The Rudolf Steiner Archive

13. Anthroposophy and Spiritual Knowledge

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! The remarks I am to make before you this evening can, in this age of the scientific spirit, only be considered valid if they are preceded by a certain examination of anthroposophy—as it is understood here—and of this scientific spirit itself. It must be shown, after all, that it is impossible today to speak of spiritual knowledge without justifying the methods of the corresponding spiritual research before this spirit of science.

[ 2 ] I took the liberty of explaining in the lecture I gave here a few months ago that this justification is indeed possible—namely, that the anthroposophy I am referring to here is in no way opposed to this modern scientific spirit, but is rather a kind of continuation of it. So if I were to present this justification again today, it would amount to a repetition for many in the audience. I will therefore take for granted the foundation that has already been laid. I will thus draw upon that earlier lecture—but only in this regard—while, of course, ensuring that today’s lecture remains comprehensible in its own right.

[ 3 ] Now, when a person focuses their attention on what they call spiritual life—namely, their relationship to the spiritual world—certain difficulties arise in the soul. However, one cannot say that these difficulties arise in relation to the existence of a spiritual life within the human being himself. For the human being is well aware that he always possesses such a spiritual life in his waking state. Indeed, as a thinking and active being, he relates to the external world through his spiritual life. Human worth and dignity are found in this spiritual life, which is, after all, the very essence of human experience. And even the most ardent materialist might say: “What appears to you as a spiritual life merely arises from material processes, from physical phenomena,” but he will not be able to deny spiritual life as such. And one may say: The difficulties that arise as enigmatic questions in the human soul regarding the spiritual world stem precisely from the fact that human beings are conscious of their spirit, that they must seek their value and dignity in this spirit, and must therefore inquire into the nature of this spirit: Is it something transient, something fleeting? Is it something rooted solely in material life? Is it something connected to some external spiritual world and representing something enduring in contrast to transitory existence? Precisely because human beings have a spiritual life, because they feel themselves to be spiritual beings, they must inquire into the nature of this spirituality.

[ 4 ] Now there are many things that, for individuals who are particularly concerned with these matters, emerge fully consciously from the depths of the soul; for most people, however, they surface more or less unconsciously as a general feeling, and ultimately coalesce into the enigmatic question: What, in fact, is the nature of the spirit, and what is the relationship of human beings to a possible spiritual world? I could cite many examples that show how this question arises from the depths of the soul.

[ 5 ] Two examples that may even be largely overlooked in broader spheres of human life, that rarely rise to the full consciousness of human beings, but which exert all the greater influence deep within the emotional spheres of spiritual life—spheres that are conveyed through feeling—and that give rise to a certain uncertainty regarding the nature of spiritual life. As I said, they may be consciously brought before the soul by very few people, but they determine the happiness and suffering of the innermost soul being. They determine the daily mood of the soul—whether one goes through life courageously or dejectedly, whether one is fit for life or unfit for one’s own life or the lives of one’s fellow human beings. All of this depends on how these feelings creep into the life of the soul and lead to the enigmatic questions described.

[ 6 ] First of all, there is something that we—as mentioned, more or less unconsciously—experience once every day in our existence between birth and death, when we transition from the waking state to the sleeping state. Each time, we feel how that which stirs, lives, and weaves—from waking to falling asleep—as our experience, our inner spirituality, how it fades into the indeterminate, how we must shut off our consciousness, how we have, so to speak, completely dimmed our spiritual life during the time between falling asleep and waking up. And when one then brings this—which is lived unconsciously every day as an experience in human soul life—up into consciousness, one must say to oneself: In this, the human being feels the powerlessness of their spiritual life, the powerlessness of their inner activity, their inner working, the powerlessness of that in which they seek their own human worth and human beinghood. It eludes them every day when they fall asleep. Then most people ask—perhaps only intuitively, but they do ask: Is it the case with this soul life as a whole that it leaves the human being dimmed and powerless? Is it the case that it has faded when a person passes through the gate of death, so that the person can no longer “bring it back,” just as he or she brings it back every morning? This is one example of how the enigmatic question described above takes shape.

[ 7 ] The other example is, one might say, the opposite pole. When we wake up, perhaps we first pass through the indeterminacy, the chaos, and the illusory nature of dream life—which, when we are in our right minds, we know to be illusory in comparison to external reality. Perhaps we pass through this semi-spiritual state until we are fully awake. But then what happens is that the spiritual takes possession of the body—the physical body of the human being. We first immerse ourselves in the world of our sense organs. What our eyes convey to us from the world of colors, what our ears convey to us from the world of sounds—what our sense organs convey to us—we experience as physical sensations of the external world’s effects upon us. We experience this through our soul life. We experience how we take possession of our limbs, how we become active with the help of our body. We feel our spiritual being immersing itself in our physicality, our corporeality. It acts upon, it weaves through this physicality.

[ 8 ] But I already hinted at this in my last lecture here: the way in which we are unaware of this immersion in physical corporeality. Let us just take, for example, this immersion into the members of our will. We have the thought. Let us take a simple action: we raise our arm; we move our hand. First we have the thought, the mental image; but how this mental image sinks into our physicality—what complex processes take place down there until it results in raising the arm or moving the hand—we know nothing of this in our ordinary consciousness. So we must say: While we feel the powerlessness of spiritual life as we fall asleep, we feel upon waking—that is, as we sink into physical embodiment—how the spiritual flows down as if into an inner darkness, where it is then sealed off. So we can say: If the spirit eludes us when it no longer acts through the body, and if it then becomes unconscious, it withdraws from us all the more when it flows into our physicality and acts through it.

[ 9 ] All of these are examples of how a person enters into a realm of uncertainty when seeking to understand the nature of the spiritual. Now, because they are led into such uncertain territory, human beings find themselves confronted—in relation to the spiritual world to which they seek a connection precisely because of the better aspects of their human feeling, willing, and thinking—with the two most significant enemies of human soul life. One of these enemies is the one to which many today succumb—those who, whether by their own will or due to their life circumstances, cannot align themselves with the conscientious, serious methods of scientific life and do not make the demands of this science their own. Often, of their own volition, they place before their souls that which we then encompass with the word “superstition.”

[ 10 ] This superstition is the one enemy of human spiritual life. Because human beings must constantly seek a connection between themselves and the spiritual world, they seek, as it were, to conjure up from within through their will that which they cannot attain from the outside through knowledge. But if there is no rational basis for it—if what a person imagines about his relationship to the spiritual world lives on in the human soul as superstition—then he must realize that wherever he enters life, he will run into obstacles at every turn. Things have their own laws—the things and facts of life, nature, and human existence. [They] unfold in a certain way when one approaches this life with superstitious notions. Nowhere do these notions prove true. One falls into a state of disorientation and uncertainty, even with regard to knowledge. One often imagines in one’s soul that a spiritual force must be working in such and such a way through external phenomena. One sees that it does not work. One becomes uncertain and weak within oneself. Or, on the other hand, the person who surrenders to such impulses—which are not grounded in the objective external world—finds in them no motivation for his actions; they provide nothing for his will. Consequently, such a person becomes not only uncertain but also incapable, unable to intervene in life. He cannot stand alongside his fellow human beings in a spirit of cooperation in the same way as someone who does not interpose illusory ideas between his soul and life.

[ 11 ] If this is the one enemy that stands before the soul of those who do not engage with scientific findings, then it is precisely among those who are engaged in science that the other enemy often enters their inner life today. Anyone familiar with today’s serious and conscientious scientific methods—through which our thinking, in experimentation and observation, seeks to trace the external sensory world down to its laws—learns to recognize how to rein in this thinking—one might say—how to strip it of all arbitrariness, how to adapt it to what appears as law in the external world. But, one might say: As a result, thinking also becomes thin and abstract. It becomes alienated from the human being itself. It then becomes merely adapted to the [conditions] of the external sensory world. And one soon realizes: Then this thinking, which is so wonderfully suited to grasping external natural phenomena, finds no way out of the sensory world and into the supersensory world.

[ 12 ] And there is something that afflicts the scientific mind very frequently today, namely doubt—doubt about the supersensible world—precisely because of the certainty it has acquired through its intellectual exploration of the sensory world. This doubt also arises in the intellect. But when it arises there—with all the seriousness of human soul life—it then descends into the soul, into the emotional life. It is precisely this that those who devote themselves to anthroposophical science can recognize: how the soul, the emotional life, is intimately connected with the healthy or unhealthy conditions of physical life as well; how that which lives within a disharmonious, torn, or even a harmonious, happy soul permeates healthy or unhealthy physical life. And one may say: In those whom doubt permeates inwardly with a kind of spiritual consumption—to put it bluntly—this spiritual consumption also flows into their physical condition. They become physically frail. Their nervous system becomes impaired. They are not up to the struggles of life. He, too, becomes incapable of taking care of himself and incapable of cooperating with other people.

[ 13 ] Thus, one can see precisely in superstition and doubt how, on the one hand, human beings must always strive—out of deeply justified feelings—toward the spiritual world to which they must feel they belong; yet how certain difficulties arise in the life of the soul, and how powerful enemies of this very life of the soul— — which one can initially only assume hypothetically — and the true spiritual beings. Consequently, it is precisely the serious, inquiring scientific minds of the present who have even turned to abnormal psychological states, because they have despaired of normal psychological life—which, while conveying to them the magnificence of the sensory world, cannot, in their view, possibly convey to them what the spiritual world actually is. Thus they turn away from normal psychological life and turn toward all manner of pathological psychological states. Today, even within the realm of the natural sciences, one finds enlightened minds who look to mediumship, who examine various visions or hallucinatory states of abnormal life, in order to gain clues in this way to answer the question: Does the human being have any relationship to a spiritual environment other than that which is revealed to the senses? One does indeed come across many things in this context, but one must be perfectly clear about this: What one can experience, for example, through a medium is, after all, experienced by the medium themselves through a lowered state of consciousness, through an interrupted sensory connection with the outside world. In a sense, one must turn to a pathological, abnormally appearing physicality in the medium. The same is true when we turn to visionary experiences.

[ 14 ] Everywhere, if one can conduct research with sufficient objectivity, one can say: Wherever something visionary appears in the life of the soul, a pathological constitution is present. And how is it possible to exercise control over what emerges from a sick person—which may, in a certain sense, be extraordinarily interesting—how is it possible to exercise control over what emerges from a deficient consciousness that is not as highly developed as sensory consciousness? How is it possible to arrive at a critical assessment of the value of the experiences gained in this way?

[ 15 ] Anthroposophy, therefore, does not address any kind of pathological inner life. It categorically rejects any connection to mediumship, hallucinations, or visions; rather, it is based entirely on a healthy inner life and physical life. It seeks to do what I described in my last lecture here; it seeks to identify exercises that the soul can perform so that the powers of cognition, which are initially present in normal consciousness, can be further developed, enabling us—just as we perceive colors through our physical eyes—to perceive the supersensible, spiritual world through supersensible organs. If you review what I have said in my various books—*How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, *Esoteric Science*, and others—regarding such exercises, you will find that these exercises fall into two parts: first, preparatory exercises that a person performs to strengthen themselves inwardly, physically, and soulfully. They are entirely suited to leading a person toward a healthy physical and soul life. These preparatory exercises are even valued today by many opponents of anthroposophy—and I must say not merely acknowledged for their worth, but explicitly appreciated. However, people are then unwilling to turn to the further exercises, which are intended to awaken the powers of knowledge slumbering within the soul. But how can a person—who fully embraces the enlightened spirit of the present age, and yet seeks the path to the spiritual worlds by attempting to understand how a person acquires such a power of knowledge that enables them to ascend into the spiritual worlds—one can more easily gain an understanding of this by building upon what was attempted in earlier times to attain knowledge of the supersensible world.

[ 16 ] We see it today: those people who do have a strong inner need to at least sense the spiritual world—when they lose hope of gaining direct knowledge, or a science of the spiritual world, turn—whether they are educated or uneducated—to the time-honored concepts that have developed throughout human history, which exist as traditional creeds and traditional worldviews. Such time-honored concepts live on in many philosophies themselves, without the people who believe they have arrived at their ideas without prejudice even suspecting it. But today one very often has the feeling that one must accept on faith what is contained in such time-honored conceptions of the supersensible world; one cannot seek such knowledge of the supersensible world as one seeks in our now highly precise science of the sensible world. And people succumb to all sorts of illusions of the kind that seek to justify faith in its independent character vis-à-vis knowledge by attempting to prove that faith, in accordance with human nature, must be a different kind of discovery of the spiritual than that which presents itself as knowledge or science.

[ 17 ] Now, anyone who looks not with the often so superficial methods of modern historical scholarship, but with a certain eye for the spiritual experience of human beings—for what has been taking place within this spiritual experience of human beings over the course of centuries and millennia—with an eye for how this spiritual life has transformed from epoch to epoch, who can look with such impartiality at what certain people once sought as paths to knowledge in more primitive times than our own—perhaps in very ancient times—will come to realize that everything that lives on today in concepts of faith and worldview, and is often accepted merely as historical fact or tradition, can be traced back to ancient insights. Indeed, everything that people today accept as beliefs developed in such a way that individual human beings distinguished themselves from the general consciousness of humanity—just as scientists do today—and sought such insights into the supersensible through the powers of their own soul life. What was then revealed to them through such paths of knowledge concerning the supersensible and the spiritual, they passed on to their fellow human beings; this has flowed through history down to the present day and lives on in our creeds, our worldviews, and our philosophies. It is just that people often do not seek out the sources from which it originated.

[ 18 ] At first glance, the paths to knowledge that existed in ancient times might seem irrelevant to people today, who must seek truth through entirely different means. Nevertheless, I would like to describe at least two older paths to knowledge whose results still live on today in various worldviews. We could, of course, describe many such paths. I want to single out two, not to recommend them to anyone for the purpose of attaining higher spiritual knowledge, for they were entirely appropriate for an earlier time but are no longer so today, as we shall see later. So, not to recommend these things, but to characterize them so that we may gain an understanding of the new—of anthroposophy—through the old insights. New paths must be taken today so that human beings, from their changed inner life and their changed state of mind compared to earlier times, may once again attain an understanding of spiritual life and of their own spiritual origin, their own spiritual source.

[ 19 ] First, there is such a path of knowledge from ancient times—that is, if I may use the expression, the one that the ancient Indian yoga scholar followed. Especially with regard to the characteristics described, one today gains only distorted ideas when studying how this path of yoga is pursued in Eastern countries today. And many of those who, out of desperation, seek paths into spiritual worlds by resorting to ancient methods pay for this with damage to their physical and psychological well-being. For what people can practice today—even what is often written about these ancient paths into the spiritual world—is thoroughly corrupted. But when we look back to earlier times in human development, we encounter precisely such primitive paths of knowledge that were valid back then, and through which we can understand the modern paths.

[ 20 ] What is the basis of this path of yoga? It was based on the fact that the yogi—I could cite many such details of the path of yoga, but I wish only to highlight the breathing process—elevated ordinary breathing, which previously occurred unconsciously, to a conscious inner activity. How does breathing occur for ordinary consciousness? It occurs in such a way that we inhale, hold our breath, and exhale in a certain rhythmic sequence. At most, we pay close attention to this breathing process only in pathological conditions. In ordinary, healthy life, this breathing process occurs more or less unconsciously. Only from a scientific perspective do we need to characterize it, so to speak.

[ 21 ] This is the distinctive feature of the ancient spiritual path of the yoga scholars: they adopted a different rhythm during certain periods when they performed their exercises to gain insight into a higher world—they inhaled, held their breath, and exhaled in a different rhythm. What was the result of this? First of all, it caused the yogi to become fully aware of the breathing process—to consciously experience what one would otherwise not experience consciously. Just as one normally experiences inner well-being, inner joys, inner suffering, and pain, so too did the yogi experience his breathing process, which he altered of his own volition in accordance with natural breathing processes. But what happened as a result? What insights did he gain through this?

[ 22 ] We can first consider this from a physiological perspective in relation to our soul. As we breathe, the breath enters our physical body; it travels up through our spinal canal into the brain, and our brain is permeated and pulsed by the breaths, by the rhythm of breathing. It is always the case, as I said, that this remains unconscious in ordinary breathing, unconscious to the ordinary soul being; it is always the case that within our skin we have not only those physical processes that belong to the nervous system and that convey thinking and the world of thoughts to us, but these nervous processes are also permeated by the respiratory rhythm. It is, for example, immensely interesting to observe what I have at least hinted at in my book *On the Mysteries of the Soul*—how, when listening to music, the breathing rhythm merges with what is experienced internally as a nervous-sensory process originating in the human organs of hearing. But it is not only in musical perception; in all mental life, the nervous-sensory process is permeated by the rhythm of the breathing process. That which a person is unaware of in ordinary life was perceived by the ancient scholar, the yogi. He sensed inwardly how the altered breath flowed through his skin, how the rhythm of breathing sank into his life of thought. What insight was gained through this? We can understand this if we immerse ourselves in the soul life that existed among the people of those ancient times, when there were yogi scholars who stood out from the general soul life with their special soul nature.

[ 23 ] Back then, things were not as they are today. Humanity has indeed changed profoundly in its spiritual nature over the centuries and millennia. Based on today’s external science, one cannot even begin to imagine how much a person’s inner spiritual life and their relationship to the outside world have changed over the course of human history. In those ancient times that gave rise to yoga, people did not perceive the pure colors that we see in the external world, or the pure tones that we perceive by listening to the external world, or the other sensory impressions. It is only in the course of human development that we have reached the point where we perceive the purely sensory world around us as we are accustomed to doing today. But in earlier times, it was not, for the people of that time, a matter of fantasy—as animism would have us believe today—but rather an elementary, natural fact that when they looked into the external world, they saw not only the pure colors, and when they listened to the external world, they heard not only the pure sounds; rather, as they gazed upon the external world, a spiritual-soul aspect of perceptions arose within their souls. In every spring, in lightning and thunder, in the drifting clouds, and in the whistling wind, people perceived a spiritual-soul element. They did not merely see colors or hear sounds; rather, drawing upon the very naturalness of the human being, they imbued these phenomena with a spiritual-soul element, just as they perceive color through the sense of sight. As a result, human beings were not as independent as we have become today. In this respect, too, the human soul has changed. That inner degree of “I”-consciousness, of self-awareness, which we today take for granted within ourselves, was absent in that earlier humanity. Human beings grew by immersing their spiritual and soul aspects in lightning and thunder, in clouds and wind, in plants and animals; they grew together with the external world, feeling, as it were, at one with it. The one who became a yoga scholar and practiced in the way I have described came to—by driving the rhythm of breathing into this inner, living thought—first to attain that which we today take for granted as we grow up; one might almost say, that with which we are born; the yoga scholar entered into abstract thinking, into pure thinking. Through this, however, he came to [feel] the Self, the “I,” all the more keenly. He had to acquire the “I”-consciousness, the self-awareness, that is innate to us, that arises within us in a natural way through our upbringing. And the results of this yogic insight are expressed in a marvelous body of literature and in a marvelous poetic art. The one who, in this way, ascended through yoga into the spiritual world felt himself to be human; he felt his spirituality; he felt that he was a living, real spirit. By withdrawing the spirituality he would otherwise have imparted to things in life, he felt the reality of his own spiritual self. That is why, in such a marvelous work of poetry as the Bhagavad Gita, we see described all the rapture, all the inner wonder, and all the sense of inner grandeur experienced by these people who, through their heightened self-awareness—which they had cultivated in this way—came to know their own spirit. Thus, in those earlier times, people sought to embark on a path of knowledge leading into the spiritual world. And much of what the yoga scholars passed on to their fellow human beings has been carried down through the ages of history; it still lives on today as certain propositions, concepts, and ideas about the human self. Religious concepts adhere to these. Philosophers take it up. They do not know that this was once sought and found by human beings through a specific path of knowledge.

[ 24 ] But we modern people cannot follow this path. This path entails something very peculiar. Anyone who attempts to ascend into the spiritual world in this way becomes extraordinarily sensitive inwardly. Their inner life becomes so active, so spiritualized, that they must, in a certain sense, withdraw from the robust outer life and its demands. That is why such seekers of the spirit, as I have described them, became solitary people. But in earlier times, people had trust in such solitary individuals. That was precisely the distinctive feature of that older culture: people believed that in order to attain true wisdom about the spiritual world, a person must withdraw from life and become a solitary individual, a hermit. One must ask these hermits if one wishes to know anything about the spiritual destinies of the human soul. And so people placed their trust in the solitary ones, the hermits.

[ 25 ] Today, that is not part of our culture; today, our culture is characterized by something else: People today are oriented toward activity. Today, a person can only consider themselves capable if they can engage in active life, if they gain their insights only through a path that is appropriate for active participation in life. Today, people would not be able to place their trust in someone who must isolate themselves from the rest of life in order to attain insight. That is why I have contrasted these old paths with the new one, which I will then describe for the sake of clarity. But, as I said, the old path cannot lead to anything equivalent to what ancient humanity attained through the path of yoga, even if that humanity only ascended into the spiritual worlds in this way through individual hermit-like members of their race.

[ 26 ] And now I would like to suggest a second path, one that has also been taken many times and whose results still live on in our worldviews, our philosophies, and our other creeds—even though people are unaware of its sources—but which is closer to modern man, although it cannot be followed in the same way as was customary in ancient times. It is the path of asceticism.

[ 27 ] What was the ascetic seeking? He sought to subdue and numb the physical functions of his body. His physical life had to become calmer than usual. His life had to be one that did not intervene in the external world with all its strength. It even had to become a life that inflicted suffering and pain upon itself, practicing asceticism in this very way. Such a person arrived at very specific results, very specific experiences. These experiences must not be misunderstood. One must not believe, for example, that describing these experiences is meant to justify the view that our body, as it exists in a healthy state, is unsuitable for our life between birth and death. Indeed, just as we carry our healthy body within us, without ascetic weakening, so is it precisely suited for a fully valid life between birth and death. But those who devoted themselves to asceticism in ancient times did notice that, however well suited human physicality may be to external physical and sensory life, it became all the more suited to comprehending and experiencing the spiritual world the more it was subdued and weakened. Thus, through asceticism, one comes to experience the spiritual world. Again, this is a path we cannot take today; again, it is a path that renders one unfit for the outer world. If we weaken our physicality, we also weaken our soul life. We cannot be capable enough for ourselves; nor can we work for the well-being of our fellow human beings. Therefore, asceticism cannot be our path. But it is nevertheless extremely important for our understanding to realize this: It was an experience of the ancient ascetics that the human body, when in a healthy state, is a kind of obstacle to immersing oneself in the spiritual world. If this obstacle is removed or weakened, then the human being immerses themselves especially in the volitional nature of the spirit that underlies the world.

[ 28 ] In describing these two paths into the spiritual worlds, I have at the same time had to emphasize strongly: They cannot be ours. Those of you here today who recall the exercises I described in my last lecture here will have noticed that I described different exercises. I do not wish to repeat them today—you can, of course, read more about them in the various books—but I would like to briefly outline one aspect of how these exercises proceed. Today we do not turn to the process of breathing when we seek, in the anthroposophical way, the path into the spiritual worlds. We approach our thinking, our life of thought, directly—not indirectly through breathing. We introduce, so to speak, other thought processes into thinking itself. In a certain sense, we leave behind that which today serves abstract thinking so immensely and celebrates such triumphs. We leave this abstract thinking behind. We devote ourselves to a meditative life, a certain resting in images and ideas, in a way we do not otherwise do when we remain within abstract thinking. We devote ourselves to a certain inner concentration. In other words, we devote ourselves to a disciplined life of thought, just as the ancient Indian devoted himself to a disciplined life of breathing. Indirectly, he allowed this thinking to become something else through breathing. We turn directly to thought. We introduce more rhythm into our thinking, whereas in ordinary consciousness we usually have more logic in it. Little by little, we attain what I can characterize as the enlivening of thought.

[ 29 ] Yes, through our soul exercises we turn directly to thinking, and we come to the point where the thoughts we normally have appear to us, in their abstractness, to be more or less dead in comparison to living thinking. While the ancient Indian yogi guided precisely the living thinking—which he and his entire surroundings possessed in ordinary life—toward the abstract thinking capable of grasping the Self, we, on the other hand, start from what we have as the Self—which we experience as abstract thinking within the Self—and fully and consciously enliven this thinking, so that through this we arrive at what I would like to call precise clairvoyance. Please do not misunderstand the term; it is meant to be merely a technical term. This precise clairvoyance, attained through thought processes, has nothing to do with the vague mystical notions of earlier times or even of the present. Just as modern astronomy developed from ancient astrology, and modern chemistry from ancient alchemy—and just as these sciences have turned more toward the material and have moved beyond astrology and alchemy—so, to characterize it, modern precise clairvoyance, as developed by anthroposophy, leads away from the older form, which was more attached to the material —since Indian clairvoyance is attached to the material—modern clairvoyance, by first turning to purely spiritual-psychic processes on the side of thinking, leads from the more material aspects of earlier times into the spiritual.

[ 30 ] I would like to describe to you how modern thinking—this living thinking, this precise clairvoyance—leads us deeper and ever deeper into the world, so that within the sensory realm we can ultimately perceive the supersensory, the spiritual. In doing so, I must touch upon certain subtle aspects of human soul life; yet if one wishes to find true paths into the spiritual world—paths that are in accordance with the truth—one must engage with these subtleties of the soul.

[ 31 ] Let us suppose that modern humans try to visualize a form of higher animality—a higher animal. They attempt to understand it to the extent that science is capable today—but science has ideals that enable it to do so better and better; yet there is something it will never be able to grasp, which I will characterize in a moment— with today’s abstract thinking, we can visualize how an animal’s bones, muscles, and internal organs are structured, and how the individual life processes interflow. In short, through our abstract thinking—which we quite justifiably cultivate methodically in research today—we can visualize the form and inner life essence of the higher animal. Then we turn our attention to the human being. We do the same with human beings. Once again, we visualize how the human skeletal and muscular systems are structured, how the life processes interrelate, and how they compose the entire human being as an organism. Then we compare the two. We find that one is, in a sense, a transformation of the other. Depending on our disposition and mindset, we may—if we are more materialistic—say: This human form has developed from the animal form over the course of time. We then become, with more or less justification, Darwinists. Or, if we are more spiritually or ideally minded, we will seek a different connection. But such a connection becomes apparent when we compare the higher animal with human beings themselves.

[ 32 ] We can do this with abstract thinking, which—precisely when we have arrived at living thinking through exact clairvoyance—appears to us as dead thinking; as the kind of thinking through which we can only stand alongside external things, through which we can form an inner mental image of every external thing and every external process and compare them in an external way.

[ 33 ] With living thought—as I understand it, and as it can be developed in human beings through the path I have described—we can now also form an inner image of a higher animal. But the living thought is then capable of transforming itself inwardly, of growing, so that it passes over of its own accord into human thought, without our first having to make a comparison. We come to the point where we do not form a dead thought about the animal that we can then place alongside the dead thoughts of human beings. We gain the living thought that transforms itself inwardly, that grows, and from which the form of the human being now takes shape within the soul. This is, after all, the peculiarity of our modern science when it speaks of development: although it says that one being passes into another, it cannot, from the thought itself that it can derive from one being, pass over to the thoughts of the other being with such vitality as is the case only with the living thought.

[ 34 ] I must draw attention to something that characterizes this bringing of thought to life, so that I might be better understood in these subtle matters. Let us imagine we take a magnetic needle; we point it in a certain direction, sometimes in this direction, sometimes in that. In every direction, it will behave differently than if we were to point it precisely in a single direction—the one that forms the line connecting the Earth’s magnetic North Pole and South Pole. This single line interacts with the magnetic needle differently than all other directions. We see that, when it comes to inanimate nature—to magnetism—we do not conceive of space as an indeterminate juxtaposition, as an indeterminate void, but rather that we must conceive of this space as being internally lived through—so, for example, for the magnetic direction, there is also a specific spatial direction to which this magnetic direction, so to speak, belongs. Thus, we cannot conceive of space as undifferentiated, but rather as internally differentiated and internally structured. Living thought leads to such a conception of space.

[ 35 ] We look at the animal. Its main axis is horizontal, and this extends into the direction of its head as well. Animals that hold their heads upright are exceptions, which I cannot discuss at this time. Otherwise, I could show that these exceptions confirm what needs to be said: that the animal is organized this way because its spine lies parallel to the Earth’s surface in a specific spatial direction, just as a magnetic needle remains at rest when it points from the Earth’s North Pole to the Earth’s South Pole.

[ 36 ] Now let us take the human being and apply the concept we have formed of the animal—along with many others, but for example, specifically the one concerning this horizontal spinal line—to the human being. We transform the image of the animal itself. In our minds, we turn the horizontal spinal line vertical. Now the human being occupies space differently; he acquires this vertical spatial axis. This is just one detail. One must take in many things in order to understand how, as the thought makes this transition—simply by moving from the animal to the human being—the phenomena and inner experiences, much of what pertains to the animal is not merely transferred to the human being, but is transformed in a way that is inwardly alive, by living one’s way from the animal to the human being—rather than first forming the thought about the human being itself. Through this, one arrives—from the thought that one has formed vividly in relation to the animal—inwardly and vividly at the thought of the human being. What does one gain through this? What one gains is an inner, living thought that does not merely stand by and compare the facts and things of the world, but that immerses itself in the things themselves. Our very thought lives inwardly just as growth lives in the animal and in the human being. We immerse ourselves in the spirituality of the world. But this is something that can very easily be opposed, something against which objections can very easily be raised. And this is precisely what is distinctive about anthroposophical spiritual science: that one is inclined to raise these very objections within one’s own soul. For what anthroposophy has to say about the world must be certain and precise. That is why I myself point out what they might be referring to when I speak in this way of living thought. I point out that, for example, in the spiritual life of such wonderful thinkers as Oken and Schelling, these thinkers had thoughts full of life—though in a certain sense, thoughts full of life that were nevertheless carried solely by the imagination—and that they, as it were, shaped these thoughts from the ideas they developed and formed regarding a fact or an entity; thoughts about other facts, other entities—thus making thinking alive, capable of growth, and transformative, just as the beings of the world themselves are transformed and grow. Yet there is one thing we do not find in these thinkers that guarantees the full reality of what is given through this living thinking. But this is precisely what anthroposophical science must point to, because it is simply experienced and lived through when one arrives at these living thoughts and this precise clairvoyance in the manner described in the various books as anthroposophical science.

[ 37 ] Yes—my esteemed audience—when one truly sets out to develop such a supersensible understanding of the world, and to form the thought of an animal, another being, or a process, and, by experiencing it inwardly, transforms and metamorphoses the thoughts themselves—a process that Goethe himself strove for, and in which he had already made considerable progress to a certain degree, Anthroposophy takes Goetheanism a step further—if one continues this process, one soon realizes: This living thinking is connected to something in the inner life of the soul that thoroughly attests to reality. Namely, with every such step, as we allow the thought to emerge vividly from another thought, suffering and pain settle upon the inner life of the soul. And it is absolutely necessary for anyone who truly wishes to attain precise clairvoyance to go through pain and suffering. The living thought does not penetrate as deeply as the thought “I want to move my arm, move my hand”—that is, without my feeling it. The living thought permeates the entire human being, right down into the physical body. Yet the experience remains within the soul. It is an experience of suffering, and this suffering, this pain, must be overcome. Only then does that which fully guarantees supersensory knowledge arise within the human being. But the person who has truly acquired such knowledge—you can ask him what he thinks about his life’s destiny. He will always tell you: “My joys—that which I experience with delight in life, that which I experience as happiness—I accept gratefully from fate. My insights—that which truly enlightens me about the innermost structure and nature of the human being—I owe, even in ordinary life, to my sufferings and my pains, in that I have overcome them and transformed them into insight.”

[ 38 ] Thus, for one who is of this mindset, even the ordinary pains of life serve as a preparation for the sufferings he must endure as a result of the influence of living thought on his entire human being. But he must overcome this suffering, this pain. As a result, he now becomes—if I may use this paradoxical expression—a sensory organ as a whole human being. Just as we have otherwise embedded the individual sense organs within our organism and perceive the sensory world through them, so do we, as a whole human being, become a sense organ when we overcome the painful experience associated with living thought. One can understand this by considering the following.

[ 39 ] Take the wonderfully formed eye. Alongside other processes, the act of seeing colors through the effects of light gives rise to something that manifests itself as destruction. If we were to experience the subtle processes that take place within us when we perceive light, they would also appear to us as a faint pain. However, at the present stage of human development, we are organized so robustly that we do not perceive what, at the very foundation of sensory life, is a faint pain. This is overcome, and sensory perception is experienced neutrally. In the same way, the one who perceives the supersensible struggles through pain and suffering to become a sensory organ. The expression sounds paradoxical, but it is justified because with this [sense organ]—which we become as whole human beings—we perceive a spiritual world around us, just as we perceive the physical-sensory world with ordinary sense organs. Thus, the human being becomes a sense organ, a perceiver of a spiritual environment. Thus, within the human being, that which he elevates above suffering and pain by overcoming them is united with that which is living thought.

[ 40 ] If this comes to life within us—this connection between the living thought and the suffering and pain we have overcome—then, as people of insight, we look at things differently—to highlight one example, the most important example—we look at the human being standing before us as a physical form in a different way than we did before. Then we look at them in such a way that, while our physical eyes see this physical form in space, these colors through which the human being reveals themselves in the physical world, we see all that is outwardly revealed in the human being between birth and death; we see it through our senses and through the intellect, which understands the language of the other and can summarize what the senses perceive into laws. But once one has risen to the level of understanding I am referring to, one sees the physical-sensory aspect of the human being embedded in a soul-spiritual form, in an auric structure, in a human aura that now represents the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being. This spiritual-soul aura, which now reveals to us the true spiritual-soul aspect of the human being, is not attained through all manner of fanciful imaginings. It is attained even today through serious paths of knowledge—those serious paths of knowledge that awaken thought to vitality, that lead to a true perception of reality by overcoming suffering and pain to the point of spiritual sensory receptivity, if I may use this paradoxical expression. And when we thus behold the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being—the auric—we do not see only the present human being. Then we look back to see what the human being was like in spirit and soul before descending from a spiritual-soul world in which he lived prior to this earthly existence and united himself with what had been prepared in the mother’s body to become a physical human being. Just as we observe a person today as they grow, and just as we know that when a person is an adult, this adulthood can be traced back to their childhood, so too do we see, in what is revealed to us today as the human aura, a path leading back—and we perceive it as extending from the present into the past. The child does not exist alongside the adult human being. The spiritual-soul aspect in which the human being lived in the spiritual-soul world before descending stands before us in living reality. It stands before us in such a way that we can speak of it not only in an abstract sense, but in all concreteness, so that I can characterize this vision for you in the following manner.

[ 41 ] When we are here in our earthly life—we look out into the external world; we see the marvelous starry sky above, we see the passing clouds, the realms of nature; we look out through our sense organs, through our eyes; we perceive the external world through our sense organs. We do not perceive what lives within the human being in the same way. I have hinted at this today, and also last time, how little we truly understand it. We can look at the external world. As for what lives within, we can visualize it through anatomy and physiology, but in doing so we are not observing the living human being; rather, we are observing the human being who has become dead.

[ 42 ] Anthroposophy teaches us what lives within the human being—I would say—within the human skin itself, as the physical embodiment of the human being. The atmospheric sphere that spreads around the Earth is certainly wondrous when we observe it along with everything that takes place within it. As little as modern meteorology is currently able to explore it, there is a wondrous order within this atmospheric sphere. Fundamentally, all life on Earth is rooted in it. We peer into wondrous mysteries when we comprehend the laws governing the atmosphere. But far more wondrous is what we can uncover—what lives within the human lungs. Whether the atmosphere is vast and the lungs small—size is irrelevant—here within the human being lives an organ; if we understand its laws, they are more magnificent and more powerful than those of the atmosphere. And let us look at the sun, the source of light and warmth: everything that emanates from the sun, everything that affects the living beings on Earth, everything else that acts in outer space—it is wonderfully immense. But let us look into the human heart; it is smaller than what we see out there in gigantic proportions, yet it is more wonderfully formed and contains a more powerful set of laws within it.

[ 43 ] And so, within the human being, there lives a microcosm—a small world set against the great world—here between birth and death. We see the cosmos; we do not see this inner order. Our spiritual-soul aspect, as it was before it descended into physical earthly life, did not see the cosmic outer world as we see it through our eyes, but it saw the inner world of the human being—that was its world. And it prepared itself to now unconsciously govern this inner world of the human being as its own world here in earthly existence, between birth and death. We now look with a different understanding at the child’s as yet indeterminately formed brain and how it takes on its plastic form. This is shaped out of what our soul beheld before it descended. It sees the human being from within. It sees the world that is given to him within the human being. And because our spiritual-soul aspect lives within us between birth and death—and therefore does not perceive this inner world, since it lives within it, [but] perceives the outer world, since it does not live within it—the spiritual-soul aspect perceives the inner world of the human being as its own world before birth.

[ 44 ] This is, first of all, one aspect of human existence as an extraterrestrial being. The other relates to what human action and human behavior are. We observe this in a more or less external way through our senses and our intellect. We see how a person develops from childhood into later years. We then observe how a stroke of fate occurs, how one person encounters another. People come together; they exchange, so to speak, their inner experiences. This exchange becomes decisive for the rest of their earthly life and perhaps far beyond. This is how one views it from the outside. One views it, so to speak, in this way: Higher insight reveals this in the same way that a person born blind perceives color—it is not seen in its true essence. And just as a person born blind undergoes an operation and enters the world of colors, seeing something entirely new within it, so too does the one whose spiritual eyes have been opened in the manner described today see something entirely new in what a human being accomplishes through their actions. He observes how the child takes its first steps in life, how sympathy and antipathy emerge, how the child grows up, how sympathy and antipathy take shape, and how the human being, by living continually in sympathy and antipathy, is led toward the blows of fate. Then one no longer speaks of people having simply come together by chance. Then one becomes aware of the profound wisdom contained in such things, as, for example, Goethe’s friend Knebel expressed from the vantage of mature experience. Addressing Goethe with this wisdom born of age, he said: When one looks back on one’s life as a human being and surveys what has unfolded since childhood. It is as if we had progressed in a very deliberate manner from our first childhood steps and, driven by an inner longing, had chosen the path that ultimately led us here.

[ 45 ] It turns out, from the perspective of exact clairvoyance, that from the very first step, the child is guided and driven by sympathy and antipathy; that, in fact, an inner longing exists unconsciously to the ordinary consciousness; and that we lead ourselves toward the fateful event that is decisive for our lives. By expanding on this—just as we look at an adult and look back on their childhood—we look back at what is revealed through the auric in the human being, and we behold the passage of the entire human destiny through repeated earthly lives.

[ 46 ] We come to realize that just as our development as adults depends on our development in childhood, so too is what we shape as our destiny the result of a previous earthly life. And in connection with this, it becomes clear to us—precisely when we become fully sensory beings in the manner described—that we can also know how we will live once we no longer have a physical body, once we pass through the gate of death and shed the body. We learn to see without the body. The very essence of this spiritual becoming of the senses lies in our ability to see as spirit into the spiritual world. Thus we learn to recognize what we are like once we have cast off the body as a corpse. And just as we can describe in concrete terms how we look into the inner being of a human being before birth, so too do we learn once again to recognize how something develops within us that passes through the gate of death and enters the spiritual world once more to continue life without the body.

[ 47 ] Here we have reached the point where genuine modern knowledge—which, though it still seems quite fantastical to most people today, is nonetheless just as precisely grounded—converges with religious and devout religious life, just as ancient knowledge once developed into religious life. When we start from such insights—which are seemingly purely scientific—we arrive at the deepest experiences, at the fulfillment of the deepest longings of the human soul.

[ 48 ] If we can point to how the soul-spiritual breaks free from the physical by the body being handed over to the earth as a corpse, then we also become aware of how something else breaks free from physical earthly existence. We see how people form friendships, how they are devoted to one another in love, and how spiritual-soul bonds are forged from heart to heart within the family. We see this human life as it creates bridges and bonds from person to person. By being able to look into the spiritual world and see how the soul detaches itself at death, we also gradually learn to look into it—as strange as this may sound to people today, it can truly be spoken of as precise knowledge— we learn to look into the spiritual world in such a way that we can discern the physical aspect of all bonds of friendship and love, of family ties, and of everything that has become dear to us through our life together with our fellow human beings, we learn to look at what is physical in these bonds and what is soulful in them, and we learn to observe how the soulful aspect detaches itself in death, how human souls find one another again. The hand we have extended to another—whose warmth was an expression of what is experienced from soul to soul, the beating of the heart in joy when we feel a sense of togetherness in friendship and love—these accompanying physical realities die with our physical being. That which has lived within you as spiritual-soul life—as spiritual-soul communion in friendship and love—breaks free from earthly existence, just as the spiritual-soul life breaks free from the physical earthly body.

[ 49 ] We arrive at the certainty—not merely through religious beliefs, but through reliable paths of knowledge—that those who were spiritually united here on Earth will be reunited in spiritual communion. We come to recognize that what is lived out in earthly life is a reflection of a spiritual vision. If we hold earthly life dear and precious, we also come to recognize how this preciousness and value of earthly life is merely the foundation for a further experience that follows when the earthly must be cast aside and the spiritual breaks free from the earthly. And a religious feeling, a religious experience, a true piety then arises from a genuinely earnest pursuit of knowledge. But this will give modern life something which, as I believe, every open-minded person must admit, already lives in the longings of many souls today—even in the souls of those who do not admit it to themselves, indeed, those who, when one speaks of it, may turn away reluctantly and as opponents; it lives in them as well. For in all that has been preserved for people today from ancient times in the form of spiritual concepts, there is already something that makes them feel uncertain. In everything in which they believe they can live by faith, something becomes uncertain to them. They long once again for knowledge of the spiritual.

[ 50 ] One might ask: What does all this have to do with those who do not experience it themselves? Well, first of all, in my book *How Does One Gain Insight into Higher Worlds?* and other books, I have described what one must do, and today anyone who has the necessary patience and energy can carry this out to enter the spiritual world to a certain degree on their own. One can enter and examine whether such a thing is fantasy or reality, as I have described today. But even if one cannot do this oneself, one can still—for the enrichment of today’s culture and for the well-being of social life today and in the future—use common sense, even without being an anthroposophical spiritual researcher, to convince oneself of the truth of supersensory experience. Admittedly, only a few individuals strive for this today, just as only a few become astronomers or natural scientists. But one will be able to gain trust, just as in ancient times people gained trust in hermits—those who can justify themselves by speaking of the supersensible worlds. Just as one need not be a painter to perceive the beauty of a painting through sound human judgment, so, too, one need not be a spiritual scientist, but only possess a straightforward, unbiased human sensibility, unhindered by prejudice, in order to understand, through sound common sense, what the anthroposophical spiritual scientist reveals to the world as the results of the spiritual path of knowledge. Today, a person can, using common sense, engage with the findings of spiritual science just as one engages with the findings of astronomy or chemistry without being an astronomer or chemist oneself.

[ 51 ] Today, however, the spiritual researcher must not withdraw from life. He must place himself right in the midst of life. For one can only have trust in someone whom one sees actively engaging with life and intervening in it just as other people do. Life today must prove itself, and anyone who has something to say about life must also throw themselves into it with all their strength. That is why we need different methods of gaining insight into the higher worlds today than those I have described—by way of comparison, to aid understanding—as being those of earlier times.

[ 52 ] But what do we gain from the fact that such an understanding of the supersensible world is spreading once again? After all, we do have concepts and ideas about a spiritual world today, provided we have not sunk into the most blind materialism. We have them, but we are aware that the ideas, concepts, and notions we have of the spiritual world are something lifeless. Let us look back to earlier times—not to conjure them up, for humanity must, after all, progress. What was experienced in social and other respects in bygone eras cannot be more appealing to us; as free human beings, we must move beyond it. But when we look back, we must admit to ourselves as impartial observers of history: where the conceptions arose that so many still cling to today, there were not merely abstract thoughts and ideas; there, by turning toward the spiritual in their thinking, feeling, and willing, people knew that the spiritual itself descended and entered into human nature; it is a companion in the world in which we live. These people were not merely conscious of thoughts and ideas about the spiritual, but the gods and spirits themselves walked among them. We need such knowledge, such insight, once again. We, too, have beautiful, magnificent thoughts about the spiritual, but they are thoughts of a spiritual realm that is alien to human beings, one that they can only conceive of in abstract terms.

[ 53 ] Anthroposophy seeks to reintroduce the spiritual into these thoughts, so that human beings may once again become aware, as they were during the golden ages of religious creativity: Not only do thoughts in human beings originate from the Spirit, but the Spirit itself walks among us. Just as we humans live here on Earth in our physical bodies, carrying within us a spiritual-soul aspect—an immortal element—that transcends the physical in the way we have described today, so do we walk here among the invisible beings of the spiritual world. We are here as human beings, and the spiritual world, in turn, becomes conscious to us as a living reality. This awareness—that the spiritual world is our living companion, that we are not dependent on abstract, powerless thoughts of the spirit—has a different effect. This spiritual world influences us in a different way. It transforms our understanding into something that in turn fills us with religious, artistic, and fully human content, so that we can place ourselves fully within the whole of earthly life—indeed, within the whole of world life—and gain a sense of what we, as temporal human beings, mean for eternal existence. But we also receive impulses to act that are more powerful and more formidable than those that are mere ideas.

[ 54 ] And this is something that can also be observed in social life today: that people no longer possess a living spirituality within themselves, and therefore, when they speak of social life, they sink into instincts and drives. In the East, we see with horror how people, having lost a living spirituality, are developing a social life that brings ruin—a social life that looms over Europe as a menacing specter. It must be defeated. But it can only be defeated if people become aware of the living spirituality that can be taken up in thought and will—and with which a person can live as with something living and not as with something dead, recognizing for themselves but also as a social being among social beings, with whom they can establish—through spiritual impulses given to them from the spiritual world of which they are conscious—precisely what serious souls hope for and long for as the rising forces of our culture; our culture, which contains so many forces of decline, but which must be overcome. What can act as forces of renewal in our time, what can spring forth from the spirit that we take in as a living reality—that is what serious souls long for and hope for today, what humanity needs in order to live properly in the present, and to move from this present into the complex future of humanity.

[ 55 ] For the present and the future, for the progress of our culture—which we must strive for, strive for with all our strength—we need the living spirit. Anthroposophy does not seek to be something fantastical, but rather, even if perhaps still with limited strength today, a path in its own way to the living spirit. It seeks to explore the relationship between human beings and this living spirit, so that human beings may find what they need at this very moment to draw upon the forces of ascent in opposition to the forces of decline—for the present and, in particular, for humanity’s immediate future.