology. Some years ago, he wrote two nice booklets: From the Cloister to the Academic Lectureship. Destinies of a Former Capuchin (1908) and In the Turning Point of the Christian World Period. A Philosophical Confession of a Former Capuchin (1910); in the one he describes his life, in the other his knowledge desire.

At a place, one has to pause particularly where this former Capuchin, who then became a professor, expresses himself about the experience that he had with thinking that he had emancipated from the sensory experience. However, he did not have the courage to go into spiritual science; he did not develop the power of thoughts so far that it wakes the spiritual organs, so that he faced a spiritual world, felt with his soul being in the realm of the supersensible. Because he was at such a border place where he experienced something with the thinking, he expressed himself as follows:

“To which philosophy one confesses, whether to a dogmatic or skeptical, to an empiric or transcendental, a critical or eclectic one: all without exception take an unproven and unprovable proposition as starting point, namely the necessity of thinking. No investigation gets to this necessity, as deeply as it may prospect one day. It must be absolutely accepted and can be founded by nothing”—he means the necessity of thinking—“every attempt to prove its correctness always requires it. Beneath it a bottomless abyss yawns, a nightmarish darkness illuminated by no beam of light. We do not know, where from it comes, neither where to it leads. Whether a merciful God or a bad demon put it in the reason, both are uncertain.”

However, no human being speaks this way who has learnt a little bit only, has maybe learnt very much, and puts up all kinds of philosophy from the learnt concepts. Thus a human being speaks who has worked through what the knowledge researcher can go through if he submerges with his soul forces only deeply enough into that undergrounds of inner experience into which one can submerge where one is confronted with the cliffs, the partitions which one only penetrates if the spiritual organs really awake if they become consciousness.

In my life, I became acquainted with a number of such persons like Gideon Spicker, and I have tried to reflect such characters in the picture of Strader in my mystery dramas. However, I had to experience with it that just those who are often called followers of anthroposophy misunderstood me to the greatest extent. While the persons whom these dramas show are taken out of the real, comprehensive life, from that life that should just show the necessity and the validity of spiritual science from the other areas of modern existence, weird persons believed, I would write such roles that are tailor-made for those who should represent them, whereas I was just a far cry from this.

I could show with a comparison what such a person experiences who does not get to the knowledge of spirit but to the insight of the necessity of thinking. Someone who gets to the knowledge of spirit knows that if one not only wants to consider the thinking but experiences it, he does not experience, indeed, that beyond the thinking that Gideon Spicker describes, the bottomless abyss, the nightmarish darkness illuminated by no beam of light, but he experiences the spiritual world beyond this thinking that bears the sense-perceptible reality. He experiences with his soul in this supersensible area. He also experiences that there is no uncertainty whether a merciful God or a bad demon has been put in the reason, but he experiences and observes the spiritual that penetrates the reason, as the sense perceptible world penetrates the sensory observation.

However, one must say that the thinking—if it is left to itself if it is only thought, and is not experienced—that such a development of the soul life can be compared—you forgive for the somewhat odd comparison—with a hungry organism. If one believes to be able to recognise something of the highest questions by mere thinking—God, freedom, immortality—, then one resembles a person who does not want to still his hunger with food from the outside, but lets the hunger develop. As little as you can develop a hungry organism, so that it balances out its needs in itself, just as little you can attain any spiritual content of the soul and any solution of the questions of God, freedom, immortality if you abandon yourself only to the thinking. As you starve on and on unless you eat, you cannot attain the spiritual development if you think only on and on.

The older philosophical metaphysics wanted this. As hard as it is, it is true: this outdated metaphysics that is something new, however, to some people is nothing but a science that suffers from mental malnutrition.

However, it is not enough that you gain this knowledge only to understand the inner experience correctly. As you have to understand that mere thinking leads to mental malnutrition if this thinking does not brace itself up for inner experience, you have also to understand that much knowledge of the outer sense-perceptible reality and its processing by the intellect, by methodical research do not lead to any knowledge of the soul.

You will convince yourselves if you take common textbooks of psychology that one normally starts speaking about the nervous system. What one says, otherwise, about the human organism is borrowed from physiology, from natural sciences.

Now I have to stress repeatedly not to be misunderstood that spiritual science is a far cry from misjudging what natural sciences have reached concerning the secrets of the nervous life, the secrets of the human organism. I do not want to discount its value. Nevertheless, the value is in another area than in that of the soul knowledge. You may abandon yourself to the mere thinking, then you starve; but abandoning yourself to the outer observation for the knowledge of the soul life only resembles the supply of all kinds of stuff that is indigestible. If you fill your stomachs with stones or the like, the human organism cannot make anything from this indigestible stuff.

Thus you cannot suppose, if you take the scientific results simply in such a way as they are and do not process them mentally, that you receive any enlightenment of the spiritual world, of the life of the soul in the supersensible realm. In our times, people abandoned themselves to the most different mental pictures that should explain how actually the soul relates to the body. Not only that there the oddest fairy tales are bustling about in that what one often calls science. One wants to eradicate fairy tales and superstition from the outer life, in science they often flourish, one only notes it in science just as little as one noted it in the outer life of former times. That fairy tale also belongs to it that the nerves are telegraph wires to the soul that pass on the outer sensory impressions, then again other nerves are there which direct the will impulses to the periphery. About this fairy tale, one would not like to talk at all, because what is meant with this comparison is far away from reality and arises only from an unnoticed scientific superstition.

However, I would like to emphasise two mental pictures that are also widespread today with those who contemplate the relationship of the body and the soul.

Some people believe that they have to regard the body or the nervous system as a kind of tool of the soul, as if the soul is a being that uses the body like a tool. The others who cannot realise how a mental-spiritual being should find a working point to work on something material like the body got even to the weird mental picture of the mental-bodily parallelism. There the processes of the body should proceed for themselves. Without the soul working on the body like a cause or the body reacting on the soul, the soul life should proceed in parallel with the bodily processes. One current always accompanies the other, but the one does not work on the other. Wundt (Wilhelm W., 1832-1920), Ebbinghaus (Herman E., 1850-1909), Paulsen (Friedrich, 1846-1908) and many others dedicate themselves to this weird parallelism theory.

All these theories suffer from the fact that they do not realise what the coherence of the soul with the body is based on. This coherence can be expressed neither by the fact that one says, the body is the tool of the soul, nor that one says, the soul processes proceed in parallel with the bodily phenomena.

However, I am able to bring only forward that what I can say that encompasses a wide field as a result and observation of anthroposophy. Everybody can find the other reasons in my various writings. Nevertheless, I would like to show the essentials briefly today.

If one wants to express the relationship of soul and body correctly, one has to say, as far as one considers the human being, everything bodily of the human being turns out to be for a real observation neither as tool nor as a process running alongside but as a creation of the soul in microcosm and on a large scale.

It is nothing bodily at the human being that is no creation of the soul. However, one has to cast off some prejudices and to take up new concepts from spiritual science if one wants to envisage this far-reaching idea that everything bodily is a creation of the soul.

Already in microcosm, this is in such a way if we form any mental picture if a feeling emerges in us. Yes, only because one has not learnt to observe spiritually and bodily, one believes that there something exterior works on a finished body; the exterior effect spreads to the finished body through the eye or ear, then the effect continues inwardly. Have an unbiased look at the suitable theories. You will find everywhere that they are not at all based on real observations but on prejudices. Since what really goes forward if we perceive if we hear anything, is already carried out, actually, for the most part when we become aware of it, and is strictly speaking always a developmental process in the body. A beam of light hits us and causes something. It is in the same world in which our body is. In our body, something goes forward. What goes forward in it is of the same kind, only in microcosm, as it is if on a large-scale forces form our organism on a large scale. As the forces of growth and other forces form our organism, something is formed in us if a beam of light hits us if a tone hits us and so on. That which is formed there as something subtle in us is reflected in the soul that is not in the body but always in the supersensible realm. We become aware of the reflection. The process, however, which must take place there for the wake consciousness must be a destructive process, a little death.

We cannot completely convince ourselves of the consciousness, of the soul being with the help of the usual consciousness processes, and with bodily-spiritual observation. Nevertheless, if we come on what also accompanies our usual awake life, on the forming of memories, we come already nearer to that which I have just said. Someone who is able to observe what goes forward in the human being knows: what makes a mental picture aware to us does not lead straight away to memories. No, something has always to run alongside, another process has to take place. If you have sense for observation, look at a pupil who studies hard ever so much; what he must perform as auxiliary exercises, so that that which he takes up also goes over into his memory. For a subconscious accompanying process must proceed always. That which we know does not remain to us, but that which goes alongside the consciousness in the subconsciousness. However, that which happens there in our organism by this side flow of the consciousness is still very similar to the growth processes of childhood.

The origin of mental pictures is a growth process in microcosm. Usually we grow like with tremendous power in proportion to the small growth process that takes place in us, unnoticed in the usual life if memory forms. Under the surface of the current of the conscious mental pictures, events happen which carry the memories; and this is very like the growth processes. Do you ask why one can well train the memory just in your youth? Because you still have fresh growth forces in yourselves, because they have not yet withered. However, I can always give such single proofs only; you can prove what I have said with many single observations.

Our usual imagining, feeling and willing intervenes already in such a way that it is reflected not only and makes aware what happens; but in such a way as concerning the memory an undercurrent is there for our conscious life, there is also an upper current. As one does not note the undercurrent—one notes it at most if the pupil studies hard and does movements and knocks its head to support this undercurrent—, one does not note the upper current all the more. However, this upper current belongs above all to that second human being who sleeps there in the usual human being, while we think, feel, and will in our usual life.

Just as the current of memory proceeds beneath the consciousness, something purely mental proceeds above the consciousness, something that does not intervene at all anyhow in the body. Because this conscious soul life has such hyper-experience, I would like to say, the forces of growth are not sufficient for this conscious soul life, for the entire soul life at all. The forces that lead the human being to birth are not sufficient. These forces could only evoke that in the human being that we perceive with the sleeping organism.

At the moment when the consciousness intervenes with its upper currents in the organism, those forces which also destroy this organism finally at death must intervene in the organism. These forces are destructive forces, so that the forces of growth must balance out them in sleep. Only then, one understands the supersensible life of the soul if one knows how far the purely organic reaches subsensibly.

I do not like speaking about personal experiences; what I tell, however, is associated substantially with that which I generally have to bring forward. I confess that I intensely pursued the problems about which I speak today and in my writings since for more than thirty years on all ways that may arise. These ways have to lead the soul into the area of spiritual life and in the coherence of this spiritual-mental life with the bodily life. I have found that—if you go about your work scientifically in the sense of our time honestly and sincerely—you really can obtain many fertile things, while you discipline yourself scientifically. On this way then you just find those questions for whose solution the usual natural sciences do not suffice. Yes, just from scientific thinking one gets other observation results about what is in natural sciences, actually.

The question of the nature of the nervous system was one of the biggest ones to me for decades, which the scientific psychologists, the psychological scientists regard as the organ of the soul who imagine that in the nerves an inner activity takes place, which is similar to other organ activities. Well, such activities also proceed in the nerves, but they do just not serve the forming of mental pictures, of feelings and will impulses. They serve the nutrition of the nerves, the production of the nervous substance if it has been consumed. They just do not serve the soul life; however, they must be there, so that the soul life can take place. I use a comparison that I have used here already once.

If you consider the nervous system as something that must be there for the soul life, you just have something, as if you say, the ground must be there, so that I do not fall into the depth if I want to go. However, if I go and the ground is soft, I leave behind tracks. Then someone will completely err who checks the ground and searches the forces in it, which my footprints have produced from inside. As little as these forces produce tracks from inside, any inner forces of the brain and nervous system produce the tracks that originate from imagining, feeling, and willing. There the mental works which prevails in the supersensible area.

Before one does not realise this and experiences it as real observation, one can generally come to no understanding of the true nature of the soul. That which is on the bottom of the soul life in the nervous life is not the organic processes of the nervous system—they lead to another direction—, this is that which I would like to specify now. I have brought in the preceding personal remark, so that you realise that I do not frivolously pronounce something such substantial that it is hard gained what I say about the nervous life: while organic forces go into the nervous ramifications, the human being goes over from life to death. In the nervous ramifications, the human being dies perpetually, if he uses these nervous ramifications for thinking, feeling, or willing.

The organic life does not continue as the growth conditions do, but it dies away, while ramifying in the nerves. While it dies away, it prepares the ground for the spiritual development, for the purely supersensible mental. As I remove the air with a pump from a container, produce vacuum, and then the air completely flows again into the container by itself, in the same way mental life flows in the dead part of the nervous system perpetually if the organism sends the partial death into it.

Hence, the partial death is the basis of consciousness. If one recognises that the human being does not need to pour his organic forces into his body to make this body the place of the soul, but that the human being needs to kill his organic experience to withdraw this organic life constantly from the places to which the nerves give the opportunity, you notice how the supersensible soul life can develop in the sensory body, however, after it has created this sensory body first. Since the same soul, which thinks, feels and wills in the time from conception to death, exists also before. The spiritual world is not anywhere in a cloud-cuckoo-land, it is there where the sense-perceptible world is also; it penetrates it. Where sensory effects are, they originate from supersensible, spiritual effects. This same soul lives in the supersensible world that has formed the body and has changed it into the apparatus reflecting the processes to it of which you can become aware. Before it came to conception, it lived in the supersensible world, and in this life on earth, it is connected with the supersensible world. This soul exists already since centuries, before it enters the sense-perceptible existence at conception. As in the life between birth and death this soul has created the body as its image and unfolds its life with this image of the body, the life of the soul unfolds the forces that develop the forces of heredity from the supersensible world.

It is correct that that which we pass on originates in the successive generations. However, our soul works already on them. We insert the forces in our ancestors by the effects of our soul that we receive then as inherited. Thus, we develop our whole organism from the spiritual world as we form something with the memory in microcosm; and only the base, the opportunity of it is given by the sensory heredity. The body is completely a creation of the mental-spiritual. As well as the single experience between birth and death is based on a creation of the spiritual, the entire human body is also based on the spiritual-mental. However, there are incorporated not only the forces of growth in this developmental current but also the forces that appear finally in the total sum as death which is only the outside of immortality.

Since while the mental-spiritual puts the body in the world, is reflected with it, it experiences its own life in the supersensible area. However, at the same time it destroys the body because the upper current mentioned just now develops. As every consciousness is based on a partial death, the complete death is nothing but the withdrawal of the soul from the body that is the beginning of a different experience of the soul. We know: as we develop memories between birth and death, we developed the inner human being in the supersensible current who goes through births and deaths who is everlasting.

What I have indicated as soul experience is not anything that the spiritual researcher produces, it is the characterised second human being whom one only oversleeps, otherwise, but is always in the human being. Spiritual research is nothing but making people aware of that what is perpetual and eternal in the human being, so that he can go through death. If you are able to move with your mental in the spiritual in the intimated way as you move with your senses in the physical-sensory, then you know that you live as a human being also in a spiritual world as one lives with the senses in a physical world. As one distinguishes the mineral, plant and animal realms in the physical world, one distinguishes realms in the spiritual world, which are full of beings that become more and more spiritual the higher you ascend to which the human being belongs with his soul, as he belongs with his body to the physical realms. Briefly, the soul consciously enters in the spiritual world.

I would like to call this worldview Goetheanism after its origins, as well as I would call the building in Dornach Goetheanum that is dedicated to this worldview. Since not on some daydreams but on the healthy condition on which the Goethean worldview is based that is also based what I mean as anthroposophy. Goethe differed in his view of the physical things just by such conditions from that what originated later as natural sciences. However, Goethe developed such scientific concepts that these concepts may sit heavily in the soul's stomach like stones, but can be transformed, so that you reach the mental realm with these scientific concepts. Goethe himself did not yet found spiritual science; he did not get around to doing this. Nevertheless, he developed his theory of metamorphosis so that you only need to develop the internal experience from the principles further, then you also attain knowledge of the mental-spiritual experience.

Whereto does the common psychology, actually, come? A very significant philosopher of the present, Franz Brentano (1838-1917), who died recently, had a rich knowledge life behind himself. He was a fighter in this area; last, he found asylum during this war in Zurich. He attempted to cope with thinking, feeling, and willing his whole life through, beside his other profound researches in the psychological field. These three concepts play a particular role in psychology. Franz Brentano did not advance further than to a classification, did not advance where one can grasp the mental itself only as something living. If one clusters imagining, feeling, willing so simply mechanically, one has three classes. To grasp the mental as something living, one has to grasp the mental, now, however, the spiritual-mental, in such a way as Goethe tried to grasp the outer physical things with his theory of metamorphosis, as Goethe imagined the green leaves of the stalk transformed into the petals, even into the fruit organs. As he attempted to explain all organs by a transformation into each other, one must not only leave thinking, feeling, and willing side by side, but also gain the living transition of them.

There I can bring in the research results again which matured in myself for a long time. Our will is not only put so externally beside the feeling and the imagining, but the feeling has simply originated as a metamorphosis of the will in such a way as the petal forms from the stalk leaf; and imagining develops from feeling. At the end the anthroposophist gets to the result that the will is basically a young being which if it becomes older changes into feeling, and if it becomes even older into thinking, into mental pictures. In the imagining the same is always mysteriously contained which is also inside feeling and willing. However, we do not experience how mental pictures arise from feeling.

However, if the soul has developed its spiritual organs, it experiences a mysterious feeling in all its mental pictures, but not a feeling which is bound to our body, but which leads us on the detour of the mental picture into the vastnesses of the spiritual world. You experience—if you are not led by the feeling into your bodily, but are led into the vastnesses of the spiritual world—that supersensible in which we are between death and a new birth. Then you experience the supersensible world with higher knowledge than the usual mental pictures are, with spiritual-mental knowledge.

However, most people would like to experience this supersensible world after the methods of the sensory world. They are not contented to experience it only in pictures, in Imaginations. They would like to experience it with the senses. However, as the body has to die to become pure spirit, one has to cast off the sensory knowledge that combines with the material. Knowledge has to become Imagination, so that in the Imaginative experience which is as subtle as imagination, but not so arbitrary, the sensory-material is cast off, and a picture of that reality is already attained between birth and death that the human being experiences after death.

Hence, nobody can hope to recognise the supersensible who would like to hear voices or to get other material effects like the spiritists do, while because of a weird self-deception these want to tackle, actually, the supersensible and put something sense-perceptible to themselves. With that subtle spiritual experience, which must happen if one wants to experience the imperishable human being, just many people are not content today. Only this supersensible experience can lead us to the real knowledge of the soul being in the supersensible field that leads us to a true view of the relationship of the body to the soul and that of the soul to the body.

As the feeling changes into imagining, the willing does it too. As one can find a feeling mysteriously in every mental picture, one also discovers a will impulse, which does not lead us to the movements of the limbs, to sensory actions, but leads us from imagining into the supersensible world.

If one discovers the young soul being of willing in the old-grown soul being of imagining, one discovers in this willing which is experienced purely spiritually those forces which work from the preceding life on earth on this life on earth. Then the repeated lives on earth and the intermediate lives in the purely supersensible world become real observation; then the human being gets to the real supersensible knowledge.

One could think that the supersensible knowledge is there only to satisfy the human need of knowledge. Let me quite briefly, at the end, only indicate with few words that this does not hold true. One could believe that only the human need of knowledge is satisfied, but this has its deep practical significance. Indeed, one is concerned with progress in the evolution of humanity. The Copernican worldview, the modern natural sciences came only, after humanity had gone through other levels before. Thus, the anthroposophical spiritual science only originates if the urge to recognise the supersensible is strong enough in the human beings. Many people who know that there is a supersensible world still believe that today the human beings are not ripe to develop those free cognitive forces to wake the sleeping human being. The opposite is the case! Today the human being thirsts for supersensible knowledge. He numbs himself only as I have said at the beginning of this talk.

This cannot go on this way for other reasons, too. One can recognise nature without ascending to laws that make the soul life explicable. You can even say that you can recognise nature the better, the more you keep away from any mental-spiritual while developing physical laws. The physical laws will be the more suited for their field, the less one confuses them with laws that refer only to the mental-spiritual. One has already to say this. However, as soon as it concerns the complete understanding of human life, so that our understanding can intervene in the development of this human life, as soon as it concerns the social and political living together, as soon as it concerns generally finding a right relation from human being to human being, something else is necessary. Then the thoughts that are formed only after the pattern of natural sciences are not sufficient.

Unfortunately, humanity has got used very much to thinking life after such thought forms after which one imagines natural processes. Thus people also have instinctively familiarised themselves with the social life, with the political living together in such a way and also to form it as the spirit forms which only is just used to thinking physical laws. More and more this has developed that way during the last four centuries. As it is correct if natural sciences exclude the spirit from their field, it is insufficient for the human living together, for everything that is connected with society, with sociology to develop thought forms that originate only from natural sciences. One does not become ready with how the human beings have to live together all over the world if one wants to develop this living together after political, after social ideals that are produced after the pattern of scientific principles.

One example of many: when this tragic war broke out, one could hear from many sides, just from the people who called themselves experts of the laws of human living together: this war can last no longer than at most four to five months.—In full seriousness, these persons said this from their scientifically developed thinking, which also exists with that who is not a physical scientist. Just the greatest experts spoke this way. How sadly has reality disproved these mental pictures! Nobody who figures spiritual-scientifically out the world can dedicate himself to such mistakes because he knows which difference exists between escapist mental pictures and realistic ones.

What fulfils our souls as spiritual science brings us together with reality; it puts us into the full reality. A social science, which really copes with this living together of human beings around the whole world which should not bring in instincts, impulses to the human beings which discharge as the today's dreadful, catastrophic events discharge—such a social science can arise only from the conditions which spiritual science gives. Since it deals not with a part of life but with the whole life; hence, it only can generate mental pictures and concepts that cope with reality.

If people do not force themselves to build up their social thinking based on spiritual science, humanity will not come out of the calamities that discharge today so frightfully. I can appreciate what goes out from the people who one calls pacifists or similarly. However, such things cannot be decided by mere orders, cannot be decided by the fact that one decrees: this and that must be.

One can absolutely agree with that which must be. However, if one only produces the orders, only the laws of the usual thinking, it is in such a way, as if one says to a stove: dear stove, it is your duty to heat the room; hence, heat the room.—It will not heat the room, without putting wood into it and making a fire.

Just as little all the usual ideas of peacekeeping et cetera are sufficient. It concerns that one not only says, human beings, love each other, but that one puts heating material into the human souls. However, these are concepts that arise from the living conception of spiritual life.

Since the soul does not only belong to the material, it belongs to the spiritual life. One does often not understand even today, what it means that this human soul belongs to the supersensible area. One usually thinks that one is with the laws which one develops today already in the supersensible area. One does not do this.

Just in the fields of serious science one often starts realising already that it is also significant to check for human experience not only that which scientific prejudice has sketched out in the last decades but also that there other concepts, other ideas are necessary.

Did we not experience the strange play in the last time that one of the most loyal disciples of Haeckel, Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922), the famous physiologist, wrote a book in which he says farewell to the whole outwardness of Darwin's theory which wants to explain the evolution only with a sum of contingencies, of coincidences, which does not want that forces intervene in this evolution that one cannot recognise with mere outer observation. Thus, one experienced the strange case that Oscar Hertwig wrote a significant book in the last time: The Origin of Organisms — a Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance (1916). In this book in which serious science itself attempts to come out from the only material, to ascend to the spiritual, Oscar Hertwig closes his explanations with the following considerations:

“The interpretation of Darwin's theory which is so ambiguous with its indefiniteness also permitted a versatile use in other fields of the economic, social, and political life. From it everybody could get desired answers, like from a Delphi oracle, concerning its practical applications on social, political, hygienic, medical, and other fields and refers as affirmation of his assertions to the Darwinian biology with its immutable physical principles. However, if now these putative principles are no real ones”—Oscar Hertwig believes to have proved that—, “should there not be social dangers with its versatile practical application on other fields? Nevertheless, do not believe that the human society can use phrases like the relentless struggle for existence, the selection of the fittest, the natural perfection etc. transferring them to the most different fields without being deeper influenced in the whole direction of its ideation. One could easily prove this assertion with many phenomena of modern times. Just therefore the decision of truth and error of Darwinism is beyond the scope of biological science.”

There you recognise how a naturalist realises: what the human beings think and what of their thoughts changes over into their impulses, that prepares and develops what then in the outer reality comes into being; the spiritual is also the creator of the material in the social field.

If the material appears in such figure as today, one has to search other reasons in the spiritual than someone searches them who goes forward with his concepts of the social only after the pattern of natural sciences. Spiritual science that is based on occultism will work different on the social life; it will not speak only of a relentless struggle for existence, but it will figure out what positions itself as something spiritual in that which appears in nature only as struggle for existence. It considers not only the existence after the outside, but after that which the spirit has poured into it; it will not only judge the course of evolution by its functionality but also by that which has been put as something ethical in the course of purposefulness. It will not only speak of perfection by natural selection but of the creative spirit that flows into the developmental current and creates the natural selection as well as the soul creates its body. It will search the bases of the social laws above all in the supersensible.

There we can already realise that spiritual science is not something that satisfies mere knowledge, but something that is intimately associated with the practical need, with the whole course of life. The future will demand those bases of thinking just for the practical life that can originate only from spiritual science.

Why are the human beings reluctant even today to accept spiritual science? Just from that which I have said now one can get an answer. We were mainly concerned this evening how spiritual science pursues the riddle of immortality. However, death separates us from immortality. We have realised that just in the course of life we have to recognise the perpetual intervention of death. In ancient times, one always said, someone who enters into the spiritual world must experience death symbolically.

It is maybe a radical diction, but it is true. Between our world of the senses and the intellect that analyzes the sensory observations and the world of immortality is no world of growth but of death. One has to envisage death; one has to look at the destructive forces that counteract the forces that just natural sciences regard as the forces of growth.

This produces something similar in the area of knowledge, as it is the fear of death in the outer life. One can already speak of the fact that people do not have the courage to penetrate that area through which one must go if one wants to enter into the supersensible. The human beings shrink from it. They do not know it. They deceive themselves with all kinds of theories and prejudices of limits of knowledge, with any only material significance of life. They rather deceive themselves than that they pass that gate courageously through which one can come only from the sensory to the extrasensory world. However, the gate is that by which one must recognise the nature of death. Since it is true: the human being will find adequate harmony of his soul only if he can absorb the secrets of immortality.

Nevertheless, to the fruit of knowledge that can be enjoyed as immortality one gets only if one ploughs over the ground of death. However, one must not be afraid of it. As the human being overcomes the deadly fear of knowledge in the area of cognition, a science of the immortal, of the supersensible will originate. Tomorrow I speak about the fact that this science of the supersensible disturbs nobody's religious confession. I hope that I do not engage your attention tomorrow as long as today; but I was not able to shorten this basic talk.

If religious feeling and experience wanted to understand its task properly towards the requirements of modern time and faced that with full understanding what anthroposophy intends, the religious feeling and confessing would consider anthroposophy as a welcome confederate just today. However, one does not always make it his business in the present to get to know the properties of those things about which one believes to judge competently. This is true to the greatest extent in particular compared with anthroposophy. One judges what one faces while one labels it from without, often sketches a caricature of that what it concerns in reality. Then one does not judge this reality but the self-made picture, the self-made caricature.

If one delved on anthroposophy, if one envisaged its task towards the riddles and problems of our time, one would become attentive above all to the fact that anthroposophy differs from all other opinions and views that arise about world and human being et cetera, because it is deeply penetrated by the idea of development in the most comprehensive sense.

Human opinions and worldviews feel contented only if they can say to themselves, in certain sense and within certain limits at least, I have thoughts that are true; they are valid in themselves; science, religion, or I have found them; but they are valid in themselves.

That does not apply to anthroposophy. Anthroposophy knows that the thoughts have to come from the spirit of time in every epoch. The spirit of humanity is continually developing. That is why that what appears as opinion in the world in an age must have another form than in another age. While anthroposophy appears to the world today, it knows that after centuries that what it says today it has to say in quite different form for quite different human needs and interests that it cannot aim at “absolute truths” but that it is in living development.

From such conditions a certain attitude results. On it the judgement depends, which anthroposophy must have about other spiritual attempts and currents; its relationship to other spiritual currents, other opinions, other views depends on it. Above all one has to take into consideration that anthroposophy did not originate in such a way as many people mean, and that it is not able to position itself in the network of contemporary opinions and views as one thinks frequently. Since one thinks if one gets to know anything about anthroposophy cursorily, while one has heard a talk about it once or has read a few pages of any book about it, or maybe not even this, but has heard from anybody who knows only very dubiously what anthroposophy intends; one thinks that anthroposophy is a religious confession as other religious confessions are.

In the course of time, one has just developed the sensation: developing ideas about the world is a religious view beside others. Hence, one thinks that anthroposophy is also such a sect, as many sects exist in the world.

I have to stress on the other hand first, just this is distinctive of anthroposophy that it did not appear anyhow in the world beside or in contrast to any faith. It did not appear because of this or that creed on which it has to take a stand, but because the scientific development made it necessary which has a formative influence on the views of the present. Anthroposophy wants to extend and to perfect what natural sciences have brought. One has to consider this starting point. If one gets to know the scientific achievements that go over in the public consciousness and work on its worldview, one has to say, natural sciences have worked and will work their way out even more in the course of time as interpreter of the outer sense-perceptible existence. The laws and methods that they develop are suitable in the most eminent sense to understand the outer existence, but unsuitable if one does not transform them in order to grasp the spiritual. If one wants to grasp the spiritual just with the same scientific severity as one grasps the natural, one has to work into the spiritual world as I have shown it yesterday from the way of thinking and attitude of natural sciences.

There, however, big difficulties tower up for some people. One may say: just by the brilliant progress of natural sciences by which one has also looked into the spiritual border areas it has happened that one has developed a worldview in which, actually, the spirit has no place. This must be like that. Just as the scientific methods are suitable for the natural existence, they must be in such a way that they exclude the spirit from their research fields. If one takes the human being himself into account, one has to say, anatomy, physiology, and biology can study the bodily existence of the human being only if they show that with their methods, with their way of research the spirit is excluded as it were.

However, if one gets involved how natural sciences go forward, then one can continue natural sciences in such a way as I have characterised this yesterday. One finds his way with certain methods that the human soul applies to itself just from the natural existence to the spiritual world. The spiritual world becomes such a reality to the spiritual senses, as the mineral realm and other realms of nature are real to the outer senses. One works the way up to the spiritual.

A difficulty arises there for many people. They say if one speaks of the relationship of natural sciences to anthroposophy in such a way, yes, he is right maybe completely if he speaks about natural sciences; one cannot grasp the spirit with the scientific methods, one cannot know anything of the spirit; there are just borders, there are areas beyond natural sciences about which we can know nothing.

However, just from the yesterday's talk it may have arisen that anthroposophy is not of this opinion. The opposite is the experience of anthroposophy: that one can really penetrate into the spirit, into this unknown land with certain spiritual methods. It is hard for some people to concede that one can still get to know something of an area if one gets involved in certain ideas and research results.

It is much more comfortable to say, this is an area about which all human beings know nothing—because they themselves know nothing about it. However, this is no proof that one can know nothing of it, although one often concludes this. Hence, it concerns just if anthroposophy argues that one can enter as a human being into the spiritual world—using those methods to which I have yesterday pointed—in which in truth the human being lives with his soul. In this spiritual world, he experiences immortality and freedom, the real impulses of his supersensible existence.

Because during the last centuries and up to now natural sciences follow the transient, just something had to face them that appreciates the same scientificity in the spiritual area. In former times, natural sciences did not yet face the religious confessions that referred the human beings to the spiritual world. Hence, a special spiritual science was not yet necessary. Such natural sciences did not yet exist which could dupe the human beings into regarding the outer sense-perceptible reality as the only one. Only in the time when such a science and with it such a belief could appear, a spiritual science had to come.

This is in the course of development. That is why one can understand the emergence of anthroposophy only properly if one understands its arising from natural sciences. If natural sciences produced a kind of confession only of their own accord in the human beings, they would gradually entice them because of their strictly scientific methods and completely dissuade them from the view that one can penetrate by knowledge into the spiritual world. They would bring along that the human beings believe to the greatest extent: well, one can know everything about the sense-perceptible world; anything else that is beyond the sense-perceptible world is subject to faith that can never lead to any certainty.

Here is the point that is hard to understand for the contemporaries at first because it requires a major effort to subject the soul to those experiences by which it attains spiritual senses to itself beside the physical senses to penetrate into the real spiritual world. It will still last long, until the prejudices disappear which prevail in this respect, until an sufficiently big number of human beings realise that one can really penetrate into the spiritual world as scientifically as into nature.

So that spiritual science can gradually settle down in our cultural life, it is necessary that people unite who intend and feel a need to maintain it. From that desire everything has also originated that comes into being in the Dornach building and its surroundings. However, the union of single persons leads straight away to the wrong opinion: well, there one deals with a sect, there the persons consort who want to support any new faith among themselves. However, associating in this area has another sense than associating in sects. Associating in the anthroposophic area has the sense that anthroposophy cannot be attained by reading a single talk, but that anthroposophy is something on which someone who wants to know it properly has to work gradually.

This takes place also in the schools, in the universities; and if one wants to call an audience in the university a “sect,” one may call an association of those who practise anthroposophy a “sect,” otherwise not. If to certain talks, to certain events only some persons can come who have absorbed other things already in themselves, this seems quite natural; since with any other knowledge it is that way. Anthroposophy wants just to consider the modern institutions. Nothing mysterious forms the basis if human beings come together and carry out events, but only that which they have searched as preparation as you prepare yourself for university lectures, before you can visit them because, otherwise, the visit is useless. Any other view about such a coming together does not apply because it does not get to the heart of the matter.

However, one has to say, an association in this area must have another character in certain respect than an association of students at a college, for example. The cognitions that a college provides refer mostly to the outer life, with the exception of quite small “enclaves;” they refer by the influence of natural sciences to the intellect based on the sensory observation. However, this is directed more to the mere thinking, to a part of the human being, to the head. By no means has anthroposophy opposed the intellectual understanding!—People who consider themselves as capable sometimes judge anthroposophy just with their prejudices and regard anthroposophy as amateurish. However, if these people engaged in it, they would realise that the thinking and the logic that one uses in the outer science must also exist in anthroposophy, but a much subtler, higher logic is necessary to understand its advanced parts really. However, what anthroposophy reveals of the spiritual world because of its research seizes not only the head, not only the thinking, but it seizes the whole human being with his whole soul: feeling, thinking, and willing. However, the human being thereby gets a more intimate relationship to that what is delivered to him as knowledge than possibly the mere university study does.

 I would now like to go back—in order to make understood myself completely in this regard—to the fact that anthroposophy is important for the human development as a supplement of natural sciences that it appears in the sense of the spirit of our time that, however, the cognitions that anthroposophy intends as they corresponded to the needs and interests of former times were always there. Nevertheless, one had other views about the development of the suitable knowledge. One has to talk about mysteries, even of secret societies if one looks for the analogous things of former times that correspond to anthroposophy. One performed that in the mysteries in the course of the human development which today anthroposophy does in another form, which corresponds to the present. Those who did such researches in former times initiated procedures by which the higher knowledge of the spiritual world approached the human beings. They took the view that they had to cut themselves off just in a circle of human beings who were very well prepared for such activities. With them one had made sure that they really had that attitude and character which is necessary to receive something that seizes the whole human being and his whole soul. Hence, one has strictly kept secret the knowledge that one cultivated in such mysteries, in such secret societies.

One can realise even today that good reasons existed to protect this higher knowledge against profanation by the public. There were good reasons. More in view of the today's development of spiritual science I would like to indicate something of these reasons.

If you get from the sense-perceptible world to the spiritual one, as I have described it yesterday, you have to cross a certain border area. One may very well use a term that many people used who understood something of such things: one has to cross the threshold of the spiritual world. This expression means something. It is not an only pictorial term. It means something, as far as the science of the spiritual—if it really approaches the human being and the human being combines with it—brings images, ideas and views with it which are completely different from the images, ideas, and views which one has in the outer sensory world. One can already say: someone who is habitually eager to accept the truth of the outer sensory world only will discover that truths of the spiritual world sound paradoxical at first; they are so different from the truths of the sensory world that they could seem maybe crazy, fantastic. This comes from the fact that one completely goes astray if one believes, the spiritual world which forms the basis of our sensory one is only a kind of continuation of this sensory world; it only seems somewhat more nebulous, somewhat subtler and thinner than the sensory world. No, you have already to familiarise yourself with the fact that you must experience something new, incredible, paradox as truth if you want to engage in the real spiritual world.

Hence, this engagement in the real spiritual world is not only something astonishing, but it often evokes feelings of fright in the human being, in particular if he stands at the threshold of the spiritual world. They are like fear, like shyness that always exists if the human being if he enters into an unknown area. Since for someone who has done his experiences only in the sensory world the spiritual world is an unknown area. Hence, it happens that at the threshold of the spiritual world two things may flow into each other: on one side that is which you have still to acknowledge as truth concerning the sensory world that you have to acknowledge as consecutive facts, as lawful course of facts. Then, however, something confronts us from the other side of the world, from the spiritual side, something that is subject to other laws, that proceeds quite different that makes a paradoxical impression. This can intertwine at first. However, thereby the thinking comes into a situation, which puts high claims to the human mind, to a healthy power of judgement of the whole state of all circumstances. One must be well prepared if one wants to distinguish illusion from spiritual reality within the border area.

Someone who studies the books really which I have mentioned yesterday will realise that the given method to penetrate into the spiritual world is designed in such a way that the human being does not impair the health of his senses, of his mind, and reason, on the contrary it furthers it. Any intrusion in the spiritual world that is managed mystically or with hypnosis is the opposite of that what a healthy spiritual research intends.

However, this does not prevent that malevolent people come repeatedly and state that the spiritual-scientific method hypnotises the human beings, persuade them of all kinds of things. Nothing can contribute so decidedly to save the human being from any hypnotic influence and suggestion as the true spiritual-scientific methods do which make the human being free. One works in the spiritual-scientific method with the following principle: I have pointed in my book The Riddle of Man to the fact that one can say: as well as the human being awakes from sleep where he has only a quite vague consciousness; he can wake from the usual consciousness to the spiritual beholding. It is like an awakening in a spiritual world what you attain with the spiritual-scientific method. However, as the usual day life can be never healthy unless one makes preparations so that the sleep is healthy, the entry into the spiritual world cannot be healthy unless one can develop a healthy everyday life based on reality, on worldly wisdom unless one has disciplined himself, so that one is a human being who copes with reality.

The awakening to the beholding can occur only from a healthy day life. Spiritual science has to expel all preparations in the usual life by which the human being becomes estranged to this life may it be by prejudices, by wrong asceticism, or by wrong turning away from life. Just the proper existence in the practical life is the best preparation to enter into the spiritual world.

However, if one has acquired a healthy sense for the outer reality if one has developed,—to put it another way—a healthy mind and power of judgement, you can distinguish illusion and reality in the border areas of the sensory and spiritual worlds, where the threshold is between both worlds. Hence, one has himself strictly convinced in former times whether the human beings who associated with the mysteries were really prepared to stand the stronger fight that the common sense had to lead off in the border area. Since someone who does not have common sense is misled by the apparently paradox phenomena. He soon leaves the whole matter as one drops an ember if one has burnt himself, and he feels disappointed and becomes more and more an opponent of any spiritual pursuit. These ancient societies wanted to be sure of their people.

Such associations have continued their work up to now; there are still ones. Anthroposophy does not belong to them; anthroposophy reckons that today on a much bigger scale than it was the case in former times, everything that approaches the human being must be subject to the public. We hear with a certain right that even the secret diplomacy has to be replaced by a public one. The spirit of time tends to public. However, just with this spirit of time anthroposophy lives. Only in this respect which I have mentioned before—because certain preparations are necessary if one wants to understand something later—only from such conditions something still has the appearance of the old institutions, but it strives to position itself completely in the public. Since anthroposophy can only become an element of the modern cultural life—what has to happen—if anthroposophy positions itself in the public.

However, not only this is a peculiarity of anthroposophy what I have just indicated, but this internal soul experience which enables you to behold in the spiritual world as you look with the physical senses in the physical world. This requires that you can generally behave to concepts, views, and mental pictures somewhat different from you behave toward the outer reality. In this area, natural sciences have also created concepts that are useless as such in spiritual science. They are useless because the spiritual researcher realises the following very soon: a concept, an idea, a mental picture is real, as soon as one approaches the spiritual facts and beings, is nothing but an image, a photo which one gets in the physical world, we say of a tree. If one takes a photo of a tree from one side and a photo from another side, a photo from the third side—these pictures look different. However, they all are of the one and same tree. Only because one takes these photos from different sides one can receive a complete idea of reality. However, one does not like that today. One likes limited concepts. One wants to adhere to them. Spiritual science cannot do this. Spiritual science describes a matter from most different sides; it describes it once from one side and knows that it gives an one-sided picture only; then it describes it from a second side, from a third side, from a third viewpoint.

Indeed, what astonishes even more is the following. If one really wants to become a spiritual scientist, one has to be completely penetrated by the sentence that Goethe formed: between two contrary opinions, the problem is right in the middle. One must know not only—if one wants to know the truth of a spiritual being or a spiritual fact—what militates for it, but also what speaks against it.

The listeners who have frequently heard talks by me know that it is my habit from the spiritual-scientific attitude to not only say what militates for, but also what militates against a matter. In particular, I have the habit of doing this always if I hold talks about more intimate talks on higher fields of anthroposophy. That is why someone who peruses my writings not only discovers with which arguments one can found certain spiritual facts, spiritual beings, but also with which arguments one can disprove the things. Only thereby, one receives truthful experience.

However, this has led just in this anthroposophic area to strange things that one can experience, actually, only in this area today. Just from within the ranks of the followers, persons have appeared who did not search work in spiritual-scientific respect but personal interests. They have seceded; they became adversaries. They needed only to copy what one can read in my writings what I have said in my talks, and then they could easily disprove anthroposophy. Indeed, one does not need to invent own disproofs, one needs only to copy the disproofs!

However, what I have just indicated is a peculiarity of anthroposophic research: to light up the things from the most different sides. Thereby only one acquires the necessary inner discipline if one does not want to live only in abstractions, but wants to unite with spiritual realities. Someone who only knows the outer nature and natural sciences has no idea of this inner discipline. For he thinks, he may be able to transfer certain concepts, certain mental pictures that one obtains from the outer nature, simply to the spiritual area; since he regards them as generally valid. However, one is not able to do this.

I would like to clarify this with the following. Indeed, the paradoxical concepts immediately begin with it. I think, for example, of a lecture which at the beginning of this century Professor Dewar (James D., 1842-1923) held in London. Professor Dewar attempted in a similar way, as the geologists do concerning the beginning of the earth, to form ideas of the possible end of the earth from physics, from chemistry. These ideas are exceptionally brilliant. If one pursues how the earth cools off gradually, and with it the conditions of the single substances change on earth, one gets to certain insights which are valid within the border of observation. Then one extends them and asks: how will all that be after millions of years?—One can be a rather witty physicist or chemist and imagine, it is so cold that, actually, no human being can live with his current constitution; even so, one calculates, how then, we say, for example, the milk looks like. Then the milk will be solid, it cannot be liquid and will have another colour. One can find certain materials, as for example proteins with which one coats the walls, so that they shine, so that one can read newspapers. The professor has derived all that from physics and chemistry as a nice idea.

Nevertheless, someone who has trained himself with spiritual-scientific methods must deny himself such ideas with inner soul discipline; he cannot get to them. Since how does one attain them, actually?

I just get now to what is paradoxical compared with the usual mental pictures: if one observes how the vital functions of a child change from the seventh, eighth years on, you get a suitable picture. Then you can continue calculating how the organs must look in 150 years. This is exactly the same method after which Professor Dewar calculated the final state of the earth.

However, if one applies it to the human being, one notices: he does no longer live in 150 years! One does not consider that that is not applicable to the human being, that the earth is dead before the state enters which one calculates from physics. One could also calculate from the changes from the seventh until the ninth years how the child was 180 years ago—but it was not there! The geologists calculate how the earth looked millions of years ago. However, at that time the earth did not yet exist.

This sounds paradoxical, and one has as a spiritual researcher to bring in concepts that sound paradoxical. Nevertheless, what one gets to know spiritual-scientifically is just something that can give soul discipline. To settle in the spiritual, just a soul discipline is necessary which can also deny itself certain concepts, which does not calculate after the same pattern which one would follow if one said, the human being who faces me existed 200 years ago.—The calculation would completely be after the same pattern.

I know very well how paradoxical this is what I say with it. However, if one does not point to such paradoxes, one draws attention to that which upsets some people so much. If one crosses the threshold of the spiritual world, one cannot enough emphasise how much the common sense must be active. However, if one appropriates such a soul discipline, one can unite with reality this way; then this becomes an achievement of the whole soul; it becomes a disposition, a basic character of the soul.

Then, however, the soul can judge how its view relates to other worldviews. Then it will understand how its worldview relates to other viewpoints. Then one can pursue which other currents of thinking, feeling and experiencing are there to criticise not only but to settle in them. Such a behaviour extends to all historical and contemporary developments concerning the human cultural life.

Only if one takes the attitude from the deepest impulses of anthroposophy, one can judge the relation of spiritual science to the religious confessions. Anthroposophy attempts to understand these religious confessions above all. It attempts to settle down into them not with critical mind, but in such a way, that one takes them, as they are to understand their right to exist. Hence, anthroposophy succeeds in making a fair judgement of the past spiritual currents in quite different sense than other directions of thought often do.

Let us take the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas or the philosophy of Aristotle at first. Someone who is today a philosopher or scientist after the pattern of the common concepts says: well, Aristotle is an old obsolete philosopher; the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas is a thing of the Middle Ages.—Anthroposophy knows that something special must arise from the conditions and impulses of the spirit of our times; it does not want to take over what in former epochs was the right thing. However, it understands that out of the conditions of those epochs what only those epochs could offer. It understands their nature; it knows that the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas was basically a servant of Christianity at that time that it could arise from the spirit of that time. You have to familiarise yourself with what cannot arise only from the spirit of our time. Anthroposophy does not regard the engagement in Thomism as an only historical study, as something that one can get only from it. This is very important. Since this does not produce that washed out tolerance, but it produces that understanding tolerance which looks at that what developed once not as something obsolete, but appreciates it at its place, appreciates it also in its developing reality. Some things have to develop in nature, in the spiritual life as annual plants develop from which again annual plants originate. However, other plants develop further from one year into the other forming wood, for example; they are perennial plants.

In the spiritual culture, it is likewise. Something must go on in the spiritual culture, must be taken up in later times by those who want to feel united with the whole development of humanity. You can also get an idea of the relationship of anthroposophy and the religious confessions that believe, but only because of a misunderstanding, that anthroposophy opposes them as another religion.

No, that is not true. Anthroposophy knows very well that it can never become a religion because it knows that just as little, as one can become a child at the age of 60 years again, just as little the modern humanity will be able to form religions of its own accord. New religions do no longer originate. Hence, anthroposophy is appropriate just to figure out the absolute value of the confessions. Anthroposophy would badly get along with itself if it believed to be able to found a new confession. However, the religions originated because human beings should receive impressions of the spiritual world. They keep their value and can be understood just with anthroposophy that also works its way to the spiritual world.

Hence, properly understood, religion and anthroposophy can meet each other. Anthroposophy works its way from the human being, developing human forces, to that spiritual area in which the religion puts its revelations.

May one be, actually, so little religious that one can believe, one has received the religion as truth from divine heights and one does fear for it if the human being strives now after working his way to the truth of the spiritual world with the forces that he received from God, as the religions believe? Is it not religious from the start if one knows that one has revelations of truth in the religion that one is not afraid that this truth will comply with that truth which the human being finds with his forces given by spirit?

One should consider that seriously if one wants to judge the relationship of religion and anthroposophy. In former times, the human being was not minded in such a way that he needed one way more into the spiritual world beside the religious way. As the human being of the Middle Ages did not need the Copernican worldview, he did not need anthroposophy. Today he needs it because humanity is developing. Nevertheless, that which certain forces, existing only in certain epochs, gave once to humanity keeps its value.

However, in this respect there is a complete contrast of anthroposophy and the modern scientific current: The latter owes its brilliant results, its value just to the fact that its methods are not suited to lead into the spiritual world. Anthroposophy could not get to such errors because quite different forces lead to anthroposophy and because it would regard any attempt to found a religion as not contemporary. It would be as if a man wanted to do the same as a child does. That what the child does has not to be less worth than what the man does. Anthroposophy knows that the time of forming religions is over. Hence, it will use just its forces to understand the religions, to lead the human being deeper and deeper into the understanding of the religions.

One has to say, as the soul strives after the spiritual world anthroposophically with its own cognitive forces not only of the head but also of the whole soul, the religions did not strive. They strove in such a way that one may say: while anthroposophy takes the human being as starting point and works its way to the spiritual world, the religions took that as starting point what they had received like by gracious revelation. However, this fulfils the human soul different from that what is created with his own forces. Anthroposophy is a science. That, however, which works there as religious truth seizes the soul different from a cognitive truth as anthroposophy must be. One cannot change anthroposophy immediately into a religion. However, from the properly understood anthroposophy a real religious need will also originate. Since the soul is not uniform, but multifarious. The human soul needs different ways to reach its goals. It needs not only the way of knowledge to the spiritual world but also the way of the warm religious feeling.

One thing was always strange. I have received many letters here from Switzerland that always had a fundamental note. In these letters, you may read the following: I can understand quite well what you intend with spiritual science, I can also understand that it is entitled to enter the spiritual world this way—not everybody writes in such a way, however, there are those who write this—but I miss that it leads so intimately into the Christian experiences as—and then the writers bring in this or that sectarian direction.

Yes, one wants to express a lack of spiritual science, of anthroposophy, in such a way. In my view, this lack is always a particular advantage. Since one demands something from anthroposophy that it just does not at all want to be by its whole nature. However, it wants also to concede the same right to the other side. They hold something against you if you still keep a way open to them. This is something peculiar.

Today some priests resent if one keeps a way open to them on which anthroposophy does not at all want to walk. There refutations appear, for example: you say something else about Christ than we do—anthroposophy says nothing else; it tells it only more explicitly—hence, you are not on the right track; we have to disprove you.

Yes, however, if the matter were in such a way that one just says that what he does not say, and lets him say what he can know what is on his way. He attacks you just because you want to accept him. On one side, he resents that anthroposophy does not solve his task because I leave it to him. If one said anything else, it would also be taken amiss. Thus the paradoxical appears that someone refutes you with that what he would have just to feel as benefit. Because anthroposophy does not want to interfere with the very own thing of the confessions because it gives them the right to work at their place of their own accord, therefore, it just says something else that is not said at this place. Anthroposophy does that in order to show the authorisation of the confessions. One demands from it, it should take over the task of the religion. In this area, a whole sum of clear mental pictures would have to replace unclear ideas.

One may say, a start has been made with the excellent book which Ricarda Huch (1864-1947. German author) has written about Luther's Faith (1916). Beside some other excellent things one gets an idea of this quite different colouring of the sentimental way that the religious confession takes. The way of the religious truth speaks from every page of this book. However, today deeper truths are trivialised as a rule because everybody believes, he does not need much to get involved with the depths of this or that matter, he is already perfect. Ricarda Huch has passed an appropriate remark concerning the way how Nietzsche's followers have originated everywhere some years ago because they believed to have the makings in themselves to be such men as they were described here and there. They do not want to work their way up, but they want above all to be on par with a superman if one describes a superman. Thus, one saw numerous “supermen” walking around who did not even have the anlage of a respectable guinea pig, they walked around as “blond beasts” in the sense of Nietzsche.

Anthroposophy is a way into the spiritual world, as the present demands it, which supports the religious confessions, the religious experience. One also judges the outer course of history too cursorily. One thinks, one has to familiarise wide sections of the population with the religion again, which does not have that influence as in former times. One believes to do the religion a favour if one fights against the putative opponents. If one goes into the deeper reasons, why, for example,—as it was stated in 1873—only one third of the French population was religious in the ecclesiastical sense if one took the matter seriously, you would say to yourself: not from these superficial reasons, but from deep soul impulses an indifference has arisen not only towards the single religions, but also towards the spiritual reality generally. A materialist age has approached.

Now anthroposophy knows the following of the course of development of humanity. While any developmental current proceeds, another proceeds unnoticed in the depths of consciousness. For example, while the tendency of materialism and denial of spirit prevailed, the need to find the way into the spiritual world developed in the unconscious depths of the souls. Thus, a human being could be with his head an atheist like David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1872 theologian and philosopher); and develop his soul forces which can be developed, however, only on a direct path of knowledge, just on the anthroposophic way, if one finds it. Then, however, one finds the connection with the religious confession again on this detour, while one leaves the religious confession if one sticks only to the brilliant progress of natural sciences.

How have those scientific directions positioned themselves that have developed only under the influence of natural sciences to the religious development? Quite different from anthroposophy. Anthroposophy attempts to understand the religious confessions. Because religious confessions speak of the spirit and anthroposophy knows spiritual facts and spiritual beings as its research results, it encounters the religious confessions.

Other directions speak different. I want to bring in the example of the psychologist Ebbinghaus (Hermann E., 1850-1909, German psychologist); he investigates with his scientific mind, with his power of judgement how religion came into being. He says, the human beings of former times did not yet have the enlightened thinking of the present, they noticed that they are exposed to dangers in the outer world, to heavy showers, thunderstorms and the like; there they imagined that hostile powers are there. Out of their fear, they imagined demoniacal spiritual beings. Then from necessity, they have invented the gods who should help them.

Such things sound rather nice, and that human being who is accustomed to the popular ideas of today understands these things easily. However, one takes a very wrong idea as starting point if one says repeatedly, the child of nature is inclined as any child to personify, to ensoul an edge of a table; if it stumbles against it, and it bashes the edge. It does not at all ensoul the edge of a table, but it does not yet know the difference of something dead and something living, and from an internal desire it bashes the dead; it does not at all ensoul anything. The child of nature does also not at all ensoul anything, but it follows its desires; and it is right that it always tries to explain that what faces it hostilely or harmfully anyhow by invention of a demon. I do not believe, if a naughty boy is a threat to a savage anyhow, that the savage invents a demon with which he defends himself against the boy, but he bashes him.

These things seem to be paradoxical again. Only spiritual science can judge it properly. Spiritual science knows how to interpret the facts properly that the child, actually, is not yet minded religiously, just as little as the savage is minded this way. One regards the religion as something childish. However, just the child is not minded religiously, but it must be educated to religion first. Thus, the human being has been educated in the course of human evolution.

A quotation by Ebbinghaus is in such a way that he says first, fear and hardship are the mothers of religion.—Then he says: “The churches fill and the pilgrimages increase in times of war and disastrous epidemics.”

I would like to know whether the churches also fill with those who are materialistically minded from the start at epidemics and war times. Nevertheless, they fill with those only who have a religious disposition anyway. However, this does not originate from fear and hardship, this originates because the human being experiences the spiritual in his soul. In ancient times, he experienced that more instinctively. Today he can experience it more consciously. Because the human being has gradually developed to the experience of the spiritual, he realises an image of the spiritual in the sense-perceptible.

If you want to call the connection that the human soul has with the environment if it faces the spirit with spiritual organs, but if you want to call it only with an analogon, you may say, it is a kind of sympathy. You know sympathy in the moral sense; it is a kind of love. The connection with the spiritual world can be compared with the feeling of love. Thus, anthroposophy may say, even if primitive religions originated from hardship and troubles, they were filled with spiritual contents, with concepts and ideas of the spiritual world because the human being lives in it. Perfect religions, above all that religion which is the synthesis, the union of the other religions have not developed from fear and hardship; it has developed from that what one can call spiritualised love, coalescing with the spiritual world. Not fear and hardship but love produces the perfect religions.

Hence, you may say, those who have materialist-scientific mental pictures only misjudge the whole relationship of religion and cognitive truth. One is allowed to repeat repeatedly: if one stands firmly on the ground of a religious truth, one can assume—if the human being approaches the spiritual world from another side—that understanding, even support is possible. Thus, one will experience more and more—even if people do not want to admit this today—that, while by the impulses of the scientific worldview the religions feel weak, their value for humanity is acknowledged if the human being can approach the spirit spiritual-scientifically. The representatives of religion should be just friends of anthroposophy.

They will become friends. Since the conflict between religion and science does not originate from certain religious conditions. This conflict originated from the fact that strictly speaking the representatives of the religious confessions once represented science at the same time. You need not go far back and you will find, the representatives of religion were at the same time those who taught the worldly sciences. They were connected with these worldly sciences. Only in the course of time, natural sciences emancipated themselves from religion. This emancipation contributes to the spiritual world process.

Only because of the human nature, the understanding of such things lags behind. As recently as in 1822, the Catholic Church abolished the decrees that had condemned the teachings of Copernicus and Galilei. Maybe it needs centuries that a decree, an opinion is abolished which forbids to the Catholics to believe in repeated lives on earth. However, this abolition will come. Since human religious experience will not come into conflicts with the repeated lives on earth, just as little as with the Copernican worldview.

On this occasion, I have repeatedly to remind of that priest (Laurenz Müllner, 1848-1911) who was at the same time a university professor. He said in a lecture on Galilei, a properly understood religion will not rebel against scientific progress, but on the contrary, the religious truth will feel supported, that it can say to itself, if astronomy points to the stars and discovers their laws, then it happens also out of the magnificence and power of the divine being. Copernicus did not undermine the religion, but he contributed with his activity to the revelation of the divine being.—These words of a priest are quite different from those, which oppose that what must just appear in the history of humanity.

I have already pointed out how strange it is that one demands that one should accept, for example, not only that about Christ Jesus as Christianity what the one or the other representative of this or that denomination says, but one should say nothing else. One cannot reproach anthroposophy that it disturbs any religious confession. Nevertheless, it has to recognise something of that most important incision of the earth evolution that is significant for the whole universe. It still can say things about the Christ impulse which are quite different from that which was said up to now. One holds against it that it wants to contribute even more to the understanding of Christianity than the official representatives contribute.

Do realise only once how little one is up to the tasks of time if one does not want to understand that anthroposophy never disturbs the truthful religious confession, but deepens it. Then, however, one needs an attitude as Bishop Ireland (John I., 1838-1918) has expressed it with the words: religion needs new forms and viewpoints to keep in step with the modern time. We need apostles of thought and action.

Yes, there are also within the religious confessions those who feel the signs of time. Then they even demand that another way is coming up to meet them. Since they understand that if humanity loses the interest in the spirit, also the interest in religion gets lost. However, if humanity gets again interest in the spiritual as it corresponds to its today's development, then one will properly understood the religious confessions again. Hence, one can always experience, while often by the unilaterally qualified natural sciences the human beings have been dissuaded from the religious experience, they are led again if the mind is filled with anthroposophy.

If one wanted to understand the way seriously how anthroposophy understands the work of the spirit in the confessions how it understands that from these conditions this confession, from those conditions another confession has originated how it can judge the value of the single confessions, one would never want to combat anthroposophy just from this side.

Today one likes stopping at abstractions. One says, anthroposophy wants to search the core in all religions; it equates, actually, all religions. That does not hold true, but it investigates how a religion developed from another. It tries to understand how that confession which wants to content all human beings in one spirit how the synthesis of the different confessions is which are distributed to the single peoples. It speaks like Frobenius (Leo Viktor F., 1873-1938, ethnographer) of ethnic religions and of the religion of humanity.

The relationship of the religious life to anthroposophy can become clear only if one realises how anthroposophy wakes the human being for the spiritual world and how he can thereby feel that again what he can experience in the religious community.

Not with details, I wanted to explain the relationship of anthroposophy and the religious confessions but from the whole spirit of the anthroposophic worldview. I wanted to show that for that who knows anthroposophy there can be no talk that anthroposophy disturbs any religious experience. In this respect, one has also to consider what I have already said yesterday: I would like best to call that worldview which has arisen to me as anthroposophy from the healthy Goethean ideas, I would like best to call it Goetheanism, and I would like best to call the Dornach building Goetheanum.

Everything that one can find on the ground of anthroposophy induces you to say to yourself, I continue only what this unique spirit has put into the human evolution. He stopped in many respects at the elementary mental pictures. But one is not a supporter of Goetheanism in the right sense if one looks historically or externally biographically at that what Goethe himself wrote; but you are Goetheanist if you can project your thoughts vividly in this worldview and develop it further.

Goethe was a Goetheanist up to 1832 here in the physical world. Today he would express himself quite different from that time. However, if anything is healthy, certain basic impulses remain which also carry over a worldview from one epoch to the other. If that blossoms anew what was there as seed, then it points to this solidarity of the entire human development that it takes up certain basic impulses. Thus, I would like to close with the known confession of Goethe.