The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. Mind and Matter. Life and Death

[ 1 ] The subtitle of today’s lecture refers primarily to the choice of its subject matter. At a time when we are surrounded by such gravity, at a time that holds within its bosom so much of what the future of humanity must bring, it seemed right to me to to begin this winter’s lecture series by directing our attention to the great questions of the human soul—its nature, its destiny—and to those sources within the human soul where its strongest inner forces lie. And what will form the basis of today’s lecture—a spiritual scientific reflection on spirit and matter, life and death—undoubtedly belongs to that which the great Greek philosopher Plato already said: that without its exploration, life is not truly valuable for human beings.

[ 2 ] I would like to begin by directing your attention to a few thinkers who, throughout the 19th century and up to the present day, have struggled to find a solution to precisely those mysteries that are to occupy us today, —drawing upon the entire body of scientific knowledge of the 19th century, drawing upon everything that the deepest thought of modern times has offered the soul as a foundation—in order to arrive at an understanding of the relationship between human beings as spirit and matter, and of the relationship between human beings—as beings existing in physical life—and the mystery of death. For questions such as those concerning matter and spirit have, at all times and in accordance with the corresponding insights of those eras, affected people in the most diverse ways. And one does not truly come close to such questions by merely speaking about them in general terms, but only by casting the spiritual gaze upon the struggling human soul. For only then does the significance of exploring these matters—for our immediate daily life and for the whole deeper destiny of the human being—truly come to the fore in one’s soul. And so I would like to direct your attention first to a spirit who, although he passed away in the 1880s, still speaks directly to us from the present with his outlook and his struggles—a spirit who, through the unique nature of his soul, was driven in the most intense way toward the questions at hand, in that his thinking was nothing less than a struggle with what the admirable natural sciences have to say about material processes—a struggle concerning how the spirit, in which the human being knows itself to be anchored as a soul, must relate to what surrounds it as material processes. I would like to direct your attention to Gustav Theodor Fechner, who, in essence, grappled with the entire intellectual landscape of the 19th century within his receptive soul; who served as a professor in Leipzig until the 1880s; and who contributed to the epistemological questions of the 19th century in the most comprehensive way. But that is not what concerns us today. Rather, we should focus on a situation in his life that he himself describes in a wonderfully tender way right at the beginning of that book, which contains so many of the depths of modern striving—On the Day and Night View of the Human Worldview. He describes how, as his eyesight had already begun to fail, he sat down one day on a bench in Leipzig’s Rosental to rest; how he had before him a hedge with a gap, an opening, through which he could see straight out onto a meadow. He could see the green of the meadow, he recounts—and his eye, his weak eye, found solace in the green of the meadow; he could see the various colorful flowers standing out against the green, the butterflies in every color flitting above the green and the splendor of the flowers: he could hear a morning concert. And he, the insightful scholar, could not help but let his thoughts wander within these perceptions—thoughts that were enriched by the full scientific education of his time.

[ 3 ] Now, in order to gain access to the characteristic thoughts of this perceptive mind, one must consider to some extent what, based on the scientific thinking of the time, was particularly close to Gustav Theodor Fechner’s heart—what had led him, in a unique way, to wrestle inwardly and spiritually with the enigma of matter precisely in such a situation in life. I have, in fact, often drawn attention to that 19th-century philosophical current which I described in my book The Riddles of Philosophy as the worldview of illusionism. I have pointed out how certain considerations in physiology and epistemology, as well as certain approaches to scientific phenomena, led even the most outstanding thinkers of the 19th century to conclude: What human beings perceive as the world of colors surrounding them, and as the sounds surrounding them, does not actually exist in the external world. In the external world there are vibrating, moving atoms and molecules—purely spatial entities that are related to one another in a certain way and move through time. Thus, Schopenhauer and others had already come to say: The colorful world around us, the world of sound around us—it actually exists only as long as a human eye can open to perceive it and a human ear can hear it. In and of itself, when this external world is not confronted by a human eye or a human ear, it is dark and silent—a movement of dark, colorless, lightless, and soundless entities. People had, I would say, come to incorporate into the human self, into the human soul, everything that delights a person, that uplifts them, that surrounds them in the world around them, and to leave to this outside world only the silent and dark cause of pure matter. A mind like Fechner’s does not merely accept such a view as a theory, but rather considers it in light of the question: How can one live with such a view? How can the soul, when it must adopt such a view, establish a relationship with the world? — And that is why Fechner said to himself, in the situation he found himself in during his restful sitting on the bench by the hedge: “There I am looking through this opening in the hedge. I think I perceive the green of the meadow, the play of colors from the butterflies. But all of this is merely an illusion conjured up for me by the colorless, lightless matter. I think I hear the sounds of the morning concert; they are not out there; they only sound when the vibrations of the air, produced by the instruments—the violins and flutes—reach my ear. Out there, everything is soundless, everything is dark and silent. And in truth, one must be aware that, by looking out into the world of matter, one is looking into a soundless, dark world. - Fechner called this view of the material world the “night view.” And he repeatedly pointed out that everything brought to light by the 19th-century natural science—which is by no means to be disputed, but rather admirable—necessarily led to this night view. And this subtle mind knew full well that he was by no means alone in this view: “When you look out there, you look out into eternal night!” But he said—and I would like to read his own words to you here:

[ 4 ] “After all, they are the thoughts of the entire thinking world surrounding me.”

[ 5 ] “No matter how much or about what they may quarrel, philosophers and physicists, materialists and idealists, Darwinists and anti-Darwinists, orthodox thinkers and rationalists all agree on this point. It is not a building block, but a cornerstone of today’s worldview. . .”

[ 6 ] And now Fechner goes on to say: Only when this silent, dark substance strikes the “clump of proteins”—as he puts it—of the human brain does the colorful, magnificent world develop through what takes place within the brain; only then does the “daytime view” emerge—which, however, under the influence of these conditions, essentially becomes a great illusion for humanity. Fechner certainly never believed that, simply because scientific development had led to this “nighttime view” as a transitional stage in the quest for a worldview, one should oppose scientific progress. He, who was himself a subtle natural scientist, certainly did not underestimate the significance of scientific findings, but he directed his spiritual gaze toward a future for humanity that he—as one may believe—suspected lay in the near distance, and of which he believed that this “night view” would in turn give way to another, spiritualized perspective capable of not to contradict in such a dismissive manner what common sense assumes, but one that builds upon all that surrounds us in the world initially called “real” by the naive person, yet rises from that to a world in which the soul must know itself as spirit if it does not wish to lose itself in an insubstantial surrender to matter. And so Fechner says, looking up from the present toward a future he foresees:

[ 7 ] “Indeed, it is my belief that, as surely as night follows day, that nocturnal view of the world will one day be followed by a diurnal view which, rather than contradicting the natural view of things, will instead reinforce it and find in it the foundation for a new development. For when that illusion which turns day into night fades away, everything that is wrong and connected with it—and there is much of it—will naturally have to fade away as well, and the world will appear in a new context, in a new light, and from new positive perspectives.”

[ 8 ] Fechner then attempted on his own to rise from the world—toward which, as he believes, everyday perception is directed—to a world in which the soul can recognize itself as spirit. But it must be said—especially if one adopts the premises of spiritual science as one’s own—that he succeeded in nothing more than arriving, based on the concepts and ideas he formed about the ordinary world and from ordinary science, at certain—one might say—conjectures, conjectural ideas, and notions about a spiritual world. To put it in scholarly terms, one might say: He attempted to conceive of the spiritual world through analogies. The Earth, with its atmosphere, became for him a great organism; the path of the sun’s rays became for him an analogy for nervous processes; the entire solar system, in turn, became for him a great organism that, just like the human organism, possesses a soul within itself. But Fechner builds all these conceptions of a spiritual world upon the ideas of everyday life and the concepts of science, which are directed toward the external material world. One might say: Only his soul’s fundamental inclination toward the spiritual compelled him to make such assumptions—not to remain confined to the material world, but to rise to a spiritual world that he hypothetically constructed.

[ 9 ] If one now asks: At what point did this insightful mind stand, a mind that, in its own development, reflected the development of 19th-century intellectual thought in a unique way? Then one might say: He stood precisely at the starting point of what, for him, was presumably—but now, after another series of years has passed since his work—can emerge with greater certainty precisely from the natural-scientific worldview; he stood at the threshold of what is meant here by spiritual science. — This spiritual science must begin where external, matter-oriented science generally ends. It must begin at the point to which ordinary, everyday life also extends. This science and this life extend to the concepts, notions, and ideas that human beings can form about the external world. Fechner was held fast—or at least was held fast—by the toneless and gloomy material that had imposed itself upon his imagination; held fast by this nocturnal view, yet striving toward the diurnal view. This view of daylight, however, cannot be attained unless one focuses sharply with the eye of the soul on the point where external science and ordinary daily life come to an end—unless one focuses sharply on what is called human thinking and human imagination. It is precisely where ordinary science ends that spiritual science must begin. Therefore, it must grapple with the question: What, in its very essence, is this thinking that lives within us, that drives us to form concepts about all phenomena, about all impressions of the external world—whether joyful or painful, whether more or less indifferent, or involving the great questions of destiny?

[ 10 ] One can only arrive at an answer to this question by attempting to confront thought with the calm—which is so often lacking in today’s scientific life—and with the inner strength derived from the spiritual unfolding of the soul’s life. Then one arrives at that view of thinking which states: This thinking itself, in which the external world is spiritually reflected, is no longer something bound to matter.

[ 11 ] I know that the very utterance of this sentence immediately runs up against countless prejudices of our time. It would take me many hours to list here all the details that fully confirm that, when we think, we are no longer woven into matter, but have already lifted ourselves with our soul out of the material realm—a realm in which the soul exists precisely because it must use the physical body as its instrument for its daily activities. One of the most serious prejudices of the modern worldview is that people fail to recognize the spiritual nature of thinking itself by contemplating this thinking from a spiritual perspective. Whoever does not merely glance back fleetingly at the act of cognition—at thinking—but places himself in a position to step back, as it were, from the act of thinking, yet in such a way that the thinking he engages in during cognition stands before the soul like a kind of mental image—so that it can be closely observed; who, therefore, does not remain within thinking—where it cannot be recognized—but rather steps back from thinking, so to speak, will realize that, in thinking, he lives within that thinking just as—to use once more this comparison I have employed here frequently—one lives within oneself when standing before a mirror. The reflective surface returns an image of one’s own being, but one knows quite precisely: this own being is not inside the mirror; the mirror is merely the cause of its being reflected back to me. By looking into the mirror, I sense my being, and I know that the image of my being is merely being reflected back. I would not perceive this image if the mirror were not there. But I know that the mirror has nothing to do with my essence other than that it reflects my image back to me.

[ 12 ] A precise, unbiased examination of thought reveals that this thought relates to the brain—as the body’s instrument—in such a way that this brain, this instrument of the body, is like a mirror; though not like a lifeless mirror, but like a living mirror, as we shall soon see. For that which lives and weaves as thought does not take place inside the body through the processes of reflection, but rather takes place in the soul’s own being outside the body, and the body is merely the means by which what would otherwise not come to my consciousness as an image of thought can enter my consciousness. And an unbiased examination of this thinking shows that human beings are greatly mistaken when they regard this thinking itself as a product of some processes within the body. Attention will first be drawn to this error here by means of a comparison.

[ 13 ] When we walk along a path that has, let’s say, soft ground, the imprints of our footsteps remain in that ground. We could not walk if the ground did not offer us resistance, if we could not step on it. We imprint the traces of our walking on the ground. But it would be absurd for someone coming after us to believe that the footprints imprinted in the ground were caused by forces within the earth itself. Only the one who knows this understands the matter: a being that has nothing to do with the earth has walked across it, but everything this being has accomplished is imprinted in the earth.

[ 14 ] This is roughly how the relationship between thought in the soul and the nervous system appears to the observer who is able to rise to a self-awareness of thought. The nervous system must be there; the entire physical organism must be there; the soul could not unfold thinking here in life between birth and death, just as little as we could stride across an abyss without having ground beneath our feet. The soul would not perceive this weaving in thought if it were not confronted, like a foundation, with that in which it imprints and weaves what lives within it as soul and spirit. Then the physiologist and the biologist can come and investigate how everything the soul has woven, everything it has imprinted, and the processes taking place within it are also imprinted and reflected in the physical organs; then they can develop the correct understanding for each individual aspect: that everything that lives in the soul is verifiable in the human brain and in the human nervous system. But one would be led astray if one were to explain everything that lives and weaves within thought as if it were, so to speak, springing forth from the inner processes of the brain and the nervous system.

[ 15 ] The truths I am thus developing cannot be substantiated, in the ordinary sense—as is often demanded today—by a superficial logic. In fact, they can very easily be attacked and criticized by such a superficial logic. But the one who devotes himself to the methods that have been described here more often than the methods of spiritual research— that is, anyone who allows themselves to become completely still within their soul, so that they can truly experience this withdrawal from thinking—such a person arrives at these truths, just as the scientist of the external world arrives at his results, through the contemplation of the soul, which is thus directed toward the weaving and essence of thinking, as truths given directly in experience. These truths must be experienced; they can be experienced only by the spiritual researcher first developing those inner methods of inquiry that I have frequently described here—which you can also find described in my book How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? and in my Outline of Esoteric Science, and now, in relation to external science, in my latest book, The Mystery of Man. Once the spiritual researcher has thus reached the point of truly penetrating the spiritual nature of thought, he can then ascend to further stages of exploring the spiritual world. For then he can further develop that which otherwise lives within thought but remains unrecognized, so that—through the unfolding of a special inner life described in those books—he immerses himself, as it were, in thought that exists independently of the physical world. It is a further development of that independence of thought which can be recognized in its very essence. It is, in a sense, an acceptance of what the world offers us as the first truly spiritual thing: thinking as a foundation, as a root, from which one can now allow all that which can be developed through further meditation and concentration of thought—through further methods of spiritual research described in those books—to grow. But by no longer viewing thinking merely as something that, in a sense, tears us away from matter—that stands opposed to our material world as an independent spiritual entity—but rather by further developing it through inner soul work, we come to experience, in a more intense sense, what can be called directly “life in the spiritual human being”—independent of the material human being—the breaking away from everything that constitutes the human being as a physical, material entity. This emergence of the spiritual-soul aspect from the physical body becomes a reality as the human being further develops their thinking in the manner described.

[ 16 ] And then the human being comes to see—now also for the sake of knowledge, not for the sake of life—that which Fechner calls the “daytime perspective” sinking into the night. As human beings fully immerse themselves, inwardly and spiritually, in the life and interplay of pure, senseless thought, the outer world of material effects that initially surrounds us truly vanishes. Instead, however, the human being’s spiritual gaze is directed toward his own essence, and the human being—who otherwise always knows himself as the subject, as that in which he lives—now has himself before him; he becomes—if I may use the expression—an object of himself; he steps back from himself.

[ 17 ] In saying this, I would like to point out a second figure of the 19th century who, because he was not merely a theoretical thinker but a sensitive thinker and scientist, perceived this unique mode of thinking—and was thereby driven to truly grasp the immaterial essence of this very mode of thinking. I would like to direct your attention to Karl Rosenkranz—a figure who is indeed less well-known but who, I would say, truly embodied the full power of German thought in the 19th century—who, until the 1870s, was Kant’s successor, the later successor, to the chair of philosophy in Königsberg. Karl Rosenkranz was a student of Kant and Hegel, but a student who, in his equally insightful spirit, truly knew how to transform questions of knowledge into questions of life and destiny, and who went so far as to say to himself: You must reach a point in your thinking where you are independent of the entire external sensory world, to which you, through thinking, first seek to gain access. And that is when the idea of thinking independent of the external world—of the material world—came to Karl Rosenkranz. And in the way Karl Rosenkranz speaks of thinking—when it knows itself to be independent of the external world that otherwise nurtures, sustains, and supports human beings in life—in this very way that Karl Rosenkranz speaks of this kind of thinking, one can see how deeply he felt what it means to make a transition from the external, physical, material world to the spiritual world; what it means, therefore, in order to recognize what the spirit is, to truly set aside for a moment everything that surrounds us materially as the world, and to withdraw into the pure thought of the world. There, if this thought cannot undergo the development I have just indicated, it is initially found in its terrible emptiness. For in ordinary life we are accustomed to directing our thoughts toward external things—the external things that act upon us through the senses—and to representing them in our thoughts. If we now disregard the external world, as Karl Rosenkranz intended, and then withdraw into thinking—without, based on the realization that this thinking is body-free, further developing it and ascending to a state of stepping out of the body—then thinking remains empty. The external world is cast out of it; thinking itself is empty. A person harbors a thought that, as it were, nestles in complete solitude within their soul, as if the world did not exist. To speak of this thought in theoretical terms is relatively meaningless. But for one who recognizes that cognition is a great mystery of life, a destiny of life, this thought is not insignificant. It becomes an inner torment of the soul, a sense of loneliness, a sense of the soul’s abandonment in relation to the external world. And Karl Rosenkranz expresses this feeling of a genuine thinker striving for living knowledge with the following—I would say—heartfelt words:

[ 18 ] “The most shattering idea, one I scarcely dare to conceive and can scarcely put into words, is that anything exists at all. From this thought, the absolute, formless abyss of the world stares back at me. It whispers to me like the betrayal of God. I am seized by a dread, as in my childhood, when I read the Revelation of John and heaven and earth collapsed within it. Around me, the world stretches out in all its breadth, with all the defiance of sensory virtuality”—that is, the effect of forces—“and seems to mock my imagination. It forces me into its orbit, compels me to obey its orders, and laughs at my thought of its nothingness as a mere figment of the imagination. And yet this thought—this seemingly absurd thought of what would be if this world did not exist—is a giant that plays with all of empirical existence.”

[ 19 ] Thus the thinker feels as if standing before an abyss, as it were, at the threshold of spiritual science—that is, having just reached the point where the thought has cast aside the sensory world, but who stops at the gate and does not enter the realm of spiritual science, where thought is now treated like a root from which, through the development of spiritual-scientific methods, the entire plant of those powers of knowledge is cultivated—powers that can now look into the spiritual world. To understand the significance of spiritual science for life today, one must recall those thinkers who have not yet been able to find their way into spiritual science, but who, precisely out of the age of natural science, sensed what takes place in the soul when it seeks to open the gate, when it arrives at the point of thinking that marks the end for external life and for external science, but which is the starting point and the point of departure for the true knowledge of the spiritual world.

[ 20 ] And among these thinkers—I choose as examples of the precursors of spiritual science, which is what I mean here, those thinkers who were not abstract theorists, but for whom the quest to explore the mysteries of human life was a profound matter of destiny for their souls—I also count Gideon Spicker, who taught philosophy for so long at the University of Münster, and who, through the very course of his outward life, demonstrated how knowledge was a destiny, a matter of life itself for him. With a fervent soul that sought to experience the spirit, Gideon Spicker—he described this himself in his beautiful book, published in 1908: From the Monastery to the Academic Professorship—became a Capuchin and a priest; then the path his understanding had to take led him to leave the monastery and immerse himself in philosophy in order to find the path that leads to entry into the spiritual world. Thus Gideon Spicker, too, reached that point where thinking is left to its own devices, where it stands isolated if it does not know how to act as I have indicated. That is why Spicker says of this kind of thinking:

[ 21 ] “All (philosophies), without exception, are based on an unproven and unprovable proposition, namely, the necessity of thought. No investigation, no matter how deeply it may delve, can get beyond this necessity. It must be accepted unconditionally and cannot be justified by anything. Any attempt to prove its truth always presupposes it from the outset.” And now comes that passage where one sees how, in the insights of his soul, he touches directly upon the powers of the heart. Gideon Spicker continues:

[ 22 ] “Beneath it yawns a bottomless abyss, a terrifying darkness untouched by even a single ray of light. We therefore do not know where it comes from, nor where it leads. Whether a merciful God or an evil demon has implanted it in our reason remains uncertain.”

[ 23 ] Spicker thus turns his inner gaze toward this thinking. He concludes: If we do not assume that thinking properly enlightens us about the affairs of the world—that is, if we do not recognize the necessity of thinking in its own right—then we cannot find our way in the world at all. But behind this necessity, Spicker believes, lies a bottomless abyss. In this way, Spicker, too, demonstrates how he stands at the gate of spiritual science but cannot enter. And in his view, it is impossible to determine what actually placed the truth we must necessarily assume within our reason—whether a merciful God or an evil demon.

[ 24 ] One must take thinking seriously if one is to grasp the full significance of knowledge for life. What can such a thinker—who, so to speak, feels compelled to act as Gideon Spicker does—what can he not do? He cannot bring himself to step back from thought in order to observe it, and thereby gain the conviction that this thought is of a spiritual nature. For then—precisely because things, when observed, reveal their true nature—it presents itself in its true nature, as it is, and leaves us no choice between the merciful God and the evil demon who might have implanted it in reason.

[ 25 ] On the path of knowledge in the humanities, everything depends on becoming familiar with the nature of thought—not accepting this thought as an end in itself, but viewing it as a starting point that is meant to lead us forward.

[ 26 ] I would like to point out how, in the course of ordinary life, a person—if only they pay close attention to certain subtler phenomena of life— can gain the conviction that thinking does not merely reside in our “I,” in our soul, or even in our brain, but that it has an essential existence in the outer world; that thinking is a contributing force among the creative powers; that it interweaves and permeates the world; that it is not thinking within us, but rather that we, with our soul, live in a world interwoven with thoughts. It does not yet require the application of the methods of spiritual science, nor even active engagement in spiritual scientific research itself, to arrive at this conviction, but only an intimate observation of certain processes. When a person awakens under conditions favorable to these experiences, they may retain something like a vague recollection of what transpired just before they woke up. There, as if flowing over from the state of sleep into the waking state, thoughts may intrude into the waking state—thoughts of which a person can see that they would never have thought them while awake, that they have no connection to anything that can be thought while awake. I can only point these things out; if we had more time, we would see that all objections regarding reminiscences, memories, and so on—which might be such notions—would fall away if the investigation were conducted more closely. But then, when one discovers—as a truth of inner experience—“You actually emerge with your soul from the weaving, living thought,” one knows at the same time, when the moments are right—I would say, when the soul is particularly gifted to perceive such a thing—that what is there as a presence of thought itself is weaving together with one’s own, and indeed now physical, being. For one becomes aware: what one has actually lived through in sleep are the processes of the inner being, of the body itself. These processes—you can read about them in my latest book, The Riddle of Man—which one experiences in sleep and which sometimes rise up into dreaming, these processes are images of the inner experience of the body. — Once one has these two insights—the insight into the independent weaving of thoughts in the world, the living thoughts in the world, and the weaving of thoughts concerning our own physicality—then one also has a starting point, grounded in sensation, for inner, meditative work within one’s soul, in order to now ascend to the knowledge of the spiritual world.

[ 27 ] The realization of the spiritual nature of thought itself—which can be attained while awake—and a more precise, more intimate understanding of thought, which can be attained in the manner just hinted at during particularly favorable moments in life—these support one in truly undertaking the inner work of the soul that the spiritual researcher must undertake: To regard this thinking—to put it once more—as a root that is now unfolded through inner soul work, to which I can only allude today; a root that ultimately enables the human being to truly step out of his body with his spiritual-soul aspect, and to now face oneself as one is in everyday life, just as one otherwise faces external things in sensory perception. This stepping out of the body is indeed a reality that becomes accessible to a person when they perform certain soul exercises. But then the human being is not merely able to observe the surrounding world through the instruments of the body; another world is there, one that is not the world of the senses—a world of the spirit now comes into view. As the human being enters this other world of the spirit, he does not—as I have mentioned many times before, but it is necessary to say it again and again, because it is precisely from this angle that most attacks come—not an opponent of natural science, but on the contrary, everything that the admirable modern natural science has rightly brought forth is proven—precisely, and more intensely than natural science can—by what spiritual contemplation finds in the world.

[ 28 ] In my book The Riddle of Man, I have called this perspective—which a person attains by preparing to break free from the constraints of material processes—“contemplative consciousness,” because, as in all my spiritual scientific endeavors, I wished to build upon Goethe’s worldview. In his beautiful essay on “contemplative judgment,” he pointed out how, if a person wishes to strive toward a form of knowledge that supports the spiritual, must not merely passively take in the external material world, but must summon the inner strength to grasp this spiritual realm cognitively, just as one grasps the external sensory world from the outside through the senses. And I have called this life in contemplative consciousness an awakening from the ordinary consciousness of everyday life and ordinary science, which one can imagine as similar to the awakening from the world of dreams into the world of ordinary waking consciousness. And so, to express what he actually means to say, the researcher of the spirit would be compelled to point to three states of consciousness: Dream consciousness, in which the human being is entirely focused on the processes of his own body—processes that, one might say, appear to him not as they actually are, but in the weaving, living thoughts that, as in an imaginative life, reveal what are in fact inner bodily processes. The images during dream life are entirely directed toward the inner physical reality of the human being. The human being is, so to speak, enclosed within his own skin, and, if I were to express myself even more precisely, I could say: It is not the actual consciousness of the human brain that is involved in the images of dream visions, but rather the soul is turned in the dream toward that which, apart from the processes of the brain, is taking place in the body. But this is reflected in the images that sometimes appear before the soul so colorful and magnificent, and at other times so chaotic. Anyone who now turns the inquiring eye of the soul toward this world of dream imagery will find that, fundamentally speaking, the images themselves—as they ebb and flow in the dream, albeit only as a revelation of inner life—do not differ in their content or essence from the images we have in everyday life.

[ 29 ] Awakening is something entirely different; it is an act of the will. It does not alter the nature of ideas, but rather the human being gathers strength through his will and, by virtue of that will, truly establishes a relationship with the external world as revealed to us by the senses. And in this way, he relates to the external world that which would otherwise be directed only inward. He, as it were, spreads his thinking and his imagination across the surface of external existence, because he has strengthened himself through his will, because he has ordered himself into the external world with his imagination. And wakefulness means: through the will, to integrate the life of imagination, together with the whole human being, into the relationships of the external world.

[ 30 ] In contemplative consciousness, reality becomes, to a certain extent, a truth that must not be misunderstood—namely, that one now perceives, from a higher vantage point, how this external sensory world is, in turn, merely a world of images; we accept it in a gross, material way as the ultimate reality in ordinary life, just as we experience our dream world as reality when we are dreaming. But as we awaken from the dream, the dream world becomes a world of images to us. And it is only from the perspective of waking consciousness that we understand how to properly place the dream world within the totality of the world.

[ 31 ] Deeper thinkers, sensing within their souls a force drawn toward the spiritual world—and not, mind you, to create misleading notions through some form of false asceticism—have, figuratively speaking, called the world of the senses, in its coarse, material reality, a world of images, and have compared it to a dream—not equating the two, but drawing a parallel. Above all, the great German thinker Fichte has a wonderful passage in his treatise on the purpose of humanity, where he speaks about the life and interplay of that which is perceived through the senses. There, Fichte says:

[ 32 ] “Images are: they are the only thing that exists, and they know of themselves, in the manner of images; — images that float by without there being anything over which they float: images connected to one another through images... All reality is transformed into a wondrous dream without a life that is being dreamed, and without a mind that dreams it; into a ‘dream that is connected within a dream of itself.’” These words are not intended to lead people to mistakenly disregard the real world, in which their duties lie and in which their lives must unfold between birth and death; they are not meant to divert people from this world, but rather to draw their attention to the fact that one can awaken from ordinary consciousness — just as one awakens from dreaming consciousness — to a higher consciousness in the contemplative state. And in the contemplative state, one integrates the images of the sensory world that otherwise surround one into the spiritual world, which is now opened up to one in the manner described above. But then, when one thus experiences the spiritual world directly in the soul, one gains a new perspective on the relationship between spirit and matter. For then one comes to perceive this relationship between spirit and matter in the human being himself, in oneself. The awakened, contemplative consciousness—which has, as it were, stepped back from the human being and observes from the outside what the human being does in ordinary cognition—relates to the world differently than what Fechner called the “night vision.” This contemplative consciousness says to itself: Certainly, for everything that a human being thinks and feels—the things that bring them joy, the things they suffer—there are physical processes taking place within them between birth and death in ordinary physical life. A person experiences everything he experiences in his soul through the body, which reflects it back to him like a mirror; otherwise, he would know nothing of it. The body is there so that a person can develop an awareness of these experiences. But when a person thus steps back and truly recognizes himself through real, not imagined, self-observation, he arrives, through contemplation, at a different perspective than the “night view.” Then they come to say to themselves: Yes, in order for me to see the colors of the world, certain processes must take place in my nervous system, in my bodily apparatus; but when I see the blue, the red, when I hear the note C or C-sharp, the processes that matter have already taken place. The soul itself, in its spiritual activity and life, imprints what it does onto, let us say, the brain; the brain reflects back to the soul—which is within the body—that which the soul itself has imprinted. And after the soul has made an imprint on the brain, the brain transforms into a mirror-like entity, reflecting the imprint back. And the soul, by simply living as itself, perceives this imprint as red and blue, or C or C-sharp. It is the soul that has already been working on the brain before it perceives. The entire act of perception is a reflection that comes about because the soul was already working on the body before perception took place.

[ 33 ] Here one looks into an aspect of the human being that cannot be recognized by ordinary consciousness; it can be perceived only through contemplative consciousness. For ordinary consciousness reveals only the world of sensory perception. But ordinary thoughts are, after all, derived from sensory perception. Now, however, one sees beneath the surface of sensory perception; now one observes the activity that otherwise remains unconscious. Now one sees how the soul enters into a relationship with matter, how spirit and matter interact. However, this interaction of spirit and matter presents itself to the observer in a way that is at first startling, perhaps even shocking; it presents itself as follows: While a person experiences what they receive through the ordinary physical inheritance from their father and mother, they live within something that sprouts and shoots forth, that proceeds, as it were, through a natural process unfolding within itself, that is like the development of that which flows from some seed and strives to become ever more and more perfect. As a person begins to develop their soul life—that is, as the soul, in the manner described, enters into a relationship and interaction as spirit with the matter that forms their body—the soul continually carries out, in imagination, in feeling, and in the whole range of ordinary soul experience, what I would like to call “dissolution.” We cannot harbor any sensation or any idea without the soul combating, repressing, and causing the disintegration of that which would otherwise sprout and grow. By, so to speak, repressing the sprouting and growing life of the nerves, the soul brings about that which is then reflected. Let us say—perhaps to state the obvious—that when the soul sees blue, it carries out a process in the nerves that is, in fact, a process of destruction and disintegration. This process forms, as it were, the reflective surface that reflects the blue back. Thus, the soul must continually dissolve the material, causing it to disintegrate; yet it is then restored either during ordinary sleep or in the sleep that is always present—the sleep that also accompanies waking life—and where it is continually restored. But what is revealed to the observing consciousness regarding the relationship of the human being to spirit and matter shows us that the spirit develops—that it unfolds, for example, spiritual consciousness for the human being—by actually continually combating matter, by continually—we can say it outright—destroying it. Thus we see a process that otherwise remains below the threshold of consciousness—a process that those who have approached spiritual science in its earlier form have known well; hence they called the approach to the gateway of spiritual knowledge a “step toward the gateway of death.” One sees that what is called death is not merely the single event that a human being undergoes at the end of life, but rather death is that which is constantly at work within the human being—so effectively so that the living is continually being fought against, so that death is always taking place, unfolding in small, incremental effects. And precisely because death is at work from a person’s birth—or, let us say, from conception—yet in such a way that its effect can always be counterbalanced, life and death are constantly intertwined within the human being. And as the physical is thus counteracted in its growth by the soul, the spiritual develops.

[ 34 ] This is a truth that is, however, surprising when one recognizes its full significance. The physical world develops by sprouting and growing; but everything that sprouts and grows is also subject to a reverse process of development—decay. This decay is always evident—though in an accelerated process in death—whenever consciousness, self-consciousness, in short, spirituality is to develop; for the material must always assert itself. —Thus, the observing consciousness is in fact constantly attuned to the interplay of death. And death is the foundation from which the very spirituality of the human soul develops; as the soul confronts life, it must, in order to attain the spirit, be active with death within life. Then, when the contemplative consciousness has made this inner discovery, it can—if the inner methods of the soul described in the aforementioned books are continued—proceed further; then it can reach a point where it not only knows itself in the spirit such that it perceives how material phenomena and material manifestations actually come about—how, so to speak, death works in its partial manifestations from hour to hour, from moment to moment—but it also learns to — and this lies in steady progress through the methods that have been indicated — the soul learns to survey, as with a single glance, that which unfolds, not in space but in time: the unfolding of the entire life, as the soul works within the physical body between birth or conception and death. Of course, not in every detail—just as one cannot foresee the weather for the coming day, but can foresee that the sun will rise again the next day after setting. Then the soul becomes so free that it not only knows itself to be independent of the physical body, but also gradually rises to the point of knowing itself to be independent of ordinary physical life, which unfolds between birth or conception and death. It then finds itself in the state in which it was before it entered this physical life through birth or conception. Just as a human being overcomes space in physical life, so the soul overcomes time; from a point that lies before birth and conception—in which it feels itself to be aware—it learns to survey life; it learns to view this life as a unity, so to speak, against the backdrop of death, which brings this life to a close. Just as a human being, with contemplative consciousness, perceives what they experience through their senses on the basis of processes of decay and dissolution in their body—as I have described—so now this contemplative consciousness, having not only distanced itself from the body but also freed itself from bodily life, perceives life as if against the backdrop of death. But this death now appears not merely in its superficial aspect, as it appears in external physical life; rather, this superficial aspect appears as if transparent, and behind death the spiritual life appears. Just as the life and activity of the soul within the body appear behind the process of the body’s decay, so too does the spirit of the universe—into which the human being is received when he or she passes through the gateway of death—appear behind the surface of death. This death is, as it were, the surface. This death has an inner reality. Through death, the human being looks into the life and activity of the spirit in the universe.

[ 35 ] Then a person knows that he stands in the spirit, and he knows how, after having lived through this earthly life between birth and death, he passes through the gate of death and is received by the spiritual world, just as his soul is received by the physical body upon ordinary awakening. They know that when this physical life falls away from them, the spiritual world rises up beyond the gate of death. They know that death is the superficial appearance. Behind death, the spiritual world appears; within it, the human being now finds himself. With this knowledge, however, the human being also knows that this life he lives in the material world has its foundation and its significance for the entire physical and spiritual life—for the sum total of human existence. For the human being knows: What he experiences in the material world remains in his consciousness, and this consciousness remains with him—just as thoughts remain in the memory of ordinary life—once he has passed through the gate of death. The life they have lived in the body lives on in their soul, and through this looking back on what they have otherwise experienced in their body, they develop the preparatory forces for their next earthly life. And so the human being learns to survey what may be called repeated earthly lives—a truth of spiritual science that will be discussed in the next lecture, where the destiny of the soul will be addressed, and where the starting point will be what I have arrived at today. I would only like to add that, in this way, a person by no means learns to regard earthly life as insubstantial or meaningless. Rather, because what a person must go through, what they take in during this earthly life, must be carried through the gate of death into the spiritual world—where it lives as a collective memory, as a force within their soul, to journey through the eternities and to shape new earthly lives—thus, through spiritual science, a person learns to live in the spiritual world. And as they thus learn to live in the spiritual world, it becomes apparent that this insight has yet another significance:

[ 36 ] Gustav Theodor Fechner adds another reflection to the one he made while sitting in the Rosental in Leipzig. He says that once—while he was in Saßnitz on Rügen—he wanted to take a walk with the person who had shared his life for so many years to Stubbenkammer through the wonderful woods there; but that person, who had walked through life with him and shared both sorrow and joy, became so tired that she could no longer walk, and she said: “I must let you go alone, but the time will soon come when you’ll have to walk a great deal without me.” Then Fechner said: “Ah, perhaps the time will also come when you’ll have to walk without me.” But let’s not think about that!”—And he walked through the secluded woods on the path from Saßnitz to Stubbenkammer, where the sun shone through the leafy trees, where everything was beautiful and magnificent. There, in a way he hadn’t anticipated—what he called a “night vision”—the full beauty of the external, sensory world presented itself to him. And then, finally, he said something that can touch the heart so deeply: “Truth also reveals itself there in its beauty.” And one senses that this sensory world—in which the soul comes to know itself, in which soul draws near to soul—is not meant to be extinguished by the dark and soundless material world into which humanity would be cast if all that it experiences as color and sound were merely a glow emerging from such an everlasting night; but rather, one senses how this sensory world, while weaving the fates between human beings, does so in such a way that, if this sensory world were to be taken away, one would see the final barriers separating soul from soul fall away, so that one may hope: When the physical shells have been cast off, soul will live in intimate communion with soul. — Here, Fechner’s scientific perspective expands into a conjecture—a strengthened conjecture—regarding the coexistence of souls in the spiritual world after they have passed through the gate of death.

[ 37 ] Through spiritual science, Fechner’s conjecture becomes, so to speak, a certainty that is not sought—for spiritual science must not be guided by feelings—but which emerges as objective truth. Human beings know they exist in the spiritual world; they know that this physical body surrounds them between birth and death so that they may bring into the spiritual world what they can only acquire while within this body. They know that life in this physical world exists, that soul is brought into contact with soul, but that with the shedding of the body, souls truly enter into a relationship that is purely spiritual. In this way, human beings come to know one another, and everything that surrounds them, while standing in the sensory world as a preliminary stage to the spiritual world; they come to understand the necessity of the physical world, but they also come to understand the reality of the spiritual world. And what Fechner sensed, what he surmised, what he longed for—what he hoped for, together with the finest minds of the age of natural science, from natural science developed into spiritual science—that is what spiritual science is to fulfill. And so one would like spiritual science to bring to life Fechner’s words, which were spoken not merely from his own soul, but from many hopeful souls yearning for spiritual knowledge:

[ 38 ] “Indeed, it is my belief that, as surely as night follows day, that nocturnal view of the world will one day be followed by a diurnal view which, rather than contradicting the natural view of things, will instead reinforce it and find therein the foundation for a new development of things. For when that illusion—which turns day into night—fades away, everything that is inverted in connection with it—and there is much of it—will naturally have to fade away as well, and the world will appear in a new context, in a new light, and from new positive perspectives.”

[ 39 ] By turning his contemplative gaze toward this world—for which we hope to find fulfillment through spiritual science—Fechner speaks of how he truly feels at the starting point, not at the end. And, I would say, he then describes how spiritual science, in a prescient and reassuring way:

[ 40 ] “Now clarity is the last thing in these matters, but clarity will also be the last thing.”

[ 41 ] And spiritual science seeks to bring clarity to spiritual life—and thus spiritual certainty—to humanity.