The Rudolf Steiner Archive

7. Anthroposophy as a Science

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! Because of its scientific nature, anthroposophy is viewed with suspicion by our contemporaries. Scientists believe that anthroposophy does not possess the characteristics of what they define as science; and, conversely, people of faith—those who, from a religious standpoint, advocate for humanity’s ability to find paths to the spiritual world—criticize precisely this scientific character of anthroposophy. Scientists are accustomed—based on what has indeed emerged with a certain grandeur in the realm of the natural sciences over the course of the last three to four centuries, particularly the nineteenth century—to taking in what is accessible to sensory observation, what can be explored through experimentation, to intellectually synthesizing the available details, and then to ascend to certain laws that are supposed to underlie the natural phenomena that are perceptible to the senses.

[ 2 ] Anyone who has immersed themselves in research in this field with the scientific rigor and serious inner discipline that are the very foundation of our modern science has often come to accept the view that precise, genuine, scientific observation is possible only if it adheres to external sensory perception and to what the intellect can ascertain through the judgments it makes about sensory perception and the conclusions it draws from them. This kind of research has a certain certainty—I would say a certain foundation—in that which cannot be denied in its existence, precisely because it manifests itself in this existence independently of human beings and reveals itself to them from within this existence. One might, as is the case with many physiologically or psychologically minded figures of recent times, believe that what the senses perceive directly—that is, the content of human perception—is conditioned by the peculiarities of the senses and thus has a certain subjective character. But one can be certain that, even if what is directly perceived has a subjective character, there nevertheless lies at the foundation of external observation for human beings an objective reality that presents itself to this observation and provides a secure basis for research. That is why such individuals—who are, so to speak, trained in the precise investigation of external natural phenomena—feel uncertain the moment they leave this realm of the external sensory world and ascend to other realms. They then believe that the inner certainty guaranteed by observation and experiment—and by the reason bound to them—ceases the very moment one leaves the ground of this sensory world. This is the source of judgments such as the one made by du Bois-Reymond in his classic lecture “On the Limits of Natural Knowledge,” namely, that science ends where the supersensible begins. Anyone who approaches anthroposophy with this mindset will, of course, have to deny its scientific character, and it is essentially only this psychological undercurrent that rebels in the widest circles today whenever the scientific character of anthroposophy is discussed.

[ 3 ] On the other hand, there are those who follow a faith. They often do not dispute that anthroposophy, in presenting what it has to say about the supersensible worlds, clothes these ideas in concepts and terms—including conceptual frameworks that are certainly of a scientific nature, or at least strive to emulate that scientific character. But they deny anthroposophy its legitimacy precisely because it strives for this scientific character. For they say: Whatever can be revealed to human beings from the supersensible worlds must reveal itself to them in the most intimate experiences of their soul; above all, human beings must turn toward what they perceive from the supersensible with feeling and a willing inclination, and this supersensible realm must possess a certain mysterious character. It is precisely when one stands before the mystery with one’s fervently devout, religiously disposed soul—before that which does not yield to transparent ideas or clear concepts—that one can cultivate within oneself that elevation, that selfless devotion, which is necessary for human beings in relation to the supersensible world.

[ 4 ] And so it is probably precisely such individuals who believe that anthroposophy, because it seeks to introduce the supersensible into the manageable realm of human consciousness, thereby misleads people in their religious feelings and in their devout devotion. Whatever pertains to religion, it is said, must have an irrational character. People even go so far as to say that religion must have a kind of paradoxical character; it must not conform to what is called, in the scientific sense, the comprehensible.

[ 5 ] Anthroposophy now stands in contrast to these two views. It is entirely understandable that, in contrast to the familiar intellectual currents of our time—all of which can be classified to a greater or lesser extent into one of the two categories described—the scientific character of anthroposophy becomes incomprehensible and difficult to understand. For anthroposophy does indeed seek to approach the supersensible in a scientific manner, albeit by paths other than those commonly recognized in science, and it courageously pursues this path into the supersensible—all the way to the point where the supersensible reveals itself to human thought in exactly the same way that external nature reveals itself to human thought in the natural sciences, and it is difficult for anthroposophy to justify its scientific character in the face of the often rigid tendencies of the intellectual currents of our time. It will now be necessary, in order to characterize this scientific character in certain respects within today’s debate, to address the methodology of anthroposophy from a particular perspective.

[ 6 ] This form of anthroposophy feels most at home at its starting point when it can stand firmly in the place to which our era of scientific thinking and scientific research has led us. Amateurism and lay attitudes toward the natural sciences may sometimes be enthusiastically touched by anthroposophy; yet they will not be able to find the deepest inner satisfaction in it, because anthroposophy will seem to them to operate far too much in the spirit of scientific thinking. But one must say: Anthroposophy begins where today’s recognized science ends. Science as it is recognized today takes its starting point in what is given externally, ascending from these given facts to the ideas—called the laws of nature—that transcend them. When we then live within these ideas—in a sense, connecting the ideas we have derived from nature with our inner life—we gain an inner vision of nature, and this inner insight satisfies us fundamentally because we can clearly grasp the transition from one idea to another, because, inwardly, we have before us—as it were—a clear overview of the entire field of our ideas of nature, just as it presents itself to us externally in its details for sensory observation and experimentation. And when this natural science has reached this experience of ideas of nature, it feels that it has come to an end. Anthroposophy, however, seeks to begin only now; it takes up what has entered the soul as ideas of nature; it looks at the state of mind into which the human being has placed himself by uniting such ideas of nature with his own soul. It examines the manner in which the human being has applied his own activity—how he has brought his soul and spirit into action while exploring nature—and how he thereby arrived at his ideas of nature; it looks at the activity the human being has exercised during his research, and it seeks to further develop this activity. In a sense, it seeks to use what natural science has reached as its limit as the starting point for an inner, soul-based development. This now seems to lead entirely into the subjective realm.

[ 7 ] Yes, through what can now be done next—by further developing the ideas gained, by seeking an inner spiritual life as a continuation of what was applied in relation to external nature—one believes one is entering into the purely subjective, the purely personal, for which, therefore, only assertions of a subjective nature may be made.

[ 8 ] Well, distinguished guests, this is undoubtedly the case for the first steps being taken in this direction. But anyone who has followed all the details regarding these inner spiritual exercises for the further development of human spiritual faculties as discussed in my writings *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, *Outline of Esoteric Science*, and so on, will find that this subjective aspect is merely a transitional stage and that one ultimately moves beyond the subjective to reach the objective—an objective that is indeed experienced subjectively within—just as the ideas of nature — but which, in its certainty and validity, is as independent of human subjectivity as the mathematical and geometric judgments that are ultimately arrived at subjectively; these judgments are, admittedly, merely formal, yet despite being arrived at subjectively, they are independent of human subjectivity in their character as truth. Only through the path taken by anthroposophical research does one not, as in mathematics, enter into something merely formal, but rather enter a realm in which thoroughly human spiritual contents arise that relate to realities. When we draw a triangle in mathematics and examine its laws, this is, admittedly, at first merely an inner, subjective experience, and we must then apply it externally to something that arises from sensory observation so that we can speak of objectivity. Through the anthroposophical method, one arrives at content that is just as certain as that found in mathematics, but at the same time one arrives at content that has its meaning and validity in the world that truly exists spiritually. This becomes clear when one—and from a certain point of view, I can do this today as well—describes the methods that the anthroposophical researcher applies to his or her own inner soul life in order to enter the supersensible world. I say: From a certain point of view, I can undertake this, for this anthroposophical path of research is a very complicated one; it must involve many details of inner spiritual practice, and with regard to these details, I must refer you to the books I have mentioned.

[ 9 ] Now, however, with specific reference to today’s topic—which is intended to address the scientific character of anthroposophy—I would like to begin with a kind of historical perspective, because it is from this perspective that the scientific character of what is currently seeking to become an integral part of human civilization as anthroposophy will perhaps be most clearly evident. For when we speak today of the methods through which anthroposophy seeks to penetrate the supersensible worlds, many of our contemporaries are reminded of methods that seem similar to them—indeed, that they might even consider to be identical to the anthroposophical ones.

[ 10 ] Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to speak about anthroposophical methods in various cities, and time and again I heard the same assessment: Europe is simply not suited to pointing people toward the ancient Asian yoga tradition, toward the ancient yoga system, in which one is supposed to prepare the soul through inner spiritual exercises so that it can perceive something other than what it is capable of perceiving without these exercises in ordinary life and in ordinary science. But the people who make such judgments fail entirely to realize that there is a radical difference between what I describe as the anthroposophical methods and what—though dating back to a distant, obscure antiquity—existed in Eastern schools of wisdom and spiritual traditions as exercises of the soul, intended to lead, in the manner of those spiritual traditions, to a world other than the one presented by ordinary life. For when one points out what these Eastern spiritual schools sought to give to human beings, one immediately becomes aware that the ancient Eastern spiritual and soul character of human beings was entirely different from that of contemporary Europeans.

[ 11 ] If one is open-minded, one must certainly take seriously the idea of seeking in human development a progression from one metamorphosis of the soul to another. Anyone who believes that, in essence, the human state of mind has been the same throughout all cultural periods—at most differing among certain primitive, wild tribes—is gravely mistaken. Anyone who is able to delve impartially into the way in which, for example, the ancient Vedas or other ancient texts of earlier times sought to convey the wisdom of the world to humanity will find that this method of transmission relied on a completely different receptivity in human beings, on a completely different state of the soul, and perhaps only anthroposophical research is capable of providing insight into how human beings have changed in this regard over the course of their evolution. For when one delves into the ideas—which, admittedly, have taken on poetic forms—that were developed regarding the mysteries of the world, for example in the Vedas, one finds that there is a vast difference between this way of assimilating the Vedas into one’s inner life and the way we today perceive as appropriate to our state of mind. Today we feel the need to have strictly defined, sharply contoured ideas—ideas that possess a recognized logical character, that are transparent, and that appeal to the feelings not directly but only indirectly. These are just a few characteristics I can point out. But anyone who compares the wisdom handed down to humanity in the Vedas, for example, with what we today call our pursuit of science and wisdom will already discern the enormous difference. What is the basis for this difference?

[ 12 ] Well, what is commonly called psychology today is, after all, hardly capable of addressing the innerly dynamic human soul life, which embodies so many individual, characteristic, and essential traits; that is why, even today, little is discovered about what the wisdom content handed down to humanity in the Vedas actually resembles. However, one gains some clarity when one does not compare the ideas contained in the Vedas with our sharply defined, intellectualistic concepts, but rather when one considers, for example, the following fact.

[ 13 ] Let us imagine a human soul that is in the very process of transitioning from the state of sleep to the waking state. Let us imagine it permeated by the content of a dream. This dream content can take on wondrous, beautiful forms; it can reveal an inner drama; it can have a pictorial quality that carries a thoroughly poetic mood within it. Certainly, this dream content cannot be directly compared to the wondrous wisdom of the Vedas. Yet there is something to it when Plato perceives the poetic re-experiencing of the world’s mysteries by the human soul as something dreamlike. Let us follow the soul as it emerges from the state of sleep and, during the transition to the waking state, has these dream images before it; let us follow its path further: the dream images gradually fade away, and the human being takes possession of his physical nature, especially his volitional nature; for only when he has taken full possession of his volitional nature does everything dreamlike disappear. Then he is able, through his physicality, to make use of his senses; then he knows he is connected to the physical external world, and then he is able to grasp the difference between the world of dreams and the world of reality.

[ 14 ] What, then, is actually the essential aspect of this transition from the state of sleep to the waking state? We can observe, as it were, how the dream gradually fades away the more daytime thoughts emerge; these daytime thoughts dispel the dreamlike quality. But no one can be in any doubt that what we experience in a dream is a genuine psychological experience, and that the part of us which later takes possession of our physical body lives within these dream images. The dream images fade away as it submerges into physicality. With a more refined psychology than is available to our contemporaries, one can trace in every detail what I am hinting at here. Then one will discover how the soul does indeed emerge from a state—which we shall leave undefined for now—through the dream state, and how, in the dream state, it is in a position, so to speak, of not fully inhabiting its body. At the very moment it possesses its body, it simply ceases to dream. When anthroposophical research is applied to this kind of fact, the following emerges. Anthroposophical research, as it must be understood today and as it takes into account the civilization of the present, is initially aimed at developing the human life of thought so that thoughts become stronger and more intense than they are in ordinary science and ordinary life. This strengthening of thoughts is achieved through meditation and concentration. One devotes oneself to a specific object of imagination, applying all the soul’s power to it. Through this, the soul strengthens itself in the same way that a muscle strengthens itself externally when it is used in work. The entire life of thought becomes transformed. One gradually feels that one no longer lives in abstract, pale thoughts that can only be stimulated by the external world, but rather lives within the thoughts themselves as in an element that is as vivid as the experience of the external sensory world; and as one then continues to develop the power of thought further and further, one eventually becomes free from one’s physical organization in one’s thinking. One develops an inner psychological activity that, so to speak, takes place outside the body, and only now does one begin to recognize what it means for psychological activity to take place internally. At first, through these exercises, it takes place in mere thinking. But thinking is independent of any physicality; one can bring it to a state of thinking that is independent of all physicality. But then, once one has brought thinking to such a state of inner clarity, one can distinguish between what occurs in waking life and what is present for a person from the moment of falling asleep until waking up in the state of sleep. For now one knows through direct perception that, in the waking state, a person must make use of the body in order to think. For ordinary, waking thought, the body is the foundation. The kind of thinking that is characteristic of our ordinary consciousness cannot, so to speak, illuminate itself to such an extent that it becomes truly conscious through its own power; the body must be its helper. Thinking must take place within the body, so that the kind of thinking we employ today in science and also in everyday life is simply thinking with the aid of the body. In this respect, anthroposophical research—particularly as it relates to ordinary thinking—makes people more materialistic than they would otherwise be.

[ 15 ] But one learns to recognize something else as well, namely, the inner state of the soul one is in when one devotes oneself to body-free thinking—which has arisen through meditation and concentration—that is, when one has a thinking experience in the soul freed from the body; and one can now compare what one experiences in this way with the state of sleep. One now learns to recognize that, with regard to one’s body, one is just as independent during this strengthened, autonomous life of thought as one is otherwise during sleep; only in sleep does the weakest aspect reign in the independent soul that has left the body—an aspect that can only be illuminated internally with the body’s help to the point of becoming conscious. Therefore, thinking remains unconscious during the state of sleep; we sink into unconsciousness during sleep. We enter a state of bodily freedom that is exactly the same after meditation and concentration. Now, however, thinking has become so strengthened that it is not unconsciousness that sets in, but a state of full consciousness, so that one lives in a state that is radically different from the state of sleep—namely, in a soul life independent of the body. Only now does one come to understand the nature of human sleep. One now knows that the human soul leaves the body upon falling asleep, but that, in the present stage of human development, it has only those thoughts that can be internally illuminated to the point of consciousness with the help of the body; and by having consciously elevated oneself to attain such a state of the soul—one that is free from the body and filled with content—one now learns to compare this state with that in which, for example, the authors of the Vedas found themselves.

[ 16 ] The authors of the Vedas could not employ the kind of thinking that we have in our present era of civilization, and we are led back to a state of mind characteristic of earlier stages of human development, in which people simply regarded it as their natural state not to convey the mysteries of the world to themselves through the body in sharply defined thoughts, but rather to draw strength for their thoughts through a certain instinct, even when those thoughts could unfold outside the body. We look back at states not as we have them today, but at dreamlike, hazy—yet still distinct—states in which people developed the most important aspect of their soul life—namely, their perception of the world—outside their physical bodies. This gives us a picture of how the development of humanity, in terms of the state of the soul, unfolded from earlier times right up to the present day. One can say that the last remnants of an earlier state persisted until the middle of the Middle Ages, indeed until the dawn of the modern era. It was only the Galilean-Copernican era—which taught people to view the world in sharp concepts modeled on mathematics—that advanced to an experience of the soul in thought through the body; whereas up until that era one can still perceive how the last remnants of a body-free mode of cognition remain in the soul’s constitution, and the further back one goes into earlier times, the more one finds such body-free cognition. This could then only manifest itself in soul formations similar to dreams. It was, so to speak, a transition of human beings from the bodyless state to the state in which they make use of the body and develop what corresponds to their insight into the spiritual world.

[ 17 ] We must look back to such times if we are to understand what ancient literature tells us about the wisdom inherent in the world. We must not immediately critique this wisdom of the world through the lens of our own conceptual frameworks; if we do, we destroy it and, precisely because of that, are unable to recognize its truth. But if we can transport ourselves back to those earlier times in this way—and also to the ways in which those people sought to transcend their ordinary perception—then much will become clear to us. For these people, after all, it was not our science that constituted their everyday reality, but rather what they beheld in their images and in their instinctive imaginings. They did not need to achieve this through special exercises. For them, the task of further self-development must have consisted of something different than it does for us. If, with this insight, we now engage with what has been handed down to us—and particularly consider the yoga exercises of the East—we must say: All these yoga exercises were aimed at attaining, from the mode of cognition in a bodiless state, a mode of cognition that makes use of the body as an instrument.

[ 18 ] That sounds strange, and yet, to an unbiased observer, that is exactly how it appears! Ancient humanity sought precisely that as its goal: to achieve something that is given to us in everyday life. They were not endowed with the sharply defined thinking that we apply with such triumph in the natural sciences; they sought to attain it through their exercises. Indeed, even when one engages in systematic, well-executed yoga breathing exercises—where those who devote themselves to them do not perform the breathing process in the usual way, but in an abnormal yet lawful manner—we see that these exercises were designed so that one might seek to grasp the human body with that which one possessed while the soul was in a bodiless state. One might say: What comes to us as a gift, these people strove to attain through their yoga exercises; we see everywhere how they endeavor to think in such a way that the body becomes the instrument of thought. Thus, to one who fully comprehends this fact, the ancient yoga exercises that have been preserved to this day reveal that these people sought to attain the state of mind that is, so to speak, partly innate to us and partly acquired through upbringing since our childhood.

[ 19 ] Now, however, the question may immediately arise: But hasn’t such a yoga student, through his yoga exercises, explored the mysteries of the world as he perceives them and become attuned to wondrous realms? Yet when one hears what they describe as the revelations they have received, one soon realizes: What they have experienced differs quite considerably from what we can aspire to today with our abstract, hollow thoughts. Here, however, lies an important psychological fact that must be taken into account. For what can offer a person, in a certain sense, the highest experience in their relationship to the world arises precisely from the practice, from the striving, from the inner work—not from the finished state. Yoga students had to conquer, through inner spiritual struggles, the perception of what is given to us as a finished product, and it is only during this struggle and through this struggle that one immerses oneself in the deeper mysteries of the world. If what is thus attained is innate or acquired—if one accepts it as a matter of course—then it also presents itself as the natural order of one’s surroundings; one no longer immerses oneself in the world’s mysteries, but simply perceives the world according to its organization within one’s surroundings. Therefore, for us who stand on the horizon toward which the yoga students first had to strive, the contemplation of the deeper mysteries of the world—which the yoga students contemplated—has ceased. And today we feel the need to continue the practice, to continue it on a different level, taking as our starting point the place where the yoga students left off.

[ 20 ] The beginning of yoga training is dreamlike and instinctively vivid; but it was precisely toward what we today perceive as the true spirit of science that the yoga student sought to develop himself. Today, because the spirit of scientific inquiry is now the natural state of civilization, we must take this state as the starting point for our inner disposition and develop it further. We can therefore say: The yoga student has developed to the point of our way of thinking; we must develop further beyond our way of thinking. The yoga student designed all his exercises to bring thinking into his soul’s activity. If I am to describe exercises today that are to be performed for the purpose of attaining higher knowledge, I do indeed say: These exercises must be directed toward strengthening thinking, elevating it—not merely to the unconscious imagination that belongs to antiquity, but to conscious freedom from physicality. We must once again be free from physicality, whereas the yoga student strove precisely toward physicality; thus, in a certain sense, we are taking the opposite path.

[ 21 ] But then I must go on to describe this process—how this practice must aim to develop in the soul the same kind of vitality that we otherwise experience in our external sensory perceptions. In our sensory perceptions, we exist in a certain independence from our physicality. The senses are integrated into our physicality. Relatively speaking, however, we become independent of our sensory perceptions; it is only in our thinking that we fully incorporate into our physicality what is revealed to us from the external world. Only when we develop further from this thinking—which the yoga student initially strove for—does it become necessary to suppress this thinking itself to a certain degree and to bring about a state similar to sensory perception, which does not dissolve into thought but, so to speak, leaves the thoughts behind in the physical body. The essence of the exercises we undertake for the purpose of anthroposophical research is this: To transcend thinking once again, to rise to a state that gives the human being an experience, as it were, within a second personality—but in such a way that this second personality now possesses the intense, strengthened, and visualized thinking, while the ordinary personality—with its common sense and healthy thinking bound to the physical body—remains behind, fully conscious.

[ 22 ] Thus, anyone who, in the modern sense, strives for supersensible knowledge through direct experience must strive toward this twofold division of their personality. Anthroposophy is by no means to be confused with any kind of pathological condition. In the realm of hallucinations and visions, the personality merges into the hallucinations, into the world of visions; in anthroposophical research, the personality remains intact, and ordinary, body-bound thinking continues to function. Those personalities who enter the higher worlds live within these higher worlds through their developed, transformed thinking. As a result, the anthroposophical researcher is always able to scrutinize what he perceives in the higher worlds with a strictly critical eye using his ordinary personality.

[ 23 ] Ladies and gentlemen, this is precisely the essential point at stake. In the course of our development, we have brought ourselves to the point where we are able to judge scientifically in our own way; we have trained ourselves to apply this scientific method to the observation of nature and to experimentation. We are familiar with the state of mind one finds oneself in when these methods are developed in the sense that is precisely defined today.

[ 24 ] This training is indeed a prerequisite for the anthroposophical path of research; and what exists within the human personality by virtue of this training—the scientific character of the soul’s constitution—is by no means abandoned. This scientific aspect of the personality stands there, critiquing, scrutinizing—and even describing—from the perspective of its scientific concepts what the other aspect of the personality, the one that has entered the supersensible world, perceives. But then one must say: On the one hand, there is external sensory perception; natural science addresses it, seeking the laws of nature, seeking to relive internally—in the ideas of nature, which have the laws of nature as their content—what appears externally to the senses. The anthroposophical researcher stands within the state of mind that results from this. As the ideas of nature are formed from nature itself, we are scientifically satisfied by the character that this world of ideas possesses. Scientific conviction is an inner experience! It is not the external world—nature—that tells us what is scientific, but rather our own methodology that tells us what is scientific. When we use our ordinary thinking to give these ideas content derived from sensory perceptions, we then, through higher insight arising from invigorated thinking, give the ideas a supersensory content. It is not a different content of thought, it is not a different logic, it is not a different scientific method that prevails in ordinary natural science and that prevails in what is supersensibly perceived by the anthroposophical researcher and conveyed to the scientific mindset for description.

[ 25 ] This is the inner connection. The ultimate goal of yoga training has been to cultivate the scientific spirit. We developed this spirit in the age of Galileo and Copernicus through the study of external nature; we are now extending it to conscious inner contemplation, but we do not deny it. We examine what is perceived in a higher sense in the supersensible world using precisely the same ideas as we use to examine what can be explored through the eyes, ears, and other senses in external experimentation. Humanity has striven for science throughout its development. What science has become has become a state of the human soul. This state of the soul is preserved by working upward into the supersensible world through anthroposophy.

[ 26 ] However, the development of thought is only one part of what is sought within anthroposophical training. In the previous lecture on “The Harmonization of Science, Art, and Religion,” I already indicated that through this strengthening of thoughts in meditation and concentration, we arrive at a vision of the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being as it existed in a spiritual-soul world before birth or conception. We ascend to the eternal aspect of the human soul in its pre-birth existence by further developing the thoughts as they exist in ordinary science. However, if anthroposophical research is to be complete, exercises of the will must be added to this development of thought. Once again, I cannot describe in detail what must be undertaken as exercises of the will for the sake of anthroposophical research; I must refer to the books already mentioned, but I can say a few things in principle.

[ 27 ] To train the will, it is above all necessary that we raise the will—insofar as it extends into thinking—to a higher level than it is in ordinary life. A good exercise for this is what I call “reverse visualization”—for example, when we look back on our daily life in the evening in reverse, preferably in images, so that a different kind of power must be developed than that contained in our thoughts. When we let our daily life pass before our soul in reverse, down to the smallest details—for example, when we walk down a flight of stairs—we would, in this backward visualization, imagine it as starting from the bottom step and working our way up to the top; this does not mean we lose track of our entire day’s events; rather, it can be done in a short time if practiced correctly; if we accustom ourselves to thinking against the flow of ordinary events in this way, then we must exert our will to imagine the events differently than they usually unfold. We can also perceive a melody in reverse or imagine a drama in reverse in this way. Through this, we develop the will to a greater strength than it usually possesses. We can now support such exercises by performing other exercises of the will. In ordinary life, we do, after all, move forward—as we can see when we consider longer periods of time—from metamorphosis to metamorphosis; but it is the circumstances to which we surrender that then transform us. If, however, we take our own development into our own hands—if, for example, we try to break habits we have, if we try in this way to break a habit — which may take years — and to make this striving a trait of one’s character by incorporating it into the will; if one attempts to take one’s development into one’s own hands in this way, following a strictly defined goal, then the will is thereby strengthened, and one thereby attains, with regard to supersensible perception, something that points in a direction other than that of thought. I would like to express this through a comparison.

[ 28 ] Let us take the human eye as an example. Because it is transparent and does not assert its own materiality, we are able to see through it. The moment it asserts its own materiality due to severe illness, we can no longer see. The eye must be selflessly integrated into the human organism if it is to serve the purpose of seeing. Now, I do not mean to claim that the human organism is sick in ordinary life; but it is just as unsuited to supersensible vision as a severely diseased eye is to ordinary vision. Through exercises of the will, our organism becomes, so to speak, spiritually transparent. Usually, the body is spiritually opaque; we carry it with us, and we live with our will within its materiality. Through exercises of the will, it becomes spiritually and mentally transparent; it becomes, so to speak, a sense organ. Through it, we learn to see spiritually and psychically, just as we see physically through a transparent eye. When we look through our body, which has become transparent, we stand—just as we stand in the physical outer world through our physical, sensory eye—within a spiritual world. We have progressed from imagination to inspiration and to actually standing within a spiritual-psychic world. In the spiritual-soul world, we learn to stand within it with our soul just as we otherwise stand in the physical world with our physical body.

[ 29 ] It follows that we now experience in the image something we would otherwise experience in death: In death, the body is cast off, while the spiritual-soul aspect lives on. The fact that this is a truth is expressed in the image of this bodyless volition—that is, of standing within the spiritual world—in the same way that what applies to our sensory environment is expressed solely through a thought. We thus arrive at the other side of human immortality; we add immortality to the state of not having been born. The anthroposophical researcher thus ascends to a true contemplation of immortality.

[ 30 ] But once one arrives at this perspective, one also learns, through a more refined psychology, to evaluate other states of the soul in everyday life in the proper way. What is present in waking life as facts of the soul’s life, one learns to recognize through strengthened thinking. That is why I also cited as an example the soul’s awakening through the dream world into the waking state and linked this to the consolidation of concentrated thinking. But when we now engage in exercises of the will, thereby standing within the spiritual world and also gaining a vision of our bodyless soul after death, then we also come to know more precisely the moment of falling asleep in ordinary life. At first, we experience falling asleep in such a way that the sharply defined ideas that permeate our soul during waking hours gradually grow darker and darker. But now we know that as we pass through the gateway of sleep, our consciousness is not extinguished, but merely dulled; and as we learn to live now also in strengthened will, we can now also observe the states in which the soul finds itself once it has entered the spiritual world after falling asleep. There we experience how the soul immerses itself more and more into an overall sensation of the world, and how, upon falling asleep, that which is opposite to the pictorial nature of dreaming is particularly captured. Upon waking, the soul is more inclined to express in dream images what it has experienced during sleep; upon falling asleep, however, what is subdued from the day’s perceptions is also transformed into a kind of dream, but one transitions to a general experience of the vastness of the world. Upon waking, thoughts are more strongly captured in pictorial form, whereas upon falling asleep, feelings—and especially the self-surrendering will—are more strongly captured. In short, one now learns to recognize—psychologically to recognize—the transition of the soul, as it experiences it upon falling asleep, from the experience of one’s own self to a state of self-surrender to the world in feeling and will.

[ 31 ] One learns to recognize what dulls the thoughts, what dampens them, but also, on the other hand, what allows the other soul forces to blossom into the world; and when this is experienced—as it can be—in a certain state of consciousness while awake, represents the state in which the devout soul finds itself—that devout soul which does not wish to have its inner spiritual disposition clothed in thoughts and ideas, which wishes precisely to have those ideas and thoughts subdued in order to surrender sensation and feeling to the totality, to the majesty of the world, to the Divine that permeates the world. In short, through anthroposophical research, one comes to know both the state in which the human being strives toward thoughts and the state in which he strives away from them, and one learns to perceive both states on a higher level. One learns to recognize that human beings live in such a way that they first move out of the cosmos to make use of their physical body, and then move back toward the cosmos when they leave their body again. The states that are then brought into consciousness from this process are the states of everyday knowledge and everyday piety; but these states are elevated to a higher level in the supersensible contemplation attained through anthroposophical training.

[ 32 ] So one might say: The scientific character of the soul is not diminished by embarking on the path to the supersensible worlds through anthroposophical training; for what one has attained as scientific conviction—that state of mind which accompanies scientific conviction—is carried upward when one attempts to fathom what the so-called second personality perceives in the supersensible world. On the other hand, however, that into which the soul wishes to surrender itself selflessly, into which it wishes to immerse itself, is woven into the ideas. This by no means loses its majesty; nor does it lose, by being brought out of the mystery and made the object of intimate inner contemplation, the character of its holiness, through which it causes us to look up to it with piety and reverence. Through the way in which anthroposophy allows the mystery to reign within the soul in a comprehensible manner, none of this is stripped of its character of holiness. And so anthroposophy seeks to maintain scientific rigor in cognition, applying it not only to the objects of ordinary experience but also to the supersensible realm. Just as nothing is taken away from nature—when we perceive it in the right way, through devotion to its beauty and its majestic qualities—so too nothing is taken away from what is of a supersensible nature when it is brought down into immediate human experience in its true form—not in an abstract form.

[ 33 ] Thus, one cannot be convinced of the scientific character of anthroposophy through a superficial definition or through cursory logical discussions of the criteria of scientific rigor; rather, by immersing oneself in the process of anthroposophical research, the thoughtful observer must convince themselves that genuine scientific rigor is present here, and indeed one that in no way prevents the supersensible from assuming a religious character once again. And so one might say: Anthroposophy certainly has the courage to proceed with scientific precision, a scientific mindset, and scientific method into realms where the ground of external sensory perception no longer exists. Anyone who then objects, for example, that “there is no ground left at all there” is like someone who might say the following: When we live on Earth, a stone is drawn to the Earth and falls until it can rest upon it; thus, all things on Earth are drawn to it and must ultimately rest on the ground. This is true as long as we move within the orbit of the [Earth] planet. But the moment we rise from the conditions on our Earth to the conditions in our planetary system, we are dealing with something else; there, the planets support one another, and they require no special ground as a foundation. Anyone who were to say that there must be a special cosmic ground so that the planets do not fall into the abyss would simply be saying something foolish. The same applies here. If one moves from what external science presents to the field of anthroposophical research with the same precision that external science possesses, then there, too, the elements support one another; through the mutual support of the individual truths, the totality of supersensible science—the totality of anthroposophy—arises.

[ 34 ] Thus, anthroposophy has the courage to expand science from the sensory to the supersensory realm, while ensuring that its scientific character is not lost. But it is also not so timid as to believe that mystery must necessarily reign over the supersensory world so that human beings may retain their piety. No! Anthroposophy has the courage to acknowledge that the Great does not derive its greatness for human beings merely from the fact that it is unknown to them, but rather proves its greatness even when it is known; and familiarity with religious content in no way diminishes religion.

[ 35 ] Thus, anthroposophy seeks to justify itself in the face of the two accusations I outlined at the beginning of today’s reflection. For it seeks to penetrate the supersensible world through knowledge, while fully respecting scientific rigor, and it also seeks to develop the courage to bring the supersensible down into the human heart. And this supersensible realm is vast enough to fill the human heart so completely that this heart can continue to develop in true piety, even as the mystery is revealed!