The Rudolf Steiner Archive

4. The Human Mind, Soul, and Body

[ 1 ] Anyone who picks up a popular or even a scholarly book today in search of insights into the relationship between the human mind and soul and the external physical body will most likely come across something like the following analogy: That the sensory impressions a person receives from the external world are, so to speak, telegraphic messages that are conducted via the nerves—like wires—to the central station of the nervous system, the brain, and from there are sent back out into the organism to trigger the impulses of the will, and so on. As compelling as such a simile—or one like it—may seem to some today, it can nevertheless be said that, at its core, such a simile is intended merely to conceal our helplessness in the face of the great mystery of the soul and spirit, which can be encapsulated in the words intended to characterize the subject of today’s reflection: the human spirit, soul, and body.

[ 2 ] I have already hinted in my previous lectures that today’s thinking in this field suffers from a fundamental flaw. Precisely when one adopts such an approach—one based on the scientific method that has been so successful in other fields—one still encounters the impossibility of overcoming the prejudice that conflates, within the human being, the life of the soul with the activities of true spiritual life. Today, in scientific, philosophical, and popular perspectives, the soul and the spirit are almost universally conflated. Such considerations today are, in fact, still akin to the situation of a chemist who wanted to analyze a compound and firmly imagined that there must be two components, two constituent substances, in this compound substance—who then acts entirely under the influence of this prejudice and, as a result, cannot arrive at any meaningful conclusions, precisely because he fails to take into account that the investigation can only be fruitful if he approaches it from the perspective of a threefold structure.

[ 3 ] Thus, research today often remains fruitless—in addition to the fact that it is also fruitless for many other reasons—because people are unwilling to let go of the prejudice that human beings can be considered without taking into account their division into the three entities, if I may call them that, or into the three constituent elements of being: body, soul, and spirit. I have also already indicated in an earlier lecture that what is meant here by “spiritual science” is to build a bridge to the spirit from the life of the soul, just as physical science and biology are concerned with building a bridge from the life of the soul to the physical nature of the human being. Once again, I would like to draw attention to what I have already alluded to in order to clarify what is actually meant. It is undoubtedly a psychological experience—albeit in the broader sense—when a person feels hunger, thirst, satiety, the need to breathe, and the like, even though in this case the psychological experience is based on physical and bodily foundations. But no matter how much one develops these sensations, no matter how hard one tries to make hunger stronger or weaker in order to observe it inwardly and psychologically, or no matter how one compares the feeling of hunger with satiety and the like, it is impossible, through this mere inner observation—through what one experiences psychologically—to determine which physical, bodily foundations serve as the conditions for this psychological experience. Here, in the manner with which you are all familiar, a bridge must be built through scientific methods so that one can move from mere psychological experience to what takes place in the human physical organism while this or that psychological experience is present.

[ 4 ] Likewise, however, it is impossible to arrive at any fruitful understanding of the human being as a spiritual being if one wishes to limit oneself solely to what the human being experiences inwardly and emotionally in his life of imagination, in his life of feeling, and in his life of will. Imaginations, feelings, and impulses of will are, after all, the content of the soul. They ebb and flow in everyday waking life. One sometimes attempts to deepen them by moving from mere everyday psychological experience in imagination, feeling, and volition to a kind of mystical immersion into one’s inner self—to a deeper experience of whatever the soul is capable of experiencing in this direction. However, no matter how far one may go with such mystical contemplation, one cannot arrive at a spiritual understanding of the human being through such mysticism, no matter how subtle it may be. Rather, if one is to strive for spiritual understanding—admittedly from the other side, but in an equally serious scientific manner— a bridge must be built from mere psychological experience to the spiritual, just as in the field of physical science, through serious, rigorous methods, a bridge is built from psychological experience to bodily processes—to the chemical or physical processes underlying the sensation of hunger, the sensation of satiety, the need to breathe, and the like. Now, however, one cannot transition to an examination of the human spiritual life in the same way that one transitions from the soul to the consideration of the human physical organization. Different methods are necessary here. I have already alluded to these methods in a general way. Of course, the details cannot be discussed in a short lecture. You will find them in the books I have mentioned many times before: How Does One Gain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, in my Esoteric Science, in the books The Riddle of Man, The Riddles of the Soul, and so on. But I would like to once again present, by way of introduction, some notable characteristics of those methods that can bridge the gap between ordinary human soul life and the spiritual nature of the human being.

[ 5 ] This concerns one thing above all else—something I have already alluded to from other perspectives in these lectures—namely, that many contemporary researchers of the soul believe certain things to be simply impossible, even though they are essential goals that spiritual research must strive toward. How often do we hear psychologists today say that the actual life of the soul cannot be observed? It is pointed out, for example, that subtle feelings cannot be observed because they slip away when one attempts to approach them with an observing mental activity. It is rightly pointed out how disturbed we feel when, for example, we have memorized something, recite it, and then try to observe ourselves doing so. This is presented as if it were a fundamental peculiarity of the life of the soul; yet it is precisely necessary to recognize that what is portrayed here as an impossibility—as a characteristic inability of the life of the soul—must be sought precisely as a method of spiritual science. What the biologist and the physiologist do for the body, the spiritual researcher does for the spirit, by striving to rise from mere everyday and mere mystical self-observation to that true observation of the soul, the impossibility of which is supposed to be demonstrated by the aforementioned example that we cannot observe ourselves while reciting a poem, because we thereby disturb ourselves. Now, it is not necessary to achieve the possibility of self-observation precisely in such external matters as reciting memorized material, although this is also a necessity for those who wish to become researchers of the spirit. It is, however, necessary for the researcher of the spirit and soul to advance to the point of achieving true self-observation by truly having before them a course of imagination, a sequence of thoughts, and even the course of volitional impulses and states of mind—in such a way that, as it were, while this is taking place within his soul, he stands by as his own spectator and truly learns to observe himself inwardly—to observe himself in such a way that the observer and the observed actually become completely distinct from one another. This possibility is often portrayed as something very easy, and those who portray it as such—even though they naturally do not strive for it with full awareness of its inherent difficulty—are also the ones who believe that, while the natural sciences are bound by strict methods, spiritual science is something that can be attained lightheartedly and with ease. True spiritual research, however—which is capable of determining what is essential to spiritual life—requires a methodologically rigorous, patient, and energetic progression in a specific way, even if applied only in the spiritual realm, and not merely as it occurs in the external realm of natural science, but in such a way that anyone familiar with both—natural scientific research and spiritual scientific research—must admit that, compared to the often years-long striving required to arrive at serious spiritual scientific results, the methods of natural science can, in essence, still be mastered more easily.

[ 6 ] The foundation for this true self-observation is laid by attempting, in a thoroughly methodical and systematic way, to introduce a person’s inner will into their life of imagination. Through this, one arrives at what can be called—in the true sense of the word, not in some obscure, mystical sense—meditation, a meditative inner life. In our ordinary, everyday consciousness, we are, of course, not at all accustomed to such a meditative life; there, we organize the sequence of our thoughts entirely according to the course of the external world and its impressions; we let one thought follow another, just as one external impression follows another. The sequence of external impressions provides the thread along which our thoughts run. On the basis of what a person has then acquired as life experience or even wisdom, they organize their inner life and the course of their thoughts in such a way that they eventually come to be able to follow their thoughts from within. Yet all of this can, at most, serve as preparation for what is meant here. This must be attained through slow, patient, and energetic work. It is attained by first exercising caution in introducing into one’s thoughts such regularity and yet—I would say—such arbitrariness that one can be certain: in what one practices in this way, nothing acts as a mere reminiscence, nothing that might arise from any more or less forgotten worlds of imagination, life experiences, and the like. Therefore, it is necessary for anyone who wishes to engage in spiritual research to become accustomed to pursuing the images that they themselves prepare in a clear and orderly manner, or that are provided to them from various sources in a clear and skillful manner, so that at the very moment they surrender to this course of imagery, they can truly say: I can see how I link one image to the next, how I influence the course of my imagination through my will.

[ 7 ] All of this must be brought to the point where it is nothing more than a preparation for what is actually to take place in the life of the soul and spirit. For although this must indeed be carefully prepared in this way, at a certain point in development it emerges as something objective, as a reality coming from the spiritual outer world. Only the person who devotes himself or herself for a time to such inner exercises—the amount of time needed varies from person to person—through which he or she introduces the will into the world of imagination, and through which he or she comes to say to himself or herself: I do not allow ideas to follow one another according to their own laws or according to laws absorbed from the outside, but through my own will I introduce that regularity into my life of imagination, whereby one idea is linked to the next—such a person gradually reaches the point — once he has introduced arbitrariness into the sequence of images and then overcome it, to discover something within himself that, just as necessarily from the spiritual realm, links one image, one thought, to the next, and thus evokes an inner life of the soul governed by a spiritual reality. Just as external observation regulates the life of the imagination and—by virtue of the fact that the sequence of external events and the characteristic properties of external entities underlie the ideas—introduces necessity into the ideas, so that they become mediators of external reality, so too does the life of the imagination gradually become a mediator of a spiritual reality. One need only recognize precisely what is meant here in the same sense as something seriously scientific—just as one does with the natural sciences—and not succumb to the prejudice that this leads one into some kind of fantasy, because one does indeed enter into an inner arbitrariness, and realize that in this way one can grasp something spiritually alive, something spiritually real, which approaches our imagination from the opposite side—that is, the side corresponding to external physical reality. For someone who has not dealt much with such matters, it is indeed difficult at first to imagine what is actually meant by these things. Yet these things, which are to form the basis of a future spiritual science and which are to constitute a future method of spiritual scientific research, are—just like the activities of the natural sciences in the laboratory and so on—nothing more than more refined forms of the processes that otherwise take place in the external world. These inner—if I may use the term—manipulations of the spiritual researcher are nothing other than the continuation of what the soul life otherwise accomplishes in order to establish the connection between human soul life and spiritual life, a connection that is actually always present but is brought more or less into consciousness through these exercises.

[ 8 ] I would like to start with something that may be easier to understand in order to characterize what I actually mean. Anyone who engages in all sorts of reflections on this or that aspect of human life or other circumstances can, as they gradually develop a sense for it, discern differences between one person’s descriptions and another’s. They will find that one writer, while perhaps quite erudite in what he says and quite strict in applying his particular method, is—due to the way he expresses things—fundamentally quite distant from what is actually taking place in the essence of things. In contrast, with another writer, one can often find oneself saying—perhaps without even feeling inclined to examine the matter in detail—that simply by the way he speaks about things, he is a person who is close to things and their inner essence. As one reads his lines, he conveys something that truly brings one closer to things. Here is an example:

[ 9 ] One may have many objections to the kind of artistic analysis practiced by the stimulating and highly likable writer Herman Grimm, but if one is sensitive to it—even if one often disagrees with some of Grimm’s remarks, or even finds him amateurish compared to what rigorous scholars have to say—one must nevertheless admit: There is something in his writings that draws one toward the works of art, toward the artists, and even toward their personal character. It is, I would say, a certain atmosphere in Herman Grimm’s writings that leads one directly from what he says to the very essence of what he is discussing. One might ask: How does such a mind come to distinguish itself in such a characteristic way from others, who may well be quite learned? For those accustomed not to speak in general abstract terms about such matters, but to seek real reasons for such a phenomenon, the following may well become apparent: For example, in one passage—though you can find similar observations elsewhere in Herman Grimm’s writings—where Herman Grimm discusses Raphael in a very beautiful essay, you will come across a few sentences that may sound provocative or irritating to a dry, pedantic, and sober scholar. There, Herman Grimm describes what he believes one would feel if one were to encounter Raphael today, and how one would feel quite differently if one were to encounter Michelangelo today. — Isn’t it true that, for some, discussing such matters in an academic treatise is, from the outset, mere daydreaming? Of course, one can certainly understand such a judgment. In Herman Grimm’s work, you will find such peculiar remarks in numerous places. One might say that he indulges from the outset in certain lines of thought, knowing full well, of course, that they cannot be realized in immediate reality, and naturally intends to say nothing specific about external reality with such remarks. But anyone who has repeatedly indulged in precisely such trains of thought would have—admittedly not in this particular field, for in this field such trains of thought lead nowhere—but certainly in other fields, in other aspects of his contemplation, reached the conclusion that his spiritual faculties have been set in motion to such an extent that he can look more deeply into things, and express them more accurately than others who disdain engaging in such “unnecessary” trains of thought. That is what matters, and what I would like to emphasize.

[ 10 ] When one engages in trains of thought within oneself, merely to create these trains of thought, merely to set one’s thinking in motion—in such a way that it has a potential connection to reality—and if one refrains from wanting anything else from these trains of thought other than to steer one’s thinking into a certain current of development, then what one is doing initially leads to nothing other than a greater agility of one’s thinking, a greater agility of one’s mental faculties in general. The fruit of this then becomes apparent in entirely different areas of observation. One must be able to strictly distinguish between the two. Anyone who cannot do this—who seeks to grasp something real through such a setting of thought in motion, who wants anything other than first preparing one’s thinking in order to then penetrate reality—will fall into fantasies, daydreams, and all manner of hypothesis-making. But whoever possesses the self-mastery and self-control to know precisely that such a setting in motion of thought has, at first, only subjective significance—and whoever then sets in motion the power that arises from such an activity of thought within the soul—for that person, the fruits of this will emerge at a completely different time. Proceeding from this point, Herman Grimm was truly able, in his treatises on Macaulay, Frederick the Great, and so on, to make historical observations that closely resonate with what spiritual science has to say about the life of the human soul and the human spirit. I do not mean to say that Herman Grimm was already a spiritual scientist; he rejects that very notion. Nor do I mean to say that what I have characterized in him is more than something that can already take place in ordinary consciousness. When something like this is developed, when it is pursued further and further, it leads to the introduction of the will into the life of the imagination and to grasping spiritual necessity within that life. For this, however, something else must be added.

[ 11 ] I have also pointed out that, in the development of the spiritual researcher, particular importance must be attached to the ability to surrender oneself to the so-called limits of knowledge. Du Bois-Reymond speaks of seven world mysteries that human beings may find themselves confronted with, describing them as boundaries beyond which human cognition cannot proceed. When a person confronts such boundaries with a twofold approach, they form the very starting point for spiritual scientific investigations. The first is to first feel, in the fullness of one’s inner life, what such a boundary question actually signifies. On such occasions, I like to draw attention to genuine, sincere seekers of knowledge. Take Friedrich Theodor Vischer as an example. When he addressed the important topic of human dream imagery, he encountered such a boundary question. He said to himself: If one considers the relationship between human soul life and human physical life, one must conclude: It is quite certain that the soul cannot be in the body, but it is equally certain that the soul cannot be anywhere outside the body.” Anyone who develops such a way of thinking—one that strives for knowledge not according to conventional, academically prescribed methods, but according to the inner, necessary currents of the soul’s life—will in many cases come to the point where they must say to themselves: You have reached a point where all the ideas that have arisen from your sensory observations—from the entire conscious life that unfolds day by day under the influence of sensory observation—can take you no further. One can, as so often happens today, come to a standstill at such limits and say, “Well, there is simply a limit; human beings cannot go beyond it!” One is already mistaken in saying this. But I do not wish to speak of that. What is at stake is that, precisely at such limits, one tries to penetrate with the full life of the soul; that one tries to immerse oneself in a genuine contradiction that presents spiritual-soul reality to us, just as it presents itself as an external, contradictory reality when a green leaf appears on a plant one moment and a yellow petal the next. Contradictions also manifest themselves in reality. When one experiences them—instead of approaching them with logical thinking or one’s ordinary, sober judgment—when one instead approaches them with the full, living inner being of the soul, when one allows a contradiction to play out within the soul itself and does not approach it with the prejudice of life, seeking to resolve it, then one notices how it swells, how something truly takes shape there that can be compared to what follows, as I have done in my book On the Riddles of the Soul.

[ 12 ] If a lower living being initially has no sense of touch, but only an inner, surging life, and gradually comes into contact with the external world, then what was previously only an inner, surging life takes shape as a sense of touch—this is, after all, a common concept in the natural sciences— and the sense of touch in turn differentiates itself, so that, in a sense, through the gradual interaction of this inner life with the external world, the external world itself first becomes an inner experience. This image of the sense of touch can be applied to that psychological and spiritual experience that must arise in the spiritual researcher. Faced with such thresholds of knowledge, he allows them to play out fully within his soul; he allows them to assert themselves. Then it is as if inner life were not encountering a physical external world, but rather a spiritual world, and a spiritual sense of touch truly develops, then differentiates further and seeks to become what, in a figurative sense, Goethe called “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears.” It is, however, a long way from engaging with such frontier questions of cognition to what I have called “contemplative consciousness” in my book The Riddle of Man. But this contemplative consciousness can be developed. That is the one thing that must be taken into account.

[ 13 ] The other point is that it is precisely through such inner spiritual and psychological activity that one comes to realize that one must not attempt to penetrate the spiritual world with the power of judgment gained through observation of the sensory world—not even in the negative sense of saying that human cognition cannot go beyond itself at this point. Rather, one must refrain from attempting to enter the spiritual world with what one previously held in the soul, before one has prepared oneself—through these and similar exercises—to truly enter the spiritual world. This requires a certain resignation; it requires renunciation in general. Whereas people are generally accustomed to using what they have gained from the external world to formulate hypotheses and all manner of logical conclusions about what might or might not exist beyond physical experience, the spiritual researcher must truly make it—not only an inner conviction, but —and I say this explicitly—make it an inner intellectual virtue not to use anything that originates solely from physical-sensory reality for the characterization of the spiritual world or for the perception of the spiritual world. One must first master this self-restraint; it must become a habitual quality of the soul, so that one refrains from formulating mere hypotheses or mere philosophical speculations about what lies beyond physical-sensory observation. One then comes to realize that, in order to penetrate the spiritual world, the soul must first prepare itself to be ready for it. What gradually develops through the full establishment of this intellectual virtue—supported by the introduction of the will into the life of the imagination, as I have described—leads one to be able to practice that self-observation of which I spoke earlier, which truly enables one, so to speak, to be one’s own spectator while thoughts, feelings, and impulses of the will unfold. Only through such true self-observation does a person come to develop a spiritual activity which they know from experience is not carried out with the aid of the body, but is carried out by the person now standing outside the body with their true self.

[ 14 ] This is a notion that, it must be admitted, is entirely foreign to the worldviews that draw their firm roots from that soil from which, in the present day, worldviews seek almost exclusively to draw their roots. For everything in these worldviews tends toward denying the possibility that a human being can develop a soul life independent of the body, and, when the results of self-observation are cited in this way, toward criticizing them with what has been gained from the external world or what has emerged for the power of judgment from that external world. This approach does not work. Misunderstandings pile up upon misunderstandings for the simple reason that all spiritual research must be based on the exact opposite of what must underlie the scientific way of thinking, even though spiritual research is structured entirely according to the model of scientific research. There, thinking and the methodical development of thinking in experimentation and so on are organized in such a way that human beings apply the scientific methods developed by the power of judgment and the intellect to eavesdrop on nature’s secrets, so that through their intellect they bring things into this or that connection, whereby they reveal their essence and their secrets. This is entirely natural on the basis of the scientific way of thinking. However, the very same power of thought and imagination that is used there to develop all manner of scientific methods is used in spiritual science to first prepare the soul so that it can then observe what spiritual science has to offer. This serves to prepare the soul so that it can observe the phenomena of soul life in a manner completely free from the body. Through this, the human being can move outward from the soul toward the spirit, just as scientific methods move him outward from the soul into the body. Thus, one can say that the very nature of demonstrative, judgmental thinking must change in spiritual science. It must not be absent, but what is achieved through it is not a weighing of reasons and consequences in the same way as in external science; rather, it is the ability to observe, because one has first applied the methods of external science to the development of the soul itself.

[ 15 ] Thus, the spiritual researcher initially prepares himself—using the very same methods by which science otherwise arrives at its final conclusions—to be able to observe the spiritual realm, so that the spiritual appears to him as an experience, just as the physical-sensory world does to the external senses. This gives rise to what I reluctantly call “clairvoyant perception of the spiritual world,” reluctantly because even today, when one speaks of a clairvoyant perception of the external world, reference is often made to older, abnormal states of human soul life, and—whether intentionally or unintentionally—the serious, rigorous method of spiritual science is confused with all sorts of pathological and amateurish methods through which humanity today often seeks to penetrate the spiritual world. I will speak in more detail about such matters in the lecture on “Revelations of the Unconscious.”

[ 16 ] One now comes to observe the life of the soul in such a way that the observation does not merely remain within the realm of psychological experience, but points toward the spirit. I would like to mention two points to begin with—though they could be multiplied a hundredfold—which are, however, important key points. As a person comes to true self-observation in this way—carried out outside the body and thus facing the spirit—he or she arrives at a direct insight, as the immediate result of observation, not only into the relationship between ordinary waking and ordinary sleeping, but above all into the nature of the phenomena of waking up and falling asleep. It remains the fate of spiritual science today that it not only speaks of things that are largely unknown today, but that it must speak in a completely different way than is customary about what plays a role in every human being’s consciousness—things that are actually familiar from everyday life. Added to this is the fact that spiritual science must, of course, use words that are coined for external, ordinary life. This presents many difficulties, since spiritual science must sometimes use the same words in a different sense. It must build upon familiar phenomena of life in order to shed light on the spiritual realm by starting from them. From the standpoint of consciousness—not from the standpoint of the natural sciences, which is not the subject of our consideration today—human beings experience the alternating states of sleep and wakefulness, on the one hand, as the time during which human consciousness is present, from waking up until falling asleep, and on the other hand as the time during which consciousness is plunged into darkness, into the consciousness of sleep. The researcher of the spiritual realm knows that this consciousness is so faint that one usually speaks of the absence of consciousness during sleep. Now, these two alternating states of the human being—both of which are equally necessary for life—are capable, through a realistic examination, of providing some insight into the mystery of the human being. It should be obvious to everyone from the outset that the actual human being cannot possibly start anew with each falling asleep and waking up. That which constitutes the human soul-spiritual being—which otherwise lives as consciousness in the waking state—must also be present during sleep. But for ordinary consciousness, the situation is such that a person cannot observe themselves in sleep through self-observation; therefore, they cannot internally and spiritually compare the waking state with the sleeping state. Externally, from a scientific perspective, this is a different matter. The point is that one comes closer to understanding these things when one truly ascends from ordinary sensory observation to spiritual observation in the manner described, so that one takes hold of the life of imagination, the life of feeling, and the life of will with the inner spiritual eye.

[ 17 ] Let us first turn our attention to the life of the imagination. People generally view it in such a way that they know: I am awake from the moment I wake up until I fall asleep. My thoughts—whether arising from perceptions or welling up from within—take their place within my ordinary waking life. Ordinary consciousness cannot possibly arrive at any other conclusion. The situation is different, however, when the human soul life has been prepared for spiritual observation through such exercises. Then one is able to observe this entire inner world of expansion—waking consciousness itself, from the moment of waking until falling asleep. It is remarkable how, here as in so many other areas, serious natural scientists today encounter what spiritual science brings to light from an entirely different perspective. But natural science can only build a bridge to the life of the soul by starting with the study of the body. It still refuses today to speak of what is being discussed here. That is why natural scientists today, when they speak of these things, use a language entirely different from that of the spiritual scientist. But the two will come together—as surely as the two ends of a mountain tunnel, bored using correct geological and geometric methods, meet in the middle. For example, interesting studies have recently appeared in the field of natural science by the researcher Julius Pikler, who views human waking consciousness in a way quite different from what has been customary in biology up to now. Of course, it does not occur to him to investigate such a thing from a spiritual-scientific perspective. He therefore bases his work on something that is little more than a word. Pikler speaks of a “wakefulness drive” that simply keeps a person awake from the moment they wake up until they fall asleep, that is present even when no specific thoughts or ideas are present, and that is said to manifest itself particularly in boredom. I wanted to point this out simply to show how drilling is taking place from the other side as well.

[ 18 ] Spiritual science cannot simply assume some word or some hypothetically posited force to underlie a phenomenon; rather, it must observe. In fact, it observes what the human soul experiences while in the waking state, which is accessible to everyone. It observes the steady flow of conscious daily life from waking up to falling asleep. What does spiritual science discover? It finds its bearings particularly well when, using its observational methods, it observes the intrusion of thoughts and ideas into this simple waking state. What does the spiritual researcher observe when he follows the calm flow of waking life and then the intrusion of ideas? It becomes apparent to the spiritual researcher that the ordinary, lucid waking state—which otherwise flows along like a calm stream—is interrupted by a partial falling asleep that occurs in the grasping of thoughts and in the experience of thoughts. We are awake in such a way that we continually dampen the waking state down to a partial sleep by introducing mental images into it. We come to understand the soul’s relationship to the life of imagination only by observing how the otherwise intense waking state—while not dimmed as strongly as in dreamless sleep—is nonetheless dimmed, and how into this dimming falls, each time, the thought that can be evoked by a perception. We therefore do not experience the ordinary waking state with uniform intensity; rather, it is continually dampened and dimmed as we form thoughts. Thus, in imagination and in thought life, what is otherwise present in sleep—in a state of greater or complete dullness—continues into waking life. This leads one to differentiate what is otherwise experienced as a colorful succession of mental images in the waking state. What is otherwise known as waking and sleeping with a uniform degree of intensity must be learned to be conceived in terms of different degrees of intensity. One must be able to observe a state of complete wakefulness, a state of diminished wakefulness, a state of complete sleep, a state of diminished sleep, and so on.

[ 19 ] In this way, one gradually learns to truly take notice in one’s conscious life of what is otherwise completely overlooked. By delving in this way into ordinary soul life, one comes to be able to contemplate the waking state itself through observation—an observation for which the spiritual eye must first be created, just as the physical eye is created for the sensory world. Then one needs no proof for what one sees; one simply sees it. One then comes to recognize a view as the correct one—the immediate one, given through experience—which has been spoken of only extremely rarely in previous psychological teachings, though once in a very beautiful way, namely by the far too little-noticed psychologist Fortlage. Here one stands at one of those points that are so interesting for the development of what today seeks to present itself, in summary, as spiritual research. This is not something entirely new, but rather something that merely needs to be systematically synthesized—though the beginnings of this have already come to light in the work of those who have grappled with this knowledge here and there in this field. Fortlage mentions this once, and Eduard von Hartmann criticizes him for suggesting that ordinary consciousness of the human soul is, in fact, a continuous, attenuated dying. It is a strange, bold assertion, but one that can be substantiated by the natural sciences, even though the natural sciences misinterpret the relevant facts; one need only read, for example, Kassowitz’s studies. Fortlage comes to realize that what gives rise to consciousness does not rest solely on the emergence of the growing, sprouting, flourishing life, but that precisely when conscious life arises in the soul, the sprouting, growing, flourishing life in the human organism must die off, so that we carry death within us in part throughout our entire life, insofar as it is a conscious one. As we form ideas, something in our nervous system is destroyed, but it reforms itself immediately afterward. Decay is followed once again by reconstruction. Conscious soul life is based on processes of decay, not on processes of budding and sprouting reconstruction. Fortlage puts it very beautifully: If that partial dying—which always occurs in one part of the body, the brain, during the formation of consciousness—were to affect the entire body each time, as physical death does, then human beings would have to die continuously. For Fortlage, physical death merely expresses, in a single instance, the sum total of what consciousness continuously rests upon. Therefore, Fortlage can conclude—albeit only hypothetically, since he does not yet possess spiritual vision—that if we are dealing with a partial death every time our ordinary consciousness arises, then general death is the emergence of a consciousness under different conditions, which human beings develop for the spiritual world once they have passed through the gate of death.

[ 20 ] Here, like a flash of insight, it becomes clear and distinct what spiritual science will develop more and more precisely by applying its methods of observation to the human being. Here, science demonstrates that the human being as a whole—which is rightly viewed today from one perspective as subject to the principle of evolution—must not be viewed solely through the lens of that principle. I will not extend this line of thought beyond the human being at this time; we will discuss nature in detail later, where such questions can be addressed. If we limit ourselves to the human being, this human being must be viewed in such a way that we recognize that while a process of development—of sprouting, budding, and growing life—takes place, a process of decay, a regression, is also constantly occurring. The organs involved in this process of decay—the organs in which development is not progressive but regressive—are, in the human body, primarily the nervous system. Spiritual consciousness intervenes in the human being by causing the growing, sprouting processes to alternate with processes that represent a regressive development. The entire waking life, from waking up to falling asleep, is based on the fact that upon waking, the soul-spiritual aspect—which has separated from the body upon falling asleep—dives back into the body, and what constitutes progressive development from falling asleep to waking up is transformed, with regard to the nervous system, into a process of regression. In order to think and imagine, a person must break down, must induce cadaverous processes in their nerves, in order to make room for the activity of the spiritual-soul. Natural science will increasingly bear witness to this from the other side. The researcher of the spirit approaches the physical from the spiritual-soul perspective and shows that, as the spiritual-soul flows into the physical upon waking, a process of breakdown occurs until this breakdown has progressed to such an extent that progressive development must once again occur with the onset of sleep. The steadily progressing waking state is based on the fact that, through the soul-spiritual in the human body, an orderly, law-governed process of breakdown—a regression—takes place again and again, in opposition to the current that is alive in ordinary wakefulness, which is active in the forces that allow us to grow and flourish as children. If we introduce imagination and thought into the ordinary waking state, we in turn exert an opposing effect. We introduce into the process of breakdown, from the physical side, elements of further development—partial states of sleep—so that we can say: The state that extends beyond ordinary waking life is weakened by processes that very faintly represent what is present in growth, through this process of breakdown. Now it becomes apparent to the spiritual researcher that this breakdown—this continuously progressing process from waking to falling asleep—is the effect of what the spiritual researcher recognizes, through true self-observation, as the spirit within the human being. The spirit breaks down, and within this breakdown, the activities of imagination and thought assert themselves once again; in these, the soul utilizes the processes of building up in order to incorporate them into the spiritual processes of breakdown. Here we see the spiritual-soul and physical aspects interacting with one another. The spiritual researcher is not inclined to speak amateurishly about the spiritual-soul aspect while disregarding what takes place in the body, precisely because he himself observes how the spirit does not act in such a way as to express the processes of growth and development—which are purely natural processes—but rather processes that are opposite to them. As the spiritual researcher comes to understand what the spirit accomplishes in the body, he also learns to recognize how the soul makes use of bodily processes to dampen spiritual processes by introducing concepts into the process of decay that the spirit carries out. By this I am merely hinting at how the spiritual researcher comes to observe the interrelationship and interaction of the spiritual, the soul, and the physical in the human being.

[ 21 ] Just as, on the one hand, he recognizes a partial falling asleep in the thoughts that intrude into the ordinary waking state, so, on the other hand, he learns to recognize how, every time a volitional impulse enters into the life of the soul, it manifests as a kind of elevation of the waking state, as an awakening. Imagination is like a dimming of the waking state; the volitional impulse is like a waking up, like a flash of light in that state which extends continuously from waking to falling asleep with regard to the volitional life—which is, after all, so dull that one can describe it, even while awake, as a life of sleep. When a person carries out any volitional impulse, what do they know about what is happening in their arm? But every time a volitional impulse arises, it is like waking up.

[ 22 ] I have thus indicated to you how the true observer, who has risen to true self-observation, can comprehend the workings of the human soul forces and spiritual forces in the spiritual realm. By continuing to advance with his methods, he can—just as one comes to know the ordinary, everyday “I”—come to know that “I” which he experiences within himself in this self-observation, the very “I” with which he engages in self-observation. This “I” cannot be recognized through philosophical speculation; it can only be experienced. Once it is experienced, one comes to know through direct perception what I have just sketched out. A person with ordinary consciousness, seeing only the growing, sprouting, and budding forces of development, cannot help but believe that, as the child grows out of a dull state of consciousness and gradually begins to say “I”—that is, to attain self-consciousness at all—what is expressed in the soul as the “I” gradually develops out of the body’s developmental processes. For those who come to know the “I” through true self-observation, it becomes clear that this is a mistake—but it is a necessary mistake for ordinary consciousness—just as it would be a mistake to believe that, because a person has air in their lungs, the air they exhale rises out of the lungs. Here one can already learn through external, factual observation that it would be nonsense to regard the air connected to the human lungs as something that emanates from the human lungs. If one wishes to perceive the air, one must step outside the lungs; if one wishes to perceive the air in its own essence, one must move into the external atmosphere. One does the same when one has risen to self-observation in the manner described here. There one learns to recognize that what takes place within the body in the continuous, sprouting, budding processes of development relates to the human “I”—to the true self—in the same way that the lungs relate to the air. Just as the lungs do not create air, so too does this human body in no way create the “I.” Only as long as one is unaware of the true spiritual-soul aspect does one fall into the inevitable error of believing that this “I” has anything to do with the body. The spiritual researcher, however, through his methods of investigating the “I,” steps outside the body, just as one who wishes to observe the air for itself steps outside the lungs. Thus the spiritual researcher comes to recognize through genuine observation how this “Self,” this spiritual-soul aspect of the human being—if I may use a figurative expression—enters the physical body at birth, or rather at conception—which it receives through the current of heredity; how this “I,” which descends from the spiritual world, is joined to the body, just as the lungs are joined to the air, so that the body inhales this “I,” and as the human being passes through the gate of death, exhales it again. This is a figurative expression for the connection between the spiritual-soul aspect, which descends from the spiritual world, and the physical-bodily aspect. Just as, when one comes to know the essence of air, one does not seek this essence in the outer atmosphere but in the lungs, so too does one not seek the essence of the spiritual-soul “I” in the outer physical body once one has truly come to know the “I.”

[ 23 ] It is precisely then, however, that a fundamental distinction between the spiritual and the soul-related becomes apparent to the spiritual researcher, even in the transition from the human being to the soul-spiritual environment in which the human being lives with that part of their being which passes through birth and death—the eternal, immortal aspect of the human being that stands in contrast to the transience of the body. This distinction between the soul and the spirit arises from the fact that in the soul—which detaches itself from the human being and is not directly connected to the human being—we come to recognize something that is, in a sense, merely a fading undertone of what is otherwise experienced in soul life as imagination, feeling, and will. Let me express this as follows: Let us take a sung song. We can regard the words, we can regard the song initially as poetry, and we can continue this contemplation by listening to the sung song. But we can also, while singing, disregard the content of the words, the sentences, and pay attention to the purely tonal, to the purely melodic—that is, to what comes to light precisely when we disregard the content of the words. It is merely a comparison I am using, but the comparison has real significance in relation to what I am saying here. The whole of human experience in thinking, feeling, and willing can be grasped in such a way that one can perceive an undertone even there, if one does not dwell on the content of thinking, feeling, and willing as they present themselves in ordinary consciousness.

[ 24 ] To express myself even more clearly, I would like to describe the matter from another perspective. You are all aware that certain Eastern peoples ascend to the spiritual-soul realm through methods which I have repeatedly stated—in the lectures I have given here and also in my books—are not applicable in the same way to our Western cultural development; rather, here other methods must be employed for conscious spiritual research. But some points can still be drawn upon for comparison. You know that people in the East attain a certain understanding of the soul—which they may not admit, but that is not the point here—by reciting mantric phrases over and over again. In the West, people laugh at the repetitions in the Buddha’s discourses, unaware that for Easterners, this repetition of certain phrases is a necessity, because it achieves a certain undertone in the inner reception of the material, setting aside what constitutes its immediate content. It is, I might say, as if a music living within these sayings were heard or spoken in the soul. The soul immerses itself in something like this. In my books, you can find how we accomplish this in Western spiritual development in a more spiritual and soulful way, so that we do not fall into such chanting or reciting of mantric sayings or repetitions. But what is achieved there in a different way can be explained by drawing attention to how, in imagining, feeling, and willing, something is experienced that serves as a fundamental tone or undertone.

[ 25 ] If one sets out to achieve complete self-observation while maintaining the content of imagination, feeling, and volition as it exists in ordinary waking consciousness, one usually finds it easiest to discover the workings of the spirit. In contrast, the soul is something more intimate that often eludes us. One must undertake difficult and prolonged exercises if one wishes to access it. While it is relatively easier to observe how the mind winds down in the flowing state of wakefulness, one must employ more subtle, intimate exercises to observe how the images that arise there are partial states of sleep. But when one then arrives at this more intimate experience in the soul through methods such as those I have described in my books, one also moves from mere subjective soul life into objective soul life. One then does not merely follow the spiritual-soul life as such—as one follows the air from the lungs out into the atmosphere—into that spiritual realm which the human being experiences between death and a new birth, in a purely spiritual experience—but one can then follow the soul life in its state before birth and in its state after death. As strange as this may still sound to people today, these things can be experienced. And on the basis of this experience—which Easterners cultivate in a way that is so closely attuned to the intimate life of the soul—they realized, sooner than Westerners did, how the entire human life of the soul unfolds in repeated earthly lives, and how repeated earthly lives truly emerge as the result of observation. It is a finding derived from observation of soul experience. To experience in its spiritual nature the eternal, imperishable being that passes through births and deaths is, however, something different from this soul experience as it occurs in repeated earthly lives. It is like a specialization, a differentiation of spiritual experience.

[ 26 ] Just as one can see, in the individual human being, the interplay of the general spiritual life with the soul—where imagination is introduced as a kind of partial slumber—so too can one observe in the outer world—I will go into these matters in greater detail in the next lecture—how the soul intervenes in that spiritual realm which is discovered as the setting for the eternal spiritual in the human being, by specializing the general eternal spiritual life into repeated earthly lives, which, however, did have a beginning and will come to an end. I will speak about this in the next lecture.

[ 27 ] This is achieved through the genuine cultivation of spiritual faculties, which not everyone needs to acquire. But every human being has a sense of truth. If this sense of truth is not clouded by prejudices—which are all too easily found today in popular or scientific worldviews—then one will be able to agree with what the spiritual researcher has to say, even before becoming a spiritual researcher oneself. For the seer differs from other people—I have already expressed this here as a parable—just as the person who watches the watchmaker differs from the one who merely sees the watch. The one who sees the watch knows that it came into being through the watchmaker’s intellectual activity; one need not have watched the watchmaker to know this. When the spiritual researcher, based on his research and through clairvoyant observation, describes how the realities of everyday life come into being, the person who directly observes these realities will find confirmation of what has been said everywhere, even if he is not a spiritual researcher himself. Even if the way a spiritual researcher conceives of the human body, soul, and spirit still appears somewhat paradoxical within the general development of spiritual culture today, over time—as the natural sciences work against what spiritual research has to say—spiritual research will also come to realize what has slowly and gradually become evident in the natural sciences. Just consider that there was indeed a time when certain prejudices prevented the emergence of physiology and biology as we understand them today. Similarly, there is a prejudice today against bridging the gap between human soul life and what takes place within the human body as the soul life flows through it. The study of anatomy, too, only emerged in the course of the Middle Ages. Before that, there was a prejudice against adding what takes place within the body to what the soul can experience inwardly. Spiritual science finds itself in the same situation today. And even if one finds it hard to believe, today’s prejudices are of the same nature and stem from the same causes. Just as in the Middle Ages people were unwilling to allow the body to be dissected in order to recognize what takes place within it as a prerequisite for spiritual life, so even today the most serious scientists still resist investigating the spirit through spiritual scientific methods. And just as the Middle Ages only gradually came to allow the scientific study of the human body, so too will the cultural development of humanity make it necessary for the study of the spirit—which is not the same as the soul—to be opened up to spiritual science.

[ 28 ] Whether one approaches people today who think in the manner of natural scientists, or other researchers of the soul, and presents findings from the humanities, one truly experiences the same thing—only in a different field—as described in Galileo’s biography. Up until Galileo’s time, the old prejudice—which still needed to be overcome in relation to physical phenomena—persisted; this prejudice, stemming from a misinterpretation of Aristotle, had been perpetuated throughout the entire Middle Ages, namely, that the nerves originate in the heart. Galileo had told a friend that this was a prejudice. The friend was a staunch adherent of Aristotle. He said that what is written in Aristotle is true, and it states that nerves originate from the heart. Galileo then demonstrated to the man, using a cadaver, how visual evidence showed that nerves originate from the brain, not from the heart, and that Aristotle had not observed this because such anatomical observation was not yet possible for him. The Aristotelian believer remained skeptical nonetheless. Although he saw that the nerves originate in the brain, he said, “Visible evidence may support you, but Aristotle says otherwise, and if there is a contradiction between Aristotle and nature, I do not believe nature, but Aristotle.” This actually happened. And it is still the case today. Go today to those who, in the old sense, wish to ground the study of the soul from a philosophical standpoint; go to those who wish to ground the study of the soul in a natural-scientific manner—they will assert that what underlies the phenomena of the soul, whether originating in the spirit or the body, must somehow be explained solely from within the soul itself; and no matter how much one points to facts of spiritual observation—which, after all, is not as easy to carry out as our scientific observation, and spiritual anatomy will be more difficult to practice than physical anatomy—one will be met today with the same line of reasoning: If there is a contradiction between what Wundt or Paulsen or any other authority says and what spiritual science demonstrates through spiritual observation, we do not believe the spiritual observation, but rather what is written in the books to which we have become accustomed in this age devoid of authority. For today people no longer believe in authorities, but—though in a way they do not realize it—in whatever is somehow officially sanctioned. Spiritual science will prevail just as natural science has prevailed with regard to the study of the physical body.

[ 29 ] Natural scientists such as Du Bois-Reymond and others like him argue that science must end where the supernatural begins. I have already pointed out in an earlier lecture the error that becomes apparent here. How did it arise? It has indeed been sensed—and Du Bois-Reymond senses it quite clearly—that the human being is rooted in something spiritual. But this spiritual aspect must first be recognized, through the development of spiritual-scientific methods, as the soil from which the human soul springs. If I have a tree before me and see how its roots extend into the ground, I may perhaps be annoyed that it hides its roots from my view, and I want to have a clear view of the tree. Modern science seeks to make things clear by focusing on what is perceptible to the senses; for the root-like elements in the spiritual soil elude it. Science acts like someone who, in order to have a tree clearly and vividly before them, tears it out of the ground or digs it up. They then have it clearly before them, but the tree withers. Thus, modern science, which refuses to engage with the spirit, has torn up the tree of knowledge. But just as surely as the tree torn from its root system withers—even if it is now clearly visible—so too does the knowledge torn from the spiritual mother soil wither. A statement such as that of Du Bois-Reymond—that science ends where the supersensible begins—will in the future give way to the opposite conviction. People will come to realize: If one refuses to acknowledge the supersensible even within natural phenomena, one uproots the Tree of Knowledge from its spiritual soil and causes knowledge to wither away. In the future, people will not say that science ends where the supernatural begins; rather, if one attempts to ground science by removing it from the soil of the supernatural, one will discover that where the supernatural ceases in human spiritual life, science cannot flourish; that no true science will arise outside the supersensible; rather, where the supersensible ends, there will be only a dead science.