The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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! The theme of this evening's lecture was not chosen with the intention of linking the observations of spiritual science to a well-known historical phenomenon – as it is done in many other fields – and thus to have the opportunity to speak about spiritual science with regard to a well-known phenomenon. Rather, this theme has arisen from the fact that, in the light of spiritual observation of our time, certain aspects of the artistic phenomenon of Raphael can indeed present themselves to the modern spiritual researcher, and these aspects virtually demand a spiritual-scientific way of looking at things, especially in the case of this subject. This can happen to you, as it has to me, when you observe a phenomenon such as that which can be observed in the literary and artistic activity of Herman Grimm. Herman Grimm, the brilliant art historian, is known to have written a “Life of Michelangelo,” which, however much it may be outdated in details today, makes a great impression on every receptive soul through the breadth of its points of view and the coherence of its approach.

Herman Grimm then also made an attempt – he himself characterizes it only as an attempt – to write a 'Life of Raphael'. With this 'Life of Raphael', Herman Grimm has now experienced something quite peculiar, and what happened to him, so to speak, will be able to make a great impression on those who, through an ever-deepening immersion in Herman Grimm's way of presenting and looking at things, recognizes that, despite some justified criticism that can be made of him, he has precisely what one can call a sense of shared experience with his observed subject in all its particulars, a struggle to gain the insights and opinions to which he advances. Well, he made the attempt – in the 1860s – to write about the life of Raphael; and at the end of his life, he admits that the attempt was not enough for him and that he repeatedly started to approach this task in a different way. We have an interesting fragment from Grimm's estate, “Raphael as a World Power,” in which he once again approached this task shortly before his death and in which he confesses that nothing he has written before can satisfy him. He died while working on the final version of his views on Raphael. But it is still interesting to observe how such an important mind repeatedly approaches this task, how he undertakes the matter again in the twilight of his life and how he struggles to understand Raphael. You can see that from the fragment.

His struggle to understand Raphael is particularly interesting, because he describes the world-famous painting 'The Marriage of the Virgin', which is in Milan, in an attempt to understand it. He needs a significant, longer introduction, and this longer introduction is actually a piece of world history. It is a reflection on the nature and essence of Roman culture, a reflection on the impact of the Christ impulse on this Roman culture, a reflection on the further development of this Christ impulse within European spiritual culture, and then follows a further reflection on the renewed impact of Greek culture on the Roman spiritual culture of Raphael's time. And in this, Herman Grimm maintains that it is necessary to consider all this in order to understand this painting by Raphael, 'The Marriage of the Virgin', because what is expressed in this painting appears to him so comprehensive, so arising out of the entire development of the human spirit, so that everything that has been felt, thought and seen within the European spiritual life since the impact of the Christ impulse until the creation of this picture appears to him as mysteriously embedded in Raphael's creation. The title of this Raphael fragment, as given by Herman Grimm, was also derived from feelings that arise from such an opinion. It means – one might be tempted to find it strange – “Raphael as world power”, because Herman Grimm actually feels inclined to place Raphael in all the causes, effects, and connections of all modern spiritual life in order to understand him. Anyone who has an intuitive sense of how certain all-embracing ideas arise in a human soul when contemplating any object or any entity will be able to understand what took place in Herman Grimm's soul when he wrote the words in this, his last Raphael fragment:

Raphael is a citizen of world history. Like one of the four rivers, he is, who, according to the beliefs of the ancient world, came from paradise.

There may be many scholarly discussions about the significance of Raphael, but one would like to say: Compared to all of them, it seems to be something tremendously significant that a contemplative human soul has been moved to make such statements about this spirit.

If you let something like this sink in, so to speak purely from the intellectual life of our time, which in Herman Grimm is not yet strongly influenced by what we today call [in our circles] spiritual science, you have to recognize the urge to a deeper contemplation of Raphael – the urge to look at him in such a way that what he has created for the intellectual eye grows out of the continuous stream of human development. And indeed, to anyone who delves into Raphael's soul with an open mind, it appears – especially in view of a certain kind of isolation from everything around him – as a kind of revelation, because, try as one might, one cannot succeed in immediately in the environment in which Raphael lived, as reasons for explaining how it comes about that this extraordinary phenomenon enters into the spiritual path of humanity and presents to humanity precisely that which has had such a profound and powerful effect on the individual devoted spirits. I would like to note from the outset that, naturally, it is not possible to go into details in the course of this lecture, because individual pictures can only be fruitfully discussed if one is able to show reproductions. [Rather, the aim is to use such presuppositions, as they have just been given and which arise from our present spiritual life, to lead in a very natural way to a consideration of Raphael from the point of view of spiritual science.]

In a sense, Raphael seems comprehensible to us only if we take him as a very young child, somehow out of his environment. He was born, as is well known, in Urbino in 1483. The first impressions of his soul come from the palace building of Urbino, which was an extraordinary event for that time and through which the soul of the very young Raphael was able to absorb what was expressed not only in architectural forms, but also in all artistic decoration and the work associated with this palace building. These were impressions that can be said to be capable of shaping the soul through themselves. But then we see Raphael transferred to Perugia, and when we look at life in Perugia at the time when Raphael was an apprentice painter there, the peculiar, isolated nature of Raphael's soul immediately becomes apparent to us. We see, when we follow life in Perugia, how it is filled with events that are in part repulsive to our modern consciousness. Strife between the individual classes rages among the passionate people of Perugia, and there is no doubt that Raphael was able to see there what was taking place in the way of stirring hatred and antagonism in human nature.

If we start from there and take a look at what Raphael's art gave in its serenity, which already meets us in the “Marriage of the Virgin”, created in the twenty-first year of his life, then we find that it is justified to say: this Raphael appears to us as a personality as if he were only externally present in this whole life of touched it with the hem of his garment, and actually only looked at it in reference to something which I would not describe in the abstract, but rather in the concrete, by directing the thoughts to a historian of the time, who quite vividly describes a scene that took place in Perugia in the nineties of the fifteenth century. There we really become witnesses, through the vividness of the description, of how the leader of an exiled family from the neighborhood invades Perugia; we are told how this leader of an exiled family, Astorre Baglione, enters the city on horseback and acts like a Saint George, but at the same time slaughters everything that comes his way. We feel from the description of the chronicler Matarazzo how something grand, powerful, but uncomfortably cruel lay in the scene. When we let Raphael's painting, “Saint George,” take effect on us in its entire composition, it seems as if Raphael had known this scene from reality, but as if all of the cruel background of reality had not existed for his eyes, as if he had lifted the flower from this cruel background and elevated it to a creation of pure spiritual beauty and greatness. It is precisely in the way in which it enters into the whole way of creating Raphael, the way in which it flows into his soul, that one sees how peculiarly isolated this soul is from its surroundings, and how these surroundings only touch it, but how he can only produce what he takes from them from his own soul. Thus this soul appears [to the observer] as a revelation, as something that is placed in this environment and cannot be explained from within it. When we take a look at the pictures of Raphael's teacher in Perugia, the Perugino, we see how, despite the greatness of the Perugino, these pictures show us that something is being presented to us in the individual holy persons of the Christian view that is a reproduction of what a person can absorb when Christianity lives all around him. We see the individual figures of Christian legend juxtaposed as only someone who, though a great painter, only knows things from the outside can do. As these paintings appear to us, we feel the path from Christian tradition, from what was alive in the Christianity of the time, to Perugino's canvas everywhere. Then we follow the creations of his student Raphael. There the matter appears different to us: we look at a soul that brings everything that the other, Perugino, presents to life from within. Everywhere we see Raphael's soul itself, a spirit that has not absorbed Christianity as it lived in its environment at the time, but we see a spirit to which all the origins of Christian impulses are linked. It is perhaps no exaggeration to use the following expression: it is as if Christianity itself conjured up its soul on a canvas painted by Raphael.

And then we follow him further as he arrives in Florence in 1504 and in Rome in 1508. In Florence, he arrives at a time when the momentous wave of spiritual renewal, I might say, had just passed over Florence, which is linked to the name of Savonarola. We encounter an atmosphere that is tired of [these struggles] - the drama of Savonarola has taken place, and many of its repercussions are still present. It is interesting to juxtapose these two figures: Savonarola and Raphael. Both present the impulses of Christianity to their contemporaries [in their own way]; they present them in such a way that we perceive the fire of an inner enthusiasm everywhere, but [in Savonarola's case] also an enormous fanaticism that leads to the impossibility of living out the impulses in the face of one's contemporaries. When we look at Savonarola, it is as if a person were standing before us who, in all phases of his soul, in the best that his soul can feel and sense, was seized by the greatness and power of Christianity, a person who now radiates what has had a very elementary and direct effect on his soul, and who then stands up for what has become so great in his soul itself. And now to Raphael: He presents himself in very strange contrast to a figure like Savonarola. We see, when we look at Raphael's paintings, that Christian impulses are expressed in a, one might say, superhuman greatness. We see these Christian impulses brought to soulful life in many details. We really see Christianity shining through in these paintings. But at the same time, we feel and sense that a soul that had only just been directly touched by the Christianity in the world around it could not have attained the same calmness, naturalness, and serenity as Raphael's soul.

While with Savonarola one has the feeling everywhere that his soul is only appropriating the greatness of Christianity during his lifetime, with Raphael one has the feeling that his soul is already born as if it were entering the world with the — with such impulses that, by passing from early childhood into the whole human being, take hold of the whole human being and, through this development, can reach heights that these ideas and forms never reach in a human being when they first appear in an elementary, direct way. And if we are not pedantic, if we have a certain feeling for the real life of a human soul, we will no longer be able to doubt that a soul like Raphael's soul, as a soul, as a spiritual being, brings with it from the supersensible worlds from the outset everything that could never live itself out if it had to first flow through the whole of personal education and development. Of course, such things cannot be proven in one evening; the supersensible truths cannot be proven - as I discussed the day before yesterday - in the same way as the external truths of natural science; but they can be proven nonetheless, because they show themselves in their effects. One must first find the way to recognize from the effects what is present as the cause behind them. Then we follow Raphael back to Rome, where he encounters an atmosphere that is strangely related to Christianity. Pope Julius II becomes his patron. Raphael paints the greatest pictures on his behalf, which many people believe are among the greatest pictures in human painting; they capture the human soul and spirit in the very depths. And he paints them in such a way that the entire spirit of Christianity lives in them, and lives in them in a completely natural way. He paints – it could not be any different – to the satisfaction of the Pope. But what kind of Pope was this Julius? He was a Pope who, according to today's somewhat different concepts, perhaps cannot really be called a Christian at all. Machiavelli, who was not particularly moral, said that he was a devilish character, a man who was primarily concerned with power and external position – with fame, perhaps not for himself personally, but for the greatness and power of the church. He was a personality who was not choosy about the means he used to achieve his ends, who was not at all Christian when it came to acquiring power, fame and greatness. That is Raphael's patron. And in other respects, too, if we consider the Rome of Raphael's time, it stands in quite a remarkable contrast to him. But it is precisely from this contrast that something as powerful as what is presented to our eyes even today in the two pictures “The School of Athens” and “Disputa” arises, even though these pictures have often been painted over. In them, a magnificent pictorial representation of the course of human development presents itself to us, a pictorial representation that is steeped in the spirit of Christian impulses.

If we look at the one painting, the so-called “School of Athens” – it is not my view that this designation is justified, but it is the easiest way to communicate – and let it take effect on us, we see, perhaps without being fully lived in Raphael's consciousness, that it represents what the human soul can recognize when it turns its gaze to the external, sensual reality and makes use of the intellect that is tied to the human brain, to the human personality. This is presented to us in a wonderful way in all its details. If we turn our gaze to the right group in the picture, we see how all kinds of things are determined and calculated astronomically, and then we feel: not only the usual calculations are being done, but great events in world history are being deduced from the movement of the stars – science is being unfolded in a cosmic sense. And if we then turn our gaze to the left, we see in the expressions of [the figures] connecting the right with the left, how what is read on the right from the star constellations is written down on the left, and if we could really get the books in front of our eyes, we could see how the secrets of the world are written on the left, which are then determined by sensory observation [on the right]. We see this, but Raphael need not have been aware of it; the tradition of the time lay in this, as in the deep mystery that constitutes the essence of [the rise of Christianity over Greece]. And whether we take the view of those who see Plato and Aristotle in the central figures, or whether we see an evangelist on the left-hand side, in both cases what is being discussed is perfectly understandable.

Then we turn to the other side of the “Camera della Segnatura” and find that magic has been poured over the whole picture, illustrating how the development has progressed from the contemplation of the sensual world by the human spirit to a deepening into the supernatural, the invisible. This immersion of the human soul in the supernatural reigns and weaves in the picture of the so-called “Disputa”. The symbolic arrangement of the stars, in connection with the scenes below, must show that something significant has happened in the course of human development, in that man has become inwardly focused through the impact of the Christian impulse on the spiritual development of humanity, which on the one hand signifies a deepening of the human soul, and on the other hand, through this inward deepening, leads to the realization, to the intuition of supersensible worlds. These can only be reached when the human soul educates itself and thereby acquires those powers through which it can sense or see the worlds that lie behind the [sensory] worlds.

It is not my intention to explain such images pedantically, for example by means of theories, but one must use words that are not just comments on images, but that are intended to suggest what one feels naturally. Otherwise, it could be as unappealing as the comments in travel guides, and one would not be interested at all in what the individual figures mean, but what is interesting is ] the artistic, the sensation that moves through the soul, and we are not placed directly on the horizon of human spiritual development by abstract reflection, not by abstract reason, but by sensation. We feel the impulse that lives and moves through the history of human development. And again, If we now disregard these images and look into Raphael's soul, we have to say that she lived in the midst of an environment that showed nothing of the intimacy and soulfulness that lies in these images, and [despite this] Raphael managed to conjure up the innermost impulses and the innermost forces of Christianity in the course of world history into these images.

This is the case with many of the other works we see, and if we then go on to what can still make the deepest impression on the viewer today, when we go on to that which is the culmination of Raphael's to the “Sistine Madonna”, if one lets this remarkable picture in Dresden take effect on oneself, then one comes to a very special understanding of this so self-evident Raphael soul, then one comes to the active spiritual Christ impulse. If, on the other hand, one stands purely intuitively before this “Sistine Madonna”, then one has the impression that something lifts one above the ordinary human. That is the first impression, but it is one that becomes ever stronger and more powerful; it lifts one up above ordinary human feeling. One becomes a participant in another world through one's soul, and if one then asks oneself, “Why is that so?” perhaps it is best to let the feelings of spiritual science enlighten one. How can these feelings of spiritual science arise?

Let us turn our gaze away from the point of view of spiritual science and look at the whole development of humanity. This puts us on the ground of a serious, comprehensive theory of development, but one that is very different from the materialistic one, which is today considered by so many to be an absolute gospel. This theory does follow phenomena back to a certain origin - tracing them back to these origins is justified for sensory perception. One arrives at material origins that show very simple forms and that, through slow perfection and development, have resulted in today's point of view. This theory of evolution is particularly proud of the fact that it understands man as a being that gradually rises from other beginnings of primitive living beings, to his present size, as he appears to us today as a physical human being. Some materialists see this as the very essence of the human being. Spiritual science also takes us back into the past, but when we turn our spiritual gaze back using methods described the day before yesterday, we do not arrive at other material life forms from which humans are thought to have developed, but we ultimately arrive at a spiritual beginning of development. We arrive at origins that are purely spiritual. And on the one hand we see matter itself emerging from the spirit, and on the other hand we see the spiritual developing into later spiritual forms in accordance with its original spiritual purpose.

If we look at the human being himself, at the whole human being, at the spiritual and soul aspects within the human being, and trace the development back, we come to an ancient and distant past in which the human being already appears; he is already present before the other beings that surround him today in the three kingdoms of nature have come into being. These prove to be a kind of descending side currents, so to speak, flowing away from the great line of development: man is the original, he is there first, but as a spiritual being, and as he develops further, he repels the other kingdoms of nature from his undercurrent, as it were. We can choose an image for this development. Let us assume that we have a liquid in a glass, mixed with something that can maintain itself purely. The finer part of the liquid remains at the top, the coarser part settles at the bottom. So we have the fine part at the top and the solid part at the bottom.

In spiritual science, we return to the origin in which man exists as a spiritual-soul being; he develops in his spiritual life into purer forms, which lie precisely in his later mission and which [compared to] the original form signify a finer development of his soul nature. In order for this abstract soul to emerge purely, he must separate the other natural kingdoms: These are there, as it were, to provide the basis for man's higher development. If we allow this thought to take effect in us, not in its conceptual form but as a feeling, if we transform it into feeling, then, when we turn our gaze to all that surrounds us in the physical realm of nature, we have the present us; but if we turn our gaze to what emerges from the human soul, we perceive something that we cannot understand - if we merely let our gaze wander over the external earthly nature and do not direct it upwards to something supermundane. We feel that the present humanity could only come into being within its earthly mission because it is the result of something that comes to us from other spheres, which is a higher humanity that has, as it were, descended to fill the earth with the present nature kingdoms. We feel that human nature tells us of its origin in spiritual heights. We feel how humanity is elevated when we, in our feelings, rise to what spiritual science can speak of.

If you disregard all theory and now stir within yourself the feeling that can arise when we sense the human being in his supersensible approach to his sensual mission, then we have - one must compare the feelings - the same feeling as when we visualize Raphael's “Madonna Sixtina”, in which we also encounter the image of Isis with Horus. And anyone who can really get into the unearthly origin of man can have similar feelings when he sees the “Sistine Madonna” floating in from the etheric spheres with the child Jesus, the exalted humanity, and when he can see the clouds as the foundation, the etheric foundation from which comes that which is the true, spiritual, supermaterial origin of man. It must be said, however, that such considerations need not have been present in Raphael's soul, but we have repeatedly emphasized that this human soul had a twofold nature, that something was going on in the upper regions of consciousness that the [lower] human did not need to know about, but which was no less real; and the impulses, the impulses of feeling and emotion, which worked as just described, alone make it possible to understand how precisely this image could have arisen from Raphael's soul.

I have tried to make all these observations for the reason that I would like to make understandable what appears to me to be in harmony with spiritual science in Raphael: we have before us in his soul, isolated from its surroundings, something that is predetermined from the outset, that is called to realize the spiritual impulses in their Christian nuances in a pictorial way. In the “Sistine Madonna,” Raphael rises in a certain way to a super-Christian point of view, to the point of view that goes beyond the historical, beyond the traditional Christian, in that he feels and artistically represents the spiritual-cosmic origin of the human being. Seen in this light, the soul of Raphael does not allow itself to be equated with that of another soul, such as that of Savonarola.

With Savonarola, we can show, so to speak, at every point in his development, how he connects with Christian ideas, how everything becomes and gushes forth; with Raphael, it seems self-evident that the Christian view is already given to him at his birth. We feel that the Christian impulses are connected with Raphael, but we do not feel anything else: we do not feel that which is connected with the soul of Raphael and which it particularly needed from its surroundings, and that was Greek culture. This Greek element is embedded in the spiritual development of humanity in a very special way. I have often pointed out that we spiritual scientists have to look at human development in such a way that, as we go further and further back into ancient times, we find human souls with different states of consciousness than they have today; everything is in development – the human soul especially! and when spiritual science is recognized in its true value, people will see how one-sided it is to look at evolution in a purely materialistic way, going back to human forms in which the soul would develop its consciousness in a more animal state. If you go back in spiritual science, you will find a completely different state of development, and today you may already be able to find truth in what spiritual research has to say about older states of the human soul from older spiritual products, myths and legends.

We are coming to understand that in primeval times, human souls were endowed with an original clairvoyance, a dream-like clairvoyance. What we today call our clear sensory perception, our sharply defined intellectual concepts, our self-awareness, was not present in the human soul in primeval times. For this to come about, the original clairvoyance had to fade away, to be subdued. This state cannot be compared to ordinary dreaming today, but rather to a dream-like life, which is organized in images in the manner of dream images, but which are nevertheless images of spiritual realities. In primeval times, the human soul was endowed with such a dream-like clairvoyance. This clairvoyance diminished, and now we stand in development where the old clairvoyance had to fade away in order to develop self-awareness and sharply contoured concepts of the mind.

When something is to develop to perfection, other things must recede. This law of balance governs all of nature, so that when we ascend to full self-awareness – in the distant future, humanity will once again associate a certain clairvoyance with it – we have, as it were, a descending line of human development from the original clairvoyance and now an ascent of sorts through [the development of] self-awareness, intellectual concepts and external scientific observation to clairvoyance. And what do we feel in the middle? We feel the Greek element – this Greek element, which is so remarkable precisely because on the one hand it signifies the conclusion of the ancient dream-like consciousness of clairvoyance and on the other hand the beginning of the consciousness of external objects. Therefore, we see this Greekness with its very special characteristics, which consist in the fact that the Greek experienced the spiritual much more directly, but not in the way that man in prehistoric times experienced it, seeing it, so to speak, externally, but in the way that the Greek felt his own personality interwoven with all external existence. He still felt himself in the cosmos, standing inside the outer world, and felt the laws that weave and live through the outer world in his own being.

It may seem hypothetical, but anyone who engages in spiritual science will find what I am saying to be true: when the Greeks created their sculptures, which have only come down to us in an imperfect form, they did not need models in our sense. When they depicted anything, especially the human form, they did not depict it in imitation of the external model, but from inner consciousness. He knew what forces are at work in space, and his consciousness of these forces was formed in such a way that he had an awareness of the inner forces from the form of space. And so he imprinted what he saw inwardly in the external material as a form from the inside out. Just as prehistoric man felt that images of space arose and was so connected in his soul to the entire cosmos that these images reflected reality, so the Greek was connected to the laws of the world, which he felt permeated the body. He created what he experienced, and in turn he created this in a sculptural work. If he wanted to depict Zeus, then he knew how Zeus's physiognomy was connected to those experiences that express themselves in external forms. He created what he experienced inwardly in the external material. We can look at Greek culture in this way; it is still a worldview in which a feeling is bound to an immediate human consciousness.

It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between the genuine Greek and his relationship to nature and to the whole of existence, and a personality who, in essence, is separated from the impact of the Christ Impulse on humanity by only three or four hundred years, a personality such as, say, St. Augustine. Read any work by this Father of the Christian Church, who was also a great philosopher, and try to compare what Augustine gives through his innermost experience of the soul, through his inner feeling for the nature of the human soul, with everything that was given in Greece, be it philosophically or poetically. In the Greek spirit, we feel how it cannot detach itself from the external, how it is one with the external world, perceiving the course of the external world flowing into itself and experiencing itself as belonging to the external world. In Augustine, we see the gaze directed inward to the inner, soul world. This makes this inner creation appear in a form that is unthinkable for any creation of ancient Greece. It could not internalize itself because its greatness was still connected with the consciousness of the outside world. It was an enormous impact on the whole spiritual development of mankind, and one does not need to be on the ground of positive Christianity to see this enormous impact. One could even go so far as to say, paradoxically, that even someone who had never heard of Christ, when considering the Greeks and Augustine in their peculiarity, would have to say to themselves: something has happened in the ongoing development that has turned the external into the internal; and this internalization is the fundamental impulse of Christianity, growing out of the external and growing into the internal.

If we look at it this way and then look back at Raphael, we can say: What appears to be the basic nerve of Christianity lives in Raphael's soul as this soul passes into existence through birth. We see this in its development, if you approach the work without prejudice and do not want to read everything into this Raphael soul with a materialistic-historical sense. If we look at it impartially, it appears as if it has already brought with it, through birth, the Christian impulses that we have to describe as its very own. But now Raphael is born at that turning point of the whole spiritual development of mankind, placed in that time when that which was memory was to be reborn, reborn in a certain outer sense. And here we see a great law of development that can only be penetrated with the help of spiritual science. Usually, we imagine development as a simple succession of cause and effect. But things do not happen that way, because a close examination shows us that such a linear development is a fantasy. The real development proceeds in such a way that a certain current progresses from one point to another, and when it has arrived at a certain point, an old one is taken up again. The later connects with the earlier, which has not passed through a developmental current, but has been preserved in its original form. We have a falling back upon and a taking up of something that has remained at an original stage and that connects with something later.

Thus, in Raphael's work, we see that what, in his time, seemed to be a character of mere inwardness has once again become an external revelation. Just imagine how St. Francis of Assisi is depicted in the works of Giotto. We see how, even in painting, everything remains inward; it does not transition into form and color. We must go back to the inner event everywhere, and when we transition to the inner event in Giotto's work, the outer representation is the less interesting part. This is not the case with Raphael. Here, we never feel the need to look beyond what he reveals to us directly, beyond what is there, what stands before us in color and form; rather, in Raphael's work, everything interior has flowed into the exterior. For this, Raphael's soul, though born with the internalized impulse of Christianity, needed the assimilation of Greek culture. In Raphael, we now see how this earlier state of development is being revisited, even though it was fundamentally new to him. It is remarkable how, on the one hand, this Greek style rested in the bosom of the earth until Raphael's time, so that Raphael's contemporaries were the first to see again what came to the surface at that time [through the excavations], and how, on the other hand, Greek style was awakened again in Raphael, only now transformed into the inward, which had created Greek style in the external sculptural form. What the Greeks had achieved in the form of sculpture was not immediately suitable for Raphael; but what was incumbent on him was to bring the inner life to external expression. To do this, painting, which, unlike sculpture, can make the inner into the outer, had to adopt Greek forms again. It adopted them in particular from Raphael. It is well known to me that one could list many other names, but nowhere else does this phenomenon occur as characteristically as in Raphael. Thus, in Raphael, we see how he acquires Greek influence through the Christian impulse. If we consider his soul from this broader point of view, it appears to us as if it had brought with it all Christian impulses at birth, but not the Greek ones – these play in from the environment. From picture to picture, one can follow how Raphael, translated into painting, appropriates more and more Greek art.

Now, anyone who delves deeper into spiritual science – let it be a mere hypothesis for my sake – will see how such a hypothesis gradually offers certainty, though not in a convenient way. When we look at Raphael's soul from this perspective, we see that it already contains the Christian impulses at birth. It therefore appears as if Raphael's soul had already made a pact with these before birth. While we can see the direct impact of the Christian impulses in Savonarola [through his environment], it seems to us that Raphael's soul already contains these Christian impulses. Just as Savonarola appropriated the Christian impulses directly through the effect of his environment in his Savonarola existence, so Raphael's soul developed them in an earlier earthly existence in such a way that it could not appropriate the Greek impulses at the same time in this earlier existence. It comes from an existence in which it has appropriated the Christian impulses so that, after the soul has gone through a life between death and a new birth, these have become a matter of course for it, as we then encounter in Raphael's paintings. And what Greek culture has achieved is only acquired by this soul, which in its previous life on earth may have been “Greek-like”, in this later Raphael life. In the soul of a Raphael, we see how what we can intuitively place in an earlier life on earth and what in later lives on earth merges with what we already bring with us at birth. Whenever I have studied this, just as Herman Grimm repeatedly made a fresh start [to write about Raphael's life], the spiritual-scientific view was really drawn to this fact by itself. It is to be assumed that Herman Grimm would not have agreed with his last presentation either, even if he had completed it, because, you see, certain things that are connected with the spiritual life of humanity only begin to become clear when one takes into account the fact of repeated lives on earth. Such a merging of the Christian impulses with the Greek ones, as was the case with Raphael, can only be understood if one is able to call the explanation from repeated earthly lives to help. It may still be foreign to our contemporaries today, but I have often used the comparison [with what] Francesco Redi said. He said that it is wrong that animals can arise from river mud; living things can only come from living things. — And in the same way, spiritual and psychological things can only come from spiritual and psychological things. ]

[Today, you would be branded a heretic if you tried to point out that a human life cannot be explained only in terms of its immediate environment. If one examines these things more closely, one will realize that when something flashes up in a human soul that cannot be explained by its environment, this leads back to a previous earthly existence, to something that this soul acquired in a previous earthly existence and that, when the soul has passed through death and a new birth, takes on the form of the self-evident in its new earthly existence, as something connected with the being, as something belonging to it. Thus, the Christian impulses are naturally connected with Raphael's being, so connected that Raphael cannot be thought of without them.

[If one presupposes the spiritual-scientific realization that the human soul goes through repeated earthly lives, then it becomes understandable that what a person has acquired in an earlier earthly life becomes forces in a later earthly life. One experiences and observes how they enter the soul and go through the stages that a person goes through between death and rebirth, and there they become one with the soul. And when the person then enters a new existence, he works with these forces on his entire inner physical form and makes his body in such a way that what he creates in the next life on earth seems to emerge naturally from his being. It seems to me that there will certainly come a time in the development of humanity when people will realize, precisely through unbiased observation of the facts, that only the great phenomena can be understood from the law of repeated lives on earth. Then it will also be clear that it is not only necessary to look at the greatest phenomena, but that every single human life can be understood if one takes the view of repeated lives on earth.

But when one directs one's human gaze to these great phenomena, which are so intimately connected with human development, with all that is the innermost impulses of the progressing human spirit, then something emerges from this contemplation that strengthens the human soul, giving it inner support, inner confidence, inner strength for work, as has often been discussed here. It leads the human soul not only to know but also to feel the germ of a following earthly existence, just as we feel how the plant has gathered its strength and summarized it in the germ and thus becomes aware that a new plant will emerge from this germ in summer. The soul can have this awareness, this feeling of having incorporated everything, as a guarantee for a future earthly life. What is already in the germ in this earthly life is transformed by the mere knowledge of immortality into a feeling of the immortal human germ, into a feeling for what builds up the future life.

Once again, it was very strange to me that it was precisely Herman Grimm's approach to such things, which were just being discussed, that compelled me to read a certain passage at the beginning of his book about Raphael. He who regards Raphael from the standpoint of spiritual science will naturally come to regard repeated earthly lives as necessary if he wants to understand Raphael quite concretely. And from the realization of repeated earthly lives we draw that strength which gives us the insight for what we will encounter in the future. Truly, it is surprising when one feels this as the effect of science: When someone approaches a phenomenon like Raphael and never comes to terms with it, but nevertheless, in the face of Raphael's greatness, receives a feeling, not yet of the reality of coming earth lives, but that in the face of this fulfilled human life, he feels a kind of desire for a coming earth life. The certainty of repeated earthly lives can only arise through spiritual science, but when contemplating Raphael's life, Herman Grimm felt a sense of security in the face of eternity, which he expresses with the strange word:

I see developments in humanity that I will be denied the opportunity to partake in, but which appear to me to be so brilliantly beautiful that it would be well worth starting human existence all over again for their sake.

It is now highly remarkable that we can translate the desire that arises in Herman Grimm through the contemplation of Raphael's life into the contemplation of a reality.

And so we can summarize what was the subject of today's contemplation in an overview of our feelings: It seems natural that in the face of a personality like Raphael's, where one feels so certain that a single life on earth is not enough to understand it, that for someone who allows this personality to have a complete effect on them, the desire that spiritual science describes as reality arises – the vision of repeated lives on earth. And so, an unbiased spiritual-scientific consideration of such great human beings as Raphael may lead to people being led more and more to develop such habits of thought through the contemplation of these great human beings. These habits of thought may still be very much opposed to today's opinions, but they will most certainly become part of people's spiritual life. As surely as the contemplation has become established – living things can only come from living things – so surely will the contemplation become established: spiritual and soul things can only come from spiritual and soul things. And it is precisely the contemplation of human greatness that can sink into our soul that which leads to such [new] habits of thinking. Wanting to try to understand human greatness also brings forth in us the opinion, indeed the certainty, that the truths of which we convince ourselves through an ever-deepening immersion in things and in the spirit of things, even if they initially meet resistance after resistance, will ultimately find their way into human hearts. No matter how narrow the chinks through which the truth must squeeze to reach the hearts of men, truth will find the way even through the narrowest chink. Those who can only see the germ of spiritual science today can be inspired by this sentence, which has been so deeply confirmed by the spiritual development of mankind, for it is only a germ. But he can also, by looking at this germ, develop confidence in his soul so that this germ will surely rise, blossom and bear fruit for the human soul. Answering

No question: I request that this lecture be printed.

Rudolf Steiner: In view of the number of lectures that have already been printed, I would prefer if nothing more were printed. What has been printed has not yet penetrated everywhere as far [into people's consciousness] as it could have.

Question: What do you do with the [standstill in development]? Is there [any] progress at all, [so that] the direction changes?

Rudolf Steiner: Anyone who has really listened will not easily be able to ask such a question. It is like this: [first there is] change, then [a] standstill. We see this in every house, [which was first built and then remains as a result for years].

Question: Is it possible for a person who can consciously leave their body to consciously remain in other spheres and no longer return to their body? And is the body then asleep or dead?

Rudolf Steiner: It is dead, of course. It is not about the real impossibility of returning, but about the moral one. Morally, one is obliged not to thwart one's karma. Natural laws and moral order are becoming more and more aligned. The natural law is increasingly becoming a moral natural necessity, and then such questions are no longer asked. [These are just as nonsensical as the question:] Could someone who has just made a watch pick up a hammer and smash the watch right away? Of course he could, but it wouldn't be reasonable.

Question: Is color blindness a hindrance to occult self-development?

Rudolf Steiner: Read my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds” - it is, however, out of print: Gazing [into the spiritual world] does not depend on our sense organs, we are, after all, becoming free of them. It is in no way disturbing if any sense organ is imperfectly developed, not even blindness [is an obstacle]. It is a mistake to confuse what appears in spiritual science with ordinary clairvoyance. Ordinary clairvoyance is not clairvoyance that really takes place in supersensible worlds. Ordinary clairvoyance is based on a certain mood in the sense organs or at least comes about with their active participation. Two clairvoyants, one blind and the other not, have the same experience when they encounter the same thing. When one says of such an experience, “It is the same as what one experiences with the color blue (or red),” one means that the same thing is experienced as one experiences with the color blue (or red). That is why it is called that, but it is not the same as the external experience of color. Because most people have a normal development [of the senses], one can proceed from this point of view; but it may be necessary to choose different starting points for those born blind; but one arrives at the same [spiritual experience].

Question: Can one get an impression of spiritual science by reading Tolstoy's books?

Rudolf Steiner: From reading Tolstoy, one cannot come to the idea that there is a spiritual science.

Question: Is it permissible to anesthetize a dying person with opium, [or] if not, [then] as with operations?

Rudolf Steiner: In the ideal case, one should act according to the appropriate knowledge that applies [also to] one, which appears to be humanly possible. One should not resist [applying that which] can provide relief to a person; [otherwise] it would lead to impossibilities.

Question: Can devout prayer grant wishes?

Rudolf Steiner: Prayer should actually be a bowing of the soul to the divine spirituality that lives and permeates the world, so that prayer actually loses its meaning when it is selfish. And only that prayer is justified which ends in the words of the original prayer: “But not my will, but yours be done.” This postscript gives prayer the right mood. Then it is a right prayer, when it is not selfish, otherwise practical contradictions arise immediately. For what should the granter of wishes do when one farmer wants something to sprout and asks for rain, but the other in the same area asks for dryness, or when of two armies, each of which certainly wishes to win, one asks for victory, but the other also asks for victory? So one should not be selfish in prayer. Therefore, the question of whether wishes are granted or not has no real meaning, because a proper prayer cannot expect wishes to be granted. I know that this is offensive to many souls, but one should only look at the nature of things and one will find that things really are like that.

Question: What about vegetarianism [in the light of the Bible? There are] the words of Christ: “My oxen are slaughtered,” or the paschal lamb, or even the banquets. And what about alcohol at the wedding at Cana or at the Last Supper, [when] the bread is dipped in wine?

Rudolf Steiner: It would be going too far if the corresponding words of the Gospels were explained [now]. But it would be shown that many of the things one reads in the Gospels today are only translation errors. Apart from that, it can be said that the development of spiritual views can be facilitated by a vegetarian lifestyle. But it is nothing more than stating the fact that he [the vegetarian] can make his path easier, just as one makes many other things easier by abstaining from meat. But it is not the task of spiritual science to promote vegetarianism in a one-sided way. Spiritual science does not subscribe to one-sided propaganda. For spiritual science, precise thinking is necessary, not only for comprehension and understanding, but also for [better] engagement with the finer webs of thought. Many a person believes they have to object to this or that, but these objections only stem from thinking that has stopped halfway. These things are not based on the consistency of scientific thinking, but on habits of thinking, on a lack of logic. Spiritual science is based on the fact that only what is known is believed: this is the view of every science. But to penetrate [into spiritual science] in such a way that one can really participate, it is necessary to relieve one's thinking of its burdens, to make it finer, so that one is able to follow paths along which one would otherwise not be able to follow – and the vegetarian way of life contributes to this.

One should also consider the relationship to the other kingdoms of nature. Today, humanity cannot even think of making vegetarianism a general diet, because it is very personal whether a person wants to do that or not. One can thoroughly spoil oneself if one wants to live in an abstract vegetarian way. This applies not only to today, but to all periods of time. Of course, today we can claim things that made no sense 2000 years ago; what is true today does not have to be true for all time. This only applies to materialistic truths. When we talk about modern man and man at the time of Christ, we are not talking about the same thing; we are only obliged to use the same word. Many things change over time. The Easter lamb does not have to mean a slaughtered lamb. Even if what is written on the note is correct, it was a different time. It cannot be deduced from this that [vegetarianism] cannot apply to today, when the finer structures of human nature have become quite different from what they were then, and that it is not a means of helping spiritual science if one becomes accustomed to vegetarianism. Now, one should not believe that one can “eat one's way up” into the higher worlds, [because it is] irrelevant whether one eats or refrains from eating. [Vegetarianism is] only a means of facilitating, not a means of comfort.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is not all of eternity mine?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear attendees! Allow me this evening to summarize some of what has been said in the course of the lectures I have been privileged to give you here from this place, in relation to spiritual-scientific knowledge of the human being, and to place it under a particular point of view, so that in the next lecture, the day after tomorrow, I can succeed in speaking fruitfully about one of the most important questions of our present spiritual life: about the origin of the human being.

The human being who occasionally casts a glance at his own soul, at himself, will undoubtedly have the impression in some cases that he not only faces his own being as if it were something unknown, but this impression can deepen to the point that this own being may well appear to the person as something that sometimes fills him with apprehension, perhaps even seeming like fear of something unknown. What takes place in our conscious soul life, what we experience from morning, from waking up until we fall asleep in the evening, often seems as if everything that lives in our consciousness comes up from unknown depths, surges up and ripples up like ocean waves from the unknown depths of the sea. And although, when we look at this stormy sea and these rippling waves, we can well imagine that something or other is going on in the depths, we often say to ourselves: How little does what is happening on the surface reveal what is going on in the depths. And so it is sometimes with our own soul life. What takes place in our consciousness is like waves breaking up from unknown depths, and since we ourselves are the scene of all this activity, the question of what is going on down there sometimes takes on an anxious character. Yes, the impression can become even more profound when we see how, from the hidden depths of our soul life, these or those feelings, these or those passions or drives, these or those volitional impulses arise, which we cannot can't control, that are there to our chagrin, perhaps often also to our joy; we can also feel as if we were standing on the earth's surface and, as it were, as if the underground depths were beginning to tremble, as in an earthquake. It is the impression of not knowing what will come, which weighs on our minds. We can often have this feeling about what is coming up, and we are aware that it is not in our hands at all. We best gain access to the hidden depths of the soul when we start from the familiar processes in the life of the soul, that is, when we start from what we are aware of; and what, after all, would a person be more aware of than what he believes he has grasped, what he believes he has recognized, in which he believes he has insight from these or those branches of knowledge of this or that science or believes he has recognized from his life experience? What, after all, is more conscious and better known in our soul life than what we call our clear ideas? Yes, but when we survey these ideas, this knowledge of ours, this insight of ours, then – if we face the matter without prejudice – a feeling of powerlessness will arise in us in the face of this knowledge, so to speak a feeling of being closed off from the world in our knowledge.

From Greek intellectual history, we know that a great philosopher was once asked how people actually relate to life, and he is said to have replied: Those who want to recognize and actually achieve it, act like certain people at some fair. While some come to a fair to sell this or that and are interested in selling their goods, and others are interested in buying, there are also those everywhere at fairs who neither want to sell nor buy, who have simply come to look at the things, at life at the fair.

It is the same with people of knowledge. They come to the market of life, not to interfere with the conflicting interests, but to quietly observe life.

Now, it might seem that a person who is immersed in ordinary life could care little about the universal task of the special people of insight, but in a sense we must say that every person, wherever they are in life, has a corner where they are people of insight; and without being a philosopher, without being a person of insight, no one can actually walk through this life satisfied. So for those moments when we are just watching without getting caught up in the “fairground life,” when we are philosophers, we are able to have the qualities of those who merely watch. And as a spectator, as a little standing in the corner, one actually always feels when contemplating the most significant performances in terms of the urge for knowledge and insight. And what applies to ideas of the life of knowledge applies, so to speak, to our entire life of ideas. There we will realize something of what is called the powerlessness of the life of knowledge.

Now one could say: Yes, you label people of knowledge as a kind of gawker of life and make knowledge into something that does not really intervene in the real surge and hustle and bustle of life. But it is precisely from this impotence of life that one gains knowledge when one observes how the human being seeks to understand and recognize the hidden forces, how they work in life, how they can advance it and keep it in order. And yet, even when a person is completely imbued with the light that, let us say, emanates from moral or other ideas, it may still be the case that his urges speak, his instincts, his passions assert themselves, and that in reality he cannot follow what has arisen in his ideas. We have to say: the images have no power to intervene in our soul life, to work and weave in such a way that we would adapt our soul reality entirely to the life of images. The power, the strength of the impulse, that is what the images lack in relation to the reality of the soul life, and we feel the powerlessness of the life of images and the real impulses of life as a duality within ourselves.

How people here and there believe, how they have believed at all times, to grasp important worldviews, yes, the whole world - and lo and behold: if the ideas had the power to really implement into life impulses what they seemingly contain, then it would have to be easier to convince people of such ideas. Every time this is at issue, one recognizes the powerlessness of ideas in the face of reality, in the face of life.

One can understand only too well if the artist in particular, who is supposed to create out of the totality of his soul, would become sober and dry if he were not there with the whole of his soul - we can see how he of being absorbed in the soul process, because he feels: the moment when, instead of receptive soul impulses, a certain logical sequence of thoughts [constructed ideas] intervenes, the moment soul life becomes weak. That is why one speaks of [the] sobriety [of the life of ideas]. The artist knows that art cannot work if it is taken from mere conceptual life. Indeed, one recognizes works of art by whether they are created out of the life of the soul or out of abstract ideas.

The basis for such a feeling is an awareness of the powerlessness of the life of imagination. And since our imaginations are actually what makes us truly human in life, and we realize that our imaginations actually reach deep into our soul life, the question arises: is it all about these imaginations, what, so to speak, ripples on the surface and does not penetrate into the deeper regions of the soul life? Here we are confronted with the most primitive question of the hidden life of the soul. Nevertheless, we can only penetrate to the essence of the feelings and sensations of the deeper soul life if we start from the everyday, from this primitive question.

Now we all know that what we experience in our conscious waking state unfolds in this way: Those who have an eye for the peculiarities of their soul life will realize that in the course of what lives in their imaginations, emotional and mood experiences are connected with the ideas. Only with the most outstanding ideas do we really feel that we are experiencing joy or sorrow. This resonance of moods with the life of ideas, however, is basically always present. No one can say that anything takes place in their conscious life that does not bring with it, even if only to a small degree, a sense of pleasure or sorrow, hope or fear, and the like. In everyday life, we never have pure thinking, mere life of ideas in consciousness; but always connected with what takes place in the conscious life is that which we can call mood, feeling, sensation.

In the course of life, however, this element of the life of ideas behaves quite differently from that which arises as a concomitant of the life of ideas in the form of a state of mind. You can see this when you try, after ten or twenty years, to recall something you have experienced more or less clearly in such a way that you can recreate the event in the life of ideas. If things are linked, some with great pain, others with great joy, we will always realize that this joy or pain does not appear with the same strength and energy in our memory. For example, if someone has experienced a death, then they know that the pain cannot be relived in their memory with the original strength in their emotional life. It is the same with joy. So in our memory, the ideas play a completely different role.

The question may be raised: Yes, but if the images that we can form of painful or joyful events are alive in our memory, where are the moods, where is the emotional life that was connected with these ideas? Now this question, however much it belongs to the “primitive”, is not so very simple. And many people will still dispute that one can give an answer to such questions using strictly logical methods. But much of what has been said about elementary questions of spiritual research does put us in a position to get an idea about the fate of the moods associated with the ideas. While the images can be conjured up again from memory, the same cannot be done with the moods. If we look at life as intensely and thoroughly as is necessary to answer such a question, we find that every person we know for a long time The overall state of health of this person is expressed in the fact that he is a more or less happy person, so that his happiness is expressed not only in the way he perceives the outside world emotionally, but also in the way he feels in his organization, in terms of harmony and health. When we speak of a person's overall state of mind, we must not separate emotional experience from what we call overall state of mind, and this also includes those moods that depend on our physical condition, on how our blood flows, on how the flow of thoughts in our brain and nervous system takes place.

If we consider the overall state of a person at a certain point in time, when he is not in a happy frame of mind, when he is melancholy or downhearted or tired of what his whole being indicates as his overall ; if we observe this state of a person and compare it with how we knew him in earlier days of his life, we will [...] find there the moods and sensations and feelings that do not enter into the memories. He does not live in the regions from which we draw our memories, but has descended into the depths of life, where the constitution that makes up our mental life is worked on, but which is also connected to our entire physical organization as a state of mind. How we are full of life and hope, how we can be melancholy and downhearted, how we can be full of zest for work, tired, exhausted or prone to attack each of these states of mind has arisen from the fact that they separate from the life of ideas and descend into the deep foundations of the soul. Where our personal happiness is built, so to speak, we see a certain line separating itself from the life of ideas; we see that part of it that accompanies this life of ideas diving down and working in hidden depths of the soul, where our life essence is incorporated into our personal state. There we have an element that comes from conscious experiences, but is always submerged in those regions where it can work on our entire life.

But sometimes what has gone underground in our overall state is brought back up, but brought up in a certain way, not just brought up when the ordinary, everyday consciousness through which we connect with the external world is switched off in a certain way - what has gone underground can sometimes be seen rising in the semi-conscious states of the dream world. This is why the images of the dream world appear to us so meaningfully that they transport us to distant, past times in our lives. If we had tried to somehow reflect on what had happened, we might or might not have gotten a clear picture. But we cannot retrieve what we have experienced in our feelings. However, anyone who examines the dream images finds that it turns out that someone expresses ancient moods in the symbols of his dreams. It may well be, for example, that someone reaches a ripe old age and is no longer inclined to go out on the street with a paper cap or a toy sword and command children as they do. He will have an idea of what has happened to him, but the moods can no longer have the same power in his daily life. They take them on in his dreams. And it is not uncommon for someone of a certain age to dream every night that he is actually a major or that he is “taking a journey in his dream”. In his outer life, he may remember what he read in children's books, but he no longer experiences the bliss he felt at the time. But in his dreams he does.

Where everyday life ends, where the human being feels the images of his or her ideas in dreams, we find that the emotional states that play and work in the hidden depths of the soul life come up when they have not yet been used – and this is important – to work on our physical organization. If they still live in a corner of our hidden soul life, then they come up in dreams. When someone is transported in a dream to earlier moods, then the whole way in which they come up in the dream reveals to us: certain feelings have remained; they have not yet exhausted their strength, so the half-asleep life of the dream brings them up into our half-consciousness – the dream images present themselves to us. Here we have an example of how we can penetrate the ceiling of our everyday state of consciousness, how what lives in the hidden life of the soul can indeed come to mind, but how these ideas are not then checked against the outside world, but live entirely in the moods present in our inner life of the soul.

This is something very primitive, but it can lead our understanding to what can be explored from the hidden depths of the soul through spiritual science. We see a property of the moods that withdraw from our imaginative life; we see a property that they acquire that is extraordinarily important: by releasing the ideas, they gain power. And we can say to ourselves: While we used to speak of the powerlessness of knowing the life of ideas in consciousness, we can see precisely from this how used moods of mind transform themselves or how moods of mind, without our intervention as dream images present themselves to us in such a way that we do not have the power to correct them through logic. We see how this life of the soul snatches itself away from outer experience through the senses, away from outer thinking, which is bound to the brain. In this way, this subconscious soul life acquires a certain power, a certain reality.

At first, this reality is one that leads us only into ourselves, into our own reality. Dreams like the ones just discussed are a reflection of what we have stored up in terms of fear and hope, of anxiety and confidence in life. But we come to something that affects our inner state and is expressed in our dream life. We do not come out of ourselves, but we get to know reality and have to say: the moods had to break free to become real in us.

How the constitutions, these moods, work down there, how that which detaches itself from the ideas works, can be seen if one considers the training that has been discussed several times, which one must undergo if one really wants to become a knower of the spiritual world. You will find – this cannot, of course, be discussed in detail today – you will find the instructions for how to penetrate into that which has descended into the depths of the soul and which makes us appear healthy or ill and only shows itself in fleeting dream images, in the writing “How to Know Higher Worlds”.

Through training, through imagination, [inspiration] and intuition, when the soul is actively immersed – not in the vague way described in the two cases mentioned – when the soul is actively immersed, then the human being learns, albeit only initially, to know what is confronting him, to know himself. All methods of meditation and concentration lead, in a sense, to the study of deep self-knowledge. They do not lead to the self-knowledge that one thinks one has exhausted when one takes a normal look at the forces with which one works in everyday life, but they lead one to where that deep individuality is in oneself, in which those moods are. He gets to know what lies dormant in the hidden depths of his soul, as if kept under a blanket. And here the human being must familiarize himself with the fact that when the forces for his recovery or illness emerge from the soul, he can acquire completely new insights into the peculiarities of this hidden self.

Only real results of spiritual research can be cited. In particular, the human being gets to know how moods of joy, delight, bliss, moods of sadness and melancholy, impressions of ugliness or impressions of beauty, impressions of error, deception, impressions of truth or wisdom affect his or her entire being. Yes, you learn to recognize that everything that has just been mentioned, the impressions we have of joy or sadness, of beauty or ugliness, are connected with the becoming and passing away of something deeper within us, so that when we begin , when we move on to this realization, we are no longer indifferent to the outside world, but learn to know: certain things that take place in the world have a real destructive effect, taking something away; others have such a fertilizing effect that they help us.

We cannot say that at the moment when we consciously or unconsciously tell lies, we are really destroying anything. We cannot say that what has a destructive effect on our being when we tell lies, and what has a fertilizing effect when we speak the truth, is the same as the external forces of becoming and passing away, but something akin to them.

He who does not form his knowledge at the point where the soul benefits or destroys itself through what takes place in his mind, is not on the right path. Self-knowledge, which takes place in the hidden depths of the soul, is therefore not what could be given to humanity at a time when humanity had not yet matured to acquire this self-knowledge, which is related to the forces of arising and passing away; it must now be incorporated into humanity. Weak humanity has been spared from realizing the devastating effect of lying and deception, and the uplifting effect of honesty and sincerity. Usually, people believe that lying and deception or honesty and sincerity are things that can only be judged by means of ideas. But what is there, without our being able to judge it, penetrates down into the depths of our soul life and takes effect there as a real force.

Self-knowledge is the true starting point for all higher knowledge. A person who wants to recognize what lives out there behind the sensuality of the outside world must delve into his or her self and will see that moral and emotional forces are not just something abstract, but something that descends and is the decisive factor not only for our entire human value, but for our entire humanity. How we grow into the outer sensory world with our body, which we wear as the garment of our self and which has the sense organs, how we see this sense world with the eyes of the body, hear this sense world with the ears, how we establish a connection with the mind, which has its tool in the brain, with this sense world, develop an inner experience of what is outside of us in the sense world, and thus come into relationship with the outer world through our outer human being. In the same way, we come into contact with spiritual forces and impulses from our outer environment through the human being that we develop within us.

When we look out into the world with our eyes, we perceive colors and forms. When he has discovered his self resting in the deeper soul forces, then what is in the outer sense world does not emerge in the usual way, but the realities of the outer world also arise, and then we get to know a new context of things, that which stands between the beings of the outer world.

As we now take the first step into the qualities of the soul forces that have a destructive and constructive effect, we then learn that the inner self expands, so that we not only have it in its arising and passing away, but we feel it interacting with the external reality, with the spiritual reality of the outer world. Therefore, the images of the spiritual environment then arise in these hidden depths of the soul.

Man comes to know the spiritual world indirectly through his self. Much of what appears impenetrable or even random to the ordinary view, which is limited only to the external sense world, is revealed to us within the context of such knowledge, in which the self grows together in its hidden depths with the environment. The strange thing about this is that the deeper we penetrate into our own self, the more the horizon with which we are connected in the external world expands; the more we dive into our subconscious, the more spiritual aspects of the external world we recognize. To delve into the powers of the soul means to go beyond belief, to learn about the spiritual world. For down there we are much more deeply connected with the essence of things than we can be with the senses and the mind, which is bound to the physical brain. When one can say that consciousness has created a larger horizon, then at the same time a spreading of one's own self and an penetration into the spiritual worlds has been achieved. There is no other way to reach hidden depths of the soul than to gradually penetrate the external spiritual world. In the process, a real knowledge of the spiritual foundations of existence arises for those who penetrate it through the observation of everything we can achieve through the knowledge of the higher world. What is described in spiritual science and what you can find in theosophical books occurs.

But it is possible - although in our time one can only gain an unchallengeable view into the spiritual world through training - for certain individuals to gain insights that come from ancient heirlooms, from the inheritance of clairvoyant qualities, insights that are nothing other than a descent into the hidden depths of the soul, so that an expansion of the hidden human being beyond the external world occurs, through which the human being perceives what would otherwise remain closed to the external life of the senses and mind. Then intuitions arise, everything that a person can recognize without proper training - also about the fate of the soul, about the fate of the soul between death and a new birth in the sense of reincarnation. On the one hand, this can happen through proper training, on the other hand, these hidden depths of the soul can 'push themselves up'. Like dreams, what is in the deeper layers and cannot be perceived by the senses or the mind can be discharged; through a “second sight” or [deuteroscopy] it can be brought to light. Insights can also be brought to light about the fate of the human soul, even if it is not embodied in the body.

We must only realize in what respect one or the other is or is not beneficial for the human being, we must realize that there is a tangible difference between looking through spiritual training and that looking, which, as it were, pushes its way up out of the hidden into the known depths of the soul. There is a fundamental difference. When a person enters the spiritual world through proper schooling, as indicated, for example, in Occult Science, it happens in such a way that the person, after penetrating into the depths of the soul, consciously brings up the forces hidden there. However, visions can also occur with the full vividness of a play of colors and sounds, corresponding to what we receive as sense impressions. But while we receive them in such a way that we know we must surrender to the control of the external world, we let those colors and tones of the visions take effect on us in such a way that we do nothing to them – and then we become fantasists, dreamers. Such visions are removed from our inner arbitrariness, our generative power, our spiritual willpower.

Conversely, in the training we have to experience the hidden depths of our soul in such a way that we know: What is there has been brought forth by our free will, by our generative power. Only when one knows: What you perceive [gap in the transcript] is made by you, because you must — because you are experiencing something spiritual that is otherwise not perceptible in the outer world — fill what you experience with colors and sounds, then the person is protected from deception. If the visions confront him with the full vividness of a play of colors, then he is one who hallucinates. The moment the vision presents itself as a sensory perception, it is a hallucination; it does not yet belong to the realm of true clairvoyance, but to the realm where the hidden powers of the soul emerge without the conscious willpower of the human being, without arbitrary training.

When the trained clairvoyant can control the way in which things present themselves to him, when they present themselves without such conscious willpower in the soul's imagination, without the inner self-activity generated by training , then we find ourselves in the realm of unschooled clairvoyance, and then man is at the mercy of the forces that play into the hidden depths of his soul; then he is unfree. Then he is connected with all the dangers with which he must be connected when he is in contact with supersensible reality without conscious willpower. In the world of the senses every phantasm reveals itself. But in the spiritual world, the moment things present themselves, it is no longer possible to distinguish objectively between reality and fantasy, and there is a danger that the human will sphere will be affected in some way and that the human being - instead of facing the spiritual world as an individuality - will be surrendered to the things that play in the hidden depths of his soul; just as the unconscious life of the soul plays out, like the rippling of the sea over the depths of the sea, so the I, one's own personality, is opened up and then plunged down again, [and he is guided from another side, through] hallucinations [and visions], [...] carried by hidden depths of the soul, and it can happen that [that this] is presented to the outsider, to the one who wants to investigate scientifically, as a phenomenon, as a specific thing, so that he can distinguish what of what he sees is real objective reality and what is fantasy; but it can only lead to fruitful observation if a trained clairvoyance exercises criticism.

It can result in fruitful observation to extract insights from the depths of the soul in this way, and since science is allowed to take anything as an object, wherever it may come from, which it must then take up into right knowledge, one cannot speak of something unlawful can be said when these things are examined, which even the untrained clairvoyant sees and which can be based on correct, useful perception of what leads tremendously deep into the hidden depths of the soul. What the objective, critical clairvoyant can contribute regarding the facts that arise through untrained clairvoyance can be extraordinarily fruitful, especially today. I may here again and again point out the fact that we now have a fine book - as I have often pointed out - which, in addition to the so-called esoteric clairvoyance, also sheds light on this side of clairvoyance: “The Mystery of Man”, written by Ludwig Deinhard.

So, when the hidden depths of the soul are discussed, one must not forget that there is a difference between proper training and the kind of clairvoyance that breaks away with elemental force and rises from the subconscious to the conscious mind. The former must be examined with critical means, while the latter, who has expanded his consciousness within himself, can take on the criticism and exercise control himself. There will come an age in our culture when individuality will become more self-assertive, when humanity will 'enter' into what can be achieved through properly trained clairvoyance, when this will be introduced into culture. When this is made clear to him, the person can then test it out in life itself, in the ordinary things of life.

There is yet another difference between the trained clairvoyant and the person who has “exposed” his clairvoyance through elementary, primitive powers, namely that the trained clairvoyant first comes to realizations that are general; and he comes to see how the visible human body differs from the supersensible human being, to see how man, as a being with many parts, is endowed with visible and invisible members, to see what there is between birth and death, not just in one life, but in several. He comes to understand everything that arises as experiences in this life between birth and death and between death and new birth, and also to understand what the origin of man is, what the course of the great world order became, of which we will present an example here in the lecture the day after tomorrow. The clairvoyant comes to an understanding of the things that concern all people, and he works his way through them with great caution, so that he first gets to know his own intellectual processes and does not carelessly communicate the fate of some disembodied soul. He can work his way to perceiving such individual circumstances and to experiencing the spiritual that plays into everyday life, but he advances from the general to the individual only with difficulty. He first recognizes that a person has an etheric body at all, but only later the individual etheric body.

In the untrained clairvoyant, however, the opposite is the case when the hidden depths of the soul struggle to emerge; he begins with visions that actually need to be carefully controlled; he begins with individual, everyday things. It is peculiar that he has basically little interest in what are general great insights. Particularly in those who have retained an old, atavistic clairvoyance, one can observe that they have little interest in things [that must prove to be significant for all people through spiritual science]. And nowhere are there such snobbish people among clairvoyants as those who call a naturally inherited clairvoyance their own.

Thus we see that which leads us into the hidden depths of our soul life and what makes us healthy and sick there, we see that which connects us to the spiritual world. Now it is natural that this is not only there because one recognizes it, only there when man dives down and beholds it; it is just as truly there before the recognition as the whale was there before man saw it.

So we are deeply connected with our hidden soul life with the spiritual world that is there. The spiritual foundations play a role here, and we should not be surprised that there is a much deeper essence down there than comes up and comes to our consciousness. We see that the bases that connect us to the spiritual world actually lie there, in the hidden foundations, and that the forces that come from the spiritual worlds have an effect on them. Only part of it enters our consciousness, so that our consciousness is only part of what we actually are. But this consciousness of man is there because man is able to raise to a higher level what can emerge from the hidden depths of his soul. For we see these things emerging in many different ways – they could emerge distorted or embellished, of which we would otherwise know nothing – but what emerges from the spiritual worlds into the depths of our souls and strives upwards is expressed in the sublime and the beautiful, which consciousness can control.

What happens when that which penetrates from the spiritual worlds into the hidden depths of the soul's life is transformed on its way up to consciousness? Then it is so that the impressions can live out as artistic fantasy, as that about which no one but the artists can say: the things are there, they rise up from the depths of the soul. And then we understand the powerlessness of ordinary consciousness, understand how the artist wants to expose the depths of his soul, even if he does not have them in front of him like a clairvoyant, and that it seems more important to him how things permeate each other.

Everything that a person can have in his consciousness without being stimulated by the outside world comes from the hidden depths of the soul. Even that which each of us needs to make this life fruitful must arise from the hidden depths of the soul. Not only the poet needs this, not only the artist, but also the merchant, the engineer – each of us needs this fertilizing stimulus from the hidden depths of the soul. We can see what these depths are truly rooted in when what lies down there rises up into consciousness. When it permeates him and presents itself in such a way that it can be perceived, conceived, experienced, then it becomes dependent on the way in which the person can absorb it. If someone has the ability not only to perceive what can be perceived through the external senses and through the mind bound to the senses, but has the ability to perceive in images, in beautiful fantasy, what lives in the hidden depths of his soul, then he can give in images what he cannot draw from nature, but what lives in the hidden depths of his soul.

But if a person is so constituted that he is untruthful, then the hidden depths do indeed come to the surface, but in such a way that, on the way from the hidden depths into the manifest, the person takes on the character and appears as a liar, as a deceiver or the like, through that part of the hidden powers of the soul that he cannot control in relation to external reality. Thus we can see how these hidden soul forces can make one person an artist and another a liar. This is what is necessary to recognize in order to penetrate into what a person has in his hidden soul forces.

This should be our first goal today: to recognize that everything that takes place in our conscious mental life is rooted in the depths of the soul, in the depths that we find in many other ways.

Finally, I would just like to say – because time is pressing – that in our ordinary lives, precisely in our consciousness, in our interaction with the outside world, in our perception through the senses and the mind, we merge with this outside world, that in the most important things we cannot distinguish what we have within, what is at the core of our being, from the outside. The human being is not capable of detaching the core of his soul from what he has grown together with externally. That is why he must take the path into his inner being. He can take it if he imagines how the ball of sunlight rises out of the dawn. We can best recognize what we experience inwardly by whether it is present in one person or not. And when we feel compassion for something that our fellow human experiences, we cannot separate what lives in hidden depths from the sight of compassion and pain; we grow together with it.

But there is a way that leads from this conscious soul life into something that can be inferred from the faith of a great man like Goethe: that it is not what lives in the external world but what lives in the spiritual environment that is significant, and this includes basically all stellar worlds, everything that works in the external world.

If it does not awaken its own life in the human soul, if we only get stuck in what connects us to the outside world, if we only remain in consciousness, then we will not penetrate into the spiritual. But we can find the way into the spiritual world.

When we look back into the past and see that up to a certain point our parents and brothers and sisters can tell us about it, but when we go back to the point where our memory awakens, we see that we have not only gone through external experiences, but that something else is connected with these experiences: the carrier of our experiences, that which we call our I. By looking back over our lives, we can see our own development. We feel how we have become more mature and more mature, because we feel we have gained in life experience. There is one thing we have to tell ourselves: the most important thing we have learned is actually one that we cannot apply in life. We have attained our greatest maturity through the mistakes we have made. We only know how to do something better when we have done it. Man learns most important things from the unrepeatable, most from what has passed. Especially with the most intimate things in our soul, we feel that something has arisen in us, of which the materialist says: When man goes through the gate of death, it disappears, or at most it is handed over to the human race, to cultural life. But the spiritual person knows that what he has experienced in his innermost being cannot be handed over to anyone else. It shows when he delves into the hidden depths, it shows that what we allow to mature within us can be fulfilled directly in us. When we examine our lives and find that we were born into certain family circumstances, into a certain environment, then something occurs – if we do not grasp our destiny in an intellectual way with our ordinary consciousness, but appeal to forces that are somewhat hidden from our ordinary consciousness . It is something that cannot so much become knowledge as a volitional impulse, when we look back at our lives and our destiny as it was when we were placed in life, but then make the decision to depart from the experiences of ordinary consciousness. Those who face their destiny with ordinary consciousness, who say that everything has happened to us by chance, will be resentful of their destiny, will feel resentment. If we move away from these peculiarities such as antipathy and sympathy towards fate and appeal to a force that we can develop within us, to the power of non-self-will - letting our own will remain silent for a while, calmly facing this fate and indulging for once in the idea: How is it that this fate is there? It continues through our ego, after all. Was our ego not there before?

If we seek our self by calmly looking at our fate, and if we now trace our self further back, we find that through such a deeper contemplation of life, our self grows together with fate, and we understand our fate as if our self were included in this fate and brought about in it before we were there. Then we come to see that we pass through the gate of death with the best that is in us and that we have allowed to mature, and that what we have experienced in previous lives meets our ego again as fate in our next life. We see that it works in the depths of the soul, and when we leave this body, what we have acquired as forces to build a new life for ourselves continues to work in us. So we see our own hidden beingness building up this soul life anew, we see it becoming real down there, becoming constructive forces in the hidden soul life.

When we look at the world in this way, we grow out of the hidden depths and into the spiritual world. And the knowledge that penetrates into these depths is so truly connected with the spiritual worlds as thinking, feeling and willing are the powers of our soul, to which the soul clings as the bonds that penetrate from the spiritual world. By penetrating into it, the human being finds his connection with the macrocosm; the forces grow out of the microcosm, [the human being grows] into the macrocosm, as [it is presented in] the drama 'The Testing of the Soul', [and every] soul can say to itself:

In your thinking live thoughts of the world,
In your feeling weave world forces,
In your will work world beings.
Lose yourself in world thoughts,
Experience yourself through world forces,
Create yourself from will beings.
Do not end with world distances
Through the play of thought-dreams ---;
Begin in the expanses of the mind,
And end in the depths of your own soul: —
You will find divine goals,
Recognizing yourself within yourself.

The previous lecture, which is followed by today's lecture, was about the hidden depths of the soul's life and explained that the soul's life is not absolutely bound to matter, that it is not only separable from the physical, but also from the ideas that are gained from it through the senses and the mind. The possibility of the separation of soul experiences from physical ideas was demonstrated by the difference between memories and dreams. Those [memories] arise without the original power of the soul's compassion, these [dreams] with the original accompanying phenomena of the emotional life of joy, suffering and the like. There - in memory - the soul life detaches itself from the life of imagination, which is gained in the outside world, and withdraws into the hidden depths of the soul, where it works and works, where it exercises its power by working on the entire human organism.

While the life of imagination often proves powerless – for we know not what goes on in the depths of the sea when the surface ripples – the hidden life of the soul proves itself to be a power. We see this in dreams, in the trance of mediums, in the work of art and in the knowledge of the spiritual researcher. For man can penetrate into it by training his mind, so that he learns to consciously draw from the sources of truly real life, into which he not only gazes without control like the dreamer and fantasist and thereby becomes a dreamer, hallucinist or even a liar, not like the one with atavistic gifted with atavistic clairvoyance, becomes the plaything of the spirits of such a soul or astral world in his dreams, nor alone, as the true artist draws from the spirit and shapes it in beauty, but as a knower, consciously seeing, can distinguish what is vision from what is true and self-willed. [...]

This knowledge of the hidden can only lead to the right spiritual research if it is gained, firstly, through self-knowledge, through descending into one's own inner being. With this self-knowledge, secondly, knowledge of the spiritual environment arises and grows. The greater the self-knowledge, the broader the spiritual horizon, the power to penetrate into the realities of the environment, into the hidden world spirit. l..]

Dear attendees! When approaching the subject of today's consideration, then one comes, starting from the points of view that are represented here, in a basically quite strange situation compared to everything that has been thought and researched in our age for decades about the important question of the origin of man. The reason why one finds oneself in a strange position is that, over the past few decades, the origin of man has been presented primarily in the form in which one believes one should think about the origin of man in the present day: in terms of the results of modern science. And who could deny that the great and tremendous advances in natural science in recent times have every right to have a say at the moment when this important question is put to man.

Most of the people present who are dealing with the question from the point of view of natural science must understandably have the impression that anything that can be said here from the point of view of spiritual science about this question is basically directly opposed to what natural science has to say about the point – understandably, dear attendees, and I ask you to bear in mind that this is being said. For it is precisely with such questions that what should emerge on the occasion of the two lectures of my last visit, which dealt with how to refute theosophy on the one hand and how to defend it on the other, always hovers in the background. Especially with questions like today's, the spiritual scientist must be completely clear that much, much can be brought forward from the ideas of the present, seemingly with good reason, against his assertions. Therefore, it must be understood that a lecture such as this evening's can provide some suggestions, but is far from quickly convincing someone who is still unfamiliar with the theosophical views. This is said as an introduction to characterize the attitude from which such a lecture is given. What have we experienced in recent decades [in relation to our topic today]? More and more, those [scientists] who believe they have a judgment in this area have come to the conclusion that man in the totality of his being has its origin from creatures that, in the sense of a systematic arrangement of living beings, actually belong to the sphere of what today's man calls his education, his culture, in fact, the sphere of his human activities. The extraordinarily fruitful principle of development has led to the belief that in the past, development would have progressed in such a way that from simple, primitive life forms, to which today's primitive life forms still resemble, through slow development - as a result of the “struggle for existence,” through adaptation - gradually more and more complicated forms of life have formed, up to the higher animals, and that in such a progressive development, man has risen, as it were, from the lower realms. So man's ancestors are sought in animal life, and there is such a conviction in [wide] circles on this point that anyone who wants to put forward something that does not agree with it is actually thought of as a retarded mind. Now, first of all, the natural scientists – not so much the natural scientists who remain in the realm of facts, but rather the natural scientists who have felt called upon to link worldviews, world mysteries to their research – they have felt compelled to present, so to speak, the outer form and the outer physical conditions of human life as a first as complications that arose from the forces that come from the realms that stand below the human, so that one would only have more complicated living conditions than in the case of animals, especially those that stand one step lower than humans, but that one must still derive the forces from what is already found in the lower living beings.

Those natural scientists who wanted to tie an outlook on life to the facts of natural science have strengthened this belief. But not only has this belief become established, but it has also become established that the higher intellectual powers, what we call man's aesthetic perception, his moral impulses, are also only higher forms of the spiritual, of the soul, that one finds in the animal kingdom, that one can also look for the more primitive forms more primitive forms of moral behavior in animals that can be grasped in terms of moral concepts in relation to humans, so that one is often convinced that man has emerged as an intellectual, moral, and aesthetic being only through complication from the living beings below him.

It must be conceded that in the face of the magnificent results of modern natural science, it is extremely difficult to come up with any other attitude, any other view. And it must be readily admitted that as a spiritual scientist one often finds oneself in a strange position when, on the one hand, one allows the achievements of natural science to take effect and, on the other hand, one has to deal with what certain more or less amateurish spiritual scientists believe they have to extract from the scientific results. When one compares the conscientiousness of the two presentations, it is the case that, in terms of conscientiousness, one would actually prefer to side with the natural scientist than with some amateur spiritual researchers.

Now the point is that spiritual research in this field is also in a very special position because, basically, it only comes into disharmony with the thoughts, ideas and hypotheses that have emerged from the results of natural science , while it becomes ever clearer to the spiritual researcher that the actual results of natural science virtually force human thinking to gradually take a perspective as it is given by spiritual science. Actually, the dichotomy between spiritual science and natural science is not that great, because the facts of natural science correspond more to spiritual science than to the monistic and materialistic [interpretations]. So, as a spiritual researcher, one feels in harmony with the facts as one progresses, and only comes into conflict with the hypotheses that are drawn from the facts from some quarters.

If one observes man in his development and wants to trace him back to his origin, it seems only natural that the views about him must be in line with the views one has about the course of the earth's development, [this going back] was indeed [previously] held entirely in the materialistic sense in which the biological theory of evolution, the theory of the development of living beings, is [carried out]. When one reflects on the course of the Earth's development, then as a rule one only considers what the external, inanimate forces, the forces of physics, chemistry, geology, can achieve, and one follows the Earth in a state in which it looked different from what it looks like today, in which it was perhaps in a state that, compared to our present-day Earth formation, resembles a gaseous ball. We know that this is a widespread hypothesis, that it is assumed that the Earth condensed from a gaseous state. It is known that if you trace this back even further into the distant past, you come to see the whole solar system in a gaseous state. The spiritual researcher recognizes that objections have recently been raised against this so-called Kant-Laplace theory, but in the broadest circles it still prevails. It is believed that the whole solar system itself emanated from a kind of primeval nebula that was in rotation, and it is also imagined that the planets, including our Earth, were separated by the forces that were at work in this rotation.

I have often pointed out how the so-called [Plateau's] experiment is carried out in schools to illustrate this Kant-Laplacean theory. You take a large drop of a substance that can float on water, let a sheet of card penetrate at the point of the equator, pierce it at the point of the axis with a needle and make the drop rotate, thus showing that small drops do indeed come off and move around the center. What could be simpler than to prove in this way how a planetary system could have formed in such a way? But in an experiment, it is important to take into account everything that needs to be logically included, and it turns out that something is forgotten in this experiment: one forgets oneself, forgets that one is standing there and turning, and that you only have the logical right to put forward the hypothesis [and to transfer the experiment to the solar system] if you assume that there is a giant teacher out there in the universe who has caused all this movement with a giant needle. If you do not make this addition in this experiment, then you are on completely unjustified ground.

Of course, spiritual science does not place a professor out in space, but it does say that nowhere is there a formless matter like this cosmic fog; that matter is permeated or at least directed by spiritual powers and forces everywhere, [without us falling into anthropomorphism in the process]. Therefore, for spiritual science it is clear: Even if it is justified in terms of material formation that such a primeval nebula is there, then a spiritual event underlies this outer event, just as the activity of the spiritual soul underlies the events in the human body. Spiritual science does not start from an analogy, but from spiritual research. In the specifically concrete, spiritual science seeks the spiritual events, the spiritual forces and the spiritual entities that underlie them, so that instead of external, materialistic hypotheses, it sees the spirit in them.

Now, if one were to undertake the usual presentations of the Kant-Laplacean theory and the associated operations, one could say that it is possible to derive what our body is and the shaping of physical and mental structures from the rotation in the primeval nebula. If we want to make the assumption that some kind of giant teacher is out there and sets the whole thing in motion, then we can speak, if need be, of the formation of the earth having emerged from the Kant-Laplacean primeval nebula. But then we come to a critical point again, and this has been seen not only by spiritual researchers, but also by thoughtful natural scientists. This point concerns the origin of life in general on our earth body. One can, of course, if one does not take certain conditions into account, perhaps indulge in the belief that living things could once have come into being through the spontaneous generation of certain substances. It would be a very long way indeed if one wanted to explain all the philosophical and other reasons that demonstrate the impossibility of deriving life from conditions that are purely physical. It is much more important that this impossibility has become clear to deep-thinking natures such as Gustav Fechner and Wilhelm Preyer, the brilliant biographer of Darwin, that they found no way to come to terms with it in their thoughts, to see life emerging from a spiritless, [inanimate] earth. So these researchers have resorted to the assumption that our Earth, at the beginning of its formation, was by no means just any physical or physical-chemical body, but they assumed that, even if it is true for the present that the Earth body that we have under our feet, presents itself as a lifeless one to mineralogists, and that the living beings on it reproduce in their own realms through inheritance, this does not apply to ancient times, but Preyer and Fechner were forced to think of the earth in the distant past as a living being, as a large organism, so that in the sense of these naturalists the earth was originally a large living organism in the universe. Then the time would have come when certain substances and components of this earth crystallized out of this so-called living substance, and what crystallized out is our present body, containing chemical and physical forces. While originally the earth had a life of its own, it now gives its life, in its own way, to individual earth creatures, so that the origin of living beings could be thought of as the emergence of a living being from a living earth body.

It makes a strange impression when Darwin's biographer directs his thoughts to this primeval form of the earth and creates an image out of his thinking. When we read in Preyer that the earth organism was originally to be imagined as being alive, that its bloodstreams were glowing iron vapors, that the breath of this earth body was incoming world vapors from the environment and the nutrition of the earth body was matter that flowed to it from the universe - a strange mixture of natural physical ideas [with life processes]! He cannot completely free himself from his physical conceptions, but he must admit that something like nutrition, breathing and blood circulation can be assumed in the incoming vapors. We do not think of glowing iron as performing these functions when it comes to nutrition. But Preyer shows us one thing: that even natural scientists can feel compelled to recognize the earth as an organism. They meet spiritual science halfway; they admit that if you go backwards, you come to a starting point where the earth [was a large living organism], that the earth, as something dead, in the further course [of development], has set the living [...] aside, [specialized] into [the most diverse] beings, into [plants], animals, humans. They think of remote pasts imbued with full life. But there is still something missing, which spiritual science must ascribe from these prerequisites to this earth body: [The thought is missing] that the earthly body must in truth not only have a living starting point, but that it must be thought of as having a soul and a spirit, so that when we look at the origin of the earth, we are not only dealing with a living organism, but we have to imagine the earth as a soul-inspired, spirit-inspired organism.

Yes, now one could say: What is being done here, other than what is to be explained first, is being placed into what was originally assumed? Instead of developing the spirit, one assumes the spirit as originally existing. But that is what one must do, ladies and gentlemen, according to all the possible prerequisites of a science of knowledge, because it is nowhere possible, even conceivable, that the higher natural kingdoms develop from subordinate natural kingdoms; nowhere in the course of experience are we given a stepping out of the spiritual-soul from a merely physical, of a living being from a merely [physical-] chemical. What we encounter, especially in ourselves, is that we see the spiritual-soul working on the material; and anyone who has followed the lectures given here and has heard what has been said about this spiritual-soul will know how right it is to say that, especially in the case of human beings, the spiritual-soul works on the external physical-material.

We follow the person in us, let us say, in the time from that moment until we remember back in normal [human life], and see our experiences emerging from the depths of our consciousness in our memory. We see at the center of these events of consciousness becoming more and more alive that to which we apply the word “I”. It would be absurd to assume that this 'I' only began at the moment up to which we can remember. It must also have been there in the dream-like, dusky consciousness, when the child does not yet say 'I' to itself. The 'I' must have been there. How was it present in connection with the other soul forces? If we consider the ordinary life of the human soul, we can say that what emerges as consciousness in this stage is something special, something personal. We see how we work the special life energies, which are individual to us, into it. Therefore, we are compelled to think of what we see working within our consciousness later in life as the actual agent of our whole organism. We have to think that we inherit the general structure of this organism from our ancestors, but that the energies that make up our organism have to be worked into it, [right down to the finest plastic formations of the brain].

When we recognize this, then we are no longer far from being able to trace this individuality back to a previous life on earth. There we see the spiritual and soul forces at work on our inner physical and material being, and we can then say to ourselves that, as today, as in our earthly present, our ego with its soul forces is still working on our body in early childhood. This work is not inherited from our ancestors; rather, there is still a certain scope left in what we have become through the forces of heredity, in which we can work our spiritual and soul nature. We see this, for example, in the fact that we develop from a crawling creature into a walking one. We see how the spiritual-soul element lifts us up, we see the spiritual-soul element working on the physical.

Only when we progress to what was mentioned in the last lecture - about the hidden depths of the soul life - to the spiritual training through which one gains insight into the spiritual world behind the physical, then we can consider what has already been described here. If you apply the methods that you will find in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds” to yourself, you will gradually come to a point where you, as a human being, are no longer dependent on living in the soul in such a way that you have to use physical tools. Spiritual science shows that man can apply methods of meditation and concentration to himself, through which he can acquire a spiritual essence, independent of the physical, so that he has experiences and knows that he did not have them with the help of the senses; but knows: Now you are experiencing something in your original spiritual-soul nature, you become aware of what you are beyond this physical being.

And it is particularly interesting that when you ascend to such a training, you have the feeling from the very beginning: Yes, you are now experiencing something supernatural. But at the same time, at the beginning you are not able to express what you experience in the same way in concepts and ideas and words. Why not? Because when you express ideas and concepts in words, you need the instrument of the brain. The ideas and concepts that people form are taken from the world, so that a gap opens up between what one experiences and what one can express. Only when one practices patience and perseverance and continues the exercises does the time come when one is able to truly express the experiences one brings down from the spiritual world in terms of concepts and ideas taken from the outer life. Before this possibility arises, one knows that one feels the brain as something that offers a great deal of resistance. One feels that in the further course of training, one must do the work of shaping the brain plastically, in a way similar to the way the child must shape the still clumsy brain plastically for life. The aim is to work such fine shapes into the brain that they cannot be recognized by natural scientists with external instruments. The work of the soul-spiritual being on the material substance of the body can, however, only be followed inwardly. Thus, we see again in the spiritual-soul realm the actual origin of what is becoming.

It is no longer an unjustified claim to say that, as things currently stand on our earth, the spiritual and soul life of man, as it was before the first material atom of our body came into being, is only able to use the scope that is limited in the general structure of our physical body. While this scope, over which the conditions of heredity have no power, shapes the soul and spirit, we see that the physical, the general human form, can only be preserved by human beings of a similar nature. Thus, under today's living conditions, the soul and spirit are only able to shape certain things within a body received through heredity.

If this is the case today – and if we assume that the earth has undergone an evolution, which even natural science admits – it is not to be said that in the distant past the spiritual-mental was only able to work within a certain scope. Take it for the moment as a hypothesis; it need not be dismissed out of hand as absurd, when spiritual science says: The further we go back into primeval conditions, the more powerfully the spiritual-soul [of man] is effective. In the remote past, this spiritual-soul was so significant, so powerful that it could also shape that which today can only be shaped within heredity. Just as we see today that the spiritual soul forms only a small part of the material human being, so we see that in ancient times it formed the entire organism, so that the human soul was present in the ensouled earth organism, and the earthly body was once able to yield such a substance that could be formed directly from the soul into a full human being by the spiritual-soul worlds.

Thus we look back into the ancient past, where conditions were not yet as they are today, where within the total soul of the earth organism the human souls were contained, that is, the earth organism also had organic substance that was different from the present one, which can only be classified according to the forces of inheritance in the human body. So we come back to an earth configuration - in contrast to the earth formation in which we stand - in which there was no such reproduction as in our time; we do not find such a connection between generations, between male and female. In the place of the interaction between male and female, we find the interaction between the spiritual soul and the living substance of the earth body. The spiritual-soul aspect had a fertilizing effect on the earthly substance and allowed that to emerge which the human being was at the origin of his earthly existence: a creature formed and developed purely out of the spiritual-soul core of his being.

If we look at present-day conditions with an open mind, this may seem like a daring hypothesis, but it is certainly not something absurd.

So we see that our earthly body is formed, as it were, out of living substance.

Something else must be said, which is also true. When the spiritual researcher refers back to epochs of the earth when it made no sense to speak of male and female, but when the heavenly and earthly fertilized each other, the views of the natural scientists get in the way, but not the facts of natural science that have emerged in recent decades. These facts have led natural scientists to particular assumptions. We see how, in recent times, which began with Ernst Haeckel's belief that he had to give a materialistic interpretation of human origin in his conception of the Darwinian theory at the [Stettin] Natural History Society [in 1863]; we see how the naturalists who hold this older point of view felt compelled to draw a straight line of development [from the monera] to man, and how they are always obliged to say that, before man came upon the earth, there lived a creature similar to the present-day ape. [But more recent research has] corrected this view. Everywhere we see that attempts have been made to bring man's ancestor closer to a physical, animal-like being, which, through the perfection of its physical organization, also produced the height of the spiritual organization.

We can no longer accept such things, that man had an ancestor who was somehow similar to a present-day animal form. We see the necessity for this. Naturalists say that there were once human ancestors that resembled today's apes. That which now lives as the animal world has arisen from decadence, so that what we have as apes is a being that has arisen from a declining formation of a higher form on the one hand, and on the other hand we have man. We see monkeys and humans as two branches leading back to a being that no longer exists, that was only in very distant geological times. This common ancestor of animal-kind and humanity, to which the facts lead the natural science worldview people, is [hypothetical], a being that is purely imagined.

Now, certain naturalists have been forced by careful results to move this being further and further up, so that many are already forced to say that even higher mammals do not resemble this hypothetical being, we would have to go back even further to a being from which the very first mammalian forms descended, and this being would have developed a branch at the same time that was always superior to animality and that finally developed into man. When one sees a monkey, one must always trace it back to an earlier stage of animal existence and then assume a purely hypothetical, purely imagined entity that developed a branch that became reptiles, while another branch was formed that became human. So we see the naturalist going to something that formed humans and animals from the same being.

How far removed are such scholars from what we have expounded from spiritual science? No further than that their habits of thought compel them to shape the conditions of the earth's development in such a way that they can only conceive of the origin of present-day life forms in a physical way, whereas the spiritual researchers put something in this place that emerged under completely different earthly conditions and from completely different conditions: the fertilization of the earthly substance by the spiritual soul.

We also find the possibility of thinking of the further progress of development up to the human being as an entity worked out of the spiritual-soul. Just as today's human being is the product of a father and a mother, so too was such a primeval human being, as I have now described him in the sense of spiritual science, joined together from two sides, from the substance of the earth and the spiritual-soul of the earth's surroundings. Thus we can say that the human being belonged to the spiritual environment. Through this primal element, the human being has lived more in the whole of the heavenly environment and felt his connection with cosmic conditions.

But we could only receive our spiritual and soul germ at a certain point on the earth. Through this, the human being is individualized, through the fact that he came [to a certain place], through this he has become a special being, a being that has become native, that has become firmly bound to the locality of the earth.

Thus in this primeval man we have at the same time: a general human and an individual, an earth-bound and a more heavenly, macrocosmic element. Strangely, we see the after-effects of what we have just characterized in today's man.

If we carefully examine everything that comes to man through heredity, it shows that, despite all the other circumstances that have been specialized through heredity, we find a general human element at the basis of man, and that every human nature is individualized into a second. We still find both today: something universally human and something specialized. If we examine present-day humanity, we find that the universal human element is inherited from the female side, while the specific, individual character is essentially inherited from the male ancestors, regardless of whether the individual as an individuality is male or female. This means that we can still see the after-effects of what manifested itself in primeval man as a general heavenly element – if the expression is not taken pedantically – and what came from the general life substance of the earth. Therefore, we need only assume that in the primeval men, who were formed out of the spirit, in the one case the macrocosmic element predominated, which had a fertilizing effect from the surrounding area, while the element that came from the earth itself receded more. As a result, some of the primeval men specialized. Where the heavenly element was more active, specialization led to the female principle, while where the earthly element predominated, where the specific earthly destiny gained the upper hand, the more individual was formed, the tendency towards the male. Thus we see how, out of these general conditions, the tendencies were formed in the original human being, consisting of soul and spirit, and how these tendencies became more and more concentrated and took shape as man and woman.

And this whole process, my esteemed audience, must be imagined in such a way that the conditions were always changing, that is to say, nothing else but that the conditions that had made it possible for the cosmic elements to fertilize from the spiritual environment were disappearing. The living earth substance released the purely mineral and chemical from itself and was therefore no longer able to release living substance. What had been brought into being through spiritual fertilization by the lower and the higher, and which could no longer shape the human being in this way, was replaced by something that emerged in a different way and became formative by being incorporated into the human being itself, so that reproduction occurred from generation to generation. We see that the forces that shape the human being lead back to each other in such a way that the female contribution leads back to a cosmic, heavenly element, and that which is given in reproduction by the male leads back to the original, organically living earth substance. We still see the general in the female and the individual in the male. No one will be able to shed light on the relationship of heredity and the contribution of male and female who does not take these things into account, even if only hypothetically. The forces that worked between the earth's environment and the earth itself had to be passed on to heredity.

We must now consider how the development of animals relates to this development of man, to this view of the origin of man. For in a certain way, the origin of man is not properly understood without considering the development of animals. It shows that man, as he stands before us today in his duality - so that on the one hand there is still a certain scope for the spiritual and soul to work, and on the other hand he receives what he has inherited - could only develop as he is today , if he retained this spiritual-soul education until a certain point in time, until the conditions on earth were such that they could no longer provide the possibility for the human being to arise from the spiritual-soul. Only then did today's form of reproduction develop. As a being formed from the spiritual-soul, the human being had to wait.

What would have happened if he had abandoned the origin of the spiritual and soul earlier and merely submitted to earthly conditions? Simple considerations can show us this. If the spiritual and soul had not remained in its original nature until the extreme moment of time, but had allowed earthly conditions to prevail, then the spiritual and soul would have become weak in the face of earthly conditions. If man had earlier adopted the mode of reproduction that is now his, his spiritual and soul forces would be weaker and that which comes from the earth would have gained the upper hand – because it was even more powerful when the earth still had organizing forces within it – and he would have descended to a lower level under the influence of the organizing forces of the earth.

This is the case with animality. The spiritual soul of the animals united with the earth at different times, descending into the spheres of the earth before man. The animal preceded man. But man does not descend from the animal, but from its spiritual archetype. Those spiritual archetypes that have become animals descended earlier than man, who remained longest at the top in the spiritual regions. Thus the lines of development do not lead to the archetype of the animal kingdom and of man. We must think of the archetype of the animal kingdom as separate from the soul-spiritual of man.

Thus we see how, in the sense of a logically developed theory of evolution, spiritual science places the human being in the context of the earth's overall development, and how this coincides with a properly considered scientific view. Spiritual science places man in such a line of development, in which the metamorphoses of the earth itself are taken into account, how then the animal forms arise and finally man arises, having waited so long in the spiritual surroundings of the earth, so that he could adapt to the conditions of the earth in such a way that the greatest scope was given for the spiritual and soul life.

Dear attendees, I have already indicated that what has been said today, especially by people who have equipped themselves with all the knowledge of today, must often be regarded as unthinkable, as absurd. And if only a few people have the inclination and the will to recognize that these things [of spiritual science] that play into cultural life should be pursued with the same seriousness as [those of] natural science, then that will be enough to show how this influence on cultural life occurs. Spiritual science starts from a different point of view, and admittedly arrives at something to which the natural scientist must still relate negatively, but those who want to can see that true natural science, based on facts, comes straight to meet what spiritual science has to give. Spiritual science starts from a different point of view from natural science, but it does arrive at something to which the natural scientist must still be hostile. If we disregard the fantasies of natural science and consider only the facts, we shall see that these everywhere substantiate and prove what has been characterized today.

But for man it is important to be aware that there is an independent spiritual element within him that is not the result of a material body, but that the physical is the result of a spiritual element that has its origin in the spiritual environment and has sunk its seeds into the now inanimate substance of the earth.

The study of the external facts in the development of the earth [does not contradict the independent significance of the spiritual and soul in human nature, but rather, through every deeper reflection, every living in its essence – like a soliloquy, like a conversation that the soul has with itself, must form itself, which, from the depths of human nature, must repeatedly shape itself in such a way that we can summarize the relationship of the human being to himself and to life in the words:

From the spirit man has sprung,

In the spirit man's whole life works and moves,

To the spirit man's whole being strives.

From an Anthroposophic News Sheet

The subject of today's lecture sets out from a question which is often asked by people who have perhaps heard superficially of spiritual science and spiritual investigation, for led by the conceptions and habits of thought ruling in the present time, they cannot think how it is possible to draw knowledge from the super-sensible worlds.

We have frequently emphasized that a person standing upon the foundation of spiritual research can best of all understand the objections raised from an external standpoint. Indeed one can say that if the conceptions advanced by a spiritual investigator were to meet the approval of wider circles, this would be far more surprising than if they were to give rise to the greatest possible opposition … for they must give rise to antagonism! This fact is explained by the whole of today's civilization and by the whole development of the external economic life during past centuries. Moreover, we have frequently emphasized that spiritual science always fully recognizes the results achieved for the whole of civilization by natural science, and the natural-scientific mentality depends on the fact that the Spirit of the Time has—if we may use this expression—turned away for a while from the spiritual world. (In the course of human evolution “a while” is long and may last for centuries!) This is evident through the fact that it is the physical world which induces people to think, so that they adopt a mentality which is not accustomed to the contemplation of the spiritual world. But this is not the only reason which induces people to oppose spiritual science; this antagonism is due to other, deeper causes. The subject of today's lecture—“How can we gain Knowledge of the Supersensible Worlds?”—therefore seems very appropriate.

The very first requirement is that the human being should recognize through self-knowledge that he is a super-sensible being and be able to understand his own super-sensible nature. But there are many things in the psychic life of modern man connected with the cultural achievements of the present time, and of humanity as a whole, which are a serious handicap to real self-knowledge.

In regard to his soul, the human being is never alone with it, yet he should be able to face his soul in complete solitude if he really wishes to understand its innermost being. Consciously, he is never quite alone with his soul. Yet there is a kind of solitude which arises when the human being passes over to that condition in which he does not use his external limbs but leaves them to the earth's force of gravity, and when he commands his memory and his intellect bound up with the senses to stand still. This is the case every day, when he falls asleep. The objection raised against the spiritual-scientific statement or truth that when the human being is asleep his bodily organization does not reveal anything that might explain the processes surging up and down within his soul until he wakes up again—that the bodily processes do not in any way explain what takes place in the soul during sleep—this will be unreservedly recognized by natural science in a comparatively short time. Natural science will admit that the soul's content dives down into the bodily organization at the moment of waking up, in the same way in which the air which we inhale becomes a part of our own body. And the same thing can be said of the moment in which we fall asleep, when the soul's content abandons the body. From the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, we therefore confront a being which is severed from the bodily structure and which does not offer us any instruments enabling us to observe this fact.

We can therefore say that the sleeping soul is in a certain sense isolated; that is to say, it is not connected with the external world through the intellect, the senses, and memory, as is the human being when he is awake. But in normal life, we lose consciousness when we fall asleep, and we must therefore say that in this isolated state of the soul the human being is not able to observe the soul that inhabits his body. It is this circumstance which renders a real self-knowledge impossible to ordinary people.

But the following question can be raised: Is it nevertheless possible to attain to real self-knowledge?

It will be of help to consider another condition of the soul. The fact which will now be advanced is not meant as an analogy, but as an aid enabling us to envisage the reality of the soul's condition between sleeping and waking. It is not an analogy, but an explanation pointing to the real facts. This is the SOUL CONDITION OF THE SEASONS OF THE YEAR.

In the Spring the vegetable world springs up, the uplifting world of Nature filling us with joy. In the Spring we see the plants springing up, in the summer we see them growing and flourishing, in the autumn we see them fade way (with the exception of evergreen plants) and in the winter Nature takes them back into her bosom, so that their growth and development cannot be perceived.

Let us now suppose that with the coming of Spring the human being were able to obtain another state of consciousness; his consciousness would be dulled, and as summer advances it would grow more unconscious—only when Nature begins to fade and to decay would he wake up again. Human consciousness would therefore be slumbering on that part of the earth where summer holds sway, but in that case the human being would never gain knowledge of the germinating, flowering plants round about him. The plants which cover the earth during the summer would remain an unknown world to a person or a being endowed with human qualities, a world which his senses could not perceive, a super-sensible world.

Now we have something in human life which really corresponds to this. Those who penetrate more deeply into things will not look upon it as a mere analogy, but as a reality—the reality which thus confronts us in the WHOLE NATURE OF THE HUMAN BEING.

What is the sleeping human being that can be physically perceived by our senses? Though outwardly and substantially he may differ from a plant, he is inwardly of the same value as a plant, for a plant's development attains the stage of life, but not that of consciousness, not even the consciousness of animals. Sleeping man therefore resembles a plant, but under different life conditions.

In regard to certain forces which influence the human being, he appears to us, in his plant-like condition of sleep, similar to the earth during summer, when the sun with its forces of heat and of light draws the plants out of the soil. We know that we fall asleep when our strength is worn out by the day's work. We also know that sleep restores our worn-out strength by drawing forces out of the depths of life.

The same process takes place in the cosmos. If we discard old habits of thinking, we gradually learn to know that sleep is in the real meaning of the word, and not analogously, the SOUL'S SUMMERTIME.

From the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, we pass through the soul's summer.

But when we are awake, the day's work, and particularly our efforts of thought and the soul forces expended on thought, demolish the plant-like processes. Does not man's waking condition resemble autumn and winter which obliterate from the surface of the earth the plants which the summer produced? Our waking hours are the soul's winter season. This is not an analogy. It is easy to maintain the external analogy so as to discover certain similarities, but this would be a superficial way of considering things. We must look upon things from within, in an intimate way.

If we wish to observe ourselves, we cannot find the same access to our being during the soul's summer season as during its winter season, but we lose ourselves as the summertime advances. For if we could observe what forces are at work in order to produce a germinating, growing life, we would really have to grow unconscious. In fact, we are not able to observe the soul; we seem to lose our consciousness in spring and regain it only in the autumn.

We can therefore say that self-knowledge is only possible if the hidden side of man's being can be revealed.

Let us now consider the characteristics of the soul's wintertime; that is to say, of the waking condition. During our waking condition, the soul is filled with emotions, resolutions, thoughts, ideals, and so forth. If we survey all this, we must say that we experience it only in part. For let us only take human thought outside the whole compass of human soul life: How does the human being experience the soul's wintertime, if he wishes to fulfill his tasks in the external physical world? He is interested in his world of thoughts, in everything which he obtains through thinking, only to the extent of asking: What external realities do thoughts reflect? What value should be attributed to thoughts, as images of reality? This constitutes, to begin with, his chief interest.

The whole life of the soul is directed towards this chief interest: to develop THIS side of the soul. Other things have far less importance in the so-called normal life. Can one, however, not attribute to thoughts another value than that which consists in merely reflecting something like a picture in the mirror? Those who only wish to attribute this one-sided value to thought (and most people do), are in the same position of an artist who only sees what his work of art is to represent. Yet in the production of a work of art something quite different takes place than a mere representation: something takes place within the soul. Art could not play such an important part in the development of humanity if it did not constantly bear the soul along the path of progress, if it were not a seed which takes root in the soul, thus enabling it to have new experiences and changing it into something quite different from what it was before it looked upon the work of art.

The soul does not advance by a one-sided pedagogical, pedantic contemplation of works of art, but by recognizing the laws of human development which are contained in art. Those who only recognize the validity of thought in regard to things which it mirrors and represents, resemble people who only look upon a work of art from the aspect of what it sets forth. The human soul is accustomed to look upon thought as a mere representation. The value of truth is determined by the value of reality grasped by thought. Thoughts which do not aim at this are generally rejected. Philosophy, for instance, has a right to adopt this attitude; but let us ask whether such concepts really grasp reality, whether they refer to something real.

There is another way of looking upon thought: it can be measured in accordance with its value as an inner means of self-education. There are thoughts which do not reproduce an external reality, but they are able to advance the soul inwardly. Thoughts of this kind should be taken into consideration when the soul really sets out upon the path of self-knowledge.

We have frequently explained that when we immerse ourselves in thoughts which do not represent an external reality, we may designate them as MEDITATION, CONCENTRATION, or CONTEMPLATION. What does this mean? That we call into being a soul condition which resembles that of sleep. It means that the soul does not use its external members, is not incited by the senses, but by a strong will power, by—one might say—a negative attention which rejects the experiences brought by the normal daytime consciousness. This is a condition which is radically different from that of sleep, because the soul remains fully conscious of itself and is filled by a definite thought, and when the soul is thus immersed in this thought, fully concentrated upon it, it is immersed in concentration or contemplation.

It is not easy to produce this condition; careful and systematic exercises are needed for it. But it kindles in the soul the light of an entirely new life. When this condition has reached the stage of maturity, the soul feels that dormant forces awaken within it. For this reason the thought itself is not the essential thing in meditation, but the essential thing is to practice CONCENTRATION, to concentrate fully upon this thought. This is the same as training the muscles by physical exercises; they develop by physical training. In the case of the ordinary forces of the soul, thought training exercises are of no importance, for new forces have to be drawn out of the soul's depths, forces which render the soul stronger and more elastic; for instance, that part of the soul has to be drawn out which only re-echoes faintly in our ordinary waking life. Consequently the CONTENT of thought is not the essential thing; the essential thing is that the soul should be ACTIVE, that through this activity it should call into life forces which exist in ordinary life, but in a dormant state. This training shows us that the soul can also exist independently without having to rely on the physical body; a condition arises which resembles that of sleep, though it is radically different from sleep.

Why is sleep an unconscious state during our ordinary life? Because the soul's inner life is so weak and concealed that we cannot perceive it. But when these forces awaken, the soul can become aware of itself even when it is not dependent on the body.

We now experience that the soul is really able to face its summer season consciously. The content of our thoughts is now experienced in an entirely different way. In the ordinary course of the day, our thoughts are like grains of corn which the farmer gathers on the field. If they are used as nourishment, they only reach a certain stage of development. But when they are gathered, they do not differ from the grains which are to be used as seed. Thus the ordinary thoughts which we experience during the soul's winter form the soul's spiritual content. They fill the soul, they are like the grains of corn which are used as nourishment. But the thoughts which form the subject of meditation and concentration resemble the grains of corn which are used as seed; dormant forces are drawn out of them, which germinate and grow.

Ordinarily we only learn to know one side of the influence of thought. But through meditation and concentration our thoughts take root in the life of the soul, and their activity changes, for they begin to germinate and grow. We now experience consciously things which we otherwise experience unconsciously during the soul's summertime; a new world arises, the so-called imaginative world. The fruit of our efforts now rises up before the soul and the soul's summer is raised into consciousness, so that we live through it differently than during our normal life, for the experiences which normally glide down into unconsciousness now begin to germinate and grow just as if plants were to grow out of single grains of corn during the winter.

We must learn to know this other aspect of our being which reveals the soul in its fruitfulness, in its greening, sprouting life. Thought will otherwise maintain the character of a mere representation, but it begins to germinate and grow if we do not treat it as a mere image, if we look upon it as a seed which can germinate.

Self-knowledge then enables us to call up in our consciousness the soul's summertime.

Even as we first assumed that springtime dulls the consciousness and that a new world arises during the summer, so the soul is now able to survey a new world, which it did not know before. A world, which otherwise would remain concealed, grows out of the soul's living foundation if we do not remain standing halfway, but use our thoughts as seeds. Meditation, concentration and contemplation simply imply that our thoughts and feelings (for this is also possible through feeling) are able to develop forces which otherwise remain dormant and unknown; that is to say, a new world rises up before us.

Many things work against us if we incessantly strive to produce this world. It is a requirement of human nature that when we enter the summer time of the soul, we must above all maintain within the soul a certain winter constitution if we wish to be capable human beings in life and in ordinary science. This is a necessity in external life, for otherwise we cannot be capable human beings. We should also have confidence in our thinking, for we cannot find our way in the world unless confidence is our starting point; that is to say, unless we confidently believe that we can be guided by our thinking and can trust in the guidance of our thought. Imagine what consequences would arise if there were worlds in which we could not rely upon our thinking! This would shatter us; it would deprive us of every capacity. Human beings must be able to rely on thought; they must have this belief in thought … no matter where they may land with it.

Everything has its light and dark side. But where we need light, we do not take into consideration the shadows. We train our thought in the sensory world; the physical world is our teacher. It is not the physical world which teaches us to rely on thought in itself; from the physical world we learn to rely on a kind of thinking which finds its support in the external sensory world. From the very outset, we are thus not accustomed to look upon thought as an instrument which is able to lead us in every sphere of life. And we lose our confidence; we begin to feel uncertain whenever we come across something which does not approach us in the customary way.

It is this which induces people to take up a negative attitude towards spiritual science. We can understand this, and, as stated, no objection can be raised against it; on the contrary, our contemporaries are quite helpless. But the true cause of their attitude is the fact that their thought has been trained by observing the physical world. In regard to spiritual science, it is as if they were to enter a world which is not the physical world, but with capacities acquired by living in the physical world which trains external thought. This explains the attitude towards realms which are different from those which can be grasped by ordinary external thought. When people are confronted by the super-sensible worlds, they feel that their confidence in thought is imperiled.

There is another thing which characterizes the soul's winter, or the ordinary waking condition. We know that the habits of thinking during the past centuries gave rise to materialism, or—to use a nobler term, which is, however, a mistaken designation—monism. This world conception can, however, only be applied to the external world, to the external aspects of life. Spiritual science shows us that the spirit lives behind everything, and if one penetrates into external things one can discover the spirit everywhere.

If the soul has passed through a conscientious training, as explained above, a point is reached where we pass through extraordinary soul experiences, which show us why we come to materialism, monism, and so forth. When we feel a new world springing up within us (as described in my book KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS), a certain moment arises in which the soul has the same feeling towards this new world as towards the physical world. This means that when we observe things in the super-sensible world, we should develop the capacity to turn our attention towards them in full freedom and then to turn our gaze away from them just as freely.

Imagine what it would be like if we were not able to turn our gaze away at will from the objects of the physical world, if they fascinated us to such an extent that we could not look away even if we wished. This would be the situation of a soul who could not turn away from the things which rise up before it as a result of exercises or through its own faculties.

In the super-sensible world, however, we cannot turn our gaze away from the objects in the same way in which we turn away from things in the physical world. This does not suffice. It should be remembered that the spiritual investigator must be able to obliterate and cancel every new soul content which he produces. In the spiritual world this is the same as turning away our gaze from the physical objects in the physical world.

This is the radical difference between the spiritual investigator and people who have hallucinations, visions and fixed ideas, which they obstinately consider to be objective realities. A spiritual investigator cannot admit such things. He must be aware of the fact that he is only conjuring up shadow images and that he must blot them out again from his spiritual vision. The capacity to obliterate such images pertains to a definite stage of development. One can see how greedily the soul clings to its fixed ideas and images and to blot them out is one of the most difficult things of all!

Why?—Because not only the forces already described develop and grow, but also other forces which normally are quite weak. There is ONE force in particular which grows with the development of the other one; namely, SELFISHNESS, the self-love which exists in ordinary life. It grows like a force of Nature. In ordinary life our moral forces can overcome selfishness, but they cannot overcome forces of Nature, such as thunder or lightning! This increased self-love or selfishness appears within the soul as if it were a force of Nature, an elemental force. The soul development leading to spiritual investigation must consequently bring with it also the capacity to overcome this enhanced selfishness, which lives within the soul like a force of Nature that fetters the soul. The soul's ordinary forces do not suffice for this; they cannot overcome it.

At this point we come across a deeply stirring phenomenon, which appears from the very outset. It may take on various forms, but it is justified to designate it as the APPROACH TO THE THRESHOLD OF DEATH. We feel as if that part which we call our Ego or the soul were torn away from us as if by lightning, taken away from us. Everything which formerly appeared to be connected with us now seems to be severed from us. Our own self appears like a Being outside; we face it in the same way in which we confront an object of the external world.

Though it is easy to describe this in words, it is one of the most stirring experiences which we can have. The ground under our feet seems to vanish. Everything which constituted our thoughts and feelings is surrendered, given up. But if we succeed in remaining steadfast, we shall be borne over a kind of abyss. This experience awakens a feeling which lived in us in a dormant state and which must now rise to the surface: it is the FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN.

The spiritual world is always present, but we do not know it, and at this moment we confront it as if it were a void. This gives rise to a feeling of fear. But if we proceed regularly along the spiritual path, we should not think that we are in any way endangered by this experience. It forms part of self-education, for we must acquire the strength to bear the sight of the spiritual world—we develop the strength and steadfastness enabling us to bear its sight. In ordinary life we are protected against it and we speak of a GUARDIAN OF THE THRESHOLD.

The fact that ordinarily we are not conscious of such things does not prove that they do not exist within the soul. The soul is a twofold being: within its depths it often presents an entirely different aspect from the one which we know. We may, for instance, hate a person and be conscious of this feeling, yet our hate may simply be the cloak of love and we daze ourselves because this love cannot come to full expression. Not only Faust, but every human being, has two souls.

A soul investigator may come across the following: In ordinary life the human being finds support and strength by checking the fear that lives in his subconsciousness. But a spiritual investigator cannot fail to see the fear which always lives in the soul's depths. He enters the spiritual world by overcoming this fear. If this fear rises to the surface without entering human consciousness, if it knocks at the door, as it were, and a person ignores it in spite of all, what takes place and what enables that person to overlook this feeling? He pushes down fear, as it were, by denying the existence of the spiritual world.

Materialists and monists are therefore afraid of the spiritual world; this fear lives in their soul's depth and their materialism dazes them, so that they do not notice it. This is a strange phenomenon; nevertheless it is true that materialism is based upon an unknown, unnamed fear. Of course, it cannot be pleasant for them to hear from a spiritual investigator that monists and materialists speak as they do because they are tormented by fear. But to a real observation this connection between materialism and fear will be clearly evident.

We learn to confront the physical world by training thought through the observation of physical things. This gives us confidence in our thinking power and we ignore our subconscious fear. But this also prevents us from entering the super-sensible world.

A twofold soul condition must therefore be developed if we wish to enter the super-sensible world: on the one hand we should rise to the state of being existing in the spiritual world and on the other hand we should be able to blot it out; that is to say, when we return to the physical world we must push into the background everything that constitutes our field of vision in the super-sensible world. For if we mix up these two worlds we become dreamers, false mystics, and so forth and can never become spiritual investigators.

Strength of soul should enable us to keep these worlds apart, but at the same time we should be able to connect physical things with super-sensible things, because the foundation of the physical world lies in the super-sensible world. This characterizes a spiritual investigator.

It is necessary, for this same reason, that a spiritual investigator should raise into his consciousness, in the soul's summer and winter time, what is normally concealed by sleep. If he fails to do this, he will at every moment fall a prey to the above-mentioned fear.

When we enter the spiritual world we do not only perceive a vague soul-spiritual element, but definite objects, facts and beings which are just as differentiated as the things pertaining to the physical world. Modern people find it so difficult to accept this. They do not forgive the spiritual investigator for seeing a spiritual reality consisting of differentiated beings.

A well-known man, such as Charles Elliot of Harvard University, once declared that he could find a spiritual element behind the physical-sensory world, but that the human being is always distinct and separate from his body. If the spiritual investigator now declares that self-training, of the kind described above, leads to the perception of DIFFERENTIATED spiritual beings that form a cosmos, people reject this. But if one were to tell Charles Elliot that whenever he sees the vegetable world or observes single plants this is nothing but Nature, Nature, and Nature, or that when he studies various substances in his laboratory these substances are “Nature, nothing but ‘Nature’,” he would come to no result whatever! People tolerate spiritual science if it limits itself to speaking of the spirit in general, but they do not tolerate it if it begins to speak of definite objects and beings pertaining to the spiritual world. But even as the physical world appears differentiated to our sensory organs, so the spiritual world has differentiated beings, even though they do not possess a physical body.

When we learn to know the spiritual world, it therefore presents a differentiated aspect. As stated, SELF EXPERIENCE OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD is needed in order to recognize it, or even to admit its existence. The stirring experience mentioned above produces the result that everything which constitutes our Ego separates from us and that otherwise dormant forces awaken within us. Our soul-spiritual being that helps to build up our physical body and unites itself with the hereditary stream, with everything that comes to us from father and mother, separates from us, and this separation is a deeply stirring, significant experience. A new being then comes to life within us and we realize that the Being which passes through birth and death is not that part of our being which we ordinarily look upon as our own Self! We now experience that part of our being described by spiritual science, the eternal part which passes through REPEATED LIVES ON EARTH.

We now face the prospect of solving the problem of infinity in a concrete way, for without such a solution we confront an infinity extending beyond our vision. Infinity comprises single lives on earth. Insight into the super-sensible worlds and knowledge of these worlds can only be acquired along the path described above. People who think that a really satisfactory knowledge can be gained along some other path follow a wrong direction which does not lead to the stirring soul experiences described above. For they wish to acquire super-sensible truths which are really physical facts, truths pertaining to the physical world, but this does not lead them to real knowledge. One can therefore see how difficult it is for modern people to acquire a true knowledge of the super-sensible even for the best of our contemporaries. Here we can only adopt Schopenhauer's standpoint, who says that to begin with truth takes on a paradoxical form, for this has always been its lot. People now adopt the same attitude towards spiritual science as they once did towards Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Copernicus. We must take it for granted that spiritual science necessarily encounters the same obstacles. Giordano Bruno said that the blue vault of heaven was not a boundary, as was generally believed. This made natural science progress immensely. Spiritual science is in the same situation today. There are no boundaries of birth (or conception) and death, even as the blue vault of heaven is not a boundary. Giordano Bruno, though he realized the limitations of human knowledge, showed that one can look into infinity and envisage infinite worlds in the infinite firmament. The spiritual scientist must now speak in a similar way. He sets forth truths pertaining to the super-sensible worlds. But our contemporaries find it difficult to understand such truths. They can see that the teaching of repeated lives on earth can really throw light upon human destiny, and they realize that this conception gives courage and strength, for it shows that death does not blot out the human being, but that he can find himself again in future lives on earth. Many of our contemporaries can see this. Nevertheless they expect proofs supporting this truth, proofs which must be advanced in a different way from the one described above and they reject everything which is set forth from the super-sensible aspect.

A modern writer who really tried to penetrate into the super-sensible sphere and who showed this in many of his writings, recently also occupied himself with the teaching designated as that of repeated lives on earth. This writer is Maurice Maeterlinck. Further down I will quote a passage from his book “ON DEATH.” Maeterlinck has no idea where the proofs for super-sensible truths should be sought, and so he designates this teaching as a mere belief, as mere faith.

Spiritual science, however, has nothing to do with beliefs and dogmas. The Copernican world conception can be accepted independently of any belief, because it is science. In the same way spiritual science, like Copernicanism, does not come into conflict with any faith. Yet Maeterlinck looks upon it as a belief and the teaching of repeated lives on earth is to him something which can also be found in certain religions, as Metempsychosis. Yet spiritual science speaks of something quite different! It speaks of the REPEATED LIVES ON EARTH. In his book on death Maeterlinck writes:

... “There never existed a belief more beautiful, just, pure, moral and consoling, and in a certain sense a more probable belief than theirs. Only the teaching of universal atonement and purification of all bodily and spiritual imperfections can explain every social error and all the injustice in human destinies which so often make us feel indignant. But the strength of a BELIEF does not prove its truth. Although six millions of people adhere to it, although it approaches the darkness of man's origins more than any other and is the only one which is not filled with hatred, although it is the least absurd of all religions, it should have given us what the others failed to bring: irrefragable witnesses. So far it has only given us the first shadow of a first testimony.”

In the first place, spiritual science has nothing to do with religion; it is a world conception like Copernicanism. Spiritual science is never in contrast with any religion which is rightly understood. But Maeterlinck's new book, which also deals with modern spiritual science, shows that he does not see that spiritual science comes to its results along paths which are quite different from those of ordinary external science. That is why he adopts the standpoint that spiritual science fails to supply proofs. What kind of proofs does he expect? Proofs consisting in the very things which must be cast aside when one enters the super-sensible worlds! He confronts this in the same way in which one used to confront the problem of the squaring of the circle. Until quite recently, the almost yearly attempts to transform a circle into a square covering the same surface never passed the test. The Academy in Paris showed that such attempts cannot lead to any results and that they must end in the wastepaper basket! If one day a solution can really be found, it will somehow come to the surface, but the Academicians declared that they could not waste their time in checking all the calculations presented to them in connection with the squaring of the circle, and people who still try to tackle this problem are looked upon as amateurs, because it is evidently impossible to solve it with the aid of mathematics. Consequently one must say that at the present time it is foolish to attempt to solve this problem of squaring the circle.

Spiritual science can easily show that in regard to super-sensible things people try to square the circle in another sphere! Supersensible things have to be treated in accordance with the methods described in “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and their demonstrations must be understood accordingly. Otherwise one chases after problems which resemble that of the squaring of the circle. One can find even today that the teaching of repeated lives on earth is “more beautiful, pure, just, and consoling,” more probable than others, and nevertheless fail to recognize it. But it is possible to grasp it if one can see that one cannot discuss it intellectually.

Supersensible facts must, of course, be investigated by a spiritual investigator, but when they have been investigated, they are accessible to the ordinary intellect. To such truths one cannot apply demonstrations which are obtained by ordinary means, but only proofs such as those required for the understanding of a painting by someone who is not a painter. The ordinary intellect can examine the facts pertaining to the spiritual world and grasp its characteristics. Under the ground there are mines and ores, which cannot exist upon the surface of the earth, under the direct influence of the sunlight. Similarly the results of spiritual investigation cannot be found with the aid of ordinary thought, or through ordinary science. For the investigation of spiritual facts we need the soul forces described above. But when the results of spiritual investigation are communicated, this is the same as sunlight penetrating into the depths of the earth and revealing the ores in all their beauty and refulgence.

The ordinary intellect can therefore grasp the results of spiritual investigation, but super-sensible facts can only be investigated by a soul that undergoes the training described above. When we thus grasp spiritual-scientific truths, we develop within the soul a FORCE which gives us inner strength and support. Fruits ripen within us, which appear as a definite way of thinking and feeling, as a definite volitional attitude towards our own self and the universe.

We have amply explained all the obstacles which the soul must overcome in order to enter the spheres where the spiritual world reveals itself in its authentic form. We must pierce the darkness and at the conclusion of this lecture we may accept the feelings which are expressed in the following words. If the soul never flags, it will finally come

Through difficult soul obstacles,
Through the chaos of spiritual darkness,
To earnest clarity,
To luminous truth.

In the scene in which he is the gravedigger's assistant, the poet has the Danish prince Hamlet speak about the value of the dead Caesar in view of a great and significant historical figure. The poet's Hamlet is disturbed and brooding:

The great Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole, well enough, from the harsh north.
Oh, that the earth, to which the world has trembled,
Might bar the wind and weather with a wall.

It is not surprising that these ideas should occur to Hamlet in memory of the great Caesar, when in his gloomy mind the thought could be conceived that of all the body, the human being, of all that exercised the power of the will, nothing remain of the body, of the human being, of all that exercised the power of will, nothing but a heap of external matter, which, broken down into its atoms and dissolved, could be used to “glue a wall” here or there; but this same train of thought is quite indicative of the prevailing mood of our time. There is an excellent manual by Huxley about physiology, in the sense of our current scientific understanding, which has also been translated into German. Right on one of the first pages, you will find a reference to the words of Hamlet that have just been spoken to you, but said in all seriousness at the end of the “First Lecture”:

It is impossible to follow with any degree of certainty these wanderings, which are more changeable and extensive than those devised by the ancient sages who believed in the doctrine of transmigration; but it is probable that sooner or later some, if not all, of the scattered atoms will be gathered into new forms of life. The sun's rays, penetrating the plant world, combine some of the wandering atoms of carbonic acid, water, ammonia and salts to produce plants. Plants are devoured by animals, animals devour each other, man devours both plant and animal; and so it is easily possible that atoms, which once formed an essential part of the busy brain of Julius Caesar, now enter into the composition of Caesar, the negro in Alabama, or of Caesar, the house dog of some English household.

We do not want to think dogmatically and reason logically, but consider how a distinguished nineteenth-century naturalist like Huxley could arrive at such conclusions based on his innermost feelings. We no longer want to ask: What becomes of the physical components when a person's body turns to dust? but we want to turn our attention to the will embodied in the human being, to his self-aware ego, and pay attention to the paths that this soul-spiritual takes, although otherwise the person feels compelled to ask, not which path the spirit takes, but which of the outer material takes.

We will soon see that there is an intimate connection between the prevailing mood of the time and the approval of winning the hearts of the people when they are told that they can become happy, or at least healthy, if they follow certain rules, eat only this or that, bathe in a special way, dress in a reformed manner, and so on; but But they react badly when one speaks to them of the fact that the spiritual content of ideas, truths, and insights with which we fill our soul become living forces to harmonize our inner being, our whole life, to make it strong and resistant to all possible attacks and to strengthen us to fulfill our life's tasks.

By way of explanation, I would just like to point out how fear and anxiety make people pale, how feelings of shame make them blush, and how the soul affects the body and also has a wider effect than is generally assumed. But if you continue to point out that the thoughts of a spiritual worldview lead us up to spiritual heights, that a correct way of thinking of this kind has a healthy effect on people, both spiritually and physically, we find strong doubt or outright disbelief in the vast majority of our contemporaries, and in many cases only because people of our time have become too lazy to think in order to apply the mental and spiritual effort necessary to work through such views. Both Huxley's book and the experiences to be made everywhere in life show in a characteristic way that our age has come to believe only in the outwardly material and the obvious. The nineteenth century brought us these conditions.

Spiritual science is now far from rejecting the tremendous achievements of natural science, which this century has handed down to us along with an almost incalculable wealth of facts. However, it is necessary to point out that certain concepts have crept into the hearts of people and become ingrained there, becoming, so to speak, fashionable, so that it is difficult for them to decide to believe in the spiritual without trying to imagine it materially. But as a result, humanity is threatened with a mental chaos in the near future, a confusion with regard to the most important things, of which I will pick out only one and therefore refer again to Huxley's “physiology”, namely the concept of life, as far as it is obvious and, so to speak, self-evident. So [there] is said:

But in reality, the immediate cause of death is always the cessation of the activities of one of three organs: the brainstem, the lungs or the heart.

Thus, a man can be instantly killed by injury to a part of the brain called [...] medulla, as can be caused by hanging or breaking the neck. Or death can be the direct result of asphyxiation by strangulation, hanging or drowning, or in other words by the inhibition of respiratory processes. Finally, death occurs immediately when the heart stops pumping blood around. These three organs, the brain, the lungs and the heart, are therefore somewhat fancifully called the triad of life.

Ultimately, however, life has only two feet on which it rests, the lungs and the heart; for death by the brain is always only the indirect consequence of the effect that injury to this organ has on the lungs or the heart. The brain's activities cease when either breathing or circulation has ended. But if blood circulation and respiration are artificially maintained, then one can remove the brain without causing death.

So if Huxley thinks he can preserve life with these means, then under certain restrictions there is no objection to it, but I would still like to raise the question of whether this can actually still be called life. Probably everyone present would say thank you for such a life. Therefore, a statement of this kind in a scientific work that delves deeply into the most essential concepts proves that today's world has forgotten how to think about concepts such as “life” in an accurate way.

But anyone who, as is right, realizes that the thoughts and feelings that we predominantly harbor can make the body healthy or sick will also soon become aware of how difficult it is to pass on clear concepts into the future. With inadequate concepts in our soul about life and death, about spirit and soul, we are placed in a state of mind that soon makes us doubt everything possible in us, paralyzes the spiritual forces in us and prevents us from adequately fulfilling our duties in life; more and more it will become desolate in the soul and spirit of man, such a one will finally be plunged into powerlessness and despair. The attentive observer foresees that humanity can be brought into a dire situation on this path, and he can see that the beginnings of this are already being made in some places, especially when the most advanced science is compatible with such concepts that have an almost murderous effect on our soul and spirit and thus also on our body.

Alongside this, something else arises, namely a need that is suppressed again by a chaos of concepts, but which nevertheless stirs anew in the soul and occupies the mind: people talk so much about development from imperfect life conditions to more perfect ones, but where it would be most necessary to talk about these things, people do not want to believe in them when it comes to the human soul. But this human soul has ever new needs from epoch to epoch, always wanting to live in more advanced circumstances; the soul of the twelfth century is still different from that of the nineteenth century. It is not a matter of external things, of schooling and erudition, but of the different way and conception of life that develops for the soul from epoch to epoch.

This evening, we can only touch on the subject of life; it is significant that almost every person feels the need to develop certain things emotionally and intellectually, which in earlier cultural epochs were accepted on trust. In the past, whole epochs were far more dominated by certain general judgments, and all souls were generally occupied with the same ideas. Today, on the other hand, the urge to be independent is increasingly asserting itself in the souls of people, to find the points of reference within themselves, to tap into themselves the reason and source of existence, in the face of moral commandments and judgments of all kinds.

Our time, however, suffers from the fact that many people allow this need to rest in many respects, or entirely, on the ground of the soul. It cannot arise because it is drowned out by the chaos of life; and such people then go under in their belief in authority - which seems all the more terrible because it invokes the materially intangible - by always repeating that “science” has established and proven this and that. The vast majority of people cannot follow up and investigate for themselves how it has been established, and that is why the authority of science has grown into a formidable general magnitude.

These two schools of thought are in conflict with each other. If spiritual science wants to establish a proper relationship with these two powers, it must pursue the strict goal of making it possible for people to satisfy, in the truest sense, the deep needs that arise within them. I would like to point out that in earlier decades, questions about the destiny of the soul, the origin of man, and the sources of all spiritual life were approached quite differently than they are today. I would like to draw your attention to a leading personality in whom this can be seen in his unique spiritual constitution, in his feelings and perceptions. Goethe, who I have in mind here, rarely expressed himself on this subject without any particular external inducement, but on the occasion of the funeral of Wieland, whom he greatly revered, he spoke to a person close to him about what he thought about the fate of the soul after death. Goethe replied to the question put to him:

[Wieland will now] do nothing small, nothing unworthy, nothing incompatible with the moral greatness that he has maintained throughout his life. [...] The destruction of such high powers of the soul can never be a question in nature under any circumstances; nature never treats her capital so wastefully [...] As for the personal survival of our soul after death, this is how it is in my view. It does not contradict the many years of observation that I have made about the nature of our and all beings in nature; on the contrary, it even emerges from them with new conclusiveness. But how much or how little of this personality deserves to continue, by the way, is another question and a point that we must leave to God.

Goethe then develops a certain hierarchy of souls, which he calls monads here, that makes them suitable for various activities; he considers these monads to be immortal and, in their higher development, to be actively involved in the development of the world system, and then continues:

I am certain that I have already been here a thousand times as you see me now and hope to come back a thousand more times. [...] But this does not mean that by limiting our observations of nature, limits are also set to our faith. On the contrary, given the immediacy of divine feelings in us, it can easily happen that knowledge must appear as a patchwork, especially on a planet that has been torn out of its full context with the sun, leaving all and any observation incomplete, which is precisely why it is only through faith that it receives its complete complement. [...] As soon as one starts from the principle that knowledge and faith are not there to cancel each other out, but to complement each other, then the right thing will be worked out everywhere.

Goethe actually mastered the natural science of his time; he also enriched it through a way of thinking that was alive in the spiritual. That is why it is all the more interesting to experience how all these things are reflected in Goethe's view, how the life of the soul after death could be shaped according to his needs, based on all his long personal and scientific life experiences, and to see how Goethe, according to his spiritual worldview, was far removed from the modern materialistic worldview that was increasingly being developed. So it is up to everyone to form an idea of the spiritual world view through their entire mental configuration.

At that time, the now widespread and scientifically promoted worldview of “monism” was not yet known. People were not yet so anxiously concerned that a gap should not open up between humans and higher animals [...]; rather, they believed in this gap in a physical sense, and if they wanted to bridge it, they thought in deeply materialistic terms [...]. People wanted to have something materially distinct, since they could not find it in the idea that something spiritual could be found as a distinguishing factor. So they searched the entire body, the soft tissues and the skeleton, and found a special intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw of animals, which humans apparently did not possess. With that, they believed that they had discovered the long-sought, exalted difference between humans and animals, and gullible, materialistically-minded people were inclined to accept this without further ado. Goethe studied these conditions and found that the premaxillary bone was present before birth, that is, in the developing human being, but that it gradually fused completely with the adjacent parts until birth. We find more details about this in Goethe's scientific writings, in which he devotes a special treatise with detailed illustrations to the study of the “ossis intermaxillaris” and defends his discovery against Soemmerring 1785 and Camper in special letters, in which he also emphasizes, however, that the difference between humans and higher animals is not to be found in the individual material, but in the spiritual, which towers mightily above the animal. If we take into account what Goethe – according to Johannes Falk – said on Wieland's funeral day about soul and spirit, their transformations and fates after death: how he had reflected during his long life, and when he now compares what he believes he has found with what can be observed scientifically, sensually, then the two are reconciled without contradiction. At that time, one could still say this as a scholar, as a true naturalist, without finding oneself in conflict with the views of the life of the soul in its special field and that of the material side of life. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, this was still the case with a pioneering naturalist who was mentioned by name, who did more than anyone else for the knowledge of the transformation of animal life forms, but who, by showing their development, came to the conclusion of saying:

I believe that all organic beings that have ever lived on this earth have descended from an original form, into which the Creator breathed life.

That was Charles Darwin. He, too, was able to look unhindered into the spiritual world without coming into conflict with the results of his research. It should be noted that the English original contains these words, but the first German translation and its subsequent editions do not. In such a short time, it was no longer possible to connect the view of the spiritual world with Darwinism, which was already much more harshly conceived. Thus, in all so-called popular presentations, we hear and read today that anyone who still clings to the influence of a spiritual world is a fantasist and a fool, since Darwin himself showed that everything spiritual is a function of the physical. Of course, nothing is easier than to refute spiritual science in this way if one translates it into the view. If this or that part of the brain becomes diseased, then, in a certain analogous relationship, the soul becomes ill; if the brain gradually wears out, then the soul is also worn away, and so the soul is to be thought of as inseparably united with matter as a form of expression. Darwin has, after all, done away with the spiritual world anyway - although this is not the case.

We live today in a time when it is already a serious pursuit of truth to make a confession, as Goethe did, and yet to come to terms with science, as Goethe did, who was able to maintain the soul as existing quite rightly. Today it seems impossible to reconcile external, material science and adherence to the spiritual world. Today we live in an age that has accumulated an almost unmanageable amount of empirical results, where it is impossible for the individual to find his way around the ever more and further divided scientific disciplines, where it is completely dizzy, to orient himself exactly about what science has “established”, just as it is difficult to determine for himself what gives him an accurate judgment, a healthy general view of spiritual science.

So here comes this spiritual science and claims that it possesses and applies the same way of thinking and logic as every other science of today, which not only assumes that the soul contains the normal power of knowledge of everyday and scientific life, which, so to speak, every normal can apply, but it adheres to the conviction that forces lie dormant in the human soul that can be developed so that life in the spiritual world will be revealed to the person concerned, as it is to the observer endowed with eyes and the other senses of the external, material environment.

Not everyone can develop their spiritual eyes and ears in life and become a spiritual researcher, but nor can everyone work in a laboratory, be an astronomer and so on, not everyone needs to work as a researcher in such ways. Only a few can achieve it to a sufficient extent, but they can proclaim it to others, and every person has something in their soul that prevents them from devoting themselves to all that is communicated in blind faith; these are: logic and a healthy sense of truth. The messages he receives can enlighten him; he can measure them against life, test them and gain experience from them, to see whether they have a healing and beneficial effect there and in themselves.

In this way spiritual science places itself in life. Through the power of his soul, the human being makes himself an instrument of spiritual scientific research. However, the demand that all results be proven to everyone with absolute certainty and at any time is just as impossible for spiritual science as it is for external material science and its researchers. The latter say that their science demands absolute objectivity, not inward-soul things and experiences, but anyone who speaks in this way does not know spiritual scientific research in its true essence.

When someone, apart from external impressions, delves into the inner soul life, he will first encounter his own inner soul experiences, which are different for each individual, but in reality the soul gradually takes different paths. The budding spiritual researcher will at first bring nothing to his fellow human beings that concerns him alone; he must first develop to the point where he feels that he has now entered with his ego into a completely new realm that has nothing to do with his personality as such. Then his spiritual insights will show the same objectivity as, for example, our sensory eye shows us that the rose before us is not green but red, as other healthy eyes can also see. Then the inner soul experience is transformed into complete objectivity, then the spiritual researcher feels that his experiences are independent of his subjective feelings, and he has attained a certainty in his vision from which the results of spiritual research have been proclaimed here on many occasions.

Our time demands objectivity. This must be respected, but first we must consider its effect in terms of a healthy sense of truth. After all, the entire body of external science speaks a clear language; for our time, it demands recognition of those results that are obtained through research methods as set out in “Mysterium des Menschen” by Ludwig Deinhard , wherein it is shown that science, which to some extent approaches spiritual science with its methods, nevertheless also achieves harmony between external research with its means and internal research through the method of spiritual science. The book shows us the need of the present time to get what is needed from the field of spiritual science, which makes it possible for man to place himself with certainty in the position he has to fill in life.

We have indicated that it is the spirit that gives strength to the human being, not a particular place of residence or a particular remedy, but in the long run only that world view that leads to the center of the spirit. The science briefly characterized above feels compelled to take on the role that natural science previously had for humanity.

Most of those present know how spiritual science demonstrates the truth of a concept, although a large part of the educated world shrugs its shoulders compassionately at it, namely re-embodiment. It may be recalled that speaking disparagingly about it will have the same fate as the assertion of the earlier natural science that hornets developed from a horse carcass, without their eggs, as was taught in the seventeenth and partly still in the eighteenth century , in which such assertions were systematically presented, so for example furthermore that from donkey carcasses wasps and so forth developed directly from river mud worms and even fish developed directly until Francesco Redi energetically objected to this and established the principle: Living things can only descend from similar living things; a view that is generally taken for granted today, not only for Du Bois-Reymond and Virchow, while Francesco Redi in the seventeenth century only barely escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno, because he was considered a heretic.

Today, the scientific opinion is that when a person is born, he is solely influenced by his inheritance from his ancestors; but this is an inaccurate observation. Spiritual science postulates that the soul unites with the physical body that the father and mother can offer it. The soul then develops this physical body and, in the further course of development, acquires the means from its surroundings. But the spiritual and mental can be traced back to earlier embodiments; and just as living things can only come from living things, so the spiritual and mental can only arise from the spiritual and mental. Thus, the present life on earth of each person is also the starting point for later lives on earth, and this is how the independence of the human soul is to be explained. The time will come, and it is not far off, when the abilities of a man of genius will no longer be traced back to his physical ancestors alone, as Goethe expresses it when he says:

From my father I have the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful nature
and the desire to tell stories.
ancestor was the fairest's darling,
That haunts me now and then;
ancestor-woman loved jewelry and gold,
That may well twitch through the limbs.
Can the elements not
be separated from the complex,
What then is to be named
original about the whole thing?

Today, people like to point out that genius is not at the beginning, but at the end of a series of developments, and that proves that it is inherited. That's a nice argument! It should be the other way around, because the circumstances are not at all in this context. Man naturally acquires physical properties just as it is natural for him to get wet when he falls into the water. In order to save this strange theory, it is said that the qualities of the father, for instance, remained latent because they did not show up in the son as they did in him. A tile falling from the roof also has the latent potential to kill someone; with such strange assumptions, anything can be proved, and this is also the case with the potential that was not present in the ancestor but has shown itself in the descendant.

There is more sound research in the field of lower life forms. A poor school teacher [monk] in Austrian Silesia [Brno in Moravia] by the name of Mendel found out in his attempts to achieve plant hybridization that the expected properties did not appear in the next generation, but in the generation after that. So people used to be just as patient about actual inheritance as they have now generally disregarded it.

Scientific materialism calls the theosophists fantasists and dualists who understand nothing of monism when they hold the view that the soul uses the powers acquired in the last life to shape a suitable body with the material means at its disposal – a view that is also, and more purely, monistic, namely from the spiritual side. These twisted minds of the spiritual scientists will no longer be burned, we have become too humane for that, but they are trying to expose them to ridicule and destruction by making fun of them. One objection is usually raised against the return of the soul, namely that one cannot remember a past life; one knows nothing about it at all. A four-year-old child cannot yet do arithmetic either, but we allow for his development and in ten years he will be able to do arithmetic.

The same applies to our review of a past life, we are only at the beginning of our development, and here too, as in many other areas, it is at least conceivable that there will be progress before each soul comes to an ever-greater understanding of past lives. In the present life there are short periods of childhood that cannot be remembered, but nevertheless the present self was already present at that time. You will neither want nor be able to deny this, although you are unable to remember it. Thus, the possibility or impossibility of your remembering has nothing to do with your earlier real existence and with the past life of your soul in the decisive sense.

But why can't we remember earlier lives on earth? Our memory in the present body goes back to the point of development where the self experiences itself. At the beginning of our life on earth, this is not yet raised into consciousness, but the moment it happens coincides with the beginning of the possibility of remembering. Thus the ego forms, so to speak, the outer wall; as far as ego-consciousness exists, so far consciousness and memory extend. But from this also arises the possibility of treating this ego in such a way that it is transformed from the state in which it normally exists in man to a higher state. We must therefore overcome our present ego-consciousness; it is not easy to do so, and I will mention just one pointer.

We can free ourselves from looking backwards if we are able to look towards the future. To do this, we must accept everything that flows towards us from the present with composure and calmness, with equanimity, and revere the world's providence without worry. We must be unmoved by praise and blame, joy and pain; our soul must stand still, calmly awaiting everything, whether it portends life or death, pain or pleasure, while venerating the wisdom of the world's guidance. If we are indeed able to see such a perspective in the future, then the result will be a review of the past; our view will then expand first into the last previous and then into earlier earthly lives.

Although a knower today can confirm the suggested effect of such exercises, in addition to the many other necessary and more difficult works, it is easy to judge this as mere theory. But the knower, who speaks from his own experience, will not be deterred by this, whether one wants to hear him and judge his communications correctly, just as little as it deterred Francesco Redi when he was called a heretic, and just as it does not bother those who do spiritual science in a thorough way when they are called fantasists and twisted minds.

On further penetrating into the nature of cultural development, one will also come to the point of asking oneself: What is my position regarding the great development of humanity, especially regarding Christianity? Before Christ, many thousands of years of people had already lived; so what could those who lived with and after him base an advantage on to be allowed to take up the Christ impulse, and not also those who lived before Christ? Today humanity has advanced to such an extent that it can ask such profound questions. Especially in our time, when people are increasingly learning to think scientifically and historically, such questions must arise. Then spiritual science comes along and says: the same soul has lived through the events before and after the appearance of Christ. Such an objection does not exist for the spiritual scientific world view. It is the same souls that go to school in life before as well as after. These ideas, which partly show us relapses as well, will always give us courage and strength to face life anew, in which we can also recognize progress again in sufficiently long periods of time.

Those who have heard me speak on a number of occasions will know why spiritual science can afford to talk about all the branches of the natural sciences and to assess their methods, goals and progress. Goethe was able to say of himself that when he allowed his scientific gaze to ascend into lofty spiritual realms, he could still always recognize the natural sciences in the process. Spiritual science must always feel itself to be a ferment and work in this sense, so that the gulf between the spiritual and the external-materialistic view of science does not become too great, so that harmony can gradually come about, which is able to give the soul joy and strength, forces that offer the prospect of success and progress.

When it is emphasized that a healthy soul can only dwell in a healthy body, this is to be understood to mean that the healthy soul alone was able to prepare a healthy body as its dwelling, but not the other way around. Thus, spiritual science not only eliminates contradictions in theory, but also drives out all timidity and weakness of soul, so that humanity can then grow up healthy and strong to fulfill its tasks. Starting from social cooperation, a healthy ascent to the heights of material and especially spiritual development can then be achieved, as is destined for humanity. Man will then be more and more able to draw the spiritual secrets out of the spiritual worlds and transfer them into the physical world, thus fertilizing life there with them. But the soul is the place where both worlds touch. Humanity can become and remain strong and healthy if it allows what we can summarize in the words: “From worlds far away, mysterious and enigmatic

The rich abundance of material
It flows into the depths of the soul
From the heights of the world, full of content
The spirit's clarifying light.
They meet in man
To form a reality full of wisdom.