The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Twenty-second Lecture

[ 1 ] We have now gathered together some building blocks that should be suitable for erecting a kind of structure, so that through this illustrative structure we may gain a deeper insight into the nature of the human being. In order to proceed appropriately from the discussions we held yesterday and the day before, it is necessary that we expand our considerations today to areas we have touched upon, in such a way that we view, as it were, the soul-spiritual—which is at work within the human being—and the physical-material—which is likewise at work within him—in their mutual relationship. It has, after all, become difficult in the scientific development of recent times to synthesize this view of the interaction between the spiritual-psychic and the physical-material in the human being in a fruitful way, for modern humanity actually knows only a duality in this realm. They recognize the material realm with its effects and configurations, and then apply this understanding to human beings as well. They examine it in human beings through disciplines such as physiology, chemistry, and biology. Certain views then emerge from these fields and are absorbed into popular consciousness. People cling to them with a certain tenacity, and it must be emphasized time and again that even those who, with their Sunday-best sentiments, still live within old, traditional religious conceptions, fully recognize as authoritative what mainstream science says about the physical aspect of human beings—perhaps they do so all the more. On the other hand, certain people do form ideas about the spiritual and soul aspects. But these ideas about the spiritual and soul-related realms are so abstract; they are sometimes, in fact, merely empty phrases about something that was once understood more precisely, but whose understanding has been lost, so that there is little to be done with them. People today may well speak of thinking, feeling, and willing; they speak of imagination. Yet they have no truly experienced insights into these things. One might say that words have multiplied, and humanity clings to these words without attaching much meaning to them. One sees this at work in the literary works on psychology and the like that appear today, where thinking, feeling, and willing are nothing but empty phrases—or at least empty abstractions.

[ 2 ] Then people realize that, on the one hand, they have a perception of the material world that they cannot deny—because they have eyes, hands with which they can touch and see material things, because they have scales with which to weigh them, because they can measure them, and so on. Thus, the material world is recognized as such through direct visual perception and sensory experience.

[ 3 ] On the other hand, people do speak of a spiritual-soul aspect, but in the way I have just discussed. And then they cannot somehow find a connection between this spiritual-soul aspect and the bodily-physical, the material-physical. People have, of course, come up with all sorts of theories about how the spiritual-psychic is supposed to interact with the physical-material. But all these theories are merely figments of the imagination. For before one can gain insight into these matters, it is absolutely necessary to be able to take the whole human being into account. After all, in the whole human being, there is never any spiritual-soul manifestation between birth and death without a physical-material manifestation. And when we speak of the physical-material and the spiritual-soul as opposites, these are abstractions, for they are one and the same thing viewed from different angles. But people do not realize that this is one and the same thing, and they see precisely the difficulty in formulating a theory of how the two interact. Yet only what we grasp through truly heightened, trained observation is what helps in this field. And for this, it is necessary to draw attention to the things that emerge during such observation. It is, of course, natural that precise observation in this field must be preceded by a certain training in the sense I described in How Does One Gain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?. But once one has the objectives in mind, once one knows what has been observed there, one can already follow along using common sense—provided one is willing at all, provided one is at all open to properly tracing the content of the ideas that are then brought to light through spiritual scientific observation.

[ 4 ] These ideas are, of course, always such that if one applies to them what one is familiar with from conventional science, one cannot keep up. One really has to open oneself up to the ideas that are presented here. But one can always open oneself up to ideas using common sense. Ideas could have come from the most unknown of worlds; if they are there, one can engage with them. As long as the experiences from those worlds are truly expressed in such comprehensible ideas, then one can indeed engage with them. But one must rise to a level that requires no occult training: the grasping of ideas.

[ 5 ] Of course, most people today are unable to do this, and least of all today’s scientists. They are accustomed to having ideas only when those ideas are borrowed from the external sensory world. And they are willing to engage with this only in mathematics, at most; otherwise, they do not engage at all with grasping ideas that are then pursued from within themselves, just as mathematical constructs are pursued from within themselves. Everything that the humanities scholar presents can be followed if one develops the will to engage with such ideas, and one can actually verify everything conceptually. But one must want to. This does not—and this must be emphasized again and again—require any occult training, but it does require overcoming what is accepted today as recognized scientific methods of thinking, which by no means coincide with common sense, because they have created the habit of thinking that only what has a correlate in the sensory world is valid. Today we must develop a number of ideas that can lead us further in the insights we have gained. When our imaginative life unfolds—that is, when we imagine—something is indeed taking place within us. And what is taking place there is not the abstract process that is often described today, but rather a process in which there is certainly also something alive that is called material processes. One is not a materialist simply because one traces the spiritual down to its material effects; one is a materialist only because one rejects the spiritual out of prejudice.

[ 6 ] As soon as one becomes fully aware of what is actually taking place in the soul when one thinks or imagines, one will gradually—even without occult training—be able to gain an inner understanding of the soul-body process that is at work. And this soul-body process involved in thinking and imagining is one that, by its very psychological nature, reveals itself to be the opposite of another process. Just try to identify, within the scope of ordinary consciousness, what the opposite process of thinking is. It is the process in which our thoughts fade away, in which we become unable to follow our thoughts in a clear and lucid manner—in other words, where what we call “consciousness” in ordinary life ceases, or at least where our control over what we call “consciousness” in ordinary life ceases. Now, it is precisely in this counter-image of thinking that you can observe how it has a physical counterpart: Wherever the actual process of growth, the process of becoming within us—the process of nourishment and growth—occurs with particular intensity, there the element of thought, the element of imagination, recedes. You need only observe with discernment the vigorous organic growth activity during a child’s early years. There, this growth activity is particularly vivid. But thinking—or at least the human capacity for thought—is present only in its embryonic form. Or observe disease processes, such as those associated with fever, in which organic activity becomes particularly intense; wherever it intensifies, conscious control over the life of imagination fades away.

[ 7 ] So we see a contrast that we could describe in ever greater detail, but I would just like to point out the general principles. One is the life of the imagination; we’ll consider it, for now, in psychological terms. The other is the life of growth. To help you understand more precisely what is actually at play, I will use the term “growth proliferation,” since this captures the contrast in a more physical sense.

[ 8 ] But try to take this a step further. Remember that I have often pointed out how, in ordinary consciousness—this bright, clear daytime consciousness that we carry from waking until falling asleep—human beings experience this only through their imaginative life, whereas what takes place within us when we exercise our will plunges into a darkness like the state between falling asleep and waking up. We sleep, as I have often said, not only completely from falling asleep to waking up, but we also sleep partially in the waking state with regard to our volitional activity. Everything that lives within us as volitional activity is actually enveloped in a state of sleep. We are aware of our intentions and our volitional motives when we want to raise our hand, but our relationship to what is actually happening within us—as the hand is actually raised, that is, as the will unfolds—is exactly the same as our relationship to ourselves when we are asleep. What is actually happening there? What is actually taking place?

[ 9 ] What we have here is this: What organically underlies the will within us is to be found below, in the growth processes that remain unconscious to us. The will has plunged down into the growth processes. Everything that flourishes within us as growth is at the same time related to the will; viewed externally from a physical perspective, it is a growth process; viewed internally from a psychological perspective, it is will. Thus we can already begin to see how this proliferation of growth—how everything that lies within those currents of force that manifest in growth, in nutrition, and in life in general—is related to the will. So when we consider it from a psychological perspective, we can say that it is connected to the will.

[ 10 ] Now, when we consider human beings between birth and death, it is certainly true that what we call our will is, in every single activity, an abstraction. This will does not operate in isolation at all. There is always a metabolic process, a process of growth, nutrition, or denutrition taking place within us, through which the will unfolds. To a lesser extent, the same process is at work that, let us say, extinguishes consciousness during a particularly intensified process of growth or life. That is why our consciousness is also extinguished in the actual region of the will. This region of the will is located where the growth proliferation occurs; therefore, it lies in the unconscious. So, as human beings, we must distinguish within ourselves a region—I am, of course, drawing this schematically—where this growth proliferation occurs, and within this growth proliferation, which does not enter ordinary consciousness, the will is rooted. But this is actually a single entity in the concrete human being. It is only in thinking that we separate the will from this growth proliferation.

[ 11 ] Another area that we initially considered only from a psychological perspective is that which encompasses our thinking. This thinking—this process of forming mental images—develops either in connection with external mental images or through the process of memory transforming itself into mental images when experiences are recalled.

[ 12 ] Well, on a psychological level, one can actually see quite clearly that this life of imagination is the polar opposite of the life of the will and also the polar opposite of the life of growth—of life in the organism as a whole. This life of thought, this life of imagination, is precisely where we are fully in control of ourselves, where we string ideas together, where we analyze and synthesize within the life of imagination. We can set thinking in opposition to the will. The will, by its very nature, is completely unconscious to us. We now know that it is unconscious to us because it is rooted in growth, in the processes of life, and in metabolic processes. Thinking stands in opposition to the will. We have it under our control.

[ 13 ] The moment, however, that the spiritual researcher advances to imagination, it immediately becomes clear to him what is actually taking place in thought. For just imagine for a moment exactly this process that a person goes through when advancing from ordinary thinking to imagination.

[ 14 ] Ordinary thinking is abstract. When a person thinks, they are aware only of their thought life (yellow). When this thinking is condensed into the imaginative life through the methods I have described in How Does One Gain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? is condensed into the imaginative life, then the images of the imaginative life emerge. But it is, of course, understandable that nothing that takes place in the soul—that is, that is experienced—does not also have some physical counterpart in ordinary life between birth and death. One perceives something within oneself when one ascends to imagination. And what one perceives is precisely the same process that takes place in thinking in the first place, for this imaginative cognition is merely a further development of thinking. As I have already said, the facts about the human being do not change simply because one ascends to higher, supersensible cognition. One merely learns to recognize what is always present in the human being. What one learns to recognize there is always happening, but one is unaware of it with ordinary consciousness. Once one has these images in advanced consciousness, one knows that certain figurative deposits—actual material deposits (red)—correspond to these images in the human organism. These actual material deposits are always present in the human being; they are simply not noticed. For what one experiences in imagination are not new deposits; rather, imagination merely enables one to see the deposits that are always present. One could not have imaginations if one did not see in a certain way—though one can hardly call it “seeing,” incidentally—if one did not become aware of these deposits, for the imaginations are reflected in these deposits. One then realizes that these deposits are indeed present even in ordinary thinking. They are connected to the fine organization of our nervous system and to that which belongs to the nervous system. They constitute the nervous system. The life of our nervous system depends on these deposits. As mentioned, they remain unknown to ordinary consciousness. Through imaginative consciousness, they are recognized.

[ 15 ] This concludes a line of reasoning that can be formulated as follows: The life of the imagination is opposed to the will. The will, however, is bound—as can be discerned from considerations such as those I have presented to you—to unchecked growth. Now one might consider: Thus, the life of the imagination must be bound to the opposite of unchecked growth—to decay. And indeed, what takes place within us—and what, in imaginative cognition, is perceived and observed inwardly, as it were—is the separation of the material, as organic matter, from the process of unchecked growth.

[ 16 ] Psychic: Imagination

[ 17 ] Will: Physical: Decay, Proliferation

[ 18 ] It is indeed true that we have within us the process of growth and proliferation—that is, the metabolic process—and dying matter is constantly being shed. As we think, we are constantly filled with this dying matter. We perceive this dying of matter precisely when we rise to the level of imagination. And our thinking, our imagination, is bound to this dying matter.

[ 19 ] It is indeed true that we human beings carry within us the metabolic process—the breakdown and synthesis of substances, and so on—that the life of the will dwells within this, and that matter is constantly dying within itself; that is to say, it excretes parts that are no longer integrated into its organizational forces. Inorganic matter is constantly falling out of the organic, and the life of imagination is bound up with this process of falling out. Thus, if the growth process—the metabolic process—becomes excessive, our life of imagination dwindles. If this process of dying off predominates, then our concepts become increasingly rigid and pedantic. It can hardly be expected that a person without occult training will easily attain such self-observation; but they could attain it—they can attain a self-observation through which it becomes clear to them: Just as when consciousness slips away in any way—even if only upon falling asleep—there is a triumph of the forces of growth and metabolism over those forces that underlie the inner activity governing thoughts. But one can also perceive—if one is open-minded enough to cultivate such inner self-observation—how an inner weariness, a settling of matter within, takes place as thoughts are developed, as one lives more and more consciously within one’s imaginative life.

[ 20 ] We do, in fact, constantly carry birth and death within us. And what stands as birth at the beginning of life—where the forces of growth are initially at their most vigorous, where consciousness has not yet fully emerged—lives on continuously with us until death and is, in essence, the bearer of our will, our unconscious will, which becomes conscious only when the light of thought is cast upon it. But that which is proliferating there is permeated by constant processes of dissolution, by a constant, continuous unfolding of that which is then compressed into a single entity at the moment of death—a process of dying off. And just as the process of growth and proliferation reveals the element of will outwardly, so does the inner process of dying reveal the element of thought and imagination. If we cultivate this insight within ourselves, we ultimately come to realize that we are, in fact, constantly being born and constantly dying, and that the single act of being born at the beginning of an earthly life is nothing other than a summation of what permeates our entire life, down to the smallest detail, right up until death.

[ 21 ] For mathematicians, one could say that true birth is an integral of all the birth differentials that are at work throughout life. But the differentials of death are also at work, and true death is merely the integral of those. That is to say, if we die inwardly so continuously that dying is constantly suspended—that it is already suspended at the very moment of its arising—then that is the material foundation of the life of the imagination. Once dying sets in—that is, when what is constantly at work within us simply intensifies in an unlimited way—then the moment of death is present, just as in true birth, what is constantly a process of growth within us is immeasurably more intense. Thus, one sees the spiritual-psychic and the physical-material processes as one. And without this, one cannot truly arrive at spiritual insight at all.

[ 22 ] Well, at certain moments in our lives, we are always very close to that point where we make a transition between thinking—which, after all, must fill our healthy consciousness from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep—and that which proliferates there and constantly seeks to erase that thinking. That is the moment of falling asleep. We can say that we reach there a peak of this rampant growth—one that is, for the time being, to be reckoned with in life. Those who advance toward imaginative cognition become very familiar with this. For at the very moment when imaginative cognition arises, they are also in a position to have experiences that are slept through in ordinary consciousness—where ordinary consciousness fades away because it is overgrown by the development of the will.

[ 23 ] These are the kinds of states into which ordinary consciousness must not enter. When ordinary consciousness does enter, the rampant growth, as it were, takes hold of that which lies in the life of dying imagery; it pushes up—I must now express myself in images, but then again, one also speaks in or from the realm of the imagination—the unchecked growth takes hold of what lies within the life of dying in the imagination. It, as it were, prevents the life of dying in the imagination from reaching its higher stage of development.

[ 24 ] This is the process that occurs in hallucinatory life and, in a certain sense, also in a life of illusions and visions. Visions are pathological constructs; hallucinations are also pathological constructs. One understands them—I would say, psychically and physically—when one perceives a certain harmony between the will and the uncontrolled growth that then takes hold and, in a sense, tears apart what should be consolidating in the process of the death of thought. In a sense, the inner, ongoing process of becoming a corpse is suspended. Something is torn from the human being and proliferates—something that should die within them if they were healthy. These are swollen masses of thought, and we can only perceive them as such when we see a harmony between what is physical and material and what is spiritual and psychological. Something of the growth processes within a person always proliferates when they experience hallucinations or visions. You will learn to recognize certain preparatory exercises for the imaginative; if these preparatory exercises are carried out appropriately, then a person is able to consciously immerse themselves in what is constantly taking place in the daily cycle of life—namely, that we truly enter the state of deep sleep through our dream images. In this state, where ordinary consciousness is set aside, one learns to immerse oneself as one progresses into imagination. One thus reaches a point where the process of dying is, in a certain sense, truly overcome. It is overcome in everyday life during the state of sleep. But in such a state—which is, after all, a conscious state—the human being is introduced to higher knowledge. And when a person transcends their ordinary consciousness in this way, they come to realize that this ordinary consciousness simply cannot enter this state. A person in the ordinary state of consciousness leaves their physical and etheric bodies while asleep; a person with imaginative insight leaves them while awake. But the realm one first enters—I would say the first realm one enters when stepping into this spiritual world, which then opens up in the imagination—is initially experienced as an absolutely empty, dark space, and one cannot actually enter the spiritual world without taking this detour through this empty darkness.

[ 25 ] But that is what lies beyond the limits of our sensory perception. If you recall the schematic diagram I drew on the blackboard yesterday—sensory perceptions that are, so to speak, sent into us and which are the waves upon which the “I” moves—you will see from this diagram how the “I” reaches out into the environment in which it otherwise exists. But while awake, it extends its sensory antennae into the body. Now, however, it withdraws from the body and, together with those parts that have become accustomed to participating in bodily life, emerges into the world beyond our senses. It comes to know the spiritual realm. It does not come to know atoms; it comes to know the spiritual world beyond the senses. But it must pass through the absolute, dark void, for it is only out of this dark void that the spiritual is born to it.

[ 26 ] There, I would say, is the boundary that human experience borders on, or that human experience has in relation to the world. There you have that boundary. That boundary must be there. If it weren’t there, we would not, so to speak, be separated from our surroundings as if by an empty abyss; we could never develop what true love is, for it requires that a person be able to come to know the emptiness around them. For if they were to fill everything around them, they would never be able to flow across into the other with their very being. But that is precisely what develops in the essence of love.

[ 27 ] If one wishes to understand the nature of love through a genuine process of insight, one must understand how a person—precisely when feelings of love develop within them—expands, as it were, toward the void in their consciousness. Thus, they can fill themselves with something else. The development of love is precisely the act of countering the emptiness of consciousness with another, which then fills that consciousness.

[ 28 ] But if there is no proper harmony between the spiritual-soul aspect and the physical-bodily aspect—you realize that this is merely an expression that does not fully capture the reality, for we speak of harmony as a harmony that serves the other processes, yet this way of speaking makes it clear what is meant—if the proper harmony does not exist, if the spiritual-soul aspect or the physical-bodily aspect develops too one-sidedly in one direction or the other, so that both sides cannot fully express themselves, then a pathological condition arises. On the one hand, a pathological condition arises when a person pours his own being into precisely that space where emptiness should be for him. Then he projects the world of his visions and hallucinations into this empty being. This is precisely what is overcome through genuine occult training: hallucinations and visions. For it cannot be emphasized often enough: this is, in fact, pathological. — And what occult training develops is the cultivation of forces that are opposite to the forces that arise when hallucinations or visions occur.

[ 29 ] Through hallucinations and visions, a person develops inner powers that are opposed to what is necessary for an imaginative life. One will therefore experience this time and again: There are people who, for this reason, are not necessarily ill to the highest degree, but who—I do not want to say have hallucinations, for then one must speak of illness—but who have visions. In fact, there are even a great many people who go through life with visions and are very proud of them, living within these visions in the belief that a real spiritual world is revealed to them, whereas it is merely the unchecked growth of their life forces pouring out into the void. There are also those who are so arrogant—who become megalomaniacal—that they claim to be experiencing an initiation, whereas what they are experiencing is merely an abnormal growth that overwhelms their thinking. And when such people then approach what must be recommended in the serious sense as exercises in imagination, something quite special sometimes arises. For when they then say, “Yes, I have now lost my spiritual vision”—they have in fact lost their visionary perceptions; and this is because these exercises in true imagination, which they are applying to themselves, directly counteract their pathological power of vision. Such people, who believe in this way that they live in the spiritual world through natural forces, live there in a pathological way, and they generally lose what they have come to love so dearly in a rather haughty self-love. This can, of course, be experienced again and again, and when it is experienced, it only serves to prove how these visionary powers are pathological forces, and how what is sought after for imaginative perception are the opposite, healing forces.

[ 30 ] It can be seen from this that, inwardly, beyond sensory perception, human experience is adjoined by a realm that can only be objectively grasped in the imaginative life. In the visionary life, we merely project our own life into the void. But when we experience this void, then—just as the external world acts upon us through our senses—that which I have already described as the weaving, active world of the Angeloi Hierarchy enters into this void. The weaving, active world of the Angeloi Hierarchy is at work all around us.

[ 31 ] But we can also find, on the other side, the realm adjacent to human experience, and that is the one that lies beyond thinking, more toward the inner realm. We can indeed say: This perception is connected to the “I” (see drawing on page 135). Now let us enter the astral body: we have imagination. Now let us descend into the etheric body: we have the activity of memory. And in the physical body, we have images. Ordinary consciousness does not reach down into the etheric body; nor does it extend out beyond it. Out there lies the world of which it must be said that it is the world of the living, weaving angels. It is, therefore, a spiritual world that exists above our world of consciousness. It does not lie outside the realm of human life, but it does lie outside the realm of ordinary consciousness. For our “I”—of which it has been explicitly stated that it lies outside sensory perceptions and brings them into our consciousness—is thus thoroughly connected to this world. It is the world we can enter only with heightened consciousness, because otherwise our consciousness would be diminished, causing us to fall into unconsciousness. We do, after all, fall into this unconsciousness every time we fall asleep, and we then ascend into this world. This is what happens when we go beyond sensory perception and enter this realm.

[ 32 ] But we can also descend to the other side, into our true being. This happens when the destructive forces of death lying within us take hold of us more than they usually do; or rather, when we become aware of them. Just as we can break through beyond the boundaries of sensory life, so too can we penetrate downward through what I call occult training.

[ 33 ] But what is experienced there must—if it is not to manifest in a certain pathological way—remain entirely within the human being. The human being must not allow it to rise into his ordinary consciousness. He must leave this realm below, where it is otherwise unconscious. That is to say, a person must not allow this realm—which, after all, lies in the etheric body—to flow up into their ordinary consciousness; rather, they must direct their ordinary consciousness down into the etheric body. Thus, what is down there must not intrude upon ordinary imagination; rather, ordinary imagination must penetrate down into that realm.

[ 34 ] From this, however, you can see that this is a realm which, just like the other one I have described, is, so to speak, the physical body of the human being, so that this realm is always present within the physical body of the human being. This belongs to the inner human entities that have often been referred to in the context of spiritual science, and this region is always described in such a way that those who have recognized it—who have caught a glimpse of it—say: It is impossible to express in human words what lies down there. — You can trace this from the descriptions of the ancient Egyptian initiations all the way up to Bulwer.

[ 35 ] But in a certain sense, we can—and indeed must—already speak today about this realm. For it is in this realm that everything in human soul-body life is rooted that, in the ordinary sense, should not actually develop in a person’s outward behavior. It is there that human evil is rooted.

[ 36 ] They see this as a very remarkable fact. This source of evil is, in fact, constantly within us. We must not for a single moment succumb to the illusion that the source of evil is not within us. It lies, if I may say so, beneath the realm of the imagination. It must simply not infect the life of the imagination; otherwise, the images become motives for evil; it must remain below. And whoever wishes to observe it there must be morally strong enough not to let it rise, but to send only consciousness down. Now you might ask: But what is the purpose of this in human beings? — Yes, this question can only be raised by someone who might say, for example: Why doesn’t the plant stop growing once it has developed green leaves? — It simply continues to grow by its own power. We carry within us the process of dying that develops our thinking. This process is still conscious, but it must descend into the unconscious. For if this process were not to continue, our thoughts would never consolidate to the point where memory can arise within us, so that later, thoughts can resurface within us regarding the experiences we have had through thinking. So the process of withering away must continue even further so that we may have a memory. And the essence to which we, as human beings, owe our ability to remember is the very same essence that, when it manifests in an improper way, does so when the motives of evil arise within a person. In a sense, the inclination toward evil present in certain people is a spiritual-soul upheaval—please forgive me for using this expression—a spiritual-soul upheaval of that which should remain below and provide for memory.

[ 37 ] This power of memory is rooted in the human being. And just as there is a physical upwelling, so there is this spiritual-psychic upwelling. When that which, in divine wisdom, has been bestowed upon us in the depths of our being as the power of memory—when that rises up into consciousness, just as something—forgive the unappetizing expression—physically belches up—then you have the criminal inclination.

[ 38 ] There is nothing in the world that does not have its rightful place, and that cannot lead to disaster if it is out of place. If anything in the world seems to us as though it should not be there, we must ask the question: Where must it be in order to fulfill its purpose there? — And here, as we descend, we enter the other realm—the realm of the hierarchy of the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones—just as we move beyond the realm of the senses into the weaving realm of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai. We descend into a realm where we can now clearly see how that natural force connected to our memories has a moral aspect.

[ 39 ] Just consider what this means: the humanities discover instances where a natural process has a moral aspect—that is, where something that seems out of place takes on a moral character! That is precisely what ails our age: that moral life, on the one hand, is abstract, while the natural and the causal, on the other hand, are concrete. We cannot find a method for bringing the two together. Here you have a very concrete process in which something natural carries within itself that which—contrary to what is moral—can now become immoral.

[ 40 ] But doesn’t something strange strike you here? If we look at the matter as it is, on the one hand, in its degenerate form, we enter, so to speak, into the realm of the antimoral without even realizing it. We need this for the sake of memory. But as I told you, when we transcend sensory perceptions, we enter the realm of love. That is, after all, the very essence of morality. We enter the realm of morality. We are on the path to being able to build an ever-stronger bridge between the moral-religious world on the one hand and the physical-bodily world—the world of natural causality—on the other. This bridge must be built. And indeed, when we go out into the spiritual realm, when we descend into the spiritual, we enter the world of hierarchies. We have, so to speak, been able to approach the realm of hierarchies from two sides.

[ 41 ] Of course, this line of thought can only proceed in such a way that we approach the goal, as it were, in a circular fashion. It cannot be done the way it is in mathematics, where one starts with elementary concepts and builds upon them; rather, one must approach, in a circular fashion, that which is ultimately to be understood.