The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Preliminary remark: There are no notes of the talk Truths of Spiritual Research held in Stuttgart the day before.

It is almost as important in the area of spiritual science to get clear about the ways of error as about those of truth because it is in this field in such a way that truths have not only to be searched as in the outer life, but that they have to be attained. Those inner fights of the soul by which the truths in spiritual-scientific area are to be attained lead us often through errors which lurk wherever you go and whose kind has to be recognised and whose significance must be overcome. One disproves errors in the outer life and science; in the area of spiritual life, one has to combat them as real powers that face us on our ways for truth. Therefore, I would like to complement the yesterday's talk about spiritual-scientific truths with the consideration of the sources of error. There one cannot say that this or that is an error of spiritual research, but there it concerns the question how the searching soul may become a slave of error.

I have pointed out not only yesterday but also repeatedly that the spiritual researcher has to make the instrument out of himself with which he penetrates into the spiritual worlds. The spiritual researcher has to develop spiritual organs. As we have physical organs as human beings of the usual life to perceive the outside world physically, we can appropriate spiritual organs by the things that we have discussed sketchily yesterday. With spiritual senses—the term is inconsistent—we enter into the spiritual world to be able to recognise its characteristics and secrets. We have further to acquire the possibility to gain them with full consciousness what one can experience with such spiritual organs. Now I have to point out, of course, although it seems superfluous to many people, repeatedly that you cannot compare these spiritual organs to the sensory organs. These are extrasensory organs. Even as the world, which you visit with them, is extrasensory, these organs are also purely spiritual-mental organs. The consciousness is higher than that of the usual life and science.

We can still come to an understanding with each other if we know the sources of error in the spiritual area. We want to take some sources of error as starting point comparatively in the sensory-physical area. In what way can we get to errors in the outer view of the sensory world? I would like to bring in a concrete example. If an eye is faulty, it may be that we see the things always wrong by this defect of the eye. I would like to quote a famous naturalist who has such a defect as an example. He tells how he always believed to see this or that figure clearly in the dusk. This is based only on a defect of his eyes. When he once turned the corner in a foreign city, his eyes deceived him and he believed that a person who approached him wanted to harm him. He took out his defensive weapon to drive the non-existing figure away.

Faulty organs cause faulty vision in the sensory world. Now we can say comparatively, in spiritual research, the faulty organs that we appropriate by self-development outlined yesterday cause faulty vision, errors in our view of the spiritual world.

In what way do we get to such faulty organs? There I have to stress from the start that that which the spiritual researcher gains to himself by self-development always depends on the starting point which his soul takes. Self-development is based on the fact that we develop the mental forces which we already have in the usual life to higher levels. Everything depends on the fact that we take a healthy soul life as starting point and then develop the spiritual organs. It is necessary to start from common sense and healthy faculty of judgement to get spiritual organs by the characterised development that delivers truths and not errors in our views of the spiritual world. In particular, any kind of infatuation and speculative fiction interferes the spiritual development. Since infatuation and speculative fiction, wrong or untrue judging of the things here in the sensory world stick to the further spiritual development in the soul in a way, and this causes at last that spiritual organs develop which do not properly work.

We stand there immediately before a point, which we have to discuss if the ground of spiritual research should be healthy. I have pointed out already yesterday from another side that the confessors of spiritual science commit a mistake if they consider a person who can tell things of the spiritual world as a special person from the start because he is a seer. One has to consider the seer's gift only as something that has developed as a special quality of the person concerned to behold into spiritual world—as well as one academically studies to become a botanist, a zoologist or a mathematician. The more the confessors of spiritual science are clear about the fact that a person is not somebody special because he is a seer, the better it is. We should not condition the value of a person on his seer's gift; he himself is not at all allowed to do this. The value of a human being also of a seer depends on the fact that he has a healthy faculty of judging already here in the physical world. This leads to spiritual organs if one applies the discussed methods to the soul development. Unhealthy human mind leads to a pathological view of spirit that shows the spiritual world in a wrong form. I have to emphasise that.

The second point that matters is that we can form a right, conscious judgement within the spiritual world that we can orient ourselves in the right way, so that we deceive ourselves neither by our organs nor by our consciousness.

Now something can happen with the spiritual researcher that you can compare with the condition if here in the sensory world the consciousness of the human being is dazed or paralyzed, so that the person concerned cannot orient himself properly in the physical world.

The spiritual researcher can do a similar experience if he does not take as right starting point that means a morally healthy soul condition. A weak moral attitude dazes the higher consciousness.

The seer is not a special human being because he has the seer's gift, but his human value must be judged as that of the other human beings, too—by his healthy faculty of judgement and moral attitude. Only these two things still are infinitely important in the area of spiritual research as in the usual life because they are the basic conditions to discover the truths and to avoid errors.

We can still give other sources of error or rather characterise the ways of error different. There it is the best if we start from the usual sensory consideration of the things again. We all know that there is a materialist view of the outside world. We have to get clear in our mind spiritual-scientifically, how this materialist attitude can appear in the usual physical world. Spiritual science acknowledges that behind everything, also behind the material existence, something spiritual works that the material existence is only the expression of spiritual forces working behind it. In the field where the material works, actually, the spirit is also effective.

How do human beings become still materialists? Why do they misjudge that—where matter appears—this matter is only the revelation of the spirit? If we recognise the spirit everywhere, we have also to look for the causes in the spirit, why human beings may become materialists. Indeed, these are spiritual reasons in the human soul, forces, which work from the spiritual world into this human soul that take the human being to a materialist attitude. Among those spiritual forces which spiritual research brings home to us, we find the so-called ahrimanic forces referring to the Persian spirit Ahriman. These are certain spiritual forces that have an effect on the human soul in such a way that they veil everything to him that does not appear in dense materiality. It is true what Goethe and all those say who understand these things really: the outer view of the senses does not err—the judgement errs if certain forces in the human souls beguile it. The material phenomena do not say to us that they are only matter. The human souls judge about that which is a manifestation of the spiritual that it is only matter. In these human souls certain forces work, which daze them in such a way that they cannot realise that the material is only the expression of the spirit. That which Goethe expressed corresponds to a real being in the human soul: the ahrimanic or Mephistophelian forces work in the soul; and if one discusses these things, one gets quite appropriately to the quotation that the materialist attitude is true evidence of those forces to the spiritual researcher that veil the spiritual to him. These Mephistophelian forces make the human beings shy away from the spiritual.

If we want to look into the soul what goes forward in it, so that it cannot find the spiritual in the material, we can ask ourselves, why does the human being become, actually, a materialist? There we have to realise that the human soul has not only that as its contents, which happens in the usual consciousness, but there are also concealed depths of the soul that there is a subconscious soul life. Since everything that can appear in the consciousness can submerge in unaware regions and works there. It would be a brainless prejudice if one believed that that which one does not know were not effective. A drastic example of a work [of the subconscious], which lives out quite different, is the following: Luther (Martin L, 1483-1546) said once, if I am rather angry, I can pray and preach best of all.—Every soul expert understands that. The forces that work in the soul can change in manifold way. Rage is simply a soul force; if it submerges in the depths of the soul, it can appear in the consciousness quite different. If we bring the rage into the subconscious soul regions, it can appear as something that looks like its opposite. Praying and preaching mostly do not look like a fit of anger; but Luther knew that he could pray and preach best of all, [if he was angry].

The same applies to many emotions. One cannot prove them in the usual sense, but they turn out to be by the observation of the soul. Someone who investigates the soul finds which ways the different soul forces follow how they change if they are in the consciousness and how different they are if they submerge in the lower regions of the soul life. There is a force, which everybody knows if it appears in the upper regions of the consciousness: the fear. It is related to hatred. We often hate that in the upper region of the soul what we fear; but we have already squeezed it into the sub-consciousness. Hatred and fear are very intimately related to each other. However, fear is also related to laziness. Indeed, for the soul expert the fact comes to light that laziness is appealed to maintain this or that, not to change this or that, from the fear of insecurity in which one gets if one acts different [than usual]. The human beings are attached to something established because they fear change. Laziness is fear in the usual consciousness that was squeezed into the sub-consciousness.

If you now penetrate into the spiritual region, you have such experiences as I have told them yesterday about which you can say that the human being loses ground that he faces nothing to gain something new. The soul sometimes feels that darkly in the sub-consciousness of which it does not become aware. This fear is only the fear of everything that you experience if you penetrate into the spiritual world. You do not become aware of this fear, but the materialistically minded person has it in his soul depths. For the psychologist turns out that one becomes a materialistically minded human being because one has fear of uncertainty into which you get if you submerge in the spiritual. If you investigate the soul, you have to characterise the materialist human being as chicken-hearted; but it is in such a way. This is nothing but the disguised fear of spiritual life by which this spiritual life is suppressed. Thus, that remains concealed to the soul which is effective behind it. The demons of fear, the ahrimanic spirits, rage in the soul of the materialistically minded human being. Thus, he is a living proof of the work of the spirit. The spirit itself that beguiles the materialist into being a materialist. There one is reminded of a quotation of the poet who is very true:

Simple folk never sense the devil's presence,
not even when his hands are on their throats.

(Faust I, verses 1281-1282)

However, for us that is only important here: what does that exposure to the demons of fear cause that daze the soul? To characterise this mood we have taken the starting point from the physical-sensory world where one becomes materialistically minded by this soul mood.

However, the same mood can be there with a person who goes through a spiritual development or has got by some special conditions to a kind of beholding into the spiritual world. The cited demons of fear work not only on the materialistically inclined souls, but also on that who can already behold into the spiritual world. Then they have another effect. However, the effect can be characterised again, while we compare the deep experiences that we have there to that which has faced us. As everything appears to the materialist in unsubtle-material compression, these demons work on the human being who is minded as the materialist that they allow him only to behold what is not spiritual, but is dense and appears spooky. The subtlety of the spiritual gets lost to him. He does not search at all the spiritual; it is too fugitive to him, too mysterious. He does not regard the spiritual as something spiritual; it must be so unsubtle, so compressed, that it is as it were only a material appearance transferred to the spiritual. He searches such visions that are not spiritual but spooky.

With it, I do not want to say that the impressions that appear in this density are not right. If they have been caused as I have characterised them yesterday here, they are true of course. However, one interprets them normally wrongly. Such a person regards these spooky things, which he faces from the spiritual world, as the only real. He looks for nothing but ghosts, rather than spirits. However, thereby he gets to spiritual phenomena, to facts of the spiritual world, but he judges them wrongly. Let us take an example. Such a seer can look back to his former earth-life with the methods about which I have already spoken here. If he looks back, pictures may appear to him, facts which show the appearance of his former life. However, in reality it is not in such a way. In reality, he does not behold that which he was in reality, but he beholds what has separated like sheaths from him. He beholds what he should not behold if he wants to see the true, advancing reality. Thus, for example, such a person beholds a kind of a ghostlike world instead of the real spiritual world. He perceives a reality [and regards it as] the objective reality of a dead person, but that which he perceives is not the objective reality, but that which the dead person has just cast off—while he does not behold the advancing reality. Since with such a mood the seer considers that as something shadowy in which he is not interested. This is just that mood which does not lead to the spirit but always beguiles into interpreting inaccurately what we behold. We believe to behold a living soul, but we regard that which is doomed to die as something developing.

Thus, we realise that in the spiritual area the question of error is somewhat different. The error in the usual world can mostly be disproved; in the spiritual world is that vitalising which we can visit, so that the spiritual world has a significance for us, and confuse it with that which is doomed to die, to the abnormal. The contrast is another in the spiritual area than in the outer area. The concepts “true” and “wrong” change for the spiritual world. The fact that we confuse truth with error in the physical-sensory world corresponds in the spiritual world to the fact that we confuse the life promoting with that which is doomed to die. Hence, the relations are quite different. One has to get into the habit of feeling quite different compared with this world, to develop quite new concepts and ideas. From it arises again how it really is with the error. It is already a fatal error, if one regards the concepts and ideas as sufficient for the spiritual area.

I would like to use another comparison that characterises an error very often appearing in this field. Let us assume once that we have to deal with that which was formed in a mine by the forces, which are active and effective within the earth. Let us assume that a gap originates up to the surface of the earth. The sunlight penetrates into this gap; it can light up everything that has formed down there in the darkness. We can feel it as wonderful and marvellous how the sunlight falls on everything that could not originate on the surface of the earth. What the sunlight creates on the surface of the earth cannot be created in the same way in the depths, and that which has formed in the depth can maybe appear as a feast for our eyes if the sunlight penetrates through a gap.

It is true what I have stated before: if the spiritual researcher brings that which he has beheld in the spiritual world in concepts of common sense and interprets it, everybody can understand these things. You can understand the spiritual world not only if you yourself are a spiritual researcher but with your healthy human mind. Only the spiritual researcher can investigate this area. However, if the representations of the extrasensory worlds are given in concepts and ideas, one just feels induced to compare such a representation with the sunlight that falls through the gap in the tunnel, and then the usual human beings understand them who cannot penetrate with the concepts of the sensory world into those regions of spiritual truth.

We have also to figure out that the soul itself has do the step into the spiritual world if from this spiritual world the facts and beings should become obvious. This is a cliff that certain spiritual forces work into the soul, which ... . [Gap in the transcript]

Another cliff is if that seizes the soul about which I have just said that it must be defeated. We have said to understand each other that any egoity of a medium must be extinguished, so that the medium can be integrated [in the world being]. The spiritual researcher, however, who consciously does research must also blank out his egoity consciously if he faces the spiritual world. However, if the human being is confronted at this point with himself like a foreign being and looks back, if he experiences all that, then he notices only how self-love works in the human being. If one speaks in such a way, someone can easily come and say, yes, there somebody talks to us about overcoming the self and the like; nevertheless, these are easy things.—Someone who speaks in such a way speaks only about what he knows as self-love.

The spiritual researcher gets to know something quite different from self-love; when he has parted with himself this self-love becomes something like an invincible power of nature. It turns out to be invincible in a certain case: where the spiritual researcher does not come so far to remove his complete self. If self-love is to be recognised really in such a way that now he overcomes and defeats it, something develops in the soul that one normally does not recognise correctly. There some self-love remains that lives so intimately, so subtly in this soul that the spiritual researcher himself interprets that which lives there in him in quite wrong way. Here a very peculiar phenomenon appears:

Because the spiritual researcher believes to have removed his self-love from himself, he says to himself, you have removed your self-love; what you find now in yourself is something else than you yourself.—He calls this the divine in himself. However, because he has not succeeded in removing the self-love completely, he becomes a wrong mystic. He looks into his inside and believes to recognise his divine self, however, he adores only that which has remained of his self-love. Many adored gods of the wrong mysticism, the mysticism on misleading paths, are only the adored own beings, the adored own selves. God's love of mystics is often only disguised self-love.

There one faces a fateful field of spiritual-scientific error. It is often quite difficult to distinguish where the mystic really attains objective knowledge of spirit and where he only reveres the rest of his self as something higher in himself.

We can find something in the usual sensory area by which we can come to an understanding with each other about what appears with the mystic who is on wrong tracks. There we only need to point to a certain scientific direction that appeared in particular in the middle of the nineteenth century. This scientific direction does not believe at all that it is materialist, because it speaks of ideas in history. Thus, many researchers would refuse to speak of folk souls or spirits of time as realities that there are generally beings that manifest themselves really. One considered it as more correct to speak about ideas in the course of history. This appeared especially absurd with the “life of Jesus research” in the last time. There a direction became prominent which stated that the historical Jesus did not at all exist; within the community, in the ecclesiastical development just the Christ idea appeared.—One took the view that this was a more distinguished view if one did not acknowledge Christ Jesus as reality but only the idea that developed in history.

How do such ideas appear to that who figures the things out? They appear to him, as if he wanted to state that an only painted painter could paint a picture; in the same way an idea could work in history. Only beings but not ideas and thoughts can work. The beings that appear embodied in any way as human beings can work but not ideas and thoughts; these vanish as mere shades if one ignores the being and the essential. As reality that vanishes for such human beings as mere shades of thought what should have spiritual reality for the human beings who have become mystics because of unrecognized, disguised self-love. It is something that cannot be at all beyond their souls, it is effective only in their souls. The result of it is that such souls cannot advance to spiritual beings that must be there independent from them. They can advance only up to that which they can bring in to their selves, which they can consume as it were spiritually.

If one wanted to use a rather unsubtle comparison, I could say, someone who wants to become a seer may be able to behold spiritual beings that are independent from him, as well as one can see physical beings with physical eyes. He must be able to see, for example, a piglet that is separated from him. However, we assume that he cannot see a piglet if it is alive, but only if it is killed and carved, and he can eat and enjoy it then. Such a mystic is a spiritual gourmet. The spiritual gourmet does not turn his view to objective beings, but to the spiritual world in general, he does not take in beings, but only spiritual substances which he absorbs, but he never attains anything that is an internally enriched self, rather only a hollow self, so that his self balloons up to a kind of spiritual universe. Just because he impregnates his self with that which fits into his self he blankets the way to real spiritual beings and truth to himself, and he beholds that which weaves and works only in himself. Therefore, the history of mysticism is so difficult to study because one has to distinguish those mystics who can really part with their selves and can behold something essential, and those mystics who, actually, confuse self-love with God's love and perceive what fulfils their selves. They live only on their selves.

On one side [the view of the spiritual] in unsubtle-material densification in a kind of ghostlike vision, and on the other side the mystic adoration of the self—these are two main ways of error in the spiritual field.

It is imperative that the soul thereby finds the paths of truth that it really puts outside that it considers that objectively, which the human being is. Hence, it is so necessary to start with spiritual research and with the study of spiritual science to get to truth and not to error concerning the things that can save us mostly from self-love.

If a spiritual researcher who wants to investigate the intimacies of life and strives at first to visit human beings who have recently died in the spiritual world, that is if a human being becomes a seeker of spirit out of altruism, he may very easily stray to the one or the other side. The interest should be directed to that which leads us into the big world which does not touch us very personally because we can then get easier free from our personality. While visiting any soul that has recently died we are exposed to all possible personal errors. If we investigate which changes the soul has experienced in the course of its development, we are easily inclined to look at the thing subjectively from our intentions.

In my Occult Science, I have tried to take the starting point of that in which not only the single but also all human beings are interested. Since that is the point if we become spiritual researchers and want to become freer and freer from error that we learn to recognise ourselves as a product of the whole world. As we recognise other beings and things as products of the whole world, we can also explain ourselves as human beings from the whole world, in particular, while we envisage our spiritual-mental being. Indeed, we are a microcosm in the macrocosm. We are an image of the big world, and we have to compare that which the human being has in his soul, in his spiritual being to the whole universe. However, we cannot do this, as long as we stick in ourselves. Not before we have really come out of ourselves if we have ourselves besides ourselves, as we are as human beings, we can compare that to the world which we now face as an object.

Whom does it surprise if spiritual science often appears as foolish fantasy to the people? In physics, for example, one forgives that one distinguishes seven colours, that one has seven tones and the eighth tone as the octave in the acoustics. However, one does not forgive the spiritual scientist that he understands the human nature as seven-membered and puts it down to seven worlds merging into each other. Still the same thinking finds seven colours, seven tones in the octave in physics, and seven members of the human nature in spiritual science. It is the same thought; the one is not more than the other is.

However, you can recognise the coherence of the human nature with the big world only if you face this human nature in such a way that you consider it as a whole. The human being is a spiritual-mental being. Our reason can consider only sensorily. To get to spiritual truths—not to spiritual errors—, you must be able to recognise the human being outside him as a product of the whole world. This is exceptionally important. You have to consider the effects of the world on the human being. As long as you look only at the effects on the own being, you do not get to truth—only to error. The human being must be outside his self and then consider himself in proportion to the world; he has to be detached from himself.

This is the first condition that the human being puts himself in the position that not everything that he has developed in himself is stuck in self-love. What does that mean? What develops us spiritual-mentally? We do certain exercises to develop the soul: meditation, concentration, and so on. Certain soul processes thereby arise in us. As long as we practise them in such a way that we even have the slightest sensation that we ourselves are that which develops there, we cannot defend ourselves from error.

This is the one side of the matter. The mystic overcomes that so hard because he loses himself in his own self, only in subtle way. That which goes forward in us to raise us to higher worlds must be a world process, not a single process. We have to recognise the human being except ourselves; we have to experience the world in ourselves. These two big secrets lead to the way of truth and avoid the errors. The second is to recognise the nature of the human being outside of us, not in us, not only to experience the world outside of us, but also to experience the world in us as an objective world.

Someone who takes these two guidelines to reach the spiritual world advances gradually so far, that he can attain the knowledge of truth as experience. If you own truth in the spiritual area, you yourself become that which you have recognised as truth because you think your way into those beings. We experience the world and we feel it then, while we experience it, like a torch that lights up the spiritual world to us. We feel it as an invigorating element that turns out to be fertile, while it leads us from step to step on our pilgrimage. We feel the world, while it arises in us and for us human beings as that which germinates, sprouts, and proves to be effective. If you can feel in such a way, you can be sure that you live in spiritual truth.

However, the error is cold; it darkens the spiritual truth. Errors are in the spiritual world forces, are beings, but extinguishing, darkening forces. The more we familiarise ourselves with the error, the more we can feel: if you want to use it for understanding the world, the more it darkens everything. You realise that everywhere life freezes due to a force of death that it begins to rot as it were if you approach it with error. The error turns out to be something real that destroys. We must defeat it; we must let forces grow—not only judgements - to disprove it, so that it escapes from us. Then we fight our way through to truth. Therefore, the quest for truth in the spiritual area is just fighting with the error, and, hence, it is important to know the ways of the errors. That is why I had to draw the same attention to the ways of error as to the ways of truth.

Perhaps I could cause a feeling with these two talks how real the soul's way is which can lead into the spiritual regions, which only someone can have who considers that unprejudiced which I have brought sketchily and which one can hard transfer on someone who faces the matter only with prejudices. However, you could still say to yourself after such considerations, there many people judge about these spiritual researchers, but you see from that which they say how much they know of it.—You can already find out whether the objections are justified or unjustified if you put the question: does the person concerned know anything generally about that which spiritual research intends? Does he know anything about the serious fights, about the overcoming and deliverance from the sufferings that one has to experience?—I wanted to evoke a feeling that these things may not be taken at all frivolously by those who only must familiarise themselves with that which the soul has to experience to get to the truths of spiritual research. Then, however, one can experience something peculiar: then those who approach the results of spiritual research seriously are no more opponents. Maybe in no other area than in that of spiritual research you can say rightly, opponents are strictly speaking only those who do not know the matter. On the field where one knows it are no more opponents. The opponents become appreciators if they get to know the matter. You can leave it to everybody to convince himself.

In this feeling we can summarise, maybe not so much what I have spoken the day before yesterday and today, but how I have tried to show the things. This time I have tried intentionally to show the things completely after the soul experience, how the soul, so to speak, is gradually led and what it experiences. Thereby you can maybe receive the sensation of the seriousness of spiritual research. You must have this sensation at first, then arises that in the spiritual-scientific area, more than in any other field, to which a Goethean sentence applies which he had deeply experienced.

“You cannot disprove a wrong doctrine because it is based on the conviction that the wrong is true. However, the opposite can, must and should be pronounced again and again.”

If this also happens concerning spiritual science, it will become a part of our spiritual culture, as it has to be. Even if errors assert themselves, truth will find its way everywhere in the world. We do not need to be anxious about truth. If we represent untruthfulness by a personal error, it will not be harmful; we are convinced of that. However, if we represent the truth, it will find the ways, so that it can settle in the development of humanity. Since the earthly evolution of humanity is designed in such a way, that humanity finds its development only in truth. In this consciousness, you can look at spiritual science, in particular if you consider truth and error with it.

The spiritual researcher just removes the errors while he recognises them—and the truth will be victorious because it has to be victorious with its power.

Since a number of years, I have spoken here about the objects of spiritual science, and several listeners who have already participated in these considerations many a time will find various knowledge that is not new just in the today's comprising consideration. Only that which I have said this year about spiritual science gave occasion to envisage the objects from the most different viewpoints. Since one could say, today spiritual science, as it is meant here, is by no means generally acknowledged and many people confuse it with everything that one calls “theosophy” more or less exactly.

The so-called chance passes something on to you in this respect. When I came on a lecture tour through a certain city, I saw two little writings in a bookstore in which I looked, however, for something quite different. The one contained a popular representation of the philosophical worldviews and approaches to life of the nineteenth century (probably by Max Bernhard Weinstein, 1852-1918, published under this title in Leipzig in 1910). If you look at this writing more exactly, you get the impression that this booklet was written with a certain seriousness; the single chapters correspond to a rather thorough knowledge of that which is discussed there—with the only exception of theosophy or—as it is meant in the narrower sense here—spiritual science.

I try to bring together spiritual science with that which is said there just in this chapter, and there one must say, as good and conscientious other chapters are, as superficial is the chapter about spiritual science. I do not want to dwell on this chapter here, I would only like to point out that beside various incorrect statements the author says that spiritual science spreads abstruse fantasies of these or those world facts.—Now I thought, there could be alluded to my Occult Science, and somebody would deny that what is well proved there, without inspection of the thing. However, I read on straight away, and found the sentence that in the circles of the supporters of this spiritual research everywhere prophecies of wars and earthquakes play a big role.—I ask you, do such prophecies play a big role in my explanations?

One could assume that few people read such writings. However, the other booklet or more precisely pamphlet had the title Seven Sects of Perdition. A Warning for Protestant Christians (edited by a Protestant association in 1913). I will not read out it. You find the following seven sects of perdition enumerated:

First: Adventists or Sabbatists—about four pages. Secondly: the dawn Bible students—also four pages. Thirdly: the new-apostolic—three pages. Fourthly: the Mormons—four pages. Fifthly: the Scientists—three pages. Sixthly: the spiritists—only two pages. Seventhly: theosophy, about that he knows half a page only. However, I do not want to read out it completely but only half of it.

“In particular it [theosophy] teaches self-redemption instead of the redemption by Christ; one can equal it to paganism” and one points to the church history. It is interesting also that this pamphlet contains the remark that you can buy the booklet at any price and dimension, also as loose sheets. For pennies you can form an opinion about that of which should be talk today, and then you can attach the concerning sheet to the wall.

Thereby it becomes clear where from the judgements come which face us from some sides if they condemn the value of our object wholesale. It is typical also that the author of this pamphlet can say only half a page about the “seventh sect.” Now, from this outer example it arises that there, indeed, in our time many prejudices exist against spiritual science and that there is little will to get really to the prime concern of spiritual science. Nevertheless, one may assume that that who wants to judge an object knows this really. It is obvious that this is not the case with spiritual science among wide sections of the population. From those persons who want to know nothing about it one cannot demand that they deal with it; however, from those who judge publicly. It would probably confuse some persons to have to deal with the things about which they want to judge “conscientiously.”

One has repeatedly to ask, how shall spiritual science place itself into the immediate life of the present? How and with which right does it position itself to the big questions of life and to the riddle of death?

It becomes more and more evident that from unaware depths of the soul life these cardinal questions become aspirations in the human souls. However, the area of spiritual science is as big as the world, and one would have to speak a lot if one only wanted to indicate what spiritual science encloses. However, even if spiritual science has to extend its research infinitely, nevertheless, its investigations culminate in both life riddles that we call with the words destiny and death. The knowledge has to assert itself that the outer science cannot answer the big questions of life and immortality if it is aware of its borders. However, this outer science tries to produce the most varied worldviews, namely just such worldviews that believe to stand on the ground of natural sciences, and believe that they are allowed to say that their results are directly contrary to that which spiritual science has to say.

It would be a wild-goose chase to speak of the fact that the bases of spiritual science really conflict natural sciences. These natural sciences have produced many things for three, four centuries, which have changed our whole life largely. If that is true which Goethe says that one has to judge a school of thought according to its fertility, natural sciences have shown their fertility—indeed, only with the solution of material life riddles. However, one has to take something else into account. Natural sciences have educated humanity in a particular way. They have been a wonderful means of education, so that the human being put the questions of life and death in another way than he put them before. It also corresponds to the fact that spiritual science works with its method, its whole view, completely after the pattern of natural sciences. However, while the questions have become deeper, the souls have been duped into accepting that as real only which they perceive with their senses.

Spiritual science cannot offer physical things. It cannot go into a laboratory and create spiritual knowledge there. Already the spirit that lives in us between birth and death can be fathomed for a certain time and for our consciousness by soul processes only. Everybody knows that the spiritual life is in him since his birth; everybody should know that he can reach that which he has experienced, for example, twenty years ago only by memory, and that he cannot bring up this process of memory with outer apparatuses. So one should also recognise that spiritual science has to look for its sources by an increase of such inner experiences like memory. However, it will still last long, until humanity realises that the method of spiritual science is, indeed, an inner one, but is inspired by the same spirit as the outer natural sciences. One can recognise this immediately if one looks at that which such critics of spiritual science say who deny that one can reach what is beyond sense perception. Even if they concede that there is something supersensible, nevertheless, they say, the human cognition cannot penetrate into it. With such spirits, one can observe with which difficulties spiritual science has to fight. Since such an objection has no other value as if anybody wanted to say, for example, what have the today's botanists in mind, actually? They say—and this should be a basic achievement of the nineteenth century—, the plants consist of single cells, and the animals consist of such cells, too. Let us assume that now anybody proves how much a human being can see with his eyes. He cannot see the cells and everything that crosses the borders of physical cognition.—Those who speak in such a way prove that the eyes cannot look into that which, nevertheless, the naturalists have seen. Such a proof can be right; then one would prove that it is impossible to reach the cell composition of plants and animals with the human eyes and to penetrate into these subtlest processes. Someone would be a fool who wanted to prove that such a proof is wrong.—Numerous proofs are of the same quality, which assume that the human cognitive faculties, as well as they are, can know nothing about the supersensible. Such proofs can be quite correct, and a fool would be who wanted to disprove them.

However, completely apart from the limits of the physical eye, [one has to take into account] that one has armed the eyes with cognitive means like microscope, telescope, and spectroscope and can thereby observe processes and substances which [were invisible before], for example, with spectral analysis. The fact that this has been done is also right, and it is as right if old worldviews spoke about the limits of knowledge. Just as natural sciences have sharpened the eye, spiritual science strengthens that about which one can say in its natural state probably rightly: it has limits. However, from it we realise that the proof of the limits of knowledge is justified just as little as the proof of the limits of the eye. The eye arms itself with microscope, telescope, and spectroscope—the human mind gains strength with inner, intimate means: meditation, concentration, and contemplation. I have already mentioned that. From my writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? you can more exactly get to know what one understands by meditation, concentration, and contemplation.

The normal soul activity, however, depends completely on the physical body, on the nerves or the brain. Spiritual science argues nothing against that. However, spiritual science applies methods by which the mental capacity becomes different, as well as the vision became different by the application of microscope and telescope.

Let me speak about the mental capacity first. In the usual life, it deals with the world of the things. How does this mental capacity work? We stand here just at one of those points where it will maybe become obvious already in the next time that natural sciences—if they are properly understood—are in harmony with that which spiritual science has to give. Natural sciences already touch this. If we develop a thought that is directed in the usual life to the area of our sensory existence, the mental capacity intervenes in our brain. This is just a common result of spiritual science and natural sciences, save that spiritual science knows it, while natural sciences hypothesise. However, the usual life already teaches us how the thinking intervenes in the brain, and one knows that the mental capacity works in such a way that it causes destructive processes in the brain, destructive processes of the smallest subtlest structures of the brain. The mental capacity is active, and it destroys the brain perpetually. Our mental capacity could be protected from causing this destruction if it were used different.

Just as a human being behaves who sees himself in the mirror, the mental processes behave; they intervene in the brain: they reflect the work of thinking in our soul, so that we become aware of the mental process. Thus, the usual mental capacity works. The usual life proves it, while the thinking causes tiredness that sleep again balances. This is the regular course: the balance of these destructive processes with sleep. Natural sciences already have words for it like assimilation and catabolism, and for that who knows to observe these things it becomes clear that the results of natural sciences also lead to that which spiritual science teaches.

This process of thinking is as natural as the vision of the eye. Just as one can strengthen the eye with instruments, one can strengthen the mental capacity, not with outer means but with the inner means of concentration, meditation, and contemplation. What do they cause? They cause that the human being gets around—if he wants to become a spiritual researcher - to giving himself contents of thought arbitrarily which are not stimulated from the outside. The usual thinking proceeds in such a way that we get from outer impressions to inner experiences. The spiritual thinking proceeds in such a way that the inner work differs from the usual way [of thinking]. For longer time the thoughts have to be directed to an inner soul experience that the human being himself has created and that is not stimulated from the outside. For example, the soul dwells on the words:

In the bright light living wisdom is flowing.

Of course, this is folly for the usual thinking. However, it matters that we do not have images of the outside world [in the meditation]. These images have rather the purpose to deepen the soul forces. This happens if the soul tries to bring out its inner abilities from its depths to do something that one does not do in the usual life at all: concentrating on such an image. One usually does not apply the soul forces that appear in the meditation in the usual day life; at most, they become faintly noticeable. They are brought up quite different in the meditation. Slumbering soul forces emerge from the depths of the soul, and then it becomes obvious that these soul forces are independent of that on which the usual mental capacity is dependent. While the usual thinking is dependent on the brain and causes destructive processes, that thinking creates an inner power, which gives the soul the experience: I am independent of my physical body.

We want now to characterise this process of the independent mental capacity a little more. We get here to an area that natural sciences can also acknowledge. I have already touched one chapter. Du Bois-Reymond (Emil D. B.-R.,1815-1890, German physiologist) pointed [in his lecture] at the scientific congress in Leipzig (1872) to the limits of cognition and he considered the sleeping human being only as explicable because he is free of affects, desires, and mental pictures. Something is there that just such scientific thinkers who take the facts, as they are, will recognise more and more. Let us assume that anybody says, air surrounds us, the human being inhales it, then a quantity of air is in him; now I want to investigate the air. I investigate the lung how it is nourished how it carries out its organic processes et cetera.—It would be the worst method to investigate the air this way. One would find out something about the lung. However, one investigates the air best of all in the atmosphere, because the air has its existence in the atmosphere. If anybody wanted to recognise the air by investigations of the lung, one would consider him as brainless.

One is still far away from getting to know the affects and passions if one investigates the physical body. One cannot get to know the thinking, while one investigates the brain. This would be as brainless as to investigate the air in the lung. As the lung inhales the air in a respiratory process that envelops the earth as atmosphere, the body inhales the soul life with every awakening. As well as the inhaled air relates to the lung, the soul life relates to the brain. With falling asleep, the body exhales the soul life again. While we are waking, we have the soul life in ourselves, which belongs to the spiritual-mental life in which we live as we live physically in the atmosphere.

Here we have a field where it is clear, how natural sciences and spiritual science intertwine, as Du Bois-Reymond already recognised. The spiritual life belongs to the entire spiritual world, as well as the air belongs to the physical atmosphere. We may say, if the human being sleeps, he has exhaled spirit and soul. His spirit and soul are in the spiritual-mental of the whole world; however, he cannot perceive them there because he has no consciousness.

Somebody who has developed his mental capacity by meditation in such a way tears his power of thought out of the material body forces; he becomes aware of himself as it were beyond the body. That is he develops thought processes that do not originate from the application to the things of the material world, but he goes with his thinking to the spiritual world. He knows by immediate experience that he develops the thought process beyond the body and experiences beings that face him as spirits. This is based on the release of the thinking from the body and is that which can be considered as the first source of spiritual research. One can also experience internally that the thinking is different which one acquires this way; it does not tire us. Since it is an important phenomenon that we experience such processes, which do not fatigue us. However, some meditating people believe at first to note that they fall asleep straight away with the meditation. This is due to the fact that then the process has not yet advanced far enough because it is difficult to detach the thought process from the purely external. It takes years and years.

What do you experience then? Then you experience something that cannot be characterised in the abstract, you experience stupefying inner things. You experience that you have your self beyond yourself that you survey from without what you have experienced.

As you feel enclosed in your skin in the day consciousness, you experience it now as an outer object. The outer world remains interesting, you are attracted to it like with hundred about hundred magnetic forces. You do not want to be torn away from the outside world. You feel, so to speak, that you belong to it. However, these are emotional forces and sensory forces, which belong, above all, to the reality of higher experience. You learn to recognise the forces with which you feel attracted to the outer physical body. Now you get to know the reason, why you wake up in the morning, you learn to recognise that the body says to us, you belong to me, you have to unite with me as that unites with me which is exhaled by the outer physical nature [during sleep] when that is repaired which the outer life has destroyed. One learns to recognise, why the soul returns to the physical body.

You learn something else: the forces that were there before conception. You get to know the soul as it is today, however, you also learn to recognise that they are the same soul forces, which were there before birth, which have drawn us to the parents who could give the physical body. You get to know the forces that led to the present life on earth, also the forces that led to our destiny. If the human beings develop forces to get free from the body with the thinking, then they get around to recognising the forces by symbols that lead their destinies. The materialist dream research has already recognised that one experiences images, memories in the dreams.

One cannot easily imagine that in the usual everyday life a misfortune that a human being experienced twenty years ago is not something that he deeply longs for. If we have drawn ourselves with the thinking from the body, we experience that that which was unpleasant to us at that time that we feel now attracted by it. Why? Because the soul recognises that it has imperfections. They are so deeply concealed that one does not notice them with the usual day consciousness. This inclination to compensate imperfections works in the depths of the soul, even if it knows nothing of it in the usual consciousness. It feels attracted to something that brings ill luck into life; not before it has passed this ordeal, the former imperfection can change into a perfection.

The life with the released mental capacity looks in such a way that in the soul the forces appear to which we feel attracted. The question of destiny becomes the question of imagining. We start understanding the misfortune because we know that the soul must search the misfortune to compensate certain imperfections. It has to know that we were equipped before our birth with forces that have drawn us to the suitable embryo, as well as the plant seed is drawn to the topsoil that is suitable to it. In this respect, spiritual science is also in harmony with natural sciences that cannot deny that, for example, an Alpine plant grows in surroundings whose conditions correspond to its growth. The soul is led to such a destiny in which it can change an imperfection into a perfection. We walk through the gate of death. If the soul did anybody wrong and walks now released from the body through the gate of death, it feels: I can only feel perfect in future, if I try to balance out what I did wrong. Committed crime changes into a feeling: my soul is helpless against that which happened, but I can learn to develop forces which are as predisposition in me and which cause that I get a destiny in which I can transform myself.

In similar way, the human being gets beyond the present soul life if he acquires another soul force. As we can disengage the mental capacity, so that it proceeds internally, we can disengage another force that finds other use in the usual life: the power of speech. What happens with this power of speech? We develop something spiritual-mental in the speech, but it does not remain something spiritual-mental in the usual life. It intervenes in the processes of the brain, of the larynx—the power of speech intervenes in the material-bodily. As we stop the mental capacity, before it intervenes in the brain, we can also stop the power of speech, before it intervenes in the brain and the larynx.

Natural sciences look for the organ of speech in the third convolution of the brain, in Broca's field; monkeys do not have it. Someone who pursues the facts only with the view of natural sciences says, speech comes about with Broca's organ.—However, the fact militates against it that somebody who grows up only on a lonesome island does not attain language, in spite of Broca's organ. The fact is that the power of speech structures the brain, so that Broca's organ is [structured) and from there the activities of will develop in such a way that language originates. Thus, we have something spiritual in the power of speech that intervenes in the organic. However, we can now change the power of speech, while we do not allow it to come close to the bodily. We achieve this, while we make our meditation, concentration, and contemplation somewhat different. To release the power of speech it is not sufficient that we dedicate ourselves only to the contents of mental pictures, but it matters that we penetrate the object of our mental picture with sensation and emotion. We can meditate in thoughts on such a saying like

In the bright light living wisdom is flowing.

However, we can set our thoughts aglow with feelings, we can feel our soul life in that light which becomes a symbol of the flowing wisdom to us. Then we feel that we retain the forces which, otherwise, we let flow out in words. This leads to Inspiration, as well as the thought power—if it is retained—leads to Imagination.

If the human being emancipates the power of speech so that he applies the same forces internally, but retains them in the soul, then the view of the spiritual world extends. Then we can take up other results of spiritual science. Since the soul life extends not only up to the existence beyond the body, but we learn also to look back to former lives on earth. Stopping the power of speech enables us to experience former lives on earth. One always regarded silence as something special. Hence, one needs not limit the outer talking; one has only to apply the inner forces.

I want to bring not only results of spiritual science, but I want also to show the means which lead to them. One maybe contemplates: how long does the interval last, actually, between two lives on earth? For the spiritual researcher arises that our former life on earth goes back to a time where still nothing of the individual language was there. The individual language needed so long time for its development as time passed since our last life on earth.—This is an example of the fact that one can only investigate facts of the spiritual world if the suitable soul forces have developed. However, to understand that without prejudice what the spiritual researcher says, one only needs to think logically. As well as someone can understand a portrait who does not understand the technique of painting, everybody can also understand the messages of the spiritual researcher. One must be a spiritual researcher to penetrate into the spiritual world, but if one puts the investigated into words, one can understand them with common sense.

One has to expect no answer to questions of the spiritual world from science. However, the common sense knows what is right. Numerous philosophers say that the human being puts questions that exceed the usual capacity of the senses, for example, the question of human destiny. The outer life does not answer it. The thinking about which I have here spoken today answers it, while it changes the question of either sympathy or aversion into a question of imagining. The big questions answer themselves in such a way that life confirms spiritual science everywhere.

Except the mental capacity and the power of speech, one can still develop a third. The human being knows that he intervenes with it already in the usual life in such a way that it can seize his blood circulation. Shame makes us blush; fear makes us turn pale. Our soul life intervenes up to the activity of the heart. One can also retain this force in the soul if the human being carries out concentration, meditation, and contemplation in suitable way, so that that which lives in the blood circulation remains in the spiritual-mental. If he connects his will impulses with those forces if he meditates, for example, the sentence:

In the bright light living wisdom is flowing

and feels it in the following way: I want to move through time in such a way that I contribute to the flowing light process, then he tears a part out of that force which expresses itself in the blood circulation, in the movements of the limbs, in the gestures of the everyday life and turns them to the spiritual. The meditation has to come about with such motionlessness of the limbs as usually in sleep. If one breaks away these forces, one can seize that which works beyond the earth as a spiritual-mental life. One gets to know the earth as a re-embodiment of a spiritual being, as one has recognised the human soul as reincarnated from former lives.

Thus, the human being rises in the universe, he experiences his coherence with a spiritual-mental that surrounds us as physically the air surrounds us. Thus, we grow into the spiritual world, while we solve not only the questions of life theoretically, but experience the solution. Then that is not theory which spiritual science gives, it becomes an elixir of life, then it flows out into our soul lives like steam energy into a machine. As natural sciences intervene in the outer life and achieve triumphs, spiritual science will intervene in the inner human life; it will give us power and certainty of life. This will not remain a theory, but get closer to the solution of the questions of life at every turn, while the human being realises what he has in his inside, as well as he has the air in his lung.

Then he knows that he has a soul in himself, something that walks from life to life. One speaks about immortality not only theoretically, but one experiences it in himself, as well as one can experience the future plant in the seed that only creates it. Yes, spiritual science shows the living spiritual core by now; we learn to experience that which prepared the next life. We understand immortality, while we experience it in such a way that there is a guarantee of living on. We will recognise that something exists after this life and something existed before this life. We get to know an originally spiritual state from which we have arisen. We learn to recognise, as long as we are still imperfect, that we must develop that we will go over together with the earth into a spiritual-mental state at the end of our lives on earth. We will know that we must experience our guilt in this and in future lives as imperfections, until we recognise that our lives are lined up. We get to know immortality in our own souls. With it, spiritual science gives us what the human being needs in this present to solve the questions of life and the riddle of death.

It becomes completely obvious—if one looks at the present time—that, on one side, the need exists of that which spiritual science can give—that, on the other side, one has the biggest prejudices if spiritual science answers single questions of everything that it has to be.

Let us take an example. One mostly judges using outer reasons. There is a famous professor of philosophy (presumably Ernst Mach, 1838-1916, Austrian philosopher and physicist). If he speaks about the soul, you find the following words, and countless students carry the words as the highest wisdom into the world. In view of this fact, you must not be surprised about prejudices against spiritual science. There he says, the sum of our experiences, imagining, willing and feeling as they combine in the consciousness to a unity is the soul which rises to moral impulses at a certain level of perfection. Of course, someone who gives such definitions of the soul can only get to the result that the soul dissolves at death. The child has already to learn in the school that one is not allowed to add apples, pears, and plums and “unless the first and second were, the third and fourth would never be.” However, what does the philosopher mean? He talks about a sum of imagining, feeling and willing and—it is strange—this can become moral feeling and willing. He performs a miracle absent-mindedly. Such a miracle is put absent-mindedly: the single experiences combine to a unity, and after they have been summed up, they get to moral feeling and willing. The child already learns at school that one is not allowed to add different things.

From there the objections against spiritual science originate. However, where it is measured in life, solutions are found which can be understood and whose comprehensibility can make the soul healthy. Spiritual science can be measured how it can cope with life. Life answers the questions in such a way as well as the scientific questions are answered. A scientific invention is so long a figment, until life proves it true. It proves itself, while it says, yes, if the facts turn out to be right in life, I can reveal myself to you. This also applies to spiritual science.

If the human being walks through the gate of death, he fights in the spiritual world for that which he has already prepared here: the seed of a new life. Then in the postmortal life, the life between birth and death turns out to be a transformation of a new soul life.

We ask a modern psychologist, Bartholomäus von Carneri (1821-1909, Austrian materialist psychologist)) to get to know something about death which is only another state of consciousness to spiritual science. He says: “Life was a fight, the human being got tired from this fight, and death is the most beneficent if it proves to be sleep after the heavy work of life which no god disturbs.”—Yes, you can touch it here with your own hands in this characteristic that got stuck unconsciously in impossible mental pictures. Someone who wants to prove the cessation of the human soul life talks of the fact that it is the most beneficent if he sleeps without being disturbed by a god. I would like to know which mechanic says if his machine does not work: I put it to bed. There one notices how those get entangled who do not yet want to get themselves into spiritual research.

Others admit [the existence of a soul], as that American who was, actually, a chemist said in a lecture which he held in 1909: every human being has to feel as an independent soul. Yes, so far the naturalists who judge impartially have come: behind the bodily, something exists. One is allowed today to speak about soul and spirit in general which are behind the sensory world. However, one is labelled as a daydreamer if one does not only say: this is spirit, spirit, and spirit. However, if you say, as well as one finds beings in the animal and plant realms, there are spiritual hierarchies that outrank the human being, then one discounts it as a pipe dream.

If humanity gradually understands that spiritual research places itself in the spiritual life of the present, it knows: it is the same situation as it was when natural sciences, when Galilei, Copernicus, and Kepler appeared. At that time, people said, the human view has proved with certainty that the earth stands still and the sun circles around it, against all appearance these men state that the earth circles around the sun, that is nonsense.—Even if Copernicus was denoted a swindler; nevertheless, his teachings were accepted later.

The world does not behave much different today compared with spiritual science that substitutes scientific materialism with spiritual reality. Spiritual research shows what its knowledge can give. It solves questions of life and death. However, one objects what I have read out at the beginning of this talk [from two writings]. People who face spiritual science as those once who denounced Copernicus, Galilei, and Kepler as heretics, will “prove” for long that one can prove the human life only from birth to death. The course of the times and of the universal spirit will be in such a way that humanity has to recognise that it will experience the same as it experienced with Giordano Bruno concerning the outer borders of space. People considered the [visible firmament] as the border of space that encloses the world.

Giordano Bruno proved that only the [restricted] human cognitive faculties gave this border. Spiritual science shows today that the temporal firmament, that [the limitation of the human life] between birth and death has to be wiped out. As Giordano Bruno extended the borders of the firmament, spiritual science shows the infinite temporality [of the human life], the infinite possibility of life transformation, [so that the human beings] will recognise the everlasting work with self-knowledge.

Hence, may popular writings speak of figments and prophecies, that who recognises the development says, may people brand spiritual research and spiritual science ever so much. The course of time will show that spiritual research is as little a sect as natural sciences are a sect. One may say about those who want to progress in the area of truth that the genius of humanity will neglect them, and one will recognise that spiritual science is not a sect, but that it speaks about the riddles of life from deep knowledge and that its knowledge has to be handed over—as the knowledge of Copernicus, Galilei, and Kepler—to the welfare of humanity.

I) It is an art of education, based on anthroposophy. It is different from other contemporary currents and world-views.

II) It depends on perceptions that can be developed.

Education : The free individuality of the child is not to be disturbed. We are to give the young human being an organism for life, which he or she can use properly. The soul will develop if we meet it with the right kind of human understanding. The spirit will find its way into the spiritual world. But the physical body is in need of education.

0–7th years. The human being develops from the head; the young child is entirely a sense organ and a sculptor.

The child under seven. Baby: sleeps a great deal because its whole body is like a sense organ—and every sense organ sleeps during the state of perceiving. The senses are awake when the human being is asleep. The secrets of the world lie in the senses; the secrets of the solar system lie in the chest organs. The senses are not predisposed for perceiving, but for plastically forming the organism.

7th–14th years. Human beings develop from the breathing and circulatory systems. A child is wholly a listener and a musician.

Learning to write—not too early—afterward learning to read—arithmetic—as analysis.

9th–10th years. Turning point. One can begin to talk about the outer world as the outer world—but through descriptions—this will harmonize the tendencies of growth.

In children, the soul exerts an immeasurably strong influence on the body.

14th–21st years. The human becomes a being of fantasy and of judgment. After the twelfth year, he or she can grow into the dramatic element. Something then remains for the rest of life. Before this time, a splitting of the personality is not good.

The question of “Drama and Education” has been raised in history through Goethe’s relationship to Shakespeare.

1) The question of the relationship between drama and education will be answered by: What drew Goethe to Shakespeare?

2) Goethe mentions three teachers: Linnaeus, Spinoza, and Shakespeare. From the beginning, he stood in opposition to the first two. But he remained faithful to Shakespeare, although Goethe himself, in his dramatic works, comes to a different way of creating.

3) What attracted Goethe to Shakespeare was what escapes logical reasoning in Shakespeare. If one wanted to explain a Shakespeare play logically, one would be in the same position as someone wanting to explain dreams logically.

4) When is it right to introduce this element into education?

5) The Waldorf school is built on the artistic element. But teachers and educators arein a position different from other artists. They are not working with material that they can permanently shape; they are working with human beings.

6) The method of the Waldorf school is built on anthroposophy. Exact clairvoyance. Exercises in thinking and willing. Through these to recognize: the child—as sense organ and sculptor—and subsequently musician and listener to music.

7) Drama: the old Aristotelian definition: Fear and sympathy in tragedy. A human being facing something higher than the self. Satisfaction and gloating over other people’s misfortunes. A human being facing a state of subordination.

8) In school, drama is to be introduced only at the time of puberty. But all teaching must pay attention to the dramatic element. The dramatic element escapes the intellect. Hence, it is employed as a counterbalance to the training of the pupils’ intellectual powers.

Lyric poetry strengthens feeling—
epic poetry modifies thinking.

Consequently, a child’s words become inward through lyricism. They become worldly through epic poetry.

Tragedy awakens mixed feelings: fear and sympathy.
Comedy awakens self-satisfaction and gloating over other people’s misfortunes.

Comedy: The human being approaches the soul within.
Tragedy: The human being approaches the physical within.

Tasso and Iphigenia: are solutions to artistic problems
Faust: represents the problem of humanity

Shakespeare’s characters are the creations of a theatrical pragmatist, created by someone who was in close and intimate contact with the audience. Goethe studies the problem of humanity in the single human being. Shakespeare embodies a certain kind of dreaming.

The impossibility for Sh. to find support in the outer arrangements of the stage. Hence, the interest is centered in the characters themselves.

In order to fully enjoy Shakespeare, Goethe outwardly contrives conditions bordering on dream conditions.

People always try to look for the logic in Shakespeare’s plays.
However, they are guided not by logic but by the pictorial element.

From the announcement of the theme of today’s lecture “Shakespeare and the New Ideals,” it might be expected that I would speak, above all, about new ideals. But I am convinced that it is not so necessary to speak of new ideals today as it is to speak of a wider question, namely the following: How are men and women of our time to regain the power to follow ideals? After all, no great power is required to speak about ideals; indeed, it is often the case that those who speak most about these great questions, expanding beautiful ideals in abstract words out of their intellect, are those who lack the very power to put ideals into practice. Sometimes, speaking of ideals amounts to no more than holding onto illusions in the mind in order to pass over life’s realities.

At this festival, however, we have every cause to speak of what is spiritual as a reality. For this festival commemorates Shakespeare, and Shakespeare lives in what is spiritual in all that he created; he lives in it as in a real world. Receiving Shakespeare into our minds and souls might therefore be the very stimulus to give us men and women of today the power, the inner impulse to follow ideals, to follow real, spiritual ideals. We shall see our true ideals aright if we bear in mind how transitory many modern ideals have been and are, and how magnificently firm are many old ideals that still hold their own in the world by their effectiveness. Do we not see wide circles of believers in this or that religion, who base their innermost spiritual life and their inner mobility of spirit on something of the past, and gain from it the power of spiritual upliftment? And so we ask how is it that many modern ideals, beautiful as they are, and held for a while with great enthusiasm by large numbers of people, before long vanish as into a cloud, whereas religious or artistic ideals of old carry their full force into humanity not just through centuries but even through millennia?

If we ask this question, we are brought back repeatedly to the fact that, whereas our modern ideals are generally no more than shadow pictures of the intellect, the old ideals were garnered from real spiritual life, from a definite spirituality inherent in the humanity of the time. The intellect can never give human beings real power from the depths of their being. And, because this is so, many modern ideals vanish and fade away long before what speaks to us, through the old religious faiths, or through the old styles of art, from hoary antiquity. Returning to Shakespeare with these thoughts in mind, we know that a power lives in his dramatic work that not only always gives us fresh enthusiasm but also kindles within us—in our imaginations, in our spiritual natures—our own creative powers. Shakespeare has a wonderfully timeless power and, in this power, he is modern, as modern as can be.

Here, from the point of view of the connection between human ideals and Shakespeare, I might perhaps call to mind what I mentioned last Wednesday, namely Shakespeare’s deeply significant influence on Goethe. Countless books and treatises have been written on Shakespeare out of academic cleverness—exceptional cleverness. Taking all of the learned works on Hamlet alone, I think that one could fill library shelves that would cover this wall. But, when we seek to find what it was in Shakespeare that worked on such a man as Goethe, we finally come to the conclusion that absolutely nothing relating to that is contained in all that has been written in these books. They could have remained unwritten. All of the effort that has been brought to bear on Shakespeare stems from the world of the human intellect, which is certainly good for understanding facts of natural science and for giving such an explanation of external nature as we need to found for our modern technical achievements, but which can never penetrate what stands livingly and movingly before us in Shakespeare’s plays.

Indeed, I could go further. Goethe, too, from this standpoint of intellectual understanding, wrote many things on Shakespeare’s plays by way of explanation—on Hamlet, for example—and all of this, too, that Goethe wrote, is, in the main, one-sided and barren. However, what matters is not what Goethe said about Shakespeare, but what he meant when he spoke from his inmost experience, for example, when he said, “These are no mere poems! It is as though the great leaves of fate were opened and the storm-wind of life were blowing through them, turning them quickly to and fro.” These words are no explanation, but voice the devotion of his spirit. Spoken from his own humanity, they are very different from what he himself wrote by way of explanation about Hamlet.

Now, we might ask, why is it that Shakespeare is so difficult to approach intellectually? I shall try to give an answer in a picture. Someone has a vivid dream in which the characters enact a whole incident before the dreamer. Looking back on it later with the intellect, she or he might say that this or that figure in the dream acted wrongly; here is an action without motive or continuity, here are contradictions. But the dream cares little for such criticism. Just as little will the poet care how we criticize with our intellect and whether we find actions contradictory or inconsistent. I once knew a pedantic critic who found it strange that Hamlet, having only just seen the ghost of his father before him, should speak the monologue, “To be or not to be,” saying in it that “no traveller returns” from the land of death. This, the man of learning thought, was really absurd! I do not mean to say that Shakespeare’s dramatic scenes are dream scenes. Shakespeare experiences his scenes in full, living consciousness. They are as conscious as can be. But he uses the intellect only insofar as it serves him to develop his characters, to unfold them, to give form to action. He does not make his intellect master of what is to happen in his scenes.

I speak here from the anthroposophical view of the world. This view I believe, does contain the great ideals of humanity. Perhaps, therefore, I may mention at this point a significant experience that explains fully—by means of “artistic seership”—something that was first known through feeling. I have already had occasion to speak about the way in which “exact clairvoyance” is being cultivated at the Goetheanum, the school of spiritual science in Dornach, Switzerland. I have described the paths to this exact clairvoyance in the books translated into English as How to Know Higher Worlds, Theosophy, and An Outline of Occult Science. By means of certain exercises, carried out no less precisely than in the learning of mathematics, we can strengthen our soul faculties. Gradually, we can so develop our powers of thought, feeling, and will that we are able to live with our souls consciously—not in the unconsciousness of sleep or in dreams—outside the body. We become able to leave behind the physical body with its intellectualistic thought—for this remains with the physical body—in full consciousness. Then we have “imaginations,” by which I do not mean such fanciful imaginings as are justified in artistic work, but I mean true imaginations, true pictures of the spiritual world surrounding us. Through what I have called “imagination,” “inspiration,” and “intuition,” we learn to perceive in the spiritual world. Just as we consciously perceive this physical world and, through our senses, learn to build an understanding of it as a totality from the single sensory impressions of sound and color, so from the spiritual perceptions of exact clairvoyance we learn to build up an understanding of the spiritual world as a totality. Exact clairvoyance has nothing to do with hallucinations and illusions that enter a human being pathologically, always clouding and decreasing consciousness. In exact clairvoyance, we come to know the spiritual world in full consciousness, as clearly and as exactly as when we do mathematical work. Transferring ourselves into high spiritual regions, we experience pictures comparable, not with what are ordinarily known as visions, but rather with memory pictures. But these are pictures of an absolutely real spiritual world.

All of the original ideals of humanity in science, art, and religion were derived from the spiritual world. That is why the old ideals have a greater, more impelling power than modern intellectual ideals. The old ideals were seen in the spiritual world through clairvoyance, a clairvoyance that was at that time more instinctive and dreamlike. They were derived and taken from a spiritual source. By all means let us recognize quite clearly that certain contents of religious faith are no longer suited to our time. They have been handed down from ancient times. We need once more wide-open doors to look into the spiritual world and to take thence, not such abstract ideals as are spoken of on every side, but the power to follow the ideal and the spiritual in science, in art, and in religion.

If we approach Shakespeare with such powers of seeing into the spiritual world, we shall experience something quite specific, and it is of this that I wish to speak. Shakespeare can be understood with true and artistic feeling; exact clairvoyance is, of course, not necessary to have a full experience of his power. But exact clairvoyance can show us something most significant, which will explain why it is that Shakespeare can never let us feel he has left us, why it is that he is forever giving us fresh force and impulse. It is this: whoever has attained exact clairvoyance by developing the powers of thought, feeling, and will can carry over into the spiritual world what we have experienced here of Shakespeare. This is possible. What we have experienced here in the physical body—let us say that we have been entering deeply into the character of Hamlet or Macbeth—we can take this experience over into the spiritual world. We can see what lived in Shakespeare’s deep inner life only when we compare it with the impressions that we are able to take over into the spiritual world from poets of more modern times. I do not wish to mention any particular poet by name—I know that everyone has his or her favorite poets—but any one of the naturalistic poets, particularly of recent years, could be mentioned. If we compare what we take over from Shakespeare with what we have in the spiritual world from these poets, we discover the remarkable fact that Shakespeare’s characters live! When we take them over into the spiritual world, they act. They act differently, but they bring their life here into the spiritual world. Whereas, if we take over the characters created by a modern naturalistic poet into the spiritual world, they really behave more like dolls than human beings! They have no life in them at all, no movement! Shakespeare’s men and women keep their life and character. But the characters of many other poets, derived from naturalism, are just like wooden dolls in the spiritual world! They go through a kind of freezing process! Indeed, we ourselves are chilled by contact with such modern poetry in the spiritual world.

I am not saying this out of any kind of emotion, but as a matter of experience. With this experience in mind, we may ask again: what was it that Goethe felt? “It is as though the great book of fate is opened in Shakespeare, and life’s stormy wind is turning its pages quickly to and fro.” Goethe knew and felt how Shakespeare created from the full depths of the spiritual world. This has given Shakespeare his real immortality: this makes him ever new. We can go through a play of Shakespeare’s and experience it ten, twenty, a hundred times!

Ladies and gentlemen, you have had before you within the last few days the scene from Much Ado about Nothing where the Friar kneels down beside the fallen heroine and utters his conviction of her innocence. It is something unspeakably deep and true, and there is hardly anything in modern literature to be compared with it. Indeed, it is most often the intimate touches in Shakespeare that work with such power and reveal his inner life and vitality.

Or again, in As You Like It, where the Duke stands before the trees and all of the life of nature in the Forest of Arden, and says that they are better counselors than those at court, for they tell him something of what he is as a human being. What a wonderful perception of nature speaks from the whole of this well known passage! “. . . tongues in trees, books in the running brooks. . . .” Here is an understanding of nature, here is a reading of nature! It is true that the more modern poets can also indicate such things, but we often feel that in them it is something second-hand. In Shakespeare, we feel that he is himself everything. Even when they both say the same, it is altogether different whether Shakespeare says it or some other poet.

Thus the great question comes before us: how is it that, in Shakespeare, there is this living quality that is so intimately related to the supersensible? Whence comes the life in Shakespeare’s dramas? This question leads us to see how Shakespeare, working as he did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was able to create something that still had living connections with the life of the most ancient drama. And this most ancient drama, as it speaks to us from Aeschylus, from Sophocles, is in turn a product of the mysteries, those ancient cultic, artistic actions that derive from the most ancient, instinctive, inner spiritual knowledge. We can understand what inspires us so in true art, if we seek the origin of art in the mysteries.

If I now make some brief remarks on the ancient mysteries as the source of the artistic sense and artistic creative power, the objection can of course very easily be made that what is said on this subject from the standpoint of exact clairvoyance is unsupported by sufficient proof. Exact clairvoyance, however, brings us into touch not only with what surrounds us at the present day but also, most empathically, with the world of history, with the historical evolution of humanity, and of the universe. Those who follow the method that I have described in my books can themselves investigate what exact clairvoyance has to say upon the subject of the mysteries.

When speaking of the mysteries, we are looking back into very ancient times in human evolution, times when religion, art, and science did not yet stand separately, side by side, as they do today. Generally, people are insufficiently aware of the changes—the metamorphoses—that art, religion, and science have undergone before reaching the separation and differentiation that they experience today. I will mention only one thing to indicate how, to some extent, modern anthroposophical knowledge brings us into contact again with older forms of true artistic life.

Across the centuries, the works of earlier painters—those, say, before the end of the thirteenth and during the fourteenth centuries—come down to us. We need only think of Cimabue. Thereafter, something that has rightly held sway in modern painting enters into painting. This is what we call perspective. In the paintings in the dome of the Goetheanum in Switzerland, you can see how we are returning once again to the perspective which lies in the colors themselves—where we have a different feeling in the blue, the red, and the yellow. It is as though we were leaving the ordinary physical world: the third dimension of space ceases to have significance, and we work in two dimensions only.

Thus, a painter can return to a connection with the ancient instinctive spiritual experience of humanity. It is this possibility that modern anthroposophy seeks to give through all that I have said concerning exact clairvoyance.

Looking back at the life of ancient, instinctive clairvoyance, we find it connected equally with the artistic, the religious, and the scientific; that is, with the whole of the ancient form of knowledge. There was always an understanding for the union of religion, art, and science—which in those days meant a revelation of divine cosmic forces—in the mystery cults. Insofar as they were a manifestation of divine forces, the mystery cults entered deeply into humanity’s religious feelings; insofar as they were already what we call today artistic—what we cultivate in art—they were the works of art for the people of that time. And, insofar as those ancient peoples were aware that true knowledge is gained, not by seeking it one-sidedly through the head, but through the experience of the whole being, the ancient mysteries in their development were also mediators for human knowledge as it then was. Today, on the other hand, according to the modern view, knowledge can be acquired simply by taking ordinary consciousness—remaining as we are—and observing nature, forming concepts from the facts of nature.

Our modern way of approaching the world in order to gain knowledge of it is not the same as it was in ancient times. In the old way, to look into the spiritual world, one had to lift oneself to a higher level of one’s humanity. Of course, this ancient way of knowing was not the same as our present exact clairvoyance. Nevertheless, the human being did see into the spiritual world. The mystery rites were enacted, not to display something for the outer eye, but to awaken inner experience in the whole human being. Mighty destinies formed the subject of these mystery rites. Through them, human beings were brought to forget their ordinary selves. They were lifted out of ordinary life. Although in a dream and not as clearly as is required today, they entered the state of living outside their bodies. That was the purpose of the mysteries. By the witness of deeply-moving scenes and actions, the mysteries sought to bring the neophyte to the point of living and experiencing outside the physical body.

There are certain fundamental experiences characteristic of life outside the body. One great experience is the following. In the physical body, our ordinary life of feeling is interwoven with the organic processes in our own body. But when we are outside the body, our feeling encompasses everything that surrounds us. We experience in feeling all of the life around us. Imagine that a person is outside the physical body with his or her soul and spiritual life and experiences spiritually—not with the intellect’s ice-cold forces, but with the forces of the soul, with feeling and emotion. Imagine what it feels like to experience outside the body in this way. It is a great sympathy with all things—with thunder and lightning, with the rippling of the stream, the welling forth of the river spring, the sighing of the wind—and a feeling of togetherness also with other human beings, as well as with the spiritual entities of the world. Outside the body, one learns to know this great empathy.

Now, united with this great feeling of empathy, another fundamental feeling also comes over the human being in the face of what is at first unknown. I refer to a certain sense of fear. These two feelings—the feeling of empathy with all the world, and the feeling of fear—played a great part in the ancient mysteries. When the pupils had strengthened themselves in their inner lives so that they were able, without turning away and without losing their inner control, to bear both the living empathy with the world and the fear, then they were ripe enough and sufficiently evolved really to see into the spiritual worlds. They were then ready to live and experience the spiritual world. And they were ready, too, to communicate to their fellow human beings knowledge drawn from spiritual worlds. With their feeling, they could work down from the spiritual worlds into this world, and a new poetic power was revealed in their speech. Their hands became skilled to work in colors; they were able to command the inner rhythm of their organism so that they could become musicians for the benefit of other human beings. In this way, they became artists. They could hand down from the mysteries what the primeval religions gave to humanity. Anyone who looks into the Catholic Mass with inner spiritual knowledge knows that it is the last shadow-like reflection of what was living in the mysteries.

At first, what was living in the mysteries had its artistic and its religious side. Afterward, these two separated. In Aeschylus and in Sophocles we already see the artistic element, as it were, lifted out of the mysteries. There is the divine hero, Prometheus. In Prometheus, the human being comes to know something of the deeply-moving, terrifying experiences, the inner fear of the mysteries. What was living in the mysteries, in which the neophytes were initiated into a higher stage of life, becomes in Prometheus a picture, though permeated with living dramatic power. Thus drama became an image of the deepest human experiences. Aristotle, who was already, in a sense, an intellectual, still lived in some of the old traditions. He knew and experienced how drama was a kind of echo of the ancient mysteries. For this reason, Aristotle said, putting into words what was an echo of the ancient mysteries living on in Aeschylus and Sophocles, what has been dismissed by learned men again and again in their books: “Drama is the representation of a scene calling forth sympathy and fear, in order that human beings may be purified of physical passions, that they may undergo catharsis.” We cannot understand what this catharsis, or purification, means unless we look back into the ancient mysteries and see how people were purified of what is physical and lived through mighty experiences in the supersensible, outside their physical bodies. Aristotle describes what had already become a picture in Greek drama. Afterward, this passed over to later dramatists, and we see in Corneille and Racine something that is a fulfillment of Aristotle’s words. We see characters clothed, as it were, in fear and compassion—compassion that is none other than the ancient sympathy and experience with all the world that the human being experienced outside the body. The fear is always there when the human being faces the unknown. The supersensible is always, in a sense, the unknown.

Shakespeare entered into the evolution of drama in his time. He entered into a world that was seeking a new dramatic element. Something transcending ordinary human life lives in drama. Shakespeare entered deeply into this. He was inspired by that ancient dramatic power which, to a certain extent, was still felt by his contemporaries. And he worked in such a way that we feel in Shakespeare that more than a single human personality is at work: the spirit of his century is at work and, with it, the spirit of the whole of human evolution. Shakespeare still lived in that ancient feeling, and so he called something to life in himself that enabled him to form his dramatic characters and human figures, not in any intellectual way, but by living right within them himself. The characters of Shakespeare’s plays come, not from human intellect, but from a power kindled and fired in the human being. It is this power that we must seek again if we would develop the true ideal of humanity.

Let us come back to the unification of art, science, and religion. This is our aim at the Goetheanum in Dornach. By the development of exact clairvoyance, we come to understand what was at work in the ancient mysteries. The element that the mystery dramatists placed, as yet externally, before their audiences was still at work in Shakespeare who recreated it in a wonderfully inward way.

It is no mere outer feature of Shakespeare’s plays that we find in them about a hundred and fifty names of different plants and about a hundred names of birds, everywhere intimately, lovingly interwoven with human life. All of this is part of the single whole in Shakespeare.

Shakespeare took the continuous current that flows through human evolution from the ancient Mysteries—their cults and rites—wholly into his inner life. He took this impulse of the ancient mysteries and his plays come forth like dreams that are awake and real. The intellect with its explanations, its consistencies and inconsistencies, cannot approach them. As little as we can apply intellectual standards to a Prometheus or an Oedipus, just so little can we apply them to Shakespeare’s plays.

Thus, in a wonderful way, we see in Shakespeare’s own person a development that we can call a mystery development. Shakespeare comes to London where he draws on historical traditions for his material. In his plays, he is still dependent on others. We see then how, from about 1598 onward, a certain inner life awakens. Shakespeare’s own artistic imagination comes to life. He is able to stamp his characters with the very interior of his being. Sometime later, when he has created Hamlet, a kind of bitterness toward the external physical world comes over him. We feel as though he were living in other worlds and judging the physical world differently—as though he were looking down from the point of view of other worlds. We then see him emerge from this inner deepening of experience with all of its inner tragedy. First, Shakespeare learns the external dramatic medium. Next, he goes through deepest inwardness—what I would call the meeting with the World Spirit, of which Goethe spoke so beautifully. Then he re-enters life with a certain humor, and his work carries with it the loftiest spirituality joined with the highest dramatic power. Here, I am thinking, for example, of The Tempest, one of the most wonderful creations of all humankind, one of the richest products of the evolution of dramatic art. In it, Shakespeare, in a living, human way, is able to lay his ripe philosophy of life into every character and figure.

So, having seen the art of drama derive from the ancient mysteries whose purpose was the living evolution of humanity, we can understand how it is that such an educational power goes out from Shakespeare’s plays. We can see how Shakespeare’s work, which arose out of a kind of self education given by nature herself, which he then lifted to the highest spirituality, can work in our schools and penetrate the living education of our youth. Once we have thus experienced their full cosmic spirituality, Shakespeare’s dramas must be livingly present with us when we consider the great educational questions of the day. But we must be active with all of the means at our disposal, for only by the deepest spirituality shall we find in Shakespeare the answer to these questions.

Such are the ideals that humanity needs so sorely. We have a wonderful natural science in our time, but it places a world that is dense and material before us. It can teach us nothing else than the final end of it all in a kind of universal death. And, when we consider natural evolution, as it is given to us in the thoughts of the last centuries, it seems like something strange and foreign when we look up to our spiritual ideals. So we ask whether the religious ideal has a real force, adequate to the needs of the civilized world today. But it has not. We must regain this real force by rising to the spiritual world. Only then, by spiritual knowledge and not by mere belief, shall we find the strength in our ideals to overcome all material aspects in the cosmos. We must be able to lift ourselves up to the power that creates from truly religious ideals, the power to overcome the world of matter in the universe.

We can do this only if we yield ourselves to the spiritual conception of the world and, for this, Shakespeare can be a great leader. Moreover, it is an intense social need that there be a spiritual conception of the world working in our time. Do not think that I am speaking out of egotism when I refer once again to Dornach in Switzerland, where we are cultivating what can lead humanity once more into the reality of the spiritual, into the true spiritual nature of the world. Only because of this were we able to overcome many of those contending interests working in people today and so sadly splitting them into parties and differing sections in every sphere of life. I could mention that, from 1913 until now, almost without a break, through the whole period of the war, while nearby the thunder of the cannon was heard, members of no less than seventeen nations have been working together in Dornach. That seventeen nations could work together peacefully during the greatest of all wars, this, too, seems to me a great ideal in education. What is possible on a small scale should be possible on a large scale, and human progress—human civilization—needs it. And, precisely because we favor an international advance in human civilization, I point to Shakespeare as a figure who worked in all humanity. He gave all humanity a great inspiration for new human ideals, ideals that have a meaning for international, universal humanity.

Therefore, let me close on this festival day with these words of Goethe, words that Goethe was impelled to speak when he felt the fullness of the spirituality in Shakespeare. There then arose from his heart a saying that, I think, must set its stamp on all our understanding of the great poet, who will remain an eternal source of inspiration to all. Conscious of this, Goethe uttered these words on Shakespeare with which we may close our thoughts today: “It is the nature of spirit to inspire spirit eternally.” Hence, we may rightly say, “Shakespeare for ever and without end!”