The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Two questions, which undoubtedly touch the interest of every human soul in the most significant sense, will be dealt with in the two lectures today and tomorrow. This evening, more from a general point of view, and tomorrow, the consideration of certain individual questions will be introduced. There is no doubt that the questions concerning the nature of death and what may be hidden in the word “immortality” must truly arouse the deepest, most sincere interest in every human soul, and one may say, must still be the greatest conceivable interest, if we disregard all the wishes and desires that attach themselves to the event of death and to the question of immortality for the human soul.

But all idle curiosity, even all that is called curiosity in ordinary life, can be set aside when considering these two questions. We can refrain from doing so because in every profound moment of our lives we are constantly stimulated – sometimes more consciously, sometimes more from the deepest, most hidden parts of our soul – by two things: the strength and confidence, the certainty of hope in our lives, to want to know something about these questions. There are two things. The first is everything that is included in the idea of human destiny. This destiny not only raises theoretical questions for us, but vital questions, and we know that if we cannot receive any information that can somehow satisfy us, this must mean a weakness, doubt, belittling of our soul. Human destiny mysteriously and enigmatically intervenes in human existence. One person is placed, seemingly through no fault of their own, in a position that can hardly give them satisfaction, a place where it is impossible for them to develop any significant powers for the good of others and their work. On the other hand, we see how, seemingly without merit, the other stands in a place that not only makes a rosy existence possible for him, but also allows him to develop the best talents for the benefit and good of others. Man, with his theories, asks for the causes when external facts occur, and there is a certain reluctance to search for the causes of human destiny.

When we look at our emotional life, with all the mysterious things that can happen in it, we realize that it is precisely the most intimate depths of our soul that raise the questions about the causes of our destiny. Perhaps the individual does not ask: What are the causes of this or that happening in my life – that would be a theoretical coloring of the question; but what we feel calls us to contentment or despair, to hopeful work or to dejection in the face of all activity. But the most important questions in this area are those that perhaps cannot even be formulated in theoretical terms, but which express themselves in satisfaction, in depression, in a feeling of abandonment and loneliness; they are questions that, only half posed in the soul, remain stuck before an open formulation, but constitute the happiness and suffering of our entire existence. If fate could intervene in our lives in such a way that we could say it promotes our abilities here or there, our actions, [or] hinders our progress, then the questions would not be so burning. But if we look more deeply, we find that everything we are in the innermost part of our being – how we live, how our value, our ability presents itself – is the result of our fate. Man says to himself that the whole being, the whole inner configuration of the being, is not so dependent on what appears to approach life from the outside and shape and form this life.

So it is the anxious question to fate, which, perhaps only half raised, goes to ask: Where does our whole existence actually come from? What is it that is mysteriously enclosed within us and is so dependent on what we have to experience as our outer destiny? We need only think of two facts, in addition to the countless individual cases: there we will find how our whole being, our innermost nature, is dependent on destiny. The first fact is that the human being is placed in some linguistic area, in a national context. Who knows how much of our intimate soul life overflows from the way language penetrates us. Or how much of our sense of confidence in life and our hopes depends on how our parents, our environment and our teachers respond to us in our early youth. How a rough treatment can harden our whole being throughout our earthly existence! One need only think how mysterious the connections of fate are in this area in particular. A case taken directly from life can teach us about this very area: a child who, in his seventh year, experienced a strong injustice at the hands of those around him, due to the way his destiny placed him in a community. Sometimes the child forgets it, seemingly on the outside, but in the depths of the soul it lives on and continues to have an effect in the deep layers of the soul, which has taken root as injustice in the soul. The child then becomes a middle school student. Something special happens in his sixteenth year. A strong effect comes from his teacher in the sense that the student has to experience a new injustice. If he had not experienced the injustice in his seventh year, the matter might have passed by without effect, as it did for his fellow student. But because the old impression continued to work in the depths of the soul, while it was forgotten for the outer being, it joined together with the experience of the seventh year, and a student suicide resulted. Thus we see how our whole being, the way we enter into life, is more deeply connected with the question of our destiny.

The second thing can be seen by reflecting on how one's life unfolds, how one gathers one's life experiences, how one becomes more and more mature as the years go by. This may be more or less the case for one person or another, but this maturing is evident from a close examination of life, and it is usually the case that we have to say to ourselves: we have matured in those things that we did imperfectly, from the point of view that we have to take after we have gained experience. If we were allowed to do them a second time, we would do them better. We learn things in life, but we learn precisely by doing imperfect deeds in this life. The most intimate life experiences result from making our imperfect actions our teachers. Then we look back from a point in our development and say to ourselves: We learn many things, we have become more mature, and this knowledge is within us. What happens to this experience when we pass through the gate of death? Does it disappear without a trace in the floods of nothingness? Yes, we do not always have to take such a life experience, we can say: What we do, learn to refrain from, has an effect that other people experience through it, either as support or perhaps as harm. We know that our value as a human being depends on whether we have harmed or helped other people. From this arises the other life experience, which is concentrated in the overall feeling, in basic sensations, in the need to do many things differently than we did in the past life. So we feel as if we have the sensation of having many debts that we can no longer repay. This is because we have created the debts in such a way that we have the actions in which we committed the debts behind us. These are the most intimate, deepest experiences of the soul. Does everything we have acquired, everything that makes us different from what we were at the beginning of life, does all this end in an indefinite nothing? That is the second thing. No matter what a person's nature may be, no matter how unexpressed it may remain, it remains a question of feeling and of life within him.

Now we can say: in our time, a period of human development lies behind us in which the noblest, most moral people, who were also scientific materialists and yet clung to moral ideas, came to terms with such soul questions in a very peculiar way. If one takes the standpoint of spiritual science, which is to be represented here, an attitude is required that is never unjust, even towards opponents. For it must be said that it was nothing short of heroic how materialistic thinkers found their way, especially in regard to a question such as the one that has now been touched upon. They said to themselves: With death, our inner soul life extinguishes, like the light of a candle when the fuel is used up. But then we have the awareness that what we have experienced lives on in the process of human historical development. Everyone gives to posterity what they have worked for, even if it has only been conquered and worked for in the smallest of circles. Many such thinkers have said to themselves that it is selfish to demand that human beings have their own personal immortality. But it is selfless in the highest sense to die in the full knowledge that the personal self perishes and what one has done passes into the process of humanity. One may say: this information is heroic; compared to much religious egoism, this heroism of materialism appears great, but it cannot stand up to a deeper understanding of the question, for the reason that when everyone looks at life, they must say to themselves: The most intimate part of our life experience is such an innermost good of your soul that you cannot simply give it to the outside world. We can give much for the outside world, but what we give does not belong to the most intimate part of our soul. The best we have learned is so tied to our individuality that it cannot possibly be handed over to the world. So the question remains: how do we cope with the sight of that which the soul has experienced, which has given it value in the way described, which makes it necessary that life is not closed off if this value is to be lived out, which it does not give up when a person passes through the gate of death?

These are the two things: the contemplation of fate and the contemplation of one's own development. These questions are to be answered in such a way that the answer can be called logical and scientific in the same way. To give answers, as answers are given in today's external science, is the goal of the endeavor that can be called spiritual science, which is entering into the culture of the present and through which something of this culture is to be incorporated as an insight into much of what life needs in order to become strong and powerful. It cannot be demanded that the suggestions given today and tomorrow be more than mere suggestions. Those who believe that scientific answers are only those that tie in with external events, with what can be seen with the eyes and grasped with the hands, will naturally not accept the answers as scientific. Only suggestions are to be given, but these are intended to show that the whole way of thinking, the whole way of looking at spiritual life, is the same as the ways of research in today's science. Modern man also demands information about the questions characterized in such a way that this information can stand up to strict scientific scrutiny. Thus, the answers will appear to be different from science in the usual sense, but anyone who delves deeper will see that the way of thinking in Theosophy is such that the scientific needs as well as the heartfelt needs of modern humanity can be satisfied.

The starting point must be that of real, true self-knowledge. Because fate shapes the essence of our “self” and because our “self” becomes more and more mature, we are confronted with these questions and can therefore hope that a true knowledge of our innermost being, of what we call our “self”, will lead to an answer. But it is difficult for the modern man to recognize what can be called self-knowledge. There are formidable obstacles to the contemplation of one's own nature. Only by overcoming these obstacles can he enter into self-knowledge, and from self-knowledge, through the connection of his own ego with the world, pass into knowledge of the world.

If we want to examine a substance in science, we cannot recognize its essence under certain conditions. Although oxygen is contained in water, we cannot examine it in water; we must first separate it from the water by a physical process, only then can we examine its essence. How different it is when it comes to us in water! It must be something similar if we want to examine our self so that this examination can satisfy us. Our self is, like the oxygen to the hydrogen, bound to the outer body in ordinary life. What we call our soul body, that in which we find ourselves as in our most intimate inner being, we always experience in such a way that we look at the outer world through our bodily organs, so that we learn to understand it through the human brain. Just as oxygen is bound to hydrogen to form water, so is the life of the soul bound to the life of the body, to what we have before us as human beings, as ourselves. So there arises the necessity that we first detach the life of the soul from the life of the body in order to truly examine it.

How can we do this? How can we present our soul life to ourselves in such a way that we can contemplate it in its truth? Now, according to the results of spiritual research, everyday life detaches the soul from the body during the night in the course of twenty-four hours. Let us accept this for the time being as an assertion; we will come back to it later. When a person falls asleep in the evening, the full human being is not contained in the body; what continues the external soul functions, as happens in the waking state, but not the actual soul life, which we recognize as our innermost being, as suffering, affects, drives and passions, is truly set aside during the night's sleep and in the morning reenters and submerges into the body, in order to use the bodily organs, the senses and the brain, the instrument of the soul. If we start from scientific prejudices, we will say that it is possible that the entire spiritual life, with all its sensations and feelings, with everything that takes place within, is nothing other than a result of physical life, just as the flame is the result of processes in the candle. But this does not hold up under deeper examination. It must be clear to us from common sense that there is something to it.

In the state that a person goes through from falling asleep to waking up, the processes that we can only understand as life processes take effect on his body. What flows from within as organic activity into the brain and other organs continues to have an effect. A comparison suggests a logical thought, which cannot be escaped on deeper reflection. If we compare our sense organs with the lungs, we find that our lungs, like our sense organs, are nourished from within and sustained by the organism. What we see flowing in as a life activity can be compared to what flows into the brain and other organs from within the body during the day and also during the night as a nutritional activity. But can something be identified that takes place within the body and supplies the activity of the lungs from within, through the nature of the air that must flow into the lungs? Could the activity of flowing into the lungs from within ever reach the lungs' goal if the air did not flow in from the outside? Does this inner life activity have something to do with the nature and composition of air? We cannot learn anything about air from within. It is the same with the soul. Just as the essence of the air that flows into the lungs is not connected with the activity that flows into the lungs as organic activity, so the content of our soul, which flows in in the morning and leaves the body in the evening, has just as little to do with what our inner bodily activity is, with what flows into our soul organs from our organism as nourishment.

If you look deeply into this comparison, try to think it through – you will not escape the logical thought that what we live in as our soul life, what flows into us, is just as foreign to the inner bodily activity as the air is to the inner bodily activity, so that the independence, the inner essence of our soul life appears well-founded. A person truly does not live with their soul life in such a way that they say: I live in my muscles, my brain. That is not their soul life, but rather: I live in my feelings, affects. That in which they live in this way enters their body in the morning like an inhalation process and leaves it in the evening like an exhalation.

In response to this thought, logical thinking can now raise the question: How can we observe soul life, which is so independent of bodily life, in itself? If we could observe it during sleep, we would be helped. But in normal life, although the soul separates from the body, we cannot examine the secret nature of soul life, because at the moment it separates, it becomes unconscious and eludes examination. But there is another way to penetrate to this soul life, which can be encountered by every person, and that is through a psychic experiment by the spiritual researcher who has obtained the instrument to artificially separate his soul life from the body; this is clairvoyant observation.

The first observation that can arise for anyone is the following. It starts from the question: What prevents us from observing our soul life separately from our bodily life? There are two reasons. Firstly, the moment we wake up, a connection is made through the senses and the thinking bound to the senses with the sensual outside world, so that we do not have our soul life to ourselves, we are not in our soul life, but in what is around us as a luminous, sounding world. The experiences of our soul flow together with what enters us through eyes and ears. Whenever we enjoy a sound, we always have, so to speak, the sound that enters from outside and the joy within us as two things that flow together. But we merge with the outer sound. We do not separate our soul life so that we lose ourselves in the outer sensory world. When we look up at the magnificent starry sky and contemplate the wonders of the rising and setting sun, everything that affects us from the outside, we feel it flowing together with what is happening in the innermost part of our soul, what uplifting and devotional experiences we have in our soul, what strength flows to us. We have never chemically separated our inner being from what penetrates from the outside world. That is why some philosophers say that there is no such thing as an inner soul life, even denying the inner soul content and allowing it to merge with those images that ebb and flow on the horizon of our soul life. For the more intimate observer, Goethe's words come true: What gives the numerous stars, all the glories of the celestial space, their true value? But only that everything that lives outside in the wide world is reflected in the human heart, is expressed, so that something is experienced that goes beyond ordinary expression. And if one proceeds to a thorough self-observation, one will find: The soul feels what is happening outside, it knows that it is experiencing inner things in outer events, that it has gradually progressed, that inner soul events have followed one another and a continuous stream has arisen from the present moment to the moment until which we can remember back, that this stream is something different than what merely affects us from the outside. The independence of our soul life seems convincing, and we wonder whether our soul life can detach itself from its surroundings when we are directly confronted with the external world and flow together with it. But when we look back on what we have not only seen but also experienced in terms of elation and despondency, and what we can remember, we find a stream of inner soul life.

This stream is precisely what was mentioned earlier. It is the experience of life. With this we stand at a certain point in our lives. No matter whether our life is short or long, when we pass through the gate of death we will find ourselves in the same situation. We will see the stream of evolving life, see what has welled up in this soul from the outer world, and we will ask ourselves the question when we take the great leap through the gate of death: Where to put what has developed as a continuous stream in our soul? So there is one obstacle: our growing together with the outside world.

Therefore, it is essentially a developmental success if we learn to isolate ourselves through a review, through an examination of the interior. But one thing comes to us when we isolate the soul life, that we say to ourselves: It is coherent, what flows there step by step. We look back to our first memory; what lies before, we can not remember ourselves, but older people can tell us about it. We remember what happened from that moment on, and we will make an effort to have moments like that again, where we artificially induce the state of sleep, but only on that side, whereby we exclude the external impressions.

When we close ourselves off from the splendor of the outside world and from the other stimuli of the outside world at such moments, then we secrete the inner life, as we separate oxygen from water. This is a matter of experience for which no theoretical proof can be provided, just as one does not need proof that whales exist if one has never seen one. If we always keep this inwardness in mind, we can say that the soul life lines up step by step, and we come to the point at which external memory reaches back. We can conduct a kind of experiment with our entire inner experience. If we see that this stream of soul life flows from the point just characterized and the later is added to the earlier, what is added to the point up to which the first memory reaches? We see how our soul life strives forth; but what caused the first moment that we recall? Now it is possible to evoke something within the soul life that only works in the soul experience, that can give something completely new, never before seen, to the human soul.

To characterize what this new, never-before-seen thing looks like, I would like to point something out. Hydrogen is a gas, oxygen is a gas; these two gases give water, something completely new from two different things. Just as something new and unlike anything in the world is created through the interaction of external things, so too, if we turn our gaze ever further into the stream of our soul life, all the way back to the starting point in this reminiscence, something entirely new can arise. Someone who had never seen that two gases produce liquid would not believe it. What provided the initial impetus in our lives? What we experience as our destiny presents itself to us as if of its own accord. Our destiny presents itself as an answer to this question. Why did it start from precisely this starting point? Why did it turn out this way? This question is answered by looking at our destiny and considering only that we have to consider destiny not with an idea, but with something completely different. What do we want to consider our destiny with? What we want to look at our destiny with, arises from the second obstacle, namely that we usually do not look at our destiny as we do now, when we have come to this point. The second great obstacle is self-love, self-will.

This self-will is a strange thing. Let us try to characterize it. What it is that makes us feel content with ourselves, that gives us satisfaction in our lives, does not need to be characterized. But this self-will has something peculiar about it: it breaks through something in our soul life. This will, it may accomplish whatever deeds, wishes, desires – if our reason is to remain true to us, we must admit that it cannot readily intervene on its own in the way that life experience has formed itself. We let life teach us, we go to the school of life and let life dictate what we have to believe. Whether we consider something to be true or false does not depend on our own will. It is precisely that which makes us mature in life, that which gives us knowledge, from which the will must be excluded! We may not summarize our experiences arbitrarily, but as common sense, the logic of the facts, dictates.

But this will is bound to our corporeality as a power of the soul in a different way than our ideas and perceptions, on which our experience depends, and in which we cannot distinguish between inside and outside. Our will is bound to our corporeality differently. We see very clearly how it continually intervenes in our corporeality. Let us consider what we learn in the normal course of life as fatigue. It comes from the fact that muscles or other organs are worn out. Nothing seems more obvious to the superficial impression than this. It seems credible that physical organs wear out, and yet it is not true. The physical organs that live in a very specific way in our organism do not wear out. How would it be if organs like the heart had to recover through sleep? The organs that are not influenced by the conscious will always remain active and do not wear out. Consider the lungs, heart, diaphragm, and even the inner workings of the nervous system; these forces are always at work. What wears out is what emanates from our conscious will. When we work to make our muscles move through our will, we become tired. No work tires us that comes from the organism itself, but remains within the organism itself. As long as the will is active, active itself, it does not wear out the organism.

Another fact also shows it. It is the same with the thought process: if we give ourselves up to the day's musings, we do not get tired, but we do when we intervene in the thinking with our will, in that consciousness, as an expression of our soul life, intervenes from the outside in our bodily organization, which we see works independently. The human will can only work as self-will by allowing itself to be stimulated from the outside, by feeling compelled by some coercion; this will wears down our organism, so that we can say: Everything that is the wear and tear of life, that consumes our body, springs from the will, which is forced by something, which does not remain in the being of the human being or within the soul's being, which is stimulated and determined from outside, which, as self-will, is in opposition to what must be from outside, which is a destructive force for our organism.

What is the opposite that builds up our organism? What actually brings it into its configuration? It cannot be a thought, not ideas, not feelings; it must be something that, like the will, intervenes in our organism. Our own will must not feel forced from the outside; it must be able to be completely as its own will. It can be when our destiny presents itself to us in such a way that we do not imagine it in ideas and concepts, but with the will, so that our own will does not come into conflict with itself. This can only happen if, however much we may quarrel and struggle with our destiny, we imagine that we would have wanted this destiny, as if we had ordained it ourselves. This can be carried out as a decision of the will. In this way we remove the obstacle of self-will. The will that regards fate as if we ourselves had placed ourselves in the community of language, in the family, has made a decision of the will, even if of a reverse nature.

These are not assertions, but so far we have only evoked certain moods of the soul. Then, as if we ourselves had willed it, our destiny wanders back to the first moment we can remember, like hydrogen wandering to oxygen. Then we have something in our soul that stands before us with certainty, as certain as we know that the flame is hot. Now we are really experiencing something new: the addition of our soul life. Our destiny enters into our soul life, and we have the answer to the question: What gave the first impetus? What we have set up as our self-willed destiny has given the first impulse, and only in this way do we come to a real insight into what we were when we began our present existence on earth, when we understand destiny as something self-willed and connect it with our soul life, which we get to know through self-observation. But then, when we have gained this inner experience, which removes the two obstacles, the outer world - Ahriman - and self-will - Lucifer -, through self-observation, then we penetrate to the realization that it is we ourselves who have shaped fate. The moment – and anyone can experience this moment – can be compared to the moment when we wake up, when we do not say to ourselves: You came from nothing, but: You are what you are now because you fell asleep last night. Those who seriously recognize their soul life in an observation that disregards external observation and destroys self-will come to an experience that is like waking up and remembering earlier lives on earth. His inner core comes across from previous earthly lives and has put together his own destiny; we come to a memory that we have gone through previous earthly lives. It is not an ordinary memory, but our life itself appears to us as a great memory. We come to the assumption of repeated earthly lives. This earthly life, which we go through between birth and death, is the result of previous earthly lives. A person has lived many lives on earth, and it is a given that, based on how the person is now, they will go through further lives on earth. We are dealing with an essence that penetrates into a spiritual world after death and then returns again to another life on earth.

What we can hope for in the time between death and a new birth also arises from introspection. You cannot intervene with your will. Your will and your thoughts, feelings and what you have conquered in the school of life are separate in your soul life. How strange the will is: we move our hand, but what happens from the moment of willing to what we then see as movement, we do not know at first in normal life. We see the will as it expresses itself in life in outer movements, gestures, deeds, but we lack any possibility of seeing how the will passes into movements and deeds. What lies before us, what we have acquired through our life experience, we have to keep at a distance in this life, because if our will were to interfere, it would be falsified by our will. But in the course of life we experience that we cannot let our will work. We cannot influence the way we are placed in this life. When we are somewhat outside of life, then our will need not be hindered from penetrating purely and powerfully through what we experience inwardly. When our body no longer forms the barrier between our will and our life experience, when these outer experiences can no longer form the barrier, then the will can grasp, penetrate and permeate our life experience. We do this between death and a new birth. Our will will permeate everything we have experienced so that we can give the first impetus in a new existence, which we have seen that we have grasped at the beginning of our life on earth.

Thus we see how, by establishing the connection with our ideas, the forces are formed that call us to a new earthly existence. Spiritual science thus arrives at the view of repeated earthly lives, which has become a matter of course for thinkers of modern times, so that they could not help but let their thoughts flow into this world of ideas, for example Lessing, who gave us the 'Education of the Human Race' as the fruit of his life. Then you realize what led Lessing to say that this view is the only way to understand death and immortality. This thought is perhaps despised because people knew about it from time immemorial, because in the past people were not yet confused by the events of the outside world and by what has taken place within human culture, as they are in this time. The soul of man has absorbed what India, Persia, Egypt and Greece have offered, what can be called the stream of human development. Does it make sense for a soul to die forever after absorbing all this? No, it makes no sense. When the soul carries over everything it has acquired into later times and new experiences are added, it is the souls themselves that carry the old cultural achievements over into modern times. Even in the nineteenth century, despite the fact that external scientific conditions were as unfavorable as possible, people came up with this.

But how spiritual science itself comes to an irrefutable conclusion through spiritual experiments by the spiritual scientist can be discussed tomorrow. It should only be explained how it comes about that such an insight is gained by processing the inner soul life. But through this it also has an effect on the inner soul life. On one side we look back at how we have placed ourselves in this life according to our deeds, thoughts and feelings from past lives. We feel that we also have to go through this life with everything that fate brings us, so that our school of life can continue. Feeling this, we say to ourselves: our life, as it unfolds in and around us, is the effect of previous causes that we ourselves have set in motion. This is the doctrine of karma, which for the new spiritual science is not an old law from Buddhism, but is derived from the modern soul itself, educated by science.

This life itself falls into an ascending and descending line. In youth, many forces from previous lives work in such a way that our physical organization can ascend. Our powers develop, becoming richer and richer, until the peak is reached, which gives us satisfaction. Then comes the descending life, where the face wrinkles and the body becomes tired. It is certain for everyone that it will come, and they need thoughts that give strength. But anyone who looks at human life in a spiritual-scientific sense, not just theoretically or rationally, will see that spiritual science gives strength, that it works almost like an elixir of life when we recognize its truth. We feel what flows into our confidence in life, our hopes, our life's work, and people will always feel it once our culture is placed in the light of spiritual science. There we feel how, in the descending life, that grows and must grow, which does not disintegrate in death, but is grasped by our will and, when the greatest resilience is reached, has the strength to enter into the spiritual and, after it has drawn the forces from the spiritual world, to build a new life.

We do not just theoretically consider the questions of immortality; we live and learn and feel the immortality of the soul by feeling the richness of our soul through an intuitive understanding of spiritual science, which tells us: Towards the end of life, you develop ever stronger powers that do not perish any more than the physical powers, which not only transform but are eternal and immortal. In the growth of your powers, in the real existence of your powers, you feel your immortality. Immortality does not begin when we are dead, but already during our lifetime. It is because the human soul is there and because a person can feel it during their lifetime in the body. Spiritual science is not theory, but lifeblood, and if we understand it correctly, it becomes vitality. Thus it does not drive us to speculate, but rather, immortality is something that the soul can feel as something substantial, physical, that enhances our powers and bears within it immortality as its deepest essence and [its deepest] quality. To feel and sense immortality as the source of one's confidence in life, that is what must spring from spiritual science. And so we may summarize in a variation of words how the insights of spiritual science become an elixir of life:

The human senses speak to
the things in the vastness of space,
they change in the course of time
at the deepest core of their being.
The human soul penetrates, recognizing
the vastness of space, unlimited
and unperturbed by the passage of time
into the realm of eternity.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak to you about two important questions from a general point of view, about death and immortality from the point of view of spiritual science. This evening I would like to be allowed to go into some special things that may shed light on these questions. Just as it was possible yesterday, in view of the two major questions discussed, to point to two important experiences of the human soul, which actually always raise these questions more or less explicitly or implicitly from the hidden depths of the human soul, so we can also today we can start from two experiences of our inner being, from two experiences which the human soul constantly points to that idea, which must actually make the mind dizzy when it tries to grasp it in any particular way: the idea of eternity. And when the human soul is often inclined to say that it has something to do with eternity in contrast to the transitoriness of the outer form of the body, it might seem as if such questions arise rather from the longings of the human soul, which desires to have a different fate from the one between birth and death. But here too we can disregard all wishes and desires, even all curiosity, and point to two experiences of the human soul that direct it towards the idea of eternity. These experiences are of the deepest, most inner sense of morality. For what could the human soul feel more deeply and earnestly than the invincible striving for everlasting perfection? One need only, as it were, truly and without prejudice delve into one's own soul and one will have to say that one would have to be dishonest with respect to what the soul wants to be if one did not want to say: an invincible striving for perfection, for a more meaningful existence, dwells in this human soul. That is one experience.

But the other experience, which can assert itself just as strongly, is that at no moment in our lives, even if we reach a very old age, can we deny how far we are from what can shine before us as the ideal of perfection, how much we feel imperfect compared to what we actually want to be according to the innermost being of our minds. The striving for perfection and at the same time the necessary confession of imperfection awakens in the human soul the longing for an eternal striving, for a striving that is unhindered by those external laws of arising and passing away, which we seriously cannot imagine as being able to offer any limits, inner limits to our striving for perfection. Thus we see that man, not out of any greed or desire, but out of the yearning to serve the highest moral order that he has in mind, to strive for the highest moral ideal of perfection, which he must present out of this highest moral desire, raises the question of the immortality of the human soul – but that is the question of eternity.

Yesterday, it was mentioned how the German philosopher Hegel said in a beautiful way: immortality of the human soul as a property that is related to the nature of this soul cannot begin only when man has passed through death; if there is something in the human soul from which one can recognize that this soul has a claim to an immortal existence, then this must also be announced in the life of the soul within the physical existence. Immortality cannot begin only after death; it must also be present in life - in this physical life. So then the question of the nature of eternity also points us to the investigation of the nature of the human soul, in order to recognize from this nature of the human soul to what extent it is conceivable, indeed necessary, to think of the soul as being lifted out of the laws of the perishability of the body. And if we want to examine this nature of the human soul, then, as was also hinted at yesterday, if we want to meet the real, if not the prejudiced demands of modern science, we have to separate this human soul from its connection with the body. For we were able to point out yesterday that it is also impossible, for example, to examine the nature of hydrogen as long as it is bound to water; we have to separate hydrogen from its connection to water if we want to examine its own nature. And so we know that in ordinary, external, normal life, the soul is connected with all that we can call the bodily organization, in that we feel through our body, look outwards, observe things through the external bodily sense organs, in that we think things through that thinking which is bound to the instrument of the brain, and, when we feel and want, we are also bound to our corporeality. Just as hydrogen is bound to water and cannot be recognized within water, the nature of the human soul cannot be recognized in the way it appears to us in normal life, where it is firmly bound and not detached from external experiences and those inner experiences that arise from physicality.

Now, as we said yesterday, basically every night when a person sleeps, a detachment of his soul experiences from the outer bodily life is evoked. In the course of today's lecture, however, we will be able to prove what was only asserted by spiritual science and logically proven yesterday, so to speak, by approaching it from the so-called spiritual scientific point of view. For the time being, however, we will accept it as it was stated as an assertion or logically proven yesterday, that the life we experience in our innermost soul is not something that, like the flame of a candle, , but something that, as an independent entity, emerges in the morning when we wake up, enters into the life of the body when we fall asleep and leaves it again, and thus relates to this bodily life as air relates to the lungs. But it was already mentioned yesterday that something, one could say with joy, makes it “literally” impossible for us to examine the independent soul life, when we have it before us or in us, from falling asleep to waking up. It is impossible because where the detachment occurs, unconsciousness also occurs. So we cannot do the examination in this normal life. We could only become independent of the physical if we became aware of the soul, when it flows away, when it withdraws from the physical.

But there is a possibility to consider an intermediate state, which is not discussed here in the sense of a superstitious dream science, but in the sense of the strictest science: it is the dream state, that strange state of dream life, in which we live in such a way that, on the one hand, we feel that ideas are being conjured before our soul, but on the other hand, the course of these ideas is completely different from the life that the ideas lead in their context in normal, waking daytime life. The dream state is an intermediate state between the waking state and deep, dreamless sleep. Perhaps we can – let us express ourselves in this way for the time being – learn something from the strange illusions of dreams about the nature of the human soul. In order to do so, however, we must proceed according to the same strict, logical and scientific laws of research in the study of dreams as are otherwise applied in the study of life. And so, in order not to extend this consideration too much, we would like to draw your attention to a very specific dream, from which we want to recognize, as it were, how strangely the dream life can have an enlightening effect on what actually goes on inside the soul. I just want to say in advance that when such examples from life, for example from the dream life, are told here, they are not made-up things, but things that have really happened - because only in this way can conscientious research proceed. The dream in question is as follows: There was a student at a secondary school who had a particular talent for drawing. As a result, in the last year of secondary school, he was given a very difficult drawing to copy. Everyone else was given easier templates. It had now become the custom at that secondary school for several such copies of drawings to be handed in at the end of the year. And it so happened that this particular student, precisely because he had a special talent for drawing and was given that difficult template, did not finish the whole year and also by the end of school. This made him very anxious, and this state of anxiety increased towards the end of school. And although the humane administration of that school fully understood that this was natural and did not harm the student, he still had this experience behind him, he had gone through the anxiety attacks. It is interesting to follow this person in the further course of his life. Of course, he continued to show his special talent for drawing. And, recurring periodically, a very specific dream occurred to him, which always lasted several nights and then passed. The dream was that he always felt transported back to the last middle class, where he felt he was trying to draw and draw and could not finish. And the anxiety he went through, so that he always woke up trembling, was so strong in the dream that it could not be compared to the anxiety he had actually experienced. After a break of several years, the dream always returned periodically. This will not be understood unless this strange dream experience is considered in the context of the rest of that person's life. The strange thing was that every time he had recovered from such a dream experience, this person felt that his drawing skills had improved in some way; he could draw better lines, could express what he imagined better, he had become more skilled. So it looked like a gradual perfection of his drawing skills, and each stage was initiated by the characterized nightmare.

You will not find it unnatural if spiritual science now attempts the following explanation of this dream. It is natural that something like an increase in drawing ability cannot suddenly occur in a person's nature, but it appeared as if it always occurred suddenly after that nightmare. This can easily be explained: first certain inner, bodily processes had to take place, finer rhythmic-physiological processes, because we have bound everything that relates to the outer world to the instruments of the body. Changes had to take place in the instruments of the body. These changes took place slowly and gradually through those periods in which consciousness had no inkling that increased abilities would show themselves. For a while, one experiences it in consciousness as if the same intensity of ability were present. But what was needed was being prepared from below, in the depths of the entire human organization, and then, as the heightened drawing ability rose up into consciousness, it became available to the person concerned. And how did what was fermenting and working down there show itself? It showed itself in that it first, in the moment when it was able to break through into consciousness, took place in the half-consciousness of the dream, lived itself out in images of the dream. Before the will was even able to make use of the abilities, it conjured itself up out of the hidden depths of the soul in the dream experience, which basically only bears an external resemblance to what develops in the depths of the soul. We can see two things: the transition from a working process in the subconscious or, let us say, unconscious bodily organization to a process of awakening, first to half-conscious ideas of the dream and then to an entry into full consciousness. Who could doubt that the same forces that later appear in consciousness as an increase in drawing ability are only the transformed abilities that previously worked below in the body's organization? They showed themselves, so to speak, in their half-transformation in the dream images. That is one thing that we have clearly and distinctly before us: the possibility of thinking in this field of spiritual science in the same way as a natural scientist thinks. Every physicist will understand that pressure turns into heat. It is part of the same way of thinking to say that what later appears in the consciousness as drawing ability has first worked in another form below, has itself first prepared the organs, and only when the organs were there could the ability be increased – as when a person must first work at the machine in order to then use the machine. What finally emerges as a usable instrument must first be prepared by the same spiritual power. What finally emerges as a result is itself, having first prepared the organs in the depths of the soul's organization.

The other thing is this: how the dream works in a remarkable way – and this is perhaps even more interesting for a deeper consideration of human nature. What does it have to do with what happened there with the transformation of soul forces at work in the depths of human nature into conscious ones, what is being lived out as states of fear in strange images that belong to a long-gone lifetime? One thing is certain: the emotional context is at work in this person, not the life of imagination. What the person has gone through, what he has experienced in his mind in terms of anxiety, is a force that is much more intimately connected with the soul, with the innermost self, than the powers of imagination, which in ordinary life are borrowed from the external world. But the dream shows itself to be more intimately connected to the life of the soul than the conscious imaginative life of the day, because it presents itself in images in such a way that we, so to speak, place images before us that are reminiscent not of an act of imagining but of an inner experience, of the life of the feelings. We can see that at all, how our emotional life works in its strange seeming connections, as in dream images. Everywhere the images that are conjured up in our dreams are the indifferent ones; they live and weave themselves out in a seemingly arbitrary way – arbitrary in comparison to the regular connections that we see outside.

For example, we may experience the following. A person in the distant past did not like another person because he could not particularly appreciate that person's activities, and had formed a certain feeling, a certain emotional experience about that person. Now he had long since forgotten those things that were connected with that person. After many years he dreamt again of that person, but now that person was not a person, but a little dog that barked unpleasantly, but then changed the barking to a language whose sound was reminiscent of that person's language. And in the dream the little dog could fit into a context quite arbitrarily. But there was something that turned out differently than one wished. One wished that this person was not completely offended. And so one said something to the puppy, and the puppy barked in such a way that it said: It was bad what you did to me, but it doesn't matter, it will be okay, it was just a misunderstanding. What does the little dog have to do with that person? If we consider logical thinking, all thinking that is trained on the outside world, then the little dog really has nothing to do with what is really going on. But if we consider the state of mind of the person in question, the way he related to that person, we see that it faithfully recurs in a much later “dream”. But in terms of the way we shape our imagination, our mind is free to transform what it feels into the symbol of the little dog, transforming dream consciousness into seemingly arbitrary images. But only what we call the logical causal connection, a connection that we have from the outside world, is arbitrary; but the interweaving of the perceptions, however different they may be from the outside world, with what our mind, our inner being, carries forward from the events of life, is entirely lawful. Thus the soul shows us in dreams that it is more in its inner being than when it is connected with the limbs of the body. When it looks outwards, when it is connected with its bodily organs, it lives with everything external, with everything we can learn from the school of life. In dreams, the soul does not adhere to what it experiences from the outside; there it forms its emotional states only in images, and these bear the exact seal of the emotional life. From this we can see that what we call our emotional life and then our will life is more intimately connected with our deepest soul than the mere life of imagination. And now let us apply what has been shown to us by observing the dream world of the person with the anxiety dream to a consideration of the whole human life from birth to death. There we see something remarkable: that in our coherent memory, in what we regard as the actual content of our soul life, we go back in ordinary life to a certain point in our childhood. Beyond this point, we cannot remember ourselves. What happened before this point can only be told to us by other people, parents, older brothers and sisters and so on. Without doubt, all that we know later was already there. It is the conscious content of our soul; it is the content of what we can think like the continuous stream of soul life, what is at work, weaving and living within, already present before. The fact that we become aware of our self from a certain point in time is no proof that it was not there before, that it has only developed from this point on. That we know something has nothing to do with reality. The fact that we only become aware of our self from a certain point in time has nothing to do with the fact that this soul life was already present before.

But now, when we look at the life of a child in a very special way, if we only look at it closely, we realize how it was present before. Is it not the case that we can say about the life of a child that sleeps and dreams that it has something in common with what we feel in the vague darkness of our conscious soul life? The human being sleeps or dreams, so to speak, into earthly existence: the way a child engages with its surroundings, how it carries over what it experiences into later moments, how it forgets things and lets new ones penetrate, this whole way of life of the child has a similarity to the life of sleep and dreams. The human being sleeps his way into life, the human being lives his way into this earthly life with a diminished consciousness, with a soul life that has been tuned down. But how much he owes to this tuned-down soul life! Jean Paul's saying that we learn more in the first three years of life than in the three 'academic' years is deeply true. But something else is also true: in the first years of life, when we have no possibility of calling our soul life to consciousness, we can observe how thoroughly work is done, first in the shaping and organizing of our physical body. The more delicate organs of the human bodily life are still indeterminate, as even the hard-nosed natural sciences have to admit. Indeed, for anyone who can perceive such things, it is a truly mysterious thing how a child learns the most important things in the first years of life. In a wonderful way, the child rises from one who cannot walk to one who walks uprightly, from one who cannot speak to one who is able to speak. But all this is connected with the preparation of our bodily organs, with their chiseling and plastic shaping. Is this not something similar on a large scale to what we see in our dreamer, who dreams his fearful dream?

As we were able to say in the case of the dreamer: During the dream period, what first emerges later in consciousness first worked in the organs, so the dreaming child soul first works on the shaping of the body, on the development of the life of the body - it is a transformation of what later occurs consciously into those forces that work in the unconscious on our bodily organization, so that we have to say: Everything that we experience later, that is the content of our soul, is consciously present in our memory as a continuous stream. It is subdued because it has other tasks than to evoke consciousness; it has to work on shaping the body. If we follow this in the sense of modern thinking, we see that we must regard the soul as the original: not as a result of the body's organization - as the flame is a result of the candle - but as that which works on the body's organization, which first shapes this body's organization.

Yesterday I already mentioned that it is only natural that today's scientists and those who blindly follow them do not admit this. But a truly unprejudiced consideration of modern findings shows that spiritual science is right in its assertions and that we are heading for a time when the results of spiritual science will be recognized. Today it is easy to say: Does this not show, in relation to spiritual science, that a certain area of our brain, for example, draws our attention to the fact that we are dependent on a material structure in our brain for our speech and language? But it is precisely this thought, when formulated correctly, that shows the independence of the soul life, so that we can recognize how it is the soul that works on the body, not the other way around. We just have to separate in the right way what lies in the mere line of inheritance, what appears in us as directly inherited. What we have inherited occurs in us even without our coming into contact with the outside world. We could transfer a person to a distant island; they would certainly get dentures because this is based in heredity, but everyone knows that if we separate them from human language, they will not be able to speak and think through their inherited traits. This can only be accessed from the outside by speaking the thought into the environment. So, the other way around: those brain convolutions that later become the tool basis for speaking are only formed through the influx of language as an instrument.

Thus, the fact that is expressed by the materialistic or, to put it more modernly, monistic world view can serve precisely as a pointer to spiritual science. Thus we arrive at the idea that the soul works in the body and that we have no right to regard this soul-life as a mere function of the bodily. And the deeper we go, the more we realize that this soul-life must work in life from the very first atomic or cellular formation of the body. This means that the soul must confront us as something that must have existed before the first atom of the body began. We look back on a life of soul, because it must be there before the physical life, must be there in a purely soul-spiritual life. We grant the eternal use of the soul, we see how we cannot think of the soul-spiritual as emerging from some physical-bodily, but from a spiritual, and must assume that our soul, before it enters the body, existed in a spiritual existence, lived through spiritual lands. This was the conclusion of all who were able to reflect on the matter without prejudice. And everything that leads to this conclusion is to be found, only differently expressed, in Aristotle. But Aristotle makes a remarkable leap here: the soul comes directly from a divine existence, detaches itself, as it were, from a divine existence, enters into human existence, from which it detaches itself again at the moment of death. This idea, that in every individual life a special soul has been wrenched from God, founders when confronted with an unprejudiced observation of life.

Let us consider how our soul develops in earthly life. No one will deny that our soul life, especially in its emotional content, in its moods, in its entire basic state, is always as it can be on the basis of previous experiences, as, for example, people who have been annoyed all day, then become grumpy in the evening for their surroundings, and the latter can often already recognize from the facial expressions, from the way the person enters, what has affected the person during the day. In this way, we see how our mood is connected to what we have experienced before. But when we look at our soul life, as we enter it into our present earthly existence, it turns out that there are, so to speak, already existing moods and wills of the soul. They are so distinctly marked that even a philosopher, Schopenhauer, who was wrong about this, believed that these moods and wills, the whole character of a person, are given at birth and remain unchanged throughout life. This is not the case. An unbiased observation shows that we can also progress in terms of our will and character formation. But Schopenhauer's error could only arise from the fact that man shows us a certain mood, which is expressed in the basic nuance of his character, which we do not find at all different if we only look at it properly, a mood that we acquire through the events of ordinary life. We enter the world in such a way that this character, this mood, is already evident, that we carry this mood with us through our present existence. It is impossible, if one does not fantasize but relies on real facts and serious observation, to think of the mood with which the soul enters earthly existence as anything other than a mood that we have acquired in life. When we look at a child, we see that it does not yet have a life of ideas, but in the way the child rejects something, feels sympathy or antipathy, how it moves and so on, we already see the basic mood that we also encounter in later life and of which we cannot think otherwise than that it does not cut itself off from a beyond, not from an immediate divine existence, but that it is the result of earthly life - just as it is a mood on a small scale - so that we can say: From the way we look at the soul, we can see that there is a concept of repeated lives on earth, of a law that says that, although we belong to ourselves at the innermost core of our being, we go through life on earth with that innermost core from life to life and that, between each death and a new birth, our soul is embedded in a purely spiritual existence. So the entire life of a person is such that on the one hand it is in the physical body between birth or conception and death and again in a spiritual world between death and a new birth.

These things could now be explained in detail, but that is not the important and essential thing today. But what is more important is that it is also shown how, so to speak, through spiritual experiment, it can be confirmed that the soul is an independent being that works on its bodily organization. However, this experiment cannot be done in the same way as external laboratory experiments. What Goethe prophetically said applies to this to a particular extent:

Mysterious in the bright day
Nature cannot be robbed of her veil,
And what she may not reveal to your mind
You cannot force out of her with levers and screws.

Those who would like to reinterpret Goethe emphasize the “not” as if it were not possible to reveal what lies behind things. So the spiritual experiment cannot be that we use our physical tools, but that we actually transform our own soul life, our own inner being into a tool. A more detailed account of this can be found in 'Knowledge of Higher Worlds'. Today, we shall merely sketch out how the soul makes itself an instrument for looking into the spiritual world.

We must be clear about the fact that the soul must first turn to its inner life and become independent of all outer life. For this to happen, it is essential that the human being should artificially reproduce what otherwise takes place naturally when falling asleep. Everyone knows that at this time the soul loses the power to use the bodily organs, can no longer see or hear, and so forth, but at the same time, in normal life, it sinks down into the darkness of unconsciousness. We must achieve the one thing and prevent the other from happening. The spiritual researcher must, through a special training of the will, which is possible, be able to truly enter into that inner calm of the mind, where, as in the moment of falling asleep - but voluntarily - he silences all that speaks to him through the senses, he also makes the ordinary thinking that he has developed through external observation fall silent. We must also suppress all that we can remember, insofar as our life is stimulated from the outside, through joy and suffering. We must suppress all of this artificially, to make the soul pure and free from all external impressions. And then we must be able to push something into the soul through our mere will, through our strong will, on which we focus our entire soul life in strict inner concentration or meditation. In this way, the soul is transformed into an instrument of the spiritual world. What can we put into the soul? Not ordinary ideas – they have the task of depicting the truth as it is outside. If we only acquire images of what is going on outside, we cannot properly detach them, we cannot make them the actual property, the inner content of the soul. We must therefore form ideas that are connected with life, but are put together in such a way that they arise purely from our own will.

Let us assume that a person who wants to make their soul an instrument of spiritual life says to themselves – and what is said here is feasible, and those who carry it out will see the success in their practical life: I will imagine what love is in the deepest moral sense. – Here we have to tie in with external processes, but we cannot actually see through the external. So we will not be able to think through the concept of love, but we can think of a quality of love. We will not just think of a quality of love, but we will make an image of a loving action, an image that appears to be arbitrary but is in a certain emotional context with what is present in us as an experience of love. We form the image of a glass of water that is not completely filled; we pour out the water in small portions, but each time the water does not decrease, but increases. An image that is fantastic, dreamy, almost crazy in relation to the external world – but we are aware that for us it is only a symbolic image. We cannot grasp what love is, but we can feel this one quality in love. The person who loves gives, and by giving, he becomes more and more capable of love. We give our best, but love makes us richer and richer. Precisely because we give more and more completely in love, it multiplies.

This abstract idea does nothing for the education of our soul. But by consciously doing what the dream does unconsciously, by transforming the human being into a puppy, and by placing this idea at the center of our consciousness in such a way that we now focus our entire conscious activity on such an idea, then such an idea reaches us. Such an image has something quite different about it than when we give ourselves a definition of love in abstracto. This is already noticed by the person who forms this image. It is precisely such images, which do not have the task of depicting the external, but which work through what we feel about them, through what they are to our mind, where the one is connected with the other not according to the laws of the course of the image , but of the life of the mind, [...] through the mediation of feeling, they must now live in our consciousness as representations, as images that fill our soul, and we must devote ourselves to such representations to the exclusion of all other life. This is often a long, inner life's work, but if we carry it out, then we become spiritual researchers and in no other way. The objection could justifiably be made: Yes, if it is often necessary to practice this unchangingly for many years and with great energy, then not everyone is able to become a spiritual researcher and convince themselves of the reality of the spiritual researcher's statements.

But how many people today are convinced of what is going on in the observatories? Outside, one only gets to know the external appearance; the essentials are fathomed by those who work in the laboratories, and from this the others form a world view. One can indeed carry out these things in every life, but depending on one's disposition, one will only get to certain degrees. But the spiritual researcher must, by means of such exercises, tear the soul away from the body. This brings him into a state that is similar to sleep and yet quite different, in that all the outer world is silent, all worries and concerns are silent, extinguished as if by sleep, but we are not surrounded by the darkness of consciousness, but experience something that we have not experienced before , of which we had no idea before; yes, we experience it so clearly that we now experience something within our soul, something without our bodily organs, yes, outside of them, so clearly that we go through an intermediate state that is even uncomfortable, that when we have taken it to a certain extent, we feel: Now you are experiencing your soul, now you are so within yourself that you experience what you do not experience from the outside, but now you experience what only arises in the soul – to use this expression of Jakob Böhme – what only exists in the spiritual. But one only experiences it and at first one cannot conceptualize it in the way one was accustomed to conceptualizing external perceptions. Why not? The inner experience shows us clearly how it is outside of the body; the brain has been formed only for the representations we are accustomed to. Now we are experiencing something new; the brain is not prepared to conceptualize this. We therefore experience it in such a way that we feel like fools, like a child who cannot yet express in words what he is experiencing.

And if you then continue such soul exercises in energy and with inner moral strength, with self-built energy, you first feel resistance after resistance, but now our brain itself, our whole body seems like a block that cannot keep up. And only by continuing, by continuing with great moral strength, do we feel how it gradually comes about that we can think what we have experienced ourselves; we can then also see it. We feel and see how something happens in us again during the spiritual exercises, which otherwise only happened in the first years of childhood. We form the tool of our soul in a plastic way, so to speak, we reshape our body, and when we feel: Now we have made the great effort that the child makes while playing with the awake body, now we have done something similar, we have worked on our body - then it happens that we can also tell what we have experienced, and only if it is told, it is spiritual science. And when it is told, then everyone can see it, as in life, through their common sense. This is the way to experience the soul in its independence through genuine spiritual experiment, so that we know: It is this soul that, out of its spiritual and soul content, always works on its bodily organization in the same way that we become aware that a child works on its bodily organization with the formative forces it has brought with it from its previous life.

And now we survey our life between birth and death once more, and we see it in an ascending and descending line. We see how the inner forces that we see coming over from a previous life gradually work their way up, how the indeterminate features form distinct features, and clumsy movements transform into skillful movements: We see this as emerging life. Then one part is released into consciousness, while another continues to work until we feel that life is moving in a descending line, until we feel that this tool of ours is moving in a descending line. Now, however, we feel that this life has continued to enrich itself, that we have taken in new things. So we feel that what is primarily shaping our present life, what our life puts into the basic lines of our character, comes from a previous life, but that we are powerless – because our life, our interaction with the outside world, comes from a previous life, because this life is given from before – to directly energize into life what we have received as enrichment. We then feel that it forms and forms as strength. If only our mind, our will, can grasp what we have gained, then when we go through the gate of death, we will be able to prepare our future life. We just need to grasp something correctly, namely that what we acquire in one earthly life is basically only what the intellect has, but that the basic direction of our mind, as it enters into life, must come from previous earthly embodiments. And so we see the confirmation of Lessing's statement that the life of imagination cannot enter from a previous life. Nothing we imagine can come from a previous life. This is because our ideas are expressed in language, and for many people, all imagining is just a daughter of language. However, we acquire language in this life, and language has to be learned anew. In any case, high school students would have to acknowledge that even if they were embodied in ancient Greece, it does not make learning the Greek language easier for them. That has to be learned anew. Only the basic direction of the disposition, the will, the character is the result of previous incarnations, is what is saved from the imaginative life of previous lives.

Friedrich Hebbel once wanted to write a drama, for which he wrote the first draft. In it, the re-embodied Plato was to appear as a student who cannot understand Plato. This could have shown how something that was direct imaginative life is not carried over from an earlier existence into a later one. What Plato experienced back then is transformed into emotional life, into emotional direction, into soul mood, and is thus carried over into a new existence. Therefore, it must be clear to us that the objection that one does not remember one's past lives in ordinary life cannot be accepted either. One remembers them in such a way that one's present life appears in its emotional content as a repetition of the past, but not in the way one remembers earlier events in one's mental life. For the mental life is what distinguishes the present memory in the one embodiment. Thus we see that especially in the face of a true contemplation of life, that which we must say the most enlightened minds have been driven to acknowledge appears to be confirmed: the fact of repeated earthly lives. One can, of course, argue with Lessing that he wrote The Education of the Human Race in the weakness of old age. One argues against greater minds, even when a work like The Education of the Human Race presents itself as the final result, as the ripe fruit of a rich life. Such minds then believe that the spirit of such a person has weakened. They just don't assume that they can't keep up with the point of view that they still recognize, to the point of view that the spirit of these people has risen to. But this excuse does not hold up in the face of another assertion made by Lessing in the full power of his life, in the “Hamburg Dramaturgy”, and which contains something that connects to what spiritual science must lead to if it continues to pursue the thoughts developed today and yesterday. The contents that we have in the soul between death and a new birth lead an independent, purely spiritual existence. But this is the recognition of the existence of a purely spiritual world. What modern enlightened thinker does not shudder when he hears that a spiritual world beyond the material one is assumed? And who would not declaim: Have such enlightened minds as Lessing and others worked to such an extent that we should go back to the old superstitious view of the existence of a spiritual world? But one could hold up the following saying of these same enlightened minds to them: for example, Lessing's saying:

We no longer believe in ghosts? Who says that? Or rather, what does it mean? Does it mean something like this: We have finally come so far in our insights that we can prove the impossibility of it; certain irrefutable truths that contradict belief in ghosts have become so common knowledge, are so constantly present even to the meanest man, that anything arguing against it must necessarily seem ridiculous and absurd to him? That cannot be what it means. We do not believe in ghosts now, so it can only mean: in this matter, about which almost as much can be said for as against it, which is not decided and cannot be decided, the currently prevailing way of thinking has given the reasons against it the upper hand; a few have this way of thinking , and many seem to have it; these make the clamor and set the tone; the greatest multitude is silent and indifferent and thinks one way now, another then, hears by daylight with pleasure mocking the ghosts and by dark night with horror telling about them.

This is certainly an uncomfortable passage for modern materialistic natural science. But we could also cite many a spirit in the course of the nineteenth century who, through an inner necessity, even if not yet on the basis of all considerations that have been cited today from spiritual science - because this was not possible at the time - came to the only possible assumption of repeated earth lives for the human soul. That is why Lessing emphasizes so strongly that this is the only possible assumption about the life of the soul beyond arising and ceasing. But with this we rise to a truly meaningful idea of eternity, because now life is not just a void into which we are placed by something outside of us, but now we feel: What we have brought into this life, we have brought with us from previous lives, we have worked for in previous lives. But what we experience now is transformed, it is processed when we go through the gate of death, so that we acquire the powers by which we can shape the later body again. We see that growing in this embodiment, which will be shaped alive in us in a next embodiment. Thus we see how eternity comes together as something concrete. We do not feel eternity as an infinite void from the beginning to the end, but rather, we experience what eternity will become as the soul lives into eternity, she repeatedly feels: “This is what I carry over from earlier stages of existence; this is how I utilize in later lives what I have acquired in earlier ones – it is what creates the form for me; and in the same way, through the present life, I can acquire an entitlement for the future.” And from these individual claims on the future, a concrete, real idea of the nature of eternity emerges. Because where we add future-proof work to future-proof work, we expand into eternity in terms of our hopes for life. We feel the real, true idea of eternity, not the empty idea that is so often presented to us. And the only way we can feel it is by looking at this whole inner life, not only in terms of ideas, but also in terms of the whole state of mind, the moods of the soul, and the life of the will. If we consider the threefold nature of the soul, how these forces transform into one another, how that which matures in the life of ideas passes over into moods of mind, in order to appear as such in the next life, to appear as a life of will, then we grasp the whole life of the human soul as a whole.

We need only fulfill one thing in order to lead what spiritual science can give us not only to a reasoned hope for eternity, but to one built on genuine knowledge. We need only look at the soul not in one of its aspects, but in its totality, and then we come to feel how true it is when we say: In thinking, in feeling and willing, in the whole nature of the soul, the world reveals itself to us insofar as we are grounded in it, insofar as we will be grounded in it for all future. What - let me add this once more - does not live in us as a theory, not as an abstract science, but pours like an elixir of life into our entire being, so that we not only fathom eternity but experience it - experience how it is built up from its individual building blocks , is expressed in the verse of the second mystery drama, where it is expressed what the soul can feel when it feels its own life, when it feels what it must carry over from one earth life to the next as a claim to eternity. Thus a true knowledge of ourselves, of our soul life, calls out to us when we grasp this soul life in true self-knowledge:

In your thinking live thoughts of the world,
In your feeling weave world forces,
In your willing work world beings.
Lose yourself in world thoughts,
Experience yourself through world forces,
Create yourself from will beings.
Do not end with what is far from the world
Through the play of thought
Begin in the vastness of the spirit
And end in the depths of your own soul:
You will find divine goals
Recognizing yourself within yourself.

When a Greek philosopher was asked about the purpose of philosophy, he replied [in the following way]: Imagine there is a fair. Some people have various things to sell; others are there to look at everything; [manifold interests, interacting] – that is life at the fair. Not the most ignoble task is that of the philosophers, who look at everything without themselves participating in the fair. But sometimes mere exploration of things might not seem useful; pangs of conscience might arise from such knowledge, from knowing for the sake of knowing. [Should playing the “gawker” really be the noblest task? Does life justify knowing for the sake of knowing?] Such a thing seems to concern the few. But it is a general human concern. Every human being feels the urge to know something [about the things of life] without a principle of utility. Why should man, as he lives, have something beyond mere knowledge? [This is a question that has been asked at all times.] There is a higher world, [underlying reality of the external world], a supersensible world, and man has certain relationships to this world, which is cognizable to him if he rises to this world, which is possible through religious faith. The religious need, the longing, is no less now than it was in the past. But this world, in which one believes, can also be explored through knowledge. [So there are no limits to knowledge.] The prejudice that one can only believe in it is no longer justified today. Other prejudices are found in those who think monistically, [they think that human knowledge can never penetrate into these worlds. It should not say anything about them]. But man must then humbly acknowledge that there is a supersensible world. Part of this is the subject of our evening meditation today: [to show the relationship between man and the supersensible world].

The external world approaches man from two sides. Firstly, through the perception of the senses, and secondly, when man tries to look into his own inner being: suffering, joys, urges, raptures and so on. In everyday life, this is often much closer than the external world. Life forces us to look at it. But on closer reflection, it becomes clear that we have formidable obstacles on both sides. There is, as it were, a boundary in forms and colors in the outer world; but we can think them up. We come up against a wall when we turn our gaze out into the world; we are in a difficult position when observing the outer world. For it is difficult to eavesdrop on ourselves in this observation. We are especially hampered in separating ourselves from the outside world. We grow together with the outside, can no longer distinguish between the external and the internal, for example, at a beautiful sunrise. It is hopeless to want to separate: this is us and this is the outside world. Or with compassion that you have for someone - [all the strength of your soul is taken away] - with devotion or indifference to others. We know that something arises from the depths of the soul, but it is hopeless to try to separate the inner sense from the outside world, [from what presents itself externally and from the supersensible within].

Within oneself, objective knowledge of one's own being is difficult, much more difficult. Self-love is a constant obstacle. In this respect we are a good person, in that a bad one. Self-love confronts us like a second wall, preventing us from formulating it as: “We are such people.” Semi-conscious states show us quite clearly where we end up when we do not control ourselves from the outside world - [in the dream world]. There is a lawfulness when falling asleep; dream images are to be judged impartially. It is characteristic: someone dreams that they are with several people; these people have various very specific relationships with him, for example, antipathy. But the dreamer does not see this as people, but as a little dog that barks, the barking turns into bickering. The little dog says something like, “Oh, it was a misunderstanding, everything is fine again.

The logical character leaves the person. What prevails when you imagine a person as a puppy? You are emancipated from the control of the outside world. The state of mind transforms [into an appropriate image] of how [the unloved person] lives in the mind of the person. That is the real law, [the characteristic] of the dream world. People imagine that they are painters. That would be pleasing to the person concerned. Every imagination is subject to a mood of the will. What is valid in the dream is our self-will, our self-love, that is the determining principle. In the waking state, this self-will must be able to be controlled, [must be broken. Our entire organization depends on how our will works in our external life.]

[Let us consider fatigue.] Fatigue – what is it, why does it occur? It is not the muscles or the organs that tire. If the heart muscle had to rest, things would go badly for the human being. They do not tire, nor do we tire when we let our thoughts wander. [Everything that follows from the human organization does not tire.] But when we are thinking about a calculation or something like that, we tire; even when a muscle is not determined to be active from within, but by the conscious will of the person. The unconscious will, the power that makes the heart, lungs, diaphragm, etc. work, does not tire when the impulse comes from within; only when self-will, self-love, self-life are at work, then they interfere with the organism. These three are in constant struggle against the rest of the world; they have to submit to the general world order – and fight against it. Self-will [self-love] prevents us from recognizing ourselves; self-will must be broken in order to understand what it is. If a person could look inside themselves, they could discover the spiritual and psychological. Dreams show us how we build ourselves through self-will. (When we are awake, we are merged with the outside world. When we submit to our own will, we become tired. Tiredness is a constant rebellion against the workings of the organism.

The relationship between the human soul and the outside world must be established elsewhere. [A saying of Goethe's is:

When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels in the world as a large, beautiful, worthy and valuable whole, when the harmonious comfort grants him a pure, free delight, then the universe, if it could feel itself, would reach its goal, exult and admire the summit of its own becoming and being. For what is the point of all the effort of suns and planets and moons, of stars and milky ways, of comets and nebulae, of becoming and becoming worlds, if not, ultimately, a happy person unconsciously enjoys his existence?]

How can we find what lives within us if we cannot detach ourselves from the external world? It becomes possible when we go beyond the ordinary, [when we rise above our immediate surroundings], when we devote ourselves to the contemplation of how the human being has come into being, when we reflect on ourselves, on the ego, on the enduring in change. But we must have pangs of conscience when we consider that the ego is repeatedly extinguished. Fichte, the ego philosopher, wants to construct an entire world out of the ego. Does the creation of the world stop for hours when we are asleep? [We must realize]: During the day we do not have the ego, but the image of the ego, like a figure in the mirror. The mirror image indicates that there is something that we only perceive in the mirror. Where is the activity of the I itself? How we have grown from epoch to epoch, our particular development is due to the particular coloring that the I has. Then there is getting over the extinguishing of the I. The idea is extinguished, but not the activity of the I. The core of the I is there in waking and sleeping, [there it shows itself to us in its reality]. We must ascend to the real grasp of the ego; our soul life will grow and become richer. The ego is to be looked at as if in a chemical laboratory some process. We must learn to feel. The task is difficult, but in the end it can lead to grasping the ego. It is difficult to get beyond imagining, to gain an impression of ourselves. Then there is the second thing that must guide us: Up to a certain point we remember; we cannot go back beyond the beginning. But it is absurd to believe that the I is not there [before]. Life, the character of the soul, is laid down in the child when it comes into the world Schopenhauer. The child will immediately push away, attack; the fundamental nature of the child remains even beyond the point where one remembers. How can the I be found as it was before?

We go to this point with our ideas. But we have to leap beyond those ideas. With our mood and our will, we go beyond our own will. We are placed in a certain ethnic and linguistic community. This is to be accepted as if I had not placed myself there. It is not based on knowledge, but on the decision of the will. Thus, with our retrospective view, we are led even further back. Then something strange happens, as if one had two glasses and poured water from one into the other, and the glass from which it was poured would never become empty – [or like gases that then result in water]. Something completely new arises. [Feeling and will come together and say: You have made your own destiny. Through a decision of the will, one has to accept one's fate, “in which I am stuck”, a feeling that one is stuck in one's fate. There one comes to the feeling of one's remaining, there we step out of ourselves behind the physical, sensual world, there we are permeated, souled by our I itself. Thus the wall is removed. In the world of imagination, it is like a wall; but our destiny is built by our I itself, out of the supersensible world. Today, the most important thing is not to look at the outside, but to experience within ourselves the feeling: “You are.”

[While a person surrenders to their will in a dream, they are guided by a world of images. There are symbols that affect the soul, not out of their own will, but out of certain necessities:] The imagination of love is like pouring from one vessel into another, whereby the one from which one pours is never empty. That is how love is. It does not help much to imagine it in the abstract. Not through definitions, but through comprehensible, symbolic images, [triangle], our soul continues to progress. If one allows such images to take effect, one comes to a separation from the external world. In this way, one grows together inwardly with the supersensible world, builds a bridge to it, and receives the assurance: “It is.” This has an immediate effect on life.

It also becomes clear through further reflection that earlier lives are [necessary, in which causes were laid for later lives].

Heroic natures will say to themselves: What we work for, we give to our descendants. [That would be] the most intimate thing we can experience; [if we were to] pass it on to the [next] generations, it would be lost [to us].

As the physical declines, the spiritual grows stronger, and it becomes tangible that something is growing within us that will give rise to a new life. Man experiences the spiritual and soul core within himself. Through this, man experiences eternity. [It is like an] elixir of life. He draws strength and confidence from such contemplations. Destiny is the supersensible law of karma. Man experiences the supersensible world and feels that he connects with these thoughts inwardly and then becomes useful in a new life to be built up, thus will not be a “gawker”. These are forces that move people forward - like the steam in the locomotive. Our thoughts are living weaving forces in the universe. The soul, which understands itself as living in the whole universe, feels its connection with it.

Answering questions Question: About Nietzsche.

Rudolf Steiner: [One should] not let one's own judgments flow when one wants to talk about certain personalities. As a cultural phenomenon, he is particularly interesting, growing up with Schopenhauer, Wagner, [with] Greek culture. Nietzsche is not a creative spirit. He loaded the fate of culture onto his own soul. He suffers from the positivism of the time. The fate of the heart will make him see others as mere [i.e., other than mere?] theory. Darwinism: ditto — applied to Nietzsche's life.

The life of ideas must be fertilized from within. Nietzsche tries; [he] does not come to the path of knowledge, seeks the supersensible in man in the contemplation of [?] the will. He is captivating because of the tragedy of his life. How one relates to spiritual science – objectively – is how one should relate to Nietzsche.

Question: [not handed down].

Rudolf Steiner: Surrender to a higher being without egoism promotes soul development. The same applies to prayer or meditation; this must be imbued with the original mood: “Not my will, but yours be done”.

[The] folding of the hands: It causes a promotion when the thought is serious. It is a kind of togetherness, according to human physiology. Naturalness - unvarnished - already causes the movement of the hands of the speaker.

Dear attendees! Allow me this evening to summarize some of what has been said in the course of the lectures I have been privileged to give you here from this place, in relation to spiritual-scientific knowledge of the human being, and to place it under a particular point of view, so that in the next lecture, the day after tomorrow, I can succeed in speaking fruitfully about one of the most important questions of our present spiritual life: about the origin of the human being.

The human being who occasionally casts a glance at his own soul, at himself, will undoubtedly have the impression in some cases that he not only faces his own being as if it were something unknown, but this impression can deepen to the point that this own being may well appear to the person as something that sometimes fills him with apprehension, perhaps even seeming like fear of something unknown. What takes place in our conscious soul life, what we experience from morning, from waking up until we fall asleep in the evening, often seems as if everything that lives in our consciousness comes up from unknown depths, surges up and ripples up like ocean waves from the unknown depths of the sea. And although, when we look at this stormy sea and these rippling waves, we can well imagine that something or other is going on in the depths, we often say to ourselves: How little does what is happening on the surface reveal what is going on in the depths. And so it is sometimes with our own soul life. What takes place in our consciousness is like waves breaking up from unknown depths, and since we ourselves are the scene of all this activity, the question of what is going on down there sometimes takes on an anxious character. Yes, the impression can become even more profound when we see how, from the hidden depths of our soul life, these or those feelings, these or those passions or drives, these or those volitional impulses arise, which we cannot can't control, that are there to our chagrin, perhaps often also to our joy; we can also feel as if we were standing on the earth's surface and, as it were, as if the underground depths were beginning to tremble, as in an earthquake. It is the impression of not knowing what will come, which weighs on our minds. We can often have this feeling about what is coming up, and we are aware that it is not in our hands at all. We best gain access to the hidden depths of the soul when we start from the familiar processes in the life of the soul, that is, when we start from what we are aware of; and what, after all, would a person be more aware of than what he believes he has grasped, what he believes he has recognized, in which he believes he has insight from these or those branches of knowledge of this or that science or believes he has recognized from his life experience? What, after all, is more conscious and better known in our soul life than what we call our clear ideas? Yes, but when we survey these ideas, this knowledge of ours, this insight of ours, then – if we face the matter without prejudice – a feeling of powerlessness will arise in us in the face of this knowledge, so to speak a feeling of being closed off from the world in our knowledge.

From Greek intellectual history, we know that a great philosopher was once asked how people actually relate to life, and he is said to have replied: Those who want to recognize and actually achieve it, act like certain people at some fair. While some come to a fair to sell this or that and are interested in selling their goods, and others are interested in buying, there are also those everywhere at fairs who neither want to sell nor buy, who have simply come to look at the things, at life at the fair.

It is the same with people of knowledge. They come to the market of life, not to interfere with the conflicting interests, but to quietly observe life.

Now, it might seem that a person who is immersed in ordinary life could care little about the universal task of the special people of insight, but in a sense we must say that every person, wherever they are in life, has a corner where they are people of insight; and without being a philosopher, without being a person of insight, no one can actually walk through this life satisfied. So for those moments when we are just watching without getting caught up in the “fairground life,” when we are philosophers, we are able to have the qualities of those who merely watch. And as a spectator, as a little standing in the corner, one actually always feels when contemplating the most significant performances in terms of the urge for knowledge and insight. And what applies to ideas of the life of knowledge applies, so to speak, to our entire life of ideas. There we will realize something of what is called the powerlessness of the life of knowledge.

Now one could say: Yes, you label people of knowledge as a kind of gawker of life and make knowledge into something that does not really intervene in the real surge and hustle and bustle of life. But it is precisely from this impotence of life that one gains knowledge when one observes how the human being seeks to understand and recognize the hidden forces, how they work in life, how they can advance it and keep it in order. And yet, even when a person is completely imbued with the light that, let us say, emanates from moral or other ideas, it may still be the case that his urges speak, his instincts, his passions assert themselves, and that in reality he cannot follow what has arisen in his ideas. We have to say: the images have no power to intervene in our soul life, to work and weave in such a way that we would adapt our soul reality entirely to the life of images. The power, the strength of the impulse, that is what the images lack in relation to the reality of the soul life, and we feel the powerlessness of the life of images and the real impulses of life as a duality within ourselves.

How people here and there believe, how they have believed at all times, to grasp important worldviews, yes, the whole world - and lo and behold: if the ideas had the power to really implement into life impulses what they seemingly contain, then it would have to be easier to convince people of such ideas. Every time this is at issue, one recognizes the powerlessness of ideas in the face of reality, in the face of life.

One can understand only too well if the artist in particular, who is supposed to create out of the totality of his soul, would become sober and dry if he were not there with the whole of his soul - we can see how he of being absorbed in the soul process, because he feels: the moment when, instead of receptive soul impulses, a certain logical sequence of thoughts [constructed ideas] intervenes, the moment soul life becomes weak. That is why one speaks of [the] sobriety [of the life of ideas]. The artist knows that art cannot work if it is taken from mere conceptual life. Indeed, one recognizes works of art by whether they are created out of the life of the soul or out of abstract ideas.

The basis for such a feeling is an awareness of the powerlessness of the life of imagination. And since our imaginations are actually what makes us truly human in life, and we realize that our imaginations actually reach deep into our soul life, the question arises: is it all about these imaginations, what, so to speak, ripples on the surface and does not penetrate into the deeper regions of the soul life? Here we are confronted with the most primitive question of the hidden life of the soul. Nevertheless, we can only penetrate to the essence of the feelings and sensations of the deeper soul life if we start from the everyday, from this primitive question.

Now we all know that what we experience in our conscious waking state unfolds in this way: Those who have an eye for the peculiarities of their soul life will realize that in the course of what lives in their imaginations, emotional and mood experiences are connected with the ideas. Only with the most outstanding ideas do we really feel that we are experiencing joy or sorrow. This resonance of moods with the life of ideas, however, is basically always present. No one can say that anything takes place in their conscious life that does not bring with it, even if only to a small degree, a sense of pleasure or sorrow, hope or fear, and the like. In everyday life, we never have pure thinking, mere life of ideas in consciousness; but always connected with what takes place in the conscious life is that which we can call mood, feeling, sensation.

In the course of life, however, this element of the life of ideas behaves quite differently from that which arises as a concomitant of the life of ideas in the form of a state of mind. You can see this when you try, after ten or twenty years, to recall something you have experienced more or less clearly in such a way that you can recreate the event in the life of ideas. If things are linked, some with great pain, others with great joy, we will always realize that this joy or pain does not appear with the same strength and energy in our memory. For example, if someone has experienced a death, then they know that the pain cannot be relived in their memory with the original strength in their emotional life. It is the same with joy. So in our memory, the ideas play a completely different role.

The question may be raised: Yes, but if the images that we can form of painful or joyful events are alive in our memory, where are the moods, where is the emotional life that was connected with these ideas? Now this question, however much it belongs to the “primitive”, is not so very simple. And many people will still dispute that one can give an answer to such questions using strictly logical methods. But much of what has been said about elementary questions of spiritual research does put us in a position to get an idea about the fate of the moods associated with the ideas. While the images can be conjured up again from memory, the same cannot be done with the moods. If we look at life as intensely and thoroughly as is necessary to answer such a question, we find that every person we know for a long time The overall state of health of this person is expressed in the fact that he is a more or less happy person, so that his happiness is expressed not only in the way he perceives the outside world emotionally, but also in the way he feels in his organization, in terms of harmony and health. When we speak of a person's overall state of mind, we must not separate emotional experience from what we call overall state of mind, and this also includes those moods that depend on our physical condition, on how our blood flows, on how the flow of thoughts in our brain and nervous system takes place.

If we consider the overall state of a person at a certain point in time, when he is not in a happy frame of mind, when he is melancholy or downhearted or tired of what his whole being indicates as his overall ; if we observe this state of a person and compare it with how we knew him in earlier days of his life, we will [...] find there the moods and sensations and feelings that do not enter into the memories. He does not live in the regions from which we draw our memories, but has descended into the depths of life, where the constitution that makes up our mental life is worked on, but which is also connected to our entire physical organization as a state of mind. How we are full of life and hope, how we can be melancholy and downhearted, how we can be full of zest for work, tired, exhausted or prone to attack each of these states of mind has arisen from the fact that they separate from the life of ideas and descend into the deep foundations of the soul. Where our personal happiness is built, so to speak, we see a certain line separating itself from the life of ideas; we see that part of it that accompanies this life of ideas diving down and working in hidden depths of the soul, where our life essence is incorporated into our personal state. There we have an element that comes from conscious experiences, but is always submerged in those regions where it can work on our entire life.

But sometimes what has gone underground in our overall state is brought back up, but brought up in a certain way, not just brought up when the ordinary, everyday consciousness through which we connect with the external world is switched off in a certain way - what has gone underground can sometimes be seen rising in the semi-conscious states of the dream world. This is why the images of the dream world appear to us so meaningfully that they transport us to distant, past times in our lives. If we had tried to somehow reflect on what had happened, we might or might not have gotten a clear picture. But we cannot retrieve what we have experienced in our feelings. However, anyone who examines the dream images finds that it turns out that someone expresses ancient moods in the symbols of his dreams. It may well be, for example, that someone reaches a ripe old age and is no longer inclined to go out on the street with a paper cap or a toy sword and command children as they do. He will have an idea of what has happened to him, but the moods can no longer have the same power in his daily life. They take them on in his dreams. And it is not uncommon for someone of a certain age to dream every night that he is actually a major or that he is “taking a journey in his dream”. In his outer life, he may remember what he read in children's books, but he no longer experiences the bliss he felt at the time. But in his dreams he does.

Where everyday life ends, where the human being feels the images of his or her ideas in dreams, we find that the emotional states that play and work in the hidden depths of the soul life come up when they have not yet been used – and this is important – to work on our physical organization. If they still live in a corner of our hidden soul life, then they come up in dreams. When someone is transported in a dream to earlier moods, then the whole way in which they come up in the dream reveals to us: certain feelings have remained; they have not yet exhausted their strength, so the half-asleep life of the dream brings them up into our half-consciousness – the dream images present themselves to us. Here we have an example of how we can penetrate the ceiling of our everyday state of consciousness, how what lives in the hidden life of the soul can indeed come to mind, but how these ideas are not then checked against the outside world, but live entirely in the moods present in our inner life of the soul.

This is something very primitive, but it can lead our understanding to what can be explored from the hidden depths of the soul through spiritual science. We see a property of the moods that withdraw from our imaginative life; we see a property that they acquire that is extraordinarily important: by releasing the ideas, they gain power. And we can say to ourselves: While we used to speak of the powerlessness of knowing the life of ideas in consciousness, we can see precisely from this how used moods of mind transform themselves or how moods of mind, without our intervention as dream images present themselves to us in such a way that we do not have the power to correct them through logic. We see how this life of the soul snatches itself away from outer experience through the senses, away from outer thinking, which is bound to the brain. In this way, this subconscious soul life acquires a certain power, a certain reality.

At first, this reality is one that leads us only into ourselves, into our own reality. Dreams like the ones just discussed are a reflection of what we have stored up in terms of fear and hope, of anxiety and confidence in life. But we come to something that affects our inner state and is expressed in our dream life. We do not come out of ourselves, but we get to know reality and have to say: the moods had to break free to become real in us.

How the constitutions, these moods, work down there, how that which detaches itself from the ideas works, can be seen if one considers the training that has been discussed several times, which one must undergo if one really wants to become a knower of the spiritual world. You will find – this cannot, of course, be discussed in detail today – you will find the instructions for how to penetrate into that which has descended into the depths of the soul and which makes us appear healthy or ill and only shows itself in fleeting dream images, in the writing “How to Know Higher Worlds”.

Through training, through imagination, [inspiration] and intuition, when the soul is actively immersed – not in the vague way described in the two cases mentioned – when the soul is actively immersed, then the human being learns, albeit only initially, to know what is confronting him, to know himself. All methods of meditation and concentration lead, in a sense, to the study of deep self-knowledge. They do not lead to the self-knowledge that one thinks one has exhausted when one takes a normal look at the forces with which one works in everyday life, but they lead one to where that deep individuality is in oneself, in which those moods are. He gets to know what lies dormant in the hidden depths of his soul, as if kept under a blanket. And here the human being must familiarize himself with the fact that when the forces for his recovery or illness emerge from the soul, he can acquire completely new insights into the peculiarities of this hidden self.

Only real results of spiritual research can be cited. In particular, the human being gets to know how moods of joy, delight, bliss, moods of sadness and melancholy, impressions of ugliness or impressions of beauty, impressions of error, deception, impressions of truth or wisdom affect his or her entire being. Yes, you learn to recognize that everything that has just been mentioned, the impressions we have of joy or sadness, of beauty or ugliness, are connected with the becoming and passing away of something deeper within us, so that when we begin , when we move on to this realization, we are no longer indifferent to the outside world, but learn to know: certain things that take place in the world have a real destructive effect, taking something away; others have such a fertilizing effect that they help us.

We cannot say that at the moment when we consciously or unconsciously tell lies, we are really destroying anything. We cannot say that what has a destructive effect on our being when we tell lies, and what has a fertilizing effect when we speak the truth, is the same as the external forces of becoming and passing away, but something akin to them.

He who does not form his knowledge at the point where the soul benefits or destroys itself through what takes place in his mind, is not on the right path. Self-knowledge, which takes place in the hidden depths of the soul, is therefore not what could be given to humanity at a time when humanity had not yet matured to acquire this self-knowledge, which is related to the forces of arising and passing away; it must now be incorporated into humanity. Weak humanity has been spared from realizing the devastating effect of lying and deception, and the uplifting effect of honesty and sincerity. Usually, people believe that lying and deception or honesty and sincerity are things that can only be judged by means of ideas. But what is there, without our being able to judge it, penetrates down into the depths of our soul life and takes effect there as a real force.

Self-knowledge is the true starting point for all higher knowledge. A person who wants to recognize what lives out there behind the sensuality of the outside world must delve into his or her self and will see that moral and emotional forces are not just something abstract, but something that descends and is the decisive factor not only for our entire human value, but for our entire humanity. How we grow into the outer sensory world with our body, which we wear as the garment of our self and which has the sense organs, how we see this sense world with the eyes of the body, hear this sense world with the ears, how we establish a connection with the mind, which has its tool in the brain, with this sense world, develop an inner experience of what is outside of us in the sense world, and thus come into relationship with the outer world through our outer human being. In the same way, we come into contact with spiritual forces and impulses from our outer environment through the human being that we develop within us.

When we look out into the world with our eyes, we perceive colors and forms. When he has discovered his self resting in the deeper soul forces, then what is in the outer sense world does not emerge in the usual way, but the realities of the outer world also arise, and then we get to know a new context of things, that which stands between the beings of the outer world.

As we now take the first step into the qualities of the soul forces that have a destructive and constructive effect, we then learn that the inner self expands, so that we not only have it in its arising and passing away, but we feel it interacting with the external reality, with the spiritual reality of the outer world. Therefore, the images of the spiritual environment then arise in these hidden depths of the soul.

Man comes to know the spiritual world indirectly through his self. Much of what appears impenetrable or even random to the ordinary view, which is limited only to the external sense world, is revealed to us within the context of such knowledge, in which the self grows together in its hidden depths with the environment. The strange thing about this is that the deeper we penetrate into our own self, the more the horizon with which we are connected in the external world expands; the more we dive into our subconscious, the more spiritual aspects of the external world we recognize. To delve into the powers of the soul means to go beyond belief, to learn about the spiritual world. For down there we are much more deeply connected with the essence of things than we can be with the senses and the mind, which is bound to the physical brain. When one can say that consciousness has created a larger horizon, then at the same time a spreading of one's own self and an penetration into the spiritual worlds has been achieved. There is no other way to reach hidden depths of the soul than to gradually penetrate the external spiritual world. In the process, a real knowledge of the spiritual foundations of existence arises for those who penetrate it through the observation of everything we can achieve through the knowledge of the higher world. What is described in spiritual science and what you can find in theosophical books occurs.

But it is possible - although in our time one can only gain an unchallengeable view into the spiritual world through training - for certain individuals to gain insights that come from ancient heirlooms, from the inheritance of clairvoyant qualities, insights that are nothing other than a descent into the hidden depths of the soul, so that an expansion of the hidden human being beyond the external world occurs, through which the human being perceives what would otherwise remain closed to the external life of the senses and mind. Then intuitions arise, everything that a person can recognize without proper training - also about the fate of the soul, about the fate of the soul between death and a new birth in the sense of reincarnation. On the one hand, this can happen through proper training, on the other hand, these hidden depths of the soul can 'push themselves up'. Like dreams, what is in the deeper layers and cannot be perceived by the senses or the mind can be discharged; through a “second sight” or [deuteroscopy] it can be brought to light. Insights can also be brought to light about the fate of the human soul, even if it is not embodied in the body.

We must only realize in what respect one or the other is or is not beneficial for the human being, we must realize that there is a tangible difference between looking through spiritual training and that looking, which, as it were, pushes its way up out of the hidden into the known depths of the soul. There is a fundamental difference. When a person enters the spiritual world through proper schooling, as indicated, for example, in Occult Science, it happens in such a way that the person, after penetrating into the depths of the soul, consciously brings up the forces hidden there. However, visions can also occur with the full vividness of a play of colors and sounds, corresponding to what we receive as sense impressions. But while we receive them in such a way that we know we must surrender to the control of the external world, we let those colors and tones of the visions take effect on us in such a way that we do nothing to them – and then we become fantasists, dreamers. Such visions are removed from our inner arbitrariness, our generative power, our spiritual willpower.

Conversely, in the training we have to experience the hidden depths of our soul in such a way that we know: What is there has been brought forth by our free will, by our generative power. Only when one knows: What you perceive [gap in the transcript] is made by you, because you must — because you are experiencing something spiritual that is otherwise not perceptible in the outer world — fill what you experience with colors and sounds, then the person is protected from deception. If the visions confront him with the full vividness of a play of colors, then he is one who hallucinates. The moment the vision presents itself as a sensory perception, it is a hallucination; it does not yet belong to the realm of true clairvoyance, but to the realm where the hidden powers of the soul emerge without the conscious willpower of the human being, without arbitrary training.

When the trained clairvoyant can control the way in which things present themselves to him, when they present themselves without such conscious willpower in the soul's imagination, without the inner self-activity generated by training , then we find ourselves in the realm of unschooled clairvoyance, and then man is at the mercy of the forces that play into the hidden depths of his soul; then he is unfree. Then he is connected with all the dangers with which he must be connected when he is in contact with supersensible reality without conscious willpower. In the world of the senses every phantasm reveals itself. But in the spiritual world, the moment things present themselves, it is no longer possible to distinguish objectively between reality and fantasy, and there is a danger that the human will sphere will be affected in some way and that the human being - instead of facing the spiritual world as an individuality - will be surrendered to the things that play in the hidden depths of his soul; just as the unconscious life of the soul plays out, like the rippling of the sea over the depths of the sea, so the I, one's own personality, is opened up and then plunged down again, [and he is guided from another side, through] hallucinations [and visions], [...] carried by hidden depths of the soul, and it can happen that [that this] is presented to the outsider, to the one who wants to investigate scientifically, as a phenomenon, as a specific thing, so that he can distinguish what of what he sees is real objective reality and what is fantasy; but it can only lead to fruitful observation if a trained clairvoyance exercises criticism.

It can result in fruitful observation to extract insights from the depths of the soul in this way, and since science is allowed to take anything as an object, wherever it may come from, which it must then take up into right knowledge, one cannot speak of something unlawful can be said when these things are examined, which even the untrained clairvoyant sees and which can be based on correct, useful perception of what leads tremendously deep into the hidden depths of the soul. What the objective, critical clairvoyant can contribute regarding the facts that arise through untrained clairvoyance can be extraordinarily fruitful, especially today. I may here again and again point out the fact that we now have a fine book - as I have often pointed out - which, in addition to the so-called esoteric clairvoyance, also sheds light on this side of clairvoyance: “The Mystery of Man”, written by Ludwig Deinhard.

So, when the hidden depths of the soul are discussed, one must not forget that there is a difference between proper training and the kind of clairvoyance that breaks away with elemental force and rises from the subconscious to the conscious mind. The former must be examined with critical means, while the latter, who has expanded his consciousness within himself, can take on the criticism and exercise control himself. There will come an age in our culture when individuality will become more self-assertive, when humanity will 'enter' into what can be achieved through properly trained clairvoyance, when this will be introduced into culture. When this is made clear to him, the person can then test it out in life itself, in the ordinary things of life.

There is yet another difference between the trained clairvoyant and the person who has “exposed” his clairvoyance through elementary, primitive powers, namely that the trained clairvoyant first comes to realizations that are general; and he comes to see how the visible human body differs from the supersensible human being, to see how man, as a being with many parts, is endowed with visible and invisible members, to see what there is between birth and death, not just in one life, but in several. He comes to understand everything that arises as experiences in this life between birth and death and between death and new birth, and also to understand what the origin of man is, what the course of the great world order became, of which we will present an example here in the lecture the day after tomorrow. The clairvoyant comes to an understanding of the things that concern all people, and he works his way through them with great caution, so that he first gets to know his own intellectual processes and does not carelessly communicate the fate of some disembodied soul. He can work his way to perceiving such individual circumstances and to experiencing the spiritual that plays into everyday life, but he advances from the general to the individual only with difficulty. He first recognizes that a person has an etheric body at all, but only later the individual etheric body.

In the untrained clairvoyant, however, the opposite is the case when the hidden depths of the soul struggle to emerge; he begins with visions that actually need to be carefully controlled; he begins with individual, everyday things. It is peculiar that he has basically little interest in what are general great insights. Particularly in those who have retained an old, atavistic clairvoyance, one can observe that they have little interest in things [that must prove to be significant for all people through spiritual science]. And nowhere are there such snobbish people among clairvoyants as those who call a naturally inherited clairvoyance their own.

Thus we see that which leads us into the hidden depths of our soul life and what makes us healthy and sick there, we see that which connects us to the spiritual world. Now it is natural that this is not only there because one recognizes it, only there when man dives down and beholds it; it is just as truly there before the recognition as the whale was there before man saw it.

So we are deeply connected with our hidden soul life with the spiritual world that is there. The spiritual foundations play a role here, and we should not be surprised that there is a much deeper essence down there than comes up and comes to our consciousness. We see that the bases that connect us to the spiritual world actually lie there, in the hidden foundations, and that the forces that come from the spiritual worlds have an effect on them. Only part of it enters our consciousness, so that our consciousness is only part of what we actually are. But this consciousness of man is there because man is able to raise to a higher level what can emerge from the hidden depths of his soul. For we see these things emerging in many different ways – they could emerge distorted or embellished, of which we would otherwise know nothing – but what emerges from the spiritual worlds into the depths of our souls and strives upwards is expressed in the sublime and the beautiful, which consciousness can control.

What happens when that which penetrates from the spiritual worlds into the hidden depths of the soul's life is transformed on its way up to consciousness? Then it is so that the impressions can live out as artistic fantasy, as that about which no one but the artists can say: the things are there, they rise up from the depths of the soul. And then we understand the powerlessness of ordinary consciousness, understand how the artist wants to expose the depths of his soul, even if he does not have them in front of him like a clairvoyant, and that it seems more important to him how things permeate each other.

Everything that a person can have in his consciousness without being stimulated by the outside world comes from the hidden depths of the soul. Even that which each of us needs to make this life fruitful must arise from the hidden depths of the soul. Not only the poet needs this, not only the artist, but also the merchant, the engineer – each of us needs this fertilizing stimulus from the hidden depths of the soul. We can see what these depths are truly rooted in when what lies down there rises up into consciousness. When it permeates him and presents itself in such a way that it can be perceived, conceived, experienced, then it becomes dependent on the way in which the person can absorb it. If someone has the ability not only to perceive what can be perceived through the external senses and through the mind bound to the senses, but has the ability to perceive in images, in beautiful fantasy, what lives in the hidden depths of his soul, then he can give in images what he cannot draw from nature, but what lives in the hidden depths of his soul.

But if a person is so constituted that he is untruthful, then the hidden depths do indeed come to the surface, but in such a way that, on the way from the hidden depths into the manifest, the person takes on the character and appears as a liar, as a deceiver or the like, through that part of the hidden powers of the soul that he cannot control in relation to external reality. Thus we can see how these hidden soul forces can make one person an artist and another a liar. This is what is necessary to recognize in order to penetrate into what a person has in his hidden soul forces.

This should be our first goal today: to recognize that everything that takes place in our conscious mental life is rooted in the depths of the soul, in the depths that we find in many other ways.

Finally, I would just like to say – because time is pressing – that in our ordinary lives, precisely in our consciousness, in our interaction with the outside world, in our perception through the senses and the mind, we merge with this outside world, that in the most important things we cannot distinguish what we have within, what is at the core of our being, from the outside. The human being is not capable of detaching the core of his soul from what he has grown together with externally. That is why he must take the path into his inner being. He can take it if he imagines how the ball of sunlight rises out of the dawn. We can best recognize what we experience inwardly by whether it is present in one person or not. And when we feel compassion for something that our fellow human experiences, we cannot separate what lives in hidden depths from the sight of compassion and pain; we grow together with it.

But there is a way that leads from this conscious soul life into something that can be inferred from the faith of a great man like Goethe: that it is not what lives in the external world but what lives in the spiritual environment that is significant, and this includes basically all stellar worlds, everything that works in the external world.

If it does not awaken its own life in the human soul, if we only get stuck in what connects us to the outside world, if we only remain in consciousness, then we will not penetrate into the spiritual. But we can find the way into the spiritual world.

When we look back into the past and see that up to a certain point our parents and brothers and sisters can tell us about it, but when we go back to the point where our memory awakens, we see that we have not only gone through external experiences, but that something else is connected with these experiences: the carrier of our experiences, that which we call our I. By looking back over our lives, we can see our own development. We feel how we have become more mature and more mature, because we feel we have gained in life experience. There is one thing we have to tell ourselves: the most important thing we have learned is actually one that we cannot apply in life. We have attained our greatest maturity through the mistakes we have made. We only know how to do something better when we have done it. Man learns most important things from the unrepeatable, most from what has passed. Especially with the most intimate things in our soul, we feel that something has arisen in us, of which the materialist says: When man goes through the gate of death, it disappears, or at most it is handed over to the human race, to cultural life. But the spiritual person knows that what he has experienced in his innermost being cannot be handed over to anyone else. It shows when he delves into the hidden depths, it shows that what we allow to mature within us can be fulfilled directly in us. When we examine our lives and find that we were born into certain family circumstances, into a certain environment, then something occurs – if we do not grasp our destiny in an intellectual way with our ordinary consciousness, but appeal to forces that are somewhat hidden from our ordinary consciousness . It is something that cannot so much become knowledge as a volitional impulse, when we look back at our lives and our destiny as it was when we were placed in life, but then make the decision to depart from the experiences of ordinary consciousness. Those who face their destiny with ordinary consciousness, who say that everything has happened to us by chance, will be resentful of their destiny, will feel resentment. If we move away from these peculiarities such as antipathy and sympathy towards fate and appeal to a force that we can develop within us, to the power of non-self-will - letting our own will remain silent for a while, calmly facing this fate and indulging for once in the idea: How is it that this fate is there? It continues through our ego, after all. Was our ego not there before?

If we seek our self by calmly looking at our fate, and if we now trace our self further back, we find that through such a deeper contemplation of life, our self grows together with fate, and we understand our fate as if our self were included in this fate and brought about in it before we were there. Then we come to see that we pass through the gate of death with the best that is in us and that we have allowed to mature, and that what we have experienced in previous lives meets our ego again as fate in our next life. We see that it works in the depths of the soul, and when we leave this body, what we have acquired as forces to build a new life for ourselves continues to work in us. So we see our own hidden beingness building up this soul life anew, we see it becoming real down there, becoming constructive forces in the hidden soul life.

When we look at the world in this way, we grow out of the hidden depths and into the spiritual world. And the knowledge that penetrates into these depths is so truly connected with the spiritual worlds as thinking, feeling and willing are the powers of our soul, to which the soul clings as the bonds that penetrate from the spiritual world. By penetrating into it, the human being finds his connection with the macrocosm; the forces grow out of the microcosm, [the human being grows] into the macrocosm, as [it is presented in] the drama 'The Testing of the Soul', [and every] soul can say to itself:

In your thinking live thoughts of the world,
In your feeling weave world forces,
In your will work world beings.
Lose yourself in world thoughts,
Experience yourself through world forces,
Create yourself from will beings.
Do not end with world distances
Through the play of thought-dreams ---;
Begin in the expanses of the mind,
And end in the depths of your own soul: —
You will find divine goals,
Recognizing yourself within yourself.

The previous lecture, which is followed by today's lecture, was about the hidden depths of the soul's life and explained that the soul's life is not absolutely bound to matter, that it is not only separable from the physical, but also from the ideas that are gained from it through the senses and the mind. The possibility of the separation of soul experiences from physical ideas was demonstrated by the difference between memories and dreams. Those [memories] arise without the original power of the soul's compassion, these [dreams] with the original accompanying phenomena of the emotional life of joy, suffering and the like. There - in memory - the soul life detaches itself from the life of imagination, which is gained in the outside world, and withdraws into the hidden depths of the soul, where it works and works, where it exercises its power by working on the entire human organism.

While the life of imagination often proves powerless – for we know not what goes on in the depths of the sea when the surface ripples – the hidden life of the soul proves itself to be a power. We see this in dreams, in the trance of mediums, in the work of art and in the knowledge of the spiritual researcher. For man can penetrate into it by training his mind, so that he learns to consciously draw from the sources of truly real life, into which he not only gazes without control like the dreamer and fantasist and thereby becomes a dreamer, hallucinist or even a liar, not like the one with atavistic gifted with atavistic clairvoyance, becomes the plaything of the spirits of such a soul or astral world in his dreams, nor alone, as the true artist draws from the spirit and shapes it in beauty, but as a knower, consciously seeing, can distinguish what is vision from what is true and self-willed. [...]

This knowledge of the hidden can only lead to the right spiritual research if it is gained, firstly, through self-knowledge, through descending into one's own inner being. With this self-knowledge, secondly, knowledge of the spiritual environment arises and grows. The greater the self-knowledge, the broader the spiritual horizon, the power to penetrate into the realities of the environment, into the hidden world spirit. l..]

Dear attendees! When approaching the subject of today's consideration, then one comes, starting from the points of view that are represented here, in a basically quite strange situation compared to everything that has been thought and researched in our age for decades about the important question of the origin of man. The reason why one finds oneself in a strange position is that, over the past few decades, the origin of man has been presented primarily in the form in which one believes one should think about the origin of man in the present day: in terms of the results of modern science. And who could deny that the great and tremendous advances in natural science in recent times have every right to have a say at the moment when this important question is put to man.

Most of the people present who are dealing with the question from the point of view of natural science must understandably have the impression that anything that can be said here from the point of view of spiritual science about this question is basically directly opposed to what natural science has to say about the point – understandably, dear attendees, and I ask you to bear in mind that this is being said. For it is precisely with such questions that what should emerge on the occasion of the two lectures of my last visit, which dealt with how to refute theosophy on the one hand and how to defend it on the other, always hovers in the background. Especially with questions like today's, the spiritual scientist must be completely clear that much, much can be brought forward from the ideas of the present, seemingly with good reason, against his assertions. Therefore, it must be understood that a lecture such as this evening's can provide some suggestions, but is far from quickly convincing someone who is still unfamiliar with the theosophical views. This is said as an introduction to characterize the attitude from which such a lecture is given. What have we experienced in recent decades [in relation to our topic today]? More and more, those [scientists] who believe they have a judgment in this area have come to the conclusion that man in the totality of his being has its origin from creatures that, in the sense of a systematic arrangement of living beings, actually belong to the sphere of what today's man calls his education, his culture, in fact, the sphere of his human activities. The extraordinarily fruitful principle of development has led to the belief that in the past, development would have progressed in such a way that from simple, primitive life forms, to which today's primitive life forms still resemble, through slow development - as a result of the “struggle for existence,” through adaptation - gradually more and more complicated forms of life have formed, up to the higher animals, and that in such a progressive development, man has risen, as it were, from the lower realms. So man's ancestors are sought in animal life, and there is such a conviction in [wide] circles on this point that anyone who wants to put forward something that does not agree with it is actually thought of as a retarded mind. Now, first of all, the natural scientists – not so much the natural scientists who remain in the realm of facts, but rather the natural scientists who have felt called upon to link worldviews, world mysteries to their research – they have felt compelled to present, so to speak, the outer form and the outer physical conditions of human life as a first as complications that arose from the forces that come from the realms that stand below the human, so that one would only have more complicated living conditions than in the case of animals, especially those that stand one step lower than humans, but that one must still derive the forces from what is already found in the lower living beings.

Those natural scientists who wanted to tie an outlook on life to the facts of natural science have strengthened this belief. But not only has this belief become established, but it has also become established that the higher intellectual powers, what we call man's aesthetic perception, his moral impulses, are also only higher forms of the spiritual, of the soul, that one finds in the animal kingdom, that one can also look for the more primitive forms more primitive forms of moral behavior in animals that can be grasped in terms of moral concepts in relation to humans, so that one is often convinced that man has emerged as an intellectual, moral, and aesthetic being only through complication from the living beings below him.

It must be conceded that in the face of the magnificent results of modern natural science, it is extremely difficult to come up with any other attitude, any other view. And it must be readily admitted that as a spiritual scientist one often finds oneself in a strange position when, on the one hand, one allows the achievements of natural science to take effect and, on the other hand, one has to deal with what certain more or less amateurish spiritual scientists believe they have to extract from the scientific results. When one compares the conscientiousness of the two presentations, it is the case that, in terms of conscientiousness, one would actually prefer to side with the natural scientist than with some amateur spiritual researchers.

Now the point is that spiritual research in this field is also in a very special position because, basically, it only comes into disharmony with the thoughts, ideas and hypotheses that have emerged from the results of natural science , while it becomes ever clearer to the spiritual researcher that the actual results of natural science virtually force human thinking to gradually take a perspective as it is given by spiritual science. Actually, the dichotomy between spiritual science and natural science is not that great, because the facts of natural science correspond more to spiritual science than to the monistic and materialistic [interpretations]. So, as a spiritual researcher, one feels in harmony with the facts as one progresses, and only comes into conflict with the hypotheses that are drawn from the facts from some quarters.

If one observes man in his development and wants to trace him back to his origin, it seems only natural that the views about him must be in line with the views one has about the course of the earth's development, [this going back] was indeed [previously] held entirely in the materialistic sense in which the biological theory of evolution, the theory of the development of living beings, is [carried out]. When one reflects on the course of the Earth's development, then as a rule one only considers what the external, inanimate forces, the forces of physics, chemistry, geology, can achieve, and one follows the Earth in a state in which it looked different from what it looks like today, in which it was perhaps in a state that, compared to our present-day Earth formation, resembles a gaseous ball. We know that this is a widespread hypothesis, that it is assumed that the Earth condensed from a gaseous state. It is known that if you trace this back even further into the distant past, you come to see the whole solar system in a gaseous state. The spiritual researcher recognizes that objections have recently been raised against this so-called Kant-Laplace theory, but in the broadest circles it still prevails. It is believed that the whole solar system itself emanated from a kind of primeval nebula that was in rotation, and it is also imagined that the planets, including our Earth, were separated by the forces that were at work in this rotation.

I have often pointed out how the so-called [Plateau's] experiment is carried out in schools to illustrate this Kant-Laplacean theory. You take a large drop of a substance that can float on water, let a sheet of card penetrate at the point of the equator, pierce it at the point of the axis with a needle and make the drop rotate, thus showing that small drops do indeed come off and move around the center. What could be simpler than to prove in this way how a planetary system could have formed in such a way? But in an experiment, it is important to take into account everything that needs to be logically included, and it turns out that something is forgotten in this experiment: one forgets oneself, forgets that one is standing there and turning, and that you only have the logical right to put forward the hypothesis [and to transfer the experiment to the solar system] if you assume that there is a giant teacher out there in the universe who has caused all this movement with a giant needle. If you do not make this addition in this experiment, then you are on completely unjustified ground.

Of course, spiritual science does not place a professor out in space, but it does say that nowhere is there a formless matter like this cosmic fog; that matter is permeated or at least directed by spiritual powers and forces everywhere, [without us falling into anthropomorphism in the process]. Therefore, for spiritual science it is clear: Even if it is justified in terms of material formation that such a primeval nebula is there, then a spiritual event underlies this outer event, just as the activity of the spiritual soul underlies the events in the human body. Spiritual science does not start from an analogy, but from spiritual research. In the specifically concrete, spiritual science seeks the spiritual events, the spiritual forces and the spiritual entities that underlie them, so that instead of external, materialistic hypotheses, it sees the spirit in them.

Now, if one were to undertake the usual presentations of the Kant-Laplacean theory and the associated operations, one could say that it is possible to derive what our body is and the shaping of physical and mental structures from the rotation in the primeval nebula. If we want to make the assumption that some kind of giant teacher is out there and sets the whole thing in motion, then we can speak, if need be, of the formation of the earth having emerged from the Kant-Laplacean primeval nebula. But then we come to a critical point again, and this has been seen not only by spiritual researchers, but also by thoughtful natural scientists. This point concerns the origin of life in general on our earth body. One can, of course, if one does not take certain conditions into account, perhaps indulge in the belief that living things could once have come into being through the spontaneous generation of certain substances. It would be a very long way indeed if one wanted to explain all the philosophical and other reasons that demonstrate the impossibility of deriving life from conditions that are purely physical. It is much more important that this impossibility has become clear to deep-thinking natures such as Gustav Fechner and Wilhelm Preyer, the brilliant biographer of Darwin, that they found no way to come to terms with it in their thoughts, to see life emerging from a spiritless, [inanimate] earth. So these researchers have resorted to the assumption that our Earth, at the beginning of its formation, was by no means just any physical or physical-chemical body, but they assumed that, even if it is true for the present that the Earth body that we have under our feet, presents itself as a lifeless one to mineralogists, and that the living beings on it reproduce in their own realms through inheritance, this does not apply to ancient times, but Preyer and Fechner were forced to think of the earth in the distant past as a living being, as a large organism, so that in the sense of these naturalists the earth was originally a large living organism in the universe. Then the time would have come when certain substances and components of this earth crystallized out of this so-called living substance, and what crystallized out is our present body, containing chemical and physical forces. While originally the earth had a life of its own, it now gives its life, in its own way, to individual earth creatures, so that the origin of living beings could be thought of as the emergence of a living being from a living earth body.

It makes a strange impression when Darwin's biographer directs his thoughts to this primeval form of the earth and creates an image out of his thinking. When we read in Preyer that the earth organism was originally to be imagined as being alive, that its bloodstreams were glowing iron vapors, that the breath of this earth body was incoming world vapors from the environment and the nutrition of the earth body was matter that flowed to it from the universe - a strange mixture of natural physical ideas [with life processes]! He cannot completely free himself from his physical conceptions, but he must admit that something like nutrition, breathing and blood circulation can be assumed in the incoming vapors. We do not think of glowing iron as performing these functions when it comes to nutrition. But Preyer shows us one thing: that even natural scientists can feel compelled to recognize the earth as an organism. They meet spiritual science halfway; they admit that if you go backwards, you come to a starting point where the earth [was a large living organism], that the earth, as something dead, in the further course [of development], has set the living [...] aside, [specialized] into [the most diverse] beings, into [plants], animals, humans. They think of remote pasts imbued with full life. But there is still something missing, which spiritual science must ascribe from these prerequisites to this earth body: [The thought is missing] that the earthly body must in truth not only have a living starting point, but that it must be thought of as having a soul and a spirit, so that when we look at the origin of the earth, we are not only dealing with a living organism, but we have to imagine the earth as a soul-inspired, spirit-inspired organism.

Yes, now one could say: What is being done here, other than what is to be explained first, is being placed into what was originally assumed? Instead of developing the spirit, one assumes the spirit as originally existing. But that is what one must do, ladies and gentlemen, according to all the possible prerequisites of a science of knowledge, because it is nowhere possible, even conceivable, that the higher natural kingdoms develop from subordinate natural kingdoms; nowhere in the course of experience are we given a stepping out of the spiritual-soul from a merely physical, of a living being from a merely [physical-] chemical. What we encounter, especially in ourselves, is that we see the spiritual-soul working on the material; and anyone who has followed the lectures given here and has heard what has been said about this spiritual-soul will know how right it is to say that, especially in the case of human beings, the spiritual-soul works on the external physical-material.

We follow the person in us, let us say, in the time from that moment until we remember back in normal [human life], and see our experiences emerging from the depths of our consciousness in our memory. We see at the center of these events of consciousness becoming more and more alive that to which we apply the word “I”. It would be absurd to assume that this 'I' only began at the moment up to which we can remember. It must also have been there in the dream-like, dusky consciousness, when the child does not yet say 'I' to itself. The 'I' must have been there. How was it present in connection with the other soul forces? If we consider the ordinary life of the human soul, we can say that what emerges as consciousness in this stage is something special, something personal. We see how we work the special life energies, which are individual to us, into it. Therefore, we are compelled to think of what we see working within our consciousness later in life as the actual agent of our whole organism. We have to think that we inherit the general structure of this organism from our ancestors, but that the energies that make up our organism have to be worked into it, [right down to the finest plastic formations of the brain].

When we recognize this, then we are no longer far from being able to trace this individuality back to a previous life on earth. There we see the spiritual and soul forces at work on our inner physical and material being, and we can then say to ourselves that, as today, as in our earthly present, our ego with its soul forces is still working on our body in early childhood. This work is not inherited from our ancestors; rather, there is still a certain scope left in what we have become through the forces of heredity, in which we can work our spiritual and soul nature. We see this, for example, in the fact that we develop from a crawling creature into a walking one. We see how the spiritual-soul element lifts us up, we see the spiritual-soul element working on the physical.

Only when we progress to what was mentioned in the last lecture - about the hidden depths of the soul life - to the spiritual training through which one gains insight into the spiritual world behind the physical, then we can consider what has already been described here. If you apply the methods that you will find in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds” to yourself, you will gradually come to a point where you, as a human being, are no longer dependent on living in the soul in such a way that you have to use physical tools. Spiritual science shows that man can apply methods of meditation and concentration to himself, through which he can acquire a spiritual essence, independent of the physical, so that he has experiences and knows that he did not have them with the help of the senses; but knows: Now you are experiencing something in your original spiritual-soul nature, you become aware of what you are beyond this physical being.

And it is particularly interesting that when you ascend to such a training, you have the feeling from the very beginning: Yes, you are now experiencing something supernatural. But at the same time, at the beginning you are not able to express what you experience in the same way in concepts and ideas and words. Why not? Because when you express ideas and concepts in words, you need the instrument of the brain. The ideas and concepts that people form are taken from the world, so that a gap opens up between what one experiences and what one can express. Only when one practices patience and perseverance and continues the exercises does the time come when one is able to truly express the experiences one brings down from the spiritual world in terms of concepts and ideas taken from the outer life. Before this possibility arises, one knows that one feels the brain as something that offers a great deal of resistance. One feels that in the further course of training, one must do the work of shaping the brain plastically, in a way similar to the way the child must shape the still clumsy brain plastically for life. The aim is to work such fine shapes into the brain that they cannot be recognized by natural scientists with external instruments. The work of the soul-spiritual being on the material substance of the body can, however, only be followed inwardly. Thus, we see again in the spiritual-soul realm the actual origin of what is becoming.

It is no longer an unjustified claim to say that, as things currently stand on our earth, the spiritual and soul life of man, as it was before the first material atom of our body came into being, is only able to use the scope that is limited in the general structure of our physical body. While this scope, over which the conditions of heredity have no power, shapes the soul and spirit, we see that the physical, the general human form, can only be preserved by human beings of a similar nature. Thus, under today's living conditions, the soul and spirit are only able to shape certain things within a body received through heredity.

If this is the case today – and if we assume that the earth has undergone an evolution, which even natural science admits – it is not to be said that in the distant past the spiritual-mental was only able to work within a certain scope. Take it for the moment as a hypothesis; it need not be dismissed out of hand as absurd, when spiritual science says: The further we go back into primeval conditions, the more powerfully the spiritual-soul [of man] is effective. In the remote past, this spiritual-soul was so significant, so powerful that it could also shape that which today can only be shaped within heredity. Just as we see today that the spiritual soul forms only a small part of the material human being, so we see that in ancient times it formed the entire organism, so that the human soul was present in the ensouled earth organism, and the earthly body was once able to yield such a substance that could be formed directly from the soul into a full human being by the spiritual-soul worlds.

Thus we look back into the ancient past, where conditions were not yet as they are today, where within the total soul of the earth organism the human souls were contained, that is, the earth organism also had organic substance that was different from the present one, which can only be classified according to the forces of inheritance in the human body. So we come back to an earth configuration - in contrast to the earth formation in which we stand - in which there was no such reproduction as in our time; we do not find such a connection between generations, between male and female. In the place of the interaction between male and female, we find the interaction between the spiritual soul and the living substance of the earth body. The spiritual-soul aspect had a fertilizing effect on the earthly substance and allowed that to emerge which the human being was at the origin of his earthly existence: a creature formed and developed purely out of the spiritual-soul core of his being.

If we look at present-day conditions with an open mind, this may seem like a daring hypothesis, but it is certainly not something absurd.

So we see that our earthly body is formed, as it were, out of living substance.

Something else must be said, which is also true. When the spiritual researcher refers back to epochs of the earth when it made no sense to speak of male and female, but when the heavenly and earthly fertilized each other, the views of the natural scientists get in the way, but not the facts of natural science that have emerged in recent decades. These facts have led natural scientists to particular assumptions. We see how, in recent times, which began with Ernst Haeckel's belief that he had to give a materialistic interpretation of human origin in his conception of the Darwinian theory at the [Stettin] Natural History Society [in 1863]; we see how the naturalists who hold this older point of view felt compelled to draw a straight line of development [from the monera] to man, and how they are always obliged to say that, before man came upon the earth, there lived a creature similar to the present-day ape. [But more recent research has] corrected this view. Everywhere we see that attempts have been made to bring man's ancestor closer to a physical, animal-like being, which, through the perfection of its physical organization, also produced the height of the spiritual organization.

We can no longer accept such things, that man had an ancestor who was somehow similar to a present-day animal form. We see the necessity for this. Naturalists say that there were once human ancestors that resembled today's apes. That which now lives as the animal world has arisen from decadence, so that what we have as apes is a being that has arisen from a declining formation of a higher form on the one hand, and on the other hand we have man. We see monkeys and humans as two branches leading back to a being that no longer exists, that was only in very distant geological times. This common ancestor of animal-kind and humanity, to which the facts lead the natural science worldview people, is [hypothetical], a being that is purely imagined.

Now, certain naturalists have been forced by careful results to move this being further and further up, so that many are already forced to say that even higher mammals do not resemble this hypothetical being, we would have to go back even further to a being from which the very first mammalian forms descended, and this being would have developed a branch at the same time that was always superior to animality and that finally developed into man. When one sees a monkey, one must always trace it back to an earlier stage of animal existence and then assume a purely hypothetical, purely imagined entity that developed a branch that became reptiles, while another branch was formed that became human. So we see the naturalist going to something that formed humans and animals from the same being.

How far removed are such scholars from what we have expounded from spiritual science? No further than that their habits of thought compel them to shape the conditions of the earth's development in such a way that they can only conceive of the origin of present-day life forms in a physical way, whereas the spiritual researchers put something in this place that emerged under completely different earthly conditions and from completely different conditions: the fertilization of the earthly substance by the spiritual soul.

We also find the possibility of thinking of the further progress of development up to the human being as an entity worked out of the spiritual-soul. Just as today's human being is the product of a father and a mother, so too was such a primeval human being, as I have now described him in the sense of spiritual science, joined together from two sides, from the substance of the earth and the spiritual-soul of the earth's surroundings. Thus we can say that the human being belonged to the spiritual environment. Through this primal element, the human being has lived more in the whole of the heavenly environment and felt his connection with cosmic conditions.

But we could only receive our spiritual and soul germ at a certain point on the earth. Through this, the human being is individualized, through the fact that he came [to a certain place], through this he has become a special being, a being that has become native, that has become firmly bound to the locality of the earth.

Thus in this primeval man we have at the same time: a general human and an individual, an earth-bound and a more heavenly, macrocosmic element. Strangely, we see the after-effects of what we have just characterized in today's man.

If we carefully examine everything that comes to man through heredity, it shows that, despite all the other circumstances that have been specialized through heredity, we find a general human element at the basis of man, and that every human nature is individualized into a second. We still find both today: something universally human and something specialized. If we examine present-day humanity, we find that the universal human element is inherited from the female side, while the specific, individual character is essentially inherited from the male ancestors, regardless of whether the individual as an individuality is male or female. This means that we can still see the after-effects of what manifested itself in primeval man as a general heavenly element – if the expression is not taken pedantically – and what came from the general life substance of the earth. Therefore, we need only assume that in the primeval men, who were formed out of the spirit, in the one case the macrocosmic element predominated, which had a fertilizing effect from the surrounding area, while the element that came from the earth itself receded more. As a result, some of the primeval men specialized. Where the heavenly element was more active, specialization led to the female principle, while where the earthly element predominated, where the specific earthly destiny gained the upper hand, the more individual was formed, the tendency towards the male. Thus we see how, out of these general conditions, the tendencies were formed in the original human being, consisting of soul and spirit, and how these tendencies became more and more concentrated and took shape as man and woman.

And this whole process, my esteemed audience, must be imagined in such a way that the conditions were always changing, that is to say, nothing else but that the conditions that had made it possible for the cosmic elements to fertilize from the spiritual environment were disappearing. The living earth substance released the purely mineral and chemical from itself and was therefore no longer able to release living substance. What had been brought into being through spiritual fertilization by the lower and the higher, and which could no longer shape the human being in this way, was replaced by something that emerged in a different way and became formative by being incorporated into the human being itself, so that reproduction occurred from generation to generation. We see that the forces that shape the human being lead back to each other in such a way that the female contribution leads back to a cosmic, heavenly element, and that which is given in reproduction by the male leads back to the original, organically living earth substance. We still see the general in the female and the individual in the male. No one will be able to shed light on the relationship of heredity and the contribution of male and female who does not take these things into account, even if only hypothetically. The forces that worked between the earth's environment and the earth itself had to be passed on to heredity.

We must now consider how the development of animals relates to this development of man, to this view of the origin of man. For in a certain way, the origin of man is not properly understood without considering the development of animals. It shows that man, as he stands before us today in his duality - so that on the one hand there is still a certain scope for the spiritual and soul to work, and on the other hand he receives what he has inherited - could only develop as he is today , if he retained this spiritual-soul education until a certain point in time, until the conditions on earth were such that they could no longer provide the possibility for the human being to arise from the spiritual-soul. Only then did today's form of reproduction develop. As a being formed from the spiritual-soul, the human being had to wait.

What would have happened if he had abandoned the origin of the spiritual and soul earlier and merely submitted to earthly conditions? Simple considerations can show us this. If the spiritual and soul had not remained in its original nature until the extreme moment of time, but had allowed earthly conditions to prevail, then the spiritual and soul would have become weak in the face of earthly conditions. If man had earlier adopted the mode of reproduction that is now his, his spiritual and soul forces would be weaker and that which comes from the earth would have gained the upper hand – because it was even more powerful when the earth still had organizing forces within it – and he would have descended to a lower level under the influence of the organizing forces of the earth.

This is the case with animality. The spiritual soul of the animals united with the earth at different times, descending into the spheres of the earth before man. The animal preceded man. But man does not descend from the animal, but from its spiritual archetype. Those spiritual archetypes that have become animals descended earlier than man, who remained longest at the top in the spiritual regions. Thus the lines of development do not lead to the archetype of the animal kingdom and of man. We must think of the archetype of the animal kingdom as separate from the soul-spiritual of man.

Thus we see how, in the sense of a logically developed theory of evolution, spiritual science places the human being in the context of the earth's overall development, and how this coincides with a properly considered scientific view. Spiritual science places man in such a line of development, in which the metamorphoses of the earth itself are taken into account, how then the animal forms arise and finally man arises, having waited so long in the spiritual surroundings of the earth, so that he could adapt to the conditions of the earth in such a way that the greatest scope was given for the spiritual and soul life.

Dear attendees, I have already indicated that what has been said today, especially by people who have equipped themselves with all the knowledge of today, must often be regarded as unthinkable, as absurd. And if only a few people have the inclination and the will to recognize that these things [of spiritual science] that play into cultural life should be pursued with the same seriousness as [those of] natural science, then that will be enough to show how this influence on cultural life occurs. Spiritual science starts from a different point of view, and admittedly arrives at something to which the natural scientist must still relate negatively, but those who want to can see that true natural science, based on facts, comes straight to meet what spiritual science has to give. Spiritual science starts from a different point of view from natural science, but it does arrive at something to which the natural scientist must still be hostile. If we disregard the fantasies of natural science and consider only the facts, we shall see that these everywhere substantiate and prove what has been characterized today.

But for man it is important to be aware that there is an independent spiritual element within him that is not the result of a material body, but that the physical is the result of a spiritual element that has its origin in the spiritual environment and has sunk its seeds into the now inanimate substance of the earth.

The study of the external facts in the development of the earth [does not contradict the independent significance of the spiritual and soul in human nature, but rather, through every deeper reflection, every living in its essence – like a soliloquy, like a conversation that the soul has with itself, must form itself, which, from the depths of human nature, must repeatedly shape itself in such a way that we can summarize the relationship of the human being to himself and to life in the words:

From the spirit man has sprung,

In the spirit man's whole life works and moves,

To the spirit man's whole being strives.

Dearly beloved! I request that the two lectures of today and tomorrow be regarded as a whole. Although I shall endeavor to present each one as a self-contained whole in a certain sense, that which I shall have the honor of presenting to you can only be fully illuminated when what is given in one lecture is measured against what is given in the other.

If today, from the point of view of the world view from which my presentations are to be given here, we speak about the nature of the human soul and its connection with the supersensible worlds, then, understandably, to someone who judges what is to be said here from the point of view of today's general education, it must at first appear strange, peculiar, perhaps even fantastic. The one who has the point of view of this world view, which starts from a kind of spiritual research, will understand this the best, because how could it not appear strange on the one hand when, compared to today's world views, which think that they stand on the firm ground of today's science, it is explained by this so-called spiritual research that the human soul is a much more comprehensive being than everything that known to man by this soul itself in ordinary life, during the whole course of life between birth and death, because this spiritual research wants to show that this human soul life is not exhausted in all that comes to light between birth and death, but that this human soul being goes its way from birth to death and again from death to birth into new life, as the consequence of the previous ones [earth lives and the cause of later ones].

Man's entire existence can therefore be divided into successive earthly lives, with intermediate stages of spiritual existence in a purely spiritual world. At first this appears quite understandably as nothing more than a fantastic thing, and no one needs to be surprised, not even those who are grounded in spiritual research, that in the broadest circles of those currently educated such a view is taken as nothing more than the fantasy of some strange enthusiasts. And if on the one hand the matter itself appears highly contestable, then to such a contestation will easily be added the other, which is also raised by many, namely the one that says: Even if there really is such a thing as a soul life that is separate from the everyday, particularly separate, man with his ordinary powers of knowledge, which are at his disposal, certainly cannot penetrate to such a solution of the world's riddles, which stand on a ground as it has just been characterized. So if someone who subscribes to the current conventional wisdom says that nothing of the kind can be recognized at all, the other would explain the matter as completely fantastic. And indeed, my esteemed audience, one does not easily come close to the research methods, the research paths, that lead to insights, of which those hinted at concerning the human soul are only a part. Man cannot arrive at such results by external performance, by external experiments, nor by the ordinary method of observation of external science, and anyone who would imagine that spiritual research can resort to methods like those of ordinary science would be labouring under a great delusion. Spiritual science cannot resort to similar proofs as the usual science. Oh, [undoubtedly] all that [to which what is said refers] lies outside the realm of what human souls can observe and what can also be experienced by those powers of human cognition that are bound to the instrument of the brain. This immediately gives rise to the question: Yes, are there any possibilities in the nature of the human soul to gain knowledge that is not conditioned by the senses, that is not through the human brain? Of course, the answer to this question can only be provided by experience, the experience of those who have come to such realizations. But anyone can ask: Is there any possibility at all of speaking of an “super-being” of the human soul that exists separately from the external corporeality of the human brain?

We must take a starting point, my esteemed audience, which I have often taken when I had the honor of speaking to you, from a fact that is intimately connected with all the highest riddles of human life, that imposes itself on man anew every day, that is only not observed because man least wants to observe in life what he experiences as an everyday occurrence. The life riddle that is to be discussed in more detail tomorrow, however, is surprisingly more significant. It is connected with the question of death and immortality. But intimately connected with this life riddle, which touches every human being so deeply, is another, everyday one. This is the life riddle that is contained in the state of change that we experience every day between waking and sleeping. We will not be talking here about the highly interesting scientific hypotheses about the nature of sleep, but rather about what spiritual science has to say in a very elementary way about the nature of the state of transition between waking and sleeping. Spiritual science must first draw attention to the illogicality of the assumption that everything that comes up during the day from morning to evening would disappear in the evening when we plunge into [darkness], into the unconsciousness of sleep. Instincts, desires, passions, sensations, perceptions, [joy and suffering], everything sinks into the unconsciousness of sleep; that it should vanish in the evening and [come again] in the morning, form itself again, that no logical thinking can assume. Therefore, this thinking can look to that, and provisionally regard as a hypothesis, what spiritual science has to say for its part. It says namely that when falling asleep, when man loses control over the outer limbs and movement, when he loses the possibility of feeling, of thinking, man's soul-spiritual being, so says spiritual science, leaves the body at this moment. Outside of the body is [then the human soul-spiritual being] during sleep, and it returns in the morning; when the person [awakens] again, begins his day life, this soul-spiritual being - so says spiritual science - [again] plunges into the [physical] body [and] begins to stir to interact with the physical-sensual outside world.

Of course, my esteemed audience, this must be a hypothesis for anyone who has not yet dealt with spiritual science in more detail; because even if one assumes that the spiritual-soul being withdraws from the body and leads its own existence, man is not able to know anything about this soul-spiritual being; even assuming that it has emerged from the external body, man nevertheless loses the possibility of feeling conscious, active and suffering in what is supposed to be outside. And if there is no possibility to show that what emerges is really present, if there is no possibility to show that a person can experience themselves outside of the body, then there can be no real proof for what spiritual science says. The one who wants to be a spiritual scientist must provide this proof, and it is impossible to look into the spiritual world, it is impossible to gain knowledge in the spiritual world, so that what is submerged in sleep [in the spiritual world] is activated in the human being as his own human soul-being, is enlivened, is raised to consciousness even when it is separated from the body. The spiritual researcher must undergo this as a development of his spiritual-soul nature in order to arrive at a [new] perception. The spiritual researcher must learn to perceive, to communicate with the spiritual-soul being, of which the human being in ordinary life knows nothing, of which he must say: Even if it is my lot to experience it, I do not know it. This implies that something could occur to the spiritual researcher that would be similar to the state of sleep [and] yet radically different. Let us assume that the hypothesis is correct; then one could say: During sleep, the human being leaves his physical body. The conscious life ceases, the [sense] organs fail to function, so the state of sleep is [constituted] by the human soul becoming [apparently] unconscious, sinking into the darkness of sleep, where it does not make use of the tools. The spiritual researcher must be able to bring about this state of the soul through his will, through his will that has been energized. He must actually bring about what otherwise befalls people without will of their own: to suspend all contact with the physical world. The spiritual researcher must artificially induce this. But that is not enough; he would not bring about anything for spiritual knowledge if he only did that; he would induce the state of sleep.

A second thing must still be [the following]: when [the spiritual researcher] has made himself independent of all service to the body through his arbitrariness, he does not fall into unconsciousness, but knows that he is in a new world with the ego, in a world beyond the ordinary world, that is, he must be able to to develop inner life and activity in the I, which otherwise appears paralyzed, feels no inner activity, no inner life; what otherwise appears as something unreal and paralyzed, he must make completely real.

At least in principle, I have to tell you, dear readers, what leads to such a revival; a detailed description of how a person can come to a real inner revival [of his soul] can be found in my writings “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”, “Theosophy” and “[A Way to Self-Knowledge of Man]”. What is said there in detail is given here only in principle. One does not achieve this through external measures, but through intimate inner processes that can be described with the words meditation, concentration of the soul life, contemplation. What does that mean? You get the best idea if you do not initially imagine that it refers to something that is completely foreign and separate from the ordinary soul life. Everything that the spiritual researcher applies to his soul is only a continuation of what he otherwise accomplishes.

Let us take an example. One of the great advances in the spiritual life of humanity is characterized by what Giordano Bruno once did, who, as a world thinker, stood on the ground of the Copernican world view. What has been gained for the developing spiritual life with Giordano Bruno? We can construct it something like this, what was gained there: A large part of the people saw [then], in the time that preceded the Giordano Bruno, up into space, he saw [there] the various stars circling, but he imagined, the naive man of that time, that the whole space would be closed from the ether, from what was called the crystal sky, because one saw the blue sky vault. But how did Giordano Bruno look into space? He looked out into space and realized that every gaze that looks out sees infinity, and where the eye perceives a boundary, there is actually nothing. It is only through the eye, through the whole human perception, that something like a blue hollow sphere is seen. What the eye could see was thus broken through, and through the world view of Giordano Bruno that which the mission of the development of humanity needed up to his time was [broken through]. A new element emerged. [Infinite cosmic space is what the eye sees], embedded in infinite cosmic space, infinite worlds. Man can say to himself: What you see there, just as your gaze falls on the blue vault of heaven, is only an illusion, is only brought about by your interaction with the outside world, is [actually] not there at all in truth. How was such a view gained? This insight was not gained through external observation, of course, because this contradicted such insights, but through a higher energization, [a permeation] of the human cognitive and spiritual life. One had the courage to acquire inner knowledge from the information provided by the senses and thus to break through what the senses offered. Something comprehensive had been explained as appearance [– what the senses offered]. Through the fact that the human soul has developed powers within itself that can enlighten it about reality despite appearances, what is termed meditation, contemplation, [concentration] has become a continuation, as it were, of the limited development of the soul to which the leading spiritual personalities devoted themselves.

How man comes to that arbitrariness of withdrawing attention can be read [in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds?”]. Just as it is possible in ordinary life to withdraw attention from something, so it is possible, through an inner, higher act of the will, to divert all soul attention from all external impressions, so that one artificially enters into the state as one involuntarily enters sleep. But] then you must have already taken care to make your soul life so strong that you do not fall into inactivity and lethargy, and that is achieved by performing the inner soul activity that is necessary for this. And how this is to be done will become most clear to us when we consider that everything a person experiences, thinks and feels is based on the outside world. One need only reflect on how empty the human soul would be if it were to suddenly, in an instant, forget everything that comes from outside. Some soul beings would feel only too empty. But now one can also achieve a certain deepening, internalization [of the soul life] if one takes the ideas gained from external impressions, holds them back, [withdraws and] processes them inwardly. That is already a kind of meditation. It only becomes effective when the spiritual researcher brings to life ideas that do not come from outside, but which he creates out of his soul, even if they are reminiscent of external realities. I would like to emphasize one such concrete idea here, an idea that may at first seem rather foolish to the outer man: Imagine having two water glasses in front of you, one empty and one partially filled; further, imagine imagine that you are pouring water from the half-filled glass into the empty one; try to imagine that the glass does not become emptier as a result of the pouring, but rather fuller and fuller, the more water you pour. A foolish notion in the external world, but such notions are important and essential for something else. To those who would object that this notion is quite foolish, one would have to say: such a notion is not meant to depict anything from the outside, but [this notion is meant] to evoke the soul to action, to stir up an allegorical notion in the soul. What is our attitude to this? This idea can be an emblem for something [very mysterious] and profound in human life; and that is what is included in the word “love”. Wherever we look in human life, we encounter it as something that fertilizes and invigorates. It presents us with riddle upon riddle [the riddle of life at its most profound]. Who would dare to say that they can look into the depths of the soul that are touched when love is mentioned? But one of the qualities of love is wonderfully illustrated by the parable of the two jars, by this impossible idea: the one who gives and gives again and again out of love does not become emptier and emptier, but fuller and fuller, richer and richer. That is a peculiarity of what is expressed there: that the soul is given more and more richly when it gives out of love. We can apply what is given in this symbol; we are not doing anything so incredibly foolish, because we are doing it according to mathematics and geometry.

Let us assume that someone has a medal in front of them, but has no idea what its substantial content is. However, there is one thing they can see: that it is circular. They draw a circle on the medal and imagine it. Everything they can imagine as a circle applies to the medal. So what does he do? He separates the properties of things and considers them individually, separately, and in this way he arrives at his insights. With such a mental image, one cannot go as far as in mathematics. But this symbol is intended to lead to the [independent] inner life of the soul. Now, the point is to, excluding all other ideas, excluding all worries, [regarding what other life experiences are], spend a while devoting oneself entirely to such an idea, to live entirely in it. What is achieved here? What is achieved is that the person who wants to become a soul researcher has united everything in his soul that he would otherwise have fragmented into many sensory perceptions and many will impulses, that he has concentrated everything on a single idea that he has created himself and that he therefore fully comprehends [as a symbol]. An enormous amount of energy of the soul life must be applied when such a concept has no support, no crutch, in the outer soul life. But it is not enough to do such a training only for a short time. Much is necessary, as stated in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Moral conceptions of all kinds [are necessary], they are particularly fruitful for the inner energization, for an inner revival, for a stimulation of the soul life.

The first thing the soul feels is not, for example, immediate supersensible knowledge – it is that it now knows: there is the possibility in you to evoke other forces than those that can be experienced in ordinary life. It is an important and essential moment in life to experience this. This moment cannot be compared to anything else that one experiences in ordinary life in another science, which one can call an expansion of knowledge in the ordinary scientific field; what one experiences there can only be compared to something else in human life, to what the child experiences after it is intimately connected to the physical for the first time, the first years after birth. We see it growing up in such a way that the soul is, as it were, not separated from the body, the spiritual influence expresses itself in physical movement, then we become aware of that [important] moment when it is aware that it is an I, until later it remembers back, while the earlier time disappears. Childhood presents itself as an inner division into a spiritual and a soul life. The physical now presents itself to the soul life as something different; a kind of birth of the soul life takes place, a detachment of the soul life; not only has the child gained something, but it has become different, it has become a different being. In the same sense, one feels one's self growing when that which can be attained through meditation occurs; [one feels something similar to the experience of the child.] In that moment, one feels more and more how something is detaching itself, just as the physicality of the child detaches itself from the soul life. The soul life becomes twofold; one sees something emerging, as when a new human being is born out of the old one, [one becomes a different being, acquires a new self, a new inner soul life awakens]; just as the child, when it begins to become aware of itself as a self, relates to its corporeality quite differently than before, so the person who has experienced this relates to his or her entire soul life. But this is a moment that is essentially different from the moment that has just been discussed in the life of the child; how, that can become clear when you consider that a person is what he has developed as his feeling, thinking and imagining throughout his life; what he now experiences in his soul, he must detach from himself like a new self. What was inward must now become outward; the greater part of it becomes outward, and a new inner, at the same time higher, soul life awakens. Only at this moment do you feel two things; the experiences are well known from the past, but you have never gone through them with such intensity.

The first thing that occurs is: Now you know what self-love is. In that moment, self-love becomes clear. Now you know: you have to separate yourself from what you were so in love with, what you thought was your everything, what you used to call your being; it is as if the ground disappears under your feet. Only now do you feel how you loved yourself, and what you have to tear out when this soul life is shown to you objectively. It must be so for everyday life, because man loves most what he is, however selfless he may think he is. One overlooks the fact that one loves most what one has gradually developed in one's soul life, [what one must snatch from oneself]. It is a difficult task to detach oneself from oneself; and without getting to the point where one, so to speak, tears out from oneself what one loves and values most in oneself, without this fact one cannot recognize the soul as grounded in the soul worlds. One also has a sense of what the expulsion of self-love is in ordinary life; one only gets to know the strength [of selflessness] that this sense now requires at a certain point in the development of meditative, concentrated mental life, which only allows the soul to become aware of itself in its essence.

The second thing is to become aware: What are you now [at your core], now that you have made your core your shell [now that what seemed to be the core is only the shell]? At first, you feel that you are not much at all, that what appears to be a new self is very thin. What is needed now is inner courage to maintain oneself in the face of the feeling of powerlessness, of the bottomlessness of the whole new being. It is basically one of the most important experiences of the spiritual researcher to tear out self-love and overcome the tremendous fear that arises when one recognizes one's own powerlessness of the new self. Now, in ordinary life, what the spiritual researcher achieves is also present in everyone; something new is not given to people at all, it can only be perceived by the soul researcher at the characterized level. There, what he actually is confronts him; only now does self-knowledge occur. Why can't people have it all the time? [Why wasn't it there before?] And here we come to the important discovery that everyone who wants to become a spiritual scientist, who transforms the nature of his soul so that he can see into the supersensible worlds, must make: He comes to the realization that it is good in ordinary life that all this [that self-knowledge] does not occur because man would not be able to bear it. The training must consist of the fact that he [at the moment when he lays aside the soul's cover] is then also able to face himself in such a way that he tears out all self-love, that he has the designated courage to a sufficient degree. The fact that a person does not face this in ordinary [real] life is a form of protection, because [the ordinary person] would not be able to bear [what used to be inside becoming external]. That is why spiritual science speaks of [this moment of] standing before the “Guardians of the Threshold”. By the threshold is meant the one that one must cross if one wants to enter the supersensible world. It is said that ordinary life finds protection through this guardian of the threshold, because only now does the possibility of the soul's relationship with the supersensible worlds begin, only now is the soul ready to look into the supersensible worlds. Only now does the human being begin to become a spiritual researcher.

For there comes a time when the human being, if he has practised such an inner strengthening of his soul life for a sufficient length of time, when he has brought such symbolic images before his soul for long enough [which he knows they serve to strengthen the soul], then his soul has become strong, then he also perceives the fruit of this strengthening, then he becomes aware of that important, significant moment, which he feels like an epiphany. Such images arise [of their own accord] from the indeterminate depths of the soul's life, which seem to show him new worlds. Now the most important and decisive moment for the soul of the spiritual researcher has come. Now he must be able to make a decision that is extremely difficult. Why it is difficult may be seen from a comparison, from the comparison of what happens to a person when new images arise in him without his doing, which do not come from external facts. You know, they are called visions, hallucinations, delusions and the like. The person who is an external scientist will be tempted to say: What the spiritual researcher experiences is nothing more than delusions that arise in an ill soul.

Now, of course, the difference cannot be readily explained, but it can become clear to anyone if they make another comparison. You will also be aware of what happens to a person who has come to such delusions through illness. To talk such delusions out of such a sick person is a futile exercise. Now it becomes clear how much a person is in love with what he has created. As a spiritual researcher, a person must not be in love with his image, and therefore he must uproot self-love; he must know: In all that comes as an image, you live only in it yourself; like shadows of your own being - what the inner nature of the soul's mood is, that is expressed in what surrounds you. That is very difficult, because you can meet people who have come to such experiences through some exercises, through states of illness, which should not be mentioned here, and the like. Oh, such people are blissful in the world that they claim to have gained. They can tell you some strange things, they are completely convinced of this new world. To prevent that from happening is part of spiritual training. Yes, the will must go further; it must not remain merely with knowledge, that does not help in the long run. A glorious new world comes to meet you, but you have to know what it means, that it has arisen from the inner nature of the soul mood. (It takes a strong will to say to yourself: All this is only a reflection of your own being; abstract knowledge is of no use here.) The willpower must be so strong that it is capable of extinguishing this entire [imaginary] ego-world so that it is no longer there. That is the Rubicon that must be crossed. You have created this world for yourself and you have to be able to extinguish this world again. Only someone who has gone through this can talk about it. But when he has managed to extinguish this entire ego-world, then he has made himself objective, and then he has freed his consciousness for the experience of an objective new world. The things come back, similar to forgotten images that lie dormant in the soul life, and yet they are quite different. Only now is the soul, through its powers, transported into a completely new world. It is so strange, what one experiences at this stage of realization; it is as if one has experienced a completely new thing, which has enabled the soul to perceive an objective spiritual world. Now the soul life has become the spiritual eye, the spiritual ear; now it does not perceive itself, one has become objective; now the soul is the spiritual eye and ear, because it no longer sees itself. Just as the outer eye [does not see itself] and knows nothing of itself, and thereby becomes permeable to the outer world, so man must, through the procedures undertaken, have made himself permeable, as it were, to the spiritual world; [then one sees the supersensible world]. When he has made himself permeable through his energy at his root, then he finds what lives within the soul!

Now, one could say that everything the spiritual researcher finds could be autosuggestion, deception. I have already mentioned here what someone told me in another [gap in the transcript]: The soul is a peculiar thing, it often imagines that it is facing a reality. — One would have to object that there is no proof of anything that can be experienced in any world except the experience itself. Only the experience provides the proof. We only need to recall a strange philosophical assertion by Schopenhauer, on which philosophies were founded. When we hear that the world is an idea and that basically everything that comes to man is only an idea, we have to answer that ideas can be clearly distinguished from experience. It is quite a different matter when we form the clearest idea of a piece of hot iron and when we actually touch a hot iron; we will get burned by the latter, but certainly not by the former. There is no proof of reality except that through direct experience. If no one had seen a whale, we could never prove that such an animal really exists. In life itself, reality is indeed guaranteed by this experience. It is the same in the supersensible worlds. Anyone who has progressed to where the spiritual researcher should go, experiences the reality of those worlds into which he has entered. When the Lord said that there are people who can imagine a lemonade so clearly that they believe they can taste it, one must say: Yes, of course, it happens that someone can imagine the taste of a lemonade from the mere idea of it, but has the experience been carried to its conclusion? It is only complete when he has quenched his thirst, and no one has quenched his thirst with the mere idea of taste. The experience must be brought to a conclusion, and this conclusion of experiences is experienced when one has [really] entered into the supersensible worlds with one's soul. Only when one has approached the supersensible worlds in this way is one in principle able to see through the supersensible self-substantial being.

This self-substantial being becomes particularly evident when one looks back on one's own life. But it is very difficult for a person to recognize this own life, because everything that it usually appears to be is actually, one might say, a one-sidedness brought about by life circumstances and by one's own disposition. We meet idealists, materialists; one regards the other as a fool. It is not enough to see through superficial self-knowledge. More profound minds, such as Goethe, for example, have known that fundamentally each of these points of view represents only one-sidedness. Material things must be recognized with material laws; spiritual things with spiritual laws. But Goethe has placed himself in each point of view and he did not come to regard the spiritualist as a fool, because he knew that one can only understand the supersensible life through one's spiritual powers. Some who have not progressed as far as Goethe think that one has to look for the truth in the middle; for someone who knows the truth, it is just as if you had two chairs, and it could happen that you sat down on the floor between the two instead of on one of the chairs. You don't get to the truth by taking the arithmetic mean, but by making each point of view your own, then you find the way to the truth, as Goethe says. But you can only do that when you have a deeper self-knowledge; when you look back on your life, you realize: you have achieved this and that because of your point of view, from which you look at the whole world, and that is how you have become what you are. In this way, life becomes an image, and one comes ever closer to what one could call the removal of the human being, because the human being is usually no more than his point of view. When man removes himself, his own life becomes an image, something that confronts him as previously mentioned in the imagination, and when he now applies his strong willpower to his life, when he suppresses everything he recognizes [through strong willpower ], when the whole of life, when it has first happened, becomes like a forgotten image, then what one is outside of the body between birth and death, what goes beyond death, [what one is outside of the individual life in a purely spiritual world]. One gets to know oneself as a spiritual being that discards the body and lives in a purely spiritual world between death and a new birth, that takes what it has experienced with it into the new life and that now helps build the human body in order to become aware of itself later. In short, through experience one will also get to know the more extensive nature of his soul, which is not limited by the boundaries that delimit our lives; [it is a nature that extends beyond the boundaries of life and goes from life to life.

In this way, this new life takes on an element that is similar to what Copernicus and Giordano Bruno brought.] While in the time of Giordano Bruno man looked up at the stars and assumed a limited world, the latter broke through it and explained it as taken out of the limitation of the soul's life; so spiritual research, in full agreement with natural science, will solve the death riddle [gap in the transcript] by showing that Just as the firmament is not a real boundary, so the boundary set for life from birth to death is not a real one, but is only created by human perception. As if from a spiritual firmament we are enclosed by birth and death; but just as Giordano Bruno broke through the limited [and pointed people to the infinity of space], so spiritual research will do the same in full harmony with science [and point to the infinity of the spirit].

But how does the spiritual researcher relate to those who cannot become spiritual researchers themselves, who can only read and hear what the spiritual researcher can communicate? The objection that only the spiritual researcher can see into the spiritual worlds is not justified. The spiritual researcher is in the same position as the painter in relation to his picture. When two people stand before the picture, one indifferently, the other with a vivid intuitive perception, a whole world can unfold for the latter. But that the picture could come into being, the cause of that is the skill of the painter. He must have overcome what led to the picture being painted, but when the viewer penetrates, what the painter thought becomes present to him. The spiritual researcher must be able to describe in ordinary terms and words what he has brought out of spiritual science. You don't have to be a painter to understand a picture. In the same way, one can sense as truth what the spiritual researcher expresses. Therefore, the results of spiritual research can be recognized even if one is not a spiritual researcher. Thus, what spiritual research reveals can certainly become part of our cultural life. Those who truly engage with the insights of spiritual research can thereby come to a real knowledge of the supersensible world and the human soul. [He can] become aware of the supersensible world with such certainty that he is put in a similar position to Goethe, who was once pushed to make his strange statement, in the face of all the objections that may come from those who, for understandable reasons, regard Theosophy as folly and fantasy. Even in ancient Greek philosophy, the denial of movement was present. These philosophers said: When [an arrow is shot and] the flying arrow is seen in one moment, it [always] rests at the point of rest, in the next moment it is at the point of rest and so on; therefore it is always at the point of rest, therefore it is not moving at all, [so there is no movement]. Goethe said, when this came before his mind's eye, which is credible proof after all:

Enemies may eye each other,
You remain calm, remain silent;
And if they deny you movement,
Go around in front of their noses.

He meant that facts have been proven, which can be proven without gaps by the intellect, but to the contrary. In the same way, one would like to behave when one has gained certainty about the reality of the spiritual world, the human soul itself and its foundation in the supersensible world. Then one would like to remember this saying of Goethe when people come and want to prove without exception from their point of view that there can be no supersensible world, and if it is, it cannot be recognized. Then one would like to hold out to these deniers of spiritual life and of the existence of the human soul in it, when they face the world view of spiritual research with hostility:

Enemy events may occur,
but you remain calm, remain cheerful,
and if they deny the spirit,
do not brood about it any longer.
Yes, in the end even agree with them,
their spirit is in a bad state.

If we speak about the riddles of existence from the point of view that was characterized here yesterday, then one question in particular must arise for every person in the present who has somehow come close to such a consideration; it is the question: What is the relationship between what has to say in relation to the present-day results of natural science, which over the past few centuries have led the intellectual life of humanity from triumph to triumph and have basically led to everything around us today appearing as a result, as a fruit of natural science. Not only is our external, material existence completely imbued with what natural science has given us, but scientific thinking has gradually penetrated into human thinking, feeling and sensing, into the whole of human spiritual life, giving it a colouring so that one can say: Anyone who wants to speak about the question of spiritual life today and who would have to contradict the scientific results of the present day would, in principle, be met with little credence. Natural science has provided a body of knowledge that, through its intrinsic value, through its relationship to the human-natural sense of truth, to common sense, penetrates our soul in such a way that one must rightly say: There must be a mistake somewhere if a world view feels compelled to contradict these scientific findings. What is to be presented here in terms of the world view is now fully in line with the legitimate results of scientific research at present, although it must of course go beyond this result in almost all respects when it comes to approaching a solution to the great question of existence, the significant riddle of life. And what are these great riddles of existence? They are not those that impose themselves through one or other scientific consideration; the greatest riddles of the world do not impose themselves on man from science alone, but they impose themselves at every turn in life; they are, so to speak, before our soul at every moment; and basically we can summarize these riddles of existence in two questions. Although what is meant here by spiritual science is not exhausted by these two questions, it must be said that, after all, for human interest, for that which man actually wants from spiritual science, all these spiritual scientific considerations ultimately aim at the two great riddles, which can be described on the one hand as the riddle of death, which is at the same time the riddle of life, and on the other hand the riddle of fate. ultimately] to the two great riddle-questions, which can be designated on the one hand by the word: the riddle of death, which is at the same time the riddle of life, and on the other hand the riddle of fate; the riddle of death, which is at the same time the riddle of fate. Surely, my honored audience, this riddle, [the riddle of death] arises for man from his hopes, from his desires, perhaps also from his fear and dread. It looms before the human soul, and it raises the question of what it is that can withstand the transitory existence of its body, what, for example, can be described as something immortal in the face of the temporary. This question is not raised scientifically, however, when it is raised as it usually flows out of the soul, where, in a certain sense, the solution to the question presents itself in concern about the fate of the soul after death, even if it is not admitted. [Man says to himself]: It would be unbearable to think of an annihilation of existence [after death], where one imagines all sorts of sophisticated reasons [for the continuation of the soul] in the face of the passing away of the body. In contrast to this, it must be emphasized that those people who, in the course of the nineteenth century, have managed to say that it is a special kind of selfishness for a person to demand that what he has in his soul as content should last beyond death, must certainly inspire a certain respect. There are certain selfless, if materially minded, noble natures who say: What I have worked for, what I have taken in my soul, I give to general human life, I sacrifice it on the altar of the human community. And so, in a sense, this [attitude] must be regarded as nobler than the one that, out of fear and dread, out of hope and desire, builds itself a belief in an immortality.

But the riddle of death comes from a completely different perspective, and that is truly the human riddle of life, where one reflects on the economy of the world, where one reflects on the nature of the accumulated forces that have come to light in the world. Man acquires - one can look at this quite impersonally - in the course of his life, from year to year, from week to week, a certain [inner] soul content; who could deny that this content in a normal person becomes ever richer, ever more inward, ever more permeated with energy. Now, those who think that the soul's content must be given to the whole [human] race must be confronted with the question: Is it really [even] possible to give away the best, what man has become within himself? Because that [which man must absorb in order to advance his soul personally] is something that is so connected with the individual life that it is impossible to give it to the general public. We can give much to the general public, but it is impossible to give away what is most essential, and precisely this most essential, which can only be achieved through personality, only through individuality, would have to disappear, would have to fade into nothingness if the human soul life, where the gate of death closes, disappears as an individual soul being. So, from the economy of life, this question arises quite objectively.

The second question that arises as a life riddle, which confronts us at every turn, [is that of fate]. It is this: [We see] that a person is surrounded by adversity and misery from the cradle, and that things will not change; this riddle of fate will confront us even more starkly when we see someone with limited abilities growing up and have to say of them: he will be of little use to society. Another will be surrounded by worries from the cradle on – [so that we can foresee]: he can become a significant member of society. These are questions that may not occupy the theoretical mind much, these are questions that in some respects ordinary science cannot even approach; but should it not be just as necessary to raise this question as other sciences seek to answer? These questions do not only occupy the theoretical mind, but the whole of human life. Inner happiness, inner support, inner security, inner joy of work in life depend on the answer that a person can give himself here. The one who believes that he can dismiss this question will notice in the course of his life that something occurs that he cannot explain, as if it came from this question; insecurity, nervousness, and instability can arise if someone does not find a way to find perspectives for a solution to this question. When approaching this question, spiritual science cannot simply take the results of natural science; it must go beyond them in every respect. We shall see why. But by going beyond the results of natural science, spiritual science, as it is meant here, retains - and this it must in the sense of modern times - the same discipline of thinking and feeling, [of research], the same way of confronting the world, which is in natural science. Oh, my honored audience, this has shown us yet another result: it has [in the course of the last century] produced a certain education of human thought, and this education is spreading. He who seeks a Weltanschhauung today, may not sin against this education of human thinking. Even though he who does not want to trouble himself with natural science can stand aside, he who wants to penetrate our culture must be able to justify it before the justified demands of natural science. (That which wants to take hold of our culture must be able to stand before justified thinking). On the other hand, however, we see how great the longing is to arrive at something in the indicated direction, beyond all traditions [about these questions], and especially in the thinking natural scientist we see that what is so often justifiably believed today is by no means considered sufficient. Hundreds of examples could be given to show how today's thinking natural scientists are striving for a worldview that can give them what they are seeking.

Of the many examples, one in particular: if we consider a speech given on July 22, 1909, by the man who had been president of Harvard University in America for forty years, a naturalist, a chemist, Charles Eliot, a man of character At the time, he spoke of the need to move forward from natural science to conquering the great soul question, and he presented it to his listeners as a matter of course, what he wanted to express as the existence of an independent soul alongside the physical life. He said: Man has always recognized in his fellow man an independent soul, a spirit that has its essence in itself, as which man experiences himself when he wants to get to know himself, as which man knows himself - [something separate from the body]. But precisely the way in which such a man attempts to move from the habits of scientific thinking into the spiritual can teach us how necessary it is for a special spiritual science to address the issue. If one follows Eliot's arguments, one actually comes to a strange thought. Although he takes it for granted that a soul being exists that is separate from the body, he never speaks of it other than: Yes, the soul is there. — Soul, soul, and always only soul. What would it be like if he applied the same approach to the field of natural science? It would be as if one did not want to construct this plant, these laws, but rather the whole external natural event, by saying: There is a nature. - The natural scientist [is not content with that]; he goes into [the details], the individual laws, the particular concrete existence of the same.

[Likewise, spiritual science does the same. It delves into the soul and seeks to penetrate the spiritual world and to get to know supersensible beings and facts. ] And that will be the task of spiritual science in the future, to be able to go into the details of spiritual life like natural science. Many people today still do not want to know that it is possible to penetrate into the spiritual world and to get to know supersensible entities there that never come to physical embodiment. That is precisely the task of spiritual science; in undertaking this, it proceeds in its field according to the same method as natural science in its. What matters is the similarity of the observation. Suppose, for example, someone wanted to observe the life of a plant, how it grows, how it produces leaves and flowers and finally the fruit. Is the human being satisfied with how plant growth comes to an end? No, when he gets there, he says to himself: the germ is the end of the plant's growth and at the same time the beginning of a new plant. End and beginning are linked together, and we then see the whole of life at work when we are able to link the end to the beginning.

In the same way, spiritual science does it [only applied to the soul]. It should be emphasized how such a consideration is fundamentally fruitful in the context of everyday life. Nothing could be more revealing of the fruitfulness of such a consideration than to reflect for a moment on the saying of an important man who occupied himself a great deal with the riddles of the maturing soul: a saying of Goethe. Goethe said, “In old age one becomes a mystic.” He did not want to present a gray theory, he wanted to present a way of life with it, he wanted to say: That which one has acquired in the course of one's life, regardless of where one has stood, what has become the content of the soul, what one has basically become has become, so that I have gradually become not only richer but also more mature, has matured inwardly, has taken on an inner energy, and detaches itself more and more from the outer life, gaining more and more independence. We are still relatively young, and everything that lives in us wants to be expressed in action; but we also know that something is increasingly forming in the soul, which the soul regards as its content to be experienced in solitude, through which it builds a world of its own, apart from the outside world. This deepening of our inner life, through the drawing in of a higher human being who reaches into our outer activity, is what Goethe meant by his saying. We become inward, soul-spiritual inward. Something similar takes place within our soul life as takes place outwardly-sensually in the plant, where the leaves and flowers gradually wither and the germ separates. What is sensually and physically separated and what becomes the starting point for a new plant life has its analogy in what is inwardly and spiritually separated, in what Goethe wanted to draw attention to, namely that the human being becomes a mystic, and this spiritual-spiritual soul is an accumulated power. One proceeds entirely according to the scientific method when one connects it with the beginning of the human body, and when one does that, then it must be done in such a way that one sees how, when a child comes into existence, it is gradually developed out of unknown foundations, which then later in the course of life comes to light. I have said here before how anyone who regards the human being as growing from birth to maturity in such a way that he believes that everything that unfolds would come into the line of inheritance, that he proceeds just as inaccurately as people , say, in the sixteenth century, when numerous people, including scholars, believed that a physical being – lower animals, earthworms – can develop from [the mere] river mud. It was a great achievement when, in the seventeenth century, Francesco Redi pointed out that this was based on an inaccurate observation and that all life emerges only from life.

Just as Redi behaved at the time, so does the spiritual researcher in relation to the soul and spirit. He shows that it is a mistake to assume only the physical, the line of inheritance, but that in truth one must see a spiritual unfolding into the spiritual-soul. One then sees how, in fact, the soul and spirit have more significant work to do in the early days of childhood than in later life. No matter how proud a person is of what he develops as intellect and spiritual ability, he is no longer so clever in the later stages of life that he is able to do what has to happen in the early days of childhood. The brain must first be made plastic; there the I has to work tremendously harder to develop a very specific ability. [A spiritual core works on the development of abilities.] There you can see: just as you see the new plant developing from the germ, so you can see maturing in a new human life the new abilities crystallizing out of the still plastic matter. [This is the very same view as in natural science.] From this arises – through a meaningful view of life – repeated earthly life. We see the spiritual-soul core of the human being passing through the gate of death, withdrawn from human observation, and emerging again to work on its physical-corporeal being until it has brought it to what then is it? What then is this? The materialist will say: It is a sum of material processes, from which the spiritual-mental then develops. He who thinks that the spiritual man can develop out of processes that arise out of bodily ones has no sense for the contemplation of what the inner soul life is. Anyone who has an appreciation of this [and wants to characterize it] will perhaps first have to resort to an image in order to construct the relationship between the soul and the body. This image could be the following: if we walk along a wall and we find mirrors hanging at individual points on the wall, we walk up to them and we always see ourselves in the mirror. But it would not occur to anyone to explain this reflection as their very own being, and it depends very much on the mirror whether and what is seen. Just as a person stands before his mirror, where the exterior of the mirror only reflects what he is, so the spiritual-soul life relates to the bodily-physical. The physical body is not a dead mirror, but a living mirror, but it is like a mirror that makes it possible for us to know something of the spiritual soul. But when we are asleep at night, we do not look at ourselves in this mirror. The further we penetrate into the everyday observation of the soul life, the more we will perceive how the spiritual-soul, when it has become independent, becomes aware of itself as in a mirror. But as long as we have not attained this independence in the first years of childhood, and as long as we are unaware of it, our soul and spirit work on our physical and material being, making it plastic so that we can recognize ourselves. Thus we see that through what we have worked for in an earlier life we become the architects of our present life.

Another contemplation of life can shed light on the question of fate. A person who has the right sense for self-contemplation will, when looking back on his life, ask himself: Would you have become what you are if you had not met this or that fate? Only a superficial view of life can separate you from what has been worked on you as fate. If you retrace your life [back to birth], you will realize that what becomes conscious to itself [the inner selfhood] cannot have started in childhood, so you will say to yourself: It must have been much earlier than that. One goes beyond one's consciously experienced destiny into earlier times; one recognizes oneself as the smith of one's destiny and one will not be far from the thought that one has also brought one's destiny in its causes from earlier lives.

Only if one does not look at life thoroughly can one be dissatisfied with such a view. One can say: the world view makes that which causes such pain and suffering to man into something that one has built oneself. But one is only dissatisfied when one looks at the surface; the more one knows that one has built one's own destiny, the more one comes to terms with one's destiny, the more satisfied one is. One is just not always a true observer of one's destiny. (A bad fate is often a necessity for moving forward.) Suppose someone has lived recklessly off his father's pocket alone until the age of eighteen, then the father loses his fortune, the young man has to work to support himself, and is forced to lead a different life. He will rightly consider this a bad fate; but when the man reaches the age of fifty, he will say, “Thank God; I would have become a good-for-nothing; my misery back then made me a decent person.” This shows that fate is a necessary part of our development. Thus, what one might feel as a reproach against this world view could perhaps be summarized by saying that if one can be an objective judge of what it can mean to have created one's own hardship and misery, one will not be dissatisfied, not only seeing misery in it, but also seeing developmental factors in it.

But is there, still apart from actual spiritual-scientific results, [a possibility] to imagine that there is a connection between the deepest core of the human soul, [what one is], and that, [what one experiences as] fate? Such an analogy also occurs in natural science. One need only imagine: Can a mountain plant flourish in the lowlands? It is transplanted [by its nature] into the appropriate environment. [There is a certain attraction between the mountain plants and their environment.] Thus man is transplanted into his destiny, for that is where he has to flourish. So there is always an inner bond between what he brings from a previous life and the following life. We always remain within the thinking habits of natural science, even within spiritual science, when we answer the riddle of death that man passes through the gate of death, leading a purely spiritual life until he enters into life again through birth; [we see a spiritual-soul core forming and perfecting itself in the spiritual world in the present life]. Thus we do not regard immortality as an unbroken line, but we see immortality as composed of individual links, and we see from the essence of the spiritual soul how the destiny of man is explained by this passing through of the spiritual-soul core through the various lives, [earthly life and spiritual life]. This already results in a purely external view of life. But when the pure spiritual-scientific method is applied, what could be regarded as a belief is fully confirmed when it is understood in the way it has just been developed.

Yesterday it was shown how the spiritual researcher is able to develop higher powers within himself. [Only someone who has developed his soul can become a spiritual researcher.] There are various moments. Some of these were already mentioned yesterday. Naturally, it is impossible to cover everything that a person experiences in the course of a lecture, even a sketchy one; but individual aspects can be hinted at, and one important point can be pointed out, which I have already tried to describe in [my] book [“How to Know Higher Worlds” and in] “A Path to Knowledge of the Human Being”. Reference has been made to a discovery that the person who is educating himself spiritually makes, [to the development that man undergoes]. What he experiences [there] he experiences figuratively [at first]; but this experience is the expression of a significant reality, of that which takes place in reality. In my book, I try to describe as vividly as possible what often comes unexpectedly as an image; when you have developed your soul sufficiently long and energetically, the moment comes when something can happen in a hundred different ways, but it can also happen in such a way that you feel: Now something is happening to you that you have never had any experience of before. It can be as if you feel within a complex of forces, as if lightning [strikes], passes through you and had blown up everything material. From that moment on, you feel [how you have come into a different relationship with the body], how you have become free and independent in your inner experience from that which is physically attached to you. One feels, as it were, consciously driven out and one feels as one can only feel when one has experienced the falling away of the body in death. That is why the words were used in the mystical life: one approaches the boundary of death.

Only from this moment on do you know what it means to experience yourself inwardly and at the same time know: It is not linked to the inner physicality, from which you feel liberated; now you know what it means to stand before the mirror. [Thoughts are not brain products]; you now know the spiritual and soul reality; but you are detached from something else at this moment, and that is the essential thing. One knows that one is detached from the body, but one is also detached to a high degree from what one has known as the spiritual-soul, from what one was in, in which one has experienced oneself, [from what one has addressed as oneself]. The mystics who have known it have spoken in such a way that one approaches the external necessity of existence. You only understand the mystics when you know this yourself; yes, you have this experience in this moment – it is a significant discovery. Just as you can only stand by and watch a foreign body, you feel that you can only be a spectator in the things you used to feel you were an actor in; you feel yourself as a spectator in the face of a spiritual-soul life. One feels it oneself as a kind of corporeality outside oneself, feels that there are processes in it over which one has no control. One feels, as it were, chained, forged to a being, to which one must remain until the gate of death and in relation to which one feels oneself outwardly as a spectator. One feels a new thinker awakening in oneself, the old will one feels snatched away, facing it. What matters more than a sensational result is that he - a person developing in this way - can really have such experiences, that he can know himself in a spiritual world; and when he knows himself there, one thing becomes clear to him. It becomes clear to him that with the new being that he has now peeled out of his previous soul life, he stands much closer to the outer physicality than he used to. We are close to the outer physicality. Today's materialist is familiar with the phenomenon of blanching, of blushing; we have experienced physical processes there; these can be thought of as being intensified; one can also refer to circumstances that come to light when one observes a person over a longer period of their life. We find that if a person has an inner life that does not remain purely theoretical, he becomes the master of his life; [the soul acts on the body; facial features change]. But these are all trivialities compared to the feeling that arises at the moment when one has, so to speak, detached oneself from one's soul and spirit, that one has within oneself the powers to create physically. [You feel that you have the strength to shape the physical body], then you feel the forces that are present in the child when it forms the plastic body, [physically develops the abilities]. This experience is not easy, it is quite difficult to bear. One cannot change this body, but one feels: one has gathered forces through one's life that can forge another body. One feels, as it were, the foretaste of the forces that will work on one's destiny in a subsequent life. One feels as if one has been detached, but one has also gained certainty about the spiritual-soul experience, [the spiritual-soul core]. As surely as oxygen and hydrogen are separated, so through the separation that one makes through this meaningful self-experiment, one recognizes that the spiritual-soul is mixed in the human body, a spiritual-soul core, and that the human being reaches out into a new life by carrying the potential for it within himself. Certainty arises for us when we do things this way. There are, however, no experiments that we can do in the laboratory; the only experiment is self-development, self-inspiration, and the only experiment to penetrate into the supersensible worlds is the spiritual-soul itself. He must make himself the instrument of penetration. Then he will actually gain knowledge about the connection of his destiny in the present life and in past lives. Just as the person who believes that he is a product of nature is in error [believes that he is even in the mirror, so the one who seeks his ego in the physical is in error], so is the one in error who experiences the following: It happens to him that he cannot find objects, for example, the buttons he needs to put on his clothes; he gets angry and assumes that someone has misplaced them. [He asks], “Who has done this to me, where should I look?” Then he looks more closely and finds that he himself is the cause, that he has had to search. What he has to do now is the result of what he himself did the day before. [So it is with our destiny.] We face our destiny; we face it in love and in hate; we do not draw it to ourselves because we have forgotten that we have caused it [ourselves]. But a true contemplation of life expands our memory, and we find that it is carpentered by ourselves.

That is the true expansion of true human self-reflection. Of course, natural science can penetrate into many things, but not into the realms of the spiritual and the soul. The aforementioned Charles Eliot said that the old worldview dealt with human suffering and said, “You will find a balance after death.” According to Charles Eliot, the new world view should not deal with death and misery, but with joy and life. We have to admit that without doubt. But can one simply say that one should construct a world view based on natural science that only deals with joy and life? You may say it, fine, you [may refuse to deal with suffering and death], may turn your eyes away from suffering and death - but suffering and death deal with us, they will get to us, and only the one who can look at suffering as a developmental factor, who can basically say to the question: You have experienced happiness and joy, pain and suffering. What would you rather give up of what you have experienced: [suffering or joys]? – I would give up joy for pain and suffering, because I actually owe my realization to them – he would speak correctly because he has acquired true realization. What makes us understand knowledge as a developmental factor, death, from which a new germ of life develops, which pushes away the shell like withered leaves, makes us see death as the event that guarantees us a new life. We would not be able to use what we should use for a new life, [the germ], if we did not have death, [if we did not go through death]. Once education is placed in this world view, it will become a practice of life, a kind of life sap; one will be able to symbolize oneself through the process, the withering of the plant, how the spiritual-soul core becomes more and more energetic, in which new life forces want to work. This will give the courage to face life. This realization will be an elixir of life. I have always pointed out the objection that is raised. Systematic investigations show us how mathematical talent was inherited in the Bernoulli family, and musical talent in the Bach family. The question now is this: Is anything of all these scientific results negated? Does something need to be denied? Through a simple comparison, we can see how everything that can legitimately be said about science can be admitted. [Spiritual science does not deny anything that science says.] The spiritual researcher is not a superstitious person; he is a person who does not want to raise objections, who does not need to reject what is justified. It is fully admitted that there is justification in the facts of heredity, [but alongside the materialistic cause there is also a spiritual one]. Let us assume that someone were standing before us and another personality said: I will answer the question as to why the personality standing before me actually lives. Well, because it has lungs inside and air outside, because it breathes. Quite right, he is right. But someone else comes along and says: Yes, but I know something else why he lives; I once happened to see how he hanged himself, I cut him down. My cutting him down is the reason that he is still alive today! Through this comparison, everything that constitutes the relationship between spiritual science and natural science is made clear. If someone comes along and says: We see the talents of a great general because his [Napoleon's] mother, when she was carrying him, had the inclination to like to be on battlefields, we can admit that, but that does not exclude the possibility that the other is also true, [that spiritual and mental connections are also present]. If we only realize this relationship between spiritual science and natural science sufficiently comprehensively, then we will no longer make the objections that we otherwise hear.

But even otherwise, these objections do not have sufficient logic. We see that genius is always at the end of the line of inheritance. Certainly we can see that the external bodily tools descend from the ancestors, but the individuality had to seek out the bodily tools. [This is proof against inheritance]. But if someone bases an assertion on this that everything only happens in the line of inheritance, saying that someone has inherited this or that quality from his ancestors because the ancestors also had it, that cannot actually be proof in the real sense. It is, in the logical sense, no more proof than saying that if someone has fallen into water, they are wet. At most, external, real proof could also be found logically if one had the genius not at the end but at the beginning of the line of inheritance, so that one could show how the genius is passed on - but one will hardly dare to do that. It can be seen that the assertions are not based on logic, but on certain habits of thought that tend to seek the reasons for everything in the corporeal, and so it must be said: it is the task of science to show what is transitory in man, and thus also to conclude its task; for how should science actually proceed? It makes use of the senses, but these cease with the death of the human being. How then can one use tools that are lost at death to gain insights into the supersensible world? How can one accomplish this with the intellect if the brain to which the intellect is bound is lost at death? It is only possible to penetrate into the spiritual, supersensible worlds if it is possible to appeal to those powers of the soul that are not bound to the senses, to the physical brain. And although it is true, and cannot be disputed, that once Du Bois-Reymond said that we understand the sleeping human being, but that we no longer understand him from a scientific point of view when the ray of consciousness enters him – [What constitutes joy and suffering can no longer be researched] – one must also admit that the solution to the riddle of life cannot be found in this way, which leaves a possibility for a solution open where natural science ends. If one does not do this, then one must despair of solving this riddle of life.

[Where natural science ends, spiritual science begins.] Therefore, there must be a spiritual science that does not want to deny the legitimacy of natural science in any way, but that has to research in the same [strict] way by developing the powers of the soul. Then knowledge comes about in the human being that is also life; it is something that pours out like a spiritual-soul elixir of life, through which we gain courage and security in life, through which we first know what we are as human beings and feel ourselves as spirit itself, as we feel ourselves within the physical-material world, as the same thing that lives out there. When we recognize the nature of the spiritual and the soul, we feel just as much a part of the spiritual and the soul as a link in the spiritual and the soul, which lives and weaves through the world everywhere, [so that we can say: what is in us as laws also lives outside, we are a part of the world]. Spiritual science should bring life and knowing life to modern culture, and that is what modern man needs. Old faith can no longer satisfy him for the simple reason that man has gone through the education that natural science can give him, and because he will demand that what is said about the spirit be said in the same way as what is said about natural science. And this finally leads us to recognize that, on the one hand, what Goethe says is absolutely justified: that because we have the ability to perceive light within us, we also recognize external light; and because we have a divine light within us, we can also recognize the divine. Goethe says:

If the eye were not solar,
The sun could not see it,
If we did not have the power of God within us,
How could we be delighted by the divine?

Goethe then points out how we [always] have a spiritual soul within us and, because we have it within us, it is, as it were, transferred out into the world and we can see it outside; if we had no eye, it is true, then everything would be dark; it is true that if we did not have a spiritual eye, we could not admire the divine outside of us. But Goethe did not just take the side of those many people who only want to recognize the spiritual and soul in man himself, but he took the side of those who knew that because light measures space, we have the eye; [because the eye is solar, we see the sun. That light floods space is the cause of the eye. If there were no light outside of us, the eye could not have become established in our lives! And so we can conclude this evening's reflections, which were intended to show us how man can attain spiritual knowledge by invigorating the forces within him, by saying that not only is the spiritual soul within us, but there is a guarantee that just as we are born out of the physical world, we are also born out of the spiritual soul [that the world lives through].

If the world were not endowed with the sun,
How could eyes blossom for the beings;
If existence were not the unveiling of God,
How could human beings come to be filled with God?

When we speak of spiritual science in our present time in the sense in which it will underlie the considerations of today's lecture, we are by no means speaking of something that is recognized in our time, not even remotely of anything popular. On the contrary, all the habits of thought and ways of thinking that have developed in a large proportion of our contemporaries are rooted in an area from which one believes that anything this spiritual science has to bring to light can be seen as something that is not scientific at all, and in many respects even as something that is mere dreaming or fantasizing. And it must be said that there is no need to be surprised at this state of affairs. On the contrary, anyone who is familiar with the whole essence of spiritual science, as it is meant here, and its task in the present, would be surprised if it could easily find the ear of our contemporaries. All the great achievements of our time, all the intellectual triumphs of our time, are based on a different field from the one in which spiritual science has its roots. And however true it is that this spiritual science fully recognizes everything that has been achieved by the scientific way of thinking since the dawn of modern natural science, since the appearance of the Copernican world view, and however true it is that spiritual science, and especially it, fully recognizes and appreciates this, it is nevertheless understandable that many people today believe that they can only stand on the firm ground of this natural science if they reject everything that this spiritual science does, and this - as will be shown sketchily in this lecture - from the way of thinking, from the same logic from which natural science itself comes.

Even if one does not speak of something popular or recognized, one speaks on the other hand of something that is deeply, deeply connected with all the longings of the human heart and soul, with all the great riddles of existence, without whose the human soul cannot exist in the long run; which do not confront us, as some scientific puzzles do, but with riddles that confront us at every hour, one might say, of our existence, at every turn. And although spiritual science has a broad field - its field is as wide as the whole universe, so to speak - it must be said that what it has to explore in the wide field of spiritual activity and existence is concentrated first of all into two significant life questions, which can be described as questions of fate and death or immortality.

This fateful question confronts us at every turn. If we just consider how one person enters into existence through birth, so that blessing hands surround him from the very beginning, that he grows to the full development of the abilities and powers that are within him, so that one can foresee in a certain way: he will be a useful member of human society. The other person [...] is surrounded from the cradle by circumstances [...] so that one can say that he will have to fight the bitterest battles throughout his life, have little opportunity to develop his abilities and strengths, so that one can say that he will become only a slightly useful member of human society. Between the two extremes – how many nuances of the fateful question that arises before the soul of man! Not so, as with some other questions, let us say, scientific questions, which man always formulates precisely – perhaps not at all in clear words does this or that man express these questions; it does not matter, every soul must ask them. And even if she does not ask: What about fate? , through its contact with the outside world it is tuned one way or another, feeling happy or dissatisfied, working joyfully, going through life confidently or having to weep at every moment. Even if it is not always clear, but rather in the way that every human soul is tuned - in the way it presents itself to others, how it behaves when it is alone with itself - you can tell that at the bottom of its soul, unspoken, it is itself a mystery of the human soul.

And not in the same way as other questions – at every turn you encounter the questions of life. They are not always raised in such a way that they appear scientific. When man faces the riddle of death, affects, feelings, hopes, doubt, all of these are certain to be involved. Fear of death, the desire for another existence, all of these are involved in the question and in the answer that many people give themselves; and it must be said that, especially in recent decades, when many of our contemporaries claim to have to reject all life after death, quite a few personalities, who were not without nobility, but who, out of their materialistic views, arrived at an illumination of the mystery of death, which, when all is said and done, is much better and much nobler than many an answer given by this or that soul, motivated by the fear of death and the longing for life. Many a materialistically minded person rejected any life for the human soul after the human being had passed through the gate of death. But he said to himself: “I will consider what I have worked for in my soul, what I have educated myself to between birth and death, what I have made it capable of, in such a way that I silence all selfishness, all selfishness and self-love and - as my scientific knowledge requires - gladly sacrifice it on the altars of general human development.

So not everything is ignoble, [if you think] that it is better, higher, not [to] wish that you carry what you have developed in your soul through the gate of death, but gladly give it to the following generations, who can do whatever they want with it. But it is precisely these feelings, which certainly cannot be described as ignoble, that show that there is a scientific aspect to the question of immortality, because if one just looks at the nature of the human soul, everything that a person works towards and cultivates up to the gate of death, then a peculiarity of the human soul comes to the fore that cannot be mistaken if one looks more closely at this human soul. One can ask: What is the most valuable, the most significant thing about the human soul? It is the incommensurable, the ideal element that this human soul has shaped in such a personal way that it cannot be given up to any other power, to any other element. This cannot be given up by the individual human soul to the human species at all. And especially when viewed impartially, it can be seen that this would disappear into nothing if the human soul itself were to disappear into nothingness, [that] something is worked out that we could not otherwise describe than that through a whole human life, [so that it] acquires inner strength, becomes richer, and [what] becomes, so to speak, only for the purpose of it [then] disappearing after all. But this contradicts the general economy. Nowhere in the whole world do we see that forces are combined in such a way to achieve the highest tension, and then, when the highest tension is reached, suddenly disappear.

One arrives at the formulation of the question out of admiration for the economy of the world, independently of all fear of death, of all hope for humanity, of personal interests, so objectively through the observation of the world, as one can objectively arrive at such an observation through the observation of any other being or thing in the external world. Thus there is indeed a scientific way of formulating the question of immortality. Of course, one does not arrive at an answer through all of the above, but only at a formulation of the question. That is to be the subject of today's consideration, that one can arrive at an answer through spiritual scientific research.

It must be emphasized from the outset that everything that man can observe in the external world, and that he can also recognize through the external sciences of this external world, is based on such an inner activity that is bound to the organs of the external body. No one can imagine that he could observe what man recognizes as sensual reality if he had no senses. But that the senses fade away with death is an immediate certainty. Likewise, man can recognize that his ordinary mind is bound to the brain and thinks and works in dependence on the senses. He must assume that his mind, his soul activity, is bound to the outer body and must fade away with death. This is just as true, [as] our external organs of perception and the external brain fall away. Thus we see how the question comes down to whether the human being is capable of becoming aware of something within himself that is independent of his senses, of the external corporeality. And it is impossible from the outset to claim that anything other than what is independent of the external body has a duration beyond death.

But do we ever have reason in our normal lives to see something in our own soul that is independent of the external body? Consciously, certainly not at first. But the fact that we have to assume it at first is suggested to us by the consideration of a changing state in human life, which, however, is not always sufficiently observed in normal life and not understood in its importance, because man easily passes by what he experiences habitually. And some of these are precisely what point the researcher as deeply as possible into the secrets of life. What is meant here is what happens to the soul daily: sleeping and waking. We need only consider the moment of falling asleep in a very ordinary way to get an idea of the nature of sleep. From the outset, it should be said that, of course, recent scientific hypotheses, which would be extremely interesting to consider, are not to be considered in a short evening reflection. There are extremely interesting observations about the nature of sleep; and even if it could be shown that the spiritual scientific observations do not contradict the natural scientific ones, but today it must be refrained from this and based on mere spiritual science it must be said: When we observe the moment of falling asleep, we do see how the human being's physicality falls away at the moment of falling asleep. The human being loses control over his limbs, which are left to the force of gravity; they are handed over solely to the force of gravity and the other forces of our earth that are independent of the soul. The human being loses the use of his senses; they gradually begin to fall silent; the surging of desires, drives and passions, ideas and ideals into an indeterminate darkness; memory is silent. Now, anyone who claims that they cannot think differently because of their scientific presuppositions will say: this calmness is only a by-product of the body. When we have the sleeping human body in bed, it is only another way in which it works, through which it conjures out of itself what we call the life of the soul.

Now, science will always recognize – and if it is unbiased, it is already on the way to recognizing it – that everything that goes on in the sleeping human body has nothing to do with the inner life that flows up and down in the waking soul. Not only von Du Bois-Reymond fully admitted in the 1870s: When we have the sleeping human body before us, it is recognizable to science, but the laws that are in this human body, what emerges, what speaks in this existence in terms of passions, sensations, drives, perceptions, will never be recognized. Rather, one will always fully recognize that Yes, when you have the sleeping human body in front of you, all chemical and physical processes take place within this sleeping human body. But thoughts, feelings, passions and drives arise from these just as little as oxygen or air can arise from the life processes of nutrition or from the lungs. Just as the air outside is and is absorbed by the lungs through the breathing process and the human body, so it must be assumed that everything we call mental life springs into the human being when they wake up – like air when inhaled – and that this has nothing to do with the processes that take place in the sleeping human body.

Today, in our time, this is only a spiritual-scientific realization, but especially in this field, spiritual science will always have the help of natural science. It will recognize that it would be just as absurd to derive the processes of the inner soul experience from the body as it is impossible to derive air as an entity from the lungs. This gives us the right to say, at least as a hypothesis, in spiritual scientific terms – we want to believe that it will rise to certainty –: Well, it is indeed the case that the spiritual-soul core of the human being flows out of the human being when he falls asleep and is in a purely spiritual world, and when he wakes up, it flows back into him into the human body. This can be logically compared to inhaling and exhaling, except that we inhale a material substance and quickly exhale it again, while sleeping a spiritual-soul essence. One might call the state of transition between sleep and waking a spiritual inhaling and exhaling of the soul, only in much larger intervals than the physical inhaling and exhaling. But this will always be recognized by the way of thinking of mankind, that it is impossible to derive the soul-spiritual from the physical body. Just as one seeks the air outside, as it has its origin outside the organism, so the spiritual origin of the spiritual-soul life is outside the human body and is taken up by the human body when one wakes up.

Thus we could initially assume – and we do not wish to say too much at this point – that the human being is outside of his physical body with his spiritual and soul-like essence. However, we must say – if we can hypothetically assume this – that when a person is asleep, his soul is alone with itself, separated from the body, but he is unaware of this. Consciousness fades at the moment of falling asleep; he is surrounded by darkness and gloom when he passes into the state of sleep. From this, however, it can be seen what the prerequisite is for recognizing the soul-spiritual. Let us first leave it completely uncertain what is outside the human body when the human being is in a state of sleep. We can then make it certain if we are able to consciously bring about the same state that is supposed to occur during sleep: to make the soul-spiritual independent of the body, and then not to experience it unconsciously, but to make it active within, even though the soul is out of the physical body. Can that be the case? Is that possible?

All the possibilities of spiritual science actually depend on the answer to this question. And this is what makes people real spiritual researchers, what helps people to look into the spiritual world, [...] puts them in exactly the same state in which they are in their sleep, only [now] instead of being unconscious, they are in a state of inner consciousness. And this latter happens through very specific spiritual scientific methods, which are just as much methods as those underlying any chemical experiment in the external world, except that the external methods are applied with hands or with other tools, while the only tool with which man can penetrate the spiritual world is his own soul -[...] there are no methods other than those of the soul - [but only if] it conquers these forces [and] transforms them.

[When] can they be conquered? Only when one is able to say to oneself: Man is unconscious in sleep, inwardly inactive and unalive, because certain forces are so weakly developed that they cannot come to his consciousness by themselves. If a person is in a position where forces in his soul become perceptible that are otherwise asleep but not perceptible, then he can summon up forces that make him a conscious being when he is independent of his body. Then the proof is provided by the experience [and] the observation that the human soul is also something when it is independent of the body.

So, if this is not to be a fantastic assertion, a state must be possible that is similar to the state of sleep on the one hand, and radically different from it on the other. Similar in that the person allows his limbs to be just as inactive and his senses to be just as unimpressionable as in sleep, but through inner arbitrariness he rejects all the worries and concerns of life. Man must be able to bring about such a state in his soul that his soul is independent of the body, as in sleep, that the body is uninvolved in the life of the soul. But then - and now radically different from the state of sleep - this soul, after renouncing all external stimuli, including all memory, must awaken slumbering powers from its own depths through what is called meditation, concentration, contemplation.

What is it? These are certain activities of the soul, admittedly not immediately noticeable activities of the soul, but they transform the soul, change it into a new entity in many respects, at least for itself. If we want to form an idea of what meditation, concentration and contemplation are, which every soul researcher must apply to himself to a great extent, we have to say: in ordinary life we form concepts, let ourselves be stimulated by things into ideas and hold these ideas in thought. How much would remain in our thought-image if we only had what comes from outside? But the spiritual researcher must withdraw all attention from everything that is essential in the normal state through his arbitrariness; and then, when there is complete empty consciousness, he must be able to place some or a single idea or sensation or a single volitional impulse at the center of his consciousness through a stronger development of his will, while in normal life one very easily sinks back into sleep. So here, when the spiritual researcher wants to make his soul into an instrument, everything is placed at the center of consciousness by his own arbitrary will.

Now one can say: It does not matter what kind of idea, sensation, feeling is used for this, [but] the fact that one pushes the whole soul life, which is otherwise distributed over many ideas and impressions, into a single idea, thereby concentrating, contracting it – that is what matters. While in ordinary life one quickly hurries from idea to idea, one must then let such an idea hover in consciousness for a long time. By doing this, during a time when the soul life would normally change from one perception to the next, the entire soul life strives to concentrate on this one point. And that is what matters. We know that we also draw strength from the outside world by exercising it; the living draw strength from exercising it. What matters here are the forces that lie in the depths of the human soul and at most below the surface of consciousness, but are now being strained and exerted.

In general, it can be said that it does not matter which ideas are used for this purpose, but some are better suited than others. But, so that it is not spoken abstractly, not as a theory, we want to draw attention to something concrete right away. In general, one does not get very far in preparing the soul in spiritual research if any old idea is taken; but if so-called allegorical, pictorial ideas are taken, then one gets the furthest – pictorial ideas. Now, especially the materialistically minded person can easily say that they have no value because they do not express anything external. But what they depict is not important, whether they have a value for this or that external thing, but what this idea brings about in the soul, in that the soul concentrates its power on it alone.

An example [that] may initially sound quite crazy: imagine two glasses [, in the first is water, in the other none. By pouring the water from the first into the second, the amount of water in the first increases, not decreases]. The point is that this idea can be a significant symbol for a life process, a process that permeates everything in life: for the effectiveness of love. However absurd this idea may seem, it can still be said that there is something in a person's life that basically works like this symbol. A person who, out of the very impulses of his soul, always performs such acts of love, does not become poorer as a result, but richer and richer. This relationship of love to the human soul can be expressed symbolically through the otherwise nonsensical idea.

Now, when doing such exercises, one can arrange one's consciousness in such a way that one has such a feeling in the background, which gives warmth to the image, so that the soul is permeated with warmth; otherwise, one must turn one's attention away from all external life through arbitrariness, as one otherwise only does in sleep, and then direct all the soul's strength towards this one image. If you do such exercises – how to use them can be found in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. It describes how to do such exercises, how a person can draw on those means in their soul through which they can really, little by little, exclude everything except meditation. And if he has the patience and persistence to work on and educate his inner soul life in such a way that he repeatedly does such concentration and meditation exercises, then he will become aware that something is indeed appearing in his soul that he was previously unaware of. Before, there was only the state of being asleep and awake. Now there is a new state of soul, which arises in the same way as the moment of falling asleep – only deliberately; it occurs when the body is surrendered to its own conditions, its that we reject all ideas, everything that is otherwise stimulated from outside, that only what we want is in the soul; that we are concentrated, bringing out of the soul the powers that would otherwise remain untrained. Then we feel that we are like the sleeping human being, but not unconscious, but inwardly active. And we notice this - if we have come so far as spiritual researchers - that we enter a certain point in time when we no longer have to conjure up images before our soul through our own arbitrariness, but now we have arrived where they arise and appear of their own accord.

Then gradually the state comes where a completely new world picture, a picture full of diversity, which we did not know before, arises before the soul. As in the morning, before the sun rises, first the dawn appears on the clouds, so a world of forms and impressions appears to us. Because we have strengthened what was previously weak within us, because we have brought about a state through inner activity in which our soul perceives something completely new that could not be perceived before; because it has become active, has become active, [it] encounters a new world; just as one can only encounter the world of colors and light when one has eyes, so now one encounters a new world because one has now made [oneself] organs for it.

It is now the case that – in the face of those who lightly object to such soul faculties – one is reminded of the words of the great philosopher Fichte, who said in 1811 and 1813:

Imagine a world of the blind, who know only the things and their relationships that exist through the sense of touch. Step among them and speak to them of colors and the other relationships that exist only through the light for the eye. Either you talk to them about nothing, and this is more fortunate, as they will say so; for in this way you will soon notice the error and, if you are unable to open their eyes, stop talking to them in vain. [...] Or, for some reason, they want to give your teaching a meaning: in doing so, they can only understand it in terms of what they know through touch: they will want to feel light and colors and the other relationships of visibility, assume that they can feel them, feel something within the feeling, contrive and lie to themselves about what they call color. Then they misunderstand, distort, and misinterpret. [...]

This teaching presupposes a new and special sense, sensory organ.

This world [is] not yet the world of the spiritual researcher, but for him it is the piece of spiritual research that he had already come to; there he was aware that he, without organs, speaks of “nothing”, of reverie, and that is why he says that one presupposes a world of [blindly] born. So, Fichte thought, the point is to create a new soul organ.

But only [the spiritual researcher] is able to make the soul into such an organ by means of the methods indicated. And now one must say: When he has reached this point, only then does the most difficult part begin for him, the part that must be observed most carefully. For now he is truly in a new world. The materialist will say, and from his point of view rightly so, that the spirit researcher can grasp all this, but his opponent does not understand it. He will say that the images also occur in the diseased soul, in hallucinations, visions, delusions, not externally, but internally all the more. [...] What is important is that [the inner perception of the spiritual researcher] is different from the delusional world of an unhealthy soul, that he [sees] something different from what emerges from the unhealthy soul. With delusions, visions, hallucinations, the essential thing – as we know to our chagrin – is that the person in question has such a rock-solid belief in them that they see them as a new world, as an objective world. And perhaps many of you know that it is easier to talk some people out of what they see with their eyes than out of their hallucinations, delusions and the like, and that some people invent strict logical systems to justify these delusions in a strictly logical way. But for the spiritual researcher, the important thing is to answer the question: Why is that so, why images that are only reflections of one's own soul, why does he see this as an objective reality?

If one tries to answer with the eye of the soul researcher, one comes upon something that is usually not taken as seriously in ordinary human observation as it should be taken. In truth, this is based on self-interest, one might say, self-love; we just must not take it as we know it in ordinary life. In ordinary life, selfishness is self-love; but we know that there are certain degrees, that because they are mental qualities, one can conquer them. External natural phenomena are different from what is in the soul. With lightning and thunder, we cannot fight against them as we would against selfishness when it arises in the soul, when it tempts us. We cannot command lightning to stand still, or thunder to roll and be audible. We have control over the inner being, not the outer. But the fact that the diseased soul has the mirror images of its own nature before it, makes such inner facts a necessity, so that they then remain as natural facts; that one can do nothing against them, as against the flickering of lightning. That is the peculiar thing, that everything that arises from self-love, from self-interest, to an inner soul activity, remains like a natural fact.

The aim of the proper schooling of the spiritual researcher is that he should not only acquire inner activity, but should also be able, precisely when he is at this point, to conquer even the stronger selfishness that the “objective” world conjures up for us. This is the most important point in his development. Everything he has done before must be overcome, as described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Alongside this, the spiritual researcher must have undergone such a self-education that he not only knows that the world of images that arises on the horizon of his consciousness is nothing other than a mirror image of his own soul; not only must he know this, but he must have trained his soul so that he is able to remove and erase these images at any time. This requires a strong self-conquest, which in itself acts like a force of nature. For just consider, my dear audience, what this means: first, all the strenuous efforts to make the soul so alive within that a new world appears to it, and then, after making every possible effort, to be able to extinguish that world again. Practical experience shows that it is part of the soul's efforts to overcome, because in ordinary life one is never necessarily required to bring about what has just been described. One can extinguish this world, and through overcoming, through constant overcoming, one can extinguish it, up to a certain remnant - one cannot extinguish that, it remains. What is this remnant? One only really gets to know it when one has come to this point. For the spiritual researcher, when he has done everything up to this point, something occurs that is one of the most harrowing experiences that the human soul can ever have. Those who have known about it in the course of human development have coined a word that only those who have reached this point understand. This word is: coming to the threshold of death – I have tried to characterize it in my writing 'A Path to Self-Knowledge of Man'. It can occur in a hundred or a thousand different ways for the human soul, but it always has a certain typical character. It may be that at a certain moment, after doing such exercises long enough – and “long” means different things for different people in this life or later – that then a moment comes when one or in the middle of your daily activities, you experience this moment as follows: you have, as it were, everything that you previously referred to as your self, as your own personality, as yourself, as a human being, beside you as if it were outside. One feels as if one had really gone out of one's body while sleeping and had gone along with everything that is the ordinary phenomena of daily life. One has one's being beside oneself like another being, not feeling, one has the sensation: something has gone through one like a flash of lightning that has struck and taken from one what one has previously called one's self, one's own being. One now learns to approach the threshold of death – not death itself, because at first one recognizes it in the image. One sees what one has to face when one has passed through the gate of death, what one must give up when one passes through the gate of death. One learns what it means to speak only “you” to that to which one has spoken “I” until now.

At the same time, something is now entering and the spiritual researcher must be able to get to this point, to control himself at this moment – which can be characterized something like this: The person has the feeling: All the perception on which you have relied so far is now outside of you; you are now consciously in your soul with inner activity, but there is nothing beside you. One now lives as if standing over an abyss, all supports have now been withdrawn, everything has disappeared, only abyss and emptiness. The feeling that arises is akin, very, very akin to fear, but a fear that arises in the soul with the power of a natural phenomenon, no longer a quality of the soul, but like lightning and thunder over which one has no control. That is why you educate yourself to be able to conquer this fear when it arises. For the paths of spiritual research are not merely theoretical and practical teachings, but victory in life, overcoming of life. And one conquers what arises as fear of the void. And then one becomes even more aware: what remains and what cannot be extinguished – that is actually you, that is your true being. The rest is discarded. But what you are experiencing now is what you bring with you when you enter the physical world through birth or, let's say, conception, and what leaves again when you pass through the gate of death.

So you get to know yourself inwardly, and at the same time something else is connected with that. In the moment when you have experienced yourself in this way, when everything that was previously the reality of the world has been left behind, in that moment the real world emerges, spiritual beings and facts. And in the face of this world, there is a certainty that is different from that in the face of the unhealthy soul - the certainty of life: to distinguish the reality of spiritual facts and entities from fantasies and mere ideas of the unhealthy soul, just as one can distinguish reality from mere ideas in the physical world. Schopenhauer tried to mislead people to some extent [by taking] the world as an idea, even if [he meant] something else by it. [...] If you imagine that you are holding a piece of iron at 90 degrees Celsius [...] to your face, it will not burn you, [whereas an actual piece of hot iron would burn us]. There is no other proof of reality than the proof of life; and this proof is valid. You cannot prove anything against Kant's sentence that ten possible dollars contain no more than ten real dollars. But there is a considerable difference: you can hardly pay debts with ten possible dollars, but you can with real dollars. That having been said, in a lecture, an objection was raised: Yes, but if life is the only proof of the spiritual world, then one must remember that some people have such a power of selfishness that [gap in the transcript]. That someone can have a taste of lemonade on their tongue just by thinking about it and not letting it flow down their throat, that may be, there's no denying it. But the 'proof through life' is not carried to its conclusion: one can have the taste of lemonade, but not quench one's thirst with it. One must always go to the end with the proof of life. And just as there is only the proof of life that something is real, but as this proof of life is sufficient, so it is also the case with the facts and entities of the supersensible world, into which the spiritual researcher enters. He actually enters into a world that shows him spiritual beings that are spiritually close to him, as he is spiritually close to these beings. These beings are not physically visible in the material world, but, like him, are in a state that he goes through when he has passed through the gate of death.

I have shown you how the nature of man is such that it cannot be known through ordinary introspection, but rather by first putting himself in the inner activity and then becoming aware of himself after he has awakened to a new being, as it were. This new being is the same one that passes through birth and through existence and passes through death again. This life is only a school and a labor. This soul is a sum of powers that we also see at work in man in other ways, but only externally. When a person steps into existence through birth, the facial features of such a human being stepping into human life are still indeterminate; they become more and more distinct as soul power upon soul power works its way to the surface from that inner core of being, which we are now getting closer and closer to: that which the spiritual researcher must now see when the soul has arrived and the soul has been recognized in its true essence. The soul-power works its way to the surface from that inner core of being, which we are now getting closer and closer to: that which the spiritual researcher must see when the soul has come there, when the soul has been recognized in its true essence. For the spiritual researcher recognizes that the spiritual-soul core of being, which comes from the spiritual world, connects with what the father and mother give. Especially in the first years, [this spiritual soul] works most to shape the physical body plastically. What the spiritual researcher learns to recognize, what comes into existence through birth, is what we see working at this point; but when he learns to recognize, through the processes described, what he actually has within him, then he gets to know within himself what works in from the outside between sleep and waking, what replaces the expended forces: soul forces; he gets to know the spiritual core of the human being. In this way, the spiritual researcher is in a similar position to the natural scientist not so long ago, in the seventeenth century. [In] river mud, [so it was thought at the time, lower animals, even warmer ones and fish, arise] through the inner activity of the river mud itself; [it was Francesco] Redi, [who proved: one had] observed inaccurately; the exact observation shows that [these] arose because a germ [was present] in the river mud. Life can only come from life; this was only first scientifically stated in the seventeenth century. At the time, such a contradiction arose, in contrast to the prevailing doctrine, that Redi only narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Today's fashion has changed, not becoming more tolerant, but more snivelling – today it is no longer the custom to burn people, in those days people were burned – but in a certain inner sense the matter has remained the same. In those days, there was the greatest contradiction. Today, the spiritual researcher comes and shows: It is a mistake to believe that the qualities and powers of the soul come only from the line of inheritance, from father and mother, from grandfather and grandmother and so on; in this you commit an observation that is just as inaccurate as that lower animals arise from river mud. Rather, you have to recognize that a spiritual core must be present from the past, which takes hold of the physical properties like [the] germs in the river mud. The spiritual comes only from the spiritual.

And if we then go into the nature of the human being in more detail, then we come to the conclusion – if I should have the honor of speaking to you again, I can expand on this – that we recognize this spiritual-soul core of our being as a repetition of earlier earthly lives. Just as the germ in the outer physical body repeats the essence of the species, so the core of our being repeats the essence of the soul, and the present life is so bound up with past lives that, with the help of spiritual research, we can recognize that What comes into existence through birth is what we have acquired through a series of previous lives on earth. We take it with us through the gate of death, then live a purely spiritual life with the powers we have acquired, which do not disappear into nothingness, and use them to build a new life, and so on again and again. This is only the consequence of the law that the spiritual and mental comes only from the spiritual and mental - not from another person, but only from oneself, because it is ideal; that is, from one's previous lives on earth. As [then with] Redi, so [is it] today, the idea of repeated lives on Earth is fought against. [It is] always so: at first [it appears] absurd, ridiculous; after some time, it is taken for granted. And just as Haeckel and Du Bois-Reymond admitted that the living can only come from the living, so it will later be admitted that the spiritual and soul-like can only come from the spiritual and soul-like; because it is bound to the individuality, not to the species. Real research then naturally only results from real spiritual research. But then we have before us the solution to the riddle of fate. The riddle of fate, what does it consist of? We are placed with these or those forces that we have worked out in previous earthly lives; we suffer blows of fate that we have condemned ourselves to in previous lives, in such a way that we have been drawn to those events that correspond precisely to what we have created for ourselves in previous lives. And if that is found to be cruel, if it is said that not only is fate to be endured, but that it is even deserved, it must be countered that it only needs to be seen in the right light for it to appear differently. Let us take an example: an eighteen-year-old man, living off his father's ample fortune, encounters the misfortune of losing the family's wealth. He has to work and gradually becomes a capable person. ... At the age of fifty, he says to himself,] For my father it was perhaps a painful fate, but for me it was a condition of my present perfection; otherwise I would not have become the person I am now, and not from the standpoint that makes fate seem unjust. In earlier life, one predisposes oneself to imperfections that can only be compensated for by overcoming this fate. Then [one's] soul becomes strong, then fate finds not only its explicable, but its great forgiving, because through this [we see] [how] humanity goes in progressive development from life to life, and [how] fate is composed of cause and effect.

Today the question is often asked: Did the earth once have a beginning? We find something else. The fateful question will one day be truly resolved for man when repeated earthly lives are recognized within the stream of fate of man. And what we call eternity, the immortal being, we experience by finding ourselves completely immersed in the supersensible view of the world.

[Let us again use a comparison: just as we can] observe the plant [as it develops] from leaf to leaf, [to] flower, then [to] germ, in which the life forces are so concentrated that they already contain the guarantee for the emergence of a plant the following year, we also look at a person who is constantly acquiring strength and carrying this germ of life through the gate of death by carrying it within themselves, as truly as the plant carries the germ of life within itself. This guarantees that he builds up a life in the same way as the germ builds up life again. [One cannot actually] speak of immortality in general, but [it is] composed of individual lives, [which carry the] germs of the following life [within them]. Likewise, [life follows] life, as plant follows plant. Of course, my dear audience, if you approach these things with today's habits of life and thought, then the opposition is understandable, and [also] that many declare it to be fantastic and dreamy. But it is the same here as with all great truths. Schopenhauer [says about] the poor truth:

In all ages, poor truth has had to blush for being paradoxical; and yet it is not her fault. She cannot take the form of the enthroned general error. So she looks up with a sigh to her patron, Time, who beckons victory and fame to her, but whose flapping of his wings is so great and slow that the individual dies from it.

That's how it is. But many a person should say to themselves – [I can only sketch this out today] – that anyone who gets to know the literature of spiritual research and delves into it could then say that there is not the slightest contradiction with science. Only those believe this who see the truth in scientific thinking habits. Whoever says that heredity is a scientific fact; that this simply contradicts what earlier earth lives say, [overlooks] that the things do not contradict each other at all. [Let us take an example]. If there is a person standing in front of us, a second person: [one] lives because there is air outside and lungs inside. No, [you could say, that does not apply, because the other person lives because he] hanged himself, [but was cut down in time] and saved. Is one thing true and the other false, or are both things true? This is how it is with things: what is inherited is true, and just as true as this scientific fact that we live because there is air outside and lungs inside, but it is also true that these inherited facts are there because these reasons [why a person embodies himself in this inheritance stream] lie in previous lives on earth.

Anyone who engages with spiritual science will see that spiritual science itself is very aware of these objections, and that some people only raise them because they are not yet familiar with these objections. But when spiritual science gradually becomes known, not just as a theory, as abstract spiritual science, but as an elixir of life that can pour into the soul of man, [then all this will become clear], and [one should not] think that one has to be a spiritual researcher to understand them; one can only research these things if one is a spiritual researcher, but when they are brought down into concepts for the physical mind, then anyone can understand the spiritual researcher today, as is also presented in 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds'. But it is the same with these things as with what arises under the earth and what is illuminated by the sun on the earth. When a mine is dug out and then illuminated by the sun, it is the same as with the achievements of spiritual science. One must be a spiritual researcher to ascend into the spiritual worlds, to recognize the beings that live there, to see what is going on there. But when they have been researched, then they can be illuminated like the sun, which can create what can arise through it, the treasures of the mine. Then one recognizes it through the influence of sunlight, sees it only in its individual nuances, and can absorb it into the sensations and feelings of the physical mind. Whether it is the spiritual researcher or someone who just grasps it, when it is absorbed, it is an elixir of life, because then we not only know about immortality, but we also become aware of the soul life in us that goes through death in us; [the soul life] grows stronger [in the same way] that a plant would feel when the germ grows up [and it] knew: next summer [it will] reappear in the same form. Invisible vitality, certainty of life [emanates from that which is acquired through spiritual science]. In this way, it gives people support by answering the question not only theoretically, but practically, as a life force, a life assurance, so that they have what they need in life: security and strength for their work, hope, confidence for the core of their lives, which no external force can break. Fichte says:

I raise my head boldly up to the threatening rocky mountains, and to the raging waterfall, and to the crashing clouds floating in a sea of fire, and say: I am eternal and defy your power. Break down upon me all, and thou earth, and thou heaven, mingle in wild tumult, and ye elements all - foam and rage and grind in wild struggle the last solar dust of the body that I call mine - my will alone, with its firm plans, shall float boldly and coldly over the ruins of the universe; for I have grasped my destiny, and it is more enduring than theirs; it is eternal, and I am eternal, like it.

This is also what the soul says when it has absorbed spiritual science and gained inner support from it. And it will always need this, but then it will also have it. The truth penetrates through thin cracks and crevices, and it will find it too. This is also the case with spiritual science. And anyone who has grasped its essence knows of its certain existence in such a way that he can be certain of life through it; and then he stands, as it were, opposite the opponents who deny the immortality of the soul and so on, as Goethe's saying stands opposite opposing views that he, Goethe, considers nonsensical , towards philosophical views – for there is the philosophical view, already in ancient Greece, [that there is] no movement [because the arrow that has been shot] [is always at one place during every moment of its flight], thus [is always at rest]; [therefore there is] actually no movement, because [it is] always at one place [. This can be proven rigorously by the intellect. But Goethe contrasted this with the certainty of life. He expressed it, not particularly deeply, but certainly:

Enemies may eye each other,
You remain calm, remain silent;
And if they deny you movement,

Go around in front of their noses.

Goethe thought that he had provided the proof; it is proof of life. The spiritual scientist can, without offending in the slightest, say a word in which we may summarize the considerations of this evening - not theoretically, but intuitively - as a certainty in the face of what they deny. To those who are inwardly moved by what spiritual science has to give, one can say:

Adversity may arise,
But you remain calm, remain cheerful,
And if they deny the spirit,
Do not brood over it,
Yes, in the end even agree with them:
Perhaps things are not going well for their spirit.

The [mystery of death] belongs to a field of science that is not only unpopular, but can also be called unpopular. Many an inner, seemingly justified contradiction is illuminated there, appearing fully understandable to those within this field of research. Besides this, there is also another reason why it is difficult to make oneself understood. It is usually thought that the person who presents this matter in a short consideration wants to persuade someone to change their mind. The recently founded Anthroposophical Society has a field of research that is broader and more extensive than that of other research societies. Therefore, the intention is not to convince or persuade, but only to indicate the direction and nature of the investigations and how the solution to the riddles of life can be obtained.

Much stands in the way of unbiased judgment. The human soul, with all its interests and attentions, is involved in nothing so much as in the riddle of death. But nothing can cloud the search for truth as much as a very specific desire and an interest in a particular solution to the mystery. Does that which we call life continue after death? This question can be approached in an absolutely scientific way, but quite differently from what is usually referred to as science. Only someone who, with regard to the question of death, is linked to other interests [than their own] can proceed in a truly objective manner. Linked to the riddle of death must also be the riddle of life. If the question is asked out of an understandable curiosity or out of an interest that is close to the human heart, it cannot be solved.

The investigations into the question of death are also those into immortality. To discuss these questions, a certain transformation of the human being is necessary, a “spiritual chemistry”. It is not readily admitted that there is a spiritual science. But tonight it should be pointed out. When the chemist approaches the study of water, he splits it into hydrogen and oxygen. But if he just fantasizes about it, he knows that he will not be able to break it down. If he surrenders to dualism, that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen, he does not violate monism. Through ordinary science, he too can gain nothing about what is his destiny. What can survive the physical body is not present in ordinary life. Just as hydrogen and oxygen are not visible in water, so what is immortal in man is not present in ordinary life. A kind of spiritual chemistry must first be used to separate what is divine and spiritual. Over the centuries, man has had a kind of scientific education, not only through school and university, but also through general education, which makes it impossible for man today to get beyond the closest matters not only with faith but with knowledge. Not only curious personalities, but also serious and honest researchers exist. But the way the problem is approached today shows that in many cases the right path has not been found. Today is not the time to point out the important work that natural scientists such as Colonel Rochas have done in this regard, conducting experiments using the laboratory method. It is interesting to note how Rochas comes close to what is being proposed today in some respects, but he takes an impossible, unfruitful path. Spiritual science cannot and must not do it this way. Rochas takes a test subject like other sciences, only not external substances, but a medium. The external soul activity is thereby put to sleep, suppressed, so that everything that is bound to the external body is excluded. He assumes that only the soul, only the spirit, is now active. Through certain processes, the thirty-year-old [female] medium is put into a kind of sleep state; then he stimulates her consciousness so that she lives as if she were eighteen years old. She feels the pains or learns what she learned at that age, and only accomplishes what she was capable of at that time. Then she is transported back to childhood; she makes unpracticed strokes, as in the fifth or sixth year. Rochas is also able to transport this personality to the time before its birth. Such souls then stammer out of a spiritual environment, which, despite all imperfection, would be highly interesting if it coincided with spiritual research. It goes further and further back, until finally he believes that it is present from the time when it had another life. Rochas believes that he has obtained several life courses in this way. These are experiments of one of the serious researchers who want to stand firmly on the ground of science. They believe that only the method in which the object is physically present is justified.

Spiritual science cannot stand on this ground. Its methods are entirely spiritual in nature, purely inward, [they are] purely spiritual-soul processes. The spiritual researcher will never make use of a purely external object in space. But within this spiritual research, the same methods are used as in science. One may think: How can something be investigated in such a simple, primitive way? But it is not that simple; it is easy, but easy things are difficult. It is all based on psychological processes. One has to work for years in one's own soul alone to obtain reasonably satisfactory results, to enter into destiny through years of practice. Through years of self-denying work, one first comes to focus one's attention, and secondly to what can be described as “devotion”. What devotion means in ordinary life is only the very first beginning of the soul's possibility of becoming one with the spiritual world.

The attention must be turned entirely to one object, in which the whole life of the soul is concentrated. This attention also exists in ordinary life, because without it, man could not come to self-awareness, and memory is intimately related to the ability to pay attention. The thought may be weak, but one forgets less and less when one repeatedly focuses one's attention on something. Thought is the result of attention, of concentration. It depends on memory that the human being, with a certain sense of self, immerses himself in the physical. This enables us to deepen our inner life. In ordinary life, people develop attention in such a way that they allow themselves to be stimulated by something external. This is where the activity of the soul, which we call attention, begins. Self-observation is necessary; this is supported by very specific soul exercises. To learn what these are, you have to become independent of any external stimulation of attention, distracting the soul life from everything else, and focus it on a self-chosen content. It is not what you concentrate on that matters, but what you do that matters. Again and again, for a long time, over and over again, you focus on the content you have chosen. Then, little by little, you have an inner experience, then you discover what the soul does when it is attentive. And then it is attentive without content, attentive without paying attention to anything; that is what you develop as inner activity. Erasing the content, suppressing it completely, no longer thinking of anything and yet having the same state in the soul - then you know what attention is. The true clairvoyant method, which leads to spiritual research, is based on increasing the soul abilities that are present in every soul. Attention becomes stronger and stronger. This transforms the entire soul life. Then the person senses what the soul life is like in the central and other nervous systems. Then he senses an entity that is apart from the body in the person. In this way, the soul life is gradually separated from the body within. Finally, one feels: one is a duality. At first one thought that one was a product of the body. Then it is the etheric body of the human being that can be observed. One separates it from the physical body. Only then can one observe the etheric body. One experiences something like the following. It can happen in everyday life or when awakening from sleep. This experience can occur in a hundred different ways, but essentially it is like this: one can experience it in the middle of one's daily life or in the middle of sleep. The usual words for it are only stammering. It is as if something were happening in that moment, as if lightning were striking and destroying the body. When the body is separated, the soul life becomes independent. At that moment, one realizes what spiritual researchers throughout the ages have called 'coming close to death in the path of spiritual research'. You get to know the independence of the soul life, and now you have arrived at the stage where you live spiritually in the etheric body. What you then experience can only be described as a morbid soul life, as hallucinations and so on, if you do not know it. My book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' talks about this. It is not comparable to mere fantasy. What flows into the soul life is like images, a kind of dream image. But it is not important that you call it that, but that you learn to read in the world you are now entering. It is like a letter in which all the letters are known, but what you learn through the writing can be new. The spiritual researcher has a world of images in front of him, but he learns to read the spiritual world that stands behind it. It can only be said with a semblance of justification by contemporary dream researchers that one can have realities from the past in front of oneself and mistake them for new images. But the state of the soul, the mood of the soul, is different. It knows what the overall memory of ordinary life consists of: in an overview of life on earth up to a moment when one is confronted with all of one's life on earth or personal life. Then one recognizes: life has the urge to dissolve into the general etheric life.

If you continue to increase your attention to observe how life dissolves and has the urge to dissolve into the general, then you recognize what is peculiar to a person when he passes through the gate of death. Through further inner training, one not only recognizes one's own etheric life, but also learns to distinguish in the environment. This path leads, even if only for a short time and in a way that varies for the individual, to an overview of this life like a panorama. To progress further, the spiritual chemistry must be pursued ever further.

But not only attention is to be trained, but also the complete surrender of the soul life. The devotion consists in the person renouncing everything. What freezes by itself in the state of sleep: he must bring it about arbitrarily - the devotion of all muscular activity, of speech activity, of thinking activity, of judgment activity, which also occurs in the state of sleep. The devotion can be increased if it is practiced for years, if everything that is arbitrary is suppressed for years. Even what is not arbitrary can be suppressed: heart activity, respiratory activity, which are otherwise withdrawn from consciousness. One can bring the physical body into absolute inactivity. Then one does not feel transported into an external world, into something that wants to draw near, but one feels that one has entered into the depths of one's own soul life. What the person then gets to know is the human being's astral body. The sense of self, all thinking, feeling and willing then appear like mirror images. Now one penetrates to what they reflect, one penetrates into the astral body. What the person experiences on this path has nothing to do with ordinary desires and so on, one notices this. The path leads one, in full self-observation, out of birth and death, and shows us how an emerging world of ideas reveals memory as something that was not there before. This is linked to the breaking of desires that are connected with earthly life: satisfaction, joy, the desire to live through what is attached to the outer body. The desire remains for some time. But through the experience of the fact that the desire can only be satisfied through the body, for example, cravings of the palate, one learns what tasks the astral body has after death. Then one gains the ability to see the period of time, after decades, different for different people; then one learns to see what one sees in the future, now also to recognize in the past. There is much in life that hurts us, and we would spare ourselves this pain. So the spiritual researcher does not dream when he looks into the world before conception and sees that the human being has prepared this pain for himself, what is called, has made his own karma, that we have prepared this evil fate, the painful disappointments, ourselves. This does not correspond to our wishes now. One could be critical and hypercritical and still not get along with the ordinary, until one returns to a period where an earlier life on earth occurs, where we were in a different language, in a different environment, in very different circumstances. However unlikely and unpopular it may be, one also comes to see more like a past life on earth. This assertion can only be made under two conditions: either the person making such a claim has no sense of truth, or he must have a sense of truth as strict as in mathematics. Much nonsense has been done in this way. It is often said that a person was this or that in a previous life. But when real memory occurs, it is impossible that one could have an idea of previous lives through wishes. An image may come to mind: 'That was you, but in such a way that no one could object. This is how the riddles of life are solved: 'That was you, that is what you looked like, that is what you could do.'

But it occurs at an age where you can't do anything with it. There is nothing to be gained from it except knowledge. There is no comfortable “That was you.” You know then: some kind of retribution is necessary, but at that moment it is impossible to even out.

The paths and results of spiritual research have been attempted to be indicated here in a brief form. Not sensationally, to convince, but it only depends on encouraging. These experiences show that man recognizes that he has a spiritual-soul life core that has repeated lives as a result of previous lives; and so his fate is the result of previous lives. The present life is directed towards making up for what one has done to this or that person in certain deeds. The spiritual researcher first seeks what is immortal in man, and he finds that when he applies the methods for doing so. He recognizes this in a thoroughly important context; he recognizes earthly life in such a way that it lies like a shell over the deeper core of life. To do this, you have to train your memory, for example, to remember what you have experienced since birth. Man comes from a purely spiritual state and enters a purely spiritual state. We are in an intermediate state in the physical body. One should not ask: Is man immortal? – but seek out immortality. What the materialistic thinker sees of the soul is not immortal. Spiritual research is to be regarded as the path to human immortality; it draws attention to the results of feelings and emotions, to the bliss of religious inwardness. But it is also what makes life strong and powerful for the external arena.

It would be unchaste to speak about the effects of the life of the soul; but the path must be proclaimed. Especially those people who are completely imbued with the spirit often cannot recognize the path.

What science says about heredity is the same as what spiritual science says about repeated earthly lives.

Question: What should one do if one has lost God?

Rudolf Steiner: Actually, one cannot lose God, but only one's conception of God. One should strive to deepen, or one could also say, to elevate, one's conception of God. Every conception of God only approaches God, none can encompass Him. People talk about pantheism and theism, for example, as if one excludes the other; but in reality one is both, because by day one is a pantheist, by night more of a theist. Pantheism means actively experiencing the divine in the world. In theism, one experiences the Deity as watching over the world, as in a clairvoyant world sleep. One cannot rely on proofs, but “whosoever strives, we can redeem him.” One should only not want to stand still, but to want to rise above every point of view. Truth is one, but it is manifold in its revelations. Above all, inner peace, security, and vitality are needed, which one acquires through spiritual science. So the answer is basically: deepening in spiritual science, not an abstract answer.

Question: Is the practice of table turning to be approved, and can messages from the spiritual world be conveyed through it?

Rudolf Steiner: It should be said that the world of the spirits is spiritual. Those who want to get to know the spiritual world by table turning are like those who want to learn mathematics and do not go to a mathematician but to a parrot.

Question: Does a person have to experience rebirth in a spiritual-divine relationship in every life?

Rudolf Steiner: The rebirth that one has experienced in one life remains a fruit for the next life on earth, but does not have to be the seed. What mystics call “spiritual rebirth” may transform into poetic or artistic abilities in the next life.

Question: Do spirit and matter both come from a spiritual source?

Rudolf Steiner: Please read my books on this topic, such as “Truth and Science”, “Philosophy of Freedom” and so on. Question: Do Neptune and Uranus belong to our planetary system or to another?

Rudolf Steiner: They do not belong to our planetary system in the same sense as the other planets, but rather have migrated there.

Question: Where are the dead?

Rudolf Steiner: I deliberately avoided speaking about space and time in this context in the lecture because these [categories] belong only to the sense world; in the spiritual world, time is experienced in a completely different way. In the nineteenth century, even the materialists said: If all souls are transported out into space after death, the world will soon be overcrowded. But that is nonsense, because the law of impenetrability belongs only to the physical world.

Question: How does what was said in the lecture square with the teaching of resurrection and the Last Judgment?

Rudolf Steiner: Some believe that a passage in the Bible is called that, but that is not what this is about, but about direct spiritual research.

Question: Can souls be helped after death? What about suicides? Rudolf Steiner: Only in more oral [personal] conversations can something be said about that.

Question: My brother Theodor Schmidt left on [gap in transcript] 1898. In a fortnight he was insane.

Rudolf Steiner: The I is not dead between falling asleep and waking up during the night. [In] leave alone, institutional treatment.

Question: If a man and woman love each other very much, will one of them soon follow the other?

Rudolf Steiner: In such a case, they long for an embodiment that does not last longer than that of the other. You will also not dispute that many a man and woman lives for a long time after the death of the other. I do not want to talk about Bluebeard, but there are people who quickly find comfort with another love. Inner connections exist between all people in a good and evil sense, in love and hate, in an understanding and unintelligent sense. Our aim should be to establish spiritual bonds in the physical body that are spiritual forces. Our strength increases, our power grows stronger when we connect with another person in our physical life through love, friendship or some other shared bond. If we strip away the forms that belong only to the earthly, what remains are the forces that live on here and in the spiritual world. Consciousness after death is much stronger, except for the period when consciousness, as it were, rejects the outside world; but the inner life is all the stronger. Also, the experience in the “midnight hour of existence” is much stronger, as consciousness can be in the body, even if it is an inner one. All fruits reveal themselves in eternity: what we experience in solitude and what we experience in community with others.