The Rudolf Steiner Archive

7. Understanding the Spiritual Nature of Human Beings

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! First, I must ask your forgiveness for not delivering this lecture in your native language. However, since I do not speak that language, I must ask your permission to present the following arguments in the language I am accustomed to using.

[ 2 ] Anyone who wishes to speak today about the spiritual nature of the human being and human knowledge will, of course, encounter a certain degree of interest among the educated people of our time. Across vast swaths of modern civilized life, a fate has indeed befallen us that can often leave people today feeling confused and adrift in the face of what the external world throws at them. And so today, many are seeking within the human soul itself precisely what was formerly sought almost exclusively in the external world; they are seeking there the forces to sustain themselves, seeking that security which the human inner being ultimately needs for a vigorous life. But if, on the other hand, one wishes to speak—in the spirit of the present age—about the knowledge of the supersensible human being, as I intend to do today, one immediately encounters resistance from precisely that world and worldview which must actually be the most valuable to us today; one encounters resistance from the scientific world, which must assert—based on the most diverse foundations of its own mode of knowledge—that one cannot ascend into the supersensible, spiritual worlds using the very methods one has become accustomed to applying in scientific life.

[ 3 ] Nevertheless, modern civilization has approached humanity in such a way that people have become accustomed to viewing everything in the light provided, in one way or another, by scientific knowledge. And so it is that, in the context of today’s education, people no longer seek fulfillment for their inner lives in the sense of old, traditional creeds, but rather feel the need to strive for a kind of understanding—even with regard to the spiritual world—that can, after all, stand up to the scientific demands of the present. And it is precisely this understanding of the spiritual nature of the human being that the anthroposophical worldview strives for—a worldview in the spirit of which I would like to speak to you today and next Friday: today more about the understanding of the spiritual nature of the human being, and next Friday about the understanding of the spiritual nature of the world.

[ 4 ] When we speak of the spiritual nature of human beings as the deepest mystery of existence, what do we actually mean by that, my esteemed audience? In fact, one does not mean that there can be any doubt about the spirit and its activity within the human being; for anyone who reflects even a little on themselves will see, precisely in what is spiritual within them, that which gives human beings their true dignity—that which elevates them above the other beings of the world. And one can say that not even the convinced materialist will actually doubt the value and the reality of spiritual life within human beings. He will merely raise objections to the independence, to the distinct essence of this spiritual life within human nature. He will say: What you, as a human being, recognize as your spiritual essence arises from the physical, just as the flame arises from the candle; it arises from this physical realm; it ceases to exist with this physical realm.

[ 5 ] Is it then the case—as one might suppose, given that human beings must regard the spiritual as their true, distinctive dignity—that it is indeed grounded in ordinary life that human beings can be driven into deep doubt, if not about the existence and permanence of the spiritual, then at least about the fate of their spiritual being? Yes, they can. They can through everyday life. And, fundamentally speaking, there are no other doubts in the science of the spiritual than those that exist unconsciously in human beings’ everyday lives—doubts that mislead people and make them feel uncertain when they seek enlightenment about the nature of their own spirit.

[ 6 ] And these doubts come from a wide variety of sources. They are particularly strong among those who are currently pursuing a scientific education. Of the various doubts that arise in people, I would like to mention the two most significant ones—those that people do not, admittedly, recognize in their everyday lives. Yet, my dear listeners, there is much that lies unconsciously or subconsciously in the depths of the human soul, which surfaces into consciousness—not as clear concepts, nor even as clear doubts, but as uncertainties, as something that arises from the very depths and constitutes a person’s inner happiness or inner instability. The one thing that—I emphasize this once more—does not evoke doubts about the fate of the spiritual with complete clarity, but is all the more powerful emotionally, actually confronts us as human beings in every course of fate.

[ 7 ] With each passing day, we sink into the realm of sleep, through which the mental life that is so active during the day gradually fades and finally dies out completely, until it rises again upon waking and fills our consciousness. This fading away, this daily disappearance of spiritual life—that is what repeatedly makes a person feel uncertain when they ask themselves: Does the spirit have an independent existence? Does this spirit not—like the flame from a candle when it is lit—rise up within human physical life, just as it develops from childhood, moving ever more and more from the dim into the light? Does this spirit not fade away again; does this soul life not fade away when the body passes through death, just as the flame goes out when the fuel is exhausted?

[ 8 ] Everything one seeks to dispel and resolve bitter doubts and the profound mysteries of life actually stems from this [nighttime experience]. But strictly speaking—and this is the other side of the matter that I must emphasize—strictly speaking, it is no different in waking daily life. When we see the spirit fade away in sleep, we see it, so to speak, plunged into the darkness of our own body in terms of its activity during the day.

[ 9 ] What, after all, is the extent of what we consciously cherish as our thoughts? Certainly, we have them. But if we ask ourselves simply how our soul acts in the simple movement of the hand—when this primitive expression of will comes about—we can only say to ourselves: Yes, we grasp the thought; the hand is to be raised. But the thought vanishes into the darkness of our own organism. In our everyday consciousness, we do not know what our soul is accomplishing within the organism in order—I would say—to send its power through muscles and tendons in a flash, so as to truly bring about the act of will. Finally, we see the hand begin to move—which is, again, a mental image—as we move from one mental image to the next, and we perceive an external action as the result. But how the soul-spiritual plunges down into our own body—that actually remains shrouded in darkness for us.

[ 10 ] Anthroposophy, as a modern spiritual science, seeks to overcome this darkness and this extinction—as I have just described them—just as these doubts have always been overcome throughout the history of human spiritual development. What anthroposophy strives for—my esteemed audience—I would like to call exact clairvoyance, and by using this term I wish to distinguish the insights of anthroposophy from all those nebulous, mystical views to which people so often turn again in our age of uncertainty. It is precisely this exact clairvoyance that seeks to take full account of the demands of modern scientific rigor.

[ 11 ] What, then, are these requirements of modern scientific rigor? Well, they are that, through inner clarity in observation and experimentation, one can grasp what presents itself to the senses; and the genuine—as he calls himself—exact modern scientist, in pursuing what his senses observe and what he seeks to achieve through experimentation, wishes to have within that process the same clarity and the same inner necessity that he finds in mathematics. That is why people are so eager to apply mathematical thinking to the natural sciences. They would actually like to apply this mathematical thinking everywhere, because it brings about exactness—that is, transparency and inner necessity. Now, anyone who speaks of exact science in this sense today seeks to introduce this exactness into the way he observes external things and processes—or, for that matter, if he wishes to be a psychologist, into the way he observes his own mental processes.

[ 12 ] Anthroposophy, as understood here, also applies this precision. But it does not apply this precision primarily to the external world, nor to the observation of sensory objects or to external sensory experimentation; rather, it applies this precision to something that is initially not even present in human consciousness—it applies this precision to the development of soul forces that are initially hidden within the human being but can be brought to the fore within it. Anthroposophical spiritual science has certainly learned from natural science how, through external sensory observation and external experimentation, and through the methods that have led natural science to such triumphs—which are also fully acknowledged by spiritual science—that through all of this one cannot penetrate into a spiritual or supersensible world; that the human soul’s powers, as they exist in everyday life and also in ordinary science, are initially unsuited to penetrating the supersensible. The human soul must first be made suitable for this, and powers hidden deep within it must be brought to the surface. One could proceed in an inner, mystical, and obscure manner. Anthroposophical spiritual science specifically rejects this. Instead, it seeks to bring forth hidden soul powers from within human nature. And by adhering to this process of bringing them forth, it follows a method that is just as transparent and just as intrinsically necessary as the research of external science in sensory observation and experimentation.

[ 13 ] Just as the exact sciences do with the finished, external natural world—by introducing clarity and precision into it—so does anthroposophy with the development of the human soul’s powers. After all, nothing is done in the human soul that is not carried out with the same inner clarity, comprehensibility, and necessity as the rigorous mathematician applies to his investigations. Thus, in its method, this exact clairvoyance seeks to develop the human soul in such a way that, so to speak, one’s own development first becomes a mathematical problem. My intention here was first to characterize how the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here does not believe that one can investigate the spirit in the same way one conducts external research in the natural sciences, but rather that it brings the scientific attitude—in its truest form, as it exists in the natural sciences—into spiritual research as well. What is precise about anthroposophy, then, is the work on one’s own being—on those forces of the soul that subsequently lead to insight into the supersensible world.

[ 14 ] From this you can already see, my esteemed audience, that the point is that the—let us now call him a spiritual researcher—who wishes to penetrate to the spiritual essence of the human being, must, so to speak, turn back to himself in order to first examine his soul inwardly; I would say, to scrutinize it. It is a process of both examination and working through.

[ 15 ] The easiest way for us to understand what is now to become, in this sense, a modern spiritual method of observation is for me to remind you, my esteemed audience, of how such spiritual insights were sought in earlier periods of humanity’s spiritual development. They were pursued, I would say, in a somewhat more material way. And since what I am about to describe to you as today’s method is more spiritual and psychological, we will be able to grasp this spiritual and psychological aspect more easily if we start, so to speak, from the coarser, more material aspects of older methods.

[ 16 ] To do this, however, we must first turn our attention to examining, even if only briefly, how human beings related to their environment in earlier periods of human development. It is all too easy to believe that the human race has always been in the same state of mind as it is today, ever since recorded history began. But that is not correct. Anyone with an inner insight into the human soul will find that, even if they go back only a few centuries, people thought, felt, and willed quite differently—indeed, that their entire mood of the soul, their entire state of mind, was different from what it is today. And if we go back millennia in human development, the picture becomes fundamentally different. External historical monuments can shed little light on this, for, first of all, even when we look at the oldest times—for example, Egyptian monuments—they do not extend exceptionally far back. Second, however, it depends on how modern people interpret these monuments. And based on that, they then find one thing or another, which is, after all, merely a reflection of their own state of mind, which they project onto the souls of humanity’s ancestors.

[ 17 ] The very spiritual science about which I intend to speak to you today and next Friday views the inner life of an ancient humanity in a different way than conventional history does. It looks at what has been preserved in significant—let us say—poetic or other monuments, and can form a conception of how what is preserved in such monuments essentially emanates from a completely different spiritual disposition than that of modern humanity, and through this it gradually comes to recognize that primeval humanity already possessed a kind of clairvoyance—a clairvoyance that was, admittedly, dreamlike, a clairvoyance that, in light of today’s demands for clarity of consciousness, must appear to us as something hazy, something dreamlike. But this dreamlike clairvoyance of ancient times nevertheless looked more deeply into the inner structure of the world, into the spirituality of the world, than today’s sensory consciousness is capable of. The older human being’s attitude toward the world was, in essence, quite different.

[ 18 ] It is so easy to say that this elderly person saw all sorts of things in the world around him—that he imagined spiritual beings in every plant, in trees and shrubs, in water and waves, in clouds and winds. Yes, his consciousness was indeed dreamlike. But what he perceived as spiritual and soul-like beings in water, in the spring, in the cloud, in the rain, and in the wind, he did not simply project these from his own imagination into things; rather, his state of mind was such that everything he described as spiritual beings in the world—he saw all of that so naturally, with such elemental force, just as we today see the color red or yellow in our surroundings, just as we hear sound in our surroundings, just as we perceive warmth. We perceive only sensory experience and its contents; people of earlier times experienced, through that same elemental world, a spiritual dimension in the entire natural environment; yet they did not feel such a “self,” not such a distinct, self-centered “self,” as modern people do.

[ 19 ] This sense of a solid “I” has only developed over time in the course of human evolution, and with it, the experience of human freedom. In order for this experience of freedom—this experience of the “I”—to come about, the older, dreamlike, clairvoyant mode has faded away. Humanity has been confined to the external sensory world. Within it, humanity has earned its freedom. But today we have once again reached a point where, in our position as humanity within the sensory world, we must yearn to reconnect with the spiritual world—a point where we are compelled to regain a form of clairvoyance. For the reasons already mentioned, however, this cannot be an old, dreamlike form of clairvoyance; it can only be an exact form of clairvoyance—one that is shaped according to modern scientific requirements. People of the past possessed a dreamlike form of clairvoyance; but just as we today cannot be satisfied with external science, neither were they satisfied with their clairvoyance, even though they found spiritual beings everywhere—in plants, in shrubs, in trees, in clouds, in the wind— he was not satisfied with it, and he turned his gaze toward those figures who, in those earlier times, represented what scholars and priests represent today. He turned his gaze back to those figures of earlier times whom one might call “initiates,” for they were perceived as such, and who, in their own way—through the development of special soul powers, though in a more material sense than we are to do today—arrived at a kind of spiritual understanding of the human being.

[ 20 ] Yes, this approach was more materialistic than ours today can be. I would like to begin by describing this ancient form of spiritual insight. I would like to describe to you what has actually—albeit more or less distorted—reached us through external literature from the ancient Orient, what was practiced in the earliest times of the Orient by individual personalities in order to attain knowledge of a higher, spiritual world and to be able to communicate it to the broad masses of humanity, who lived in the same state of mind as I have characterized.

[ 21 ] I know—my esteemed audience—that what I am about to describe as the so-called yoga method of that most ancient form of Eastern spiritual development has fallen into decadence, has fallen into decline, and that even in many descriptions of that yoga method—because they actually describe periods of decline in this kind of spiritual research—something very negative is conveyed.

[ 22 ] But I would like to describe that authentic, ancient yoga method to you a little, so that we can then gain some perspective on what modern people can [then] strive for in terms of precise clairvoyance. This yoga method aimed at a particular way of breathing. How does breathing actually work in the average person? In such a way that they don’t really know much about it. They inhale; they exhale. Only when our breathing becomes irregular due to illness do we really become aware of it. We do not pay attention to it in everyday life. It fills our physical being, but it does so in such a way that its activity remains, in essence, entirely unconscious. Yet this breath—and we can now prove this physiologically as well, though I can only hint at it in this lecture—plays a significant role in our entire human life.

[ 23 ] We inhale. The breath does not merely travel into the internal cavities of our body only to be exhaled again in a transformed state; rather, this breath, for example, passes through our spinal canal, pours into our brain, and within the structure of our head, within our brain, while we are awake, we do not merely have nervous activity; rather, this nervous activity is continuously vibrated through, radiated through, and rippled through by the breaths, by the rhythm of the breathing process. And we can say that the respiratory process plays the greatest conceivable role even in our thinking and our imagination.

[ 24 ] But just as we do not pay attention to this breathing process in the rest of the organism, we are equally unaware of it in our mental organization. The ancient yogi—he altered his breathing; that is, he shifted his breathing into a rhythm different from the usual one. One does not notice the usual rhythm. By inhaling differently—slower or faster, holding his breath longer or shorter than one does in ordinary life, and exhaling longer or shorter—he brought himself into a different rhythm. This made him aware of the breathing process. It enabled him to follow the course of the breath—from inhalation through the lungs, how it spread throughout the entire organism, and how it flowed through the spinal canal into the brain. In this way, the human being permeated the organism with his consciousness. He followed the flow of breath everywhere. Through this, he came to know his own organism. And this process of getting to know one’s own organism—this, my esteemed audience—is precisely where all experience of the merely material comes to an end. Anyone who, in those ancient times of human spiritual development, had inwardly and consciously permeated his own humanity with an altered breathing rhythm would have considered himself a fool if he had spoken of nothing but a material force circulating through his body. No, to those ancient yogis, the flow of breath appeared, so to speak, as an inner probing of the organism. And what this probing revealed to them was the inner spiritual and soul aspect of the human being. The method was applied to the material realm. What was discovered was the inner spiritual and soul aspect. They discovered how one feels, how one thinks. They proceeded in a material way, and they discovered something soulful. They examined themselves internally, as it were, probing their inner selves. And what the ancient yogi had sought, on the one hand, was precisely the sense of self—which he did not yet possess through his natural insight, and which he sought to acquire in this way.

[ 25 ] One simply must not view such things with the dry, philistine attitude that is so often adopted today; one must immerse oneself, with all one’s full human feeling, in what one experiences when one explores one’s inner humanity.

[ 26 ] Then—my esteemed audience—one once again senses what is described, for example, in the wonderful Bhagavad Gita as the true human self; what is depicted there as the true human self, which flows through the spiritual-soul world as the eternal within the human being. One senses that what is described there as the “I” in this marvelous work of world literature is the result of such a process, such a procedure, as I have just described as yogic breathing.

[ 27 ] Now—my esteemed audience— as modern people, we cannot proceed in this way, for after all, it is true that those who followed this path—by altering their breathing, or by seeking to support all of this through specific postures, through the human body’s positions in relation to the physical body—because this made the physical body particularly intense, because it made the human being hypersensitive in general—as a result, they were compelled to withdraw from life. This, however, was entirely in keeping with humanity’s ancient ways of gaining insight. Those who, in this way, made themselves hypersensitive in their striving toward the spiritual world sought solitude, for it was not fitting for them to be constantly in relation with or in contact with the harsh rest of the world. On the other hand, however, those who wished to know something about the destiny of human souls sought out such solitary figures. People placed their trust in these hermits. They knew, as it were, that from them they could obtain counsel regarding the eternal in contrast to the temporal destiny of the human soul.

[ 28 ] We cannot proceed in the same way today, for humanity has reached a stage in its development where it can no longer place its trust in those who, in order to explore the truth and the spiritual realm, withdraw from life; rather, it can place its trust solely in those who fully participate in life, who, like every other human being, immerse themselves in the practical realities of life and in the needs and demands of the day. Today we need methods that do not make the human body hypersensitive, but which strengthen the human soul. These methods can indeed be attained, and they can lead to true, precise clairvoyance.

[ 29 ] First and foremost, one must devote oneself to the intimate processes of the human soul life: meditation, concentration of the imagination. In a similar way, I have described what a person must devote themselves to in my books—for example, in *How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?* or in my *Secret Science*. I have pointed out what modern people today must do to enter the spiritual world in a similar way—but now in accordance with their own needs—as was possible for the ancient yogi.

[ 30 ] Shall I now briefly explain to you what meditation means? Meditation is, in fact, a specific training of the thought life that does not exist in ordinary life. And through this training of the thought life, one first develops those spiritual powers that lead into the spiritual world, into the supersensible. But what is this meditation?

[ 31 ] Well, ladies and gentlemen, you will find more detailed descriptions in the books mentioned above regarding what this meditation is and what these modern methods of clairvoyance entail. But you will also find more detailed descriptions there of how modern people must go about it—what modern people must do—in order to attain such precise clairvoyance. Here, however, I can only outline the basic principles.

[ 32 ] And if I were to describe to you in a single word what the soul must do there, I would put it this way: When we otherwise develop our imaginative life, we engage with our imaginings with a certain indifference; in the rest of our lives, we often engage with great warmth or deep antipathy. Our entire inner being can be stirred up by fiery passion or fierce aversion when we are immersed in ordinary life. But our ideas—they are, I would say, a cold stream in our everyday life; they accompany this everyday life.

[ 33 ] Anyone who wishes to proceed to meditation, however, must do something other than rely on that detachment of the imagination with which one otherwise copes in ordinary daily life. One must be able to summon thoughts into one’s soul—thoughts that one might receive as advice from someone who is already a spiritual researcher, or thoughts that one might otherwise discover in the world—but these thoughts must work within the soul in such a way that they fill the soul’s life with complete tranquility. One attempts to divert the soul’s life from everything else in the world. One seeks to direct one’s attention to such images and to rest in them; one seeks to surrender oneself entirely to imagination, to individual images. But one thing is necessary in this surrender to the images: that at the very moment when we thus surrender ourselves, when we turn away from the rest of the world and live entirely within an image or a complex of images in inner peace of mind, we are able to love these images.

[ 34 ] Yes, my esteemed audience, the unfolding of inner love, the unfolding of inner warmth of the soul as we rest in our mental images—images that we ourselves have first brought into our inner life—is what transforms ordinary imagination into meditation. If we can love our own imagination with the very same inner love with which we otherwise love objects or human beings—if we can love it universally, if we can lose ourselves in it completely with love, if we can remain in it with love— then this life of imagination gains that inner power which, while quite different from yogic breathing, works in the same way, though it yields slightly different results than yogic breathing. While yogic breathing attempts to direct the breathing process into the head in order thereby to internally probe and illuminate the whole human being and to recognize his spiritual and soul nature, we gradually attain a genuine inner power of thought with which—though not in the same way as with the altered breath— but in a certain way, we can probe our inner selves and examine them from within.

[ 35 ] And so, in modern humans, exact clairvoyance can be brought about through a strengthening and invigoration of the soul life, whereas in earlier periods of human development it was sought in a more physical way as dream-like clairvoyance.

[ 36 ] But then, when we truly come to examine ourselves inwardly in this way—through intensified, invigorated thinking—we become aware of something different from what we experience in ordinary life; then, my esteemed audience, then we have developed within ourselves a power of insight that leads us, at first, beyond ordinary memory. What do we have in this life of memory? We look back from the present moment of our earthly existence to some time after our birth. Thoughts of past experiences rise up from memory. There is a continuous stream, but it remains in the subconscious; rising freely, as one might say, or even evoked by ourselves, these memories surface. These memories are abstract thoughts of experiences that we may have lived through with all the warmth of life. What remains with us are these abstract thoughts. But then, when through meditation or concentration, through loving thought and the repeated practice of loving thought—when this is applied sufficiently to the life of the soul (for some people it takes a shorter time, for others many years, but everyone can, depending on the inner nature of their destiny, attain such precise clairvoyance)— then, when we use it to illuminate our inner being, our soul life up to the present, from birth onward, lies before our spiritual gaze as a unified whole, like a panorama of time. But not in the same way as memories, rather in the way that what might be called an ethereal human existence creatively works within us.

[ 37 ] We look not only at the external experiences we have had that have remained as abstract thoughts, but also at the course of our lives so far—how, from our spiritual and soul life, we ourselves have worked on our organs since childhood. We examine how, in early childhood, we shaped our still-undeveloped brain in a plastic manner. We examine how we have taken external substances into our organism, how they have worked within us through growth forces, and how we continue to work on ourselves daily through the forces of nutrition. We regard the external organism as that upon which we ourselves are working. After all, we do not now have a spatial organism, a spatial body, before us, [but] we have a body of time before us.

[ 38 ] Suddenly, there stands before us what constitutes our entire life course—that which, however, merely underlies our outward appearances and works within our external organism: a body of time—which anthroposophy calls the etheric body—a body of time that cannot be recorded or depicted, any more than a flash of lightning can be recorded or depicted, but can only be captured for a single moment.

[ 39 ] This is the first thing one discovers through this precise clairvoyance: a temporal body that we carry within us, which is a unity just like our spatial body, just as—in our physical, spatial body—the arms or hands are conceived as a unity with the head, just as one cannot be conceived without the other, and just as one interacts with the other— so we look upon our time body when we have reached the age of 50; just as we once, at the age of 30, formed our physical body out of our etheric-soul body, so we look back to our 28th year, so we look back to our 18th year, looking back at that which is interconnected in the same way as the individual members of our physical body in space. We look upon an ethereal substance that underlies us. This ethereal substance remains within us throughout our entire earthly life, from birth to death. While we remove the substances that make up our body from our physical body after a relatively short time and replace them with others, that which we perceive as the “body of time”—from our birth or conception until death—is a unity, a force that is constantly active within us as a unified whole. Like a vast panorama of time, it now stands before our soul life as that which we have made our own through meditation, concentration, and a life of loving thought.

[ 40 ] But we can go further. Anyone who persists week after week, month after month—or, for most people, year after year—in such meditative, that is, loving thoughts, even if only for a very short time each day, will eventually come to see how their inner life of thought grows stronger. And because it intensifies, it works within him as forces of growth, as realities, not merely as abstract thoughts. In his thoughts, he grasps those forces that have brought about his growth, that provide his nourishment, and that act within him as nourishing forces. He transports himself, so to speak, from a passive, abstract, lifeless thought life into the world of living thoughts. And the first thing he learns to recognize in this world of living thoughts is his own etheric body, which has been building him up since his birth or conception, and which is still at work within him today.

[ 41 ] Oh, it is as if, my esteemed audience, one day something were to happen within us through this loving visualization, through this loving thought, through the attainment of this precise clairvoyance—as if something were to arise within us that gives us the feeling, as if, after having endured a dark night, were to see the morning sun rise and watch as light spreads around us; in that moment, we experience within ourselves something like an inner, spiritual sunrise. Our inner being, whereas it was previously dark—whereas we had to tell ourselves that we do not penetrate down to where our soul works on our physical body, nor do we even penetrate down into those depths where the soul, as I said earlier, flashes through the muscle like lightning to move the arm or lift it through thought— Now, through loving imagination, we look into our organism. What we otherwise have only as thoughts when we look within ourselves—we now have as living forces; this is who we are, just as we have been in every hour of our earthly existence since our birth.

[ 42 ] But as we continue our meditations, we come to realize—as I have described again in my book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?* or in my *Secret Science* or in other books—we finally come to feel that other exercises are necessary, for we learn to recognize that even if we always work on our soul life with the kind of inner awareness we otherwise experience only in mathematical work—even if we work with such inner awareness, with absolute inner clarity and comprehensibility— we come to see that it is now becoming more difficult to banish from our consciousness those thoughts that are now living forces—indeed, that are ultimately what we recognize as ourselves—these living thoughts. It is as if they were taking root, for after all, we ourselves are ultimately what these living thoughts are. But just as we first learned to live lovingly within these ideas, so must we now turn our attention to something else with all our inner effort. To do this, we must once again be able to remove these ideas from our consciousness of our own free will.

[ 43 ] This becomes more difficult for us—especially when we have lovingly invited them in beforehand—than it is in ordinary life. That is why, as a rule, someone who has been meditating for a while and is then advised by a spiritual researcher to move on to clearing away mental images will say: “Oh, the thoughts rush in like swarms of bees; I can’t get rid of them.” But one must exert the effort, so to speak, to bring about an artificial forgetting within, a suppression of thoughts. And one can actually achieve this by making an effort, by practicing inner self-discipline to suppress the thoughts, and finally—after first strengthening and intensifying the thoughts—achieve a state of empty consciousness. One can then rest in this empty consciousness. One is now, in fact, in a state that is merely waking. One is awake, but there is no content to that waking state.

[ 44 ] You will see, my esteemed audience, that this is difficult from the fact that most people fall asleep immediately when their everyday consciousness is devoid of content. But this is precisely what must now be developed in order to gain knowledge of the higher worlds: to have a completely empty consciousness while remaining awake. If one truly succeeds in this, then—just as the effects of light and color stream into the eye, and the sounds of the physical world stream into the ear—the spiritual worlds stream into the empty consciousness, provided this has been prepared. And for the first time, one becomes aware not only of what I described earlier—seeing one’s own life course as an etheric-soul world—but one also becomes aware of a spiritual world around oneself. I will speak in more detail about this next Friday, but for now I want to speak about the spiritual nature of the human being and show that one can go further.

[ 45 ] Just as one can come to dispel ideas that one has hitherto sought to attain with all one’s might, so too, by intensifying the power to dispel these ideas, one can finally come to dispel the entire overview of one’s own life course. Everything one sees there—what works internally within one’s own organism, what brings about growth and nourishment, what transforms us from small children into fully grown adults—everything that is at work within, everything that stands before us like a spiritual panorama—one can eliminate it; just as one learns to abstract from one’s own ideas, one gradually learns to look beyond one’s own life course. Just as it is otherwise difficult to attain an empty consciousness, one can now attain an empty consciousness by having set aside one’s own consciousness in life. Then one stands there with an empty consciousness, fully awake. One stands beyond one’s own life.

[ 46 ] Now—my esteemed audience—a spiritual life is flowing into this soul, which has banished the memory of its own life journey between birth and death from its consciousness; now a spiritual life is flowing in, which we come to recognize by perceiving it more and more as our pre-earthly existence. And now we look into a spiritual world that has nothing in common with the sensory existence that otherwise surrounds us—a world that is purely spiritual. But we ourselves are within this spiritual world; we are there just as we were before we descended as spiritual-soul beings into the physical-sensory world and united ourselves with what was given to us by our father and mother as our physical body. Now faith is not necessary; through the appropriate exercises, we have acquired a genuine, precise insight—a precise perception—of what we were in the spiritual-soul world before our birth or conception. Just as we worked, acted, thought, and willed there in a spiritual environment—just as we act after we have clothed ourselves in our physical body between birth and death in earthly existence—just as we bring everything about in earthly existence through our physical organization, and just as even the thought we form can only be conceived because the nervous system serves as its vehicle—so we now perceive ourselves, through truly precise clairvoyance, in our spiritual-soul existence before we descended to our Earth.

[ 47 ] There we find ourselves surrounded by spiritual beings, just as we find ourselves surrounded here in the physical world by physical beings. What draws us back a little into the physical world—but does not take us out of it—is our memory. We have abstract thoughts in the present moment. They bring into our soul the experiences we had years ago; but now, through the processes I have described, we have before us not only the ordinary experience on the physical Earth—now we have before us—admittedly in an image, but in the image of a reality—our pre-earthly existence with all its essence and all its activity.

[ 48 ] I could only describe to you—my esteemed audience—the paths the soul must take to advance beyond the transitory nature of time, which the soul experiences as thinking, feeling, and willing—toward that which was creative in the human body, that which existed before this human body became united with you, that which belongs to a spiritual world, that which does not arise with the body, but rather has itself first brought the body into being and actually makes its existence as a human body possible. Through such precise clairvoyance, we advance step by step from physical existence into the superphysical, into the spiritual. We do not speculate; we do not philosophize in abstract terms; we seek experiences of the spiritual world, and through these experiences we seek to arrive at an understanding of the spiritual essence of the human being.

[ 49 ] In this way, we come to discover—I would say, on the one hand—the eternity of the human soul. On the other hand, this enables us to cultivate—in a modern form—the precise clairvoyance that was once cultivated in so-called asceticism during an earlier era, which was characterized by a more dreamlike form of clairvoyance. Let us once again clarify, within the context of asceticism, what was sought in a more material way, whereas in modern times we must seek it in a more spiritual way: The ascetic sought to numb his body, to kill it off, indeed, in a certain sense, to make it sick. Now, as a modern person, I will certainly not in any way advocate making the body sick or killing it off; yet in those earlier times, people knew full well what they were doing when they systematically killed off their bodies. What happened to the human being then? To the same extent that people systematically mortified their bodies, to that same extent did their soul life become active within them. Precisely through this mortification, the body—I would say—became ever more transparent, ever more transparent. It was once an experience of these ancient ascetics that, as they weakened the body, the soul became more and more alive. And in this way they gained an insight into what a person unconsciously experiences during the ordinary state of sleep.

[ 50 ] I have described to you in this way—on the one hand, through the philosophy of yoga, and on the other, through modern meditation—how a person can consciously, that is, clairvoyantly, penetrate into that which is otherwise shrouded in the darkness of their own organism. I said, then, that this is what initially fills us with doubt regarding the fate of our own spirit: that we do not see how the soul-spiritual works down there in the human organism; that, while awake, we enter, as it were, into the darkness of the human body; that we do not even know what the soul is doing when it moves a hand.

[ 51 ] The ancient yogi came to know this inner world by, so to speak, probing it with his breath. The modern clairvoyant, on the other hand, penetrates his own body with precise thinking that has become clairvoyant, and in this way he penetrates the darkness of his own body. This brings certainty in place of the uncertainty that arises precisely because, in ordinary daily life, one otherwise plunges only into the darkness of one’s own body. But on the other hand, doubt arises from the fact that, as one falls asleep, one sees the spiritual-soul aspect fade away, and ultimately one sees that it only shines forth again upon waking. One must ask oneself: Can this soul life exist independently if it can be extinguished in this way every day by the needs of the body?

[ 52 ] That was precisely what the old ascetic achieved: To the same extent that he systematically weakened and subdued his body—indeed, in a certain sense even made it sick and weak, to that same extent his soul became more conscious; it no longer completely permeated his life between falling asleep and waking up; as consciousness sank into the unconscious during sleep—dreams that, however, allowed him to experience realities—something ever more definite and distinct emerged. To the same extent that the body was subdued, a soul life shone forth that was similar to the sleeping soul life, but which was conscious—and thus, in turn, the opposite of the sleeping soul life. One had to say to oneself: So you can also live with this soul in the way you otherwise live only during sleep. Thus, this soul can sustain itself in relation to the body, even when it is not within that body. By dampening the life of the body, the ancient ascetic, so to speak, drew out the independent life of the soul, and from this came his insight—albeit in a dreamlike manner—in those ancient times. Now, when your body falls away from you completely—when it reaches the highest degree of numbness that you have attained to a lesser degree during ascetic practice—when it falls away from you in death, then the supreme moment will occur, one that you have already experienced in a diminished form here in earthly life. And from the practice of ancient asceticism, that insight emerged for the ancient clairvoyant human being, which he was also able to communicate in other ways: that the soul has an eternal life in the spirit, even in the face of death. Thus, through a kind of exercise— yoga exercises in earlier times, and just as one sees today through meditation exercises into pre-earthly existence—that is, into the eternity of the soul on one side—so the ancient clairvoyant looks through the gate of death and sees how the soul overcomes death precisely through the stilling and numbing of the body.

[ 53 ] Again, this is something we modern people cannot do, for once more it became clear to the ancient ascetic: his body, weakened by asceticism—that is, by the pursuit of higher knowledge—was not up to the demands of daily life. In those ancient times, people placed their trust in such hermits, seeking from them the insight they did not wish to attain for themselves. Today, people would not want that. But just as yoga exercises can be adapted to modern life and our contemporary sense of time, so too can ascetic practices be adapted. If the ancient ascetic weakened his body in order to awaken the life of the soul—as it was in relation to eternity—at the moment of his death—that is, if he weakened the body so that the unchanging life of the soul might be relatively stronger in contrast to the weaker body, thereby enabling him to recognize it—then modern man must take the opposite path. He leaves the body as it is and strengthens the life of the soul. This, in turn, is achieved in a special way through exercises.

[ 54 ] I would like to highlight some of what I have described in detail in the books mentioned. One exercise is particularly effective. In everyday life, we tend to passively allow our thinking—our inner spiritual life—to be drawn along each day by the events of the external world. We think about what comes first first, and what comes later later. And when we trace life in reverse—as in legal or logical thinking—we are doing nothing other than placing the correct sequence of time before our soul. Anyone who wants to systematically strengthen their inner life must work day after day—even if only for a few minutes—and if they wish to achieve something serious, they must work as diligently as in a laboratory, an observatory, or a clinic; yet what they must undertake are intimate inner processes. Let’s say, for example, that they first let their daily life pass before them in reverse order—say, at seven o’clock; they let what happened between seven and six o’clock pass by, then between six and five o’clock, and thus retrace the day’s experiences backward. It is best to retrace the events of daily life in every detail. Let’s say, for example, that one walked up a flight of stairs. One was first on the bottom step, then on the next, and so on. In this reconstruction—which is not meant to be a mere recollection but a reconstruction—one starts at the top step and imagines walking down to the second-to-last step, the last step, and so on. You retrace the entire process. The same applies to other things. You can also do this with other years of your life, going back from the age of eighteen to the age of fifteen, but ideally in every detail. This is more difficult than is generally believed. In doing so, you actively resist the external course of events from within. You no longer merely surrender to the external course of events. One opposes it. In doing so, one detaches one’s thinking from the sequence of the external sensory world. By detaching one’s thinking from the sequence of the external sensory world, one accustoms oneself to a completely different inner way of handling thought. Thinking must become more powerful and independent by detaching itself in this way from the external world.

[ 55 ] Similarly, one can do other exercises. As you know—my esteemed audience—life is constantly changing. Anyone who is honest in their self-assessment will have to admit that they are now a completely different person than they were, say, ten or twenty years ago. But how did we become this way? Well, we have really just surrendered to life; we have become what life has made of us—what our heredity, upbringing, and so on have made of us.

[ 56 ] Anyone who wishes to become a spiritual researcher in the sense intended here must take control of their own life; just as they have done in meditation with regard to strengthening their thoughts, they must do the same with regard to strengthening their will. For example, at a certain point in their life, they must say: “For the next three years, you set yourself the task of shaping your inner life with inner habits in a certain way. You take into your own hands what life would otherwise have simply made of you. Life transforms you into a different person with each passing year. Now you yourself take control of this force of the life current.” You consciously change certain habits within yourself that life would otherwise have changed. You will see that small habits in particular—ones that have become ingrained in your life—when cultivated through increasingly conscious spiritual practice, work veritable miracles in inner self-education—for example, someone who has had a certain handwriting style up to this point in their life, and who now changes that handwriting out of this very strength. And so you can imagine that there are countless habits, both small and large, that one can take in hand, so that one becomes, in a sense, one’s own inner guide, and increasingly becomes the master of one’s own will.

[ 57 ] And whoever then continues with the exercises related to the will—as described in *How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?* and other books—whoever continues with these exercises, in other words, practices what can be cultivated both through that “reverse visualization” and through this self-discipline; whoever practices self-mastery strengthens the life of the soul, just as the ancient ascetic weakened his body and allowed the life of the soul to develop, so that it became relatively stronger than the weakened body. Thus, the body remains as it is; but the life of the soul is strengthened in this way. And we see something peculiar in our own human existence. I can describe it to you by using a comparison.

[ 58 ] Take the human eye. How does this human eye see? Well, because it is itself transparent, because it, so to speak, selflessly allows light to pass through it. The moment the eye—let’s say—develops a cataract and asserts its own materiality, at that very moment, vision ceases. The eye, so to speak, completely forgets itself. In this way, it becomes the servant of the human organism with regard to vision. By not asserting its own materiality, it becomes the sensory organ for the external physical world.

[ 59 ] Our spiritual life, when we strengthen it in the manner described through self-mastery, will ultimately reign over the human organism in such a way that it is not only illuminated from within [through] the meditation exercises, but that just as the eye is transparent to sensory light, so too does the body become spiritually and mentally transparent. Just as we do not see the eye itself but rather the objects outside it, so too, through our body—which is now transparent not physically but psychically and spiritually, and which no longer drives out desires, cravings, or passions from within itself—at the very moment we wish to use it as a higher spiritual sense organ, we come to know the spiritual world through this organism as through something psychically transparent. And in this way we gain the ability to say to ourselves: We see into a spiritual world through our organism. It has become our soul’s eye; it has become our spirit’s eye. Now, like the ancient ascetic, we attain knowledge of the eternal nature of the human soul beyond death.

[ 60 ] And as we learn to live with the spiritual world around us—once our own organism has become a selfless sensory organ—a life of the soul outside the physical body is revealed to us. And we now gain the ability to leave the body untouched by our soul life, just as it is during sleep. Yet we have strengthened our soul life. We can separate the soul from the physical body and the etheric body, just as it is separated during sleep. We experience a sleep-like state, which is, however, the opposite of sleep. We come to realize that sleep does not extinguish our soul life; rather, the soul life was simply too weak to develop consciousness from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up. Through our strengthened soul life, we radiate through an artificially induced sleep; we illuminate it. We know that we can develop a spiritual-soul life without the body. Thus, through this image that stands before us—this image of dying, of life after death—we know that the soul, beyond death—that is, on the other side from the one I described earlier—is endowed with eternal life.

[ 61 ] Thus, through our meditations, we learn to reflect on our soul life and to recognize our pre-earthly existence—one aspect of eternity—and, through the discipline of the will, self-overcoming, and the strengthening of the soul life, to perceive eternity extending beyond death, which brings into clear view the eternity of the human soul and the spiritual nature of the human being.

[ 62 ] You can see how this is attempted. The approach is not, as with spiritualism, to conduct experiments that are identical to those in the external world; rather, the human soul life itself is developed in such a way that this soul life acquires the strength to look into the spiritual world. Anthroposophical spiritual science does not wish to sin against the spirit of modern, exact scientific inquiry. But it cannot, at first, precisely investigate an external environment, for that environment does not yet exist—just as colors do not exist for the blind—but rather, the spiritual eye, the power of vision, must first be developed. This is achieved through meditation and the discipline of the will.

[ 63 ] But by proceeding in this meditation, in this discipline of the will, in the same way that a scientist otherwise proceeds with the external world, we can say that we are carrying the spirit, the essence of modern scientific civilization, into those realms where scientific life ultimately gives way to religious experience, where we ultimately recognize what constitutes the spiritual essence of the human being. And this spiritual essence of the human being, my esteemed audience, lives just as the physical human being lives here in a physical world; it lives in a spiritual world.

[ 64 ] And how human beings can find their way into this spiritual world, how they can discover the spiritual essence of the world—that will be the subject of next Friday’s lecture here, so that through it, just as the spiritual essence of the human being becomes clear to us through the method of supersensible knowledge, the spiritual essence of the world will also become clear to us. Then, however, it will become clear to us how, through the intimate interplay of the human being’s spiritual essence with the spiritual essence of the world, a deepening of religious life can emerge from genuine modern clairvoyance—how the human being might regain what he has lost through modern science in terms of the old, intimate religious life, and regain it in such a way that he can now combine the deepest religion with rigorous scientific rigor.

[ 65 ] This is, in fact, what modern civilization is striving for. Because this modern civilization has lost the spirit, it has consequently fallen into such harsh external circumstances. Perhaps we will also be able to shed light on what exactly constitutes the dire fate of our times when we next consider the spiritual essence of the world. Today, I wanted, so to speak, merely to lay the groundwork by showing how human beings recognize themselves as spirit, so that they may then also find the spirit within the world and connect with it religiously in bright, clear lucidity. For perhaps this will emerge from the discussions I took the liberty of conducting before you today — my esteemed audience — that what is called here “exact clairvoyance,” and which is intended to lead to a recognition of the eternal essence of human nature, should not conflict with the spirit of modern science, whose triumphs within modern civilization are to be—and can be—fully acknowledged by anthroposophy.

[ 66 ] But we must seek something that this modern science—as it has developed through external observation and experimentation—cannot provide. Anthroposophical spiritual science neither denies nor criticizes the validity of this modern science any more than it is a critique of human existence when we stand before a person and say: Here we have the physiognomy of the face, the person’s gestures, their form, the color of their skin; yet in all that we see with our external senses, there lives something soulful and spiritual. And only when we perceive the soul through the incarnate—through skin color—through gestures, through the entire form of the human being, and see the soul shining from the gaze, do we have the whole human being. And in precisely this sense, when we perceive the external world through the external sciences of observation and experimentation, we have, so to speak, the external gesture of the world, the external physiognomy of the world—but not yet the soul, not yet the spirit of the world. But just as we know a human being only halfway and cannot establish a true relationship with them if we look only at the exterior—at their color and form— and can only establish a relationship when the soul and the spirit speak to us through all of that—so too can we only come to know the world on a grand scale and the essence of the human being when, through all that true, genuine natural science—precisely when it remains within its limits—provides us with the physiognomy and gestures of the world, when, through all of that, we acknowledge, indeed, recognize [and] advance to an exact clairvoyance, so that through the outer physical gestures we may recognize the existence of the soul of the world, so that through the outer physical gestures of human beings we may recognize the spirit of the world, and thereby the spirit of humanity.

[ 67 ] Anthroposophy, then, does not seek to rebel against science; on the contrary, it seeks to bring science into those realms where modern science cannot reach. It does not seek to become something that, I might say, aggressively pursues spirituality; rather, through full recognition of the natural sciences—indeed, through a higher appreciation of the natural sciences than is often possible for the sciences themselves—it seeks to become, in relation to what we come to know as soul and spirit in the world of materialism and in the world of physiology, the very soul and spirit of modern scientific thought. And this modern scientific approach needs the warmth of the human soul, the inner light of the human soul, and the true religious need; it needs, in addition to science, soul and spirit. Only in this way can modern humanity be revitalized in a new way from within its soul and spirit and move toward a more hopeful future than would otherwise be possible with a more materialistic worldview.