The Rudolf Steiner Archive

9. Insight and Initiation

[ 1 ] Anthroposophy, as I intend to present it, is based in our present time on the same foundations as any initiatory science of any past age. But in the course of its development, humanity has undergone the most manifold metamorphoses with regard to its spiritual constitution. Each age, within the development of human civilization, presents a particular, predominant spiritual constitution, and the science of initiation—which strives to explore the eternal aspects of the human being and the world—must also be guided by this spiritual constitution. Our time requires a different initiatory science than was necessary, for example, in the Middle Ages, in ancient Greece, or even in earlier eras of human civilization. Anthroposophy aims to be a science of initiation that corresponds to the needs and longings of the contemporary human soul. In keeping with the spirit of our age, it must proceed from the premise that, with the current scientific worldview, human beings cannot recognize either their own eternal nature or the eternal nature of the world itself. It must also assume that when human beings turn inward from external science and seek to immerse themselves mystically within themselves, they cannot arrive at a satisfactory result by this path either. For external science does not extend to the eternal, and inner immersion, while it may provide mystical faith, does not yield the kind of knowledge that people of the present need.

[ 2 ] What I have now briefly touched upon in my introduction could be proven in detail. However, I assume that the esteemed audience present here today consists solely of those who have experienced from within their own inner lives that external natural science does not provide them with satisfactory insights into their own eternity and the eternity of the world, if they wish to attain true knowledge and not merely an inner mystical illusion. Therefore, I would prefer to speak at length about the relationship between the anthroposophy referred to here and natural science on the one hand, and mysticism—where it is often sought—on the other. I will simply say that, arising from the spirit and the state of the soul of civilized human beings, this anthroposophy strives for something I would like to call “exact clairvoyance.” Because it strives for this, it encounters so many opponents today. And it is so difficult to understand, even though, deep down, all the soul forces of the present day yearn for it. Why is it misunderstood? It is misunderstood because people have not yet progressed from the judgments, feelings, and so on that they are conscious of in the present, to the unconscious longings that are, after all, already present today in every thinking human soul.

[ 3 ] These vague longings, these unconscious goals, demand that we strive today for a deeper knowledge, a higher understanding of the eternal—and indeed, through very specific exercises, through a very specific development of the human soul and the faculty of cognition—but that these exercises or developments can be structured in the same way that we are accustomed today to structuring knowledge in the exact sense. This anthroposophy wishes to present itself to its contemporaries in this way—following the model of exact natural science and with the scrupulousness of natural science. And at the same time, it wishes to be a form of knowledge accessible to every human mind, even the simplest and most naive, so that no mind need remain shut off from the knowledge of that which concerns the eternal and the imperishable within the human being. And so, having said this simply by way of introduction, I would like to begin today by simply setting forth how this anthroposophy—this modern science of initiation—arrives at its path of knowledge.

[ 4 ] It is based, first of all, on gaining a clear understanding of the relationship among the three fundamental forces of the soul—thinking, feeling, and willing—within the human being. In everyday life, when we look into our inner being, we speak of thinking, feeling, and willing. When we speak of thinking or imagining, we are also clear that we are then reflecting on something within us that actually awakens us as human beings. This life of imagination is silent during sleep; it remains silent from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up. A person’s entire consciousness is then in a dull state. We perceive the world, so to speak, in a clear light—to the extent that we can take in such a clear light within ourselves with ordinary consciousness—when this consciousness is permeated by waking images.

[ 5 ] We then speak of our feelings. Although they may be the most important thing to us as human beings on an inner level, they are less clear than our ideas. They well up from the unknown depths of our inner life, illuminated, as it were, by our ideas and thoughts, but they are not imbued with the same clarity as the ideas themselves. And as we will have to discuss later—how obscure is everything connected with human impulses of the will! They surge, I might say, from unknown depths, penetrate us, and prompt us to act as human beings. And only in the rarest of cases can we actually state clearly what is going on within us when an impulse of the will is present.

[ 6 ] These three fundamental forces of human soul life can be distinguished from one another simply by their varying degrees of clarity and by many other factors. Yet they form a unity within the entirety of human soul life. We can say that the life of imagination is one pole. But we also know that we want something when we string one image after another, when we allow one image to emerge from another. Our will plays a role in the life of imagination. And in turn, the other pole—feeling, which lies right in the middle between these two—is the volitional aspect, the impulses of the will. We would not be human beings if we did not consciously shape our most important life actions, if we did not allow ourselves to be impelled by ideas. And so we can say: On the other hand, the will is in turn permeated by the life of imagination. The training and development of the life of imagination on the one hand, and the life of will on the other, is the responsibility of those who, in the spirit of anthroposophy, wish to arrive at modern initiatory science—at what I have called exact clairvoyance.

[ 7 ] One must engage in exercises of thought on the one hand and exercises of the will on the other if the gate is to open to the supersensible world—a world we must enter if we, as human beings, wish to recognize our Eternal Self and if we wish to recognize the world in terms of the Eternal. The exercises of thought are carried out precisely by reflecting on how elements of the will always interplay with thought; the exercises of the will, by observing how thought interplays with the will. It is only in ordinary life that we do not pay attention to these elements of the will. To attain modern initiation, we must pay attention precisely to the subtle will that is present within the life of the imagination. We must achieve this step by step through the exercises I have described in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?. This is precisely what I wish to suggest here: We must set aside what is usually considered the most important—the content of thought—and learn to consciously use the will in thinking. This is done in the following way. But as I said, I can only outline the principles here; my esteemed listeners will find all further details in An Outline of Esoteric Science and in How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, as well as in other books.

[ 8 ] Consider a mental image that is easy to grasp, one that is completely clear to you—like, I might say, a mathematical triangle. Place this in the center of a complex of ideas. It does not matter at all what the content of this idea is, but rather that one concentrates one’s entire inner life in this way on this single complex of ideas, in a meditative act of thinking. We must put ourselves in a position where we can set aside the entire rest of the world, so that nothing else remains in our consciousness but that one idea, that one complex of ideas. It requires a vigorous effort of the soul to accomplish this. But just as an individual muscle grows stronger and more powerful when we use it again and again, so too does our spiritual power grow stronger when we use it again and again. For some, this takes months; for others, years. When we repeatedly and vigorously concentrate all of this spiritual power on a single conceptual complex, on a single idea, it grows stronger after some time. After some time, one may have an experience that is initially internal and deeply moving. This deeply moving experience will consist in the fact that one has now inwardly strengthened and energized oneself for a completely new way of thinking—a way of thinking that one did not have before. What one has attained there can most easily be described in the following way:

[ 9 ] When we face the ordinary world, the sensory impressions we receive are very vivid. We live vigorously within these sensory impressions; we live vigorously in the world of colors, the world of sounds, the world of warmth and cold, and the rest of our sensory stimuli. In contrast, the thoughts of ordinary consciousness are weak. Everyone need only recall how much weaker their life of thought is than their life of sensory perceptions. Eventually, we reach a point where our life of thought becomes as vivid and as energetic as sensory life otherwise is. This is an important transition on the path of human knowledge, for then this life of thought no longer appears in a linear fashion, as it usually does in ordinary consciousness, but rather appears as vividly, as intensely, and as richly as the external sensory perceptions themselves. One has advanced to what, in contrast to ordinary abstract or concrete thinking, can be called imaginative thinking—not because one can indulge in what one imagines, or in what one can see when one surrenders to the imagination, but because one can behold worlds of which one knows that they live in the soul as easily as dream images. But they are not dream images; rather, they are filled with inner reality.

[ 10 ] Once you have spent some time learning precisely how to live in imaginative thinking—to engage your whole being inwardly within this imaginative thinking—you will find that, through this imaginative thinking, you immerse yourself in a reality, sinking into a reality you have not known until now. For it is through this imaginative thinking that one attains the first level of the supersensible world. One gradually discovers that, through this imaginative thinking, one now experiences within oneself a second human being—a human being who is as real as the outer, physical, spatial human being. And just as this outer, physical, spatial human being is an organism whose individual members are in reciprocal relationship to one another—just as the head depends on the hand, and in turn the hand is dependent on the head, just as the right hand is dependent on the left, and just as all the members of the human spatial organism are interdependent, so one discovers a second human being within oneself, whom I must now call a “time organism.” This is a time organism; it is not something spatial. Yet it stands before our soul’s gaze like a vast tableau. Once we have progressed far enough in imaginative insight, we no longer look back from the memory of individual recollections, but rather we look back on our earthly life thus far, beginning with the earliest years of our childhood. We look back by surveying everything at once, as in a single image—but an image of which we know it is not a spatial image. If we were to paint it, we would paint something like a flash of lightning—something that can be captured only in an instant. This is what I have called the “body of formative forces,” the “etheric body.” But it cannot simply be painted; rather, we must be aware that we are depicting a cross-section of a temporal organism. And we now see how, in our childhood, we were endowed with supersensible powers that were innate to us, that worked in our brain like a sculptor, that found their way from the brain into the respiratory and circulatory organisms, in order to work their way more and more deeply into the entire spatial organism until they mastered it. Through what we come to experience here as the time organism in imaginative insight, the child increasingly takes possession of the entire spatial organism. This etheric body fills us through the unfolding of its forces. In ordinary consciousness, we become aware of its effects, not of the organism itself. But through imaginative insight, we become aware of this time organism. We learn to recognize why we have become precisely the kind of human being with a certain character; why, to mention just a few examples, we are, so to speak, more predisposed—one to be a painter, another to be a mathematician—and how something supersensible is at work within us, in our earthly existence. We learn to explore the first supersensible aspect within us in this way. Through systematic training of the thinking faculty, one can develop precise clairvoyance. This is the first stage of supersensible knowledge: imaginative knowledge. One reaches the first supersensible entity that a human being can attain—one’s supersensible body, which one carries within one’s earthly body, here in this physical, spatial body.

[ 11 ] So far, I have tried to describe how human beings arrive at the first supersensible realm through imaginative knowledge. It is a supersensible realm that is initially contained within the sensible realm. We have not yet emerged from the earthly body. But even within this earthly body there is a supersensible element, which I have described here, at least in principle. We come to know it through imaginative cognition. Thus we have described the first stage of supersensible cognition. Now we must go further. We now find that we can, in a certain sense, step out into the higher human nature, into that which lies beyond birth and beyond death: into eternal human nature.

[ 12 ] In everyday life, the integration of the will into the faculty of thought—into the power of thought—is connected with having attained this imaginative insight. One can proceed further along the paths into the supersensible world by, in a certain sense, performing the exercises in the opposite direction. We know from everyday life that we must not only acquire the necessary attention to be able to concentrate on an idea or an object, but that we must also have the power to withdraw the soul from whatever we have initially directed it toward. This is precisely what must lead to the next exercise. Once one has applied inner spiritual strength to systematic concentration—which has led to imaginative insight—one must then apply even greater strength to ensure, so to speak, that one is not held captive by the particular image or complex of images in question. One must apply this greater power if one wishes to progress further along the path of knowledge. This greater power is necessary once one has attained such vivid thoughts that one can push these thoughts out of one’s conscious life entirely at will and with full awareness—that is, sweep them out again. In this way, one progresses farther and farther, and one eventually becomes capable of removing from consciousness everything that one has brought into it through concentration and meditation—all those intensified mental images—and ultimately of living in a state of complete wakefulness, yet with an empty consciousness.

[ 13 ] Let us now consider what it means to live with an empty consciousness. We know that in ordinary life, when we have no sensory impressions and our memories do not arise from within us, we fall asleep—we slip into a state of unconsciousness. We protect ourselves from this by intensifying our imaginative life and by subsequently extinguishing this intensified imaginative life. We remain awake and, at the same time, experience everything that comes before us with an empty consciousness. For the time being, external sensory perception cannot come before us. It is extinguished by the intensified thinking. Memories, too, do not stand in the way of this intensified thinking. I have already said that in imaginative thinking we come to experience what has happened so far not as a memory, but as a tableau. With a single glance, we can take it all in as a single unit. What now enters our consciousness is something entirely new, something the person did not expect to find in their surroundings. Now, for this empty consciousness, a vision of a supersensible environment emerges, in which the human being stands just as he otherwise stands within the colors and sounds of the world. Now, in a sense, truly spiritual essences spring forth from everything. Now we no longer stand before the clouds as they drift by when we see them with our eyes; now we perceive a supersensible aspect in all such sensory phenomena. We do not have a world beyond this one before us, but a world that lies before us just as our own does—just as the sensory world lies before us—yet one that is a true supersensible world to be attained through initiation. Now, by immersing one’s consciousness in a supersensible world, one comes to know a new way of thinking, a new way of imagining. Now one comes to know a way of imagining and thinking that is independent of ordinary thinking and of the nervous system. One knows: You had to make use of your nervous system, but now you think thoughts for which you do not need a brain; now you think thoughts that are brought to life in your consciousness solely through the power of the soul.

[ 14 ] If we can do that, then we will certainly make many more discoveries that can help us understand how we have derived a new way of thinking from the old one through new experiences. It now becomes clear that this new way of thinking, which exists outside the brain, cannot be compared to the old way of thinking, which is bound to the brain, because this new way of thinking, in the ordinary sense, has no recollection and no memory, whereas the thinking of ordinary life is only sound when it entails recollection and memory. As strange and paradoxical as it may seem, it is true that, at first, no recollection is evoked by the new experience. This is sometimes a surprise to students of the science of initiation: they attain a certain degree of clairvoyance; they believe they can preserve what they have experienced in this way in their memory and recall it from memory just like other thoughts; they are then unhappy because they cannot do so. All they know is: “I was standing there, but now I cannot recall it within my physical body.” — That is precisely what characterizes the experience of a reality, not merely a thought. When I have a sensory experience, I can recall the thoughts associated with that experience. I can retain in my memory the thoughts of a rose. But if I want to have the rose, in all its redness, before me, then I must return to the rose. If, through effort during initiation, I have progressed from my ordinary consciousness to a new way of seeing, then in order to have the spiritual experience itself before me, I must retrace the steps I took earlier, so that just as a rose once again appears before me as a sensory perception, this spiritual experience must also come to me once more. Someone who speaks from the spiritual world—who does not merely speak of what he has learned about it, but of what he knows from his own observation—knows, even when speaking of the most elementary things, that through precise clairvoyance something new must be created in the soul each time. The one who works from ordinary science can work from memory. The spiritual researcher, however, must take the same steps that once led him to the experience. Then the process must emerge once again as an original experience. Thus, the conditions of the spiritual experience are also different from those in the ordinary consciousness of everyday life.

[ 15 ] However, in order to find our bearings in spiritual realms—to truly perceive the spiritual-supernatural world—we still need a special inner quality. We need what I would like to call presence of mind. In everyday life, this is what one needs to be able to make a specific decision without hesitation in a given situation. One must practice this presence of mind extensively in order to learn to observe in the supersensible world. For without this presence of mind, one would not have time to grasp the experience; one would arrive at the spiritual experience so late that it would already be over. This tremendous speed, this swift composure, must occur at the very moment one has progressed to thinking without the brain.

[ 16 ] But then, when one reaches the supersensible essences in our surroundings in this way—through empty consciousness while fully awake—one can do something else as well; one need only develop this power a little. If one continues to practice this power, one can extinguish this image body, the etheric body. One does not merely erase individual images; one erases the entire etheric body. Then, in a higher sense, a state of empty consciousness sets in, and before this empty consciousness our soul-spiritual life appears, just as it was in a soul-spiritual world before we, as souls, descended from the supersensible worlds into this earthly body. We come to know prenatal life through inspired insight, which I would like to call “insight through inspiration.” Just as the external air enters the lungs through inhalation, so does the spiritual world enter through the consciousness that has become empty. Then we breathe in—in a spiritual sense—the spiritual worlds, as it were, just as we knew them before we descended from spiritual heights into physical earthly existence.

[ 17 ] We have come to know one aspect of our being; the other aspect is spiritual immortality, which we will discuss in the third part of our lecture. Immortality negates death. One does not speak of “unbornness”; we would have to say that it is the other aspect of the human soul. As human beings, we are unborn, just as we are immortal. Anthroposophy, as a modern science of initiation, does not proceed like a philosophy by drawing conclusions and seeking further knowledge based on what is already known; rather, it seeks to prepare the soul to elevate itself to a higher level of understanding. When the soul is more highly developed than in ordinary life, it attains, through intuition, knowledge of its eternal being. This is, first of all, one aspect of inspired knowledge, which relates to our own humanity. I would like to describe the other aspect in the following way. Through inspired knowledge, we also come to know the external world. I can only sketch this out briefly. When we have the external sensory world—for example, the sun—before us, ordinary science presents the sun as a self-contained body in space. But this is only one part of the entire solar being, just as the physical body is only one part of the entire human being. In the case of human beings, we speak of the spiritual and soul aspects dwelling within the body. In the case of the sun, we must speak of the supersensible, the spiritual aspect of the sun, as being outside the sun and filling the entire universe with its solar nature. What is present everywhere—in minerals, plants, and animals—and what is within us as human beings as a solar quality—we perceive in physically concentrated form when we look up at the sun with our senses. In this way, through inspired insight, one learns to recognize this solar quality in plants, animals, and human beings. One learns to recognize it in every individual part of the human being—in the lungs, heart, liver, brain, and so on. But one does not merely come to know this solar quality; one also comes to know the spiritual aspect in relation to all external beings. Just as the sun does not have only sharp contours, so it is with the moon. The outer physical moon is merely the physical concentration, whereas the lunar aspect flows through the entire universe. Today, these things are regarded as superstition. They are just as much exact science as anything else, but one must see through them. We perceive plants, animals, and human beings—insofar as they are physical organisms—as something in the outer physical cosmos; but through inspired insight, we come to know their inner nature. In the same way, one also recognizes every individual hand, lung, liver, and so on. Within them, the solar and lunar principles continue to live: the solar principle in sprouting, growing, and flourishing; the lunar principle, however, also in what we must experience—degeneration and decline. We could not live without the solar and lunar aspects. As long as we recognize an ascending solar development and a descending lunar aspect, we learn to recognize the solar and lunar aspects in the external world. But we also learn to recognize what is diseased in the external world. We learn to recognize how the solar or lunar qualities predominate in a diseased organ; we learn to recognize how a human being can lose their health as a result of cosmic influences. And we also learn to recognize how the solar and lunar qualities live in plants, animals, and minerals—how opposing forces, as well as individual external natural forces, can be found that point us toward remedies for certain internal illnesses. Here, anthroposophy intervenes in external practical life, like an external medicine. It can be developed by looking into the spirit of the cosmos and thus recognizing the human being—in both their sick and healthy states—from within the cosmos. What I am hinting at here are just a few words about what already exists today as anthroposophic medicine, anthroposophic healing. There is no medicine, no psychology, no therapy that is anything other than the result of trial and error unless one advances toward a spiritual understanding of the universe.

[ 18 ] I have shown how we arrive at true human self-knowledge through inspired insight, and how this inspired insight can also be of help to us in practical life, in a practical field. I have demonstrated this in one area; it is also possible to demonstrate it in others. So we can say: On the one hand, the science of initiation provides the foundation for the deepest longing of the human soul; it provides what we need to intervene practically in the universe in a deeper sense than is possible through external sensory science. This is what we must say about the second part of human knowledge—inspired knowledge—which leads into the spirit of the cosmos. This leads even further—to the knowledge of the human being as he passes through the gate of death.

[ 19 ] It is only through the inspired insight just described that one truly comes to know the real soul of the human being—that essential soul nature which continues to exist even when the human being is outside of his body, indeed even before he descended from the spiritual-soul worlds and took on his physical earthly body. However, this understanding of the human being’s spiritual-soul nature remains one-sided at first if one proceeds only as far as inspired insight. One perceives only that aspect of the human being’s spiritual-soul nature that lies before birth. But if one is to come to know what lies beyond death, then the exercises for developing human supersensible powers of perception must be continued further. This is achieved by now carrying the thought-content into the will—just as one previously carried the will into the thoughts during the concentration exercises. I will now simply describe once more how one can succeed in gradually carrying the power of thought into the will, as I explained in the concentration exercises. Let us take a simple example. Every single person can do this every day. We sit down to rest and then reflect on something we experienced during the day—but not by starting in the morning and letting the events pass before us as they followed one another in the external flow of time. Instead, we review our daily life by beginning with the most recent experiences, in the evening, moving backward in as small segments as possible toward the morning. At first, it is entirely possible that we’ll focus on just one episode from the day; later, the tableau of memories will organize itself. What matters is this: We are accustomed to surrendering our thinking entirely passively to the external sequence of events; we always think of what came later in connection with what came before. As a result, we develop only weak willpower through our thinking. We develop a stronger will by proceeding in the opposite direction—by breaking our thinking free from the sequence of external natural events through a movement from back to front. We exercise our will by perceiving events from back to front. Similarly, one can think of a melody from back to front; one can let a drama unfold before one’s eyes from the fifth act to the first, from back to front. What matters is that, through strong will, we detach ourselves from the external sequence of events. In this way, we strengthen the will and develop within ourselves the power to drive thought into the will, just as we have driven the will into thought during concentration and meditation exercises. I have described this in more detail in the books already mentioned.

[ 20 ] I would like to add a few more points to make this clearer. When one engages in such intensive self-discipline of the will—when one is not merely able to surrender to external life, to what one’s upbringing and environment have made of one, but rather, when one, so to speak, cultivates this self-discipline through mature insight, if one takes complete control of oneself to the point of breaking a habit and replacing it with another through exercises that span years. When one says to oneself: “Purely through the power of your thinking, through the power of your will that is present in your life of imagination, you are trying to develop a certain quality—one you do not yet possess—into a lasting quality”—which may take as long as seven years. If we do this again and again, decade after decade, if we repeat it over and over, then we strengthen the will. And there are many other exercises of the will through which we enter the supersensible world to the same extent from another direction. But how do these impulses of the will relate to our consciousness? We can understand this in the following way. I have an impulse of the will when I raise my hand or my arm. Then this impulse of will penetrates into the depths of my being. This eludes ordinary waking consciousness, just as it usually eludes consciousness during sleep. Even when we dream in our feelings, we are still asleep with regard to our impulses of will. We can therefore say: In a certain sense, we are spiritually opaque. For just as we find this or that object opaque to physical light, so we find our body opaque when we look at the will. We cannot see into the will, whereas we see through the “eye”—the physical sense—because the eye is transparent. When we suffer from cataracts, we can no longer see. I certainly do not mean to claim that, in relation to our physical organism, we are sick in ordinary life; anthroposophy does not seek to practice false asceticism—but if we were to succeed—not physically, of course, but spiritually—in making the body transparent, we would truly be able to look from our thoughts into the physical organism and perceive the impulses of the will. We would come to see through the impulses of the will because our physical organism would be transparent. In this way, we see ourselves as beings of will and at the same time look into the spiritual world of the will to which we belong—into that external reality which we make transparent through exercises of the will. But then, for the one who has attained a level of insight in which the physical body is spiritually transparent—since the will is seen through and beheld—for that person, the physical body initially disappears from view, and thereby, if they wish to look farther and farther, empowered in the manner described, they come to have before them the image of the moment of death—that moment when we surrender the physical body to the earth and pass through the gate of death with the spiritual-soul aspect. We have this image of crossing the gate of death before us when we succeed in making our physical body transparent in order to look into the spiritual world. Then we understand what this physical body no longer possesses, and that we are not merely looking into the spiritual world, but are truly living within it by entering the spiritual world. This stage is intuitive knowledge—true intuitive knowledge. This stage gives us a vision of immortality. By attaining this stage through the imaginative and the inspired, we know that we belong to the universe as eternal spiritual beings, that we perceive the spiritual realm of the universe with the eternally spiritual soul within ourselves. This is the path of initiatory science, even as it fully adapts to modern consciousness—just as it arose in ancient times through deep, atavistic dreaming, but today with full consciousness, moving from the transitory to the eternal. Thus it can also be brought to the fore and rise from the modern state of the soul today. But what has been said will not be recognized in this Anthroposophy only by those who undergo all the exercises in order, so to speak, to convince themselves through their own observation of this world and its essential life within the Eternal. No; to explore this, imagination, inspiration, and intuition are necessary. The spiritual researcher has brought forth what he can explore. He has clothed it in ordinary logic and language, and thus presented it to his fellow human beings in a more recent age. Thus, his findings become understandable if a person possesses only a healthy sensibility. Just as one need not be a painter to understand a work of art—one need only have a healthy sensibility—so too can one understand all these findings with ordinary human understanding, provided they are presented to the world in the right way and received with an open mind. We must simply avoid creating misunderstanding upon misunderstanding ourselves, as so often happens everywhere. Then people frequently confuse what has been described here today as imaginative, inspired, and intuitive insight with the hallucinatory state that arises from pathological conditions. And one might say: Perhaps what is sought here as imagination is nothing other than the imagined, the illusory—such as a vision, a hallucination, and so on—or even a mediumistic state. But what is described here in terms of meditation, concentration, and so on is precisely the opposite of these states. The person who hallucinates immerses themselves completely in those states. But whoever ascends through spiritual exercises—through imagination, inspiration, and intuition—does not ascend in a hallucinatory state; rather, they remain grounded, precisely through their common sense, and develop to a higher level. For the one who proceeds with common sense stands as the one who always exercises control and judgment in life, so that he cannot lose himself in meaningless fantasy or in meaningless hallucinations. It is the opposite of the pathological states that arise in imagination, inspiration, and intuition, so that what occurs is the process one goes through when, moving from modern consciousness, one arrives at a conviction of the supersensible life—in the way it manifests as a continuation of modern consciousness. Thus, in anthroposophical initiation science, one gains a supersensible knowledge that is adapted to modern life.

[ 21 ] Thus we must pass through modern consciousness, for we must have experienced the full triumphs of knowledge of the external world. We need an understanding of the supersensible world, in the service of present-day civilization and especially that of the future. It is already becoming evident among many people that they, too, wish to attain supersensible knowledge—and it is possible to attain it—in relation to religion, through anthroposophy. Anthroposophy wishes to serve this new call. Tomorrow I shall take the liberty of speaking about such a field by discussing the paths of anthroposophical initiatory science leading to the Mystery of Golgotha and to a true understanding of Christianity. Today, however, I simply wanted to point out what, in general, is the task of anthroposophical initiatory science. — When we have a person before us and look at them with our physical eyes, we gain an impression of their outward appearance. This is not a complete impression of the person. Only when we can look into the spiritual-soul aspect with our heart and soul do we have the whole person before us. Just as a person does not stand fully before us through the physical eye, so too do the world and humanity in general not stand fully before us when we view them solely through external knowledge. For we need a consciousness that external knowledge cannot provide; we need a form of knowledge—initiatory knowledge—concerning the spiritual and soul aspects of the universe. This must become our conviction. And only with this conviction can we truly satisfy the deepest needs of the human soul. But only then will we strive in this way toward the fulfillment of the human soul—when we add something to the external natural science, which has made such magnificent progress—anthroposophy fully acknowledges these advances—when we add what we must add: an understanding of the inner soul-life and spiritual aspects of the cosmos and of humanity. But the anthroposophy referred to here seeks to place this inner knowledge alongside external knowledge in a meaningful way; it seeks to truly add the inner spiritual to this external knowledge, and the supersensible to the sensible. Just as a complete view of the human being must add the inner soul to external life, so anthroposophy seeks to be the soul, the spirit, and the inner essence of modern knowledge in general.