The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. How Does One Gain an Understanding of the Spiritual World?

[ 1 ] If you have a dream and remember it, then—provided your memory of the dream is as clear as possible, as is often the case—it is likely immediately clear to you that, as the dream unfolds, you are, so to speak, an observer; yet during this observation, you do not possess a distinct sense of self regarding the images that weave their way past your soul. As I said, one must always assume that in a dream, self-awareness does not occur as clearly as in waking consciousness. These images, weaving past the soul, represent scenes and sequences of images that are either well known to the dreamer—as they tie in with experiences from earlier days or recent times—or that transform such experiences in the most varied ways, altering their forms so drastically that a specific experience is not recognized, and one believes one is dreaming something entirely different. It also happens that one has dreams that do not tie in with experiences, that is, they present an entirely new mental image, as it were, compared to the experiences one has gone through. But each time one will have the sensation: a kind of living, weaving images have passed before the soul, have revealed themselves to the soul. — And one will remember these experiences after waking up. There will be dreams that one retains in memory for longer, and there will be such dreams that, as one returns to the experiences of the day, seem to be erased.

[ 2 ] Today, let us try to answer the question: In what, exactly, do we perceive such weaving dreams? When we are awake in the physical world, we know that in the world we call the physical world, we perceive exactly what we are perceiving. What, then, is the substance—the material, so to speak—in which we perceive while dreaming, just as the processes and material things of the physical world exist in the waking state? It is that which we call the etheric world, the ether that extends throughout the entire world with its inner processes, with all that lives within it. This is, so to speak, the substance in which we perceive when we dream. As a rule, however, when we dream, we perceive only a very specific part of the etheric world. Just as the etheric world is closed to us in ordinary life when we are awake and perceive physically—just as the ether is all around us without our perceiving it through our physical senses—so too, in ordinary dreaming, the ether that surrounds us remains imperceptible. Only that part of the etheric world appears before us, as it were, when we dream, which is our own etheric body. For when we sleep, we are outside our physical body and our etheric body. And this is what ordinary dreaming consists of: that with what we are outside our physical body and etheric body—namely, the astral body and the I—we look back, as it were, upon that from which we have emerged in sleep; but that in this act of looking, our physical body does not come to our consciousness, and therefore we do not make use of the physical senses, but rather look back, as it were, disregarding our physical body, only at our etheric body. So, fundamentally, it is the processes of our etheric body that lift their veil at some point and appear to us as a dream. Most dreams are indeed such that the human being actually looks down from sleep upon his own etheric body, and that a fragment of the immensely complex processes of his own etheric body comes to his consciousness, and that this constitutes the dream.

[ 3 ] This etheric body of ours, which is thus a part of ourselves, is something extraordinarily complex. It contains, for example, all our memories—memories that are always present within it. Even that which has sunk deep into the depths of the soul, which does not come into our consciousness in ordinary daily life, is always contained in the etheric body in some way. Our entire life so far in this present incarnation is contained in the etheric body; it is truly there inside. Of course, one must admit that it is extraordinarily difficult to create a mental image of this. But it is nevertheless so. Imagine, for example, that you were to talk all day long—some people do that, after all—and everything you say were to be recorded onto a phonograph record by some mechanism. Once you’ve spoken enough to fill the phonograph record, you set it aside, take a second one, and when that’s full, a third, and so on. So you use more or fewer of these records depending on how much you speak. Let’s say someone else would then place each record into a phonograph, and by evening all the records would be neatly inside. Everything you have spoken during the day would be in the phonograph by evening. If someone were now able to play back what was spoken from the phonograph, then everything you spoke during the day would come out. Thus, everything that constitutes our memories is always present within the etheric body. And let us suppose that, due to the special conditions of sleep—let us stick with this comparison—a part of the components of the etheric body were to step before our soul, just as if one were to take out a part of the phonograph records and let them play, then that would be the dream, those dreams that are by far the most common. So we weave with our consciousness within our own etheric body.

[ 4 ] In a similar way, the same applies to many hallucinations that appear before the human soul. Such hallucinations are usually caused by the fact that the human being, with his ego and astral body—which are then situated within the physical body—can nevertheless, in a sense, see a torn-out piece of his etheric body. This comes about in the following way. Imagine that something in your physical body is sick, for example, something in the nervous system or the like. Then the etheric body cannot intervene at the point where the nervous system is diseased; it is, as it were, cast out. The etheric body itself is not at all diseased, but it is stretched out of the physical body at a specific point. If it were integrated, then everything would unfold as it does in normal consciousness. We would not become aware that the physical body is ill. If the etheric body cannot intervene at this point, and if what is there—and into which the etheric body cannot intervene—shines back at the etheric body, then this comes to consciousness as a hallucination.

[ 5 ] The very same substance from which dreams or hallucinations appear to us surrounds us everywhere in the world. It is the etheric substance. And from the etheric substance that surrounds us, our own etheric body is, as it were, cut out like a piece. When we have passed through the gate of death and shed the physical body, we make our way through the etheric substance. In essence, we never actually leave the etheric substance during the entire journey between death and new birth. For this etheric substance is everywhere, and we must pass through it; we are within it. After all, some time after death we have also shed our own etheric body. It dissolves precisely into this outer etheric substance. In ordinary life, human beings do not initially possess the ability to perceive within this outer etheric substance. Therefore, what would constitute perception does not occur—not now in the physical world, but in the etheric world. Through dreaming, human beings are, as it were, introduced to a perception of the etheric that is dependent on themselves.

[ 6 ] Now, true perception in the etheric world that surrounds us depends on something very specific. If, after death, a person truly perceives the etheric world surrounding them, or if they develop to the point where clairvoyant images arise within them—for this also means that they perceive the etheric world surrounding them—then they must possess a greater power than they have in ordinary life between birth and death, a stronger inner soul power. That is why we do not perceive the etheric world around us: because our soul power is too weak to perceive it. We must become much more active and dynamic than we need to be in ordinary life in order to perceive the etheric world. We must also have a much more active power in our soul after death than we have in ordinary life, so that we may have an environment around us after death. Otherwise, the ether is all around us, and we do not perceive it. It would be as if we had not a single sense in ordinary life. Thus, a person must have a more active, dynamic soul force so that they can manage after death, so that after death they are not, figuratively speaking, deaf and blind to the world into which they enter. But if one wants to form a mental image of the way the soul perceives after death, or after it has acquired the ability to unfold the powers of imagination, one can imagine what this ability of the soul must be like by first choosing a comparison. This comparison can be drawn from writing. When you write something down, what you write down does mean something. It expresses something. There is something behind what you write down. And yet, you yourself have only created the symbols for it. And if that is to be true, if what you have written down is to correspond to an objective reality, then you can of course bring that about. If you want to communicate this or that fact to a friend through a letter and you write it down so that the friend far away can read it, then you have first put down the symbols, through which the friend, when he deciphers the symbols, learns the fact. Now if someone were to come along and say: “That cannot possibly be true under any circumstances! For it is not inscribed into the world in an objective way. Someone has first written it down, and that cannot correspond to an objective fact”—that is the kind of nonsense such a person speaks. Just as you designate an objective fact when you write by first setting down the symbols, so it is with imaginative seeing in the imaginative world. You must be active. You must first set down what serves as a symbol for the objective processes of the spiritual world, and you must be conscious that you are setting it down. Whether you put it down depends on your having the necessary strength to be actively immersed in spiritual reality, so that it inspires you to put down what is true and not false. But the fact is that one knows: one puts it down.

[ 7 ] I’ll try to describe this in another way. Let’s go back to the dream. When you dream in ordinary life, you have the sensation that the dream images “weave” themselves, unfolding in this way. Think about the mental images you need to create regarding these dreams: the dream images float past my soul in this way. —That is the mental image you must have. Now imagine you did not have this mental image, but the opposite: you yourself place the dream images in space and time, just as you place letters on paper. You do not have this mental image in ordinary dreaming or even in hallucinations. But one must have this awareness during imaginative mental images. There one must have the awareness: You are the ruling power in your dreams. You place one thing and add another, just as one writes something down on paper. You are the ruling power; you do it yourself. Only the power behind you, as in writing, is what makes what you write down true. — One must realize that the great difference between dreams, hallucinations, and true clairvoyance lies in the fact that in the latter, one is always conscious of being, so to speak, the occult scribe. What one sees is recorded as an occult script. One writes down into the world what is for one an expression, a revelation of the world. You might of course say: Then there would be no need to write it down, for one knows that beforehand. Why should one write it down? — But that is not true. For the one who then writes is not oneself, but rather the being of the nearest higher hierarchy. One surrenders to the being of the next higher hierarchy, and that is the power that reigns within one. One writes down, entirely within an inner soul process, what reigns through one. And by then looking at it—this writing in occult script—what is to be expressed reveals itself to one.

[ 8 ] You can now see why it has been pointed out so often in public lectures that the development of clairvoyance is based on the fact that all perception becomes active and dynamic; it does not remain, as is true for the perception of the physical world, a passive surrender to the world. In this way, one gradually learns to truly understand inwardly what was already called the “learning of the occult script” at the very beginning of our anthroposophical life, and what I have described in greater detail in my work *The Threshold of the Spiritual World*. The soul power required to inscribe the occult symbols into spiritual space and spiritual time is a stronger, more powerful, more mighty soul power; it must be stronger, more powerful, and more mighty than the soul power we use for perception in ordinary life. And we must possess this power once we have passed through the gate of death. Whoever wishes to acquire imaginative clairvoyance develops this power through meditation; they attain it gradually. Through this, they arrive at what has just been described, that is, they arrive at an experience in which they know that they are in a world of which dreaming is a faint reflection, but they are so immersed in it that they wield their dreams as one wields them when making a table or a shoe, assembling piece by piece and so on. When so many people keep coming back to the point where they say: “Well, I do try all sorts of meditation. But I just can’t seem to become clairvoyant”—this is based on the simple fact that people do not want what I have just explained, that they are glad when they do not need it. They do not want to develop an inner, active soul power; rather, they want to become clairvoyant without having to acquire a stronger soul power. They want the tableau that appears before them through their clairvoyance to arise all by itself. But then it is nothing more than a hallucination or a dream. A piece of the etheric world—if I may put it rather drastically—that one can take from one place, grasp with the etheric antennae, and place in another; such a piece of the etheric world is the dream. This has no place at all in true clairvoyance. In the experience of true clairvoyance, one feels just as one does when writing on paper in the physical world, except that when one wants to write on paper in the physical world, one must first know what one wants to write down—at least in most cases it is good to know it— whereas in spiritual perception one allows the beings of the spiritual hierarchies to write, and it is only by actively writing it down that what is to be perceived appears. But without actively participating in every atom of what one sees, without being actively involved in the process, no true clairvoyance can come about.

[ 9 ] And we will also need such power to truly write into the etheric world once we have passed through the gate of death. All the thinking we do in the ordinary physical world, and which serves us there, is of no use for such perception after death. No matter how intelligent a person may be, or how astutely they may think about the things of the physical world, it will not help them at all after death. For this power of thought is far too weak to enable one to write into the etheric world. All the mental images one develops that relate to physical things stem from such a weak power of thought, which would be of no use to us after death. We must have a stronger power of thought, a power of thought that acts within itself, a power of thought that, in other words, forms thoughts without these thoughts representing anything external, anything found in the sensory world. If we did not have something within us that leads us to form thoughts that do not represent anything external, but rather rise up internally, as it were, from the depths of our soul; if we did not have the ability to form such thoughts, then we would not be able to possess a corresponding ability after death.

[ 10 ] Now someone might say: So one could conceive of all sorts of things, imagine all sorts of things. One could strain one’s imagination as much as possible to come up with a great many imaginary thoughts that do not represent anything in the external world. Then one would indeed be well prepared to develop the necessary mental power after death. — So it could be that someone would say: I want to have a lot of mental power after death. So I create mental images of winged dragons that don’t even exist, terrifying animals, and so on. I imagine all of this because I do not want to be held back by external mental images, but rather I put together the most colorful things. In this way, I develop an inner power of thought and thereby prepare myself to have a strengthened mind after death. — There is no denying it: If someone were to do this, they would have greater abilities in the world after death than someone who does not. But they would perceive nothing but falsehoods, mere distortions, just as someone with a diseased eye must perceive the physical world incorrectly, or as someone with a diseased ear must perceive the sounds of the physical world incorrectly. Whoever were to do such a thing, therefore, would only condemn themselves to perceiving only the most grotesque things in the etheric world, but not that which is truly rooted in the etheric world.

[ 11 ] Throughout the course of human development, care was always taken to ensure that people held mental images that were not derived from the physical world, yet were also not created in the arbitrary and fantastical manner just described. It was the great religious founders who appeared in the course of human development who ensured that people had such mental images not derived from the physical world. By passing on to people, through the methods available to them, mental images that did not relate to the physical world but to the supersensible worlds, people were able—when they followed their religious founders—to develop mental images that were not shaped by the constraints of the external sensory world, yet were true because they were drawn from the supersensible world. This is the great, mighty education of the human race by the founders of religion, of which one can say, if one wishes to characterize it quite correctly: The founders of religion set themselves the task of passing on to people such mental images that gave them a way of thinking through which people did not arrive in the spiritual world after death spiritually blind and deaf. Thus we see how the founders of religion ensured that human beings are, so to speak, fully alive and fully conscious—that they do not merely possess a consciousness that fades or dims at the hour of death, or that is distorted after the hour of death.

[ 12 ] However, as has often been pointed out from other perspectives, we are currently living in a developmental cycle of human evolution in which people are, so to speak, to come of age in such a way that religious founders will no longer appear in the old manner to appeal to people’s faith. Those times are past, although of course these old times still extend into our present, and at present only a small number of people can begin to experience this new life, so to speak, and people find it difficult to follow, even longing to grasp the traditional mental images that still come from the old religious teachers. But we live in a time when people are to become mature. Therefore, what the founders of religions have provided for faith must be replaced by what the newer Spiritual Science offers. This newer Spiritual Science differs in its very essence from what the old founders of religions have handed down. It must be emphasized here, so that no misunderstanding arises: When speaking of these ancient founders of religion, Christ is excluded. For I have often emphasized: With Christ, it is not a matter of what he taught, but of what happened through him. The ancient founders of religion were, in a sense, teachers; but Christ worked primarily by pouring his own power into humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha. This is still extraordinarily difficult for many people to grasp today. That is why they speak of Christ only as a great world teacher, which, however, is simply nonsense for anyone who truly understands the full significance of Christ. So we are currently facing the fact that humanity is coming of age. And this is to be achieved through modern Spiritual Science, through the concepts, ideas, and mental images that relate to human life after death and thus to the whole of the soul’s life. Spiritual Science is, after all, attained in such a way that it can actually be attained by every human being, provided they truly develop themselves toward the findings of Spiritual Science. Spiritual Science strives to give people what the individual human soul can truly achieve through itself, not as things were achieved in the past by listening to the founders of religions. And while today Spiritual Science can, of course, only be brought to its conclusions by individual spiritual researchers, so to speak, and then communicated, it is communicated in such a way that one can understand it completely, if one is only willing to do so. I have often emphasized: When it is said that one must believe in Spiritual Science as well, this is based on a complete misunderstanding. The fact that people say one must believe in Spiritual Science too is due to the fact that they are so steeped in materialistic prejudices that they do not engage with what Spiritual Science can truly offer. As soon as one engages with it, one can understand everything and find it comprehensible. Clairvoyance is not necessary; ordinary understanding is sufficient to truly understand and grasp everything little by little—though this “little by little” may be inconvenient for some.

[ 13 ] Spiritual Science thus approaches human beings in such a way that it appeals to their understanding and comprehension, in a sense applying a principle that is the very opposite of the one through which the ancient founders of religion worked. Thus, in the mental images that reached human souls from the ancient founders of religion, these souls found something that, as it were, spiritually awakened them and gave them the power to perceive in the etheric world—and thus also to lead a self-aware life after death. And in turn, by taking in modern Spiritual Science, the human soul will possess that which gives it the strength to develop, after death, the necessary imagination to consciously perceive the etheric world as its surroundings. The people of old, who listened to their religious founders, and the people of today, who have the will to understand Spiritual Science, will thus be equipped, as it were, with the abilities to find their way in the right manner after death. Only one type of person has difficulty finding their way after death; and for this one type, what is often described as life after death does not even apply, because it is often clouded and obscured. This type of person consists of those who are materialists in their outlook, who wish to cling only to things that are images of the ordinary physical world, and who do not wish to acquire the power to perceive the world into which we enter after death. To be a materialist, in terms of one’s spiritual and soul life, really means nothing other than deciding to destroy one’s eyes, destroy one’s ears, and gradually kill off one’s senses in the ordinary physical world—and then to go on living. It would be as if someone were to say: These eyes—one cannot rely on them anyway, for they provide only impressions of light. So away with them! These ears—one can perceive through them only vibrations of air, not a single truth. So away with them! Away with the senses, one by one! — Just as sensible as this would be for the sensory world, so sensible is it in relation to the spiritual world to be a materialist. It is exactly the same. And this is not even that difficult to understand if one considers the reasons put forward by Spiritual Science.

[ 14 ] Today I have tried to describe to you, from this perspective, what it is like to be inside the spiritual world. I would like to describe another phenomenon in a similar way. From the realm of dreams, we can single out a type of dream that everyone is actually familiar with, for everyone must have had a dream of the kind I am about to describe. It is that kind of dream in which we, in a certain sense, face ourselves in the dream. Ordinary dreams unfold in such a way that what I described earlier occurs: the dream fabric unravels before us, and we do not have a clear sense of self during the dream, but only later reflect on the dream fabric with our sense of self. Anyone who examines the circumstances closely will find that this is the case. But there are also dreams in which we, as it were, face ourselves objectively. Not only do we, as sometimes happens, actually see ourselves—for that can also occur—but something else can happen as well. There is, of course, the well-known dream in which a schoolboy dreams that he is sitting in school, that he is given a math problem, and that he simply cannot solve it. Then someone else comes along and solves it with ease. He really does dream this. Now you will surely realize that it was he himself who confronted himself and solved the problem. So one confronts oneself in this way, but does not recognize oneself. But that is not the point. In such a case, the human ego splits, as it were. It would be quite nice if this could also be the case in the physical world, so that when one does not know something, the other ego would confront one, and one would then know the matter in question perfectly. But this occurs in dreams. There the dream has a completely different character than in the ones described earlier. For in a dream one is outside one’s physical body and etheric body, existing in one’s astral body and ego. While the dreams described earlier are based on gaining insight into the nature of one’s own etheric body, the dreams in which one encounters oneself are based on the fact that one’s own astral body, which one has brought along, reveals a part of itself, so that it confronts one through this part. It is a fragment of self-perception outside the physical body. While one does not perceive the astral body in ordinary life, it can certainly happen in sleep that one perceives a fragment of one’s astral body, and there are many things within the astral body that are not at all known to us in the ordinary waking state. I drew attention to this earlier—I will now have to tell you something quite strange—regarding what is contained in the etheric body. In any case, everything we have experienced is in there. But the astral body even contains what we have not yet experienced. For the astral body is a rather complex structure. It is, so to speak, organized from the spiritual worlds and contains not only the things we already have within us, but also those we will learn in the future! These are already predisposed, are already present within it in a certain way. This astral body is much more intelligent than we are. That is why, when it reveals something of itself to us in a dream, it can also allow us to encounter ourselves in a form in which we are more intelligent than we have become through physical life. If you consider this—though I would like to weave this in now merely as an aside that is not part of the lecture—it may shed some light on the nature of the “intelligent” abilities of animals. Animals do, after all, have an astral body, and through the astral body, things can emerge that do not emerge in the ordinary life of animals. Many things can indeed emerge there that may well surprise us. For this astral body contains, for example—believe it or not—the entire field of mathematics, not only what is currently known, but also everything in mathematics that is yet to be discovered. If, however, one wanted to consciously extract all of mathematics from it, one would have to do so actively, first acquiring the correspondingly strengthened abilities for this; but everything is truly contained within it. So it is a revelation as if from a part of our astral body when we face ourselves. And much of what comes to us as inner inspiration is indeed based on these revelations of the astral body. Just as a certain kind of hallucination arises under such circumstances, as I described earlier, so too can that which is wiser than we ourselves become active within us through particular conditions of our constitution. Then we can have inner inspirations; then something can arise within us that would not arise if we were merely to apply our ordinary powers of judgment in the ordinary physical body. But it is dangerous to allow such things to arise, to give oneself over to such things. It is dangerous for the reason that such things arise and we cannot master them as long as we do not approach them with discernment. And since we cannot master them, Lucifer has such easy access to all these things, and we cannot prevent him from directing them according to his will and not according to the will of the proper world order.

[ 15 ] So when a person strengthens their inner powers, they also learn to live in such a way that they become clairvoyant in the astral body. But you will now see from what I have said—which is why I referred to the dream—that in order to become clairvoyant in the astral body, it is necessary to always have, so to speak, a clear mental image of the confrontation with one’s own being. Just as one does not live healthily in physical life if one is not fully conscious, so too does one not live healthily in the soul in relation to the world that is higher than the physical world if one does not constantly observe oneself. In the physical world, one is oneself; in the higher spiritual world, one relates to oneself as one relates in the physical world to a thought that represents a past experience. One looks inwardly at such a thought, which represents a past experience. One relates to it as one does to a memory. Just as one relates to a thought in the sensory world, so in the spiritual world one knows that one is looking at oneself, observing oneself. One must always be present with oneself in the things one experiences in the spiritual world. And this is, in essence, the one and only mental image that is placed within things—over which one initially has no power, as I mentioned earlier—and which also applies to the spiritual world, so that one masters things, that one is the ruling power. One’s own being is like the center of gravity around which everything is grouped. How one behaves in the spiritual world is evident in one’s own being. One realizes: This is how one is in the spiritual world. — Let us suppose one is in the spiritual world and perceives something incorrect, that is, one behaves incorrectly through the occult writings. Yes, if one handles the occult writings incorrectly and perceives oneself as the center of gravity around which everything is grouped, then one experiences in one’s own being: This is how you appear, because you have done something incorrectly; now you must correct it! — You can tell from the way you become what you have done. If I want to illustrate it by way of comparison, I would say: Suppose you are here in the physical world, but you are not within yourself, but around yourself, and you say to someone: It is now half past eleven — but that is not true. And in that moment you look at yourself, how you stick out your tongue and say: That’s not you! — And now you begin to correct yourself until it is right, and until you say: It is twenty minutes past nine! — Then the tongue goes back in. So look at yourself to see if you are behaving correctly in the spiritual world.

[ 16 ] These are the things that might be characterized by such grotesque images, yet everyone will sense that they are meant to be taken far more seriously than anything that can be said about the physical world. That is precisely the point: that we first acquire an understanding of the supersensible worlds through the power of thought we already possess for the physical world. In this way, we free our thinking, which otherwise truly remains on the leash of the physical world. In earlier times, people possessed an atavistic, elemental clairvoyance. They were capable of having imaginations and so on, as well as inspirations. But the fact that they form concepts about the physical world today represents a more perfect state of humanity compared to the past. In the time when people had atavistic clairvoyance, they were simply unable to think properly. And for proper thinking to emerge, the power that was previously required for clairvoyance had to be directed toward thinking. And when a person today develops clairvoyant powers in certain areas of life that have not been developed as described by Spiritual Science, this means: They have inherited them from earlier times, because as a clairvoyant in those areas of life where clairvoyance is present, they have not yet attained mature judgment. But we are moving ever closer to an age in which mature judgment must first be present, and only then can clairvoyance develop again from that mature judgment. So if someone appears today who, without having done serious exercises, without having, let us say, delved into Spiritual Science accordingly—for Spiritual Science itself, if one delves into it correctly, can be the best exercise for bringing out the old clairvoyance—if such a person displays certain psychic abilities, a certain clairvoyance or something else, this indicates not that they are ahead of others in their development, but that they have fallen behind. One need not yet have reached the stage of clear thinking if one develops atavistic abilities in the soul today. So when the question arises today: Which soul is, so to speak, ahead in its development: the one that judges soundly with ordinary understanding—and with this ordinary understanding can also, if free of prejudice, comprehend Spiritual Science—that is, the one that first forms a view of spiritual worlds and senses through understanding, or a person who brings forth all manner of things clairvoyantly from within? — then the personality with sound judgment is the more advanced one. And one goes most astray when one allows oneself to be impressed by such atavistic clairvoyant abilities. If one allows oneself to be led to believe that such a personality represents a particularly developed soul, one is always mistaken. For the fact that this soul displays such abilities means that it has not yet undergone certain things that had to be undergone during the time of clairvoyance. That is why it is making up for it today. The most grotesque thing is when, within the Spiritual Science movement, the belief arises that someone who possesses a certain degree of clairvoyance, without having penetrated Spiritual Science, must have been something more significant in the past. He is certainly something less significant than the one who possesses sound judgment regarding things.

[ 17 ] It is now of the utmost importance that our Spiritual Science movement works specifically toward having a certain circle of people who see through these things, who truly understand them, and who are thus, above all, capable of making the following judgment: Spiritual Science must emerge in the present, for one must pass through Spiritual Science; one must pass through an understanding of Spiritual Science in order to make progress.

[ 18 ] It is of the utmost importance that this occurs. Certainly, there are teething problems in all areas—in the various spheres of human life and, of course, within those movements that emerge in the world as spiritual currents. And the teething troubles of Spiritual Science are all too easy to understand, because Spiritual Science naturally aims to provide people with what has been attained through clairvoyant consciousness. But you see how this must be characterized. That it must be characterized in such a way that it does not at all appeal to human convenience to become as clairvoyant as present and future humanity demands. This requires something quite different from merely allowing things to come to one. It involves being present at every moment, maintaining self-control, and being able to observe oneself as soon as one ascends into the spiritual world. This is what must become widely understood. It is more comfortable to let something come to oneself that approaches people like a dream, ebbing and flowing. One would like to experience the spiritual world exactly as one experiences the physical-sensory world. This is a remnant from the ancient times of human cultural and spiritual development, because in the old clairvoyance, things were experienced in such a way that one did not actually “know” them, and therefore it could well be the case today that one would like to experience the spiritual world in such a way that one does not actually “know” it. People underestimate what they know with crystal clarity. When one does arithmetic, for example, one follows a method. You are not personally involved in the process. When you add five and seven to make twelve, you are not involved in the way meant here—that is, you do not have to stand there, be present everywhere, to perform the task. That is why people do not like it when someone has an opinion about the world that they have formed themselves. As soon as you can show people just anything—something you weren’t present for—they’re happy, tremendously happy! But if someone comes along and says: He knows about the spiritual world, knows it in such a way that he’s present—then people say: Oh, he knows that! That’s a completely conscious process; it’s not objective. — But when someone comes who has a vision of light and has no idea how they produce it, then people say: That is objective, completely objective! That is something one can believe in. — But that is precisely the most significant point in our Spiritual Science, in the spiritual current that corresponds to true Spiritual Science, that one tries to form clear mental images. Precisely because Spiritual Science is still something new, but of course the longing for the spiritual world and for knowledge of the spiritual world is now awakening in human souls, that is why people everywhere, wherever something still emerges from the old world of clairvoyance and clairsentience, try to pick up on it, to gather it, so that they can then believe they are doing something quite special by preserving the old things. But this is our task: to see clearly in this area! We must realize that it is no less valuable when someone offers fully conscious advice regarding a spiritual healing process. But people will value that less than when someone comes along who has the story “under control,” who surrenders entirely to dark feelings, who doesn’t “know” at all; for then one has that dark, blissful feeling: This comes from something unknown! — And don’t we hear people saying at every turn: What we can understand doesn’t interest us at all; it’s the incomprehensible that draws us in! That is the sublime, the divine!

[ 19 ] Indeed, it is necessary not only that the individual truths of Spiritual Science gradually take root in our souls, but also that we develop a clear, confident perspective regarding the circumstances that have just been touched upon and that have become apparent to us as I attempted, starting from the characteristics of dreams, to show how true clairvoyance presupposes an active exercise of the soul comparable to writing. My book *The Threshold of the Spiritual World* was written to shed ever greater clarity on these matters. Whoever understands it will grasp the fundamental essence, the very core of what matters most in our movement. That is why it must be pointed out again and again—even though it has often been done over the years—because so much depends on it: whoever truly wishes to penetrate Spiritual Science must acquire a sound perspective on what is truly spiritual scientific. Then we will gradually become a society that can set itself the task of having a truly healing effect on everything that belongs to the realm of spiritual life.

[ 20 ] We will continue discussing what we began today—a description of the dream world as it is perceived in the spiritual realms—at the next opportunity.