The Rudolf Steiner Archive

23. The Nature of Spiritual Scientific Knowledge and Its Significance for Human Life

[ 1 ] Today [I have the] task of saying a few words about [the] nature of spiritual scientific insights. The point is that when we have spoken here of spiritual scientific insights, the focus has been not so much on the field itself as on the nature of the insight; for example, modern psychology is not a spiritual science in our sense, for the way psychology is treated and practiced today—as mere external observation—it is actually a science of the soul without a soul. In official psychology, one finds, for instance, how ideas arise from sensory perception, and so on. But for those who seek the science of the soul in a different sense, official psychology is fruitless; one cannot learn anything through it about the fate of the soul, for example, after death. It is possible to penetrate the nature of the spiritual and the human soul to such an extent that one can say something about the fate of the soul.

[ 2 ] Spiritual Science [is] misunderstood by many—by those who believe they stand on the solid ground of a religious system, or of science. Spiritual Science, as presented here, has essentially nothing to do with religious creeds or any religious systems. Spiritual Science regards what is contained in religious creeds as a field of research and seeks to uncover what lies within them. One might just as easily call botany a meadow or a field as one might call Theosophy a religious creed.

[ 3 ] Three hundred to four hundred years ago, the state of the natural sciences was such that great thinkers [such as] Kepler and others had turned away from sensory observation. Sensory observation cannot lead to truth in the field under discussion. Spiritual science seeks nothing other than to uncover the highest, most valuable insights through the same logical paths as those used in the natural sciences. The botanist must bring the end of a plant’s development into a unified organic whole with its beginning: development from seed to flower and fruit, and back to seed, and so on. Goethe described the progression of the human being toward old age and maturity. The spiritual-soul aspect is like a seed; he says that in old age one becomes a mystic. Goethe did not, however, mean by “mystic” what is today understood as a form of delusion, but rather that human beings, through their experiences and actions, become ever more mature; they mature and bear the fruit of their lives. We recognize [this] especially in the things we do wrong, but we are usually unable to repeat them. Experiences and forces thus accumulate within a person that he does not utilize, and these forces reach their peak potency—they have become most mature—immediately before death; they form the seed, the spiritual-psychic germs. The ideas and impulses within a person do not fade away; they possess inner potency and inner activity and must continue to have an effect. This coalesces into a spiritual-soul germ, and what possesses inner activity, inner strength, and inner truth is what Goethe refers to as the mystical; he calls the person who grows old a mystic.

[ 4 ] It is different in youth: there we see what lives in the soul burst forth outward; it presses outward; one is an idealist, energetic, effective—not a mystic; from the very first hour of physical existence, the soul bursts forth into outward energy, into outward form-building and development, just as the vital force does in a plant. This fact escapes external psychology—the insight that within us lives a spiritual-soul core that becomes increasingly impulsive as it moves toward old age and then undergoes an intermediate state, only to penetrate outward life once more. The consistent development of the methods of modern psychology—as Franz von Brentano began it—the strictly scientific methods, will and must lead to the doctrine of reincarnation. However, this requires that human beings transform themselves into instruments.

[ 5 ] How do we comprehend and recognize things at all? — If we can know how things, [such as] a work of art, are composed; if we are able to trace it in its becoming, in its composition; if human beings themselves are part of the process. But this is not the case with nature, as Goethe says; it is not the becoming but the become that stands before us, and Goethe’s other significant statement [is]: We do not understand the become.

[ 6 ] There is, however, something in which we are actively involved in the process of becoming. [A] person alternates between [the] states of sleep and wakefulness. What, then, causes fatigue? Fatigue is caused by what a person wears down through a part of their conscious activity. Fatigue does not set in when one lets one’s thoughts wander freely, consciously daydreaming; that does not cause fatigue. But thinking that involves the conscious will—it is the conscious will that makes us tired, that wears us down. Sleeping in a train car is not as restful as sleeping at home in bed. At home, the organism rests, whereas on the train, the body remains in motion. This imposed movement contradicts the body’s innate forces. Every time an activity is imposed on the body from the outside—one that is not part of its own nature—fatigue sets in; this is also the cause of seasickness. Every night during sleep, a process of renewal and regeneration takes place in our body, restoring what we have previously worn out. We are in the midst of this process of renewal, but we are simply not aware of it.

[ 7 ] But this is what spiritual science strives for: that human beings develop in such a way that they can be consciously present during this process of becoming. Through meditation and concentration, they achieve the ability to fall asleep consciously—which, of course, is not actually falling asleep: one lives within oneself without making use of thought or the physical organism. But at first, one experiences this as a miserable state, for one perceives one’s own brain, for example, as an obstacle; one must first work on the brain from the spiritual-soul level, so to speak, reshaping it in order to express through the brain what one experiences spiritually and soulfully. One is indeed consciously involved in this process of becoming and works constructively on the body and the organism in the same way that the spiritual-soul works on the developing child’s organism.

[ 8 ] If one compares children whose parents are still alive with those whose parents have already died, the trained observer can note many interesting things; for example, a teacher may try to stimulate something in a child who lost his father at an early age and find that he is making no progress. The child’s emotional state is influenced by the father’s sympathies and antipathies; one can discern the father’s sympathies or antipathies toward the mother or toward others, or the way the father intended to raise the child. Thus, pronounced antipathies, etc., manifest themselves strikingly in the child as a lingering effect of the deceased. Here, the father’s spiritual and psychological makeup influences the child’s spiritual and psychological makeup.

[ 9 ] Spiritual science will not be guided by prejudices or aversions; rather, these will be guided by the impulses that spiritual science imparts to human life.

[ 10 ] Raphael’s father was not a great painter, but when he died — Raphael was eleven years old when his father died —, what was within him—which had been unable to unfold in the material realm—was able to live out and unfold unhindered by the physical, and this radiated into the spiritual and soul life of the boy Raphael, enabling him to overcome the obstacles.

[ 11 ] Just as our heart and lungs do not grow weary because they are in harmony with the rhythm of the world, so too, when our spiritual-soul life dwells in the spiritual world, it is brought into harmony with the rhythm that is inherent to it; our feelings, sensations, and thoughts are permeated by this rhythm; theosophy has a healing effect. Human beings are provided with [a] spiritual guide, [which] prevents them from rushing along unconsciously like a leaderless locomotive; rather, spiritual science can mean something to the soul: that it knows it is integrated into the spiritual-psychic world, [and that] its [the human being’s] thoughts are [connected] with the thoughts of the world and its will.

[ 12 ] Faust wants to expand his self into a kind of spiritual organism; he feels within himself [the] forces of the cosmos. [So one might say:]

[ 13 ] Thoughts about the world, etc., live in your mind.