The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. The Spiritual Foundation of Education II

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen, first of all, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks once again today for the words that were just read aloud; I certainly take them to mean an encouragement for what we will be undertaking here in the coming days. I was informed yesterday that some parts of the reflections I shared yesterday were more difficult to understand, specifically because difficulties arose regarding the use of the terms “spiritual” and “spiritual knowledge.” This prompts me to slightly alter the topic I had set for myself today and to begin by addressing the use of the terms “spirit” and “spiritual life,” which will take us somewhat away from the topic of teaching and education. Based solely on the feedback I received yesterday, I can conclude that we will be able to understand one another better in the coming days if I address these points regarding spirit, soul, and body today. I will certainly have the opportunity to present what I actually intended to say today in the coming days.

[ 2 ] At the same time, however, a discussion such as the one we must have today tends to make one a bit more theoretical and lead one to speak in ideas and concepts. I ask you to bear with me on that for today; things will get better again in the coming days. I won’t be so cruel as to torment you with ideas and concepts, but I may perhaps be able to please you with facts.

[ 3 ] The word “spirit” within the worldview and understanding of life from whose perspective we are speaking here—as well as the word “spiritual”—is usually not taken seriously enough. When the word “spirit” is used, people tend to look for something akin to “intellectuality,” or something similar to what is generally meant by the English word “mind.” Yet what I mean here by “spiritual” and “spirit” is something entirely different. It is by no means to be confused with all those things that are regarded as “spirit” and “spiritual” by, for example, mystical, fanatical, or superstitious, sectarian movements; but it is something entirely different from the intellect and from what is referred to as “mind.”

[ 4 ] If we can gain a true insight—a direct, actual understanding—of what is at work internally in a very young child up until the time of tooth replacement, in such a way that it cannot be directly perceived but can only be observed in the child’s outward expressions, however primitive these may seem to us, that is “spirit,” and that is “soul.”

[ 5 ] Otherwise, when we observe nature and human life, we never encounter the spirit and the soul in this sense, except when we observe the very small child’s expressions of life. As I said yesterday, the spiritual forces are at work within the structure of the brain and in the development of the entire organism; the essences of the soul are at work there. What we see are the child’s expressions of life; we perceive them through the senses. But what acts through the veil of what is perceptible to the senses is spirit, is soul; in a way that we can never otherwise perceive them in life without inner spiritual development. So we must say: Spirit is, at first, something entirely unknown to ordinary perception. The soul reveals itself, at most, in ordinary perceptions. But we must feel and sense it through these perceptions.

[ 6 ] If I may use an analogy—merely to illustrate, not to explain—I would like to say: When we speak, we do so in such a way that our words and sounds consist of consonants and vowels. Note the great difference between consonants and vowels in speech. Consonants—they round out the sound, they sharpen it, they turn it into a blowing sound or a rippling sound, depending on which organ we use to form the sound—the lips or the teeth.

[ 7 ] Vowels are produced in a completely different way. Vowels are produced by directing the airflow through the speech organs in a certain way. We do not round our lips; rather, we form the substance of the sound through the vowels. To draw a comparison, we might say: The vowels provide us with the substance, the material. The consonants give shape to what the vowels provide as substance.

[ 8 ] When we speak of spirit and soul in the sense intended here, we must say: Spirit is in the consonants of language; soul is in the vowels of language. When a child begins to say “A,” there is something within it—a sense of wonder, a content of the soul. It lives out this content of the soul directly before us. It flows through the “A.”

[ 9 ] When the child utters the “e” sound, there is something like a quiet antipathy within the soul. It withdraws, recoils from whatever makes an impression. There is an element of antipathy in the soul that finds expression in the “E.” Amazement: A—Antipathy: E—the soulful nature of the vowel.

[ 10 ] When I form any consonant, I round my lips; I shape the vowel. When the child says “Ma-Ma”—the “A” twice—it expresses what is conveyed, for example, by this gesture of seeking help from the mother. “A” represents what the child feels and senses toward the mother; “M” is what the child wants the mother to do. And so, in “Ma-Ma,” the child’s entire relationship to the mother—in soul and spirit—is contained. This is how we hear language: we perceive its sensory aspects, but we do not pay attention to how soul and spirit are hidden within it. In language, one sometimes still becomes aware of this. But in the whole human being, one no longer pays attention to it. One sees the outer form of the human being. The soul and the spirit are just as present there as they are in language. But one no longer pays attention to them.

[ 11 ] But people once took this into account in the dawn of humanity, when they did not say: “In the beginning, in the very beginning, there was the Spirit”—that would have seemed too abstract—but rather they said: ‘In the very beginning was the Word’—because people still had a vivid sense that the Spirit moves upon the waves of language. This Spirit is that which, by its very nature, is referred to here as the spiritual—that which does not manifest itself in our intellect, nor in what is called the ‘mind.’ “Mind” and “spirit” are distinct from one another, as distinct as my personality is when I stand here, hold a mirror, and see myself in it; there, within it, is my reflection. This reflection makes the same movements that I make; it resembles me, but it is not me; it differs from me in that it is an image, while I am reality. Spirit reigns in the hidden realm. The intellect perceives the spirit only as a reflection. “Mind” is the reflection of the spirit. “Mind” can show what the spirit does; “mind” can perform the movements of the spirit, but “mind” is passive. “Mind” can reflect when someone strikes me; “mind” cannot deliver the blow itself. The Spirit is activity. The Spirit is always in action. The Spirit is creative. The Spirit is the absolutely productive. “Mind,” the intellect, is the reflection, the absolutely passive, that which we carry within us in later life in order to understand the world. If the intellect—if “mind”—were active, we would not be able to understand the world, for “mind” must be passive so that the world can be understood through it. If it were active, it would constantly be changing and manipulating the world. It is the passive image of the spirit.

[ 12 ] And so we must tell ourselves: Just as we must look beyond the reflection to the person if we want to arrive at reality, so too must we try—if we want to seek the spirit and soul of reality—to move from the unproductive and passive to the productive and active.

[ 13 ] This is what people have been seeking ever since the dawn of human evolution. And today I would like to speak to you about some of the paths of this search, so that we may reach a common understanding of what “spirit” and “soul” actually mean when I speak of them here.

[ 14 ] As adults, we initially perceive the spirit only in its reflection as intellect, as “mind,” as reason. We perceive the soul only in its manifestations, in its revelations. We are closer to the soul than to the spirit, but we do not perceive it in its full inner activity either. We perceive it in its manifestations; the spirit only in an image—an image contains nothing of reality—the soul in its manifestations. What we experience as a feeling, as antipathy, as sympathy, what we experience as a desire, as passion, rests in the soul; but we do not perceive what the soul actually is within us.

[ 15 ] What is the soul within us? Well, perhaps I can shed some light on what the soul is within us by distinguishing between what we experience ourselves and what is created within us so that we may experience something.

[ 16 ] When we walk on soft ground, our footprints remain in it. Someone comes along, sees our footprints—will that person say: “Down there, beneath the earth, there are certain forces that have shaped the ground so that it takes on such concave forms”? No one will say that. Everyone will say: Someone walked across it.

[ 17 ] The materialistic view of the soul says: I find grooves in the brain; the brain has impressions. — The ground also has impressions when I have walked over it! — Now the materialistic view comes along and says: “There are forces inside the brain that make those furrows.” — Incorrect! The soul makes the furrows, just as I make them on the ground, and it is precisely because there are furrows inside that I perceive the soul at all. I perceive a feeling in the soul. The soul is initially hidden. It has made the furrows in my body. If I make a very deep furrow, it hurts me; it causes pain. I do not initially perceive what I have made there; I can do that later as well. But even if I do not see what I am doing, I perceive the pain. In this way, the soul, as it were, etches an impression onto my body, hidden. I perceive the effect in passions, in sympathy, and so on—the effect in the revelation of what the soul does. With the mind, it is the image; with the soul, it is the revelation.

[ 18 ] We are closer to the soul. But we must bear in mind that the spirit or soul must be sought at a deeper level than the “mind,” intellect, reason, or rationality.

[ 19 ] This may perhaps contribute somewhat to our understanding of the mind and the soul. To clarify the concepts of spirit and soul even further, I would now like to touch on some historical points—I am very often misunderstood in this regard, and I ask that you not misunderstand me today—in order to explain, not to assert, that in order to arrive at an understanding of spirit and soul, we must still do things today exactly as they were done in earlier times. But today’s method of approaching the mind and the soul is more easily understood if we consider historical context.

[ 20 ] In the 20th century, we can no longer approach the spirit in the same way it was done centuries or even millennia ago in ancient India. Nor can we do so in the same way it was done before the reality of the Mystery of Golgotha. We are living in the evolution of Christianity. But we can understand spirit and soul if we look back to this older way, if we perceive, in particular, how very different the path to spirit and soul is for the spiritual person compared to the merely intellectual person.

[ 21 ] If we want to gain clarity about ourselves today by stepping back from the general consciousness of our time, what do we do? We reflect; we engage our intellect. Even if we want to gain clarity about nature, what do we do? We conduct experiments and engage our intellect in those experiments. Intellectual activity everywhere. In ancient times, people sought to reach the spirit and the soul in a completely different way. They sought—and I want to highlight two examples from the many I could cite—to reach the spirit and the soul in ancient times, in the East, through the so-called yoga method. Yoga—the very mention of the name today evokes a slight sense of horror in many people, for historically we are actually familiar only with the later yoga methods, which are largely based on the egoism of people who want to possess something powerful in the external world. The older yoga methods—which today can really only be discovered through spiritual science, not through external science—were paths that human beings took toward the spirit. What were they based on? They were based on the fact that, out of a certain instinct, people said to themselves: We cannot reach the spirit through mere thinking alone. We must do something that reveals within us an activity, an inner dynamism, far more than mere thinking. We can stand somewhere apart from the world, playing the role of a spectator, while thinking takes place within us. We do not bring about any change within ourselves that is perceptible to us.

[ 22 ] Jogi was seeking a much more real process within himself than we seek today when we want to understand the spirit. When we ask ourselves, based on our current physiological knowledge: What happens when we intellectualize? — Well, something happens in our nervous system, in our brain, and in those parts of the rest of the organism that are connected to the brain via the nerves. But what happens there in the nerves could never occur if a much more perceptible activity were not intertwined with the processes of our brain. From birth to death, we breathe in, hold our breath, and breathe out ceaselessly. When we inhale, the air we breathe flows throughout our entire organism. The breath is driven through the spinal canal into the brain. We do not breathe only with our lungs; we also breathe with our brain. Our brain is constantly in motion. Breathing—inhaling, holding our breath, and exhaling—ripples through and animates our brain. This takes place—entirely unconsciously for us today. The yogi said: “Something is happening within the human being; I want to become conscious of it.” So he did not breathe in the usual, unconscious way, but rather he breathed in an unusual, abnormal manner; he inhaled differently, held his breath differently, and exhaled differently. Through this, he became aware of the breathing process. And what remains entirely unconscious to us took place fully within his consciousness as he recognized and felt it. And so he gradually sensed how, in the brain, breathing was connected to what underlies the material activity of thinking and intellectualization. He sought this connection between thinking and breathing, and he finally sensed how the thought—which is something abstract for us—moves through the entire body on the waves of the breath. There, the thought was not only in the brain, not only in the lungs, not only in the heart—there, the thought was in every fingertip. There, by actually feeling the breath pulsing through oneself, one experienced how the spirit is creative through the breath in human beings: “And God breathed into man the breath of life, and he became a soul.” He did not breathe the breath into us only at the beginning; rather, He continues to breathe it into us as we breathe. And it is in the process of breathing—not in thinking, not in the intellectual process—that we become soul. We feel our being by sensing the thought pulsing through our entire body on the waves of the breath. You see, now the thought—the spirit—was no longer regarded as something intellectual, as something abstract and separate; now one sensed it, felt it throughout the entire body; now one felt oneself as a human being, a creature of the spirit. You see, one had the active spirit.

[ 23 ] In intellectual activity, we have the passive mind, not the active one. Today, because we are organized differently, we can no longer replicate this yoga process—nor should we. For what was the yogi’s aim? His aim was to feel how his thought process was linked to the breathing process, and to perceive his humanity within that breathing process—which he then experienced as insight. He connected thought more intimately with the human being than we do today. But our human progress is based on the fact that we have detached thought itself much more—made it much more intellectual—than was the case back when the yoga method flourished. With a system of thought such as that developed by the ancient Indians when they were yogis, it would never have been possible to make the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Faraday, Darwin, and so on. For that, thought was needed as a mere image, as intellectuality. And our entire civilization is based on the fact that we are no longer like those who developed the philosophy of yoga. This is usually misunderstood when I explain these things. People think I want to lead people back to the philosophy of yoga. Not at all! Rather, I want to approach things exactly as they must be approached in the age of Copernicus, Galileo, and Faraday. We must recognize that our Western civilization has grown great through intellectuality. But at the same time, we must perceive things differently from those who lived in ancient India, and we must also perceive them differently from those who wish to practice yoga today. Today we must proceed in a completely different way—even more spiritually than was done in ancient India. And because it is supposed to be more spiritual, and because people today do not hold the spirit in high regard, they do not particularly appreciate the newer method. It is convenient today—or at least it seems convenient—to practice yoga breathing in order to find one’s way into the spiritual world. But that is not the path by which modern man should enter the spiritual realm. No, modern man must first have experienced everything that, in mere intellectualism, can be perceived as unreal—as an image; he must first have gone through all the suffering that consists in telling oneself: “By thinking, by engaging merely intellectually in the experiment or in other observations, I am living in emptiness, in mere images.” I have distanced myself from reality.

[ 24 ] What I am expressing here may seem trivial; yet it is profound in terms of inner experience. Once one experiences that all thinking that takes place in the intellectual realm is unreal—a mere image—then one experiences in the soul the same thing one physically experiences as a sense of powerlessness. Powerlessness in the face of reality. True knowledge does not arise from the resolve: “I can think, and therefore I can reflect on all things”; true knowledge arises from saying to oneself: “And if I were to reflect on all things using the mental images I possess, I would be nothing more than a powerless being.” The yogi sought his true self in the breath. We modern people must lose our sense of self in a powerlessness that we feel in the face of the mental image, the intellectualistic. Then we must be able to say to ourselves: Now we do not turn inward, as the yogi did, toward the breath process; now we turn outward, look at every plant, look at every animal, look at every human being, and live with the external world.

[ 25 ] In my book *How Does One Gain Insight into the Higher Worlds?*, I have described how to do this—how to look at the plant not merely from the outside, but to follow each of its processes, so that thinking emerges entirely from the realm of mere imagery and participates in the real life of the external world. One immerses oneself in the plant, so that one feels how gravity draws down into the root toward the earth, how the flowering force unfolds upward. One experiences the blooming and the fruiting firsthand. One plunges completely into the external world. There, there one is carried away by the external world. One awakens again as if from a faint. But one no longer has abstract thoughts; one has imaginations. One has images. And in these images that one receives, one no longer sees any knowledge from the standpoint of materialism. One says: Knowledge must take place in abstract, logical terms. Yes, but what if the world is not such that it yields to the abstract concepts of logic!—If the world were a work of art, for example, then we would have to perceive it artistically, not logically; then logic would merely be there to discipline us. But we would understand nothing of the world through logic.

[ 26 ] So we must immerse ourselves in things. Where the yogi has turned inward, we turn outward, striving to connect with all things, and thus attain the same in deed, only in a more soulful, more spiritual way. By allowing our concepts, ideas—that which represents mere intellectuality—to be permeated by reality, we feel once again how creative the spirit within us is.

[ 27 ] Then we can sense what is truly at work within the child. It is not what we carried out within ourselves as the “mind.” That would not be creative in such a very young child. It would only lead to our losing ourselves. But what we arrive at through the creative process just described is what works within the child—what causes the second set of teeth to follow the pattern of the first, and what ceases to have a formative effect by the age of 7.

[ 28 ] Look, you might say: Yes, but a teacher can’t just become a clairvoyant overnight. He can’t possibly master all these methods! How are we supposed to manage with schools and the educational system if we assume such a complicated path is necessary to enter into the spirit?

[ 29 ] That is not necessary. There may be some people in the world who develop higher insight in this way. The others need only sound judgment and a sound perspective. They will discover what the individual has discovered through sound judgment and a sound perspective. Just as not everyone can observe the transits of Venus—since they are, after all, far too rare—astronomers can do so precisely during the times when they are visible; but would it therefore be nonsensical to speak of the transits of Venus simply because not everyone has observed them? What is observed, and how it is observed, can be understood. The same is true of the spiritual world. It is merely a bit of today’s selfishness that always wants to do everything on its own.

[ 30 ] But there is another way to make what is spiritual fruitful and useful. I would like to illustrate this with an example. Let’s suppose, for example, that I am teaching a child who is perhaps 9 or 10 years old. I want to teach the child about immortality—the immortality of the human soul. No matter how beautifully I present my philosophical arguments, the child will not understand anything at first. The child remains completely unaffected by what I present to them. But if I now say to them: “Dear child, look at how the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis, how it flies out of the chrysalis,” then you have an image that you can apply to human beings. Look at the human body—it’s like a butterfly chrysalis. And just as the butterfly flies out of the chrysalis, so does the soul fly out of the body when death comes. The only difference is that the butterfly is visible, while the soul is invisible.

[ 31 ] Well, I just want to hint at this image. But I will elaborate on this image further with the child. I can have two different experiences when I apply this. I can find a teacher—a man or a woman—who explains this image to the child, and the child gains nothing from it. The child may have a very beautiful image, but for their soul—for what is to be achieved—it means nothing at all. Another teacher explains this same image, perhaps using the very same words, let’s say, and the child gains an immense amount from it. The child is completely absorbed in it in their soul. So where is the difference? The difference is that the first teacher is terribly clever—infinitely clever. That’s why they tell themselves: “Well, a clever person doesn’t really believe that the doll and the butterfly are a picture; I’m only doing this because the child is stupid. The child is stupid; I’m clever. I’m creating a picture for the child.” The clever teacher, who has the “stupid” child sitting next to them and has created a clever image for that child, is not understood by the child. You can be sure of it—they won’t be understood! Then there is another teacher who believes in their own image. They tell themselves: “The divine order of the world has placed this image within nature itself so that we may understand immortality.” It is not there so that we can invent it, but rather so that we may discover this image. The creative spirit in nature creates this image for us so that we may see immortality in it. God Himself has painted this image before us. We believe in this image, just as the child is meant to believe. And the child has everything it needs, simply because we ourselves do not say, “We are smart and the child is stupid”—but rather, we say, “The child brought its intelligent spirit into the world at birth.” The child is smart. The spirit has simply not yet been awakened. If we cannot awaken it, we are the stupid ones, not the child.

[ 32 ] If we can just for a moment entertain the thought that the child is actually secretly smart and we are apparently stupid, and that our task with regard to the child is precisely to learn from the child and only then become smart ourselves, then our teaching will have an impact on the child.

[ 33 ] And then, if that is the case, in the first example we have seen, through the teacher—the man or woman who thought themselves clever—the workings of the intellect; and in the second example, the workings of the spirit, of the spiritual, of that which is alive within, which connects with things, and which can also be at work even if one has no clairvoyant perception of the spirit. There, the spirit is the active force. One acts in the spirit when one believes in one’s own image. If one does not believe in it, but instead forms the image out of sheer cleverness and intellectualism, one stands outside of reality with intellectualism and the “mind,” and one has merely a mirror image. Mirror images do not act; mirror images are inactive. Mirror images are merely passive. The spirit is productive; the spirit is creative. And above all, in order to act in the spirit, we must find our way into the creative.

[ 34 ] And so, through the path of spiritual work—by immersing ourselves in the process of imagination—we draw near to the Spirit and gradually enter into the Spirit, into that which is the spiritual. We need only first to feel the powerlessness of the intellectual realm; then we enter into the spiritual realm.

[ 35 ] We have come so far that this must surely be the conclusion for today. I will then take the liberty of describing another path into the spirit tomorrow and then continue with our reflections. Yesterday’s request already provided the impetus to discuss these concepts in greater detail. I ask that you accept this out of necessity, so that we may understand one another. Very soon—once I have explained the other path, that of asceticism as opposed to the yoga method—this cruel game will come to an end, and we will indeed immerse ourselves in the paths of educational life.