The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Anthroposophy as a Human and Personal Path in Life

[ 1 ] Yesterday I took the liberty of describing how it is possible for human beings to embark on a path toward knowledge of the spiritual world, and how the fact that such a path is presented today as a possibility can indeed satisfy a deep need—I would even say a hunger—of present-day humanity for supersensory knowledge. It will now have become clear from yesterday’s description how this path to spiritual knowledge penetrates into the very heart of the most fundamental human striving, the most fundamental inner life of the human soul. After all, I had to describe how such an insight into the eternal in the human soul is only possible if the human being first undergoes certain inner, preparatory soul experiences and thereby, as it were, first awakens the consciousness that otherwise lies dormant for the world of the spirit.

[ 2 ] As a result, what could be described yesterday as such supersensible knowledge—as knowledge of the eternal within the human being—differs quite fundamentally from what is today regarded as the only recognized form of knowledge, which, as I explained yesterday, inevitably leads everywhere to the limits of this knowledge. Let us just consider how what is gained as knowledge today—whether through observation or through experiment, but in all cases solely through the activity of the intellect in relation to observation and experiment—bears a completely impersonal character. This impersonal character strikes us most vividly precisely when fate has brought us closer to the way of knowing that is common today. But where, then, is this way of knowing? One might say it is in books. It exists in a more or less written tradition, and people very often—in the vast majority of cases—take it in through external influences. Let us just consider, in all honesty with ourselves, how people today must be guided toward what is recognized as knowledge, and how—in view of all the procedures they had to go through to attain such knowledge—they are often very glad when, upon entering into the questions of practical life, they can once again leave all these things largely to the books — we could call it “objectivity,” to make it sound nicer —. He then wants to be fully human again; he does not want to remain stuck at the point where people always say with such pride, “We” have found it. How often does this “We have found it” confront us in every field! If someone, from the depths of their experience, claims to have found something, then someone well-versed in the realm of scientific life will immediately come along and say: But that doesn’t agree with what “people” have found, with what constitutes scientific knowledge.

[ 3 ] I would like to say, then, that knowledge is something that has become separated from the immediate, heartfelt experience of the individual human being. People even believe that something can only be true if it is experienced in isolation from everything that springs from the immediate heart of human nature. In contrast, yesterday I had to describe to you a path to knowledge that is not like that, but rather one that engages the individual personally and directly involves the human heart in a fundamental way. One cannot appreciate it, if I may say so, without being fully present with one’s innermost heart. Thus, knowledge is brought into contact with the human personality. And today I would like to speak to you about all the consequences for human life of bringing knowledge into contact with this personal element.

[ 4 ] It is not as if this insight described yesterday, when it reaches us, is, so to speak, merely a continuation of what is today regarded as insight under the banner of “It has been found.” It is not merely the sum of our insights that changes; the entire way in which we experience this insight also changes.

[ 5 ] Let us take a look at the most striking characteristic of that form of knowledge to which present-day humanity has just been raised to its very highest level. I do not mean by this to raise any objection to this type of knowledge. It has achieved the greatest successes within its own sphere and has brought humanity an extraordinary amount of benefit in external terms—though a benefit that, in the present age of civilization, is in turn being largely negated. But this form of knowledge has one defining characteristic: it speaks of something being “true,” “false,” or “erroneous.” And people naturally seek to determine—intellectually or through what the intellect can grasp of the external world—what is true and what is erroneous. — One wants to be logical, to proceed empirically, to determine truth and error on the basis of experience. Certainly, one already has means for determining truth and error empirically. As I said, no objection is to be raised against this method; but it should be pointed out how differently those methods I spoke of yesterday affect human beings. Now, even if one has truly discovered something about which one says, “This is true, this is false, this is real”—it still remains before us as an abstract tableau. It also separates itself from us in its truth and in its error in such a way that we, as individuals, have little personal involvement with this truth and this error. Certainly, we can be enthusiastic about the truth—and we should be—and we can abhor error—and we should abhor it—but when we compare everything we can identify as truth and error with the other conditions of human life, a tremendous difference becomes apparent. I would like to put it very bluntly: When we satisfy the need for food, we know that we are doing something to ourselves that has a thoroughly personal character. In doing so, we cannot detach ourselves from what we are doing; it does not present itself to us as some kind of objective tableau. When, on the other hand, we make judgments about truth and error, we do not actually want this to be directly connected to us. If we were mistaken about something yesterday but are no longer mistaken about it today—certainly, it is an abstract decision, but it does not fundamentally alter our personal being. However, if since yesterday we have eaten something we had not eaten before—something we have internally incorporated—then something within us has personally changed.

[ 6 ] These concepts—“truth” and “error,” “right” and “wrong”—change in the direct experience of the truths of spiritual science. As one immerses oneself in the path of knowledge I described yesterday, one gradually ceases to speak in such a way as to say that something is true, something is an error, or something is false. These words actually apply, at their core, to what can be accepted or rejected by us in the outer material world, and very few people really know what this truth or this error is all about. For if one delves a little into what it means to say that something is true or something is false—one must go back to people’s understanding of these concepts of truth and error, and then one arrives at something quite special. Precisely when one examines the terms for truth and error in various languages, one realizes that these two concepts, in their present abstract form, have only recently come into being. They did not exist in earlier times; they are a product of development. In earlier times, a particular thing that a person was expected to acknowledge was regarded as what the gods willed; and what a person was not expected to acknowledge was what the gods did not will. Thus, the world was distinguished as that which the gods willed and that which they did not will. And by acknowledging what was willed by the gods, a person was true, was faithful to the gods. The word “faithful” as a synonym for “true” can still be found in various languages. True: faithful to the divine world order; false: unfaithful to the divine world order. The other conception came only later. When the intellect came to dominate all knowledge, people forgot the original foundations to which the terms “truth” and “error” actually trace back. And so today we regard accepted knowledge impersonally, indeed with a high degree of indifference.

[ 7 ] The kind of knowledge I spoke of yesterday leads us once again to connect something real, something concrete, with what we accept and with what we reject. That is why, in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, we do not merely speak of something being true; rather, we arrive at a concept that is very similar to what we mean when we call something “healthy” for us human beings. And what I presented yesterday regarding the spiritual science referred to here is described by those who are deeply immersed in it much more readily as “healthy” than as “true.” We speak of healthy insights, and we speak of unhealthy insights that should be rejected. Thus, the concepts of “true” and “false”—which apply only to the physical world—are gradually replaced by the concepts of “healthy” and “unhealthy.” This, however, compels us as human beings to personally draw closer to the whole of knowledge. For we are, understandably, accustomed to perceiving as “healthy” whatever we desire, whatever we want, whatever our personality strives toward. In contrast, we reject—as far as we are able—what is “unhealthy” as that toward which our personality does not strive.

[ 8 ] As what is true is thus transformed for us into that which fosters life, into that which is healthy, into that which enriches life—and what is untrue, what is erroneous for us, into that which impoverishes life, that which makes life sick, paralyzing, and desolating—our ideas gradually prove to be something that becomes deeply and intensely connected with our feelings and with our entire personal life. As a result, one approaches the knowledge commonly accepted today as one would a personality who leaves one more or less indifferent, with whom one actually—as is the case in the majority of instances—has only an external, conventional relationship. The spiritual science referred to here, on the other hand, is not approached in such a conventional manner. One approaches it as one would a friend, as a being in its own right, toward whom one can feel love from the very core of one’s being. As a result, this spiritual science becomes more and more a personal matter.

[ 9 ] When one approaches the truths that I could only hint at yesterday—regarding the prenatal, pre-earthly life of the human being; of the human being’s spiritual-soul nature, which descends from a purely spiritual world into the physical human body through conception and birth; or when, as you can see from the literature of anthroposophy, one delves deeper and deeper into the realms of the spiritual worlds that the human being experiences between death and a new birth, just as one experiences the physical world here through one’s senses—if one delves deeper and deeper into these worlds, then one feels so connected to a certain aspect of these worlds that one must anchor one’s own being to sound insights and sound perspectives. And likewise, one feels that one must distance oneself from, and move away from, what one must call unhealthy perspectives.

[ 10 ] For example, to illustrate what I mean, we know that a person who is able to live a physically normal life consumes food, that this food undergoes a transformation within them, and that through this process they can replenish what their body has expended; and we know that their healthy well-being stems from this transformation of external food for their personal physical existence. But we also know that circumstances can arise in human beings whereby they may be unable to consume food, because their organism is not capable of digesting it properly—perhaps because their digestive system is diseased—or there may be other reasons why a person cannot replenish what they lose through food. Then they draw upon what is within their own body; then they begin to consume themselves.

[ 11 ] This is something that leads us to the connection between certain symptoms of illness and the consumption of one’s own body. But this is also what one grows into as one gradually gains insights into the spiritual world. One has precisely this feeling toward insights that have a healing effect: through them, one comes into communion with the spiritual world; through them, one merges into the spiritual world; one becomes one with the spiritual world; one makes one’s way to the gods; one makes one’s way to one’s own immortal soul. One makes one’s way toward what one will experience after passing through the gate of death and finding oneself in the spiritual world, but one also makes one’s way toward what one experienced before descending from the spiritual world to Earth through conception or birth. One experiences all of this as if, as a human being, one had given one’s existence to the world, yet thereby become fuller and richer within. It is precisely by gradually becoming the world itself that one first comes to grasp one’s full human inner being. And as such an insight—such a healthy insight—takes root within one, one senses how the whole being of a human being depends on coming together with the world. Likewise, one gradually comes to realize that being deprived of such healthy truths is as if we were living in the world without an organ to receive nourishment and were forced to consume ourselves. And that which one feels must be rejected—that which emerges as a pathogenic element of the world—one experiences, when one takes it in, as if one were consuming oneself, as if one were becoming less and less.

[ 12 ] That is the difference between the search for truth when one remains solely in the intellectual realm, and the search when one advances to genuine spiritual insights—the path to which I described yesterday. Here in the realm of the intellectual, one can debate idealism, spiritualism, and materialism; one fosters a friendly disposition, the other does no harm—there is nothing intensely human in it. Whoever, on the other hand, grasps spiritual truths—that is, sound spiritual insight—is pained by ideas oriented toward materialism, because they know that these materialistically colored truths consume the human being. But this, in turn, gives the spiritual truths two new nuances—nuances that one can perceive very keenly as one gradually immerses oneself in the process of grasping spiritual insight. There one learns to recognize the kinship of truth with love, the kinship of sound insight with human selflessness—but that selflessness which does not lose the self, but rather, as it develops, gains the self all the more. When a person knows how to step outside of themselves and enter the world, when they are selfless in this sense—not in the sense of becoming empty of content, but of filling themselves with the content of the world—then this selflessness leads to true humanity, to true human feeling, to the very essence of the soul.

[ 13 ] This devotion to the spiritual realities of life—which is akin to love—is what then presents itself as a kind of character trait. It therefore becomes a characteristic feature of those who are capable of absorbing spiritual insights. That is also why one does not sense much in people of the character impulses arising from purely intellectual, rational insights, because they simply do not come close to the personality; but when one grasps spiritual insight in its innermost essence, one will also know that one cannot accept this spiritual insight without it transforming one’s character—without it bringing about, if I may use the paradox, a character trait that penetrates, as it were, into the very flesh and blood of the soul: namely, a tendency, first and foremost, toward selflessness and love. This is what distinguishes the assimilation of spiritual truths from the assimilation of physical truths.

[ 14 ] And once again, one learns to recognize how one lives in a self-destructive way, remaining closed off within oneself, when one absorbs these unhealthy insights—how one truly consumes oneself spiritually in this process. And through these two nuances of feeling, one learns to recognize what the innermost selfishness in human nature can be. Through this insight, one thus learns to recognize love and selfishness, and it is indeed one of the greatest achievements that spiritual science can offer humanity—that the results of this spiritual insight can take the form of character traits, that such character traits can become necessary. Mere abstract intellectual knowledge actually resembles a plant root artificially fashioned from wax. No plant can grow from it, for it is, after all, an artificial creation of our intellect. All the insights we hold in such high regard today—as useful as they are and though they should not be disputed—are artificially shaped by the intellect. But from the real plant root, the real plant also emerges. And from the true insight through which a person can connect their spirit with the spirits of the world, the whole inner human being gradually emerges: the person who, through living feeling, understands what selflessness, selfless love, and what selfishness is—and who, from this understanding, is now driven to act in life, to act where it is right to do so—in selflessness—or where it is necessary, for example, to draw from within oneself to prepare for life, with full consciousness and without concealment, and then to develop this self-interest.

[ 15 ] This gives rise to a certain clarity in human self-observation and in the translation of this self-observation into outward action. A soul-spiritual human being springs forth from that which can become spiritual knowledge. Through this, however, we approach the moral realm in a very practical way through such knowledge. When we pursue the knowledge that is recognized today, we take pride in making sure we do not find the transition to the moral realm. We seek to be “objective” by saying: Well, of course we must understand the processes in inorganic, lifeless nature according to its natural laws, tracing causes and effects within them, but we find nothing moral in them at all. — We take pride in extending this method further into the processes of animate nature—into the plant, the animal, and the human realms—and to accept as morality only that which springs from certain depths of human nature, though we cannot say that it can assert itself in the world through its own inner power and impulsiveness or find its way into objective existence.

[ 16 ] Driven as we are by spiritual knowledge, on the one hand to cultivate within ourselves a deeply vivid experience of selflessness and loving devotion to the cause—for without this, spiritual knowledge is not possible— on the other hand, to acquire a subtle sensitivity to what self-consuming egoism is, we are driven by spiritual insight directly into the moral world order. Therefore, this moral world order gradually reveals itself to us in all its concreteness, and we come to look not only in an abstract way at pre-earthly human life, that is, at what the human being, as a spiritual-soul being, has experienced before descending to Earth through conception and birth, but we come to truly look into the spiritual world, just as we look into our physical surroundings through our physical senses. And in this way we come to recognize how, there in the spiritual world, we are surrounded by spiritual beings who never take on a physical body, just as here in the physical world we come together with beings who, like us, are in physical bodies. But we come to know this spiritual world and its beings in a concrete way; we do not come to know them without having, through the path of knowledge, inwardly and characteristically—in a living, vital way—made our own the feeling of selflessness, of selfless devotion. For that is the secret of earthly, physical existence: As we grow more and more into our bodies from the moment of our birth through childhood—a time when we are still more or less driven by instinct, unconscious, or semi-conscious—we approach the world in physical life entirely through our physical organs—and this is precisely what stands so clearly before the soul’s eye of a human being. Through our creative activities, we do indeed lose ourselves—soul- and spirit-wise—to our bodies. But this soul-spiritual aspect fades from our consciousness. The entire content of the world is conveyed to us through the physical. Therefore, materialism is valid for earthly consciousness, for in the earthly realm we must make use of the body if we remain within earthly consciousness, which provides us with nothing but this physical reality. For earthly consciousness, we must remain within the perception of the physical if we do not wish to rise to a consciousness independent of the physical.

[ 17 ] Thus we must say: in order to come to a grasp of the spiritual world and of one’s own supersensible being, a person must develop something within themselves that the body prevents them from grasping. The body tears us away from the spiritual world; it alienates us from the spiritual world and leads us ever more back to our own self and to egotism; and in spiritual knowledge we must do as we do in love, where we must step outside of ourselves. This is where the profoundly significant truth emerges—especially when a person attains a consciousness independent of the physical—that human beings undergo repeated earthly lives. We do not take notice of what occurs in our soul through these repeated earthly lives because we are trapped within our bodies. In life, we meet a person whose experience becomes our destiny. We meet them at a certain stage in life; we experience something with them that then shapes the course of our entire subsequent life. If we now look back impartially on our life’s journey up to that moment when we met this other person, then—if we look with spiritual eyes, seeing what we cannot perceive with physical eyes—we find that our earthly life up to that point was actually a search for this person. That is why people who have grown old in this sense, looking back on this earthly life, have always said: What we have found in this earthly life seems to have been entirely planned. It is as if, even as a small child, one were already setting a course to meet a certain person later on. — When one surveys one’s life path spiritually, one must say that every step is directed toward ensuring that such an experience can ultimately come to pass. And as one progresses further and further in this experience, one comes to realize that everything one does—everything that is under the influence of the physical forces of the Earth—is guided by something else. And we come to acknowledge that this life we are currently living depends on previous earthly lives, between which other lives existed in a spiritual world between death and rebirth.

[ 18 ] But we cannot come to recognize these other lives unless we are able to develop loving knowledge and knowledge-filled love. For the person we were back then is not as easy to reach as one often imagines. What we were in a previous earthly life is as foreign to our present personality as another person we encounter. And only when we can develop loving insight and insightful love can we truly grasp this other being—who at first seems completely foreign to us—through insight. Then he enters our consciousness.

[ 19 ] This is true of all stages of higher spiritual knowledge: we must develop something like loving knowledge—that is, something that is intimately connected to our personality, in which we are directly and personally involved, and which we cannot even possess without being personally involved in it. But by growing into such a world—by actually expanding our existence through knowledge beyond birth and death, and by expanding it beyond the sensory world as well—in the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, the mineral kingdom, everywhere we see spiritually active beings—by doing this, we ascend to a realm of reality that can now incorporate moral impulses into our knowledge. For human beings in particular, this takes shape in roughly the following way. We say that it is often extraordinarily oppressive to endure one’s fate. Certainly, when we remain here in physical-sensory earthly life, we see how all too often what springs from the best moral impulses yields little result, while many things that do not at all spring from good moral impulses achieve good results. Why is this so? It is so because this very physical-sensual world—which we have, so to speak, “drawn upon” ourselves, namely a part of it as the garment of our body—does not contain any moral impulses at all. To begin with, moral impulses are entirely absent from all our actions and activities within the physical world; at best, conventional compensation may occur. But through spiritual insight, we learn to recognize this world not as the only one, but as one permeated everywhere by the spiritual, and we also learn to recognize how what we carry within us—in our moral or immoral actions—is carried into this world of the spiritual. If we learn to recognize truth as that which is healthy and error as that which is unhealthy, then we extend this insight to moral truth and immoral errors, and we learn to recognize how a person, by devoting themselves to moral truth, becomes a fully developed human being inwardly, spiritually, and soulfully. This need not be immediately evident in the present earthly body. By experiencing moral impulses within oneself, one becomes an inwardly fully developed spiritual-moral human being. By surrendering to error, one becomes inwardly—spiritually and soulfully—a cripple. Then one learns to recognize the moral as healing and the erroneous as sickening, and one learns to recognize how life in moral truth harmoniously shapes the human being. Yet in the cycle of development in which we find ourselves, this is something that does not immediately manifest itself in the physical body—which we bear as the result of what we actively acquired in our previous earthly life. But by devoting ourselves to morally healthy truth or to morally unhealthy error, we either become healthy, harmonious human beings in spirit and soul, or we become spiritually and soulfully crippled. When we pass through the gate of death and shed the physical body, it is no longer an obstacle; then our spiritual-soul being assumes in its entirety the physiognomy we have acquired through the experience of moral good or moral evil; then we live there either as a fully developed human being in soul and spirit or as a spiritually and emotionally crippled being.

[ 20 ] And so we journey through the spiritual world until we once again take on a physical earthly body, through which we shape our own destiny from within—either by carrying within us a harmonious spiritual-soul aspect from a previous earthly life, we can shape this earthly body more fully and lead it toward one form of achievement or another in life; or—by arriving as moral cripples, living clumsily and awkwardly in the guidance of our earthly body, from the embryo all the way to adulthood—we create an inner destiny for ourselves that then also becomes our outer destiny. Anyone who is able to view life impartially will discover how the shaping of inner destiny is linked to the experience of outer destiny, in that we are capable of making use of the body and all that is connected with it—where we interact with the sensory-physical world through our body—and can use it skillfully or clumsily from within. In this way, we also bring about external events—at least in part—in such a way that external fate, too, arises as a partial result of inner fate. And what we go through in this way is in turn balanced out in successive earthly lives.

[ 21 ] Thus, in the spiritual world—and this is where, in a spiritual sense, true and false are transformed into healthy and unhealthy—we actually gain the formative powers of the spiritual-soul realm and of moral impulses. The moral world becomes just as real to us, and we tell ourselves: In a single earthly life, the moral impulse cannot directly produce an effect in the physical realm; but when it passes from one earthly life into the next, then it has its healing effect in all reality, just as heat, light, and electricity have their effects in the physical world. The fact that we believe the moral world order to be merely an abstraction arising from human thought stems solely from the fact that we think we know only the conditions that apply to the physical world. We overlook the path of causes by focusing on the effects. In the spiritual world, however, we can recognize the conditions governing the interplay of forces just as well; we must simply recognize that the causes of the effects in one earthly life lie in a previous earthly life—with a life in the spiritual world lying between the two. In other words, we must recognize the level at which cause and effect operate in human destiny. In this way, what is otherwise regarded merely as solid physical knowledge expands into the moral-spiritual world order, and we thereby gain a grasp of this moral-spiritual world order.

[ 22 ] The objection to this spiritual insight—which was already hinted at yesterday—might now be raised: That may all be very well, but to begin with, people do not possess this spiritual insight; rather, only a spiritual researcher can clothe what he sees in the spiritual world in words and ideas, and these ideas can then be grasped. — As I said yesterday: to paint a picture, one must be a painter, but to experience the beauty and inner content of the picture, one need not be a painter; one need only surrender to one’s unbiased, undisturbed human nature. This is indeed the case with spiritual science as well. To “paint” it oneself in ideas, one must be a spiritual scientist; but when it is presented as it is in the lectures given on the subject and in our literature, it stands there like a painting before the viewer who is not a painter himself. All a person needs to do is surrender to their unbiased, unwavering sense of reality—and they will receive a healing impression from the description of the spiritual world! Indeed, something quite special must be said about this. It is still the case today: Because spiritual science—as we mean it here—is something relatively new in our civilization, the one who advocates this spiritual science based on his direct knowledge stands quite alone, and he must limit himself to expressing it in words and ideas in order to communicate it to others. One might now believe that what he has to say is really only his own concern. But as things stand today—and still stand—one must very much hope that this will change very soon, because spiritual science is something that inwardly enlivens people—humanity still stands before the spiritual knower as a mere recipient. But for the one who today, with this insight, advances to spiritual knowledge through direct personal perception, for that person spiritual science is nevertheless something different than it is for the person who initially receives it, as I have just described, through his unwavering sense of truth. I already hinted at this yesterday: At a certain point in spiritual knowledge, one must go through a pain that cannot be compared to any other pain in life. It is at the point where we transcend our own spiritual experience between birth and death and enter the vast sea of spiritual eternity—the realm in which we find ourselves once we have passed through the gate of death, or in which we were before we descended through birth into physical life on Earth. One must endure an unspeakable pain when, in the process of gaining knowledge, one must leave the sensory-physical world behind and seeks to enter the spiritual world. This pain, I would say, already casts its shadow over one’s entire human life. And above all, for those who today—and today it must indeed be so—undergo initiation, the initiation into higher knowledge, through their own efforts, this higher knowledge presents itself as something that, while initially seizing their entire being, then detaches itself from them in an incredibly powerful way. And allow me at this point to describe something that appears to be of a very personal nature, but the very personal aspect of it—since I also want to focus more on the personal today—already has an impersonal character; anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation can experience this.

[ 23 ] First, spiritual cognition encompasses the whole person. Ordinary intellectual cognition, after all, encompasses only the person’s head—the intellect—that is, that which, in essence, remains quite neutral in relation to immediate personal experience. One also knows that one need only exert the head, and that everything else is secondary. Certainly, in order to attain certain things in today’s understanding, one must spend a great deal of time sitting. Some people have much to say about this sitting, which they have often interrupted because it is not pleasant. But what one exerts in ordinary understanding is not actually the whole human being. However, if one advances, as I have described, into true knowledge of the supersensible world, then one has the feeling: If you exert only your intellect—that for which the head is the organ—then this spiritual knowledge slips away from you like dreams; it slips away both in its grand, all-encompassing ideas and in regard to details. And it is truly the case that when one breaks through into the spiritual world, when one crosses over what is called the “Keeper of the Threshold” to the spiritual world, one faces a great challenge—not regarding the content one attains through knowledge—which is very real—but in bringing the experience into consciousness in its fullest reality. The fact is that a great many people can have experiences in the spiritual world relatively quickly. But one must have presence of mind—that is, be quick to grasp them. For most people, what they experience in the spiritual world is indeed there, but by the time they turn their attention to it, it is already gone. One must have the presence of mind to quickly turn one’s soul’s gaze toward what has been experienced. Presence of mind is something immensely necessary for spiritual knowledge. One must take the presence of mind—as I have described it in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?—very seriously. When one succeeds in grasping these insights—which actually lie outside of space and time—they easily slip away because they lie outside—and outwardly, they appear like dreams. It is a struggle to transcend their dreamlike nature. Whatever one approaches merely with the intellect slips away like a dream. That is why I can say: whoever speaks of ideas drawn from the spiritual world must, even at the very moment of speaking, always have the spiritual world before them. But one can only become accustomed to this inner presence in the spiritual world if one shares this insight—at least in some way—with one’s whole being. One person may do this one way, another another. For me, for example, it is always a necessity to capture—either through individual, disjointed words or through small symbolic drawings—what presents itself to me in spiritual vision. This is not, for instance, in order to write mediumistically. It is entirely deliberate, absolutely conscious writing, but in doing so one engages not merely the mind, but also something else that completes human activity as a whole when one writes at the same time. It does not matter at all whether what one has written in this way is later used as notes; what matters is simply the act itself. I can tell you that I have produced entire cartloads of notebooks in this way throughout my life, which I have never looked at again—because what matters is to capture what one has seen in the spiritual world with a power stronger than that of the mind alone. And it is recorded with a greater power when one pours the experience into one’s hand through that impulse of will that leads to writing. This fixation of inner experiences in the spiritual world depends on experiencing the truths—I would say—“organically” with one’s whole being.

[ 24 ] There is also something else to consider—something that does not have to remain this way in civilization, something that was not the case even in earlier, entirely different paths to initiatory knowledge. But what I mean now—and what is very much the case today—is the following. If one has produced spiritual scientific work in some way and wishes to return to it later—especially if, like me, for example, one has grown quite old and some of what one now has to share was produced perhaps forty years ago—it is, after all, something very old, and then the activity one engages in inwardly and spiritually is really almost like wanting to tell someone something one reads in a completely unfamiliar old book. Do understand me: what one produced oneself years ago becomes as foreign to one as something written in a foreign book from those years. It becomes separated—not in the same way as the abstract knowledge I have described—but it separates from you spiritually. What one otherwise, when standing outside of initiatory knowledge, feels so closely connected to one’s own being, emerges as a second person. I can say that some books by friends are more familiar to me today than those I myself wrote in the past. In any case, I only read my earlier books when I have to—for example, when I need to correct them for new editions—because they are, after all, foreign to me. Thus, even today, what the spiritual researcher must produce separates itself from him; it becomes something objective. One cannot experience, in a purely elementary way, any profound joy or profound exaltation from it, and so on. But this is not connected with knowledge as such; rather, it is connected with the very way one must approach it today—in solitude. In earlier times, when a much more instinctive, less deliberate approach to the science of initiation prevailed, this science of initiation was not at all well cultivated in solitude. If you follow the history in this regard, you will always hear that the science of initiation was practiced in societies. Such societies still exist today, but they are merely perpetuating tradition. However, anyone who speaks today from the path of immediate personal knowledge is already condemned to a certain degree of solitude.

[ 25 ] But how were such societies organized, and what will it be like when knowledge of the spiritual is once again incorporated into civilization, when it is once again called upon to permeate all spheres of life and all aspects of daily practice? For it will certainly be able to do so once people embrace this spiritual knowledge. In such societies, it was the case that, through their own free agreement, one group took on this aspect of knowledge while another took on that aspect. One group focused its spiritual research on investigating the influence of the world of the stars on human life, while the other focused on investigating the path of human life from pre-earthly, spiritual existence into the earthly sphere. The aim was to ensure that these individual areas could be explored in every detail.

[ 26 ] For while it takes ten years just to begin to understand the influence of the celestial bodies on human life, it actually takes not ten years—but rather an entire human lifetime—to explore in detail even a few steps of the journey from pre-earthly life into earthly life. It was therefore entirely justified to divide the various fields of knowledge. In this way, each person immersed himself in the field on which he particularly concentrated, while relying on his comrades for everything else. In doing so, he experienced both the inner process of generating knowledge and the experience of receiving knowledge he had not generated himself.

[ 27 ] Once humanity becomes warmer, once hearts open up with full warmth, then spiritual science will inevitably be like a painted picture. Then, through his natural sense of reality, a person will grasp what lives in the idea—an idea he did not produce himself, but which he experiences directly by receiving it with his unbiased sense of truth. And on the other hand, they will also experience that pain and suffering of which I spoke—in short, all the personal nuances—in what stands before them as knowledge. Through this, they will be impelled to grasp the spiritual with their soul forces. Human beings can do this by receiving spiritual truths. Today, however, he must often forgo this; in this regard, he must often resign himself to it when he produces a certain area of spiritual-scientific truths on his own. Therefore, the fruits of spiritual-scientific truths—provided only that a full, warm heart is present—can penetrate precisely those who receive these truths. In the earlier spiritual science communities, one simply had to receive. Therefore, a specific area of spiritual research was set aside for one—or one isolated oneself—for which one renounced that life-sustaining, life-enriching aspect of receiving. In contrast, one received this life-enriching aspect of receiving from the other members. Something similar must arise again in the future.

[ 28 ] I am not describing this in order to present, so to speak, personal experiences, but rather to draw attention, from this personal, emotional perspective, to the fact that the fruits of spiritual science—as I mean it here—do not depend solely on one’s own production of them. If one has produced something in any field, then one simply knows what it means to produce. And anyone can achieve this if they only give some thought to what I have described, for example, in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?—such as soul exercises, meditation, and concentration, and so on. If, through this, one then grasps—even if only for a few steps—the inner activity of the soul that leads into life, one thereby opens one’s heart to what can be received from the spiritual researchers called to this task. And then the spiritual gift received becomes something that can connect deeply with the individual’s personal being, because it speaks to the individual’s personal being. Then, through their individual self, the person reaches the sources of that life from which the Eternal originates in its essence. Then he delves into what existed before human life on Earth and what will exist after it; he delves into the experiences one had in the spiritual world before earthly life and those one will have in the spiritual world after earthly life, after passing through the gate of death. The second, higher human being grows out of the first, lower one. But this second, higher human being cannot grow forth—we cannot gain an understanding of the ideas of spiritual science—unless we feel at rest with something in the spiritual world, just as we feel at rest here in the physical world with its robust natural ideas. The fact that we have muscles and bones connects us to external nature; through them, we find a sense of rest with our own physical nature within external physical nature. When we grasp the true content of spiritual ideas and recognize it as one with the spiritual world, then we learn to feel at rest in a spiritual-divine world, just as we feel at rest in the sensory world through our body. And this sense of being at rest is what matters, for through it we perceive ourselves in our spiritual being just as we perceive ourselves in our physical being through our body. But just as we perceive through our body only the transitory being—existence between birth and death—so do we perceive ourselves through our spiritual-soulful, eternal existence in the eternal, divine-spiritual world. Precisely by delving deeper into the personal, we experience not only how humanity in general—the abstract human being—is rooted in a spiritual world, but we also come to realize how each individual, precisely through what is most personal to them —through what they can experience in full individuality at a particular place and time on Earth—is fundamentally rooted in a spiritual world, a spiritual world to which they belong and which bears the character of eternity. And as they feel this way, they hear, so to speak, the voice calling out to them: Do not make yourself a spiritual cripple through unhealthy spiritual content, for just as with every human being, so too with you—it is not merely a general matter, but it applies to you specifically, insofar as you are a wholly personal, individual human being!

[ 29 ] And in this personal, most individual form of humanity, the human being immerses himself in the religious and highest artistic mood that one can feel toward the world. Therefore, spiritual science leads directly into a religious sense of feeling. And anyone can see from our literature how Christianity is deepened, how it can only be portrayed in its full light and true essence through immersion in the personal, human experiences of Christ, who appeared in a personal form.

[ 30 ] It is precisely by advancing in this way along a personal path of life toward an eternal spiritual being that our personality is truly integrated into the real world with the right nuance; for this is how we gain the awareness that each of us is counted upon as a personality. And we then truly come to perceive the spirit as something that directly becomes a human, personal life journey. We then feel as if we are being inwardly moved by the content of spiritual knowledge, just as our body is moved by the life-giving power of the blood.

[ 31 ] We then feel as if we could characterize our individual, personal existence on Earth using the following analogy, for example. There is a gathering somewhere. We are called upon to attend this gathering. We are therefore asked to come to this gathering as individuals because people there are waiting for us to say precisely what only we—the individual “I” as a personal entity—can say. Let’s suppose we do something before we go to the gathering where people are waiting for us—something that prevents us from going. We don’t go. We are the one who is expected—and who does not come!

[ 32 ] As spiritual science becomes a deeply personal and human endeavor, one gradually comes to recognize how what one does in life through spiritual science enriches life, even in its most practical application. One comes to realize that this is the direction of our most personal life path toward something where we are awaited. As we look into the spiritual world—the world where divine-spiritual beings are creatively at work in our individual existence—we thereby look into something where we see that we are awaited, and we will fulfill the expectation placed in us and arrive among those who are our companions in a higher, spiritual world only if, through our human-personal life path into the spiritual world, we find this eternal human being in his full harmony and in his full power by taking the spiritual-soul aspect into ourselves. Thus, spiritual insight rooted in the human leads us to make the decision as to whether we will reach that realm above where the spiritual is experienced alongside the human—where we are awaited—or whether we—since we do, after all, pass through births and deaths—will eventually arrive at that point where the reproachful words will one day ring out to us: “You were expected—and you did not come!”