The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Anthroposophy as a Response to the Needs of Our Time

[ 1 ] It is a widely held view today that human knowledge has certain limits—not only temporal limits, which would consist in the fact that we have not achieved everything in the course of time already elapsed and must leave many things to the future, but in a very general sense, people today speak of “limits of knowledge,” of the limits of human understanding. It is believed that human beings are simply so constituted that they can comprehend only certain things and know only certain things, while other things lie beyond their capacity for knowledge. And it is probably the phenomena of the so-called supersensible world that are most often cited as those which human beings cannot reach through cognition, for which they must be content with what is often called a belief, an assumption arising from obscure feelings and the like. It is precisely the endeavors of the past centuries and the present—those that have yielded the greatest successes in the scientific realm, namely the natural sciences, which have also brought the greatest conceivable practical benefits—that today’s humanity regards as proof that one must confine oneself to what the senses can observe, what can be established through experiments, and the like; and that is precisely only the sensory-real world. When speaking of human beings, this is merely the world that a person experiences in the physical body between birth and death, or between conception and death.

[ 2 ] Now, it should not be denied that the natural sciences in particular owe their great successes to the fact that they have limited themselves in this way—that they confine themselves to investigating the sensory world from every angle and do not allow themselves to draw conclusions in any way from the sensory world regarding a supersensory world. But on the other hand, for the rational person, there is something deeply tragic associated with this very assumption—which is believed to be fully proven—regarding the limits of knowledge; something tragic that, while not yet brought to the consciousness of many people today, plays out in vague feelings and all manner of subconscious sensations in numerous human souls, making them insecure in life—indeed, often makes them insecure and inept in their outward actions, in their relationships with their fellow human beings, and so on. For it is gradually being felt more and more that the limits at which one wishes to draw a line in this way are not merely those of an external supersensible world, but that something quite different is connected with these limits of knowledge, if they are to be accepted in the right way. Human beings are gradually coming to feel that their true nature itself must be of a supersensible nature, that their true nature—through which they recognize their own value and dignity as human beings—must lie in the spiritual, that is, in the non-sensory realm. If one stops at the suprasensory realm with all one’s knowledge, then one is in fact stopping short of human self-knowledge. Then one forgoes bringing to light the most valuable and most dignified aspects of the human being itself.

[ 3 ] But in doing so, one also undermines one’s true inner self-confidence. How, then, does a person feel connected to the natural world, which has been explored with such great success today? Only by carrying this natural world within oneself—first and foremost in one’s outer physical body. Everything in our surroundings—all natural substances and natural laws—we carry within us, at least to a large extent. This allows us to feel connected to the sensory world of nature. We would not feel that we existed at all within this sensory nature if we did not belong to it through our own bodies, or if we could not explore ourselves as sensory beings. Similarly, however—even if people have not yet fully brought this to consciousness—the same is true of the supersensible, of the human spiritual inner life that is felt as the true human being. If we cannot feel that we belong to a spiritual nature, if we cannot feel that we are beings who take in and carry within ourselves the forces and substances of the spiritual, then we cannot recognize ourselves as spiritual human beings at all. But then we must lack self-confidence in what we do feel to be our most precious, our most worthy, and that through which we are actually human—indeed, through which we want to be human.

[ 4 ] This also has a certain connection to another aspect. We sense that what we call moral impulses—what we call the content of our moral-spiritual powers—flows not from the natural realm, and certainly not from the processes taking place in muscles and bones or in the blood. We feel them emerging from a spiritual world, but we are left in uncertainty regarding this entire spiritual world when we must stop at the boundaries of the supersensible with our knowledge.

[ 5 ] And so humanity today is unable to build a proper bridge from what is, I would say, brutally fixed in its external natural existence to what flows from its most intimate spiritual innermost being as the content of the moral world order. People simply lack the courage to always make themselves fully aware of what is actually before the human mind. Natural science has worked diligently toward being able to say, at least hypothetically, something about the living beings of today from which human beings are said to have evolved. We describe, at least hypothetically, how our present world once took shape out of the cosmic nebula; we also formulate hypotheses about the end of our planetary system or the system to which we belong. We conceive of this entire system, unfolding over time, as coalescing and constituting itself in some way from natural substances and through natural forces. One then conceives of physical human beings emerging from a portion of these forces over a certain period of time. Electricity, magnetism, thermal energy, and so on—these present themselves to external observation, and within them the thinking human being feels secure with the contents of their consciousness. But when the need then arises within him to conceive of that which does not stem from his physical nature—the moral and spiritual impulses—as active in the world; when he is to think of what he actualizes from a spiritual-elemental force as active, of what is now also to be present in the world; when he is to have experiences in the world that are not to pass away with what passes away with the physical — then human beings have no point of reference from which, based on what is recognized as the limits of knowledge, to say to themselves: These moral forces are just as effective as the results produced by the brutal physical forces of nature.

[ 6 ] This gives rise in people today not merely to theoretical doubts, but to a deep-seated unease of the soul, an unease of the mind, which is plain to see everywhere to anyone who observes our civilized life with an unbiased eye—even if people delude themselves about it. For that is, after all, the defining characteristic of today’s civilization: that people delude themselves precisely about the deepest questions of civilization. But these questions are still at work in the subconscious; there they manifest themselves—not as theories, but in the entire mood of the soul, in the confidence and vigor of the soul’s life. Therein lies the inner tragedy that can actually be perceived at the very core of every soul, even the most superficial. And from this springs what may seem paradoxical to us today: the longing of many people for precisely a supersensible understanding! One might say that in the spiritual realm, the situation is just as it is with hunger and thirst. One does not crave food and drink when one is sated, but craves them precisely when one is unsatisfied. And out of a deepest need, present-day humanity craves the supernatural, precisely because it lacks the supernatural. While, on the one hand, philosophers and natural scientists today increasingly seek to prove that there are insurmountable barriers and limits to the supersensible, we see, on the other hand, an insatiable thirst in the souls of many people for supersensible knowledge, and the number of these people will continue to grow.

[ 7 ] This form of supersensible knowledge is complemented by a perspective—or, I might better say, a method of inquiry—that I would like to discuss with you today. But I do not wish to speak to you about the kind of research that many today seek to use as a very easy means of attaining the supersensible; rather, I will speak to you about a kind of knowledge that, while it is indeed a thoroughly inner, intimate matter of the human soul, is nonetheless just as scientific—indeed, just as precisely certain—not merely like an external scientific finding, but like the mathematical or geometric findings of science itself. But in striving for such knowledge—and especially in approaching an understanding of what constitutes the supersensible in human beings—one immediately enters into something that, from the very beginning, arouses all manner of doubts and gives rise to uncertainties.

[ 8 ] When we look outward, we very soon realize that, in light of our immediate external perception, the natural scientists and philosophers who speak of the limits of knowledge are right. So we must look inward. But when we look inward, and if we remain within ordinary consciousness—the kind we have in everyday life and also in conventional science—then at first we encounter nothing other than the external world again, this time in the form of a mental image. If one is completely honest in one’s quest for self-knowledge and asks oneself: What is there when, instead of looking out into the world, you look back into yourself—what is actually inside you?—then one will have to realize that one finds the world there again, albeit only as an image. What one has experienced has become imprinted on our life of imagination and our life of sensation. We experience, so to speak, a mental and emotional image of what is also out there. We have merely turned our gaze inward. At first, this offers us nothing new at all, but only a faint, pictorial representation of what is also out there. Only a general feeling takes hold of the person—that in these surging thoughts, ideas, and sensations, they are present as an “I,” as a self. But this is so general and indefinite that, at first, they cannot make much of it.

[ 9 ] For this reason, in the Middle Ages—during periods when people approached self-knowledge and the knowledge of the human soul in a more intensive way—they did not initially pay much attention to what could be gained through mere introspection directed inward during ordinary consciousness; rather, they sought to gain insight into the soul in a different way. This other way is certainly interesting, and—so that we can understand the kind of insight into the soul I actually have in mind—I must begin with this other, often highly sought-after form of insight into the soul. I should note from the outset, however, that I am taking this other form of insight into the soul as a starting point solely to clarify what I wish to explain, but I do not intend to attribute any intrinsic value to it. Thus, no one should believe that, simply because I take dreams as my starting point, I am already attributing any epistemological value to them. This dream life, however, is immensely significant. Those who have ever sought insight into the soul through the life of dreams have already noticed that, in a certain respect, the soul appears much more characteristically in dreams than when one merely broods inwardly and, as is often said, seeks to observe oneself. They have studied their dreams and have initially found two distinct types of dreams. It is true that dreams form images that ebb and flow with a fantastical vividness that, at first glance, is not as abstract as the thoughts we have in our waking consciousness. But dreams initially form something that appears enigmatic—on the one hand, due to their composition, and on the other, due to their content.

[ 10 ] There are two kinds of things that appear to us as images in our dreams. First, images of experiences we have gone through in our earthly existence—reminiscences from life. These rise up and show this or that which we experienced many years ago. But what asserts itself there rises up alongside other things, in a context that life did not present. Events that took place ten years ago are jumbled together with those that occurred the day before yesterday. The most distant things come together. By piecing together these fragments of life, the dream forms impossible images, chaotic images. Everything that external life has offered in terms of events we have experienced is conjured up before us in a chaotic manner in the dream. That is one form of dreams. The other form is where, through a kind of symbolic imagery, the dream presents us with an illusion of our own inner world. Who hasn’t dreamed of suffering from the heat of a burning stove? They’ve seen the flames flickering; they wake up with a pounding heart. Or we dream of walking past a fence; we see the individual posts of the fence, we see how two posts—or one post—are damaged, and then we wake up with a toothache. In the first case, where we dreamed of the burning stove and its heat, it was an image of our heart beating violently. In the other case, where we dreamed of the fence, it was an image of our teeth, which were somehow causing us pain. And anyone who can examine these things more closely knows that a certain realm of dreams is characterized by the fact that internal organs or processes are symbolically presented to us through the dream. But one must be somewhat knowledgeable about all the circumstances at play in order to recognize, within the symbols of the dream, what is actually being expressed from within the human being. Then one will discover that there is almost no organ or internal process that cannot be symbolically presented to us, even in an inner way, through the dream.

[ 11 ] Now, older researchers of the soul who have studied dreams have developed a very accurate view of the relationship between human beings and dreams. They have said to themselves: what we carry within us, we actually feel at most, but we do not look at it; we do not have it before us like an external object. But when we have the image of our own heartbeat before us in the form of a burning stove, we at least have an image in our consciousness that looks like the image of an external object that we form in our minds. We must be separated from the external object if an image of it is to arise within us. What one is oneself—even if it is one’s own body—one feels within oneself; one feels it painfully at times when something organic is not right, but one does not look at it. When one looks at something in pictorial form, one must be outside of it. And so the earlier researchers of the soul—who were, after all, still very much of the 19th century—said to themselves: If I dream in symbols about my own body and its processes, I cannot be within my body, for otherwise I would not experience it. I must therefore, in such a case, be outside my body. In any event, the image presents to me something of an independent soul-spiritual life distinct from the body. And again they said to themselves: If I dream of reminiscences of life in any way, however hidden, then external natural existence should present itself to me just as it is. But there, things are constantly changing; the dream conjures up the most fantastical connections for me. I must be inside my body again, for the nature that otherwise surrounds me cannot possibly show me the events I have experienced with it—nor the events of human life that I have experienced—in a completely different order.

[ 12 ] Thus, something took shape that could be described as follows: It was a justified conviction on the part of these early researchers of the soul that they had caught a glimpse of the soul in a state where it is separated from the physical body. For, first of all, a person cannot be united with their body if the body’s processes appear separate to them—even if only as a mental image—in a dream; they must then be outside their body. But we must also, in turn, be inside—be together with the memories of our experiences—when we have the second kind of dreams; for nature does not alter the context in which experiences have taken place. We must alter that ourselves. We must therefore be outside, outside our body, in the first type of dreams, and we must likewise be immersed in our experiences in the second type. That is to say, we must actually be outside the physical body with our mental experiences when we dream. In this respect, what earlier researchers of the soul have said is absolutely indisputable; there is absolutely nothing to object to.

[ 13 ] But something else must be said. A dream cannot give me any certainty of knowledge about the self; it can only show us how to find the path to such certainty. For what we are inside, during the time from falling asleep to waking up, when we are outside our bodies—what the dream shows us there—is certainly not who we are; for on the one hand, these are images of our physical interior, and moreover, symbols of this physical interior—that is, things derived from our physical interior. After all, when we are outside our bodies while asleep, we cannot, so to speak, be the same as what we are inside, in our physical bodies. So there must be something else at work. We must be something outside our body, but this does not make itself known. Moreover, we are initially incapable of grasping the true nature of the soul in the sleeping state. It conceals and masks itself at first; it envelops itself in images of its own physicality and reveals itself, in relation to its own life, in arbitrary combinations of what has been experienced. The older researchers of the soul correctly concluded that we are outside our bodies when we dream; but while they believed that the dream reveals something to us about the being located outside our bodies, this is not the case. For it reveals nothing to us other than what we have otherwise experienced within the body, and our own body in symbolic forms. So, if we are something outside our body, this is masked in the dream; in this respect, the dream wears a mask. If we wish to get to the heart of our own being, we must be able to remove this mask from the dream—that is, from the soul—for the dream is this mask. —Thus far, a more intimate understanding of the dream guides us along a path. Since earlier researchers of the soul had certainly noted that the dream ultimately reveals nothing other than what it itself draws from the sensory world, doubts naturally arose in their minds as well. And just as one could not believe one had certainty through ordinary, inward-turned self-observation, one was equally unsatisfied with what the observation of the dream world could provide.

[ 14 ] In contrast to this stands what I always refer to as the anthroposophical worldview or the anthroposophical method of research. This takes the following initial standpoint: If a dream shows us that we are something outside our body, it proves, in and of itself, too weak to bring its own essence to light, to reveal itself. In order to reveal itself, it makes use of fragments of memory from life, the symbols of our own physicality. We must therefore strengthen and invigorate our soul life so that we can approach what stands before us in the dream, masked within the soul life. This is possible. It can be achieved by, as I have explained in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? and in other writings, by consciously imitating the dream through a systematic and precise so-called “meditative” life—not by artificially creating dreams, but by consciously awakening in the soul that which spontaneously rises from the subconscious in the dream. This is achieved by accustoming oneself to proceed in the same way that the dream proceeds involuntarily—that is, by symbolically representing things one knows well in inner meditation. The dream symbolically presents our own physicality to us. Since neither our own inner life nor nature provides us with symbols, we must now practice—in a strictly systematic way—visualizing things figuratively. In this way, our mental images are arbitrarily transformed into symbols, just as the dream unconsciously presents them to us. This must be brought about through inner activity; in other words, the dream must be intensified.

[ 15 ] When we are engaged in external life, we passively surrender ourselves to external observations and perceptions. Then our inner activity becomes shadowy. Everyone actually senses how shadowy abstract imagination is, how thoughts are devoted to the external world and then fade into the shadows. Everyone speaks of thoughts as being shadowy in comparison to concrete reality. But when one rises to the level of imagining symbolic images, one must create these symbols. And if one is a fully conscious person and not a fool, one knows that one creates them oneself. One is then by no means a dreamer, but an ordinary waking person—indeed, even more than an ordinary waking person. To the dreamer, the symbols come involuntarily; to the waking person, the images of the imagination arise through external stimulation. The person who is awake—who actively creates for themselves what dreams provide, who places symbols before their soul with all their inner strength, and who imitates the dream with full, conscious deliberation—awakens, so to speak, to a higher level of thought and imagination, and thus to a higher level of soul activity in general than one experiences in ordinary consciousness. But this must then be carried out in a truly systematic manner.

[ 16 ] And the other side of the dream can be imitated in the same way. We take events from our lives that may be years apart. We arrange them according to certain criteria so that one stands next to the other—but not chaotically as in a dream, rather according to criteria that may well be entirely products of the imagination, yet which we consciously oversee; criteria that are not imposed on us from within, but which we ourselves create internally. And in this way we gradually train ourselves to remain within an inner life of the soul; to remain firmly within a life of the soul that arises entirely from inner activity.

[ 17 ] What actually happens to a person when they engage in such exercises is often underestimated today, because people do not appreciate the inner activity of thinking, and because they already consider it very active when they live in their thoughts under the guidance of external observation. But the person who seriously becomes a true imitator of the dream with full consciousness experiences that they greatly intensify their inner soul activity, that they truly draw strength from it. However, if they are not a fool but a reasonable person, they are fully aware that they themselves are creating all these images and these life contexts—that is to say, that they are thus living in an illusion. With dreams, one must first wake up in order to see through the illusory nature of the dream from the perspective of waking life. A dream can only be seen through from the standpoint of wakefulness; the dreamer regards the content of the dream as reality, even though his sense of reality is not one that has been fabricated in this way. Whoever becomes an imitator of the dream becomes aware of how a living, inner, active force is vigorously awakened within him, yet how its content is entirely a self-image, an illusion. Consequently, one comes to attach no importance whatsoever to what is present within as content, but rather to focus on what is at work within, what is active. In short, what we otherwise have only as a general sense of “I” or self becomes a strongly felt inner activity. If one wishes to become a researcher of the spirit and not a vague mystic, one must remain level-headed and precise. But if one remains so, one will increasingly come to experience the very nature of the illusory. One knows: You are not imagining anything, yet you are imagining. Through this, one also gains the possibility of eventually developing the soul’s capacity to truly imagine nothing and yet be as active as one has learned to be in the imitation of a dream.

[ 18 ] I would like to draw your attention here to a mental activity that must certainly be cultivated by the spiritual researcher. It is commonly believed—and those who judge matters superficially often say so—that spiritual research is something in which a person simply indulges in their thoughts and imagines things—that is easy, whereas conducting research in a laboratory, a clinic, or an observatory is difficult and requires self-sacrifice. — But that is not the case. For what a person must develop as such an inner spiritual capacity requires, at the very least, an inner process of work that is just as long—if not much longer—than any externally acquired scientific expertise, such as is customary today in the natural sciences. Those who wish to familiarize themselves with what is called spiritual research here should not raise the objection at all: In natural science, one cannot be an amateur if one wishes to participate in the discussion; one must truly understand something. — What the spiritual researcher presents is usually viewed as if it were acquired so easily compared to what is achieved in natural science through great effort. But it is simply a different path. Natural science involves processing external perceptions and facts. The spiritual researcher, on the other hand, must first set out to develop his own inner capacity for insight. He develops it by imitating the dream, but by overcoming, through meditative activity, what is delusionally presented to us in the dream. In the dream, we are not conscious of an activity; the dream images merely delude us into believing in it; but at the first stage of supersensible knowledge, the illusion is completely seen through. One knows: You are not imagining anything—but one becomes aware of the inner, intensified, empowered activity and ultimately learns, through much practice, how to evoke this activity without first needing an illusory activity, without first having to imitate the dream.

[ 19 ] It is through imitation, then, that one develops this capacity of the soul. Once the capacity is there, one knows what to do with it. For then one is in a state of empty yet thoroughly alert consciousness, accompanied by inner activity. After casting off the illusory nature of this activity, one initially has no content. Yet the state one experiences—precisely when one begins to develop the capacity for inner activity without initially having any content—this state requires a great deal of effort to overcome. And in fact, this effort required to overcome it is the test and touchstone of whether this spiritual research is honest and genuine. For at the very moment one sets out to live with an empty consciousness—with simple waking consciousness, without this waking consciousness having any content—at that very moment an indescribable pain, a boundless deprivation, spreads throughout one’s entire soul life. Everything else one might otherwise experience as pain in the world is actually insignificant compared to this spiritual-psychic pain that one experiences in this moment of realization. And one must overcome this pain. For this pain is precisely the expression of a force that finds its physical counterpart in all possible forms of deprivation: in hunger, which prompts us to eat; in thirst, which compels us to drink; and so on. Now we feel something in our soul that must come to us, and we feel it as an unspeakable pain. But if we live within that pain for a while—if we truly feel our inner self as one filled with pain; that is, if for a while we are pain itself, if our own human being is, for our consciousness, nothing but a web of pain—then this consciousness no longer remains empty; then this consciousness is filled, and it is now filled not with sensory content as we receive it through our eyes, ears, and so on, but rather this consciousness is now filled with spiritual content. And the first thing that presents itself to us as spiritual content in this way is our own spiritual being, as it extends—as a unified spiritual organization, existing in time rather than in space—from birth or conception to the present moment, up to which point we have lived out our earthly life. Just as we otherwise look into a spatial perspective, seeing objects that are distant from that perspective, so we learn to look back into our own past from the present moment of our life. We do not see the physical aspect at this moment; we merely remember it—but we must remember it, for otherwise we are destroyed in our consciousness. But anyone who wishes to become a spiritual researcher must not become a fantasist, nor a confused mystic; they must apply their consciousness and their level-headedness just as a mathematician would when solving a mathematical problem. But just as we normally view spatial objects in perspective, so now we look into a temporal perspective. Everything we have experienced in our lives now stands before us in a tableau of time—but a living one. Yet it is not only what we ourselves have lived through that stands before us in this way, but also that which shows us how we have become who we are—how inner spiritual and soul forces have built up our body from birth or conception onward, and what the formative forces are that have worked upon our body. We look at ourselves from the outside. But what we see there—through which our own soul life stands before our soul—now also differs qualitatively from the experience of this timeline. When one otherwise looks back on one’s life, one experiences the events that come toward one. For example, one experiences how a person approached one, how they met one—lovingly or with hatred—and how they accomplished this or that by approaching one. In this image of memory, one experiences oneself in the way the external world approached one. In this other tableau of memory, however—which now stands before us in real images that we know reflect our own spiritual nature, just as ordinary memories reflect our external nature—in this other tableau of memory, we see how we ourselves approached the outside world. There, within it, is how one was oneself when, for example, one approached another personality—how forces unfolded within one’s soul that found their satisfaction, their fulfillment, their delight, and their joy precisely through that personality. One truly looks upon oneself as one was as an earthly human being. And one then sees how, in reality, the two sides in which the dream was masked now flow together.

[ 20 ] Now the dream becomes a fully conscious reality. It even becomes more than what ordinary consciousness perceives. First, one perceives the spiritual being that lives within the body, that is independent of it during sleep—indeed, that is the creator of the physical body. That is what one perceives. And there one already notices that this spiritual being also contains, though in a spiritual form—metamorphosed—something akin to the laws of nature, but—you are already objecting to this—within a spiritual being. The moral world already plays a role in what one experiences there. The moral laws are already present there, and they are present in such a way that one now knows: just as one’s own spirituality acts, so do the moral laws take effect. This is where the moral laws begin to stand on an equal footing alongside the laws of nature.

[ 21 ] But this only takes one as far as experiencing one’s own spiritual existence as a human being on Earth. If one wishes to go further, one must develop other abilities within the soul. — You can read more details about this in the books already mentioned, for a deeper understanding can only be attained through practicing many specific details. Here, only the fundamental principles will be discussed. — Imagine that you are recalling a moment in the day leading up to the morning when you got up—or rather, when you woke up. If you make an effort, the course of the day up to that point can unfold before your soul. Now, if you do not present the course of the day to your soul by starting in the morning, then moving on to the experiences of the morning, and so on, but instead present the course of the day in reverse order—beginning at that specific moment and tracing it backward—then you can also say that you arrive at the night when you fell asleep. But then you leave out some parts; something remains unfilled, and what follows the events you’ve recalled in reverse is the last experience before falling asleep, and then you can once again bring the course of the previous day to mind. In short, when a person recalls events in this way in ordinary life, there are always gaps between conscious experiences—the gaps we have gone through in the unconscious state during sleep.

[ 22 ] To move forward with the exercises that can build on this experience of looking back, the key is to develop a strong sense of reality. Such a sense of reality is not, at first, something that strongly characterizes people today. It is, in fact, something that is not entirely easy to attain, for when it comes to memory, people generally limit themselves to what, in the narrowest sense, is somehow attached to their personality. In their thoughts, they do not draw the threads toward the outside world strongly enough for those threads to become linked to their memories. People generally have no inclination whatsoever to live in the external world through their memories—to live truly in the external world. Just how true this is can be seen in everyday life. I have met people who, for example, saw a woman one morning who greatly interested them, and when asked, “What color was the woman’s dress?”—they don’t know. So it’s as if they hadn’t seen the woman at all, because if they did see her, they must also have seen the color of her dress. So how loosely are we connected to the outside world if, by the afternoon, we don’t even know what color the dress was of someone we saw that morning! Yes, I’ve even met people who were in a room and afterward didn’t know whether there were pictures in the room or not. One can have the most incredible experiences in this regard. Therefore, anyone who wishes to acquire a sense of reality must first train themselves to live fully even within external sensory reality, so that what they pass by stands before them just as it is out there in reality. The spiritual researcher certainly does not become a fantasist; he must acquire a sense of reality to such an extent that it cannot happen to him that, in the afternoon, he does not know what kind of dress the lady he spoke with that morning was wearing. He must truly be able to live with a sense of reality even within the sensory world.

[ 23 ] Only by training oneself to connect what remains of things in one’s memory to the external world of reality can one develop the ability to bring about a fruitful review for such spiritual insight. For in the ordinary human memory, the mental image before falling asleep last is very easily linked to the one after waking up last. Without any difficulty at all, people simply omit what lies between these two images—the abyss of the night—and immediately link the image of the first event after waking to that of the last event before falling asleep. Most of the time, they do not even notice with a vivid awareness that something lies in between. But if one wishes to cultivate an awareness that connects what one has experienced inwardly with the image of the external world, then one must realize that what one experiences in the morning upon waking is connected to the whole of nature, which makes an impression on us—connected to the rising sun, with all the impressions one receives from the rising sun, and so on—and what one experiences as the last events before falling asleep is connected to something that does not belong together in nature, namely, to what one experienced after waking up last. Then, looking at the images side by side, one will realize: Something is missing! — But by practicing in this way, by reawakening soul faculties that are not present in ordinary life, one gains the power so that, when looking backward—where one now has the first image after the last waking and wants to advance to the last image before the last falling asleep— you no longer see a stretch of darkness in between, but rather that this darkness begins to lighten spiritually, that something steps into this darkness. Just as one normally, in waking states, only traces what one has experienced, so suddenly something interposes itself between the first experience after the last waking and the last experience before the last falling asleep, about which one now says to oneself: You do remember something—just something—that you did not know before. — It is exactly the same as in ordinary memory, except that one knew nothing beforehand about what is now surfacing. Now one begins to recall what one would otherwise have slept through—even during dream-filled sleep. The empty time that one usually experiences in consciousness between the last experience before falling asleep and the first after waking up is now filled. And just as our ordinary consciousness is filled with the experiences of our existence in nature, so now our consciousness is filled with what rises up like a memory—but one of which you now know you experienced in the unconscious. Our consciousness is now filled with the content of the soul that did not participate in the external experiences but withdrew from them and fell asleep. Now one learns to recognize what the sleeping soul is truly like when it lacks the strength to become aware of the experiences it has in the spiritual world during sleep in the same way that a person becomes aware of the events of physical life in daily existence. Now one truly comes to know human inner life as spirit and soul, and at this moment one looks beyond earthly life. And one will now be able to connect what one perceives—in the manner described, as a vast yet concrete tableau of memories from one’s earthly life thus far—to what one was as a spiritual-soul being in a purely spiritual world before descending into this physical world through birth or conception.

[ 24 ] And just as this experience unfolds, another follows. If, throughout the entire practice, one develops alongside all this a capacity that is not usually regarded as a capacity for insight, but which is indeed one—if one develops what is love of the soul, full devotion to whatever comes one’s way, so strong that this love remains even when one now looks at one’s own self, so that one can with a truly devoted love—then the possibility arises of freeing oneself from the physical in one’s inner experience while fully conscious in the waking state. But the moment one has freed oneself from the physical in one’s inner experience, one knows what it is like for a human being to live out their life without their physicality. And the image of passing through the gate of death—of dying—arises before one’s soul. Once one has recognized what it means to perceive oneself in one’s spiritual powers, independent of the body, then one also knows what one is in spiritual existence once one has laid aside the body and passed through the gate of death. And one also comes to know the environment that then exists for the human being. One learns to recognize how, when the body is shed, that part of us which connects us to the sensory world falls away. What remains, however, is what has shaped us as human beings in the first place: the soul-spiritual aspect of the human being. Thus one learns to recognize the experiences one has had with other human beings. But one comes to recognize the eternal-spiritual aspect of what lay within these sensory experiences—how soul met soul, what played out in relationships with other people, both close and distant, what unfolded in space and time—as it sheds the earthly form of experience. And all the more does the soul then experience what was spiritually inherent in its relationships with other people. And what is otherwise only a matter of faith becomes certainty of knowledge.

[ 25 ] This is what people experience when they themselves have passed through the gate of death. What the human soul usually longs for as immortality enters into true human knowledge only in this way. But only by recognizing the truly eternal in the human being—by straining our powers to the limit to recognize this eternal aspect in our existence within our pre-earthly, spiritual-soul life—do we also attain that which gives us the certainty of life after death. That [pre-earthly] aspect, even as the eternal within the human soul, has no place in today’s civilization, for we know only one half of eternity; we speak of immortality. Older languages had the other aspect—unbornness—that is, our existence before we enter earthly life. But it is only these two aspects—unbornness and immortality—that constitute eternity. And it is the case that a person must pay for his longing for immortality by allowing it to become a mere belief if he wishes to renounce “unbornness” in his understanding; for eternity becomes clear to him only when he recognizes the two sides of eternity—the “unbornness” as well as the immortality of his being—as a unity. Thus, human beings have advanced toward a true grasp of what they are, toward true self-knowledge.

[ 26 ] Time and again, on such occasions, I must emphasize that, certainly, such spiritual research can only be carried out by those who have acquired the necessary abilities through practice or in some other way through fate; but when the results of such research are presented, they can actually be found just as plausible by anyone as, for example, the results of astronomy. And just as one need not be a painter to experience the beauty of a painting—for if that were necessary, only painters could do so—one need not, in order to grasp the insights of spiritual research, necessarily become a spiritual researcher oneself, although one can become one to a certain degree, for human beings are inclined toward truth and not toward confusion and error. Just as one can stand before a painting with a healthy sense of experience and admire its beauty, so too can one experience what spiritual science presents—provided one does not place obstacles in one’s own path in the form of prejudices and the like. One can understand this if one simply devotes oneself to the matter with a genuine sense of truth, and the accusation made by those who claim that adherents of spiritual science merely indulge in blind faith is entirely unfounded. Especially in our time, when people come to a self-knowledge of the human being through the application of their sense of truth or through research in the manner described, anthroposophy will be able to bring to human souls that which, as I said in the introduction to today’s lecture, these souls are hungry for in the present age. Even if this need of our time has not yet come to the awareness of many people, even if it manifests itself only vaguely or even merely as a lack of competence in life—it is present in what is so clearly expressed in contemporary civilization.

[ 27 ] The natural sciences and many philosophical worldviews speak of insurmountable limits to knowledge. For them, the limit that leads to human beings themselves is insurmountable. Human beings, however, cannot do without true self-knowledge in the long run.

[ 28 ] In tomorrow’s lecture, I will pick up where I left off today and describe moral and religious life as it enriches and becomes internalized within the human being. I will then have to apply this to immediate practical life tomorrow. In today’s lecture, I wanted first to show how this demand of our time—which arises as a demand of the mind and soul in more and more people in the face of present-day civilization with its limits of knowledge—can be met through genuine spiritual knowledge; through an understanding of what human beings wish to know—indeed, must know—about their own immortality and all that is connected with it, for only in this way can true self-knowledge be attained, and only this true self-knowledge can be linked to a grasping and feeling of one’s own self. For it is only by gaining an understanding of how, as a spiritual-soul being, he is woven into the spiritual-soul sphere of the world—just as he exists as a physical being in the physical world—that a human being will be able to stand before his own soul with its eternal nature. Only when a person gains an understanding of themselves as a spirit among spirits will they also be able to attain true inner security. Only when a person knows what they are worth and worthy of in the world do they stand in the world with an awareness of themselves as a human being—an awareness that they can recognize, out of an indefinable feeling, as the only true human consciousness. And only when people once again seek such a light of self-knowledge and spiritual understanding of the world—only then—will the present-day hunger for a true penetration of their own human nature be satisfied. For humanity will be unable to cope with all the demands of advancing civilization unless it understands: Self-knowledge of the human being can be nothing other than knowledge of the spirit, for the human being can only perceive himself as a true human being if he recognizes himself as a spirit among spirits, just as he can only perceive himself in his transient earthly existence as a physical being among physical beings.