The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eighth Lecture

[ 1 ] In this pedagogical and didactic reflection, we have had to point out how our educational work depends on what we develop within ourselves and how we find our place in the world. And we have had to draw particular attention to that stage in children’s lives—in their 13th, 14th, and 15th years—which we have already described several times, and during which it is especially important that we ourselves prepare in the right way to approach teaching during this period.

[ 2 ] But we must also be able to structure all of our educational work in such a way that we prepare the children properly up to this point. After all, everything depends on the growing child developing a certain relationship to the world. This relationship to the world becomes particularly evident at the age we are now discussing, specifically in that both boys and girls begin, in a certain way, to develop a inclination toward ideals—an inclination toward a life that is to be added to the external sensory world. Even in the deviations of childhood behavior—in the boy’s rowdiness, in the corresponding traits we have observed in girls—what is essentially playing out is what we might call a yearning for a supersensory, ideal existence, for a higher sense of purpose, so to speak: Life must exist for a purpose! — This lies deep within the human nature. And we must reckon with this: Life must exist for a purpose; life must have goals. It is particularly important for this age group that we do not lead this intuitively felt inner principle—“Life must have a purpose”—down the wrong path in life. Young men are very often viewed in such a way that, when they reach the age of 14 or 15 and all sorts of hopes for life are floating before them, they easily become immersed in the feeling that “this or that must be such and such.” — And young women, in turn, become immersed in a certain way of judging life. It is precisely at this age that girls are sharp critics of life. They believe they know a great deal about what is right and wrong—namely, what is just and unjust. They project a certain judgment onto the world. And they are imbued with a certain certainty that life must offer something grounded in idealistic principles inherent in humanity itself. This inclination toward the ideal and the idealistic is particularly strong at this age. And throughout the entire course of schooling, starting in the first grade, it is up to us whether or not we have succeeded in helping the child grow into this idealistic realm and this ideal in the right way.

[ 3 ] To this end, it is necessary that we learn to imbue ourselves with principles that give us a correct understanding of a child’s development. Theoretically, through Spiritual Science, we do indeed acquire these three most important perspectives. Until the age of 7—that is, until the time when the child’s teeth begin to fall out—the child is essentially an imitative being. The child actually grows by doing what is modeled for it from the outside, what it sees. Basically, all of the child’s activity during this time is imitation. During the period of tooth replacement, the child then develops a need to act in accordance with authority, to hear from those around them what they should do. So while earlier it naturally accepted whatever was happening in its environment—the good and the bad, the true and the false—and imitated it, from the time of tooth replacement onward it has the sense that it no longer needs merely to imitate, but can hear from its surroundings what it should and should not do. As the child reaches sexual maturity, it develops the sense that it can now make its own judgments; but it has the need to find a point of reference—the natural authority, the self-chosen authority—and to say to itself: “He is like this, she is like that,” so that one can rely on this when forming a judgment. — It is important that we allow the child to grow into this natural sense of authority in the right way.

[ 4 ] To do this, however, we must be clear about the significance of the impulse to imitate. What, exactly, does this impulse to imitate represent? One cannot understand its significance unless one is clear that the child actually grows out of the spiritual world. An age that is merely convinced that the child grows up through heredity, that it descends from its ancestors and parents—such an age cannot truly gain insight into the nature of imitation. Such an age does not even arrive at the simplest viable concepts. Such an age perceives the chemical and physical world; it sees how the various elements listed in chemistry are analyzed and synthesized; and by ascending into the living realm—but treating the living in such a way that this treatment is synthetic or analytical—it finds a state of affairs like that of nature in a human corpse in the grave. When science carries out a procedure such as that which nature employs when a human being decays in the grave, it finds—even within the living—carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements. And it finds this living substance in the form we call protein. Now one reflects on how carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen can be essentially synthesized within the protein. And one hopes that one will one day discover how these elements—C, N, H, O—form a structure through their coexistence within the protein.

[ 5 ] Well, by approaching it this way, one gets absolutely no mental image of what the protein that underlies living organisms is actually all about. If we characterize the protein in the cell in this way, we are actually going down the wrong path; for in reality, the forces that hold things together—the forces that, for example, shape the form of a rock crystal, a cube of pyrite, or another mineral structure—descend into chaos as they form into protein. For when we consider protein, we should not focus on how the laws become more complex, but rather on how they paralyze one another in their mutual interaction, how they cease to act within the protein, and how they are no longer present within it. Instead of structure, we should seek chaos, dissolution. We should tell ourselves: The substances become chaotic in their interaction when they transition into the state in which they appear as protein; there they enter the indeterminate. There they cease to influence one another and fall into a state where they are susceptible to another influence.

[ 6 ] In the normal behavior of living beings, this chaotic element is still somewhat restrained by the mineral processes taking place within the organism. In the cells we have in the brain, lungs, and liver—since these cells are composed of protein—the substances we consume as food still exert their influence on them. Thus, they are not in a state of chaos. In the cells that go on to become reproductive cells, the cellular substance within the organism is placed in a position where it is protected from the influence of food and from the forces absorbed with the food. In the sex cells, chaos is almost completely present, and everything mineral is completely destroyed and ruined as a mineral substance. The sex cells arise because, in humans, animals, and plants, the earthly-mineral activity has been laboriously destroyed and ruined. Because the mineral activity has been destroyed, the organism becomes receptive to cosmic activity. Now cosmic forces can act in from all sides, and these cosmic forces are initially influenced by the fertilizing cells of the opposite sex, and through this, the astral is mingled with the etheric. We can say: as the mineral element demineralizes into the protein-like substance, the possibility arises that—whereas in the mineral realm earthly forces always act upon other earthly forces—cosmic laws now come to bear through this indirect path via the chaotic protein-like substance.

[ 7 ] Natural science will never understand protein if it seeks to do so by viewing organic molecules as more complex than inorganic ones. After all, chemistry and physiology today are primarily concerned with determining the structure—that is, how atoms are arranged in various substances. And so one imagines that the arrangement becomes more and more complex, reaching its peak of complexity in the protein. The protein molecule does not tend toward greater complexity, but rather toward eliminating the mineral structure, so that not the earthly, but only the extraterrestrial can gain influence. Here, our thinking is directly confused by modern knowledge. We are led directly into a way of thinking that, precisely on the most important points, has nothing to do with reality. And therefore we cannot rise to the idea that something enters into human beings that does not come from the stream of heredity, but is carried into them indirectly through the cosmos, because our conception of protein formation prevents us from creating a mental image of this. After all, given our current mental image of protein formation, we cannot speak of the pre-existence of the human being.

[ 8 ] “We really must recognize that it is immensely important for us, as teachers, to break away from the basic concepts of today’s academic system. With the basic concepts of today’s academic system, one can pull the wool over the world’s eyes, but one cannot teach. Therefore, nothing is actually taught at our universities—but what exactly goes on there? There are faculties of teachers who hold together through a certain sense of professional solidarity. And it is there that young people must gather and prepare themselves for later life. People would not do any of this—neither the old nor the young—if they were left to their own devices, if they were working toward their own developmental potential. That is why, in order for them to do it, one must resort to coercion. One must forcibly herd them together so that they find their way into life only by having been confined there for a time. And so these institutions have the very greatest reason to ensure that coercion is never allowed to cease. It is therefore childish to believe that those institutions—which, after the coercion of the guild system had ceased everywhere else, were the very last to preserve the guild system—will be the first to march at the forefront of progress. They are the very last institutions one can count on, for the rest of society has adapted to working without medieval coercive measures. The way work is done at universities today is the same way it was done in the trades during the Middle Ages. Universities are the last institutions to have preserved all of this.

[ 9 ] And since one no longer has any sense of this matter, the whole thing essentially amounts to a theatrical mental image unfolding at certain crucial moments. Such a mental image is particularly evident in connection with the examination system. Just imagine all the theatricality that comes to the fore in connection with the examination system. It is extraordinarily important to understand this from within. If one wishes to teach and educate, one must become a human being in a way different from that offered by today’s educational system. One must be able to gain new mental images of the basic concepts; only then will one arrive at a true mental image of the child’s imitative nature.

[ 10 ] If the child is present in the spiritual world with its soul before it is conceived, then it lives within its spiritual environment in such a way that it naturally absorbs everything that exists in this spiritual-soul environment of its own. And when it is born and begins to settle into this life, it actually continues the activity it was accustomed to in the spiritual-soul world before birth. Through its imitative nature, the child shows us that it has retained the habit from before birth, only—one might say—it has turned the matter around. Before, it oriented itself toward what was to take shape within—its inner world—and now it faces the world from the outside. When the child faces the world, it is truly as if it had first been inside a sphere and is now looking at the sphere from the outside. The world one sees with the eyes presents the outer side of what one previously viewed from within. And this imitative nature is an impulse in all of the child’s activity, a continuation of what has been experienced in the spiritual world; and therefore, at this age, the relationship to the spiritual world first takes shape in the sensory world through imitation.

[ 11 ] Just consider what that means! Consider that the child seeks to adapt to the outside world according to the principles of the spiritual world that it internalizes in the first years of life; that during these years the child develops a sense of the true, and that it grows into the world in such a way that it forms the fundamental judgment: the things around me are just as true as everything that appeared to me in transparent clarity in the spiritual world. The sense of truth develops even before the child is taken to school. We are still experiencing precisely these final phases when the child is brought to school, and we must now receive this sense of truth in the right way. For if we do not receive it in the right way, we dull it instead of developing it properly.

[ 12 ] Do you think that when a child is brought to school, we simply make the child adapt in the usual way to what initially approaches human nature in a purely external way: reading and writing? This reading and writing, in its present form, approaches human nature in a purely external way. What one sees there, what one does when writing—in times not so long ago, this was done quite differently: pictures were made; thus, it did not merely recall reality in the form of symbols, but actually depicted reality. Today, when we introduce children to reading and writing without further ado, we are leading them into a completely foreign realm. They can no longer imitate in this context. If we introduce them in such a way that we show them pictures, teach them artistic, pictorial forms, and if we guide them to make themselves into reflections of the world through musical activities adapted to a child’s nature and so on, then we are continuing what the child does on its own until it is brought to school. If we do this by simply telling the child in a philistine manner—that an “I” must be formed this way and an “O” that way—then there is no reason for the child to take an interest in such things or to connect with them. The child must be connected in a certain way to what it is doing. And what now takes the place of the sense of imitation can only be the sense of beauty. We must begin to work from all sides to ensure that the child detaches from imitation in the right way, so that its imitation grows into a proper, more external relationship with the outside world. It must grow into beautiful representation. From imitation, it must grow into a beautiful representation of the external world. And what we teach the child regarding activities that are more oriented toward action, and what we teach regarding activities that are more oriented toward cognition, must actually still appear in a fairly undifferentiated way.

[ 13 ] When a child does eurythmy, when a child sings, what is the child actually doing? In a certain way, by detaching imitation from itself, the child continues to imitate. The child moves. Singing and listening to music are, at their core, inner movements, just as they are when imitating. And when we do eurythmy with the child, what are we actually doing? Instead of placing a stylus or a pen in the child’s hand and letting the child produce the shapes that represent the letters “A” and “E”—to which the child is supposed to have a purely cognitive relationship—we allow the child, through its own human form, to write into the world the very content of language. We do not abstract toward an abstract sign, but rather we let the person write into the world what they can write through their own organism. So, in a certain sense, we allow him to continue the activity he had in his pre-existing life. And when we then move not toward an abstract sign but toward the image in the process of learning to read and write, we do not thereby distance ourselves from his essence—because his essence must be engaged; we do not allow him to distance himself entirely from what his essence is. We teach this to the whole human being through practice and effort.

[ 14 ] Just think how far apart these two approaches are in terms of activity: on the one hand, we have the child in a purely physiological physical education class, where—essentially—we train them—albeit using different methods—just as we train animals we wish to tame. There, we proceed in such a way that we actually disregard the soul and the spirit. We set that aside on one hand, and on the other hand, we set aside that which has nothing at all to do with the physical. After all, we have already progressed so far with our writing and reading that the arms, fingers, and eyes—with their finer movements—are made so active that this alone already disregards the rest of the organism’s activity. We cut the human being right down the middle. In contrast, when we practice eurythmy—so that the movement itself contains what the child is also supposed to learn through writing and reading—we bring these things closer together. When the child engages in artistic activity and derives the letters and everything else from form and image, this is one and the same activity—one that is merely more subtly nuanced in a soul-spiritual sense when we practice eurythmy, or one that is carried out through the child’s own consciousness, as when listening to singing. We bring things together. We allow the child to be a unity.

[ 15 ] If we proceed this way, the following will happen—something that happens to me so often at events like this where parents are present. Then the parents come up to us—we just need to learn how to respond to parents when they come and say: “Couldn’t you do something to get my son into a different class where he has a male teacher, so he’ll have more respect? He’s already 8 years old and still can’t read or write.”—This is attributed to the fact that there’s a female teacher in the classroom. The parents believe that if he has a male teacher, he’ll be more likely to be disciplined properly. And that’s how we end up with these completely mistaken judgments that are lurking everywhere—and about which we must educate parents in particular. We mustn’t shock them. We can’t tell parents the same things we discuss among ourselves. We can’t say: “Be glad that your son still can’t read or write at age 9.” He’ll read and write all the better if he hasn’t mastered it by age 9; for if he can read and write beautifully at age 9, he’ll later become a robot, because something foreign has been instilled in him. He’ll become a robot. But those who, in their childhood, set something in opposition to reading and writing will become fully developed human beings. We must approach people who come from today’s educational system gently and not strike them down right away; otherwise, our efforts would be crushed. But with all gentleness, we must still teach them that it is truly no sin against the child’s Holy Spirit if, at the ages of 8 or 9, the child cannot read and write properly.

[ 16 ] Now, if we guide the child correctly into life in this way—by allowing the child to remain whole, without splitting the child into two parts—then around the age of 9 we experience an extraordinarily important moment in the child’s life that simply must be observed: The child suddenly begins to relate to the outside world in a completely different way than before. It is as if the child were awakening, as if it were beginning to develop a very special relationship with its own “I.” At this stage of life, around the age of nine, we should pay close attention to the child. And we should actually be paying attention from the very beginning. In today’s world, it can easily happen that the child shows us such tendencies relatively early on. We should pay attention to how the child comes to feel a sense of wonder inwardly. The child begins to feel wonder at all things. It develops a new relationship to everything. In normal children, this occurs between the ages of 9 and 10. If we now ask ourselves meaningfully, inwardly: What has actually happened to the child? — then we receive an answer that cannot be expressed quite precisely in the language of today, but which can be put roughly as follows: up until that point, if a mirror had been held up to the child and it had seen its own face in the mirror, it would have looked at it a little differently than it looks at external objects, but without any particular feeling. Just think about it: if you give a monkey a mirror—have you ever observed this?—it takes it and runs off to a place where it can look into it undisturbed, and then it stares into it and can’t be pried away. If you try to take the mirror away from it, it takes it very badly. It is incredibly intent on really taking in what it sees inside. But you will not have experienced a monkey changing in any way after looking into the mirror. You will not observe that the monkey has become much more vain. It makes no impression on it in that regard. What his immediate perception reflects back to him does make an impression on his powers of perception, but it does not transform him. He forgets it immediately when the mirror is taken away from him. He does not become more vain. From that moment on, from this age I am describing, the child would in fact be led, through seeing itself, to transform its earlier mode of feeling into vanity and coquetry. That is the difference between the monkey—which attaches far greater importance to seeing itself than the child does—and the child. In the case of the monkey, this does not consistently translate into emotional or volitional character traits. With the child, however, it must be said: when the child sees itself in the mirror from the age of 9½ years onward, seeing itself in the mirror is something that leaves a lasting impression and influences its character in a certain way. One could observe this if one were to conduct the experiment. — And isn’t it true that in an age when people want to turn pedagogy into an experimental science—because they can’t approach it any other way, having lost all sense of the inner world—there might also be a tendency to try to experimentally investigate this particularly important transition between the 9th and 10th — to have a “mirror” for each individual child during this time, constantly holding up that mirror, then having a piece of paper and always recording the specific developmental states the child exhibits, so that one can write it down in a book and turn it into a chapter on experimental pedagogy. But this procedure, as it pertains to the soul and spirit, is no different from saying: “Yes, we cannot uncover the mystery of human nature through our own means; we must resolve to kill one person every year so that, at the moment of death, we may gain insight into life.” Science does not yet permit such observations in the physical-sensory realm, but in the soul-spiritual realm, we have already reached the point where experiments are conducted in such a way that, at the same time, the unfortunate victims are, in a certain sense, crippled for life—that is, we are conducting precisely those experiments that should be avoided.

[ 17 ] For example, you can pick up books on experimental pedagogy and find that they advocate exactly the approach you should actually be taking a completely different stance on. For instance, you might find information about memory and sensory perception that you should avoid when dealing with a growing child. Experimental pedagogy makes precisely what should actually be abolished the subject of its experiment. Everything that should be prevented is drawn into the experiment. This is what is so destructive about contemporary civilization: it seeks everywhere to understand how corpses behave, rather than how life behaves. People want to figure out how corpses behave, instead of making an effort to observe how things unfold in life: how a child actually, in a subtle and delicate way, comes to a kind of wonder at everything happening in the world, because it begins to see itself within the world. It is only at this stage of life that one arrives at self-consciousness. When one sees it shining out everywhere, when one begins to feel and sense it everywhere in the plant and animal worlds, then one knows something about oneself. And this begins to awaken in the child between the ages of 9 and 10. It does not begin to awaken if one avoids encouraging the child to engage in creative activity, if one avoids guiding the child to perform meaningful actions through its own movements. That does not happen today. Children today are not educated in such a way that they perform meaningful actions. Like a poor little lamb led to pasture, they are led into the gym and taught through commands on how to move their arms and how to use the various pieces of equipment. There is nothing particularly spiritual about that, is there? Or have you noticed that something particularly spiritual is being pursued in these activities? Certainly, people speak very beautifully about these things. But these things are not imbued with spirit.

[ 18 ] What happens as a result? What happens is that at the age when an inner sense of beauty can best be instilled, the child does not have it instilled. The child would so much like to be amazed, but this capacity for wonder has been stifled. Take a typical curriculum used today; look at its tendencies: They consist of treating the child—when it is thrust into school at age 6 or 7—in such a way that it remains numb to the experiences it is supposed to have between the ages of 9 and 10. They do not experience it at all. But because they do not experience it at all, they retreat into physicality, remain rooted in physicality, instead of being rooted in consciousness. And the consequence of this—because what wants to be rooted in consciousness is instead rooted in physicality—is that it churns down there, that it transforms down there into feelings and impulses, and that people have feelings and impulses within them without knowing anything about them. So they go through life finding nothing in it anymore. This is, after all, a hallmark of our time: that people find nothing in life, since as children they did not learn to find beauty in life. They want to find everywhere only that which, in the driest sense, somehow enriches their knowledge. But they do not find the hidden, secret beauty everywhere, and their connection to life withers away entirely. This is the course of culture: the connection between human beings and nature is dying out. When one is deeply aware of this, when one has noticed something of it, then one knows that what matters is finding the right word—that around the age of nine, the child is now expecting something that will fill it with wonder. For if one fails to do this, one actually destroys an extraordinary amount. —One simply must learn to observe the child. One must grow into the child itself with feeling; one must be immersed within the child, not experimenting externally, but being immersed within it.

[ 19 ] It is truly the case that one must say: Human beings develop in such a way that they follow a certain life path from the moment when, in a lower layer, the phrase “You are an ‘I’” emerges, as it were, from language. — This phenomenon, which occurs relatively early in a child when it learns to say “I” to itself, is like something out of a dream and continues to exist like something out of a dream. The child is then brought to school. And as it is brought to school, we must redirect this. It wants to take a different direction. We must direct it toward artistic activity. And once we have engaged with the child in this way for a while, it makes its way back, and it passes once more through that point in life where it learned to say “I” to itself; then it continues along this path and, later, upon reaching sexual maturity, passes through this point once again. And we prepare for this moment by inspiring in the child, sometime between the ages of 9 and 10, a sense of wonder and admiration for the world. If we make the child’s sense of beauty more conscious, then we prepare the child so that, upon reaching sexual maturity, it learns to love the world in the right way—that is, to develop love in the right way.

[ 20 ] It is not just love between the sexes; that is only a special case. Love is that which extends beyond everything, the innermost impulse to action: we should do what we love. Duty should grow together with love; we should take pleasure in what we are supposed to do. And this develops in the right way only if we guide the child properly. Thus, throughout the entire elementary school years, we must take care to cultivate a sense of beauty in the right way. For the child brings a sense of truth with them to a certain extent; the sense of beauty, however, we must nurture in the manner I have described.

[ 21 ] The fact that the sense of truth is, in a certain way, innate is evident in the fact that children learn to speak before they start school. Language, after all, contains, so to speak, an embodiment of truth, an embodiment of knowledge. We must always rely on language if we wish to fathom the truth about the world. Hence the fact that people like Mauthner believe, in the first place, that everything is already contained within language. People like Mauthner, who wrote *Critique of Language*, actually believe that one does a person an injustice by taking them beyond the age at which they learn language. Mauthner wrote *Critique of Language* not because he does not believe in the world, but because he believes that people should be left in a childlike state—the state in which they learn language. If this mindset became widespread, we would all have a mind like that of a child just learning to speak. This mindset tends toward creating people who are at the same level as children once they have learned to speak. After all, everything else is rejected today; everything else is labeled as “not naive” and the like.

[ 22 ] The point now is that we must empathize with the very essence of the concept of imitation, so that we can then see, in the concept of authority, how a sense of beauty develops between us—as the authority figure—and the child. And if we have pursued this up to the point where the child reaches puberty, then—as the child grows into a love for the ideal—a sense of the good develops in the proper way. We must keep the child close to us so that it does what is good until it reaches puberty. Until then, we must work through our mutual interaction in such a way that the child does what is good. It is indeed necessary that when an eleven-, twelve-, or thirteen-year-old child does good, the educator’s authority stands so firmly behind them that, at the very moment they do good, they feel as though they are thereby pleasing their teacher and educator. And they should avoid doing wrong. They should feel that wrongdoing comes from some undefined source and causes dissatisfaction. Somewhere, the child should sense the presence of the educator. In this way, the child should grow closer to the teacher and the educator. Only with the onset of puberty should the child begin to outgrow this bond.

[ 23 ] If we educate and raise the child in such a way that we already consider it mature by the time it starts school, and guide it toward forming its own judgments as soon as it has learned to speak—that is, basing everything on direct observation—then we leave the child at the stage of development where it has learned to speak and simply do not allow it to progress further. So if we do not allow the child to truly undergo a transformation with sexual maturity—if we do not allow the child to truly shed something by first accustoming it to authority—then the child cannot grow beyond that authority. The child must first have experienced authority. Only then, with sexual maturity, can the child grow beyond the sense of authority and seek its own judgment.

[ 24 ] We must then truly enter into a relationship with the child in which each one chooses his or her own hero, following in that hero’s footsteps up to Olympus. Of course, this involves all sorts of discomforts. We can no longer take it for granted that we will remain the child’s natural ideal. We must then live up to that ideal ourselves. Earlier on, one can still command it. With the onset of puberty, however, the child begins to notice and becomes very sensitive to the teacher’s and educator’s shortcomings. We must consciously expose ourselves to this risk—that the child will become highly sensitive to precisely what the teacher himself should not do. In particular, you will notice that during this time the child becomes very sensitive to the teacher’s attitude. But if we are sincere with the child—rather than acting out of self-interest—then we will educate and teach precisely with this capacity for feeling in mind. Then we will foster precisely what is needed to establish a free relationship with the growing youth. And then we will ensure that the human being grows into the True in the right way—the True that is, as it were, bestowed upon them from a spiritual world as an inheritance—that they grow together with the Beautiful in the right way, and that in this world of sensory existence they learn the Good that they are to embody here. It is nothing short of a sin to speak of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good in an abstract sense without drawing attention, in concrete terms, to how they relate to the various stages of life.

[ 25 ] Of course, my dear friends, when one makes such a brief reflection over the course of just a few days, one can always offer only a small glimpse of what is meant to come to us; we can only gradually grow into the tasks set before us. But truly: we are already growing into them in a certain way of our own accord, when we are guided by the power we gain from the things we acquire, when we view everything physical and sensory from a spiritual and soulful perspective, and when we observe the world while always keeping our gaze fixed on the human being. We must do this especially as educators, as those to whom young people are entrusted; there, above all else, we must truly feel ourselves to be a part of the whole of the world, within which the development of humanity plays a major role.

[ 26 ] That is why I always want what we feel when another school year begins, when we start anew, to be, in a certain way, imbued with a true sense of our great task—that we feel ourselves, in all humility, to be missionaries of human development. In this sense, I always hope that what I say to you on such an occasion will also contain something like a prayerful elevation toward the spiritual, which we call upon not merely as an intellectual concept but as a living force descending upon us.

[ 27 ] I would like you to become aware that the spiritual is spreading among us like a living cloud, imbued with soul and spirit, and to feel that the living spirits themselves are being summoned by what we say among ourselves at the beginning of a new school year; that these living spirits themselves are being summoned, that we are imploring them: Help us, bring living spirituality among us, pour it into our souls, into our hearts, so that we may act in the right way.

[ 28 ] If you feel that this should also be an emotional experience—one that we take as the starting point for the beginning of our year—then you will sense an intention connected to these reflections, and that is why I would like to add something like a short meditation formula at the end of these reflections. This meditation formula is to read:

[ 29 ] We want to work by allowing into our work that which, from the spiritual world, seeks to become human within us—both in a soul-spiritual way and in a bodily-physical way.