The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Pneumatosophy III

[ 1 ] Yesterday we saw how, in a certain sense, even for ordinary consciousness—provided it understands itself correctly—there is something akin to proof of the existence of the spirit, and we were able to say that, for this ordinary consciousness, error and the possibility of overcoming error are, in the first instance, evidence of the existence of the spirit. To understand this, we drew upon a property of the spirit that seems self-evident to us, namely, the property known as the supersensible; for we have, after all, argued that error must have its roots in the supersensible. I have said that it is, of course, not possible to provide all the details necessary to substantiate such a matter in full. But it could be done. It might even be of great interest to show how, in a sense, the possibility of error arises only in that realm to which human beings ascend by freeing themselves from the constraints of the external physical world—that is, by freeing themselves from everything that they can, after all, only perceive through their senses. For now, it suffices to point out a single fact to hint, as it were, at the method by which one could show how, fundamentally, only human beings can be exposed to the temptation to fall into error through a relationship with the external world—mind you: exposed through their own inner nature and essence. On other occasions, attention has already been drawn to how, in essence, modern science itself provides, from all sides, what one might call evidence for the findings of spiritual science. However, these findings from external science are not interpreted today by its adherents with sufficient freedom from prejudice.

[ 2 ] Let us consider a fact such as that observed by the naturalist Huber when he examined a caterpillar spinning a web. There are caterpillars that spin such a cocoon in successive stages, so that one can say the caterpillar spins in the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth stages. Now Huber took such a caterpillar, which had completed its cocoon up to the third stage, and placed it inside another caterpillar’s cocoon that was already finished up to the sixth stage. Something strange then came to light. This caterpillar, which had completed its web up to the third stage and had now been transferred into another web—one that had already been completed by another caterpillar up to the sixth stage—calmly continued, of its own accord, albeit with some difficulty, not to spin the seventh and eighth stages, but rather the fourth and fifth. So it calmly continued spinning, as its instinct dictated, from the stage it had reached—that is, it followed an inner life that was unwavering, one that can follow only itself. If one then took such a caterpillar out of its own cocoon—which it had spun up to the third stage—and placed it into another cocoon that was also complete up to the third stage, it calmly continued and completed this cocoon in a regular manner, because even there it did not follow an external impression, but rather its inner instinct to spin on from the third stage to the fourth. It does the same, however, even when there is an external stimulus from a web that has already reached the sixth stage.

[ 3 ] This is an extraordinarily interesting fact, because it shows us that in the beings found in the animal kingdom, external impressions cannot at all bring about what can be included in those concepts that we, in the case of human beings, describe as right or wrong—as falling within the realm of the possibility of error. Only human beings can be led astray by something external because they are organized in such a way that they do not merely follow their inner instinctual life and inner impulses, but must also, in what they do, follow the impulses that impinge upon them from the outside. In this sense, we actually see only human beings as facing an external world. But this, in essence, gives rise to all those misconceptions one might harbor regarding the concept of the spirit. It is closely connected to this.

[ 4 ] Today, in order to find the proper point of connection to our spiritual science’s doctrine of the spirit from a scientific perspective, let us once again consider what a perceptive contemporary researcher of the soul has put forward to characterize the soul and its faculties as such. Brentano—and I would like to sketch out on the board, so that we may make an appropriate transition into the realm of the spiritual, what this entails—has classified the faculties of the soul, as I mentioned in the first lecture, into what is within us as imagination, into what is within us as judgment, and into what we might call the emotions—the phenomena of love and hate.

[ 5 ] If we were to conceive of the entire scope of the life of the soul as divided in this way, we would have to conclude that, upon truly close examination, imagination and emotions stand in a different relationship to the soul—and to what a person might otherwise include in their considerations—than judgment does. This is precisely what this teacher of the soul, the psychologist Brentano, claims as his own special contribution: to point out that he distinguishes judgment from representation in such a way that he sees a judgment as something other than a mere combination of representations. I already pointed out in the first lecture that it is commonly said that a judgment is formed by combining representations. “Tree” is a concept; “green” is also a concept; “The tree is green” results in a combination of concepts: this is said to constitute a judgment. Our psychologist, however, does not at all regard this as the essence of judgment, which is said to consist in a determination, for he says—and there is good reason for everything that is put forward here—that when we connect ideas, it may also be a matter of establishing the impossibility of connecting these ideas. It could, for example, also involve connecting the ideas “tree” and “golden”; then, if we had to form not the ideas “tree” and “green,” but “tree” and “golden” for a truth proposition, we would be compelled to say: “No tree is golden” or something similar. What, then, is actually the prerequisite for a judgment in this sense? It is that we can, so to speak, form an existential proposition from every such judgment, and that this existential proposition is valid. From the combination of the concepts “A tree is green,” I can form the existential proposition: “A green tree is”; only then have I made a judgment. And when I try to form the existential proposition, I realize for the first time that something can be established through a combination of ideas. “A golden tree is”—that doesn’t work. So the question would be whether a judgment can arise from a combination of ideas, whether an existential proposition can be formed.

[ 6 ] But now I ask you: if you explore the entire scope of your inner life, searching every corner of your soul, can you find any way to form an existential proposition so readily from a combination of ideas? What, then, could prompt you to form the existential proposition “A green tree is” from the combination of ideas “A tree is green”? Nothing other than something that is not initially present in your mind; for you can find nothing within the vast expanse of your mind. And if you wish to find the transition from a combination of ideas to an existential proposition—to a proposition that decides something, through which a determination takes place—you have no choice but to go beyond your inner life to that place where you still feel, deep within your soul, that this soul enters into a relationship with something other than itself. That is to say: There is no other way to find the transition from a composition of ideas to a judgment than first through perception [the word “perception” is inserted into the diagram on the board].

[ 7 ] If what we might call perception is added to a set of representations, then only then are we given the possibility of saying that we can form a judgment in the sense of this arrangement. But in doing so, we have shown that, regarding everything we conceive, we can initially say nothing more than that it exists within our mind, and that we need something other than what is in our mind if we wish to move from conception to judgment.

[ 8 ] When it comes to emotions, everyone will likely find it even easier than with ideas to be convinced that they exist only in the soul; for otherwise, emotions could not possess such an individual character among the most diverse people as they do if these emotions were to exist in something other than the soul. We therefore need not dwell at length on the fact that emotions exist primarily in the soul.

[ 9 ] But now let us ask ourselves: Is there any possibility at all of attributing a mere existence in the soul to ideas and emotions, even though we know that we cannot initially form any judgment based on them, because they are inner processes of the soul? If there is no contact with the external world through perception, if we cannot rightly speak of perceptions, then we must ask: Are we in any way justified in speaking of our ideas and emotions as if they existed solely within the soul? With regard to the life of ideas, we could first point out that when a person lives within their ideas, they by no means feel as though they were completely in control of these ideas within their soul, as though there were nothing compelling or the like living within these ideas. If we hold fast to precisely what we recognized the day before yesterday in the second lecture: that error is a spiritual, a supersensible force that can enter the realm of our ideas, and that our ideas, in turn, can overcome error—for otherwise it would never be possible to move beyond error—then we must, so to speak, acknowledge that within our soul there is a kind of arena for a struggle between error and something else. But error is a spiritual force. We must therefore have something opposed to error that is capable of standing up to it; otherwise, we would never be able to move beyond any error. And there is a way to overcome error. Everyone knows that within the life of the imagination there is the possibility of overcoming error. Since error is a spiritual phenomenon, we cannot overcome it through mere perceptions from the sensory world. I have already pointed out on the occasion of my lectures on anthroposophy that the senses, strictly speaking, do not err. Goethe once emphasized this very strongly. The senses cannot deceive. Only what takes place in the soul can err. But for that very reason—as a little reflection shows—error can also be overcome only within the soul, and initially through imagination. We thus transcend error through imagination. But yesterday we saw that error is, in a certain sense, a kind of degenerate form of something else—namely, that which we were just able to identify as the element within us that lifts us up into higher regions of our soul life. The essence of error, after all, is its lack of correspondence with the world of perception. And we have said to ourselves: On the path we must take upward into the spiritual world, we must indeed—in our meditations, concentrations, and so on—indulge in mental images that do not correspond with external perception. The Rose Cross itself—we have cited it as an example of an idea that does not correspond to external perception, and which thus shares a similarity with error in that it does not correspond to external perception. But we have said that if we were to employ error on the path of spiritual life, it would have a destructive effect within us, and that experience also shows that it does indeed have a destructive effect.

[ 10 ] How, then, do we arrive at such ideas, which, while sharing with error the characteristic of not corresponding to the external world of perception, nevertheless awaken higher spiritual powers within us in a healthy and proper way? In other words, how do we move from a mere false idea to a symbolic idea, as we have often described it, and as we find it in the Rosicrucians as one of the most outstanding examples? We achieve this when, in compiling such ideas, we do not allow ourselves to be guided by the external sensory world—the world of perception—nor by those forces that lead us into error. We must set aside both: the guidance of the external sensory world of perception and that world which leads us into error. We must appeal to forces within our soul that we must first awaken. The day before yesterday, they were characterized as inner impulses arising solely from the foundation of morality and beauty. In a certain sense, we must break away from our instincts and passions, as they have been imprinted upon us by a world that we can only describe as external. We must work on ourselves to evoke, as it were on a trial basis, from our soul those very forces that we do not initially possess. And when we awaken from our soul such forces that we do not initially possess, we are then able to form symbolic representations that, in a certain sense, possess an objective validity—even if not one related to the world of perception. First, as has often been discussed, we form the image of the human being as he stands before us now in the present—as a being to whom, in a certain sense, he cannot say “yes” at all, with whom he himself cannot agree, of whom he himself must say: “This human being must be overcome, just as he is!” - And then we set alongside it the other conception, one that cannot enter into our perception for the very reason that it does not relate to the present or the past, but to the future of the human being—that other conception which tells us: Human beings feel within themselves that they must strive for a higher self-nature—a nature that makes them completely and utterly masters of all that which they do not recognize in their present form. And then, from such inner impulses, we bring together ideas that would otherwise not coincide under the guidance of the world of perception; we bring together the symbol of that which must be brought to an end—the black cross— and the symbol of the life that must spring from it—the red roses—and in inner meditation we envision the Rose Cross as a concept that we can only describe as unreal, yet one that we could not have assembled in the same way that a simple error arises, but rather one that we have brought forth from the noblest stirrings of our soul.

[ 11 ] We have thus given birth, from the noblest impulses of our soul, to an idea that corresponds to no external perception. And when we now apply this idea—that is, when we devote ourselves to such an idea in deep inner contemplation, allowing it to take effect within our soul—it becomes evident that our soul develops in a healthy way, that it reaches higher heights than it had previously attained. We then gain the experience that this soul is capable of development. Thus, with an idea that at first truly coincides with error in relation to the world of external perception—insofar as it does not reflect anything from that world—we have accomplished something that leads to the truth, to that which reveals itself as true in and of itself. |

[ 12 ] Now let us ask ourselves: Can we grant to all that which initially enters us from the outside—from external perception—the power over a concept that has nothing in common with this external perception; can we grant it the power to exert any force—a force that transforms it into something entirely different in our soul than what would result from the error? Here we must say: That which within us has transformed this symbolic idea into something entirely different from what might otherwise arise from error is precisely the opposite of what is at work in error, of what operates within error. And if we were able to say the day before yesterday: “In error we perceive the Luciferic forces”—then we can now say: In the transformation of the symbolic image that takes place within our own soul—in the healthy guidance of the symbolic image toward a higher vision of the soul—it becomes clear to us that in what we perceive as noble impulses within ourselves, we have the opposite of the Luciferic, namely the spiritual-divine. —- And the more deeply you delve into this connection, the more it will become clear to you that through this inner experience of the transformation of a symbolic image, the inner workings of the supersensible are directly perceived and felt. But when it becomes evident that the supersensible is at work within us—that it accomplishes something, brings something about—then what was previously merely a concept in the soul, something that lived within the soul, becomes something entirely different: something we must now describe as a realization—as something that cannot be brought about by the soul itself, as it is at first. Just as a finding can be brought about in judgment through perception, so too can the inner idea, through the entire process now described, accomplish by itself what has been described here. Just as the idea, when it comes into contact with the ordinary external world through perception, leads to judgment, so the inner life of the representation—which is not aimless but allows itself to be guided in the manner described—leads beyond this mere representation to the point where the representation becomes something else; if not yet a judgment, then at least something that transforms this representation into a meaningful one that points outward from the soul. This is what we can then call, in the true sense of the word, “imagination” [written as “Imagination”].

[ 13 ] Thus we can say: On the one hand, by coming into contact with the external world, the representation points toward judgment; and on the other hand, by undergoing the process described, it points toward what we now call, in the true sense of the word, imagination. Just as a perception is not merely a representation, neither is imagination merely a representation. Through perception, the life of representation comes into contact with an external world that is initially still indeterminate to it; through the process described, representation immerses itself in what we might call the imaginative world. And just as there is indeed a transition from the mere combination of representations—“A tree is green”—to the judgment—“A green tree is”—so too is there such a transition from mere representational life to what lies in imagination in the fulfilled representation—one that is fulfilled not by some external, spatially external world. Thus we have before us the process that fills our representations in the life of the imagination.

[ 14 ] There is, in fact, something else that lies between imagination and mental representation. Imagination is, in fact, such that the moment it arises, it already announces itself quite tangibly. When our soul truly enters into its imaginations, it feels something in its life of representation quite similar to what it feels in its life of perception. In the latter, it feels its immediate contact with an external world of physicality; in imagination, it feels its immediate contact with a world that is at first also external to it, but an external world of the spirit. This spirit, as it immerses itself in the mental images when they truly reach the level of imagination, is just as compelling as the external physical world is compelling. Just as, when we come into contact with the external world, we cannot imagine a tree as golden—but rather the external world compels us to imagine it in a certain way, and we have nothing for this compulsion other than our contact with the external world—so, too, do we feel that compulsion emanating from the mind when representation rises to the level of imagination. But when representations rise to the level of imagination, we know at the same time that this life of representation unfolds independently of all those pathways through which representations are otherwise filled with content. In ordinary life, representations are filled with content through the perceptions of our eyes, ears, and so on; these perceptions feed into the life of representation, so that the life of representation is filled with the content of our perceptions. In imagination, we allow our ideas to be filled from the side of the spirit. Nothing may contribute here that could form the content of our soul through the physical organs; nothing may contribute—and indeed nothing does—that enters us through the eyes or ears. Here we have a direct awareness that we are free from everything that belongs to our own physicality, to our own corporeality. We are directly free from all of this—as free as we can say, when we observe things impartially, that we are free from all the processes of the external body during sleep. Therefore, for the person who is imagining, everything regarding their entire physical organization is as it is in sleep, except that the unconsciousness of sleep is replaced by imaginative consciousness, so that what would otherwise prove to be completely empty—that is, what has separated from the body—is filled with what we might call imaginative representations. There is, therefore, no other difference between a sleeping person and one who is imagining than that what is outside the physical body during sleep is, in a certain sense, devoid of mental images in the case of the ordinary sleeping person, whereas during imagination it is filled with imaginative images.

[ 15 ] However, an intermediate state can also occur. This would happen if a person were filled with imaginative visions while asleep but did not have enough strength to bring these visions into consciousness. That could also happen; for it is a possible state. You can already see from everyday life that it is possible. I just want to point out to you that in everyday life you perceive a great many things that you do not bring into consciousness—for example, when you are walking down the street: you perceive a whole world, but you do not bring everything into consciousness. You can often convince yourself that you have already perceived things but have not brought them into your consciousness when, for example, you dream of strange things. There are dreams that are quite strange in this regard. Suppose, for example, you dream that a man is standing next to a woman and saying this or that to her. Well, the dream remains in your consciousness—you remember the dream—but you must admit to yourself, when you reflect on the dream, that the situation actually existed, yet you would not have known anything about it had you not dreamed it. The same lady, the same man, had been standing right in front of you, only you hadn’t noticed; only when you were free from all other impressions and were dreaming did this otherwise completely unnoticed image enter your consciousness. Such things happen often. Thus, perceptions that have certainly been made can leave consciousness untouched. Likewise, imaginations that live in the soul can leave consciousness untouched and cannot immediately appear as imaginations in the soul. Then they enter consciousness in a manner similar to the perceptions I have just described. Namely, such perceptions—which have been made but have passed into consciousness unnoticed—sometimes approach a person in that state of semi-consciousness that is dream consciousness. And in the same way, such imaginations—which a person does not yet have the strength to bring into consciousness—can shine into waking daily life and there take on a transformed form similar to that in a dream, fluctuating and flowing into perceptions that otherwise stand clearly before the person. And what happens is that such imaginations truly enter into the consciousness of ordinary daily life, but undergo a transformation in the process, when that which is called “imagination” — grounded in the reality of the world and constituting the true foundation of all artistic creation, of all creative activity connected with human productivity in general — plays out in human consciousness [the term “imagination” is used here].

[ 16 ] That is why, for example, Goethe—who was well acquainted with the artistic process—so often emphasized that the imagination is by no means something that assembles the phenomena of the world in any arbitrary way, but rather that it is subject to the laws of truth. But the laws of truth are such that they operate entirely from within the world of the imagination. It is only because they influence everyday life that they change and interweave with what everyday life holds in consciousness, structuring the ordinary world of perception in a free manner, so that in true imagination we truly have something that lies right in the middle between mere mental representation and imagination. If fantasy is not understood as something that is merely regarded—as is often said—as “something that is not true,” but rather if it is truly understood, then it contains an immediate testimony to the progression of ideas in the direction where they can flow into the realm of the supersensible, the imaginative world. Here we have one of those points where we are able to perceive the direct influx of the spiritual world into our ordinary world.

[ 17 ] But let us now consider the other side of the matter—the side of emotional stirrings. It has already been said that the psychologist under consideration here remains within the soul and therefore, with regard to all that constitutes impulses of the will, pursues the matter only to the point where, remaining within the soul, he stops at the emotions. When a person carries out any action, such an action is, of course, based on a desire, an emotion, or an impulse—that is, on what, when considered within the soul, must be regarded as an emotional state. But a mere emotional state does not, after all, bring about anything. As long as we remain within the soul, nothing needs to happen. We may experience any emotional movement with tremendous intensity: yet this does not achieve what the will is actually intended to achieve—namely, that something happens which is now independent of the soul. For everything that remains within the soul is not a true expression of the will. If the soul were never to transcend itself—if it were to experience only this or that emotional state within itself, ranging from desire and so on, on the one hand to revulsion and on the other to the highest reverence—then nothing would have happened that were independent of the soul. We must therefore say: Since we must recognize the will in its true form as a fact, the entire realm of emotional stirrings also points us beyond the soul. But in a very peculiar way, this sphere of emotional states points us beyond the soul. Where, then, does it point us first? When the simplest expression of a will occurs—when, for example, we raise a hand, or walk, or strike the table with some instrument— that is, when we perform an action that has something to do with the will, we can see that in reality something takes place that we can call a transition of our emotional states—that is, of the inner impulse toward the action—to something that is truly no longer within our soul, yet is still, in a certain way, within us. For what happens there through a genuine impulse of the will—as we set our own body in motion, and through which the external action then takes place, so to speak, as a continuation of this setting in motion—is by no means confined to what is exhausted within the soul; for it is impossible for a person to track all the actions that must take place from the decision to raise a hand to the actual raising of the hand. On the other hand, a person is led by their emotional stirrings into an external realm, but into an external realm that is now external in a completely different way—namely, the external realm within ourselves: our physicality, our own corporeality. We descend from the soul into our own physicality, into our own corporeality; but at first we do not know how to do this in external life. Just think of the effort you would have to exert if, instead of moving your hand, you had to construct a device that—by moving it from the outside with springs and so on—would produce the same effect as if you were to say: “I want to pick up the chalk”—that is, if you simply said, “I want to pick up the chalk,” and then raised your hand to do so. Just think of everything you would have to accomplish—everything that happens between the thought, “I want to pick up the chalk,” and the actual act of picking up the chalk—in order to truly bring it about in reality through a tool! Just think of all the preparations you’d have to make! You can’t even imagine it, for the simple reason that you’re not capable of doing so. Nor does such a mechanism actually exist. Yet it is present in human beings. Something is happening in the world that is quite clearly not in our consciousness; for if it were in our everyday consciousness, we would be able to construct the mechanism with ease. If one knew everything that takes place between the thought, “I want to pick up the chalk,” and the actual act of picking up the chalk, one would be able to construct the appropriate apparatus. So something is happening there that we must count as part of our physical nature, but which is completely unknown to human beings.

[ 18 ] We must therefore ask: What would have to happen if consciousness were to penetrate into what is being carried out in the movement of the hand or in any other bodily movement that follows the will? Then such a reality, which lies outside of us, would not stop at the threshold of our consciousness, but would have to rise up into our consciousness. We would have to have before us a process exactly like the one that takes place in our own physicality—one that does not force its way into our consciousness—in such a way that it would be just as external to us, yet just as intensely connected to us as the movement of our hand is to our consciousness. We would need to have something that belonged to us so intensely and yet fell into us as if from the outside—that is, something we would experience in our soul and yet experience within our soul as an external phenomenon. Thus, we would need to have something as ingeniously crafted as a device for erasing chalk, and we would need to have this ingenuity—just as we have something grounded in fixed external laws—within our consciousness. Something would have to enter our consciousness that acts within that consciousness in a lawful manner, so that we would not think now as we do in the case of any other act of will, when we say to ourselves: On the one hand, the thought lives within us: I want to pick up the chalk—and then, strictly separated from it, something about which I know nothing at all, namely the process that I can at most regard as an external perception—but rather, the two things would have to coincide; they would have to be one and the same. The event would have to be directly connected to mental consciousness, so that it falls into it—much as if all the details of the hand movement took place not outside but within consciousness. But this is the process that takes place in intuition [“intuition” is written here].

[ 19 ] Therefore, we can say: If we—with our own consciousness—can grasp something that unfolds entirely within that consciousness, not as mere knowledge but as an event, as a world event, then we are dealing with intuition, specifically with intuition in the higher sense, as is also meant in the book How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, so that within intuition we are dealing with the ruling will. While Brentano, that astute psychologist, finds only emotional stirrings in the ordinary phenomena of the soul and does not find the will at all—because it is not present there, since the will falls outside the scope of ordinary consciousness—it is only the consciousness that ascends into the higher regions that finds within itself something that is at the same time an event. This is where the world enters into consciousness. This is intuition.

[ 20 ] Here, too, there is a kind of transition, though it is not as easy to notice as the transition that leads from mental imagery through the imagination to the imagination. This transition occurs when a person learns to pay such attention to themselves that they are not only able to will something and then follow through with the action—with thought and action standing, so to speak, side by side in a gaping contrast—but when they begin to extend their emotional responses to the very nature of their actions. In many cases, this is actually quite troublesome; but it does happen in life that, while acting, one can feel a kind of pleasure or disgust at one’s own actions. I do not believe that an impartial observer of life can deny that one can extend one’s emotional responses to the point of allowing the characteristics of one’s own states to flow into one’s actions, so that within these emotional responses one also experiences what might be described as sympathy or antipathy toward an action. But this shared experience of one’s own actions within the emotions can also intensify. And when it intensifies—when it appears as what it is actually meant to appear as—then we have, at the transition between the emotions and intuition, what we can call the human conscience, that is, the stirrings of conscience [it is written as “stirring of conscience”]. Conscience is something that resides in this transition, if we seek it according to its proper place. Therefore, we can say: In fact, our soul is open on two sides—toward the realm of imagination and toward the realm of intuition—and the soul is closed off toward the side where we are, as it were, thrust out through perception into external physicality. It finds fulfillment when it enters the realm of the imagination, and it also finds fulfillment—in the form of an event—when it enters the realm of intuition.

[ 21 ] Now, since intuition and imagination must coexist within a single soul, how can a kind of mediation, a kind of connection, arise within this one soul between imagination and intuition? In imagination, we first have an image—a complete image of the spiritual world. In intuition, we have an event that flows in from the spiritual world. An event, when it confronts us in the ordinary physical world, is something that, so to speak, does not leave us in peace. When it confronts us, we seek to get to the bottom of it; then we seek that which lies behind this event as an entity. So it is also with the event that lies in the spiritual world and is meant to penetrate into our consciousness. Let us consider the matter once more more closely, as it actually is. How does intuition first enter our consciousness? We first had to seek it on the level of emotional stirrings. There it does indeed enter our consciousness, our soul, but on the level of emotional stirrings, not on the level of imagination. This is how it is with intuition at first. For this intuition can indeed penetrate into our consciousness, into our soul, without our having the ability to conceptualize it. We have also said of imagination that a person can have it without being conscious of it; it then enters the fantasy because it acts directly within conceptualization. But we had to place intuition on the other side—the side of emotional movements. In human life as a whole, intuition generally belongs to the realm of emotional movements. I would like to cite once again the example I mentioned recently, which is a well-known dream.

[ 22 ] A couple had a son. He suddenly fell ill one day, and even though they tried every possible remedy, he died within a few days. The parents were deeply moved by their son’s death, and their thoughts were entirely occupied with him—that is to say, in this case, their memories were occupied with him. They thought about him a great deal. One day, however, it turned out that during the night, both the father and the mother had had the same dream. They recounted it to one another. You may find this example cited by a dream researcher with a more or less materialistic outlook, who goes to the most grotesque lengths to explain this dream but cannot deny the fact. For in their dream, their son appeared to the parents and urged them to have the grave checked, because he had been buried alive. The parents went to every conceivable length to have an investigation conducted to determine whether their son had been buried alive, but they did not live in a country where the authorities would have permitted an investigation of a grave after such a long time.

[ 23 ] How, then—and I mention this only to provide a way to deduce the relationship between intuition and emotional responses—can we, so to speak, form a kind of explanation for the fact presented by this dream? Well, you can probably assume this from the outset: Because the parents continually focused their thoughts on their son—who, after passing through the gate of death, existed in the spiritual world as a spiritual being—this created a sort of bridge to their son. By directing their thoughts in this way, a connecting bridge exists with the son’s enduring individuality. But you cannot possibly assume that, once one has penetrated all the veils that lie between the living and the dead, there was anything merely subjective in the revelations from the deceased—which must have existed, since the two people had the same dream. Or it must be a so-called coincidence—but in that case, one could explain all sorts of things—if it is the case that the two had the same dream, as I have described. In reality, however, there was a connection that night between the parents and their son. He had also told them something—or rather, he had instilled something into their minds. But since the parents had no way whatsoever to bring into their consciousness what their son had instilled in them, only the dream image—which contained ideas they were accustomed to—preceded the actual event. So it was actually something entirely different that the son had intended to reveal; but the parents were forced to form a conception that they could draw only from the material of their own imaginative life. This took the form of a dream superimposed upon the event.

[ 24 ] Or another dream: A farmer’s wife dreams that she is going to church in town. She dreams every single stage of the journey: how she enters the church, how the preacher stands there with his hands raised to heaven and preaches with extraordinary fervor; she dreams how this fills her with enthusiasm. But then a strange transformation takes place: The preacher changes his form; he grows wings and feathers, and finally his voice changes—it becomes more and more like a crowing sound, until at last his entire form transforms into a rooster that is crowing. The woman wakes up—and outside, the rooster is really crowing! —This crowing, as you can imagine, triggered the entire dream. But you must also admit that this crowing could have triggered other dreams in the most varied ways. A rascal, for example, might have dreamed that he was startled by the rooster’s crow and might then have dreamed that he spent a very long time thinking about how he could open something—a lock, for instance. Then another rascal, who was smarter than he, would have given him instructions, which would then have transformed into a rooster’s crow. — From this you can see how what appears as a mental image superimposed on the actual experience need not have anything to do with what the soul actually experiences. What, for example, did the couple mentioned experience? A connection, a revelation from their son that flowed directly into their hearts. And in the other case: The farmer’s wife was a very devout woman who was completely immersed in an atmosphere permeated by piety. That is what she truly went through. And when she is then jolted awake, she still has the fleeting feeling that she is emerging from something; but her entire consciousness is absorbed by the crowing of the rooster, which superimposes itself on her experience by imagining itself to be the preacher in the church. Thus, the spiritual experience becomes what was dreamed.

[ 25 ] When someone then acquires a certain practice of moving from dreams to the corresponding realities, it also becomes apparent that, before reaching the inner reality, they must pass through a state of mind characterized by elation or sorrow—in short, some form of emotional tension or release. The mental images of what is experienced in the spiritual world usually dissolve into a kind of nothingness; one must form entirely different conceptions of what is actually happening. Or, to put it another way: Spiritual events are closer to emotional stirrings than to mental imagery, for none of these mental images are decisive for the events of the soul and spirit. There, in the spiritual world, are the events that extend into the emotional stirrings throughout the entire night; but through his imagination, a person cannot grasp these events sufficiently to characterize this experience.

[ 26 ] This allows us to point out that intuition, too, is connected in a certain way to emotional states. This is also why mystics, before they arrive at any clearly defined concepts of the higher worlds, experience a kind of general, vague emotional sensation of these higher worlds, and many are satisfied with this—many even with even less. But those who truly immerse themselves in the higher worlds with their emotions all describe in the same way the states of spiritual devotion they experience there—in short, a series of emotional states arising from what can be called a direct experience of the spiritual world.

[ 27 ] If we were to proceed based on this intuition that arises within the mind, we would not make much progress; rather, we must actually start from the other side. In order not to indulge too generally in the stirrings of the soul, but to arrive at a concrete perception of the spiritual world, we must try to cultivate images and then direct our attention to them in relation to the spiritual world. Then, gradually, a connection arises in our lives between the intuition—which is still not understood but felt more than anything—and the imagination, which still hovers more or less in unreality and consists solely of images. And what this connection is, is ultimately revealed to us as we approach the thought: We have now arrived at the beings who carry out spiritual events. We describe this approach to the beings as inspiration [“inspiration” is written here]. So here we have, in a sense, the reverse of the processes we experience in relation to the external physical world. In the latter, we have, so to speak, the thoughts we form about things. There, the things are already given to us, and we form thoughts about them. Here, however, the event—the thing that first appears in intuition as a stirrings of the mind—is entirely indeterminate, and imagination as such would be something suspended in the air. Only when the two come together—when imagination works its way into intuition through inspiration; when, in other words, our conceptualization leads us up to imagination; and when we feel imagination as coming from beings—does the essence of these beings also flow into us as an event. Imagination brings with it something that flows in from intuition, and with this event we perceive a content that can be compared to the content of our conceptions. We then perceive these thoughts—for the perception of which we have prepared ourselves—through imagination within the event given to us in intuition.

[ 28 ] Today I have described to you how the human being, as it were, grows upward into the spiritual world on the other side of his or her soul life. I have, however, anticipated some of what only spiritual science itself can provide through spiritual research; but I had to do so in order that we may more easily understand one another in tomorrow’s lecture regarding what will now be our main focus: a description of the nature and characteristics of the spiritual world itself.