The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear Attendees!

As at my previous visits here in Munich, I would like to take the liberty of speaking on one of the two lecture days about a subject that does not strictly belong to the field of spiritual science, but rather touches on general German intellectual life. In these fateful times, this can be considered particularly appropriate.

And the day after tomorrow – on Sunday – I will return to a consideration from the narrower field of spiritual science, as I have been allowed to present it here for years, myself.

But it is not only because of my feelings in the face of the momentous and far-reaching events of our time that I would like to talk about today's topic, but because I may assume, not out of purely national feelings , but because I believe that I can assume, based on the facts, that the spiritual-scientific worldview represented here is intimately connected to very specific currents and aspirations of German intellectual life.

Not, dear ladies and gentlemen, to stoop to the level of Germany's opponents – the opponents of German national identity – who not only accuse but also defame what German intellectual life has produced, not to stoop to that level – I believe that is not necessary within German intellectual , but because I would like to make this observation, because our time requires a kind of self-reflection on the actual essence of the developing German national spirit, also with regard to the attainment of a spiritual world view, because self-reflection on this matter of German spiritual life must arise like a kind of basic need of the soul currently within this spiritual life.

When one engages in such reflection, one's spiritual gaze naturally falls first on the three great figures that I spoke of during my last visit here. And I would like to begin by saying a few words about these three great German thinkers and philosophers, about whom I was already able to speak here last time, even at the risk of having to say some things again that have already been said before, at the risk of having to say some things again that have already been said before, at the risk of having to say some things again that have already been said before.

First of all, our spiritual gaze must fall on that personality who had grown entirely out of German intellectual life and who, even in one of the most difficult times in German life, found tones that were suited to carry the whole nation along in a world-historically necessary enthusiasm: our spiritual gaze must fall on Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Fichte – I believe one must say of him: on closer, more thorough examination of his work, it becomes apparent how deeply true it is that he expressed what he felt to be his own sentiments in the most diverse forms. The best that he has to say in his world view was born in his soul from an intimate conversation that he repeatedly had with the German national spirit itself.

I do not want to present this as an external judgment, but rather as something that Fichte himself felt in his deepest innermost being. And what exactly is this innermost path of Fichte's striving? I think it can be described as a well-founded conviction: to so power the innermost part of the human soul, the center of the human spirit-soul-being, to so inwardly enliven it that in this heightened experience of the innermost soul life, that which interweaves and lives through the world as divine-spiritual resonates, that one enters into the innermost being of this conviction by , so that what one can go through inwardly in one's own soul - not in everyday life, but in moments of celebration in life - grows together with the spiritual-divine currents themselves, but now not only in our inner being, but also in the whole of nature and in all spiritual, outer spiritual life, which pulsates through the whole world.

Now, in Fichte it is as if something is revealed from a particular side of the soul that has taken root in him, from a soul power that was particularly strongly developed in him, from that soul power that can perhaps be described as follows: Of the three powers of the human soul – thinking, feeling and willing – he felt the willing above all. And he himself felt the I in such a way that the most essential thing in the experience of the I is that the human being can indeed come to say to himself: the I actually consists in the fact that one can will, and always will anew; and that one's eternity is guaranteed by feeling within oneself the authorization to will it again and again; and that into this volition there penetrates what one feels in the very deepest sense as a commitment to life and the world; that in this commitment to life and the world one can at the same time feel something that strikes from the divine-spiritual expanses into one's own being. So that one can say: the highest that one can experience is the duty that reveals itself to one's own soul in the whole of the world, that strikes into one's own being and gives one the certainty that, because one has interwoven into what goes through the world as a duty-bearing will, as an eternally duty-bearing will, one oneself stands in this world as an eternal being.

From such an experience, from the experience of such a relationship to the world, Fichte's entire - one cannot even say “worldview”, but entire - way of thinking and feeling and speaking about the world emerged.

But it did not follow from his nature that one could speak of a theory, of a theoretical side, about the world. It followed from his nature - and he always felt that to be the German thing about his way of thinking about the world - it followed from his nature that what was like a general sense of the world, a general view of the world, was the most direct, personal power of his nature. And so it was the most immediate force of his being that it basically emerged when Fichte was very young, a boy.

And so allow me to describe a few traits that characterize this personal relationship to the world: There we see Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the son of poor people, at the age of seven – he was already a schoolboy – there we see him one day standing by the stream that flowed past his father's small weaver's cottage, and he has thrown a book into the stream. He stands there crying; his father comes to him.

What had actually happened? As I said, Johann Gottlieb Fichte was already a schoolboy at the age of seven; and since he had often been praised for his good learning, it was now clear to see how, since his father had given him the book that he had now thrown into the stream, he was no longer as attentive and diligent at school as he had been before; this had often been criticized of him. This book was a description of the deeds of “Horned Siegfried.” And when young Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who could already read, got hold of this book, he became absorbed in these great exploits; his attention to school subjects waned, and he was reprimanded for it.

But then the deepest trait of his character immediately showed itself in his soul.

However your inclination may speak, however your enthusiasm may be kindled by the figure of “Horned Siegfried” – he thought to himself – that must not be; duty is the highest. Because he does not want to diminish duty in any way, he throws the book into the water – as a seven-year-old boy! Thus, what later became the keynote of his relationship to the wider world was already alive in the boy: this permeation of the human soul with the will borne by duty, which he later felt to be the fundamental force of the whole universe.

And two years later, the nine-year-old boy Fichte, we see him in the following example: the neighbor of the estate – who later became Fichte's benefactor – had set out to hear the sermon in Fichte's hometown on a Sunday; but this neighbor from the neighborhood had arrived too late. The sermon was already over. The neighboring landowner was a little sad; he would have liked to hear the sermon. And while they were talking, they came up with the idea that there was a boy who knew how to listen to sermons in such a way, even though he was only nine years old, that he was able to repeat them quite faithfully. They fetched young Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who appeared in his blue peasant's smock, at first rather awkwardly, then warming up, repeating the whole sermon, not repeating it in such a way that he rattled it off without inner participation, but in such a way that one saw – and this had the effect, as I said, so deeply significant that the estate neighbor later became the benefactor of Johann Gottlieb Fichte – so that one saw: this entire boy's soul was interwoven with every word, and with what lived in each word, and could give the whole sermon anew, as one's own spiritual property!

Interweaving this, the environment, the why, the observation with the innermost of one's own experience in the soul, that is the characteristic that Johann Gottlieb Fichte always felt was the basic feature of the formation of a specifically German world view. This was very much alive in him, that only by strengthening this inner self, by experiencing what sits in the deepest soul, can one also experience what lives and weaves through the world as divine-spiritual.

Something like this lived, for example, in a basic trait that the profound Steffens tells us about, which he himself experienced in Jena when Fichte was already a “professor”. There Johann Gottlieb Fichte stood before his audience and said: First of all, gentlemen of the audience, think of the wall! He did not just want to speak to the audience in such a way that he communicated a content to them, but he wanted to create a living bond between his soul and the soul of the audience. They were to participate in a spiritual process that he allowed to take place directly: Think of the wall! Well, the people could do that. After he had let them think of the wall for a while, he said: So, now think of the one who thought the wall! That was more perplexing; they were no longer fully engaged in the activity he was asking of them. But he immediately pointed to this inwardly grasping and seizing of that which works and lives in the world.

Therefore, the whole way in which Johann Gottlieb Fichte presented was very special. People who heard him say how his speech flowed like rolling thunder, and how the individual words discharged like lightning strikes. Yes, we are told how he seemed like a person who not only inhabits the transcendental realm of ideas, but directly rules in it. And this is a word coined by his loyal listeners.

And indeed, they too have retained such a saying. If you have an ear for tracing history in its more intimate currents, you can follow what became of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's students and how they retained such a saying. People who understood him said: He does not just want to educate good souls, he wants to educate great souls!

This should give a rough idea of the depth of Fichte's work; for when he stood before his audience, he was not really concerned with saying this or that, he was not just concerned that his listeners should take up this or that of his words; he did not prepare himself at all for the individual wording, but he tried to live that which he wanted to bring home to his listeners - to live in it with a living, inner part of the soul. Then he would go before his audience. And, as already mentioned, it was not important to him that they should take up these or those words, but what he experienced in saying them was most important to him: to express the Will of the World, so that the Will of the World would live on in his words. That this should surge and surge to the souls of his listeners, that was what he wanted, this will that felt so alive in him in what underlies the world according to his view.

That is why he was able to find those stirring words to characterize German national character, which he found in his “Discourses to the German Nation.” No one understands their deeper meaning, which is Fichte's soul, and is unable to respond to the deep needs from which they arose. We may say: That which the German spirit had to say to the world was realized through Fichte's personality in terms of the will.

If we consider the second figure — the figure of someone who follows on from Fichte, Schelling — we see a completely different side of the German nature. When Fichte speaks, it is as if the element of will itself were rolling through his words. Schelling did not appear to his listeners that way. Even as a very young professor in Jena, still a youth among youths, Schelling spoke enchantingly, in a way that perhaps no one before or since has achieved through a directly academic speech.

Why does Schelling have this effect? With Fichte, we can say that what he said to the world lived in the will. With Schelling, everything lives from the mind, from that mind for which only the German language has a word, from that mind that wants to convince with love, even when it recognizes that it wants to submerge with love in the things to be achieved. Thus, for Schelling, what it means to be in nature flows together, and he wants to immerse himself in this with love so that all of nature becomes like the outer countenance of his hidden spiritual life, spirit in nature. He went so far that he could utter the one-sided saying, Schelling: “To know nature is to create nature.” Certainly a one-sided, in this one-sidedness quite untrue word; but it points us precisely to the essential thing with him, Schelling, to this creating and weaving of the spirit, which lives behind nature, and in which the human spirit wants to grasp itself in order to know itself as one with all natural and with all spiritual existence.

Because he worked in this way, he appeared to his listeners as a seer, so that while he spoke, Schelling was able to convey the spirituality of which he spoke and which surrounded him. While Fichte conveys the will, with Schelling it is as if he had spoken as a seer and directly said what he saw while saying it.

One learns such things most easily – I would say – from direct, traditional observation. Therefore, allow me to describe the impression that a truly deep mind, who was Schelling's friend and first listener – Schubert – had of him; because it is good to put oneself directly into what happened in a certain period of German intellectual development.

“What was it”

as Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert asks.

“that attracted young men like mature men from far and near to Schelling's lectures? Was it only the personality of the man or the peculiar charm of his oral presentation, in which this attractive power lay?”

It was not only that.

“There was in his lively words”

indeed

"an absorbing power, which no young soul, wherever it met with any receptivity, could resist. It might be difficult for a reader of our time

Schubert writes down in 1854 what he had experienced with Schelling in the 1890s

"who was not, like me, a young and enthusiastic listener, to make it understandable how it often felt to me when Schelling spoke to us, as if I were reading or hearing Dante, the seer of a world beyond that was only open to the consecrated eye. The powerful content of his words, as if measured with mathematical precision in lapidary style, seemed to me like a bound Prometheus, whose bonds to be loosened and from whose hand the unquenchable fire to be received, is the task of the understanding mind."

All of this must have been magical. I myself knew people who got to know Schelling when he was already an old man [...] because he expressed what he, as a shearer of the spiritual worlds, brought to his listeners in such a way that, as people who saw and knew him in those days say, he not only spoke to them, but his words, as he wanted to communicate them, flooded out of his eyes to them. That was still the case in old age; what must he have been like as a youth!” Schubert then says:

"But it was neither the personality nor the invigorating power of the oral communication alone that so soon after their public announcement by writing, evoked such interest and excitement for or against the direction of Schelling's philosophy, as no other literary phenomenon of a similar kind has been able to do for a long time before or since. ... In matters of sense-perceptible things or natural phenomena, one will immediately recognize whether a teacher or writer speaks from his own insight and experience"

from the spiritual world

“speaks or merely speaks of what he has heard from others, or even has thought up according to his own self-made ideas...”

Now, dear audience, it is probably fair to say today that it would be a childish view of the world to believe that by describing such spirits, one is demanding to speak to followers or opponents. In such matters, allegiance and antagonism are not important. One need not subscribe to a single word that Fichte or Schelling have written or spoken, nor need one be their opponent for not subscribing to a single word. The content is less important in this regard. The content of worldviews is in a state of dynamic development.

We will have much to discuss the day after tomorrow, especially about the living development of these worldviews and what the content has to do with it. It is not about defending this or that position that Fichte or Schelling took, but rather about looking at the lives of the personalities – at how they were situated within the whole of German intellectual life.

It is something tremendously significant when such minds try to recognize what nature is and what historical life is, so that they - as Fichte himself was well aware - grasp what is around them in a living way, submerging themselves in the things with their own knowledge. And that was what these minds strove for.

But because of this – and one really does not need to speak out of narrow-minded national sentiment, but one can speak entirely from the factual; as I said – we do not need to fall into the tone in which our enemies today fall! In this, as Fichte also emphasized, life in the German world view shows itself to be different from, say, the Western European, French or British world view.

Last time I pointed out what an enormous difference there is between this kind of Fichte and Schelling and - however much one may fight against them in terms of content - [what an enormous difference there is] between this kind of Fichte and Schelling, between penetrating into the foundations of things, where the whole outer world lives and gains life in knowledge itself, to what Fichte calls the dead world view, the world view of the inanimate among Western European minds [; where the world] of the inanimate begins, we say, within French folklore at the beginning of the seventeenth century with Descartes or Cartesius. But then it develops further, and we find it particularly pronounced, shortly before Fichte and Schelling, as has been described, appeared before their German nation, we find this world view of the dead, of the merely material and mechanical, over in France; we find it expressed, for example, in de La Mettrie.

This world view, as it can be found in de La Mettrie, for example – in this father of materialism, of modern materialism – is not to be fought against; it is only to be pointed out how precisely the French nation, in contrast to the German nation, is moving towards the dead and the mechanical. We see this already in Descartes, in Cartesius, in that for him not only minerals, plants, but also animals are merely moving machines. For de La Mettrie, the world finally becomes what he was able to put down in his book: “Man a Machine”.

Now, of course, dear audience, it is easy to find materialistic and spiritualistic elements in every culture and so on. But I am aware that I am not following this convenient mode of expression, but that I am highlighting precisely the characteristic that is related to the culture, and that for the German culture, Fichte and Schell ing in their striving - even if perhaps not in their thinking, as we shall see shortly - are as characteristic and as significant for German folklore as de La Mettrie - this could be proved in detail - for French folklore.

Everything is explained in such a way – and this is justified because it is self-evident – that one can see how man is dependent on what also works in him materially.

De La Mettrie comes to some strange assertions when he wants to prove how everything that exists depends on what is taken in through eating. Perhaps it is not entirely unnecessary to draw attention to a passage in de La Mettrie's book, “Man a Machine”, and to point out this passage in the Frenchman's book precisely in our present time. Of course, we do not need to endorse this passage in the way it is quoted here. We do not want to think such terrible things of a nation that is now at war with us, as the Frenchman de La Mettrie thought at the time. But it is perhaps interesting to quote what he says in order to prove how an entire nation, by eating in a certain way, acquires very specific mental and spiritual qualities, and thus wants to deduce the dependence of the soul and spirit of an entire nation on what is taken in materially through eating and drinking. So de La Mettrie says in the book 'Man a Machine':

"Raw flesh makes animals wild; men would become wild if they had the same food. How true this is can be seen from the fact that the English nation, which cooks meat less than we do and eats it quite raw and bloody, shows greater wildness, which is partly brought about by such food and partly, of course, by other causes, which only education can suppress. This wildness produces pride, hatred, contempt for other nations, stubbornness and other feelings in the soul that corrupt the character, just as coarse food produces a heavy and clumsy mind in a people whose main characteristics are laziness and dullness."

As I said, we do not need to subscribe to this harsh judgment of a Frenchman about the English; but it is perhaps interesting to recall it, especially in our time, when so much else is heard today, moving in other directions from this side, towards today's English allies.

The third person, who is very much honored by being present, and to whom attention must be drawn, because the third side of the German character speaks through him – and of the soul's character in general – is Hegel.

Of course, when people speak of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel today, the first thing that comes to mind is: Yes, but you really can't expect people to deal with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel! And most of them will indeed open a book and then close it again because they find it too difficult.

But, dear attendees, anyone who is familiar with the more intimate sides of intellectual life will not entirely disagree with me when I say that the time will come when these three minds will be so grasped in their striving that they can be vividly presented in modern times, so that what is essential – which, of course, had to first be expressed by them in a language that is difficult to understand – can be understood by everyone. And this treasure, which lies in these three minds, will once again bear fruit for every German child, if we are no longer too casual and too lazy to delve into the greatest treasures of the mind.

The third, as I said, is Hegel. If in Fichte it is the will that seeks that which weaves and breathes through the whole world; [if] in Schelling it was the mind, in that love is sought, which can recognize all exteriority in its liveliness – so in the present case it is the conviction that man, when he ascends to the thought that is not permeated by sensuality, when he ascends to the thought that is free of sensuality, and allows this sensuality-free thought to grow and live within him, that this thought, which the soul now experiences within itself, is a flowing in the soul, in which the divine-spiritual thoughts, from which the universe itself is created, work and weave. The soul is permeated by the Divine Being, and the soul thinks free of all sensuality.

The content may be wrong – and you can read more about this in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” – but something significant underlies it, and this in turn resonates with the most intimate trait of German spiritual life: mysticism as a striving, but not mysticism, which attempts to solve the riddles of the world in the dark and confused, which wants to reject all ambiguity, as mysticism so often wants, namely amateurish mysticism, confused mysticism, which we will talk about the day after tomorrow. Hegel's striving is mystical, namely to unite the soul with the very weaving of the world. But the goal is to achieve this mystical experience not in a dark emotional chaos or in a dark inner visionary chaos; but in the full clarity of the world of ideas, in the clarity of the world of ideas of the spirit of all things.

And this mystical connection in clarity is one of the deepest traits of the German character. One almost recoils from finding such a connection to the German character as a German and from emphasizing its significance for the German character. Therefore, let me present to you another characteristic of the German character, esteemed attendees. In 1877, someone noted in his “Diary”:

"Perhaps only the Germanic mind has the need to think for itself, to search for the source of things. The Slavs and Romans are more strongly under the rule of convention, tradition, custom, prejudice, fashion; and when they break through them, it is as a result of revolt and rebellion, without therefore recognizing from within themselves the law immanent in things, their true standard, not the written, arbitrary one that has been read into them. The German wants to get back to nature; the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Russian stop at convention."

So that I cannot be accused of characterizing from a one-sided national sentiment, I bring you this characterization, written from a soul torn by pain, and which – dear lady – was not written by a German, but by the French Swiss Amiel, in 1877! I think it behoves us to be more forgiving of the others, who perhaps have more justification from their feelings and from their observations to express themselves about the relationship of the German spirit to the other national spirits of Europe. And the same Amiel wrote in his “Diary” in Geneva in 1875:

“Thirst for truth is not a French passion. Appearance is more important than essence, the shell more than the kernel, form more than substance, gloss more than fertility, public opinion more than conscience.”

This is how the French Swiss write; as I said, as a German I would not say it directly.

“Appearance is more important than essence, the shell more than the kernel, form more than substance, the shiny more than the fertile, public opinion more than conscience.” This means that the Frenchman's center of gravity is not within himself, but in the others, in the great multitude. Individuals are zeros; the digit that forms them into a number comes from outside: That is the sovereign, the writer of the day, the most-read newspaper, in a word, the current master of fashion. All this can be deduced from an exaggerated sociability; it stifles in the soul the courage to resist, the ability to judge, personal conviction, the cult of the ideal."

Thus the Frenchman Amiel, a Frenchman who was familiar with German intellectual life, about what he had noticed. Amiel himself says, as early as 1862:

"I feel a common bond with a Goethe, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Leibniz, who are different enough among themselves, while the French philosophers, orators or mathematicians leave me cold despite their great qualities, because they do not carry the sum of general life within them, do not control the whole of reality, gag me or make me suspicious. What the French lack is direct knowledge of the living unity, a sense of the sacred, a feeling for the mysteries of being; what is theirs is the foundation of specialized sciences, the art of making a book, it is style, politeness, grace, a spirit of order, didactic art, discipline, elegance, truth in the details, staging, proselytizing zeal, strength in practical conclusions. But for the journey through Inferno and Paradise, other guides are needed; they are rooted to the earth, in the realm of the finite, changing, historical, and limited. Mechanism and dualism are the pinnacles of their intellectual flight. To break out of this circle, they must force themselves."

The same approach could be taken for other Western European cultures. But it is more important to take a look at these three minds that created a German worldview, which forms the backdrop to what German intellectual life produced in Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Herder and the others associated with them, as a flowering of intellectual human experience that can only be compared to the flowering that existed in ancient Greece. But when we consider Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in particular, when we look at them in this context, we have a special feeling; we can almost believe that something else is speaking, something higher that lives in all three of them than is expressed in each individual personality. One picture expresses more than one speaks when this feeling is expressed: the German national spirit speaks through these three personalities. And that is perhaps the solution to a riddle that must emerge when we consider the German intellectual life that follows on from these three personalities, albeit in a much more faded and forgotten form, which I will now try to sketch in a few characteristic strokes.

We are witnessing something very special. Within a more or less forgotten current of German intellectual life, which has been forgotten throughout the entire nineteenth century and into our own days – only this forgotten tone has been little studied so far – there are spirits who, in terms of their intellectual makeup, in terms of the extent of what they know and can do, in terms of the their genius, are far below the tone-setters Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, but who, curiously enough, when one looks at what must be striven for today through spiritual science, have created more of spiritual science or have created more that corresponds to it than the great inspirers: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel.

The lesser minds that come afterwards create more significant things than the great minds that preceded them. It is a striking phenomenon. It does not need to be a cause for great surprise, because it is self-evident that it is easier for those who follow; as lesser minds, they can achieve greater things than those who preceded them under certain circumstances. In the extreme, this can indeed express itself in the fact that every schoolboy can understand and grasp the Pythagorean theorem - and for its first formulation Pythagoras himself was necessary.

Thus the great men had to come; the clever ones are already there, pointing the way into the spiritual world. But that which has come out of the German folk spirit through them lives on now. Even if it is still emotionally restricted and spiritually surrounded – one can also speak of spiritual encirclement – it still forms the vanished, the faded tone in the world view that I would like to talk about now.

Here we find, dear ladies and gentlemen, the son of the great Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Immanuel Hermann Fichte, who was influenced by his father's ideas. But we also find that he is able to penetrate deeper into the knowledge of the spirit than his father, despite being a much lesser spirit than his father. Immanuel Hermann Fichte already speaks of the fact that man, on the one hand, has this physical world. He, Hermann Immanuel Fichte, calls physical the substances and forces that the outer physical world also contains. Through this physical world, man is connected with the physical substances and forces of the earth world, he is connected with what appears to him as something past. But behind this physical body, for Immanuel Hermann Fichte lies what he calls the etheric body; and just as the physical body contains within itself the substances and forces, so the etheric body contains substances and forces of a supersensible nature, which link this inner man, this supersensible spiritual man, to the great world of the spirit and place him in it.

Thus, Immanuel Hermann Fichte sees behind the other person the etheric human being, who is a reality for him, not just an image. And everything that spiritual science has to say about the etheric body, about these supersensible powers of human nature, in the sense often hinted at here in these lectures, can be found very beautifully in Immanuel Hermann Fichte.

But, one might say: Even with regard to the path that has been characterized here more often, an infinite amount already lives in the germ of another, who is to succeed in the world view of the great period of German idealism: For example, we see Troxler. Who knows Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler today? Who reads Troxler? Who, even among those who write the history of philosophy, takes more of an interest in Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler than to scribble five or six lines that say nothing about Troxler! Who is Troxler?

Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler is indeed a mind that – even if he has not yet fully mastered the spiritual science, for which it is only now at the right time – but Troxler is a personality who is on the path to this spiritual scientific research. We see then how Troxler coins strange words that show that something lives in his soul of the living spirit of spiritual science itself. Troxler coins strange words such as “supersensory spirit” and “supersensory mind”.

“Supersensory spirit” is relatively easy to understand; now, “supersensory spirit” is precisely what Goethe calls “contemplative judgment”. For – Goethe, in his real world view, is on exactly the same ground – because “supersensible spirit” is precisely that power of the human soul which unfolds in such a way that, without the help of the body, without external senses and without the sense bound to the brain, the human being directly “looks” into the spiritual environment, just as the spirit itself does – “supersensible spirit”.

But “super-spiritual sense”? By speaking of the “super-spiritual sense”, Troxler shows that he really has an understanding of the essence of spiritual science. I have mentioned it often, as there are people, idealistic philosophers, who say: Yes, of course, that is quite clear: the physical world is not the only one; spirit is present behind the physical world. Spirit, spirit and always spirit — they say. And that's where that pantheism comes out, that worldview that, doesn't it, spreads such a general spirit sauce – it doesn't specialize in that, it's nothing; maybe today you would have to say “dipping sauce” instead of “sauce” – [that worldview that] thinks it has spread such a general dipping sauce over everything that appears before people as physical objects and physical facts, doesn't it.

But that was not the case with Troxler! Troxler would have said: Those who speak only in a pantheistic way of spirit, spirit and spirit again, they seem to me to be saying: Why should we speak of tulips or lilies, of snowdrops, for example? Nature, nature is everything! And why should we speak of individual experiments in the laboratory? Nature, nature is everything. Those who speak of naturalism in this way should just / gap in the transcript /

But what matters is not just to talk in generalities about the spiritual, but to be able to point out that we are surrounded by a spiritual world that consists of individual entities and individual facts just as much as the physical world does.

That is why Troxler, because he knows this, speaks of the “super-spiritual sense” - which is of course a figure of speech, but which testifies that one can really look into, is able to look into the spiritual world and observe it in its details - not just as a “general spirit dip”.

And in yet another way, Troxler – in his “Lectures on Philosophy” in 1835, he speaks very beautifully about all these things – in yet another way, Troxler speaks of a kind of spiritual-scientific path that he has already taken. He says: The most beautiful powers of the soul that rule man here, insofar as he lives in his physical body, that man can make his own, insofar as the soul expresses itself through the physical body, these powers are those of faith, love, hope. But now – Troxler says: faith, love, hope, as great and significant as they are for the life that the soul spends in the physical body, they are – this faith, this love, this hope – the outer shell for the soul's spiritual powers that lie behind them and that this soul will experience when it has discarded the body and passed through the gate of death.

While the soul lives in the body, it lives out – through the bodily organs, of course through the finer bodily organs – the power of faith. [But, says Troxler, this power can be experienced not only as the power of faith, but also – as Troxler believes – as spiritual hearing, as spirit-hearing, in such a way that the power of faith becomes the outer, physical shell for a spirit-hearing of the soul; this organ would allow itself to be experienced free of the body – a wonderful, great thought.]

And love, this bloom of outer physical life on earth, this highest development of outer physical life on earth, insofar as the soul lives in the physical body in earthly life: For Troxler, this love, this love-power, one could say, is the outer shell again for something that the soul has within, that envelops this physical body. And what Troxler now addresses as a spiritual sense, a spiritual feeling - as one today senses physical things with the physical - lies behind the power of love. When the soul is able to free itself from the body or passes through the gate of death, then its spiritual organs unfold. And as it hears through that which lies behind the power of faith, what resounds as facts in the spiritual world, so it is able to feel the spiritual facts and entities through its [“groping”] spiritual organs, which the soul extends out of itself. While when it lives in the physical body, the spiritual feeling powers, touching powers bring themselves as love to revelation.

And in a similar way, behind the power of hope, in the power of an expectant confidence in something, lies for Troxler, spiritually, what he calls “spiritual vision”.

Thus, Troxler knows that a soul dwells in the physical body of man, endowed with spirit-hearing, spirit-touching, spirit-seeing, and that this soul passes through the portal of death with these three powers, but that it is also able to experience, when it frees itself from its ties to the body, that which spiritually surrounds and envelops us.

And, for example, Troxler expresses how he thinks – and I would like to share this with you in his own words – and at the same time points out that he has certain comrades in relation to such a way of looking at the world. He points to these or those spirits. I would like to read one of these passages to you verbatim. He says:

"The philosophers of old distinguished a fine, noble soul from the coarser body (or in this they assumed a kind of shell for the spirit), a soul that had an image of the body, which they called a schema, and that was the inner, higher man for them. This view, even if it is only an explanation, was also held by most of the first great church fathers, such as Origen, Irenaeus, Lactantius, Tertullian, and Augustine. In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously jokes about an entire, inward, spiritual man who wears all the limbs of the outward man on his spirit body. Lavater also writes and thinks in the same way; and even when Jean Paul humorously jokes about the Bonnese under-skirt and the Platner-esque soul-corset, which are said to be hidden in the coarser body rock and martyr's robe, we still hear him asking, “What is the use and origin of these extraordinary talents and desires within us, which, like swallowed diamonds, slowly cut our earthy shell? [Why was I stuck to this dirty lump of earth, a creature with useless wings of light, when I should rot back into the birth clod without ever wriggling free with ethereal wings? “The inner man,“ he says in another place, ‘this ’veiled God in nature,' is not himself of stone, like the latter.] In the stony limbs” — of man — “his living limbs grow and mature according to a way of life unknown to us. We could

”still cite a myriad similar ways of thinking and writing, which in the end are only different views and ideas in which [the one Evangelical-Apostolic idea is revealed,

"we could cite a myriad more similar ways of thinking and writing, which in the end are only different views and ideas in which [the one Evangelical-Apostolic idea is revealed that Paul expressed to the Corinthians , saying: “A body that the soul has quickened is laid down, and a body that the spirit has quickened rises, for there is a body that has been quickened by the soul, there is also a body that has been spiritualized. And in this is] the true, only teaching of the individuality and immortality of man.”

And now a remarkable – I would even say a decisive – thought arises for Troxler. He thinks something like the following. It is quite clear when you let his various writings sink in, especially his lectures on those subjects, which he had already written and delivered in 1835. The following thought is on Troxler's mind: There is an anthropology, a knowledge of man, he says. How does it arise – a knowledge of man? Man comes to know it by observing what can be observed of man with the senses and with the intellect, which is connected to the brain – that is how anthropology comes about. But this man who sees with the senses and observes through the intellect – in this man the higher man lives. And we have seen how clearly Troxler can express himself about this higher man. This higher human being, with his “supersensible sense” and with his “supersensible spirit”, can now also observe that which is supersensible and superspiritual in the other human being. In this way, just as anthropology arises in a lower realm, a higher science arises: the science of the spiritual human being - anthroposophy. And Troxler expresses himself about this in the following way:

"While it is highly gratifying that the latest philosophy, which [we have long since recognized as the one that founds all living religion and] must reveal itself in every anthroposophy, thus in poetry as well as in history, is now making headway, it cannot be be overlooked that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true personality or individuality of man must not be confused either with what it sets up as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it confronts with as absolute spirit or absolute personality.

Troxler speaks of a foundation of an “anthroposophy” in contrast to “anthropology”!

And so one has the right to speak of the germs of that which must now be incorporated from the universe into the spiritual development of humanity as spiritual science. One has the right to speak of it in such a way that it is present as a germ in these personalities. These germs, however, ladies and gentlemen, are firmly anchored in German intellectual life, in keeping with its nature. I can only hint at how firmly these things are rooted in German intellectual life. And how German intellectual life, through its innermost development, cannot but produce them. Everywhere we look back, we find that this is firmly rooted in German intellectual life, and we can only hope that it can incorporate itself as a spiritual science into the future development of humanity.

Such a tone has been forgotten many times; it has faded away. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, it still exists! And it was able to live in the most diverse fields. Not only does it live, so to speak, in the spiritual heights, but wherever there was spiritual striving, there were also such endeavors as these. And the time will come when people will gain a new understanding of the deepest essence of German striving, and that this must be brought up again.

Much has covered up precisely this innermost part of the German being! This can be seen when one tries to seek out the German essence in very specific, particular, concrete areas. For thirty-three years, esteemed attendees, I have endeavored – forgive me for making this personal – for thirty-three years I have endeavored to show the significance of Goethe's Theory of Colors for a true knowledge of nature that penetrates to the essence of things, and the significance of Goethe's dispute with Newton, who is rooted in British nationalism!

But, as I said, it is not only external political life that has been encircled; the deeply, deeply influential, brutal foreign scientific attitude has come to such a pass that it is still a laughing-stock for the physicist to speak of the justification of Goethe's theory of colors! But the time will come when, in this field, there will be a deeper understanding and the chapter “Goethe vindicated against Newton” will be revived, precisely on the basis of the spirituality of the most Germanic nature; and it will be revived in a completely different way than one might have dared to dream of today.

One must then be able to bear the fact that one is regarded as a fool for representing in advance what must come, what must be recognized, when one is fully aware of it. But, as I said, this striving lives not only on the spiritual heights, but also in many ways in the German character. I could cite hundreds and hundreds of cases for this; one for many shall be cited, because we do not have time to cite many. One for many shall be cited: I would like to point to a small booklet published in 1856 by a simple pastor Rocholl in Sachsenberg in the Principality of Waldeck - a small booklet. It was published in 1856 and is called “Contributions to the History of a German Theosophy”. Today, one may find much of what is written in this little book fantastic; one may even be right in much of what is said when calling the little book fantastic. But this little book, published in 1856, shows Pastor Rocholl in an awakened, true spiritual striving that at least wants to penetrate world phenomena with a “supernatural sense,” with a “supernatural spirit.” And in wide-ranging spiritual views, an attempt is made to characterize how natural life and spiritual life, sensual life, are one, and how divine spiritual forces weave and work, and how man has the possibility to ascend to them.

The level of education and the depth of knowledge are the things that come to light in such phenomena, which, as I said, can easily be ridiculed. But we also encounter this in other areas and with other personalities. Here, I would like to draw your attention, most esteemed attendees, to a spirit who, unfortunately, is all too forgotten: Christian Karl Planck.

After the Swabian Vischer – the V-Vischer – referred to him in an essay, I tried again in more recent times, as early as the first edition of my “Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert” (World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century), to draw attention to this primordially German world-view personality, Christian Karl Planck. But what use is that today? People generally have other things to do than to look into the German character, or the most German character.

I can only give a brief description here of what Planck's German nature was. And in his case it was certainly grasped out of his German nature, what he presented. We will see in a moment how conscious he was of the basis of his world view. I will illustrate this with an example.

When people today look at the earth as natural scientists, they see it, let us say, as a geologist would see it. The earth is seen as it is built up from mineral forces, as known from geology. For Planck, such a view of the earth would not have been considered without higher world-view questions. For him, it would have been like looking at a tree and only wanting to accept the wood and bark, but not the leaves, flowers and fruits! It is clear to him that the leaves, flowers and fruits are part of what makes up the essence of the tree, and that anyone who only looks at the wood, bark and roots is not looking at the full tree. To Karl Christian Planck, this seemed to be an earthly consideration that is only held in the sense of geology.

For Planck, the full earthly consideration is not only an ensouled, but also a spiritual-soul being. And man, as he walks on earth as a physical human being, belongs to the earth, to the essence of the earth, which one has to seek if one wants to learn to recognize the earth, just as one has to see the essence of the fruits and the flowers and leaves together with the essence of the tree if one wants to recognize the tree in its essence; a worldview - I would like to say - genuinely spiritual and genuinely interwoven with life.

Christian Karl Planck wrote many books in an effort to gain recognition; he did not succeed! For example, in 1864 he wrote a book, his “Fundamentals of a Science of Nature”. And from this book I will read a passage to prove how much this Christian Karl Planck belongs to that forgotten, faded tone of German intellectual life - the German intellectual development that was conscious for some of the personalities who worked for him, as the work is from the primal power of German nationality. There Planck says in 1864:

“The power of deeply rooted prejudices from the previous view of his”

the author's

"Schrift entgegensteht, dessen ist er sich vollkommen bewusst; allein wie schon die Arbeit selbst, trotz aller Ungunst der Umstände, die zufolge der ganzen Lage und Berufsstellung des Verfassers einem Werke dieser Art sich entgegenstellte, doch ihren Durchführung und ihren Weg in die Öffentlichkeit sich erkauft hat, so ist er auch gewiss, that what must now first fight for its recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most self-evident truth, and that in it not only his cause, but the truly German view of things, will triumph over all still unworthy external and un-German conception of nature and spirit.

People who have different ways of thinking first see it as pure folly – then it becomes a matter of course. This is how it was with the Copernican worldview; this is how it was with everything that belongs to the development of mankind's worldview. And Planck says words that prove how he consciously penetrated from the German spirit to his spirit-based worldview. And he continues:

"What our medieval poetry has already unconsciously and profoundly foreshadowed will finally be fulfilled in our nation in the maturity of the times. The impractical inwardness of the German spirit (as Wolfram describes it in his Parzival), which has been visited with harm and ridicule,

1864, written before Wagner's Parsifal!

“Finally, in the strength of her unceasing striving, she attains the highest; she looks into the last simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what poetry has symbolized in a fantastically medieval way in the wonders of the Grail, the rule of which her hero attains, that, conversely, receives its purely natural fulfillment and reality in the lasting knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.”

Karl Christian Planck wrote this in 1864; he died in 1880. In the last years of his life he had written his Testament of a German, in which he summarized all the individual lines of his world-view. In 1912 the second edition of this Testament appeared; it did not attract much attention and was not much studied. One had other works to deal with, which had appeared in the same publishing house at the time! For example, one had to deal with a world view that is truly not one that has somehow emerged from the German character or is even related to it! You can read more about this in my book, “Riddles of Philosophy.” However, the passage in question was not written under the influence of the war; it was written long before the war. In 1912, people were too busy dealing with Henri Bergson – yes, he is still called Bergson today, Henri Bergson he is still called – to deal with this Henri Bergson, who, as I mentioned last time, tells his Parisians all kinds of slanderous things in prominent places of his intellectual work! Next time he will also do it in Sweden.

When you look at this Bergson: Let us highlight just one aspect of his philosophy, one aspect that does resonate with something that is truly being recognized today: the aspect where he says – I could of course highlight many other things, among other things – the beautiful sentence that has been so admired throughout Europe: that one can only recognize the soul if one comprehends it in its duration and in particular if one understands the sentence in relation to the essence of the soul “Duration endures”. I have had to read an awful lot about this infinitely ingenious sentence by Henri Bergson: “Duration lasts”. I have never been able to find it any differently than when one says “The wood is wooding” or “The money is moneying”. But let's ignore that.

A fruitful world view would only be achieved if one did not start in an abstract way, as some do, who actually start with the most imperfect beings and go up to the most perfect, and believe that they have a perfect derivation, but if one starts from the most perfect, from man, and places man at the origin, and then considers the other kingdoms - animals, plants, minerals - and considers them in such a way that they have arisen like waste from the overall flow.

Certainly, a good thought. But it is presented in a slightly distorted way by Henri Bergson. And what is essential: long before Bergson expressed it - I point this out in the second volume of my “Riddles of Philosophy” - this thought was expressed - as early as 1882 - by the German thinker Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss, most recently in his book “Geist und Stoff” (Spirit and Matter), but also in earlier books! There we find this idea powerfully expressed from the very basis that I have just characterized as the very basis of the German essence.

One can now assume two things: Bergson, who expressed this idea later, may not have known Heinrich Preuss – which is just as unforgivable in a philosopher as if he had known him and failed to mention that he got this idea from this source – one could believe the latter, now that it has come out that entire pages of Bergson's books have been copied from Schelling or Schopenhauer! However, this is a basic feature of the times, isn't it, to confront German culture, which appears “mechanistic” to him, and which he says has come down from its great heights and only produces mechanistic things.

I said it before: He probably expected that when the French shoot with guns and cannons, the Germans will come and quote Novalis and Goethe! He could hardly have expected that, could he? But he speaks of a “mechanistic culture”. I would like to know: is copying entire pages from German philosophers and then slandering them the opposite of the “mechanical”?

But we do learn a great deal in this field, and we have to find our way through these things. But the only way to find one's way, dearest attendees, is to try, as a person living in Central Europe today, to delve into that which, from a certain point of view, is able to unfold this Central European and, above all, especially the German essence to unfold, the power that must be present today in the physical world in an external way, so that in our fateful time the German can defend itself against all attacking enemies. This same power lives, expressing itself in a different way, in the German spiritual being. The two are intimately connected. The two cannot be completely separated. In the distant future, when the fateful situation of the Central European German people in this fateful time is judged, history will have to be spoken of in this way.

One needs only to consider a few figures, but these figures, which will speak to the most distant times, must come to mind when the following questions are asked: What, then, is actually confronting what is to unfold in Central Europe with the spiritual content just characterized? Not counting smaller nations: 741 million people encircle 150 million people in Central Europe! And do these 741 million people, who are facing the 150 million people, have reason to envy the ground on which these 150 million people stand?

One need only remember that this humanity encircling Central Europe owns 69 million square kilometers of the earth – compared to 5 to 6 million square kilometers of the Central European population! 69 million square kilometers compared to 6 million square kilometers in Central Europe! 9.5 percent of the earth's population is pitted against 47 percent of the earth's population! So half the world is being called out against Central Europe. That will stand out in history in simple numbers!

And how does this surrounding population, which does not even rely on direct combat but on starvation, how does this surrounding population view this population, this Central European culture, of which one says – the least one can hear –: The spirit – this spirit that is all around – fights against the raw material in the middle!

And this view, we find it in a certain modification also when we look across to the East. And there we find, as it developed throughout the entire nineteenth century, one can say from the simple Russian people, who are predisposed to something completely different - you can read more about this in my little book “Thoughts During the Time of War”, which will soon be available again; at the moment it is out of print. There we find that a Russian intelligentsia is developing from the Russian people – but one could also follow the development in other areas – that grows up to hold very, very strange views. Much of what is in my little book Thoughts During the Time of War would have to be repeated – and much would have to be added to it – if one wanted to even begin to characterize the trend that is taking hold in Russian intellectual life, the intellectual life of the intelligentsia, which draws from the belief that Central Europe in particular, but also Western Europe, is basically an aged, decrepit culture, and that it must be replaced by the culture of the East, that this culture of the East is young and fresh and must be brought into Europe because everything within Europe has become decrepit.

For example, we find – just to mention a few things, although I could of course talk about this for hours – we find, for example, as early as 1827, Kirejewskij indicates a tone that is then found again and again. Only, various things have been done to prevent the good Germans in particular from noticing this tone; sometimes strange ways have been sought to prevent the Germans from noticing this tone. One of these ways is this: after the lecture that I have given in various places about Tolstoy, no one will attribute to me the claim that I do not value Tolstoy precisely as a spirit of the very first order; but precisely with spirits of the very first order, whom one does not need to fight as spirits, one can find the characteristic peculiarities that develop in them out of their nationality. Now, even in Tolstoy's works of fiction, one finds this tone, this sense of the staleness and decrepitude of Central and Western European intellectual life. But, you will say, people have read Tolstoy's works, they can't possibly have forgotten that they found this in them!

Something strange is going on here. Until Raphael Löwenfeld published his complete edition of Tolstoy's works at the end of the 1890s – which is the most accurate – all earlier translations had deleted the passages that were directed against Germanness! All the works that Löwenfeld translated before the complete edition was published – and who had the complete edition by Löwenfeld in their hands? – all of Tolstoy's works that had been translated by others before that, were presented to the German people in this way!

In 1829, Kirejewskij said:

“The fate of every European state depends on the union of all the others; the fate of Russia depends on Russia alone. But the fate of Russia is decided in its formation: this is the condition and source of all goods. As soon as all these goods will be ours, we will share them with the rest of Europe, and we will repay our debt to them a hundredfold.”

You see what the background here is – to make Russia Russian and then generously assign to the individual what one wants to assign to him. And seriously: this tone runs through the whole of Russian intellectual life. And in a strange way, it appears in various places in more recent times. For example, in [Michajlovskij] there is a Russian spirit that takes this - as he thinks - strangely decrepit, crippled, brutalized intellectual product of Central Europe, Goethe's “Faust”, and says: What then is this Goethe's “Faust” actually like as a personality? Well, just as in Central Europe one strives for metaphysics, so Faust strives metaphysically. —- He needs the expression, this Michajlovskij: a metaphysician is a person who has gone mad with fat! I don't know how many metaphysicians one has come to know with this characteristic! But he regards Goethe's Faust as such a metaphysician, who has become alien to all human life.

But let us go to the end of the nineteenth century; there we find a mind like that of Sergius Jushakow; he wrote a book in 1885 that reflects much of what is currently in this Russian intellectual life: he despises Western Europe as something decrepit! He says, Yushakov: “Let us look across to Asia, where we find the fruits of European culture, which must be eradicated through Russia and replaced by something else. Let us look across to Asia, where we find these Western and Central European fruits of culture. There we find these Asian peoples, and it reminds Yushakov of an Asian legend that truly expresses what lies in the development of Asian peoples. He says: “These Asian peoples have expressed their destiny themselves by speaking of Ormuzd and Ahriman. Then there are the Iranian peoples, to whom the Persians and Hindus also belong; they have had to fight against the Turanian peoples, who are under the leadership of Ahriman. And as the people of Ormuzd, the Iranians, to whom the Persians and Hindus belong, have what they have conquered materially and spiritually through their culture, they have conquered it through the kindness of the good spirit Ormuzd against the evil Ahriman.

But then, according to Jushakov, the evil Europeans came and did not help the Asians to continue their Ormuzd culture, but came to take away from them what they had received under Ormuzd and to deliver them to the bondage and dangers of the Ahriman culture. Russia must intervene against this unpeaceful, unloving Western European culture. Russia must turn, says Yushakov, towards Asia and join forces with the Asian peoples languishing under Ahriman, in order to save them from the parasitism of Western European culture.

Yushakov says that it will be two powers that will join forces, two powers that express the greatest, most significant, and strongest cultural forces of the future. It will be two powers that will look towards Asia from Russia – I am not saying it, Yushakov is saying it; so if it sounds strange, read Yushakov! There are two powers: the simple Russian peasantry will join forces with the greatest bearer, with the noblest bearer of spirituality, with the Cossacks! Peasants and Cossacks will rescue the Asian population and the ancient Asian culture from the clutches of the Western Europeans. One day the world will owe this to Russia and its mission, which is made up of the deeds of the peasants and the noble Cossacks.

The book that Sergius Jushakow wrote in 1885 is called: “The” - yes, it is called “The Anglo-Russian Conflict”. And he characterizes the Asian peoples from a Western European point of view in terms of what they have suffered. He says, for example: These Asian peoples are viewed by Western Europeans – he couldn't take the Germans, so he didn't take the Germans – these Asian peoples are viewed by Western Europeans, he says, as if they existed solely

“to clothe themselves in English fabrics, fight among themselves with English weapons, work with English tools, eat from English vessels and play with English tinsel.”

And then Jushakow continues, summarizing what appears to him to be a great, pan-Asian ideal, so in summary, he says:

“England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples who inhabit the rich peninsula; I do not wish anything similar for my fatherland – I can only rejoice that it is sufficiently far removed from this state, which is as brilliant as it is sad.”

I do not wish anything similar for my homeland, says Yushakov, a leading Russian, in 1885 – about England! It is probably on this path that we should seek that strange world-historical consequence – the forging of the alliance between Russia and England! For at first little was noticed of the current, of the mission to Asia, which should have come about under the influence of the peasants and Cossacks. For the time being, we can only note that Russia has allied itself with England and France, the latter of which have thus betrayed European culture in reality! It has allied itself in order to uproot the decrepit, decrepit Europeanness root and branch, at least that is what they said.

Dear attendees, it is necessary to speak out, as I said, without falling into the tone that is being struck around us, and anyone who is even a little familiar with this tone knows that today's tone has not tone of the English, French, Russians, without falling into the tone that is being struck around us today, purely on the basis of the facts, can point out what is going on within German intellectual life for self-reflection. There it is, after all, [that what lived in minds like Troxler, Planck, Preuss and so on, and in the minds of others – what was a germ, will also come to fruition as a flower and as fruit]!

However, through this tone of German intellectual life, which still resonates today, a realization must come to those of you who are present: intellectual observers of the world are not the impractical people that they are often made out to be by the very clever people – and especially by the very practical people. Because that is, after all, the general tone, isn't it, that one thinks: Well, people like Planck, like Troxler or like Preuss and so on may have very nice thoughts - but they don't have a clue about practical life. That's where the practical people have to go, those practical people who, in their own opinion, have a practical insight into practical life. Because the others are those impractical idealists!

Well, but I could also give you hundreds and hundreds of examples in support of the refutation of this sentence. Karl Christian Planck, for example, who was one of the most German of Germans, died in bitterness in 1880. And the dullards will no doubt say: something like megalomania sometimes emerges from the last thing he wrote - after time itself had driven him to a certain nervousness because he could not convey to his contemporaries what was in his heart. The dullards will even say: he became megalomaniac. But he died in 1880, and in 1881 his “Testament of a German” was already in print. It contained words that I will read to you now. So they were already written in 1880. Planck – about whom certainly quite practical diplomats, politicians and people who know everything about practical life will judge disparagingly – Christian Karl Planck spoke of the present war, of this war in which we are now embroiled. He spoke the following words in 1880. They were written by this “impractical idealist,” who was, however, a very practical thinker and who should have been put in a practical position, because the power that lives in the spiritual life also knows how to judge practical life correctly. This “impractical” Planck, who in 1880 wrote about the present war, which he knew would come, the words:

"No political cleverness, no love of peace on the part of Germany can prevent this hostile clash within the current merely national order. For the nature of the circumstances is more powerful than all cleverness; and already now, despite the friendly attitude of Germany and Austria, the hostile mood of the Russian East is only emerging all the more clearly because one could not give it a free hand in everything, but had to set a certain goal. And if it comes to a fight one day, then, however much we have to fight it for the good of Europe, the latter will not stand by our side, but as in the East, we will also have to defend ourselves in the West and in the South at the same time; on all sides, national jealousy will rise up against the new empire in their midst."

I ask you, how many diplomats believed – you can point the finger at them – much later, yes, much later, that Italy might still be dissuaded from participating in the war. I will only point out the one point. But these are the “practical” people, they have eaten practice for breakfast, lunch and dinner. But the unpractical Christian Karl Planck, in 1880 he characterized what happened in 1914, 1915 and so on, so that what he said back then has appeared again exactly in the real, actual facts!

Oh, one should listen to what a spiritual man creating out of the real depths of the German essence would be able to create if this German essence were to once fully consciously stand on its own feet – symbolically speaking.

But for this to happen, the present moment in world history must provide the right conditions. For the German spirit will also one day solve the problem for the world of the fact that it must be realized from within the German spirit what it means that power – the power of the incompetent, which crushes so many legitimate aspirations – is actually the ruling power in so many parts of the world! It is precisely in this area that the German spirit must have a healing effect. Without in any way seeking to flatter national pride, this can be emphasized in the present fateful hour from the facts themselves.

Finally, let us point out to you, esteemed attendees, how those who were steeped in this German essence, who know how to grasp it with their whole soul, with their whole heart, how they always experienced what has now taken place. I may, since I have spent almost thirty years of my life in Austria and had to go through the last times just at the end of these thirty years within the struggles that Germanism had to wage there, [since I was] in the midst of these difficulties of the German essence, I would like to draw attention to how naturally it lived in a spirit like Robert Hamerling, one of the most German spirits in Austria, one of the best spirits in Central Europe in general, how he expressed what lived in him so beautifully: “Austria is my fatherland; Germany is my motherland!” These words express a vivid sense of the spiritual reality that has forged Germany and Austria into this Mitteleuropa out of necessity in these difficult times. But such minds as Robert Hamerling's not only grasped such a thing in its depth, in its full depth, but also experienced it, esteemed attendees. This is particularly evident when you look at Robert Hamerling – not, of course, in the poem that has been distributed and which so many people have fallen for, even quite clever people have fallen for it, it is, of course, a forgery, the prophetic poem that has now been widely published in the newspapers – I don't mean something like that, of course! Anyone who knows Robert Hamerling even a little recognizes it as a fake from the very first lines. But in Robert Hamerling's work, there are enough clues to see how this Mitteleuropa lived! In 1862, he wrote his “Germanenzug”. Let us highlight the “Germanenzug” from the many. In 1862, he wrote in his “Germanenzug” how the ancestors of the Germans moved among the Germanic peoples from Asia - this is described to us in a wonderful mood , as they camp there - it is evening - how they camp there still in Asia; it is a beautiful evening atmosphere: the setting sun, the rising moon, the Teutons are asleep as they move across. Only one is awake: the blond Teut. And above him appears the genius of the future Germans and speaks with him. And that which one must cite as a fundamental trait of the German striving for knowledge - the genius speaks with him, with the blond Teut of this German future - is expressed by Robert Hamerling through the genius of Germanness to the blond Teut. I would like to say: the beauty of what is a German trait is already evident in the “Philosophus Teutonicus”, in Jakob Böhme, where this Jakob Böhme regards all knowledge in such a way that this knowledge, insofar as it comes from the German mind as knowledge, is at the same time a kind of worship. Jakob Böhme says so beautifully:

"When you look at the depths

, he means the depths of the blue sky

“When you look at the depth of the sky, the stars and the earth, you see your God, and in the same you live and are you too. And the same God reigns through you and also reigns you.” “You are created from this God and live in the same. Also, all your knowledge stands in this God, and when you die, you will be buried in this God.”

This mood also lived in Robert Hamerling when he let the genius of the German spirit speak to the blond Teut:

"To whom will the word break out of the depths of the soul one day
Like your people, so rich, so delicate, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly into the strings of the searching thought to the stars
so boldly and strives and fights on all paths?
Whom leads so high, so deep his urge, his foreboding?
Who grasps so faithfully the near as the far?
Where does every earthly and heavenly zone
reflect itself as in your thinking, O Teuton?»

This mission of the German character - Robert Hamerling was already aware of it at the time he wrote his “Germanenzug” (The German Character).

To see clearly the full world-historical, the all-embracing world-historical significance of this German nature – one can indeed look across to Asia in a different way from that in which Yushakov did: there one sees these Asiatic peoples, how they once, in primeval times, aspired upwards to the spiritual worlds. They brought it from India; they did it by sinking and muffling everything that forms the basis of the human ego, the center of the human being, into a kind of dream life. And by muffling the ego, they created something within themselves that arose out of a dream life, which introduced them to the spiritual that permeates and lives through the whole world. This world cannot and must not arise again as it was, as a witness of what remained from ancient times over there in Asia; for after the greatest impulse that earth-dwelling humanity could experience, the Christ-impulse, had broken into the development of earth-dwelling humanity, something else must come than this former elevation to the spiritual world.

And this other - with the same inwardness, deep inwardness, with which the spirit was once to be experienced in the ancient Orient, with the same inwardness it is to be experienced again through this other; but this other is to develop in the exact opposite way: The ego is not to be paralyzed, it is to be strengthened, it is to be invigorated - precisely by rising up, by living to the full, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, want the other spirits, who are rooted in the depths of German intellectual life, to penetrate into the spiritual world: And so this German essence is to give the Orient what it once had in the form of profound inwardness in pre-Christian times; it is to give the German essence in a new way, as it must be given in the post-Christian era.

This was already clear to Robert Hamerling when he had the genius of the Germans speak to the blond Teut, the leader of the Germanic peoples, in his “Germanenzug”. Robert Hamerling draws attention to the fact that all cognition in the German is to be a kind of worship, that the German wants to know himself in such a way that he knows himself as born out of the divine-spiritual powers, living in the divine-spiritual powers, and being buried again with the divine-spiritual powers.

That is why Robert Hamerling lets the genius of Germanness speak these beautiful words to the blond Teut:

"But however proudly you may strive, high above other swarms, you will still keep a blazing, ancient, sacred fire: the dream-filled drunkenness of God, the blissful warmth of the heart of Calm existence
This holy ray, a temple fire, free of smoke, with pure flame, will glow in your chest and soul, remaining your pilot and your rudder! You strive only because you love: your most daring thought will be devotion that wants to sink into God."

So the one who, as a Central European German, feels at home in the intellectual life of Central Europe, which I have tried to characterize today, also in one of its faded tones, in one of its forgotten intellectual currents, but precisely in the intellectual current that shows which seeds, which roots of a striving for the real, for the real spirit, are anchored in German intellectual life.

The insight that this is so will always give the one who recognizes and feels German essence within himself the justified conviction: Whatever arises from the 68 million square kilometers around against what lives on the 6 million square kilometers, whatever has such roots, such germs, will bear its blossoms and its fruits against all enemies in the way and as they are predisposed in it! This hope, this confidence and also this love for the German essence is precisely what characterizes anyone who truly recognizes the German essence.

Let me summarize in four simple lines by Robert Hamerling, after I have tried to characterize such a Central European spirit to you. Let me summarize what can arise in the soul from an objective observation of the German character and immersion in this German character today, in the face of our difficult, fateful events.

I believe that these four simple lines, with which I would like to conclude today's reflection, these four simple lines by Robert Hamerling, which state that it is true, that not only out of national overheating, but out of objective knowledge, it may be said:

“And if ever the day
proves hostile to the German name,
from sea to sea
the German spirit will find its way.”

Dear Attendees!

Spiritual research, as it is meant in the lectures that I have been holding here for years now, has, as is well known, basically not only opponents and antagonisms from those sides from which other worldviews their nature have opponents and opposition – materialism has opponents in spiritualism, spiritualism in materialism, idealism in realism and so on – and in a certain sense it can still be said today that spiritual science is fought against by all possible ideological directions. And so the question must arise: What is the essential reason why spiritual science in particular is so strongly rejected by the current zeitgeist as a whole?

I have already repeatedly drawn attention to what is important in relation to this question. The peculiar thing about this spiritual science is that the opposition does not arise from the fact that one gets to know this spiritual science more closely, that one studies it in order to be unable to agree with it, but rather that the opposition is mainly based on the fact that there is little inclination on either side to get involved in the actual essentials, in the meaningfulness of this spiritual scientific direction.

Instead, people invent all kinds of characteristics that this spiritual science must have according to their own ideas, without any knowledge of it. They think something like this: From what I know and from what I have heard said offhand from this quarter or that, this spiritual science wants this or that. Or rather, one thinks even differently, one thinks: it must want this or that. So in this or that sense it is naturally reprehensible.

And then the peculiarity emerges – and precisely this peculiarity can be observed if one delves deeper into the relationship between spiritual science and other currents of world view. The peculiarity then emerges that many people assert this or that against spiritual science on the assumption that it can affect spiritual science, while in truth the fact is that, as regards what these people assert, one is in complete agreement as a spiritual scientist in the sense in which spiritual science is meant here, that one has nothing at all against what these people say, that they only believe that, because one is precisely on the point of view of spiritual science, one must object to this or that.

So the peculiar thing is, dear attendees, that spiritual science is very often fought by those with whom it actually agrees entirely in all the positive things it demands.

One particular area that must be illuminated by the light that has just been mentioned is the subject of today's reflection: “Healthy mental life and spiritual research”. For it will be seen time and again that the very ways and methods of spiritual scientific research, the paths taken by spiritual science, are presented by those who, under the influence of today's habits of thought, believe they have built their views on the foundation of pure natural science. beliefs on the foundation of pure natural science. It will be found time and again that these methods and procedures are treated as something unhealthy, as something diseased, or at least lumped together with something diseased. And in this case, ladies and gentlemen, one cannot even say that the cause of such misunderstandings lies solely with those who develop misunderstandings from this side, but the causes lie in completely different circumstances, which will also be considered in the second part of today's reflection.

But first I would like to develop some essentials with regard to the types of spiritual science procedure, in order to show, by means of the actual method of spiritual research, how little justification there is for pointing to this method as something that could even remotely be connected with a somehow pathological soul life. In doing so, I shall today refrain from what I have often allowed myself to present here over the years; I shall refrain from a more detailed description of what the human soul has to accomplish in order to enter upon the path of spiritual research and to follow this path. A detailed description of the soul's inner processes can be found in the books already mentioned here: in the second part of my “Outline of Esoteric Science”, also at the end of my “Theosophy” and in detail in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Much will be derived from these writings with regard to the methods. Today, however, I would like to describe the effect of the spiritual research path on the human soul, not so much what the spiritual researcher has to do, but rather how his soul is affected by what he has to accomplish.

One of the essential things that the spiritual researcher has to accomplish in order to move into the spiritual world is, as has often been emphasized, a certain transformation, a development of thinking, of human thinking. After all, we also distinguish the three human soul powers: thinking, feeling and willing. All three soul forces undergo a certain transformation under the influence of the spiritual scientific path, a certain inner development in the life of the soul.

One such direction of development now relates to thinking. What happens, we might ask, to what a person calls their thinking when they want to become a spiritual scientist? In a certain way, an impulse is given to thinking – an impulse given out of the arbitrariness of the soul – so that this thinking becomes something other than it is in ordinary life. In ordinary life, thinking develops thoughts. These thoughts are there to depict some external reality. It is said that one has a true thought in that this true thought refers to a reality that it depicts. Such an aim of thinking is perfectly healthy for everyday thinking and also for thinking in the ordinary sense of the word scientific.

For the spiritual researcher, however, this thinking, which is justified in everyday life and must be applied unconditionally in ordinary science, is only the starting point of his path of research. The spiritual researcher must devote himself to such inner activities that he does not turn his attention so much to the content of the thoughts within the thought process - this, as I said, is important for other things, not primarily for the spiritual research path. So the attention is not turned to the content of the thoughts, but - is, after all, a specific activity, an inner accomplishment. The attention is diverted - this is essentially the culture of this thinking that is meant here - the attention is diverted from the content of the thinking and is directed entirely to the inner activity of thinking that is being done.

The thinker captures himself in the act of thinking, focusing so strongly on this thinking, on what is actually going on inside him, that this attention is completely diverted from any thought content - yes, that it to such an extent that the content of thought is completely expelled from consciousness, and the person ultimately comes to do this himself in an inner process of activity that is thinking, but which is not filled by certain thoughts relating to anything.

But as a result, one experiences the peculiarity in the thought process of bringing something to consciousness that, in ordinary life and in ordinary science, must not be brought to consciousness in this thought process, because otherwise the judgment about external, sensually real things is clouded.

A volitional process is hidden at the basis of our thought process. This, which is the will to think, which is actually an unconscious volitional process in the thought process, is detached from what thinking otherwise is in life, and the soul holds consciousness solely and exclusively on this inner volitional reality of thinking. In this way, through an inner, spiritual-soul process, which is absolutely real, something is detached from the thinking of ordinary life, in the same sense, only spiritually-soul-like, not physically, something is — as in the chemical process that separates hydrogen from oxygen, just as hydrogen is released from water, just as hydrogen is released from water, in exactly the same sense — only transferred to the soul-spiritual. So it becomes a scientific method that is well recognized in the outer life, and it is simply transferred to the soul-spiritual.

What one arrives at can only be experienced, dear attendees, of course only be experienced. And what is experienced is that one has now detached a process of the will from the thought process, and one now knows that by living in it, one no longer lives in the physical body. At first this sounds fantastic to anyone who is not familiar with these things. It also sounds fantastic to many who believe that their habitual thinking is based on solid scientific ground, and therefore view something like what has just been said as fantastic from the outset.

Nevertheless, the more one continues to pursue the development of thinking described above with perseverance and iron energy in one's soul, the more one becomes aware of how, in the end, one really lives in an element that only experiences the will present in the thinking process in the soul; but experienced in such a way that the experience is free from the body.

You experience this freedom from the body in two ways, through two things. The first is that you can have the – and it is not too strong a word to use – harrowing experience of realizing that, when you have come as far as just described, one's own corporeality, and one's physical experiences, which one otherwise experiences as belonging to oneself, that one has these outside oneself, as one otherwise has mountains, tables and chairs [– just external facts –] in front of oneself in physical perception. Being outside of the physical body is experienced by no longer having the physical body within one's subjective experience, but rather having it as an external object. This is one thing.

The second thing, however, is that a very definite transformation of thinking takes place through the processes that have just been described. Ordinary thinking, which a person must develop in everyday life and in ordinary science, has the peculiarity - and must have the peculiarity - that the thoughts it develops can be remembered. For a healthy life of soul within the physical body, it is a necessity that the thoughts that are developed about external things or about the inner processes of the soul should, if we may use the rough expression, stick to them as they live and can later be brought up again from this life of soul. This possibility of recalling the thoughts we have experienced, this ability to remember, must be connected with the healthy life of the soul in our everyday life and ordinary scientific work.

I have often mentioned here how this healthy soul life would be disturbed if such an ability to remember did not exist back to the point in time when we can become aware of our self in childhood, in our first childhood. A soul life that has an interruption in the continuous ability to remember, that could not recognize that its experiences belong to its self, that would be a sick soul life.

Such illnesses of the soul do exist. There are people who experience a condition in which they are completely rational and can carry out intelligent actions, but they forget how they have seen this or that happen in their inner life or how this or that has developed in their inner life. Because their I is interrupted in them, this I that is so intimately connected with the ability to remember, such people can nevertheless appear to have a sick soul life in their ability to remember, despite the fact that they carry out intelligent actions.

So, dear ones, the ability to remember is connected with the nurturing of thoughts in thinking.

It is quite different with the inner soul activity that one enters into when one carries out in the soul what has just been described. Then one has the opportunity to really weave in an initially indeterminate experience. You know full well that you are immersed in a new reality, one that is essentially different from the external sensory reality and also from the reality that can be grasped by the mind.

But what one experiences, which initially shows itself in images, so-called imaginations, weaving through the reality of the will - you will find this explained in the books mentioned - shows itself in such a way that it cannot pass into the ability to remember as it is immediately. And that is an essential part of this higher thinking. Because there is no other term for it, it should be called: This higher thinking, which is developed out of thinking, cannot be remembered so directly. It belongs to a world in which one now lives and moves, a world that is in constant becoming, a world that flits by. It could initially be compared to fleeting dreams that do not imprint themselves on memory, where these dreams are different from the ordinary dreams of everyday life.

If you take this immediate psychic experience that has just been described, then you can say: you experience a certain content of the soul; it is not immediately imprinted on the memory as it is, [in such a way that you could later say, “What did I experience back then?”] and that you would not need to relive the experience, but could simply remember it. That is not the case! If you want to have what you have experienced spiritually back again, then it must be experienced again in the same way. And you can recognize from this that you are really in the spiritual world, that no memory remains of what you remember in the spiritual world. You can recognize it precisely from this!

And you can tell something else too: you can tell that everything that, like ordinary, everyday thinking, leaves memory traces, that this is dependent in its process on the physical body of the person as its tool. And it is precisely the spiritual researcher who, in this respect, can fully agree with certain directions of modern science. It is precisely the spiritual researcher who realizes that this ordinary thinking cannot take place without the physical organism, the nervous system and that which is connected with the nervous system in the rest of the physical organism being set in motion. And through the - again, roughly speaking - imprinting of the life of thought in the bodily life, the remnants of memory remain.

In this way, one can learn to distinguish between what has really been experienced in the spiritual [from what] is only conceived and bound to the physical. And precisely by recognizing the spiritual experience of the kind described, by realizing that it is basically only there in the experience itself, in its process itself, one learns to recognize it, [learns to] distinguish it from everything that is bound to physical corporeality. Because in the moment when any remnant remains in the physical human being, the bodily life is also involved.

However, ladies and gentlemen, if you want to penetrate into spiritual science, you have to make more precise distinctions. You might now ask: So is there no way for the spiritual researcher to remember what he has once experienced in the realm of the spirit in the way described?

To speak correctly, I have always used a word that I would like to draw attention to. I have used the word: “The spiritual experience does not immediately imprint itself on the memory.” Not “immediately”; but when it has been experienced, when this spiritual experience has been made, then it can be allowed to flow over into the ordinary presentation. It can be converted into an ordinary thought, and this ordinary thought can then be remembered in exactly the same way as one can remember an external life process. One has formed an idea of it. The idea is retained, but the life process is not carried along in life. If one wants to have it again, then one must relive it, exactly as with an outer life process, which also does not itself live on in memory, but only in the idea that one has formed of it.

Exactly as it is with the external life process, so it is in the spiritual experience. Not the spiritual experience as such passes over into memory, but only that which has arisen when one has first allowed the spiritual experience itself to flow into the ordinary life of thought through the exercise of the will.

The process of detaching the spiritual and soul life from the bodily life takes place as I have just described. But this side must not remain the only one. And so all the inner soul processes that are intended to point the way to the spiritual world are described in the books mentioned. They are designed in such a way that this development of the soul life, as it has just been characterized, is paralleled by another development. And just as the one development directs thinking in a certain direction through an inner impulse, so the other development directs the will life of the person, the will, to a certain development, which in turn is not present in ordinary life and of which ordinary science, including ordinary spiritual science, can know nothing.

As I said, today we are not here to repeat things that have often been discussed here, but to describe the effects. We can cultivate the will of the human being by looking at this will, as one would otherwise only look at external objects. In ordinary life, one has will. You have volitional impulses that arise from opinions, from external concerns and the like. But if you want, what is wanting flows so closely with what is carried out as an action and the like, or it remains contained in the sensation of desire, that the actual volitional process is not looked at. Even the self-observation that is often referred to as mystical, which so easily believes it can achieve certain [goals] that it sets itself, this self-observation also knows nothing of a real observation of the will.

This real observation of the will must in turn be achieved through long, energetic and persistent soul work. In this way, the human being comes to give the striving a certain form: to become a spectator of his own will. But then something very strange happens. By striving to become a spectator of one's own will, by striving, so to speak, to look at one's own will as one otherwise looks at external mineral or plant or other entities, one gradually loses oneself completely as a matter of course, one ceases to be a spectator, so to speak.

So the strange thing happens that what one must energetically strive for – to be a spectator of one's will – is that in the process of developing this spectator role, one's will is extinguished like itself! You really do extinguish yourself by trying to look more and more at your will, you extinguish yourself!

On the other hand, the will that one gazes upon will bear less and less the character of the will, the character of wanting. What one has previously experienced as volition will appear to one as a superficial configuration of the inner soul existence. And from this surface, as it were, something emerges from the underground through this surface, through something that one knew nothing about before, one learns to recognize that something is hidden beneath the surface of the will.

What I am going to tell you now is not just an image, not a metaphor or an illusion, but a full reality, a reality that is even more real than any external, tangible event! That which springs forth out of the will, which always remains unconscious in everyday life, is, yes, it is consciousness itself. One experiences that one carries within oneself during one's whole life an inner, invisible, unconscious spectator of one's whole volition.

This other person in the person is quite real. It is present in every human soul, and it can only be seen by directing one's gaze to the volition. And in that, as it were, one's own consciousness is extinguished, [through the surface of the will another, higher consciousness emerges] that takes the place of the ordinary consciousness, it is the reality of the will that is brought out of thinking through spiritual development in the way indicated above. So it is a different consciousness from the everyday consciousness that is now released from the activity of the will.

And now, instead of merely looking at the world with our ordinary consciousness, we learn to look at a [new] world with this consciousness that we ourselves have born out of the surging and driving of our will.

But that which has developed out of the will, that which one gets to know as a power of the will and soul, must connect with that which develops out of thinking. This consciousness that has broken out of the will must, I would say, connect spiritually and chemically with that reality of the will that has broken out of thinking. Then the inner spiritual man is present - who now knows himself as the spiritual man completely free from the bodily and at the same time knows himself in a spiritual reality, just as the sensual man with his eyes and ears knows himself in the physical-sensual reality.

If one were to develop only that which can be brought out of thinking, one would enter into an ever more anxious, one might even say fearful, state of mind, into a feeling of inner loneliness. By detaching from thinking that which can be detached from it, one actually only finds oneself, oneself weaving and existing in spiritual becoming - in a spiritual process of becoming. The one-sided experience of this could be compared to the ability to stretch out one's hands everywhere, to make grasping movements everywhere, but not being able to grasp anything. One would experience one's own spiritual-soul reality, but not a spiritual-soul reality outside of oneself. This spiritual-soul reality outside of one is experienced by the fact that the consciousness, which has been hinted at, is raised out of the will-being. And in and through this consciousness, in this and through this consciousness, one now experiences a spiritual external world, as one experiences an external physical world through the senses.

You see, dear attendees, that in all striving for spiritual research, it is important to develop something within the soul that makes that soul completely independent of all physicality. And the processes that really develop the soul are solely soul-spiritual processes. Everything that happens for the further development of the soul, all these are intimate, inner soul processes in which the body cannot participate; because they consist precisely in their essence, that the spiritual-soul is drawn out of the physical. From this it follows that the physical body as such cannot have any part in the development of real methods of spiritual research, because their essential nature consists precisely in making oneself independent of everything physical.

At the moment one believes that through some physical process, which must be stripped away to such an extent that even memory is immediately excluded, one can enter into the spiritual world through some physical process, one is completely mistaken.

And now, dear attendees, ask yourselves: how can it be possible to somehow bring about an unhealthy human experience through methods that lead people to experience something that is completely free from their physicality? How can physicality be ruined, how can it be affected by something that is precisely what it is because it makes itself independent of all physicality? It will admittedly take a while before it is recognized in wider circles of those people who have a scientific mind, that true spiritual scientific methods - and these are only those that really lead into the spiritual world - make man independent of all corporeality, so that it is absurd to speak of an ill soul life in any connection with the spiritual research methods! For it is precisely spiritual research – when it is based on such premises as those just briefly characterized – that must agree with true natural science regarding everything that modern science has to say about the dependence of soul life on physical experience.

Even ordinary memory, which is thus an entirely soul power that is part of healthy soul life, even ordinary memory knows: spiritual research is linked to the tools of the body, because thinking must work in such a way that the fabric of thought sends its waves into the physical realm and thus gives the physical realm its due by developing thoughts that are capable of being remembered.

Spiritual research has come to a deep insight with regard to the share of bodily life in the life of the soul. And it is only a delusion and a misconception when some scientific school claims that true spiritual research wants to deny the dependence of ordinary thought or will life on the body. It is precisely through this spiritual research that it becomes clear that what is to be independent, soul-spiritual life must first be released from ordinary soul life.

But the ordinary life of the soul is such – and it is precisely from the point of view of the liberated life of the soul that one experiences it – the ordinary life of the soul is such that it is everywhere submerged in the ordinary life of the body and thus dependent to a certain extent on this life of the body.

And further, in the spiritual scientist's research, it is shown how other expressions of the soul, other experiences of the soul, which are rightly counted among the pathological experiences of the soul, are also bound to the life of the body. When the natural scientist comes and says: We know visions, we know hallucinations, we know illusions - we must, even if we have not researched all the details, definitely take the view that an illusory, a hallucinatory soul life is at the root of this, that the bodily tool that has to be used by the soul life is not functioning in the right way. When the natural scientist says this, he will find that the true spiritual researcher is in complete agreement with him. This is because the combination of visions, hallucinations and illusions with that which has just been described as developing in true spiritual research means combining things that are as different as day and night.

The development of soul powers, which spiritual research requires, lies in the exact opposite direction to the processes in the soul that lead to hallucinations, visions or illusions. And anyone who is in the process of developing spiritual research abilities knows that they should not devote themselves to that part of the soul which can lead to visions, illusions or hallucinations, but that he should devote himself to those forces in the soul which alone are fruitful for him, which alone lead him to something that is suitable for dispelling, combating and dispelling hallucinations, illusions and visions. The development of spiritual research into the life of the soul lies in an intensification of this, in something that makes visions, hallucinations or illusions healthy. Because hallucinations, visions and illusions make the human being dependent on the life of the body in a much greater degree than the ordinary life of the soul, which he develops in everyday life, this healthy ordinary life of the soul, makes it appear dependent on the body.

This does, of course, touch on a sensitive issue, in that spiritual researchers are perhaps misunderstood not so much by natural science as by a school of thought that also claims to be spiritual research. And here we touch on the area where some people claim that true spiritual research - which is difficult - should not be difficult. Understanding a watch is difficult; but you get involved with it if you want to understand it; but the deep secrets of the world and the secrets of the soul should not be difficult to understand!

But those who shy away from the difficulty of spiritual research find an easy way to look into the spiritual world, precisely by resorting to a visionary, hallucinatory life – even if this hallucinatory world appears in all kinds of guises. And the evil is that spiritual research is all too easily lumped together by those who do not like to get involved with the differences with all the amateurish goings-on that claim visions, hallucinations instead of true spiritual insight.

The spiritual researcher takes the following stand on these matters, and stands by it so firmly that what he has to advocate becomes spiritual research practice. He takes this standpoint: the ordinary mental life that makes us familiar with the physical environment in a healthy way, and with much of what can be grasped about the physical environment through the mind that is tied to the brain, this mental life is bound to the whole human body in its thinking, feeling and willing. The normally organized human body is the tool for this outwardly healthy spiritual life. If true enlightenment is to occur, so that one really looks into a spiritual world, then the human being must rise above this normal, ordinary looking at things, which is bound to the body, to a healthy body. He must make his looking more comprehensive. And above all, he must make it more suitable, more subject to the will. He must do it in such a way that, while a large part of what takes place in ordinary mental life remains unconscious precisely because the body serves as an instrument, in spiritual contemplation man cannot be as passive as he is in ordinary contemplation, but must be active in everything he contemplates; he must develop will, inner activity. In short, in true clairvoyance, the human being's experience becomes broader than that which is bound to the body.

But what is seen in hallucinatory, visionary, illusionary soul life is more bound to the body. Because it is usually not the whole body that is seen, but only a part of the body – so that another part of the body is even paralyzed – it is more bound to the body than the ordinary spiritual life that is unfolded in everyday life.

So that one does not, through visions, hallucinations or illusions, gain access to a spiritual world that can give one more insights than the outer world of the senses. On the contrary, one does not gain access to a supersensible world, but to a subsensible world. One uses a smaller part of one's body as a tool than in ordinary life, in which one uses one's whole body as a tool.

But this is also why hallucinations, visions, illusions are less subject to arbitrariness, less subject to acts of the will than the perceptions of ordinary life; while true clairvoyance is a more active process, that is, it is more subject to the will than this perception of ordinary life. And the images that arise in hallucinations, visions and illusions are much more bound to the body than the images of ordinary memory. And if man were clever, he would value the occurrence of the images of ordinary memory more highly than all the fantasies that live in visions and hallucinations and illusions, insofar as they are bound to the body in the way described. He would realize that it is only his need for sensation that leads him to appreciate not what he sees in everyday life, but to appreciate more what is rare, what one produces through some rare process - to appreciate this more for the exploration of the secrets of life than the everyday observation. And in this unfortunate, psychic sensationalism lies a multitude of aberrations that consist in an amateurish spiritual worldview.

It is gratifying to be able to point out that one has this or that medium. The spiritual researcher, who says yes to everything from his consciousness; you don't have to believe that. He says yes just as in everyday life everything comes from his consciousness. You can't be sure. You don't have to believe it. But if you have a medium, you can be sure, because the will plays no role in it, everything happens in natural processes. Real, will-free science is present!

The true spiritual researcher knows that the field of vision into the world is narrower for the medium – although nothing should be said against some research methods involving mediumship, I have already spoken about this here – but the true spiritual researcher sees that the field of vision into the world is narrower for the medium, not wider, but narrower than for ordinary observation in everyday life. In ordinary observation, in ordinary science, which simply come about with healthy senses and with a healthy mind, one experiences many more of the secrets of existence than through any kind of mediumship, through which one can only experience something strange - something strange because under abnormal conditions a smaller field of vision is overlooked. (Interjections: “That's wrong!”; “Oh oh!”).

But that is precisely what it is about, that for true clairvoyance this field of vision must be expanded, that this field of vision must be expanded precisely by the fact that what one otherwise experiences in terms of world secrets in ordinary life undergoes an addition, in order to experience what is now being experienced, completely independently of all physical activity!

It is therefore, esteemed audience, that a number of people are gradually coming to recognize, precisely from the genuine, true conditions of natural science, how all development in clairvoyance to the opposite side, from which, wherever the human soul develops, when it falls into hallucinations, mediumship and the like due to a downgrading of healthy life.

I have already indicated, dear attendees, that it will take quite a while before the recognition of such a spiritual path can be achieved on the basis of genuine science. Because the people who still call what is presented as the essence of spiritual research wrong will still be around for a long time! These people belong in the same category as those who initially rebelled when the Copernican worldview was introduced into human history; these people belong among those who are not counted on when it comes to the further development of because they are naturally subject to the law that everything that enters world development may initially appear to be wrong, or at least to be something dreamy, crazy, fantastic. [...]

But this, esteemed attendees, already indicates how, basically, I would say, the balance between spiritual science and natural science is slowly coming. Little by little, natural science will realize that the true spiritual researcher is indeed on their ground.

But today there is still a danger that must be faced directly, and it comes from another side. This danger is not to be sought among those who, perhaps because of well-founded habits of thought, are opponents of spiritual science because they are scientists, true, honest scientists; but the danger lies with those who often believe themselves to be true followers of spiritual science; for spiritual science has to shake off much of its coat-tails, if I may use the rough expression, that clings to it. And above all, it has to draw a clear dividing line between the paths it takes and that have been characterized, and those that lead into the hallucinatory, visionary and so on, into the media, and that do not broaden the field of vision in relation to everyday life, but narrow it.

Someone who has become established in any field of natural science, let us say – because this must be of particular interest to us for our topic today – let us say in the scientifically based psychiatry of today, who has become established in such a field today, who has experience through faithful and faithfully meant scientific research , what the seriousness of the methods of procedure in natural science means, who is familiar with the efforts in the genuine sense of truth, which prevails in the field of natural science today, where it appears truthfully and honestly, must, in a certain way, be given attention if he is still unable to approach spiritual science simply because of his habitual way of thinking. And if it happens to him, which can easily happen, that he does not immediately get to know spiritual science where it is represented by its serious methods - by methods that are just as serious as the scientific methods - if he does not get to know this spiritual science in these sources, but gets to know it through all kinds of followers and if he then throws this following together with what true spiritual research is, there is a danger.

I do not want to talk about appearances, dear attendees, I do not want to talk about the fact that today there are still people who see an essential thing in how one feeds oneself in order to get on the path of a certain spiritual research! Whether one is a vegetarian or not is a matter of taste; it depends on other things. There may be certain advantages and benefits; but with regard to the intimate development of the soul, which generates the forces that have been mentioned and leads to the spiritual world, what one eats or does not eat has nothing to do with it, directly. It can make the physical life, which goes hand in hand with it, more comfortable; but it has nothing to do with it directly. You cannot eat your way up into the spiritual world by not eating certain things, for example. And anyone who believes that you can eat your way up into the spiritual world through such external materialistic processes or not eat – let's say starve – is just as much on the wrong track as someone who, out of his materialism, what de La Mettrie, whom I quoted the day before yesterday as the father of modern materialism, saw as the influence of the food of a meal, the substances ingested, on the actual life of a person. These things are indeed plausible.

It is plausible, for example, much more plausible than anything that the spiritual researcher has to bring forward in further development, it is much more plausible when de La Mettrie says: What power joy has over us. Joy awakens in a sad heart; it passes over to the souls of the fellow diners and is expressed in those charming songs in which the French excel. And then de La Mettrie points out – draws attention to the fact, which is certainly true – that Erasmus of Rotterdam and Fontenelle, for example, would not have become the geniuses they were if just a small cog in their brain had developed differently than it did.

The truths that come from this side are characterized above all by the fact that they are self-evident, so self-evident as to be trivial, but they do not touch on the subject of true spiritual science. Because a statement like that – de La Mettrie makes it in relation to Fontenelle and Erasmus – can even be taken further. If you think of it as even more exaggerated, you can say: Well, if Erasmus' mother had been murdered by some bandit before Erasmus was born, then the whole of Erasmus would not have come into being. There you can see the dependence of the spiritual life on the physical.

Yes, esteemed attendees, that is the essential point: the opponent of spiritual science does not even suspect from this side how true spiritual research basically agrees with his trivialities. I do not want to speak of other external appearances either, but unfortunately a spiritual research world view is often judged by those external appearances, which, for example, express themselves - if it were not discussed, there would be no need to comment on it - in the fact that certain ladies who consider themselves to be spiritual researchers wear their hair short - if they are men, they wear their hair long - that they wear certain clothes and so on. Well, of course, all such frippery can be lumped together. But there is a much more serious area - the one that is most certainly likely to give rise to the worst attacks and opposition to spiritual science in the near future, and in the more distant future.

With true natural science, for example, and with true psychiatry, spiritual science will be able to fully agree. The spiritual researcher will readily concede to the psychiatrist that there is, for example, a certain pathological mystical disposition, and that simply due to some characteristic of the human body, a person shows a certain urge for inner brooding; that he then comes up with the idea of wanting to find the solution to great world riddles in a certain chaotic inner emotional life. That such drives are connected with the life of the body, that is what the psychiatrist of today will have to assert. In this the spiritual researcher will be in complete agreement with him! And he can do so because that which he, as a soul-spiritual being, must develop in order to enter the spiritual world must be made independent of the bodily, and must therefore also remain independent of a possibly diseased bodily.

Anyone who adopts the perspective that spiritual research must take must look at precisely such a process of a strengthened soul life, even in the case of a pathological, mystical disposition of the soul. And so, if you yourself had a mystical disposition, this morbid mystical disposition could be viewed like an object from the outside. And you would come to a healthy judgment about your own work if you strove for a true, healthy spiritual-scientific point of view.

In this area, it will depend on distinctions. The spiritual researcher would have to show, with regard to certain spiritual phenomena, how spiritual realities around him are experienced in such a way that the experiences can only be expressed in colorful images. You will find such colorful images described in my Theosophy and in Occult Science in Outline. When such colored pictures, such auric pictures, arise out of true spiritual research, one must be clear about the fact that they are developed with the inner will for that which is really spiritually experienced, and that such a description of a spiritual experience of color is not made in a passive letting-upon-oneself of some color impression (which, however, can also be a hallucination).

With regard to hallucinations in this area, the spiritual researcher is in complete agreement with the psychiatrist, who is grounded in natural science. The spiritual researcher knows that such perceptions can naturally arise out of the sick soul life. There are people who simply experience very definite inner color experiences when they read certain words, when certain letters affect them; there are people who, when something unpleasant is said to them, hear it only in the left ear; when something pleasant is said to them, in the right ear, and so on. These things belong entirely to the sphere with which bodily life is connected - more intimately connected with soul life than in the case of ordinary, everyday views of the world.

But the spiritual researcher stands on the same ground as the natural scientist with regard to these things. And more precisely than the natural scientist, he can see how such involuntary hallucinatory vision arises from the body's predestined devotion to its own processes, while in true clairvoyance, free, independent activity of the will, independent of the body, is involved in every detail that one experiences in relation to the spiritual world. When a person succumbs, let us say, to delusions or obsessions, the spiritual researcher will perhaps stand even more firmly on the ground occupied today by the scientifically trained psychiatrist, with regard to these areas in particular, and be clear about the fact that certain ideas that arise and exert a compulsion on the person that he cannot resist are conditioned by the fact that the life of the body has been pathologically altered. But with his spiritual life freed from the life of the body, he will be able to look more closely at this bondage of all involuntary, abnormal ideas to the body and its functions as a natural scientist himself. If only one would realize ever more deeply that true spiritual science need not be in disharmony with what natural science asserts as a justified demand.

But, dear assembled guests, although it is true that the spiritual researcher arrives at something that is outside of him, even if it is his own self, and fundamentally cannot even change his body if he does not , although this is absolutely correct, there will nevertheless be more and more people who believe that they recognize in a certain development that is bound to the body that which also leads to real insights into a completely different world than the ordinary one. And there will be confusion among them; and these are often precisely those who lean on all kinds of spiritual-scientific, even real spiritual-scientific worldviews, and these spiritual-scientific worldviews are often judged by them.

There are people, let us say, who from the outset are afflicted with some kind of predisposition to abnormal mental life. If they had remained outside of a spiritual-scientific current, then, of course, they would have come to madness themselves in the course of a certain time. Now, due to some circumstances, they have come close to a spiritual-scientific worldview. Instead of giving themselves up to all kinds of crazy ideas outside, they then give themselves up to their crazy ideas within this school of thought. Because then, if one does not distinguish, one can of course very truly say: Well, the school of thought has driven the person concerned crazy! - But in the end, what are such statements worth?

They remind you again and again, dear attendees, of that old woman who looked after the great anatomist Hyrtl in his last days; and when he died, she went out into the street and said: Yes, now Hyrtl has died! That's what happens when you spend so much time studying! Then a stroke strikes him down! Hyrtl lived to be eighty-four years old!

This should be considered proof that, in this case at least, studying was less harmful than drinking wine and beer is for some people, and that a stroke can strike at a much earlier age.

Equally clever are those judgments that are often made when someone, afflicted with some kind of mental illness, has spiritual scientific views and after some time shows himself to be crazy - when it is said: If he had not come to this spiritual science, he would not have gone crazy!

The truth is this: one can, of course, just as well as through cleverness, come to spiritual science through madness and just as well through one's weak abilities come to madness there, or through some other kind of abnormal abilities come to madness, if one is unsatisfied by this or that in life. One goes here or there to find satisfaction, and then, of course, believes that one can feel comfortable in what initially seems difficult, by indulging in strange, unclear ideas that one has no desire to clarify, one believes that one can free oneself from some of life's pressures. The amount of spiritual research attributed to this side, which must therefore be characterized, cannot be exhaustively stated!

This, however, demands, demands more and more that it be pointed out that by its very nature, all spiritual research methods cannot, under any circumstances, be related to any kind of pathological mental life, because they are built precisely on freeing oneself from everything that can cause pathological mental life.

But just as I was able to point out certain dangers and adversities that are asserted against spiritual science in detail, so it can be said that with regard to its representation in social life, in human life in general, it is all too easily lumped together with all sorts of amateurish, even fraudulent, charlatan-like paths. And because these things, dear attendees, are now being discussed in more materialistic circles of world outlook, the spiritual researcher must necessarily point out how he draws a strict dividing line between what he, in an honest striving for truth, pursues only as a goal of truth, and all the various things that are asserting themselves in a field where one can so easily rely on superstition and on the credulity and for all kinds of impure goals, people try to spread alleged spiritual science or - as it is also called - occultism, so that people are confused by all kinds of secretions of what occult knowledge is supposed to be, and when they have been confused, they have a certain power over them - even if in our time it is said over and over again: it is the time when we have finally freed ourselves from the old belief in authority and when people profess “free judgment”.

Well, the truth of what this claim is based on is not so far away. It is true that people boast about it very much, saying that in earlier times people believed in the dogmas of the church fathers. Yes, for those people the church fathers were called Tertullian, Gregory of Nazianz, Irenaeus and so on; for modern people, who in their opinion - and that they have the opinion is perhaps even more harmful than it was for the old people that they did not have it. For modern people, who believe that they do not look to any authorities, the “church fathers” today are called: Helmholtz, Haeckel, Darwin, Dubois-Reymond and so on - they are only secular church fathers. They are spoken of more as a principle; but the dependencies on them are quite the same. We must not believe that credulity and superstition have particularly diminished in our time. They have only taken on a different form.

And so the true spiritual researcher is necessary so that he is not confused, especially in the present fateful time, with what, under the guise of an alleged occult science, pursues all sorts of dishonest and corrupting goals. So that he cannot be lumped together with it, for this is happening more and more every day: everything, even the most crass and foolish superstition, is lumped together with that spiritual science which, in fact, has a brighter, clearer, more illuminated thinking than even ordinary science, as can be sufficiently proven.

And here attention must be drawn to an apparent phenomenon, because otherwise errors could all too easily arise in this field if it were not known what the spiritual researcher wants to discard; it is positively a duty to draw attention to certain things that are also connected with our present momentous world-historical events. The following is mentioned only, as already stated, to set forth spiritual science in its purity and to draw a line against dishonesty. Only individual facts are singled out, and only for the reason that they are discussed in newspapers hostile to spiritual science.

For example, a personality who lives in the western part of Europe, in a capital city of the western part of Europe, published a kind of “almanac”, a yearbook, every year for years. Such a yearbook for 1913 has already been published in 1912. In this yearbook for 1913, which appeared in 1912, the words were written, esteemed attendees, with reference to the development of Austria - the words were: the one who believes that he will govern will not govern; on the other hand, another young man, who is believed to not yet govern, will govern. And in the almanac that was printed in 1913 for 1914, these things were repeated.

The credulity of our time, the foolish superstition, can of course easily believe in all sorts of prophecies. And how many will have believed in prophecy in this area!

Perhaps people will believe less in prophecy when they know that almost simultaneously with the appearance of this passage in the said almanac, the following sentences appeared in a very ordinary Parisian newspaper, “Paris-Midi”: “It is said that it is wished that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria be assassinated at the right time.

The personality who wrote such things in her almanac is probably connected with certain circles that pursue this or that goal through all kinds of underground channels. And anyone who is serious about spiritual research must also show that they agree with serious, scientific thinking in this area, even if it initially comes from the field of materialism, and not with the fraud that, under the guise of prophecy, pursues all kinds of charlatanistic or dishonest goals. The same personality who published this almanac and supposedly knew how to predict what would happen as a prophecy of the future, went from Paris to Rome in the first days of August 1914 to influence certain people there in their way to do certain things, which then contributed to the well-known interest in current events, or at least was supposed to contribute something.

The personality who wrote such things in her almanac is probably connected with certain circles that pursue this or that goal through all kinds of underground channels. And anyone who is truly sincere in their spiritual research must also show that they agree with serious, scientific thinking in this area, even if it initially comes from the field of materialism, and not with the fraud that pursues all kinds of charlatanistic or dishonest goals under the guise of prophecy. The same personality who published this almanac and supposedly knew how to predict what would happen like a prophecy of the future, went from Paris to Rome in the first days of August 1914 to influence certain people there in their way to certain things, which then contributed at least something to the well-known interest in current events, or at least should contribute something.

Because, as already mentioned, these things are publicly discussed, the spiritual researcher must point out that all unhealthy response of the human soul to this or that “revelation” based on such foundations must be rooted out by true spiritual research! True spiritual research will not work towards the unhealthy, but towards the healthy. For true spiritual research is not capable of obscuring thinking or making man stupid in regard to the outer real processes of life. Everything that paralyzes spiritual life and leads it astray, as has been described, also clouds thinking and makes it dull to the sober realities of life. Everything that broadens, these spiritual explorations that expand one's view beyond ordinary life, also enlightens one's healthy judgment of this ordinary life. This does not force people to be deceived under the influence of superstition, but it does lead to a clearer and brighter understanding of life's circumstances.

In this area, spiritual science still has much to offer and much strength to give. For today, esteemed attendees, one does not notice how, I might say, dull the weapon of thought has become, how much thoughtlessness always prevails!

In conclusion, let me give you another example of this, which will show you where unhealthy thinking lies and that this unhealthy thinking does not lie in spiritual science.

I would like to say: chance has just brought it home to me, which I now have to explain in relation to the following. Some time ago, dear attendees, I gave a lecture in a city in Austria. There I developed thoughts that I had also developed here in Munich, partly in the lecture that I gave here months ago, about the world view of German idealism, partly in the lecture that I gave here the day before yesterday about the individual national souls.

I think that all healthy thinking will be able to at least recognize this – however one may critically view it – at least recognize that when one truly looks into the spirits of the people, into the individual national souls, certain characteristics present themselves, so that the individual national soul differs from the other in a certain way.

I also presented this in that city in Austria. Not only did a confused mind in a newspaper at the time go on about this truth, which he did not understand at all; he also said: I would have taken the opportunity, because the military power relations in the east and West and Central Europe happened to have brought about antagonism, to now also construct a spiritual antagonism. Well, that was a confusion that one can absolutely conceive in a “daily paper”. But that was not enough; rather, a reprint of what was in that “daily paper” at the time appeared in a German magazine. And in a German magazine, a man writes - according to him, he is an Austrian German - the following words, really the following words:

"The critic's accusation that Steiner has constructed opposing cultures from the current constellation of powers is justified. With the best will in the world, I am unable to perceive any essential difference between Central European and Western and Eastern European culture, as Steiner does. In my opinion, European culture is essentially completely the same.

Consider the light of thought that such a claim casts! Consider it, honored attendees! Yet the same man even finds the opportunity to say:

“Intellectual life has also developed in this direction and is absorbed in this pursuit. The wild greed of the European man of culture for the possession of earthly goods would degenerate into a predatory struggle of all against all if individuals were not constrained by iron state structures.”

Now I ask you: Did the “human individuals” today declare war, or did those at the heads of the states?

So with a complete slap in the face of what is accessible to the simplest thought, people are beguiled! Such things exist in the world of that thinking, which one does not want to recognize as unhealthy today because one has become too indifferent to it. Instead, one finds, the less one is aware of it in particular, in what is contained in true spiritual science, that which is intended to mislead people, that which is intended to create confused ideas in people.

Truly, the spiritual researcher could, if he found it somehow compatible with his otherwise sound character, could fall into a certain complacency when he sees the confusion of ideas prevailing today as a result of a very common-place thinking - but which in truth turns out to be quite unhealthy compared to the healthy thinking life of spiritual research.

It is possible – one must, I would say, as with Hamlet's words: “Writing table here!”, so that one can write it down – it is possible that a person exists who is able to tie something like this to humanity! And it is possible that a magazine exists that prints something like this! The person who publishes the magazine is called: Dr. Friedrich Maier and lives in Tübingen. And attention must be drawn to such things so that one can see where unhealthy thinking and spiritual life exist.

In this case, dear attendees, if one or the other might be surprised that I say such things with apparent zeal – as one might always believe in such a case – perhaps out of wounded, personal vanity, I can in this case provide the counter proof, I can adduce the counterproof from the journal itself – although anyone who knows me and is familiar with how I represent spiritual science will trust me when I say that whether what I do and say is praised or criticized by someone else is of as little personal concern to me as possible! Truly, whether someone praises or criticizes what I do and say is of as little personal concern to me as possible. But when it is a matter of pointing out where there is public mental illness or health, then I feel called upon to have my say, precisely from the point of view of pure spiritual science.

As I said, I can prove that I am not dealing with vanity here; for I have published a brochure - “Thoughts during the Time of War. For Germans and those who do not believe they have to hate – Berlin 1915). These are – admittedly with somewhat different examples, but essentially – exactly the same thoughts that I expressed at the time in Linz an der Donau and in other lectures, which I – as I have explained here – on the diversity of the European national souls. The thoughts are contained in it, of which the magazine I have just mentioned has spoken in such a way, as it has been suggested, has spoken in such a really nonsensical way. The next issue of this magazine contains the continuation of the article. In any case, it continues in the same vein. And at the end of the same issue there is a section in which the brochure 'Thoughts During the Time of War' is discussed. And there this book is particularly praised. Part of the article was written in August 1915, the rest in [October] 1915. So in this [...] article, alongside the article in which the foolishness in question is mentioned, there is also a laudatory review of the book that says exactly the same thing! So here we have a case, ladies and gentlemen, which I just wanted to highlight, that should really be seen, and from which it can be seen how true spiritual science is often placed in the overall spiritual life of humanity. I have often pointed out how the spiritual and cultural conditions of the present demand that from now on and into the future, spiritual science must be incorporated into the development of humanity.

Of course there will be people for a long time to come who will denounce, defame and fight spiritual science. But spiritual science, firmly rooted in the ground it has managed to gain through the foundations it has laid today and in the past, will always and forever have to be aware that the truth, if it is the truth – and if it is the truth is the truth, it will always and always have to be aware that the truth, if it is the truth, will find its way through the narrowest cracks, no matter how large the masses of rocks of prejudice and slander and opposition that arise, which only leave the small cracks for the truth to pass through.

Therefore, esteemed ladies and gentlemen, allow me to conclude these reflections of today, which only sought to hint at a truly healthy soul life in connection with spiritual research, with what lives in the spiritual researcher who carries the fundamental nerve of his science within him as the source that gives him convincing power and certainty of action and will.

To this spiritual researcher - to put it figuratively - the human soul appears as a sister of truth. And by cherishing this thought, he says to himself: One can fight the truth, but it will always and again assert itself through the truth power within it, even if the fight should make its existence difficult in a certain period of time. One can even suppress the truth with force, suppress it for a certain period of time; not suppress it for the entire developmental history of humanity.

The suppressed truth will emerge again and again, because the human soul and the truth are siblings. And even if, as is otherwise the case with siblings, they live in a kind of disharmony and alienation in certain periods of time, There will always be periods of time when truth and the human soul will come together in their brotherly relationship and remember their origin, their common origin, their paternal source in the world. And this common paternal source in the world for truth and the human soul, which is at the same time the source for all true soul-searching, is what spiritual science, in healthy endeavor, seeks to find. This is the world spirit itself, interweaving and permeating from eternity to eternity, into which, starting from the point of origin of matter, to penetrate is the task and goal of all true and healthy spiritual research.

Dear attendees, the two lectures that I will take the liberty of giving today and on Monday will together form a whole in a certain respect, with one explaining the other; however, I will endeavor to make each of the lectures a complete whole so that it can be heard on its own. The spiritual scientific world view, which I have been presenting here in Munich for many years now, is subject to many misunderstandings, as is well known to many who have encountered this world view and yet, it may be said that, even if not in the consciousness of our contemporaries, this world view proves to be very strongly hoped for, one might say, in the general emotional life of our contemporaries.

But the source and the actual character of this world view are misunderstood by one side or the other. Therefore, whenever it is mentioned, it is always necessary to at least briefly point out, in the introduction, how the very way of thinking in our time and in the recent past, which is particularly justified in becoming established in the consciousness of of the contemporaries, how the scientific way of thinking forms the source of spiritual science, of which a large proportion of our educated contemporaries are justifiably of the opinion that it stands on the ground of well-disciplined scientific research. And precisely because the scientific character of the humanities represented here is denied from the most diverse sides, it must always be emphasized that these humanities not only do not contradict – that would not mean much – the natural scientific way of thinking of our time, but that it has its source in it, that it is confirmed and supported by this natural scientific way of thinking, if one understands the latter in the right sense, in all its statements.

Now, however, there are many reasons for misunderstandings, and if I may make a personal comment, it is that wherever the relationship between all kinds of amateur representations of this or that intellectual direction and between natural science is at issue, I myself will always stand on the ground of natural science and with natural science against amateurish intellectualism. But precisely the way in which natural science has developed in recent times, how it has found its way into the minds of contemporaries, makes it necessary to emphasize with all strength the possibility of a special investigation of spiritual life.

The nature of science in this direction can best be described by saying that anyone who is familiar with the development of science in recent centuries, and particularly in the immediate past, can only be an admirer of science and an acknowledgment of the fact that science has developed the best-disciplined concepts to get to know and control the broad field of natural phenomena with these concepts as well as possible. No branch of spiritual science should want to deny the great achievements of scientific research and thinking; but on the other hand, there is the following significant fact, namely that if one endeavors to do scientific research and think in the right way, thinking, when one develops such concepts and ideas that are particularly suited to grasp nature in its external, sensory phenomena, then these concepts and ideas will prove inadequate, indeed unsuitable, for penetrating into the spiritual realm.

Those who are familiar with the development of human spiritual life know that centuries ago it was different in this respect. One of the greatest rifts in human cultural life occurred when the scientific way of thinking arose three or four centuries ago. Because people are not familiar with the way people thought about nature before, they fail to recognize this tremendously significant change in human spiritual culture. But anyone who is familiar with the way thinking about nature was viewed throughout the ages more than three or four centuries ago knows that in earlier times, the concepts of nature always included the idea that spiritual forces are at work in natural processes and phenomena. At the same time, by observing natural phenomena, one has taken with one's knowledge of this or that natural phenomenon ideas about the spiritual that permeates nature.

The scientific view has rightly discarded everything that somehow refers to the spiritual in order to get nature pure in its insights. And so it is no wonder that in the course of the last three or four centuries, such ideas have emerged that are precisely suited to understanding nature and that prove unsuitable for somehow approaching the spirit. And in our time, after this process has existed for a long time and become established in the minds and souls of men, in our time, even if it does not yet fully understand this desire itself, the human soul demands an approach to the spiritual realm that is just as rigorous as the scientific path to the spiritual realm, but one that stands alongside the path of scientific world view, since the latter itself cannot find access to the spirit.

What I have just said can be seen not only when one looks at the general course of scientific development over the last few centuries, but also when one looks at the particular way of thinking of the most outstanding scientific researchers of the present day. I must emphasize that, precisely with regard to the exemplary nature of scientific thinking of thought of outstanding researchers of the present, for which I, as a humanities scholar, am full of appreciation. I would just like to emphasize by way of introduction that the natural scientific development in recent years has come to a level-headed, solid position regarding the much-debated question of Darwinism, and really significant work has been done in this area.

One of the many, many testimonies to this is the significant book by Oscar Hertwig, “The Becoming of Organisms”, a refutation of the Darwinian theory of chance. Here, for once, a scientist himself, with all the tools that science can provide, has shown how one-sided the last third of the nineteenth century was in relation to important questions. If you then set about recognizing the way such personalities think, you find the peculiarity that such personalities limit themselves in their field, rightly limiting themselves to researching what is given externally through the senses , and that they say – this can be found in particular in Oscar Hertwig: everything that goes beyond observation and the methodical knowledge of the senses must, Hertwig says, be left to metaphysics, epistemology and so on.

All this would be very nice. One could say: Such a researcher therefore refers to spiritual science himself; but it is not that simple. Wherever such things occur today, especially among the most important natural scientists, they are at the same time connected, I would say, with an unspoken but effective fight against any kind of research into spiritual life in our time, in that it is always pointed out – even if it is said that natural science itself has no access to the spiritual, it must leave that to another branch of science —-, when it is always emphasized that true science can only be achieved by sticking to sensory observation and the methods that take sensory observation a little further. Thus, at the same time, the necessity of a special spiritual science that goes beyond the sensory world is emphasized, but, I might say, unconsciously, this spiritual science is discredited at the same time by denying its scientific nature.

As a result, not only those who are scientists in our modern sense, not only those who inform themselves in a popular way about the results of science, but also those who learn something from their newspaper, in the Sunday supplements, about the way the world is being explored in the present, that everywhere the opinion is established that whatever is not found only through the scientific way of thinking is simply unscientific; that one is only enlightened if one no longer speaks about the spiritual at all, if one does not fall back into the outdated superstition of still somehow speaking about the spiritual. It is in the flesh and blood of our contemporaries – as I said, even those who draw their view of the world from the Sunday supplement of their newspaper – it is in the flesh and blood that what the great naturalist du Bois-Reymond, a great naturalist, said at a leading naturalists' meeting in the 1870s (this has almost been forgotten today) that science ends where supernaturalism begins, that is, where life begins in the face of the spirit. This has led to the establishment of the prejudice that anyone who somehow speaks of a consideration of spiritual life cannot be a scientist.

But because the natural-scientific directions have developed so strictly that they are applicable only to the sensual, a very particularly constituted spiritual science must stand beside them, which today can lead man to the spirit, while in earlier centuries and millennia he was led to the spirit by the contemplation of nature itself.

Now in our time there is still a significant prejudice prevailing, a prejudice that exists in the general public, but also exists in the chairs of philosophy professors, especially those who deal with spiritual life, a prejudice that prevents the human being from being considered in the right scientific way, a prejudice about whose historical origin one could tell a lot. This prejudice consists in the fact that as soon as one comes to speak of the purely physical aspect of the human being, one does not want to consider that one must distinguish in the supersensible being of the human being the soul and the spiritual.

Everyone who speaks about this relationship today - as I said, within the broad limits that I have indicated - speaks of the human being as consisting of body and soul. But if one speaks of the human being in this way, then it is impossible to penetrate to an understanding of this human being by scientific means; it is, if I may use a comparison, as if someone has a chemically composed substance that contains three components and he absolutely wants to deny that a third component is present, that only two are there. He organizes the entire investigation in such a way that he only wants to find two components; if he breaks it down into two components, then he will always and always have a confusion either of the third with the first or of the second with the first or of the third with the second. And so it is with today's scientific view of the human being. In the supersensible, spirit and soul are thrown together. That is why I wanted to choose the topic 'The human being as a spiritual being and a soul being' for today's reflection, to point out what kind of prejudice has to be overcome in order to arrive at a corresponding scientific view of the human being.

Now, what is the actual situation regarding the division of the human supersensible being into soul and spirit? We can form a preliminary idea about this if we consider that the human being, as he is, experiences the physical between birth and death or, let us say, conception, that the human being also experiences the physical. We must be clear about the fact that hunger, thirst and the need to breathe, for example, are basically experiences of the soul. We experience hunger and thirst inwardly, emotionally; we feel a certain mood arising from this or that need to breathe.

If a person wants to explore the physical basis of hunger and thirst and the need to breathe, he must not stop at inner perception, he must not, for example, deny himself food in order to experience severe hunger, or overload his stomach to see what it is like to be satiated. In this field, one would never delude oneself that by mere introspection, by observing what it feels like to be more or less hungry and thirsty, one can learn something about what corresponds to hunger, thirst, and the need to breathe in the body.

The science of physical life has its special methods, its special types of research, to see what is going on in the body while we are hungry or when the comfortable feeling of satiety has set in. Whether it is right or wrong is not of interest to us; but physical research, which goes from what is merely experienced inwardly in the soul to physical processes, examines the chemical changes in the blood that occur when we are hungry, and so on. In order to recognize what is physically at the root of this kind of soul life, which I have just described, physical research must go from the soul to the physical, and it is admitted that for the person who only lives in ordinary consciousness, lives in the everyday consciousness, all these processes that take place in the body in chemical and physical terms while he experiences something like hunger or the general comfortable mood of his state of health, that these processes remain unconscious.

What does a person in their ordinary consciousness know about their body? What little they observe and recognize through external perception with their senses, that is explained by the science we call physics; but what physics provides is not conscious in the ordinary life of the soul.

Spiritual research shows, in turn, that what underlies the human soul as spirit is the same on the other side as what underlies the human soul as body. Just as little as one can, without any scientific approach to the body, make out anything about the body from the sensation of hunger, thirst and the need to breathe, so little can one, through the mere inner experience of imagining, feeling and willing, as they take place in the of the soul in everyday life, one can know anything about the spirit of the human being; for it is the case that the spirit of the human being, which determines the soul life from the other side as the body, only projects a part of this spirit of the human being into everyday life, just as it does of the body.

Just as one can perceive the body through one's eyes, so one cannot know anything about the soul that only physical research can tell us. From the spirit, the ability to concentrate our soul activity, which we summarize by saying that we think, feel and will, penetrates into the soul. This focusing of the soul life on an ego, which otherwise remains an indeterminate concept, is what projects from the spirit into the ordinary soul life, just as what projects from the bodily life lies before the eyes, without one investigating.

But just as one must proceed from this to physical research, so one must proceed from what is experienced in the soul in imagining, feeling and willing, and from what projects from the spirit, by combining the imagining, feeling and willing in the I, which is as inclined to the soul life as the physical form is inclined to the eye from the other side, ... [...] one must move beyond everything that can be experienced in the soul to a science of the spirit, to that which, from the spirit, determines these processes of imagining, feeling and willing just as hunger and thirst determine bodily processes, which can only be found through physical research.

Admittedly, other research methods are needed to explore the mind than those of physical science; but it must be emphasized with full clarity that no matter how far-reaching the study of, for example, mere inner life may be, it can never lead to real spiritual science. Just as increasing hunger or thirst or the need to breathe or satiation cannot lead to ordinary science, to teaching anatomy and physiology; just as little can mere mystical immersion – however intimate – mere living into ideas, into feelings, that can never lead to an understanding of spiritual reality. Only a real expansion of the field of observation from the inner soul life to the spirit, which is present outside of us and with us, as well as to nature, which is present outside of us and with us, can seriously lead to this; for this nature, which is present outside of us and with us, organizes our body, and this spirit, which is present outside of us and with us, organizes our own spirit. The soul life then develops between the body and the spirit through the interrelations between spirit and body.

In this process, however, the methods that lead to the knowledge of the spirit are to be understood in a spiritual sense. One can never come to the spirit through external activity, no matter how spiritual it may be, because the spirit is only given in the supersensible. If one only strives to learn something about the spirit through external activity, one shows that one actually has no understanding of how to come to the spirit at all. The point is this: just as one must pass from the soul-life, from hunger and thirst, to the soul-dead in the bodily life in order to gain physical science, physiology and biology, so one must pass from the soul-dead to the spirit by strengthening the soul life, by bringing in completely new elements of the soul life.

Now I must emphasize that what I have often stated here and am stating again today in principle as a path of research into the spiritual world is not meant to be taken as a recommendation for everyone to immediately go this way into the spiritual world. And those who, in order to discredit spiritual science, repeatedly emphasize that only those who have had experiences in the spiritual world should actually speak about spiritual science, fall into the same contradiction as those who say that only those who research in them should speak about chemistry and physics.

No, just as it is not an unjustified belief in authority to include in general human education what chemistry, physics and so on research, it is just as little an unjustified belief in authority to include in general human education what spiritual science is able to research; but it is true that the methods of spiritual science must become generally known today, and one finds more detailed information about what I will now only hint at in principle in all the details in my books: “How to Know Higher Worlds,” “Theosophy” and “Secret Science,” “The Riddle of Man,” “The Riddle of Souls,” and so on. There you will find a detailed description of the facts and the path that leads into the spiritual world.

Today, however, it is necessary to talk about this matter because it is desirable, according to the whole spiritual constitution of our time, that as many people as possible should follow the path that leads at least to the point from which one can bear witness that the spiritual life is a reality. And basically anyone can come to this point if they take the instructions of the books mentioned into account in some way.

But even if one did not want to do this, if one did not want to enter the spiritual world, then it would still be valuable to know how the person who presents himself as a spiritual researcher presents the results from the spiritual world and how he has arrived at these research results; because one must actually know what the spiritual researcher's findings are based on. One will be convinced when one gets to know a method that one can already judge well with the ordinary healthy human understanding whether the spiritual researcher says something absurd, foolish, stupid, fantastic, dreamy, or whether he is able to show a way that makes it seem to the healthy human understanding that one is really finding something spiritual.

Now, if I am to characterize in principle the path the spiritual researcher takes, I must say: the spiritual researcher must transform the ordinary feeling, the ordinary imagining, the ordinary will impulses; he must shape them in a different way, in such a way that that he really goes beyond mere thinking, feeling and willing, that he comes to a real insight into spiritual life, just as one comes, by going beyond the life of hunger and thirst, to a real insight into the life of the body.

Now, dear ones, there is very often the idea that physics is difficult and that you have to have some self-control to come to the strict scientific methods of physics. That is one reason why one commits oneself to the physical science, one reason besides the other, that although the physical science is officially recognized, that one can make one's way in life with it and so on, but one has the idea that spiritual research must be something easy, otherwise one would rather leave it entirely. One has the idea that one can enter into the spirit with a few transformations of one's ordinary concepts.

Now it must be emphasized that compared to what is actually the case, what I now want to describe, what is actually the path of spiritual research, the study of chemical, physical and biological methods is easy and that progress on the path of spiritual research requires patience and perseverance, depending on the various human talents that are available for this purpose, may take a shorter or longer time, but nevertheless, even if there is a strong aptitude for exploring spiritual life, it often takes many years to make any progress in just one or the other direction, even if there is the necessary seriousness of purpose in exploring spiritual life. Thus, what can be given as a description of spiritual research paths appears relatively simple; but to really put it into practice requires patience and perseverance and, above all, a strong inner energy and a certain courage of thought.

I would like to start with a comparison in which I want to show what it takes to get from the physical or mental world into the spiritual world. Each of you knows that if you have learned something by heart and recite it, it is good if you do not observe yourself while reciting it. If you want to listen to yourself reciting something you have memorized, you will stutter and get stuck. The spiritual activity that unfolds when reciting a poem cannot be fully experienced if you want to stand by as a self-observer.

So we know that self-observation is difficult. Nevertheless, not only that one observes oneself when reciting a poem, but that it is necessary to enter the spiritual world by observing one's own thinking, feeling and willing. There are philosophers who describe it as a characteristic of the human soul life that one cannot observe oneself in this way. For these philosophers, of course, the spiritual scientific path is from the outset an impossible one, because they understand what one can already do as a peculiarity of the soul, and what one must first learn, they consider as an impossibility. If you want to become a spiritual researcher, you have to learn not only to observe yourself when you recite a poem, for example, but also to stand beside yourself, as it were. You must not only achieve this through constant practice, but it is necessary and indispensable to achieve that you evoke the course of thoughts and feelings in the soul and at the same time stand beside them, so to speak.

You see, we in the West do not have the opportunity, nor should we even try, to penetrate the spiritual world in the way that the spirits of the Orient do. The methods of the West must be different from those of the Orient. But still, we can sometimes listen when an Oriental, who by his very nature is much more attuned to self-observation than we are, says something.

In an excellent essay that was recently published by Rabindranath Tagore, who is well known for receiving the Nobel Prize for his poetry, there is a brief comment about introspection that is meaningful because it comes from the soul of someone who is more familiar with introspection of the soul than most Western thinkers are. He – Tagore – points out the necessity of self-observation in relation to public culture as well; but he says: I know how difficult it is to observe oneself, and I know that the one who is drunk stubbornly denies his drunkenness; if he had self-observation, he would hardly be able to deny it. Of course, this is not only the case for the drunkard, it is the case for people in general, that self-observation, penetrating into what is within themselves, causes them enormous difficulties. But it must happen if one really wants to come to knowledge of the spiritual world.

And so, anyone who wants to penetrate into the spiritual world must increasingly learn to separate what takes place in thoughts, feelings and will from what is actually in him, and to live in a different element by putting aside what is otherwise in him and observing. In this way he must come to enter from the ordinary life of the soul into the experience of the spiritual. One must, as it were, expel, as one recites the poem when observing oneself, one must expel thinking, feeling and willing, and one thereby comes into the position - as strange and paradoxical as it may sound at first - if one does it again and again the energy with which one otherwise drives the chemical method in the outer world, one comes to develop in a completely healthy way what one can call 'having I-consciousness', having self-consciousness, but not in one's thinking, feeling and willing, but outside of it.

And when such spiritual scientific methods are applied, it becomes real, a reality, that the person can say to themselves: I am outside of my body. This consciousness, which is then an experience, which is then a view, this consciousness penetrates, that the person no longer feels with his I in his thinking, feeling and willing, as always, but that he stands outside of it and that he now knows: I am still a being, even when I have left thinking, feeling and willing, which is initially dependent on my body!

What still seems grotesque to so many people today, what they ridicule, that one can lay aside one's body and stand beside it, is a fact for him who advances in spiritual research in the appropriate way. It is a fact, although one does not, I might say, stand outside the physical body in a duplication of it, but rather in the spiritual. This can be achieved through a life that only takes place in the spirit. Just as the workings of chemical methods are in space, so too is what the spiritual researcher must undertake, something that takes place in the spirit.

One can see from the way even soul researchers talk about the ego that this ego only turns its outside to them. After Ziehen had given very beautiful and meaningful lectures on physiological psychology, which were meaningful from a purely scientific point of view, he said to his audience: “Gentlemen, the ego is by no means something very simple. When you think about what the ego is, what comes to mind?” First of all, your body comes to mind, then your relationships with the outside world, then your property and ownership, then perhaps your names and titles – he leaves out the medals – then all the experiences of your past come to mind and so on. In short, Theodor Ziehen mentions everything that can actually tell us very little about the self. Then he says: However, metaphysicians often say that the ego is something special in addition to what comes to mind, such as names, titles and so on, but that this is just a fiction. Again an example where a researcher who is to be taken very seriously – I am also full of appreciation and admiration for him – explains the scientifically researchable in an exemplary manner, but points out that one cannot find the spiritual in this field; but then also discredits this spiritual as a fiction.

To reduce this spiritual element, this I, to a single word does not prove at all that, just because one can reduce it to a single word, one also knows something about the nature of the I. Every person knows how to pronounce the word “sleep”; but the fact that one can pronounce the word “sleep” does not indicate what the nature of the soul is between falling asleep and waking up. One only speaks about something that presents itself as a gap, that actually presents itself as something unfilled in life.

It is the same when one speaks about the self: one points to something about which one has no view. When one sees a colored area and the color stops in the middle of the area, one sees a black dot. One actually sees nothing, one designates nothingness. So when you say the little word “I” in your ordinary consciousness, you don't mean anything in particular; you almost mean a nothing, actually just a spiritual point. But if you expand your consciousness by becoming your own spectator, as I have indicated, then you learn to recognize something very meaningful about this ego, you learn to recognize that what the essence of the ego is is basically always misinterpreted by ordinary consciousness.

I will use a comparison to suggest how the sense of self, with all that belongs to it, is misinterpreted in ordinary consciousness. Imagine someone were to examine the human bodily constitution and find that lungs and air belong together. Because lungs and air belong together in a certain way, he would declare that the air inhaled and exhaled in the lungs actually came into being in the lungs; the lungs gradually develop in the human body in such a way that they generate air. Of course, one cannot arrive at this error, because through physical science one finds that one not only exhales air that arises from the lungs, but that one first inhales air in order to be able to exhale it. One can only arrive at this through contemplation.

In this way one acquires an understanding of how one is to relate to one's self. Just as the air does not develop in the lungs, so the self cannot develop out of the human body. Just as one draws air into the lungs and releases it again, so the I is present in the objective spiritual life. The lungs are not the source of air, nor is the body the source of the I. The I is taken up into the body and, as it were, exhaled out of the body as the human being passes through the gate of death. But to recognize this, one must first have a real insight into the I.

Through the true self-observation described above, and not through the self-observation of which mystics speak, one must come to develop the sense of self in the spiritual, outside of the physical. Then one knows that one has grasped what is absorbed by the body but is not produced by the body. Only when one has grasped this does one have an idea of what the human being actually receives with his body; only then does one arrive at valid ideas about what can be summarized by the words inheritance and so on. Then one can speak biologically knowing that what is inherited from one's ancestors does not develop an I. It does not develop an I in the course of life, but is there to receive an I that must descend from the spiritual world.

The I must be received by the body; just as air enters the lungs from the outer space, so the I comes from the spirit. The I and that which is accomplished through the I can never be inherited in any way, even if it is absorbed and thus becomes dependent on the physical. Air is also absorbed into the lungs and, depending on the function of the lungs and their constitution, the lungs experience life in the way that lungs can experience life. Likewise, what we have inherited from our parents as formative forces is experienced by the I; in this way the I presents itself in such a way that it dresses in its activities in what we have inherited from our ancestors; but one only comes to an idea of what the true relationship between the physical and the spiritual I is if one acquires the corresponding direct insight.

Spiritual research is a progression from ordinary judgment to such judgment, which is acquired through seeing consciousness, if I may use the term, although it is often misunderstood. Spiritual research can only be attained by progressing from ordinary judgment to the seer's judgment, before which the spiritual is spread out in a spiritual external world just as the physical is spread out before the physical senses of man. If one applies what I have described, self-observation, one comes so far as to know through direct insight that what lives in the human being comes into his body from a spiritual world and goes out again through death. One comes to recognize that which is not bodily in the body, but is spirit, and which, in connection with the body, brings about the human soul, the feeling and the will.

But one must go further if one wants to come to a real knowledge of the spiritual life. One arrives, so to speak, at a clear distinction between the bodily-mental and the spiritual, but one does not arrive at a concrete view of the spiritual; one arrives at self-awareness, at what the spiritual self is, but one does not arrive at a view of the world in which this spiritual self lives, just as the bodily person lives in the physical environment. For this to happen, not only must self-observation be present, but the whole life of the human being's imagination must also be changed in a different direction.

In our ordinary life, our mental life proceeds in such a way that we orient ourselves to the processes that take place outside in space and time. We rightly set up our ideas in such a way that they follow the spatial and temporal course of beings and processes. Above all, anyone who wants to observe the spiritual must get away from being guided by external spatial and temporal processes. And he can free himself from this by introducing the will into the human life of ideas to an ever greater extent. This is achieved by tearing oneself away from the self-evident life of ideas of everyday life. In order to tear oneself away from the ordinary course of ideas, exercises of the soul, patiently and persistently spent over many years, are also necessary. This is achieved by systematically making such images in the soul that only come through one's own will into the soul.

Let us give an extreme case for this: in ordinary life, we are accustomed to first imagining the earlier, then the later. If you just get into the habit of spending at least one or two minutes each day to imagine an event in reverse, so that you imagine the end and then the previous event and so on backwards, a melody, a drama, and so on, then you have to exert a completely different willpower than the one you are used to applying in the physical world. In short, you have to introduce the forceful will into the world of imagination. I have described in detail how to do this in the aforementioned books. One must practise what can truly be called meditative life, a life of imagination that is completely permeated by will and not under the tyranny of the external world.

Take Theodor Zichen again, he says: The soul life proceeds in such a way that it is actually completely dominated by the associations of ideas, by what the person either puts together from the inner connections of the ideas, or what he puts together in space next to each other or in time one after the other in memory, and so on. — In this way Ziehen describes exactly what is not spiritual in the soul. Everything that is subject to association is unspiritual. Whenever one overcomes this association, whenever one does not proceed in such a way that the ideas associate of their own accord, but instead confronts what happens of its own accord, then one surrenders to the spirit, then one introduces the will into the life of ideas and then you notice that you are gradually moving away from that which is only connected to the body in the life of the imagination, then you notice that you are moving away from it, but also that something completely new is gradually moving into the life of the imagination.

One notices that one is not drawn into a fantastic world, a world that, because it has detached itself from the outside world, links one idea to the next in arbitrariness, but that one really experiences that through something that arises from a completely different side, namely the spiritual side, one also links one idea to the next with necessity - not by imagine a table when the chair is not present, as one necessarily does in the world of the senses under the influence of the external world of the senses - then one gradually becomes aware, when one has first brought the imagination to free itself from bodily compulsion by introducing the will, then one becomes aware that something settles into the inner life of the imagination, which, as a purely spiritual impulse, elevates one above arbitrariness. Arbitrariness is only the way. One frees oneself by introducing the will into the world of ideas.

But by going through this practice, one goes from merely shaping meditative thought complexes to the point that a spiritual necessity creeps in, which links one thought to another in the same way that only the external spatial sequence links one thought to another in the sensory world. Dear honored attendees, then one is in the process – I may use the expression, although it can be easily misunderstood, but it is only meant as I have explained it – not only to get something into one's ideas through external sensory perception, but to experience spiritual inspiration flowing into one's ideas. One must not take this expression superstitiously, but in the sense of inner, spiritual experience. Only then does one stand in the concrete spiritual world; whereas before, one only has imaginations, only that which can depend on one's own will, now flows into the soul life, in that the life of imagination has become something completely different, in that one has freed oneself from the merely soul experience, now the spiritual experience flows in.

I know very well what the objections to such a thing are. I know very well what objections can be raised against it; but anyone who has become familiar with this outpouring of the spiritual world into the world of imagination over decades also knows how to connect a real concept with the word inspiration, and knows that what is referred to here as inspiration may, in the true sense of the word, be placed alongside external perception from the spiritual side. Above all, he knows one thing: you can come and tell him that if you believe that something is inspired into your ideas, then you are deluding yourself, but only your known ideas, which you have absorbed here and there, come back to you as reminiscences, and because you do not know how these things have flowed into your imaginative life, you believe that they come to you from a spiritual world.

I know how much weight such an objection carries, but anyone who knows what is at the root of it, and has known it through years of experience, knows one thing above all: no prejudice can this field, for the simple reason that he has experienced it too often, when he is truly devoted to inspiration, that the things one comes to know in the spiritual realm always turn out differently than one's preconceptions assume.

These are precisely the most meaningful experiences and the most important spiritual experiences: You accept your spiritual path to some spiritual being or phenomenon, and lo and behold, you may have formed certain ideas about what it should look like in the spiritual world, based on the ordinary world, on what you can perceive externally through the senses, through the ordinary mind; these ideas will always be proven wrong.

And when one really experiences what flows into the world of ideas from the spiritual side, then one knows, especially after observing the most blatant cases, that one cannot get what one quite unexpectedly gets from the spiritual side into the realm of ideas from the sensory side , then you know that you are really surprised by everything you have not only experienced but that was possible to experience when you enter the spiritual world, just as you are surprised in the sensory world when you have a new experience that you have not yet experienced.

Thus one can, by means of spiritual experiences, very well distinguish these spiritual experiences from everything that can be experienced in the sensory world. What matters is to understand correctly what I mean by the words, which every spiritual researcher knows well: things always turn out differently than one expects, and in countless cases they turn out differently. This is how one can enter the spiritual world when one enters into what I have described as self-observation from this side into the spiritual world. Then one enters into a concrete world; one does not just speak of a spiritual world in general. One then knows that pantheistic contemplation of the spirit is no more valuable than if someone would disdain to look at individual plants, animals and minerals and would always just say: “Nature, nature, nature,” instead of studying them individually. One would not feel enlightened, but would simply say to the person concerned: ‘You just know nothing about individual plants and entities of the different kingdoms of nature.’ But one considers him to be particularly spiritually advanced who does not distinguish individual spirits and spiritual processes, but speaks generally pantheistically of spirit and spirit and spirit.

Now, in addition to what is achieved through this second principle, which I have characterized in principle, there is another thing that is added to the achievement with regard to the ego. Through true self-observation, one comes to recognize the ego as a spiritual being that is distinct from the bodily beings. Now, by adding real spiritual insight to self-observation, one learns to recognize that everything that is experienced in the self between birth or, let us say, conception and death, is experienced by the self, and that this is not only dominated by such forces and impulses as lie within life between birth and death; through insight one comes to see beyond birth and death. We now know that just as when water rises in waves, wind has struck it from the outside, we know that what happens in the human emotional and imaginative life between birth and death is influenced by the forces with which the soul was connected in the time before it united with the physical body.

We get to know prenatal life through direct observation, we get to know the life that follows death through observation, we learn to recognize that although this I in the body expresses itself in the known phenomena of the soul for the external sense world, but that in the subconscious is further developed, which is the eternal in human nature, that these impulses for the eternal already exist in the physical body, but are covered by the physical body, that through death, enriched by the experience of physical experience, the soul moves out through the gate of death. For one does not only learn to speculate about the eternal in human nature in this way, but one learns, by becoming free, to recognize that which passes through births and deaths.

Thus spiritual science is the kind of research that does not develop speculation about the spiritual life, not a mere philosophy about the spiritual life, but that develops spiritual insight. The one who has this spiritual vision and has thus become a spiritual researcher can speak about the spiritual world – the spiritual world in which the soul is between death and a new birth – in the same way that one is able to speak through physical consciousness about the sensory world in which the human being is between birth and death.

And this spiritual insight, even if the individual does not acquire it at first, it leads to the fact that the spiritual researcher is able to describe the phenomena of the human soul life in such a way that they become understandable. And, following on from this, it can be said that one does not have to be a spiritual researcher, a seer, to find the result of spiritual research plausible. Anyone who picks up a watch after being told how a watchmaker made it will also recognize the product of human intelligence , human ability, even if he has not himself spent time in a watchmaker's shop watching how a watchmaker makes a watch. Not everyone needs to be a seer to recognize the results of seeing from an honest sense of truth, but one must develop a seer's awareness. Just as one must develop the skill to make a watch in order to make a watch, one must develop the visionary abilities to be able to say about the spiritual world what the other person can judge by common sense when the visionary says it.

But this healthy human understanding must not be affected by all kinds of prejudices, which believe that they are standing on the firm ground of natural science, but have gained nothing from this except what can be gained from the fact that natural science points to a supersensible realm, but in turn discredits this realm by saying: true science consists in the study of the physical world.

What is important to emphasize is that spiritual research leads into a real world that surrounds us just as the physical world surrounds us. Before spiritual science, a world arises in the same way as the physical human body arises when it was previously blind and it is operated on, the physical world of the eye; in the same way, the spiritual world arises for the spiritual person. Through self-observation, man learns to recognize what is eternal in him. He learns to recognize through spiritual vision how the eternal in him is related to the eternal in the external world. The eternal learns to recognize the eternal. This shows us that, in addition to what the human being experiences as the mere soul, we have to add, from spiritual science, the spiritual, just as we have to add, from physiological science, the physical to what the human being also experiences, from the side of the body, as soul. The soul stands, as it were, between the spiritual and the physical, so that it experiences the transitory, temporal on one side, and the eternal on the other.

Indeed, my dear attendees, through spiritual science, what we might call the riddle of immortality really does enter a field that is strictly scientific. Today, many people still consider this to be impossible; just as there was a time when people refused to penetrate from the soul to the body, to a real dissection, so today they still refuse to penetrate from the soul to the spirit. What Galileo and others achieved, namely to penetrate from the soul to the body, spiritual science has to accomplish on the other side, to penetrate from the soul to the spirit, not only in an abstract way, but in such a way that one really also recognizes that as soon as he frees himself in his imagination from the body – through seership or by passing through the gate of death, he enters into a real spiritual world – that he then finds himself among concrete spiritual beings and spiritual processes, as here among concrete sensory beings and sensual processes.

The next lecture will deal with the details. For now, it only remains for me to say that what is revealed by this method of spiritual insight can truly be placed alongside the ordinary scientific path, which is used today for the knowledge of external nature, without being hindered by any kind of fear. Particularly when one really learns to recognize natural science, then one finds that piece by piece that which spiritual insight offers is confirmed by natural science, and one learns to recognize the fact that it can become so meaningful for the soul. If one stands only on the ground of natural science and is captivated by the successful methods of natural science, then one can understandably come to the prejudice that, because these methods have become so sure, so sure in nature, the study of the spirit is impossible. But if one becomes acquainted with spiritual science in its details and does not remain shod in leather, then as a spiritual researcher one also comes to recognize natural science. One comes to know something quite different from what the natural scientist can come to know compared to the spiritual scientist.

The natural scientist very easily comes to reject spiritual research, but the spiritual researcher never comes to reject natural research; he will see the scientific facts in the right light and be able to recognize their significance when he knows that the scientific facts are correctly understood, only that they appear from higher points of view as emanations of spiritual life. Those who penetrate spiritual research in this way will also be freed from the prejudice that spiritual research could be detrimental to any religious confession.

In particular, the religious side very easily makes common cause against what wants to be a new spiritual element in our cultural life. If people recognized the necessity of placing spiritual science alongside natural science, if they recognized the basic character of spiritual research, if they recognized that it strives for the human being as a spiritual being, just as biology and physiology strive for the knowledge of the human being as a physical being, going beyond the merely soul-related, then they would not believe that this spiritual science could be detrimental to any religious confession. One would find that while the materialistic creed, which has been widely adopted in modern times as a result of the external scientific approach, can very easily, but not necessarily, become a religious creed, spiritual science, on the other hand, leads man back to the spirit [and he] thereby - because he can now also gain knowledge of the spirit - will turn again to religious life, to which the longing of many more people in the present day goes than people are actually aware of.

However, even today we still experience many misunderstandings in this area. In an excellent essay in the “Christian World”, Dr. Rittelmeyer recently pointed out what I understand as spiritual science, how it can provide a foundation for religious belief, and how it can open up a path even for those who, through misleading research into nature, have been led away from their religious confession, to return to it. All sorts of objections were raised from a side that also enjoys a great deal of respect. Above all, because it is important today, I would like to mention one point very briefly; the objection was raised: Yes, this spiritual research requires that a person perform arbitrary soul exercises in order to find his way into the spiritual world through arbitrary development of his soul. That is a wrong – that was even remarked – a dangerous, a tempting way; because one would actually enter into the spiritual life only involuntarily, when it presents itself of its own accord. Yes, that was mentioned, that the disposition to enter into the spirit is as specific a disposition as the musical or mathematical disposition.

One should understand that man can find himself as a spiritual researcher, that it cannot be a special talent to come to the spirit, but must be a general human predisposition. But if it is objected that, like a grace, spiritual research must also come, the one who says this does not understand the essential of the spiritual. Because they do not find the spirit in the soul, today's soul researchers describe the soul life as if the ideas socialized themselves because the body forces us to do so. They do this because one is dependent on the body. One reaches the spirit when one becomes independent of what the body accomplishes. One reaches the spirit by breaking free in freedom from the merely physical life. No matter how much mysticism one can muster, no matter how much one can talk about the soul, if it is not gained through the free exercises of the soul, through the active life of the soul, then it is only experienced or acquired in a bodily or lowly-soul way.

The truly spiritual begins where one frees oneself from the body and can only be explored by gaining knowledge through freedom, through the activity of the will, and through the kind of activity that arises from freedom. Only by becoming free from the body can one attain the consciousness that otherwise remains in the depths of the soul life in man.

But the consciousness that remains in the depths of the soul life in ordinary experience can be explored, and what is freed when a person passes through the gate of death, which is otherwise covered by the soul experiences dominated by the body. So one can say that such an objection actually provides the proof, as well as a side that often finds recognition has no concept, no idea at all, of the real spiritual, as one describes the soul, which is dominated by the body, as the spiritual.

Now, my dear audience, such sides are often, such currents are often, which in a completely misleading way make front against the spiritual science, as I tried to characterize it again from the most diverse points of view. This spiritual science itself cannot relate to other directions in this way; it knows that it does not need to exclude anything else, that it does not need to make a front against others in order to maintain itself. This spiritual science, which seeks the spirit in the soul in the manner indicated through genuine science, just as the physical science investigates the processes of the body in relation to the experience of the soul, this spiritual science can say: Do not be misled, enter into the natural science, recognize everything that the natural scientist has to say! You will understand it no worse than he does. You will understand better than he does, and you will do complete justice to him if you open yourselves up to what he says.

Spiritual science is not shared by the condemnation that one finds again and again among the so-called monists, who always want to confront themselves, despite their position being very shaky, on the firm ground of natural science, and who avoid the spiritual because they believe that one cannot engage with spiritual science because no valid concepts exist for it, or the like. No, the scientific way of thinking, which at the same time wants to be a worldview, provides narrow concepts that do not lead into the spiritual; spiritual science provides concepts that not only lead into the spiritual, but even into natural science. Therefore, it says that man acquires as much natural science as possible. Spiritual science has nothing to fear from it; on the contrary, spiritual science will just as little describe a religious path to anyone as something that he should avoid.

Spiritual science will tell everyone: If you are equipped with the ideas about the spirit that true spiritual science can give you, then your soul is also suited, through the strength and power of these ideas, to follow the religious path with all its intensity, to take in what your religion wants to give you in its revelations in the true sense of the word. It is not religious prejudice, which is not really religious but rather a prejudice of the representatives of religion, that needs to be adopted by spiritual science. This prevents one from dealing with something else, which even finds the other path tempting, but says: Go to church and religion, they will be able to give you, by virtue of your spiritual science, what they would otherwise not be able to give you if you understand spiritual science in truth. Go into life. That which one acquires through spiritual science gives such ideas and concepts that they do not make the ideas of practical life the same as they are today, where people consider themselves practical when they are mere fantasists.

Spiritual science, even if one is not a seer, will give the ideas of practical life flexibility, direction, energy, so that one becomes more practical for ordinary external life. It does not turn one away from external life. It gives one moral direction and support, it even gives skills for external techniques. Go into life, not into asceticism! Life will not destroy spiritual science, but on the contrary, this life will confirm spiritual science everywhere, and I could add: for my part, go to Johannes Müller yourself. I will not run the risk of saying: Johannes Müller's path is a dangerous, tempting one, as Johannes Müller recently wrote, that one should avoid the spiritual scientific path because it is a temptation. I will not say to anyone: Avoid the path of Johannes Müller! Go to him! You will find the right point of view precisely when you go there with spiritual science. No one who approaches spiritual science with true understanding will be deterred from anything, for spiritual science is intended to lead into the spiritual life in such a way that the rest of life, which is ultimately nothing other than the manifestation of the spiritual, can be more fully understood, more insightfully experienced, more energetically felt and more keenly sensed.

What spiritual science can pour into the human mind and what must become useful for the longings of humanity, which can be perceived today as the most significant longings, but which are often only in the subconscious, if one has true observation of people, this attitude, which can be placed in the human heart to satisfy these longings, I would like to describe as follows: I have said: In the broadest circles, people are dominated by the prejudice that du Bois-Reymond once expressed in the 1870s, but which still haunts souls today; that science can only extend to the sensual, that it cannot explore the supersensible, can investigate the supersensible, but that science ends where the supersensible life, the spiritual life, the eternal actually begins. Spiritual science should show humanity that the opposite attitude corresponds to true insight into world conditions, that one must rather say: even natural science does not penetrate into the true deeper life of nature unless this natural science is permeated by the spirit.

But if we recognize in science itself the necessity of being permeated by the spirit, then we will no longer say that science stops where the supersensible begins, where the spirit begins, but rather the other way around: science of nature also dies, ceases, when we come out of the spirit with our concepts. Even in natural science itself, one needs the spirit for real understanding. Unfortunately, however, for the sake of cognitive comfort, one has gone through a peculiar process in recent decades. One has said to oneself, something I could compare to when someone said: There I have a tree in front of me, it grows and thrives. It draws certain forces out of the earth; but the forces that it draws out are covered by the earth. I will pull the tree out of the earth so that I have it all before me, then I can see it all.

This is how people who think in terms of natural science have done it. They have said: If we look at nature, we do not understand it; so it is rooted in something. We uproot it, we pull it out of its soil, then we survey it. But that natural science, which uproots itself in this way, is like a tree that has been torn out of the ground by the root; it is killed, it dies. And knowledge that is uprooted from spiritual knowledge dies. When the prejudice that is associated with a saying such as that of du Bois-Reymond has passed away: “Where the supersensible begins, science ends,” one will come to the realization and the true attitude towards the spirit and its relationship to man, when one will then substitute the other for du Bois-Reymond's saying: Where knowledge wants to disown the spirit, where knowledge wants to step out of the supersensible and, uprooted, wants to grasp nature, that is where knowledge dies. Not that science stops where the supersensible begins, but where the supersensible ends and knowledge is still sought, that is where this knowledge itself is killed, that is where all striving for knowledge dies.

Dear attendees, it has recently become common practice in certain circles to speak of the unconscious in relation to the human soul. What was described in the lecture I gave the day before yesterday as spiritual and supersensible is, as I have shown, sensed and longed for by a great many souls at the present time. And since the very prejudices against the study of the supersensible, of which I have spoken, happen, but since one still has an indefinite feeling that there is something beyond the sensual, one speaks in the present time, one speaks more in the negative sense about this beyond and, in contrast to what consciously enters into the human soul life in everyday life, one speaks of that which remains hidden, and also unconscious or the like.

Now, if the history of the development of ideas about the unconscious in recent decades were to be discussed, it would be possible to talk about it for hours alone. But that is not my task today. I will just mention in the introduction that, although a lot has been said about the unconscious by individual personalities in the past, the term “unconscious” was used in a broader sense by Eduard von Hartmann, who is therefore often referred to as the philosopher of the unconscious, to describe what is hidden from the senses and the immediate soul life and is connected with human existence. And perhaps I may point out by way of introduction, and only hint at, that I myself at the time, in the 1880s and early 1890s of the last century, tried to come to terms with Eduard von Hartmann's views on the unconscious in human mental life, on the unconscious in the world in general.

I have reported on those discussions, which [I] also had in personal acquaintance with Eduard von Hartmann, in the second book of the second year of the journal “Das Reich”, which appears here in Munich. Perhaps it is easiest for me to begin by expressing how the spiritual-scientific direction represented here generally relates to the concept of the unconscious if I tie in with the ideas that Eduard von Hartmann had about the unconscious unconscious in human mental life, in nature and in existence in general, because I must first deviate in two respects and have always had to deviate from Eduard von Hartmann's views on this point.

The first is that Eduard von Hartmann points from the sensory, from the soul to an unconscious, to a supernatural, supersensory, but that he was of the opinion that this unconscious could only be reached for human knowledge through logical dissection of what is perceived in nature and in the human soul, that there is no other way to get at this unconscious than in a hypothetical way, by concluding from what one sees and hears and can understand, by concluding from this that there is an unconscious in the world that must always remain an unconscious, a mere hypothetical, in relation to what man can recognize here in his physical body.

In the face of Eduard von Hartmann's opinion, I have always had to put forward the spiritual-scientific one, which consists in the fact that such a hypothetical statement, such a mere logical conclusion about an unconscious, is completely worthless; because ultimately it leads to nothing but to assume that what one deduces so logically could also be otherwise. From the experiences which I permitted myself to describe the day before yesterday and on the basis of which today's consideration is to be built, I always had to conclude from these truly spiritual experiences of the human soul that one can only come to the supersensible through logical thinking, through the hypothetical dissection of the world supernatural, but through direct experience, by bringing the forces slumbering in the soul so vividly into perceptual abilities that one can not only infer the unconscious, but grasp it as such in the same way as one grasps the sensual, the ordinary conscious.

Thus spiritual science penetrates from mere logic to a real vision of the unconscious, the supersensible, for ordinary consciousness. The methods to which the human soul has to submit in order to develop, so to speak, from its foundations, which are unconscious themselves, what one could call... [Gap] I mentioned the day before yesterday the methods by which the human soul can be made to develop out of its unconscious depths what might be called, in Goethean terms, 'spiritual eyes' and 'spiritual ears', 'spiritual organs'. That is one thing: spiritual science, as it is meant here, must relate to the unconscious in a completely different way than any philosophical direction of the present, especially those that are even hypothetically based on the unconscious.

The second point at issue is that Eduard von Hartmann ultimately regards the spiritual element under consideration as unconscious of itself, that is, he believes that although it is possible to arrive at the assumption of a spiritual element behind the sensual existence by means of certain logical conclusions and conditions, one cannot but state, on the basis of the evidence, that it itself is not conscious, that it is unconscious spirit, that consciousness arises from this only when this unconscious spirit embodies itself in the human body and there creates consciousness, which would then be the only consciousness that comes into consideration, and that, in contrast to this, that which lies higher in reality than this consciousness, would be an unconscious. One would then come to see that what man must regard as his actual being of consciousness arises like a wave from an unconscious spiritual life. I believe, esteemed attendees, that it must appear quite unsatisfactory from the outset, although this is of no particular value, if one assumes the spirit but finds it endowed only with unconsciousness, and such a spirit is basically not much more valuable than the unconscious matter. It comes down to the same thing, whether one lets the spirit arise out of unconscious matter or the conscious soul-life out of unconscious spirit; one is always dealing with what I would call a purely natural spirit, with no anchoring of the human soul-spiritual in a related or superordinate soul-spiritual.

But precisely the experience of which I spoke here the day before yesterday, the experience that is based on the life of the soul transformed into spiritual perception, shows that when one penetrates, vividly penetrates, into the world of the spirit , one does not arrive at unconsciousness, but at real beings, which, quite independently of human consciousness, are just as conscious as the human consciousness itself. Indeed, there are degrees of consciousness in the universe that are superordinate to the human.

Dear attendees, today I will undertake the task of giving you a consideration of what borders on the ordinary human soul life in the area that the spiritual science represented here actually designates as the spiritual, as the supersensible; because from such a consideration, I would like to say, many things arise that illustratively lead into an appropriate judgment of what spiritual science has to say about the actual supersensible itself, and besides, it is very close to the present, where so much is said about the unconscious, where one wants to recognize the spiritual precisely in the form of the unconscious, that this spiritual science also speaks about those areas that one would so much like to confuse with the actual area of spiritual science itself.

It happens again and again, despite the fact that for many years I have seized every opportunity here to emphasize the difference between the field to be considered by spiritual science and these border areas. It happens that spiritual science is confused with these border areas. Therefore, it must talk about these border areas. Besides, there is something else. The field of spiritual life, which, when viewed as I described it the day before yesterday, is avoided by very many people today, is seen as a dream, a fantasy, and people prefer to stick to what cannot be achieved through free spiritual knowledge, as spiritual science wants it, rather than through the supersensible, but what is more self-evident. Now the supersensible does indeed flow into the sensory as a revelation; but these revelations of the unconscious supersensible in the sensory can only be judged correctly if one is able to look at them from the point of view of actual spiritual knowledge.

Today I will speak only in spiritual scientific terms about the relevant phenomena, and I hope that it will be understood that not everything can always be said in every single lecture. I may point out that even if I merely discuss these phenomena more or less from a spiritual scientific point of view today, it is understood that what I emphasized the day before yesterday is that what spiritual science tries to recognize is not only not in contradiction to a truly understood scientific result, but that these insights of spiritual science, including those into the unconscious, are confirmed by real, genuine scientific knowledge.

The areas that come into question when talking about the revelations of the unconscious are very broad, and I will only be able to consider, I would like to say, a limited area today, the area that encompasses the interesting, familiar, albeit little researched, disregarded area of field of human dreaming, the world of dreams. I shall also have to consider a field that many people regard as related to the field of dreams, but which is not really so. This field is of great interest to many people today who are seeking the path to the spirit. It is the field of sleepwalking and all related phenomena.

I will then have to point out another area of the subconscious or superconscious that also extends into ordinary human life: it is the area of fantasy creations, poetry, and artistic creation. And I will then have to point to a broad area, even if it can only be briefly considered today: a broad area that approaches man half consciously and half unconsciously, but no less significant for human life, the area we refer to as “human destiny”, in which one might not even believe that so much unconsciousness lives in it. And then I will have to point out the area that is the actual field of spiritual science, which also remains unconscious for ordinary consciousness, but whose revelations shed light on all other areas of the unconscious. I will have to talk about the I will have to speak about the realm of intuitive consciousness, which I would prefer to avoid calling the realm of truly developed seership, although that would be correct.

I will first try to give a brief characterization, without going into any explanations, of how these individual areas, from which the unconscious reveals itself, approach the ordinary human consciousness. No one should hope that spiritual science is willing to look into the realm of dreams as some amateur or superstitious people do. But spiritual science seeks to look into this realm in such a way that it can itself explain and reveal many a mysterious aspect of the life of the human soul. Everyone is familiar with this realm of dreams, with the surging dreams that a person remembers in their waking life and has an inkling that they reveal themselves from an unconscious realm, that they occur like images of memory so that they can be grasped to a certain extent.

But everyone also senses that a person dreams much more than they remember, that the dream life permeates a much larger part of the sleep life than is believed, because a large part of the dreams experienced is actually forgotten. The external characteristics of the dream life are extraordinarily interesting. At first it seems as if the dreams undulate up and down without any inner lawfulness. But one only needs to bring a few categories of dream life to mind and one will see that a certain lawfulness prevails in this dream life, even if it is only superficially observed at first.

First of all, there are what some philosophers have called sensory stimulus dreams. In them one becomes aware that the soul-spiritual life of man stands in a different relationship to the environment than in ordinary consciousness when dreaming. In them one becomes aware that in a certain way - now speaking superficially - the normal sense life is switched off, but not every language that the senses speak inwardly to the soul also ceases. One only needs to think of an example from the realm of sensory-stimulus dreams to see that, although the receptivity of the senses to the external world does not need to cease, the way in which a person otherwise communicates with the world through his senses is not present in these dreams.

You have your watch lying next to you and you dream that you hear, for example, a rider trotting by. In the waking state, you would... [Gap] – By waking up, one realizes that it was the striking of the clock that symbolized itself into the dream. In the waking state, one would have placed oneself in relation to the environment in a normal way through the sense of hearing; in the dream, what is ordinary sensory perception transforms into a symbolic process. In principle, every sense can perceive, and a very dramatic action can be linked to a sensory perception. But you will always notice that the sensory perception in the dream is in some way symbolically, pictorially reinterpreted. An ordinary sensory perception does not live in the dream life.

In the same way, bodily processes can be symbolized in dreams. We dream of a boiling oven, wake up and know that this dream has been caused by an unusually rapid heartbeat. We experience moods of the soul, reminiscences of life, things that may lie far back in the past, coming to life in dreams. We also experience dreaming things that may surprise us greatly. Everyone is familiar with these different categories of dream life. If we want to enter into a characteristic of dream life, as we want to do later, one thing must be particularly clearly noted: it is clear that dreams lack two sides of ordinary human experience.

Anyone who follows the dream life will find that dreams lack what we call the logical course of our ideas in our ordinary conscious daily life. The dream excludes logic. Sometimes one would like to contradict this statement; but the contradiction would not stand up to close observation. A dream can proceed logically; but then the logical course is not brought about by the application of the logical power in the time of dreaming, but rather we dream some event that we have once followed logically in itself. We dream along with the logic, but do not reason. This gives the appearance of being able to dream logically. One can dream the logical as reminiscence; but one cannot realize the logical as the power of logical reasoning.

The other characteristic is that moral standards and moral judgment are absent from our relationship to dream images and also from the genesis of dream images. Everyone knows that in dreams they do things about which their conscience is silent, which they would condemn, would never do if they actually happened in their waking lives. This is significant for the assessment of the world of dreams: logic and moral judgment are actually excluded from dream life. The other thing that is of real importance is that while we dream, we are in the same relationship to our environment as we are in dreamless sleep.

This is very important. In dreamless sleep we experience nothing of what is going on around us through our senses, nor do we experience anything of what is happening in our own body or what else wants to flow out of this body into the soul life. In a sense, we withdraw into the soul life, which initially remains unconscious, in dreamless sleep. If the dream images flow into this dreamless sleep, our relationship to the environment does not change. This is essential. We can speak of sensory stimulus dreams themselves, but what affects us through the senses does not do so through the process that takes place in the senses, but much more inwardly affects the human soul life; it works in such a way that the sensual is already symbolized, that it is already in a certain way spiritually transformed. We do not enter into a relationship with our environment through dreams in the same way as through rational sensory perception, and we do not do so with our own body either. We do not experience the conditions in our body in the same way as we experience them when we are awake; we experience them in a transformed way, in a way that is shaped by the soul. We experience them in a symbolized way or something similar, and that is the essential thing in dream life: that it conjures all kinds of things into consciousness, but that the person always enters into an equally closed relationship with their environment, despite dreaming, as in dreamless sleep.

This is, on the surface, the reason why we are always able to put the dream into the right perspective in its course in our waking day life [and] why we cannot be deceived by the dream into thinking that it has any meaning within our waking day life, that it sets up any unjustified claims in practical life. From this point of view, the very characteristic of a healthy psychic life is that we are not in a position to place the dream in the wrong context in our waking daily life. While the dream itself does not reason or moralize, we are always able to fully establish the logical and moral relationship of the dream itself to our waking daily life.

This is what distinguishes the dream in relation to its relationship to waking life from all personal experiences that one can now have with the second kind of unconscious, with the somnambulistic phenomena and all that goes with it, the hypnotic phenomena, the phenomena of mediumship and so on, and so on. This area is one that is of particular interest to the present day, because it is believed that in the abnormal phenomena that come to light, a gateway can be found out of the ordinary life of the senses, a place where something unknown can be glimpsed and revealed in the ordinary life of the soul.

And so it happens that people who are not only to be taken seriously as scientific and other researchers believe that one can approach the true spiritual through research in this field, or also that true researchers - sometimes great researchers in their field - because they also have the general yearning, they judge wrongly that which can be summarized in the wide field of somnambulant phenomena, and believe that by observing these somnambulant phenomena they can really approach a spiritual life in the beyond.

Now, in the realm of somnambulism and related phenomena – and I am mentioning everything related here – one has to distinguish between everything that arises in a visionary, hallucinatory way from the inner life of the soul, so that one can judge: it arises from the inner life of the soul. Even Eduard von Hartmann was unable to distinguish the image that appears in a dream from that which, for example, is a hallucination. And so he says that every dream image has something of a hallucination. But there is a fundamental difference between a dream image and a hallucination: the person, in their waking consciousness, has full control over the dream image, and is always able to integrate it correctly into the ordinary course of their waking daily life. A hallucination, on the other hand, takes away the ability to relate to it objectively. It takes control of the person's consciousness. The same applies to a vision. And the fact that they occur simultaneously means that something is taken from the person of that power which makes it possible to integrate what arises in the right way into waking day life. ... [space] The illusory character of dreams.

But this is the essence of hallucination: logic is silent, the hallucinating person combines the matter with the waking day life and is not able, by succumbing to the hallucination, to place what occurs in the hallucination in the right way into the course of the waking day life. We speak of another form of somnambulism when a person is able not only to have hallucinations and visions arising from within himself, but when he changes his sensory life in a certain way so that things become perceptible to him through this sensory life, by analogy with this sensory life, that would otherwise not be perceptible.

One may think of these phenomena as one wills – I do not want to go into a discussion of principle of these phenomena, nor into the question of whether one is justified in ascribing a scientific character to what is accepted in this field in the broadest circles. What matters to me is to show you how, regardless of the objective justification, respected researchers want to gain insight into the supernatural world through this field! It may be said that, however one may feel about these things, there are people who are to be taken very seriously indeed, who are clear about the fact that certain people have the ability to perceive things in their environment that are not perceived through ordinary sensory activity, in the broad field of “remote viewing” and thought transfer.

All this is well known today. They belong here, and I will show by a particular example how a researcher who is to be taken seriously in the highest sense believed that it was precisely through the development of human personalities, I might say to a refined sensuality, to an increased sensuality, that he could approach the other world, the unconscious, the supersensible. Rarely has anything in this field caused such a stir as the fact that Sir Oliver Lodge, who is known throughout the world as a natural scientist to be taken very seriously, has written a thick book about a field that must certainly be counted among the somnambulant phenomena by the spiritual science represented here, but which he has taken as a way to enter the supersensible world. Without committing myself to an explanation, I will first describe what happened to Sir Oliver Lodge.

Oliver Lodge's son fell at the French front during the course of this war. The remarkable thing was – and Sir Oliver Lodge describes all of this and everything related to it in his book in such a way that one gets the impression from every page: Here a person is describing with the conscientiousness of a scientific method. He draws on everything that somehow demands scientific caution. The strange thing was that even before his son fell, Sir Oliver Lodge received a message from the Americans that a medium had said that a long-dead friend of Sir Oliver Lodge would take care of him during an event that would befall Sir Oliver Lodge's son. At first, this was a very vague message, because, of course, it could be interpreted in any direction. One could say: Sir Oliver Lodge's son had gone to war. Anyone can fall there, and any friendly, superstitious side can now send a message that is as vague as possible to Sir Oliver Lodge. Sir Oliver Lodge could have interpreted this to mean that his son's life was in danger and that a deceased friend from the supernatural world would protect his son.

The other interpretation could have been that the son would fall and that the friend who had already preceded him in death years before would take care of him in the supersensible world. It happens all too often that such preliminary communications in this area are left as vague as possible. People are gullible; they are very inclined not to consider whether what is said fits whether the event happens in this or that way. But the son has fallen. The only possible interpretation was that the message was that Sir Oliver Lodge's friend in the other world would take care of the son.

Now all sorts of things were dragged to Sir Oliver Lodge - but he proved them in a truly scientific sense - all sorts of so-called trustworthy somnambulant mediums were dragged in, and many things came out of it, from which Sir Oliver Lodge, despite his scientific mind and conscientiousness, believed he recognized that his deceased son was speaking through the revelations of the mediums, and through him his protective friend. I will not present what Sir Oliver Lodge describes in the thick book, except for one thing, which can be understood in a way that is otherwise referred to as a cross experiment, which really approached people in such a way that it caused a tremendous sensation. One might say that skeptical people were actually led to believe by these things: Something from the beyond, from the soul that has passed through death, must resonate with the Father, with the whole family, wanting to speak through the mediums.

This experiment consisted of a medium describing a photograph taken by the son of Sir Oliver Lodges before he was killed. He had himself photographed with a number of comrades. The medium stated that it was said through her that this photograph was taken. The individual comrades were described in the seating arrangement, and it was said: several pictures were taken of this group. The seating arrangement was changed a little; but in one shot, it was said: the way the son places his hand on his neighbor's shoulder is different from the hand position in the other shot. Now the strange thing was that exactly this photograph was described by the medium. The other strange thing was that, scientifically speaking, no one – neither the medium nor any of the participants – could have known anything about this photograph, because it had not yet been sent from France to England and did not arrive in England until at least a fortnight later. No one could have known anything about it, yet it turned out that the medium's description was absolutely correct in the most remarkable way.

It is perhaps extremely seductive for a scientifically minded person, and it caused the utmost sensation, as mentioned, making even the most skeptical people think. Because people said to themselves: No one could have known anything. There could be no question of thought transference. It could only have come from the soul of Sir Oliver Lodge's son himself. This was an experience that happened not to a gullible spiritualist but to a conscientious naturalist, and it led him to fully acknowledge that the experiment had provided proof that his son's soul had revealed itself from the unconscious into the conscious. We will discuss Sir Oliver Lodge's error later.

I give this example because it belongs to those experiences in which something is perceived that otherwise cannot be perceived from the environment of the external world, through a modification of the sense life. This area includes everything that consists of the fact that what otherwise cannot be known through the senses and the processing of sensory impressions in space and time can be known by the human being. It includes everything that involves looking into such distances that cannot be seen with ordinary eyes, which includes predicting future phenomena and the like.

The third area that comes into consideration when speaking of the revelations of the unconscious is, of course, the area of artistic creation, and everyone is fully justified in being convinced that in the case of poetic, truly poetic or artistic creation, certain impulses from the unconscious or subconscious reveal themselves in the conscious, that what the true artist brings about cannot be explained in its entirety if one only considers what takes place in ordinary consciousness. That is why all those who have given it reasonable thought have come to the conclusion that in artistic creation, another world flows into the world of consciousness, a world that is unconscious to the ordinary world of consciousness. I do not need to characterize this area in detail, not because it is unknown and little observed, but because it is so obvious and so understandable to everyone that the unconscious reveals itself in this area.

A special area where, as already mentioned, one could deny the character of the unconscious, where the conscious and unconscious play together, can be understood as the area of human destiny. We face the guidance of our destiny in such a way that the individual events of this human destiny come about for most people in such a way that they say: Well, one thing and another happens to us. Most people are convinced that what occurs in their lives as fate is more or less due to chance, that it is a series of chance events, and that there is no inner, lawful sequence in the course of this fate.

However, this is contradicted by something else, which may only come to our consciousness in a vague and hazy way, but all too clearly nonetheless. Let us consider the relationship between our destiny and what we actually are in the concrete human life. If, at some point, we examine ourselves with even a modicum of clarity and not get stuck in abstractions, but look concretely at what we actually are, what we are capable of conceiving and giving these conceptions in terms of emotional coloration, and summoning up in terms of will energies, we will find that this actually emerges from our destiny. We look at the course of our destiny and, with clear self-observation, we know: we are a result of this destiny and we would have to deny ourselves if we wanted to deny the identity of our destiny with our soul life. We are nothing other than what fate has made of us, and if we do not want to acknowledge that we are nothing more than a play of forces, then the question of human destiny becomes a mystery.

The answer to the question: Is fate really just a series of coincidences? - depends on the other, how we are able to place ourselves in the whole world context. But from this, at least the suspicion arises in every reasonably sensible soul that in what we consciously experience and what seems to affect us more or less randomly in our destiny, that something prevails in it that remains unconscious for ordinary experience, but what can be brought into consciousness and proves to be something quite different than what occurs in ordinary consciousness.

And finally: the last area is the area of spiritual science, as it is meant here, itself, the area of the actual seeing consciousness, of which I said the day before yesterday that it can be observed in such a way that in it the human being feels as spirit in spirit, just as he feels here in the sense world as a body within the sensual beings and their appearances. The area of which I have said, that man enters when he, through the development of the otherwise hidden powers of his soul, comes to know: I stand with my I in the spirit, while otherwise I only stand in the body; I experience soul-life by separating myself from my bodily life and unfolding a self-conscious soul-life outside the body.

The phenomena and experiences that occur before this actual vision, which can only be called that, must be characterized in more detail, and before I describe the other borderlands, I would like to characterize this area of true vision first, because this is necessary for a better understanding of the other areas. What a person experiences as spiritual experience, as I said the day before yesterday, differs from experiences within the sensory world in that it actually surprises in every detail. One cannot gain any kind of judgment about what one experiences visually through what one has experienced in the sensory world. It always turns out differently than one might expect from what one is able to observe from the sensory world.

But the very way in which the spiritual world appears before one is able to perceive it visually is different from the behavior of the soul in ordinary consciousness. In our ordinary consciousness, we deal with our ideas and concepts. When speaking about the spiritual world, one must also express in concepts and ideas what can be observed. It can easily happen that one confuses ideas and concepts with the actual spiritual experiences that one encounters through the visionary consciousness.

Nevertheless, there is a fundamental difference. We can remember ordinary perceptions, what we experience emotionally in and with the external sense world, in the ordinary sense of the word; but that is precisely a fundamental characteristic of truly experienced spiritual reality: just as it confronts us as spiritual, it cannot be remembered in the ordinary way. One could only believe that one had indulged in a fantastic imagination, that one had experienced something as a reminiscence of life, if one did not know the difference between a reminiscible conception and the non-reminiscible, seen, truly spiritual event. A truly spiritual event is not memorable.

One must not look at such a thing wrongly. Of course one can object: Then no one could speak of such an event; if he did not remember it, he would not be able to communicate it. Yes, just as we can transform an external sense experience into a concept that can then be remembered, so can someone who has trained for this purpose also bring a spiritual experience into the ordinary consciousness and transform it into a concept. The concept can then be remembered. But a concept is being remembered. I want to reject the objection that what is described as spiritual events is only something imagined. It is not, because if it were imagined, it would have to be memorable as such without having to be transformed first; but just as little as the sensual objectivity itself goes with us, so little does the spiritual experience go with us.

When I have seen a tree and walk away, I can again actualize the mental image of the tree in my mind, I can remember by awakening the mental image within me, if I have already awakened it when seeing the tree. If I want to experience the tree again, I have to go back to it. It is the same with spiritual experiences. These do not accompany me on my journey through the soul's life, but only what I have imagined can I remember as an image. Only when one is aware of this can one distinguish between what one has experienced and what one has merely formed as an image.

Another important difference between the visionary experience and ordinary life is that in life, through what one does, one acquires habits. What we have done often becomes a habit. If humans were not given this ability to acquire skills by repeating things over and over again, what would this human life actually be without it?

It is strangely different when, through the exercises I described the day before yesterday, one comes to have spiritual experiences. It turns out that the more often one tries to bring about this spiritual experience, the less one is skilled at having this spiritual experience. I emphasize that this is important. The seer cannot recall the spiritual experience by mere memory; he can only evoke the idea. If he wants to face the spiritual experience a second time, he has to go through the same exercises and create the same conditions so that the spiritual arises as spiritual perception. But when you do this again and again, you experience that it becomes weaker and weaker.

The fact that one cannot acquire something habitual, but that something completely different is necessary to bring about the repetition of the spiritual event, is an experience made by very many who really embark on the path to the spiritual world. It is relatively easy to take a few steps into the spiritual world if one has patience and persistence; however, further steps are as difficult to achieve as I described the day before yesterday. But the first steps are not at all difficult for specially gifted people, and the first experiences come if one pays attention to some of what I have described in “How to Know Higher Worlds?” or in my “Occult Science”.

But such people who have taken the first steps experience that they have had the experiences once, and because they then do not apply the much stronger will, they are no longer able to come to these spiritual experiences, are then very unhappy, are disappointed. This is an experience that many people have. It is absolutely necessary not only to acquire the ability to have such experiences in the first place, but also to have the modified ability to attain them again and again after the event has occurred. Each time you want to attain it, you have new difficulties; each time you have to do more emphasized, different preparations if you want to face the spiritual with the same vividness as the first time.

A third thing that one experiences as a characteristic of the spiritual event is that it is necessary to have a certain quality of soul towards the spiritual experience. This can be cultivated in ordinary life, but very often people have not developed it. A spiritual experience, however strange it may sound, does not actually last very long compared to an ordinary event; it passes by so quickly that usually the situation is that the person has barely mustered the strength to observe the event before it is already over. The thing one must summon in order to have spiritual experiences is presence of mind. This can be trained in ordinary life; but very few people train it to the strength necessary to have experiences in the spiritual world. Those who are accustomed to brooding in their ordinary lives when they want to do something, who consider all sorts of things before making a decision, who are not accustomed to making instinctive decisions and exercising their will to stick to them, who do not train themselves to make such decisions in the presence of a situation, prepare themselves poorly for real experiences in the spiritual world.

On the other hand, what one brings into the spiritual world is what one has already trained in the ordinary world as presence of mind. One can say: the training of presence of mind in relation to sensory events prepares one well to observe as quickly as is necessary in the spiritual realm, and one can truly say: the ordinary reflection of everyday consciousness is of little use to oneself, through the power that is inherent in it, for the perception of the spiritual world. This ordinary reflection, which interposes itself between perception and action, is more harmful than useful for the perception of the spiritual.

The perception of the spiritual in the spiritual realm is similar to what is called a reflex action in natural science. When a fly flies towards my eye, I close my eyelid. In such an instinctive way, in such an exclusion of the usual conscious consideration, in such a return to reflex actions, much of what we need to look around us in the right way in the spiritual world lies. This does not mean, of course, that we should somehow shut out rational consciousness; but it is only after the spiritual perception has been made that what one has experienced can be brought into consciousness.

I could cite many more such peculiarities of the perception of the spiritual world. In such perceptions, in such perceptions that are already completely different from those of ordinary sensory consciousness, the one who knows himself as a spirit lives within the spiritual world that surrounds him, who knows that he as a spirit has self-awareness and that the world that surrounds him is the spiritual world, which he would never have been able to perceive within the body. These things are so.

Now, only someone who has really come to know the spiritual world through such developed vision is able to compare what he is able to observe in the spiritual world with what occurs in the characterized border areas. By mere philosophizing about dreams, however developed the power of judgment may be, one can never really know how dreams enter into ordinary personal life. One is unable to compare the dream that penetrates into ordinary consciousness with anything else; one can only describe it, and everything that natural science has to say about it is very useful, very valuable; but the actual significance of the dream in life can only be grasped by the one who is able to compare the dream with what he gets to know in the seership as the character of the spiritual world. And there he learns in relation to the dream that the dreamer, that is, the actual dreaming being in man, is no different from the one in which the mind consciously knows itself when it is in the spiritual world.

With ordinary consciousness, one cannot judge whether it is the body or the soul that is actually dreaming. Only when one knows how one stands in the spiritual world, when one consciously grasps the self in spirituality, only then can one compare what one observes in oneself and in one's existence in the spiritual world with what occurs in dreams. And then, through direct observation, through direct spiritual insight, one can know: There is nothing else in us that dreams but what is also there when one has developed in fully conscious vision. Thus, through direct observation, one comes to the - if I may express myself pedantically - actual subject of the dream.

But one can learn even more. The one who gradually enters the spiritual world finds that his dream life gradually changes, that he no longer needs to let his dreams wash over him in such a helpless way, but that he can intervene within the course of the dream with his will, directing and guiding the dream images. It is evident, then, once again through direct observation, that what is gradually attained as the spiritual ego is itself the one that intervenes in the dream in a directing and orienting way. It is precisely through this change in dream life, through this observation of oneself becoming a spirit intervening in the dream, that one can see how the actual dreaming is nothing other than what one grasps when one is actually in the spiritual world.

And yet another aspect arises. You are aware that among the many endeavors that are now unfolding in relation to the unconscious, there is one that seeks to approach the spiritual world of man, which is called analytical psychology. This psychoanalysis, which is an exploration of a certain area of the soul, albeit with inadequate means, does not lead to an understanding of the true character of the areas under consideration. This psychoanalysis also works with the dream images of the human being. The psychoanalyst seeks to unravel the dreams and what they reveal about some hidden aspects of the soul life.

Now it is very strange that when I recently discussed the relationship of spiritual science to this method, I was reproached by several psychoanalysts. They claim that psychoanalysis is the true science, it only takes the dream in so far as it is symbolic, whereas I maintain that one ascends to the imaginations and intuitions, and I treat the dream in such a way that I grasp it in its reality. I make the mistake of taking the dream seriously, taking its imagery seriously, while psychoanalysis sees the symbolic character of dreams.

Well, one can be amazed at how misunderstood one is. What I represent as spiritual science adheres neither to the actual course of the dream nor to the symbolism to which psychoanalysis adheres. In fact, it does not adhere to content at all. The one who studies the world of dreams as a spiritual researcher comes to the following conclusion: You see, it can happen that ten people tell you about a dream, and if you are familiar with such things, you can be clear about the fact that these ten have dreamed very different things in terms of the dream sequence, but that exactly the same thing underlies the dream sequence in all ten as a spiritual reality. What matters is neither the symbolism nor the reality of what takes place in the dream, but it is clear to the spiritual researcher that what matters is the inner drama of the dream.

It may be that someone has unconsciously experienced an event in the spiritual realm. It also remains unconscious to him in relation to the dream. The event took place, taking place in the relationship of the human being as a spirit to the spiritual world. But what now occurs as a dream is an external transformation, in that what remains completely in the subconscious is used, what the person has as a sensory stimulus and so on. That is the garment that the dream drama is clothed in. That is the imagery. One can experience something that causes such tension, and this is released by confronting a spiritual event. One person may experience this by climbing a mountain and encountering an obstacle; another by being led to a door, into a labyrinth; a third person may experience the same event in a different way. What matters is not what the dream images say one after the other, but the inner drama, what lives behind the dream without images. This is a spiritual reality, and the spiritual researcher investigates what lies behind it by looking into the real spiritual.

Dreams themselves arise from the fact that what a person experiences in the purely spiritual realm is transposed into a somewhat irregular union of the eternal spiritual self with the physical body. I must assume that the real spiritual knowledge, that is, the possibility of observing human self-awareness as a spiritual being, shows people through direct observation that we are in sleep and dreamless sleep, not when falling asleep and waking up, but that we , albeit with a subdued consciousness, that we are outside our body in this sleep, that we really leave our body when we fall asleep and move back into it when we wake up, and that what moves out and moves in is a spiritual being. Vision consists in nothing other than that which otherwise remains unconscious in sleep is now raised to consciousness in the spiritual world. The dream arises from the fact that what is otherwise fully separated in the spirit, that which comes into a partially irregular connection with the bodily, arises from the fact that it comes into relation with the bodily, that it sinks into the bodily, but not so that it fills the full body, arises from the fact that that it partially sinks in, that the compulsion arises to clothe that which remains behind from becoming aware of processes in the spiritual world in that which one of the corners of corporeality gives, without one having already moved into the whole corporeality.

And so it is always a kind of darkening in the dream of what is truly eternal in man, of that which passes through birth and death, of that which, free of the body, prepares for what follows death, and also develops between birth and death in a germinal way for the next spiritual life. It is a darkening of this soul life, it is a clouding of the soul life caused by the incomplete approach to the body. Only if the human being were incapable of accomplishing what, in a healthy development of his being, he must always accomplish, of fully absorbing and thus appropriating what is attained through the body for the ordinary sense life, of controlling his involvement in the sense life, only if this did not occur would the dream life intrude into human life as something pathological!

Something else becomes apparent when one considers the boundary of the dream life in relation to the world of seeing. The one who develops the gift of second sight learns to understand through the kind of experiences he has in the spiritual world, that he experiences them separately from the body, and learns to understand that this life between birth and death, this life in the sense world, the life in the physical body, must not be seen as a life in captivity. Spiritual science never leads to false asceticism. The student comes to recognize that, in the wise ordering of the universe, the sojourn in the sense body has its good meaning. The entire life of man, which flows between forms of existence in and out of the body between death and new birth, this entire life of man takes on different things.

The power to develop in oneself those impulses that contain logic and morality, this power the person must acquire here in his sensual body, in addition to everything else he receives from the universe, if he wants to acquire it at all. This, to think logically, could not be acquired in the spiritual world, for that we must embody ourselves. Then, through the gate of death, we carry those impulses, which can only be developed on earth, into the supersensible realm.

Now because the dream consists in the fact that one actually carries a spiritual experience into the physical world through the incomplete merging with the body – I cannot go into the details – but because the human being emerges from the spiritual world as a personality, he brings into the physical world from the spiritual world something that is both unlogical and amoral, which can only enter into the content of the dream. That is why the dream appears without any logical or moralizing. Only the seer can compare this peculiarity of the dream, how it relates to morality and logic. Thus I have indicated the possibility of comparing the dream life with what man can know as the content of the spiritual world. But this reveals that the dream is... gap); only the peculiar thing is that in the dream man does not face the eternal. His eternal is active, but what fills this eternal is what comes from the body. In dreams, the eternal in man is directed towards the temporal. But the fact that the eternal is present in these events is shown by a truly spiritual scientific consideration of the dream.

The situation is different when it comes to hallucinatory, somnambulant life. Here we are dealing with the fact that the human being also enters his physical body from the spiritual, that spiritual influences it, but that the spiritual enters the physical either because the inner physical life is in some way diseased, so that the spiritual enters a diseased physical body. Now, the human being can only develop a correct relationship if he immerses himself in the bodily world, which functions as a unified whole. If he submerges himself in such a way that no part of his physical body can fully participate in the development of sensory perception, then, through the elimination of a physical element, a spiritual element arises in part.

We would not see this spiritual if we did not see when our body was somehow diseased. By the fact that it is, the spiritual asserts itself. The spiritual researcher sees the spiritual by standing in the spiritual; the hallucinator sees a spiritual in a diseased, impossible way, actually, by partially switching off his normal physical for sensory perception. But this also means that the occurrence of a spiritual vision that we have no control over is always a sign of some kind of physical illness. One can say: It is understandable that people believe, that even researchers believe, that a real spiritual being is encountered in such a pathological physical condition; but it is to be rejected to do anything that leads to the illness of the physical body for the sake of a spiritual vision. The path that leads to the forced vision is to be rejected from the spiritual-scientific point of view, because it would be a promoter of the human organism becoming ill. And anyone who so misjudges the spiritual scientific methods, as they are described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” as if these methods could somehow seduce one to cultivate that which they specifically condemn, defames these spiritual scientific methods. They are defamed in the broadest sense.

But it can also happen that, to a certain extent, the sick body infects the senses, so that the senses come into a different relationship – I can only mention this in general terms – that the senses come into a different relationship to the usual environment. In everyday life, you perceive your surroundings as you know them. It may happen that through the change in the life of the senses, what is perceived in the environment is what otherwise eludes the senses. It will be what is not accessible to man through the higher spiritual life. But I will explain right away, perhaps better than by generalizing, what I mean by the example from before, by way of an example of what I mean by a somnambular life, by a refined sense life. What is otherwise understood as second sight falls under this category; I must say: it is remarkable, although Sir Oliver Lodge's book has a thoroughly scientific character, that a certain hidden dilettantism can generally be found in this book in particular. The phenomenon, which is presented as a cross experiment, is in fact nothing other than what anyone familiar with this field knows as a refinement of the sense life, so that this sense life is able to perceive things other than what is usually associated with it. If someone whose sensory life and sensory life interwoven with the intellectual life is such that the intellectual apparatus extends down into the senses, if someone has developed such a sensory life, it may happen that today he has the idea: I will ride in a fortnight and have an accident. That can happen. These things are known.

Something that cannot be perceived through the ordinary temporal connection can be perceived by a person simply through an especially abnormal sense of life that has been infected from within. There are cases in which what is seen or suspected occurs with such inevitable necessity that precautions are taken and yet it happens anyway. Now, for someone who is familiar with such things, there is nothing different about somnambulism and the like than there is about a remote vision. What did the medium actually communicate in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge? Well, about a fortnight after the seance, the photograph arrived in the same room. Two weeks later, this photograph could be described with normal consciousness. Through a remote vision, the medium described what arrived later. The somnambulant medium perceived nothing from the hereafter, saw nothing but what later became an event, and the whole crucifixion experiment is objectively, in the facts, correct; the explanation is completely incorrect.

What is at issue is that one realizes that through a somnambulant human life, one can see differently than in normal sensory and mental life, but that in this way the human being is, so to speak, more intimately united with the external world. However, a real insight into the supersensible world of the senses, which man enters after death, in which man is always in touch with the Eternal, is not possible through such abnormal states of consciousness, but only when man really enters this spiritual world in full consciousness, so that he stands as a spirit in the spiritual world and can distinguish between what he can perceive through his corporeality. Wherever there is no real looking in, wherever the spiritual mixes with the bodily itself.

Somnambulism also has its dangers, if only because the soul is switched off – for the soul is switched off and remains switched off during the dream – because the person with the spiritual and soul is completely immersed in the body, a part is switched off, and then the person becomes an automaton. This can be interesting, but must not be cultivated, because only by making the right connections between the spiritual and the physical in the proper way does a person place himself in the right way in relation to the logical and moral world. When the spiritual world has an effect in an abnormal way, this effect, in which always excludes a part of the body, can lead to an incorrect relationship between the personality of the medium and the moral and logical, to moral decline, and to the interweaving of all kinds of lies in a cognitive way, and so on, and so on. We can conclude from the fact that man actually turns himself into an automaton in the artificially induced somnambulistic state that it must not be artificially induced.

Thus, spiritual science shows especially for this area how much man has to pay attention to the fact that these border areas can indeed be illuminated by spiritual science, but that, conversely, they cannot be used to enlighten spiritual life. Then spiritual science shows further that what flows out of the unconscious or subconscious into the human imaginative life actually has the eternal in human nature as its actual subject; only in both the dream life and in the somnambulist is the spiritual inclined towards the bodily.

In the artist, the spiritual-soul is inclined towards the spiritual. While it is inclined towards it, it remains in the unconscious. Then it enters in a proper way, so that the whole physical is taken up. While in sober consciousness such things are forgotten by the spiritual, in the artist the spiritual is carried in, but in such a way that it is not absorbed by a part of the physical, as in somnambulism, and thus weakened, but is brought into the right relationship to the ordinary course of life. Thus, in artistic creation, the eternal is unconsciously inclined towards the spiritual; the eternal towards the eternal. But because the human being is not consciously aware of what he experiences in the eternal, he brings it into the ordinary consciousness and transforms it, and thus it will take on an individual character.

This is the spatial difference between what is artistically created and what the seer, who is immersed in the spiritual world, has before him. The seer has something impersonal before him; he has something around him that has just as little to do with his individuality and just as much to do with it, namely, seeing from a point of view like the external sensory world. The one who perceives unconsciously what the seer sees in the spiritual world with an immediate part of consciousness and brings it into the ordinary world becomes an artist, a poet. That is why people have the well-founded opinion that true artists bring messages of the eternal into the sensual world, that the supersensible reveals itself out of the unconscious through true art into the sensual, into the life of ordinary consciousness.

Then, as I have indicated, the human being experiences his destiny in a peculiar way, consciously and unconsciously. Through what Scher experiences, something is now raised from the unconscious into the conscious that would otherwise always remain unconscious. In ordinary life, we are actually only fully aware of one part of our being, namely our perceptions and ideas. You can see this for yourself from a scientific description such as that of Theodor Ziehen. In contrast, what is called the emotional and will life remains down in the half or completely unconscious. What does the human being know in his ordinary consciousness that only takes place when he moves his hand! Theodor Zichen characterizes correctly when he says: We only have the ideas of what is taking place. That which mysteriously vibrates into the hand as we raise it is as unconscious to us as the events in sleep in ordinary waking day life. The whole real essence of the life of the will, which indeed rules in us, which permeates our eternal being, nevertheless remains unconscious, becomes conscious only through the representations of the arising ordinary consciousness, just as a dream becomes conscious out of sleep in ordinary consciousness; but what we know of the will is not what goes on in the will itself. What we know is as much as we know of a dream when we are awake.

Our emotional life, in which we are equally immersed, is not as unconscious as a dream. It is partly conscious and partly unconscious. The great esthete Vischer already suspected that the emotional life is related to the soul in the same way as the dream life. While the dream life unfolds in images, the emotional life unfolds in feelings, but these feelings arise from the subconscious. We form ideas about them, but we do not get closer to the reality of these feelings than we do to the reality of the dream in the dream, which has its subjective origin in the eternal of the human ego.

Thus, a person is only really aware of half of their waking day-to-day life; the other half remains subconscious. The seer brings it up. He perceives, not only through ordinary conceptions, what lives essentially in feeling and will, but he also forms, through the senses, what he sees in them. But then this experience is a very peculiar one, one that does not arise as it does in dreams or in the recollection of ordinary life, when the shearer follows his feelings - it is a human life or several human lives that arise before his soul; but it is not the life that he can follow when he looks back to birth; it becomes clear to him that past earthly lives play into this earthly life.

At the moment when the light of knowledge flashes through will and feeling, impulses of feeling and will from previous earthly lives make their impact felt. And what germinates in us for subsequent earthly lives flashes again in our life of will. However paradoxical it may sound, it is true that when one does not merely speak hypothetically about the will, as Schopenhauer did, but rises to an intuition of the essential nature of the will and feeling, then the repeated earthly lives become a fact within human consciousness; but then we learn to recognize how, through earlier earthly lives, we ourselves bring about, as it were, what happens to us from the outside. What we have experienced in the past forges the paths within us that lead us to our destiny. The individual earthly lives illuminate each other. What we experience as fate, half-dreamed, half-consciously, like a dream, and what befalls us as chance, all this is illuminated for us when what is unconscious reveals itself.

Talking about previous lives on earth and the lives we live in the spiritual world between death and a new birth is something that still seems as paradoxical to people today as it did in the days when people believed that the earth stood still and the sun and planets revolved around it. The reversal of this entire world view will take time. For a long time people did not want to believe it. For centuries there have been people who have regarded it as impossible; and of course there will also be people today who will receive such things, which occur in such a way, with scorn.

That may be. That is as self-evident as can be; but these things are, so to speak, at the gates of our cultural development. They are what can really illuminate the much sought-after field of revelations of the unconscious. The unconscious is a broad field. It also rests within the sensory world itself. By believing that it is not within this sensory world, one falls back on all sorts of methods to explain this sensory world from something other than the spiritual.

We can see how something like the Kant-Laplace theory comes about. I have often mentioned this before and will only refer to it today because it sheds light on our present-day field. Whether he is an astronomer or a geologist, man tries to guess from what is happening before his senses at the present time, from a calculation, what happened millions of years ago. One can do this without making the slightest mistake against any scientific laws; one can calculate a state of the earth that occurs after millions of years. Unfortunately, however, one is in the following case. For example, if you calculate from heredity what the human stomach goes through in the course of one, two, seven years, what changes it undergoes in three hundred years, you proceed in the same way as a geologist or astronomer, in the same way as the one who put forward the Kant-Laplace hypothesis. We can calculate in the same way as for the small changes that take place in the constitution of the stomach, what the stomach must have been like 300 years ago; only it had not yet come into existence at that time. In the same way, we can calculate what this stomach will be like in 300 years. The calculation may be correct, but the result is untenable. The calculation based on the changes in the rock can be correct and it can be scientifically established that the earth was in this or that state millions of years ago; only at that time the earth had not yet come into existence and will no longer exist in the millions of years that can be calculated by the same method, because it has inner laws of life through which it has developed out of the spiritual and will in turn develop back into it like man.

Today we are already on the verge of intuiting those spirits that are healthy, on the verge of intuiting a science that is meant to be spiritual science. While those who follow popular judgment in this field are far from a healthy view of these things, which healthy view would naturally lead to spiritual science, we also find others. An example may be given. Eckermann, who emerged from Goethe's view, wrote the following words: ... [space]

This is how a healthy person thinks, how someone thinks who is not completely numbed by what is officially recognized. But he who is compelled, by what his unbiased sense of truth suggests to him, to point out spiritual science in our time, also knows in what way he and his views fit into what the best minds of humanity developed, sensed and thought even before there was any science. In our time, we can repeatedly and again and again point to the prophetic way in which Goethe foresaw spiritual science. By dealing with how, through the development of the human soul, the human being comes to juxtapose the spiritual self as spirit with the spiritual, by linking what is spiritual in the universe with a bridge to what is spiritual in the human being, one is reminded of what Goethe wrote in his book on Winckelmann out of deep insight:

He who feels the healthy nature of man as a whole, who perceives himself in his environment as a great, valuable and dignified whole, would, if the universe could feel itself, reach its goal, exult and admire the summit of its own becoming and being.

Goethe, then, looked at something that can take place in the human mind, where the spirit of the universe directly beholds the spirit of the universe, where spirit confronts spirit.

Now, I can also summarize what I have said, albeit in a sketchy way, about the border areas by saying that spiritual science, when it is really strictly methodical, wants to show that even if a person only lives unconsciously, what is real is research is only raised into consciousness, that only what is always present and going on as the greatest secret in the depths of man reveals itself consciously, that the spiritual faces the spiritual, that the spiritual works with the spiritual, the spiritual recognizes the spiritual, and that the spirit creates and perceives the spiritual.

Dear attendees! It is not an external occasion that leads us to treat the two most significant questions of the human soul and spiritual life in this context today, the question of human freedom of will and the question of the immortality of the soul. Rather, it seems to me that the real inner knowledge of the human being's supersensible personality reveals a natural inner connection between these two significant human riddles in such a way that one must shed light on the other.

All you have to do, dear attendees, is take a closer look at the recurring philosophical and other endeavors of very astute minds throughout human development in order to get closer to these two human questions. And you will see that a purely philosophical consideration, as it is usually understood, cannot approach what actually wants to approach the human being with these questions that take root so meaningfully in every single human mind. I myself, esteemed attendees, if I may mention this by way of introduction, have been dealing with the question of human freedom of will for decades. It has been a quarter of a century since I attempted, in my book 'The Philosophy of Freedom', to point out, at that time in a purely philosophical-scientific form, those points through which one can at least approach this question of human freedom. What I expounded then, a quarter of a century ago, I would say in an abstract, philosophical way, I would like to ground in a spiritual-scientific way in tonight's reflection, in the spiritual-scientific way in which it was meant through the long years in which I was also able to give lectures here in Munich every year on anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

Now, perhaps only someone who has wrestled with what the natural scientific worldview has to say about these riddles of humanity today, and who has wrestled with it to such an extent that he realized in the course of his struggle where the scientific approach must actually fail, especially when it comes to the deepest human questions such as these, which everyone will admit from the outset must lead to what can be called human self-knowledge.

Now, dear attendees, let me say, figuratively, by way of introduction, what difficulties must actually be assumed from the outset when it comes to human self-knowledge. Figuratively speaking: the eye can perceive the visible things around it; the eye can perceive the visible things around it precisely because it cannot see itself. Anyone who thinks up this image will find it understandable that the difficulty of human self-knowledge must lie in the fact that, although one will be able to see other things with all the organs available to a person for their knowledge, one's own self can be seen spiritually as little as the eye can see itself.

Now, in the case of the eye, it is possible for another person to examine it physiologically, anatomically or in some other way; but a moment's reflection shows that this cannot be the case with regard to the actual self of the human being, which more or less everyone senses in their subconscious as a supersensible being. One person cannot observe the invisible supersensible that rules in us in the same way that another personality can observe the human eye.

However, another image can be used. We can see our own eye when we look in the mirror. This only leads to the fact that we then do not see with the eye the whole life-filled content of this eye, that which must actually live in the eye in order to make it an organ of vision and a mediator of spiritual knowledge of the external world. Only an image of the eye can show itself to us when we look at the eye in the mirror.

I have presupposed these images in order to lead, I would like to say, approximately through some ideas to what should be the core of today's reflection. If self-knowledge is to occur at all in the human being, nothing else is possible than for the human being himself, not another, to step out of the human existence in which he usually dwells and to learn to look at himself from the outside. In saying this, however, something is expressed that is actually a scientific abomination in the widespread contemporary world view, but it will most certainly become established in human thinking, just as the Copernican world view has become established. It is only unfamiliar today, which, as in the past, should come to our minds today. That man can step out of his self, so to speak, can face himself in reality, seems to most people today an absurd thought.

Now, the spiritual researcher is obliged not to proceed in the same way as one proceeds in another scientific investigation. In this scientific approach, when it is done in a popular way, one usually gives results; the spiritual researcher is not in a position to merely cite such results. He must, especially when dealing with such a fundamental question as today's, indicate the path above all, to which he wants to refer when he wants to demonstrate certain research results that have proven to be important and essential in every human life. Therefore, in the first part of today's meditation, my task will consist primarily in showing how the spiritual researcher approaches the human being, in order to recognize what is meant by freedom of will and the immortality of the soul. I would like to reflect on the sense of stepping out of one's usual human existence and observing oneself from the outside, as in a mirror, whereby one can of course assume – and I will say this right away – that one does not initially have the lively person in front of them, but perhaps only an image, as the eye has an image in the mirror.

But before I begin these considerations about spiritual-scientific methods, I would like to at least cite an example that is suitable for showing how the natural-scientific approach to the present, which is fully recognized by spiritual science, always and everywhere endeavors to approach the questions of human self-knowledge, but how precisely this scientific observation, when it is good in its method, when it proves unsuitable for what is scientifically excellent, how precisely it proves unsuitable for approaching the true human self.

By way of introduction, an example that is treated in a work by Ludwig Waldstein in “Das unterbewusste Ich” (The Subconscious Mind), which is part of an excellent collection of books published in Wiesbaden, deals with borderline issues of mental and nervous life. This is a scientific work through which the author wants to get to what lives in man, and as a natural scientist it is self-evident that he approaches it with a truly scientific method, as does the humanities; for the humanities cannot allow itself to approach man through mystical reverie and fantasy either. Spiritual science must place itself on such a strict foundation, even if it must proceed differently than any natural science can or will do.

Now, Ludwig Waldstein gives a remarkable self-observation – but this example could be multiplied by hundreds and thousands – he says of himself: He once stood in front of a bookshop, looking in. His eye fell on a book about molluscs. It was natural for the naturalist to let his gaze rest on the title page of this book. But as he looked over this title page, he couldn't help but smile. He cannot explain how it is that he, who is a naturalist, must surely find this book a serious matter, that he must begin to laugh. He wants to find out why a book title makes him laugh. He tries to find out by closing his eyes. And lo and behold, by closing them, he hears the melody of a barrel organ in the distance, playing exactly the same thing that was played to him decades ago when he danced his first quadrille as a very young man; when he looked at the mollusc book by title, he had no idea why he had to laugh, because the sound of the organ was quite fading away. He would not have noticed it if he had not closed his eyes.

So he realized, first of all, that one can make certain statements about one's own mental life without actually knowing, unless one investigates particularly, how one comes to make such revelations of the self as one's smile; then secondly, he has realized that decades ago, but only very quietly, this melody on the barrel organ made an impression on him, but only a half-dreamy one; for he knew himself that at the time he had not paid much attention to it. Nevertheless, the sound of the organ, heard so softly and fading away, has remained connected in the subconscious mind, and now, when it echoes even more softly, it mingles with the soul's life as a reminiscence and causes a revelation that must first be investigated.

At best, purely scientific methods can only approach what lies behind such a fact, but one cannot get close to the true essence. One will have to ask oneself: What actually lives in this subconscious soul life, what floods up in an indefinite way, asserts itself and can deceive one about what is actually present in the soul life? And many people who are not attentive to such things, as they have been mentioned, experience something coming up from their soul life that particularly interests them, something they consider a special revelation. They feel they are the bearers of a great revelation, and yet this great revelation may be nothing more than something similar to the fading tones of the barrel organ. For it could easily have arisen through some kind of association of ideas that the man who stood in front of the mollusc book when the sounds were heard softly, that this could have connected with something else.

And lo and behold, there are already people in the present day who are suited to this, if not the naturalist – such a person might have believed it if perhaps the sounds of the barrel organ had connected, well, let's say, with the idea of the music of the spheres, which could also have been that he would have been honored in this case, to divert his gaze from the book to the sublime music of the spheres. It can easily happen to someone who is a prejudiced mystic that they mistake the notes that resonate from an organ grinder heard decades ago for the music of the spheres or for other spiritual revelations.

From this it can be seen that real spiritual research must be something that exercises all due caution to exclude what flows through the human soul in such an indeterminate way and can arise in an inexplicable way that is easily led astray by all kinds of illusions. We have to realize that a variety of things are flooding in and, if we consider what human memory is, we should actually soon be able to think of all the individual possibilities, from the usual dry, sober recollection of something specific that we can survey, to the vague reminiscences of the sounds of a barrel organ, which we might not even get behind if we don't close our eyes and explore the matter. Spiritual science must be aware that everything that can deceptively approach human beings must be methodically processed by it; that it is incumbent upon it to approach the human self with strictly methodical work, especially with regard to the fundamental questions of human self-knowledge.

And here I may draw attention to the fact – as I said, a quarter of a century ago I already tried to shed light on human freedom of will – I may draw attention to the fact that two things flood into the human soul life, which one can start with in contemplation.

Particularly when one wants to get deep inside the human being, something may flood in an indeterminate way that we may not be able to follow at all – I have pointed out such things very clearly in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” – but nevertheless, such surging and surging up in the human soul life can be found, and one comes to realize that This surging up and down is connected with our organization, and it truly does not require any very deep self-observation to see to what extent even bodily processes and dispositions determine what surges through the soul from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep. Freely arising images come and go, associating with others. That is what constitutes our soul life.

But one thing floods into this soul life, which is clear to every philosopher, clear to every human being when he reflects on it, but which is not always brought to consciousness in the right way. One thing floods in that can become a fundamental riddle, however simple it may appear, and that is: we do not just let the images that want to socialize in our soul flood in and out in any way. We could not carry our lives through the world in an appropriate way if we wanted to give ourselves over to the play of images. We always do something very specific. We let something flow in this imaginative life that determines the ideas according to right and wrong ideas; we let powerful thinking, dominated by logic, flow into our imaginative play, and even if one does nothing more than a very superficial self-observation, one will discover that there is a radical, fundamental difference between simply abandoning oneself to the play of imagination and the self-active domination of this play of imagination by thinking, which is determined by right or wrong.

As simple and primitive as this may be, it must actually be the starting point of any healthy self-reflection. We have to say to ourselves: we can only get out of this game of imagination, in which all sorts of illusions can play a role, if we become aware that all possible false, erroneous ideas also run through determinable laws of our human nature and organism, but that what intervenes in what is so scientifically and necessarily determined by the organism, correct and incorrect thinking, cannot come from the same game of ideas, this is simply shown by healthy self-observation. I have explained this in more detail in the book cited.

That is one aspect of the question: What actually floods into our soul life when we apply logical thinking, or perhaps, better said, right and wrong thinking, true-to-life thinking, to the arbitrary game of ideas? That is one question. Let us take it as the basis for today's reflections.

The other question is this: in our actions, in our deeds, in all the ways in which we lead our own lives into the social, moral, and ethical existence of humanity, a healthy self-observation shows that our drives and desires, which underlie our will impulses, assert themselves first. But anyone who does not stop at some prejudice will realize that at least in terms of action, in terms of doing, in terms of moral conduct, one can approach what can be characterized in the following way – and this is the other point that leads us to the life riddles we are discussing today: Certainly, the vast majority of human actions are based on instincts, desires, on some kind of constitution of the self; but there are still such actions – at least we approach them, which, because we are imperfect human beings, we can never fully carry out; we consider them at least as an ideal. We know that a person is only worthy of humanity if his actions approximate to the way I am about to characterize them. It is conceivable that we are not determined by some urge, but by the contemplation of what is to happen through us, in the rarer cases, of course, to what we are to do. It is a special feeling, a special sensation, that we can develop in response to what is to happen through us.

Of course, we will rarely be able to have this feeling, but we have it within us as an ideal and we are constantly approaching it. Something in the outside world can make such an impression on us that we say to ourselves: a change must occur, something must happen, and then, if we want to get to the bottom of it with healthy self-observation, when we say something like that to ourselves, there is nothing else to compare it to but the feeling we have when we are confronted with a personality that stands independently outside of us and that we love selflessly.

Twenty-five years ago, it seemed particularly important to me to protest in a philosophical book against a widespread prejudice. This prejudice is summarized in the words: love is blind. I have asserted: love gives sight. It leads us into that into which we cannot enter if we remain closed up in our selfishness, if we are able to give ourselves up so completely in our own self that we live with our perceptions, with our feelings, in the other person, and therefore live, because we have the greatest reverence for the independence of the other being, which we do not want to change through our love. That is not a complete love that wants to tinker with the other being that it loves, that wants the other being to be different, but that is the right love, that one loves the being for the sake of that being, so that the lover goes out of himself.

Just as we can have the feeling of love towards another person who is completely separate from us, whom we love just right when we are aware that he is separate from us, that we , that we love him for his sake, not for our own, if we have this feeling, then it is undoubtedly the ideal of love, that love of which I believe, precisely, that it is not blind, but that it gives sight. And this love can also be developed in relation to an action, in relation to what is to be done, if we devote ourselves purely to the contemplation of this action. Among the manifold actions that flow from our instincts and desires, there are also those in which we at least approach the impulse to perform what one undertakes purely out of love for the action.

Here is the other point that I characterized in my Philosophy of Freedom, where I said: The one who now considers the idea of freedom soon comes to realize that an action can only be free if it arises from the impulse of love for the action. This is, to be sure, at first to be accepted only as an observation; but this observation provides the possibility of at least initially forming an idea about what a free action can be. One comes to realize that one is not authorized to describe other actions as free. And the only question that arises is whether it is possible for such actions to enter into human life, whether it is possible for actions out of love to be realized in human life. If we can acknowledge that actions out of love can be realized in human life, then we may not call man free in relation to his entire being; but we can say that man is approaching freedom to the extent that he is increasingly transforming his actions so that they become actions out of love.

But now, when we have these two things before us, which I have characterized, we cannot understand them by merely considering them externally and conceptually. We can only understand them by using spiritual scientific methods, which I will now describe.

I have given a detailed description of what the soul has to go through in order to truly look into the spiritual world as one looks with physical eyes into the sensual world. I have characterized this in my various books. Today, however, I want to draw attention to a point that is particularly suitable for shedding light on the two questions that have been characterized. I have pointed out that the first step of spiritual knowledge can be called imaginative knowledge, imaginative observation of the environment. This is not present in ordinary consciousness at first. By imagination I do not mean something that arises only from fantasy, but something that leads not into a physical, but into a spiritual reality. This imaginative knowledge is the first step; if the term were not so misused by superstition, one could say it is the first step to true clairvoyant knowledge. However, I want to say that it is the first step of the seeing consciousness, as I have called it in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man).

I will now describe how one can reach this first stage of looking into the spiritual world. The first step is to exclude everything that could come from, let us say, the barrel organ that one heard decades ago. Everything that may arise in our consciousness in this way, through reminiscences, through memory reflexes, however hidden, must be excluded if one wants to enter the path into the spiritual world. Therefore, it is necessary to place something in the consciousness that does not come through the free play of ideas, but that comes into consciousness in the way it otherwise enters consciousness when we say: some idea, which also flows from our organization, is wrong or right. Just as thinking that is truly self-reliant and concerned with right or wrong enters into the life of the soul with its own content, so anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher must attune their consciousness to such content that cannot deceive because it is comprehensible.

What do we mean by such straightforward content? Straightforward content is that which either someone else or one has put together in such a way that at the moment one takes it into consciousness, one is quite clear about it: this compilation of pictorial content – in the case of pure thoughts because they can always be colored by reminiscences — of images that you have formed yourself or that have been formed for you by others, into consciousness, whose composition you can clearly see. What matters is to devote oneself patiently, energetically, calmly to such images, which one has put together in this way. In such images, it does not matter whether they express something real – for it is not the meaning of these images that is important, but rather what kind of inner soul activity one develops by devoting oneself to such images.

Let us say, for example, that someone devotes themselves to the idea that one is convinced from the outset is a merely pictorial idea, but such pictorial ideas must be increased; they devote themselves to the idea: “Spirit of the universe shines from the sun”. Certainly not something that can be called “real” in any sense, but something that can be grasped in its composition, where one can become aware of how the soul is engaged in something like this. Those who, in the course of human development – and there have always been such people in closed circles – have been concerned with showing people the way to the spiritual world, they have carefully worked out such pictorial representations, and if you look into the literature on this subject, you will be able to see for yourself that certain circles, which want to train those who join them for the path into the spiritual world, perhaps keeping silent about some things for certain reasons; but they keep the most intense, most energetic silence precisely about what they have put together in terms of ideas that the soul is to delve into in order to come to imaginative knowledge. And they consider at the moment when such ideas are revealed, it is necessary to replace them with others. Why?

Now, imagine that someone joins a circle that tells them that the way into the spiritual world is to be shown to them. First of all, images are presented to them that they have never thought of before, or at least not yet, and to which they devote themselves in completely new soul activity. They must not have been presented to him before. But once published, they reach people through many channels. They should approach people for the first time. It should not be possible for any reminiscences or the like to have an effect. It should be clear that the soul approaches the matter directly.

When one patiently and persistently absorbs such, especially pictorial, representations and becomes aware of how one has to work inwardly to keep these images in one's consciousness over and over again, to surrender to them in a way that can be described as true meditation , then one becomes aware that a stronger inner strength is needed for such inner soul activity than for ordinary thinking, in which the course of the external world of perception guides us, in which we can passively surrender to the external world of perception.

A greater effort is necessary when we devote ourselves to certain ideas in certain areas of imaginative knowledge that have no external correlate; but this still needs to be further developed. The human being must be able to look at nothing, through no sense, of anything that he perceives with his senses, and be devoted to such a conception, which he overlooks, where he is only aware of what is in the immediate present as limited soul activity in him, where nothing can come in from any reminiscences.

A remarkable thing happens. What is to be experienced here often requires years and years of work. We usually imagine that spiritual science is something that anyone can develop from some concepts. No, spiritual science is no easier than the natural sciences that figure as physiology, chemistry, biology, anatomy, history, but spiritual science requires devoted work that is much more difficult than any work of any external science, if spiritual science is really to lead into the spiritual world, if it is not to be a mystical game.

What happens is that you first really discover that you are more and more immersed in your self in a way that you have not been immersed in before; you first notice more and more – you just have to experience it – that you become independent of what you otherwise experience through your body, you become more independent in your activity. Those who have not experienced this cannot really look at it critically; but those who have experienced it know that just as water can be separated into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis, it is equally true that the inner experience of the self can be separated from what is otherwise experienced in waking consciousness from waking to sleeping only with the help of the physical organization.

One now gets to know what it means to live in the spirit. This sense of self, this self-awareness, becomes richer. Otherwise, self-awareness is concentrated in a point that we call the self; but now it becomes richer, and the further we penetrate into this imaginative knowledge, the richer it becomes. But one thing becomes clear in the end: however far one takes this imaginative knowledge, it does not yet lead directly into a spiritual world. That is the important thing. Just as an eye that does not look at the world does not lead to a world, so mere imaginative meditative meditation does not lead to the spiritual world. One does not devote oneself to this imaginative meditation in order to recognize something outside, but to strengthen and empower the self. And that begins at a certain point of inner development, when this self no longer feels physical, but spiritual, in its inner experience.

This must be experienced. In order for this experience to take place correctly, it is necessary, dear attendees, that the person learn to distinguish between what I have now characterized as imagination, on the one hand, and mere vision, on the other. Vision is always conditioned by the body; for spiritual science it forms nothing that can be used in any way, for it wells up out of the bodily organization, however hidden this upwelling may be in its origin. Man is not consciously involved in the coming about of the vision. Spiritual science does not seek anything of that kind.

Nor does spiritual science seek that which is mere fantasy; for that which he practices in the characterized way does not remain a fantasy, but condenses and becomes inner reality. From a certain point of development, one no longer can string image after image, but the images string themselves. You realize that with this inner experience in the imagination, little by little it becomes the same as it is in the world with objects. You can place a chair on a table - that corresponds to the external lawfulness, but you cannot let a chair float in the air. The external things in their mutual relationships require that we submit to the external laws if we want to act with them. Thus, by developing imagination, one comes at a certain point to the realization that one can no longer string images together in any old way, but that one must place one thing next to another with the same necessity with which one places a chair on a table. One experiences inner spiritual necessity.

This is a significant point on the path of spiritual research. However, it is necessary to be aware of every point of this inner process of searching for the imagination. Anything that could lead to hypnosis or suggestion must be excluded. During meditation, one must be present step by step. It would be nonsense to seek spiritual science through crystal gazing or looking at shiny objects. This would lead to the opposite of the soul mood that must be sought in order to immerse oneself in the spiritual world with full consciousness.

This mood of the soul, of which I have just spoken, is still little known in the widest circles today. It will become known in that humanity will be able to do nothing other than what is already an unconscious urge, an unconscious drive in countless people today, in that humanity will come to demand to penetrate the highest questions of the soul's life in a different way than has been possible until now. But then, when one has developed this imagination in a certain way, perhaps after a long time, quite methodically inwardly, one must pass over to something that I would describe by saying: one must make the imagination transparent.

In relation to the imagination, one is in the following situation, in a situation as one would be in relation to an eye that is clouded; one does not see through it. One has imaginations in order to strengthen one's self-awareness spiritually, to actually attain it spiritually. What one gains for oneself is initially the consequence of imaginative life; but one is, as it were, blind to the spiritual environment. The imaginations are not yet transparent; just as the eye must be transparent in the vitreous humor so that the external world can be seen, so the imaginations must be formed transparently. We can achieve this by progressing more and more not only in forming the imaginations, but also in inwardly experiencing them.

At a certain point in one's development, one gains the ability not only to summon the imaginations into consciousness, but also to remove them again, to suppress them in any way one likes. But then not only to suppress them, but by suppressing them, they are gone. But something else takes their place. The imagination has prepared you, has merely prepared your own self for something else to enter it. If you are able to make the imaginations transparent, then you see how you can see through the vitreous humor of the eye to the visible object, into the spiritual world, you arrive at spiritual vision.

Imaginations that have become transparent! They allow the revelations of the spiritual world to reach the soul, and I will mention the stage of knowledge that arises there. One need only think of what I am characterizing here, not of superstitious ideas, not of ideas laden with prejudice. I will mention the stage of knowledge that arises there, after one has gained so much from the imagination, by relying only on the soul-spiritual, outside of the body, that one has arrived at being able to sustain oneself spiritually; when one can then exclude the imaginations, then what one can call enters, one is inspired inwardly by the spiritual world.

The inspired realization, that is the second stage. And it occurs in such a way that we are able to suppress the image that we ourselves have created, and that through the work of suppressing this image, the inspiration, the spiritual revelation, which speaks to us from the spirit of the world, occurs. In this way, it is different from any ordinary memory, from any ability to remember. The human being suddenly sees what his ability to remember actually is, because he has now excluded it, because he now has a clear overview of how the cause, the image that he himself has formed, is connected to inspiration. That which otherwise reigns in us subconsciously, as with the barrel organ, now approaches us in a new form. We notice within us: the ordinary memory is not there in moments of spiritual research, but it has been transformed into something else, into the gift of inspiration.

Of course, on such an occasion I must note that a person cannot be a spiritual researcher from morning till night, that it is not a matter of me describing a perpetual state into which a person is supposed to come, but rather I am describing how one enters the spiritual world through research. Of course, the things I have described here are most often corrupted when they enter the world through society, because all kinds of errors occur within societies. The most absurd ideas are often spread about what is meant. The point is to show the way into the spiritual world. And just as one is not a chemist all day long from morning to evening, but only when doing experiments at the laboratory table, so one is only a spiritual researcher when carrying out what I have described, when one finds the transition from an image, the imagination, to inspiration.

And now, when you have risen to the possibility of inspiration, the world presents itself to you in a new light. Now it is not sensory perceptions that surround us – we have suppressed those – but a spiritual world presents itself to our spiritual eye, to use this Goethean expression in a varied way. And now you can go back to the questions that confront you enigmatically in ordinary life. Having learned what inspiration is, one can now confront oneself with what I characterized earlier, namely, that correct or incorrect thinking flows into the mere play of ideas. Once you have risen to inspiration, if you examine your soul life with the clarity that is now possible, if you get to know, with the help of imagination and inspiration, the difference between the ordinary play of ideas and memory, and that which radiates into ordinary consciousness from the point of view of what is right or wrong, then one comes to a very remarkable result, then one comes to answer oneself to what actually approaches the human being, what flows into the soul as logically correct or incorrect thinking. This only reveals itself in its true form before inspiration.

What flows into the soul is already contained in what connects, descending from a spiritual world, with what we physically bring from father, mother, grandfather, grandmother and so on in physical inheritance. By looking back through inspiration to our soul-spiritual being, which we have lived through before we entered into physical life through conception or birth, which we have lived through in a purely spiritual existence, by looking back through inspiration, we become aware: the impulses lie in there, not at all in our organization, which we have received through birth.

In our immortal part, which descends into the physical world through conception or birth, lie the impulses for right or wrong thinking. And it turns out that the human being introduces right or wrong thinking into that which depends on the play of ideas of his bodily organization because he has not a conscious inspiration - he only becomes conscious of it through the processes I have described - but an unconscious one. “Right” or ‘wrong’ comes into our soul life from our prenatal life through a subconscious or unconscious inspiration.

We also have inspiration in this ordinary life, but not in ordinary consciousness. Every time that which allows us to decide whether a thought is a correct or incorrect judgment flows into our play of ideas, we are not at all determined by our ideas, which are bound to our organism, but the cause goes back to our immortal part, which has united with our mortal part. The causes of our correct thinking lie before our birth; we are always inspired human beings, it is only in the unconscious that we are just that.

What I have just explained is first considered from a spiritual and psychological point of view. But the time will come when, because the foundations already exist in today's natural science, anyone who really studies physiology, biology and anatomy will come to the conclusion that, precisely when one is able to properly survey the physiological and biological facts of the human being, then a full confirmation of what I have discussed can also be found from a natural scientific point of view. In this regard, one must simply say: the scientific approach of the nineteenth century and up to now, however meritorious it is, has oversimplified things, and above all has oversimplified the development of the human being. Yes, when one carries out something like what I am about to briefly mention, then one really feels how spiritual science can only come into its own when it is possible for it to work in a laboratory-like, clinical way, just as ordinary official science works today.

Spiritual science is not opposed to natural science, only to the interpretation that natural scientists give to their own facts. I can only cite certain results. For me, they are the results that have emerged over the past 30 to 35 years from my study of contemporary biology, physiology and anatomy. If you approach this work more carefully than the Darwinists and evolutionists of the nineteenth century did their work, you come to the conclusion that in the case of humans – we will ignore the animals for now, we don't have time for them today – it turns out that in the case of humans, this evolution that natural science has actually included in its concepts is only present for part of human nature – only for a part, that is the strange thing – only to some extent for the trunk organization, not for the head organization and not for the limb organization.

If you really want to understand human development, you have to divide the human being into three parts: a head person, a trunk person and an extremity person. The facts are all there, principles only exist in spiritual science in order to consider these facts realistically and appropriately. The strangest thing then comes to light when one observes progressive development, when one sees development as a progression from imperfect structures to perfect ones. The head of the human being, the brain organization, is not only present in progressive development, it is also present in the way that the human being presents himself in ordinary life, in a retrogressive development. In relation to his head, the human being is at the same time developing backwards. I could talk for hours, then it would turn out that today this can be proven in a strictly scientific way. Study the scientific facts in this area, but study them not as we do today, but really in depth. Do not remain a scientific dilettante, as many researchers are, but become a real expert in the strictest sense, by engaging with what is there.

Then it turns out – for example, if you look at the human eye, it must not be presented in relation to the facts as if, for example, the animal eye were only more perfect in the human eye. No, in certain animals you will find certain organs inside the eye, such as the xiphoid process, which are more intimately connected to the blood muscle system than in humans. In humans, the eye is simplified compared to the eyes of various animals. It is in retrogression, not merely in progressive development. And so, precisely when one proceeds carefully, one could now show that the human head organization and everything connected with it is in retrogressive development, that something is being withdrawn that is connected with the sprouting, growing, and thriving of life. Development collapses into itself.

This is a very interesting fact that will bridge the gap between natural science and spiritual science. After all, what is the meaning of this collapse of development? Well, if the development in the head were to take place in the same way as in the trunk of the body, in a straight line, it would not collapse in on itself, so to speak, then the imaginative life of the human being could not occur, then the human being could not unfold his spiritual and soul life. Development retreats, it makes space. A correct scientific observation shows it: development makes space. Where the physical is held back, the spiritual comes to the fore.

Superficial scientific observation leads to materialism. Deeper scientific observation leads to the recognition that development is pent up precisely in the main brain, that it makes room and that where physical development, the spiritual soul, no longer reaches because it is pent up, it enters there. From the rest of the organism, what determines the arbitrary play of ideas floods up. That which, through unconscious inspiration, intervenes in this life in a regulating way before birth, can creep into the main organization of the head. Unconscious inspiration is present. The prospect of the immortal, of that which is only connected with the mortal, presents itself to us when we penetrate with spiritual scientific research into something that is present in people, that philosophy has been looking at for decades but cannot understand because it shrinks back from entering into the real spiritual world. When inspiration reveals to us what right or wrong thinking is, then we enter the realm where the human soul comes to us as the immortal, as that which unites with the mortal.

The other point, esteemed attendees, leads, I would say, to the opposite. Another strange thing is present, an unconscious inspiration, I said, on the one hand, which brings itself into the human organization in that this organization is in regression in relation to the human head. The reverse is the case with the human organization in relation to the human limb structure. Again, a very careful study of the purely scientific facts would confirm what I am about to say. Just as the head is in a state of regression, the organization of the extremities in humans is in a state of overdevelopment, goes further than normal development, exceeds the point of normal development, goes beyond it. The person who is only able to properly and physiologically observe arms, hands, legs, feet with their appendages anatomically-plastically towards the inside of the organism knows that the human organization goes beyond itself, that the is not just a regression, not even just normal, but leaps beyond the point of normality, so that more comes to light in this development than what is included in the trunk organization within the limits of normal development. Seen spiritually, this presents itself in such a way that for this observation, which I have just characterized, what is connected with the limb organization presents itself as recognizable and accessible only to the imaginative life. Imaginative life and imaginative knowledge are confronted with something when we look into the human organization of the extremities with a truly clear and insightful consciousness. We encounter something that the human being has within them that can fall between birth and death. They can have more within them because their extremities are, in a sense, super-organized.

Allow me – we are not children, after all – to approach this idea, which is somewhat difficult, by means of a comparison. In doing so, we must not look at the extremities only in terms of what is completely external, but we must also consider them in terms of their continuation towards the interior. In relation to the purely physical, what then presents itself? It presents itself that the organization of the extremities is intimately related, already physically – but the physical comes into consideration for us only comparatively – with that through which the human being also goes beyond himself physically. In the case of women, observe the connection between the organization of the arms and that of the breasts. Consider the connection with the rest of the limb organization, with sexuality, and you will recognize that in relation to the physical constitution, the constitution in overdevelopment works through that which is connected with the limb organization. Physically, the human being first develops something that is not included in his individual life, that goes beyond it. It is the same on the soul-spiritual level.

That which is connected with the purely physical organization of the extremities, which is overdeveloped, can only be achieved through imagination. And what can be attained there in imagination belongs just as little to the human personality, enclosed between birth and death, as in the physical sense the child belongs to the human being as an individuality. That which arises as imagination belongs to the human being when it has stepped through the gate of death. What announces itself by entering into what emerges spiritually and soulfully in the overdevelopment of the limb organization is carried through the gate of death. But what is present, dear Reader, is not only connected with love in the physical sense, it is connected with love in the spiritual and soulful sense at all, because the human being goes beyond himself.

This is where the second point comes in. As already indicated, by developing something within his individual personality that only acquires its significance when it passes through the gate of death; by developing something that leads his perishable being passes through the gate of death into the region where his immortal self continues to develop, man lives in something that is not connected with his egoity, with his immediate selfhood, but goes beyond it.

He can assert this in a special way. Twenty-five years ago, I called what I am now hinting at, as arising from inspiration, in pure thinking, when it occurs not only in logical but in moral ideas, when man acts from moral ideas, I called it intuitive thinking. And what now occurs when a person becomes aware that something lives imaginatively within him, I have called moral imagination. By becoming aware of how, as it were, at one end there is unconscious inspiration and at the other unconscious imagination, he becomes aware of his own immortality. But in ordinary life this is only unconsciously or subconsciously present; but it is there. And it is present in the unconscious inspiration through the right or wrong, also in the moral ideas that arise before our spiritual eye, it is present when we go beyond ourselves in love, as I have described it, to an act that goes beyond our egoism, develop strength.

Here we come upon something very remarkable about human beings. When what is otherwise only unconsciously or subconsciously present, the unconscious imagination that is so closely connected with it and can only work in love, as I have described, and the intuitive or inspired thinking, which shines in from one side, illuminating the imagination, when this thinking, which is not drawn from mortal man but from immortal man, and the imagination, which remains unconscious in ordinary life but which, through our loving actions, instinctively approaches the person, when these two work together, but from the immortal man, and the imagination, which remains unconscious in ordinary life, but which, through our loving actions, instinctively approaches man; when this instinctive love, which is the instinctive expression of the imagination described, seizes man, and seizes him in such a way that he asserts what inspiration shines into him before his birth, then the immortal works on the immortal in man, then the idea works from the immortal as it experiences itself before birth, together with the immortal as it unconsciously arises in the imagination and as it enters the spiritual world through the gate of death.

Thus, human actions are possible in which the immortal, which only reveals itself after death, already interacts here in life as a force with the free idea, which enters our human personality through inspiration from the immortal before birth as an impulse. That is then free action. This free action is present in man, of that man is conscious. One can only recognize freedom when one knows that the unconscious imagination that prepares our life after death works together with the unconscious inspiration that, as a force from the life before birth, resonates in our soul. By instinctively carrying out such actions as his immortal self performs, man carries out free actions. And the fact that a person is aware of free actions is a reflection, a mirage of what rests in the supersensible personality deep within the human being as an immortal. As I explained 25 years ago, man is not so free that one can say: he is either free or unfree, but he is both free and unfree in his ordinary actions. He is on the way to freedom. But one does not become aware of freedom unless one becomes aware of the immortal essence of man.

Today, in conclusion, I would like to summarize in two sentences what I have brought out of the spiritual-scientific consideration of free action and soul immortality before you, what I have tried to show: that one cannot understand freedom without recognizing immortality, and one cannot recognize immortality without looking at the consequence of real immortality, freedom. The immortal man is a free man; the will that comes from immortality is a free will. Man approaches these free actions with his ordinary actions. Mortal man is on the way to freedom. By elevating the immortal more and more within himself to a conscious being, mortal man becomes aware of his freedom. Man is born to freedom, but he must educate himself to realize freedom.

Dear attendees! With regard to the historical life of humanity and the understanding of this historical life, as it was striven for in its time and is still striven for in our time in much the same way, Goethe made a significant statement that can force one to reflect. He said that the best thing about history is the enthusiasm it arouses. If one is accustomed to seeking in Goethe's sayings the result of his deep experience of life, his wisdom, then this saying in particular can certainly give rise to much reflection. And if one that one can have in relation to what is called historical knowledge, if one goes to certain experiences, then one certainly comes to an insight that can lead to what Goethe might actually have meant.

Historical knowledge – it may be said that, especially in the course of the last century, great human acumen, great scholarly care and conscientiousness have been applied to it. And it is not a frivolous criticism of the historical judgment that people have acquired when I point out how little, especially in tricky cases, what is called history to this day serves when it comes to gaining a judgment from history, as such a judgment demands of us in real, true life. In our catastrophic times, every thinking person is often confronted with considerations that suggest to him the question: What does historical knowledge say about the truly far-reaching events of this or that day, which are so frequent after all, what does historical knowledge say?

I would just like to give an example, by way of introduction, of how truly not to be taken lightly and not to be considered merely as theorists, but as very serious people who believed that they could form a truly sound judgment from the study of history. At the beginning of this catastrophic period of war, have come to the conclusion that this world-cataclysm could not last longer, in view of the general conditions which have developed in the social and moral life of mankind, and which have been recognized by the study of history. They thought that this catastrophic clash of humanity could not last longer than four to six months. This is what people who, in a sense, had already formed a justified judgment from history and who were also quite close to practical life thought in August, September and so on in 1914. And what did reality, what did life say to this judgment? This can certainly make one think, it can certainly draw attention to whether the historical approach, as one is accustomed to, is in fact suitable for forming a judgment, how reality seriously challenges such judgments.

Yes, esteemed attendees, I would like to mention another similar one – hundreds and thousands of examples could be given in this direction – I will mention another one that was given by a personality whose genius no one can doubt; a personality who felt called upon to ask himself the question: What does history say about human life in modern times? This question was posed to him when he took up his university professorship, and this personality who made this judgment is none other than Friedrich Schiller. And what judgment did Friedrich Schiller give when he felt compelled to instinctively express the effect of historical study on his soul in his inaugural lecture? Schiller said, back in 1789: History teaches that the peoples of European humanity have finally emerged as one big family, within which there may well still be these or those differences, but within which it could never again happen that they tear each other apart.

This judgment was delivered by none other than Friedrich Schiller, just before the outbreak of the French Revolution, the great clashes in Europe that followed. And if you add to that what has happened to this day, then Friedrich Schiller's judgment is also shown in a peculiar light. One can say: Because perhaps Goethe, in his wisdom, looked deeper into human life and existence, he did not seek what history, as it confronted him, could offer in a judgment that could be learned, but rather, Goethe sought the fruit of history, perhaps for good reasons, in an impulse that goes deeper in man than into the mind, deeper than into the outer intellect. He sought the fruit of history in the seizure of the whole soul with enthusiasm.

And perhaps today's reflections can be suitable to develop and expand this judgment of Goethe and to show it in all its reality. For I would like to base today's reflections on the question: What does science, which we have been accustomed to considering as history, offer in comparison to what reality demands of us? One could say: Precisely when we consider life in its various forms, this life in its various forms perhaps indicates in a meaningful way something extraordinarily instructive in a deeper sense by what has emerged as a historical judgment itself.

Therefore, I will start from the perspective and way of thinking of two historians, observers of history, who in their mental peculiarity are as far apart as can be imagined; but the present day really does demand a way of looking at things that is different from the kind that only wants to dwell on what can be grasped in the surrounding area, to the extent that you can see the church tower of the place. The events of today, of the immediate present, however, demand of us that we broaden the horizon of our consideration to include the whole earth, and so I would like to preface my today's consideration with that which two very different personalities had to think about history in a particular case in a particular field.

The first personality is the late Karl Lamprecht, a retired professor of history at the University of Leipzig. He summarized what he had to say after a lifetime of research devoted to the history of the German people in a short extract – which is why it is so instructive. He had summarized what he had to say about the developmental forces of his people summarized it in the way he believed he had to summarize it, especially for a foreign population, for a foreign audience; for I base this consideration on the lecture he held in 1904 at the World's Fair in St. Louis and at the invitation of Columbia University in New York. Karl Lamprecht spoke there about the driving forces behind the development of the German people from the beginnings that the historian can penetrate, the first Christian centuries, to the present.

And I would like to parallel this form with the way of presentation that a mind has given, which has grown out of Central European folklore and that which experiences this Central European folklore as its history. I would like to parallelize this with the peculiar way of thinking of another man, who is also a historian in a certain sense, with the way of thinking of Woodrow Wilson, who spoke almost at the same time about the same subject, but with reference to his American people. I cannot think of anything more characteristic for those who want to gain insight into the way history is sought on earth today than what results from comparing the historical view of their own people in these two personalities.

Karl Lamprecht attempts to go beyond the old English and Rankean views of history, which rely only on external documents. He tries to turn his attention to the inner driving forces of historical development, to that which cannot be found merely in external records, but which can be found if one wants to penetrate into the soul life of the people, seeking the deeper forces that condition historical development. Karl Lamprecht comes to many interesting conclusions. He says: If we look back at the earliest development of the German people, we find that by the third century A.D. a peculiar kind of emotional power and its effects had developed in the soul of this people. If we examine the various areas in which these powers were expressed in this ancient time, whether in the , in the military, in the state, in the social sphere, in the artistic sphere, in a primitive way, as it was then, one must say: the people of the German nation lived in such a way back then that they shaped their social life and their social work out of a certain symbolist, emblem-forming disposition. Not only did they try to depict world events in symbols in primitive art, they also lived from person to person in such a way that the symbolic nature shaped these experiences. For example, one identified with the leaders of the people, seeing in these leaders of the people symbols of the whole nation, and this, says Karl Lamprecht, meant that at that time what can be described as the military-comradely principle emerged in the moral, in the social togetherness.

Then, Karl Lamprecht believed, what lives as an inner impulse in historical becoming is replaced by another form of emotional power, which then comes to shape the configuration of German development up to the eleventh century. This symbolist, symbol-forming emotional nature is replaced by the typifying one. Now it is no longer imagination that is at work, but reason. It attempts to find types in the individual phenomena, representatives of a whole, not symbols, but types; even in the individual personality who is leading, one sees the type for the other people. Military-comradely life changes, while this disposition changes, into a more cooperative way of living together, where the rational, the reasonable, already has more influence on the imaginative, also in the social, moral structure of human coexistence. But the impulses are still elementary, primitive, arising from the will in this time.

Then, according to Karl Lamprecht, we can see very clearly an age in which quite different impulses prevail in the soul forces. It begins in the tenth or eleventh century, continues until the middle of the fifteenth century, and I would ask you to bear in mind that Karl Lamprecht's historical instinct led him to set the middle of the fifteenth century as the end of what he begins in the eleventh century and calls the conventional age. Whereas in the past the moral and social structure of human beings was shaped out of certain necessities, he argues, consideration is now entering into the structure, although the old remains: conventions. Contractually, cooperative life is formed between person and person, society and society, which differentiates people even less, creates powerful differences through this conventionality, and divides people into classes; knighthood and urbanity, knighthood and bourgeoisie develop under the influence of conventional impulses. Landlordry and serfdom emerge as a social-moral structure in relation to the manorial system and the lease relationship, which were already present earlier. But in the social-moral, the social configuration of the relationship of domination and the relationship of servitude is structured by this purely externally necessary configuration in the ownership structure.

Then Karl Lamprecht, by always also observing how the various artistic achievements emerge from the same impulses, finds that what he now calls the individualistic age begins in the middle of the fifteenth century. Now, he says, the assertion of the individual comes first. Before that, the individual works more out of the whole, out of the whole that is grasped in conventions, for example in the last [era]. Now the individual asserts himself and in the individual gradually, namely, the rational, the intellectual element. And it is quite interesting – to a certain extent – how Karl Lamprecht shows for individual areas of life how this understanding comes up with the intellectual from the mid-fifteenth century. It is quite interesting when Karl Lamprecht goes into this area in detail. For example, when he shows how the diplomatic and political relationships between different people in earlier ages arose out of elementary impulses of will and feeling, whereas now the diplomatic and political is submerged in intellectualism and begins to be determined by the intellect. Karl Lamprecht then allows this age to last until about the middle of the eighteenth century.

Then he begins the era that, in his opinion, continues to the present day and in which we ourselves are living: the subjective era, the individualistic era. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, the human individual remains on the scene; but this individual does not yet act through his internalized powers. Subjectivity, inwardness, first appears around the middle of the eighteenth century and then constitutes the actually decisive factor in the impulsive forces of the development of the German people. This subjectivism is particularly evident in the great, classical achievements, and so on, and so on.

I cannot go into the details. I just wanted to point out how, in the present day, the old historical view of Ranke and others has given rise to the endeavour to grasp inwardly what is alive in the course of historical development. It must be said that one is highly unsatisfied in many, many respects when one allows Karl Lamprecht's way of looking at things to take effect on oneself. It often gives the impression of a chaotic, confused presentation; but one sees in it the direct personal and most intimate struggle with certain forces that are sought, that are to be realized in that which then externally reveals itself as historical becoming. One has the feeling that someone is searching, but is not yet able to find what he is looking for due to the given time conditions.

If we now compare this kind of personal search by the German scientist with Woodrow Wilson's approach, something extraordinarily interesting emerges. I do not wish to be misunderstood, either way. I do not want what I say to be interpreted in a one-sided chauvinistic way, nor do I want to leave any doubt as to how I actually feel about Woodrow Wilson with regard to what I have to say. I have, dear ladies and gentlemen, characterized the whole nature of Woodrow Wilson before it was as obvious to characterize him as an opponent as it is today, namely long before the events that occurred in July 1914 In a series of lectures which I delivered in Helsingfors before the war, I pointed this out at a time when everything was still full of admiration for this new, great world view of Wilson's, even in our country. What is not admired in this day and age, if one is not pushed aside by some circumstances? When people were still admiring the greatness and novelty of Wilson's world view, I pointed out how limited, how narrow-minded, how incapable of penetrating the true impulses of reality the way of thinking of this personality in particular is, and how infinitely regrettable it is that the impulses of the times have truly not placed a way of thinking of such limitedness in a most important post of modern times for the benefit of humanity. I do not believe, therefore, that I am misunderstood if I attempt in an objective manner to characterize that which is now to characterize in its own way that which, like Karl Lamprecht for his people, Wilson has said for his Americans.

It must first be noted that this lecture, which Wilson gave on the development of the American people, provides a remarkable piece of powerful insight into the way the Americans have developed historically. Curiously, Wilson shows how the perspective he has acquired for the development of his people leads him to the salient points where it becomes clear to him how the American has become American historically. So let me also briefly characterize that.

Wilson points out that those who have completely false views about the development of the Americans are those who, like the English who settled in America's east, look at this development of the American people. Wilson rejects this English way of looking at things; he also rejects the one that comes more from the southern states; he points out that what has made the American an American, what is at the heart of the history of the American people, lies in what emerged when the American East advanced against the West , when this mixture of peoples, formed from Scandinavians, English, Germans, Russians, Latin peoples and so on, when this mixture of peoples moved from the east to the American west, that which had not yet been cultivated, cultivated, overcame the old wilderness. Not what was brought from Europe, but what was appropriated in the struggle with the wilderness by a mixture of peoples, that is the starting point, that made the American, whom he, as one can feel, accurately describes, with his adventurous spirit for everything that quickly arises and is quickly seized upon, with the homelessness that awakens plans that are not tied to a homeland but can be carried out anywhere, and so on, and so on. The cattle driver, he says, not the statesman, the woodsman, the hunter, not the statesman, is what the American has produced from the mixture of peoples in the advance from the east to the west in the course of the nineteenth century.

And his portrayal is, it must be said, accurate for this American people. He presents all the details that are otherwise usually viewed differently and that form the content of the social and moral history of America, of the United States, in the light of this approach. The tariff question, the land distribution question, and even the slave question – he shows that all three of these most important questions took on their particular form, their social and moral structure, through what he calls the conquest of the West from the East.

You could say: a powerful judgment! But it is precisely this judgment that is very instructive, and you have seen from the words I have mentioned before that, in my way of looking at things, Wilson is not a particularly likeable personality; but nevertheless, as I delved deeper and deeper into what actually underlies his way of thinking, something very peculiar presented itself to me. I had to ask myself: What about the peculiar impact of Woodrow Wilson's historical judgment? I tried to remember, to compare with the historical judgment of a personality whom I particularly appreciate and who has grown out of the latest phase of German intellectual life, I tried to compare Wilson with the peculiar way of his sentence formation and so on with Hermann Grimm, who only looked at history in terms of artistic phenomena. But he himself once explained to me, when I spoke to him personally, how he actually had in mind a comprehensive historical view that really, as far as he was able, wanted to go into a kind of intellectual grasp, intellectual consideration of the world of facts. I had to compare – the subject itself demanded it – some of Wilson's work with some of Hermann Grimm's.

The strange thing turned out to be that I was extremely surprised: some sentences could be taken as they stand in Wilson, could be taken and translated, and translated over into works by Hermann Grimm. According to their wording, they fit well. And conversely, one can take sentences as they stand in Hermann Grimm and translate and place them in Wilson's treatises. They fit in. The sentences are interchangeable. This peculiar fact presented itself to me, turned out. All the more reason to go into the psychological underpinnings, which are at issue here. In Hermann Grimm's work – and the same can be seen in Karl Lamprecht – there is a personal struggle for historical judgment. Everything that such personalities say is individually, personally experienced and fought for, is a direct personal experience in the inner struggle with the meaning of the facts. You get this feeling when you look at things quite objectively. What about Wilson? Especially where he judges so accurately, the matter is quite different. I am not afraid, because I believe that after my lecture the day before yesterday, I cannot be misunderstood with such remarks in terms of terminology. I am not afraid to use an expression that is very often interpreted in a superstitious sense, but certainly not by me, but in a strictly scientific sense, as I showed the day before yesterday. With Wilson, when you penetrate into the structure of his sentences, into the wording of his sentences, you have the insight: what he says, he does not say in the immediate struggle of the individual personality with the matter, with the object, but says it as if he this view as if he were possessed by an unknown power, as if possessed by something to which the soul is only remotely connected, which dawns in the soul from special irrational depths, whereby one is not completely aware of what one is possessed by. And I must say: when you take the accurate judgment that Wilson gives about the American national character from this development of his historical view, one feels, I would say, the exterior of the American, which he indicates there, something of this obsession with judgment. The “rapid mobility of the eye”; compare this, if one may say so, with the extraordinary calmness of the eye of a human observer such as Herman Grimm or other Central European human observers, who, although they fight with all their souls for their judgment, for their judgment, but who reflect the calmness in the eye, which has nothing of that mobility of the eye through which that which the soul is obsessed with, and also the other characteristics, which Woodrow Wilson means.

From such an example, dear attendees, we can learn something extraordinarily important for the present. Our present, of course, considers itself to be so extraordinarily practical, considers itself to be so akin to reality and realistic in its judgment; but our present is in fact excessively theoretical in a certain respect; for it is mostly clear about this: When two people say something with the same wording, they are saying the same thing. Nevertheless, you can be as different as possible by saying things that have the same wording. You only get to the reality of people when you are able to see the right reality behind the thing I just mentioned.

Those who establish a position of confession or opposition only on the basis of wording no longer meet reality. Today, if you want to go along with the impulses that the times demand of us, you have to develop something deeper in your soul than the mere intellectual and rational assimilation of a wording. Today, wordings no longer form the content of world views, because such a wording can be fought for in every single idea of the individual soul. Then, through the way it is said, it must be possible to become a participant in what is going on in the soul. Or such a wording can make the soul obsessed; then again one must be able to look deeper into some things that are empty and barren, even if, as is strikingly the case with Woodrow Wilson and Hermann Grimm, the sentences are interchangeable. And perhaps in no other field than where the present is viewed historically can one have such experiences.

It is interesting that the German scholar Karl Lamprecht is pushed by a certain instinct to base historical observation on spiritual forces; but he leaves something unsatisfied. Why? He is left unsatisfied because he turns to the soul study, the official soul study, by which he is surrounded in the present. He turns to the soul researchers who have emerged from the ranks of official philosophy today. He asks them: What goes on in the soul of the individual human being? That is already the new thing. But he starts from a great error. Even if one were to assume, which of course the spiritual researcher cannot assume, even if one were to assume that the official psychology or soul science practiced today is more than mere dilettantism compared to the real insight into the soul life, it would still not be possible to do what Karl Lamprecht tried out of an estimable instinct, but with which he must fail. He tries to make himself clear: what does the psychologist say about the development of the individual in relation to his soul? And then he applies what comes to light in the soul development of the individual in today's official psychology to his entire German nation.

A strangely enigmatic characteristic emerged, one that distinguished the different eras but indulged in endless repetition. If we wish to recognize the basis of this, we must point to something that can certainly be regarded today as paradoxical, perhaps as fantastic, perhaps as a mere reverie, but which must penetrate into the historical way of looking at humanity if history is really to become for life what it is believed to be for practical life. If we consider the individual human being in the development of his soul with that which enters into his ordinary consciousness, we do not stand at all in the realm that contains the driving forces in historical becoming. For why? That which works and lives from person to person in the moral, historical, and social togetherness does not live in the ordinary consciousness of the human being.

We can only come to terms with what is at stake here if we truly bring to mind a thought that I have often mentioned. In the ordinary, trivial consideration of life, one is of the opinion: the human state of consciousness alternates between the two great phases of daily waking life and nocturnal dull sleeping life, where consciousness is pushed back into the dullest possible twilight. But this is only a superficial way of looking at it. In truth, anyone who delves deeper into the conditions of inner human life and its revelations, using the means that I presented here the day before yesterday as imagination, inspiration, in short, as means of visual penetration into the spiritual world , that what we call dream life, what we call sleep life, does not merely occupy the human senses from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, but that it extends into our waking life.

Even when we are awake, we are only awake, dear attendees, with regard to our perceptions, our imaginative or mental life. We are not fully awake to our emotional impulses. These emotional impulses are down there in the depths of our soul life. What we experience of our feelings while awake, what we bring into our ordinary consciousness, are only representations of our feelings, and these are to our feelings as the memories of dreams we have when we wake up are to the dreams themselves. Feelings are no brighter, no more manifest in our soul than dreams themselves. By leading an emotional life, we lead it in the element of dreaming. And only by imagining our emotional life do the waves of this emotional life break from the subconscious into the conscious.

And even in the impulses of the will! If you remember how I dealt with it from a different point of view the day before yesterday, even in the impulses of the will, one has to say: There the human being not only dreams, but there the sleep life in all its dullness continues in the actual element of the impulses of the will in the daytime consciousness. What does a person know, by having the idea of what he will do, how this idea is realized only in his hand movement! What does he know of the mechanism of this hand movement, of the transition of the will's idea into the hand movement! This is overslept in the depths of consciousness. Thus the life of dreams and sleep continues in its impulses in the waking life, and it does not express itself particularly in the individual human life; for man is so concerned with his individuality that his life of conception and of perception is of importance for him, for his development, for that which stands clearly before his soul stands clearly before his soul; but when man works for man, when man learns to know and love man, when man acts for man, then it is not the impulses of perception and thinking recognition alone that work, but what leaps from man to man out of dream-like feeling, out of sleeping volition. In social and moral life, there is an element that works through all of humanity, especially through a humanity that belongs together, which is dreamt, which is overslept, an unconscious element.

Dear attendees, to express such a truth in abstracto, as I have just done, is of course relatively easy. If it is introduced into the true contemplation of life, it requires a strictly scientific approach. But this strictly scientific approach leads to something completely different from the historical consideration, as we have been accustomed to in school so far, which, as I have shown you in the introductory words, is so inadequate in the most important cases of life assessment. Once we have recognized, in its full significance, that what pulses as historical, moral, and social life in humanity must be considered as it directly works, like dreaming, like sleeping, we will realize that History must become something other than what has been understood by it so far and than even Karl Lamprecht understood it, because he wants to consider the soul of the individual and now apply that which lives in the waking consciousness to the historical consideration. No history comes of it, because one does not approach the dreamy and sleepy impulses of the event with it. And one comes to it least of all when one does what has been done more and more in the course of the nineteenth century, when one, which has led to such great, such powerful results for natural science, which have also been fully recognized by spiritual science completely appreciated by spiritual science, if one wants to apply the scientific way of thinking to history, this scientific way of thinking, which is, after all, a result of the intellectualism of modern times.

The greatness of the modern study of history has been seen precisely in the fact that one has begun to look at everything scientifically, that one has begun to place historical development in the same light in which natural phenomena occur to us and in which natural phenomena are rightly viewed. Here, too, Hermann Grimm made a very significant remark out of a deep instinct, although he did not recognize the significance because he was not a scholar of the humanities and also rejected the humanities. He made a remark about the way history is viewed. He pointed to a typical nineteenth-century observer of history like Gibbon, with his history of the decline of the Roman Empire. And he said it was strange that this Gibbon, who, in the spirit of the natural sciences, wanted to link the events of historical life according to cause and effect, that for the first centuries of the Christian development of the Occident in the Roman world, he actually only finds the decay forces, while he simply lets the rising, sprouting, sprouting life, which comes over the world in the emerging Christianity, in the emerging impulses of the Mystery of Golgotha, fall between the lines, without even realizing it.

Herman Grimm did not know that there was a deep necessity underlying this. Just try to apply the scientific approach, the adherence to facts that can be grasped by the intellect, to the consideration of the individual, individual human life, which is right here and also good for directing the individual life, not [true], to historical becoming. And one will see, especially with a thorough and proper examination of historical life, that one can only find in history that which leads to decline in history, and that one can never find, through the way in which natural science is emphasized as a way of thinking, anything other than the products of history's decline, that one can never find through it the sprouting, sprouting forces, because for ordinary consciousness they remain below the threshold of consciousness and must first be brought up from the dreaming and sleeping through the forces of imagination, inspiration and so on, as they were described the day before yesterday here as the method of spiritual science.

If natural science is particularly illuminated by what can come from spiritual science, history will only be able to be written at all, will only be able to be found in its essence, when one decides to apply the spiritual scientific method. What Karl Lamprecht instinctively wanted, what he felt out of a very deep Central European spiritual need, will only become reality when one passes from the ordinary knowledge of ordinary consciousness to the spiritual knowledge of historical becoming in the way just characterized.

Dear attendees, anyone who gets to know life, who acquires the ability to understand life from spiritual science, knows that looking into the emerging forces of life, into that which is future-proof and future-oriented in life, can never come from the mere intellectual, theorizing, present-day mode of thought, which is brilliant for natural science. It is a somewhat radical statement, but one that can be fully justified: the human being is at the center of reality and must shape reality through his actions; he must place himself with what reason and intellect give him and what can make him great in science in social and moral action. If he wants to regulate it, if he wants to give it a structure, even if it is only in the external commercial or banking sector, he is bound to fail. If you try to put together a parliament, any kind of society that is called upon to give social structure to humanity, from brilliant, ingenious representatives of scientific intellectualism, which is so good for the natural sciences; such parliaments of such scholars will most certainly ruin the social order, because they will only be able to give those impulses that can serve to wither and decay.

One would come upon many of life's secrets if one were to observe life so full of life. Many uncomfortable truths would come out of it, but reality is so serious that it must also be viewed seriously, that one must know what kind of mental strength one has to deal with reality. If this were realized, much of what is today called amateurishness and what is today called fantasy and dreaming would be recognized for what it is: imbued with reality, akin to reality, and called to intervene in reality where the theorist of today, the scientific thinker of the Wilson type, only has the banal, so-called ideals of peoples, so-called principles of interstate treaties, and so on, and so on, as all the theoretical, impractical, self-abrogating stuff is only called; where such a purely theoretical personality sets something unreal, there must enter into a time that demands such seriousness from us as today.

Dear attendees! I will not shrink from developing at least a few points here before you, showing how what I developed yesterday as the consciousness of vision can truly be immersed in reality, and how this leads to a consideration of history. I will only be able to develop the initial, very elementary ideas today, since I cannot speak until midnight and beyond; but you will see from this how, admittedly, there is an instinctive desire for such a historical perspective in individual minds like Karl Lamprecht's, but how there is no awareness that, in the field of historical perspective in particular, one must move on to a real, spiritual-scientific way of looking at things. I have pointed out that, out of a correct instinct, Karl Lamprecht assumes the mid-fifteenth century to be a significant dividing line in the modern development of the German people. And since, in fact, the German people are placed in modern times as a representative people out of objective knowledge — I say this not out of chauvinism — one can study the demands of the impulses of modern times especially in the German people.

But Karl Lamprecht does not go beyond an instinctive observation; otherwise he would not have equated this profound point, this turning point in historical development in the mid-fifteenth century, with turning points in the eleventh century or even with one in the eighteenth century. But anyone who penetrates deeper than Karl Lamprecht into historical becoming will notice that – although this is only ever reflected in external events – a mighty leap, a mighty change in the current of development occurs in the depths of life around the mid-fifteenth century. And the beginning of this same European current, which ends around the middle of the fifteenth century and gives way to certain impulses in which we still stand, in the beginnings of which we actually stand, the beginning of this current, which ends with the middle of the fifteenth century, lies roughly in the seventh or eighth century BC.

From the seventh or eighth century BC to the mid-fifteenth century, European life had a unified moral, political and social configuration. All facts and impulses worked out of an inner spiritual fact, which I, because I must describe it briefly here, would like to describe by saying that it works as it works from person to person in historical development because during this time people are still dominated by a certain instinctive way of using the intellect. Until the middle of the fifteenth century, beginning with the seventh or eighth century BC, the soul life of human beings was, in a sense, homogeneous, shaped in a unified way, but in such a way that the intellect, which is grasped and experienced individually today, worked like an instinct; and all events, all that which human beings wanted, all cultural All these things can only be understood in this time if one can enter into this special way of the soul's activity, where the intellect works instinctively, where reflection does not yet play a major role, where events happen elementary from the human breast, which can only happen now when the human being has long deliberations behind him.

And in the mid-fifteenth century, what replaces the instinctive intellectual soul – in spiritual science, one can also call it the emotional soul – what replaces the instinctive what can be called the consciousness soul, where everything has to pass through the individual consciousness, where the human being has to place the concept, the thought, everywhere, where the instinctive no longer works so fundamentally in his soul. Everything that has happened since the middle of the fifteenth century – I can only hint at it here in rough outlines – can only be understood if one has the first foundation, if one really has this turning point that I have indicated. There you have one point of view – I can only give guidelines – I will give another point of view, which is, however, regarded by people of the present time as even more fantastic, that it is deeply rooted in a truly scientific way of thinking, not in a dilettantish way, but in a way that is difficult to achieve, the existence of which most people still have no idea. This will be recognized in the course of time, just as it has been recognized that not the old world view of the pre-Copernican era, but the Copernican world view is the appropriate one for more recent times.

Ordinary historical research into documents already leads back quite a long way today compared to earlier times; but we only arrive at an understanding of the developmental history of humanity, an understanding that can arise from comparing the various earthly developmental epochs, when we can go much further through the seeing consciousness, through the insight of the seeing consciousness into the development of humanity, than historical documents can provide. Of course, this will naturally be dismissed as fantasy – that may be – but it is nevertheless true that what I described the day before yesterday as the three foundations of true, non-fantastical, non-superstitious clairvoyant consciousness in imagination, inspiration and intuition, that this is added to by following the development of humanity on earth from within, by looking inwardly. Then, not guided by external documents but examining the life of the soul through inner spiritual vision, one goes further back than the seventh or eighth century BC. One goes back to a time that took hold a few millennia earlier. One goes back to those periods of time that follow that significant catastrophe in the earth's history, which geology reports as the Ice Age, which various folk traditions report as the Flood, which of course must be dated much further back than tradition says; one goes back into ancient times, into which no external document, no literary monument, but into which spiritual vision reaches - today I can only hint at the results - one comes back into an ancient past, where a culture existed from which that which emerged later, but in a much later time, existed as the culture of ancient India. Sanskrit literature reports on this, but it is a later product than what I actually mean here in the development of mankind. One goes back to an age in which the human soul worked under completely different conditions.

It is a prejudice today that the human soul has not changed since the time when it can be observed. Oh, it has changed so much. If you go back with a spiritual scientific view to the first period after the great glacial epoch of earthly development, which reached its peak in particular in ancient Indian culture, you encounter a completely different kind of mankind, from which impulses must have emerged that are quite different from those of later times; we encounter a type of human being that remained capable of development into old age in a way that we are only capable of development in the first years of childhood. We are capable of development so that we experience - we still experience it in dullness - what occurs at the change of teeth, for example. We experience the physical in the soul. How does the young person experience sexual maturity, the physical body in the spiritual soul! But in our time, this ends in the twenties. Certain precocious children – one dare not even say this today – even believe that this dependency of the spiritual soul on the physical body ends. It is believed that one is even more mature at twenty for writing “below the line” than at twenty. The dependency on the physical body also lasts until then. But then it stops. I do not mean the external dependency that occurs in the fatigue of the body, in the greying of the hair, in the wrinkles of the face - that is external dependency.

But in that ancient epoch of which I am now speaking, a person experienced such dependency until the age of fifty, which today is only experienced in childhood. Everyone who was there as a young person knew that you experience something new when you get old. That was something very significant, because from about the age of 35 onwards, a person's development takes a downward turn, with physical development entering into decline.

Now, the experience of the decline of the physical is not as we experience it today, but the inner experience, the way one experiences sexual maturity, is a special inner development in relation to the spiritual. It is precisely the spiritual that gives us this experience of physical decline. And by experiencing the physical in this oldest epoch, this physical in that older epoch was particularly suited to develop in the soul in an immediate, elementary, natural way. Just as we today only remember the different stages of our childhood and youth, so in this most ancient time, the human being was suited to experience special spiritual-soul experiences inwardly, the echo of which can be clearly perceived in later ancient Indian literature and culture.

Then came another age. There was already a decline. Man was only in this way with his spiritual-soul in connection with the physical-bodily, only until the last forties. Then came the third age after the great ice age. There man was only capable of development in the way I have indicated until the last thirties. And then came the age that began in the seventh and eighth centuries before the Christian era, of which I said that the mind still worked instinctively, because the ability to develop dawned on the whole of human life until the mid-thirties. During this Greco-Roman period, humans remained capable of development.

Then there was a decline, and for our time – one can calculate such things, but I can only present the results here – the 27th year is approximately the limit up to which the soul and spirit go along with the physical and bodily. In spiritual science, I call what I have just explained the process by which humanity becomes ever younger. Humanity remains, so to speak, youthfully fresh, growing and flourishing in older times well into old age; it retained its developmental forces well into old age. I call this process by which humanity becomes ever younger.

As you can see, if we look at the real laws of historical development on a large scale, we cannot consider the psychology, the soul science, of the individual human being, as Karl Lamprecht does; because the soul in humanity's development, in the times when people did what Karl Lamprecht wanted, they did it in such a way that they said: well, in ancient times humanity is in childhood; then it comes of age and then into mature age; then it becomes old. The opposite is true for the study of reality. Humanity remains young from the earliest times to the highest age, that is, it reaches a high age in youthful freshness and becomes ever younger and younger with its decisive powers, that is, it comes more and more to development, which depends on youth, which no longer gives anything to old age.

One must therefore apply a completely different method and psychology of soul observation if one wants to elevate what is otherwise experienced in the dream world, even in the sleeping state of human beings in their historical and moral development. And only when we study the pulsating depths of the human soul, when we truly get to know the driving forces of evolution, only when we study human evolution and delve into the individual facts, only then will we arrive at a vital and realistic view of historical life.

I would like to mention just one event. Those of you in the audience who have been coming to my lectures here every winter for years – it has been 14 or 15 years – know how little inclined I am to go into personal matters in these lectures; but here the personal is often also appropriate. If I may mention something personal, it may be the following: I myself tried to remain objective with regard to the greatest historical events of the coming into being of the earth, to remain as objective as was at all possible. I started out with no prejudice. And after decades of research, I found the law of this historical coming into being of the earth's humanity, as I have described it, this law of the aging of humanity, in regard to which one must say: There was an age when humanity was capable of development until the age of fifty, until the age of forty, then until the age of thirty, and so on, and in Greek times it was capable of development until around the age of thirty-five. In the seventh and eighth centuries, then, to the 34th, 33rd year, then back to the 28th year. We are roughly in the middle of the fifteenth century. There the instinctive knowledge of the mind ends in the human soul.

Now I said to myself: There comes a point in time when humanity stands in the middle of its development, when the development of humanity stands at a particular point. Once, in this Greco-Roman age, humanity was on the verge of growing older and older and younger and younger. 33 years old; a new impulse had to come if humanity was not to lose its connection with the spiritual world. For this spiritual world opens up to man especially when he sees within himself in his spiritual and soul experience the physical and bodily decay, as it was in ancient times. This spiritual impulse came. It is to be deepened through the newer spiritual science. For that which the human being can no longer draw out of his bodily form, the spirit must give him through spiritual-scientific knowledge as spiritual, in order to keep him capable of development up to the highest age. But for this to happen, a special impulse had to come at a particularly important moment in history, when humanity, going down from above, had reached the 33rd year. And strangely, the greatest symbol in human development is the new impulse of Golgotha, the Christ impulse. The greatest impulse for the development of the earth comes from the 33-year-old Christ Jesus in the 33rd year of humanity. I did not set out, dear attendees, to look at the Christ impulse first and to place it artificially. I knew nothing of this being placed in this way. This law presented itself to me first, as I have explained it before, and then I had to see the Christ impulse in the light of this law.

When one looks at it this way, one first recognizes how spiritual science does not lead to a superficiality, to a shallowness of religious life, but truly to a deepening of religious life, to that deepening which sinks this religious life so deeply into the human development of reality. I just wanted to mention this because you so often encounter the following: people criticize you, well, whether you speak of religious life in spiritual scientific lectures or whether you don't speak of it. What don't they criticize! If one does not speak of it, they say, spiritual science has no religion, no Christianity; perhaps this only arises because this spiritual science, in a deeper sense, understands a certain commandment that also exists:

Thou shalt not take the name of the divine being in vain! (Ex 20:7)

If one does not speak the name of Christ or God in every sentence, it is said that spiritual science leads away from religious life. If one does speak the names, people regard it as an attack because they all feel called upon to speak about religious life. You can't please people. But that is not the point. Those who get to the very heart of spiritual science can see how it can only lead to a deepening in all areas, including religious life. And how is moral, social and historical life grasped, which proceeds in such a way that its impulses do not even penetrate into consciousness? But we live in an age where awareness must arise, where what could remain unconscious in earlier times must emerge into consciousness. We can look back to those ancient times of human development, when the dream-like, the sleeping in human impulses was experienced in a different way. Then, historical life was lived out in consciousness in myths, legends and fairy tales.

Those who understand how to appreciate such things know that fairy tales and myths, in the external sense, do not contain any truth in the way that history is viewed today; but in a deeper sense, they contain the historical impulses that people otherwise dream about and ignore. By developing his myths, legends and fairy tales, man placed himself in the moral, social and historical context of his fellow human beings, and in his own way brought to consciousness in a pictorial way what is actually at work in historical, social and moral life.

Today, of course, we cannot invent myths and fairy tales; but we must use spiritual scientific imagination and inspiration to bring up from the depths of the human soul what would otherwise remain subconscious. We must recognize that when one person stands morally face to face with another, there is a kind of subconscious clairvoyance in this confrontation. And what the spiritual researcher recounts is only a raising of the subconscious, the dream-like, but in human actions to revelation coming, into consciousness.

In this way spiritual science has a hand in the investigation and deepening of reality. And this spiritual science corresponds fundamentally to what the instinctive consciousness has been striving for in our spiritual life. One has only to think of a spirit like Lessing and his “Education of the Human Race”, or of the great and significant impulses for the study of history that were given by Herder. Much of this has been forgotten. In my book “The Riddle of Man” I have pointed this out, and also pointed to a forgotten current in German intellectual life. But this forgotten current in German intellectual life will resurface; for in it lie the seeds of a spiritually appropriate view of reality.

Such a spiritual view of reality is particularly needed in history. Then the real impulses, which no intellectualism, no scientific observation, no Wilsonianism can bring to the study of humanity, will enter into the study of humanity. It will be realized that that which is revealed in history, that which is revealed through man, goes deeper to the soul than that which merely seizes the head, that which merely seizes the intellect and which rightly celebrates such glorious triumphs in scientific knowledge. But with this one cannot master reality. One will understand why a history educated in the natural science pattern had to make such mistakes as even Schiller made, as the people of our time have made in relation to the great world catastrophe.

In our time, we are called upon to form our judgments about the development of the earth. We must not shrink from deepening these judgments, we must grasp what Goethe means, what underlies Goethe's words when he says that history cannot be learned intellectually, but that history when we immerse ourselves in it so deeply that we bring the subconscious into consciousness and place it in the human context, we develop ideals that enable us to cope with current situations. False prophecies will not arise in our consciousness, but the strength will arise wherever we are placed in life; we will know how to grasp the context of the facts and will be able to act out of natural necessity. Then we will not be taken in by false prophecies, all kinds of predictions and the like, but by real prophetic, that is, future-proof, future-oriented action, which we will come to know through the study of history.

History must first come into being and will only come into being when people come to a spiritual-minded view of reality. Then history will also develop true moral science, then history will be what can give man the best in the first place, namely the right enthusiasm for life, an enthusiasm that is full of understanding, that penetrates into reality, and that meets the right thing in the right place. And such a thing is demanded by the life of the immediate present. The life of the immediate present teaches many things; it also teaches that we must meet the demand for a true view of history.

Dear attendees! Today, anthroposophy is still seen by many people as a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into areas of the world through knowledge, which serious science should have nothing to do with. Now, however, there are also scientists who are to be taken very seriously indeed, who speak of the fact that going beyond the usual scientific methods to knowledge of worlds into which these scientific methods do not lead must be striven for, and one speaks then of all kinds of abilities that one or the other person may have in order to penetrate into such worlds. They then endeavor to fathom what comes to light through such abnormal abilities and register it in the usual scientific way. But even such serious scientists will not want to have anything to do with anthroposophy for the reason that they do not want to recognize the path by which anthroposophy attempts to penetrate into supersensible worlds as a scientific one, but at most want to regard it as a kind of fantasy, as a special kind of impossible mysticism or even as a special kind of superstition. Now, my dear audience, those people who strive for enthusiasm, for nebulous mysticism or even for superstition will sometimes come close to what anthroposophical knowledge wants to incorporate into our spiritual life, but in the long run they will hardly get their money's worth. People who run everywhere where there is talk of some “Sophie” or some “occult” will very soon see that Anthroposophy in particular endeavors to work entirely out of the spirit of modern scientific spirit, and even to take this spirit of modern science to its very last consequences, but above all that a thoroughly healthy and as far-reaching thinking as possible is necessary for anthroposophy. And that is not exactly what the devotees of enthusiasm and nebulous mysticism love. The fact that anthroposophy has such aspirations cannot, however, prevent those people who would like to reject it with a slight wave of the hand from repeatedly saying that only neurasthenics or hysterical people can approach anthroposophy.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, this evening I would like to take the liberty of addressing the essence of anthroposophy, as it is intended by those who who, in the spirit of this serious science and serious thinking, strive for an expansion of our knowledge because they recognize that, in our scientific culture and in that which opposes it, the modern person must remain unsatisfied in two directions. In the first instance, where it is a matter of research in natural science, anthroposophy places itself firmly on the ground of this natural science research, and it sees, with all those who proceed as cautiously as, for example, the famous du Bois-Reymond, it sees precisely the limits of this natural science research. It sees how human thinking, which has celebrated such great triumphs in modern times and is justifiably so proud of its methods, can nevertheless only work in the direction of natural scientific research by adhering to external, sensually given facts, by more or less summarizing these sensually given facts and arriving at natural laws. When we realize that our present thinking, which is so conscientiously applied in science, is trained entirely on external, sensory facts, that it can only have methods that correspond entirely to the course of these sensory facts, then we will have to speak of the limits of scientific recognize the limitations of scientific knowledge and admit that all philosophical speculation that seeks to go beyond these limitations by means of pure thinking, by thinking left to its own devices, will enter into uncertainty in those areas where the actual being of the human being is rooted in its immortal foundation. That is why there is so much controversy about the one or other philosophical system that wants to speak about the immortality of the soul, about the divine spiritual foundations of the world. One feels how thinking, tearing itself away from sensual facts and wanting to build on its own foundations, how this thinking absolutely enters into uncertainty, so that one can actually have the feeling: this thinking no longer deals with anything outside of the sensual facts. On the other hand, there are numerous people today who have a more or less clear feeling that they still want to penetrate to the deepest human longing, to penetrate to the world reasons with which man is connected in his innermost being and through whose knowledge he could gain insight into his immortal being. Then such people probably surrender to one or the other direction of mysticism, that is, they say goodbye to all knowledge. They delve into their own inner selves. They believe that if they delve into their own inner selves, if they dig deeper and deeper into the shafts of their own human soul, then the eternal essence of man must also be found.

In this area, I would say that anthroposophy takes exactly the same scientific approach to observation. And by engaging in taking what some mystics present as the actual essence of the human being, it sees how there is nothing in it but transformed perceptions of the external sense world, which to a certain extent withdraw into memory and the ability to remember. And who knows how, over the course of years and decades, that which this mysticism may have half-consciously taken up into its memory can be transformed and how it is brought forth by mystics as something quite different, how they believe that something is telling them about a certain divine spiritual being in man, while in fact they are only dealing with the transformed memories of external perceptions. Anyone who has insight into these things will see, precisely in these mystical endeavors, however well-intentioned they may be, a stumbling block to truly scientific penetration into a spiritual world to which the human being truly belongs.

And so, dear attendees, there are two pitfalls that anthroposophical research must avoid. The first is mere mental work, which wants to be left to its own devices, philosophical speculation about the supernatural and the beyond, which leads into uncertainty and even into nothingness. The other is mysticism, which, although it believes it is penetrating to the divine-spiritual through immersion in one's own inner self, nevertheless has nothing to do with anything other than what the human being has first led down into his soul through observation of nature, through observation of the external sense world, and what he then later brings up again.

These two pitfalls stand in stark clarity before anthroposophical research. Therefore, anthroposophical research tries to simply say: the paths of knowledge that one must take in the field of external knowledge of nature do not lead at all into the spiritual, supersensible realm. Other paths of research must be taken. And since the usual paths of research make use of the cognitive abilities that a person has in ordinary life, anthroposophical research must seek out other cognitive abilities. It can be said right from the outset: the anthroposophical research referred to here is not based on any kind of abnormal ability that individuals may want to have through grace or illness, but on the fact that there are abilities slumbering in every human soul – if one wants to express oneself scientifically – that are latent abilities that can be brought out by certain methods, so that only when man has come into full possession of the cognitive faculty, which is applied in ordinary life and in ordinary science, only then does he begin, I might say, to imitate the child once more. We see the child as it enters the world with only limited abilities to gain insight into its surroundings. We see how these abilities lead ever deeper and deeper into the outer and inner world and how these abilities develop. In our ordinary lives, we complete this development at a certain point. And having acquired a certain way of thinking, a certain way of feeling and a certain way of willing as adults, we stop at that point, using these to drive our everyday lives and our ordinary science. Those who want to do anthroposophical research must continue this development. At a certain point in their life, they have to say to themselves: the abilities in the soul are not fully developed in this way; more can be raised up from the depths of the soul. And this bringing up leads to those cognitive abilities that can guide us into the supersensible worlds. I have described in detail, Ladies and Gentlemen, what a person has to do to bring up dormant abilities in his soul. I have described it in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in the second part of my “Occult Science” and in other writings. I would like to take the liberty of now quoting in principle what is described in detail there.

What a person has to do in order to develop their higher, their supersensible cognitive abilities is not an external process, but a process that takes place within the most intimate depths of the soul itself. There are certain soul exercises, soul exercises that lead in two directions. One direction is a certain treatment of thinking, of imagining, and the other direction is a certain treatment of the human will. The way in which imagining is in every human being can be transformed and furthered by certain soul exercises, and the same applies to the human will. What is to be achieved through thinking is a certain inner strengthening, a certain inner strengthening of the thought life itself in the first instance. This is not achieved by some arbitrary act, by an arbitrary inner contemplation or the like, but it is achieved in the sense of anthroposophical research by giving thinking itself a kind of inner schooling, and indeed a schooling that works, I might say, according to the principle by which we otherwise also make the human being stronger in life. If I may use a very trivial example, I can say: If a person repeatedly strains a particular muscle system in his work, this system becomes particularly strong. The same can now be achieved in relation to the act of visualizing itself. For example, you can do the following – and many such exercises are mentioned in the books I have mentioned – you can place any idea or a set of ideas at the center of your entire mental life. I call this meditation and concentration of thought. This is truly not some kind of magic, but a development of the very ordinary, normal human abilities. So you put some idea that you can easily grasp at the center of your mental life. It is often recommended — and rightly so — that you look up such an idea in a book or elsewhere so that it is new to you, or that you get it from an experienced anthroposophical researcher so that it is new. Why should it be new?

Because when we have an idea that we have had for a long time in our lives, or even for a short time, because such an idea, by bringing it into the center of our attention, evokes all kinds of memory remnants. Much remains in the subconscious and unconscious. We do not overlook what we put into the soul when we take such an idea or series of ideas from our treasure trove of knowledge. But if we take something that is completely new to us, or something that we have been given, then there can be no question of any reminiscences emerging. Instead, we then devote our entire soul life to a new, but now inner, impression, an impression that we can only grasp with thought. We give ourselves over to such an image with all our soul life as intensely as possible, and we try to bring it to the same kind of vibrancy in the act of visualizing such an image as we otherwise have vibrancy when we are confronted with an external sensory impression. This activity of the soul in response to an external sensory impression must in every respect be the model for every exercise that the anthroposophical researcher first undertakes in his soul.

This clearly shows — my dear audience — that it is not a matter of bringing something out of the depths of the human organism in a pathological way, so that what I am describing to you now can by no means lead to hallucinations, visions or the like, but on the contrary, leads precisely to the other pole of human soul life. The ideal is not what can be achieved by some kind of morbid brooding, isolated from external perception, but rather the ideal is, so to speak, that healthy human devotion of soul that one develops when one faces external sensory impressions with full consciousness and with the most absolute control of the will. And by applying this liveliness to that which one places at the center of one's soul life in the manner described, one actually comes to strengthen one's imaginative and thinking life, to make it more powerful, just as one strengthens a muscle when one uses it continually.

If you continue such exercises — they require a lot of patience and perseverance, because anthroposophical research is no easier than research in any field of external science — you will eventually notice how your thinking has become more intense, more vigorous, more powerful. And one arrives at developing within oneself what can be described as a kind of first step on the path to supersensible knowledge, and what I have called — names must be there, one must not be offended by them — imagination. One gradually learns to live completely, as otherwise in the world of the senses, in an inwardly intensified thinking.

But what is most urgently needed now, above all, is to be clear about one thing: when one's entire soul life is concentrated on such a complex of images, then — I would say — the soul life gradually submerges into a realm in which it , to imagine them vividly, to have such images in abundance, they would arise with an inner intensity that is otherwise only found in external sensory perceptions; but if one did not develop another faculty, one would ultimately come to be dominated by these images in a certain way. They would besiege you, they would be there, you would be devoted to them. It would come to pass that the ideas have the person and not the person the ideas. Therefore, it is necessary that these exercises — modified in the most diverse ways — are accompanied by others, exercises that consist of suppressing such ideas, of removing them from consciousness; so that on [ on the one hand, to develop the ability to make one's consciousness as intensive as possible through thinking, and on the other hand, to remove these thoughts at will and to pass over into a state that can be called empty consciousness. But one notices that after such exercises have been continued for some time, one's entire thinking has become free of that which the body has as its share of ordinary thinking life.

This, ladies and gentlemen, can only be realized, I would say, through the experience itself. In the practice of thinking, as I have described it to you, of thinking that has been thoroughly worked through, it becomes apparent how one moves freely in thought and then has the thoughts as something like an external table or some other object. And just as little as one would think of placing an external object in the interior of the soul or the human body, so little would one, when one has penetrated into such a modified imagination, place what then arises in consciousness only in the interior of the organism. It is an experience that one comes to a soul life that takes place outside the body. It is important, my dear audience, that this first stage, the stage of imaginative knowledge, be transcended before moving on to higher stages.

But now we must be clear about one thing: everything that arises in this way initially takes on a pictorial character. The usual abstract way in which we otherwise follow natural phenomena, carefully lining them up link by link, can certainly be evaluated by the spiritual researcher in the right way, and must remain so, because common sense must run entirely parallel to what I describe as supersensible research, this kind of linking-together abstract thinking ceases for the field of supersensible research itself and an inwardly intensive, pictorial imagining occurs. One lives in pictures and manages to remove these pictures from consciousness in order to remain with an empty consciousness.

Dear attendees, it actually seems quite easy to remain with an empty consciousness. But most people who have not undergone this training immediately fall into a kind of sleep when there is no content of consciousness, when the content of consciousness is suppressed. That is what must be achieved for anthroposophical research: that after one has first brought the life of thought to its fullest development of strength, one can then immediately suppress it again and, so to speak, face the emptiness on one's own initiative. One does not stand there facing the void, because we will see in a moment that if one makes the consciousness empty from within, after first having permeated it, that if one has become free of the body penetrates with his imagination into the supersensible world, that this is the way not to remain with a sleeping consciousness, but that this consciousness is filled with the content of a supersensible world. But man still has to imagine — I would like to say — undergo a transition. When one enters ever more strongly into this world of images through intensified visualization, one comes to the point where one can simply say, from the facts that one experiences inwardly: You do not have the same lightness of thought within you that you used to have and that you reserve for ordinary life; you do not have this lightness within you in imaginative thinking. You live in these images now in such a way that you are devoted to them. You know that you cannot simply structure one image within another as you used to, but that the images structure themselves. They demand, through their own essence, the form they are to take, and you feel yourself in a world that is a reality.

You enter this imaginative world and from a certain point onwards you experience how you are immersed in reality, I would even say, how you are immersed in the soul. And the first experience one has when one has penetrated to such imaginative vision is that one's life on earth since birth comes to life before the soul as in a great tableau. Otherwise, a person has the stream of memories from this life, from which this or that emerges, either voluntarily or involuntarily. This is not the case with what I am now describing, but what emerges from a certain point of imaginative knowledge is that the human being has before him, as in a broad overview, the workings of his inner being. He overlooks how certain forces have given rise to this or that disposition in him, how he has come to this or that heroic or unheroic decision. He does not so much gain insight into the individual facts of life as into the forces that lie behind them, that have shaped us ourselves, that have given our thoughts their direction and content, that have guided our feelings from within when they have been stimulated by the outside world, that have impulsed our will. All that has been incorporated since birth, one can see.

One comes to experience, not through fanciful arbitrariness but through the realization of the experience of anthroposophical research, what is called the formative forces, or, with an older term, the etheric body. One experiences that which the human being carries within, which has not only a spatial character but also a spatial-temporal character. What stands as a unity above the time space since birth is experienced as something that cannot be depicted in detail, unlike a flash of lightning. One can depict this formative body in a single moment; but it is in motion, it is that which works in us, which flows through and pulses our entire soul life. In that, one lives initially.

But – dear attendees – once you have acquired the ability to extinguish the images that arise in the imagination over and over again as I have described, so that you can penetrate to the empty consciousness, then you have gradually acquired the ability to powerfully concentrate and suppress this entire formative force body, so to speak, to remove it. Just as one otherwise only removes the individual images that one has brought to, so one removes this formative force body, thus emptying one's consciousness of this content, which now contains not abstract ideas and images, but the forces of inner growth. When you remove it, you have not only stepped out of your body, you not only perceive spiritually outside of your body, you have stepped out of your earthly existence. Then you perceive in that in which the essence of the soul lived before birth or - let us say - conception, and in which it will live after the human being has passed through the gate of death.

You see, dear attendees, for the anthroposophical spiritual science meant here, it is not a matter of philosophical speculation, but of something that is achieved through gradual, truly systematically applied inner methods as a human ability. One does not penetrate to human immortality with mere thoughts, but one penetrates to that which precedes birth and follows death — I would like to say — through an inner method of experimentation — please do not misunderstand this word — but one must continually make the attempt. When you have come so far that you can imagine without the body and can suppress the images that arise in the imagination, that you can step out of the life between birth and death and enter into the essence of the human being, which is the immortal part of the human being, when you have strengthened the soul to such an extent that it can become empty, then it is not an empty consciousness that enters. Rather, this consciousness is filled with facts that one could never perceive otherwise, with facts from a purely spiritual, supersensible world, from a world that is always around us, permeating all sensuality, in which the human being lives without his sensual body before birth or, let us say, conception as in a spiritual world. And in this way one actually enters into concrete spiritual ideas that cannot otherwise be obtained except through inner experience. One arrives at the experience of human immortality.

You see, dear audience, you may doubt the results of anthroposophical research at first – not only do you have the right to do so, but it is even understandable for the first attempt at human understanding – but if you look at what underlies the anthroposophical researcher, if he puts himself in a position to get these results, then you will have to admit: He has the right attitude for true science and scientific conscientiousness. He tries to change his soul, but not arbitrarily, but out of such inner conscientiousness as can be found in the laboratory or clinic.

The fact that a person, having created an empty consciousness, now perceives something, means that in the most eminent sense he no longer perceives with the body – which he otherwise always does for ordinary and scientific consciousness – but perceives with the soul, freed from the body. And when a person perceives, as I have now indicated, that which is not contained within the sense world, that which is the essence of the human being before he enters into embryonic life, then one can speak of the second stage of higher knowledge, of knowledge through inspiration. That which penetrates into the soul because the consciousness has learned to empty itself, is inspired into this consciousness. And from experience we know that through such inspiration alone man can form an opinion about immortality. But if it is presented as a result, then everyone can follow with common sense what anthroposophical research does. Anthroposophical research does not lead to visions or pathological states, but can be followed at every stage with common sense. Therefore, one can always verify whether the paths taken by the spiritual researcher are reasonable and whether reason can therefore also be found in the results he gives.

And when one now advances to such inspired insights, then the first step is indeed the recognition of the supersensible entity of the soul, as it was before birth or – let us say – conception, as it will be after death, the realization of the immortal essence of the soul But one can only penetrate to this immortal essence of the soul if the soul has come to a body-free realization, if it exercises pure mental, transparent cognitive activity, which it otherwise exercises with the help of the brain and nervous system. This is independent of brain and nerve activity. And just as, to the ordinary consciousness, man must be more or less a materialist, as materialism is right for the ordinary consciousness, that it is bound to the physical organization, that the physical organization must underlie its activity, so it is true on the other hand that, by developing such abilities as I have described here, man then comes to make free use of the soul as an organ of knowledge. In this way he not only penetrates into the supersensible world just characterized, but also into that which is continually around us, of which the ordinary sense world is only a manifestation. That is to say, now man can penetrate into a world that lies behind the sense phenomena, not merely through philosophical speculation, but by using purely soul organs that he has first — I would almost say, if it did not sound philistine — laboriously acquired. And then one does indeed enter into regions that are still very much resented by today's familiar modes of representation.

But before developing knowledge for these areas, other methods of imagination and concentration must be added to those described. These other methods go in the direction of the will. Just as thought, for ordinary consciousness, is dependent on the brain and nervous system — I cannot go into the details here, but for those who are truly familiar with modern scientific developments, this will be beyond question — so too is the human will, as it unfolds in all that leads a person to action, dependent first of all on the human physical organization. Just as one has to free the life of thought from the bodily organization for supersensible research, so one also has to free the life of will from the bodily organization. But even that strong effort of the will, which one must unfold in imaginative knowledge, leads one to gradually apply the will in a body-free way.

Dear attendees, perhaps I may make a seemingly personal comment here, but one that is entirely relevant. I published my “Philosophy of Freedom” at the beginning of the nineties and tried to show what human freedom is actually based on. The usual question is: Is man free or subject to an absolute necessity? Does everything that leads to a decision of the will, to an act, flow from the necessary conditions of his organism, or does the possibility lie within man to decide freely out of himself, without necessity? I tried at the time to show that, for the vast majority of human actions, one must indeed speak of necessity, that the instinctual, the drive life, the emotional life, that everything that is bound to the human organism, is the basis for the vast majority of our actions, but that man can also rise to have pure thoughts as his volitional motives, pure thoughts that live inwardly in moral ideals.

When man lays such pure thoughts as moral ideals at the foundation of his volitional impulses, then he gradually comes to be a truly free being as a personality. And I called this sum of moral ideals that can find a place in a person, and which then find their outward expression in the way a person morally lives, I called this sum of moral ideals moral intuition. And I have said that the truly free life of man is based on such an intuition, an intuition of which I said: What its content is does not come from the human organism, but is taken from a spiritual world, and it is from a spiritual world that the free man is determined. And if one now pursues the philosophy of freedom in this way, then this philosophy of freedom is thoroughly a preparation for insight into such cognitive abilities as I have described today.

When one sees the essence of these moral ideals that are to be realized here, then one comes to expand this essence more and more. And when one adds such inner exercises as I have described today in principle, then one realizes: what is granted to man as an earthly being in terms of free actions can take part in a spiritual world. This can fill his entire soul, it can bring him to imagination, through which he surveys his body of formative forces, and can bring him to inspiration, through which he surveys the soul that he was before he entered earthly existence through birth or, let us say, conception, and that he will be when he has crossed the threshold of death. But the capacity for such supersensible knowledge as this in man must be cultivated also in the sphere of the will.

Here one can indeed bring forth the best fruits by endeavoring to make one's will ever stronger and stronger in relation to the purely inner life. This can be done in many ways.

I will give the following one. We are accustomed to thinking in terms of how external facts unfold. We treat what is earlier as the cause and what comes later as the effect. And when we are immersed in ordinary life, we think along the lines of external facts. The one who only thinks in this way along the thread of external facts, who thus, so to speak, passively surrenders to the course of external events, cannot achieve the development of will that is necessary for the purpose of supersensible knowledge. But the one who, for example, does the exercise – and does it again and again – that he, instead of thinking along the thread of external events, imagines these external events backwards, the last ones first, then the penultimate ones and so on and so on – let us say, for example, the course of a drama from the last act to the penultimate, third-last and so on, in the smallest possible portions backwards – or if he considers his experiences of the day in this retrospective view in the evening, then, if it is to be done seriously, a different effort of will is required than that used when he lets his thoughts run along the thread of external facts.

This effort of will, which one then arrives at, ultimately brings about what otherwise – I would like to say, although this is perhaps not popular with those people who only ever speak of objective knowledge — this effort of will brings about a deeper sense of what, in ordinary life, is tied to the organization as the most beautiful and best expression of the human will: to develop love. I know, dear listeners, that love is not readily seen as a cognitive faculty. And in the way it is in ordinary life, anthroposophy does not seek to appropriate it. But when the will unfolds in the way I have described, then the human being comes to discover that the capacity for love is one of the most significant cognitive faculties.

Through this cognitive faculty, which he can still increase by, when he has, as it were, grasped this ability to love within, when he has become aware of it, by now pursuing the external facts in such a way that he really lovingly puts himself in the individual kingdoms of nature — I have described this in detail — as a person develops such cognitive abilities, as he lovingly follows the life of a plant from germination to fruit, so that he experiences how leaf by leaf unfolds. Likewise, one can — I would say — with such a developed capacity for love, delve into the animal organization and so on. If one also strengthens the life of the will in this way and begins to observe oneself more seriously than usual as an active human being, if one observes oneself in one's actions as objectively as one otherwise only observes external objects, if one gets into the habit of walking beside oneself like a second person and always watching oneself in his volitions, then the will comes to not only let inspiration unfold in man, but to let that which speaks into the human soul from a spiritual world also be experienced through the imagination. Then man comes to make his own soul a living organ of knowledge for the spiritual. In inspiration, the spiritual world does not yet reveal itself to the soul in a clear way. In the third stage, which I have called intuition — real intuition, not the vague one that one also speaks of in one's outer consciousness — in this intuition, man truly penetrates into the spiritual world.

This is what anyone who wants to penetrate the spiritual world, which always surrounds us and of which the external sense world is only the manifestation, only the outer expression, should have achieved.

Just so that I am not misunderstood, I would like to say in advance: when a person enters into abnormal, pathological states of visionary life, when he is taken in by a hypnotic state, when he is suggested something by others, then he is in this abnormal state of mind and the other state is, as it were, suppressed. The person is completely surrendered to the abnormal perception or experience. Those who are really pursuing the anthroposophy referred to here will see that there is not the slightest reason to confuse what is referred to here as the anthroposophical method of knowledge with anything hallucinatory, visionary, or pathological. The latter comes from a completely different direction. This can be recognized mainly by the fact that in all hypnotic, hallucinatory, visionary, pathological states, the person is given over to these states, and his ordinary soul life is extinguished, either temporarily or permanently. In the case of the supersensible form of knowledge described here, we do indeed penetrate into a completely different way of looking at things, into a perception of the world of the spirit that has nothing in common with the world of the senses. However, in every moment in which one surrenders oneself to this supersensible knowledge, ordinary knowledge and the ordinary state of consciousness, the completely normal, healthy human understanding, remain present at the same time. In the process of realizing spiritual life, this maintained healthy state controls the other unusual, but no less healthy, state in every moment.

I must say this before I describe how things appear under the influence of supersensible knowledge. Let us take something cosmic, the sun. We see it for ordinary observation in the way you know it: as a disk within space. We construct its true size and shape and so on with the physical methods we have. For the knowledge I have described here, the picture we have of the sun through ordinary science is completely transformed. The solar phenomenon that appears with firm contours and emits rays ceases to exist in this way before supersensible knowledge. For supersensible knowledge, the solar phenomenon, as it were, fills the whole space. The sun-like quality is everywhere and we become aware that this sun-like quality, which is everywhere, is only concentrated, so to speak, on the physical sun, that this physical sun is only the physical manifestation of something spiritual that fills all of space. Then one becomes aware of how this sun-like quality is a process, an event, and indeed an event that one is now [getting to know], since one has indeed got to know the formative body of the human being, which is the creative force in the human being, the creative force that gives us our abilities and forms our organs plastically.

By getting to know this formative body of the human being and how the forces of this body are connected to the forces of the sun, we recognize that everything that is constructive growth forces, that is the progressive forces of flourishing, of increasing, of becoming, is contained in the sun. In short, I would like to say that the cosmic space that has now been transformed into spirituality is filled with the power of becoming, of growth, which unfolds outside in nature and underlies nature. One sees this solar aspect as that which is becoming, growing, penetrating everywhere, one sees it penetrating into the own constitution of the body of formative forces. One learns to recognize how the human being, with his intimate spiritual-soul and bodily organization, is integrated into a cosmic principle of development. The world of facts is truly enriched by a sum of spiritual processes.

Just as one gets to know the solar, one gets to know the lunar. It becomes apparent as the process that asserts itself in everything as that which dies, decreases and withers, and which also extends into the human being, constantly bringing about the fact that not only ascending forces of growth are within us, accompanying us from youth, becoming less and less towards old age, but which nevertheless accompany us until death, that not only the forces of growth are in us, but also the others, those of destruction, of decline, of aging, that the lunar forces are this.

The human being learns to fit into the solar and lunar process. And in this way, I would say, the human being appears as a member of the whole cosmos. Just as our hand appears as a member of our organism, which, as we know, is no longer what it is as a member of our organism when we cut it away; it only makes sense through the whole organism. In the same way, when we look at it with the means of knowledge, we perceive how man, though closed off from the other things of the sensory world by his outer sensory form, is nevertheless backed by the forces that shape this sensory form, but which at the same time make it a member of the whole cosmos.

Here it is possible to show that to get to know the cosmos as a sum of spiritual beings is not based on fantasy, but on the fact that man first grasps within himself the means by which he can see through the processes and events of the cosmos in their spirituality. In this way one goes further and further, and comes to recognize the cosmos as a spiritual world. And when one has ascended to the point of really seeing the spiritual in the soul in this way, then one actually only ascends to that which is now exalted above the forces of growth and destruction, which, in the case of a person with an inner struggle, so to speak, carries the victory over what is solar and lunar in man. There one arrives at the most complete realization of the human ego, and one learns to recognize that this ego is not limited to this one earthly life.

Once one has recognized through inspiration what goes through birth and death, and what the soul is like outside the body, one has recognized how that which is outside the body connects through conception with that which is given to it through the powers of inheritance. Then one notices, when one can perceive this together, that something else is at work in the soul that is purely spiritual, but which works in our ego. Without this spiritual element, the ego in man would be a completely powerless thing. This spiritual element, which manifests itself when one reaches intuition, is a repetition of earlier earthly lives. Man has gone through earlier earthly lives and lives again and again between death and a new embodiment. And that which, in an earthly life, is active in the ordinary life and ordinary science with the help of the ordinary organism, and which finds its expression through this ordinary organism, passes through the gate of death and through the spiritual worlds. Having passed through the spiritual worlds, having absorbed everything that it had previously only worked and experienced through the body in the world, it enters a new earthly life.

What one experiences in this realm is one of the most intimate experiences of the soul, one of those experiences in which one becomes aware that behind even the spiritual-soul activity at work in the organism lies something else, something that has already gained earthly experience, that brings something into this life that is not contained in the two worlds that one has already become acquainted with. It is not contained in the sense world and not in the spiritual-soul world. One learns to recognize that which is now elevated above the sensual and the soul-spiritual in that it has already experienced a sense world. One learns, because one has first got to know those other two worlds, also to know that world where the repetitive in man reveals itself.

This can be said about the world outside of man in connection with man himself.

In this way, I have roughly indicated to you the essence of anthroposophy, how through it one can penetrate into the immortal part of the human being, how one can penetrate into the cosmos and into the connection of the human being with the cosmos. But when we get to know the human being in this way, and his or her relationship to the world, we gradually advance to the areas where anthroposophy is not just a form of knowledge, although that is what it seeks to be at first, and from which it but one advances to that which anthroposophy is already capable of in a certain sense today, namely to the applications of anthroposophy to the most diverse fields of science and practical life. I can only make brief references to these things here, but I would like to make them based on the principles that I have just discussed about the nature of anthroposophy.

First of all, we get to know the human being as a sensory being, as a being that exists as a natural being within natural facts, natural forces and natural substances. When we learn through physiology and biology how the substances of the external world penetrate into the human being, which paths they take, which forces then continue to work, then we become aware of how the human being stands – I would like to say – as a physical-sensual whole. But when we get to know the human being in the way I have just described, then we see not the physical-sensuous whole, but we become aware of the many different ways in which the human being is determined by the cosmos in relation to his various members. Thus, for the characterized supersensible knowledge, it shows that the solar element, which has an effect on man from the cosmos and continues to have an effect on man, has its effect on everything that I would like to call the main, the head organization of man, the one that is mainly the nerve-sense organization. This is therefore what has to do with the development and growth of the human being, and what is most active internally in the very young child.

In the course of life, the moon-like forces, the [dampening] forces that lead to physical death, become more and more effective. These are mainly active at the opposite pole of the human organization, in the system of limbs, the organs of movement and the internal organs of movement, the metabolic organs. In short, we now learn to understand the human being not just as a whole, but learn to integrate it into the outside world. This can then be further specialized. What seems to us to be closed off in the human being for the ordinary consciousness becomes an event, a process for supersensible knowledge. We learn to speak through supersensible knowledge not only of the brain and its parts, but of the brain process, the lung-like process, the heart process, in short, of the human being as a form that is mobile in itself, even in its physical organization, permeated by the formative forces of the body, moving it, and we get to know what the etheric body accomplishes with the physical body as a sum of processes. In this way, however, we penetrate deeper into the human being.

We get to know the human being's relationship to its surroundings, in the broadest sense to the cosmos. In this way we arrive at a real, genuine knowledge of the human being. And you have seen that we not only gain knowledge of the human being, but also of the outer world. We get to know the sun-like, moon-like, that which otherwise lives in the cosmos, in the plant, animal and rock world. We learn about the processes that take place in healthy and sick people. We recognize external processes that are, in a sense, the opposite processes of these processes. We get to know the plants and minerals that contain the opposite processes. We penetrate to a pathology and therapy, to a medical science that is not only based on trial and error, but that, like any rational science, learns from knowledge of man and the world how to observe health and disease and how any medicinal substance helps any process in the human body that deviates from what is beneficial for the human body. So you can see how it has come about that anthroposophical research has been made fruitful by setting up our Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Stuttgart, where we are looking for new remedies and new therapies. The experiments have already progressed so far that they can go out into the world and prove how it has been possible to make anthroposophy fruitful in this field of practical scientific life.

Likewise, my dear attendees, we were able to find a path that may be said to fulfill Goethe's path of art in a certain way, by which I mean a path that leads from what is there into what is formative, for example, through our building in Dornach, the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science, which is not only, so to speak, an external framework for anthroposophical activity, but is artistically so imbued in its architectural style as anthroposophy with that with which it, as a world view, presents itself to humanity. If any other spiritual movement had needed its own building, it would have turned to this or that master builder, who would have created a setting for it out of the Romanesque or Gothic or some other architectural style.

Anthroposophy does not want to be abstract knowledge, it does not want to be mere theory. It cannot merely fertilize the individual sciences, but it penetrates from the formed world to the forming world. And let us take a saying by which Goethe has just characterized his own artistic perception. He says: Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that could never be revealed without art. By creating art, Goethe does not want to implant human arbitrariness into the material, but rather what is felt or, as we would say today, seen in the spiritual from the cosmos itself. A building could arise that says exactly the same thing in its forms for external observation as is said in words, by representing the anthroposophical view, the view of the spiritual world, from the idea. And so anthroposophy will also be able to have a fruitful effect on artistic life.

In Stuttgart, Emil Molt founded the Waldorf School in 1919, which I run. This Waldorf School is by no means a school of world view, and those who think that anthroposophy is taught there as a world view are quite wrong. That is not the case. It has gone so far that the religious worldviews are represented by the representatives of the individual religious denominations. Catholic worldview is taught by the priests of the Catholic Church, Protestant worldview by the priests of the Protestant Church. We have introduced special religious education only for those children who would otherwise have no religious education at all, but this does not aim to graft an anthroposophical worldview onto the children. The educational method of the Waldorf School, its didactics, should express what anthroposophy can give in this most important area of practical life.

And, dear ladies and gentlemen, anthroposophical knowledge gives us knowledge of the human being. With it, we can follow how the soul and spirit of the child express themselves from the first moment of life, how the soul and spirit have an ever-increasing plastic effect on the external physical form. Certain laws can be found that are different in the child up to the time he learns to speak, then different again up to the age of nine, and then again up to sexual maturity. We can get to know the child completely without having to become a revolutionary with regard to the basic laws of life. What we need is practical knowledge of human nature. Anthroposophy does not want to create revolutionary new principles at any price; it wants to get to know the child in such a way that anyone involved in teaching can, so to speak, deduce everything that is developed in the curriculum and teaching objectives from the spiritual, mental and physical knowledge that anthroposophy can provide, as I have described it.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is fair to say that if anything in any other field had been able to bear fruit in the same way as some things did at the Anthroposophical Congress in Stuttgart this past summer, the world would have looked at something like this differently. At this congress, for example, we saw how external experimental psychology and education were so excellently discussed, as in the lecture by Dr. von Heydebrand. If this had been given in other fields too, it would have been the talk of the day for a long time for all those involved in education and teaching. Anthroposophy, which has to fight for its field, to fight for it in the field of education and also in other fields, will then also be fruitful for other fields.

We have experienced in modern culture that thinking, the whole way of imagining, which simply emerges from the scientific way of thinking, has led us into a social world view and outlook on life that is now bearing its terribly destructive fruits in Eastern Europe in particular. We have seen the fruits of a purely scientific life that does not want to penetrate to the spirit in the social sphere. The Anthroposophy that is to be revealed does not merely comprehend man as a natural being and also think him into social life as a natural being, but comprehends him as a being of body, soul and spirit. And in this way Anthroposophy can fertilize social life. However, this can only be shown little by little, it must gradually be lived out in individual practical things, which have already been pursued. I do not want to talk about that, but about the fact that even economics, which arose from purely external views, has been subjected to an excellent critique by Emil Leinhas, so that here, in his lecture 'The Bankruptcy of Economics', which is now also available in print, a way has been shown to introduce spirituality into social life. But social life is not steered in the right direction merely by speaking to a stove: “Dear stove, your task is to warm the room, so warm it up.” That is of no use, as we know; instead, you have to put fuel on the stove, and then the warming will come of its own accord. Social life is not steered in the right direction by persuasion, by a categorical imperative. This can only be achieved by making use of the forces that can really be introduced into practical life.

And finally, where anthroposophy can have a fruitful effect – but this is perhaps the most important thing, although it does not belong to our topic – I mention the area of religious life. It is precisely here that anthroposophy is misunderstood, in that people believe that it wants to incorporate something sectarian into life, when in fact it shows how knowledge — which is as rigorous as ordinary science — penetrates to the spiritual and soul life in the world and, in the core of the human being, fulfills that which comes from it, the human soul, with religious intimacy. In a sense, the human being learns to recognize this through being a religious adult, illuminated by the light that can only come from beholding the spiritual worlds to which the human being truly belongs.

Nothing would like to be anthroposophy for religious life more than what, according to the demands and longings of modern man, can live through this life in such a way that it offers inner security, that it gives support for life, that it can also enter into life practice. Because ultimately that is what everything depends on: life practice. If we were to ascend to a spiritual world that we only half-dreamt of, glimpsing it out of cloud-cuckoo-land, and if our lives on earth were to continue without the influence of this spiritual world, then this spiritual world would be of highly questionable value to human beings. Anthroposophy does not present itself to people in such a way that they should follow the example of certain mystics for whom the material world is always too bad. It also wants to advance to the higher worlds, but it knows that the higher spiritual worlds are those that bring their lives to a revelation precisely by creating the physical-material.

And so anthroposophy seeks to become the basis for a true practice of life. We permeate ourselves with what can be seen in the spiritual life, but we try to carry it into all areas of life, into the practice of life. Because it is not the spiritual world in which one must flee that is the right one, but the one in which one can actively immerse oneself in life. And so anthroposophy does not want to become something that turns against the great advances in knowledge of nature and what comes from it, but something that further develops this knowledge of nature in the sense of a knowledge of the spirit, but also in the sense of a true spiritual practice worthy of human beings. No one more than the one who stands on the ground of this spiritual-scientific anthroposophy will recognize the great importance of modern science and reject any dilettantism in any field if it wants to set the tone for the spiritual life. But it must nevertheless arise from the deepest longings of the human heart and all human striving for knowledge, which ultimately wants to be anthroposophy.

Just as we only have the whole, the full human being before us when we not only consider the outer nature of the human being, the outer, bodily organization, but when we see him or her as ensouled and spiritualized , we only have real knowledge of the world and of the human being and a spiritual and humane way of life if we want to penetrate our natural practice and our natural knowledge with what comes from the spirit, from the soul. And so anthroposophy does not want to oppose scientific progress, but wants to have genuine scientific meaning itself, wants to be that which is soul for the whole human being, which is spirit in corporeality. It seeks to be this for external natural knowledge and for external natural practice. To a certain extent, it seeks to see a soul and a spirit in the magnificent and powerful contemplation and practice of nature in recent times, and it is this anthroposophy that is meant here that seeks to act as and be understood as the center, as the soulful and spiritual center for natural knowledge and natural practice.

Dear attendees! Before I begin my remarks today, please allow me to say a few words by way of introduction. What I will be saying today can be fully justified scientifically. And I will try again and again to establish a relationship with science by showing that anthroposophy is in no way opposed to the justified results and conscientious research methods of the present day. But I have already allowed myself to make the relevant remarks, at least in outline, in the lecture that I was allowed to give here in the same place a few months ago. And since I can assume that a large number of the esteemed audience who were present that day are here again today, a repetition of what was said then could well seem superfluous to them. And so I will leave out what I said then about the relationship between anthroposophy and science.

Dear attendees! When we speak of the spiritual world, fundamental questions and riddles arise for the human soul, questions and riddles that are not merely theoretical, but are connected with the inner peace and joyfulness, with the whole inner destiny of the human soul, and with the ability and efficiency of the human being in life. But the nature of these difficulties that arise for the human being in relation to the spiritual world is not always considered in the right way. That a human being has a spiritual entity to claim for himself cannot really give rise to any mystery or doubt. For man knows in every moment of his waking existence that precisely that in which he feels himself in his true human dignity and in his true human nature is what he describes as his spirit. He is concerned about such riddles that arise in this direction. He is concerned, after all, with the fate of this spirit, which actually constitutes his being. Whether this spirit is something that belongs to the ephemeral, whether we can ascribe a duration to it, whether it is what emerges from material existence like a bubble, whether it is what gives meaning and value to the material. So that is essentially what it is about, not the spirit as such. Even the materialists will not deny the spirit, but only regard it as a result of the material processes of the world.

If a person feels the urge to explore the nature of the spirit, not only for the sake of science but also for the happiness of everyday life, it is because, in the face of this fate, the soul — one might say — from unconscious depths, which are actually only raised into consciousness by a scientific world view, because uncomfortable, worrying moods continually arise from them. And these are connected with a vast number of experiences that flash through our soul. I could mention many of these experiences that cause a person to worry about the spirit, but I will only give two examples, two that are precisely those that a person does not always realize, that do not always enter a person's consciousness. But it is precisely such worries that dwell in the subconscious depths, giving rise to moods and states of mind, bringing happiness or sorrow to the soul, and which intrude into everything that makes a person capable or incapable in life. When we define them, we often describe something that the simple, naive mind does not bring to consciousness, but which is rooted all the more deeply in the soul and is connected with the whole life of feeling and sensation. And from this realm I would like to give two examples.

The first is the feeling that arises at the moment when a person passes from the waking state into the sleeping state, which actually occurs every day in a person's life. The inner spiritual activity in which the human being finds his true being fades away. It becomes completely unconscious, and the human being enters the indefinite. Even if one does not always feel it, there is something in this experience that could be called the powerlessness of ordinary spiritual life. There is something in the world existence that we enter through the state of sleep and that takes away from us the state in which we recognize our human dignity and our human worth, that takes away our spiritual life. This powerlessness in the face of the spirit is the one thing that, more or less, half or wholly unconsciously underlies the riddle questions about the spiritual being.

And on the other hand, it is that which can arise when a person awakens in the morning, perhaps through the transition of the dream state, which he can only see as a sum of chaotic experiences in relation to the reality of waking life, then immersed in his physical being, serving his bodily senses, his organs. But then the human being notices — I would say — the other pole of that which raises questions about the nature of the spirit within him. He notices that, in relation to what he is as a spiritual being, he is claimed in his bodily presence. He lives in the senses, in the nervous system, in the limbs. But if we ask ourselves the simplest question: how do we move the hand, the arm? In our ordinary consciousness, we cannot account for what flows from the intention to carry out the action down into the body, what works and weaves in this bodily existence, so that ultimately raising and lowering the arm comes about. It is as if what we call our spiritual life were plunging into darkness.

Thus, on the one hand, we see the sense of powerlessness of the spiritual life and, on the other, the descent into an undefined darkness that lies within us. And when a person, through experiencing something like this, brings to mind all the soul moods and dispositions that arise from it, then the question somehow urges itself upon him: Yes, what is the truth about this spiritual life? Is there another spiritual life in which this, which seems so powerless and dark to me, is somehow rooted, that guarantees its continued existence? But then two opinions, two enemies of thought and feeling, are placed between man and this spiritual world, which fill man with illusions about the spiritual world and which feed on something in him, in the mood and state of his soul.

The first is superstition. The person who wants to come to an awareness of his connection to a spiritual world does indeed strive inward, seeking, not through his knowledge but out of his will, to surrender to all kinds of illusions, all kinds of clouds to his judgment, things that are supposed to tell him something about the spiritual world. I need only hint at these things for you to feel what sources of illusion lie in what we call the various forms of human superstition. But let us see how the superstitious person must fare in the world.

What he conjures up within himself and what is supposed to visualize his relationship to the spiritual world collides with external reality at every turn. Let us look at the processes and things around us. If we approach them according to their laws, we find that something else is true than what we believe from superstitious ideas. This leads to a certain disorientation. We stagger through life instead of feeling connected to our spirituality, to the real laws of the world. And we also become unfit because we cannot find the strength within ourselves to adapt to the laws of the outside world. A superstitious person must ultimately become an unfit person for themselves and their environment. Now, it is precisely those who, because of a certain will or a certain situation in life, must refuse to deal with the whole scientific life of the present day who fall prey to superstition. Those, then, who are little touched by the significant insights of scientific life, easily fall prey to the disorientation and unfitness in life that I have just described.

Those who truly enter into this scientific life, who conscientiously penetrate with the scientific methods what the senses, what experiment and observation can offer, are exposed to another pole of mental experience. Such people then feel how they must shape the intellect so that it may find its way unclouded and unmolested through all kinds of illusions into the realm of true reality. But then they feel further: with this intellect, which is so well suited for the realm of the [sensual] world, one cannot ascend into the supersensible world. And precisely those who take the scientific life seriously are then thrown into doubt. And these doubts, when they take hold of the serious mind, the serious soul, they descend from the intellect, in which they are initially rooted, deep into the life of feeling and emotion. And it is precisely through anthroposophical research that we recognize how intimately our emotional life is connected with the states of suffering and joy in our physicality. So that in the end what descends from the intellect into the mind as doubt extends into the bodily existence. So that a person — one may use this radical expression in this case — is thrown by doubt into a certain mental wasting disease, then into physical weakness and unfitness. Through doubt, too, he ultimately becomes unfit for life, for himself and for his fellow human beings.

Because these things affect modern man so deeply, those personalities who take the spiritual life seriously seek the most diverse means of information in order to gain a relationship with the spiritual world after all. We see how precisely these latter natures now turn to that which, because of its vagueness and lack of certainty, can never actually form the basis of real knowledge. They turn to the pathology of human nature. Because they doubt what the healthy soul and healthy body can produce in terms of knowledge about the supersensible world, they turn to the abnormal human nature and believe that, in what they can find in deviation from what normal knowledge produces, normal knowledge, can be found that points to things and processes in another world than this one, in which man also feels just as little at home and where he cannot want that the spiritual could sink into indefinite darkness. And so especially doubters from the fields of science often turn today to mediumistic phenomena; they turn to the sick human nature, out of which come all kinds of visions, all kinds of inner views, which are nothing more than hallucinations after all. For we can see, if we look impartially at the facts in this area, how the medium, who in terms of his normal life of cognition is cut off from the environment, how he, out of a morbid physicality (for a healthy nature produces a healthy capacity for knowledge), has all kinds of inner experiences, which he then communicates. It is never possible to examine these experiences with the same accuracy with which, for example, one examines those of a dream. In the case of knowledge, it is important that what is experienced from somewhere can be examined by the healthy human understanding of everyday reality. We can do this with dreams, but not in the same way with mediumistic revelations, because we do not see through them, because they do not live within ourselves. Nor can it be tested in terms of knowledge what arises from a diseased nature as visions and hallucinations. We will always find that something is wrong somewhere when visionary or hallucinatory phenomena arise from the soul life. And one can say: it is only a continuation of the despair at healthy normal knowledge in the face of the supersensible, which expresses itself in such seeking.

On the other hand, there are many natures in the present day that have not yet emerged from what education, from what we are born into, gives, but there are already a good number of natures today that, by despairing of other ways of entering the spiritual world, they now come to what I might say the most naive minds seek out to satisfy their spiritual needs. There it is, time-honored, the result of a development from ancient times up to our own, there it is. One can quite certainly feel how such confessions, and they extend into our present-day philosophy, how they really reveal something of a spiritual world. But one can actually, since they are simply there as results, since they are preserved by tradition and approach man in a certain finished form, yet give nothing but what in the present day is called belief as opposed to actual knowledge.

Those who lack the courage to penetrate to knowledge seek to justify their belief through all possible conceptual constructions. But those who approach the event with deeper insights of the soul and follow it from period to period, who not only follow the external facts of history but also follow the inner life of the soul of humanity in historical life, they find that everything that occurs today in traditions, in worldviews that exist as creeds or as philosophies, to which one then devotes oneself with a certain faith, they all lead back to old forms of knowledge, not to old forms of faith.

Dear attendees, I will certainly not be one of those who recommend such old forms of striving for knowledge for the present day. However, in order to be able to communicate how man, by nature and essence, can come to a knowledge of another world, it is necessary to discuss the way in which man in earlier epochs of humanity and how that which has been revealed as the result of such earlier paths of knowledge, how that, without our having any clarity today about what these paths of knowledge were, how that was then communicated to the course of development of mankind, how it is still there today. People would be amazed if they realized with complete historical accuracy how even the most self-evident philosophies only contain the results of those that are present on the basis of earlier knowledge.

I would like to highlight two examples of the way in which such insights were arrived at in very, very ancient times. I could also cite others, but I will choose two characteristic ones. The results of these paths of knowledge, which can no longer be ours, still live on today in tradition. Many, indeed millions of people, devote themselves to them without knowing it. For that which lives in all creeds and in all world views has once been sought by individuals on their paths of knowledge. In particular, the first path of knowledge that I will indicate is not really characterized correctly at present. For it actually characterizes only that which has remained in the ancient oriental world as old traditions, but which has remained defective and decadent, of that which was a fully justified striving for knowledge.

The first thing I would like to characterize is what is usually known as the so-called yoga path of oriental spiritual seekers. Through this yoga path – without people necessarily knowing it – which is said to deliver the results that many people devote themselves to, what was it that they strove for? This will become clear to us once we have summarized its most important characteristics. One process that the yoga scholar particularly turned to was breathing that was different from ordinary breathing.

Of course, I know, dear audience, that breathing techniques in particular can be quite detrimental to people today. But what is harmful to human nature today can be traced back to forms of paths to knowledge that were once perfectly justified in older, more primitive forms of human nature and that were really paths into the spiritual world from the essence of the human spirit at that time. The yoga scholar tried to bring into a different rhythm what otherwise takes place unconsciously in the human being, what only becomes conscious in pathological states or otherwise in some abnormal cases, what thus essentially takes place unconsciously in the healthy person. He tried to inhale, hold his breath and exhale again in a different way than in ordinary life. What did he hope to achieve in this way? He sought to bring the one element of the human soul life to a knowledge of other worlds than the ordinary ones, the element of thinking. And the yoga scholar noticed that through this abnormal breathing, his thought process was brought into a completely different orientation. Into which orientation? We can make this clear by referring to the physiology of today. When we breathe in, the respiratory current is driven through the spinal canal into the brain. This is an unconscious process for modern man. But that does not make it any less true that through the processes that take place in the body and that are the exterior for the soul-spiritual processes of life, not only everything for which the brain is the tool is drawn through them, but also that which is the refined rhythm of breathing. As we think about the world, the subtle current that arises from breathing vibrates and flows and undulates and weaves continuously in our brain and in our nervous system. By breathing in an abnormal way, the yoga scholar became aware of what remains unconscious in the breathing process during normal breathing. And he was able to follow what now flows into the brain from the breathing process,

And what came about as a result was that thinking became different. In ancient times, thinking was very much alive for humanity. In ancient times, it was the case for humanity that people did not, as we today justifiably see pure colors everywhere through outer eyes and hear pure tones through outer ears, the ancient man saw everywhere that which arose in his soul as a soul-spiritual. In the cloud, in the thunder and lightning, in the spring, in the plant, in the stone, everywhere man saw, except for the sounds that the ear gave, except for the colors that the eye supplied, and so on, everywhere man in older times saw a spiritual-soul. People today say: These were fantasies. They were not figments of the imagination, just as we perceive the blush through our eyes, so the ancients perceived what was spiritual and soulful in wave and wind, in lightning and thunder, in plants, stones and animals, in springs and streams, in sun and moon. This thinking, which was the common property of humanity in those ancient times, was of course also the thinking of the yoga scholar. But by sending the consuming breath through this thinking, this thinking became something else for him. Through the thinking that he developed as a result, he perceived a different world than through his ordinary thinking. He perceived the world that gave him, above all, the certainty of his own being.

And when we read today the wonderfully poetic descriptions given in the Bhagavad Gita, for example, about the nature and workings of the human self, they were gained through the fact that the yoga scholarship pulls itself together into a thinking that was acquired through the self-regulated breathing process. Above all, the old man, by seeing the spiritual in all things and processes of the external world, did not have his inner spiritual. Through the yoga process, he became aware of his spiritual self. And that which often resounds from ancient times, which was only changed on the outside, lives on in worldviews and creeds. And many philosophers and religious believers do not know how what they say about the human soul and the self in connection with the eternal has developed over time from ancient times, when it was the result of the training of ancient yogis. But it can be realized that these are inner exercises that were intended to lead the way up to this way of knowing in the supersensible worlds, so that one should get to know one's relationship to a different world than the one that otherwise surrounds us. On the one hand, in the direction of thinking, this was such a path of knowledge.

Another older path of knowledge was the one that is still recommended today in many cases, which is less harmful than the yoga path when applied to today's nature, but which cannot bring real knowledge today. The yoga path is inappropriate for today's human being. Because by performing a certain breathing process, one makes the organism different from what it otherwise is. The organism becomes fine and sensitive. The lightest breaths of life weave themselves into it, so that the person becomes extremely sensitive to the hard, robust outside world. The yogi therefore likes to withdraw from this. In the old days, when people sought higher knowledge from those who withdrew from life, this was possible. That does not apply to our lives today. Our modern life has come to the point where anyone who wants to give people knowledge should be fully immersed in life. We will say of the one who wants to withdraw into a hermit's life: You cannot reveal anything to us. Only when you live life with us and yet come to certain insights, then we can follow your paths of knowledge. Therefore, we need different paths of knowledge for the modern person than the old ones were. And one such older path of knowledge was that of asceticism. In turn, what was practiced as asceticism in ancient times as a legitimate path had been corrupted, and what can be read and learned about this asceticism today in many cases is not what an ancient humanity once used in its legitimate way to seek knowledge, which in many cases lives on much more than that of the yogis in today's worldviews. So what is this asceticism based on? It is based on a lowering, a relaxation of our physical body. And it was the experience of those who underwent such asceticism when they tuned down their bodily functions, when everything ran more smoothly than in ordinary life, what takes place in the physical body, so that they were filled with the experience of inner strength. The will became purely spiritual as the outer physical existence was tuned down. And such ascetics said to themselves: Yes, those bodily functions are actually nothing more than an obstacle to penetrating into the spiritual worlds. For the ordinary outer world, our body is indeed the right tool. We can only live spiritually and mentally in a world between birth and death if we can devote ourselves to what the external environment triggers in our senses in a purely physical and physiological way. Only when we can use our body normally can we truly live with the outer world. But precisely because this body, according to both the cognitive and the will side, is so well suited for the waking life between birth and death, it proves to be unsuitable for allowing people to experience inner soulfulness in its purity. Therefore, such ascetics sought to tune down the physical, so that the spiritual-soul within them would arise. And they felt bliss when it arose. And in this bliss they felt that which was otherwise incorporated in powerlessness, united with a spirit that never sinks into powerlessness, into darkness. They felt united with the spirituality of the cosmos.

If we tuned our body down, we would become unfit for the outer world. What we humans need to do today, in an age when we are surrounded by magnificent external culture, we could not do. We would become unfit if we wanted to devote ourselves to such asceticism in the old sense. Therefore, for the modern human being, the inner practice must proceed as I have described in principle in the last lecture and as you will find described in detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my “Occult Science” and in other of my writings. There I showed and in these writings I show how the modern human being practices purely in soul and spirit, not by doing breathing exercises with reference to the physical, not by tuning down the physical body but by doing exercises that are to be done purely inwardly, intimately, exercises that consist of concentration and meditation of thought, that consist of the person not devoting himself to another breathing process, but to another way of thinking. This is the difference between the old yoga method and the exercises you will find described in the books mentioned, the exercises that do not turn a person into a hermit and do not degrade his physical body. The old yoga scholar relied on breathing processes that , but which the modern human being must try by concentrating on certain trains of thought, by overcoming abstract thinking, which is otherwise everywhere in ordinary life and in ordinary science, and by doing so, entering into inner mobility.

I would like to say that our exercises are aimed at achieving the opposite of what the ancient yoga scholar wanted to achieve. He had the naive belief, shared by the rest of humanity, that the peculiarity of the time was that his thinking was inwardly alive and that he wanted to calm it. He sought the abstractness of thinking that we already have today, simply because human nature has developed further, and from which we want to escape today in order to gain knowledge of other worlds. It is remarkable that in ancient times, with all one's might, one strove for what we already have today, and that today, by turning directly to thinking, we are taking this thinking in different directions than it is in ordinary life and in ordinary science. That we inwardly enliven today's abstract thinking, which we increasingly perceive as dead thinking, so that we pass from abstract, dead thought to inwardly living thought. That is the secret of today's practice: to enliven the abstract, dead thought that is present in us in ordinary life and in ordinary science. In this way we achieve the goal today of looking into other worlds in our knowledge.

What happens in the process leads us to the characteristics of certain subtle processes. But one must decide to delve into such subtleties. If one does not want to do this, one cannot really understand the path of knowledge into higher worlds. By practicing such exercises – as I said, I will not describe them further today – a person first notices how his thinking gradually comes to life. And I will hint at what that comes to by means of an example that is appropriate for today's culture.

Suppose we look, as one is accustomed to doing if one has had a scientific education, at a - let's say - higher animal. We make ourselves clear, precisely through our abstract thinking, which is the inner conditions of life and relationships, which are the formal designs, in this higher animal. We make all this clear to ourselves as far as it is possible for today's science to gain a correct idea, so that we can visualize the essence of the animal inwardly. What we visualize in this way, we are then accustomed to relating, for example, to the formative development and inner physical essence of the human being. We then visualize how the internal organs are formed, how they function in the human being, and how the external form is developed. We then compare what we can establish about the human being, which we develop into natural laws, with what we gain about the animal. And by comparing the two, we come to form a certain idea, whether in a more or less materialistic or spiritual sense, about the relationship between humans and higher animals.

But now we ask ourselves something else, something that one actually only learns to ask when one devotes oneself to such exercises, which relate purely to thinking and bring thinking to life. Then one asks oneself: Yes, when one turns to the higher animal world with one's ordinary abstract thinking and realizes what one can realize about it, is one then able to ascend from one's idea of the animal to the idea of the human being? Can we, with our inward liveliness, do with the idea what we can do outwardly with the transformation of form that we observe in the outside world, and then compare in its various aspects and relate to one another through logical abstractions? Can we, with our inward liveliness, do with the idea what we can do with the idea of the animal to arrive at the idea of the human being? Does one thus live through in abstract thinking what is presupposed in us out there in nature, as forces of growth and of formation? No, one does not. But if [he] devotes himself to the newer, purely soul-based yoga, if he arrives at bringing this thinking of the human being to life in such a way that, by gains the idea by which he inwardly visualizes this process, then he comes with this idea, in which it is transformed in the way the outer process is to be transformed, over to the very different nature. Then he submerges himself with this living concept into things, while otherwise, if one has only abstract thinking, one stands and does not submerge into them. And so, through this modern system of exercises in relation to thinking, the human being is inwardly completely transformed. His thinking becomes inwardly something completely different and enables him to truly immerse himself in the world to which he belongs, but to immerse himself with that which he inwardly experiences spiritually. And by immersing himself, he becomes certain of this: that which lives in me as a spiritual being, which may appear to be immersed in darkness and powerlessness, is nevertheless grounded in a spiritual world. For by immersing himself in living thought, he makes himself one with the spiritual of the world, he lives together with the eternal, spiritual foundation of existence, and in this way man gets to know his eternal nature in terms of thought.

But then, my dear audience, the doubts really begin. The path is initially like that on one side. However, one should not think that those who seek their path of knowledge in this modern sense will initially live in pure bliss by entering into a completely different state of mind than that of ordinary consciousness. What is at issue here can be gauged from the well-founded objections that can be raised from all sides against it – and I want to say quite categorically – that can be raised with a certain right, the objections that proceed from the fact that one points to a philosophy like that of Schelling or one like that of Oken: ingenious, powerful, ingenious world conceptions, emerging from a kind of living thinking. But if we enter into both with an unprejudiced human sense, in the way that Schelling or Oken formed their thoughts about individual facts, then, in a more imaginative way, these changed so that they fit into something else, so that they can submerge from being into becoming, there is only mere thinking, a mere dwelling in inner imagery. Nothing guarantees existence, reality. This is precisely what one must reproach such thinkers with: although they set thinking in motion, they cannot give it a character whereby it guarantees its reality in the immediate cognitive life of the human being. And here we may point out that whatever in anthroposophical form seeks to penetrate into the supersensible world, can do so whenever a human being endeavors to follow the path of knowledge in the right way by means of the exercises described here. He then comes to such living thoughts. He develops them by using them to try to grasp the world by immersing himself inwardly in it. But just when he has such a living thought in a particular case and wants to grasp something in all seriousness with it, then inwardly he really experiences what can be called the deepest inner soul pain, the deepest inner soul suffering. Such a thought, which can be transformed inwardly, is not without pain, is not without suffering in the soul. That is why anyone who has acquired even a little knowledge will never tell you anything other than this: Yes, what I have experienced externally as happiness, as pleasure, as satisfaction in life, for that I am quite grateful to my destiny; but what I have acquired as a little knowledge, I basically owe to the suffering that life has brought me, most of all to mental suffering. And these mental sufferings, which came over me by themselves, so to speak, also brought me the certainty that the reality of a living thought can only be experienced by inwardly living through its effect, its truth, in suffering and pain, and that real knowledge of the spiritual world cannot be attained without inner tragedy.

This could also be seen through a somewhat unbiased, more subtle way of looking at things. What about our sensory approach? Well, my dear audience, when we indulge in sensory perception, a subtle change first occurs in our sensory organ; even in the wonderfully constructed eye, small changes occur. Today, because we are no longer aware of what early man perceived – these small changes as pain – we are so organized that we experience them with a certain matter-of-fact painlessness, because we are not in them with the whole person. But what the enlivened thought brings about makes us, as a whole human being, aware that the physical human being is permeated by the spiritual. This practice makes us a sense organ, and we must gain the ability to perceive the spiritual world that we acquire through this sense organ by first going through and overcoming pain and suffering. And by overcoming it, not only does the healthy physical body remain, but the soul in us is now able to look directly into the spiritual world. But then, through this seeing, which is conveyed to us by becoming a pure sensory organ after going through the pain, what presents itself to us in this way connects with what presents itself to moving thought. One acquires a consciousness of reality about the spiritual world through the sense organs interacting with animated thinking, just as we otherwise acquire a consciousness of reality about the world of colors and sounds. But in this way, my dear audience, the modern human being also gains the ability to see into another world. In this way, he has a spiritual reality before the eye of his soul, so to speak, as a whole human being becomes the eye of the soul and, in addition to the sensual reality, the spiritual reality lies around him. For example, the human being, as he is physically formed, also appears before our soul in a different way when we have the living thought. He lives in images. And when we look at a person, what is standing there before us as an outer human form — even what is standing there as an outer human form — shows us something that is connected with the purely spiritual soul. We look, so to speak, at a spiritual soul form, just as we look with the physical eye at the bodily form. And by looking at this spiritual-soul aspect, we connect with the physical body what I call, without hesitation — even if it may cause offence — an auric aspect of human nature. We see an auric aspect; we see a spirit-soul organism. And this spirit-soul organism shows through its own nature, just as the physical organism shows when we have an adult human being before us, that it was once a small child. What we see as the auric human being points back to what we were as pure spiritual-soul beings in a spiritual-soul world before we descended into the physical world and united with that which had been prepared in the mother's body for union with the pure spiritual soul from this physical world. And not only are we pointed in this general way to that which we ourselves were when we had prepared ourselves for it, we are also pointed to in a concrete way to what the person was at that time. We gradually get to know the human being as a spiritual-soul being in the spiritual-soul world in the same way that we get to know the physical human being through our eyes and intellect. However, we have to rise to a certain level of contemplation, which consists of saying to ourselves: Yes, we look at the external world that surrounds us with all the abilities that we have in our normal life between birth and death. We see everything around us in the stars, in the clouds, in the realms of nature; but we look least into ourselves. For we know, if we are unbiased, that what we see within us is basically only a pictorial representation of what we experience in the outside world.

Between birth and death, the human being is organized around the external world. An incredible abundance of content is revealed to the human being as he turns his eyes and other senses out into this environment, from the stars to the smallest worm. But the one who is unbiased enough can intuitively see that what he carries within him is formed in an even more wonderful way. Yes, the outer world may be gloriously formed, and through science we may reveal great and powerful laws from it. If we can look into it, not through anatomy, not through what is revealed to external science, which leads to the glories of the outer world, but through inner faculties, then we will say to ourselves at every moment: That which lies within human nature reveals much more than the cosmic outer world. It differs only in external space, but not in abundance. We can only guess at this human interiority in our ordinary consciousness, but it is truly a microcosm, a small world, and however magnificent the external world may be, here within the human being it appears even more magnificent. But between birth and death we only grasp this intuitively. For when we use our senses and will, we descend into darkness. We do not see what builds up our lungs; we do not convince ourselves that what builds up our lungs is greater and more powerful. We look into our heart, but cannot convince ourselves that the inner organization of the heart is a much more powerful one than what we encounter as an organization when we seek out the relationships between the earth and the sun. We can only guess at all this. With the tools of science, however, we cannot look inside. But if we look into the world with supersensible vision — into the world in which we lived as spiritual beings before our birth, or, let us say, conception — then we find that, while here between birth and death the cosmos is our external world, to which we direct our deeds, our spiritual self before conception — the human inner being — is our external world.

We look at this human interior because we have to immerse ourselves actively in it. For example, we have to prepare for the transformation that takes place so wonderfully in the child as the brain develops. We look at what we make of ourselves out of the soul and spirit before we descend into the physical world. We not only see the human inner world, which appears dark to us between birth and death; it is not only our knowledge, it is not only what we admire when we let our sympathy and antipathy play; it is also what we have turned our actions towards before birth or conception. The human being's will nature aims at what he is then able to make of his inner organization. And, ladies and gentlemen, however unconsciously this may take place in ordinary life, it must be achieved. And what the human being experiences in the purely spiritual world through knowledge and activity is what is then, albeit unconsciously, carried out in this physical life on earth. And that is one side of the auric human being.

The other side of the auric man comes before our contemplation when we do not bring the outer form before our eyes, but that which lives in the human being's will impulses, in the human being's deeds. There we indeed learn to look at the world differently, namely at the world of human beings. One says to oneself: What people do appears to one as the world of colors appears to a blind person who has been successfully operated on. He gets to know a completely new world by opening up an external sense. In this way, a sense is opened up for us by transforming ourselves into a sensory organ as a whole human being. With this, however, we look differently at what people experience. Above all, we get to know ourselves with this sense organ, not like the ascetic who downgrades his outer physicality so as to have no obstacle for the spiritual, who caused suffering in order to come to the spiritual through the suffering of the physical; we come to the spiritual through the suffering in the soul. But through this we get to know in ourselves what is spiritual-soul in this earthly life. We learn to recognize what prepares itself as spiritual-soul and, in turn, strives out of the physical as the second auric when we go through the gate of death. We thus become acquainted with our life after death by becoming sensory organs ourselves. We become acquainted with that which passes through the gate of death as the eternal soul nature of man. We become acquainted with the forces that strive within us towards the spiritual world, towards the spiritual in the cosmos, just as we strove with our deeds and our vision before birth.

But we become aware of something else. We learn to recognize, for example, that when one person meets another, the two paths of life converge. Something develops that is of decisive importance for the fate of both. The two go from there together on their path through life. This is usually called coincidence. But if one learns — I would like to say, like the blind man, when he is operated on, learns to see colors —, if one learns to know what a person does in his life with the sense organs that he forms out of himself as a whole human being, then, from early childhood on, one follows what he does, out of sympathies and antipathies — out of sympathies and antipathies that are replaced by others. What becomes his life path always strives out of us, so we can draw the line as if planned to what has become his destiny. We see: what shapes his life comes from within him. We understand more precisely what older people, who have become wise through age, said without bias. Goethe's friend Knebel once said: “When you look back through life, life seems to be thoroughly planned, and you feel drawn to the individual decisive points as if they had emerged from a previously laid out plan for life.” Thus one can see into one's own life and recognize how it is shaped by actions arising out of likes and dislikes, out of instincts and desires. From there, the path leads to the contemplation of the thread of destiny through repeated earthly lives. We learn to recognize how what springs up in sympathies and antipathies goes back to earlier earth lives. It can only be hinted at how, in this way, by becoming completely a sense organ, one gradually gains a view of the repeated earth lives through which the thread of fate runs. One sees into the eternal spiritual through the higher sense.

Now is the time when, in a very modern way, man can find his way to those other worlds with which his soul must feel connected after all, how he can find this path for real knowledge, without becoming alienated from life but by fully engaging with it. Now he can delve into what he acquires in this way as a knower, so that he stimulates his whole being. Now what knowledge is connects with inner religious devotion, now that man finds the way in a modern way, knowledge can in turn lead to religion, now knowledge can lead to true, genuine devotion. Man reaches this goal of knowledge by a path that is full of the inner way. Before that, one had to tune down the body. Now one leaves the body as it is, so that it remains suitable for the outer life, so that one can have the trust of other people. But in the soul, by making the soul work all the harder, one nevertheless undergoes suffering; one produces suffering in an inner way, which used to be produced in an external way. And now, if such anthroposophy, as it is meant here, is understood, it can be understood that the individual can be understood if one listens to him without prejudice. Today, in a sense, every single person can follow certain rules to pave their own way into the spiritual world. But it is not necessary, for one can grasp through one's own common sense what the spiritual researcher can reveal through his vision, and understand it. Just as little as one needs to be a painter to judge the beauty of a picture, so little does one need to be a spiritual researcher oneself to find the truth of what the spiritual researcher says. For through his higher vision, this spiritual researcher is also only led into the higher worlds. He must also recognize the reality of these worlds through his common sense. Just as one checks by means of common sense that a dream does not correspond to external reality, so one must recognize, by means of a more advanced logic, the truth and reality of what the spiritual researcher fathoms in spiritual worlds, in order to fathom the true relationship of human beings to these spiritual worlds in such a way that there is no feeling of powerlessness or darkness. But at the same time, something else arises that we need very much in the present. In the present time, we are completely immersed in a flood of ideas and thoughts. Science and many other aspects of life give us these ideas and thoughts, but these ideas and thoughts are abstract and, in the sense in which they were mentioned today, dead. At most, we have thoughts of the spirit, ideas of the spirit, but the spirit does not live among us. This is what we, as modern people, must confess when we look back at past ages. Certainly, we cannot wish that they would arise again. Many things must appear quite unappealing to us that people once considered right for their way of life. And in terms of this way of life, today's people have an enormous number of hopes and illusions. But if we do not want to bring back the old days, we have to say: they lived in the spirit; for they immersed themselves in the spirit. They did not devote themselves to abstract thoughts. This spiritual life has become life for people, not just thoughts about spirituality. Today we only have thoughts about spirituality. We will again have spiritual liveliness among us. We need this, by developing thoughts about the spiritual, developing them in such a way that the concrete, the living spiritual moves into ourselves, so that we are penetrated to the innermost being not only by thoughts but by the spirit, so that we also know: spiritual beings live around us, with us, in our life of will, in our thoughts. We need the spirit not only in the form of thoughts, we need the living spirit everywhere in our midst. We must know, in turn, that we can conjure up the experience of the thought, of the living will, not just the abstract, but the concrete spiritual. If we know that the spiritual lives in us as a thought, that it lives with us as a companion, can inspire us, can fill us with enthusiasm, can open up our true human existence and human dignity, then, with such a human relationship to the world, elevated into the supersensible, into the spiritual, we can find paths that lead us to demands that are being made today with deep longing and deep tragedy and also with many illusions. But we must seek the spirit as a companion in our endeavors in the present and the future by spiritualizing our thoughts and by bringing dead thoughts to life. That, and nothing else, is the aim of anthroposophical research into the world, of the anthroposophical paths that are supposed to lead from the physical world into the spiritual world for the sake of inner blessing, for a true experience of the all-encompassing reality that is not only physical but also spiritual. And it is only in spiritual reality that man can find the satisfaction for those riddles that I mentioned at the beginning of today's lecture.

The word health means something very precious to every human being, and rightly so. Not only must we recognize health itself as a precious thing, which is only a product of selfish sentiment, but we also feel that health is connected to something that flows from the depths of our inner being. Health is a means to external vitality, to the fulfillment of our duties, to the performance of every activity, etc. And from this point of view, health must be placed at the center as something of the highest value. However, when we consider what health is, we arrive at a gloomy judgment when we look around the world and see how health and illness are judged by the competent and the incompetent in the most diverse ways, how all kinds of shades of parties are spoken of, and how the healing process of this or that is disputed. When we consider all this, it does indeed seem that one of our most precious possessions is at the mercy of all these different schools of thought.

Before I try to tell you what spiritual science has to say about health, we must first be clear that spiritual science or theosophy cannot have the task of interfering in this or that party line; the point of view must be gained that neither approves nor condemns this or that world view. What is said here will not fully satisfy the adherents of either party, for in the case of party doctrines it is not a matter of something being absolutely true or false, but of something being not quite true or not quite false. And those who want to look up to the unseen behind things see that, with all the shades of parties, we are not dealing with an either-or, but with a both-and.

And in particular, as far as our question today is concerned, we see how fanatically the one party of medicine fights the other. There is a broad movement that does not think favorably of what is official for today's general human thinking. In many cases, this official health teaching is attacked. Spiritual science is not there to take a layman's point of view and fight the official line. Spiritual science will always be inclined to recognize how official health science is able to provide the means to reach a judgment in a truly magnificent way. It is just that official science, in this particular field, is tied up in a certain dogma, so that the majority of those who are called upon to form an opinion cannot but consider what spiritual science has to say as foolish, fantastic, or even worse. But regardless of the judgments, the question must be discussed.

First, let us consider how partiality has delivered judgment. We can only agree on the principle, on the current, only on what the popular view is in this area. It is completely imbued with materialistic thinking. Much has changed in recent decades; we will see what is being neglected; we will see that reference will have to be made to the higher aspects of human nature; we will see that there is no awareness of these aspects at all in our time. And we may say that it has only become so in the course of the last few decades.

I would like to mention just one symptom. I would like to remind you of a personality, the once really very famous anatomist Hyrtl. Not only did he write excellent books on anatomy, but he was also one of the best teachers. He presented anatomy in a way that made it seem less dry; but he presented it in his own, unique way. He had a prerequisite for his students; he always said that he had written his books so that readers would read the parts they already knew before listening to his lectures, so that they could skip over what they already knew. But when he explained the entire structure of the human organism, it was as if one saw the creative hand at work; that which is composed came to life, and that was because this architect really exists, because the etheric body really exists, because Hyrtl spoke as if from these forces. The spirit of his description was permeated by these forces. This anatomist had, so to speak, expressed the invisible essence of human nature between the words.

A saying of Hyrtl's may be in the memory of his listeners in the 1970s. He said: Only a doctor can recognize an illness, but only someone who knows what helps can heal an illness. The spirit that hovered over the whole has given way in such a way that today's approach is only concerned with understanding the human body as it presents itself as a sum of processes that can be examined, perhaps more thought of as chemical or physical processes. The approach that views health from such a perspective has produced extraordinary results because the physical body is what is really there, and because it has provided the most wonderful means.

If we want to establish a principle, it is that there are certain antidotes for illnesses that make the causes of illness disappear. So we speak of illnesses and specific remedies; we speak of the fact that the human organism must be protected by various means, by water and air treatment, etc. From this point of view, we point out the progress that has been made recently. And one would be mistaken if one were to deny this point of view outright; one need only point to the mortality rates of cities, for example, and one will see what official science has achieved; one need only point to what has been added to the store of remedies in recent times. So it is not to deny the fertility of official medicine that these considerations are intended.

But there is a dark side to this progress. Imagine what would happen to humanity if it had to live according to the will of those who would exploit the fear of germs to create social institutions! Take, for example, tetanus. It is caused by a germ that does not need its carrier, the sick person himself, only the person who comes into contact with the sick person. Now imagine that everyone who has come into contact with someone suffering from lockjaw is checked. Imagine the tyranny that would result! Of course, all these things are right, but it is impossible to base anything on them in social life.

Now, spiritual science is not one of those currents of contemporary thought that seeks to deny that there are specific remedies for certain diseases that are “poisons”. The word “poison” has a kind of suggestion, and many feel within themselves when it is said that certain medicines are poisons, as if something tremendously striking against medicine were being said. But it must be realized that one should not allow oneself to be suggestively influenced by a word.

What exactly is a poison? Those who have been subjected to the suggestion of this word will not be able to answer this easily. We can form a rough idea if we bear in mind that belladonna, for example, is a poison for humans, but rabbits can eat it without harm; in the same way, hemlock does not harm goats. This gives you the whole relativity of the concept of “poison”. And in this respect, spiritual science will never go against official experience.

Let us now contrast this approach with another, namely naturopathy or homeopathy. These differ in many ways in the way they think about illness. One says: When a disease process is present, we have to look at it as something that should not be there and that we have to fight against. The other says: It is not a matter of fighting directly; what presents itself to us as an illness is an attempt by the person to fight against the cause lying within. One has to support a disease process so that nature, the symptom, can take effect. – That can be said in many respects. But the remedy that causes illness in a healthy person can have a healing effect on a sick person.

Now, however, we have to say that when this view is theoretically applied, when it is advocated, those people say something very specific that comes close to what spiritual science must advocate, namely that beyond the physical body lies something much more real, the actual builder, the etheric body. But in many respects it is actually impossible for those who want to be considered important in the conventional world view to admit that there is an invisible part of the human being. Spiritual science that wants to be valid must today point out that behind all physical processes there is something as a system of forces, the etheric body, permeating everything that is physically visible with forces. It may well be that the causes of illness lie in the etheric body.

We so often hear people compared to a machine or a mechanism. Of course, in a certain sense, this is true; but what is a machine without the person who builds it or the one who operates it? There is no visible builder or guide in the human body, but there are invisible guides. When we die and the etheric body separates, the physical body succumbs to physical and chemical processes.

Just as there is damage in the physical body, there is also such damage in the etheric body, in the astral body and in the I. One must not only theoretically admit the spirit, so to speak – it may be enough for the soul egoism – but if one is unable to apply the spirit in one's true behavior, then the spirit is an empty theory. What matters is that we are able to put what happens in the spiritual world at the service of life. We will show in a moment how this comes into play when we talk about health. When we speak in this context, we must not think of external injuries such as a broken leg; these are things that belong in the realm of external healing methods. But there are injuries where we have to say: the causes are to be sought in the spiritual realm; and there we must also seek the healing methods. For such things it is not enough to say that the invisible limbs are at work, that they bring about the damage.

I would like to follow up on the last lecture given here on “Nutritional Issues”, in which we saw how what a person takes in as food is significant for the strength or weakness of the human organism. Today, we want to realize that by taking in food, we enter into a relationship with the processes of the environment. In this way, he ceases to merely allow processes to take place within him. Depending on whether we take this or that food, we are dependent on the processes that they trigger in us. We must be able to process what we take in from the outside within us. This other aspect is no less important; depending on how we eat, we are connected with our organism to the spiritual world. On the one hand, we are devoted to the whole outside world, and on the other hand, we withdraw into ourselves to devote ourselves to the spirit. The organism enters into an exchange. There it takes up these spiritual products just as it takes up the physical products in the physical world. When a person devotes himself to the spiritual world in the right way, his spiritual organs become the right tools for digesting the spirit. If he does it in the wrong way, they become unsuitable for processing what is taken up materially; he must become ill.

There is a definite relationship between what a person does and what happens to his spirit. You can visualize this if you consider the astral body to be a good and accurate indicator of what a person experiences in relation to the outside world. There are parents who think this or that is good and now expect their child to share the same view. This is the most misguided method of education there is. When the child is young, its organism has a yardstick by which to measure what arouses its antipathy and sympathy, what gives it pleasure and pain. We should therefore carefully examine the sympathy and antipathy of childhood.

This is not to say that the child should not be disturbed by the naughtiness; you should only choose the right way. First of all, it is a matter of creating pleasure, that is, one should first act on the astral body. By the indirect route of pleasure and pain, we come to what can now be absorbed by us in the appropriate way. You see, anyone who looks at our social life today knows that countless pathological conditions are connected with it. When we look at the human organism, we see the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I. Let us assume that a person has a task to perform that becomes habitual for him. What happens then? The physical body and the etheric body are involved in such work. When something becomes habitual for a person, when he does it, so to speak, because he has to do it, then the astral body is not involved. Observe the countless people sitting and working here or there, who hardly involve the astral body at all, except at most through annoyance and displeasure. Under the influence of such activities, a process takes place that we can call a process of solidification of the astral body. The astral body is in a healthy state when it can actively engage with the physical and etheric bodies. If you have made the astral body rigid and hardened, it is as if you have a machine in front of you that you cannot control. When the etheric body and the physical body switch off the astral body, it is not present during activities. The fact that it encounters resistance means that such a person feels the resistance not only as an illness, but as having this or that illness.

Thus, the simple fact is that the non-consideration and non-participation of the astral body in countless disease processes is the cause of the present situation. These are not counteracted in the right way. Of course, a great deal of emphasis is placed on all kinds of useful things, such as gymnastics, for example. But the way it is done in our time does not promote intensive health care. The focus is too much on the physical body, on the idea that a limb must move in a certain way and that a person must perform this gymnastic exercise in a certain way, because it promotes the physical body. It will be understood that if one envisages that a very specific feeling of pleasure must be associated with each exercise, then one is, as it were, doing gymnastics in the astral body. Then harmony is established with the astral body. I knew a gym teacher who was an example of how gymnastics should not be done. He was a person who was proud that he understood anatomy. The man himself could not do gymnastics, he could only show how things should be done. His instructions indicated that he only looked at people from the outside, only as a composition of bones and muscles.

Gymnastics should be spiritualized, so to speak. At some point, every gymnastics exercise will have a very specific name, and you will feel that you are imitating something very specific. You do an exercise, for example a little ship, and you feel that you are imitating something. This is spiritual gymnastics. If young people do this, it also has the side effect of ensuring that they never suffer from poor memory in old age. If you look at it this way, spiritual science can have an extremely fruitful effect.

All that we have mentioned now shows how spiritual science can be applied in health practice. If you consider that people today lead two lives, one in the outer world and one in the inner world, in feelings of pleasure and displeasure, you will see the whole disharmony of the inner and outer human being. Harmony can only come about when one knows how the astral and etheric bodies can work healthily. When the instincts and desires are directed in a certain way, let us say, according to the general laws of the world, then the astral body will find within itself the strong power to rule over the etheric body and the physical body. If a person is gloomy, if pain constantly touches the soul, then the astral body will be weak. A varied life of ideas and feelings has a healthy effect on the astral body under all circumstances.

It is remarkable how human culture has always worked towards shaping all means to achieve the goal of having a healthy effect on human nature. Aristotle said that drama should present a series of actions that arouse fear and compassion. So, emotional processes should be evoked in us, but they should be such that they allow a catharsis, a purification of the passions to occur. Thus, he shows that he sees a healing process in the emotional process that is stimulated in a person. Yes, the astral body becomes stronger as a result. From this we see that it is not irrelevant how the whole process plays out in the astral body. Depending on whether we alternate exciting or calming feelings, storm or calm, we will have an effect on the etheric body and the physical body if we do it in the right way. One of the most beautiful ways of stimulating the human astral body for a certain class of people is the very ordinary circus games with the clown. The lust with which people see the clown's antics is extraordinarily healthy. Feeling superior, seeing the absurd, makes one healthy. It is precisely these things, which make us able to counteract destruction, that have unconsciously been used in the natural process of human development. One can say that events in which nonsense is obviously presented are just as effective as saying, “You should drink this or that water, breathe this or that air.”

Furthermore, the I is involved to a very extraordinary degree in how a person tolerates the outside world. If we do not see the functions taking place properly because they cannot tolerate this or that, the interests of the person are misdirected, then we can find disturbances in digestion, etc., as an effect. If we understand this connection with interests and the direction of attention, what is already there could also be introduced.

Human beings express their feelings through two actions that you do not find in animals, namely laughing and crying. The ape may have a certain grin, but it is not human laughter because the animal has no I. You also know that just as slowly as the child comes to self, so too does laughter and crying come to him, only from about the 40th day onwards. Why is that? It is because when a person laughs, a relationship exists in which the astral body expands. We see how the ego takes on a superior relationship to what is happening in the environment. Just as one breathes, one must have this feeling of superiority. When crying, the whole ego contracts. Therefore, crying is a certain voluptuousness; it is basically an antidote to what one has experienced. Thus we see how the ego changes the organism, attacks it. In the discharge of the tear water, a secretion of the blood, we have a very material effect on a mental process. Thus, the spiritual works continuously in all possible details.

I will give an example to show how tremendously enlightening spiritual science will be. There is a certain rhythm, a rhythm that encompasses many things. Take the human ego; it goes through a very specific rhythm within 24 hours. When you wake up, you experience the same thing exactly 24 hours later. Thus the ego remains in a rhythmic activity. Just as the I has a rhythm in 24 hours, so does the astral body in 7 days. Just as the I returns to a starting point after 24 hours, so does the astral body after 7 days. And finally, the etheric body goes through a similar rhythm in 28 days. So you see again that the human being is a very complicated being. We can compare these rhythms with the hands of a clock; the rhythm of the I with the rotation of the second hand, the slower rotation of the minute hand with the rhythm of the astral body; with the even slower rotation of the hour hand, the rhythm of the ether body. Just as the minute hand is above the hour hand at a certain time, so it is with the movements, the rhythmic movements of the human etheric and astral bodies. The etheric body has only made a quarter of the astral body's full revolution.

The position of the etheric body in relation to the astral body is therefore different, so a lot depends on the state of the person when a particular event occurs. If, for example, fever occurs in a very specific position of the etheric and astral bodies, when the etheric and astral bodies collapse after seven days, the fever can be combated again by the etheric body. From this you can see that it is connected with this behavior of the etheric and astral bodies that the fever drops after seven days in the case of pneumonia.

This phenomenon that we are confronted with is a very specific effect of the whole human nature and its rhythms. And such behaviors exist for each individual system, whether it is the lung system, heart system or any other. If we recognize this as a truth, it will have an enormous influence and the groping in the dark will end. Of course, it is necessary to be vividly aware that one can also work on the spirit. When one speaks of the influence of this or that light, one has only the physical processes in mind and not the spiritual effects.

A start has just been made here in Munich by our dear member Dr. Peipers. This is important because it involves taking into account the higher bodies in man, that the blue or red has a certain effect on them. It must be made clear that this matter cannot be compared to any color theory, but that the perception of colors triggers healing processes and thus has a healing effect. And it is reckoned here that there is a spiritual world, and it is placed in human life.

Just as colors, tones and very specific thought complexes are used for the recovery of the person, because they evoke very specific processes in the person. For example, it has a very specific influence on a person whether he indulges in ideas that are linked to reality. Today, one is instructed to use, as far as possible, ideas that are only a photographic image of reality. These are the most unhealthy. Those ideas that are in the realm of natural science kill the human spirit all the more, the more central they are, and the consequence is that the human being cannot overcome the physical body, and the further consequence is that this or that illness must occur. In contrast, ideas that are produced by the spirit itself have an invigorating effect. When imaginative thinking takes place in a lawful way, it is healing. Directing attention in the right way is also health-giving. This is of tremendous importance, for no person can suffer from a digestive disorder, for example, who is filled with such interest. And such interest can only be evoked by the whole world appearing before us, guided and directed by the spiritual.

When humanity will one day realize that educating oneself about the riddles of existence pours all the vitality into our soul and gives such joy and pleasure that no storms can change it, then one will understand that spiritual science itself is the original remedy for all diseases. Those who do not want to come to it will rush from one impression to another and get bored. Nothing is more unhealthy than this rushing about. When the correctly guided interest of life goes to the center, then there is neither boredom in the world nor rushing from one sensory impression to another. The one who is guided by spiritual science finds something interesting in even the smallest thing. One does not always have to beg the outside world to interest me. - Because one finds a source within oneself that creates interest. And this makes the person healthy.

Spiritual science must not be accused of alienating life; no, it contains the only elixir of life. It has the right effect on everyone because it leads to the center of the world; it is a source of health. However, we may say that through a failed inner life, man creates the cause of the disease that takes him furthest away from the goal. Therefore only spiritual science will be able to answer the question, because it takes into account the whole human being. And so spiritual science will give us a health care that makes man the master of his organism. Even if one will establish a dogmatic medicine, where the dogma was always there, one will not be able to force people to keep themselves healthy. Therefore, the question to be answered in the near future will be important: How do we keep ourselves healthy? And this will be possible for the person who is able to repair what can be disturbed by the causes of illness. He knows that inner strength accomplishes more than what can be done from the outside. And so Theosophy is able to give people health in such a way that they acquire the ability to live and the security to fulfill their tasks and duties in life.

Dearly beloved! In many respects it is already extraordinarily difficult today to penetrate with a certain understanding into [the life and work of] figures of the past who are not too far behind us. But the difficulties become especially great when we are to penetrate into the depths of the soul and the workings of such human individuals who, in the very, very distant past – one might say in prehistoric times – placed themselves with their work in culture, in the development of humanity. And such a figure, such an individuality should arise before our spiritual gaze today in the often mentioned figure of the old Persian founder of religion and world view, Zarathustra, or, as it is also said, Zoroaster.

I said that it is relatively difficult for us today to really objectively understand thinking and feeling that is not so far behind us. Nowadays, one has the strong feeling that when one believes to have understood something and regards one's knowledge as the truth, it is in a sense the only true truth and that everything else is wrong, basically nonsense. The fact that truth and human knowledge itself are subject to development, that each epoch is forced to look at the riddles of the world in its own way and solve them to a certain degree, that each epoch must speak a different language, so to speak, about these riddles of the world – this is not well understood today. We can only hope that the descendants of today's human race will not behave towards it as we so easily behave towards our ancestors.

Who would not decree today from his strict, let us say scientific, throne that a mind like Paracelsus', who lived and worked so little time ago, was full of the prejudices of an era long past, with all kinds of judgments that are, of course, long outdated today. It does not occur to one, though it would be natural, that what we today consider to be seemingly irrevocable in relation to our science, will certainly be just as corrected and to a certain extent transformed when so much time has passed after us as between Paracelsus and us, as the Paracelsian views have been transformed by ours. We can only hope that future generations will be fairer than we are, that they will know that truth is in a state of development and that basically every way of expressing the truth is only a form of expression for what we would like to call original truth or original wisdom. In short, what we humans call truth is in a constant state of change, and therefore we must see the human pursuit of truth only as developing. If we imbibe this view and ask ourselves: How did our ancestors think? What about them can make a great impression on our souls today? — then we will also be able to look back without prejudice to minds as far back as the great, the shining Zarathustra.

There has never been any real agreement as to the age in which Zarathustra lived. There are even scholars today who claim that Zarathustra probably only lived six centuries before our era; other scholars point to a period of 1000 years before our era, and still others go back even further. What spiritual science has to say through its research will be mentioned here only briefly, because for us it is less a matter of establishing mere historical facts than of illuminating the soul of this great individuality. Therefore, it should only be briefly mentioned that spiritual science must go back at least five millennia before our era - even into the sixth millennium - if it wants to meet this luminous figure of Zarathustra with a backward glance.

Now, although one may argue about the age in which Zarathustra lived - one should not really argue about it, because the course of human cultural development speaks too clearly, because what is associated with the name Zarathustra and what has emerged from Zarathustra as a cultural movement has exerted the deepest, most significant, and even extraordinarily long-lasting influence on human progress. If we would fathom the soul of Zarathustra, if we would recognize the mission that this unique individuality has fulfilled in the progress of humanity, then we must attempt to understand Zarathustra's task on a larger scale. we must realize that we can only come close to what he was if we assign him a task of the very first order in the development of humanity since the great Atlantic catastrophe, as seen by spiritual science. Much is said about this catastrophe; the religious records, the religious traditions of all the peoples of the earth report about it - the Christian tradition speaks of it as the great flood.

We cannot now go into the details of the time when this catastrophe swept across our earth; but even the external, geological science is today increasingly being driven to recognize that such a great catastrophe once took place and that through this catastrophe the face of the earth was thoroughly changed. If spiritual science is forced by its research to recognize that where the Atlantic Ocean is today was once dry land, where people lived at a time when most of the present-day continents of Asia, Africa and Europe were still under water, it may be said that today, natural science is no longer far from admitting that the fauna and flora in the western regions of Europe and the eastern regions of America do indeed indicate that there was once land between the west of Europe and the east of America that became the bottom of the sea due to subsidence during that great catastrophe. And that our present continents have repeatedly risen and sunk has already become common truth even in geological circles.

For spiritual science, such great catastrophes, such changes in the face of the earth, are connected with significant processes within the development of mankind. Today I can only hint at what I have already explained in more detail to the listeners of my lectures on earlier occasions. I can only hint that the human race that lived on the Atlantic continent in that epoch had a very different state of soul from that of today's people, who are the descendants of those ancient Atlanteans. If we want to give a brief indication of what kind of culture was present in that primeval time of humanity, we can, if we do not misuse the word, call this culture a “clairvoyant culture”. However, the word “clairvoyant” must not be misused in the sense in which it is very, very often misused today. What does this tell us - “clairvoyant culture”?

Yes, if you want to speak from the point of view of spiritual science, then you have to honestly believe in human development, then you have to honestly be convinced of this human development, then you can't just be fascinated by the development that the popular Darwinists talk about today. We look back at an earlier humanity that had a very different kind of knowledge and soul capacity. We can briefly form an idea of this ancient state of mind by remembering what remains, as an inherited residue from that time, in the dream consciousness, where man sees echoes of the day's life in dream images. These dream images no longer have any reality for us today; they are echoes of what was experienced during the day – some pictorial representations of this or that that occurred. Dream consciousness, however, is like an old inheritance, a faded remnant of a prehistoric human consciousness, when people did not see and recognize their environment as directly as today's people, who only recognize everything with their senses and with the mind, which is tied to the brain. The people of that time saw what explained and solved the riddles for them in what, from today's point of view, were abnormal soul states. They saw with a kind of image consciousness, but these images were not phantasms like our dream images. Man did not speculate about the riddles of the world in terms of concepts and ideas, but experienced states – abnormal states by today's standards – in which images appeared that were not dream images, but which depicted the very foundations of existence.

And this humanity, which had such an awareness, also had guides and teachers who had led this awareness to a very special height and who - clairvoyantly - looked very deeply into the spiritual background of existence. I can only mention this today in the introduction. These teachers of old, who had clairvoyant insight into the spiritual world, related to humanity much as those who today, in their normal consciousness, come to ingenious insights, ideas and concepts. Just as these relate to humanity as a whole, so too did the great seers of old, because they had a concept of how to look into the spiritual world, because they had natural clairvoyance. The development of humanity begins with the fact that humanity really did come from spiritual origins. Today, we are no longer very aware of this; this awareness [of the spiritual origin of human beings] has actually been lost, although in the first centuries of the Christian era there was still a clear awareness of an ancient, inherited wisdom that had come from the forefathers of humanity and of which nothing else remained but traditions taken from that old clairvoyant insight into the spiritual world. Plato, for example, speaks of the people of the Kronos realm, saying that they could see into the spiritual world and that they were the keepers of the original world wisdom. Plato was aware that much of that wisdom had simply been handed down from generation to generation. And Plato, the philosopher who had come a long way in what he was able to explore himself, was nevertheless aware that this primal wisdom could penetrate deeper into the very foundations of the world than anything he himself could give his students through the normal powers of human beings. We also find the greatest respect for the primal wisdom of the world in other thinkers. We must seek this primeval wisdom in its original form before the Atlantean catastrophe, which has been characterized above.

The development of humanity consists in the fact that in this post-Atlantean epoch, in which we live today, man has gradually, so to speak, seen this primeval wisdom dwindle, that he has lost the old, elementary because he should develop the sense to judge things by external, sensual perceptions and to penetrate the riddles as far as possible with the mind bound to the brain. Today's short-sighted people will naturally believe that today's knowledge is the sum of all wisdom, that there cannot be any other wisdom. But anyone who takes a broad view of human development knows that even knowledge bound to the intellect, which humanity had to gain in its present era (the previous one was the era of childhood), is only a transitory epoch, only a point of passage in human development.

They know that people will rise again to a future clairvoyance and that they will take with them what they have gained through the knowledge of the physical world. A necessary transition point is this kind of knowledge. And so we can say: What we today, as normal human beings, call our knowledge, and even more so, what we have under the influence of this knowledge in terms of moral and aesthetic ideals, in terms of moral judgments about the world, all this has only just been acquired. Everything that we have recognized as the actual characteristics of today's human being is based on the old clairvoyance that human beings lost for a while. But this present-day realization is so characteristic of our present epoch that we must say: The post-Atlantean time, the time in which the earth has the present physiognomy, is called to develop just this thinking and feeling and to close the door, so to speak, to all clairvoyance for the normal human condition, so that man is forced to fix his gaze on the sensual reality in order to also go through this epoch in his development of knowledge.

There were now two cultural currents in this post-Atlantic epoch, which really had the mission to lead humanity out of the wisdom of the forefathers into the wisdom of understanding and reason, as I have just characterized it. There were two currents. And strangely enough, the originators of these two currents are quite close to each other geographically and in terms of world history. We have to look for the one main current of the post-Atlantic period in the settlements that formed after the Atlantic catastrophe in India, the venerable cultural land. We have to look for the other main current to the north of it, in the area that was fertilized by the great, luminous spirit of Zarathustra. And although these two currents of human spiritual development are so close, although to the outside eye they look so similar that sometimes the words for this or that in the older languages of the two cultural currents are the same, we must, when we look deeper into things, see in these two currents of post-Atlantic cultures quite opposite ways of founding our present culture.

You see, when the spiritual researcher looks back to that ancient culture of time-honored India, which can only be seen with the spiritual eyes – because what is contained in the great, wonderful Vedas is only a late echo of the primeval world wisdom of the Indians . We are then led back to something that preceded all Vedic culture and that is of such sublimity that the human being, who has a sense for the transformation and development of the human spiritual life, stands with the deepest reverence before this ancient-holy culture of India. And there is some truth in what is usually taken only as legend: that this ancient Indian culture goes back to a series of great sages, to the seven Rishis of ancient India. If we examine this ancient Indian culture from a spiritual scientific point of view, how does it appear to us?

We cannot describe it more precisely than to say that it appears to us as a kind of ancient heritage that could be passed down from that wisdom that existed as the common wisdom of humanity before the Atlantic catastrophe. We must only imagine the right way of inheriting an ancient store of world wisdom. Just as it was still present in Atlantean humanity as primeval world wisdom, so this wisdom, based on clairvoyance, could not, of course, be directly transmitted to a humanity whose soul capacities were quite differently constituted. The ancient wisdom was adopted into Indian culture in the same way as a tradition that has to be adapted to a new faculty of the soul. Basically, only a few people were still able to develop something in their souls that could point to the realm that had been seen in ancient times through living clairvoyance behind the world of the senses. Whoever wanted to rise in living inwardness to the vision that was once normal for humanity in a certain way had to become what is called an initiate or an initiate. He had to develop certain abilities of the soul that are not normally present; he had to undergo certain exercises, a certain training of the soul, in order to develop an ability that otherwise slumbers in his soul. Then he was able to learn through his own observation what the great teachers of the Indians, the seven Rishis, had to proclaim. What was he led to then? He was led back, as it were, to an earlier state of development; he was able to see something that humanity in the normal state could no longer see, but which it had been able to see earlier.

This is essentially how we understand this ancient, pre-Vedic Indian culture, which then resonates in the Vedas. This is also the source of the underlying mood in which something is spread out over this ancient and sacred Indian culture, like a wistful look back that says: There was a time when people could see into the spiritual world, when the origin of people was revealed. That time is gone. The senses now have only the ability to see the external, physical reality. And only by developing a special ability can one transport oneself back to those ancient times; then one can again see the spiritual, which is hidden by the human being's sensory capacity for knowledge, by the intellect, which is bound to the brain. Thus did he feel who, in the world-view of the ancient Indian, lived with the realization that man is cut off from the contemplation of his spiritual origin, and he has a longing for this origin. Thus the ancient Indian believed that truth was only to be found beyond what humanity could see at that time. He believed that above and beyond all that humanity could see at that time, the great illusion spread out, “maha aja”, the great deception, “maja”, the great non-being. And behind that lay true being, which people had once seen.

A worldview, such as that of the pre-Vedic Indian, cannot be understood by merely looking at what appears to be dogmas, but only by putting oneself in the shoes of people felt at that time, how they felt cast out of their spiritual home into a world of maya, of illusion, and how they longed to return from this external, sensual-physical reality to that ancient, original world. And it is wonderfully moving, in the highest sense, to place oneself in this ancient Indian soul with its pessimism, which is not as frivolous as it sometimes appears today, but which is a heroic pessimism that does not complain about this great deception, but says: the sense world is simply not reality; reality is found by turning away from this sense world and going back into earlier epochs in one's soul.

What do we actually find when we go back to what the people of old in India were able to see? I have already pointed out that all spiritual science leads us to the fact that the soul that now lives in us between birth and death has often lived on earth and will live many more times. Spiritual science therefore leads us to the realization of repeated lives on earth, so that when we look back into past times, we do not find other souls, so to speak, but our own souls, that is, ourselves in earlier embodiments. And the soul of such an old Indian man could say to himself: As I now live between birth and death, I am bound to the illusion. I am now more entangled in the body of the senses than I was in earlier lives, for example when the primeval wisdom was experienced by myself. Basically, such a member of the ancient Indian culture looked back into his own earlier soul states. His soul used to live in such a way that it could look into the spiritual world itself. It descended into the world of the senses and can no longer see into the spiritual world. If a member of the ancient Indian faith wanted to regain this earlier vision, he basically ascended to his own earlier embodiment; he penetrated completely into himself. This is roughly how we can characterize the mood of ancient India.

In a sense, the exact opposite was offered by the cultural impact that occurred in the north of ancient India, in Bactria, Media, Persia, through Zarathustra. If we can call the ancient Indian wisdom a kind of heritage from ancient times, which also awakened a yearning for that ancient time, we must say that what was given to people through Zarathustra, what was imprinted on human development through him, points just as strongly to the future as the ancient Indian teaching points to primeval wisdom. There is a remarkable contrast between the teachings of Zarathustra and the ancient Indian teachings. If we allow not dogmas, not teachings, on which it actually matters little in human development, but moods, feelings to come before our soul, then we can say: the mood of the ancient Indian world view that has just been characterized is a mood of redemption: out of this body, which can no longer see the truth, into the earlier seeing! That was the mood of the ancient Indian: to be redeemed from a body that is dependent on maya. Therefore, in the best sense of the word, everything that emerged from ancient Indian culture, right up to Buddhism, is a kind of religion of redemption.

In Zarathustra's view, what appears first is not a religion of redemption, a worldview of redemption, but rather a worldview of resurrection, a worldview of awakening. And in this respect, the teaching of the doctrine in the north is the exact opposite of the teaching that arose in the south. Zarathustra was to be the first great leader of humanity to radically point out that it is a necessary point of passage for them to develop the senses for what is spreading before them, and to develop the mind for what is logical thinking, what is reasonable understanding. Only, the great Zarathustra does not stop at the materialistic level of the external sense world. As an initiate, he says in his own way: Certainly, post-Atlantean humanity has the task of sharpening the senses for what presents itself to the eyes, to the ears, to the entire sense-perceiving human being. Post-Atlantean humanity has the task of grasping the phenomena of the sensual world in accordance with reason and intellect, but as we grow together with the sensual world, we must become capable, if we develop certain slumbering powers in our soul, not of stopping at what the senses offer us, but of penetrating through the sensual cover to what lies behind this sensual world.

This is the great contrast between the Indian world-view mood and the Zarathustra world-view mood. The ancient Indian says: If I look at the world that spreads out in color, form and all its sensual qualities, it is not a true world, but Maya. I can only enter the true world by turning away from this external sense world; so I turn away my eyes and ears and the other senses, and I let the mind stand still, insofar as it combines ideas and concepts. I pay no attention to this sensual world if I want to see the truth, but I delve into the human interior, I live myself into that self that was there in previous embodiments; I climb up the ladder of embodiments to acquire the ability to see the truth. In a sense, the basic mood of the ancient Indian was to flee from the world of the senses and to ascend to the truth through strict immersion in one's own inner self, in that which can live in the soul when it disregards its surroundings. It was a mystical immersion in the inner life of the soul, distracted from the outside world, which wants to know nothing of “maha aja”, the great illusion: this is the tendency of ancient India.

Joyful acceptance of the reorganization of our soul-faculties, which shows us the world with all that it can offer to the open eye, what it can offer to all outer human possibilities, and also to the mind bound to the sense world; joyful acceptance of all that spreads out as an outer carpet of the senses before the senses: that was the mood of Zarathustra! If an Indian looked at the plant cover, at animals and clouds and air and mountains and stars, he said to himself: All this is only outer illusion. Dare to look at the one who has exhaled this great Maja, at Brahma, but who can only be found within! And Zarathustra says: Turn your gaze to that which spreads out before your external senses, use the soul capacity that is right for the present age of humanity. But don't stop there; grow together with the sensory world, penetrate it, go through it, and when you go through this sensory world and don't let yourself be held back, then you will find a spiritual world beyond it out there – beyond the stars, beyond the mineral, plant and animal world. Not only when you go into yourselves, no, also when you go out into the world of the senses, then you grow together through your new abilities with a spiritual world.

What expresses the individuality of Zarathustra most beautifully – take it as a comparison for my sake – is when it is said of him: When he was born, the first thing that happened to him as a miracle was that he smiled at the first glance at the world – the Zarathustra smile! One must be able to put oneself in the place of what is said with such a truly magically deep formula for such an individuality. It is suggested that in Zarathustra an individuality is born that looks at the whole carpet of the sensory world, but penetrates it as if clairvoyant and sees the spiritual behind it, and that in the consciousness of man's superiority to that which spreads around him, lets that exultation flow out of itself, for which the smile of Zarathustra is a symbol.

And so we see that in Zarathustrianism there is a completely different mood than in Indianism. Therefore, this Zarathustrianism could point to what the human soul is now to take up, what it is now to unite with itself. The fact that people look out onto the world of sense and normally no longer see in pictures what is not in the world of sense means that they take in something that they will carry over into the future and that will be a new component of the human soul in the future. Through this new component it will experience a resurrection: In the future, the human soul will not only be as it was in the past, but it has taken on this new element that can only be acquired in the sensory world. That is why this deep idea of resurrection lives in the Zarathustra teaching. I cannot today go into this in detail, justifying my views from this or that passage; I will merely characterize them, and everyone can see from the usual communications that what is to be given today as a characteristic of Zarathustrianism is well founded.

Zarathustra said to himself: It is basically not compatible with the right progress of humanity that only old heritage in humanity is praised as the highest. Why should people go back to earlier embodiments and the way they looked at the world then? They should take in what is offered to them as new, they should enrich and expand their world view, give it a greater scope. Thus did Zarathustra say to men: Look into the future, take in the new, look up to that spiritual world which presents itself to you when you sense the world of sense as a transparent covering. That was what he had to say to the world, and in saying it he felt a deep reverence for the spiritual world behind the whole world of sense. He felt that it was like the beginning of a new ascent [into the spiritual world] when we strive to penetrate the sensual world in order to enter the spiritual world, just as the old Indian wanted to enter a spiritual world by descending into his own inner self. He felt that humanity had actually fallen from a higher, spiritual point of view to a lower, physical one, and that it had the added awareness of wanting to longingly return to the old one by holding on to an old, inherited wisdom.

Zarathustra was deeply imbued with the fact that something had been working on the human soul that had led it down and entangled it in the world of the senses. But he was equally clear that this human soul could now be seized by something that would lead it up the path to the spiritual world. That, so to speak, was before Zarathustra's spiritual eyes: the opposition of two powers, one leading humanity down into the world of the senses and the other lifting it up into the spiritual world. This contrast is evident where we read that Zarathustra speaks of the one power that leads man upwards, of Ahura Mazdao, Auramazda, which later became Ormuzd, and opposes this to another power that leads the human soul downwards: Ahriman, Angra Mainyu.

Thus one must first perceive these two powers and how they work: the one leading the human soul down into the sensual world, the other leading it up into the spiritual world. But Zarathustra is completely consistent in the deepest sense, in that he does not accept the external, sensual world in the abstract and say that something spiritual is behind it - as the pantheists say today - but he says: the individual formations of the sensual world differ; one appears in one way and the other in another. One appears as mighty, luminous and effective for the rest of the sensual world, the other as small and insignificant. And everything that appears to our world as a great and mighty power through its external form, Zarathustra sensed, in the sense of the world view also adopted by his people, as a component of the sun - that sun which, every year anew, conjures up the plant world necessary for man, that sun without which there can be no life on earth.

But even with regard to the sun, which he felt to be the most powerful, the most powerful influence on earth, Zarathustra was clear that it too belongs to the external world of the senses, that what external science can fathom about this sun is only the external expression of what lives behind this sun. And he felt it so that he said: Just as plants are magically produced on earth in spring through the power of the sun's rays, so that which lives as the spiritual power behind the sun is that which draws man out of the world of the senses, that which can create the powers for man with which he can penetrate through the world of the senses. Behind the sun, therefore, for Zarathustra lives that mighty spiritual essence which he has just named Ahura Mazdao, Ormuzd. But what is it?

We can only form an idea of the thoughts that lived in Zarathustra if we remember that in spiritual science we do not consider the physical body of the person as the only thing, just as the person stands before us, but that we say: this physical body is the outer expression of his spiritual being. And when the eye becomes clairvoyant, it sees this spiritual essence, and we call that which the clairvoyant eye sees as the content of the spirituality, the aura of the human being. We perceive the physical body as the expression of the human aura, the small aura. Now Zarathustra says: Just as man has his aura, as he has his spiritual behind the physical, so is the sun the outer body of a spiritual being, namely the great aura, the Great Ahura - the word always means the same - the solar aura. - There we have Ahura Mazdao, the great aura, in contrast to the small aura of man.

Thus, Zarathustra pointed people to what lives out there in the universe as a mighty spiritual being and has its body in the sun, just as a human being has a body that is permeated by a spiritual-soul being, the small aura. That is [also] Ormuzd, that is what can unleash all the powers of man that go towards the spiritual. For this spirit that lived in Zarathustra, this Ahura Mazdao, this great aura, was a truth, a reality, before the clairvoyant gaze. And he said to his disciples, to those he could initiate more intimately into his secrets, something like the following: Look here, if you seek that which urges and leads man to the good, then you must raise your gaze to that which stands spiritually behind the sun. Man is indeed called upon to ascend ever higher and higher in the course of his development on earth. Ahura Mazdao will help him to do so. But not always, says Zarathustra, will that which is the spirit of the sun be seen only up there behind the body of the sun, but it will become ever greater and greater, will embrace more and more of the earth and will finally expand to the earth. The spirit of the sun will one day become a spirit active on earth.

If we survey the time [of Zarathustra] and the development of humanity, we see that these are in harmony with each other. What Zarathustra saw behind the physical sun was, for his time, only to be found in the sun in outer space; today, however, it has expanded to such an extent that we find it within the earth aura itself. And the event in which Ahura Mazdao, the great aura, descended to earth, we see, if we stand on the ground of true spiritual science, in what took place through the Christ impulse, which played out on earth in the events of Palestine.

From the standpoint of spiritual science, we can understand what Zarathustra once said to his disciples: “I will speak; now come and listen to me, you who long for it from far and near - now I will speak and no longer shall he who leads men to error with evil will through his tongue be able to poison the development of mankind. I will speak of what in the world God has revealed to me, what He Himself reveals to me - He, the Great Ahura. And anyone who does not want to hear my words, as I mean them, will experience bad things when the circles of earth's development will approach their completion. - When Zarathustra spoke of the spirit of the sun, we, who stand on the ground of modern spiritual science, say: He spoke of the same spirit that in his time could only be found in the vastness of the heavens, and today we find it when we study the mystery of the origin of Christianity in its full truth, as it emerged from the Mosaic religion. Having evolved to the Christian era, Ahura Mazdao descended, as it were, from the sun, and the Christians call him Christ. And he who interferes with the development of the world in order to halt the progress of human evolution, which is brought about by the great power of Ahura Mazdao, is Ahriman.

Zarathustra did not see the development of the world and of humanity in such a one-sided way that he could have asked, as many modern people do: Yes, how can I actually believe in an all-wise, great God when there is so much evil in the world? This is generally said today; one does not want to believe in a wisdom that permeates and lives through the world when one has to notice so much evil. Zarathustra does not speak in this way, and he also guides his disciples not to speak in this way. Zarathustra was clear that what comes from Ahriman, what stands as an opponent in all life, and that it must be allowed by the wisdom of the world, so that people who are to undergo an upward development can strengthen themselves through the resistance and gradually also lead the bad to the good. In this way a higher development is attained than if man had been simply comfortably placed in all that is good and had nothing bad to overcome.

Thus, although Ahriman was felt by Zarathustra and by all those who professed him to be the enemy of Ahura Mazdao, he was felt to be a necessary part of the development of the world. If we wish to understand the inner structure of the Zarathustra teaching, we must draw attention to individual things that may indeed cause great offence among today's clever people, who believe that they are so firmly grounded in the most modern world view. But what good does it do to carefully want to conceal the truth over and over again? We must plunge into Zoroastrian clairvoyance and explain in detail the structure of the system of thought which I have just characterized in superficial terms. Here it must be clearly understood that Zarathustra was one of those thinkers who, although they turned their gaze joyfully to the sensual world, nevertheless sought the truth in the spiritual world and, in essence, saw the essence of all world content in the spiritual. Powers such as Ormuzd and Ahriman are spiritual forces; they confront us in the world as spiritual entities.

But how did such high spirits as Zarathustra think about the outer structure of the world in the face of these spiritual powers? Just as Zarathustra looks up at the sun and says, “This is the outer body of a spiritual power,” so he looked up at the starry sky and at everything that the outer, sensual gaze could grasp, and he and his disciples perceived what was spread out in space as writing, as symbols, as metaphors that expressed the weaving and essence of the spiritual powers. This is extraordinarily important. Not in the way that we are accustomed to today with our materialistic sense, did Zarathustra and his students look at the outer world of the stars and see only spheres moving through space, but they saw in this world of the stars the expression of spiritual entities and spiritual processes, and in the arrangement of the stars they saw the symbols for what the spiritual entities behind them were doing. The starry sky was a starry writing to them, expressing to them the deeds of the spiritual world that took place behind it. Neither in the direction of today's materialistic sense nor in that of today's materialistic astrology, which would like to see the cause of the fate of mankind in the stars themselves, while they are only signs - neither in one nor the other direction did Zarathustra's thinking go. For him, what he could see in the starry writing was something like the meaning of a sentence for us, which we put on paper with characters. For him, the stars were cosmic characters. And what mattered to him were the spiritual entities behind them.

Zarathustra saw the highest spiritual entities in Ormuzd and Ahriman. For him, they belonged together, even though one is the enemy of the other. They originated, so to speak, in a single, great spiritual entity. In the sense of the Persian language, this primal being can be called Zaruana Akarana or, as it is often expressed, “eternity shrouded in glory”. It is difficult for today's human sense to penetrate to the heights where the followers of Zarathustra stood and where they grasped what must be grasped if one wants to see Ormuzd and Ahriman in one. The best way to achieve this is to endeavor to gradually arrive at the idea that if I look back in time, further and further back, I come to that which existed in prehistoric times and where the causes of the present lie. I myself also come from that which has developed out of this past current. But in the opposite direction there is a future current, and if one can rise to the point of seeing that the future is something that comes towards us from the other side, that we go towards, then one gradually comes to a true understanding of what Zarathustra sees as the unity behind Ormuzd and Ahriman.

Imagine a curved line, running forward and backward in such a way that it forms a small circle. If you make the circle larger, the line is less curved; make the circle even larger, and the line approaches more and more a straight line. If you take the diameter of the circle to infinity, then the arc of the circle gradually becomes a straight line that extends to infinity. Thus, we can assume that every straight line, by tracing it backwards and forwards, is a circle of infinite size. And so we can also say: if we go back into the past, we come to a point where the past and the future join together in a circle. This is the eternal current that Zarathustra pointed out – Zaruana Akarana. Past and future have become intertwined in the eternal cycle of the world, and from this the god of the sun, of light, of all that is good - Ormuzd, Ahura Mazdao - and likewise the god, through whose resistance the good forces must develop - Ahriman - both emanate from the snake of eternity: Zaruana Akarana. One must only feel one's way into these conceptions of eternity, then one gets a sense of the mood that prevailed among those who were around Zarathustra, then one feels something of the full magnitude of the feelings that flow from the teaching of Zarathustra, who continues to work in humanity to this day.

And so, for example, Zarathustra said to his disciple: Now you have a mental picture of the closing circle of the world, of one part of the world circle as the higher power of light, Ahura Mazdao, and of the other part as the dark power, Ahriman. What we have just spoken is written in the Star-writing, and in the Star-writing you see this circle, which closes in upon itself as a symbol of Zarana Akarana: the zodiac that closes around the vault of heaven. This is the symbol of the outer circle of the world, and when you stand on the earth and turn your gaze to the zodiac, imagine the sun as the great Ormuzd, passing through this circle. And what the deeds of the circle of light are, that shows itself to you as the realm of creation of Ormuzd, and what lies in the night, what is immersed in darkness for man and stands on the other half of the earth, that is what Ahriman symbolizes. The seven signs of the zodiac in the daytime course of the sun on one side and on the other side the five signs in the nighttime course of the sun: these are the symbols of Ormuzd and Ahriman.

Thus the stars were perceived as writing in the sky for what Ormuzd and Ahriman were. Such entities, which stand behind the sensory world, were imagined to have an effect on human nature, but it was realized that they were not a unified whole, but that there were partial spirits, sub-spirits. And in the individual signs of the zodiac, the symbols for seven or six serving spirits of Ormuzd were now felt. These were sub-spirits, called Amshaspands in the old Persian language. The best translation is the one that Goethe chose in his “Faust” when he said:

But you, the real sons of the gods,
Enjoy the living, rich beauties!

Sons of the gods! Six of them – on the light side of the Zodiac – were connected with Ormuzd, while the other five spirits, opposed by Ahriman, were called Devs. This sounds strange and shows the contrast to Hinduism, to what the Indians worshiped as their highest powers, the Devas. While for Zarathustra the highest spiritual powers are found in the penetration of the sense-covering - these are the Asurian powers that work in the outer world - so for the Indians the highest powers are those that are found by penetrating into the mystical interior of man. The simplest explanation for the fact that ancient India saw the highest in the devas, while the Persian religion, on the other hand, saw something dangerous in them, and that furthermore the Indians saw something in the asuras that they did not want to know anything about, while the Persians revered them, is this: In the Zarathustra sense, one should take leave of that world which relies on the inner alone, which can become seductive for man if he does not want to grasp the outer world of the senses. Therefore, delving into the inner, into the world of the Devas, became somewhat dangerous for the Persians, while for the Indians they were something of the highest.

Thus the five spirits of Ahriman are symbolized by the five dark winter constellations of the zodiac. And so there are twelve spiritual entities: Ormuzd with his servants and Ahriman with his servants. Basically, we have to think of the realms of Ormuzd and Ahriman in such a way that these twelve [spirits] work together in the spiritual world - Zaruana Akarana! How do they work? By communicating to the human being that which, for Zarathustra, is the expression of the goal of the world, by pouring into the human being that which they allow to flow through the universe. Zarathustra felt that man, as a small world, is a confluence of what is spread out as great cosmic forces throughout the universe. Thus he felt. Therefore, it would be only natural to find that Zarathustra did not see what is found today through anatomy, physiology and so on in the dissected human being. The Zarathustra wisdom did not dissect the human being, but there was a clear-sighted insight that showed how the spiritual forces worked into human nature and composed human nature. Zarathustra says: “Through the universe, twelve forces emanate from the twelve spirits of Ormuzd and Ahriman; they compose the human body. Like a seal imprint, the human body expresses in miniature what is spread out in the great world in the Amshaspands, the sons of the gods. In there, it continues to have an effect as currents from outside.

What does the disciple of Zarathustra actually mean by what continues to have an effect in there? What I am about to say is somewhat disturbing for modern science. In its own way, more recent science has rediscovered what flows in as the twelve currents, what makes human beings a being that can strive up into the spiritual world, that can have a brain, an intellect; it has rediscovered it in the twelve main nerves of the head. But that is a nuisance for modern science, almost the height of madness, when one says that these twelve nerves are the crystallized, condensed currents that the twelve Amshaspands, according to Zarathustra, channel into the human organism. And so, in materialistic research, we see a concentrated focus on the human being of what Zarathustra – the luminous, clairvoyant personality – revealed as a spiritual secret. At that time, one saw in spirit what was important. And it is our time's task to see in the material what is, as it were, the condensed spiritual.

Zarathustra continued: Yes, you see, just as today man, through his spirituality, which is bound to the brain, strives up into a higher world, to a higher development, so in earlier times he strove for something else. Just as man is connected with Ahura Mazdao today, he was once bound to lunar development. This is also something that annoys modern science. Nevertheless, it is a spiritual truth. This lunar development expresses itself in a further stage of condensation of spirituality. Lower spirits came into play here. Just as the twelve great Amshaspands worked into man, so before that other spiritual entities had brought about a lower spiritual activity. Today we would say: When a person reflects, it is a higher spiritual activity; when he reflexively chases a mosquito away from his face without thinking, it is a lower activity. We see these lower activities as connected to the nerves, which have their center in the spinal cord. What intruded into the human organization as a lower activity, Zarathustra attributed to an earlier spiritual influx.

He said that the twelve great spirits were opposed by 28 others, whom he called Izeds. These Izeds had an effect on the human body and constituted it. He further said that this implied a certain irregularity in that the lunar government had been replaced by the solar government. In addition to the 28 Izeds, which correspond to the 28 lunar days, there are three more, which are inserted by the [longer] solar cycle - up to three irregularly inserted days. So you can count 28 to 31 Izeds. This brings us close to what newer science has as these Izeds: They are the 28 to 31 nerves in man running to the spinal cord - these are the crystallized izeds. So you see the Zarathustra wisdom crystallized in the human anatomy, so to speak. It would never have occurred to anyone to direct human thinking in such a way that it could have researched and searched in the way it does today if Zarathustra had not provided the impetus for it.

He pointed to higher spiritual powers that radiated into man. And to the extent that these were Amshaspands, they became the twelve brain nerves in the physical organization of man; to the extent that they were Izeds, they became spinal nerves. This is something that seems even more twisted than what I said yesterday about reincarnation. But it is something that people will gradually come to recognize, namely, that humanity started out from a spiritual world view and only then descended into materialism. People will gradually come to see how useful it is to raise our eyes again to those great geniuses who, so to speak, saw it as their mission to give people a spiritual gift that can in turn lead them out of this world of the senses. From what it had previously seen in the spirit, humanity descended to sensual things.

Now, today people are not inclined to find such things anything other than annoying, but only because certain things are easily forgotten. For example, everyone will say: How should we actually imagine the structure of the world after Kepler's laws, other than as a sum of purely mechanical processes? Well, one should just remember that Kepler came to his laws precisely through a spiritual worldview and made the statement: “So I carried the sacred vessels of Egyptian secrets up to the north and translated them into the language of the present.” Those who were truly great cultural mediators knew how to tie in with the time when one could still see into the spiritual world. Thus, in essence, Zarathustra stands before us as the one who, in his spiritual worldview, feels the mission to point out to the human being who has the tool in the physical body for his work in the world, but who still points to it with spiritual means. That is why Zarathustra is so tremendously significant. He is always spoken of in connection with the entire outer life of the people in whom he was incarnated.

It is deeply significant that the legend, told so wonderfully, tells how this people, in whom Zarathustra lived, migrated down from the north. The legend, which is truer than history, tells us the following: This people once lived far to the northwest of the areas they later moved into. Before Zarathustra worked there, it was once able to live in these northwestern lands because the conditions there were favorable. But then strange changes occurred – so the legend goes: Winters came that lasted ten months; the people could no longer stay there, and King Dschemschid led them away [to more southern areas]. He received [from Ahura Mazdao] a golden dagger, which he plunged into the earth at various places. As a result, grain grew in those areas, and the people settled there.

If we translate what this legend tells us into the most sober truth, we have to say: This people, into which Zarathustra was introduced, was dependent as a people on cultivating the earth; it was dependent on tackling the real work of life with its hands. Zarathustra's mission for this people is, to begin with, the dissemination of spiritual wisdom, but at the same time it is a guidance to the immediate sensual reality. Hence their turning away from that world view, which wants to know nothing of work that has to be done in the sensual world and which perceives as Maja that towards which the work of the hands should be directed. No, for those who had Zarathustra as their teacher, the soil was not Maya. It was a reality as it was.

And it was a reality that was to be led higher and higher by extracting its fruits from the soil. By working, one connected with what Ormuzd wanted. Work was service to Ormuzd. And everyone felt the Zarathustra mood in their veins when they worked the soil: “I must not abandon myself to the mood that leads me to long for another world; no, here I will be a servant of Ormuzd. By thrusting the spade into the earth, I work as a servant of Ormuzd. And man has to live here on earth in truth. Therefore, in those who were the followers of Zarathustra, there was also the most sublime and beautiful belief in truth and truthfulness, in moral purity. And that is one of the most beautiful impacts associated with the mission of Zarathustra, that the sense of truth and truthfulness developed because of this connection with the outer world, in which one needs a sense of truth.

And so we also see that among all the things that were seen as something bad, as belonging to Ahriman - deception, lies, slander - the worst vices in the teaching of Zarathustra were seen.

Thus the gaze of Zarathustra and his people was directed towards external reality, but in such a way that the spiritual world was sought behind it. In this spiritual world, man hoped to find his resurrection, his future union with Ahura Mazdao, when he had worked his way through the world of sensuality. The religion of resurrection, the first religion of resurrection, is the teaching of Zarathustra. And so it became a world view that looked with kindness, love and goodwill at what further south was regarded only as Maja. Within the Zarathustra religion, that which instincts are for reality, for working on reality and for connection with reality developed. Therefore, in this religion there was not that tendency to chastise the body so that the spirit could emerge from it as easily as possible, but rather it had that instinct that wants to shape the body so that the senses can become as fine as possible and the thinking as sharp as possible. And that had to develop into instinct. And so one sees a wonderful sum of healthy rules of life developing, from such healthy rules to eating, that later Plato stood in admiration before the Zarathustra religion precisely in this respect.

Yes, how long one appreciated the mission of Zarathustra - until the materialistic time made this impossible - we can see from the fact that it was said that Pythagoras learned geometry from the Egyptians, astronomy from the Chaldeans, other sciences from the Greeks, but that he learned the worship of the gods and the wisdom of nature from the magicians of the Zarathustra religion. So they revered those people in the followers of Zarathustra, who are called the Magi, who understood something about how to see through the world of the senses into the spiritual, who knew that one does not come to the spiritual through mere mystical immersion into one's own inner self, but how to make the outer carpet of the senses transparent. In short, those who said of Pythagoras that he had learned the worship of the gods from Zarathustra saw in the followers of the Zarathustra religion – if I may express it thus – “specialists” with the right view of the spiritual world, with the right worship of the gods. This is how people thought of what Zarathustra gave to humanity. But the time will come when people will look up to Zarathustra in veneration again, and that will be when, through spiritual science, they will gain the possibility of understanding such great spirituality as can be found in Zarathustra.

It is useful and significant to turn our gaze back to the starting points of human cultures. When we do that, then among the luminous figures to whom we look back to see how we actually have become and how our present culture has gradually emerged, there will always be the one who was there, the “Goldstar” - Zoroaster, Zarathustra, because one can with some justification translate this honorific name as “Goldstar”. Gold has always been regarded as a symbol of wisdom, and for the followers of Zarathustra, wisdom was something vividly effective, not an abstract, dead science. It is therefore a tremendous aberration for people to believe that the Amshaspands were abstract ideas for Zarathustra and his followers. Anyone who takes even a cursory glance at this cultural movement must realize that living spirits were meant.

Zarathustra's followers sensed that when he spoke of the spirits within himself, for example of “Vahumano”, of the attitude that draws man up to the spiritual world that lies behind the carpet of the world of the senses, the truth of the living spirituality that permeates space lived in him like a seal impression. They understood what Zarathustra had to give to humanity from the source of his soul when they heard him say: “Everything that weaves and lives through the world as a spirit of light, as the power of light and fire, can work in and ignite an inner fire in people. What is spread out in space can gather in a center, so that man feels placed in the macrocosm. And as the disciples of Zarathustra look up to the spirit of the macrocosm, they say: Something in us resounds like an echo of what flows to us as a secret [from the macrocosm]. We feel within us what the power of light - the being clothed in glory - can become in us if we allow to resound within us what flows towards us from all sides. - The students called what they experienced within “Ahuna Vairja”, which later became “the word”, “the logos”. And this was felt like a prayer detaching itself in the soul, humbly flowing back to the secrets of the world - like a living echo that man can send out as a prayer into the universe on all sides like an image of the primal light.

Only when one is able to understand that Zarathustra, the luminous spirit, was able to evoke such sublime feelings in his disciples and through them in a large part of posterity right up to our time, only then does one feel something of the mission of Zarathustra. It cannot be felt if one only points to dogmas and names, but only if one feels the living power of the feelings that ignite in the living interaction between Ahura Mazdao and the space-filling light and the Logos, the holy word that streams out as an echo from the primal light. If one feels this interaction and understands the world-historical mission of Zarathustra, then one looks back in the right way to that being who was embodied in a human body about 5000 years before Christ and who became essential for all humanity.

What Zarathustra was for humanity and what his mission was should be indicated today with a few words. It should be pointed out that Zarathustra is one of the great leaders of humanity, who from epoch to epoch proclaim the old, the present and the future truths that give comfort and security and strength to man in all situations of life. And we can summarize this in the words:

They speak to the human sense
The things in space
They change over time.
The human soul lives
Through space
Unlimited and unharmed through time.
It finds in the spiritual realm
The deepest reason of one's own being.