The Rudolf Steiner Archive

New Year's Eve Lecture

[ 1 ] I think that on a day marking the turn of the year, it is also fitting to speak of a turning point in the history of human development, and today I will speak specifically about that turning point—the transformation of human cognition as a whole—during the period between the earliest time to which humanity can historically look back and our own time. Even in the most ancient times, people were fully aware that knowledge of the true, deeper nature of the human being can only be attained when the powers of cognition hidden within the human being are brought to the surface. It has always been said that experience of the external world can reveal only the outer aspects of human nature. Within the specific rituals of the mysteries, those who sought such knowledge were offered the opportunity to attain these higher insights into the true nature of the human being through powers otherwise hidden in the depths of the human being. It was perfectly clear, especially in the times when a certain instinctive, primordial wisdom prevailed, that the true nature of the human being is different from what can be found within the sphere experienced by the human being in ordinary everyday life. That is why people have always spoken of an initiation, through which the deeper mysteries of life—with which the human being is connected—can first become accessible to him.

[ 2 ] Even today, as anthroposophical spiritual science clearly shows, we must speak of such an initiation. But one can say: The consciousness of humanity today—which has been shaped under very specific, strongly egoistic conditions—resists the idea that true knowledge of the human being and of the nature of the world can be found only through such special preparations and developments within the human soul. Modern people would like to settle the highest questions of existence without applying such principles of development, relying solely on what is given to them in ordinary life. And when they get the feeling that they cannot resolve such supreme questions of existence with their ordinary powers of cognition, they claim that human cognitive capacity is limited in the first place, and that it would be absurd to go beyond the ordinary limits of human knowledge. One also tends to harbor a prejudice against the principle of initiation, asking: Does what is to be said from the science of initiation have any value at all for those who cannot yet attain such initiation in their present incarnation? How can such people be convinced of the truth of what arises from a very specially prepared form of knowledge?

[ 3 ] However, that is not how things actually are. And that last objection, in particular, is as unfounded as can be. For what, exactly, is the nature of that which approaches human beings through the science of initiation?

[ 4 ] Imagine that a person first enters a dark room. As he walks around, he distinguishes objects by their shapes through touch. Suppose this room is suddenly illuminated by a lamp positioned somewhere so that it is not at all noticeable within the room itself. All objects will appear different to the ordinary senses of the person who previously walked around in the dark room, touching everything only by touch, and thereby forming a conception of the shapes of the objects in the dark room. Under the influence of the lighting—without anything having been added, and without anything now being inaccessible to the person standing in the illuminated room—all objects will now appear differently, revealing their essence and, at the same time, the essence of light. Thus, when the science of initiation approaches a person, all that is required is for them—whether or not they can attain it directly on their own—to accept what the science of initiation offers with an open mind and to regard it in such a way that they allow what they know, the world accessible to them, to be illuminated by this science of initiation. This science of initiation in no way seeks to introduce anything into the world other than what this world already is. But just as one cannot perceive what is in a dark room in the darkness, yet can perceive it immediately in the light, so too can that which is spread out around the human being for ordinary consciousness not reveal its own nature unless it is illuminated by what comes from the science of initiation. Humanity itself stands before humanity in the ordinary world. Human beings carry an immortal soul within them, just as perhaps the picture hanging on the wall in a dark room represents something that cannot be seen in the dark room. When the room is lit, one sees it immediately. It is not that the initiate adds the immortal soul to the human being; rather, when the human being is illuminated by the science of initiation, the immortal soul becomes visible to everyone. And only a prejudiced science could deny that the world in which human beings exist ceaselessly in earthly consciousness between birth and death—that this very world, which can be grasped by ordinary common sense—confirms everything that the science of initiation teaches.

[ 5 ] The science of initiation itself, however, has undergone a transformation. It was something different in the ancient times of humanity, and it now presents itself to people once again in a transformed form. Between these two periods, however, lies a phase of human development—beginning around the 15th century and now drawing to a close—that was dark and gloomy in relation to the spiritual light that the science of initiation seeks to be; yet this darkness is also deeply rooted in the very nature of the entire development of the Earth and humanity. When we look back to earlier times—traditions of which were still preserved into the post-Christian era but which also faded away in the 15th century and became incomprehensible during that period—when we look back to ancient times, we find that when human beings looked out into the world with their instinctive powers of perception, they saw not merely what can be seen today by human beings through their sensory perception and intellect. Human beings saw the spiritual everywhere in sensory objects—and not merely the abstract spiritual, but the concrete spiritual; they saw real spiritual beings. Even in ancient Greece, people saw such concrete spiritual beings. And one can trace this all the way back to the transformation of sensory perception itself to understand how it was that people were able to perceive such spiritual beings. Today, people believe that this tapestry of sensory impressions unfolding before us has always been exactly as it is today. Even the natural sciences can show people that this is not the case.

[ 6 ] The Greeks, for example, did not see the blue sky as blue as we see it today. The Greeks had no concept of this blueness of the sky. To them, it was shaded. Instead, they saw the so-called light colors even more vividly, even more brightly, than we do. This can be gleaned from the literature. But in a sensory perception of this kind, the spiritual lies spread out directly over the tapestry of the senses itself. I would say that it is precisely the blue coloring of the world—the blue tint—that causes the outer spiritual to recede. And at the same time that people’s instinctive consciousness perceived the most elemental things everywhere in the outside world, human beings also perceived an elemental spiritual-psychic reality within themselves.

[ 7 ] Today we speak of the conscience that tells us this or that. The Greeks spoke of the Erinyes. It was only in particularly striking cases that the Greeks became aware that something like spiritual-elemental forces approached them as something objective. But in earlier times, people perceived everything that we today assume simply arises from the human being itself as being brought about by a foreign spiritual power approaching the human being. What is entirely normal in one period of human development need not manifest in the same way in another period. If a person today were to become aware of the moral voice in the same way as was the case in the earlier period of Greek development—the time when Aeschylus was still writing—it would today be regarded as a mental illness, and one would likely say, using an expression that may no longer be considered entirely accurate today: “This person is possessed by a foreign power.” In ancient Greece, this “possession” was entirely normal. Today, we must perceive the very same thing that was once felt to originate from a foreign power as coming from within ourselves, as stemming from our conscience.

[ 8 ] When a person—who, based on his instinctive consciousness, held the view that spiritual-elemental beings are at work in the outer world, and who also held the view that spiritual-elemental beings are at work within him—was admitted into the school of the Mysteries, these spiritual-elemental beings were, so to speak, illuminated for him by higher spiritual beings through a new insight. Through instinctive consciousness, one perceived nature spirits and certain demonic forces at work within human nature. Through initiation, one delved deeper into nature and deeper into one’s own human being. And what was particularly significant—what was of the utmost importance—for someone who underwent the first stage of initiation in ancient times was that, precisely through initiation, they ceased to perceive the elemental spirits within the external natural world and the demonic within their own being. One might say: What is commonplace to us today—what we carry with us as our natural perception of the external and internal worlds—the ancient mystery student first had to acquire. Thus humanity progresses in such a way that certain things, which later become natural, had to be acquired in earlier times through the science of initiation. And then, once a person had arrived through initiation at a view of nature and humanity that, at that time, was accessible only to the mystery student, he would, in his own way, penetrate to the spiritual beings who govern both the inner life of the human being and the essence of external nature. That is why the older principle of initiation was expressed as follows: One ascended from the ordinary view of life to the elements earth, water, fire, and air. In the ordinary view, one actually had elemental-air-spiritual, elemental-fire-spiritual, elemental-water-spiritual, and elemental-earth-spiritual. In a pure sense, one actually perceived earth, water, fire, and air only through the first stage of the science of initiation.

[ 9 ] This is the essential point: that in the course of human progress, the perception of spiritual and soul elemental beings in the external world and also within the human being has been replaced by what we can today call “disembodied nature”—or, if I may use the expression, what we can call the “transparent human being” as perceived through inner contemplation. When we look inward today, we see only the echoes of the external world in the form of memories. Everything else remains as invisible to the human being as a completely transparent body remains invisible. When the human being of old looked into his inner being, it was not spiritually transparent to him. He actually saw spiritual-soul beings within himself.

[ 10 ] If things had remained that way, human beings would never have been able to attain full consciousness of freedom. For full consciousness of freedom has only begun to permeate the totality of human mental and soul powers since the time when the old, instinctive view of the spirit began to wane. Necessity reigns within the world of spirits. There, spiritual beings act, and the course of events is determined by what arises from the activity of these spiritual beings. When one stands with one’s soul within this world of spiritual beings, one is interwoven into a realm of necessity. There, one has only the longing to explore the intentions and thoughts of the spiritual beings within whose realm one is interwoven, and to carry out what is in accordance with the intentions and impulses of these spiritual beings. There, one has no intention of realizing one’s own impulses. There is no cause for freedom at all. Only when one confronts soulless nature—when one finds no traces of spiritual beings in nature—does one arrive at a perception of the external world that no longer contains any reality, but only mental images. And mental images are all that modern knowledge has handed down to us since the 15th century.

[ 11 ] Just as mirror images have no binding power over us—just as, for example, the mirror image of a person standing behind me, whom I cannot see, cannot strike me—so, too, thoughts cannot manifest any real action or real forces. The thoughts we carry within us—and humanity has only recently, in the course of its development, and specifically only from the 15th century onward, become capable of grasping such pure, imaginal thoughts that are free of reality—these mental images cannot, therefore, exert any compulsion or determine human beings in any way. Even as they permeate a person’s understanding, the person is not compelled to act in accordance with them. Just as a mirror image cannot push me, so a thought cannot determine me. But just as I can, through the sight of a mirror image, determine myself to do something from within myself, so too can pure mental images determine me. Therefore, that pure thinking—which, strictly speaking, has only become a benefit to humanity since the fifteenth century—is the foundation for the human experience of freedom. This is what I sought to explore in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity in the early 1890s: that pure thinking is the foundation of freedom. And spiritual science shows the place this pure thinking occupies in the overall development, in the total being of the human being, and how this pure thinking has entered into the historical evolution of humanity. This impulse of freedom first entered humanity in the mid-15th century. It is now here. It had to be won through the perception of a disembodied nature, of a spiritless human inner life. It had to be achieved at a time when supernatural worlds were spoken of only in traditional religious creeds and traditional philosophical worldviews, which no longer offered anything directly experienced. If humanity were to remain any longer in this view of a soulless nature and a spiritless human inner being, it would inevitably lose its connection to its own origin.

[ 12 ] The time is fulfilled, and the days must come when people will once again turn their attention to their spiritual-soul origin—that is, when they will once again become aware that the world in which they find themselves is not merely a soulless nature, and that human beings do not merely participate in a soulless nature, but rather that they live in a world filled with concrete spiritual beings. With this newly attained awareness of freedom, human beings can once again immerse themselves in the world of necessity. For within this world, they will then be precisely the beings called to freedom, having once, in their physical incarnations, passed through the state in which they were left to themselves with their physical bodies. We can, however, set out to explore once more the divine origin of the voice of conscience, now that we have learned a sense of responsibility under the influence of the consciousness of freedom throughout that period in which conscience appeared to human beings only as an inner voice—that is, as an image. Human development was not intended—as many a haughty modern mind believes—so that human beings would have had to remain for the longest time in a state of childlike perception of the external world, and now that they have finally reached the point where all existing knowledge, even with its limitations, must remain as it is. No, that is not the case. Anyone who looks at human development with an open mind will find that this development has progressed from stage to stage, that even the kind of knowledge we currently possess represents a stage, and that in the future, humanity will relate to nature differently than it does today.

[ 13 ] Just as we look back today on Thales, and—if we are arrogant—say: Thales childishly sought the origin of everything in water; we know better today—and some, in this very arrogance, believe that we know it today from our findings in the chemistry laboratory, just as one will always have to know it—if one takes this arrogant standpoint, one might actually expect that someday, in future centuries, people with the same mindset might look back on us and say: “What childish notions these people of the 20th century still had, coming from their laboratories, from their physics labs!” — But that is simply not the case. These ideas, which seem so childish to today’s arrogant people—and which they believe they need to consider, at most, only from a historical perspective—represent important developmental impulses that humanity had to go through just as it had to go through today’s developmental impulse. And just as humanity has moved beyond Thales, so will it move beyond Lavoisier, beyond Newton, beyond what is regarded today as authoritative—even beyond Einstein. The world must certainly be conceived as a flowing process in spiritual and psychological terms as well, and human beings must conceive of themselves as part of this living flow.

[ 14 ] But the fact remains that external revelation does not, at first, contain what leads human beings to their own origin; rather, at all times, it is necessary to draw upon hidden forces within the human being in order to find the path to the world of human origins. If we simply look out into the external natural world today with our ordinary consciousness and ordinary sensory faculties, we do not readily encounter elemental beings; and when we look within ourselves, we do not readily encounter demonic beings. Outwardly, we find the laws of nature; inwardly, we find something like conscience and the like. But if we truly develop the capacity for conceptual thought and reasoning that we can direct toward the external world—if we bring our thinking to the point where it acts with the same vitality that sensory perceptions otherwise possess—then we find the possibility of perceiving spiritual beings in the external world once again.

[ 15 ] What kind of ancient, instinctive consciousness once existed in a way that we can no longer make use of becomes visible to us once again—supernaturally visible—as we intensify our thinking. With thinking that has become thin and pictorial, we no longer penetrate to the spirit of nature. But when we intensify our thinking, when we make it strong, just as the sensory faculties are, then we penetrate through the outer tapestry of the senses to what underlies the outer world as spirituality, and we go beyond the limits of knowledge that are rightly assumed by ordinary consciousness. And we must pursue self-education to the point where we learn, as it were, to observe ourselves in our impulses of will just as we observe another human being. And when we not only learn to observe ourselves, but when we can shape impulses of will out of consciousness in the way these impulses of will otherwise take shape only passively in life—in other words, when we act not merely out of an inner necessity, but out of an insight into the world that crystallizes into love, into love for this or that impulse—which is given to us not only by our freedom but also by the world order, the wise world order—when we make ourselves, in this way, the agents of the impulses necessary for orientation in the world, then our love condenses within us. We attain a loving devotion to purely spiritual impulses. And once these have undergone the necessary development, we then also find the spiritual within ourselves; we find the harmony between the spiritual in external nature and the spiritual within. For wherever the search for the spirit has been pursued far enough, the same results have been reached. When the initiates of the ancient mysteries sought outward and, as they said, found the higher gods, they then turned their gaze back into the human inner being, and there they found, as they said, the lower gods. But ultimately they reached a stage of development where the world of the upper gods and the world of the lower gods were one, where the above became the below and the below became the above, where these distinctions—which stemmed only from spatial considerations—no longer mattered.

[ 16 ] The same is true of the newer initiation. We penetrate into the spiritual-soul aspect of nature. It is not a world of atoms and their collisions that reveals itself to us, but rather the spiritual forces of spiritual beings behind sensory perception; and through inner contemplation, beyond the limits of memory, the spiritual-soul beings within the human being reveal themselves to us. But these two worlds—the outer world of spirituality and the inner world of spirituality—ultimately merge into one. We can already look toward this one spiritual world in a truly vivid way. Consider the human being with his ordinary consciousness. He looks out into the outer world of nature. He perceives color and light; he directs his other senses outward toward the natural world. He perceives sounds, differences in temperature, and other sensory qualities in the external natural world. He then looks at his own body. He perceives his own body through sensory qualities. He looks at nature; it reveals itself to him through sensory qualities. He looks at his own body; it reveals itself through sensory qualities. When a person begins to set their will in motion, when they walk through the world, they become aware that this force of will acts into the movements of their eyes, that the very same force that directs the movements of their legs already flows into the very essence of their eyes for the purpose of sensory perception. When a person has already immersed themselves deeply enough in the sensory realm, they become aware of the very same thing that they relate to the external world through the expressions of their will. The sensory world is already merging into a unified whole for him. This unified merging of the sensory world is a superficial, yet nonetheless a reflection of the merging of the world of outer spirituality and inner spirituality. By discovering these two worlds—which are one and the same—human beings become aware once more of their spiritual-soul origin. And so today we stand, as it were, at the end of an ancient era that reveals to us how, in earlier epochs, humanity gazed into spiritual worlds—a gaze in which the human being looks outward into nature, and a gaze in which the human being looks within themselves. Then came a period when darkness fell, when the greatest triumphs were celebrated precisely in the realm of darkness, without the science of initiation.

[ 17 ] But the World Year has come to an end; World New Year’s Eve is here. A new World Year must begin. We were able to say this on Christmas Eve; we would also like to experience this symbolic festival—which is now approaching us—in the same way; we would like to experience, through such a festival, the turning of the ages, which we must already sense today as a world-historical turning point. Times have grown serious—so serious, in fact, that today we must look up from the narrowly confined events within the horizon—which most of humanity today would like to recognize as the only legitimate one—toward the vastness of the worlds, including the vastness of human soul-spiritual experience. And there we experience a world-historical turning point. If we become aware of this cosmic turning point, if we realize that a new cosmic year of the spirit must begin for humanity, If we learn to recognize this, then we alone can experience true humanity in our present epoch. For true humanity is experienced only when the human being, passing through repeated earthly lives, finds in each individual earthly life the opportunity to feel not merely as a human being in general, but as a human being with specific tasks, within the specific time period into which one of his earthly lives falls.

[ 18 ] Human beings can live with eternity only if they find a way to live in time in the right manner. For human beings, the eternal should not only reveal itself in time, but through human beings and through time, the eternal should become an experience for them. The eternal reigns in timeless duration; it also reigns in timeless duration through the human being. But its heartbeats are the events of the individual epochs, as they strike into human experience. Only by experiencing these heartbeats and uniting them into a comprehensive rhythm can we experience the eternal through time. Duration belongs to our true human nature. We can experience duration only when we lovingly and powerfully allow the individual heartbeats of the eternal world-being to become our own experience.

[ 19 ] This is what I wanted to place in your hearts and souls today, at the turn of the year. May the coming days bring us all the opportunity to apply—in this spirit, in the smallest of things and, if we are so fortunate, in the larger ones as well—those impulses in our thinking, feeling, and willing that we are capable of cultivating within ourselves as our very best.