The Rudolf Steiner Archive

4. The Human Being in the Light of Anthroposophy

[ 1 ] I would hardly be able to deliver today’s lecture in the form I have in mind if yesterday’s lecture had not preceded it. Not only because this lecture is intended to be a continuation of yesterday’s, but also because what can be said from the perspective of anthroposophical insight about the very essence of the human being sounds so paradoxical to external experience at first that it is indeed necessary to know the solid foundation upon which such insights are built. And I believe I have made it clear that, both from the perspective of the critical mind and from that of conscientious research, anthroposophy can certainly hold its own against everything that modern times have come to regard as scientific methodology and scientific attitude.

[ 2 ] The subject of today’s lecture is precisely the very core of human nature, which also underlies the outer, physical human being in a formative and guiding way. As spiritual science can demonstrate, the physical human being is, more than is generally assumed, part of world evolution as such, and will need to be the subject of the next lecture in the context of world evolution as a whole. Even with regard to the true nature of the human being, people in serious circles today—including serious scientific circles—think differently than was customary just a few decades ago, at the height of materialism, even among the most enlightened people. But what is presented to you in this lecture as anthroposophy may be rejected more strongly than by some other quarters precisely by those who now wish to approach the spiritual-psychic element in human beings in their own way—I would say, while clinging to the more materialistic spirit of science. We see how people today are beginning to take an interest in uncovering the actual reasons why a person can fall into certain abnormal states of mind, in which they experience hallucinations and illusions, and in which they are susceptible to suggestion and autosuggestion. The reason there is such particular interest in these abnormal psychological phenomena today is that—without the forces slumbering in the soul, whose development I have spoken of, actually being unfolded—they can be subjected to investigation just as one conducts an external experiment. One simply approaches such individuals, who have an abnormal mental life in this way, and examines the phenomena just as one is accustomed to conducting experiments in a laboratory or a physics laboratory. These individuals—and even some who do not suffer from such abnormal mental states—very often believe that it is precisely through such abnormal mental states, through visionary perception, and through hallucinatory experiences that one can gain the means to penetrate more deeply into the true essence of the human being. Indeed, it is even believed that in such states one can receive a kind of revelation from actual spiritual worlds. When we examine the human being today from an anthroposophical standpoint, we will be in a position to shed light once again on the significance of these abnormal states of mind. From the critique I offered yesterday, you will be able to see from the outset that anthroposophical spiritual research is critical of these phenomena as well, in the fullest sense of the word.

[ 3 ] Another type of phenomenon occurs when certain thoughts of individuals can undoubtedly be experienced under extraordinary spatial and temporal conditions. These cases are already being discussed today even in very serious scientific circles. One such phenomenon is telepathy. It is said that, without the usual sensory mediation, people in certain states of mind are able to develop a certain perception of thoughts—perhaps even of thoughts taking place at a distance. There is also talk of telekinesis—that is, of certain forces that can emanate from human beings and which, without the physical mediation of the person, manifest themselves, so to speak, merely through an effect at a distance, so that it then appears as though a person could exert a will at a distance without the mediation of their limbs. Indeed, even today, scientific experiments have been conducted using scientific methodology, which fall under the category of teleplasty, where material-like formations, phantoms appear, which are clearly seen to consist, for my sake, of fine matter, of the ethereal, but into which is incorporated, as a plastic formative force, that which is rooted in human thought, that which is present in human thought.

[ 4 ] People speak, then, of telepathy, telekinesis, and teleplasty. Anthroposophical spiritual science must, in turn, pose the critical question regarding these phenomena: Do these phenomena truly stem from what was described yesterday—namely, that when a person falls asleep, their emotional-volitional being steps out of the human physical body and the etheric or formative body and remains outside until they wake up? When we observe what manifests in humans as telepathy or telekinesis, or as telekinesis—are we dealing with an effect of the eternal spiritual-soul aspect, that which we have come to know as the being of feeling and will, or are we perhaps dealing only with what is left behind in the bed when a person sleeps—that is, what consists of the physical body and the etheric or formative body? If we are dealing only with the latter, then no matter how wondrous these phenomena may seem, no matter how strange they may be, they belong to that which disappears with a person’s death. For with a person’s death, that which remains behind when they fall asleep disappears. That which is the truly immortal, eternal essence of the human being—which withdraws from the physical and formative-force bodies when one falls asleep—is, as a rule, also removed from the physical and etheric bodies when these phenomena of telepathy, teleplasty, and telekinesis occur, even if under hypnotic influence or the like. So one must say: These so-called miraculous phenomena cannot point to anything connected with the eternal core of the human being. No matter how miraculous they may be, they are bound to that which detaches itself at death and unites with the element of earth. They can then only point to a world that likewise vanishes from the human being when he passes through the gate of death. Anthroposophical spiritual science must therefore raise this critical objection not only to individual phenomena—many of which are already widely recognized today—but also to the phenomena I described to you yesterday; and it will depend on what anthroposophy has to say about these phenomena, once it has conducted its own research into what the truly eternal core of the human being is.

[ 5 ] Now, perhaps I may once again draw your attention to the fact that through those mental, meditative, and volitional exercises of which I spoke yesterday and in my earlier lectures here, a state is brought about in the human being—specifically in the human being’s emotional and volitional nature—that, on the one hand, resembles the state of sleep, yet at the same time differs radically from it.

[ 6 ] Yesterday I described how the human being’s emotional and volitional nature—which is otherwise unconscious, as it were paralyzed—becomes inwardly alive, illuminated, and energized; how, therefore, the human being can, for the purposes of anthroposophical research, bring about states in which he is, with his emotional and volitional nature, outside the physical body, just as he is during sleep. But they are not then in a dark, gloomy world—a world that entails unconsciousness for them—but rather in a world of spiritual surroundings. And for the human being, the very first object they can look back upon will be their own physical body and their own form-force body—that form-force body which, through thoughts perceived as forces, reflects the world back to the core of the human being’s being, who has stepped out of this physical and form-force body. The world of thoughts with which one was previously connected is, in a sense, reflected back by the physical body left behind, and one now gains an image of the world not by the external world being reflected merely in the sense organs—such as the eye—and thus the physical world being consciously experienced, but rather one gains an image of the spiritual foundation of the world by the entire human organism, as it were, becoming a kind of single, total sense organ, which is now, however, outside the human being, like any other object.

[ 7 ] This being, which exists outside of the human being, is gradually revealed to the human being as he advances further and further in anthroposophical research and becomes ever stronger and stronger inwardly. As I have already said: This state into which the anthroposophical spiritual researcher enters differs from everything a person might experience as a visionary, as someone who hallucinates, or as someone in any kind of abnormal mental state, in that the researcher always has the ability to retain his or her healthy, level-headed consciousness alongside the vision of the higher world. What actually occurs for the person now is something that can be called a back-and-forth oscillation, a swinging back and forth between perceiving the spiritual world and perceiving the physical world. That is to say, the person can alternately be outside their physical body and observe in the manner I have just described; but they can also return to their physical body to full consciousness, to ordinary thinking, feeling, and willing, and evaluate what they have experienced using ordinary thinking, feeling, and willing, with the ordinary, healthy level-headedness with which they otherwise assess their outer sensory life and ordinary life in general. Thus, a person can approach what they explore in this way—what appears before them as a higher experience of the soul—with complete criticality, using the very critical faculties they have cultivated throughout their life.

[ 8 ] This alternation between states is absent in abnormal mental states. The visionary or the person experiencing hallucinations does not have the ability to use his healthy, level-headed will to return at will—whenever he deems it appropriate—to his usual state of clarity, that is, to his ordinary body. It is something involuntary, something subconscious, that leads him, in these abnormal states, to hallucinate or have visions, and it is precisely this lack of critical discernment regarding these abnormal states that must be pointed out again and again when the findings of anthroposophical spiritual research are conflated with what pertains to the hallucinatory and visionary nature.

[ 9 ] But by oscillating in this way back and forth between supersensible vision and the ordinary state of consciousness, one comes more and more to look back—with the powers one has developed in one’s emotional and volitional nature—at what now objectively exists outside the spiritual -psychic core of the human being. And by striving upward to imaginative consciousness, one learns to truly recognize what one has before oneself as an image of another world. And this is the important point: through imaginative and inspired cognition, as I have described in recent days, one learns to assess what it actually is that one now perceives from the outside as the physical body and the body of formative forces. It is, if I may use a comparison, as when someone first has a picture before them and, through an understanding of perspective, comes to know from this picture the corresponding reality that it is meant to depict. Except that what one comes to know in this way from an ordinary picture as the corresponding reality is, after all, merely an inner, psychological experience, whereas the perspective to which, as spiritual research progresses, this objective physical body—this objective body of formative forces—expands is, in fact, an experience of reality. For one comes to recognize that contained within this physical body and this body of formative forces—and specifically contained within the image—is what the human being was before descending into the physical world through birth, or, let us say, through conception. In a sense, what emerges from what one has before one is the perspective that leads back into the spiritual-soul world one passed through before uniting, through conception and birth, with the physical matter received from parents and ancestors through the physical currents of heredity on Earth. And what becomes accessible to the mind is the spiritual-soul environment that surrounded the human being before descending into earthly existence; the world in which the forces reside that the human being has incorporated into the physical form handed down to them by their parents and ancestors becomes accessible.

[ 10 ] One now gets to know oneself in the pre-existent state, and what is peculiar about this is that, in this tableau—which represents the pre-existent essence of the human being—one actually sees the world essentially reversed in relation to a physical perspective. In a physical perspective, one sees nearby objects clearly, and to the extent that objects are farther away, they become less distinct. This, in turn, lies in the nature of perspective perception in the spatial world. In the perspective that now arises from the human being left behind, however, it is the reverse. What is close to physical earthly life is also close to the present experience, and the human being, of course, does not know his inner self in physical earthly life. His physical earthly life is something that obscures his eternal core of being. This “near” aspect does not become spiritually visible first when one looks into the pre-existent world; rather, the “distant” aspect becomes visible first. And once one has ascended through the three stages—which can be developed within oneself through exercises as higher levels of knowledge, in the sense I have described in my book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?* , one does indeed arrive, through imagination, inspiration, and intuition, at a coherent, spiritual-psychic worldview that leads one back to a previous earthly life.

[ 11 ] Just as a physical perspective is limited in the distance, so too is the image of the world one has experienced in a previous earthly life—which is revealed to one through intuition—limited by that past life. When anthroposophical spiritual science speaks of repeated earthly lives, this is neither something fanciful nor something deduced logically; rather, it is something attained through knowledge, something that presents itself to true spiritual vision. This spiritual vision, however, must first be drawn forth from the depths of the soul’s being. One then gains a positive insight into the fact that the forces of being that were present in the human being during the time between death and a new birth have taken shape and been imprinted in the human physical body and in the human etheric body, or body of formative forces.

[ 12 ] This explains how we have evolved from a spiritual world into the physical world. And into the physical body—which we carry, in a sense, as a tool, not merely as a shell— and into the body of formative forces—which contains the living forces underlying the organs, metabolism, and growth—into this physical body and etheric body, which then appears before us as objectivity in spiritual vision, is imprinted the essence of the soul, as it has developed from the last death up to this birth through a spiritual-soul world. One comes to know what a human being leaves behind when, as a being of feeling and will, he departs from his physical and etheric bodies—in a sense, as the very last thing toward which the human being has longingly turned from the spiritual world, after having, so to speak, grown old in the spiritual world and passed away from it during the life between death and the new birth. Just as a person finds their physical body withering at a certain age as they approach death from old age, so too does a person find the spiritual-soul being in which they then find themselves withering away in the spiritual world.

[ 13 ] This fading manifests itself in a longing for the physical world, for physical embodiment. And so what lives in the human physical body—what lives in the etheric body—is, in a sense, the final phase of life up in the spiritual world. We leave our past behind when, in sleep, we step out of our physical body as beings of feeling and will. And what do we take with us then? As we realize that we are leaving our past behind, we also come to realize that what we experience unconsciously—from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up—is that part of the human being which now passes through the gate of death and enters anew into a spiritual-soul world. That part of the human being that could not submerge itself in the physical body and the etheric body—the part that, so to speak, remains behind—leaves the body every night upon falling asleep and, as a being of feeling and will, now also passes through the gate of death once more. Thus, eternity is guaranteed to the human being through this true insight.

[ 14 ] And let us now look back at what a certain branch of science—one that has remained confined to the external realm—is today, incomprehensibly, striving to achieve in terms of knowledge through the investigation of phenomena such as telepathy, teleplasty, and telekinesis—then we see that these phenomena are in fact bound up with what constitutes a person’s past, what perishes with their death; thus, they cannot represent anything from the true supersensible world, but only the forces connected to the human being in this sensory earthly world.

[ 15 ] If we imagine the living essence that descends from our pre-existing being through conception and birth into physical embodiment, we will understand that it absorbs into itself—and incorporates into its form—not only the forces and matter transmitted through the current of heredity, but also those that are taken in over the course of life through food, breathing, and everything else that a human being receives from the external world. For a human being, in their full inner being, is truly only that essence which descends from pre-existing existence into physical embodiment. It integrates itself and envelops itself in physical matter already in the womb, and later through breathing, the intake of food, and so on.

[ 16 ] What a person incorporates into themselves in this way enters into a relationship with the true nature of the human being only in the normal state, through the mediation that the physical body and the etheric body have with the human being’s feeling-willing being in the waking state. There is a normal connection between a person’s feeling-willing being and their power of thought—which, as we have seen, is bound to the body of formative forces—as well as with the physical body.

[ 17 ] Let us now assume that, by inducing a hypnotic state in a person, the emotional and volitional being is drawn out of the physical and etheric bodies. We then have the human being—the hypnotized person—before us as a mere body of formative forces and a physical body, along with everything he has absorbed from the external earthly world in terms of physical substances and physical forces. These physical substances now have all kinds of interactions with the environment; they carry these interactions into the human being. Whatever can act from these substances themselves comes to the fore when the emotional-volitional being is removed from the physical body and the etheric body. Anthroposophical research thus shows that we are not actually dealing with anything that belongs to the eternal core of the human being, but rather with what is incorporated into this eternal core—albeit in the past—from the external world. The same can occur when a person is afflicted by any kind of pathological condition. In a normal state, a person perceives a diseased organ through pain, nausea, or the like. This is the case when the feeling-willing being is properly connected to the physical body and the etheric body. But if, for some reason, the human physical body or even the etheric body is significantly deformed by illness, then through the disease of any organ, of any internal organ, the human being’s spiritual-soul being—the feeling-willing being—is drawn deeper into the animal, physical nature than is the case in normal consciousness, where only memories are reflected back. When the organs are healthy, a person sinks into their physical body only to a certain degree. But if the organs are ill in any way—often even with just one diseased organ—then, when the illness takes on the corresponding form, the person sinks with their spiritual-soul being not merely to the point of feeling pain, but even deeper. They connect their spiritual-soul being with the organism. Whereas a person is otherwise connected to their emotional-volitional being only through their senses and nervous system, they now become connected to the lower animal organs and the vegetative organs, thereby entering the unfree states of hallucination and visionary experience. It is evident that hallucinations and visionary experiences, just like the other states, are entirely bound to the human being’s physical and etheric bodies; thus, they can only represent experiences that vanish with the person’s death and cannot shed light on the supersensible world in which the human being finds themselves between death and a new birth. However, it is true—and has been confirmed by research—that it is also possible for a person to perceive thoughts of a certain significance while in a mediumistic state, so that one may sometimes be astonished at the brilliant thoughts—thoughts that would be impossible for a person in ordinary consciousness—that emerge from a trance, that is, from a kind of hypnotic state.

[ 18 ] But does this contradict what has just been said? It does not, for the reason that not only can the physical body, so to speak, act into space without physical mediation in the manner described, but so can the body of formative forces. Now, it happens that even perfectly normal people, but especially those who possess certain genius-like aptitudes, generate within themselves thoughts and images of the imagination that do not remain confined to the body of formative forces; rather, because they transcend the normal human life, they also extend beyond the human being—so to speak, beyond the skin—and act in the general world ether, which we will learn about in the next lecture.

[ 19 ] One can certainly say that what resonates in the general world ether is, for example, artistic thought that transcends normal human life and manifests—if I may use the expression—in superhuman experiences and creations. Such thoughts are floating about. And precisely those who have prepared themselves for this through meditation and through the exercises of the will that I spoke of yesterday and the day before know that human beings do not merely bring about in the world what they accomplish through their physical efforts. They know that the thoughts which are not necessary for the maintenance of individual life—for this, thoughts are needed that are then transformed into forces of growth—are communicated to the general world ether. And when the human etheric body is in a kind of pathological state—when it is deformed or becomes mediumistic through a trance state—then indeed, what does not penetrate the human being’s normal state—the swirling world of thoughts—can penetrate precisely into the de-spiritualized and de-soulful human being who presents himself as a medium. And if, for example, a person who has died has, through some means, communicated such thoughts to the universal ether, and these come to light through a medium, one might then believe that one is truly perceiving the thoughts—the present thoughts—of the deceased, whereas in reality one is merely perceiving the echo of the thoughts that the living person radiated even before his or her death.

[ 20 ] This is what a sound critical approach in the humanities must always keep in mind: whether one is dealing with the aftereffects of thoughts, or whether, through the actual development of supersensible powers, one is truly penetrating the supersensible world to which human beings belong after death and before birth. If one is dealing with telepathy, this is nothing other than an etheric transmission of thoughts with the senses excluded. If one is dealing with telekinesis, certain forces arising in the transformed physical body through food and other physical matter are stimulated to act through space without physical mediation. After all, the human being consists of only about ten percent solid matter; ninety percent is a column of fluid, but he is also composed of finer substances, extending all the way to etheric matter. And with those substances that he radiates in a certain way, he can—precisely when, as I have indicated, he plunges too deeply with his spiritual-soul aspect into his animal nature through diseased organs or pathological conditions—imbued his thoughts with these radiations. This is when teleplasty arises. He can then shape what he radiates in terms of fine materiality, and what is shaped by thought can also be luminously translucent. Plastic forms arise, just as they are depicted—without one needing to think of them as illusions or deceptions—in the consistently scientific works of Schrenck-Notzing and others like him. But one is never dealing there with anything other than the effects of the part of the human being that passes away in death. One has nothing to do with anything that leads into the truly supersensible world. One is led into this true supersensible world when, through the entirely systematic training of the normal soul faculties and while maintaining ordinary consciousness, one arrives in this way at an observation outside one’s body with one’s feeling-willing being, and thereby surveys one’s past in the physical and etheric bodies—that which has been beamed over from a spiritual world and which intervenes formatively in physical and etheric matter. And since one first sees, I might say, what lies farther away with greater clarity, and only gradually what lies closer, one can see back to the boundary, to the point where the death of the previous life occurred. Therefore, one can also describe—as I have done in my *Theosophy*—what a person experiences after death based on this observation of the pre-existing life. One then truly describes a perspective—I would say—in the opposite direction from what one sees before oneself. And so everything I have described regarding the states of the human being after death is described entirely on the basis of those visions that are attained in the manner I described yesterday and again today.

[ 21 ] One might say: Human beings can learn nothing about the higher worlds other than what they have first cultivated within themselves through a serious struggle for knowledge. One must, through the strengthening of thought—as I described it yesterday—create the possibility of stepping outside one’s body while in a conscious state, and then look back upon the physical body. This can be achieved only through this strengthening of thought. But one must now learn to distinguish: What one has from one’s previous life is perceived through observation. What one will become in the future is experienced through inner experience. Therefore—however sparse these inner experiences may be compared to what one has before one as a powerful supersensory tableau from one’s pre-existing life—the pre-existing life can truly be the subject matter of a developed science. But what a person learns about the future will depend very strongly on how they can strengthen themselves inwardly in their eternal being of feeling and will outside their body. And you can also observe this being of feeling and will as it develops through physical earthly life and matures toward a higher state after death. If one conducts this observation in such a way as to observe what otherwise withdraws unconsciously from the human body during sleep—first in a more youthful state of existence and then in a more mature state of existence—differences become apparent. What withdraws from the physical body as a being of feeling and will in a younger person while asleep contains more of the thought-like aspect. It becomes apparent that what the human being harbors within as the thought-element continues to resonate within them unconsciously. As a person grows older, they no longer carry the thought-element out of the physical body through the gateway of sleep to such a great extent; rather, they carry out into the outer world through the gateway of sleep what lies in the forces of their character and in the forces of their developed impulses of will. Therefore, one can say: From a being that carries more thought content, one develops in the spiritual-soul realm throughout one’s earthly life into a being that reveals, in the spiritual-soul realm, the lingering resonance of the human being’s character. In essence, one does not actually pass through the gateway of sleep with one’s thoughts. One leaves the thoughts behind upon falling asleep; they shine upon the physical body. The thoughts that animated one during earthly life between birth and death are also left behind there. One learns to recognize them as the outer thought force of the world; one later comes to know them as an outer world after death. One passes through the gateway of sleep primarily with what the human character has become, with what the inner moral development has become. And every phase that one now wishes to interpret correctly from that perspective of pre-existing life must be attained through the development of normal soul powers.

[ 22 ] I have already explained this to you in my previous lecture: When a person strengthens their thinking—their inner life of thought—through meditation and concentration to such an extent that they can live in thought as one otherwise does only in sensory images; when this inner life of thought becomes as powerful, as vivid, and as intense as the life of the soul is otherwise only when it is surrendered to sensory impressions—then the person attains imaginative cognition. And through this inner life of thought, strengthened to the point of becoming pictorial, the person now does not see before them a tableau of memories of the earthly life just passed, extending up to this point of experience, but rather surveys everything that the physical earthly organism has organized through its formative powers. In a powerful tableau, as his first supersensible experience, he looks back on his own earthly life—which has just reached this point—all the way back to childhood.

[ 23 ] I have already mentioned in previous lectures that this tableau experienced by a person resembles, to some extent, what even serious natural scientists today speak of—because it has been sufficiently studied—as occurring when a person is facing a mortal danger from which it is very difficult to escape. For example, when a person is on the verge of drowning, they experience within a vast scene precisely what the ethereal, temporal body of formative forces is: they are surveyed. The same is surveyed in supersensible cognition, and the same presents itself in the first experience after death through the correct interpretation of the perspective I have described to you regarding the pre-existent life. One recognizes there that when a person passes through the gate of death, for a very brief time—measured in days, roughly as long as a person’s constitution can endure remaining awake for several days—they perceive a kind of tableau that allows them to survey their last earthly life as if in a web of thought, yet one that is pictorial. One gains such an overview of one’s earthly life for a brief time after passing through the gate of death. I would say: without any involvement of feeling or will, purely in a kind of passive overview, one has this earthly life before one, and in the way I have described, one comes to know this first state after death. One must first become acquainted with it through supersensible knowledge, through meditation and concentration, and so on. But if one wishes to correctly interpret what follows this tableau of one’s past earthly life in the life after death, one requires yet another kind of practice.

[ 24 ] In earthly life, and also in conventional science, human beings usually passively surrender their thoughts, their perceptions, and even their emotional and volitional impulses to the external world. They move forward with the external world. They experience yesterday, followed by today at a later point in time, and then tomorrow at an even later point. And what human beings develop in their inner life as reflections of thought, feeling, and will also follows the external passage of time as a continuous, natural experience. Through this, one has, I would say, a certain support for ordinary thinking and ordinary feeling as well. But one cannot develop human thinking to the degree required for supersensory research if one merely surrenders passively to the external passage of time in this way. One must also perform other exercises: one must try, if I may put it this way, to think backward. That is to say, once the day has passed, one can—not in thought, nor through critical analysis, but in images, as if reliving what one has seen throughout the day—let it pass before one’s soul as in a fantasy, but from evening to morning, in reverse order. One must acquire a certain practice in such backward-looking visualizations. For while it is relatively easy to visualize larger segments in reverse, one must—in order to do so—visualize long, truly, I would say, atomistically small segments from back to front, truly visualizing the course of the day in reverse. One can then move on to other exercises, perhaps aided by, say, unraveling a play from the fifth act backward to the first act, or by inwardly experiencing melodies from backward to forward—hearing them, so to speak, with one’s mind and soul. And one can then come to perceive the memories of one’s life—which is now something different from the tableau described—in such a way that one truly conjures up one’s life from the present moment, by bringing forth from memory what one has experienced, in reverse order and in a pictorial, imaginative way before one’s soul. By doing such exercises, one detaches one’s thinking from the external passage of time. The habit—deeply ingrained—of following the external passage of time with one’s thinking, perception, and feelings must be overcome. And through this powerful backward thinking, one is enabled to draw upon a much greater and stronger power of thought than is required for merely passive thinking. It is precisely through this backward thinking that the power of thought is significantly strengthened.

[ 25 ] And then one discovers something that certainly sounds paradoxical to ordinary consciousness, to ordinary cognition. But just as one perceives the sensory world through ideas that flow by in the course of time, so too does one gradually perceive the spiritual world once one has freed one’s thinking in this way from its bondage to the external flow of time. And through this, one gains a further ability. This gives one the ability to observe the subsequent experience and, from the perspective I have described, to correctly interpret what follows the tableau of one’s life—which one experiences over the course of several days after death. One now sees how, after this tableau of life, the human being—moving backward in their experience—goes through life once more in very vivid imagery. The human being, so to speak, experiences the soul world before the spiritual world. And indeed, more quickly than they lived here between birth and death, they live their way back after death all the way to birth. They pass through this life in reverse. One acquires the ability to perceive this through the exercises in backward thinking that have been described. And now one gains an insight into how, in this backward-moving soul life after death, the human being experiences everything that he or she went through here in earthly life within the physical body. Only now does the person experience it on a soul level, and can see everything that has hindered their moral progress. It is precisely during these times of backward progression that the person can review what they must now, from a higher perspective, wish to be different in their life. They can see how moral shortcomings have held them back from achieving perfection. But since he now experiences all of this vividly, it does not remain merely a thought. In the soul life that proceeds backward in this way—I would say, in the soul life that develops backward—the thought does not remain abstract, for abstract thoughts have been left behind in death; rather, it develops as a force of thought. And it develops as the impulse to make amends in some way in a subsequent earthly life, to experience in some way the opposite circumstances of those that, so to speak, now present themselves to the soul. Something develops in the soul that then manifests in the next earthly life as subconscious longings to draw closer to this or that in life. It is precisely in this process of looking back on one’s past life—for everything one has gone through in earthly life—that the longing develops to experience, in the next earthly life, a subsequent event that will balance out the previous one. And so, in this process of looking back, one experiences the seed of what one unconsciously carries forward into the next birth, which can be described in the following way.

[ 26 ] This aspect usually eludes everyday consciousness, yet it lives within human beings. But if one observes—even using only common sense—something that ultimately leads to certainty through supersensible research: how one approaches some important, decisive fact of life.

[ 27 ] Let us suppose that, in the course of an earthly life, we encounter another human being in our thirtieth or thirty-fifth year—and in this person we find—to name a truly decisive event—a life partner with whom we wish to journey through the rest of our lives, and we discover that our souls are in harmony. The outwardly materialistic person calls this a coincidence. Deeper minds—and there are plenty of them, as history attests—have, however, given this some thought: If we look back from this event, which is so decisive, to what came before it, and before that, and even further back, then the course of our lives, which led up to this event, appears to be very systematic. And we sometimes find that what we experience in life as a fact that now intervenes in our lives is the organic culmination of what appears to be a plan. If one has first constructed such a plan hypothetically, and then examines this hypothetical construct—extended all the way back to birth—in light of the development of supersensible powers of perception through meditation, backward thinking, and the development of the will, as I have described them, then one does indeed come to say to oneself: What you have hypothetically constructed there may sometimes truly be nothing more than a figment of the imagination, but it is not always so. Rather, it sometimes proves to be of the utmost importance—especially for decisive facts in life—that a person carries within them a subconscious longing from birth, and that from this longing, which they may interpret quite differently during corresponding periods of their life, he takes the first step, the second step—all the steps that ultimately lead him to the event he had imagined in embryonic form in that past life after death, and which now carries us through this new earthly life as an indefinite longing, so that through it we unconsciously shape our own destiny. In this way, we come to recognize what we encounter in earthly life as destiny, or as it was called in the ancient, instinctive clairvoyant wisdom of the Orient: karma. We learn to recognize this destiny—on which all our happiness and misfortune, our joy and our suffering in life depend—by beholding our successive earthly lives.

[ 28 ] Of course, people will very quickly be inclined to say: Well, what about freedom then? That would mean people are guided and directed by fate! What, then, of human freedom? — Yes, one actually arrives at this solution to the question of destiny only after having seriously grappled with the problem of freedom. And at this point, because it certainly has objective significance, I would like to insert a personal remark once again. I wrote my *Philosophy of Freedom* in the early 1890s. This *Philosophy of Freedom* set out to affirm precisely the experience, the reality, of freedom. I attempted to characterize the consciousness of freedom as something absolutely certain, based on what human beings experience within themselves. And so what I later attempted to present—as the partial solution to the question of fate, as I have now outlined it—was conceived by me to be entirely in harmony with what I had described as human freedom. Anyone who studies this book, my *Philosophy of Freedom*, will, however, find that I was compelled to speak not initially of a freedom of the will, but of the freedom of that which is experienced in thought—namely, in thought free from sensuality, in pure thought—but in that thought which arises consciously in the human soul as a moral ideal, and which attains the strength capable of motivating the human will. We can speak of human freedom when we speak of those human actions that are shaped by free thinking, in which a person, through moral self-education, reaches a state where instincts, drives, emotions, and temperament do not influence them to act, but rather only a selfless love for an action. In this selfless love for an action, what arises from the ideal strength of pure moral thought can develop. This is a truly free action.

[ 29 ] It is precisely through spiritual science that we come to realize that thinking as such—this thinking that underlies free moral action—remains behind in the reflective physical body during sleep; that this is, therefore, something a person experiences between birth and death, which makes earthly life valuable simply through this incorporation of the impulse toward freedom, even if it were not otherwise infinitely valuable. We will discuss this in the next lecture. Human beings become free in this one physical earthly life, where they develop thought as such, where thought loses the formative power it still possesses in the etheric body, and where it is developed as pure thought within the consciousness that is alive. I was therefore compelled to present something quite daring in this *Philosophy of Freedom* back in the early 1890s. I had to present moral impulses as ethical ideals and had to say: they do not come to human beings from the physical world; they do not come to human beings from nature; they come to human beings through intuition. And at that time, I spoke of “moral imagination.” And why was that? I said at the time in my *Philosophy of Freedom*: These moral motives flow into human beings from the spiritual world, though initially only as images. They are received as intuition from the spiritual world.

[ 30 ] But in this way, I would say, one arrives at the opposite pole of what one experiences here in the physical world. If one looks out into the natural world with common sense and scientific training, one discovers necessity everywhere. If one looks into the world of moral impulses, one discovers freedom—but freedom, at first, only in thought itself, in pure thinking, in intellectual intuition. And at first one does not know how forces enter into the will, for one perceives these moral intuitions unconsciously. On the one hand, one has nature, to which one belongs through one’s actions, and on the other hand, one has one’s moral experience; and when one has nothing else at first but the natural sciences, the possibility of attributing reality to these moral intuitions—of attributing world-creating forces to them—vanishes. One experiences nature, so to speak, in all its crude density, in its necessity. One experiences freedom, but one experiences it in the finely woven thought impulses, refined to the point of becoming pictorial, which one knows—precisely because they cannot belong to nature, because they are experienced in free activity—and I have indicated in my *Philosophy of Freedom* that they come from the spiritual world. But something must now intervene between these intuitions—which are thoroughly pictorial and unreal, and which become real only through moral life—and what one possesses as objective knowledge of the natural order. And this is where imagination and inspiration come in, arising in the manner I have described. And then the intuition, too, becomes something else. Then, in a sense, what first appeared to us only in pure thought condenses into a spiritual reality. In this intuition, newly attained through imagination and inspiration, one now learns to recognize not one’s present self, but the self that passes through repeated earthly lives, and which carries our destiny through these repeated earthly lives in the manner I have described. We are unfree in that we have lived through these repeated earthly lives and thereby shaped a destiny. But we can always weave free actions into this fabric of destiny within our individual earthly lives. Precisely because we experience moral impulses in pictorial intuitions—not as realities, but as something to which we can freely commit ourselves—we can weave freedom in our individual earthly lives into the fabric of destiny. And so, by being carried from one earthly life to the next by destiny, we do not become any less free than we might be, for example, if we were to let ourselves be carried by ship from Europe to America. There, our future is indeed determined by the decision we make here in Europe. But we are always, within certain limits, free beings, and as long as we are over in America, we can move about freely. Thus we carry fate from one earthly life to the next. But into the world of facts that we experience in this way through repeated earthly lives, we can bring what springs from the freedom of the individual earthly life.

[ 31 ] And so one can see that the person who grapples with the problem of freedom—who sees the problem of freedom as solved by contemplating moral ideas that are initially graspable only in the moral imagination, but which are striving from the spiritual world into the physical world of human beings—that whoever acquires an understanding of freedom in this way has, precisely through this, prepared themselves to understand the workings of fate, which intervenes in human life like a kind of necessity.

[ 32 ] Once one has arrived at this intuition, once one has understood how to interweave fate and freedom, and thereby further strengthened those powers one has acquired through meditation, concentration, backward thinking, and so on, then one can also observe—or rather, further interpret—what presents itself in this perspective. What now follows this life lived in reverse is a life in a purely spiritual realm, in which one now lives in anticipation of the next earthly life. And in this spiritual realm, one experiences—I would say—in a manner opposite to that here in earthly life. Here in earthly life, one experiences things in such a way that what is within us can initially be perceived only inwardly as images. In ordinary consciousness, one does not experience the inner self of the human being; rather, in waking consciousness, one experiences the outer world. In a sense, one sees the outer world in the spatial sphere surrounding one’s own center. The human being is within themselves; the outer world is outside them. In the time between death and a new birth, this perception is reversed: the human being merges into what was their outer world here. They experience what was their outer world here as an inner world. And what is hidden from them here—the inner nature of the human being—they now experience as the outer world. For the life between death and a new birth, the human being, with his inner self, becomes the world, and the world becomes the “I.” And as the human being experiences that which is now higher than what we have here in the world around us—for the human being is the crown of creation; he carries within himself a higher realm than the external environment—he thus possesses within himself a more valuable world between death and a new birth. And what they thus experience as their world—which is in fact the mysterious world of the human inner being—they experience creatively. In the spiritual world, they creatively experience the forces in communion with higher spiritual beings, by whom we are surrounded as spiritual-soul beings, just as we are surrounded here as physical human beings by the three kingdoms of nature: animals, plants, and minerals. In communion with these spiritual beings, one experiences the forces from which one gradually shapes not only one’s destiny—the seed of one’s destiny—but from which one also forms the archetype in the spiritual-soul world—the real archetype, the spiritual-soul being—which, after a certain time, develops the longing to reincarnate what it has initially formed as an archetype, but which it has formed in a living way, through the power of thought, to embody once more. Because it must now be connected to a physical body—and can only attain its completion again within a physical body—this spiritual-soul being feels the urge, the longing, to incarnate once more here on Earth. It is from the spirit that what constitutes our pre-birth existence—or our existence prior to conception—unites with the physical body. One will also only gain a true understanding of the way in which the human being, as a physical being, is formed here on Earth—we will discuss the details of this the day after tomorrow—when one realizes that what is formed in the mother’s body is merely something that receives the actual essence of the human being from a higher world.

[ 33 ] Natural science harbors a certain dream, which consists in the hope that one day it will be possible to study the cells—and indeed even the most perfect cells, the reproductive cells, the germ cells of the human embryo—in terms of their complex chemical composition. Anthroposophical spiritual science, however, approaches the same problem using entirely different methods and from entirely different perspectives. And it serves, so to speak, to indicate the direction in which one must seek what develops within the mother’s body as the germ cell of the human embryo. Here, one is not dealing with a more complex chemical compound, but rather, in truth, with the process by which matter becomes chaotic. It is not a highly complex chemical compound or a molecular structure, but rather a descent into chaos—a chaotic swirling together of what, in a crystal or in a chemical molecule, is arranged in accordance with certain laws. In the germ cell, matter is not developed into a further system of laws, but is driven down into chaos; and from this matter—from the matter that is becoming chaotic—there forms that which can now receive what is descending: the supersensible human being coming from the spiritual worlds. And only then will one understand what develops as the physical human being, when one applies physical research to the point where one can see how the physical human germ, precisely by having returned the matter to chaos, becomes capable of now receiving the spiritual-soul germ that descends from pre-existence. Only in this way can one understand how, from conception through birth, that which descends from the spiritual-soul worlds unites with that which has dematerialized in the germ at the onset of embryonic growth. Anyone who truly observes the formation of the embryo with insight can discern from the physical structure of the embryo itself what I have described to you today, whereas embryonic development remains a mystery if one is unable to view it in this way.

[ 34 ] However, if one truly wishes to understand the essence of the human being, one must, through supersensible research, uncover what also belongs to the human being. For example, I have pointed out on previous occasions how, in the science of the lower realms, those things that are regarded as wisdom in the study of the human being would be considered foolish everywhere. Suppose, I said, that someone has a magnetic needle in front of them: one end points north, the other south. It would never occur to anyone to say: “The forces that cause the compass needle to point in that direction lie solely within the compass needle itself, within the space enclosed by the matter of that compass needle.” — Instead, one regards the Earth itself as a great magnet that acts upon the individual compass needle and determines its direction. One integrates the individual magnetic needle into the entire organism of the Earth. One thus moves beyond the individual being in order to recognize the great, all-encompassing whole—and to recognize it also in its interaction with the individual being. Only in the case of human beings, however, does one seek—by tracing the development of the germ cell under a microscope—to discern, solely from what is enclosed within human skin, what brings the human being into being. Just as the direction of the magnetic needle cannot be explained from the needle itself, one will never be able to understand what develops within the human being unless one places the human being in relation to the entire world—not only to the world of space but also to the world of time—and unless one goes back to what is revealed to one in supersensible vision as the pre-existing being of the human being in the manner described. One comes to recognize this as that which, in turn, when a human being sheds his physical body here, is seen to dissolve in his etheric body into the world ether, and which then passes through the gate of death to begin such a cycle anew, but for the further balancing of the facts of life and for higher perfection.

[ 35 ] Thus, when we consider human nature in and of itself, humanity initially takes its place within the evolution of the world. And what now befalls humanity as it brings its spiritual-soul nature down into the world belongs to the evolution of the world; it must be integrated into the evolution of the world, which we intend to examine the day after tomorrow. Humanity will only become comprehensible when what has been expounded today is simultaneously integrated into the becoming, essence, and interweaving—that is, into the entire development of the world. For humanity can only come to know the world by coming to know itself. And that which is the world is reflected in earthly life; the human being experiences it after death and before birth. From it, the human being draws the forces that he or she incorporates into his or her physical body at birth or conception. The world and the human being belong together not only externally but also internally. Human beings carry the world within themselves; the world as a totality constitutes the essence of the human being. Therefore, the question raised here will be partially answered today. It will receive its full answer—to the extent that science is already capable of providing it today—in the next lecture.

[ 36 ] In closing, I would just like to say a few words. I want it to be truly understood that while what the spiritual researcher presents is indeed based on the development of certain powers that would otherwise remain unconscious to the soul, the spiritual researcher proceeds, from an anthroposophical point of view, in such a way that he clothes what he has to present from his own insight in the ordinary thoughts that are otherwise common in science. He carries his thoughts with him everywhere. For that pendulum swing, that oscillation between the supersensible and the sensory world, must continually accompany him in his research. He must always stand as his own critic alongside his higher being, which has the supersensible visions. Therefore, even someone who has not undertaken such exercises can, if they truly surrender themselves without prejudice to sound common sense, mentally verify everything the spiritual researcher presents. And it is actually not correct to say that what the spiritual researcher presents can only be verified by another spiritual researcher. In our time, people have simply become too accustomed to thinking bound to external materiality and the laws of nature, and they then conclude that the spiritual researcher lacks evidence from this perspective. But anyone who sees through the whole situation will understand the relationship between ordinary, sound common sense and the methodically trained intellect of science—of external science. And anyone who then proceeds critically and examines in their thoughts—but only with sufficient open-mindedness—everything that the spiritual researcher presents will be able to verify it, even without having visions themselves. The spiritual researcher presents everything in such a way that it can be verified in this manner. And anyone who says that the spiritual researcher merely recounts what he sees but does not provide evidence is like a person who is accustomed to the idea that everything he finds on Earth rests on solid ground, and who then asks, when a solar system is explained to him: “Yes, but what does it rest on?” — That it rests within itself, that it sustains itself freely through its own forces—perhaps he does not perceive this. Such a person, who asks, “On what ground does a solar system stand?”—is like someone who habitually demands proof, and by “proof” means only the kind that can be demanded for the external sensory world, where one finds without proof what one has just perceived with the senses, what can be demonstrated through the senses.

[ 37 ] But human thinking is not limited to this alone. Thinking can also rise above merely finding proof through common sense—proof that is supported by sensory experience—to grasp that which, in a sense, sustains itself internally like a spiritual planetary system. If you examine matters in this way—by applying to anthroposophical spiritual research the kind of self-sustaining, self-evident thinking described here—you will find that what the spiritual researcher presents is inwardly so secure, even without so-called external supports, just as the planetary system sustains itself freely in the vastness of space, and only that which is earthly and heavy must be supported. But it must be borne in mind that thinking must also truly become free, must become that which can sustain itself internally, if one wishes to find, through sound common sense, proof of what spiritual science has to say about the nature of the human being and the nature of world evolution. I will now, following the discussion on the nature of the human being, take the liberty of elaborating on the fact that everything can be proven from this standpoint the day after tomorrow in my next lecture here on the nature of world evolution.