The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. What Was the Purpose of the Goetheanum, and What Is the Purpose of Anthroposophy?

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! The terrible fire that occurred on the last night of December has destroyed an outer shell of the anthroposophical endeavor. This event, which is so painful for many who had grown fond of this building—the Goetheanum in Dornach—may perhaps serve as an occasion for me to begin today’s reflections by referring first to the Goetheanum in Dornach. I have, of course, had the privilege of offering many reflections of this kind from this very spot, and today’s—my dear friends—is intended to be just one such reflection, presented in the same spirit as the others, with the sole difference being its connection to the Goetheanum. This Goetheanum has certainly had many people who, through their insight into the intent that this Goetheanum sought to embody, held it in extraordinary esteem and love. Yet one must say that the vast majority of visitors—the numerous visitors there have been over the years—were unable to see anything special in this Goetheanum. There were many people who were annoyed by the very name “Goetheanum.” And there were many who, upon seeing the forms of this complex—composed of two domed structures joined together—found them strangely simple, perhaps perceiving them merely as the expression of a fanciful aspiration. Then there were people who, based on one rumor or another, believed that all sorts of haunting—perhaps spiritualist haunting—took place in this Goetheanum; that the Goetheanum had been built to represent some vague, nebulous mysticism; perhaps even, as some put it, to serve the blindest superstition, and so on, and so on.

[ 2 ] And yet one might almost be astonished at how far what is currently believed about this or that can be removed from reality. For this Goetheanum certainly did not serve any of the purposes I have just described. And if there are today those who oppose all these more or less backward or superstitious tendencies—those who sought what was truly intended in the spirit of the Goetheanum’s founding—they most certainly belong among these opponents. But I do not wish to speak of the negative today; I would like to speak of what the Goetheanum intended, and what anthroposophy—for which it was meant to be a place—is actually meant to be for humanity today.

[ 3 ] The fact that the name “Goetheanum” was chosen over time essentially reflected the heartfelt desire of a number of admirers of the Goetheanum and anthroposophy. At first, the name of one of the characters in my Mystery Dramas, Johannes Thomasius—not the evangelist John, but the name of one of the characters in my Mystery Dramas—was chosen for this building on the hill in Dornach, and it was accordingly named the Johannesbau.

[ 4 ] Naturally, as is easy to understand, this in particular gave rise to many misunderstandings, and I have therefore had to emphasize time and again that, for me, this building in Dornach is a Goetheanum. Why? Let me say this: For more than 40 years, I have been engaged with what is rooted in Goethe’s philosophy, art, and worldview. And anyone who, with an open mind, delves into Goethe’s quest for knowledge, into Goethe’s art, into Goethe’s quest for a worldview—and truly immerses themselves in them—will not merely be inspired to observe from the outside what Goethe intended; rather, if one truly engages with him and with the all-encompassing nature of his striving, Goethe acts as a living impulse. One can permeate the soul with what he intended, as with a spiritual lifeblood. And out of this permeation of that which I am convinced Goethe intended—in accordance with his era—for certain aspects of human perception, out of this experience of what one might call “Goetheanism,” anthroposophy has grown.

[ 5 ] Certainly, anyone who takes Goethe’s worldview and his artistic intent and views them from the outside will not be able to extract from Goethe what lies at the heart of anthroposophy—using, say, any kind of logic or, let’s say, any conventional artistic taste. But there is—I would say—a logic of thought, and there is a logic of life. Anyone who makes the logic of life their own can immerse themselves in something like what Goethe revealed to the world, so that it comes alive within them, continues to grow, and develops. And in this sense of a living logic, I feel how anthroposophy emerges from Goetheanism without contradiction, however little this is acknowledged today. And because anthroposophy essentially owes its origins to Goethe, it was a natural emotional impulse to name the place where anthroposophy—the descendant, so to speak, of Goethe’s worldview—was cultivated the Goetheanum.

[ 6 ] This is by no means intended to make the absurd claim of representing, say, what Goetheanism is with any kind of perfection; rather, I would say, this Goetheanum was meant to be a kind of place of homage to what Goethe gave to the world. It was certainly not intended to serve as a means of seeking prestige by representing the Goethean spirit, but rather as an expression of gratitude for what can be gained from Goethe’s striving for the world. And anyone who perceives this naming as an expression of gratitude will probably no longer be annoyed by the name.

[ 7 ] But if I am to continue—my esteemed audience—and show you what the Goetheanum intended, then I must simply continue the reflections I have often been allowed to share here in this hall, and explain what anthroposophy is meant to be. Anthroposophy is indeed meant to find the answer—to the extent that human beings are capable of finding one—to the highest questions of human existence, to those questions connected with human destiny and human dignity in the highest sense of the word. If human beings do not numb themselves to their true inner life, then the question of the eternity of the soul inevitably arises again and again. Then the question arises: Is the human soul a free or an unfree being? Then the question arises: To what extent does the human soul rest and act within what one might call a divine world order?

[ 8 ] When it comes to these questions—often referred to as the ultimate questions of existence—our modern science, which has achieved such unspeakably great things in the external realms of life, has become rather timid, for this external science, even as a real, true science, is willing to acknowledge only what can be perceived by the senses, what can be synthesized by human intellectual activity from sensory perceptions, and it rejects anything that goes beyond the sensory realm. In doing so, however, it also rejects any answer to the deeper questions of human existence just described. For without knowledge entering the supersensible realm, human beings cannot even attempt to approach a humanly possible answer to this question.

[ 9 ] Anthroposophy, however, does not seek—to the extent that this is possible for human beings—to provide answers to these questions through mere dogma, nor does it seek to provide them through obscure mysticism; rather, Anthroposophy seeks to advance as far as possible toward these answers in the same way that modern science actually strives to do. However, anthroposophy is clear that what human beings call “knowledge” must be understood in a completely different way than is often the case today, even among the most authoritative figures, if one is to view these questions in their proper light at all.

[ 10 ] I would like to begin with a parabolic approach, one that is meant to be more than a mere parable. You see—my esteemed audience—in fact, every soul that contemplates the world—though without the expectation that this will yield specific clues for solving the world’s mysteries—every deeper soul stands, even if perhaps only in wonder and admiration, before the images of that subdued world we call the world of dreams. I take the dream world as my starting point, certainly not in order to extract anything from it in a mystical way, but to illustrate how anthroposophy conceives of that which must become knowledge for humanity if we are to approach the questions outlined above.

[ 11 ] Let us consider for a moment how the dream world—so diverse and so rich in color—unfolds before the sleeping soul. Imagine how, on the one hand, the content of the dream is a reflection of what we know well from the world we experience in our waking consciousness. But also imagine the soul, and how the dream world hovers around and surges around it, transforming itself in such a freely fluid way and taking on fantastical forms. And anyone who thinks with an open mind—anyone who engages with the world above all else with a sound mind and a sound will—will be unable to say anything other than: We can never recognize the reality of the dream world while we are actually dreaming.

[ 12 ] We could, I would say, dream our entire lives; then we would simply—just as we do in our dream experience—take the content of the dream to be our reality. We would believe that the world we are dreaming is the real world. But since we wake up from the dream world through our consciousness, we gain, while awake, the perspective needed to assess the reality of the dream world. Only when we are outside the dream—only when our senses and our will are, so to speak, engaged with the external world around us—do we have a perspective from which to judge the reality of the dream world. Of course, no one may judge what constitutes spatial reality from the perspective of a dream. For sound thinking and sound volition, only the reverse judgment is possible.

[ 13 ] Well, by immersing oneself not in a dream world, but precisely in the world of everyday reality—which, although in a different way than a dream, also provides us with manifold, colorful images—images whose inner content we can only recognize when we penetrate them, specifically when we penetrate them in their interaction with what our intellect provides us. As anthroposophy delves into this world of reality, as anthroposophy approaches the world of everyday reality in the same way that the dreamer approaches his dream world, you arrive at the question: Yes, isn’t it possible that, so to speak, a second awakening takes place in the life of the human soul? Just as the natural functioning of our organism rouses us from sleep, and just as our will becomes engaged with the external sensory world of reality upon awakening, so it might well be possible that yet another awakening could occur even from the world that concerns our everyday consciousness. If this is the case, then one must say that it is only from the perspective of the world into which one awakens—the supersensible world—that the reality of the sensory world can be assessed, just as the reality of the dream world is assessed from the perspective of the everyday world. I would like to say: Anthroposophy first poses the great question: Is such a second awakening possible? It does not wish under any circumstances to sink back into dreamlike reality in order to perceive the world. It wishes to take the opposite path; it wishes to take the path that the human being takes from the dream into sensory reality. It seeks to proceed further, from sensory reality into supersensory reality. Whether this is possible depends, of course, on one’s ability to penetrate human soul life—indeed, the whole of human life. I would like to say: One must simply subject the soul and its life to scrutiny to determine whether it has the capacity for such a second awakening.

[ 14 ] Now—my esteemed audience—such a second awakening is indeed possible. It is possible, above all, when a person does not succumb to intellectual arrogance, which might lead them to say to themselves: At first you were a small child; back then you were not yet equipped with the faculties of thought, feeling, or will that you possess as an adult; you first had to develop these faculties—with the help of your human environment, your upbringing, and life itself—to the degree to which you now possess them. But if, as an adult, one were to set aside this intellectual arrogance, so to speak, and ask oneself: Might the faculties—from the stage to which one has brought them as an adult—now be developed just as they developed from the childhood stage up to the stage of everyday life? And one is guided along the path of such further development of human abilities when one directs one’s special attention to individual abilities of this kind.

[ 15 ] Let us first turn our attention to that capacity of the human soul—or, shall we say, of the human being—which is commonly referred to in everyday life as memory, the gift of recollection. Let us first consider it as memory presents itself in everyday life. From the realm of the soul’s life, amidst the impressions of the present—perhaps evoked, and most often evoked by these very impressions of the present—mental images emerge: faint mental images of something we may have experienced years ago. There, mingling with what surfaces from the depths of the soul or is brought to the surface by present-day perceptions, there perhaps mingles the all-encompassing, transformative imagination, and perhaps even some elements of fantasy. And through the power of memory, a person has before them images of something about which one can say without a doubt: It does not exist in actual reality—in the reality to which we are accustomed when we open our eyes and hear our surroundings with our ears—it does not exist in that reality. We incorporate into our mental images of memory events that consist simply of the fact that, years ago, we ourselves entered into this or that relationship with this or that person, with this or that natural phenomenon, or with something else.

[ 16 ] What took place there is no longer a reality today. However, we have the ability, from the depths of our soul, to bring before us—in images that are more or less faint or more or less rich in content—that which, in the way we otherwise perceive reality through the senses, is simply not a present reality. This capacity for recollection can be cultivated. And it is cultivated when a person immerses themselves in their inner life to a degree that they rarely do in everyday life today. When people today engage in thought, these are mostly thoughts prompted by external influences or that arise, as I have described, as recollections. If a person is honest with their inner life, they must tell themselves: The outer aspect of the inner life is actually composed of what external impressions provide and what rises from the depths of the inner life as a memory.

[ 17 ] But there is also something else one can do. One can break free from this—I would say—passive role that one plays in relation to thinking. With ever-increasing inner activity, one can try to live in one’s thoughts. In particular, one can live in one’s thoughts in such a way that one simply forms thoughts that are easy to grasp; so that one can be certain that, when one devotes oneself to these thoughts with intense inner activity, one will not fall prey to suggestion or mystical reveries—provided one presents only clear thoughts to the soul in such a way that one does not let them flit by, as thoughts stimulated from outside or within tend to do. Then one notices that in this thinking brought about by one’s own volition—in this life, in the activity of thinking—something takes shape within the life of the soul that can be compared to what happens when, for example, we use a portion of our muscles in external physical work. They become stronger, they become more powerful; it is precisely through active use that the muscles become stronger and more powerful. But we notice this in a different way, by immersing ourselves again and again through our inner will—if I may put it that way—in [self-woven] or even self-created thoughts, or in thoughts acquired from some researcher of the spiritual realm. We become stronger inwardly and spiritually, and we notice—when we do such exercises (for some it takes longer, for others shorter; it can take weeks or even years)—that as we continue these exercises, the inner strength of our soul awakens. And it awakens in such a way that we come to know what we previously knew only as a memory in a transformed, reshaped form. A new inner ability—I would say an enhanced capacity for memory—which, however, does not now provide us with memories; rather, we sense it within our soul.

[ 18 ] And at the moment when this power has become strong enough—that is, when thinking, which has been repeatedly and constantly engaged in inner activity—thinking that is now no longer merely thought but experienced, so that one feels it as an inner reality—at the moment when this inner thinking has become strong enough, something occurs, it usually appears in fragments; something steps before the human soul that it has not known until now. It is not merely memory that steps before the human soul, but the vision of what the human being has experienced roughly since their earliest childhood within this earthly existence. But what the person experiences there is not merely a sum of memory images painstakingly recalled, but rather something that suddenly steps before the soul like a vast tableau of life, allowing one to survey—as something present, as if time had become space—one’s earthly life up to that point. If one is capable of this, then one also feels, with one’s “I,” in a completely different way than is possible with ordinary consciousness—in fact, no longer in the physical body. One feels connected, through one’s “I,” to all the experiences one has gone through, which now rise up into consciousness within this vast tableau of memories.

[ 19 ] I would like to describe that in which one now experiences oneself—just as one experiences oneself in physical life, in one’s earthly existence, in one’s arms, head, and legs—I would like to describe this sum of life images from which one senses: One is oneself; one is oneself, only extended beyond the duration of one’s earthly life. I would like to call this the “time body,” in contrast to the “spatial body” in which one perceives oneself in ordinary consciousness. It is the first supersensible experience one has in this way.

[ 20 ] But what one experiences now—and this is the significant point—is that one does not perceive this tableau, this body of time, by observing it from the outside; rather, by immersing oneself again and again in thought through active, inner engagement, one has thereby acquired the ability to be immersed in these experiences—to experience them as if they were happening in the present—to truly be one with this body of time, not merely to stand in space, but to move through time and, as one moves through it, to feel oneself as a human unity. One extends one’s existence back nearly to one’s birth as a continuous reality.

[ 21 ] This is the result of what I would call a transformed memory. While one is in this state—in which one views oneself as trapped within one’s past life—one does not have the ability to shape the memory in any particular way. In fact, the person experiencing this must go through it again and again—at least in a shadowy way—if they wish to have it before them. The fact that one has transformed memory for this supersensible world into something else—into a vision of a finer temporal realm—means at the same time that memory itself is, as it were, erased during the moments when one beholds this higher world. But the person who develops in this way in a healthy manner will not, like a mystical dreamer or a somnambulist, involuntarily arrive at a different kind of imagination; rather, they will arrive at this different kind of imagination with full consciousness. As a result, they are also able to return again and again—I would say—to the ordinary consciousness of everyday life. Even though they initially look into the first realm of the spiritual world, they are still able to stand with both feet firmly planted in sensory reality in a healthy way and by no means become a mystical dreamer or fantasist.

[ 22 ] But through this, a person attains true self-knowledge. For it is not what has come to me from the outside that appears in this tableau of life, but precisely the way in which one has oneself intervened in external events. There is indeed a difference between, for example, someone making an effort to recall the events they have experienced in ordinary consciousness and memory, and what I have just described—that is, when one recalls, for the sake of ordinary consciousness and ordinary memory, the events one experienced at birth. Above all, one is interested in how the world has affected one, how this or that person has treated one, and what effect this or that natural event has had on oneself. When one has this higher, spiritual, transformed tableau of memory before one, one does not actually see what another person has done to one, but rather one sees how one oneself behaved toward the other person, how one behaved toward this or that natural event, this or that fact of life. One sees oneself acting, sees oneself as active. In short—my esteemed audience—one has advanced to a true self-knowledge, to a vivid self-knowledge. This is due, if I may put it this way, to the intensification of thinking to such a degree that one feels one is now living in thought, just as one otherwise lives in one’s blood circulation and in one’s breathing.

[ 23 ] In everyday life, thoughts are faint and shadowy. They do not compel us; they are not something in which one lives as one lives in one’s blood or in one’s breath. By practicing in the way I have described, one feels, so to speak, one’s life in thought just as one otherwise feels life in the physical body. And one then knows that, alongside what a person carries as their physical body, there is precisely this second, temporal body, which is not spatial—one can map it out spatially, but that is only a visualization—that there is this second, temporal body, which is infinitely finer, if one may use that expression at all, than the physical body. In my writings, I have called it the etheric or formative body, because one must have a term for these things. One need not take offense at such terms. Alongside the physical body, this is the second member of the human being, and it leads up the first step toward the supersensible body, in order to penetrate further. For through such contemplation one comes to know only one’s own human being for this earthly life.

[ 24 ] In order to go further, it is, so to speak, necessary to develop the opposite force to that which consists in becoming lost in thought. It is indeed true: Anyone who is familiar with this state of becoming lost in thought knows how it ensnares people. One does, however, protect oneself by practicing the method as I have described it in my book *How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds* or in my *Outline of Esoteric Science*. One does indeed gain access to this world, however, if one performs the exercises as I have described them there, in a completely free manner. One is not influenced by what one experiences; one stands within what one experiences just as one stands as a free human being in the sensory outer world.

[ 25 ] And yet, just as anything in the external world that particularly moves us captivates us, so too does this world we experience when we immerse ourselves in thought; little by little—and it is not even an exaggeration to say this, my esteemed audience—one gets the feeling: You are now living in this power of thought, just as you otherwise live in your physical body. And yet, if one wishes to make progress in supersensible knowledge, it is necessary to overcome precisely this stage. For one must be clear that this stage is actually nothing other than what I have called in my books an [imaginative] stage. One experiences what the world has instilled in one during one’s earthly life—what one has, so to speak, imagined for oneself as thought, feeling, and will—not in the sense of a fanciful construct, but in the sense of truly imagining what one has imagined.

[ 26 ] But one experiences only what one is, in the strictest sense, as a human being; one experiences only one’s human-soul aspect. And one has no right yet to say that this human-soul aspect—which one experiences as if in a temporal body—will continue to exist beyond earthly life. Higher exercises are necessary for this. It is necessary to be able to place oneself inwardly in a position—just as one has placed thinking before the soul, just as one has immersed oneself in thinking so that thinking became a life—to suppress this thinking again at any time in complete inner freedom. But this now means something special.

[ 27 ] Once one has freed oneself from the physical body in the sense I have just described—that is, once one has become attuned to the etheric body—then, to begin with, the suppression of the life of thought does not mean a relapse into the physical body, but rather a remaining outside the physical body. But one suppresses what one has acquired from outside the physical body. And one creates what might be called empty consciousness. This is the significant point: that a person develops their inner soul faculties up to this stage of empty consciousness.

[ 28 ] I would like to say: Just as a person breathes in ordinary life—how they inhale and exhale, how the inhalation contains the breath of life and the exhalation the breath of death—so, on this higher level of intellectual spiritual experience, a person must come to activate thinking within themselves, just as they activate the inhaled air as a physical organism. But they must also be able to bring this experience of thinking forth from their soul again. Then consciousness becomes empty. But once one has attained this capacity for empty consciousness, one has advanced to the point of being able to alternate within the soul between being filled with powerful inner thinking—which unfolds in images, as I described in the tableau of life— once one has achieved the ability to alternate between these images and the state of having nothing in the soul, then after a suitable period of time—all these things must be awaited with patience and energy—the following occurs: the empty consciousness that one has attained in this way no longer remains empty, yet external perceptions do not arise either. A spiritual world emerges around us. And we gain the ability to live for a while within what we awaken within ourselves as images of our own earthly life, and to alternate between them by suppressing these images, taking the first step toward establishing empty consciousness, and then filling this empty consciousness with the content of the outer spiritual world.

[ 29 ] Yes—my esteemed audience—into this empty consciousness now enters the phenomenon of a spiritual world, which we distinguish from what we know ourselves to be in our temporal body, just as we distinguish external colors and sounds from our physical body when we stand in the spatial world, in the physical world. We learn to distinguish between what we perceive externally as the spiritual content of the world—a world of spiritual beings that exists around us just as the physical world of physical facts and physical beings does—and we learn to distinguish ourselves from this spiritual world.

[ 30 ] If I could say that the first stage of supersensible knowledge leads to a genuine form of self-contemplation—which is a strengthened thinking—then this second stage, through which we perceive a genuine spiritual world and come to realize that the spiritual world surrounds us just as the sensory world does, this second faculty can be compared to the soul activity that we pour into our physical organism when we speak. Speech is, after all, not merely a physical, mechanical expression of the human organism. Into what the physical organism reveals when a person speaks, the person pours what constitutes their soul life, and what constitutes soul life flows through the words and sentences. If we learn to suppress this intensified thinking, as I have described it, then we learn, in connection with this suppression of thinking, something that I will describe in a few words—something that is familiar, but which, in this case, is denoted by these words in a somewhat different sense. For we do not merely learn to suppress thinking; rather, we learn—in a higher sense than is the case in ordinary life—to be inwardly silent. Yes, once empty consciousness has been established, the inner experience is there: now the soul is silent. I said that I use the word as it is used to refer to not speaking in ordinary life. But in this case, the word means something else. This silence following the suppression of thought is now, so to speak, a positive inner experience, just as we are otherwise—let’s say—filled with joy or pain by what our speech contains, by what our words contain. In the same sense, we now feel—as we immerse ourselves in our supersensible being in the manner described—that we are filled with silence. And this silence is of a special nature in yet another respect.

[ 31 ] I have to use an analogy to make this clear. I have to say: Let’s suppose we’re in the midst of the noise of a big city, with all sorts of sounds rumbling around us. We move away from the city; the sounds grow fainter and fainter as they come from farther and farther away; it grows quieter and quieter. We go out into the solitude of the forest—it grows even quieter. Finally, there is complete silence around us. But I would like to say: This silence is only zero. We can go further. We can reduce silence—which simply means “not hearing anything”—even further—if I may use a very trivial expression—just as we can reduce something when, having spent our resources down to zero, we must go into debt, ending up with even less than zero. That is how we can reduce silence. There is something deeper in the soul, once thought has been suppressed, than silence. There is an inner power in this intensified silence, and within this intensified silence—this stillness that goes beyond the zero of tranquility—this stillness, it brings forth something that is not an external manifestation, but an inner language—a language that does not emerge from the depths of the soul, but rather—as one clearly experiences—comes in from the supersensible world, in which one is now oneself, as a supersensible being, just as I have described. One now feels compelled to describe what one experiences in the inner silence of the soul. One does indeed experience the spiritual world, and it is as if the spiritual world were speaking to us through the silence of our soul. It truly speaks to us. Only, one must not express this speech in the words that are otherwise produced by our speech organs, but rather one must express it by using natural phenomena themselves to convey what is revealing itself there as the spiritual world. This is how it happens. But what happens—my dear friends here present—is that one seeks an inner, elemental naturalness, just as one’s attitude toward the external sensory world is. I perceive something spiritual in the world in the manner described. This spiritual aspect makes an impression on me, a very specific impression. This impression stands immediately before my silent soul. It is the same as the impression the color red otherwise makes—not as I have seen the color red, but just as when I see a red surface in my memory light up completely once again: I do not see the redness of the color, but rather the memory of its colorfulness, of the redness of the color. Yet it is something quite different. Thus I now experience in my soul the immediate presence of something spiritual. I must describe this immediate presence of something spiritual in such a way that I, so to speak, recall it. This spiritual element affects me like the color red or blue. I can compare the spiritual element in the color red or blue to this or that tone—though I do not mean any tone from the external sensory world at all. In other words: My language in relation to the spiritual world becomes a very special one. My language in relation to the spiritual world becomes such that, in order to characterize and express what is revealed to me in the spiritual world, I make use of sensory phenomena—which, however, belong just as little to spiritual beings and events as the word “thinking” ultimately belongs to thinking itself. One describes what one beholds in the spiritual world just as I have described it, for example, in my *Theosophy*; but it is a language that one uses. One makes use of sensory colors and sensory tones to describe what one has to describe in the spiritual world. It is a language; it is the language of the silent soul.

[ 32 ] And once the soul has progressed in this way, then—simply by strengthening the power that suppresses thought and brings about the soul’s silence—the entire tableau of self-perception can also be erased. I can, so to speak, erase my temporal body. Just as I otherwise erase only individual images and individual thoughts from my consciousness, I now erase everything I have experienced as an earthly human being since my birth. Once I have learned to establish consciousness through the silence of the soul, not only does the all-encompassing spiritual world emerge, as I have just described, but my own true essence also emerges—the being that I was before I descended into the physical world in a previous existence. Now, by suppressing what one has experienced as an earthly human being, through the empty consciousness filled with silence, one comes to know one’s pre-earthly existence—and thus the soul in that state in which it is eternal, in which it was before it entered physical earthly life through the physical human embryo. Now one attains, not through philosophical speculation but through actual insight, the knowledge of the eternity of the human soul.

[ 33 ] But in this way, one also gains an understanding of the entire connection between the human soul and the human body. For one now learns to look into the world in which one existed before descending into earthly existence. And now one learns to recognize how, in this world—which is a purely spiritual one—in which one existed before descending into earthly existence, one now comes to understand how this human being, the one standing before one, is a human being, just as the non-human realm on Earth is the world here. One learns to recognize how the human being directed his supersensible senses—if I may use this paradoxical expression— had directed his supersensible senses—if I may use this paradoxical expression—precisely toward the nature and essence of the human being; how, in his pre-earthly existence, he had penetrated the mysteries of the human being; how he had penetrated these mysteries of the human being in the spiritual world while he was in his eternal nature, not clothed in his physical body.

[ 34 ] And this also opens the way to the realization—the vivid, non-speculative realization—of how the human being passes through that which sustains its eternal essence when it crosses the threshold of death. One can form beliefs about that which lives on beyond death. It is by no means intended here to suggest that these beliefs are necessarily false or deficient; no objection is to be raised against their validity. However, we are already living in an age in which human beings are called upon to penetrate to that which is given to them through knowledge and insight, not through the content of faith. Therefore, [the path of knowledge], not merely the path of faith, should be sought.

[ 35 ] One comes to understand how the human soul itself is connected to the physical body, how it lives within it, how it lives in the circulation of the blood, in the process of breathing, and in every single function of the physical body. One therefore learns to recognize that in physical earthly life there is not only an ascending, sprouting, and budding life, but—having come to know the eternal character of the human soul—one looks within to see how this human soul lives within the physical body. One learns to recognize that, while the will and the power of growth are indeed bound to the sprouting and budding forces, one also learns to recognize that thinking in particular—and to some extent feeling as well—is bound to the forces of decay within the human organism.

[ 36 ] Yes—my esteemed audience—when you grasp a thought or an idea, what takes place is not a process of growth, but a process of decay, a kind of atomistic process of dying. We are constantly dying as we think, and this also applies to a certain aspect of feeling. As physical human beings on Earth, we carry within us that which grows, just as a plant grows. But we also carry within us that which is constantly withering away within our nervous system, just as a plant withers. Yet while the plant experiences only decay as it withers, we possess—alongside, I might say, the crumbling away of death—the capacity for thought and a part of feeling. This offers a different perspective on human life on Earth than is otherwise provided by mere external physiology. It reveals how human beings arrive at their thinking through the fact that, so to speak, a thought only takes root when matter is [no longer] alive with its power of growth—or even when the structure of matter is destroyed.

[ 37 ] Matter has so little control over our thinking that it must relinquish its own nature within our organism wherever thought seeks to reign. Thought reigns in our organism not because its entire structure consists of the growth of matter, but because matter withers away. It is only by making way for thought that matter yields. If we come to know—I would say—partial death in this way, if we learn to recognize how something within us is always dying precisely to make room for our spiritual nature, then—especially if we have developed our thinking and inner silence as I have described—we will be able to truly behold and recognize human eternity on the other side, beyond death. But this requires something else as well.

[ 38 ] And now—my esteemed audience—I must briefly mention something that will certainly seem extraordinarily paradoxical, but it is nonetheless a reality. A particular spiritual faculty must still be developed if one is to gain insight into the reality just described, which extends beyond death. For as one cultivates this empty consciousness—this inner silence of the soul—one also increasingly feels the need to transform a spiritual power that is otherwise present within us, one that plays an extraordinarily large role in human life, into something that extends further into the spiritual and the soul-level. This is the power of love. Love, the noblest of the soul’s powers, can also, in a certain sense, be the lowest. It plays its great role in life. So when a person passes through this stage—first feeling themselves within their temporal body, then looking toward that even higher body—if I may use that expression—which they bore in their pre-earthly existence—their soul forces have increased to such an extent that they also feel the need to enhance their capacity for love. That is why, in my book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, I have also outlined those exercises that enhance the capacity for love. If one increases this capacity for love in parallel with the other abilities mentioned, one gradually comes to truly experience, even during earthly life, that which one perceives as one’s own being in pre-earthly existence. And now one experiences oneself in a third aspect of human nature.

[ 39 ] In ordinary life, one usually experiences one’s physical body, as well as one’s etheric or formative body and one’s temporal body, in the way I have described. Now one experiences oneself in one’s true supersensible body, in which the life of the soul unfolds. One now recognizes this as the body for which space must always be made by matter—through the destruction of matter’s structure—so that the true soul-spiritual can expand within our organism. And now one also experiences—by first seeing how, as it were, matter falls away from the nervous system, becomes dead, and the soul-thought aspect asserts itself—one now learns to recognize how the soul, when the entire body falls away in death, passes over into the spiritual world.

[ 40 ] I had to explain to you, my esteemed audience, as I spoke to you about human immortality—this was the question I wanted to address today among the three mentioned—and in doing so, I had to speak in a different way than is often done in philosophical discourse. There, it is assumed that one can remain within the realm of ordinary thinking, that one can combine thoughts, and that through judgments and conclusions one can thereby gain insight into the immortality of the soul. Here, however, I had to demonstrate to you, from the perspective of anthroposophical endeavor, how one must first develop the human soul by suppressing intellectual arrogance in order to arrive at a vision of the eternal core of being, the soul-spiritual core of being within the human being.

[ 41 ] But this—my esteemed audience—is not a mystical activity in the soul, nor is it a dream; it takes place in the soul with the same inner clarity—indeed, I would say with the same inner sobriety—as breathing and thinking do. In fact, anyone who practices anthroposophy in the way I have indicated—as you can read further in my books—always feels the obligation to use their soul forces in the same way that a mathematician does: step by step, constantly giving an account of that aspect of soul life. The activity one engages in within anthroposophy is the same as that in mathematics, except that mathematics deals with lifeless spatial and numerical relationships and, as a result, applies what it internally grasps spiritually—in its structures, in its geometric, arithmetic, algebraic, and so on—only to the external, lifeless world; anthroposophy, on the other hand, creates within the living. Everything is alive. And therefore it can apply what it grasps—I would say in a mathematical way—not only to the living, but also to the spiritually existing inanimate.

[ 42 ] When one is surrounded by one’s own images in a room, one is alone with oneself as a human being. The person standing next to you, and the other people who may be in the room, inhabit a completely different world. If they are all dreaming, they may be dreaming of different things. In one’s dream world, a person is entirely alone, isolated. The moment they wake up, the moment they engage their will and their senses in the surrounding sensory world, they are no longer isolated; they experience a shared external world together with other people. But a person’s inner life—the true life of the soul—remains their own even within the sensory world of earthly existence. It is just like a dream. We actually share only this with regard to the external sensory world; inwardly, each person dreams their own world of the soul. At the very moment we look into pre-earthly existence—or, as I have described it, into the existence a person enters before passing through the gate of death—at that very moment we also share a spiritual-soul existence with other human beings. We live in a spiritual world, just like all souls. Therefore, anthroposophy opens up not merely an idea of immortality, but a genuine understanding of it: When you pass through the gate of death, you shed your physical body; you continue to live in your spiritual-soul life within the spiritual world. But even the earthly relationships you have formed with other people—the bonds you have formed with those you have loved, with whom you are related or whom you otherwise hold dear, friends, kindred spirits, and so on—the earthly aspect of these relationships falls away. But what lives on in your own soul—you experience this in communion with those with whom you have formed relationships; you also continue to experience it with those who may have gone before you or who have likewise entered the spiritual world.

[ 43 ] The true nature of the community relationship, once human beings have passed through the gate of death, presents itself in direct perception to the insight—the insight that has attained, if I may use this expression, the ability to develop inwardly with the transparency and clarity of mathematics, and on the other hand [seeks to reach] once again up to the highest [questions] of human existence. Anthroposophy sincerely strives for such insight.

[ 44 ] And since humanity today has indeed become accustomed, through the awe-inspiring natural sciences, to gaining a clear, transparent understanding of whatever it seeks to know, this humanity—provided it has not numbed itself—will not be able to content itself in the long run with mere beliefs—which, incidentally, have themselves emerged from ancient insights—; just as humanity has gained an understanding of nature over the past three, four, or five centuries, it will likewise have to gain an understanding of the spirit. The human soul would indeed have to numb itself to the highest questions of its existence if it did not strive for such an understanding of the spirit. Call it anthroposophy or whatever you will, but such an understanding of the spirit is a need for most people today, even if this need still lies deep in the subconscious. Thus, much of the good and ill of present-day humanity stems from this need. If one examines what lies unconsciously in the mere feelings of today’s humanity—which feels unsatisfied, has become nervous, harbors all manner of disharmony and chaos in the soul, and carries this out into the world as well—one comes to the conclusion that, although these people cannot bring [this] to the level of comprehension or understanding, it is nonetheless a deep need to gain knowledge of the spirit, just as humanity has gained knowledge of nature, which has led to external technology. This knowledge will lead people to a grasp of external experience, but also to a deeper grasp—a truly inner, spiritual grasp—of morality. That, too—my esteemed audience—is what anthroposophy is meant to bring about.

[ 45 ] And the Goetheanum was to be its outer shell. Goethe spoke these beautiful words about art—after he had, in fact, first come to know art in Italy—in his own way, beautiful words that he wrote to his friends in Weimar: “I have a hunch that the Greeks proceeded according to the very same laws by which nature proceeds and which I am on the trail of.” Goethe thus sought in art a sensory expression, a sensory revelation of that which dawns upon spiritual insight, when Goethe spoke from the depths of his soul the words: “Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that without it”—namely, without art—“would never be revealed.” Goethe regarded precisely that aspect of human cognition pertaining to the spiritual world—not to the sensory world—as that which so permeates human beings that they then, as sculptors, painters, musicians, and so on, seek to master form anew from within the spirit. Thus, one might say, for Goethe, knowledge was one expression of human striving, while artistic creation and artistic enjoyment were the other. Only in the course of humanity’s development toward abstract thought and theory—into which we have become so deeply immersed today—has art become alien to knowledge. Goethe, in turn, strove to bring knowledge to art and art to knowledge, because he knew that nature, particularly in creating the human form, creates as an artist in her own right.

[ 46 ] What good does it do—my esteemed audience—to say, no matter how sound the logic behind it may be: “One must not conjure up artistic images in one’s mind if one wishes to perceive?” If nature itself creates like an artist, then one simply fails to understand nature if one seeks to grasp it purely through logic; and one is least able to understand human beings if one is not capable of gradually transitioning from strictly logical thinking to an artistic, imaginative apprehension of that which lives in the human form, in colors, and in all that is human. A direct path leads from the cognitive to the artistic.

[ 47 ] Well, one wanted to be “Goethian” in this sense at the very moment when some friends of that worldview—which I have once again sketched out for you today in a few broad strokes—when some friends came together in a spirit of self-sacrifice to create a site in Dornach near Basel. I was commissioned to build this site.

[ 48 ] Many people have gotten into the habit of saying: “Those who call themselves anthroposophists follow my every word; they believe only in my authority.” Well—my dear friends here today—I believe no one can say that they see their will fulfilled any less by their followers than I do. I say this quite openly, even though it sounds paradoxical: Most of the time, what I want does not happen.

[ 49 ] So I was commissioned, in a certain sense, to build this very site. If such a site had been to be built for any other worldview, one would have turned to this or that architect; the architect would have built a Gothic, Renaissance, or classical structure—in this or that style—to foster that worldview or spiritual movement. That could not happen with anthroposophy. For anthroposophy aims—as you will have recognized from my description today—to be something that fits into the spiritual development of humanity as a new impulse. Anthroposophy indeed aims to bring about a transformation of knowledge: that human beings can attain this second awakening of which I have spoken becomes evident precisely when the attempt is truly made in the manner described. There, the human being awakens into the supersensible world. There, he can then assess the sensory world here in the same way that, from within the sensory world, he can assess the world of dreams. But that—my dear friends—is not abstract knowledge; it is not a collection of theories; it is not a contrived worldview; it is something that must be experienced. It is not something that merely fills the head; it is something that fills the whole human being and seeks—you will understand what I mean by this—its human center in the heart. But then it cannot be limited to a one-sided activity; it must flow into everything that springs from human nature. Then a person cannot espouse a worldview within a building that was constructed on the basis of an entirely different worldview. Within a Greek or ancient—that is, essentially a Renaissance or Gothic—building, one can express that which has emerged from the Greek or Gothic worldview. Anthroposophy needs its own outer form through its very essence. For it is not merely a worldview; it is not merely a theory; it is life and becomes life within the human being, just as blood does within an organism. And just as blood artistically builds up the human body, so too does the person who experiences anthroposophy build upon that which they establish for it as a dwelling place. I have often used a simple, trivial comparison, but one that is meant to convey a deeper meaning. I have said: Look at the nut shell. One cannot imagine that forces other than those acting internally [within the nut kernel itself, which we eat instead of the nut shell] are at work in the nut shell. Arising from the same forces, in a form similar to that in which the nut itself is created, [the nut shell] is entirely adapted to the nut; in the same way, the architectural envelope must be that which is not theory, but life, embodying all the life forces of the human being.

[ 50 ] And so the Goetheanum had to be designed in such a way that, for example, when one stood on the podium and spoke, the words one chose to express what supersensible vision revealed those very words—in the form of thought—had to express what the forms of the columns and the paintings on the domes conveyed to the human eye; the whole had to harmonize right down to the very last sensory forms.

[ 51 ] And again, when the art of eurythmy was cultivated in Dornach—this art in which the human being finds a visible language through complex gestures drawn entirely from their own nature, so that a poem can be rendered through individual movements just as it can through recitation and declamation — there, when the stage at the Goetheanum in Dornach was filled with moving people who, through their movements, were performing a poem or a piece of music—not by dancing, but by singing through movement—what was singing on the stage through movement was a continuation of the very forms that surrounded the audience in the building. When the audience turned their gaze to the forms of the columns, to the interlocking forms of the domes, or looked up at the dome paintings, they experienced a sensation similar to that which they felt when looking at the stage where eurythmy was taking place.

[ 52 ] Just as the nut can exist within its shell only through the laws it has formed within itself, so too could anthroposophy—once given the opportunity to have a home of its own—create this shell artistically only from the spiritual realm, from which it itself experienced its worldview, and from which the entire worldview that moves people was born. The Goetheanum was intended to be for the eye what anthroposophy is through the word for the soul’s immediate perception.

[ 53 ] That is why, because anthroposophy still seems strange to people today and because those unfamiliar with it interpret it in all sorts of ways—as I described at the beginning— that is why even what was merely an outer shell—in a new architectural style—seemed strange to people, just as a nutshell would seem strange to someone who knows nothing about the nut but believes that something is present there in a random form and shape. Just as the world itself is shaped, so too was an attempt made to recreate it from a world of spiritual impulses, drawing upon the anthroposophical worldview—including artistically—to create in Dornach.

[ 54 ] The Goetheanum sought to express this in its architectural form, entirely in Goethe’s style: Art is a revelation of those secret laws of the universe that cannot be revealed without art—just as the Goetheanum itself speaks through sensory forms, where thought itself flows into sensory forms. There was no symbol, there was no allegory; there was artistic feeling wherever thought, as mere thought, was no longer sufficient—where thought only becomes complete by flowing over into artistic form. But since thought is born of the spirit, that into which it flows is also born of the spirit. Art is entirely for contemplation, but it is nevertheless—like everything in the world—born of the spirit. Therefore—my esteemed audience—even for those who truly understand anthroposophy in the depths of their being, something has been lost at the Goetheanum that is, in a certain sense, irreplaceable—for the Goetheanum was not meant for thinking, for explaining, or for describing, but for contemplation; for within it, that which springs from the same source—namely, anthroposophy—was to become visible. But what anthroposophy can offer only in words—words that are literally crying out to take on a sensory form—what was meant to be made visible—the fire has, so to speak, taken precisely that away. In short, the Goetheanum was meant to embody the way Goethe thought about knowledge. The Goetheanum was meant to make visible what anthroposophy is meant to express.

[ 55 ] Just as, from an anthroposophical perspective, the human soul is understood to be immortal within the mortal body, so I may say without sentimentality: Just as the body can be cast off—even though all the pains and sufferings we know are still attached to it—we only think of the immortality of the soul when the body is cast off. And so I may well conclude today with words that are meant only to illustrate what I have meant not theoretically, but from a human, intuitive, and emotional perspective in answering the question today: “What is the purpose of anthroposophy, and what was the Goetheanum’s purpose?” I would like to say—when the question arises, “What was the Goetheanum’s purpose?”—it must be said: The Goetheanum sought and was compelled to express the spirit in external matter, just as the human body is formed in external matter. That which is expressed in external matter can be destroyed by the elements; but that which was meant to live in the Goetheanum is itself of a spiritual nature. Anthroposophy does not seek to be built—and cannot be built—from external matter; it can only be shaped from that which reveals itself from the spiritual, supersensible world. But this cannot be destroyed by any element; it is of a permanence that may be characterized by the following statement: Indeed, anyone who can observe the human soul impartially today knows that this human soul can no longer find peace in what can come to it today through knowledge of the [sensible] world. It yearns—even if still quite unconsciously today—for supersensible knowledge. And because humanity will nevertheless not be able to do without knowledge of the supersensible in the long run, anthroposophy may hope that, despite having now lost its home, that by shaping the spiritual word precisely out of the present-day needs of the souls, it will come to life all the more when humanity becomes aware that it needs anthroposophy to attain true human dignity and to perceive the true human destiny—as the knowledge of the true spiritual, eternal essence of the human soul.