The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. The Event of Death in Relation to Christ

[ 1 ] As I move on to discussing in the next lectures the problem of human death, the immortality of the soul in connection with Christ, and the development of Christianity, it will be necessary today for me to shed light once more on some of what I have already presented here, but from a different perspective.

[ 2 ] When we look at the two states that alternate in everyday human life—the waking state and the sleeping state—what first strikes us, from the perspective of ordinary consciousness, is that during sleep, a person not only shuts down their sensory perception but also, in a sense, extinguishes what they experience in their inner life as thinking, feeling, and willing. Everything that we, as human beings, summarize as our “self” in the waking state is actually extinguished during sleep.

[ 3 ] What has been extinguished here is now rekindled, bit by bit, through imagination, inspiration, and intuition. First, in order to evoke imaginative thinking, meditation must turn to ordinary thinking. I have described how one uses thoughts to arrive at imaginative insight through meditation. Precisely with regard to the problem of death, it is necessary to set forth once again more clearly what initiatory insight experiences along its path, because only then does it become vividly apparent what relationship the human being enters into with his physical body and with his spiritual-soul being upon the onset of death.

[ 4 ] If one approaches thinking in the way I have described, one first experiences that, by feeling oneself with one’s whole soul outside the physical organism, one is actually unable to think for a while. Thinking, so to speak, ceases for a brief moment. It takes a certain courage, an inner energy, and also a certain presence of mind to experience this moment with complete composure. But then one notices, as one awakens, a much stronger spiritual activity within oneself than one had before. Thinking begins again. Progress, then, consists in the fact that one first has ordinary consciousness—I expressly note: this ordinary consciousness is retained during true imagination—but one must always move over into the other state and then move back again. In this other state, however—for ordinary consciousness, one naturally retains the ordinary earthly image—in this other state, into which one can enter, one loses, so to speak, the ability to produce thoughts; but as one continues to meditate, a stronger activity arises, and one now experiences a more intense inner life of thought. And while, for ordinary consciousness, thoughts are experienced as being mostly thoughts about the external sensory world and memories, dull thoughts arising from all manner of emotional experiences and feelings, one now possesses a form of thinking through which—as I have already described—one can take into consciousness, as active thoughts, the course of one’s own life that one has lived here on Earth from birth until now; and indeed, it is a deeper layer of one’s life course that is involved here. As I have already said, these are not the memories one also has in ordinary consciousness, but rather a deeper layer. One actually looks into an etheric process that builds up, permeates, and penetrates the physical organism—and has always permeated it. Everything that has taken place there since birth—as growth was brought about in the physical organism, the individual organs were plastically formed, and our intellectual, emotional, and volitional capacities were drawn up from the depths of the organism— everything that has taken place in connection with a real life that is otherwise hidden from consciousness—all of this surges forth in the form of active, inwardly experienced, substantial thoughts. One thus, as it were, crosses an abyss from ordinary thinking to a form of thinking that experiences one’s own etheric body.

[ 5 ] When revealing imaginative thinking in this way, one must pay very close attention to what one loses sight of during the moments when one is engaged in this imaginative thinking. The first thing one loses sight of is, in fact, one’s memories. One has memories in ordinary consciousness, but alongside ordinary consciousness, this other form of consciousness—imaginative consciousness—develops. In this state, there are no memories. To understand what this means, I ask you to consider the following: Even when one remembers—as in all experiences of ordinary consciousness—one actually lives in the present. You perceive what is currently before you; you have thoughts about the present; and when you recall the past, you still have an image in the present moment that merely points to the past. Thus, ordinary consciousness experiences the present. Imaginative consciousness experiences one’s own life course in such a way that the individual phases are surveyed all at once, as if the things that exist in time were like those in space. The events one experienced at the ages of thirty, eighteen, ten—one experiences them all simultaneously, side by side, just as one experiences one’s own earthly past all at once. Time becomes like space. The events one experienced at the ages of thirty, eighteen, ten, seven, and five stand there before the soul; they stand side by side.

[ 6 ] This is what distinguishes these experiences of imaginative consciousness from those of ordinary consciousness. Ordinary consciousness lives in the present; for the past, it has only memory. Imaginative consciousness relives times, but in such a way that those times stand before the soul all at once. Memories, I said, are the first things to fade away. This is indeed the case. What helps us immensely in life within ordinary consciousness—namely, that we have a memory, that we have memories—is something we do not have in imaginative consciousness. Of course, because one has the natural human being beside oneself, one retains the memory capacity of the ordinary human being just as it was; but for what one has newly acquired—that is, the ordinary course of human life—one has no memory. Suppose an imaginative person experiences the course of their life at a certain moment. In three days, they want to experience it again. They cannot recall what they experienced today. They must perform the same actions again that lead them to experience the course of their life. They must train themselves anew for this experience. Just as a real physical object cannot simply be there for one to remember, but one must return to it, so too can one not simply evoke through memory what one is now experiencing—namely, one’s etheric body—because it is a reality; it must be evoked anew again and again.

[ 7 ] This is something that disappoints many who engage in such spiritual exercises. They embark on their exercises, achieve something, and are able to perceive certain things. They believe that this perception will now remain with them, that they will be able to recall it again and again. They cannot do so, and they are disappointed. Efforts must be made again and again to recreate the experiences inwardly. Here is an example. Suppose someone speaking from the perspective of modern meditation science is giving a lecture. He delivers it in such a way that he has not reduced everything to abstract ideas, but rather speaks from a living insight. Therefore, he cannot prepare by memorizing something he has conceptualized. One can memorize things that relate to the physical world, but one cannot memorize things that relate to an imaginative consciousness, for these must be produced anew time and again. One can prepare, but this preparation is a form of practice.

[ 8 ] It is like acquiring a skill through practice. In the same way, meditating and practicing help you bring forth what you wish to manifest from the supersensible world. But if it is to truly come to life from the spiritual world, it must be produced in the immediate moment. It must arise in the present moment. Then its expression and formulation will carry the immediate resonance of the spiritual. Please forgive me if I present this as something personal. I have already spoken on a given topic thirty or forty times. Speaking on a topic for the thirtieth time does nothing to ease my burden. It is just as difficult as the first time; it is always the same process all over again. What is needed to lay the foundation for this creation is concentration and stillness, so that the creation can emerge from a calm soul. Perhaps it isn’t necessary, but to make my point clear, I would like to note that in this regard, an audience can often be downright cruel toward the one it expects to present something from the spiritual world, in that — of course, those present are always exempt — while this may work quite well during a professorial lecture, in the case of a spiritual lecture, all sorts of listeners arrive beforehand and ask all sorts of questions, showing no consideration whatsoever for the fact that in the very next moment, things are to be drawn from the spiritual world.

[ 9 ] This is how I have tried to describe to you the subjective experience of imagination. By knowing within oneself how this active, this living thinking—which now takes one’s own life course as its content—emerges, one also comes to know what ordinary thinking is in its very essence. One can now, from the perspective of the imagining consciousness, look back at this ordinary thinking, and one comes to the realization: this ordinary thinking has no reality of its own. — In reality, every human being imagines. They imagine unconsciously and possess this substantial thinking within themselves. But because they have not sufficiently strengthened their soul forces, they are spiritually too weak to bring what lies within them up into consciousness; and so, when they want to think, they always rely on their physical body. This becomes the foundation for their ordinary thinking. But what actually arises there? Well, as this inner activity—which is unconscious imagination—turns toward the physical organism even within ordinary consciousness, it slips into that physical organism. That which one does not know—that which remains unconscious, and which then shines forth in imaginative cognition as active thinking—slips into the physical organism in ordinary consciousness, makes use of it, and is now reflected back as inner mirror images of that which it is and does not know, because it remains unconscious. These are ordinary thoughts. They have just as little reality as mirror images have in relation to the objects standing before the mirror. Something is reflected back to us from our physical body, and these are the thoughts that enter ordinary consciousness—merely mirror images. Whoever experiences these thoughts, therefore, finds nothing substantial in them. There is no vitality and no power in these thoughts of ordinary consciousness. The moment, however, that active thinking enters into imagination, there is substance in the thinking. In every imagined thought there is substance; there is vitality and power within it. One knows: With this imaginative thinking, one lives in a power such as that which has transformed us from children into adults.

[ 10 ] It is precisely the transition from ordinary reality into the etheric reality that occurs when one forces oneself to engage in imaginative thinking. Through this, however, one now gains the first glimpse of an understanding of the physical body. One regards the physical body as a mirror that reflects one’s thoughts back. This is how one begins to approach the problem of death, for until one has one’s physical body as an object, one cannot approach the problem of death. If a human being still exists in essence after death, then he or she most certainly does not exist in his or her physical body. And so, if one wishes to solve the problem of death during one’s lifetime, one must view the physical body as something outside oneself and observe it objectively, just as one would view it relatively in death—beside oneself, outside oneself. This characterizes the first step toward a solution to the problem of death. What else is needed for this will be presented in the second part of our discussion today.

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[ 11 ] Through such insight as I have described to you, a person is enabled to truly assess the relationship between the soul-spiritual and the physical-bodily aspects of the human being. Only by being able to objectively survey the physical organism, the etheric organism, and the soul-spiritual realm through imaginative perception and the subsequent methods of supersensible perception can one recognize how these two aspects relate to one another in the various situations of life. It is therefore of immeasurable importance to bear in mind that in the kind of supersensible knowledge I am speaking of here, the human being retains the ordinary consciousness he otherwise has in waking life, alongside all other experiences of knowledge. Thus, even in imaginative consciousness, one has before one’s eyes something from one’s life course—for example, the way in which, when one was still a child of nine or ten, certain predispositions emerged from the conditions of growth, or how moral inclinations and so on manifested themselves—one observes this by holding before one’s eyes the unity of the physical and the psychological in those ninth or tenth years of life. One observes what took place in the organism during the ninth or tenth year of life. But one must also maintain ordinary consciousness; that is to say, one must now focus on the ninth and tenth years of life, which reveal something that would otherwise remain entirely unconscious, and, on the other hand, one must immediately, through a conscious effort, find the transition to how, in ordinary consciousness, one recalls memories that refer one back in the most ordinary way to one’s ninth and tenth years of life. One must always be able to compare one with the other: higher consciousness and ordinary consciousness. Just as one moves from one thought to another in ordinary consciousness, so must one move back and forth between what is experienced in imaginative consciousness and what is experienced in ordinary consciousness.

[ 12 ] This characteristic of the higher consciousness referred to here is particularly important. All those who judge anthroposophical research solely from the outside often believe that what appears as imagination can be dismissed as just another content of consciousness belonging to a visionary or a hallucinator. One must, however, note the radical difference that exists between true imagination and vision. Vision certainly provides a person with pictorial content, but the person is completely absorbed in their vision. While they are having this vision, their consciousness has transformed into the vision itself, and they cannot arbitrarily move back and forth between the vision and ordinary consciousness. The person who imagines, on the other hand, has not transformed their ordinary consciousness into a vision; rather, they have enriched their ordinary consciousness with imagination. The imagined has simply been added to what one already possesses in ordinary consciousness. Consequently, it is precisely the imaginer who rejects the ordinary visionary experience, yet he can also understand the life situation in which the visionary finds himself. For whoever has attained the level of insight referred to here can observe very precisely how the soul is active inwardly, how it makes use of the physical organism so that it may reflect the soul’s thoughts back to it. The imaginative and inspired person knows the nature of the soul’s relationship to the physical body in ordinary, normal consciousness. That is why he can also assess the visionary. In the case of the visionary, the soul has not, so to speak, become free from the physical body. The imaginer knows what it means for the soul to be free from the physical body, for he has truly drawn the soul out of the physical body and spurred it into activity. But when he observes the visionary, he sees that the soul is embedded more deeply within the physical body than usual, as when it perceives the external world in ordinary consciousness.

[ 13 ] This is the difference between the imaginer and the visionary: The visionary delves deeper into his bodily functions than one does in ordinary life, whereas in the case of the imaginative person, there is a genuine stepping outside the physical organism, and at the same time, the ordinary presence of the soul within the physical organism remains consciously intact. If one does not grasp this difference in all its profound significance, one will always confuse what one has at one’s disposal through the sharp control of ordinary thinking—namely, imagination—with the visionary life, which has no such control at all, where the person simply descends deeper into his physical body, so that what appears to him as his visions may simply be the ailments of his liver or stomach that he already has in ordinary life, but now he has become immersed in these ailments. The person who imagines, on the other hand, has nothing to do with his organs in his imaginations, but he consciously looks upon a part of the soul that was previously unconscious. Thus, imaginative consciousness does not lead away from ordinary consciousness toward something visionary, as some believe, but rather the training and practice of imaginative consciousness is precisely an antidote to all uncontrollable visionary experiences. One does not develop in the direction of visions, but in the opposite direction: to become free from the physical organism, and to be able to use the soul—initially the etheric—in imagination itself in relation to the physical organism, in order to arrive at a substantial experience. In ordinary life, the physical body is what is substantial, and whatever one has beyond the physical body are, in thought, mirror images that have no substance, that lack an inner, real activity. It is precisely in the contrast between supersensible visions—as meant here—and the visionary life that what is meant here by the imagined, the inspired, and intuition in higher consciousness can become particularly clear. Once again, you will then see how, through such insight, one gradually learns what the relationship is between the soul-spiritual and the physical-bodily. One comes to understand how a visionary life arises when, during one’s earthly existence, the soul descends more deeply into the physical body. But one also comes to understand what it means to be outside one’s body, and what the soul experience is like when one is outside one’s body. Through this psychic-spiritual experience outside one’s body, one senses and foreshadows how one must live when one no longer has a physical body. The aim is to solve the problem of death within one’s physical earthly existence by living in the state of being that one occupies when one no longer has a physical body. — I ask you to understand that it is my aim to show how this focus on the problem of death can be characterized with all the caution of the thinking mind, for the problem of death is, after all, often treated in a layman’s manner today. But it should become clear how, precisely in anthroposophical research, all the intellectual caution one could possibly demand is actually applied when addressing this problem. That is why I have not shied away from structuring today’s lecture somewhat more precisely, so that a solid foundation is in place for grasping the problem of death. More on this will follow in the third part of today’s reflection.

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[ 14 ] When, in the ascent toward imaginative, inspired insight, and so on, one gains a view of the soul-spiritual on the one hand and the physical-bodily on the other, one can—as I said—survey, for every situation in human life, the relationship between the soul-spiritual and the physical-bodily. A few days ago, I described here how, in the descent from the soul-spiritual world, a human being works on the formation of their own physical organism, how this organism is then lost to them, and how they regain it in a different way through conception and birth. I went on to explain how the problem of birth appears when viewed from the perspective of pre-earthly existence. Let us now take a closer look at earthly existence, for this earthly existence lies between the event of birth and the event of death; and if one wishes to gradually come to an understanding of death, one must be able to link death—through earthly existence—to birth, or rather to the conception of the human being.

[ 15 ] It is precisely when one considers how the soul-spiritual aspect of pre-earthly existence relates to what one possesses as a physical body during earthly life that one comes to see how a part of the soul-spiritual—a part that one also possesses in pre-earthly existence—actually undergoes a complete transformation through conception and birth. This one part of the soul-spiritual existence actually disappears. It is still present in pre-earthly existence; it is the part from which thinking has developed. It is present in pre-earthly existence, but it disappears as a soul-spiritual element at the moment one enters the earth. Traces of it are still present in the very young child, but gradually this part of the soul-spiritual life disappears entirely. What has happened to it?

[ 16 ] The part that disappears there has been transformed into the life and form of the human head organization. So let us understand this correctly: It is, in fact, entirely incorrect to believe that the entire soul-spiritual aspect of the human being exists as such in pre-earthly existence. In that case, the human being would be given a kind of house on earth in the form of the body, and the soul-spiritual aspect would then move into it and remain there. It is entirely incorrect to think this way about the part of the soul I am referring to now. This part fades away, disappears, and transforms into something truly physical and material—which is our head structure. The life and form of our head structure are a physical metamorphosis of a spiritual-soul aspect of our pre-earthly existence. Look at your head—and I do not mean merely the head that is severed when one is beheaded, but the head with its entire inner content, with all the nerve tracts that enter it, and also with the blood circulation, insofar as it is the circulation of the head—all of this is a product of the transformation of a part of the human being’s pre-earthly existence. This aspect of pre-earth spiritual life is absorbed into this head structure. And because we have, within our head structure, a true transformation of what we experienced in our pre-earth life—precisely because we see in the human head a true physical image of our pre-earth existence—this head is a true mirror for reflecting thoughts. It has become so because it has formed and come to life as a physical entity out of the thoughts experienced during pre-earthly existence. Thus, it serves as a mirror for the thoughts we form from our perceptions. |

[ 17 ] In contrast, I would say, on the other side of the soul’s life, there emerges that part of the soul which passes through the human being via conception and birth—not transforming itself into a physical body, but entering only into a loose connection with our metabolic and limb systems. This is the part of the soul life that, in ordinary consciousness, is experienced in its reflection as volition. Compare volition with the life of imagination and with thinking. In the life of thinking, we as human beings are actually always fully conscious when we are awake. Yes, being awake actually means living in images. It is not the same with volition. Take the simplest act of volition. You raise an arm or a hand. What do you initially experience of this in waking consciousness? In waking consciousness, you first have the thought: I am raising my hand. — Then something takes place that unfolds in the depths of your human constitution. You do experience all sorts of vague feelings, including residual emotions and the like, but what you experience again clearly and with full wakefulness is the result: the arm is raised. — You can observe it. What takes place between these two states in the depths of the organism—as the actual essence of volition—remains as unconscious to ordinary consciousness as the events that occur during sleep. We are awake in our life of thought; in our actual life of volition, we are asleep, even when we are awake.

[ 18 ] This partial state of sleep, which manifests itself in our volition, is thus a sleep that also permeates our waking state. We are always asleep in one part of the soul, even when we are awake—namely, in the part of the soul where volition is rooted. But this is precisely the part of the soul that does not transform into physical organization as it passes through conception and birth. The other part of the soul, in turn, appears here in the physical world after birth as the human head organization. The organism of the limbs and metabolism is not a direct reflection of the other part of the soul; rather, it is born out of the physical world, and the other part of the soul has connected with it in a loose manner, so that this organism of the limbs and metabolism does not reflect what the soul experiences. Therefore, the human being is asleep with regard to his will and also with regard to his limb-and-metabolic organism. He is asleep in this respect, even when he is awake. And from the perspective of supersensible perception, this part of the soul—when viewed in connection with the physical organism—is quite similar to how the ego and the astral body, that is, the entire soul, are present throughout the entire physical organism from the moment of falling asleep until waking. Human beings are, in fact, far more complex beings than is commonly thought. There are certain descriptions of the supersensible that simply state: When a person is awake, their soul-spiritual nature is inside their physical-etheric organism; when they sleep, it is outside. — But the matter is not that simple, for one can speak in this way at most with regard to the head organization, but not with regard to the rest of the human organism. For with regard to this rest of the organism, a part of the soul life is asleep, even when the person is awake.

[ 19 ] This aspect of the soul’s life—which lies dormant and emerges only in very specific images from the dark depths of the human organism—becomes visible to us as a vision the moment we rise to the level of intuition, for this intuition is, as I have explained, the result of exercises of the will. Through this, one learns to look into what is otherwise always veiled in waking life; one learns to look into the mysteries of human volition. Even for waking life, human volition is a mystery that is partly revealed by inspiration but only fully unveiled by intuition. And as paradoxical as it sounds: Once a person has reached the point of penetrating the true essence of their own volition, they also penetrate the divine-spiritual world. — In the physical structure of the head, the spiritual world is contained within a physical transformation; there is not much of the spiritual world to discover there at all. The human head is actually the least spiritual part of the human being. But the rest of the organism contains the unaltered life of the soul, just as it is when a human being, in pre-earthly existence, lacks both a physical and an etheric organism. In this aspect—which lives beneath the will—the human being is, even between birth and death, thoroughly spirit, so that one can see through intuition what this spirit is like.

[ 20 ] This spirit, which reveals itself to intuition as the essence underlying the will, presents itself as the repository of everything one has experienced in the soul during one’s earthly existence—all intellectual soul activities and impulses, as well as moral inclinations and impulses. As I have already noted from a different perspective, this becomes the younger part of the soul—the soul that exists in an embryonic state within our present earthly existence; it is the part that is at the beginning of a process of becoming. When one looks at this part of the soul, one is thereby looking at something within the human being that lives toward death in order to be truly born only through death—just as the soul in its pre-earthly existence lives toward earthly life in order to be born into this earthly life through conception and birth. Beneath our will lies the soul’s embryo, which—when recognized in its essence—represents its embryonic life; and just as one can see that the human soul in its pre-earthly existence enters earthly life through birth, so too can one see that this embryo is born in death into a new spiritual life. The point, then, is that in order to understand physical existence, one must first come to know, within the supersensible realm, the soul-being that underlies the will. With this, we have once again taken a step closer to the problem of death. — I will conclude this discussion in the final, fourth part, and it will then lead us the next day to a summary of the problem of death in connection with the Christ problem.

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[ 21 ] Through such insight, one gains an overview of how the eternal core of human being has evolved through pre-iridic existence, earthly existence, and existence after death. To the unbiased observer, however, a tremendous mystery now presents itself. This mystery arises when one considers the acquisition of ego-consciousness. Now, as you will have gathered from yesterday’s lecture, ego-consciousness is dependent on the physical organism, for in the course of human development on Earth, it arises only at the moment when the human being, in ordinary consciousness, can make use solely of his or her physical organism. It is precisely here that imaginative, inspired, and intuitive insight teaches us with the utmost clarity that we, as human beings, first acquire our sense of self here in the physical world between birth and death, and that the acquisition of this sense of self is connected to the use of the physical body. But this body is lost to us at death.

[ 22 ] What humanity on Earth experienced as spiritual life prior to the development of ego-consciousness can, according to its eternal nature and from the perspective I have once again characterized today, only appear as a progression from pre-earthly existence through earthly existence to post-earthly existence—which, in other words, means through repeated earthly lives. But with regard to what is acquired as “I-consciousness,” there is, first of all, complete certainty: You acquire this “I”-consciousness through the use of the physical body; indeed, it was only in the course of human evolution—at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha also entered into this human evolution—that you learned to use your physical body in such a way that “I”-consciousness dawned within you.

[ 23 ] Therefore, it is equally certain that, since we attain self-consciousness through the physical organism, we must fear that this self-consciousness will be lost to us upon death. This is one of the problems of death. Even if we already see everything that reveals itself to us as an eternal core of being in thinking, feeling, and willing—in its transformation—as that which appears in thinking only as a mirror image and is in fact the vanished soul life that has been transformed into the organization of the head, if, in our willing, we see the reflection of that which leads a soul-embryonic life in the rest of the human organism, only to be born with death, if we can thoroughly penetrate the nature of the soul life in this regard, then we must be filled with fear—not fear arising from a secondary emotional disposition, but fear born of insight—when the question arises: What, then, do we carry over from the physical organism through death? — For the physical body decays with death. If we have acquired our sense of self through it, then a sense of dread arises—one that is entirely scientifically grounded: How do we carry our sense of self through death?

[ 24 ] Only the Mystery of Golgotha can resolve this question. Humanity could never carry the sense of self through death unless this sense of self—developed within the physical body—were united with Christ, who sustains it when it would otherwise dissolve from the human soul along with the physical body. The sense of self is acquired through the physical body. At death, it would dissolve from the human soul along with the physical body, were it not for the fact that, in the sense of Paul’s words, “Not I, but Christ in me,” this sense of self is united with the Christ Being; for Christ takes it and carries it through death. — How this occurs in detail will be described in the subsequent lectures, and it will be shown how Christ is the very Being who enables us to carry our sense of self safely through the gate of death.

[ 25 ] Only through anthroposophical research, as understood here, is the full significance of the Christ problem for human life revealed. After all, the significance of such insight begins even with ordinary philosophy! This ordinary philosophy is only awakened to an inner life and only gains self-knowledge when it can be nourished by imaginative knowledge. Consider what I set forth for you at the beginning of my lecture today. As one moves through meditation toward imaginative cognition, one crosses, as it were, an abyss. Thinking ceases; there is a state of non-thinking between ordinary thinking and active, life-filled, imaginative thinking—a state of non-thinking lies in between. Individual philosophers have sensed this non-thinking—Augustine and Descartes, for example—but they were unable to interpret it correctly. They speak of the doubt that lies at the beginning of philosophical inquiry. This doubt, of which Augustine and Descartes speak, is merely the reflection, brought into ordinary consciousness, of that state in which one finds oneself in non-thinking—between ordinary thinking and imaginative thinking. Because neither Augustine nor Descartes had immersed their souls in this actual non-thinking, they did not arrive at the true experience, but only at the reflection of what one experiences when, between ordinary thinking and imaginative thinking, thinking itself simply ceases—namely, when memory-based thinking ceases. The doubt of Augustine and Descartes is merely the reflected image of this experience, which arises only during the transition from imaginative consciousness back into ordinary consciousness. Thus, one can truly understand what appears obscure in mere philosophy of ideas when viewed in the light of imaginative philosophy.

[ 26 ] Likewise, you have seen how, through the insight that allows one to live into one’s own etheric body, one perceives the course of life as a unity before oneself, how that which unfolds in time as the course of life stands side by side. What one otherwise perceives as occurring one after the other, one perceives through this insight just as side by side as one normally perceives things in space. Bergson, for example, sensed this when he developed his idea of “duration.” This idea of duration plays a major role in Bergson’s philosophy; but as he conceives it, it is only a glimpse of what the truth is. The truth is the imaginative perception of time as a juxtaposition. Bergson arrives only at the abstract sense that, when one delves deeper into the matter, one transcends this world—now, but in the present—so that one experiences duration as such. But since Bergson does not wish to tread the ground of anthroposophical knowledge, he too arrives only at a reflected image of what one experiences through imaginative insight with regard to time as this juxtaposition, and he calls this “something”—which one experiences as a reflected image—duration, durée. It plays a major role in Bergson’s thought. Wherever one approaches philosophy, it becomes clear: philosophy will regain its substance and vitality only when this substance is grasped in the way it has been grasped once again today.

[ 27 ] I have already hinted that cosmology and religious insight also derive their substance from this, and I will elaborate further on this in the coming days in connection with the Christ problem. It will become clear there how, fundamentally speaking, for modern humanity, all higher knowledge concerning its own being is an appeal to the Mystery of Golgotha. And through the will of this Mystery of Golgotha—as the Christ-being once again enters human consciousness in its full, supersensible reality—modern supersensible knowledge, through spiritual philosophy and spiritual cosmology, will lead to a foundation not only for supersensible life in general, but also for spiritual Christianity.