The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eighth Lecture

[ 1 ] I would like to accept this kind invitation to speak here this evening by sharing some insights into how one can, through direct research, attain that spiritual knowledge whose educational implications are to be discussed here. I would like to note from the outset that today I will be speaking primarily about the method of entering the supersensible worlds through research; perhaps another opportunity will arise to share some of the results of supersensible research. But I must also say by way of introduction that everything I have to say today relates, in the strict sense, to the exploration of the spiritual, supersensible worlds—not to the understanding of supersensible insights. The supersensible insights that have been researched and communicated can be understood with ordinary common sense, provided that this common sense does not lose its objectivity by relying solely on what is called evidence, logical deductions, and the like in the external sensory world. It is solely because of these obstacles that it is very often said that one cannot understand the results of supersensory research unless one becomes a supersensory researcher oneself.

[ 2 ] What is to be conveyed here is, in fact, the subject of what is known as “initiatory knowledge”—the kind of knowledge that, in earlier periods of human development, was cultivated in a somewhat different form than we must cultivate it in our own age today. It is not a matter of reviving the old—as I have already noted in the other lectures—but rather of embarking on the path of research into the supersensible worlds in a manner suited to the thinking and feeling of our age. And here, especially with regard to initiatory knowledge, it is of the utmost importance that one be capable of effecting a fundamental reorientation of the entire human soul constitution.

[ 3 ] The person who possesses initiatory knowledge differs from the person who possesses other forms of knowledge in the modern sense of the word not merely in that his initiatory knowledge is a higher stage of ordinary knowledge. It is, however, attained on the basis of ordinary knowledge; this foundation must be in place; intellectual thinking must be fully developed if one is to attain initiatory knowledge. But then a fundamental reorientation is necessary, so that the possessor of initiatory knowledge must view the world from a completely different perspective than it is viewed without this initiatory knowledge. I can express in a simple formula the fundamental difference between initiatory knowledge and ordinary knowledge: In ordinary knowledge, we are conscious of our thinking—and indeed of our inner soul experiences through which we acquire knowledge—as the subject of that knowledge. For example, we think and believe that we recognize something through our thoughts. Here, when we regard ourselves as thinking human beings, we are the subject. We seek out the objects by observing nature, by observing human life, and by conducting experiments. We are always seeking the objects. The objects are supposed to come to us. The objects are supposed to present themselves to us so that we can grasp them with our thoughts, so that we can apply our thinking to them. We are the subject; what approaches us are the objects. For the person who strives for initiatory knowledge, a completely different orientation arises. He must become aware that, as a human being, he is the object, and he must seek the subject in relation to this human object. Thus, the exact opposite must occur. In ordinary cognition, we feel ourselves to be the subject and seek the objects that are outside of us. In initiatory knowledge, we ourselves are the object and seek the subject accordingly; or rather, in true initiatory knowledge, the subjects then yield themselves. But that is the subject of a later insight.

[ 4 ] So you see, it is just as if, through the mere definitions of the concepts alone, we were compelled to realize that in the knowledge of initiation we must actually step outside of ourselves, that we must become like the plants, the stones, the lightning, and the thunder—which become objects for us. We ourselves, so to speak, slip out of ourselves in initiatory knowledge and become an object, and we seek the subjects for this. If I may express myself somewhat paradoxically, I would like to say—since we are focusing specifically on thinking—that in ordinary knowledge we think about things. In initiatory knowledge, we must seek how we are thought of within the cosmos.

[ 5 ] These are nothing more than abstract guidelines, but you will find these abstract guidelines reflected everywhere in the concrete details of the initiation method.

[ 6 ] First of all, if we wish to receive messages today based solely on modern initiatory knowledge—that is, the knowledge currently in force—this initiatory knowledge arises from thinking. One’s life of thought must be fully developed if one wishes to attain initiatory knowledge today. This life of thought can be particularly cultivated by delving into the development of the natural sciences over the past few centuries, especially the 19th century. People relate to this scientific knowledge in various ways. Some people take in scientific findings and listen—with a certain, I might say, naivety—to how organic beings are said to have evolved from the simplest and most primitive forms up to the human being. They form ideas about this evolution, and they pay little attention to the fact that they themselves have an idea—that within themselves, in their perception of external processes, they are developing something that is their own life of thought.

[ 7 ] But anyone who cannot accept scientific findings without taking a critical look at themselves must indeed ask: What does it mean, what am I actually doing here, as I trace being after being from the imperfect to the perfect? Or else, he must ask himself: When I engage in mathematics, when I develop mathematical concepts, I am, after all, forming thoughts purely from within myself. Mathematics, in the true sense, is a web that I draw out of myself. I then apply this web to external things, and it fits. This brings us to the great question—one that, I would say, is downright tragic for the thinker: What about that which I apply in all my cognition—what about thought itself?

[ 8 ] No matter how long one thinks about it, one cannot determine the nature of this thinking; for thinking simply remains stuck in the same place—one merely revolves, so to speak, around the axis one has already formed for oneself. One must accomplish something through thinking. One must carry out through thinking what I have described as meditation in my book *How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds*—*The Way of Initiation* in English.

[ 9 ] One should not think of meditation in “mystical” terms, but neither should one take it lightly. Meditation must be something completely clear in our modern sense. But at the same time, it is something that requires patience and inner spiritual energy. And above all, it requires something that no one can give to another person: the ability to make a promise to oneself and then keep it. Once a person begins to meditate, they are thereby performing the only truly completely free act in this human life. We always have within us a tendency toward freedom, and we have also realized a good portion of that freedom. But if we reflect, we will find that in one respect we are dependent on our heredity, in another on our upbringing, and in a third on our life experiences. And ask yourself to what extent we are capable of suddenly letting go of what we have acquired through heredity, upbringing, and life experiences. We would be faced with nothingness if we were to suddenly let go of all that. But if we resolve to meditate in the morning and evening so that we may gradually learn to look into the supersensible world, then we can choose to do so or not each day. Nothing stands in the way of this. And experience also teaches us that most people who approach the meditative life with grand resolutions give it up again very soon. We are completely free in this regard. Meditation is an act of primordial freedom.

[ 10 ] If we can remain true to ourselves despite everything—if we promise ourselves—not to anyone else, but only to ourselves—that we will remain faithful to this practice of meditation, then that in itself is a tremendous source of spiritual strength.

[ 11 ] Now that I have explained this, I would like to draw attention to how meditation itself is practiced in its simplest forms. Today, I can only address the fundamental principles.

[ 12 ] The point is that we bring a particular idea or complex of ideas to the center of our consciousness; the content of this complex of ideas is entirely irrelevant; but it must be immediate, so that it does not involve any recollections from memory or the like. Therefore, it is best not to draw it from our own store of memories, but rather to have someone else—who is experienced in such matters—provide us with a meditation topic, not because they wish to exert any kind of suggestion on us, but because we can be certain that what we then meditate on will be something new to us. We might just as well take some old work that we are quite certain we have not yet read and find a sentence for meditation from it. The point is that we should not draw a phrase from our subconscious or unconscious that overwhelms us. That is not manageable, because all sorts of residual sensations and emotions get mixed in. The point is that it should be as manageable as a mathematical theorem is.

[ 13 ] Let’s take something very simple: the sentence “Wisdom lives in the light.” At first, there is no need to examine whether it is true. It is a metaphor. But what matters is not that we engage with the content as such in any particular way, but rather that we take it in inwardly and spiritually, that we rest in it with our consciousness. At first, we will only be able to rest our consciousness on such content for a very brief moment. That time will grow longer and longer.

[ 14 ] What, then, is essential? It is essential that we take the whole spiritual being into account in order to concentrate all that within us—our power of thought and our power of feeling—on a single subject. Just as the muscles of the arm grow strong when we work with them, so the spiritual powers are strengthened by being directed again and again toward a single subject. As far as possible, this single subject should remain the same for months, perhaps even years. For the spiritual powers must first be strengthened and developed before true supersensible research can take place.

[ 15 ] If one continues to practice in this way, the day will come—I would say, the great day—when one makes a very specific observation. You realize that you are gradually engaged in a mental activity that is entirely independent of the body. And you also notice: Before, all your thinking and feeling depended on the body—your imagination on the sensory-nervous system, your feelings on the circulatory system, and so on; now you feel yourself engaged in a spiritual-mental activity that is completely independent of any bodily activity. And one notices this because one is now able to set something in one’s own mind into vibration that had previously remained entirely unconscious. One now makes the remarkable discovery of what distinguishes sleep from wakefulness. This distinction lies in the fact that, when one is awake, something vibrates throughout the entire human organism—except in the head: there, the same force that is otherwise in motion throughout the rest of the human organism is at rest.

[ 16 ] We will better understand what this is all about if I point out to you that we, as human beings, are not these robust, solid bodies that we usually believe ourselves to be. In fact, we consist of approximately ninety percent liquid, and the solid components are immersed in this liquid—floating within it—to only about ten percent. Thus, we can speak of the solid aspects of the human being only in a vague sense. Ninety percent of us, if I may say so, is water. And to a certain extent, air pulsates within this water, and then, in turn, warmth.

[ 17 ] If you imagine that human beings consist, to a small extent, of a solid body, and to a large extent of water, air, and the heat vibrating within them, then you will no longer find it so hard to believe that there is something even more subtle within us. And I will now call this more subtle aspect the etheric body. This etheric body is finer than air. It is so fine that it permeates us without our being aware of it in everyday life. It is this etheric body that, while we are awake, is in a state of inner movement—a regular movement throughout the rest of the human body, except for the head. In the head, the etheric body is internally at rest.

[ 18 ] It is different during sleep. Sleep begins with this and continues in such a way that the etheric body also begins to move within the head. Thus, during sleep, as a whole human being—including the head and the rest of the body—we have an etheric body that is in inner motion. And when we dream—as we say upon waking—we are still perceiving the final movements of the etheric body just as we are waking up. These appear to us as dreams. We still perceive the final etheric movements in the head as we wake up; this cannot be the case when we wake up quickly.

[ 19 ] Anyone who meditates for a long time in the way I have described, however, will gradually be able to form images within the calm etheric body of the head. In the book I have cited, I call these “imaginations.” And these imaginations, which are experienced in the etheric body independently of the physical body, constitute the first supersensible impression we can have. This then enables us to look entirely beyond our physical body and to view our life up to the moment of birth—in its actions and movements—as if in a picture. What is often described by people who have gone under in water and were drowning—that they saw their lives in moving images as they looked back—can be systematically developed here, so that one can see all the results of our present earthly life within it.

[ 20 ] The first thing that initiatory knowledge provides is an insight into one’s own soul life. This, however, is different from what one usually assumes. Usually, in the realm of abstraction, one conceives of this soul life as something woven from ideas. When one discovers it in its true form, it is something creative; it is at the same time that which was at work in our childhood, that which shaped our brain plastically, that which permeates the rest of the body and brings about a plastic, formative activity within it by sustaining our waking state and even our digestive processes every day.

[ 21 ] We perceive this inner activity within the organism as the human etheric body. This is not a spatial body; it is a temporal body. Therefore, you can only describe the etheric body as a spatial form if you are aware that you are doing the same thing as when you sketch a flash of lightning. When you sketch a flash of lightning, you are, of course, depicting an instant; you are capturing that instant. The human etheric body, too, can only be depicted spatially in such a way that it represents an instant. In reality, we have a physical, spatial body and a temporal body—an etheric body that is always in motion. And it only makes sense to speak of the etheric body when we speak of it as a temporal body—one that we can survey as a unified whole all the way back to our birth, starting from the moment we are able to make this discovery. This is the first thing we can initially discover within ourselves regarding our supersensible faculties.

[ 22 ] What is brought about in the development of the soul through such soul processes as I have described is evident, above all, in the complete transformation of the soul’s mood and state of mind in the person who strives toward the knowledge of initiation. Please do not misunderstand me. I do not mean that the person approaching initiation suddenly becomes a completely different person. On the contrary, modern initiatory knowledge must allow the person to remain fully engaged in the world, so that even when he comes to it, he is able to continue his life as he once began it. But during those hours and moments in which supersensible research is pursued, the person has indeed, through initiatory knowledge, become someone different from who he is in ordinary life.

[ 23 ] Above all, I would like to highlight an important aspect that characterizes initiatory knowledge. This is that the further a person advances in the experience of the supersensible, the more and more they feel their own physicality slipping away—that is, in relation to the aspects of ordinary life in which this physicality is involved. Let us ask ourselves how our judgments in life come about. We grow up and develop as children. Sympathy and antipathy take root in our lives—sympathy and antipathy toward natural phenomena, and above all, sympathy and antipathy toward other people. Our body is involved in all of this. We naturally attribute these feelings of sympathy and antipathy to our body, and to a large extent, they are even rooted in physical processes within our body. The moment the initiate ascends into the supersensible world, he enters a realm in which these sympathies and antipathies—which are connected to physicality—become increasingly alien to him as he remains in the supersensible realm. He is detached from that with which he is connected through his physicality. If he wishes to resume ordinary life, he must, so to speak, first re-immerse himself in his usual sympathies and antipathies—something that otherwise happens quite naturally. When one wakes up in the morning, one is already within one’s body, developing the same love for things and people, the same sympathies or antipathies that one had before. This happens of its own accord. If, however, one dwells in the supersensible realm and wishes to return to one’s sympathies and antipathies, then one must do so with effort; one must, so to speak, immerse oneself in one’s own physicality. This detachment from one’s own physicality is one of the signs that indicates one has truly made progress. In general, the emergence of magnanimous sympathies and antipathies is what gradually becomes a part of the initiate.

[ 24 ] There is one area in which the development toward initiation is particularly evident: the functioning of memory during the initiatory insight. We experience ourselves in ordinary life. Our memory is sometimes a little better, sometimes a little worse; but we acquire it. We have experiences; we remember them later. It is not the same with what we experience in the supersensible worlds. We can experience these in grandeur, in beauty, in significance; once they have been experienced, they are over. And it must be experienced again if it is to stand before the soul once more. It does not become imprinted in the ordinary sense of memory. It becomes imprinted only when one first, with great effort, translates what one sees in the supersensible into concepts—when one sends one’s intellect over into the supersensible world. This is quite difficult. For one must think just as one does here, without the body assisting in this thinking. Therefore, one must have consolidated one’s concepts beforehand; one must have become a proper logician beforehand, so that one does not constantly forget this logic when looking into that world. It is precisely the primitive clairvoyants who can perceive many things, but they forget the logic when they are over there. And so it is that precisely when one has to communicate supersensible truths to someone else, one notices this change in memory with regard to supersensible truths. And one sees from this how our physical body is involved in the exercise of memory—not in thinking, but in the exercise of memory, which, after all, always plays a role in the supersensible realm.

[ 25 ] If I may say something personal, it is this: When I give lectures myself, it is different from the way lectures are usually given. Often, one speaks from memory; what one has learned, what one has thought, is often drawn from memory. The person who truly develops supersensible truths must, in fact, always create them in the very moment they are developed. So that I myself can give the same lecture thirty, forty, or fifty times, and it is never the same for me. Of course, this is true in other contexts as well; but this independence from memory—this immersion into an inner life—is particularly pronounced once an inner level of memory has been attained.

[ 26 ] What I have just told you about the ability to bring forms into the etheric body of one’s head—forms that then make it possible to see through the temporal body and the etheric body all the way back to one’s birth—this in itself already puts one in a very special state of mind toward the cosmos. One loses, so to speak, one’s own physicality, but one feels oneself living within the cosmos. Consciousness expands, as it were, into the vastness of the ether. One no longer looks at a plant without immersing oneself in its growth. One follows it from the root to the flower. One lives in its sap, in its blooming, in its fruiting. One can immerse oneself in the life of animals according to their form, but especially in the life of another human being. The slightest trait one encounters in another person leads one, so to speak, into the entirety of that person’s soul life, so that one feels one is no longer within oneself, but rather, during this supersensible perception, outside of oneself.

[ 27 ] But one must always be able to return—this is essential—otherwise one is a sluggish, vague mystic, a dreamer, and not one who truly knows the supersensible worlds. One must be able to live in the supersensible worlds at the same time as being able to bring oneself back again, so that one can stand firmly on both feet. That is why, whenever I discuss such matters concerning the supersensible worlds, I must emphasize that, for me, what truly makes a good philosopher—even more than logic—is knowing how a shoe or a coat is sewn, that is, being truly immersed in practical life. One really shouldn’t reflect on life unless one is truly immersed in it in a practical sense. But this is even more true for those who seek supersensible knowledge. Those who seek supersensible knowledge cannot become dreamers or dreamers; they cannot be people who do not stand firmly on both feet. Otherwise, one loses oneself, because one must, in fact, step outside of oneself. But this stepping outside of oneself must not lead to losing oneself. The book is written from such an insight as I have described; it is titled *Geheimwissenschaft im Umriß* in German and *Occult Science — An Outline* in English.

[ 28 ] But then the point is that one can delve deeper into this supersensible knowledge. This is achieved by further developing one’s meditation practice. At first, one focuses one’s meditation on specific images or complexes of images, thereby strengthening one’s inner life. This is not yet sufficient to enter fully into the supersensible world; rather, it is also necessary to practice not only resting on these images—not merely concentrating the entire soul, as it were, on them—but also being able to cast them out of consciousness at will. Just as in sensory life one can look at something and then look away again, so in supersensible development one must learn to focus sharply on a soul content and then to be able to cast it out of the soul again.

[ 29 ] Sometimes this isn’t easy even in everyday life. Think how little control a person has over constantly pushing thoughts away. Sometimes thoughts—especially when they’re unpleasant—haunt a person for days on end. They can’t shake them off. But it becomes even more difficult once we’ve gotten used to focusing on that thought. A thought we have focused on eventually begins to hold us fast, and we must exert every effort to banish it again. If we have practiced this for a long time, we bring ourselves to banish this entire retrospective view of life back to birth—this entire “etheric body,” as I call it, this “body of time”—and cast it out of our consciousness.

[ 30 ] This, of course, is a stage of development that we must reach. We must first mature; by dispelling meditative images, we must acquire the strength to remove this spiritual colossus, this spiritual giant; the whole dreadful shark of our life up to now stands before us between this very moment and birth—we must eliminate it. Once we eliminate it, something will emerge for us that I would like to call “more awakened consciousness.” Then we are simply awake, without anything present within that awakened consciousness. But it is now filling up. Just as the air the lungs need flows into them, so now the true spiritual world flows into the empty consciousness that has arisen in the way I have described.

[ 31 ] That is inspiration. Something is now flowing in that is not, as it were, a finer form of matter, but rather relates to matter in the same way that the negative relates to the positive. That which is the opposite of matter is now flowing into humanity, which has been liberated from the ether. This is the important point we can become aware of: Spirit is not merely a still finer, even more ethereal form of matter; that is not true. If we call matter the positive—we could just as well call matter the negative; it doesn’t matter, since things are relative—then we must call spirit the negative in relation to the positive. It is as if, let’s say, I have the vast fortune of five shillings in my wallet. I give one away, then I have four shillings left; I give another one away, have three left, and so on, until I have none left. Then I can go into debt. If I am one shilling in debt, I have less than one shilling.

[ 32 ] When I have removed the etheric body using the method I have developed, I do not enter into an even finer ether, but into something that is the opposite of ether, just as debt is the opposite of wealth. And now, for the first time, I know from experience what spirit is. The spirit enters us through inspiration, and the first thing we now experience is that which existed in a spiritual world with our soul and our spirit before birth—or rather, before conception. This is the pre-existent life of our soul-spiritual being. Before that, we had beheld it in the ether right up until our birth. Now we look beyond birth—or rather, conception—into the spiritual-soul world and come to perceive ourselves as we were before we descended from the spiritual worlds and took on a physical body through the line of inheritance.

[ 33 ] For initiatory knowledge, these things are not philosophical truths that one conceives in the mind; they are experiences—but experiences that must first be acquired by preparing oneself for them in the way I have just indicated. And so the first thing that becomes clear to us as we enter the spiritual world is the truth of the pre-existence of the human soul—or rather, the human spirit—and we now learn to behold the Eternal directly.

[ 34 ] For many centuries, the people of Europe have viewed eternity solely from one perspective: that of immortality. They have always asked only this: What becomes of the soul when it leaves the body at death? This is, of course, the selfish right of human beings, for people are interested in what follows after death for selfish reasons. We will see shortly that we can also speak of immortality, but for the most part, people speak of immortality for selfish reasons. People are less interested in what came before birth. They tell themselves: We are here, after all. What preceded that has only intellectual value. — But one does not gain true insight unless one directs one’s understanding toward what our existence entailed before birth or, more precisely, before conception.

[ 35 ] We need a word in modern languages that makes the eternal truly complete. We should not only speak of immortality; we should also—and this will be somewhat difficult to translate—speak of non-birth; for eternity consists of immortality and non-birth. And non-birth is discovered by initiatic knowledge before immortality.

[ 36 ] A further stage of development toward the supersensible world can be attained by seeking to free ourselves even further from physical support in our spiritual and psychological activities. This can be achieved by shifting our meditation and concentration exercises more toward exercises of the will.

[ 37 ] Now I would like to present you with a simple exercise of the will as a concrete example through which you can study the principle under consideration here. In everyday life, we are accustomed to thinking in step with the course of the world. We let things come to us as they happen. We think about what came to us earlier first, and what came to us later later. And even if, in more logical thinking, we do not follow the chronological sequence, there is still, in the background, an effort to adhere to the external, actual sequence of events. To train ourselves in the balance of spiritual and soul forces, we must detach ourselves from the external course of events. And here is a good exercise—one that is also an exercise of the will—in which we try to think through our daily experiences, as we live them from morning to evening, not from morning to evening, but backward from evening to morning, going into as much detail as possible.

[ 38 ] Let’s suppose we come to this point while looking back on our daily life: We were walking up a flight of stairs. We imagine ourselves first at the top, then on the last step, the second-to-last step, and so on. We go back down in reverse. — At first, we’ll only be able to recall episodes from daily life in this backward manner—for example, from six to three, from twelve to nine, and so on, until the moment we wake up. But we will gradually acquire a kind of technique through which we will indeed be able—as if in a tableau played in reverse in the evening or the next morning—to let the day’s events or the previous day’s events pass before our mind’s eye in reverse. If we are able—and this is what matters—to free our thinking entirely from the way reality unfolds, three-dimensionally, then we will see how an immense strengthening of our will takes place. We will also achieve this when we become able to perceive a melody in reverse, or when we imagine a five-act drama unfolding in reverse order, from the fifth act to the fourth, and so on to the first. Through all these means, we strengthen the will by invigorating it internally and tearing it away externally from its sensory bondage to events.

[ 39 ] This can be supplemented by exercises such as those I have already hinted at in previous lectures—namely, examining the habits we have. We make a firm resolution and apply iron will so that, in a few years, we will have adopted a different habit in this regard. For example, I’ll just mention that every person has something in their handwriting that is called its “character.” If we strive to develop a different handwriting that no longer resembles the previous one at all, this requires a strong inner force. But then the second handwriting must become just as habitual and second nature to us as the first. That is just a minor point. There are many ways in which we can change the entire fundamental direction of our will through our own energy. Through this, we gradually bring ourselves to the point where we not only receive the spiritual world as inspiration within us, but truly immerse ourselves—with our spirit, now freed from the body—into the other spiritual beings that exist outside of us. For true spiritual perception is an immersion into the beings that surround us spiritually when we look at physical things. If we want to perceive the spiritual, we must first step outside of ourselves. I have described this. But then we must also acquire the ability to immerse ourselves once again into things—namely, into spiritual things and beings.

[ 40 ] We can only do this after we have also performed initiation exercises such as those I have just described, in which we are in fact no longer disturbed by our own bodies, but can immerse ourselves in the spiritual essence of things; in which the colors of the plants no longer appear to us, but we dive into the colors themselves; in which we no longer see the plants as colored, but see them taking on color. By knowing that the chicory growing by the wayside is not merely blue when we look at it, but that we can inwardly immerse ourselves in the flower and participate in the process of it turning blue, we stand intuitively within this process, and then, starting from there, we can expand our spiritual insight more and more.

[ 41 ] We can see from certain symptoms that we have truly made progress with such exercises. I would like to cite two, but there are many. The first is that we come to have a completely different view of the moral world than before. To pure intellectualism, the moral world has something unreal about it. Certainly, if a person has remained decent in this materialistic age, they feel obligated to do what is traditionally considered good; but they still think—even if they do not admit it to themselves—that doing good does not result in something as dramatic as a flash of lightning cutting through space or a clap of thunder rolling through it. He does not think of anything as real in that sense. When one immerses oneself in the spiritual world, one becomes aware that the moral world order not only possesses a reality comparable to that of the physical world, but that it possesses a higher reality. One gradually comes to understand that this entire age, with its physical elements and processes, can perish, can dissolve; but what flows from us morally endures in its effects. The reality of the moral world becomes clear to us. And the physical and moral worlds, being and becoming—these become one. We truly experience that the world also has moral laws as objective laws.

[ 42 ] This increases our sense of responsibility toward the world. It gives us an entirely different consciousness—a consciousness that modern humanity desperately needs. This modern humanity, which looks back to the Earth’s origins, to how the Earth emerged from a primordial nebula, to how life and humanity arose from this primordial nebula, and from this, like a mirage, the world of ideas. This humanity, which looks toward the heat death of the universe, so that everything in which humanity lives will once again be submerged in a vast graveyard of that very existence—this humanity needs an understanding of the moral world order. This understanding is, in essence, fully attained through spiritual knowledge. I can only hint at this.

[ 43 ] The other point, however, is that one cannot attain this intuitive recognition—this immersion in external things—without having gone through heightened suffering, an intensified form of the pain I had to characterize earlier in connection with imaginative cognition, when I said that one must first, with great effort, find one’s way back into one’s sympathies and antipathies—which, whenever it must happen, is actually always painful. Now the pain becomes a cosmic sharing in all the suffering that lies at the very foundation of existence.

[ 44 ] One might easily ask why the gods or God create suffering. Suffering must exist if the world is to rise to its full beauty. The fact that we have eyes—to put it in layman’s terms—stems solely from the fact that, in an initially undifferentiated organism, the organic elements that led to the sense of sight—and were subsequently transformed into the eye—were, so to speak, “dug out.” If we were still able today to perceive the smallest, most insignificant processes taking place in our retinas as we see, we would realize that even this is a pain rooted in the very foundation of existence. All beauty rests upon the foundation of suffering. Beauty can develop only out of pain. One must be able to feel this pain, this suffering. It is only by passing through pain that one can truly find one’s way into the supersensible world. This can already be said, to a lesser degree, at a lower level of knowledge. Anyone who has gained even a little insight will be able to make a confession to you; they will tell you: “For the happiness and joy I have experienced in life, I am grateful to fate; but I have attained my insights only through my pain, only through my suffering.”

[ 45 ] If one senses this even at the very beginning of lower knowledge, one can live through it by overcoming oneself, by working one’s way through the pain—which is felt as cosmic pain—toward a neutral experience within the spiritual cosmos. One must work one’s way toward sharing in the unfolding and essence of all things; then intuitive knowledge is present. But then one is also fully immersed in a state of knowing experience that is no longer bound to the body, that can freely return to the body to be in the sensory world once more until death, but which now fully knows what it means to be real—to be truly spiritual and soulful outside the body.

[ 46 ] Once one has grasped this, one has a clear picture of what happens when one leaves the physical body at the moment of actual death; then one knows what it means to pass through the gate of death. The reality that confronts one—that the spiritual-soul aspect passes into a spiritual-soul world by leaving the body behind—is experienced with clear understanding once one has risen to intuitive knowledge; that is, once one knows what it is like in the world when one has no body to serve as a support. One then returns to the body with this insight, once one has grasped it. But the essential point is that one learns to live even without the body, and thereby also gains an understanding of what it is like when one can no longer use the body—when one sheds it at death and passes into a spiritual-soul world.

[ 47 ] Once again, it is not a philosophical speculation derived from the initiatory knowledge of immortality, but an experience—or, I would say, a foretaste, a preview. One knows what it will be like then. One does not experience the full reality, but one experiences a real image that, in a certain way, corresponds to the full reality of dying. One experiences immortality. So in this respect, too, it is an experience that is brought into the realm of knowledge.

[ 48 ] Well, I have tried to describe to you how one ascends through imagination to inspiration and intuition, and how, through this, one first comes to know oneself as a human being in one’s full reality. One comes to know oneself in the body as long as one is in the body. One must free oneself from the body through the spiritual-soul aspect; only then does one truly liberate the whole human being. For what one perceives through the body, through the senses, and through what follows from sensory experiences as thinking—and what, for ordinary thinking, is bound to the body, namely the sensory-nervous system—with all of this, one comes to know only one aspect of the human being. One can only come to know the whole, complete human being if one has the will to ascend to those insights that come precisely from the science of initiation.

[ 49 ] I would like to emphasize once again: Once these matters have been thoroughly investigated, anyone who approaches them with an open mind can understand them using ordinary common sense, just as one can verify with common sense what astronomers and biologists say about the world. And one will then find that this verification is the first stage of initiatory knowledge. Since human beings are not predisposed to falsehood and error but to truth, one must first have an impression of truth from initiatory knowledge; then, as far as fate permits, one will be able to penetrate ever further into the spiritual world even in this earthly life. What was inscribed above the Greek temple as an exhortation—“Man, know thyself!”—must also be fulfilled in modern times, and indeed in a higher way. This certainly did not mean a journey into the human inner self, but rather a call to investigate the human being: the essence of immortality = the body; the essence of the unborn = the immortal spirit; and the mediating principle between the earth, the temporal, and the spirit = the soul. For the true, the real human being consists of body, soul, and spirit. The body can be known by the body, the soul by the soul, but the spirit can be known only by the spirit. Therefore, one must strive to find the spirit active within oneself, so that the spirit may also be recognized in the world.