The Rudolf Steiner Archive

9. Anthroposophy and Spiritual Knowledge

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! In a certain sense, today’s lecture will build upon previous ones, since I presented the scientific rationale for anthroposophy’s engagement with contemporary science in my most recent public lectures here in Berlin; repeating these fundamentals today would merely be a repetition for those members of the distinguished audience who were present at that time. So today I will have a few points to make that can certainly be understood on their own, but which require those previous lectures for their scientific justification.

[ 2 ] When a person speaks of the spirit and spiritual knowledge, it must be said that he is actually referring to something that is constantly present to him, at least as long as he is fully conscious. After all, a person cannot doubt that both their cognitive and volitional interactions with the external world are carried out in such a way that they engage spiritually with their entire being. And so people actually speak of spiritual activity as if it were something independent. The difficulties really begin only when it comes to delving deeper into the nature of the human spirit and the spiritual foundations of the world. When this is said, it can point to a wide variety of things. For these inner psychological difficulties regarding the spiritual life in human beings arise from many different directions. And I will, so to speak, single out just one example to illustrate how these difficulties arise and ultimately affect the entire human soul. I will cite an example that may not always be felt as strongly as others. But much of what a person must come to terms with because of the inner destiny they must live through lies, after all, in partly or entirely subconscious psychological processes. A person does not always realize where their inner suffering and inner moods actually stem from. But through unbiased self-observation, based on a certain degree of self-education—including scientific self-education—one can discover the source of these moods, these feelings of happiness and suffering in the life of the soul, which mean a great deal—a very great deal—for the way a person can approach life, for the way they can act in life, and for the way in which they can influence the well-being or misfortune of their fellow human beings in the world. And so I would like to point out how a person, when summarizing what they call their spiritual life, can, in a sense, feel the powerlessness of this spiritual life anew every day; as I said, even if they do not feel it, the result of these unconscious interrelationships of feeling in their inner life nevertheless points to it. A person feels the powerlessness of spiritual life at any moment when they see this spiritual life fading away, when they see it sinking into the state of sleep, and between falling asleep and waking up, this spiritual life sinks for them completely into a kind of unknown world. There, in a sense, they feel the powerlessness of that aspect of spiritual life which they are able to hold onto within their earthly existence through their own soul power. The course of the world takes this soul life away from them, takes this inner spiritual activity away from them once every day.

[ 3 ] But then, when a person observes with a certain detachment how he awakens from sleep again, how he—perhaps through the transition through the dream life, which he can regard only as unreal in contrast to the external physical reality of the world— re-enters his physical earthly existence in such a way that, in a sense, he strengthens his soul being with everything that permeates his physical organism, with everything that is active in his will—then the human being feels something different, or at least can feel it; then he feels how what constitutes spiritual life becomes dependent on physical embodiment. But at the same time, he feels that he cannot look down into this physical body. He feels that, in a sense, this spiritual life sinks into his own being, sinks, as it were, into a kind of darkness into which he cannot see. They feel how what they call their spiritual life is taken over by the processes of bodily life—whether nervous processes or others. They cannot see through it; it eludes them as if in a kind of inner darkness.

[ 4 ] What one might feel when one is able to delve deeply into one’s powerlessness in the face of the human spirit—one might compare this to a kind of spiritual breathlessness. And this spiritual breathlessness, with all the uncertainties of life it contains, can spread over the entire state of the soul like an inner, spiritual gloom and give rise to the great question of life: Who am I? Why am I here in this world?

[ 5 ] And again, when a person sees how his spiritual life is submerged in physicality—as it were, as if in darkness—he feels just as he would if, to use a physical analogy, the air he breathes were being tainted internally by his metabolism. They feel as if in a kind of spiritual suffocation—or at least they are capable of feeling that way. But within the human being lie precisely these two poles of insecurity and uncertainty. And this is what has led humanity to seek, time and again, the very essence of what the spiritual actually is.

[ 6 ] Anthroposophy, as I use the term here in my lectures, seeks to approach this spiritual world from the perspective of modern human consciousness. In doing so, however, it must be fully aware of what—I might say—all too easily lies in wait for human beings right at the gateway to the spiritual world, preventing them from entering it either in the proper way or at all. For two powerful enemies of inner human life lie in wait at the gates of the spiritual world: superstition on the one hand, with all its delusions, and doubt on the other. Those who suffer most from superstition—even though they feel so at home in it—are precisely those who do not wish to grapple with what modern science has to offer. They then conjure up all manner of constructs from the arbitrariness of their inner soul life, through which they seek to make sense of what the spiritual world means to them. Indeed, in a certain sense—I would say—with a certain superficiality of mind, one can be satisfied with the delusions of superstition. But when one then wants to or must be an active person, when one wants to intervene in life, when one encounters phenomena in nature or in human life, then one feels how, everywhere, what the human soul conjures up in the form of superstitious delusions is shattered, and one arrives at a certain disorientation in life. One cannot find one’s place in life because one stumbles everywhere; life becomes full of rough edges, because what is revealed in things is something other than what superstition conjures up from the soul.

[ 7 ] Those, on the other hand, who have become more immersed in modern science, train their thinking based on the phenomena of the external world—on what observation and experimentation can reveal to modern people. But they often find that this way of thinking remains confined to the external basis of knowledge—to what the senses alone provide. As a result, they come to tell themselves: I can apply this way of thinking only to what my senses tell me. And they find this way of thinking, so to speak, too limited to break out in any way from the world of the senses into a world of the supersensible, into a world of the spiritual. Then doubt creeps in. This doubt can be conceived of; it can perhaps even be logically justified. But one cannot live with doubt in the long run unless one seeks to overcome it through all manner of superficiality and illusion. And if one does the latter, then doubt settles deep within the soul and permeates the physical body along the paths that lead from the soul to the physical. Under the influence of doubt, a person gradually comes to feel like a weakling, and it may then be that the more they entangle themselves in doubt through their logic and science, the more the effects of doubt take hold of them in life, and they fall, so to speak—even if the expression seems exaggerated, it is nonetheless justified to a certain extent—into a kind of spiritual “consumption” that renders him unfit to fully engage with life’s tasks. And if he does not notice how doubt is consuming him, then others will notice it, and what doubt has made of him will be reflected back to him in the esteem he receives in life.

[ 8 ] This allows us to gain a deeper insight into the way in which human beings relate—and must relate—to what they call the spiritual world. In our time, people who have recently begun to doubt the possibility of direct insight into—or direct recognition of—the spiritual world through sound human judgment find either a certain reassurance by turning back to, or by not stepping out of at all from, what has become their reality: all manner of old, traditional worldviews and creeds. Many feel a certain fear, a certain reluctance, to step out of the framework into which they were born or raised—that of old creeds—because they fear losing that anchor in life by thereby forfeiting a glimpse into the spiritual world.

[ 9 ] Others, however, who are unable to hold fast to what has been passed down to us through the immeasurable forces of human civilization—in the form of revelations of the spiritual world of one kind or another—are undergoing strange developments today. They despair at the fact that a healthy person can look into the spiritual world, and so they turn to what anthroposophy, in harmony with true natural science, must also recognize—but in a certain respect, as pertaining to the sick person. They turn to what can be provided to them through all manner of mediumistic practices. They rely on what certain individuals can perceive in visions and the like. What lies at the root of this? In any case, if one approaches the matter with true objectivity, one will be able to say that a medium can arise solely because the physical constitution is such that certain external impressions can be blocked or suppressed, allowing the deeper physical nature to become more active than it can be when a person is attuned to their healthy sensory impressions. Based on what can reveal itself in a certain way, people believe that such abnormal human activity provides all sorts of insights into what remains hidden from them in the normal state of life—and which is then regarded as the intervention of another world into this, our world. One thing is easy to demonstrate: in all cases where something visionary becomes present in the human soul, there is underlying some kind of disruption in the human constitution. Without delving into the pathological, it is simply impossible to explain what appears as a spiritual content in a visionary way within a person. And so we see how those today who despair that the normally functioning, rational human being is capable of penetrating the spiritual world turn to those who appear to be abnormal.

[ 10 ] Anthroposophy approaches these matters in such a way that it takes as its starting point the person who is healthy in both soul and body. And when I had to discuss here how a person can awaken powers of cognition—which otherwise lie dormant in life and in science—through certain spiritual exercises in order to penetrate the spiritual world, the prerequisite was established that such exercises may only be undertaken when one is in a state of absolute mental and physical health. Anthroposophy must, in a certain way, engage with the approaches just described—those taken to enter the spiritual world—if it is to discuss its relationship to the spiritual world. Here one can observe that certain spiritual contents, which people today receive more or less as revelatory truths, exert their influence above all through their venerable age. After all, we see today what an impression the venerable age of such revelatory content makes on people seeking the spiritual. We see people doubting the paths that the human scientific spirit can take into the spiritual world.

[ 11 ] And so they turn back to the ancient times of human development, or turn toward what still extends from those ancient times into our own, in order, as it were, to see how human beings once arrived, through their own powers of insight, at what is presented as a worldview in traditional religious creeds. It is precisely through such a supersensible insight—as I have elaborated in my recent lectures—that one arrives at an extraordinarily significant spiritual discovery concerning the development of human spiritual striving. Ultimately, one says to oneself: If one looks impartially at what actually lies at the heart of the traditional creeds that exist historically today—to which thousands upon thousands of people turn with the deepest needs of their souls—one finds that it is ultimately based on paths of knowledge that people once followed, perhaps using means quite different from those we now regard as correct. One may say: Everything that is taken in as a worldview through historical development or tradition—taken in, as one says, through faith—was once regarded as knowledge. All the supersensory assertions and dogmas that can be found in our creeds, in our worldviews, and in our philosophies rest upon what people once sought within themselves along paths that, while in a certain sense similar to the paths I will speak of again today as the anthroposophical ones, were nevertheless fundamentally different in earlier times. But even today, one can gain some insight into the path to the spiritual world by turning one’s gaze back to the paths that were once taken into these spiritual worlds.

[ 12 ] Now I would like to highlight two paths that people once followed—both of which are completely impassable for us Westerners today. But if we hold them clearly before our souls, we will see that, ultimately, these paths, too, sprang from the same mindset from which we act today when we seek the spiritual world through anthroposophy. These two examples are the ancient Indian practice of yoga, through which serious seekers of the spirit once sought to enter the supersensible world, and furthermore, what might be called asceticism in the periods when it was not in a state of decadence—both paths which, as I said, are not suited to us Westerners, but whose characteristics can serve as a stepping stone to understanding the path that is necessary today.

[ 13 ] What did the ancient practice of yoga consist of? Among other things, it involved, above all, a kind of regulation of the human respiratory system—a regulation such that, for the sake of insight, a person did not rely on the natural breathing characteristic of ordinary life, but instead breathed differently according to certain laws. What is the actual purpose of such yogic breathing? What is the significance of imposing upon oneself, for a time and through repeated practice, the inner commitment to breathe differently—to inhale differently, to hold the breath in a certain way differently than one does in ordinary life, and also to exhale in a distinct manner? The purpose is to direct one’s consciousness toward an inner human process—namely, breathing—which otherwise takes place entirely, or at least for the most part, unconsciously. I would say that in everyday life, we breathe without thinking about it. We do not pay attention to our breathing. But the moment the Indian yoga student begins to breathe differently from this automatic breathing, the entire focus of his inner life is directed toward this breathing process. The breathing process becomes something he can experience intensely within himself. And what does he ultimately experience? He experiences the connection between the breathing process and human thought. What is happening here can be characterized abstractly and logically in the following way. As we inhale, we simultaneously propel the breath rhythmically upward into the organ of our thought life—the brain and nervous system. The breath interweaves with and ripples through what is taking place in the brain. As modern people, when we breathe, we do not pay attention to how the breath flows through the thought process. But this is precisely what the Indian yogi seeks to understand. He permeates what for us is abstract thinking with the denser flow of the breath, of which he becomes aware. In this way, through processes that take place entirely within the human organism, he strengthens his thinking. He strengthens his thinking, but he also enlivens it. What now comes to his consciousness from within is a different kind of thinking than what takes place in everyday life.

[ 14 ] To one who has undergone such a yoga practice, this way of thinking in everyday life appears as a human corpse appears to us in comparison to a living person. Ordinary abstract thinking—or even thinking connected to sensory perceptions—appears dead in comparison to the inwardly alive thinking that is gained for consciousness through such strengthening. But then, the one who has performed such exercises repeatedly over a certain period of time looks more deeply into the world through their strengthened thinking. And because his thinking has now, through this strengthening, become as powerful as our sensory perceptions otherwise are—for example, when we direct our eyes outward, perceive the world of colors, and it makes an intense impression on us, or when we perceive sounds through our ears— he now perceives—because his thinking has gained the same power as perception, yet he does not see the outer world with his thinking, but rather experiences the world—he now perceives the spiritual world. What has been perceived in this way from the spiritual worlds by individuals who have undergone such a yoga practice has then become part of the development of human civilization. And some of those who today accept this or that—whatever has been handed down to them traditionally and historically as a worldview—accept it without knowing that it has been incorporated into the development of the human spirit through the results of this yoga practice. One might say: In all worldviews, even those that claim philosophical certainty—if one is able to view them correctly from an inner, spiritual-historical perspective—much of what modern people accept today stems precisely from that which once flowed into human consciousness through the path described above.

[ 15 ] By bringing thinking to life in this way, human beings gain insight into the eternal aspect of their being; they gain insight into the fact that they existed as spiritual-soul beings before descending from the spiritual-soul worlds into what developed for them in their mother’s womb from the physical world as their physical-bodily organism. With the kind of thinking that is natural to us—without undergoing any training that strengthens or enlivens it—we perceive in a human being only that which occurs between birth or conception and death. With thinking that has been strengthened and enlivened, one perceives in the human being that which is his own eternal essence—that which can live even without being in a physical body—and that which immediately reveals itself to the enlivened thinking as that which, before the beginning of our physical life, lived as a spiritual being in a spiritual world. One gains a vivid insight into the spiritual nature and the spiritual past life of the human being.

[ 16 ] This is one path. Initially, it led its followers to focus primarily on what is called the pre-existence of the human being in relation to their earthly life. And they devoted themselves to the practice of yoga with a certain one-sidedness. Through this, they gained an insight into that state of existence in which the human being existed spiritually and soulfully before birth or conception. They spoke of this aspect of human existence as something self-evident. And in this way they overcame that sense of powerlessness that a person must feel in the face of the spiritual when they see it sinking into the state of sleep every day. What becomes unconscious during sleep does not elude animated thinking. For what becomes invisible to the sleeper is, in a sense, interwoven with inner spiritual vitality, but in such a way that it extends beyond birth and death and reveals itself as that which exerts a formative influence on the human organism—and it exerts this formative influence from the very moment of conception onward—so that it cannot be understood as a product of the human organism, but must be understood as that which submerges and immerses itself in this organism as its eternal, spiritual-soul essence.

[ 17 ] Another path is the one that has now once again led certain people from various cultural eras to gain insight into the nature of a spiritual world—one that, however, shed light on the other side of life. As I said, this matter has often taken a certain harmful turn. But it is precisely through anthroposophical science that we can look back to times when asceticism—the kind I am referring to now—had not yet degenerated into its harmful currents, when it was not yet a form of spiritual coquetry, but was intended to represent the most honest path to knowledge for certain seekers of the soul. Asceticism consists in a person, in a certain sense, toning down—or one might even say dampening—his ordinary life functions; in suppressing what otherwise wells up and surges into his conscious life from his instincts, drives, and passions in ordinary life, that, drawing on the full inner strength of the soul, they command certain inner impulses—those connected to the organism and its functions—to come to a standstill for a time; that they even train their bodies to maintain a calmer rhythm for a while with regard to physical functions and what is connected to them: the drives, desires, and passions. What lay at the root of this? Underlying this was an insight gained through experience. For these ascetics had arrived at certain insights, and in so doing, they came to understand what asceticism truly is for them. They came to the realization that while our physical body is indeed the rightful vessel for everything we are meant to experience between birth and death, it is also an obstacle to the perception of the spiritual world; and that everything which allows the essence of the spiritual world to rise into consciousness has a moderating effect on the manifestations of this physicality in the manner described. Those who, in this way, had so to speak removed the physical obstacle to looking into the spiritual world, turned their gaze more toward the other side of human eternity. They looked toward the gateway to life that a human being must pass through when he sheds his physical body by passing through death, when he re-enters the spiritual world with his eternal being. They focused less on the pre-existence of human existence and more on the life that a human being begins once he has passed through the gateway of death.

[ 18 ] I have cited these two examples to illustrate how, in other eras, people arrived at experiences and insights into the spiritual world from certain underlying sources. Today, however, we are faced with a world development, a cultural development, and a civilization that must, above all, establish the right relationship with the external world. Those who had acquired insights into the spiritual world—whether through Indian yoga practice or through asceticism—had, in a certain sense, rendered themselves unfit for external life. By undergoing the described yoga breathing practice, a person attunes themselves in such a way that their sensitivity becomes extraordinarily refined; they perceive everything happening in their surroundings with extraordinary ease. This gives them a tendency to withdraw from external life, just as a snail, when its feelers are touched, retreats from the outside world into its shell. Thus we also see that those who attained genuine insights into the spiritual world withdrew and lived in hermitages, paying little heed to coexistence with the external world. We find the same pattern among those who, through asceticism, come into contact with the spiritual world. They undergo exercises aimed at attuning the processes and forces of their physical nature, thereby rendering the physical body incapable of intervening in the more robust life of the external world. Once again, these individuals are led to a certain inability to intervene in external life. But again, it was necessary for these people—for reasons that are beyond the scope of this discussion—to devote themselves to the knowledge of the higher worlds, so that others, who accepted more out of deference to authority what such experts could reveal to them, would then accept this in good faith and carry out in external life what the reclusive hermits could not. Such behavior, however, contradicts both our present-day understanding and the demands of modern life.

[ 19 ] We humans, who do not live as the original yogi scholars or as the ascetics of the pre-Copernican or pre-Galilean era, but who live in an age in which a highly developed natural science has transformed our entire external life and demands that, if we wish to be people of knowledge, we must also know how to actively intervene in life, we must be clear today that it is no longer possible for us, as people of the present, to penetrate the spiritual worlds in the ways described. This does not, however, prevent modern human beings from finding the path to the supersensible world if they—as I have already indicated—undertake certain practices that have nothing to do with breathing exercises but consist of meditation and concentration, through which a person can enliven their thinking. This is similar to the inner experience that the yoga practitioner also undergoes. Or when I describe what a person can go through in certain exercises of the will—aimed at educating their self, taking their own development into their own hands, and casting off this or that habit with all their strength, and to adopt other attitudes regarding one’s state of mind or outlook on life, then what a person experiences through this kind of strengthening of the will may bear a certain resemblance to what the ancient ascetics experienced. But the aim is not to weaken the physical body; rather, it consists in ensuring that it remains in full vigor and fitness for external life.

[ 20 ] But what do we achieve when, on the one hand, we enliven our thinking through meditation and concentration in a way appropriate to the present moment? We achieve something that, even in its insight, need not withdraw from the external world—something that, in fact, establishes a very specific relationship with the external world, a relationship that is entirely in harmony with what we are accustomed to applying today, at a lower scientific level, as our methods of observation for external nature. I would like to cite an example in this regard—an example of what our thinking can become, through purely intellectual revitalization and through the inner spiritual strengthening of this thinking, precisely in relation to the external world.

[ 21 ] We have, after all, gained a large part of our current views on living beings—on the relationship, for example, between animals and humans—by comparing the individual organs of, say, higher animals or animals in general with the corresponding organs of humans. We also compare other things, such as blood composition and the like. Through this, we form a conception of how the human organism might be related to or connected with what we encounter, for example, in the organization of higher animals. But there is something peculiar here. What I am about to say may be somewhat subtle, but the entire modern path of knowledge into the supersensible worlds is, after all, a subtle one and must certainly be considered in its details and peculiarities. Let us suppose that an unbiased observer of the higher animal world forms a conception—a mental conception, not merely an external sensory perception—of a higher animal, and then also forms a mental conception of the form and structure of the human organism. He can hold the relationship between the two before his soul. But if one were now to ask such an observer to do the following, he would immediately realize how dead, how lifeless, how abstract his inner life of thought actually is. People simply do not do this in ordinary life or in conventional science, and therefore they do not realize how lifeless their observation and thinking are. Let us suppose that he has formed a conception of the external organization of higher animals and so on. In this case, even if he were to bring these thoughts to life, he cannot proceed from the living thought of the organization of higher animals to derive the thought of human organization. He can find a relationship between the two only by first forming the thought of the higher animal, then that of the human being, and finally bringing the two into connection. But he cannot allow the idea of the human being to emerge vividly from that of the higher animal. His thinking lacks this inner vitality. We recognize this vitality by observing how we grow, carry out our daily metabolism, and so on. But our thoughts exist side by side. We cannot allow the concept of the human organism to grow out of the concept of the animal organism, just as, for example, in the human embryo during the embryonic period, the individual organs grow out of the more undifferentiated human organism. In ordinary life, we do not have living thinking, and our entire thinking bears this character both for conventional science and for ordinary life. But the moment one engages in spiritual exercises that strengthen thinking from within, thinking becomes alive, and one comes to the point where, with these living thoughts, one can inwardly experience the form of a higher animal by considering how the higher animal orients the main axis of its organization horizontally, whereas the human being orients it vertically, and how the human being diverts his arms from the function they serve in animals. To be able to do this, a person must develop an inner relationship to that which, in ordinary thinking, they have no relationship to.

[ 22 ] For—dear friends—, when it comes to the external world, we often think differently—because we rely on “dead” thinking in that context—than we do when we think about human nature, or indeed about living nature in general. For example, when we look at a magnetic needle that can rotate around its axis, we find that it has a particularly distinct orientation, pointing toward the magnetic North Pole on one side and the magnetic South Pole on the other. This leads us to the idea that the magnetic north-south direction in space has something distinctive about it compared to the other directions. We differentiate space, which would otherwise appear undifferentiated to us. Once one has developed living thinking, the vertical direction—which human beings acquire by bringing their animal organization, oriented in an entirely different direction, into the vertical plane—becomes equally animated. In this way, one learns to experience the world firsthand; the entire space thereby comes alive. Through this, however, one can then transition from the living thought of the animal organism to the living thought of the human organism. The thought of the human organism grows out of the living thought of the animal organism itself. One sees: by observing the phenomena of the external world, thinking comes alive. For the Indian yogi, too, thinking came to life only through entering into a relationship with the spiritual world; however, he did not attain the kind of relationship with the external world that we require in our process of cognition.

[ 23 ] Even if, in this way, the possibility is developed to bring the world to consciousness as a living entity through thought, this would still not guarantee to human beings that they are dealing with a reality, with something truly real. What one develops as living thought could still be mere fantasy. One must have a distinguishing feature to indicate that one is not dealing with mere fantasy, but with something that, while living within our living thought, simultaneously lives out there in the things themselves, so that the thought I experience as living represents that which lives out there in the very beings of nature. This distinguishing feature becomes apparent to those who follow the path of knowledge leading to the living thought, as I have described it in *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, in my *Esoteric Science*, or in other books. The reality of the living thought becomes evident to them simply because, when they possess it, the nurturing and experiencing of this living thought at every inner step they take in life is accompanied by a spiritual pain, a suffering. Indeed, true higher knowledge cannot be attained without spiritual pain, without spiritual suffering. And what does this suffering, this pain, signify?

[ 24 ] Well, this pain and suffering are nothing other than the result of our entire organism—our whole human being—becoming, through and through, as sensitive internally as the senses alone are otherwise. We are accustomed to the sensitivity of the senses; they no longer cause us pain, even though processes are taking place within the senses—for example, in the eyes—that, if we had any sensation of pain for such processes at all, would indeed appear to us as painful processes. We do not have a sense of pain for these processes. But when our entire organism, through the exercises described, becomes a single, unified sensory organ, we initially experience this as pain, as inner spiritual suffering. That is why one must say again and again: The person who experiences joy and pleasure can, of course, be grateful to life for this joy and this pleasure. Yet this does not lead to deeper insights. Anyone who has acquired a little insight knows how much of it they owe to the sufferings and pains that ordinary life has already given them; so that these sufferings and pains have prepared them to now, through inner self-education toward living thought, also experience the sufferings and pains that this very living thought brings to human beings, precisely because they are placed within the outer world. By experiencing reality through suffering, we experience the spiritual world—which we now grasp with living thought—with the same degree of reality with which we experience the sensory world through our senses. Through this, we become a wholly spiritual sense organ, if I may use this paradoxical, self-contradictory, yet very real expression, and only as whole human beings can we become this. Then we perceive the spiritual world in its reality. Then we know how the living thought is just as much a reality as, in ordinary life, we know how to distinguish a piece of hot iron that we actually grasp with our fingers from one that we merely conjure up in our imagination.

[ 25 ] Thus, these two things go hand in hand in the perception of the higher, supersensible world: that the living thought is experienced within the human being, and that, through inner, soulful pain, the human being’s entire being is permeated by inner sensitivity. Thought must come alive—the whole human being must become a being of feeling during those moments of life when he seeks a connection to the spiritual world. We see that, as modern people, we remain entirely within the realm of the soul. We do not turn to the process that strengthens consciousness through regulated or irregular breathing. Nor do we turn to the process that slows down our bodily functions. With our exercises, we remain entirely within the realm of the soul, yet on a different level we develop the very same faculties that were cultivated through yoga practice and asceticism for the perception of the higher world. We develop these higher insights and yet remain human beings who can fully face the rigors of life, who need not withdraw into seclusion—neither as people of knowledge nor as people of action. Why is that? We perform only inner soul exercises, yet through them we arrive at the empowered thought—the very thought that was empowered in the Indian yogi solely by allowing the stronger current to flow into the current of breathing. And on the other hand, purely inwardly and spiritually, we arrive at what, in a certain sense, becomes a kind of attunement of the physical processes. But we now have both within our grasp. We have the power, for example, to ensure that suffering remains purely spiritual, and that we can return at any time—when we awaken from sleep—to our healthy state of mind and body. For it must be emphasized again and again that what matters in anthroposophical methods is that we can return from that state which leads us into the spiritual world to the state where we stand with both feet firmly on the earth.

[ 26 ] But once one has succeeded in enlivening thought in this way, one knows that one possesses something entirely different from what the much-mocked philosophy of nature once had. Oken and Schelling also arrived at a living form of thought. And anyone who reads Schelling’s works today will notice that there is something in them that is not dead thought, but living thought. But what Schelling does not articulate is precisely what makes his living thought different from the mere image of such thought. It is different because of what I have added—what testifies that we have become, with our whole being, a sensory organ: the pains and sufferings that one recognizes as a necessity if higher insights are to arise in human beings. Therefore—one might say—such knowledge, as it seems to exist in Schelling, provides only a kind of inner, psychological pleasure, whereas the knowledge I am referring to becomes quite serious when the question arises: How is one to endure it?

[ 27 ] And yet another difference arises between anthroposophical knowledge and Schelling’s. We are accustomed to acquiring knowledge through ordinary science or speculative philosophy; once we have it, it remains with us as it becomes a mental image. I would like to say: It is not quite so simple with anthroposophical spiritual knowledge, for it is a living thing. Once one has, in the manner described, gained the ability to look into the spiritual realm within a certain area of the world: No matter how intense an experience or how vivid a vision one may have at a given moment—after a short time it has faded, like a dream that has faded. And if one wishes to bring it back to life, one must reawaken it within oneself, for one has, after all, entered the sphere of the living. And just as no one in the sphere of the living can say that what came before renders what comes after it unnecessary—for example, that if one ate once eight days ago, one therefore need not eat now, eight days later—so it is here as well: one must continually reacquire the insight one has gained in spiritual life. This gives the life of the soul a certain attitude toward the supersensible world—namely, that the spiritual reveals itself as alive precisely because it must continually be grasped by living forces in order to be present to consciousness. In short, one lives one’s way into the supersensible world by simultaneously experiencing the reality of this spiritual world, just as one lives one’s way into a reality through the senses.

[ 28 ] But once one has developed within oneself this living thinking—imbued with inner sensitivity and the capacity for inner perception—one no longer approaches the person standing before one in the same way as one would with dead thinking. With dead thinking, after all, the peculiarity is that we have this person before us, form certain ideas about them, which we then carry within us. But none of these ideas extend beyond the space enclosed by the person’s skin. If, on the other hand, we look at the human being with living thinking, a spiritual human being—which is itself structured—is added to our physical-sensory perception of the person. We look at the human being in their physical form. This form, however, appears to us as if enclosed in a spiritual shell, and this spiritual shell points us back to earlier earthly lives. We see how the present earthly life, in which the current form lives out its existence, is a repetition of a previous earthly life. And we come to perceive the human being in such a way that we recognize what he experienced in the spiritual world during the time from his previous death to the beginning of his present earthly existence. We look at the human being’s spiritual-soul being as it was before descending into the physical earthly world, and see how the activity of this spiritual-soul being—which does not yet have a body—unfolded, and how it is directed toward permeating, with a full—and now spiritual—consciousness, precisely the mysteries of human physicality. We now become aware of the profound meaning of the saying: “The human being is a microcosm.” For this microcosm is small only in terms of space compared to the vast world of the cosmos. It contains not only the mysteries of the cosmos. It contains far more than can be seen in the cosmos with the ordinary eyes, just as we survey the outer cosmos with our intellect and direct our gaze into it so that we may recognize it or act within it. Thus, as a spiritual-soul being living in a spiritual world before conception, the human being’s gaze is directed toward the human organism—toward the human being as he is enclosed here within his skin with his spiritual-soul being. This is the world one experiences between death and a new birth, and we look toward this world through what—if one may use this expression—we see as a spiritual aura around the human being and through the human being, and which points us toward the world the human being experienced before his earthly existence.

[ 29 ] And we turn our attention to that other structure through which it becomes clear to us how human beings appear before us as agents. When we observe with our ordinary intellect how one person encounters another in life, we might attribute it to so-called chance when we realize that this encounter has a deeper meaning for the person. If we realize that this encounter—perhaps because these two are destined to become life partners—is decisive for their entire earthly existence, we might still attribute it merely to chance that these two found one another. But if we look at it with strengthened thinking that attests to its reality, then we recognize how the entire lives of these two people seemed to unfold with a certain magic, and that one of them ultimately came into the other’s field of vision because he found the other person appealing. It becomes a certainty—what thoughtful people, once they have reached a certain age, say to themselves, as Goethe’s friend Knebel, for example, put it: “When I look back on my life, it seems to me as if I had willed it out of unconscious, inner desires.” It becomes evident how what seeks to emerge in a person’s destiny binds us together in our inner being with the essence of the other.

[ 30 ] This brings us to what the ancient ascetics, the yogis, called karma—how destiny unfolds in connection with successive earthly lives. To some people today, this still seems paradoxical. But anyone who takes seriously the question of how the reality of living thought can be substantiated will nevertheless form a conception of the connection between human destiny and what are cultivated as higher, supersensory powers of perception. Just as one can say that a person born blind is unaware of what exists in the world of colors, yet the world of colors must not be denied for that reason, so too, from the perspective of higher knowledge, the connection between human destiny and repeated earthly lives does not appear to contradict human freedom. When one considers human freedom, it might seem as though it has nothing to do with such a view of karma and repeated earthly lives. But that is not the case. For example, I am not unfree simply because I am building a house this year and will move into it next year. Nor am I any less free because I develop certain powers within myself, and because these powers then seek their own paths in earthly life. Just as with the building of a house, human freedom still remains intact. But through such a possibility of insight, one comes to see how human action constitutes the second link of the human aura. And through this, one gains an understanding of that part of us that is constantly at work as the human being engages in activity in the physical world. It is not only the ordinary powers of cognition that live within this, but also that which, for example, one might otherwise sense in connection with one’s digestion. Thus, a person now perceives what they experience from day to day, what enriches their life, through which they grow ever greater and greater—in the spiritual sense, of course—and what then passes into the spiritual world through death: they perceive the mystery of death.

[ 31 ] This is the anthroposophical path into the spiritual world. And this path also explains why those who do not wish to follow it now condemn it so vehemently, as we see today. They have an unconscious aversion to what must one day be overcome through higher knowledge—to suffering, to that which brings human functions into a certain state of calm, but a calm that is subject to an inner mastery. They therefore prefer to see visions and the like emerge from a subdued physical state—as in the case of a medium—which, however, have no value as knowledge. Whereas true knowledge arises not from experiencing what is brought about by the outer physical body, but from what is experienced from within the soul—albeit as a certain suffering—which guarantees the certainty of the supersensible world.

[ 32 ] And in seeking the path to the supersensible world in this way, its findings must also be communicated in such a way that the entire presentation is an expression of the seriousness required of one who wishes to ascend the path to the spiritual world and, from there, bring news of this spiritual world to other people. Today, the view must take hold among people that messages about the spiritual world can be proclaimed by those who walk this path, and that through this the mystery of birth and death can be explored. People must be able to emerge who seek knowledge of the spiritual world, not merely that of the natural world as studied by the natural sciences. And just as one need not be a painter to appreciate the beauty of a natural phenomenon, so too one need not be a spiritual researcher to appreciate the value of what the spiritual researcher has to say about the supersensible world. Only when a relationship has developed toward understanding the spiritual world in a similar way to how one can understand works of art—even if one is not an artist—will the proper relationship exist between the spiritual researcher and the non-spiritual researcher, just as the proper relationship already exists today between astronomers and non-astronomers.

[ 33 ] And spiritual science will establish the proper relationship between the spiritual researcher and those who wish to engage with spiritual research. And since this relationship is oriented toward truth, the truth must also be perceived when people allow their sense of truth and common sense to prevail—toward which the spiritual researcher’s communications are also oriented. But once such a relationship between spiritual science and this life exists, as I have just described, then that which can transform the spiritual impulses of this spiritual science into a genuine way of life will take hold in life. What do we have today from the spiritual world? We have thoughts about the spiritual world; we live in thoughts and ideas that, however, as I have characterized them, are actually dead. But if one is able to infuse these ideas with anthroposophical spiritual science, then it breathes life into these thoughts and ideas. Through this, the people who are able to understand these anthroposophical thoughts are themselves inwardly and spiritually enlivened.

[ 34 ] Do we have spirit in our present-day culture? We may say: We have spirit in the sense that we have developed beautiful, grand ideas about the spirit. But the living spirit is not present in these ideas. Anthroposophy does not seek to develop ideas about the spirit, but rather to infuse the living idea itself into the human being as spiritual blood, so that the human being is permeated in his spiritual nature by spiritual blood just as he is permeated in his physical nature by physical blood. Then, however, we will be able to imbue our entire life with spirit once again—not merely with thoughts and abstractions about the spirit, but with living ideas of this spirit. Then, however, the great questions of life—above all the social questions—will be resolved in an entirely different way when we can say: We do not merely have thoughts about the spiritual, but the spiritual world itself walks among us. It is present wherever we ourselves are as physical human beings. But by carrying—each within our physical being—a spiritual human being within us, we become companions of spiritual beings who walk among us. We will relate to the world in an entirely different way, and the great enigmas of the present and the near future will present themselves to us in a completely different light when we cease to merely think of a dead spirit, but when we can once again say: We humans are not alone on Earth; we do not merely carry thoughts of a spirit within us—thoughts that, as mere thoughts, are unproven and lead, on the one hand, to superstition and, on the other, to doubt. For we can say with certainty: We are not alone on Earth; spiritual beings are among us, are connected to us; spiritual beings work with us to shape the course of the world, and we shape the course of the world when we enter into a relationship with them!

[ 35 ] Thus, anthroposophy does not seek the spirit, which often proves to be a lifeless presence in life and can offer us only a dim picture of the future. Rather, anthroposophy turns to the living spirit, so that people may not only have ideas about the spirit, but may have the living spirit walking among them!