The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. How does one gain insight into the supersensible world?

[ 1 ] Anyone today who strives from within for knowledge of the supersensible world is generally directed to methods and results that date back to ancient times. If one then examines more closely what is referred to in this way, one encounters what are known as the mysteries in the course of human development. These were places where, on the one hand, religious and ritual life was cultivated—the spiritual flowed through the religious and ritual—and, on the other hand, what we today call scientific knowledge was cultivated. The spiritual flowed into this other form of human perception. And a third element was the artistic, which found expression in the Mysteries. On the one hand, what flowed through religion, ritual, and science revealed itself to sensory perception—to the immediately perceptible view of life—and on the other hand, what flowed through art. And fundamentally, humanity, in its striving for the supersensible, still lives today from what tradition has preserved from ancient times.

[ 2 ] In today’s lecture, I do not wish to speak of these ancient traditions, nor of the ancient mysteries; but I would like to speak of the possibility of a new life of mystery, of the possibility of a new path to the supersensible worlds, one that may have grown in significance and understanding to meet the demands placed on scientific knowledge today by the tremendous advances in scientific thought in recent times.

[ 3 ] When we look within ourselves, we find the following inner activities: thinking, feeling, and willing. Of these activities of the soul, only our thinking is independent of our physical nature—as long as this thinking is sound. Those who are able to devote themselves entirely to the nature of thinking with their soul know that independent, logical laws can exist only in this way, because healthy thinking in the natural human being is independent of the physical body. Only when a person begins to think pathologically—when something morbid enters their thinking—do they become dependent on the physical. But what does that mean? It means nothing other than this: As long as thinking is healthy, it remains outside the physical realm; it only submerges into the body and is only absorbed into the unconscious—that is, into the body—when it becomes diseased.

[ 4 ] This is not the case with our feelings; this is not the case with our will. In its normal state, our feeling is submerged in physicality and is scarcely as conscious to us as anything dreamlike. It is entirely within physicality. The same is true of the will. In ordinary life, we are not aware of the actual process of willing because it is deeply submerged in physicality.

[ 5 ] If we now wish to attain a higher level of understanding, we must develop human faculties that are just as independent of this physicality as our ordinary thinking is, but which are capable of perceiving higher worlds than our ordinary thinking—which, in the current state of humanity, is capable only of perceiving and analyzing the physical, sensory environment.

[ 6 ] In the ancient mysteries, this liberation of spiritual faculties from the physical organization was brought about by external processes. Let us consider, for example, the effect on our soul of a sound—a noise, a tone—that passes quickly and fills us with terror. This rapid impression prevents us from allowing what is happening emotionally within our soul to sink into the physical realm. And if we experience shock, anxiety, and fear in rapid succession, we come to keep the soul-life outside the physical realm. The highly methodical rituals of the ancient mysteries consisted of liberating the soul-life from the physical in this way. Shock, entire dramatic processes that raised the life of the soul to a peak and then let it fall—these were designed to allow people to experience things in such a way that this life of the soul remained outside the physical realm and did not submerge into it. When a person came to their senses again after such experiences, it was clear to them: during these experiences, they had gained insight into a world they would otherwise not be able to see. And they called this world the “supersensible.” Such external rituals, which for the most part took on a ritual form in the ancient mysteries, are no longer suitable for modern humanity. They also presuppose that those who were led to higher knowledge would set themselves apart. The mysteries were strictly secluded places, strictly guided by priestly figures who could organize these external rituals in such a way that, by undergoing them over the course of years, a person truly developed the habit of keeping his soul independent of the physical body and, with this independent soul, entering the spiritual world.

[ 7 ] Modern people would have no trust in those who must seek their way into the spiritual world in this manner. For these methods required the spiritual seeker to isolate himself strictly from the world, and in ancient times, people would only truly trust a spiritual person if he had separated himself from the rest of humanity. Today, one can only have trust in a person of insight if they are fully immersed in life, if nothing in the full, immediate human experience is foreign to them. Therefore, the present age—and the near future as well—requires methods for the path into the spiritual world that are more inward and soul-based, so that the person pursuing these methods is independent of external activities and external influences. I would like to speak to you about methods for the path into the spiritual world that work very quietly within the soul, but which lead just as surely to the knowledge of the spiritual world—that is, to initiation—as the older methods of the Mysteries led to this initiation.

[ 8 ] In my book *How Does One Gain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, which has been translated into French under the title *Initiation*, I have discussed the modern methods of initiation. This evening, I would like to take the liberty of speaking, in principle, about what these modern methods of initiation are.

[ 9 ] The first step on the path to understanding spiritual worlds must be taken through a special inner, psychological process involving our world of thoughts and our powers of thought. In everyday life, we surrender ourselves to the external world or to the thoughts that arise from within us. And no matter how much relative activity we may develop within this ordinary state of consciousness, on the whole we remain passive in our thinking, surrendered to the sensory or inner spiritual world. Indeed, modern people even place great value on remaining in this passivity of thought, because they fear that the moment they form their own thoughts, they will enter the unreal, the realm of fantasy. This entire attitude toward thinking must change if a person wishes to enter the supersensible world. They must activate their thinking. Following an old custom, I have called this activation of thinking “meditation.” It consists in not surrendering ourselves entirely to our thinking or to any objective reality, but rather in placing—from the inner strength of our soul life—a clear, well-defined thought of the simplest possible kind at the center of our consciousness, and for a certain period of time, excluding all other forms of attention, directing the soul’s entire attention toward this one spiritual content.

[ 10 ] When we actively rest with our whole soul on a spiritual content in this way, something occurs within the soul’s powers that otherwise occurs with the physical powers—for example, when we habitually use a muscle for a task over and over again. The muscle grows stronger. In the same way, the soul forces are strengthened and gain inner power when the soul’s activity is repeatedly directed toward a single content. The content must be clear for the reason that it must not contain anything that might come from the unconscious. We must rest entirely upon this content of the soul with all the composure of which we are capable. If we take anything that is complicated—something perhaps retrieved from memory as a reminiscence, or something that is intellectually or emotionally linked to these contents as old soul content—that must not be allowed to happen. We are therefore best advised to allow such a soul content to come to us either by, say, taking a completely unknown book—one we have certainly never read before—opening it to a random page, and reading a sentence that would otherwise not interest us at all, whose content would otherwise hold no interest for us. We place this sentence at the center of our consciousness and rest upon it. We concentrate our entire inner life on such content for a long time. It is even better if we can muster the confidence to approach someone who truly has knowledge of these matters and have them provide us with a spiritual content of the kind described. Then, if he is already a spiritual researcher, he will have the practice to tell us, simply by looking at us, what kind of spiritual content is best for our meditation. When we take such a content—one that is fully present in our consciousness and easily comprehensible—and concentrate on it, lingering in that concentration in a meditative state, our thinking is gradually transformed. All abstractness vanishes from our thinking, all coldness vanishes. Thinking becomes entirely pictorial; we gain the ability to think in rich images that are saturated with color. Images that gradually resemble living dream images—but possess a completely different spiritual character—enter our consciousness; we experience something we have never before experienced in this state of consciousness. We experience the possibility of thinking as calmly as only the most level-headed logician or mathematician can think—but not thinking abstractly, not thinking in terms of natural laws, but rather thinking in images whose origin we do not initially know.

[ 11 ] This first stage of supersensible knowledge is called imaginative knowledge. We must develop these abilities if we wish to enter the first sphere of the supersensible world. If such exercises are continued for a sufficiently long time—for some people, depending on their individuality, they last for years; for others, for months—then the person finally comes to develop, in a sense, a perfected form of pictorial consciousness, just as one can otherwise think abstractly in ordinary consciousness; that is, to be able to think in images rather than to dream in them. But then, once one has advanced far enough with such pictorial thinking, one knows through direct consciousness: this pictorial thinking does not sink into physicality; it is free and independent of physicality. One now feels oneself within this independent pictorial thinking; one lives entirely within it; one now lives in this independent pictorial thinking just as one otherwise lives in one’s physical body. Just as one feels within one’s physical body through general bodily sensations—through all that one might feel flowing from this body into the soul, whether it be pain or general well-being—just as one otherwise feels, in short, within one’s physical body, so does one now feel within a finer, second human being. One has separated this second human being from the physical body, and one can then say, out of inner experience, out of one’s immediate life: I experience myself as a human being not only in the physical body; I experience myself as a human being in an etheric body, in a body of finer substance. One now knows from experience that a second human being is contained within the first. Just as one can perceive the physical world through the physical organs of the physical body—colors through the eyes, sounds through the ears—so now, when one feels oneself in the etheric body and knows oneself to be a second human being through this etheric body, which is organized in the same way as the physical body, one can perceive a new world that remains impenetrable to the physical body.

[ 12 ] The first new world one perceives is the world of one’s own last earthly life. In a powerful tableau, standing there majestically—everything that once unfolded in sequence over time now appearing simultaneously, as in a panorama—our earthly life unfolds before us, from the present moment in which we live, looking back all the way to our birth. Just as things usually stand side by side in space, so in this retrospective does the experience we went through, for example, in the eighth year of our life, stand there simultaneously with what we went through in the twentieth and fiftieth years of our life. Time becomes like space. And what we experience there in vivid images within a majestic panorama of life, we learn to distinguish clearly from ordinary memory. Ordinary memory, which we draw forth from our human being in individual thoughts, ideas, and images, is weak and pale. What we survey in this way is rich in content, powerfully colored, if I may use that expression. But everything also appears to us just as external things appear. We now know, in the overview of a moment that is admittedly somewhat extended, how our life appears to the soul’s gaze. And there it becomes clear to us that a spiritual-soul element has been surging and weaving within us at every moment of our earthly existence since our birth—or rather, since our conception. This spiritual-soul element condenses into the power of growth, the power of nourishment, and all that surges and weaves within our physical body; yet ultimately it is a spiritual reality that we behold as we thus ascend to the first stage of supersensible knowledge. At the same time, however, we learn to recognize, apart from our own etheric body, the etheric world that surrounds us and to which our etheric body belongs; we learn to recognize how differently we relate to this etheric world—which exists just as the physical world does—than to the physical world. In the physical world, the thing is there; I am there. I speak of physical things as something strictly separate from me; I point this out. Through my etheric body, I am connected to the etheric world just as a limb of my organism is connected to the whole organism. And just as a limb—my finger—is set apart from my organism, so the etheric body is set apart from the etheric universe, yet it still forms a limb within it. We are far more a unity with the world that lies behind the physical world than the physical body is a unity with the physical world. This is the first stage of the supersensible world, and it is also the first supersensible world we reach on the path to supersensible knowledge. The stage of supersensible knowledge I have described so far does not take us further than an understanding of this essence of human nature, which develops and transforms as a unity from birth to death, yet remains constant throughout our entire earthly life, while the individual substances we take in are absorbed by us and then expelled by us again, so that we, as physical human beings, are constantly renewing ourselves, even during our earthly life. That which is the etheric body remains present as a unity from birth to death.

[ 13 ] But if one wishes to go beyond this first supersensible realm, a second level of knowledge must be developed within the soul. This can be achieved by the following: after we have activated our thinking for the first level of knowledge—which required us to exert effort so that we could perceive and grasp ourselves in our etheric body—we must now, for the second level of knowledge, remove from our consciousness everything we have gained through this exerted thinking. Once we have brought a content of consciousness into our soul with great effort—by concentrating with all our might—we must now let it go again. You know the state a person enters when they must remove their usual soul content—the world presented to them by the senses—from their consciousness: they fall asleep. Gradually, they sink into a state of soul paralysis. This must not happen—and indeed, it does not. Yes, it is difficult to let go of a mental content that we have brought into consciousness with all our strength. It is harder to let go of this content than of the content of ordinary consciousness. But when we succeed in letting it go, something occurs that is otherwise never present. In the life of the human soul, a complete emptiness of consciousness has then set in. Through what the person has gone through in the powerful experience of their own etheric body, they become capable of abstracting, of rising above the entire sensory world and all ordinary thinking. They live in a higher realm. If they then, in turn, set aside this higher region—their own tableau of life—their consciousness becomes empty, and we find ourselves in that state which is significant for all higher knowledge: we are in the state of mere wakefulness, without this wakefulness having any content of the soul. We direct an intensified, strengthened consciousness out into the emptiness of the world. We do not fall asleep while performing this act, but we remain awake; yet at first, for just a moment, we face nothingness. This does not last long. So when we have maintained mere wakefulness in our consciousness—true, empty consciousness—a spiritual world penetrates us, one that is not our etheric body, nor anything related to it, but rather a spiritual world that is, at first, entirely separate from it. The real spiritual world penetrates into this mere wakefulness and empty consciousness; however, this empty consciousness and wakefulness must be acquired through long soul exercises, which I have been able to describe only in principle. For this suppression of all content—it does not succeed on the first attempt. It must be practiced again and again. Again, for some it takes years; for others, if they are predisposed to it—depending on their destiny—it takes months to reach the point where they can keep their consciousness empty without lulling it to sleep, so that the spiritual world can penetrate them.

[ 14 ] Certainly, one might say that when a person enters the spiritual world, it could be mere suggestion—autosuggestion. How, one might ask, does one distinguish suggestion from what the spiritual researcher—that is, the initiate—calls a real spiritual world? One can distinguish them only through experience. Just as one distinguishes an imagined hot iron from a real hot iron through experience—because one does not burn oneself on an imagined hot iron, but does burn oneself on one actually grasped—so, in the spiritual world that flows into empty consciousness, one experiences real facts. One simply knows—just as one can distinguish a hot iron one has actually touched from an imagined one—through lived experience, which is what distinguishes this spiritual reality from mere autosuggestion.

[ 15 ] In the book mentioned earlier, I referred to this second stage of supersensible knowledge—following an old usage of the term that need not be taken offense at (after all, we need terminology)—as “inspired knowledge.” When one attains inspired knowledge, one experiences oneself, as it were, in a third human being. First there is the physical human being, then the etheric human being; now one experiences oneself in a third human being. But in experiencing oneself in this third human being, one knows oneself not only—as with invigorated, imaginative thinking—as independent of one’s physicality, but completely outside of it. One has reached the state that can be called: life in the spirit outside the physical body. Then the human being is also able to leave the etheric body; that is, just as he has erased all content—including imaginative content—from his consciousness, so he can completely erase this tableau of life to which he first arrived; that is, to plunge what he has from his earthly life down into the unconscious and to live outside his physical and etheric existence. But when a person achieves this, their retrospective view extends not merely to birth or conception; it reaches further back into the past: we look into a spiritual world in which we existed as spiritual-soul beings before we descended into the physical world. We see ourselves acting and living in this spiritual world, just as we see ourselves as physical human beings in the physical world. We come to recognize that what nature forms as our physical human embryo must unite with what descends from the spiritual worlds, for we now behold this ourselves. And when we have attained this insight, through which we step completely out of our physical and etheric bodies, then, as we return —that is, when the moment of our beholding the spiritual world has come to an end—into our own physical and etheric bodies and find that our earthly life in the soul-spiritual realm is a reflection of what we were in the spiritual-soul realm before we descended to Earth. And precisely by re-entering our body—the physical and etheric body—we acquire the power of, I might say, a configured, individualized perception. Now we learn—while we experience, outside our physical and etheric bodies, a more general spiritual world that we passed through in our pre-earthly existence—now that we are returning to our physical and etheric bodies, now we learn, not by immersing ourselves, but—I would say—by turning inward, by dwelling within our physical and etheric bodies, now we are learning to distinguish between the spiritual beings of a higher world—with whom we were united before we descended into earthly life—just as we distinguish here between individual human personalities. We are learning to recognize beings who never descend to Earth, who never take on a physical body: spiritual-divine beings. We were their fellow inhabitants in the spiritual world before we descended to this Earth. And we are learning to see—precisely because we can now alternate between being outside and inside our bodies with our spiritual and soul aspects—we are also learning to recognize how, among these higher spiritual and soul beings, among whom we were before we descended to Earth, there are now human souls waiting to descend to Earth to experience it at a later time than we did.

[ 16 ] And so, through this stage of inspired insight, we come to recognize that part of the human being’s eternity which is scarcely taken into account by our sense of time—not even by our religious consciousness. The present does not like to look back at pre-earthly existence. People are certainly interested in contemplating—even if only through faith or tradition—what lies beyond death; for that is yet to come, whereas the human being is already here and therefore does not need to reflect particularly on what existed before birth. After all, he is here! But whether he remains here is what interests him; in his selfishness, he is interested in the second part of eternity—immortality. In modern languages, we do not even have a word for the other half of eternity—for pre-earthly existence, which extends backward as infinitely as immortality extends forward. For in truth, one can only come to recognize the eternity of human life by referring back to the words that the proto-languages had for eternity—words that spoke just as meaningfully of “unbornness” as they did of immortality. Modern initiatory science, in turn, conceives of the eternity of the human being as composed of unbornness and immortality. However, one needs “unbornness” less for the sake of selfishness than for true knowledge. As for immortality, people can content themselves with mere belief. Unbornness—the certainty that a spiritual essence existing even before my physical formation is my true being—I can only come to recognize this if I am able to look upon the unborn within me, not merely upon the immortal, which we will discuss shortly in the final part of this lecture.

[ 17 ] When one has stepped out of one’s physical and etheric bodies in this way and finds oneself among spiritual beings—just as one previously felt oneself among physical beings and things while in the physical body—one still knows oneself as a human being, as this specific “I.” And in a sense—as one experiences it—one need only embark on the journey back, moving backward through the sequence of time to the world one lived through before one’s earthly life. But if a person, while feeling themselves within a spiritual world apart from their physical and etheric bodies, wishes to look down toward the world of the stars, and the stars no longer appear to them as stars but as worlds where higher or even lower beings dwell, then everywhere where there is a star to the physical eye, there is a world sphere inhabited by other beings. When a person, just as they normally feel in their physical body on Earth, now feels themselves to be in the world of the stars—in a spiritual world—one can speak of the astral body, just as one speaks of the etheric body in the first stage of supersensible knowledge, because one is now within the spirituality of the world of the stars.

[ 18 ] If human beings are to move forward, they must add a third faculty of cognition to imagination and empty consciousness—a faculty that is very often not regarded as such by contemporary consciousness. A faculty that, while playing the greatest conceivable role in human life, is not recognized as having any significance in the realm of knowledge. This is the human power of love: the love that brings people together with others in such a way that they draw near to the being they love—whether through the physical body, the soul embodied in the physical body, or the spirit embodied in the physical body. By further developing this love—so that it can first reach into the experience of the etheric body, and so that this love can also be carried over into the experience of the astral body— by further developing this capacity for love, we ultimately come to not only experience our physical body through recognition, but we also come to be able, little by little, to increase our love to such an extent that we not only see other beings but can also enter into a relationship with these other spiritual beings—we ourselves are then spirit—just as we have entered into a relationship with physical human beings on Earth. Intuition provides the ability to interact with spiritual beings, just as physical faculties enable human beings to interact with physical human beings on Earth. But once we have developed our capacity for love to the point where the spiritual becomes as objective to us as the physical world is in the physical realm, we are then able not only to look back on our pre-earthly spiritual existence but also to look back on past earthly lives, and it becomes a fact for us that we pass through the entire human life in forms of existence between birth and death, and then between death and a new birth—again from birth to death, and again from death to a new birth—that we live through life in successive earthly lives and in successive purely spiritual lives. We learn to look back on our past earthly lives and see our present life as a repetition of those past ones.

[ 19 ] But no one can gain insight into what he was like, what he was, or that he existed at all in a previous life unless he has developed love to the point where he can face another just as another being faces him. There must be a profound difference between ordinary cognitive ability and that love-imbued cognitive ability through which we perceive our past earthly lives just as we perceive the life of another person in the present. Then, when we rise to this stage—which I have called the intuitive, the truly intuitive stage—we see ourselves standing before our spiritual eye in repeated earthly lives as spiritually active beings. Only then are we completely outside our physical life. But the one who experiences this knows what death is. Death now stands before him as the external, objective realization of what he himself has accomplished in his insight. Just as he has shed his physical and etheric bodies in his insight, so he knows that death merely sheds the physical and etheric bodies, and that the human being enters a spiritual world through the gate of death. Faith becomes knowledge; opinion becomes insight. What we otherwise call immortality in life becomes for us a certain, precise, and vivid science. We look upon the immortality of our own human life, upon the entry of this human being into a life after death, just as we look upon a pre-birth spiritual life, upon a pre-earthly life.

[ 20 ] Wir schauen aber auch hin auf dasjenige, was sich im physischen Erdenleben, zwischen Menschen im physischen Leben angesponnen hat an jenen Verhältnissen, die in der Familie sind, wo Mensch zu Mensch in eine Beziehung kommt, zu jenen Verhältnissen, die durch die Liebe, durch Freundschaft im Menschenleben veranlaßt werden. Auf das alles schauen wir hin. Wie im Tode beim einzelnen Menschen abfällt die physische Körperlichkeit, und die Seele aufsteigt in eine Geistwelt, so fällt auch, was an Freundschaft, an Liebebeziehungen auf der Erde physisch ist, ab, und ein durchseeltes, um so innigeres Zusammenleben tritt dann auf, wenn die Menschen, die hier auf der Erde durch ihr Schicksal zusammengeführt worden sind, durch die Pforte des Todes gegangen sind und sich dort unter höheren Wesen wiederfinden. Es kann durch moderne Initiation nur gezeigt werden, wie der Weg beschaffen ist, um dasjenige, was sonst Sache des bloßen Glaubens ist, durch Schauen zu finden, zu sichern für das Wissen dasjenige, was Unsterblichkeit, die andere Seite der Ewigkeit ist.

[ 21 ] In this way, through imaginative insight, the human being ascends to a perception of that which lives between birth and death. When the human being gains this insight, he ascends to his etheric body. Inspired insight leads the human being to his astral body, and through it he enters the world he experienced before his birth, the world he will enter again after death. In the astral body, one comes to know the pre-earthly and post-death spheres of human life. In the ascent to intuitive knowledge, one comes to know the fourth member of the human being—the true, eternal “I,” which passes from one earthly life to the next and, between individual earthly lives, exists in purely spiritual forms.

[ 22 ] In conclusion, now that this path of modern initiation has been outlined in broad strokes—at least in principle—let me say this: If we look at the ancient knowledge that was attained in the manner described at the beginning—through external ritual and other practices—this knowledge was more dreamlike and instinctive. And from this ancient, instinctive, dreamlike knowledge, people’s beliefs about the supernatural and the spiritual eventually emerged and have been preserved as tradition. But one can already sense today that more people than they themselves realize have the urge, the deep longing, to rediscover the paths to the spiritual worlds. Only a few people admit this to themselves quite consciously, but on a subconscious level—if one is able to perceive such things—one can see today just how many people are once again yearning for mysteries because they wish to find the path to the supernatural worlds.

[ 23 ] We were able to make only a tentative start with what we call the Goetheanum in northwestern Switzerland, where a place of mystery was created in which human beings were to find a path to the supersensible in a modern, thoughtful way, just as they had found a path to the mysteries in ancient times in a more instinctive way. Enemies have snatched this place from us. It was, after all, destroyed some time ago by arson. Even these things have their eternity. The physical fire could take from us the physical building, the Goetheanum—the physical building in which, until then, that spiritual science of which I was allowed to give you a glimpse had been cultivated. Yet there is also a spiritual fire. This spiritual fire does not burn physical sites, but will cause them to rise anew time and again. Quietly, and not as boisterously as in the ancient mysteries, the disciples of spiritual wisdom will draw near in the new mysteries, who in turn will bring to humanity the knowledge—so necessary to them—of the eternal nature of humanity and the world. For human beings need this knowledge for their thinking, feeling, and willing, so that they may attain clarity within themselves and lead a life of inner harmony, and so that they may also gain strength and security for their outer lives. They need a connection with the spiritual world. And something like the spiritual school in Dornach, on the northwestern border of Switzerland—something like this will increasingly awaken as a longing within human souls, a longing born of humanity’s eternal yearning for the spiritual. This urge lay dormant for a time, spanning centuries. These centuries have brought humankind a magnificent understanding of the natural world. Today, humanity stands there and is once again knocking on the gate that leads to the supersensible, because it cannot advance its soul any further through knowledge of nature alone. That which in a few people consciously, but in a large part of humanity unconsciously, yearns for the spiritual world will only be satisfied through the modern mysteries. Those who are sincere in their pursuit of the spiritual world will see a human will—which will most certainly arise—for new mysteries; for spirituality will only return to humanity when new mysteries emerge, in which people will find the Spirit in a more thoughtful and luminous way than in the ancient mysteries, but in which they can once again be led—through the mysteries—into the spiritual, divine world and thus to the source of humanity, in a more developed and perfect way.