The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] Last time, I spoke to you about the three encounters the human soul has with the regions of the spiritual world. I will have a bit more to say on this subject, and on this occasion, the opportunity will also arise to answer a question posed by our friends following the last public lecture at the Architektenhaus regarding the forces that lead to the realization of karma, destiny, and external fate from a previous incarnation. I have been told that this is a difficult concept to understand. I therefore intend to return to this topic in the course of these lectures. However, it would be advisable to do so only after we have discussed a number of other points, which may then help bring about a full understanding of this matter. Today, however, in order to make the discussion of the three encounters in the spiritual world even clearer, I would like to insert, so to speak, an anecdotal remark that seems particularly important to me to share with you at this very moment.

[ 2 ] When we consider which ideas and concepts have particularly taken root in the souls of all people, people of all educational levels—through the spiritual development of the past few centuries, we must draw attention to how this spiritual education of the past few centuries has strongly pushed for the world’s development and humanity’s place within it to be understood solely in terms of scientific concepts. Certainly, there are still very many people today who believe that they have not shaped their minds or souls according to scientific concepts. But these people do not realize the deeper foundations of their mental development; they do not know how scientific concepts have crept into their minds in a one-sided way and determine not only all thinking but, in particular, all feeling in a certain way. For anyone who thinks today in terms of the conventional concepts held by everyone in regions with a general school education—anyone who shapes their mind in connection with these concepts, proceeding from them—simply cannot come to feel the proper, true relationship between what we call the moral world, the world of moral feelings, and the world of external facts. When we reflect today, in the spirit of our times, on how the Earth—indeed, how the entire celestial structure—might have developed, and how it might reach a certain final state, we are thinking in terms of purely external, sensually perceptible facts. Just consider how profoundly significant it is for souls—even if they do not always realize it—that there is the so-called Kant-Laplace theory of the origin of the world: From a purely material cosmic nebula—for it is conceived as purely material—the Earth, indeed the entire cosmic structure, is said to have formed according to purely physical and chemical laws; it is said to have developed in accordance with these laws and, so people believe, will also meet its end according to these laws. A time will come when this cosmic structure will come to a close just as mechanically as it came into being.

[ 3 ] Certainly, I’ll say it again: There are many people today who resist thinking about the matter in exactly this way. But that is not the point; for it is never the ideas we form that matter, but rather the impulses of the mind from which these ideas are formed. The idea I have just developed is a purely materialistic one; it is the kind of idea about which Herman Grimm says that a piece of rotten bone, around which a hungry dog circles, is a more appetizing sight than this cosmic edifice conceived in Kantian-Laplacian terms. But it was able to arise; it was able to take shape. And not only has it been able to take shape, but for the vast majority of people it reaches, it is something that makes sense. And there are only a few people who ask, as Herman Grimm does, how future generations of scholars will come to terms with pondering how, as he puts it, this madness could have arisen in our time at all; how it was possible that, in some epoch, this madness regarding the origin of the world could have seemed plausible to many people. There are indeed very few individuals who ask such questions—who ask them from a healthy state of mind. And those who do ask such questions—well, they are regarded, at least in these fields, as a sort of eccentric. But as I said, it is not the ideas formed in this way that matter; it is the impulses of the soul that matter. Certain mental tendencies have given rise to these ideas, and even though they originated with scholars and are presented to people today in such a way that most people still believe the world did not come into being solely through such mechanical forces, but that all manner of divine forces also played a part, it was nevertheless possible for such ideas to take shape. And it has been possible for the human mind—the state of the human soul—to take on such a form that a purely mechanical conception of the origin of the world could indeed take shape. This means that at the core of the human soul lies a tendency to form materialistic conceptions. And this tendency is not limited to the few scholars and others who believe in it, but is widespread among all kinds of people. It’s just that most people today are still too timid to boldly—well, I would say—become Haeckelians and to conceive of everything spiritual solely in material terms. People lack the courage. They still tolerate the existence of such spiritual things alongside the material; they do not reflect on it.

[ 4 ] If this conception, as it has been characterized, holds true, then there is room for the spiritual—and specifically, room for the moral—only in a certain way. For just think about it: If the world had truly come into being as the Kant-Laplacean theory conceives it, and if the world were to find its grave solely through physical forces—and in that grave were buried all human beings with their ideas, feelings, and impulses of the will—what would then become, for example—setting aside everything else—of the entire moral order of the world? What would have become of it? What would it mean then, if we had once said—let us suppose the state of the universal grave had come to pass—“This is good, this is evil; this is right, this is wrong”? It would mean forgotten concepts, swept away as something that might not even—indeed, if this world order is correct—live on in any memory of the soul. That is to say, the situation would be as follows: Through purely mechanical causes, through physical, perhaps through chemical forces, the world came into being and is perishing. From these forces, phenomena rise up like bubbles, representing human beings. Within these human beings, moral concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, arise. But the entire world slips back into grave-like silence. All of right and wrong, “good and evil,” has simply been an illusion of human beings, forgotten and lost once the world has become a “grave.” The only thing that remains for the moral world order, after all, is that people feel—as long as the episode lasts, the one that unfolds from the initial state to the final state—that they need such concepts to live together; they must develop moral concepts, but these moral concepts cannot be anchored anywhere in a purely mechanical world order. Isn’t it true that a natural force—heat, electricity—intervenes in the natural order and asserts itself within it; whereas the moral force—which, if the mechanical world order were correct, would exist only in people’s imagination—would not intervene in the natural order. It would not be something like heat, which expands bodies, or light, which illuminates bodies, makes them visible, and permeates the world and space; rather, this moral force is there—it hovers, as it were, like a great illusion over the mechanical world order and fades away, vanishes, when the world turns to dust.

[ 5 ] People simply don’t think this idea through enough. That is why they do not resist a mechanical world order, but rather allow it to persist—not out of good nature, I won’t say, but simply out of convenience. And when one has a certain emotional need, one then says: Yes, knowledge simply compels us to conceive of such a mechanical world order; faith demands something else of us, so we place faith alongside knowledge—we believe, in addition to mechanical nature, in something else that we have a certain inner emotional need to believe in. — That is convenient. One need not rebel against what, for example, Herman Grimm perceives as the madness of contemporary science; one need not rebel. But there is truly no inner justification for this approach for those who wish to think their thoughts through to the end, who truly wish to come to the end of their thoughts.

[ 6 ] And if one asks oneself why it is that people today live so blindly in a conceptual impossibility—to the point of accepting such a conceptual impossibility—the answer lies—as strange as this may sound when one first has to familiarize oneself with the idea —in the fact that, over the course of the last few centuries, people have more or less forgotten how to conceive of the Christ Mystery—which ought to stand at the center of modern life—in its true, real sense. For the way in which modern people think about the Christ Mystery is such that it radiates out into all their other thinking and feeling. And the fact is—and we may well have to speak about this very point in the near future—that the way a person relates to the Mystery of Christ since the Mystery of Golgotha serves, I would say, as a kind of yardstick for their entire world of concepts and feelings. If a person cannot grasp the Mystery of Christ as something truly real, then they cannot develop ideas and concepts—even with regard to the rest of their worldview—that are imbued with reality, that truly engage with reality.

[ 7 ] This is what we want to keep very clearly in mind above all else today. If people truly think the way I have described—and the way most people today actually think, more or less unconsciously—then the world breaks down, on the one hand, into the mechanical order of nature, and on the other hand, into the moral order of the world. Now, timid souls—who often consider themselves very courageous—incorporate the Christ Mystery into the purely moral world order; and it is incorporated into the purely moral world order by all those who see nothing in this Christ Mystery other than that, at a certain time, a great—let us even say the greatest—teacher of the earthly world appeared, and that what matters first and foremost is his teaching. But if one regards Christ merely as the—albeit greatest—teacher of humanity, then this view is, in a certain sense, entirely compatible with this division of the world into the natural order and the moral world order. For, of course, even if the earth were to have formed itself as the mechanical world order depicts it, and were to perish in such a way that it would one day become a universal grave, a great teacher might still appear who could indeed do much to improve and instruct humanity. His teaching might be sublime, but it would not alter the fact that, after the end of all things, the whole would become a grave, and even Christ’s teaching would be blown away and obliterated, not even remaining as a memory in any form of existence. The fact that one does not wish to think this way does not change the matter. If one adheres at all to the purely mechanical world order, then one would have to think this way.

[ 8 ] Now everything depends on recognizing that with the Mystery of Golgotha, something took place that belongs not only to the moral world order but to the entire, all-encompassing world order; something that belongs not only to moral reality—which, in the sense of the mechanical world order, cannot even exist—but to the entirety of intensive reality.

[ 9 ] You see, the best way for us to understand what this is all about is to reflect a little on the three encounters I mentioned last time—but from a different perspective than I explained recently. Every time, I said, when a person sleeps—in that state between falling asleep and waking up—they encounter beings of the spiritual world; beings of the spiritual world who are substantially similar to their spiritual self, as we are accustomed to calling it. This means: When a person awakens from sleep, they emerge having encountered spiritual beings and carry the aftereffects of that encounter—even if they remain unconscious of it—into their outer physical life. You see, what takes place in the soul during these everyday encounters relates in a certain way directly to the human future. People who do not engage with spiritual science know very little today about what actually takes place in the depths of the soul when a person sleeps. Dreams, which might reveal something to ordinary life about these processes during sleep, do indeed reveal something, but they do so in such a way that the truth cannot easily come to light. When a person wakes up from a dream or recalls dreams, these dreams are usually connected to certain images they have already acquired in life—to reminiscences. But this is merely the garment of what actually lives in the dream, or rather, in the state of sleep. When you clothe the dream in such ideas that come from your life, these ideas are merely the garment; for in the dream, what actually takes place in the soul during sleep comes to light in a different guise. And what takes place in the soul during sleep relates neither to the past nor even to the present, but rather to the future. During sleep, forces are formed that, for the human being, can be compared to the germinative forces that develop within a plant for the next plant. As the plant grows, the germinative forces for the next year are already developing within it. These germinative forces then culminate in seed formation; that is when they become visible. But as the plant grows and matures, the germinative forces for the next plant are already present. In the same way, the germinative forces—whether for the next incarnation or for the Jupiter period—are present in the human being, and the human being develops them primarily during sleep. The forces the human being develops there do not relate directly to individual events; they relate more to the fundamental forces of the next incarnation, for example—but they do relate precisely to these forces of the next incarnation. Thus, during sleep, the human being works on the seeds for the next incarnation—and, in general, toward the future. So when the human being sleeps, they are already in the future.

[ 10 ] I do not wish to leave too much uncertainty in your mind regarding this matter, so I will say this first: The next incarnation is to this state of sleep what the knowledge of the next day is to it. We know about the next day—simply from experience—that the sun will rise again, and roughly how the day will unfold, even if we do not know what the weather will be like or how individual events will affect our lives. Thus, the soul is indeed a prophet in sleep, but like a prophet who looks only at the great, cosmic things, and not at the weather. So anyone who were to hold the notion that the details of the soul’s coming incarnation present themselves in sleep would fall into the same error as someone who believes that, because they know with absolute certainty that the sun will rise and set next Sunday—and because they know certain general things—they can also know what the weather will be like. None of this, however, changes the fact that during sleep we are dealing with our future. Thus, the forces that shape our future—forces that are substantially akin to our spiritual self—encounter us in the midst of sleep.

[ 11 ] Another, further encounter—if I leave out the second encounter—is then the third encounter, about which I said last time that it occurs only once in the entire course of human life, in midlife. When a person is in their thirties, I said, they encounter what can be called the Father Principle, while every night they encounter the Spirit Principle. This encounter with the Father Principle is of great significance for the following reason:—and you know this, for I have explained that it must also occur for those who die before the age of thirty; it only occurs in the course of one’s life if one lives through one’s thirties; otherwise, it occurs earlier in the event of a premature death—because through this encounter, a person is enabled to imprint the experiences of the present life so deeply that they can carry over into the next incarnation. Thus, what constitutes an encounter with the Father Principle is precisely related to the earthly life of the next incarnation, whereas our encounter with the Spirit Principle radiates into the entire future, throughout the whole of future life, including the life that unfolds between death and a new birth.

[ 12 ] The fact is that the laws in which this once-in-a-lifetime encounter is woven are not earthly laws, but laws that have remained within Earth’s evolution just as they were during the Moon’s evolution. And these laws are connected, on the physical side, with our physical ancestry—and indeed with everything that physical heredity entails. This physical heredity is, of course, only one side of the matter; it is based on spiritual laws, as I have already sufficiently indicated. Thus, everything that unfolds in such a way that it requires an encounter with the Father-principle points back to the past. This is a legacy of the past; it points back to the lunar stage of evolution, back to earlier incarnations, just as what takes place during every sleep points toward the future. Just as what takes place during sleep forms the seed for the future, so too is what takes place when human beings are born as descendants of their ancestors—and also carry over from earlier incarnations precisely what must be carried over from those earlier incarnations—something that has remained from the past. Both of these—that which relates to the future and that which relates to the past—strive, as it were, to break free from the natural order. The farmer still goes to sleep at sunset and rises at sunrise. But as human beings advance further in so-called civilization, they detach themselves from the natural order. And in the cities, one already encounters people—though this is not common—who go to sleep in the morning and get up in the evening. Human beings detach themselves from this mere natural order; this is inherent in the very possibility of their development of freedom. Thus, in a sense, because they are preparing a future that does not yet exist, human beings are torn out of the natural order. They are also torn out of the natural order by bringing the past—namely, the lunar past—into the present. For no one can derive from general laws of nature any necessity for Hans Müller to be born precisely, say, in the year 1914; there is no such necessity as there is with the rising of the sun or other natural processes, because the natural order of the moon prevails there. Everything there was just as it is in the order of our birth on Earth; during the lunar period, everything was just like that.

[ 13 ] But man is truly situated within the natural order only insofar as it concerns what is of immediate significance for his present, what relates directly to his earthly existence. While, in relation to the Father principle and the Spirit principle, he carries within himself both the past and the future, he is bound to the natural order in relation to that encounter which, as I have said, takes place in the course of the year and is still connected even now with the encounter with Christ. If they were not bound to the natural order, the result would be that one person would celebrate Christmas in December, another in March, and so on. But even though peoples differ in various ways—even with regard to how they celebrate Christmas—there is still something of a festivity that always has some connection to this encounter, to what I meant, and it falls within the last days of December. In relation to this encounter, which is embedded in the course of the year, human beings—precisely because this is their present—stand in direct connection with the course of nature; there they conform to the course of nature, whereas, with regard to the past and the future, they have stepped outside the course of nature—and have been doing so for millennia.

[ 14 ] In ancient times, however, people also conformed to the course of nature with regard to the past and the future. For example, in ancient times in the Germanic lands, childbirth was governed by the course of nature. For childbirth was permitted to take place only at a very specific time of year, as it was regulated by the mysteries. It was thus embedded in the cycle of the seasons. And in ancient times—in the distant pre-Christian era—conception and birth in the Germanic lands were governed by that which has survived only as faint echoes in the form of myth: the Hertha cult. For in ancient times, the Hertha cult entailed nothing less than ensuring that the days of conception occurred only at the time when Hertha, with her chariot, drew near to humanity; and once she had withdrawn again, they were no longer permitted. This meant, however, that in those days anyone who was not born within a certain season was considered dishonorable—because they fell outside the natural order with regard to their human existence. This was just as adapted to the natural order in ancient times as sleeping and waking were adapted to it. People simply went to sleep when the sun set and woke up at dawn. But these things have shifted. What cannot shift, however, is the middle ground: the adaptation to the cycle of the year. For it is through this adaptation to the cycle of the year that something is to be—and must be—preserved in the human soul.

[ 15 ] What, then, is the whole purpose of human development on Earth? The whole purpose of human evolution on Earth is for human beings to adapt to the Earth, to internalize the conditions of Earth’s evolution; to carry into the future of their own evolution what the Earth can give them—and I do not mean merely in a single incarnation, but throughout all incarnations—what the Earth can provide for their future development. That is the purpose of Earth’s evolution. This purpose of Earth’s evolution can only be realized through the fact that human beings, so to speak, gradually learned to forget their connection to the cosmic, to the heavenly powers. Human beings learned to forget their connection to the heavenly powers. We know, of course, that in ancient times human beings possessed an atavistic clairvoyance, but it was precisely within this atavistic clairvoyance that the heavenly powers worked within them. At that time, human beings still had their connection to the heavenly powers; in a sense, the Kingdom of Heaven reached into the human soul. This had to change so that human beings could develop their freedom. Human beings had to have nothing left of the heavenly kingdom in their outlook or in their immediate perception, so that they might become attuned to the earth. But it is precisely for this reason that the possibility arose for human beings to become materialistic during the most extreme phase of their attunement to the earth—namely, in the fifth epoch, in which we ourselves are now living. Materialism is merely the most radical, most extreme expression of humanity’s affinity with the Earth. But this would mean that humanity would truly succumb to the Earth if nothing else were to intervene. Humanity would have to become akin to the Earth, gradually sharing the Earth’s fate entirely. It would have to follow the paths that the Earth itself takes; it would have to integrate itself completely into the Earth’s development, if nothing else were to occur. It would have to, as it were, tear itself away from the entire cosmos along with the Earth and bind its fate entirely to the Earth’s fate.

[ 16 ] But that was not what was intended for humanity; rather, something different was intended for humanity. On the one hand, human beings were meant to connect properly with the Earth, but a message was to come down from the heavenly, spiritual world that would, even though they are “by their very nature bound to the Earth,” carry them beyond this earthly bond. And this bringing down of the heavenly message took place through the Mystery of Golgotha. Therefore, on the one hand, the being who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha had to assume human nature, but on the other hand, had to carry within himself heavenly nature. But this means: We must not merely imagine Christ Jesus as one who, within the course of human evolution, develops as just another human being—even if he is the Highest—but rather as one who takes on heavenly being, who does not merely spread a teaching, but who brings into the earth that which comes from heaven. That is why it is important to understand what the baptism of John in the Jordan actually is: that it is not merely a moral act—I am not saying “not” a moral act, but “not merely” a moral act—but a real act; that something happens there that is as real as natural phenomena are real, that is as real as when I heat something with some source of heat and the heat passes into the heated object—that the Christ-essence passes into the human being Jesus of Nazareth at the baptism by John. This is certainly moral in the highest degree, but it is also a reality within the course of nature, just as natural phenomena are real. And what matters is that this be understood: that we are not merely dealing with something derived from rationalistic human concepts—which always correspond only to the mechanical, physical, or chemical course of nature—but that it is something which, as an idea, is at the same time so deeply embedded in real reality, just as the laws of nature are present in real reality—or, more precisely, the forces of nature are present in real reality,

[ 17 ] Once you grasp that, other concepts will also become much more real than they are at present. You see, the ancient alchemist—we don’t want to discuss alchemy right now, but we want to look at what the alchemist had in mind; whether that is justified or not, we won’t discuss that—that may be the subject of another consideration—he had in mind that through his imaginings, something is not merely imagined, but something actually happens. Let’s say: He burned incense. And when he then formed the idea or spoke it aloud, he sought to infuse that idea with such power that the incense truly took on form. He sought concepts that have the power to intervene in external natural reality—not merely to remain within the egoistic realm of the human being, but to intervene in natural reality. Why? Because he also held the conception of the Mystery of Golgotha—that something happened there which intervenes in the natural course of the Earth, and which is just as much a fact as a natural process is a fact of nature.

[ 18 ] You see, this is the basis for a significant difference that emerged in the second half of the Middle Ages and continued into more recent times—into our fifth world period, which followed the Greco-Latin one. During the era of the Crusades—the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, and even 16th centuries—there were certain women in particular who immersed their souls so deeply in mysticism that they experienced the inner reality it brought them as a kind of wedding with the spiritual realm, whether with Christ or something else. Numerous ascetic nuns and others celebrated such mystical weddings. I do not wish to dwell today on the nature of these inner mystical unions; but it was precisely a process taking place within the soul that could then only be expressed in words—a process that unfolded, so to speak, within the realm of ideas, feelings, and even the words into which those feelings can be clothed. In response to this, Valentin Andreae, drawing on certain ideas and spiritual-scientific contexts, set forth his *The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz*. This chymical wedding—we would say “chemical wedding” today—is also a human experience. But if you read through it—this “Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz”—you will see that it is not merely an emotional experience, but something that grips the whole human being, something that is not merely expressed in words; something that is not merely presented as an emotional experience in the world, but as a real process, a natural process, in which a person does something to themselves that becomes like a natural process. Thus, Valentin Andreae intends his *Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz* to be something more deeply imbued with reality than, say, the purely mystical wedding of Mechthild of Magdeburg, who was a mystic. Through the mystical wedding of the nuns, something was done solely for the subjectivity of the human being; through the alchemical wedding, the human being surrendered himself to the world, and through him something was to be accomplished for the whole world, just as natural processes accomplish something for the whole world. This, in turn, is conceived in an eminently Christian sense. People who thought in more concrete terms—even if only in the one-sided sense of the ancient alchemists—wanted concepts through which they could master reality in the right way, through which they could intervene more effectively in reality—concepts that truly had something to do with reality. The materialistic age has, for the time being, cast a veil over such concepts. And people today, while they believe they are thinking about reality quite correctly, live far more in illusions than those they despise—for example, the people of the alchemical era—who strove for concepts through which reality could be mastered.

[ 19 ] What, then, can people do with their concepts today? We are seeing right now in our own age what people can achieve with their concepts: illusions, empty concepts. That is what people today chase after like idols: empty concepts that have nothing to do with reality. For reality is attained only by immersing oneself in reality itself, not by forming concepts in any arbitrary way. And yet, even in the most ordinary things of daily life, one can discern the difference between concepts imbued with reality and unreal concepts. Only most people today fail to recognize this. They are so infinitely satisfied with mere shadows of concepts that have no reality. Imagine, for example, that someone were to stand up today and give a speech in which they said—well, let’s suppose someone said: A new era must come; it is already heralding itself—a completely new era in which a person must be judged solely by their own merits, where every person is evaluated based on what they are capable of achieving! — Well, who today wouldn’t say: “Now that’s something spoken from the very depths of our time’s understanding!” But as long as these concepts remain empty shells, no matter how beautiful they may be, they are simply not imbued with reality. For it does not matter that someone pursues the principle that every person should be placed in the appropriate position according to their abilities, if they are subsequently convinced that it is precisely their nephew who is the most capable. It does not matter what concepts or ideas one has, but rather that one is able to penetrate reality with one’s concepts, to recognize reality! Having principles, having ideals—that is all very well; it is a great delight, and expressing them is often an even greater delight. But what is necessary is to truly immerse oneself in reality, to recognize reality, and to penetrate the real. We sink ever deeper into what our infinitely sad age has brought about if we continue to indulge in this idolatry of empty concepts and conceptual shadows, if we fail to come to terms with the realization that having beautiful concepts and beautiful ideas, and to articulate beautiful concepts and beautiful ideas, is not worth a single grain of gunpowder if it is not connected to the will to immerse oneself in reality and to recognize reality. And if one plunges into reality, then one finds in this reality not merely the material, but one also finds the Spirit. It is the Spirit alone that is being turned away from when people today practice idolatry with conceptual shadows and empty shells. But this is also the immeasurable misfortune of our time: that people intoxicate themselves with beautiful words. And this is at the same time un-Christian; for the fundamental principle of Christianity is that Christ did not merely instill teachings into Jesus of Nazareth, but drew himself into him—that is, united himself so closely with earthly reality, entered into this earthly reality, and thereby became the living message from the cosmos.

[ 20 ] The book that, when read correctly, is the most wonderful educational tool for understanding reality is, after all, the New Testament. But this New Testament must be gradually translated into our language. Today’s translations no longer fully convey the original meaning, but when the ancient meaning is rendered in the immediate language of the day, the Gospel is the very best means of leading people to thinking steeped in reality, because the Gospel itself, in every line, does not contain the kinds of thought forms that lead to conceptual shadows and empty conceptual shells. We simply need to grasp things in their deeper reality today. It might sound almost trivial to speak of “intoxication with concepts,” but this intoxication with concepts is so incredibly widespread today that what matters is not so much the concepts or ideas themselves—no matter how beautiful they may sound—but rather that the person expressing those concepts and ideas is grounded in reality. This is so incredibly difficult to grasp today. After all, almost everything that enters the public sphere today is judged solely by its content—specifically, by the content of its concepts. Otherwise, one would not have regarded the most idea-deficient documents—I’ll just mention, for example, the so-called peace note by Professor Wilson, or rather President Wilson, an empty shell, a mere patchwork of conceptual shadows—one would not have considered them to have any bearing on reality. Anyone with a sense for the shadowy nature of concepts could tell from this collection of mere conceptual shadows that it could, at best, come across as an absurdity—which might then constitute a certain reality. For what is needed today is precisely this: to acquire and seek out concepts saturated with reality. But this presupposes that people can become deeply, deeply connected to reality, that they are selfless enough to connect with what lives and weaves within reality. For one can see many things in the present that lead one away from this search for reality, lead one completely astray, and one does not notice these things.

[ 21 ] All sorts of things are happening that are most sorrowful to the connoisseur. For example, it is possible today for people to be moved—simply by the arrangement of words—by a number of speeches that have also been published; a number of speeches that are downright horrifying to anyone who focuses not on the words but on reality. Speeches have been delivered by a highly respected contemporary figure who, in one of his very first speeches, takes the position: Yes, with regard to one aspect of human beings, humans certainly belong to the natural order, and theologians do themselves a disservice if they do not leave the natural order to the pure natural scientists. — The speaker then goes on to explain: With regard to the natural order, humans are purely a mechanism; but the soul’s activities also depend on this mechanism.” — And what he describes as the soul’s activities is more or less everything the soul actually does. This, too, is to be left to the natural scientists. And for theology, nothing remains but the consolation: Everything has been ceded to the natural sciences, but we are to do nothing but talk! Then, of course, one can only speak in empty phrases. Moreover, the speeches are structured in such a way that they contain discontinuities—I will return to this entire issue in the next lectures and discuss it in more detail—so that the next thought, if it is truly understood, cannot even be conceived of in any way in connection with the preceding thought with which it is linked. But the whole thing sounds wonderful. And in the preface to these lectures on so-called “life design,” it states that these lectures were recently delivered to thousands of people, and that in any case many thousands more will feel the need to seek solace in these lectures during these serious times. These lectures are by the famous theologian Hunzinger and are included in the Quelle and Meyer Collection— I believe it’s called “Science and Education,” and they are, in fact, among the most dangerous things of our time, because despite their beautiful-sounding—indeed, intoxicating-sounding—content, they actually confuse people’s thought processes, since the ideas lack any coherence, and because the whole thing, once stripped of its intoxicating words, is nothing but nonsense, Nevertheless, the praise heaped upon these works has spread to incredibly wide circles—I will demonstrate to you in detail in one of my upcoming lectures what intellectual confusion lies within them—and no one bothers to examine the forms of thought; instead, everyone stops at the shadows of the words.

[ 22 ] Yes, what constitutes external reality is entirely connected to what a person develops internally. If a person develops concepts that are divorced from reality, then reality must fall into confusion, and conditions such as those we see today arise. One can no longer judge the matter based on the external conditions one encounters, but must judge it based on what has often been developing in human minds not just for years, but for decades, perhaps even longer. That is where the cause lies. That is where one must look. But everything depends on the fact that Christ is not merely taken in terms of the content of his teachings, but that the Mystery of Golgotha is viewed in its reality, in its truth—that it is recognized that something truly supernatural has indeed united with the earthly through the person of Jesus of Nazareth. For then one will come to realize that the moral realm is not merely that which vanishes and passes away when the earth or even the heavenly structure has become a grave, but that the present earth and the present heavenly structure can become a grave, just as the present plant turns to dust. But just as the seed of the next plant is contained within the present plant, so too is the seed of the next world contained within the present world. And human beings are connected to this seed. Only does this seed require a connection with Christ, so that it does not—just as a plant seed, if not fertilized, decays with the plant’s dust—decay with the grave of the earth. That the moral world order in the present is the germinative power of the future natural order—this is the most real thought there can be. The moral is not merely something contrived; when imbued with reality, the moral exists now as a seed for later external realities.

[ 23 ] No worldview of the kind described by Herman Grimm—who said that a piece of rotten bone around which a hungry dog prowls is a more appetizing sight than the Kant-Laplacean world order—can arrive at this idea. This idea—that the moral has within itself the power to become natural, that it is the seed of the natural, of the natural of the future—is something the mechanical world order never grasps. And why not? Well, it must, after all, live in delusion. For imagine if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place; then things would be just as the Kant-Laplacean theory envisions them. You need only remove the Mystery of Golgotha from the earth, and then this theory would be correct. For the Earth had to enter a state at some point which, if left to its own devices, would have caused the human condition to end in the desolation of the grave. This had to happen so that humanity could attain freedom through its connection to the Earth. Humanity does not find this grave because, at the very moment of crisis, the Earth was fertilized by Christ, because Christ descended—and because Christ is the opposite force to that leading to a grave-like end, namely, the force of the seed—to carry humanity up into the spiritual world; that is to say, when the Earth becomes a grave, when it follows its destiny according to the Kant-Laplacean theory, not to allow what lies within it as a seed to perish, but to carry it over into the future. Thus, the Christian-moral world order conceives of what Goethe calls the “higher nature within nature,” and one can say: Whoever can conceive of the Mystery of Golgotha in the right way as a reality can also think in a real way; such a person can also form concepts imbued with reality.

[ 24 ] But this is necessary, and it is also what people must learn above all else. For as they have entered this fifth post-Atlantean epoch, people have sought either to form concepts that intoxicate them or to form concepts that blind them. Concepts that intoxicate have often been developed in the realm of religion; concepts that blind have often been developed in the realm of the natural sciences. A concept must be intoxicating if, while acknowledging the purely natural order on the one hand, it focuses solely on something moral—as in the case of Kant, who placed these two worlds side by side, consigning one to knowledge and the other to faith. Such concepts, once developed in the moral realm, can intoxicate, and in that intoxication one fails to realize that one has in fact inevitably succumbed to the deathly silence of the world, into which all that constitutes the moral order of the world has faded and sunk. Or concepts can blind us, as is the case with the scientific, economic, and—forgive me, this is hard to swallow—political concepts of the present day. These concepts blind us when they are not formed in such a way that they are connected to the spiritually comprehended world, but are instead formed solely from the fragments of the external so-called “actual”—that is, sensually perceived—reality. So that everyone sees only as far as the end of their nose, that is, judges blindly based solely on what they can see with their eyes and grasp with acquired concepts between birth and death, without forming concepts that are steeped in reality because they are imbued with the spiritual, with an understanding of spiritual reality.

[ 25 ] We must repeatedly and time and again draw attention to what our age so particularly needs—truly needs. For even history often appears in our time as nothing more than a shadow of a concept. How much is declaimed today—I mean, of what Fichte said to the German people! One can only truly understand what Fichte said to the German people by looking at Fichte’s entire life—a life so deeply rooted in reality. That is why, in my book *The Enigma of Man*, I have attempted to portray Fichte’s personality as it developed, showing how it was intertwined with reality from childhood onward. And one so dearly wishes that words like these—which speak of how concepts and ideas are imbued with reality—would not merely be heard superficially today, but would be taken deeply to heart; truly taken deeply to heart. Only then will we acquire a free, open eye—I mean the eye of the soul—for what our time so desperately needs. And every human being needs such a free, open eye of the soul. Anyone who has not made it a special task to reflect on precisely these facts I have touched upon here pays far too little attention to how conceptual shadows and empty phrases are exploited in our time, and how everything is designed to lead people either into intoxicating or into blinding concepts.

[ 26 ] Do not take what I said today as some kind of agitation, but rather as an attempt to express what is. People must certainly live in step with their times—and should do so—and they should not, when something is characterized in a certain way, interpret it as though it meant that everything is thereby rejected. But a counterbalance must be created. It is only natural today that the world is facing impulses that lead entirely into materialism. This cannot be stopped, for this drift toward materialism is connected to the deep need of our time. But a counterbalance must be created. I would say that all forces are bent on leading people firmly into materialism. This cannot be stopped; it is part of the nature of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. But the counterbalance must be created. A particularly effective means of driving people into materialism is something that is hardly noticed from this perspective: the motion picture. There is no better educational tool for materialism than the motion picture. For what one sees in the motion picture is not reality as human beings perceive it. Only an age that has as little understanding of reality as one that worships reality as idols in the sense of materialism can believe that the cinema offers reality. Another era would reflect on whether people on the street walk the same way as they do in the cinema; and then, when asking oneself, “What did you see?”—whether one truly had that image in mind as the cinema presents it. Ask yourself honestly—but truly, deeply honestly: Is what you have seen on the street closer to the still image a painter creates for you, or to the eerie, flickering image of the cinematograph? If you ask yourself honestly, you will say to yourself: What the painter depicts at rest resembles much more closely what you yourself see on the street. Consequently, while a person sits in front of the cinematograph, what the cinematograph offers does not take root in their ordinary powers of perception, but in a deeper, more ethereal layer than we normally experience in our perception. The person becomes ethereally wide-eyed. They develop eyes like a seal’s—only much larger—when they surrender themselves to the cinematograph. I mean this in an etheric sense. It does not merely affect what a person has in their consciousness, but it also has a materializing effect on their deepest subconscious. Please do not take this as a diatribe against the cinema. Let me state this explicitly once more: It is entirely natural that cinemas exist; the art of cinema will continue to develop more and more. That will be the path to materialism. A counterbalance must be created. This can only consist in the human being combining the craving for reality—which is developed through cinema—with something else. Just as this craving leads to a descent below sensory perception, so must the human being develop an ascent above sensory perception—that is, into spiritual reality. Then the cinema will do them no harm; they may then watch cinematic images as they please. But it is precisely through such things—if no counterbalance is created—that people are led not toward becoming earth-related as is necessary, but toward becoming ever more and more earth-related, until they are ultimately completely cut off from the spiritual world.