The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. Anthroposophy and Psychology

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! When the mysteries of existence concern the human soul itself, they become not only great questions of life, but, in an intimate sense, life itself. They become the happiness or suffering of human existence. And not merely temporary happiness or suffering, but happiness or suffering that a person must bear throughout life for a certain duration, so that through this experience of happiness or suffering, he becomes capable or incapable of living.

[ 2 ] Now, a person relates to his own soul in such a way that the most important questions of existence concerning this soul and its spiritual nature do not truly occur to him, precisely because he could somehow doubt the spiritual and soul-related aspects of his own being. Precisely because, in a certain sense, he is certain of this spiritual and soul nature of his own being—because he must see in this spiritual and soul nature his true significance as a human being and his dignity as a human being—the question of his soul’s destiny in the world becomes a great and overwhelming mystery of existence for him. Of course, it would never occur even to the most staunch materialist to deny the spiritual aspect within human beings. He will acknowledge the spiritual as such, viewing it, so to speak, merely as the result of physical, material processes. But the person who, without such a theory—simply out of the deepest emotional needs of his soul—asks about the destiny of this spiritual self will find himself confronted in life with a vast multitude of phenomena and experiences that become enigmatic questions precisely because he is fully conscious of his spiritual-soul life, and precisely because of this he must ask: Is this spiritual-soul life a fleeting breath, rising from physical existence and returning with it to the general world of natural facts, or is this spiritual-soul aspect connected to a spiritual-soul world itself, within which it has eternal significance?

[ 3 ] Of the many spiritual experiences that come to people and present the soul’s mysteries before their inner eye, I would like to highlight just two.

[ 4 ] One might say: For few people, perhaps, will these experiences impose themselves to such an extent that they become conscious—or even theoretical—questions of the soul. But that is not what is important at all. What is important is that such experiences affect precisely the subconscious or unconscious regions of the soul, become embedded there, and flow up into consciousness only as a general mood or even a disturbance of the soul—as that which makes us courageous and strong in life, or as that which makes us despondent, so that we are never able to truly find our place in life or to grasp this life in a way that suits us. As I said, I would like to highlight just two of these experiences.

[ 5 ] This appears before the soul’s eye every evening as a person falls asleep, when what surges and weaves up and down in the soul’s experience during waking life sinks into the unconscious as if erased. Then, when a person looks upon this experience—or, as is the case with most people, when the unconscious sensations of this experience are at work within their soul—they are overcome by a sense of the powerlessness of this soul life in the face of the course of the outer world. And precisely because a person sees in their soul life what is most precious and most dignified—because they cannot deny that, in the true sense of the word, they are indeed a spiritual-soul being—they are assailed from within by what they thus perceive as the powerlessness of soul life, and they must ask themselves: When a person passes through the gate of death, does the general course of nature take over the soul’s experiences just as it does every time one falls asleep? — I would say that this experience is the powerlessness of the soul’s life.

[ 6 ] The other experience is, in a certain sense, the polar opposite of the first. We sense it more or less distinctly or indistinctly, consciously or unconsciously, when, upon waking—perhaps after passing through a fantastically chaotic dream world that does not correspond to reality—we immerse ourselves in our physicality with what we sense and experience as our spiritual-soul life. We then perceive how this spiritual-soul aspect seizes our senses, how, through the interplay between the external world and our senses—which are, after all, of a physical-physiological nature—we have interwoven our soul experience. We sense how this spiritual-soul aspect descends further into our physicality, how we engage our organs of will with this spiritual-soul aspect, and then become the awake, level-headed human being who can make use of his body and his organism. But when we now reflect on this, we must admit: Despite all of anatomy and physiology—which, from the outside, strive in magnificent ways to fathom and analyze bodily functions—when viewed from within, we human beings, through our ordinary consciousness, initially know nothing of the interplay that exists between our spiritual and soul life and our bodily functions. When we consider the simplest physical action arising from the will—raising an arm, moving a hand—we must acknowledge: First, there is within us the idea, the thought of this raising of the arm, this movement of the hand. But how this thought, this idea, flows down into our organism; how it intervenes in our muscular system; how, ultimately, what comes about—which we, in turn, know only through direct observation—actually takes place within us: it remains hidden from ordinary consciousness, just as the spiritual-psychic element that intervenes in this marvelous mechanism remains hidden within the human eye or any other sense organ—a mechanism revealed to us by physics and physiology.

[ 7 ] So, we must say, just as it is the powerlessness of the soul life on the one hand that presents us with mysteries, so it is the darkness into which we plunge with our spiritual-soul life when we feel this spiritual-soul life flowing into our own body—which continues to pose these mysterious questions to us. We must tell ourselves—certainly, most people do not do this consciously, but they experience it as the mood of their soul—that this spiritual-soul aspect, in its interplay with the organism, is unknown to us as a creative force; it is unknown to us precisely where it reveals its true purpose outwardly in existence within physical earthly life.

[ 8 ] What every naive person experiences in this way extends, in a slightly modified form, into the science of the soul. It would, however, take a long time to discuss scientifically how these enigmatic questions creep into science; but it can at least be stated—perhaps with a certain degree of superficiality—in the following way.

[ 9 ] On the one hand, science looks toward the soul and asks: How does the soul relate to the physical, to the external, bodily realm? When they look at the other side—the physical realm—and consider everything that external natural science has to say about the physical, some—and the study of the soul has a long history in this regard—believe that the soul must be conceived as the actual active cause of the physical; while others believe that the physical must be regarded as the actual active force in this process, and the mental merely as a kind of effect of the physical. More recent researchers and thinkers in the field of psychology have recognized the shortcomings of these two views, and have therefore proposed the peculiar concept of psychophysical parallelism, according to which one cannot say that the physical acts upon the psychological or the psychological upon the physical, but only that: physical processes run parallel to mental processes and mental processes run parallel to physical ones; one can only ever say which mental processes accompany the physical ones or which physical processes accompany the mental ones.

[ 10 ] But this study of the soul itself, on the one hand, perceives something like the powerlessness of the soul’s life. If one attempts to fathom this inner life with ordinary consciousness—even as it presents itself to the researcher of the soul, the psychologist—it has something inherently passive about it; it has something that cannot be observed as powerfully intervening in bodily life. For those who study the psychological essences of thinking and feeling—in the case of volition, it cannot be fully grasped; and so, in a certain sense, the same applies to psychological research regarding volition as it does to thinking and feeling—whoever examines this thinking and feeling through the methods of psychology finds it to be powerless, so that they can find nothing anywhere that could truly and effectively intervene in the physical body. The researcher of the soul then perceives what one might call the powerlessness of the soul life in relation to ordinary consciousness. Admittedly, attempts have been made in a wide variety of ways to overcome this sense of the powerlessness of the soul life. But the disputes among philosophers, the transformations of the various philosophical worldviews that have emerged over time provide the impartial observer of human nature with empirical proof of how impossible it is for ordinary consciousness to come to terms with this spiritual experience, because everywhere the feeling of the powerlessness of that spiritual realm—which ordinary consciousness itself can observe—imposes itself.

[ 11 ] Precisely with regard to such an observation of the inner life as it exists prior to ordinary consciousness, a series of classic literary works has emerged here in Vienna that stand as milestones in the development of philosophy. I believe—even though I cannot in the least identify with the content of these books—that these books are extraordinarily significant precisely from the standpoint of ordinary consciousness. I am referring to Richard Wahle’s *The Whole of Philosophy and Its End*, which seeks to demonstrate how this ordinary consciousness cannot actually arrive at any significant results regarding the life of the soul, and how, consequently, philosophical research in this direction must be ceded to theology, physiology, aesthetics, and social pedagogy. And Richard Wahle elaborated on the ideas of this book even more incisively in his *Mechanism of Spiritual Life*. We can say: here it is truly demonstrated for the first time that ordinary consciousness is, at its core, powerless to say anything meaningful about the questions of spiritual life. The “I,” the spiritual unity—all that which older psychology has brought to the surface—crumbles under the criticism that ordinary consciousness directs against itself.

[ 12 ] On the other hand, in more recent times, there have been understandable—indeed, one must say, necessary—attempts to approach psychology not by tackling the psychological directly—against which ordinary consciousness is powerless—but rather indirectly, through the physical manifestations that spring from what is called the psychological, to explore something about what is commonly called psychological phenomena. This is how experimental psychology came into being. It is certainly a necessary product of our current worldview and our current research methods. And anyone who stands on the ground from which I am speaking to you here today will never deny the full legitimacy of this experimental psychology. They may not entirely agree with the specific research methods or findings; but the legitimacy of this experimental psychology must not be denied.

[ 13 ] This is precisely where the other mystery of the soul arises. Even if we learn a great deal about what can be experienced through experimental psychology of the soul in connection with the human body, we must nevertheless say: Everything that is explored in this way indirectly through the body—or even what is explored through what appear to be purely soul functions—is, if one does not wish to be deceived, recognized only indirectly through the body. All of this belongs to a sphere that, upon a person’s death, is handed over to the general course of nature, so that nothing can be learned through it about the spiritual-soul realm, whose destiny in the world is of such great and profound significance to human beings. And so we can say that, in a certain sense, the great mystery of the soul has reemerged even for this science of the soul.

[ 14 ] Once again, it is a more recent psychologist—one who lived and worked here in Vienna for many years—who will remain unforgettable to all those who ever sat in the schoolrooms here in Vienna, just as I myself, who am speaking to you now, did. It is a modern researcher of the soul who, in the first volume of his unfinished work on psychology, put it this way: What could the study of the soul possibly offer us all if it enlightened us—be it, I might add, by experimental or non-experimental means — about the way in which ideas connect or separate, how attention functions, how memory, for example, comes about in the life between birth and death, and so on—if, precisely because of the scientific nature of this psychology, which seeks to emulate the natural sciences, we were forced to forgo recognizing what the fate of the human soul is when the human body disintegrates into its elements? This, my esteemed audience, was not uttered by some fantasist, but by the rigorous thinker Franz Brentano, who essentially made the study of the soul his life’s work and who sought to approach it in accordance with the rigorous scientific method of modern times. Nevertheless, it was precisely he who presented the mystery of the soul—in the manner I have just indicated—to his contemporaries as a scientific necessity.

[ 15 ] From all of this, any unbiased person today must surely draw a conclusion. It is this: that with the methods of the natural sciences, as far as they have been developed today, we can go so far in our exploration of the human being; but when we approach the soul with ordinary consciousness—which is fully justified for the natural sciences, just as it is fully justified for ordinary life—we are at a loss when it comes to the soul. And for this reason—because this insight must now arise in the unbiased person precisely from scientific foundations—I speak to you from the standpoint of a worldview that now asserts: The life of the soul simply cannot be investigated using the soul forces that reveal themselves to ordinary consciousness—those that are at work in ordinary life and in ordinary science. Other soul forces must be developed within this soul—forces that, in the soul, lie more or less dormant to ordinary consciousness or, to use a scientific term, are latent.

[ 16 ] If one wants to adopt the right attitude toward such a view of life, however, it requires something that is actually present in people today only to a very limited extent—let me just say it plainly. It requires what I would like to call intellectual humility. There must come a moment in life when one says to oneself: I was a small child; back then, I developed a spiritual life that was so dreamlike and hazy that it has been forgotten just like a dream. Only gradually did what enables me to find my bearings in life, to align my thoughts, my emotional impulses, and my volitional decisions with the course of the world, and to become a person capable of work, emerge bit by bit from this dreamlike childhood soul life. From the indeterminate and undifferentiated nature of the childlike inner life interwoven with the body emerged the experiences we gain through our inherited traits—which then develop as the body matures—and through our ordinary upbringing.

[ 17 ] Anyone who looks back in this way—with intellectual humility—on how he has become in this earthly life will not shy away from asking himself at a certain point in his life: Why shouldn’t this continue? The spiritual powers that are most important to me today—those that guide me through life and enable me to be a productive person—lay dormant during my childhood. Why shouldn’t there also be powers slumbering in my soul that I can continue to develop?

[ 18 ] One must arrive at this decision, which stems from intellectual humility. I call this intellectual modesty because people are inclined to say: The form of consciousness that I possess as an adult is that of a normal person; anything in one’s inner soul life that differs from this so-called normal consciousness is either fantasy, hallucination, vision, or the like. The worldview of which I am speaking here is based entirely on a healthy inner life and seeks, from the vantage point of that healthy inner life, to develop the powers slumbering within the soul—including the powers of knowledge—which then become clairvoyant powers in the sense in which I spoke yesterday of precise clairvoyant powers. I hinted at what the soul must undertake in this regard in a certain sense yesterday. I also referred to my book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, to my *Secret Science*, to *On the Mysteries of the Soul*, and so on. There one will find the details of those soul exercises which, starting from a healthy soul life, lead upward to a development of the soul, so that it actually attains a kind of spiritual vision through which it can look into a spiritual-soul world, just as it can perceive the physical-sensory world through the ordinary sense organs. Throughout the books mentioned, you will find a first part; this first part is recognized even by some opponents of the worldview I represent here as something that could certainly be of benefit to people. It deals with how a person, through certain exercises of an intellectual, emotional, and moral nature, brings themselves into a state of soul and a physical condition that can certainly be considered healthy—a state that strives to enable the person to remain inwardly vigilant against everything that, arising from a pathological soul life, leads to mediumship, hallucinations, and visions. For everything that arises in this way must be rejected by a genuine science of the soul. Visions, in particular, do not arise from the soul itself, but rather from pathological formations within the organism; the same applies to mediumship. All of this has nothing to do with a healthy science of the soul and spiritual development; it must be judged, even in terms of its significance, from the standpoint of this healthy science of the soul. Today, however, opponents regard as fanciful and harmful those exercises that follow as a continuation of these preparatory ones—exercises intended to draw forth from the soul those powers of thinking, feeling, and willing which, when developed, introduce the individual into a spiritual world in such a way that he learns to orient himself within it and is also enabled, through his own will, to enter into it.

[ 19 ] I already touched on this briefly yesterday: how we, as modern people, can initially use certain thinking exercises to lift our thinking out of its ordinary state—a state in which it passively surrenders to the phenomena of the external world and to what arises internally as memories, which are, of course, also linked to the external world. We transcend this way of thinking by performing meditation exercises in a serious, patient, and energetic manner, repeating them over and over again. Depending on one’s predispositions, it may take years for some and less time for others; but everyone can sense, when they reach the decisive point, how their thinking then transforms from what I called yesterday “abstract, dead thinking” into an inner, living thinking—an inner, living thinking that is capable of experiencing the rhythm of the world. A balanced view of the world and of life does not strive to conjure up visions or hallucinations from the soul, but rather to experience the life of the imagination and the life of thought with the same intensity with which one otherwise experiences only what is presented to the external senses.

[ 20 ] You need only honestly compare the vibrancy with which we experience colors through our eyes and sounds through our ears with the pallor of the thought-life in ordinary consciousness. Through that energizing of the life of thought that I spoke of yesterday, we gradually make the mere life of imagination, the mere life of thought, as intense inwardly as the life of feeling otherwise is. Thus, the modern person who seeks to recognize the spiritual—if he is a level-headed person—does not seek the hallucinations and visions that arise; rather, he strives precisely for the ideal, I would say, of the life of the senses in terms of its intensity and vividness, in a fully level-headed manner within the life of thought, within the life of imagination itself. And when, as a researcher of the spirit, you devote yourself to such meditations as I have described, you must not be dependent in any way on the unconscious or subconscious; rather, what takes place there—you can read about the exercises; they are all attuned to what I am about to describe— everything that is carried out as exercises in the inner life of the soul proceeds so consciously, so deliberately—one might say, so precisely—as otherwise only mathematical or geometric operations do.

[ 21 ] It can therefore be said that what we are dealing with here is not the old, nebulous form of clairvoyance, but rather a form of clairvoyance brought about through fully conscious, level-headed spiritual experiences and spiritual exercises. The level of deliberation at every step is such that what a person experiences and creates within themselves can be compared to what one otherwise experiences when solving a geometric problem. Otherwise, this practice is not effective.

[ 22 ] But then, when modern human beings arrive at a life of imagination that is now energized, that is now also becoming independent of the respiratory life, but that is also becoming disembodied—a mere spiritual-soul function—in contrast to which we know through direct perception: one does not carry out this thinking with the body, but in the purely spiritual-soul—only then does one feel this thinking, in contrast to abstract thinking, as something living in contrast to something dead. Just as if we were to find a dead organism suddenly coming to life, so do we experience it when we become aware of the transition from ordinary abstract thinking to living thinking. And this living thinking, even though it is a spiritual-psychic process, is not as linear, not as two-dimensional as ordinary abstract thinking. It is internally rich and pictorial. And it is this pictorial quality that matters.

[ 23 ] But then it is also of the utmost importance that we extend the composure we must maintain during practice to the very moment when this animated thinking, this imaginative thinking, arises within us. If, at that moment, we surrender to the images we ourselves have conjured up and believe that we are already finding spiritual realities within them, then we are not spiritual researchers; then we are simply fantasists. We must certainly not become that; for that could not provide us with a worldview for modern humanity built on solid ground. Only when we say to ourselves: We have attained a content of spiritual life, but this content is an imaginative content; this content tells us only about forces at work within ourselves, about what we ourselves are capable of inwardly through our own human nature; only when we say to ourselves, in the fullest sense of the word: This—what I usually call imaginative knowledge—cannot provide us with any information about the external world, not even about what we are in the external world; but only when we feel ourselves within this process of becoming images, within this weaving of images, when we know ourselves to be alive within as a force: only then do we stand in the right perspective toward this experience; only then do we feel ourselves within our own being; only then do we feel ourselves as spiritual-soul beings outside the body—but we feel ourselves precisely only within our own being, through an inner, image-like character of our being.

[ 24 ] And only when we then have the courage to continue the exercises to the next level do we arrive at true spiritual insight. This next step must not consist merely in developing the ability to bring certain concepts—which we can easily grasp, much as we grasp geometric concepts, knowing that there is nothing unconscious at work within them—into the center of our consciousness in order to strengthen our soul’s power through them, but also in enabling ourselves to remove these ideas from our consciousness with deliberation and at will. This can be a difficult task under certain circumstances. In everyday life, forgetting is not as difficult as ordinary consciousness is well aware. But once one has made the effort—even without driving oneself into any form of self-suggestion; for that cannot occur when one is acting with composure—to bring certain images into the center of one’s consciousness, then one needs a greater strength than is ordinarily required in the life of the soul in order to remove these images from consciousness again. However, one must develop this strong power gradually, so that just as one first gathered all one’s attention, all one’s inner soul power, and all one’s soul’s tension to rest upon such an idea in a state of meditation, one must now be able to remove these ideas—and indeed all ideas—from consciousness with level-headed willfulness. And it must be possible for what one might call “empty consciousness” to arise from our will. What “empty consciousness” means—even if only for a few moments—will be understood by anyone who thinks impartially about what happens to a person with ordinary consciousness when this consciousness must do without sensory impressions and must also do without memories—when, due to certain events, the person is deprived of external impressions, as well as memories: they fall asleep—that is, consciousness is dampened and dimmed. The opposite of this must occur: completely clear, conscious wakefulness, even though everything has been removed from consciousness by inner will.

[ 25 ] Once one has first strengthened the soul in this way, then emptied it, and maintained it in a state of consciousness, a spiritual environment appears before this soul—which has thus prepared itself—just as colors appear before the eye and sounds before the ear. We look into the spiritual world. And so we can say: It is perfectly understandable, particularly in the context of spiritual research as discussed here, that spirit and soul cannot be reached by ordinary consciousness; indeed, it must turn out to be true—as it is, for example, for Richard Wahle—that ordinary consciousness should not speak of an “I” at all. For everything that—I would say—emerges there like darkness in contrast to light, and which in ordinary life is actually described only in words, only begins to emerge when such powers are developed that are not yet present in ordinary consciousness. It is precisely the sober recognition of what ordinary, body-bound consciousness is capable of that spurs us on to develop within ourselves those powers that can now truly discover the soul and the spirit.

[ 26 ] However, there is one more thing to consider if one wishes to arrive at a healthy—rather than a pathological—understanding of the soul through this approach. If we consider mediumistic, visionary, and hallucinatory experiences to be pathological, then it is the case that the person who falls into such a pathological soul life becomes completely absorbed in it with their entire being. They become one—at least for the duration of their mental illness—with what manifests as a pathological soul life. This is not the case when exercises such as those described here are undertaken. The one who becomes a soul researcher in this way does indeed leave his physical body behind, along with the faculties necessary for ordinary thinking and for ordinary orientation in life; he steps out of this body, learns to see imaginatively without the body, and develops a contemplative thinking—but not for a single moment does he become completely absorbed in this—if I may call it that, it is not said out of arrogance—this higher human being—but is always in a position to act just as level-headed within his body as before, so that the ordinary person with his common sense always stands alongside this higher-developed human being—the ordinary person with his common sense, who is a sober critic of everything that “this higher human being” arrives at through his vision.

[ 27 ] We first come to face our own spiritual essence by developing vivid, imaginative thinking and then establishing a state of empty consciousness, thereby arriving at a vision that, as a unified image, encompasses everything we have experienced in our earthly life since our birth, since we entered this earthly existence. Not as it usually is in memory, where individual recollections arise—spontaneously or through effort—this past earthly life now stands before the soul not in that way, but is suddenly surveyed as a mighty tableau that stands before us not in space but in time. We suddenly survey this life with a soul’s gaze; but in such a way that it also intervenes in the conditions of our growth, in the forces at work within our physical body. We see ourselves as we were here on Earth as thinking, feeling, and willing beings, but in such a way that thinking, feeling, and willing now condense and, at the same time, become integrated into the human being. We see through our spiritual-soul life as it stands in direct connection with the physical. We give up trying to fathom through philosophical speculation how the soul acts upon the body. When we look at the soul, we also see how, in every moment, what appears to us in this tableau has intervened in our physical earthly life. The details will be described in the coming days.

[ 28 ] The next step must now be for us to strengthen these concepts of power more and more by removing from our consciousness the concepts of power that we ourselves have instilled within us. We strengthen them by continuing these exercises more and more, just as we strengthen our muscles when we exercise them over and over again. And by continuing these mental images of power, we come to the point where we can now also remove from our consciousness this entire tableau of soul life—which we have only just managed to bring to light—this entire tableau of soul life spanning from our birth to the present moment. This does, of course, require a greater effort than merely removing visual images; but one eventually achieves it. And when we succeed in removing this life of our own—which we call our inner life during our earthly existence—from our consciousness in such a way that our consciousness is now emptied not only of present impressions but also of everything we experience inwardly as if in a second body, in a finer body—which, however, intervenes in our very processes of growth and memory—as we experience it as if in a finer human being, as it were, in an etheric human being, a first supersensible human being—then our consciousness, which is now empty during full wakefulness but has attained a stronger inner power, will be able to see further into the spiritual world. And it can now look upon what its own soul-being was before it descended from the spiritual-soul worlds to a physical earthly existence. Now what we call the eternity of the human soul becomes a vision, lifted out of the sphere of mere philosophical speculation. Now we learn to look upon a purely spiritual-soul entity that we were in a spiritual-soul world before we descended to clothe ourselves in a physical earthly body through conception, embryonic life, and birth.

[ 29 ] As fantastic as this may already seem to some people today—even though it has been arrived at through a process as precise as that of mathematical concepts—what must now be said may seem even more paradoxical: not only regarding the soul when it still had a spiritual-soul existence, but regarding the concrete nature of this experience. This lecture can only touch on the subject briefly; more will be said in the upcoming lectures. What is to be hinted at here can perhaps be made understandable in the following way.

[ 30 ] Let us first ask ourselves: What do we actually see when, in our ordinary earthly life, as thinking, understanding, and perceiving human beings, we enter into interaction with our natural environment? We actually see only the external world. This is already evident from what I mentioned at the beginning today. We actually see only the external world, the cosmos. But we also see what is happening within us only by making it external through physiology and anatomy. Even though this is remarkable, we see the inner world only by first making it external and then conducting investigations in the same way we are accustomed to doing with external processes. But there is darkness down there in the realm into which we plunge, into which we feel our spiritual-soul aspects flowing down into the organs. In ordinary life, between birth and death, we essentially see only what is outside of us; through direct observation, we cannot look into the inner being of the human being and see how the spiritual-soul aspect intervenes in the bodily organs. But anyone who is able to look at life with a little open-minded curiosity from the standpoint of a spiritual perspective, as I have developed it, will come to the following conclusion. They will say: Magnificent and awe-inspiring is the outer sight itself, are the laws we explore in the outer world of the stars, in the outer world of the sun, which sends us light and warmth; magnificent and awe-inspiring is what we experience when we either simply observe—and are fully present as human beings in this act of observation—or when we scientifically investigate the laws at work as the sun sends us light and warmth and conjures up the green of the plants; magnificent and awe-inspiring is that. But if we could look into the structure of the human heart, the inner laws of that heart would be even more magnificent and awe-inspiring than what we see externally!

[ 31 ] A person with ordinary consciousness can sense this. But science, based on precise clairvoyance, can also elevate it to a genuine research finding. It can say: The changes in the atmosphere appear vast and mighty to us; and science has before it an ideal—to look deeper into even greater and mightier laws here as well—but even greater is what exists and takes place in the structure and functions of the human lung! It is not a matter of size. The human being is a small world compared to the great one. Schiller himself says: “The sublime, my friend, does not dwell in space.” — He means the highest sublime. This highest sublime can only be experienced when one experiences it within the human organism itself.

[ 32 ] Between birth and death, this is not explored by human beings with their ordinary consciousness. But in the existence we inhabit before we unite with our physical body—in that spiritual-soul existence, within a spiritual-soul environment—the exact opposite is true. Just as the inner world of the human being appears dark to us here, while the outer world of the cosmos appears bright and resounding, so too, in the purely spiritual-soul life before our incarnation on Earth, the outer cosmic world appears dark to us; in contrast, our world is then the inner world of the human being. We gaze upon the inner human world! And truly, it does not appear any smaller or less powerful to us than the cosmos appears when we behold it through our physical eyes during our earthly existence. We find ourselves entering—as into our “outer world”—into that which is the lawfulness of our human inner life, our spiritual-soul human inner life, and we prepare ourselves to now become, in the spiritual-soul realm, the inner agents of our bodily functions, to become the agents of that which we are between birth and death. What we will be between birth and death lies spread out before us as a world, open to our view, before we descend into this physical earthly existence.

[ 33 ] Ladies and gentlemen! This is not speculation. It is direct insight derived from precise clairvoyance. From the perspective of this precise clairvoyance, it leads us a little way into what we might call the connection between the eternal human being and life between birth and death—the eternal human being that remains hidden from us between birth and death, which only becomes clear to us when we are able to perceive it in its still disembodied state. In this way, a part of human eternity itself has been explored. We do not even have a word for this part of human eternity in modern languages. We speak of immortality, and rightly so; but we should also speak of “unbornness.” For this is what first presents itself to us as immediate insight.

[ 34 ] This is one aspect of exact clairvoyance, one aspect of human eternity, the great mystery of human spiritual life—and thus the highest question of psychology itself. The other aspect emerges when we perform those other exercises that I referred to yesterday as “exercises of the will,” through which we take control of our will in such a way that we learn to use it independently of the body. I have explained that these exercises lead us to have to overcome pain and suffering within the soul in order to make this soul—in a figurative sense—entirely a “sense organ,” and in the proper sense, a spiritual organ of perception, so that we not only perceive the spiritual, but perceive it in its certainty. But then, when we learn to experience in this way outside our body—not only with our thoughts but with our will itself, that is, with our entire human being—free from the body, the image of death appears before the soul’s perception in such a way that we now know what it is like to experience life without the body: both in thinking and in willing, and in what lies between them—in feeling. We learn, in a pictorial sense, to live without the body. This gives us a picture of how we pass through the gate of death, how we can do without the body even in reality, and how, passing through the gate of death, we return to that spiritual-soul sphere from which we descended into this physical existence. What lives within us as eternal and immortal becomes not merely a philosophical certainty, but a direct insight. Through the formation of the will, the other side of eternity—immortality—is revealed to the soul’s insight just as pre-existence is revealed to the formation of thought.

[ 35 ] But then, when the soul becomes a spiritual organ in this way, it is indeed as if, in a lower region, a person born blind were undergoing surgery. Until then, the person born blind had been accustomed to perceiving what is a world of colors for the sighted only through touch. Once the operation is complete, he sees something entirely new. The very same world in which he used to live now becomes a different one for him. In the same way, for the person whose soul’s eye is opened in the manner described, this environment becomes a different one. And today I would like to highlight just one aspect of how it becomes different.

[ 36 ] In life, we usually see with the unopened eye of the soul how, for example, a person lives—first taking their first childlike steps in life, then growing up, and eventually reaching a fateful event in their life: they meet another person; their souls unite in such a way that, through this union of souls, the two people bind their destinies together and now continue their life’s journey side by side—I want to single out just one event, as I said. In ordinary consciousness, we are inclined to view what occurs in life as a sum of coincidences and, to a greater or lesser extent, also as a coincidence that we were ultimately led to this fateful event—to the encounter with the other person. Only a few individuals, such as Goethe’s friend Krebel, acquire—in a sense, purely through their age—an inner wisdom of life. He once expressed this to his friend Goethe: When one looks back on the stages of one’s life in advanced age, one finds something in them that appears to be purposefully ordered, so that from the very beginning everything seems to be predisposed in a nascent form, and the rest unfolds in such a way that one is led, as if by an inner necessity, to what then appears as a fateful event. With the eye of the soul opened, however, we behold a human life that relates to the life seen with the unopened eye in the same way that the world of color relates to the world merely felt by the blind.

[ 37 ] One observes how, out of the child’s inner life—out of the interplay of sympathy and antipathy—the child’s first steps develop; how then, springing from the innermost being of the human person, the person themselves—guided by their innermost longings—directs their steps; how they lead themselves toward the fateful event. This is sober observation of life. But when one views life in this way, it stands before one much like the life of an old man: we would not say that the old man’s life “exists in and of itself”; through logic, we know that old age can be traced back to childhood; through its own peculiarities, we must trace it back to childhood. What mere logic does for the life of an old person, exact clairvoyance—contemplation—does for human life in general: When we truly observe life as it develops from the innermost longings of the soul, we must trace it back through this observation. And then we arrive at earlier earthly lives, in which the very things that are now developing as soul longings were prepared—things that then lead to our actions and so on.

[ 38 ] Today I could only hint that it is not some fanciful notion, but a very precise path that leads to such a comprehensive view of life—one that, through a developed psychology of the soul, indeed penetrates to the eternal in human nature. But then, on such a foundation—which may still seem abstract to some—something arises that becomes certainty, something that springs from the knowledge appropriate to us as modern human beings and provides a basis of understanding for true inner piety, for a true inner religious life.

[ 39 ] Anyone who has ever witnessed—and here I mean the word “witnessed” in the literal sense—anyone who has seen how the individual soul breaks free from the body to enter a spiritual-soul realm, will also view our social life differently. Equipped with this understanding, they observe how friendships, romantic relationships, and other social bonds form among people; they observe how soul finds soul, emerging from the family and other communities; they discover how physical togetherness fosters spiritual communion, spiritual empathy, and a shared spiritual life; he now knows that just as the body falls away from the individual soul, so too do earthly physicalities and events fall away from friendships and romantic relationships, and he observes how that which has become soul-related between human beings continues into a spiritual-soul world, where it can also be experienced in a spiritual-soul manner.

[ 40 ] And then it can be said—now on the basis of knowledge, not faith—that people find one another again as they pass through the gate of death. And just as in the spiritual world the body ceases to be an obstacle to perceiving the spiritual, so every obstacle to friendship and love now falls away in the spiritual world. People are closer to one another there than they are in physical life. A realization that may still seem abstract in relation to true psychology culminates in this religious feeling, in this religious vision, without the worldview from which I speak here intending to encroach upon any religious creed. It can be tolerant; it can fully acknowledge the value of every individual religious creed and even practice it; but at the same time, as a helper of religious life, it also provides a foundation of understanding for this religious life as well.

[ 41 ] Well, today I simply wanted to outline a few basic points regarding the relationship between a modern spiritual worldview and the study of the soul. I know, perhaps better than many of its opponents, what objections can still be raised today when the beginnings of such a worldview are presented in this way. But I also believe that the longing for such a science of the soul exists today—even if entirely in the unconscious—in countless souls, so that it must be said again and again: Just as one need not be a painter to appreciate the beauty of a painting, so one need not be a spiritual researcher oneself—although one can become one to a certain extent—to be able to verify whether what I am saying here is true. Just as one can appreciate the beauty of a painting without being a painter oneself, so too can one understand today, with ordinary, sound common sense, what the spiritual researcher says about the soul. I believe I have further confirmed that this can be understood, for I perceive how, after delving deeper into the science of the soul, souls thirst for the great mysteries of existence as they relate to the soul; how, in fact, what is being attempted with such a modern worldview as has been outlined here is today the driving force behind countless people—who are not even aware of it in their ordinary consciousness—and is the source of the pain, suffering, deprivation, and longing of countless people, all those who are serious about what we must find as ascending forces in the face of so many forces of decline present in our time.

[ 42 ] And everyone who speaks of a contemporary worldview today must be aware of this: that they must speak, think, and will in harmony with what our time of such gravity strives for in people’s souls, even if often unconsciously. And I believe—let me conclude with this—that it is precisely in such approaches to a worldview, as I have outlined today, that there lies something of what numerous souls are striving for today, because they need it as spiritual substance, as a living spiritual life for the present and for the near future.