The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Sixth Lecture

[ 1 ] We concluded yesterday by setting forth what, at one limit of human knowledge of nature, constitutes genuine, true knowledge; we concluded by characterizing inspiration. I drew your attention to how, through inspiration, a person grows into a spiritual world in which they then know themselves to be present, and in which they simultaneously know themselves to be outside their body; and I showed you how this process of growing into that world unfolds, rising from a musical element that is, so to speak, without tone, up to the point of growing into an individualized, essential element. It has probably also become clear from yesterday’s remarks on hypercriticism and hyperskepticism that pathological conditions can arise in human beings when this stepping out of the body occurs, so to speak, without the “I” being brought along—when the human being does not weave his full consciousness, his “I”-consciousness, into the very states he is experiencing during inspiration. When a person brings this “I” into this inspiration, it constitutes a healthy—indeed, a necessary—advance in human cognition. But when, in a cultural epoch such as the present one—where the human being simply strives to free itself from the organism—a person instinctively, unconsciously, and pathologically allows this process to overwhelm them, then precisely those pathological states emerge that were discussed yesterday. We have, so to speak, these two poles within our human nature. Either we can turn our gaze toward that which offers us a free spiritual outlook into the highest realities, or—by avoiding it, by failing to muster the courage to penetrate this realm with full consciousness, and instead allowing ourselves to be driven by the unconscious forces of human nature—we can fall into a state of illness within the human organism. And it would be a mistake to believe that one is protected from this illness by avoiding the pursuit of the true spiritual world. One succumbs to this illness in any case when the instincts drive the astral body—as we then say—out of the human organism. And what is experienced by the fact that we—even if we do not ourselves enter this spiritual world, which has been characterized, in an exploratory manner—simply take in the ideas of Spiritual Science through rational understanding, that fully protects us, especially in the present time, from the unhealthy descent into those pathological states—even if they occur only on the soul level—that had to be characterized yesterday from one perspective.

[ 2 ] But what, exactly, do we bring into the higher world when we bring our full consciousness into it? You need only follow human development a little, from birth through the change of teeth and beyond, and you will find that, alongside the development of language, thinking, and so on, a particularly significant element in this human development is the gradual emergence and transformation of memory. And when you then look at the course of human life, you will understand the full importance of memory for a full human existence. If, due to any pathological conditions, memory is interrupted—so that we cannot recall certain experiences we have had, resulting, as it were, in a discontinuity of memory—then we fall prey to a serious mental illness, for we feel, as it were, the thread of the “I” that otherwise runs through our lives being severed. This memory—you can also read about this in my Theosophy—is closely connected to the “I.” Therefore, we must not lose what is expressed in memory as we travel this path, which I described yesterday. We must, so to speak, take the power within our soul that endows us with memory with us into the world of inspiration.

[ 3 ] But just as everything in nature changes—just as a plant transforms its green leaves into red petals as it grows upward, and just as everything in nature is based on metamorphosis—so it is with the stages of human life. When, under the influence of full self-consciousness, we truly carry the power of memory out into the world of inspiration, it transforms; it undergoes a metamorphosis. Hence, on the one hand, one experiences that at those moments in life when, as a spiritual researcher, one is in a state of inspiration, one does not have ordinary memory at one’s disposal. This ordinary memory is available only in healthy life within the body; in life outside the body, this memory is not available.

[ 4 ] This gives rise to a peculiar fact that may seem paradoxical to you—since I am presenting it to your inner eye for the first time—but which is nonetheless based entirely on reality. Anyone who has truly become a spiritual researcher—and who, through inspiration, thus penetrates concretely into true spiritual reality as described in my books—must experience it anew every time he wishes to keep it in his consciousness. Therefore, when someone speaks about the spiritual world out of inspiration—not from mere notes or mere memory, but when they directly express what is revealed to them in the spiritual world—they must perform the work of spiritual perception anew each time. The power of memory has been transformed in this process. One has retained only the power to bring the same thing forth again and again. Therefore, the spiritual researcher himself does not have it as easy as the person who relies solely on memory. He cannot simply recount some information from memory; rather, he must produce anew each time what presents itself to him within the inspiration. And in essence, this is no different from how it is with ordinary physical-sensory perception. If you truly wish to perceive in the physical-sensory world, you cannot walk away from the perceived objects and have the same perception in another place. You must return to the objects. In the same way, the spiritual researcher must return in the spiritual realm to the same content of spiritual consciousness. And just as one must learn, in physical perception, to move through space in order to perceive one thing or another in turn, so must the spiritual researcher who attains inspiration learn to move freely within the element of time. He must, so to speak—if I may use this paradoxical expression—be able to swim in the element of time. He must learn to move in step with time itself. And when he has learned this, he will find that the power of memory has been transformed into something else, that a metamorphosis has taken place within the power of memory. What memory has accomplished in the ordinary physical-sensory world, he must now replace with spiritual perception. But that into which memory has been transformed gives him the perception of a more comprehensive “I.” Now the fact of repeated earthly lives becomes a matter of knowledge. Now the “I” is recognized in its expansion. Now that memory—which holds together the Powers of the “I” between birth and death— now that this memory has been transformed, the content of the “I” bursts through the shell that encompasses only a single life; now the realization of repeated earthly lives—between which a purely spiritual existence is lived out between death and a new birth—now this realization emerges as something that is actually recognized.

[ 5 ] On the other hand—the side of consciousness—a different perspective emerges when one attempts to avoid what an ancient view of the spiritual, which I have already characterized for you as that of the Vedanta philosophies, for example, did not yet recognize. We in the West, on the one hand, sense the loftiness of the spiritual perspective when we immerse ourselves in ancient Eastern wisdom. We sense how, in Vedanta philosophy, the soul was carried up into spiritual realms where it could move freely—just as a Westerner, with ordinary consciousness, can move only within mathematical, geometric, and analytical-mechanical thinking. But when we descend into the vast realms that were accessible to ordinary consciousness in the East, we find something that we Westerners, by virtue of our more advanced stage of human development, can no longer tolerate; we find extensive symbolism and allegorization of external nature. This symbolization, this allegorization, this thinking about external nature in images—this is precisely what we are clearly aware of; it leads us away from true reality, from a true insight into nature. It has given way to certain religious creeds. Certain religious creeds no longer know what to make of this art of symbolism, which has fallen into decadence, nor of this art of mythologization. For us in the West, what the Easterners applied so directly to external nature in an illusory world—through which they believed they could recognize something in external nature—has come to have value for us only insofar as we use it as an inner exercise for further spiritual exploration. We must cultivate the very spiritual power that the people of the East used for symbolization and anthropomorphism. We must exercise this power inwardly while remaining fully aware that we fall into superstition and nature worship if we use this power for anything other than shaping our own souls. I will speak to you here on another occasion about the details—which, incidentally, you can also find in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?

[ 6 ] But by applying this power—which the Eastern person directs outward—inwardly as a power of practice, and by first cultivating mental images within oneself in this way, one truly comes to develop insights on the other side, the side of consciousness. One gradually comes to transform abstract, purely conceptual thinking into pictorial thinking. And then something occurs that I can only call experiential thinking. One experiences pictorial thinking. Why does one experience it? Indeed, one experiences nothing other than what is at work within the body itself during the early years of childhood, as I have described to you. One does not experience the human organism as it is quietly formed in space and does not change its form, but rather experiences that which lives and weaves within the human being. One experiences it in images. One gradually works one’s way toward a vision of the real life of the soul. On the other hand, what develops into insight is that which lies within consciousness: imaginative mental images, life in imaginations. And without advancing into this life of imaginations, modern psychology cannot move forward. Only by advancing toward imaginations will it be possible for a psychology to emerge once again that transcends mere quibbling over words—a psychology that truly looks into the human being.

[ 7 ] And just as the time has now come for human beings to transcend their physical bodies through general cultural conditions—to strive toward inspiration, as we have seen in the example of Nietzsche—so, too, has the time now come for human beings, if they wish to know themselves, to feel drawn toward imagination. Human beings must delve deeper into themselves than was necessary in the cultural developments up to now. If development is not to descend into barbarism, human beings must arrive at true self-knowledge. And they can do this only by receiving knowledge through imagination. That human beings are striving inward in this way—that they wish to delve deeper into their inner selves than has been the case in the course of culture to date—is evident to us once again in what has only recently been described as emerging pathological conditions in their specific modern forms by those who are able to study such phenomena from the perspective of psychiatry or medicine in general. This is shown to us above all by the emergence of agoraphobia, astraphobia, and claustrophobia—forms of illness that occur particularly frequently in our time. And while they are generally observed only in their psychiatric manifestations, the more discerning observer perceives something quite different. He sees agoraphobia, astraphobia, and so on, already emerging in the purely psychological realm within human development—just as he saw inspiration emerge in a pathological form in Friedrich Nietzsche—he sees, above all, in those states of mind that are often still regarded as normal on the surface, precisely what appears in agoraphobia, in the fear of open spaces, and in the fear of enclosed spaces. He sees emerging that which emerges in astraphobia—when people sense something internally and do not quite know how to cope with it, when this inner sensing goes so far that, for example, their digestive organs are affected and their digestion is thereby disrupted. He learns to recognize what one might call the fear of loneliness, claustrophobia—when people cannot be alone, when, in a pathological way, they can only be present—always and everywhere—if they have company around them and the like. These things come to the surface. These things show how humanity is currently striving toward imagination, and how an affliction that would otherwise become a cultural affliction can be combated only through imagination. Fear of open spaces—it is, after all, an affliction that manifests itself in a frightening way in some people. These people are growing up. From a certain point in their lives, strange conditions begin to appear in them. When they step out of a front door onto a square that is perhaps sparsely populated, they are seized by a fear that is unfathomable to them. They are afraid of something; they do not dare to take another step on the empty square, and if they do take another step, they may sink to their knees or perhaps even fall over, overcome by a sense of powerlessness. The moment even a child approaches, the person in question grasps the child’s arm, or simply holds out his hand toward the child’s body, and at that very moment he feels his inner strength return, and the agoraphobia subsides. One case described in the medical literature is particularly interesting. A young man who felt strong enough to become an officer was suddenly overcome by agoraphobia during a military exercise, just as he was sent out to map a certain area. His fingers trembled; he could not draw; wherever he is surrounded by emptiness—or at least what he perceives as emptiness—he is overcome by a fear that he immediately recognizes as pathological. It happens near a mill. In order to fulfill his duty at all, he must always have a small child standing next to him, and simply having the child there is what enables him to draw again. We ask ourselves: Where do such phenomena come from? Where, for example, do the other phenomena come from—such as the fact that there are people who, if at night they have somehow forgotten to open the door to their bedroom—which may already be a long-standing habit of theirs—awaken from sleep drenched in sweat and cannot help but jump up and open the door; for they cannot bear to be in a locked room. There are people who reach the point where they must have all windows and doors open, and even—if the house is in a courtyard—must leave the courtyard gate open, so that they have the awareness that they are free to step out into the open at any time. This claustrophobia is something one can already see emerging—even if it does not often occur in this radical form—something one can see emerging when one is able to observe people’s mental states more closely.

[ 8 ] And then there are people who feel something inexplicable in their bodies, even to the point of physical sensations. What is it? It is an approaching thunderstorm, or other atmospheric conditions. There are people today—otherwise very intelligent people—who must draw the curtains when there is lightning or thunder; they must then be in a dark room, for only in this way can they protect themselves against what they experience from the atmospheric forces. This is astralophobia. Where do these conditions come from, which we already notice very clearly in today’s spiritual life, especially among those people who have long devoted themselves to a certain dogmatism, devoting themselves to it with faith; in them, even if it has not yet manifested physically, one observes precisely these conditions in their souls. They are, after all, in their early stages. They interfere with a calm, serene grasp of life; they also manifest in such a way that they give rise to all manner of pathological conditions which—because the physical symptoms of claustrophobia, agoraphobia, or astraphobia do not immediately appear—are attributed to all sorts of causes, whereas in truth they are attributable to the particular configuration of the inner life that is taking hold within the person.

[ 9 ] Where do such states come from? They arise from the fact that we must not only learn to experience our inner life independently of the body, but we must also carry this inner life—experienced independently of the body—back into the physical organism; we must consciously immerse it there. Just as that which I have already described to you in the course of these lectures peels away from the body between birth and the change of teeth, so too does that which is experienced externally—what we might call astral experience—submerge once more into the human physical organism between the change of teeth and sexual maturity. And what takes place during the onset of puberty is nothing other than this immersion between approximately the seventh and fourteenth years of life. That which the human being possesses independently as soul-spiritual must once again submerge into the organism. And what then manifests as physical love, what manifests as the sex drive, is nothing other than the result of this submergence that I have described to you. This submergence—one must come to know it precisely. Through such exercises as those I will describe to you here on another occasion, the person who wishes to attain true insight on the level of consciousness must be able to bring this about in a fully conscious, healthy state; that is, they must learn to submerge themselves into the body. Then one will initially experience what presents itself there as an imaginative mental image of the inner world. And it is not enough to have an external, plastic-spatial mental image of form; for this practice, it is sufficient only when one has a dynamic mental image of form, when one can gradually overcome all spatiality in this imagination and immerse oneself in the mental image of something intense, something that acts from within itself. In short, one must immerse oneself so that, even in the act of immersion, one can still clearly distinguish oneself from one’s body. For one can recognize only that which becomes an object. What remains connected to the subjective cannot be recognized. If one can keep what one experiences outside the body free from an unconscious immersion into the body, then one descends into this body and experiences within it, in imagination and in images, that which constitutes the essence of this body as it rises up to consciousness. But the person who, as it were, allows these images to slip into the body—who does not keep them free, for whom the body does not become an object but remains a subject—takes the sense of space with them into the body. As a result, the astral body fuses with the physical body to an extent that should not be allowed. As a result, the experience of the external world fuses with the inner life of the human being, and the human being can then no longer experience space in the normal way—because by turning what should have become an object into a subjective experience, they have transformed it. A fear of empty space, a fear of lonely places, a fear of the astral realm spreading out in space, of stormy phenomena, perhaps even of the moon and stars—all these arise within a person. They live too intensely within themselves. It is therefore necessary that all the exercises leading to the imaginative life protect one from such an excessive immersion in the body—that one now immerses oneself in the body in such a way that one does not immerse the “I” within it. Just as one must take the “I” out into the world of inspiration, so one must not take it into the world of imagination. There, even though one has just prepared oneself through symbolization and mental images, all images of the imagination now cease. But objective images emerge. Only that which actually lives within the human form ceases to present itself as an object before human beings. One loses the outer human form, and what emerges is the diversity that, in a sense, manifests itself from the human’s etheric body. The human being now sees not his or her unified human form, but the diversity of all those animal forms whose synthetic intermingling and fusion constitute the human form. They learn to recognize, in an inner way, what lives in the plant kingdom and in the mineral kingdom. They now learn to recognize what they can never recognize through atomism and molecularism—what truly lives within the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms. Through inner self-observation, they learn to recognize this. And what does it matter that we do not bring our “I” into this physical body when we strive toward imagination? It is precisely this that enables us to develop within ourselves, in a higher way than in ordinary life—where it is guided by the physical forces of the sensory realm—the power of love; that we acquire the selfless power of love, freedom from selfishness even toward the natural world, not merely toward the human realm; that we bring ourselves to allow everything that leads us toward imagination to be carried by the power of love; that the power of love is never absent from an object of knowledge that we seek in this way.

[ 10 ] Once again, we have two diverging paths: the healthy way of extending the power of love into the imagination, or, in a pathological manner, burdening ourselves with fear of what lies outside, because we experience what lies outside within our ego and then, without holding back our ego, carry it into the body, thereby giving rise to agoraphobia, claustrophobia, and astraphobia. But the prospect of the highest knowledge opens up to us once more if we develop in a healthy way that which, in a pathological way, threatens human civilization and would lead it into barbarism.

[ 11 ] And in this way, one attains a true understanding of the human being. One goes beyond everything that anatomy, physiology, and biology can know, and one enters into a true understanding of the human being by truly seeing through its organization. © This human self-knowledge takes a different form than many vague mystics believe; they think that when they delve into it, some abstract divine reality will reveal itself to them. Oh no, what is revealed is a rich concreteness that, however, sheds light on the human constitution—on the lungs, the liver, and so on—and that alone can serve as the foundation for a true anatomy, for a true physiology; that alone can serve as the foundation for a true understanding of the human being and also for true medicine. Two forces have been developed in human nature: one is the force of inspiration toward the material realm, in which one gradually discovers the spiritual world within the material, expanding into that tableau that Mr. Arenson has described to you here; the other force consists in discovering, inwardly, those worlds that had to be laid as a foundation, as I already explained here in the spring before nearly forty physicians and medical specialists, regarding how one must truly understand the human being if one wishes to establish a true medical science.

[ 12 ] But these two forces—that of inspiration and that of imagination—can unite. One can become one with the other. But this must take place in full consciousness and through a loving embrace of the cosmos. Then a third force arises—a convergence of imagination and inspiration in true, spiritual intuition. There we then rise to that which enables us to perceive the outer material world as a spiritual one, and the inner spiritual-soul world with its material foundations—a perception that teaches us the expansion of human life beyond earthly existence, as has also been presented to you here in other lectures. In this way, on the one hand, one learns to recognize the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, and the mineral kingdom according to their inner essences, according to their spiritual contents through inspiration; and by coming to know the human organs through imagination, one establishes a true organology, and by then synthesizing through intuition what one has learned about plants, animals, and minerals with what emerges through imagination regarding the human organs, one thereby attains true therapy—a science of remedies—that is capable of applying the external to the internal in a genuine sense. The true physician must recognize remedies from a cosmological perspective; he must recognize the inner human organology from an anthropological—or, more precisely, anthroposophical—perspective. He must comprehend the outer world through inspiration and the inner world through imagination, and he must rise to the level of therapy through true intuition.

[ 13 ] You can see what prospects open up before us when we are able to grasp the Spiritual Science in its true form. However, Spiritual Science still has to shed many of its outer layers—much of what still clings to it today among many who believe they can practice it, along with all sorts of fanciful notions and dilettantism. Spiritual Science must develop a method of research that can stand up to scrutiny by the rigorous mathematician or analytical engineer. On the other hand, Spiritual Science must become completely free of all superstition. Spiritual Science must truly be able to develop, in luminous clarity, the kind of love that otherwise befalls a person only when he or she can develop it from instinct. Then, however, Spiritual Science will be a seed that will develop and radiate its powers into all sciences and thus also into human life.

[ 14 ] Let me therefore conclude what I had to say to you in these lectures with one more very brief reflection. Before that, I would like to say that, of course, there is still much to be read between the lines of what I have presented. I will bring some of that to light by giving two more lectures this evening and tomorrow as a supplement to what, of course, could only be hinted at in the limited time available for this course. But what a person acquires by cultivating inspiration on the one hand and imagination on the other—and then uniting inspiration and imagination in intuition—is what first gives them that inner freedom and inner strength that enable one to grasp concepts that can be applied to social human life. And only those who live through the present with a dormant soul can pass by all that is bubbling up in a terrifying way, looming menacingly over the future.

[ 15 ] What is the spiritual basis for this? Spiritually, the basis lies in what one can clearly perceive through a careful study of the latest developments in human beings, particularly among truly outstanding personalities. How did people strive in the 19th century and into the 20th century to arrive at clear concepts, to gain true inner, clear impulses for three concepts of the utmost importance in social life: the concept of capital, the concept of labor, and the concept of the commodity? One need only look at the relevant literature of the 19th century and the early 20th century to see how people strove to understand what capital actually means in the social process; how what people sought to grasp in conceptual terms then spilled over into terrible struggles in the external world. Look at how intimately connected is what people can feel and think about the function and significance of labor in the social organism with the particular sensibility that has emerged in recent times, and then take a look at what I would call the bottomless definition of the concept of a commodity. People strove to clarify three practical concepts. Today we see life in the civilized world unfolding in such a way that, everywhere within it, there prevails a lack of clarity precisely regarding the triad: capital, labor, and commodity. And one cannot rise to the level of answering the question of what function capital has in the social organism. One will only be able to do so when, through a true Spiritual Science—by means of the combined forces of imagination and inspiration—one recognizes intuitively that a proper impulse for the effectiveness of capital can be derived only from spiritual life as an independently existing member of the social organism. Only true imagination leads to a correct understanding of this member of the social organism. And one will recognize something else. One will realize that one can only understand labor in its effectiveness for the social organism if one grasps that which, as labor, separates itself from the human being—that which points away from the human being—not first in the product, so that one describes the commodity in a Marxist manner as “crystallized labor” or even “crystallized time,” but rather by recognizing that what separates itself from the human being can only be understood if one enters into a mental image, into a free experience of that which can separate itself from the human being. The concept of labor will only gain clarity through those who know what is revealed to human beings through inspiration.

[ 16 ] And that which lives in the commodity is the most complex concept that can initially be grasped. For no single human being is sufficient to grasp the commodity in its reality in life. If one wishes to define a commodity at all, then one does not know what knowledge is. A commodity cannot be defined, for in this context one can define or conceptualize only that which concerns a single human being—that which a single human being can grasp with his or her soul. A commodity, however, always exists in the interaction between multiple people and multiple types of people. A commodity exists in the interaction between producers, consumers, and those who mediate between the two. With the meager concepts of exchange and purchase—which have been developed within a science that fails to properly recognize the limits of understanding nature—with these meager concepts, one will never grasp the commodity. The commodity, the product of labor, exists among multiple people; and if an individual attempts to recognize the commodity as such, that is wrong. The commodity must be grasped in its social function by the collectively organized majority of people—by the association. It must be grasped by the association; it must exist within the association. Only when associations are formed that process within themselves that which emanates from the producers, the agents, and the consumers—only then will the social concept emerge, not from the individual human being, but through the association, through the workers’ associations—the concept that must live within the human group as the concept of the commodity for a healthy economic life.

[ 17 ] If we are willing to rise to what the spiritual researcher can bring from the world of higher knowledge, then we will gain an understanding of what must emerge in social life if we are to make progress, if we are to transform decline into ascent once again. Therefore, what lives in all that is to be pursued here in this room is not merely a theoretical interest, not merely a scientific need, but rather, in the broadest sense, the need for what is worked out here, what is researched here, to mature people so that they may go forth from this room to all To all corners of the world with such ideas, with such social impulses that can truly help our declining age, that can lift up our world, which is so clearly heading downward.