The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventeenth Lecture

[ 1 ] We can best come to terms with ideas that are meant to place us, as human beings, within the spiritual world by trying to orient ourselves through comparisons of the various facts of the world.

[ 2 ] What I want to talk about today can best be explained if I start with such a comparison—namely, by comparing our current consciousness as a humanity, which we must attain in accordance with the task of our time, with earlier stages of consciousness in the development of humanity.

[ 3 ] Think back for a moment to the Greeks’ sense of space—their ordinary sense of space, understood, of course, in the broader sense. You will easily realize that the Greeks, with their sense of space, actually encompassed only a part of Europe—their Greece and what bordered it, a part of Asia, a part of Africa—and that beyond this limited area, the world lay for them in a certain state of indeterminacy. One could say: That which formed the horizon of his consciousness was bordered on all sides by an indeterminacy for his consciousness. And this consciousness of his can be called—if the expression is permissible (it is, of course, clumsy, as expressions for such things always will be, since linguistic consciousness is not geared toward them)—this consciousness of the Greek can be called a “national consciousness.” Now you know that the essential aspect of the development of modern times for humanity and its consciousness lay in the fact that this “land consciousness” evolved into “earth consciousness,” that, for human consciousness, the surface of the earth was, so to speak, brought to a close. Human beings conceive of the Earth’s surface as spherical in shape, a result of the discoveries of modern history. From a world-historical perspective, the situation was such that, as this world consciousness—or rather, Earth consciousness—emerged from rural consciousness, a perspective on the extraterrestrial simultaneously took shape, one that is essentially mathematical and geometric in nature. The Copernican worldview emerged, and people imagined what lies beyond Earth in space in terms of mathematics and geometry—and, at most, mechanics. The Copernican-Newtonian worldview is, after all, essentially a mathematical-mechanical worldview. Naturally, the question should arise for every truly thinking person: Is that which lies beyond the earthly realm and can be perceived by humans in space truly exhausted by the image of conceiving it in mathematical-mechanical terms? It is evidently just as far from being exhausted as when the ancient Greeks confined themselves to imagining their own land—which they could survey from the horizon of their consciousness—and constructed the external world in a certain way, shaping it, so to speak, in the realm of the imagination. Modern humans do not, admittedly, shape the extraterrestrial realm with such a more poetic imagination as the ancient Greeks did with regard to what lay outside the territory of their conscious awareness, but modern humans do encompass what is around them with mathematical imagination. That, too, is imagination. And essentially, humanity today still stands firmly on this vantage point: imagining the Earth as a large sphere in outer space, and actually comprehending the extraterrestrial realm only through mathematical and mechanical concepts—which are purely mathematical at most for a few individuals who think somewhat more precisely—because the conceptualized notions of all manner of gravitational forces are omitted today by more level-headed people, and the extraterrestrial worldview is actually conceived of only mathematically.

[ 4 ] For us—and we need only take stock of what we have considered over the years in the realm of the humanities—the questions that must arise today are whether the time is ripe to breathe life into this mathematical-mechanical conception of space, this extraterrestrial conception of space, with something else—with something based on experience. For this mathematical-mechanical conception of space is by no means based on experience. It is entirely a product of the imagination. It is a construct. This concept of space—this Copernican, Keplerian, Newtonian concept of space—has been assembled and constructed from a relatively small number of observations. Now you will understand that, since there is as yet no way to physically explore the outer reaches of space, such an exploration can only take place in the spiritual-scientific sense. But in the spiritual-scientific sense, it can already take place today in a certain way. The mathematical-mechanical conception does not, after all, provide us with any real human content. In fact, the mathematical-mechanical conception tells us only something in abstract terms—something that does not even come close to the substance we require. After all, everything that mathematical physics and astrophysics have to tell us today about the extraterrestrial cosmos is cold, sober, and devoid of any real content. Yet we have already reached the point at which it is impossible to make further progress in human development if we remain stuck with a purely mechanical-mathematical worldview. Just as the ancient Greeks had a sense of the land, and humanity has developed a sense of the Earth since the beginning of what is commonly called modern history, so must human consciousness now expand into a sense of the world. And today, in the hour we still have available to devote to such reflections, I would like to offer you—at least briefly and in aphoristic form—some hints as to how this world consciousness, which is to take the place of mere earthly consciousness, should be shaped. We will, of course, still have much to do in the future when we must gather more precise—and also more conclusive, substantiating—evidence for what I will present to you today in the form of aphoristic outlines.

[ 5 ] As you know, research in the spiritual sciences is based on experiences gained through the soul. You have been given a large number of such experiences gained through the soul in my *Secret Science*. In this *Secret Science*, I have gone as far as is necessary for the general consciousness of humanity today. But we must continue to go further and further. What is written in my *Secret Science* must be deepened and expanded.

[ 6 ] Now, with regard to the coming, desired world consciousness—if I may use a comparison—we are in the position of a traveler sitting in a train. He looks out through the train car’s windows and imagines that he is sitting calmly on his seat. He forgets that the train is moving forward. He forgets the movement he is making forward along with the train. At first, he considers only those movements he makes when he stands up or moves, in relation to other people also sitting in the train car. Now, what this person experiences as such a traveler in the car is, at first, something very limited, and it can be expanded if he gets off the train from time to time, perhaps interrupting the journey in one city or another. Then, while what he experiences inside the train does not change, the content of his consciousness expands every time he gets off in a different city and has the experiences that he can have there. This then adds up to the content of his journey, and the abstract image of the journey becomes something concrete. The outline of the journey takes shape as what actually happens to one—the specific experiences in the individual cities—is incorporated into that outline. Through these experiences, one gains something that, through inner experience, confirms that one has moved forward and entered into different circumstances. One knows from these experiences that one was not at rest, that one could only delude oneself into thinking so while one was on the move.

[ 7 ] What I mean here is quite different from what is often said when the Copernican worldview itself is discussed. Of course, people also talk about all sorts of illusions we fall into when the Earth is in motion—believing we are at rest on Earth, when in fact we are moving along with the entire Earth. However, that is not what is meant here; rather, I would like to point to something else: namely, that a person can have certain purely inner experiences in the course of their life, and especially in the course of successive experiences that can be compared to experiences in cities—when one gets off a train and gets back on again—and thus, in a sense, pauses with regard to one’s inner soul experiences, with regard to what arises in the inner content of the experience. This could then serve as a guarantee that one is, so to speak, traveling through spaces in the world and experiencing something within these spaces that shows one: You, as a human being, are not at rest; you are on a genuine journey through the world. — Use this comparison to realize that such a thing can exist. The proof of this can, after all, lie only in actual experience. Realize that there can be such a thing as a varied experience in the state of the soul at successive moments, which assures you: You are, so to speak, at different points in the space of the world. We will see later that all of this is really only spoken of in comparative terms, that the difference between successive experiences points us to a much more qualitative aspect of space than the merely quantitative one that comes to mind when we speak of space. Anyone who truly has inner experiences—not merely the abstract experiences that are very often cited in a highly external sense when mysticism is discussed—knows that there is such a thing as what I have just hinted at. Anyone who has inner experiences can, in the course of a lifetime, notice differences between the state of their soul as it was in their thirtieth, fortieth, and fiftieth years of life. When reflecting on these inner experiences of the soul, they know that they have, so to speak, moved through the world, that they have sought out other places, and that their inner—if I may call them that—mystical experiences have changed. I am pointing you here to certain experiences that are, however, discussed only by those who do not take mysticism in an outwardly abstract sense, but rather as it truly and concretely presents itself in inner experience. The abstract mystic speaks, at the age of twenty-five, of the God who lives within him; at thirty, at forty, and so on until the end of his life. The one who truly knows how to grasp these inner experiences concretely also knows that these experiences change, as if on a journey through the worlds—a journey that is not the same as wandering around on Earth. Thus, if I may once again express myself mystically, we consciously traverse the space of the worlds through our inner experiences. We can only navigate this if we examine our relationship to the environment—albeit in a much more precise way than we usually do.

[ 8 ] We can only consider our relationship to the environment by taking into account, on the one hand, our sensory perceptions and, on the other hand, our will, our desires, our actions, and our conduct. By taking our sensory perceptions into account, we are in a certain relationship to the external world; we perceive certain facts of the external world through our eyes and ears, and we are in lively interaction with the external world. What happens takes place, so to speak, at the edge of our physicality. I will not go into certain physiological or epistemological objections today that might seemingly be raised against what I am saying, for I wish to outline for you the consciousness we are to cultivate, in contrast to earthly consciousness and rural consciousness.

[ 9 ] Thus, through our sensory perceptions, we stand in a certain relationship to external events. And conversely, when we act, when we accomplish something, we also stand in a certain relationship to external events from the other side—from the other pole of our being. We are entangled in external events, for we ourselves bring them about in part. Between these two extremes of our human life lies everything else that takes place in our consciousness: on the one hand, that relationship to the external world as conveyed to us by the senses; on the other hand, our will and action. By developing sensations from our sensory perceptions, by developing feelings, we live an inner life. And in turn, based on feelings and sensations that deepen or condense into abilities, one might say, we shape our will. Thus, between perception and will lies what we otherwise experience psychologically.

[ 10 ] However, what we experience in sensory perception is only seemingly a unity. In sensory perception, we look out at the world, and as we take in the view, the world appears to us as something unified that we can grasp with our senses. But this apparent unity contains a duality. For those who are truly capable of perception—of perceiving in accordance with the senses—this apparent unity clearly contains a duality: that which is dying and that which is arising, continually coming into being. The world outside of us is in a state of constant dying and being reborn. At no moment is the world anything other than this: we live in something that is moving toward death and yet, out of death, continually brings forth life anew. If you simply observe a cloud or something else in the external world, that cloud appears as a unified whole. But it is not. In truth, something within the cloud is dying, and out of this dying, something that gives birth to itself develops anew. From what rises up from the past, something that moves toward the future develops. Continuously contained within what we behold is emerging fuel—that is, that which is dying and that which is being generated; fire—that is, that which is taking shape and moving into the future. If, through training such as that described in *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, we learn to distinguish these two poles of sensory perception from one another—if we learn to truly perceive dying and being born in every phenomenon—only then does the world take on a real face for us. Those who are properly trained also approach a human being—perceiving them through the senses—in such a way that they continually see within that person something that is dying and something that is being reborn. Dying—being born, dying—being born: this is something that is taken in by our perception if we only train ourselves a little in this way. But the fact is that at the very moment when this constant dying and being reborn becomes concrete for us—when we truly see it, when we do not merely conceive of it abstractly but actually see it, when we truly and continuously witness a corpse forming within the human being and a child emerging—one can see it this way— at the very moment this becomes a matter of perception, at that very moment we stand within the perception of the three hierarchies: the Angeloi, the Archangeloi, and the Archai. The world then truly takes on this content. We no longer see it as we otherwise look into nature, when we perceive nature as a single entity. We cannot perceive this dying and being born, this Prana and Shiva of nature, without finding that the whole of nature is transformed, so to speak, dissolved into the deeds of spiritual beings of the three hierarchies standing above humanity.

[ 11 ] It is the same at the other pole. When we consider the other pole—the pole of our actions, of our achievements—we find there, too, a constant process of passing away and constant coming into being. But at this pole, it is more difficult for us to perceive what lives there spiritually. Nevertheless—we can perceive it. It requires prolonged training, but we can perceive it. We then perceive those hierarchies that are described as Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. And what lies in between—that we perceive through self-contemplation, the contemplation of that Being of whom I have told you that it stands right in the middle between these two poles. In short, everything in this world becomes much more alive and spiritual when we rise to such contemplation.

[ 12 ] But by rising to this level of contemplation, our inner life changes quite significantly. The moment we truly come to see the actions of spiritual beings within our sphere of experience, we also come to perceive concretely those differences in the life of the soul across successive periods of time, which I spoke of earlier in comparative terms. And then, once we have learned—it is difficult to learn, but it can be learned—to pay attention to these inner changes in our concrete inner experience, we truly perceive ourselves as travelers through the cosmos. Then we know—not from external mathematical considerations, not from telescopes or angular measurements, but from the sequence of inner experiences—that we have changed our location in the cosmos along with the Earth. Then the cosmos becomes something other than the mathematical-mechanical cosmos of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. Then outer space becomes something inwardly alive. And we learn to distinguish between the movements we make—the ones we simply perform absolutely as human beings in outer space. We learn to distinguish a movement we make from left to right—that is, a real movement we make with the Earth from left to right. And we come to know another movement we make as we ascend. We perform it in such a way that we know: we are not merely rotating, but we are ascending in space. And a third movement—I would like to call it a “striding” movement—we perform it from back to front. — This is not identical to moving on Earth, but rather it is something we experience together with the Earth, something we can ascertain through inner experience. We can observe that we turn from left to right, that we ascend as we turn, and that we move forward at the same time. So this is a threefold movement that we perform absolutely—not in relation to any other celestial body, but absolutely within cosmic space—and we perceive it through our inner experiences.

[ 13 ] Well, you might say: People’s present-day consciousness is far from having any inkling that human beings, in this sense, are travelers through the worlds, and that they can even observe this journey through the worlds. — Yes, there is a way for people to attain such an awareness, even if present-day human consciousness is still so far removed from these things. What I have described is simply a reality, and if people today know nothing of it, this ignorance can truly be compared to the belief held by a person sitting on a train who thinks he is at rest while he is actually moving along with the entire train. Why does a person hold this belief? First, for the past three to four centuries, the purely mathematical-mechanical Copernican worldview has lulled people into complacency rather than enlightened them. I have, after all, often pointed out that this purely mathematical-mechanical worldview is actually based on a rather obvious error. It is a convenient concept. It presents a convenient picture of space, but it is, in fact, nothing more than a convenience. You see, in Copernicus’s well-known work on the revolution of the celestial bodies in space, there are three propositions, but modern science relies only on the first two and disregards the third. Copernicus knew something more than modern astronomical science assumes. And this “more”—he enshrined it in his third proposition! But the third proposition is always ignored. The observations do not agree with the Copernican system, but modern science finds a way around this. If, under certain circumstances, one examines purely empirically where—as seen from Earth—one star or another should be located at a specific point in time according to the correct calculations based on the Copernican system, it is not there. But then there is the so-called Bessel correction, and a correction is always applied to the result; then the correct result emerges. Applying this correction is only necessary because Copernicus’s third law has not been taken into account. As a result, a convenient, schematic, mathematical-mechanical worldview has emerged over the last three to four centuries. This is incorrect in many respects; yet even today, one is still considered a scientific fool if one points out that it is incorrect. Scientifically speaking, one must firmly believe that these things are correct.

[ 14 ] Humanity has thus always been lulled by the Copernican worldview with regard to certain things, even though these can be clearly observed from within. Human consciousness is, so to speak, clouded. But in the future, we will have to ensure that it is no longer clouded.

[ 15 ] I have often said that people do not want to understand spiritual science—they do not want to understand it through their own sound senses. This actually stems solely from certain educational prejudices that are very prevalent today. Very often, when a spiritual scientist shares his findings today, people say: “Well, that may be so, but only someone who has undergone a certain kind of training—which people call ‘mystical’—can know that.” — That is true to a certain extent, but not entirely. I have often emphasized this: to a very high degree, every person today could, purely from their own consciousness, recognize as fact what is presented, for example, in my *The Secret Science*. They need not merely “accept” it on authority, but can understand it through ordinary, sound common sense. But how? They could understand it if, from the age of seven to fifteen, they were sent to a Waldorf school and there, through a method that corresponds to the facts and reality, their soul powers were developed in a healthy way, and then, with these healthily developed soul powers, enter higher schools, so that—with the necessary flexibility of soul—they could absorb what is usually not learned until after the age of fifteen. That would be the way to produce people who simply say: everything else is nonsense, for reality is revealed only through what spiritual science states about the world. The reason people do not admit this is not because they cannot understand spiritual science without training, but because our school education between the ages of seven and fifteen is such that, instead of being awakened, certain powers are merely stifled and dulled. This is why people are reluctant to accept the factual content of what is presented by spiritual science, whereas they would readily accept it to a high degree if their soul forces were healthily developed. These healthily developed soul powers are not as dead and rigid as they are in most people today; they are much more agile, much more flexible, and a person would very easily become resistant to today’s scholarship if these soul powers had been properly developed in them between the ages of seven and fifteen. Today, people put up with an awful lot, especially when their illusions are made even greater than they already are by certain unfounded hypotheses. I have often cited a very characteristic example: Children in their twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth years are told that lightning is caused by friction in the clouds, while at the same time it is acknowledged that the clouds are wet. Of course. But then, if one wants to produce the earthly counterpart of lightning—the electric spark—one must keep the electrostatic machine and everything associated with it completely dry, so that nothing watery is present, and thus everything is removed from the very place where the lightning is to be produced, which is supposed to be the same phenomenon as the electric spark. Students put up with this, and so do adults, when they are lulled into complacency by all sorts of hypotheses. There are countless examples like this, where people accept outright nonsense simply on the basis of authority, because our age has “cast off all authority” and is no longer “authority-worshipping” at all. But if that were not the case, the common socialist-Marxist worldview could never have emerged in our time, for it is far more deferential to authority than old-school Catholicism.

[ 16 ] The point, then, is that it is truly a task of culture today to overcome, through a sound school education, everything that so inhibits human powers of comprehension and human conceptual capacity. One of the very first social tasks is to ensure that the obstacles to human understanding are removed. Then people will no longer approach what spiritual science has to offer in such a resistant manner. But if people are developed in a healthy way, they will become somewhat stubborn toward some of what official science offers today; then they will very soon become aware of the glaring contradictions. Hence this instinctive resistance to healthy school conditions. For if these healthy school conditions are allowed to take hold, the authority of today’s scientific luminaries will very soon be terribly undermined. This is what it is all about: that the more flexible soul forces be truly re-cultivated in people, forces that can simply arise from a healthy human sense in response to what can be proclaimed as the results of spiritual science. Then people will also understand, in relation to such things as the fact that human beings are caught up in an absolute movement, what needs to be said. People will understand how a cosmic consciousness can arise from earthly consciousness. To put it in a truly figurative—but perhaps quite apt—way: how human beings can learn to feel themselves as travelers through cosmic space, moving in a rotating motion, in a motion going from bottom to top, and in a motion going from back to front. If one traces these movements—rotating, rotating upward, and moving forward while rotating upward—if one draws this curve, one also obtains the Earth’s path through the cosmos. One does not arrive at it as it is currently constructed—purely mathematically and dynamically from the Copernican-Newtonian worldview—but rather by following what inner observation reveals. It must be reconstructed in this way. But then one is not constructing something abstract, like the Copernican-Newtonian worldview, but something very concrete—that is, something truly experienced through supersensible empirical perception, if one may use this tautology. This world consciousness is not merely important in that a person, so to speak, begins to feel closer to the truth than they do now, when they believe that the Earth’s orbit, as constructed by the Copernican worldview, is the correct one. Rather, when one possesses this world consciousness, many other things depend on it. Through it, one becomes, in a sense, a different person inwardly. One learns to feel oneself not merely as a citizen of the Earth, but as a citizen of the universe. The universe expands for one as one concretely engages with the forces that are now truly at work in these movements. When turning from left to right, one becomes aware of the effects of the Angeloi. When ascending from below to above, one becomes aware of the effects of the Archangels. And when moving through cosmic space from back to front, one becomes aware of the direction of the Archai, the forces of the Archai, the spirits of time. One turns toward a spiritual realm by taking the absolute cosmic journey into one’s consciousness. One becomes aware that physical space is only an abstract reflection of this concrete spiritual space, in which the activities of the higher hierarchies represent reality.

[ 17 ] The fact that such consciousness is linked to something else is already evident from what I have just said. Anyone who has even the slightest inkling that such a thing exists—that it is connected to the true nature of the human being—must surely regard it as a terrible failure of our educational system that we raise our children in such a way that we allow certain powers within them to atrophy until the age of fifteen, so that as students they are then forced to develop in the way that is inevitable given these atrophied powers. Consequently, between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, young people absorb things that are entirely different from what they should actually be absorbing according to the demands of our time. As a result, something entirely different resides in their souls than what should actually be there. Truly, my dear friends, by offering the most beautiful, most unctuous exhortations up to the age of fifteen—and then again later, during the time when people used to have ideals, when they were young women and men of twenty— through the most beautiful, most eloquent exhortations, you achieve nothing—or only that our university and college youth become what they are today, which I need not describe further. You will achieve something only by truly unleashing the forces necessary for life at the universities—forces that today are not merely suppressed but paralyzed. The question of education is, in fact, a question of humanity today. It is not a matter of arbitrary ideals, but a question of humanity that must be understood in light of the deepest demands of the present age. At most, people today sense that many things should be different—let us say, in the medical treatment of people, perhaps also in legal relations—but this is precisely what is suppressed from the consciousness of lawyers whenever a claim is asserted. People sense that certain things should be different, but they cannot be changed unless attention is directed toward not stifling but rather awakening the human forces at the right stages of life. After all, it is not for nothing that a person goes through the stage of life between the ages of seven and fifteen. During this stage of life, very specific forces emerge from a child’s nature, and these must be taken into account when educating and teaching during this period. Working in the appropriate direction in education and instruction is quite different from working arbitrarily, without taking this direction into account. When one takes this into account, one will notice certain things that are not given any attention today.

[ 18 ] In the essay that will appear in the next issue of the WaldorfZeitschrift, which will discuss our Waldorf school, I have pointed out these circumstances from various perspectives. I have pointed out that we can no longer be content today with a form of pedagogy such as that which is very often shaped out of the very best of intentions. Certain pedagogical and didactic methods, principles, and standards are established, and people believe—whatever objections one might otherwise raise (after all, much of what is said in this field stems from good will but not from a thorough understanding)—that one can learn these standards of pedagogy. The Herbartians in particular, and their modern-day successors, hold this belief that by studying pedagogy, one can become a good educator and teacher. Well, let us suppose that such a standard in pedagogy were the most perfect conceivable—it is almost as useless for teaching as a well-written textbook on aesthetics is for a painter. One certainly does not become a painter by studying a well-written textbook on the aesthetics of painting, nor does one become an educator by studying pedagogy, no matter how well one has mastered it. After all, one does not really need to know physiology in order to feed oneself; one can sustain oneself through knowledge entirely different from physiology. We use physiology for something entirely different from nutrition, and it is a substitute when physiology must step in to ensure proper nutrition. It has always struck me as dreadful when I’ve encountered people sitting at the table with a scale beside them, measuring and weighing every morsel they put in their mouths—the very food they are meant to enjoy as part of a meal. That is a devastating way for physiology to interfere with the process of eating. You laugh at it out of a certain naivety. Conversely, those who today, based on certain scientific prejudices, consider this to be justified—and who view what I have spoken to you about today as godforsaken dilettantism—would laugh at you. Today, one can laugh at such a thing from very different perspectives.

[ 19 ] So, a standard approach to pedagogy cannot actually make one a true educator. Why? Well, it is, after all, designed so that one adopts its principles and then applies them fully and consistently. But that hinders one in the act of educating; it does not help one in educating and teaching. Something else is what helps one: When, at any moment, when facing one’s class, one can forget pedagogy—forget everything one has learned about pedagogy. And when, as an educator, one has simply acquired such a profound understanding of human nature that one derives pedagogical principles from that understanding at every moment, so that they arise anew at every moment. That is what the educator absolutely needs. For one cannot actually be trained to become an educator simply by studying pedagogy; rather, pedagogy can only be awakened in a person through the acquisition of an understanding of human nature. Pedagogy should be entirely discarded as a science; at most, it should be regarded in the same way that a painter regards aesthetics—the painter who is certainly aware that he cannot learn to paint from it. A painter from Munich told me some time ago, when I was speaking with him about aesthetics—referring to Carrière, the famous aesthetician—‘Yes, back when we were at art school, we used to call Carrière the “aesthetic grumbler.”’ — It is not yet common among seminar participants to refer to theoretical educators as “pedagogical grumblers,” for people still believe that in pedagogy one can make use of what is of no use in art. But in reality, it is the same in both fields. One should replace seminarian pedagogy with what we did in our teacher training course: an understanding of human nature, which then inspires a living relationship with the emerging human nature in the child, so that pedagogy is born in the teacher at every moment—so that simply from the way one perceives the child before one, the urge arises to educate and teach the child in a certain way. This creates a completely different kind of atmosphere in the classroom, because this atmosphere is not generated by a pedagogy based on standards, but rather flows from living life itself at every moment. When education and instruction arise from such a living reality, the powers that should be present at the age of fifteen are not stifled; rather, the individual enters their later years possessing the flexible soul powers they are meant to have, so that something similar to what occurred during the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times—when rural consciousness was transformed into earthly consciousness—can happen in our own time, and so that earthly consciousness may in turn be transformed into a world consciousness. But this cannot happen through external experiences; it can only happen by becoming inwardly receptive to the successive, varied experiences that one can have inwardly, in the soul. Not even within the narrowest limits does humanity today have any awareness of the diversity of these soul experiences.

[ 20 ] What is it actually like today? A human being is a child; as such, they behave in a childlike manner, as their environment dictates. Then they become an adult. Their concepts become more abstract, their experiences richer; certainly, all of this is true. But something similar does not happen to the soul as it does to our outer, physical body. We develop more sharply defined facial features when we reach a certain age; we no longer have the rounded features of childhood; we get gray hair and wrinkles and so on—or often go bald as well; in short, our outer physical form changes. But in reality, one could say: The inner, spiritual aspect does not change in this way; at most, it is crammed in more and more, but it does not grow in such a way that one’s relationship to the external world changes. There is not a proper connection between old age and childhood. Such things—as I have often emphasized—are no longer in people’s consciousness today; for example, that when one has become an elderly person, one can give a blessing, and that this blessing has a certain significance—one that is not the same as that of a person of middle age. People today have no awareness of this, and the reason is that they do not know that, in order to bless properly in old age, one must have learned to fold one’s hands in youth. For it is only from folding one’s hands in prayer during childhood that the ability to bless in old age arises. The spiritual aspect of blessing and folding one’s hands is related in the same way that gray hair is related to a child’s hair. This inner transformation is something that falls within the sphere of experience of modern people only to a limited extent. But it must be brought back into that sphere. People must once again come to see life as a whole in all its various metamorphoses. Otherwise, we will never overcome the immense damage caused, for example, by something like this: when someone is somewhat talented and is eighteen or nineteen years old, they become a feature writer. And those who then read only the arts section—and have no idea that an eighteen-year-old wrote it—read it exactly as one reads an arts column in the absolute sense. But once you become a feature writer at eighteen and write feature articles, you no longer grow older; you actually remain at that age forever. You do not develop any further. But then there’s also the fact that by the time you’re twenty or twenty-one, you’re mature enough to vote for members of parliament or city councilors—and to be elected yourself; at that point, you’re a fully formed person. By the time you’re forty, you no longer need to strive to become a more perfect person than you were at twenty. After all, you’ve achieved everything the world has to offer—and everything you have to offer the world. At twenty, one votes or is elected, and nothing of substance is added to that. Only then, when one comes to realize once again that life is something that is concretely changing, will one also understand how to grasp the world concretely. And then that abstract socialism, which is so widely advocated today, will fade away; something concrete will take its place.

[ 21 ] So the emergence of world consciousness from earthly consciousness will have a significant impact on life, particularly through what is evoked emotionally in human beings. It is not what one knows through such things that is significant, but rather the way one feels through them—that is what is significant. People will only come to understand certain things in the context of life once they have attained this world consciousness.

[ 22 ] Above all, people today speak in very abstract terms about successive generations. We tend to think—I mean those of us who have reached a respectable age; I’m leaving the young people out of this for now—so we might think something like this: You have this or that character now. You live this way or that way. In your childhood, you lived that way. — In this regard, some people are very short-sighted: they take great offense at what today’s children do—things they themselves did as children—and fail to understand that today’s children are doing exactly what they themselves did; they want today’s children to be as well-behaved as they are now in their old age, and don’t realize that they only became well-behaved as they grew up. But aside from that, there is another factor at play. It is this: people imagine that children today must be exactly as they themselves were in their youth. So, for example, just as I was in the 1860s, so should the children being born now be. That is nonsense. For we have moved on entirely within the cosmos. And the children being born now—to return to my original comparison—are born into a different world. Isn’t it true that if you travel from Stuttgart to another place today, you’ve eaten in Stuttgart today and will eat elsewhere tomorrow? You can no longer eat in Stuttgart when you’re traveling. And the children being born today can no longer have the same psychological makeup as the children we once were—we who are now of a respectable age. Childhood itself is changing; that’s what we must understand. This is connected to our absolute movement through the cosmos, of which mathematical space is only a schematic representation. People always want to view things in absolutist terms, and today we’re already happy when things aren’t viewed in absolutist terms.

[ 23 ] I recently had a great joy, namely that a man visited me in Berlin who—well, how should I put it—had read the discussion of the threefold social order titled “A False Prophet” in *Hilfe*. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this essay. So an American had read it and said to himself: “If something is written about in this way, there must be something to it; I have to take an interest in this.” — And he then came to see me with Pastor Rittelmeyer and explained that he had gathered from the rather feeble style and so on that one simply had to take an interest in the matter. And among the questions he asked—all of which were very sensible—was the following, which pleased me particularly: “Well, the threefold social order—one can see its value very clearly for the present time; one can see that the threefold social order is necessary now, that it must take the place of the old unitary state.” Do you believe that the threefold social order is now the final, definitive solution to the social question? — That was a very insightful question. I was able to answer him: I do not believe that at all. Rather, in the course of historical development over the past centuries, it has turned out that the unitary state has increasingly come to the fore. Now, due to the demands of the times, the threefold social order has become necessary. And there will come a time again when the threefold social order must be overcome. But that is not the present time; that will be the time three to four centuries from now. Then we will once again have to consider how to replace the threefold social order. — This is the opposite of millenarian thinking, the opposite of the thinking that seeks to bring about a millennial kingdom once and for all, the thinking that says: We must bring about a blessed state for humanity; then it will simply be there, and it can remain. — Life in the world is not that convenient. It is necessary that what is brought about as the right thing in a particular epoch be in turn superseded by what is then relatively right for the following epoch. That is what this is all about. This means thinking organically, as opposed to the mechanical thinking that dominates the present, where people actually believe there is something that is absolutely right once and for all. One thing is right for Stuttgart, another for New York, for Australia. One thing is right for 1919, another for 2530. No, the development of the world does not make it that convenient for people to assume that there is anything absolutely right. Things are always right for specific places and specific times. And one must think concretely based on the circumstances. But one will do this only if one is also aware that one is carrying out absolute movements in the cosmos—movements that can be perceived only through inner experience, through inner living.

[ 24 ] Today I have once again drawn your attention to something that is meant to show you how things should be viewed at the present time with regard to the integration of spiritual science into our current culture. Anyone who understands such things will realize that people, out of a sense of comfort, resist something like spiritual science, because everything else is more comfortable. Spiritual science is, after all, terribly uncomfortable. It does not even allow one to imagine a state of affairs that can remain permanent. It forces us to conceive of the good only for the coming centuries, perhaps even for a shorter time. But one can only think this way if one does not judge humanity based on abstract intellectual constructs, but rather if one tries to truly get to know one’s own time in its particular character, and thereby understand its demands. This is indeed inconvenient, but it is what corresponds to reality. People today would very much like to deal with cultural development in a very, very comfortable way, especially those who want to be leaders in cultural development.

[ 25 ] Here is a brief example that was shared with me regarding spiritual science and how it is viewed by leading figures of our time: In a city—I don’t want to go into exact details, as people tend to take offense at that—in a city, someone had the opportunity to give a lecture on my anthroposophy at a private college. He spoke about the worldviews of people today. Since it is historically necessary—one strives for a well-rounded curriculum, after all—he wanted to include a lecture on anthroposophy. How did he go about it? Well, the curriculum—the lecture schedule—is drawn up at the beginning of the semester, and “Anthroposophy” had been scheduled for the umpteenth session of the semester; just as previous sessions had covered Darwinism and so on, the man had set aside a specific session for “Steiner’s Anthroposophy.” That was arranged at the beginning of the semester. When he scheduled it, he didn’t have the faintest idea what was in an anthroposophical book. Then the evening of the lecture arrived, and the gentleman showed up at the home of someone who owned my books; that morning, he had the owner select the most important ones so he could familiarize himself with them—and then, that evening, deliver his lecture on anthroposophy. It is convenient to “immerse oneself” in a worldview in this way and then “represent it authoritatively.” But this is not so rare when it comes to the most diverse circumstances of the present day. This is something that deserves to be discussed. For a great deal has been said, presented, and written in the present day from depths that do not go much further, and it is accepted with blind faith. And it is from this unquestioning acceptance that the various worldviews people hold in their minds and souls are formed. One must not turn a blind eye to this fact of the terrible superficiality that has taken hold. One must be clear that today it is necessary to first look at who is standing there, where this or that is being authoritatively represented.

[ 26 ] More important than anything I can offer you in terms of content, my dear friends, is the awakening of this awareness in relation to the present age; this awareness that we need—we need it immensely—to look closely at the degree of depth that prevails in what flows toward us, what asserts itself, and what is, in reality, right to assert itself. When one speaks of these things today, one actually offends many people. And especially when it comes to anthroposophists and theosophists, people say: They should be more forgiving, they should judge with goodwill and not be so critical; for if one is so critical, it hurts people. But the question is whether it is love for humanity to let such people go unchallenged as they are unleashed upon the general public—people who learn in the morning what they are to present in the evening. With the questions that life poses, it is a matter of how they are posed. It is important to pose them correctly; only then can the right answers emerge.

[ 27 ] So today I tried to convey to you the necessity for earthly consciousness to transform into a cosmic consciousness, just as rural consciousness has transformed into earthly consciousness. But I tried to convey this to you in order to point out, from a certain perspective, some of the things that are emotionally necessary for bringing about healthier conditions in our culture than we currently have.

[ 28 ] This must happen, oh, it simply must! One would like to rouse people to this end; one would like to call upon the sleepy human beings of the present age to do so. But that is not at all easy in the present day. Certainly, some efforts are being made in this direction, but people avoid thoroughly familiarizing themselves with our circumstances. It is not enough merely to put forward anthroposophical theories. It is necessary to sharpen one’s gaze for what is needed in our time, and not to shut oneself off in prejudices. One must open oneself to what must be fought against, so that one can intervene actively in the present precisely from the standpoint of true love for humanity. If even the slightest spark can be kindled in people’s souls and minds in this direction, then more will have been achieved than through the most comprehensive theories.

[ 29 ] It breaks one’s heart to realize how true it is, as Mr. Molt said recently here at the Cultural Council meeting, that there are already people today who say: “Oh, come on—before we even think about something like the threefold social order, we’d rather become a province of the Entente.” — Unfortunately, this is true to a very large extent. And many other things are connected to this kind of mindset, because, after all, other ways of thinking can only arise from a inclination toward spiritual deepening. The present age can only be healed through spiritual deepening.