The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Humanity in the Past, Present, and Future from the Perspective of the Development of Consciousness III

[ 1 ] As you may have gathered from yesterday’s remarks, a certain state of consciousness—which was still a lived experience for people in earlier times—has, in a sense, been lost. I did say that this particular kind of waking consciousness, as we have it today—which exists primarily in more or less abstract concepts, or at least in shadowy images—that this waking consciousness was not always present in the same form, but instead there was a kind of waking dream, a dreaming wakefulness—which, however, could not be experienced as a dream is today, but rather as the embodiment of living images corresponding to a more or less spiritual reality. There was also a kind of sleep state that was dreamless, yet from which a lingering aftereffect remained, as I have described to you. Beyond that, however, there was a third state of consciousness—that state of consciousness which, in the after-experience, was actually perceived as a resting in the waves of the lunar forces that submerge beneath the earth, and which, in a certain way, actually lift the human being above earthly heaviness and allow him to perceive his cosmic existence. That was, after all, the essence of the ancient states of the soul: that they shared in the perception of the human being’s cosmic existence. Today, in the ordinary human consciousness, only a shadowy afterglow of this ancient state of consciousness remains—a shadowy afterglow that is noticed by only the very few, one that simply passes before human consciousness without anyone taking notice of it.

[ 2 ] I would like to characterize this remnant of consciousness from time immemorial. When people today reflect on their dreams, they will find that a wide variety of experiences from their life on Earth flow into these dreams, which take on a somewhat chaotic character. Things long forgotten surface in dream experiences, transformed in manifold ways; even things overlooked in waking life can emerge in dream experiences. And the times when these experiences occurred are, of course, jumbled together in the most varied ways. But when one examines these dream experiences more closely, something quite peculiar becomes apparent. You will find that, essentially, everything that surfaces in the dream’s content is somehow—however remotely—connected to the experiences of the past three days. You may dream that you are once again faced with something you may have experienced twenty-five years ago. It stands before you in all its vividness, perhaps somewhat transformed, but it is there. Yet if you look more closely, you will always make discoveries of the following kind: In this dream, which brings up an experience from twenty-five years ago, a character plays a part who—to use a rather abstract example—is named Eduard. You will at least find that somewhere—even if only faintly, passing by your ear for a moment—you heard the word “Eduard,” or that it passed before your eyes for a moment. Whatever is brought up in the dream—even the most distant experience—is always connected to something from the last three days, no matter how insignificant that experience may be. But this is because people actually carry the experiences of two, three, or four days—this time frame is, of course, only approximate—within themselves quite differently from what was there before.

[ 3 ] At first, a person takes in what they perceive into their astral organism and their ego organism. There, the perceived experiences initially lead a life directly connected to consciousness. What has been experienced over the course of three days still affects one’s feelings in a much more intense way than when at least three days have passed. As I said, one does not observe these things in ordinary life, but they are, after all, realities. This stems from the fact that everything a person takes in through perception or thought processes—into the astral organism and the ego organism—must be imprinted upon the etheric body or body of formative forces, but also, in a certain sense, at least upon the physical body. And this imprinting takes two, three, or four days, so that one must sleep two or three times over something one has experienced before it is imprinted into the etheric body and the physical body. For only then is it, so to speak, firmly established—at least in the etheric body—so that it can now become a lasting memory for one. And so, in fact, a constant inner interaction, a kind of struggle, takes place within the human being between the astral body and the etheric body, and the result of this struggle is always that what the human being initially experiences as a conscious being becomes imprinted upon and shaped within the denser, more material elements of their being. After three or four days, one carries with oneself—as a kind of imprint, so to speak—in one’s etheric body or body of formative forces and in one’s physical body, that which one previously experienced only as a fleeting sensory perception.

[ 4 ] Just consider, as I describe this, how little people today are actually aware of it. Yet it is something that is constantly taking place in human soul life and also in physical life. Every experience we perceive must, in essence, wait three or four days before it becomes fully our own. During that time, it oscillates back and forth between the astral body and the etheric body, not quite sure, as it were, whether it will truly be imprinted on the etheric body and, through it, on the physical body as well.

[ 5 ] For something extraordinarily important is actually happening here. Just consider that, in our true essence, we are essentially nothing more than our ego and our astral body. We cannot say that our etheric body is our property. People of the materialistic age presume to call their etheric body—and especially their physical body—their own. But the physical body and the etheric body actually belong entirely to the cosmos. And as, over the course of three or four days, what we experience in the “I” and the astral body is transferred to the etheric body and the physical body, it no longer belongs to us alone; it belongs to the cosmos. We can really only say, for three days, that something we have experienced in the world has meaning solely for us. After three or four days, we have inscribed it into the “universe”; it rests within the universe, no longer belongs to us alone, but belongs to the gods as well.

[ 6 ] In the very early stages of human development, people had a clear sense of this strange phenomenon precisely because of this state of consciousness—which has now been lost—that was a kind of deeper state of consciousness than ordinary sleep. And the initiates were able to explain what actually lay behind this strange sensation. Particularly during the epoch I spoke of yesterday—the Egyptian-Chaldean cultural epoch—what people experienced was merely a vague feeling. But the initiates of the mysteries were initiated into the true nature of this matter, and this came about because in those days—whereas initiation today must be a purely inner, soul-spiritual process, at most involving physical symbols and physically symbolic acts—initiation was essentially an external process, and what took place externally with the human being was then transferred to the inner being. And in many cases, initiation consisted—I’ll give one example, though I could give others—of the initiate being placed by his mystery guides, who initiated him, into this state—which has essentially been lost today—for about three days. He was placed in this state for three days, so that he could experience firsthand what a human being undergoes in the world outside of the human being during these three days, and how it, so to speak, passes over into the very essence of the human being. The initiate came to understand what an idea, a sensation, or a feeling about facts undergoes before it becomes the property of the human being. But what occurred there—what lay within this wisdom regarding that state so hidden from human beings—contains something extraordinarily significant, so significant that it is not even suspected today by the materialistic worldview. It contains, namely, the following:

[ 7 ] The easiest way for me to explain what was achieved during this initiation—which lasted three days in a state of dull consciousness—is to first remind you of the dream life, which everyone is still familiar with today. Certainly, the life of dreams is something that must be studied closely. Even if one sets aside all superstition—which must, of course, be a given when one delves into the “life of dreams” with a pure outlook, one that, I would say, strives for genuine science—it still represents something extraordinarily profound.

[ 8 ] For how does this dream life actually manifest itself? Well, we are familiar with many different kinds of dreams. But let’s focus on the kind of dreams that consist of reminiscences of experiences. The images of such experiences appear in these dreams. How do they appear? Well, as you know, they appear in an extraordinary state of transformation—highly transformed. It may well be that the transformation goes, let’s say, to such an extent that someone—who perhaps has not the slightest prospect of ever carrying out such a task in real life—dreams that, in his profession as a tailor, he has to make the official coat for a high-ranking minister. He may not have the slightest prospect of doing so, but he always makes robes and has always made them—perhaps even robes that he took pleasure in making. Well, all sorts of things can come into play in such a dream. The person in question may have been the servant of a Roman statesman in a previous earthly life and may have had to help the statesman put on his toga. Subtle emotional forces remain, and what the person experiences in this life is colored by what radiates from earlier earthly lives.

[ 9 ] I mentioned only one of the reasons why dreams change in terms of their content. But still, they change drastically—everyone knows that. And one really has to ask: What is contained in these dreams? What is at work within them? After all, it is external events that give rise to this kind of dream, but these external events appear in a completely transformed form.

[ 10 ] Where does that come from? You see, it comes from something that the current scientific worldview cannot even begin to imagine. It stems from the fact that the regularity recognized today as scientific—the one sought everywhere in the external world through observation and experimentation—that this regularity, this sum of natural laws we speak of, ceases right at the human skin. And if anyone believes that the laws of nature he observes in his laboratory are also the very laws that operate within the human body, then he is significantly on the wrong track. Not only are the substances within his organism—which a person ingests through food—transformed, but the laws governing these substances change down to the smallest atomic details. But what appears to a person in a dream is not merely an abstract image of reality; rather, the dream embodies the interplay of the organic laws into which the person is woven. The dream is closer to a person than the abstract thinking of the waking day. The dream contains, as its law, the way in which external substances behave within a person. And as what does the dream present itself? As a protest against reality, which is bound by the laws of nature. From the moment you fall asleep until you wake up, you live in the world of which natural scientists say that everything in the world unfolds according to these laws. The moment you pierce—through the dream, I might say, through nothing more than a gossamer web—into the spiritual world, the dream experience presents itself as a protest against the laws of nature. The dream cannot unfold in the same way that external events have unfolded; otherwise, it would be very close to wakefulness. The dream that emerges from actual sleep protests, in its very context, against the laws of nature. For it comes closer to the human being.

[ 11 ] In this regard, the materialistically minded people of our time are indeed making interesting discoveries. There is a book—an interesting book—that was published years ago, about which one can really only say that it is quite characteristic of the mental constitution of scientifically minded people today: Magic as an Experimental Natural Science by a certain Staudenmaier. Some of you may be familiar with the book. The man also wanted to get to the bottom of what the spiritual world is really all about. As for anthroposophy, he admitted that he had read only the critical works; people are reluctant to engage with it because they find it very difficult to navigate. Especially when they are embedded within the scientific framework of the present day, they find it very difficult to enter into anthroposophy. And so he first conducted experiments to get to the bottom of the spiritual world, in the manner of spiritualist experiments. He suppressed his consciousness, clouded his mind, until he entered a kind of mediumistic state. And then he wrote in a mechanical script. Now he was surprised to find that he had written down nothing but nonsense, that none of it matched what he otherwise knew about reality. It didn’t add up. Above all, it didn’t add up that this writing claimed: spirits were speaking to him. For he knew full well that it was not possible for spirits to speak to him. But what he wrote down told him that spirits were speaking to him. And besides: it was terrible, all the lies these “non-spirits” were feeding him. Just look it up in the book—all the unbelievable lies that flowed into his hand. Yes, he became completely—I don’t want to use a bad word—well, psychic, and could no longer make sense of the whole thing himself. Then a friend advised him to drop the whole thing and return to leading a sensible life—for example, by going hunting. So he went hunting—hunting magpies. Lo and behold, even while hunting, what he had stirred up within himself continued to manifest. He couldn’t shake it off. When he looked up at a tree, there wasn’t a magpie there, but a terrible dragon with fearsome fangs, staring at him with dreadful eyes—utterly horrifying! And such things were everywhere. Now he lived constantly in this inner struggle to find his way back to normal humanity.

[ 12 ] I mention this to you because it has been experimentally demonstrated here that wherever—at the very moment when one is not merely daydreaming but, through such machinations, approaches that realm where the inner self has a say—a protest against the external natural order immediately arises. Of course, one perceives this as a lie. If one is accustomed to always seeing a friend as a reasonably decent person, and then, when in this state, one notices that this person is constantly sticking out their tongue, making faces, and grinning at you—if that happens in this state, then one says: The spiritual world is lying to me! — In such a case, one really behaves just as one does in a dream. Well, there is truth in this after all: that in every instance where a person approaches the spiritual world—in which they are enclosed along with what lies within their own skin—this existence they are now entering protests against the natural order. It is not surprising that in such an undeveloped case, where one cannot judge the matter, all manner of elemental beings appear in a deceptive manner. But wherever one approaches the spiritual, there is always a protest against the natural order, as even the ordinary dream demonstrates.

[ 13 ] And one should really say to oneself: Here I am entering a completely different order, and even if it appears only in the fleeting form of a dream, it appears as a protest against the most beautiful laws of nature, which can be externally verified through laboratory work and experimentation. — But you see, this is the first stage on the path to the spiritual world. On this first stage, one encounters this protest against the laws of nature. There, the laws of nature—I would say—are horrified by their own majesty as soon as one penetrates into the inner being of the human being.

[ 14 ] By going through those three days, the ancient initiates gained a clear understanding not only that there is a natural order, but also that a spiritual order lies within and behind this natural order. Anyone who becomes acquainted with initiation in this way can still penetrate these matters today using modern means; they can go through the experiences of those three days when they first approach the experience of that truly terrible agony of the soul! For there the human being truly enters a world where all natural laws collapse, where the weaving of the dream takes place—in which, even when reminiscences of ordinary life play a part, the relationships become different because the natural laws no longer apply. And one is then truly, when one perceives the natural laws as everything, initially face to face with nothingness.

[ 15 ] The point is that, as a modern human being passing through initiation, one experiences—in a particularly painful, deeply painful, and tragic way— one experiences this entry into that region of existence where a protest is voiced against the laws of nature—because one has the feeling that, above all else, everything one previously held in the intellect—which was, after all, guided by the laws of nature—that this intellectual aspect of the soul is drowning. One can no longer breathe spiritually because one has become too accustomed to the natural order. And finally, one sees that from an entirely different side of the world, another world reaches in—one that does not live within a natural order but within a spiritual order, which is permeated and suffused everywhere by what is today sensed from the depths of the human conscience as the moral world order. What one learns to tell oneself is this: Here is the natural order; my senses perceive it, and its laws are established for it by the natural sciences. When I emerge from this natural order, I enter a world that protests against this natural order; and in perceiving this protest against the natural order, that which is the moral world order—which ultimately expands into the spiritual world order—pours forth from all sides like a new, luminous water of life, with which one can breathe once more. — That was the great insight of the initiates of ancient times: that they saw the real moral world order penetrating the physical, real world order, as they experienced within it the protest against the physical world order. This is experienced, albeit in a faint afterglow, in the event of the three days of which I have spoken. Whatever we experience in the outer world—be it our sensations or our actions—takes three or four days to become imprinted in our organism. But once it has been imprinted, it is not imprinted in the form in which we experienced it externally; rather, it is imprinted as an impulse that demands a moral shaping according to a set of laws entirely different from those of the natural order. And if a person could see what becomes of their experiences within themselves after three days, they would say to themselves: What I have experienced in a natural way during my earthly existence has become imprinted on the core of my eternal being, so that it is no less real than in the external world, but now lives within me as the impulse of a moral world order, upon which I now venture further out into the ocean of life. — Thus we carry within us the events of what we have experienced naturally as the moral causes for our future life.

[ 16 ] But in the final stages of human evolution, as human beings sank into what I might call a “deep sleep”—the state of being enveloped by the Earth—they also sank into the outer ether. And there, what human beings had experienced finds its balance with the outer ether. Human beings were, so to speak, placed morally within the moral order of the world—not only in terms of the direction of their inner lives—but in that “deep sleep,” in the embrace of the Earth, they were placed within the morality of the cosmos. And this has been lost to humanity because this deep sleep was eliminated from the state of consciousness, so that human beings now have only that faint echo in the three-day experience I have described to you. Humanity would, so to speak, have been gradually cast out of the self-evident moral world order had something not occurred in the course of Earth’s evolution. What individual initiates had previously undergone in order to be able to tell people what is experienced during those three days was accomplished as a world-historical event—a unique earthly event—by the Christ Being, who descended from the spiritual worlds into the body of Jesus of Nazareth and, as God, lived a truly human life. And what was experienced during those three days was now experienced on behalf of all humanity. What could formerly be found through the deep sleep of the unconscious—not consciously, but at least subconsciously taking root within human beings—that is, what was experienced by human beings in a purely natural way—had to be undergone so that human beings might find their connection with what Christ accomplished for humanity on Earth in the Mystery of Golgotha. This is the vicarious act of God. Because human beings made a leap forward in their development of consciousness, they had to relive—in a moral sense—in relation to Christ Jesus—that which they had previously experienced in their nature. And so the advent of the Mystery of Golgotha is connected with the entire meaning of Earth’s evolution, because it is connected with the meaning of the development of human consciousness. And one can only understand what was actually meant to happen through the Mystery of Golgotha if one can look back on what once happened naturally and must now happen morally.

[ 17 ] But it is precisely in this regard that this modern consciousness—which flows back and forth between waking, sleeping, and dreaming—has not yet attained its inner harmony. For what is it that runs through this modern consciousness—what has been running through it more and more, especially since the 15th century, ever since this consciousness found its true form? A one-sided view of the natural order. Yes, people believe in it, and they also believe they understand this natural order. And they call that which exists within this natural order “real existence.” But they do not wish to go any further. They do not wish to penetrate to that power of human cognition to which the spiritual reveals itself, just as the natural order reveals itself. And so it has become customary in recent times to speak of the moral world order as something that simply comes in from somewhere. In doing so, one has simply forgotten honesty; for if one were to look at the natural order as one has become accustomed to doing more and more, one could not actually attribute any reality to the moral world order. One could really only—I would say—get around what was actually there in a somewhat dishonest way by saying: On the one hand, there is knowledge; on the other, there is faith. Knowledge cannot become faith, nor can faith become knowledge, and the moral order of the world belongs to faith. — That is the convenient formula that has become widely used in recent times. This separation between faith and knowledge is even regarded as something genuinely Christian, whereas Christianity—not so long ago, five or six centuries back—certainly did not make that distinction in this way, certainly not early Christianity. And even today, it is still not Catholic dogma—though it is Catholic practice—to distinguish between faith and knowledge in this manner. People simply cannot find their bearings in relation to the natural order and the moral-spiritual order, because they do not know the transition, because they do not even understand the dream that leads one out of the natural order and is a protest against the natural order—a dream that, in a sense, is the great precursor. For once one has gone through this preparation, one can encounter what is the moral world order—because it is the moral-spiritual world order.

[ 18 ] Only an unbiased look at humanity’s past and at what the present does not yet possess can truly lead to a satisfying understanding of these things; otherwise, even the historical documents of ancient times remain, in essence, things that one stares at but does not understand at all. You see, this morning there has been much discussion in a wide variety of ways about the opponents of anthroposophy. Some things can be credited to these opponents—not to their credit, mind you, but for their own good. When listening to what the opponents say about anthroposophy—at least I, for one, must sometimes recall an anecdote said to be based on a true story that the famous Professor Kuno Fischer used to tell time and again. He recounted that he had two schoolmates who lived together—they may have been brothers—and they had an extraordinarily simple-minded uncle. Then came the time when they were learning logarithms in math and had to buy logarithm tables. The simple-minded uncle took a look at these logarithm tables. He saw nothing but numbers on them, so he asked the students—his nephews—what those numbers were. They had no idea how to explain it to their uncle. Finally, one of the rascals had an idea: “Yes, those are all the house numbers in Europe.” — The uncle believed him, and in the end even thought it would be quite useful to know all the house numbers in London, Paris, and so on right away. Just as this uncle stood before the logarithm tables, so do people who do not look inwardly at what the ancient documents proclaim stand before these ancient documents. Today’s researchers, who are republishing these documents, ultimately say little more than what the uncle said about logarithms when he mistook them for house numbers in Europe. One need only realize how far the mode of perception made possible by abstract thinking today diverges from spiritual-real reality. One must make this completely clear to oneself. To do so, one must have the courage. Otherwise, one will not understand how human beings have developed from a past of a completely different nature into the present. And in fact, we are already living in an age in which—in the most manifold ways—for those who are now in a position to practice self-observation and self-reflection in particular—the current way of experiencing sleep, wakefulness, and dreaming leads to inner conflicts and inner struggles. For just as that deep sleep—which was so significant for humanity in an earlier past that the Initiates had to explain to people the nature of what they experienced during this deep sleep—has crumbled away from humanity, so too is what constitutes sleep today crumbling away. It is not as though human beings will now, in the future, dream continuously throughout the night, but they will actually experience this state in such a way that dreams become more dulled. Just as they have transformed since ancient times from waking dreams into our abstract imagination, so too will today’s chaotic “dreams” become dulled, and human beings will simply have this dull “dream sleep.” The dream will not enter their consciousness. Above that will lie today’s waking state with its abstract, so-called logical thinking. But then a superconsciousness will emerge—a superconsciousness that is already entering humanity today for those who understand these things. For this superconsciousness deals specifically with the human will and with the effect that the will can have as it acts upon the nervous system. And if you observe today the unbridled manner in which the human will unfolds across the broadest horizons, and understand this through the science of initiation, then you can already see how it penetrates into the soul’s expressions — penetrating even into physical states of illness — that which is the harbinger of a superconsciousness, a consciousness higher than ordinary waking consciousness.

[ 19 ] But it is not yet something people want to experience today, because they can only experience it if they make spiritual science their own—this spiritual science in which one must think in a completely different way than is done in the ordinary world, this spiritual science that is truly much more practical than today’s theoretical approach to life, which is actually the deepest form of impracticality. This spiritual science, however, adds an inwardly living way of thinking to ordinary abstract thinking. But this is not something that can be arbitrarily added or omitted; it is something that arises simply because a certain organization is taking shape within humanity—one that did not exist in earlier times and is currently present only in its earliest stages. The human body’s locomotive organs—arms, legs, hands, and feet—are experiencing an ever-changing blood circulation; the human being is changing. But what we often refer to today as nervousness is the expression of the fact that something from a higher state actually wants to enter into the human being, yet the human being does not yet accept it and thus becomes restless, because it is still something foreign. The human being will only find peace when it can become part of them.

[ 20 ] Thus, we can consider three further states of consciousness that lie ahead for the human race—toward which the human race is working its way: a dull, dreamlike sleep; a state of wakefulness; and a state of heightened awareness. And everything that is currently shaking and rattling humanity—even in its external living conditions—has its root in the fact that humanity today is still, for the most part, unconsciously resisting what is seeking to come to it from the spiritual worlds. But it wants to come; it wants to enter. It seeks to approach the human will in particular. In a way entirely different from what people want today, they will have to understand that where the spiritual begins, the matter transcends the realm where protest against the laws of nature is voiced. Therefore, humanity will only be able to arrive at an understanding of the future through the Mystery of Golgotha if it can rise to the realization that the essence of the Mystery of Golgotha cannot be grasped through knowledge of nature, but can be grasped through what one develops within oneself when, with true understanding, one transcends the stage of mere ‘ dreaming—which heralds the natural process—into an understanding of the other shore of existence. For it is from the spiritual shore of existence that the elements of understanding must be drawn which correspond to an understanding of the future regarding the Mystery of Golgotha. It is absolutely essential that one be able to place what a person can experience in the present in this way—between the past and the future—so that the person learns to feel themselves as a transition from this past into the future. Then they will also be able to gain more and more understanding of how to apply spiritual truths alongside natural truths.

[ 21 ] What misleads people appears to be an easily understandable error, because things that are wrong can be so incredibly logical. People don’t consider today that things that are wrong can be so incredibly logical. What could be more logical than observing how long it takes for this or that rock sediment to reach a certain thickness; what could be more natural than to then calculate—if a certain geological layer is so-and-so thick—that you multiply the small thickness by the number, calculate how many times it is contained within the larger thickness, and arrive at so-and-so many years: twenty million years, two hundred million years—an epoch—the Silurian, Devonian, or some other epoch lies in the past. Oh, the calculation is so spectacularly correct—there’s nothing to object to—but here it is precisely the supposed logic that is deceptive.

[ 22 ] This line of reasoning always reminds me of the reasoning that one of the greatest mathematicians of all time once applied to his own life. When he had already reached a considerable age, he suddenly developed a lung disease, and through his many connections with doctors, he figured out how many small abscesses he would have to cough up to get rid of this lung disease. That was a calculation based on how the lungs develop: he came up with fifteen years. So he would live for fifteen years, and then he would be fine. Now he died two years later. Yes, you see, that is reality. The other was logic. And reality stands in exactly the same relationship to logic throughout the entire cosmos. These things are so incredibly easy to prove because logic is not to be attacked, but rather defended. It must be explicitly stated: it is true. It is just as true as when someone calculates: My heart is undergoing a certain development. It will have reached a certain state within a certain period of time. I calculate how long it might take for it to reach this specific state, and I come up with three hundred years. Then I count back three hundred years and calculate what my heart looked like three hundred years ago. — But I, as a physical human being with this physical heart, did not live three hundred years ago! And in three hundred years, I will no longer be alive either. But neither did the Earth exist during the time periods calculated by geologists, for the destinies the Earth has undergone must be understood according to the spiritual order. That is the captivating aspect of contemporary science: that things which are illusions can be proven so rigorously, yet the proofs say nothing about the truth. So that humanity today—though it does not bring this to conscious awareness because it does not want to, but subconsciously—truly lives in the fear that the truth must ultimately be lost to it. And we can already see this fear shining through in numerous human expressions today. Deep down, those who today shape their worldviews out of materialism actually feel uneasy. They sense everywhere a certain anxiety toward the boundaries that, on the one hand, they do not wish to cross, but which, on the other hand, nevertheless represent terrible obstacles to a fully human life. People already sense that if they accept what is merely the natural order, they cannot truly live with it; above all, what is taken into our conceptions as the natural order cannot, in turn, lead to a truly inner artistic and religious feeling and imagination. We must not forget that what exists today as a religious system stems from those times when people, in the manner I have described, fathomed the cosmic from a deep slumber. All of our religious institutions still stem from those ancient times—the religious institutions, not the Mystery of Golgotha. The latter is not dependent on any religious view; it stands as a fact within the development of the Earth. This must also be understood by those states of consciousness that are only just beginning to take shape. But up to now, the creative religious impulse in humanity has remained barren for many centuries, indeed millennia; the truly artistic capacity has remained barren. For, with a few exceptions such as the Renaissance, we do not actually live in a state of primal, elemental creativity. Yet it is striving to enter the present. And that human unease, which today manifests itself as the most prominent feature of civilization, is, so to speak, the birth pangs of a new era—a new era on scientific, artistic, social, religious, and moral grounds—the future of humanity, which must be foremost in our hearts, for it is toward this future that humanity must strive. At no time has the human ear been less inclined to listen to the science of initiation than it is today. In a certain sense, one could also say that at no time has humanity needed it more than it does today.

[ 23 ] That is why I wanted to speak at this conference specifically about the past, present, and future of humankind from the perspective of the development of consciousness. Of course, in just three lectures, I could only provide a rough outline, but what has been said can certainly be further developed within each individual’s mind. For it seems to me that consciousness, precisely because it lies closest to a person’s own being, is also what can most easily bear fruit within the individual, inspiring him or her to enter ever more deeply into spiritual experience itself. And this kind of spiritual experience—not the materialistic one—is what people of the present need so that they may become the people of the future. But in truth, all of humanity’s—I would say—inner habits of life have, through their immersion in powerless, abstract thinking and imagination, become such that, when they are absorbed in the culture of the present, talk of the spiritual makes the same impression on them as logarithm tables do on a simple-minded uncle, and that he misinterprets what, in the present, nevertheless appears here and there as mighty landmarks signaling the spiritual’s desire to enter—he misinterprets them as if these things were the house numbers of Europe. This is a somewhat far-fetched comparison, but one that makes sense in the context of what I have said. For what is so often an outward habit of life today—or rather, I should say, a habit of judging life—also forces its way into the most scientific of thinking, and there it becomes not only philistinism, but philistinism and base, boorish humanity in its highest potency; it becomes moral hypocrisy that cloaks and disguises itself in scientific garb. And if something dares to emerge—even if only as a faint trace—it is received today as something that, according to the materialist view and with clear common sense, can only be called “crazy.”

[ 24 ] You see, there’s a lovely story based on reality about this, too. In the early 1840s, the aging philosopher Schelling was appointed to a position in Berlin from Munich. He had been silent for a long time. He was preceded by a great reputation. He was to lecture there on “positive philosophy” as opposed to “negative philosophy,” as he himself called it. At the University of Berlin at that time, he intended to explore the development of humanity’s spiritual life—the development of the realm of mystery and the realm of religion—in a far deeper way than anyone else has done to this day. When Schelling gave his first lecture in Berlin, the most enlightened minds were seated in the front rows. The students were by no means seated there; rather, the professors from all faculties, the heads of the educational system, and the most brilliant representatives of intellectual life were seated there, with the students coming only at the very back. And people were indeed waiting—insofar as one could honestly wait there—they were honestly waiting for what this great reputation, which had preceded him, would now bring to fulfillment. The faces grew longer and longer as Schelling delivered his first lecture. In this first lecture, Schelling truly spoke in a special way about the spirit; indeed, he spoke of the spirit at a time when the materialistic age was preparing for its culmination, when it was just reaching its peak. He spoke of the spirit. The faces grew longer and longer; no one knew what he wanted. No one had the slightest idea what he wanted. The philosopher Trendelenburg, who later became famous, sat in those front rows. He said: Yes, he thought he had understood just a tiny bit; the rest of this philosophy he hadn’t understood at all, but he wasn’t sure whether he had even understood that tiny bit. — But look, one day one of those who had attended this lecture ran into another who had also been there. People—including these two acquaintances—had been racking their brains for days: Why, after all, had Schelling been appointed to Berlin, since he talks about things that no one can understand? — Well, the friend was able to tell the other; he was able to announce that Schelling’s daughter had become engaged to the son of the Minister of Education. Now one could understand why Schelling had sought a position in Berlin; now the whole thing had a real meaning.

[ 25 ] Yes, it does seem paradoxical, however, when one talks about such things, but one must tell it this way, for what the characteristic way of thinking of the present is currently capable of grasping is, for the time being, so far removed from that which truly points toward the future—not arbitrarily as a spiritual science, but because it is an inner human necessity, because the human race must fall into decadence unless a new spirituality emerges. For only this new spirituality will in turn be able to experience the three full states of consciousness that must come about in the future—the subdued dream-sleep, ordinary waking, and super-waking. Otherwise, human beings will not be able to experience their humanity on Earth in the future. For the Divine intends to form this future threefold human being out of the present threefold human being, just as it formed the present threefold human being—the dreaming, sleeping, and waking human being—out of the old image-dreaming, sleeping human being with after-feelings in waking, and the deep-sleeping human being. And human beings have now arrived in the age of freedom—as I have often explained to anthroposophists. They must resolve to live in accordance with their own free insight toward what the Divine has ordained for them in the world.

[ 26 ] Then, today, people will not only be able to think about the past, present, and future of humanity in the right way, but above all, they will be able to feel it. Then, too, it will be possible to act—with regard to life on Earth—in accordance with what the divine-spiritual world order is actually meant to be, extending from the past through the present and into the future.

[ 27 ] That is what I wanted to talk about. With these words, I would like to conclude these reflections; I would just like to express my hope, as a final thought, that such a discussion will begin here tomorrow, so that within the Anthroposophical Society there will be a noticeable shift—that there is now a genuine desire to shape this Society in such a way that within it there exists a true, living awareness of what the complete human being is to be, the complete human being, who must rightly understand himself as the human being of the past, the human being of the present, and the human being of the future. For these three are also one. And that which the human being has been in the past, is in the present, and will be in the future—that, I would say, is what first and foremost encompasses the entire anthropos before the divine world order. But this must be strived for through an anthroposophy embraced enthusiastically and with a full heart, leading to the true, authentic Anthropos, the total human being, the complete human being.