The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Inspiration and Intuition

[ 1 ] Let us once again consider the soul and where the newer initiation leads once the first steps toward imaginative knowledge have been successfully taken. The individual comes to experience his previous, abstract, purely ideal world of thought permeated by an inner vitality. As a result, he is no longer confronted with the lifeless thoughts acquired through passive cognition, but with an inner, living world of forces, which he feels just as he otherwise feels his blood pulsing through him or his breath flowing through him. It is therefore a matter of the ideal element of thought transforming into a real one that is experienced inwardly. Then even those images that were previously thoughts are no longer abstract, no longer shadowy, no longer mere projections of the external world, but are inwardly filled with living existence. They are true imaginations that, as I hinted at yesterday, are experienced two-dimensionally—but not in the same way as when one stands before a painted picture in the physical world—for whoever experiences it that way is experiencing visions, not imaginations—but rather, one experiences it as if one were moving within the image itself with one’s own being, which has now also lost the third dimension. So one does not see what one experiences there in the same way one sees in the physical world. Anything that still appears as it does in the physical world is simply a vision. True higher knowledge is present only when the imagination is experienced in such a way that, for example, one no longer looks at colors within it as one looks at colors in the physical world, but rather experiences the colors. How does one experience the colors? Well, when you perceive colors in the physical world, you have different experiences with the various colors. You perceive red as something that attacks you, that wants to leap at you. The bull defends itself against this red that leaps at it—a red it experiences much more intensely than humans do, for whom everything is attenuated.

[ 2 ] When you experience green, you feel a sense of balance within yourself—an experience that causes no pain but also brings no particular pleasure. When you experience blue, you have a sense of devotion and humility. Now, one can truly immerse oneself in these various experiences that one has with colors in the physical world, and one can then recognize—when something in the spiritual world comes at you as aggressively as red does in the physical world—that this corresponds to the color red. When something comes toward you that puts you in a mood of humility, this is the same experience as the experience of the blue or blue-violet color in the physical world, and one can then say, for the sake of brevity, that one has experienced red or blue in the spiritual world. Otherwise, if one wanted to speak precisely, one would always have to say that one had experienced something similar to what one experiences when looking at red in the physical world, or when looking at blue in the physical world. To avoid this lengthy, repetitive way of expressing things, one shortens it and speaks of having “auric vision”—an auric perception that differentiates between red, green, blue, and so on.

[ 3 ] But it can certainly be observed that this crossing over into the supersensible, this shedding of all that is sensory and yet concrete, is always present. And it is precisely in this concrete experience that one feels what I described yesterday—as if thinking were becoming a tactile organ filling the entire human organism, so that one feels, spiritually speaking, as if one were probing a newly emerging world, which is not yet the actual spiritual world, but rather what I would like to call the world of formative forces or the etheric world. Anyone who truly wants to get to know the ether must grasp it in this way. All speculation about the ether, all conceptual reflection, does not lead to a true understanding of the ether. In this—one might say—realized thinking, one now lives with one’s own formative forces, or etheric body. But one lives in a different way than one has lived until now in the physical world. The way one lives within this etheric world—I would like to describe it by means of a comparison.

[ 4 ] If you consider a finger as part of your organism, it is a living part of that organism. If you cut it off, it is no longer what it was before. It dies off; it no longer lives. And if the finger had consciousness, it would say to itself: I am only a part of the organism; I have no independent existence. But this is precisely what one must say at the moment when, through imaginative insight, one stands within the etheric world. There one no longer feels oneself to be a separate, individualized being, but rather a limb of the entire etheric world, of the entire etheric cosmos, and one realizes afterward that one has been made into an individual, into a personality, solely by virtue of having a physical body. The physical body individualizes. The physical body is what makes one a separate being.

[ 5 ] We will see that we can also become individualized in the spiritual world, but more on that later. If one first ascends into the spiritual world as I have described, one must certainly feel oneself to be a part of the etheric cosmos. And if, with regard to the etheric body, one were ever cut off from the cosmic ether, one would die etherically. It is very important to grasp this so that we can then fully understand what must be said about the human being’s passage through the gate of death—but that will come later.

[ 6 ] Now—as I already hinted at yesterday—this vivid experience, which becomes a tableau of life spanning our entire existence on Earth from birth to the present moment, is accompanied throughout the etheric realm by an extraordinarily strong sense of happiness. This is, first and foremost, the higher experience—one that is extraordinarily pleasing to the human being—of this entire world of images being permeated by a sense of happiness perceived inwardly.

[ 7 ] Then, as I hinted at yesterday, one must be able to let what one has attained in this way—in terms of imagination and one’s own tableau of life—disappear arbitrarily from one’s consciousness. One must be able to empty one’s consciousness. And only when one’s consciousness is empty does one understand how things actually stand in the spiritual world. For then one knows: Everything one saw before was not yet the spiritual world; it was merely an imaginative tableau of the spiritual world. Only now, when one has reached the stage where one’s consciousness has become empty, only now does the spiritual world flow into us through groping thought, just as the physical world flows in through the senses. Only now do we begin to gain a genuine experience of the spiritual world, the spiritual external world. After all, in the tableau of our lives we had only our inner world. Imaginative insight reveals only the inner world, which, however, appears to higher insight as a world of images. And it reveals the images of the cosmos. The cosmos itself and our own true being—as it was before birth, before earthly existence—appear only in inspiration, when the spiritual world flows into us from without. But when we arrive at this state of empty consciousness, our soul is initially filled with mere wakefulness, and we must be able to attain a certain inner stillness and peace within this mere wakefulness. I can characterize this peace only in the following way:

[ 8 ] Let’s imagine we’re in a very noisy city. We hear the roar of this city all around us. It’s terrible, we tell ourselves, as it echoes and rushes past us from all sides. Let’s imagine ourselves in a truly modern metropolis—London, for example. But now let’s imagine we’re leaving the city. And as we walk step by step further out of the city, it grows quieter and quieter. Let’s really immerse ourselves in this diminishing of what we can hear. It grows quieter and quieter. Finally, let’s say we arrive in a forest where everything is completely silent, where we can’t hear a thing anymore, where everything around us is silent. We have, so to speak, arrived at the zero point of what we can hear.

[ 9 ] But the matter can go even further. And here I’d like to use a trivial comparison to show you how it continues. Let’s imagine we have money in our wallet. We spend more and more every day; the money gets less and less, just as the sound becomes fainter and fainter as we move away from the city. And finally, the day comes when we don’t take in any more money—when we have absolutely nothing left in our wallet. We compare this zero to silence. But what do we do now if we still want to keep eating? We go into debt. I don’t exactly mean to recommend that, but I’m using it as a comparison. How much do we have in our wallet then? Less than zero. And the more debt we accumulate, the less and less than zero we have.

[ 10 ] Now let’s imagine that the same thing were to apply to silence. It would not merely be absolute stillness—the zero point of silence—but it would go further; it would be the negative of hearing, quieter than quiet, more silent than silent; that is what would come about. This must indeed occur when we attain this inner peace and stillness through an intensified force, as described yesterday. But then, when we reach this inner negative audibility—this stillness that is greater than the stillness of zero—we are so deeply immersed in the spiritual world that we do not merely behold it, but it also resounds within us. Then what we previously saw is elevated by the sound to a more living world. Then we stand within the real spiritual world. Then, so to speak, we have crossed to the other shore of existence for the moments in which we are over there. Beyond this shore, the ordinary sensory world disappears; we find ourselves in the spiritual world. We must, however—as I will explain later—be properly prepared so that we can return at any time. But something else occurs as well. An experience arises that a person has never been able to have before. What I have described as an inner, fully experienced, all-encompassing—I would say cosmic—sense of bliss transforms, at the very moment we establish this empty consciousness with stillness, into an equally all-encompassing soulful pain, into an equally all-encompassing soulful suffering. And we come to realize that the world is built upon the foundation of cosmic pain—or rather, a cosmic element that can be experienced by human beings only through pain. And we come to know profoundly that truth which is so readily disregarded by humanity, which seeks only external happiness; we come to know the truth that all existence must ultimately be born of pain. And once one has penetrated in this way to the experience of cosmic pain within the knowledge of initiation, one may say the following out of genuine inner knowledge:

[ 11 ] Let us consider our eye. This eye, which reveals to us the splendor of the physical world—which means that we derive nine-tenths of our life’s purpose from our physical existence between birth and death—is embedded in a bodily cavity that, in its very formation, actually represents a wounding of the body. What today can only come into being by hollowing out the body in a wounding manner—that is what gave rise to the eye sockets. The history of external evolution presents this in a far too neutral, far too indifferent light. What led to the eye sockets—into which the eyeball was then forced from the outside—as the history of physical evolution itself already shows—the eyeball, the eye socket, arose at a time when human beings were still unconscious beings, out of a process that, had it been brought into consciousness, would have meant a painful wounding of the organism. But as it is, the entire human organism has been born out of an element that, if experienced with the consciousness human beings possess today, would be an experience of pain. And it is precisely at this level of insight that one deeply senses how all happiness, all pleasure, all bliss in the world springs from the soil of the element of pain, just as a plant springs from the earth, which in fact always signifies pain.

[ 12 ] If we, as human beings, could be transformed in an instant into the substance of the earth while retaining our consciousness, this would result in an infinite increase in our feelings of pain. Superficial people, when told of this fact—which is revealed from the spiritual world—say: “But I had imagined the Deity differently; I thought that the Deity was so powerful that it could bring about everything from happiness, just as we humans want it to be.” Such people are just like the King of Spain, who was once presented with a vivid picture of the universe and the movements of the stars, and who had to strain immensely to comprehend how these movements occur and how it all works—yet in the end he did not understand it and then said: “If God had left it up to me, I would have made the world simpler!”

[ 13 ] Well, that is essentially the attitude toward knowledge and religion held by many people: if the deity had left it up to them to create the world, they would have made it simpler. But these people simply do not realize how naive their words are. And a true science of initiation cannot merely lead to what makes people happy; rather, it must lead people to truly comprehend their nature and their purpose in emerging from the world—in the past, present, and future. This requires spiritual facts rather than mere content that appeals to one from the outset. But ultimately—and this is what these lectures are also intended to demonstrate—it is precisely through the experience of these facts, and even through the conceptual understanding of these facts alone, that one will be able to gain a great deal of inner satisfaction for one’s earthly life as well. Yes, one will be able to receive what a human being needs for earthly life in order to be a whole human being, just as one needs one’s individual physical limbs to be a whole human being.

[ 14 ] The world one enters in this way—once one has gone beyond the imagination into the stillness of being, from which, as I have indicated, the spiritual world reveals itself through colors and sounds—is fundamentally different from the world we perceive with our senses. And one notices, when one lives in harmony with this world—and one must live in harmony with the spiritual world if it is to be present for one—one notices that all sensory-physical things and all sensory-physical processes have in reality emerged from this spiritual world. So that human beings, as earthly beings, actually see only half of the world; the other half is hidden from them, remaining occult. And it reveals itself, I might say, from every crevice; and out of every event in the physical-sensory world emerges the spiritual—first in the images of the imagination, then in what the imagination itself can creatively give, in inspiration. One can feel at home in this world of inspiration. There one finds the origins of all earthly things, of all earthly creations. There one finds, as I have already indicated, one’s own pre-earthly existence. I have—names are not important; one needs terminology based on the usage of earlier times—called this world, which lies beyond the imaginative, the astral world. And that which one carries within oneself from this world, which one has already brought with one into the physical and etheric bodies, can accordingly be called the astral body of the human being. It is within this body, so to speak, that the actual “I”-organization is contained. Thus, for a higher understanding, the human being proves to be a fourfold being, consisting of the physical body, the etheric or formative body, the astral body, and the “I”-organization. However, one can only advance to this “I-organization” through a further step in supersensible knowledge—the step I have called “intuition” in my books, particularly in the book How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds—which has been translated into English under the title Initiation.

[ 15 ] It is very easy to misunderstand the term “intuition,” because, for example, someone who has imagination or poetic ability might already call the emotional sensations they experience of the world “intuition.” But this is a vague, purely emotional intuition. It is, however, related to what I mean by “intuition” here. For just as human beings, as earthly beings, possess their sensory perceptions, so too do they possess a reflection of the highest form of knowledge—intuition—through earthly feeling and earthly will. Otherwise, he could not be a moral being. Thus, that which reveals itself to the human being in his conscience in a dark, premonitory way is a reflection—a shadow image, so to speak—of the Highest, which now appears only in true intuition, in the highest form of knowledge initially possible for the human being as an earthly being.

[ 16 ] As an earthly human being, a person truly possesses something of the lowest realm, and at the same time is a shadow image of the highest realm, which can only be attained through intuition. It is precisely the middle realms that are initially completely absent from the earthly human being. These must be acquired: imagination and inspiration. He must also acquire intuition in its pure, luminous inner life; but it is precisely in moral feeling, in the content of the moral conscience, that he possesses an earthly image of that which then appears as intuition. So one can also say: When a human being, as an initiate and one who knows, ascends to a true intuitive knowledge of the world, the world—which he otherwise knows only through the laws of nature—becomes as inner to him, as intimately connected with him, as the moral world otherwise is for him as an earthly human being. And this is precisely what is significant about human existence on Earth: that we are connected to the Most High—which, in turn, is accessible in its true form only to developed knowledge—as if through an innermost, dark premonition.

[ 17 ] The third step of higher cognition, which is necessary to enter the realm of intuition, can only be attained through the highest development of an inner capacity that, in today’s materialistic age, is not considered at all to be one of the cognitive faculties. Only through the highest cultivation and spiritualization of the capacity for love can that which reveals itself in intuition be attained. It must become possible for human beings to transform the capacity for love into a cognitive power. We are already preparing ourselves well for this spiritualized capacity for love when we detach ourselves in a certain way from our attachment to external things; for example, when we make it a regular practice to recall the things we have experienced not in the order in which they occurred, but in reverse order.

[ 18 ] With our passive thinking, we are completely—I would say like human slaves—at the mercy of world events. As I said yesterday: Even when forming thoughts, we place what came first earlier and what came later later. When we watch a play unfold on stage, it begins with the first act, followed by the second, third, fourth, and fifth acts. But if we can rise to the challenge of beginning our imagination at the very end—first imagining what happened immediately before, then what occurs at the beginning of the fifth act, then going back to the fourth act, then to the third, the second, and the first act—then we completely detach ourselves from the outward course of the world. We imagine things in reverse. That is not how the world unfolds. We must make a significant effort, drawn purely from within, to imagine things in reverse. In this way, we free the inner activity of our soul from the leash by which we are otherwise constantly pulled, and thereby we gradually bring this inner spiritual-soul experience to the point where the spiritual-soul aspect truly breaks free from the physical and also from the etheric.

[ 19 ] A person can prepare well for such a breakaway if they are able to recall their daily experiences in reverse order every evening—first recalling what they experienced most recently, then working backward, but if possible also to recall the details in reverse order, so that, for example, when one has climbed a flight of stairs, one first imagines oneself at the top on the highest step, then on the second-to-last, the third, and so on, moving backward down the stairs while recalling what one accomplished on the way up.

[ 20 ] You might say: There’s so much to experience during the day; it takes a long time. Well, to begin with, try this exercise: imagine going up and down a flight of stairs in reverse—going down and then up; this will give you an inner agility so that, little by little, you can actually visualize the entire course of a day’s life in reverse in just three or four minutes. But with that, you’ve actually accomplished only half—essentially the negative aspect—of what is needed for the development and spiritual cultivation of the capacity for love. For that capacity must reach the point where you lovingly follow every stage of a plant’s growth—in ordinary life, after all, you only see the plant’s growth as it unfolds in space; one does not participate in it—but when one participates in every single aspect that manifests in the plant’s growth, when one immerses oneself in the plant, becoming that plant with one’s own soul, when one grows, blooms, and bears the plant’s fruit oneself—in other words, when one immerses oneself completely, when the plant becomes as precious to one as one is to oneself; when one then ascends in the same way to the concept of the animal realm and descends to the concept of the mineral realm; when one feels how the mineral forms into a crystal; when one can, so to speak, develop an inner delight in this formation of surfaces, edges, and corners; when one already experiences an inner delight in the very perception of these surfaces, edges, and corners; and when, upon splitting, or splitting the mineral, one can feel something like a sensation of pain that shoots through one’s own being—if, in this way, one becomes empathetic—indeed, not merely empathetic, but actively participating in one’s soul with all natural processes.

[ 21 ] This must be preceded by a genuine capacity for love that extends to all human beings. One will not be able to truly love nature in the manner described unless one has first attained this capacity for love toward all human beings. Then, once one has attained this kind of understanding and loving capacity for human beings and for all of nature, what initially presents itself to our perception—say, in the auric colors or in the spherical tones—begins to take shape and form into actual spiritual beings.

[ 22 ] But the experience of these spiritual beings is different from the experience of physical objects. When I have a physical object in front of me—for example, a clock—I am standing here, and the clock is there; I can only experience it by looking at it, and it is at a distance from me. I am situated in space in relation to it.

[ 23 ] This is why one can never truly experience a spiritual being. One must experience a spiritual being by immersing oneself completely in it—that is, by applying precisely the capacity for love that one has first developed through nature. Spiritual intuition is possible only through the application—in silence, in that which is empty for consciousness—of the capacity for love that one can develop through nature. Imagine for a moment that you have developed this capacity for love through minerals, plants, animals, and human beings. You now stand within it, in the emptiness of consciousness. All around you is that negative stillness, lying below zero. You sense the suffering that lies at the very foundation of all worldly existence; it is, at the same time, the suffering of loneliness. Nothing is there yet. But the capacity for love welling up from within—which is differentiated in the most manifold ways—leads you to truly permeate with your own being that which now arises in inspiration: the visible and the audible. Through this capacity for love, you immerse yourself in one being and penetrate into another.

[ 24 ] The beings I have described in my book Geheimwissenschaft — Occult Science — these beings of the higher hierarchies—one now experiences them directly; they become a real, substantial presence in the world. One experiences a concrete spiritual world just as one experiences a concrete physical world through the eyes, the ears, the senses, and warmth. But one must have advanced to this level if one wishes to arrive at a realization that is particularly essential to human beings. I have described how, through inspiration, our pre-earthly, purely spiritual existence extends into our soul, and how it is only through this inspiration that we come to know what we were before we descended into an earthly body through conception. When, through clairvoyance—as I have just described—we are able to penetrate into spiritual beings through the capacity for love, then what makes the human being whole in its inner experience is also revealed to us. What is revealed is that which lies in the spiritual world prior to the time of this life; what is revealed is what we were before we ascended to our last spiritual life between death and a new birth. Our previous earthly life is revealed, and gradually the other preceding earthly lives as well. For this true self, which exists through repeated earthly lives, can only reveal itself when one has developed the capacity for love to such an extent that the other being—whether out there in nature or in the spiritual world—has become as dear to one as one can love oneself through self-love. But the true self, which passes through repeated births and deaths, is never accessible to self-love. Repeated earthly lives reveal themselves to a person only when they no longer live in self-love for moments of insight, but in that love which can completely forget self-love and live within the objective being just as one otherwise lives in one’s physical existence, loving oneself with self-love. For this “I” of the previous earthly life has become as objective to this present earthly life as any external stone or plant is to us when we stand outside of it in space. We must have learned to grasp, in objective love, that which has at first become entirely objective and entirely foreign to our present subjective personality. We must have transcended ourselves in our present earthly existence in order to gain any insight at all into a previous earthly existence.

[ 25 ] But when we develop this insight, the complete life of a human being appears as one that flows, like wave oscillations, through earthly stages of existence from birth or conception to death, and again through purely spiritual stages of existence from death to a new birth, only to return to Earth once more, and so on. The complete earthly life appears as repeated cycles of birth and death, with intervening lives in purely spiritual worlds. This is a kind of insight that can only be gained through intuition as a real, experiential understanding.

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[ 26 ] I had to describe to you—in outline form, at first—the path of initiatory knowledge as it must be followed, especially in our time, at the present stage of humanity’s development, in order to arrive at a true spiritual understanding of the nature of the world and of human beings. Initiatory knowledge, however, has existed for as long as humanity has existed. It has had to take on different forms at various times in human development. Because human beings are beings who, in each successive earthly life, actually journey with their souls in a different way, what appears within humanity during the individual epochs of world development is also entirely distinct from one another. We will come to know the specific differences over the next few days; today I would simply like to say the following: Precisely with regard to what must be given as initiatory knowledge, things were quite different in ancient times of human development than they are today. We can go back millennia—more precise details will become clear later—and we find, long before the Mystery of Golgotha, a completely different way in which human beings related to the natural and spiritual worlds than they do today, and accordingly, a completely different science of initiation than the one that is right for human beings today. Today we have a very, very highly developed natural science. I do not wish to speak of the highest realms of natural science, but only of what is taught to children from the age of six or seven as common knowledge. Even at a relatively early age today, children absorb those laws that, let us say, are based on the Copernican system of the world; and starting from this Copernican system, hypotheses are constructed about how the universe might have come into being. People speak here of the Kant-Laplace hypothesis, which, although it has been revised, essentially still stands before humanity today. Essentially, one looks to a primordial nebula—as can still be illustrated today through relevant physical experiments—in which one sees the initial states of the solar system; one looks to a primordial nebula and assumes that, from this nebula, the planets arose through centrifugal forces, while the Sun remained behind. One then imagines how, from this particular ring—which subsequently condensed into the Earth and split off from the primordial nebula—further beings were formed through differentiation: minerals, plants, animals, and finally human beings as well. And this is initially described in a purely scientific sense.

[ 27 ] You can make this very clear to the children by performing a kind of demonstration exercise that immediately makes everything clear. Take a droplet of oil—a drop of a liquid that floats on water—place it near the equator on a sheet of map paper, insert a pin into the top of it, and then rotate the sheet of map paper. You can now show how, at first, an outermost droplet separates and rotates, then a second droplet, and so on, and you end up with a tiny planetary system made of oil, with the sun right in the middle. If you saw this as a child, why wouldn’t you find the emergence of the entire planetary system from the primordial nebula highly plausible? After all, you’ve seen it with your own eyes—you’ve seen it recreated.

[ 28 ] It is, of course, a wonderful thing to be able to forget oneself in life—in one’s moral life—but when demonstrating natural phenomena, one should not forget oneself. The whole story of the oil droplet would never have unfolded if one hadn’t stood there and turned the pin with one’s hand. So one must take that into account. If this is to be considered a hypothesis, one must necessarily place a gigantic schoolteacher out into the universe, just as the primordial nebula was first set in motion and is, in fact, continuously spinning; otherwise, one does not have the idea in its primordial essence before one.

[ 29 ] But that is precisely the peculiarity of the materialistic age: that quarter, eighth, and even smaller fractions of the truth are conceived, and that this takes root in the human soul with tremendous force. Thus, we live today with a one-sided view of nature and its laws.

[ 30 ] I could now cite many examples that would make it clear to you, in a wide variety of fields, how people today go out into nature and—because they perceive it through the lens of modern civilization—view nature as governed by what is called “causal laws.” This permeates their entire existence today. At most, they can still hold on to the spiritual world through religious “tradition.” If one wishes to ascend to the true spiritual world, one must undergo an inner process of development through imagination, inspiration, and intuition, as I have described. One must therefore be guided by the science of initiation from the lawful permeation—or at least from the belief in the lawful permeation—of naturalistic existence toward an understanding of the spiritual. All science of initiation today must aim to lead people from the natural understanding of the cosmos, which they now take for granted, toward a spiritual understanding of the cosmos.

[ 31 ] The opposite was true in the ancient science of initiation thousands of years ago. At that time, the mystery sages—the leaders of the initiation centers, which in those days served as schools, churches, and centers of art all at once—were surrounded by a humanity that, in the sense of nature, knew nothing—as humanity today has known since the Copernican worldview—but which instinctively experienced the spiritual and soul-related as cosmic within itself, and expressed this spiritual-soul-cosmic reality in myths and legends that we in today’s general civilization no longer understand. We will also have to speak about them in greater detail. But what constituted experience was instinctive, soulful, spiritual experience. And this was what filled human beings, as it were, with dreamlike images and imaginings during their waking existence. These dreamlike imaginings, which then developed into legends, myths, and tales of the gods, continually arose from within primeval humanity. People lived within them. They looked out into the world and experienced their dreamlike imaginings. Then they realized: when they were not living within these dreamlike imaginings, they were living in the natural world. People saw the rainbow, the clouds, the stars, the sun racing across the sky; they saw the rivers; they saw the mountains in their becoming, in their very essence; they saw the minerals, the plants, and the animals.

[ 32 ] And everything that could be perceived there with the senses became, especially for early humanity, the great mystery. For the period I am referring to—there were earlier and later times when civilization was different—but the period I am referring to, which lies several millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, was one in which humanity felt inwardly blissful when it was immersed in its dreamlike imaginings. And the external sensory world—in which one saw only what the eye could perceive of rainbows, clouds, the setting sun, minerals, plants, and animals—and through which one also observed only what was recorded in the pre-Copernican, that is, the Ptolemaic, world system regarding the starry heavens— this external world of the senses appeared to humanity at that time in such a way that humanity as a whole said to itself: “I, with my own soul, do indeed live in a divine-spiritual world. Out there is a nature stripped of divinity.” Nature has no spirituality when I look at it; the rainbow has no spirituality; the minerals, the plants, the animals, and other physical human beings have no spirituality when I perceive them externally through the senses. And nature appeared as a universal world that had fallen away from divine spirituality.

[ 33 ] This sense of humanity prevailed in that era when the entire cosmos, in its visible form, was viewed as something that had fallen away from the divine-spiritual. And people needed more than just abstract knowledge to connect these two experiences—the inner experience of God within themselves and the outer experience of a fallen sensory world; they needed a kind of knowledge that at the same time offered comfort in the fact that, as human beings, they belonged to this outer, fallen sensory world with their physical and etheric bodies. One needed comfort that would explain how this fallen sensory world relates to the one experienced through instinctive imagination—through a dreamlike, obscure, yet, given the circumstances of the time, sufficient experience of the spiritual world. Insight had to be comfort. And those who now rushed to the Mysteries sought solace—either as people who desired only what could be given outwardly in the Mysteries as such solace, or as disciples of such sages of the world, in order to be initiated into the mysteries of existence, into the enigma that thus stands before humanity.

[ 34 ] Those ancient initiates of the mysteries, who were at once priests, teachers, and artists, made it clear through all that which still needs to be described—that which was present in their mysteries— made it clear to humanity that even in the fallen world—in the trickling spring, in the blossoming tree, in the blooming flower, in the mineral forming into crystal, in the appearing rainbow, in the fleeting cloud, and in the setting sun—the same divine-spiritual forces live that human beings instinctively experienced in their dreamlike imagination. They presented to humanity the reconciliation of the world that had fallen away from God with the divine world that human beings perceived in their instinctive imaginations. They brought humanity this comforting insight; they were its saviors through a knowledge that made all of nature once again a God-filled reality, visible even to human eyes, for it was precisely this comforting insight that human beings sought in the Mysteries.

[ 35 ] We see, therefore, as is reported from these earlier times of human development—and this is also reported by the Greeks—that precisely what we teach even the youngest children in school today—that the sun stands still and the Earth revolves around it—was preserved in the Mysteries as a secret science. What for us is purely external knowledge was, back then, a secret science. The explanation of nature—that was a secret science back then. Today, as anyone can see who has lived through the course of human development within our civilization—which, after all, every thinking person who has been educated and instructed does—today, nature with its laws is that into which human beings immerse themselves. In contrast, the spiritual world has withdrawn. The old, dreamlike imaginings have ceased. Human beings perceive nature as that in which they do not, at first, find full satisfaction—it is presented to them neutrally, not as a fallen, sinful universe, not as a fallen cosmos, but as a cosmos that, by an inner necessity, must be exactly as it is. Then human beings sense their self-consciousness; then they learn to recognize the spiritual in that single point; then they feel the inner urge that seeks to reconnect the inner self with God. And then they need—in addition to their knowledge of nature, and in accordance with that knowledge—to be led into the spiritual world through a new science of initiation. The old science of initiation was able to proceed from the spirit that human beings instinctively experienced—and which was embodied in their myths—and lead them toward nature. The new science of initiation must proceed from what is humanity’s primary experience today—namely, the perception of the laws of nature, in which they then come to believe—and from this knowledge of nature, it must point the way back to the spiritual world through imagination, inspiration, and intuition.

[ 36 ] Thus, in the course of human evolution, a few millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, there was that important turning point when human beings moved from an instinctive spiritual experience to arrive at those concepts and ideas that constituted the most esoteric science, encompassing the laws of nature. Today, even children experience the laws of nature. Faced with this sobriety, this prose of life, this naturalism, the spiritual world initially withdrew into the innermost being of the human being. And today, an initiatory science must, conversely, point the way from nature back toward the spiritual. For ancient humanity, nature was in darkness; the spirit was in the light. The ancient science of initiation had to bring the light from the spiritual realm—light drawn from there—into the natural darkness, so that this too might be illuminated. Today’s science of initiation must proceed from that light which, in an outwardly naturalistic manner, was cast into external nature by Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and so on. This light must then be taken from folly, enlivened, and the path must be made to the Spirit, who must be sought in his own light through a path that is the reverse of the ancient path of initiation.

[ 37 ] I'll talk more about that tomorrow.

Q&A

[ 38 ] Questions were asked about the nature of imagination, inspiration, and intuition. The stenographer did not record the exact wording of the questions.

[ 39 ] Rudolf Steiner: Regarding the difficulty associated with a term such as “imagination,” I would like to make the following observation:

[ 40 ] When we adopt a word to convey a meaningful concept, we should always refer back to the word’s original meaning and not ask: “What meaning is currently attributed to the word in colloquial language?”, ^{1The word “imagination” is also used in English to mean “fantasy.”} for, fundamentally, all contemporary colloquial languages have diluted the meaning of words. I already had to point something out this morning, but it has an inner justification. The word “intuition” is also used in what I would call an everyday sense, but rightly so, because the highest insight into spiritual life must reach down into the moral realm, even to the simplest, indeed most primitive, human mind. We cannot say the same thing about a word like “imagination,” and one should therefore always first make clear to oneself what is contained within such a word. The moment you strip away the prefix and suffix of the word and focus on the middle part, you immediately arrive at “magic.” “Magic” is embedded in the word “imagination”: it is an internalization of the magical. If you go back to such an original meaning of the word, you will find that the usage underlying it today is, in fact, a thoroughly trivialized one.

[ 41 ] Now I would like to know what one is actually supposed to do in anthroposophy—and indeed in any form of spiritual deepening—if one does not require that every word be traced back to its deeper meaning.

[ 42 ] You see, one must take something like anthroposophy so seriously that one must also ask oneself this question: Is it even possible to truly describe anthroposophy in today’s everyday language? Is it even possible to say anything truly significant about anthroposophy in any everyday language? — Well, all everyday languages originally contained something profound, and in all of today’s everyday languages, one can trace back to these deeper meanings.

[ 43 ] When people today speak of “imagination” and also apply the word to what the imagination takes in, they have simply taken the word to mean only what is known today as an inner experience. Most people today, when they hear talk of inner experience, assume it is all fantastical, and they then describe the fantastical as the “imaginative.” From their point of view, they are quite right. But if one lacks the will to return to the original meaning inherent in the word “imagination,” it will be very difficult to incorporate anthroposophy into language at all.

[ 44 ] One must be clear about the following: You see, the word “magic” encompasses many things. First of all, the word “magic” contains something that I would like to describe as follows: Today, when we are scientifically curious, we look through a microscope, and we see what is small in the world—whether it be the long-sought-after atom, which has now been demonstrated experimentally, or some kind of germ—and modern materialistic science is always curious about this smallness. But the moment we turn to the true causes of things, the moment we go where the creative forces and powers of things lie, we do not arrive at the small, but rather at the great. And to draw from the great, to draw from the mighty and imposing—that which encompasses creative forces that tower above the small human being—and to bring this into the human soul in an appropriate way: this means condensing the magical so that, in its condensed form, it can be received and experienced by the human soul.

[ 45 ] And just as one should handle the word “imagination,” so too should one handle all the other words that are used. After all, almost everyone today talks about inspiration. I do not deny them the right to do so—why should I deny it, since everyone, at the level at which they operate, has the right to use the word “inspiration”—but everyone today, even when a joke occurs to them, speaks of “inspiration.” Well, of course, this interpretation of the word “inspiration”—when used in this way—is not sufficient for the paths of higher knowledge. But let us once again make it a principle to view the words in the languages of our present civilization in the same way that people were once viewed in general.

[ 46 ] Just think: Even in the 18th century, people here in England and throughout the continent were deeply engaged with so-called Martinism—the philosophy originating with Saint-Martin—and especially with his book, Des erreurs et de la vérité. Indeed, a book was published in “Edinburgh” in 1775 that was translated into all European languages—a book that, in the style of the time, dealt with the spiritual, so to speak, representing a final offshoot of the kind of spiritual contemplation that was still possible through the 18th century and into the early 19th century, but which is no longer possible today.

[ 47 ] Now, if we take one of the main ideas from Saint-Martin’s book Des erreurs et de la vérité, we find that humanity in its totality, as an earthly being, is viewed as having fallen from its original greatness; there, the—I would say still complete—human being is accused of the Fall. According to Saint-Martin, human beings were once mighty beings, encircled by the so-called sacred armor, which served them magically, rendering them magical in the face of all the forces and entities of the world that were often hostile to them. Humanity lived in that place designated by Saint-Martin as the place of the seven sacred trees, which is then referred to in religious legend—or, for my part, in the Bible—as Paradise. Humanity was endowed with the fiery lance through which it exercised its corresponding power, and so on. All the things originally attributed to man are said to have been lost by him through his own pre-earthly guilt; man is even attributed a terrible sin in his pre-earthly state, the very mention of which today is somewhat shocking even in social life. And so man is portrayed as a being who has fallen from his original greatness. And the whole of Martinism, the entire philosophy of Saint-Martin, actually sets itself the task of showing what man could be if he had not fallen from his original greatness.

[ 48 ] Well, these connections can no longer be fully brought to life today; they are, after all, the last vestiges of the way of thinking that I described this morning as the old way of thinking. Within modern initiatory science, we must proceed from the scientific method of knowledge—not from natural science itself, but from the scientific method of knowledge—for this alone will be able to satisfy people in the near future. However, when it comes to specialized fields, if we truly wish to penetrate the substance of anthroposophy—indeed, the substance of any spiritual endeavor at all—with the necessary mood, with the necessary uplifting of the soul, with the sacred enthusiasm with which we are meant to penetrate it in order to truly understand it — if we wish to do so, then we must not simply take words from ordinary colloquial language; rather, we must regard words as if, in fact, all words up to the time of our civilization had undergone a fall from grace. Words today are no longer what they once were: they have become sinful entities. They have fallen into the material realm and no longer denote what they once denoted when they were still close to that stage of human development in which they were used in the Mysteries. And we must, in a certain sense, make a leap upward in our perception of words. We must strive not to remain stuck at the level of general colloquial language; otherwise, the words will take on the very color and “timbre” that these words have in colloquial speech. Fundamentally, the easiest way today is to ascend from the words caught up in the Fall to a kind of sacred meaning of words found in the Hebrew language. For those languages that have been used more extensively in modern life, with its thoroughly non-sacramental interests, it is naturally difficult to rise to the sinlessness of words—if I may put it that way; I don’t mean it in a negative sense, but in a certain sense we must do just that. And so we must be clear: the word “inspiration” has today fallen to the level of sinfulness, where anyone who tells a joke already claims to be inspired. — Why not? After all, writers—and even cartoonists for humor magazines—need a great deal of inspiration in today’s sense, but today it is a profaned inspiration.

[ 49 ] But if we return to the word in its more original sense, we are led into the very depths of human striving.

[ 50 ] I must remind you, then, of the way in which, for example, in India—albeit at a decadent stage—a magnificent, admirable form of knowledge has been preserved, one that was once far more significant than it is today, but which did not, as is necessary today, arise directly from thought, but rather from a very specific regulation—or even irregularity—of the breathing process. Within the original yoga method, the aim was to raise the breathing process—which otherwise always proceeds unconsciously in human beings—to the level of consciousness. This can be achieved by structuring the rhythm of inhalation, breath retention, and exhalation differently than it occurs when breathing proceeds unconsciously. If one applies different numerical ratios to the breathing rhythm than those found in ordinary, everyday breathing, then one breathes differently in terms of the ratio of inhalation, breath retention, and exhalation. What is known as the yoga method was essentially based on such alternative ways of structuring and shaping the breath. Through this, the yoga method brought the entire breathing process into consciousness. By consciously altering the breathing rhythm, the person directed the flow of breath into the blood circulation. The entire human being was permeated and interwoven with an altered breathing rhythm. And just as we receive sensory perception through the visual or auditory rays—just as we gain knowledge of the colors of surrounding objects through sight, and knowledge of the sounds emanating from surrounding objects through hearing— so too did the person who elevated the respiratory rhythm to a heightened, magical perception; that person perceived the soul-spiritual, perceiving within the breathing process the soul-spiritual that permeated them. At the moment when the breathing process became fully conscious, and when at the same time the spiritual disposition existed that was present in South Asia some seven or eight thousand years before our era, at that very moment, through this altered breathing rhythm, one sent not only physical air into the body with this surging and billowing motion, but one also sent soul and spirit into this flowing breath within oneself, and one experienced soul and spirit, insofar as the human soul and spirit are present in this flowing breath.

[ 51 ] Now, in a material sense, one can call inhalation “inspiration”—that is the literal meaning. If one spiritualizes inspiration, one does what happened in ancient India: then, with spiritualized inspiration—with breath imbued with soul and spirit—one will experience perception as if one were a being of thought. Then one is dealing with what the word “inspiration” actually always meant originally—even in non-Indian, European contexts. So when we speak of the word “inspiration,” we must also rise, I would say, to the purity of the word. And for this reason, I have actually always been reluctant—even though such suggestions have constantly come from all sides—to write so-called “popular” books on anthroposophy. Of course, that would be very easy. But even the beginner should not really be given entirely “popular” books on anthroposophy; rather, they should have access to anthroposophical books that—spiritually speaking—they can really grapple with, where they have to make a tremendous effort—and that is not something that comes easily! For in this effort, in overcoming what one must overcome when bringing something difficult to understand into comprehension, there lies something else at the same time. For if one receives anthroposophy in a popular way—well, how shall I put it?—like a folk speech, then one also develops a different taste and a completely different attitude toward the meanings of words; then one drags the meanings of words down into their sinfulness. But if one has to grapple with the difficulty of a beginner’s book, then one also develops a taste for delving deeply into the words. One can even recall certain historical examples in this regard. Just look at how Jakob Böhme first reflects—deeply reflects—on the words before he uses them. I would say that Jakob Böhme first distills entire worlds from the words before he uses them. And so the significance of concepts such as “imagination,” “inspiration,” “intuition,” or other words as they are used in everyday life lies at a deeper level than is generally assumed. And so I do believe that one should not actually try to replace words that are rightly used—“imagination,” “inspiration”—with others, but rather that one should strive to elevate these words to a state of purity for the sake of anthroposophical understanding, at least as long as one is engaged with anthroposophy. When one returns to everyday life, of course, one can once again fall back into the “sinfulness” of the words, and that does no harm. And so precisely such an attitude toward the words could be of extraordinary benefit to anthroposophical deepening. So, I mean, anyone who becomes aware of what the word “imagination” actually entails would ultimately—even if they were a fanatic—call for a law prohibiting the use of the word “imagination” for this “fantasy” game, so that such a word might be preserved for the realm where it is actually and rightly applied.

[ 52 ] Regarding the question, “Who or what perceives within the human being?” I would like to say the following: Unfortunately, these questions are indeed asked more quickly than they can be answered, and one must touch on a great many things if one is to answer such a far-reaching, comprehensive question. When such a question is raised, one must clarify what the actual content of this morning’s remarks was. Isn’t it true that when we speak of the paths to supersensible knowledge—as I did this morning and also yesterday—what exactly are we referring to? It concerns how this human soul, which is present in any human being in the current incarnation—how this spiritual-soul aspect, which is thus present in a physical body between birth or conception and death—how this ascends to the gradual recognition, first, of the world of etheric formative forces in imagination, second, through the stillness I have described—through empty consciousness—in inspiration, to the recognition of the pre-birth world. And then, through intuition—which is attained through the special cultivation of the capacity for love—one arrives at the vision of one’s previous, or one might also say, previous earthly lives—that is, those earthly lives that — as I explained this morning — can already be viewed as objectively as any external object or natural process, or, if you will, just as one might view another human being objectively. When I encounter another human being in ordinary social life, I am, of course, related to that person through the inner kinship of the human race, but I stand objectively before them. Just as objectively as I stand before another human being, so must I stand before my past incarnations if I wish to perceive them in truth. Then one learns to recognize, through the soul-spiritual nature that is embodied in the present earthly body, the actual, true Self that passes through repeated earthly lives.

[ 53 ] Now it seems to me that the question boils down to this: Who, or what, is it within the human being that recognizes this true self, which passes through repeated earthly lives, or which part of the human being is it? — This question itself, my esteemed audience, is not actually a question with any real, concrete content. It asks after the subject of cognition. This subject of cognition is precisely that “I” which is embodied in the present earthly body; it is this “I” that then rises to the level of cognition. The true “I” can therefore be attained only by first encompassing with one’s consciousness that which is enclosed within earthly life between birth and death; then one lives in the “I” at a certain level; one lives in this “I,” but one does not yet recognize the true “I” that passes through many births and deaths. But through the methods I have described, this very higher “I”—which one carries within one’s earthly life—is enabled, by bringing itself to a state of selflessness, to recognize the true “I.”

[ 54 ] And keep in mind: You are, in fact, transforming the subject during this path of realization. First, we are dealing with the “I” that lives between birth and death; this “I” does not yet recognize the true “I” at all. Now this “I” rises up and initially becomes the knower of the true “I,” which passes through repeated earthly lives. Through this, it identifies itself—in a truly knowing way—with the true “I.” Thus, by undergoing a metamorphosis, this higher “I” is elevated to the true “I.” And then, once it has been elevated to the true “I,” it can finally recognize the true “I” for the first time.

[ 55 ] Thus, we cannot ask, “Who or what in a person perceives?” but rather we must say: Whatever perceives in a person in ordinary life is itself transformed into a different “I”; it undergoes a metamorphosis as it ascends from imagination through inspiration to intuition. But then it is a transformed “I” for the purpose of cognition. Yet the transformation exists precisely to attain the true “I.”