The Rudolf Steiner Archive

12. Anthroposophy and Spiritual Knowledge

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! The remarks I am to present here today require—if they are to appear justified in the present—I might say—in our scientific age—a certain prerequisite: the prerequisite of engaging with what must currently be recognized as scientifically possible. However, what needs to be said in this regard—namely, what anthroposophy asserts about its relationship to the contemporary scientific worldview, how it is by no means in opposition to it but fully acknowledges its significance, and how it, for its part, extends beyond this science—I took the liberty of addressing in my last lecture a few months ago, which I was permitted to deliver here in this very same venue. And since I may safely assume that a large portion of today’s esteemed audience was also present on that occasion, it seems to me neither possible nor, moreover, necessary to repeat what was said then. I will simply take it as a given and build upon what anthroposophy now has to say through its research and its insights into the relationship of the human being to the spiritual world.

[ 2 ] When we, as human beings, speak of the difficulties we feel we face—when puzzling questions about the spiritual world arise—when we speak of such difficulties, these difficulties cannot pertain to the existence of a spiritual world as such, with which human beings feel connected in their earthly existence. For a person need only reflect on himself, and he lives in a spiritual world. Through his spirit, he relates cognitively to the things around him and to the actions he himself performs. And even the most ardent materialist does not deny this relationship between human beings and the spiritual world, insofar as a person is always conscious of his spirit while awake. The difficulty begins only when a person looks at the nature of this spirit, for it is in this spirit alone that they can truly perceive their human dignity and their true human worth. After all, a person must say to himself: I have a spirit. As I said, even the most extreme materialist does not deny this. At most, he believes that what a person experiences within himself as spirit is a product, a creation of material existence. And precisely because human beings feel themselves to be spirit, because they perceive their value and dignity in this spiritual realm, they must ask: What is the essence of the spirit, and how is it perhaps grounded in a comprehensive spiritual world that does not belong to the transitory, but rather endures in contrast to the transitory? This points—my esteemed audience—to the inner spiritual difficulties into which human beings—I might say—feel themselves plunged every day and every hour when they look upon the nature of their own spirituality. These difficulties are not always brought into clear consciousness by human beings in the full sense of the word. But they live in the depths of the soul; whether one explores them or not, they live in these depths of the soul, welling up into conscious soul life, shaping the joy and sorrow of the innermost human being, constituting the innermost destiny of the human being, and forming the soul’s mood and disposition. In this way, a person finds their place in the world; they become useful to their fellow human beings and to the world to the extent that they can—even if perhaps unconsciously and naively—gain insight into the nature of the spirit. And from many depths arise the enigmatic questions in this regard, and I could cite many things that live in the soul, whether consciously or more or less unconsciously.

[ 3 ] I would like to highlight two examples from all that exists within the soul—two examples that may not even be among the most common, but which can precisely illustrate the various aspects of a person’s inner life that one encounters when seeking to gain insight into the spirit. Every day, as we transition from the waking state to the sleeping state, we see how our inner spiritual liveliness—our inner spiritual activity—slows down and fades into an indeterminate darkness, as the time of sleep sets in, during which we cannot say what actually becomes of our inner spiritual and soulful liveliness and activity. That is when we feel—one might well say—the powerlessness of what constitutes our spirituality. We live within this spirituality from the moment we wake until we fall asleep; we truly feel like human beings when we live within this spirituality, but we see it fading and dimming, and we are simply powerless in the face of this daily vanishing, in the face of that which is our true humanity; and even without always feeling it—as I said—from the unconscious experience of this powerlessness arises that which gives us uncertainty about the nature and destiny of our spirit. And that is one side of it.

[ 4 ] The other is—I would say—polar opposites. We experience it again more or less unconsciously—unconsciously for most people—when we transition from the state of sleep to the waking state, at most through more or less chaotic dreams, which, however, we know with sound reason to have only an illusory value compared to what we call the reality of existence in ordinary life. With this transition through the dream state, we take possession of our physical being with our spiritual self. When we wake up, we take hold of our senses as the external world—in its colors, sounds, and so on—is reflected in our senses; we experience this inwardly. We experience inwardly how we take hold of the faculties of our will and thereby become active human beings. However, as I already hinted at in my last lecture here from a different perspective, into what darkness do we actually look down when we have even a simple act of will—when we resolve to raise our arm or move our hand? We have this thought; we then see how this thought is carried out in the movement of the hand, in the raised arm; but as the thought flows down into the organism—all the complex processes involved until the hand is moved—all of that vanishes from our consciousness. When we wake up, we grasp our organism with our spirit; yet the experiences that this spirit has down there are shrouded in complete darkness even during the waking state, so that even in this waking state we have only an indefinite relationship to our spirituality and its connection to the external world—to the external world that we ourselves are through our body—a relationship that presents us with a mystery. While we sense the powerlessness of the spirit on the one hand, we feel it sinking down into our own inner darkness upon waking. Out of such experiences, questions and mysteries about the nature of spirituality arise within the human being; and then two—I would say—adversaries of the soul’s life stand before this spiritual world toward which the human being strives with their knowledge and will—two enemies, one of whom obscures this spiritual world for them, while the other threatens to take it away from them. One enemy targets precisely those who, even in our present-day existence, live more or less naively in accordance with our scientific worldviews, incorporating certain traditional elements uncritically into their worldview as their own ideas—often as the worst illusions about the supersensible and the spiritual—because they feel that without such ideas about the spiritual, they cannot truly live a healthy spiritual life. Thus they surrender themselves to that which comes from the one enemy of the soul life: superstition. All manner of soul-formations flow from the human life of the will; they stand before the human spirit, seeking to tell it what spiritual realities underlie the external world. Those who have not become acquainted with the scientific rigor and methodology of the present day very easily succumb to such notions, but they also experience a sad consequence of superstition in the human soul. If we view the world in such a way that we accept what flows into our consciousness through our will as authoritative regarding the supersensible, then we step forward; we seek to understand the external world. At every turn, we encounter obstacles to orienting ourselves within the external world. We believe that this or that must be true in the sensory world because we accept it out of superstition. External nature does not confirm at every step what we presuppose in our superstitious experience. As a result, we undergo a certain reorientation toward this external world. The world appears to us differently than we imagine it. We become uncertain within ourselves, and because we become uncertain within ourselves, we lose the ability to generate strong impulses for our actions. We become incapable even of our own actions; we become incapable of interacting with other people.

[ 5 ] That—my esteemed audience—is the one enemy that arises in the human soul in response to the enigmatic questions of the spiritual world. The other enemy confronts, above all, those souls who engage with scientific life in the modern way. They learn to recognize how to develop their thinking in a conscientious, methodical—one might say—precise manner, in order to trace sensory phenomena back to their external laws and to penetrate them with ideas that make them comprehensible. But one very often notices, precisely when one immerses oneself in the external world in this conscientious way, one notices precisely then how our thinking, through this scientific path—I might say—becomes thin, how it gradually becomes only commensurate with what the sensory world actually is, and how, in its thinness, precisely because of its conscientiousness, it cannot find its way upward from the sensory to the supersensory realm. And then, precisely those who immerse themselves deeply in the scientific world are overcome by doubt, that other enemy of human soul life. Doubt is, of course, something connected with the development and education of our intellect. But when doubt arises in the human intellect, it sinks down into the soul; it sinks down into the mind. It is precisely the person who, based on the deeper insights that anthroposophy can provide, now recognizes the connection between the life of the soul and the human physical experience—who knows how what takes place in the soul pours into the physical body and how that which—one must put it this way—storms into the life of the soul from doubt, how this initially evokes in the human being a certain wasting away of the soul life, how this wasting away can—I would say—weaken us to the very marrow, down into our limbs, down into our muscles, so that we can become incapable of our soul, spiritual, and physical activities precisely because of doubt. Precisely because this is experienced by one group or another within modern civilized humanity, perhaps the most ardent skeptics feel compelled to seek information about the spiritual and the supersensible—to which they do not wish to turn out of traditional faith, unlike the first type of people who indulge in superstition. Since they wish to turn toward the supersensible realm through knowledge, it is precisely scientific minds that are led to study the abnormal spiritual life of human beings—the spiritual life of people in a depressed state, mediums, and people who experience all manner of hallucinations. It is evident that something different is at work in this abnormal life than in the normal human life of cognition and will, and one believes that from this abnormal life—which arises from mediumship and from visionary experiences—one can draw into the realm of ordinary consciousness insights into human faculties and their connection to another world.

[ 6 ] It is precisely those who stand on anthroposophical ground who know that all these manifestations belong to the realm of pathology, to a pathological soul life. The medium’s soul life is pathological because, at the very moment when he or she is acting as a medium, his or her physical life must be in a state of lowered vibration. This lowering of the vibrational state simultaneously makes it impossible for the person acting as a medium to gain an overview of what constitutes the direct experiences of their soul. One cannot then assess—not even as an outside observer, who may well possess sound judgment when observing the medium— one cannot then discern what kind of relationship the person—the medium—actually has with another world unless one is immersed in that experience. The medium is, after all, set apart; their common sense distracts them from what they reveal to us in their mediumistic states. Whenever a person experiences hallucinations, we can always demonstrate how these are rooted in a pathological aspect of the human physical constitution, and how what appears in the soul as other experiences can only arise from this diseased part of the human organism. Thus, even here we lack the possibility of finding that transition we are specifically seeking—from healthy human soul life to an understanding of the supersensible, spiritual realm. For control is lacking at every turn, at every step, when we turn to diseased soul life. And so, once again, when it comes to the supersensible and the spiritual, most of our contemporaries feel compelled to cling to time-honored, traditional conceptions—to that which has developed from earlier epochs of humanity into the tenets of faith and worldviews that have been passed down to our time.

[ 7 ] People then tend toward these worldviews that permeate our philosophies—people have no idea how much this is the case even in philosophies that many great thinkers consider to be free of prejudice, when in fact they are not—and, as they say, they cling to faith in that which they cannot attain through knowledge or insight. And today we have already gone so far as to construct all manner of artificial concepts to justify faith as something that must stand on its own, distinct from insight and knowledge—which are supposed to be directed solely toward our sensory experiences or the like—while faith alone is permitted to be directed toward the supersensible. But once again, this supersensible realm is derived from what has been traditionally handed down and what exerts a powerful influence on people—an influence that is often still felt today—by virtue of its venerable age. But if one looks impartially at what human beings have in their creeds and worldviews—which have been historically handed down—and at what they hold within them, one can trace this through true history—not merely the history recognized today, but a history permeated by psychology and the study of the soul—and thus arrive at earlier epochs of human history. There one sees that what people wish to believe in today—what they accept, accepting it as an idea in its effect on the world of sensation—actually emerged in earlier epochs of human history from insights that individual human beings had attained out of their need for knowledge, following paths intended to lead them into the supersensible. For everything that is justified today as a matter of faith anywhere actually goes back to ancient insights.

[ 8 ] At some point in the past, a person—or that person’s community—found their way up into the supersensible world through special inner spiritual paths, received impressions from this supersensible world, grasped them with ordinary consciousness, and passed them on to their fellow human beings. Fellow human beings recognized that such paths of knowledge could reveal something about the supersensible world. Compared to the paths of knowledge that must exist for us today, such earlier paths may seem primitive. But it is unacceptable for the truly open-minded person to overlook this, to fail to see how the religious beliefs of our time actually trace back to such ancient paths of knowledge, whose source of insight we have simply forgotten. And when one explores them—sometimes through external history or various documents—one feels unsettled because we no longer turn to such sources of knowledge; one says: “That is suitable for an earlier civilization and culture.” Yes, but—my dear friends here today—what people believe today stems from these sources of knowledge; it has merely been altered in some way in terms of concepts, but in terms of its true content, it goes back to such sources.

[ 9 ] Ladies and gentlemen, Anthroposophy, as I understand it, provides people with a path of knowledge leading into the supersensible world, and we will have more to say about this anthroposophical path of knowledge and how it is suited to people today. But we will be able to communicate more easily today if we consider older paths of knowledge, which I alluded to in my last lecture—paths whose findings are available today to both the uninitiated and, often, the learned person, provided they believe in the supersensible.

[ 10 ] I would like to describe two of the ancient paths to knowledge here before you. It is, of course, possible to describe countless other such paths of knowledge, but I want to single out two because they are particularly characteristic, and because people have largely forgotten how much of what people today accept as beliefs stems precisely from these sources.

[ 11 ] I would like to begin by noting—as I said, simply so that we are on the same page, not because I wish to recommend such a path of knowledge to anyone, but because through an understanding of the ancient, we can work our way up to an understanding of the new— I would like to mention first the path that is well known, the path that was taken in ancient India to attain knowledge of a world other than the one that usually surrounds human beings.

[ 12 ] I would first like to describe what is known as the ancient system of Yoga knowledge, which was once sacred in the East but has now fallen into decay. The system of Yoga knowledge leads—I would say—to its own kind of scholarship, to its own kind of insight into another world. What was the essence of this system of yoga? I would like to mention a practice that, when carried out today, is cause for concern—it was not cause for concern back then, but the way it is practiced today makes it so—because it is no longer suited to human nature as it is today, since human nature has changed since the times when these yoga practices were performed. What could be practiced back then without any harm to human nature—and was practiced in ancient times, let us say, in Indian culture—cannot be practiced today, especially by Westerners, without harming their body and mind. But let us agree on this. The essential and purely essential aspect of yoga practice, among other things, is a modified form of breathing distinct from a person’s ordinary, everyday breathing.

[ 13 ] How does this everyday process of breathing actually work? More or less unconsciously. Only when we are afflicted by illness do we become aware of our breathing. Otherwise, inhaling, holding our breath, and exhaling take place almost entirely unconsciously. And it is precisely this unconsciousness of inhaling, holding our breath, and exhaling that forms the basis of the uninhibited naturalness of our lives. In the ancient East, anyone who believed they could become a yoga scholar would, for certain periods, practice a form of breathing that they regulated differently from the way nature itself regulates natural human breathing. They established a different rhythm for inhaling, holding the breath, and exhaling. What did this achieve? It enabled them—whereas one would otherwise breathe unconsciously—to breathe more or less fully consciously, to experience breathing as a fully conscious process. This takes place within me as I inhale; it takes place throughout my entire organism during the flow of inhalation; it takes place within me during the retention of breath; and it takes place during exhalation. In particular, the yogi directed his attention to what now resulted for his thinking from this altered breathing process, which had been raised into consciousness. For his thinking, what did result from this? Well, we can characterize what happened there physiologically in the modern sense. What takes place unconsciously during the breathing process—what is it in relation to the human brain’s organization, to the organization of thought? We inhale; the breath enters our organism, acts upward through the spinal canal onto our brain—the instrument of our thinking—which performs a certain activity arising from the nervous-sensory life, so that something of the breath’s current flows through this activity. In reality, our thought life is not merely concerned with the activity of our nervous-sensory life; rather, this nervous-sensory life is permeated and surges through with the rhythmic life of the respiratory current. But we know nothing of this. This permeation of the physical aspect of his thought activity by the breath current—this permeation—was brought into consciousness by the yogi who strove for higher knowledge. What did he attain there? We can only grasp what he attained there if we compare what the yogi experienced in his consciousness with regard to thinking with what his entire surroundings—the rest of humanity—experienced.

[ 14 ] Yes—my esteemed audience—humanity has changed more than people realize today in terms of its spiritual life over the course of historical development. What today—I would say—constitutes the very essence of our consciousness was quite different in ancient times. Today we perceive the external world by—I would say—clearly taking in colors through the sense of sight; we hear the external world through the sense of hearing, perceiving sounds with a certain clarity, and the same is true of the other sensory perceptions. It was not like that in humanity’s ancient times. We do not understand the senses of ancient humanity if we say that they had, as animism would have it, fantastically dreamed themselves into the world. That was not the case. Ancient people experienced, as a matter of course, the rising within themselves of what existed as a living spiritual-soul element in the external world, and as they looked upon lightning and thunder, the rushing clouds, the blowing wind, springs, plants, and animals—all that which surrounded human beings in the external natural world—they did not merely see, as we do today, a world of colors, warmth, cold, or other sensory qualities. No, they saw a world in which every spring was permeated by the spiritual-soul element; in every breath of wind that played around them, in the stars, in the sun and moon, they sensed the expression of the spiritual-soul element. It was just as natural for people to see this spiritual-soul element as it is natural for us to see colors and hear sounds. Such was the ordinary experience of the people who made up the yogi’s surroundings. The yogi sought a world different from the one they ordinarily experienced. That is why he undertook the exercises I have just described, and by using these exercises—I might say—to direct the conscious flow of breath through his thinking, he transformed his thinking into something entirely different.

[ 15 ] Yes, the person who lived in this way—as just described—by seeing a spiritual-soul aspect in every spring, in every breath of wind, in all of nature—did not possess that strong “I,” that strong sense of self that modern people have; he could not perceive the strong spiritual aspect within his own self, his very being, as it were, flowed together with the external world, which was spiritual to him, just as his inner world was spiritual to him. But when the yogi transformed his thinking in this way through his breathing, his experience was that he attained a view similar to ours, but through this path of knowledge; he strengthened his thinking and led it into abstraction. Through this, he perceived the spirituality of his own self. And he felt this self rooted in yet another world, a world that is eternal.

[ 16 ] And all the wonderful things that were said in earlier times about the spiritual world were spoken from the experience that human beings, in the manner described, came to their Self, to their “I,” and felt their “I” as their eternal spirituality, united with the universal spirituality of the world. And one should read the most beautiful chapters in the wonderful poetry of the Bhagavad Gita; one should read how it describes in such a magnificent way how human beings come to their Self and to the experience of the spiritual world, and one will feel transported into the unique character of the spiritual path of those ancient times. Much of what has been revealed to humanity in this way about the human self, about human spirituality, and its relationship to the spirituality of the world lives on in many forms in today’s traditional creeds, in today’s traditional worldviews, and even in the philosophies that people believe they approach without prejudice. People do not realize how much of what they embrace in their belief in authority has been inherited from the experiences that the ancient yogi underwent.

[ 17 ] Those who today seek to understand the meaning of the modern yoga system usually arrive at a misconception, and they believe that by practicing such a method, they can still achieve something special today. That is not the case. People will harm themselves, both mentally and physically, if they seek to revive on their path of knowledge that which was appropriate for an ancient humanity. But even with regard to what is necessary for modern people to attain higher knowledge—and which we will discuss later, also [in order] to reach an understanding about it—such a characterization of old paths of knowledge, which are no longer suitable today, can serve as an example. I would like to say that, once again, the opposite reveals itself to us as an example when we look at an older path of knowledge—the one that was pursued through asceticism, a path of knowledge that we can no longer follow today.

[ 18 ] We cannot follow the path of yoga. We cannot walk the path of yoga for the following reason: the person who immerses himself in his breathing in the manner described, and then lives within the [by] breathing—becomes so highly sensitive that he can no longer endure the rugged outer world to any great extent. Because of this sensitivity, he must withdraw from the outer world; he must surrender to a certain solitude, indeed, to a hermit’s life. But it was precisely this that characterized the views of the ancient people: they sought wisdom about higher worlds specifically from those who did not experience life as they themselves did, but who set themselves apart, who, so to speak, withdrew into a corner in order to strive upward into the higher world in this solitude, to explore that which is supersensible in human nature, so that they might proclaim it to others. Today, a well-adjusted person cannot relate to people who seek solitude and seclusion in this way. Modern life places demanding requirements on us to find our place within its bustling activity, and modern people, even with regard to knowledge, can only place their trust in someone who does not need to withdraw from life, but who engages with life just like everyone else. Therefore, we have no need for the path of yoga. It would not inspire confidence in anyone who understands themselves within the context of modern cultural development.

[ 19 ] The same is true of the ancient path of asceticism. What does the ascetic do in the traditional sense of the word? He curbs his bodily functions; he, in a certain sense, dampens them. His physical organism should be less active during those times when a higher insight is to dawn upon him than it normally is—than when he is outwardly devoted to a robust life. Then the one who strives for a higher life experiences—through this subduing of the bodily functions—that he comes to realize: Yes, this body we carry is suited to the life we lead outwardly; it is appropriate for that, and we should not actually wish for any other body—and therefore should not seek to subdue the bodily functions. But if we wish to look into the spiritual world, then this body, which is constituted for the sensory world, is an obstacle. If we tone it down—if we make it less active than it is in ordinary life—then we remove that obstacle, and the supersensory world flows into our consciousness. This is simply what the ancients experienced: the body is an obstacle to the knowledge of higher worlds. Again, it was the case that, by attuning the physical body to pain and suffering through asceticism in order to connect with the spiritual world, a person entered into an inner experience that carried them away from the robust outer world into solitude, into the life of a hermit. From there, they were able to explore many things that then sank deeply into the human soul when the soul sought to know: How am I connected to the spiritual worlds, and how do I find true happiness in my heart?

[ 20 ] But once again, the people who were able to say such things—and this extends right back into our present-day religious creeds and worldviews, without people even realizing it—once again, these people had to attune the functions of their physicality to the robust external life; they had to develop a hypersensitivity toward this life, leading to solitude and hermitage. Even that ancient path of asceticism—which has also fallen into decay today—even this ancient path of asceticism is not suited to modern human beings. Through such asceticism, first of all, a person alienates themselves from reality, into which we must fully immerse ourselves today; but they also render themselves unfit for action, unfit to work for the salvation of their fellow human beings. But we can at least look back on the two paths through which people once strove upward to the contemplation of supersensible worlds.

[ 21 ] How a person today can elevate themselves into the supersensible world—that, my esteemed audience, is precisely what I described, at least in principle, in my last lecture here. You can find a detailed account of this in my books *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?* , *The Secret Science*, and in my other books. There, however, you will see that modern human beings can no longer follow the path of, say, regulating the respiratory system—the path of conscious breathing—to transform their thought life in such a way that ordinary human perspectives are transformed into the wondrous worldviews of the *Bhagavad Gita*. In those days, humanity—I might say—began its path of knowledge, its path of thought, from something that was still entirely appropriate for those ancient times, something intimately connected with its physical functions.

[ 22 ] Everything I have described to you here in the previous lecture, and everything I describe in my books, consists of processes that are not carried out through breathing, nor in this way within the physical body, but rather within the life of thought itself, within the inner life of the soul, through a special training in meditation, through a special training in concentration of thought and contemplation. Today’s exercises, which are intended to lead us up into the higher world, are carried out through practices that regulate thought itself. The ancient Indian yogi regulated his breathing; we directly regulate our ordinary thinking; we introduce a different rhythm, a different inner law, into our thinking through meditation and concentration. We do not take the roundabout route through breathing to transform our thinking; we tackle thinking directly. Of course, I cannot now repeat all the exercises that you can read about in the books mentioned, *How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds* and *Esoteric Science*; I can only hint at the principles in this way.

[ 23 ] But where do we end up by doing such exercises that are intimately directed toward human thought? Through them, we come to see through what we today, by virtue of our birth and upbringing, regard as our ordinary thinking—in its abstractness, in its lifelessness, if I may put it that way. We come to essentially enliven thinking, whereas the ancient Indian yogi—I might say—started from a certain liveliness of thinking, from which he moved away toward abstract thinking, toward the kind of thinking we take for granted as a natural part of life. There he experienced the Self. Now, we possess this Self through birth and upbringing; we must, by taking hold of thinking—not breathing—revitalize this thinking. Through this, however, we come to perceive ordinary thinking precisely as the abstract, as the lifeless, and to transition to living thinking through inner exercises.

[ 24 ] This is the significant transformation that the modern seeker of knowledge—who wishes to penetrate into the higher worlds, into the world of the spiritual—must undergo; this is the method that today’s seeker of knowledge must follow, which leads from abstract, lifeless, and dead thinking to inner, living thinking.

[ 25 ] And now I would like to use modern forms of consciousness to illustrate where we are headed when we make this living thinking our own. I am pointing to something that is familiar to everyone today. We realize—if we have even the slightest connection to contemporary worldviews—that we understand the nature of a so-called higher animal, how its functions and physical processes work; we form an inner mental image of this higher animal. In this way, we bring the essence of this animal to mind. But then we might turn our attention to the human being. Once again, using all the material that science provides us today—which will become even more complete in the future, but in principle will remain the same as long as thinking is applied only in an abstract way, just as it is applied today to the study of the laws of nature— we form a picture of the human being—of the structure of their bones, the structure of their muscles, the structure of their other organs, and the interweaving and interflow of their internal bodily processes. Then we compare this picture with the image we have of higher animals, and we find a certain kinship. Depending on whether we think in a more or less materialistic way, we imagine that human beings then emerge physically from higher animals. If we think in a more idealistic or spiritual way, we conceive of this kinship differently. But by forming the idea of the higher animal on the one hand and the idea of the human being on the other, and by comparing them, we develop through this comparison something that will then become our worldview regarding our environment. But now let us ask ourselves a question that may interest us. What is the difference between the kind of thinking used to compare the concept of the higher animal with that of human beings, and the kind of thinking by which one can outwardly compare a higher animal with a lower animal, or a lower animal with a plant? Let us ask ourselves: What is the difference between this dead, abstract thinking and that living thinking which one acquires through modern exercises in insight into the supersensible world?

[ 26 ] When one uses this ordinary way of thinking to form a conception of the higher animal—of its inner structure, its processes, and the interplay of its life processes—then, through a thought—I would say—one has inwardly visualized the essence of this higher animal that stands before us. But the thought is alive, and as it lives, it transforms itself inwardly without our needing to look closely. It forms the thought of the human being out of itself; it undergoes this metamorphosis inwardly. With dead thinking, we can only form the thought of the higher animal; then, through thinking, we can move on to the human being—in the human being we experience externally—and find the human thought; but with the animal thought, we never arrive at the human thought. By simply allowing the thought to be alive within us—through which the human thought then emerges from the animal thought—we arrive at a different, spiritual relationship to the world.

[ 27 ] I would like to illustrate this as follows. Consider a magnetic needle. You can point it in all sorts of directions. Only one direction is the distinguished one—the direction pointing from the magnetic North Pole to the magnetic South Pole. This single line is the distinguished one. No matter which way you orient the magnetic needle, you do not have such a distinguished direction. By virtue of the laws of nature themselves, this magnetic needle belongs in the north-south direction. In this way, living thought differentiates the entire space. In living thought, we do not have the space of indifferent juxtaposition—the mathematical space—but rather we experience a space in which something else becomes the vertical line extending from the Earth to the stars; the horizontal line that is the tangent to the ground on which we stand. Space is inwardly lived through by the living thought.

[ 28 ] Then let us turn to the higher animal; we find that its spinal line runs horizontally, and where this line turns vertical, these are exceptions that demonstrate that what I am saying is correct. We see the vertical direction in humans; we sense that this line is different from the one the animal maintains with its spine, and we perceive this line into which the human now positions itself—along with many other things we must change as we move from animal thinking to human thinking. We sense that a different being is emerging, and as we embrace animal thinking, we must keep the form flexible and must know: When we enter a different spatial direction, we arrive at a different being. In our inner experience, we allow one thought to emerge from another.

[ 29 ] Just consider—my esteemed audience— how vivid our inner life becomes as a result, how imbued with spirit our inner life becomes, as we place one dead, abstract thought beside another; how we stand outwardly before the world; how our inner experience now comes to resemble life itself—the mutual transformation, the growth, and the becoming of external things; how we immerse ourselves in the outer world, no longer merely standing beside it.

[ 30 ] This is the first step for modern humanity: to breathe life into abstract, lifeless thinking, thereby immersing oneself in the spirituality of the world. But all of you—my esteemed audience—may raise a significant objection as I describe this living thinking. You might object that there have been all sorts of thinkers—the natural philosophers Oken and Schelling—who, in a certain sense, possessed such living thinking; they knew how, in a certain imaginative way, to grasp the idea of an external object and to transform it in order to find something that then naturally corresponds to another thing. And modern humanity has, after all, recognized how much that is fanciful in Schelling and Oken stems precisely from this kind of thinking. But there is something that anthroposophy must add to what even the most recent past did not possess. When thinkers such as those mentioned describe what is actually taking place in their spiritual life, one finds no reference to that very thing to which anthroposophical research and anthroposophical experience must point.

[ 31 ] The person who, as I have described, forms a thought about the things of the external world—a thought that is itself alive—cannot take a single step with this living thought without feeling inner, spiritual pain, a kind of suffering. And now, as this living thought is experienced as suffering, as pain—not initially in the physical body, though it can only propagate there—something begins that can be experienced as truly real. Anyone who comes to understand how, in the modern sense, higher knowledge can be attained only through the passage through suffering and pain will always tell you one thing about their ordinary life as well; they will say: Whatever I have experienced as happiness, as joy, as good fortune—I am grateful to my fate. Whatever suffering, pain, disappointments, and hardships I have endured in ordinary life—to these I owe the little insight I have gained. And because I have gained such insight through the ordinary pains and disappointments that life has given me, I have undergone a kind of preliminary training for what must be experienced when the living thought—as living spirituality—fills the soul; that is why it is also alive in the soul, and why it also drives the soul toward suffering and pain.

[ 32 ] What is achieved by this? This transforms our entire human being into a sense organ—the expression sounds paradoxical—but not a sense organ that perceives the external world from the outside, like the eye or the ear, but rather a sense organ that perceives itself spiritually from within and also looks into the spiritual world, into the world to which living thought gives its content, and truly experiences this living world. One can understand why we must go through pain and suffering. The fact is—my dear friends here today—that even in a structure as perfect as the eye, certain processes and changes take place as a result of light acting upon it. If we had a subtle sensitivity to these changes as they occur, we would experience a sensation of pain, and this sensation of pain would only then give way to the sensation of color. And human beings experienced this in the most ancient times of human evolution; sensory perception arose from pain. Human beings have since become resilient to it, have become neutral toward it, and today experience sensory perception directly; that which underlies it as pain eludes perception. But when we strive to ascend into the spiritual world, we must force our way through suffering and pain, and only when we have overcome these—when we have transformed suffering and pain into something else—do we gaze into the spiritual world, which is opened to us, on the one hand, through living thought. And then, indeed, after we have transformed our entire organism into a sensory organ from these two sides—through the enlivening of thought and the overcoming of that suffering—as I said, the expression is paradoxical—we find ourselves, once these two paths have been taken, as modern human beings confronted with the spiritual world in understanding and in science.

[ 33 ] We can now seek spiritual insights for ourselves, and we do not need to withdraw from life into a hermitage to do so. We can place ourselves within life; we do not subject our outer physicality to asceticism; our outer physicality remains as it is, and can therefore robustly face external life and meet all the demands that contemporary life places on modern human beings. In this way, we can gain insight into the spiritual world by remaining within this world, in which modern human beings must eventually remain. But then, when we gain such insights, human beings do indeed appear to us in a different way than when we merely observe them with our physical eyes. Usually, we perceive only the outer physicality of the human form. The person who has worked their way up to dynamic, living thoughts no longer sees merely this outer, sensory human form; they see something that is spiritual and soul-related in this human form—an auric quality, a spiritual-soul aura. Only in this sense is the word “aura” to be understood, not in any superstitious sense. One perceives the auric field in which the human form is embedded, but one recognizes in this aura not only that which stands outwardly in space before one, but one looks upon that which the human being already was in his spiritual-soul nature before he descended from a spiritual-soul world. Through their auric being—which reveals itself to such contemplation as I have described—one comes to know the human being as a spiritual-soul being, and one learns to look back into the spiritual-soul world, into their pre-existence, into the life they had before they began their earthly life. And one does not merely come to know in such an abstract sense that the human being truly lived in a spiritual-soul world before birth; one also comes to know the concrete reality of this spiritual-soul human being—that is, our own self—just as we come to know the external world through sensory perception.

[ 34 ] I can describe this as follows. As we stand here between birth and death, we look out into the external world; we gaze up into the cosmos, marvel at the stars, and admire the splendor of the sun and moon; we look upon the realms of nature, and through our science we increasingly perceive the wondrous laws that govern all of this. But as we look out into the world and turn our gaze inward with an open mind to what lies within us, we must say to ourselves: What the human being perceives between birth and death in ordinary consciousness when looking into their inner self is dark. We must indeed say: What lives within us as our organism—certainly, some of it, but only in its lifelessness, is revealed by anatomy and physiology—but it is precisely anthroposophy that shows that human beings have a world within them in a completely different sense than ordinary science reveals to us. If one truly comes to know what is inside there, then one will say to oneself: Yes, the atmosphere out there and its inner laws are wonderful, but more wonderful than this atmosphere with all its mysteries is what takes place as laws within our own lungs. The sun out there is marvelous, with all the effects that emanate from it, expressed in light and heat; but more marvelous than the light, than the currents of heat—more marvelous than all of that—is what lives within the human organism, within the structure of our heart. And so, when we look at the human interior—particularly in relation to the physical organization—we can say to ourselves: Great and mighty is the world of external knowledge; greater and mightier still is that which lives within us as a microcosm.

[ 35 ] That—my dear friends here present—is something we are indeed coming to recognize more and more. You can see this in my *Secret Science* and in my other books. But that which is today veiled from ordinary consciousness between birth and death ceases to be veiled when we look upon the spiritual-soul being that the human being was before descending into the physical world. What was the human being’s world while he was himself a spiritual-soul being in a spiritual-soul world? Not the external world of space that we otherwise survey, but precisely this human inner world. There, what is human inner being for the Earth is the external world for our spiritual-soul being.

[ 36 ] Just as we are surrounded here by the stars, the sun, the moon, and the three kingdoms of nature, so too do we find the mysteries of the lungs and the heart before us in all their grandeur and power in the spiritual world from which we descended. We have the human inner world before us as an outer world, and there we acquire the ability—which we humans exercise—to unite ourselves with this physical body. We perceive the inner laws as an outer world before we descend from pre-earthly life into earthly life; this is the outer world of the spiritual-soul, which we experience before conception. And only when we enter the physical body does the external world appear around us, and the world of the human inner life disappears. Out there is what the single aura reveals to us.

[ 37 ] The other aura that we take on reveals to us what is alive in human actions. Here in the physical world, we observe these actions with our ordinary human consciousness; we see how this or that action has been performed since childhood; we see people meeting, and how this encounter shapes the destiny of their entire future life, how these people now form a life partnership; from the perspective of outer consciousness, as is often said, this appears to be a coincidence.

[ 38 ] If we cultivate the consciousness that leads to the auric realm I have described, it is like the world as experienced by a person who was born blind and has since had surgery. Previously, he could not perceive colors or light; now he can. Previously, one saw the steps a person took in life as subject to chance. But now, after the spiritual eye has been opened, one observes the first steps the child takes, the vague sympathies and antipathies—and the child develops its life’s steps more and more. The sympathies and antipathies that arise within the child lead it to the next steps, which become decisive in the course of human life, and we realize how the goal was already set in the sympathies and antipathies present in the child’s very first steps. In other words, we are looking at the shaping of human destiny, and in a completely natural, fundamental way, it becomes clear to us when our spiritual eye is opened—just as it becomes clear to us when we look at an adult that he or she was once a child— we can know that this destiny, which takes shape over the course of a life, stems from other life courses; that human life on earth is lived through in repetitions; that the entire life is cause and effect of other lives between death and a new birth; and that what is fated carries over from one life into the next.

[ 39 ] One might think that this sense of fate robs us humans of our freedom. Yet we do not compromise our freedom any more than we do by deciding to build a house this year and move into it next year. We become free only by creating such foundations for our lives. Nor do we deprive ourselves of freedom by building a house in this life for the next.

[ 40 ] Thus—my esteemed audience—the spiritual world is revealed, and humanity’s relationship to this spiritual world is revealed, as anthroposophy reopens the paths through which individual human beings can ascend into the spiritual world and share their findings with their fellow human beings. We need a method that is met with the same level of trust as that accorded to external science. In the books I mentioned, I have described how anyone can, to a certain degree, become a spiritual researcher—how a person can come to hold such views regarding the supersensible and the spiritual that give them their true worth and true human dignity. But a person does not necessarily need to become a spiritual researcher. Just as one does not need to become an astronomer to incorporate astronomical findings into one’s knowledge, and just as one does not need to become a botanist to incorporate the necessary botanical findings into one’s education, so too does one not need to become a spiritual researcher to incorporate the findings of spiritual science into one’s being.

[ 41 ] I would like to use another comparison that I have used many times before—I believe here as well. Someone who wants to judge a painted picture in terms of beauty and artistic value does not need to be a painter themselves. Human nature is oriented toward truth and beauty. Even someone who is not a spiritual researcher, and whose mind is not oriented toward illusions and error, can use their common sense to examine what the spiritual researcher says. And even the spiritual researcher must first examine what is revealed to him through his common sense; he must apply it just as the other person does, for higher vision provides him with a higher world, but not its reality. Just as we first examine a dream through common sense, so too must we first examine the reality of what we perceive in higher worlds through common sense. The one who masters precise clairvoyance—not the old mystical clairvoyance—the one who masters this modern clairvoyance, finds his way into the spiritual world along paths that are entirely appropriate for people today, and what he explores there can certainly be examined with common sense in the manner described.

[ 42 ] But what does this mean for our civilization today, my esteemed audience? Well, what is gained here is by no means insignificant. What is gained is something we can certainly make use of. Do we possess spirituality today? We have thoughts about the spirit, and we certainly live within these thoughts and ideas. But when we look back to earlier times, things were different. Yes—my esteemed audience—they were different. We do not wish to conjure up the past, nor do we wish to overestimate it. We know that humanity must continually move forward; we do not wish to reactionarily revive what belongs to a bygone era. But when we look back at the ancient epochs, from which many unconscious beliefs have carried over, we see that in those ancient times there were precisely such insights through which the spirit was not merely grasped in thought, but through which the spirit entered alive into the whole human being. Of a person from those times, one can say not only: “He has thoughts about the spirit; he has ideas about the spirit,” but rather that through his thoughts and ideas, the living spirit enters into the human being. Such eras have existed, and such eras have in fact provided the true power and the true impulses for human development—eras in which people knew that the spirit lives among us, that the divine lives among us. Only then did spiritual knowledge deepen into true religious devotion. If such times can return—not in their old form, but in a modern form—then by deepening their understanding through anthroposophy, human beings will acquire a true religious inner life and an appropriate devotion. But through this, modern humanity will regain the certainty that a time will come when thoughts and ideas will not merely live off spirituality in a state of aridity, as is the case today. Spirituality will take hold through living thought. And through a conception of reality that overcomes suffering, living thought, living reality—the Spirit itself in its liveliness—will take hold within human beings. We must look forward to such a time, because we need it—a time in which we can say to ourselves once more: It is not only we who stand here in the world—we as human beings with our actions, which are outwardly regarded as random—but because we humans are ourselves comprehensively spiritual beings, when we recognize our relationship to the eternal Spirit, we come to realize how other spiritual beings act alongside us, a spiritual world just as real as the sensory one, and how spirits do not merely live in our thoughts but are our companions right here in our earthly lives.

[ 43 ] That—my esteemed audience—when we once again perceive the spiritual world as the world of our fellow beings, rather than as merely abstract theoretical concepts, then we enter the world that humanity today—and even more so the humanity of the near future—needs in order to return to life-sustaining, inner piety, to fruitful insights, and to actions and impulses for activity that humanity today longs for—longs for more than it usually realizes.

[ 44 ] Today we look into our social life; we see how people long for new impulses to emerge. But we also see the forces of decline that are at work. There must be something wrong, and that is precisely what is wrong: we have lost the living spirit. It is only with this living spirit—which does not merely enter into our scientific, abstract thoughts but permeates our entire human being—that we will be able to solve the great and difficult social questions of the present, to the extent that they can be solved in any age.

[ 45 ] Anthroposophy, which is so often rejected, seeks to be nothing other than that spiritual activity, that spiritual life, which leads people to recognize and vividly grasp this living spirituality, this spiritual fellowship, so that humanity—imbued with this insight, with a will and an enthusiasm that spring from this shared experience of spirituality — can fully grasp the present and live into the future, just as is necessary for the continued well-being and further development of humanity. Much of this is already sensed by humanity today, but it lies in the unconscious depths of the human soul. Anthroposophy seeks to advance toward a full understanding of what humanity needs for its inner insight and for its social goals—both for the present and, above all, for the future.