The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees,

Anthroposophy, which I have been privileged to represent here for many years now, is initially met with disbelief for a very specific reason: because its particular modes of knowledge not only require it to speak about different things than one is accustomed to hearing in scientific circles today, but also to speak in a different way, to have a different mode of expression. This, however, my dear ladies and gentlemen, does not only lead to the essence of anthroposophy in an external, formal way, but, as the considerations of this evening for a particular case would like to show, leads deep into the whole essence of the anthroposophical world view.

The ideas and concepts in which Anthroposophy expresses what it gains in a certain way through so-called supersensible knowledge have, in contrast to the concepts that one is accustomed to in scientific life today, something, one may say, more vividly. Without abandoning its scientific basis, it stands out in a certain way from that which is only bound to the outer world of facts that can be perceived by the senses and reached by the intellect. From this outer world of facts, anthroposophy turns to another world of facts, and from this other world of facts it must not only proclaim something other than what the senses are able to see, but it must also speak in a different way.

This can be seen particularly clearly in the fact that most intensely characterizes human earthly destiny: the fact of death. For human hopes of being able to transcend one's own nature through death are connected with the fact of death; the problem of immortality is connected with the problem of death. And talking about the problem of immortality today is considered unscientific.

Now, my dear audience, when we consider such a fundamental question, such a fundamental riddle of life, we must draw attention to the way in which the way of thinking is expressed in the most diverse ways across the different regions of the earth. I would like to say: we here, within the German world of Central Europe, are precisely wedged between the West and the East with such questions. And I would like to point out, just by way of introduction, the Western way of thinking and the Eastern way of thinking, and then show how it may be incumbent on the German mind, precisely by avoiding the one-sidedness of the West and the East, to arrive at a higher level of knowledge in this field.

If we look across to the West, we encounter above all a thinker who has also profoundly influenced Central and Eastern European thought for almost a century, a thinker who has had more influence on Central European scientific concepts in particular than is usually realized. He is Herbert Spencer. He looks at human life, and it is most interesting to take his view of life where he applies it to the problem of education. He asks: What must be the real goal of human education? And he comes to say – as I said, I will only mention this in the introduction, not explain it – he comes to say that the real goal of education must be to make proper parents and educators out of all people. Now, what he presents as the goal of education may be of little interest to us today, but the reason why he recognizes this goal of education as his own is. He says: human development reaches a certain conclusion at the moment when a person becomes capable of reproduction, when a person thus enters into sexual maturity. And if the power to produce one's own kind is the highest that a person can achieve in the course of their life, then the highest goal of education must also be to educate and teach these descendants in the appropriate way. And it is clear from the context as a whole, rather than from this single assertion, that this Western thinker actually sees a sure cognitive insight into the human being only by pursuing natural processes to their peak, to the point of producing the same; that he regards, so to speak, everything that man has to strive for most significantly after he has reached sexual maturity, that he regards all so-called intellectual development only as a kind of superstructure, only as a kind of appendage, one might almost say, to the secure natural foundation of human development.

Now it is extremely interesting to contrast this Western thinker with an Eastern thinker: Vladimir Soloviev, the most significant Russian thinker of the most recent period, who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century and whose most important works thus extend well into the present day. From a completely different spirit, from completely different psychological backgrounds, we hear this Eastern thinker speak; in that – one might say – although he expresses himself entirely in Western and Central European thought forms, the whole of the Orient still resonates emotionally and sentimentally, which everywhere nuances what he has to say in a warm, deeply intimate way.

Solowjow now also speaks about the human course of life. And he says: Man must have two goals in life. One goal can only be the striving for perfection through ever further and further advancement in the knowledge of the truth, but the other must be to live in that which gives man immortality. One might say that Solowjow speaks not from abstract concepts but from the full human experience when he says that life, which would only perfect itself in truth, would be meaningless if it were not accompanied by immortality immortality, because without immortality the striving for truth, for perfection in truth, would be senseless, a simple dying down, a passing away of the being; the striving for truth would be senseless. And an immortality without the striving for truth would be equally senseless; life would be a world deception if the striving for truth were not accompanied by the fact of immortality. And it is precisely against this background that Solowjow speaks out sharply against what Herbert Spencer sets as the goal of human development, not mentioning Spencer on this occasion, but discussing it himself. He says: Let us just assume that this development of humanity would consist solely of individual generations producing further generations, thus the same always producing the same; a rolling wheel of this kind would be the most senseless thing imaginable.

Now, my dear audience, if we go deeper into the basis of these two completely opposing views, we find a very different way of living in the soul life. In the work of Herbert Spencer, one finds a thorough familiarity with the concepts that have emerged as scientific concepts in the development of humanity over the past few centuries, and one finds his view that truth and knowledge can only be attained with such concepts. We find that Solowjow expresses himself entirely in the same conceptual worlds as the Western thinker, but at the same time we find that he speaks from something in man that does not dissolve into these concepts, that only makes use of these concepts as if they were a language. And one has the feeling that old times of human cultural development, old times of human thinking are coming to life in a religiously colored world view in Vladimir Solovyov, the thinker of the East, and that something deeper in human nature is speaking than that which can be expressed in the external, sensory and intellectual representations.

But while we find, I might say, strictly reasoned logic in Spencer, and while one moves in the element of a certain certainty of concepts and ideas when pondering him, in Solovyov we find something is at work that cannot be grasped with the same certainty; in his work one finds something that seeks to renew the leap beyond the conceptual world of the old thinkers, the old visionaries. And in modern times, when discussing the deepest riddles of human existence, one feels caught between these two worlds. But perhaps one may say: It is the destiny of Central Europe to observe the two one-sidedness in the way of development and to seek a way that goes beyond both, which then leads into a real supersensible world, in which the problem of death on the one hand, that of immortality on the other, can really come before the human soul in a satisfying way. This path, ladies and gentlemen, is what anthroposophical research is trying to take.

Anthroposophical research can neither remain within the Western conceptual world nor in that world which, I would say, only makes external use of concepts like a language, but which draws from a more or less mystical darkness that characterizes the Oriental essence. On the one hand, the anthroposophical method of research must avoid losing itself in this mystical darkness; on the other hand, it must try to overcome that which always wants to keep the human being, who only lives in concepts, within the sensory world. This can be shown particularly clearly if we first consider, outwardly, that which intrudes into human life as the most intense destiny, if we consider death, in order to then ascend in the realization of the grasp of death to the grasp of immortality.

Death confronts us within nature itself, to which man belongs with one side of his being, as the great riddle of existence. And if we could link it, on the one hand, to what Herbert Spencer presents as the goal of the human life cycle – the generation of the same – and, on the other hand, to what Vladimir Solovjov addresses to immortality, not as a non-logical but as a purely human appeal Vladimir Solovjow addresses to immortality, then one would give human knowledge only that conclusion, which makes it from a mere factor dominating the external world to one that can now also carry the internal of man with certainty and with a firm hold through life.

Let us look, then, my dear audience, at how death manifests itself in the natural existence of man; and let me be clear: today I will speak only about human death, not about the types of death that we can observe in the animal world and even down to the plant world. Within the human world, how does death confront us? It draws together in a certain sense into a single moment – precisely at the moment of the conclusion of life – and that is what makes it so mysterious. We live our lives, we enjoy this life of ours, we make use of it in the outer realm of humanity and the world, and we do not immediately become aware of death in this experience of existence, but only as a riddle about a fact, that this life, as we live it every day, simply comes to an end.

When we now place this single fact of life before our soul, what do we actually find there? Man leaves behind from his life in the physical world that which we call a corpse. The substances and the forces in this corpse are in a certain connection; when the human being has become a physical corpse, they are in such a connection that they cannot remain in it, and they must emerge from it , and this must happen through the same forces, through the same natural laws that we find all over the world externally with our senses and with our intellect, into which we are placed in a sensory way. It must be said that, in a certain sense, the human material and energetic context is taken over by that world when death occurs, from which we actually draw our knowledge from birth to death, insofar as it is knowledge of the senses and mind.

And what does this external world actually do to the human corpse? It dissolves the human corpse, destroys its form, and in other words, it causes it to pass from the individual existence in which it was enclosed from birth to death into a general physical world existence. We look at this physical world existence, and must initially call it “the conclusion of life”. We must admit, when we follow the processes that the human corpse undergoes from the onset of death until it is completely dissolved in the course of the world, that these are processes that are completely unlike those that - albeit initially unknown to human knowledge - clearly take place until death. For as soon as death occurs, as soon as the external forces of the world take over the human corpse, its components, its forces, take different paths, initially for the outer sense existence, than they did between birth and death.

Between birth and death they are held together by something, whether this something is conceived as this or that, or perhaps even denied, and everything that is present is pushed into a mere different context during life, as that which is after death, but this context must at least be called a different one. And so, on the one hand, the human physical body after death, absorbed by the general forces of nature; on the other hand, this same human body, removed from general dissolution, renewing itself again and again from birth to death, maintaining its individual form. The contrast, the polar contrast, is initially a great one, and the question must be asked: How can knowledge come to terms with this polar contrast?

Well, my dear audience, it will never come to terms with it unless it appeals to that which anthroposophical research wants to introduce into scientific life, that which I have tried to characterize in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds » as a path that leads beyond mere sensory and intellectual knowledge, in that the human being becomes aware of certain deeper powers of knowledge present in the human soul, which are simply not applied by ordinary consciousness. These powers are always present in the human soul. Ordinary consciousness leaves them lying in the unconscious; the higher path of knowledge brings them up through meditation and concentration. The seeker devotes himself to certain exercises, intimate soul exercises, through which he strengthens thinking, feeling and willing, thereby evoking more intense experiences in the soul for this soul life than are ordinary experiences. But in this way he also rises above what ordinary knowledge can achieve.

Today I cannot go into a description of this particular path, which I have given here several times. It will be touched on in my lecture next Tuesday here in Stuttgart. Today I just want to point out that this path consists of the soul forces that every person has at the bottom of their soul being raised through meditation, through concentration of the soul life, and being applied to the world.

And what happens as a result? As a result, dear attendees, a third state of consciousness is added to the two in which a person alternates in ordinary life. The two states of consciousness that I have in mind are the one that we have from morning till evening, which encompasses our ordinary mental life and also encompasses everything that external science regards as accessible – it is precisely the state of waking; the other state of consciousness cannot really even be called a state of consciousness in the proper sense – it is the state of sleep. But out of this state emerges the strange life of human dreaming – that human dreaming that is perhaps accepted in a superstitious way by one person, marveled at by another, regarded by a third as something mysterious and unknown , but which draws the attention of very many people to the fact that perhaps the directing of the soul's gaze precisely to this emergence of dream waves from the deep ocean depths of the human soul life could have a special importance for the knowledge of the whole of life. Of course, anthroposophy has nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of dream-related superstition. However, if it does not draw any knowledge from the dream life – that is quite beyond it – it must at least point to something deeply enigmatic and vitally important in the dream world. It must say the following to justify itself.

Is not that to which ordinary knowledge surrenders also something turned away from life when we surrender to life in the usual robust way, when we live our existence in the world only by exerting our physical bodies from morning till night? What we call knowledge, even in ordinary life, cannot come about through this. The finer concepts, the more intimate connections with the world that are sought through knowledge, depend – initially in a formal way – on the external, robust way of life. In a sense, one has to retreat to a place of existence in knowledge that lies apart from the external life. And yet, one must admit that through that which one intimately explores in this remote place, by observing, experimenting, and thereby going beyond the ordinary course of existence with observation and experiment, that precisely through this light comes into life; that light comes into life from something that withdraws from life. Could it not also be the case that the mysterious world of dreams is initially meaningless for the external, robust life, but that it is precisely in its remoteness, and in a remoteness in a higher sense than ordinary knowledge, that it points to the essence of life?

And indeed, this dream world, that which resonates and vibrates from the time we spend between falling asleep and waking up into the waking consciousness, contains something that can indeed be further developed. And this further development happens precisely through the higher knowledge of the human being, through the attainment of a third state of consciousness. Through the intensification of thinking, feeling and willing, something is achieved that is, on the one hand, similar to the world of sleep, out of which dreaming arises, and, on the other hand, is completely opposed to it. When we say we fall asleep, we let the dream sound from the world of sleep; so we have to say: in the world of supersensible consciousness, into which anthroposophical research wants to penetrate, there is not a falling asleep, but on the contrary a higher awakening. There is an experience in a world that is similar to and yet very different from the world of dreams; similar in that it ceases when we submerge into the full physical life with the dream world, which, after all, flits past us in moments, say, of waking up, and immediately gives way to the life that permeates the thoughts imbued with will. The life in consciousness that is attained in the manner indicated can and must likewise cease when it submerges into ordinary human corporeality. Just as the dream fades away, so the higher consciousness ceases when it submerges into corporeality. This waking up, this higher state of consciousness, if I may use the much-debated term, hovers, I would like to say, in a lightness just like that of the dream world – but on the other hand it is opposed to it because it is interspersed with certain thoughts in just as strict a sense as waking daytime cognition.

Thus, anthroposophical research consists in an advance to a knowledge that is experienced with a lightness like a dream, but at the same time it is experienced with a firmness that is only possible if it is logical in the context of knowledge. But one thing is the case with both. When one becomes conscious of the complete context with one's corporeality from one or the other area of consciousness, then one or the other occurs in such a form that the dream is extinguished by the waking day life, can at most remain as a memory, but as a memory it integrates itself into the waking day life , but the content of higher knowledge is not erased, but stands alongside ordinary daytime cognition, but stands in such a way that it clearly stands out from it, so that the person can then experience his own existence as if he had two personalities, one can control the other, can illuminate what he has in ordinary consciousness in the waking state from morning to evening, with the higher knowledge that he has attained, which in turn he can control through his ordinary logical thinking, in order to experience how it relates to what can be experienced in the sensory world. This higher knowledge places us in a purely soul-spiritual experience, one that is full of content and inner reality. Just as in the ordinary life of the senses one can distinguish between something merely fancifully imagined and reality itself in life, just as one can distinguish between the mere idea of a hot iron and the real hot iron that one touches through life itself, so one can distinguish between something merely fancifully imagined and what is really seen in higher knowledge, what is directly experienced.

But this reality confronts man in such a way that it constitutes the complete opposite of what confronts us in natural death. In natural death, as we have seen, the human body is taken up by the general, natural laws of the world, which dissolve it, take away its form, and allow it to merge into their general existence. In higher knowledge, the soul life becomes more powerful, permeates itself with purely soul-spiritual reality, and comprehends itself in purely soul-spiritual reality. But it does not flow out into the general laws of nature as the human body does after death. It does not flow out into the general laws of nature, and this soul-spiritual experience does not flow into any general laws of the world either.

In this soul-spiritual experience, we become acquainted with something that must be said to be different from what we otherwise experience between birth and death in our waking daily life; it is something viewed from within that is as different from this waking daily life as the dead corpse is different from the living human body that we carry within us between birth and death. We look at something from the outside in the human corpse, which allows us to approach the mystery of death in the realm of nature; we look at something that is different in its innermost being from what we carry within us between birth and death in the same organism. And in higher knowledge we behold something — spiritually, inwardly — that is just as different from all that we experience inwardly, spiritually, through our human organism, which in death becomes the corpse. One would like to say: On the one hand, the dead corpse has separated from life for our external view; for our inner view, that which can be seen as a spiritual-soul reality in higher knowledge has separated from the same experience before our soul's gaze.

My dear attendees! In this confrontation with death staring at us from nature, when we look at it, I would say, in the form in which it presents itself to us, when we follow the fate of the human corpse after death, in the confrontation of this fact of death and that which knowledge — when the human being brings the soul forces that exist subconsciously, one could also say superconsciously, into his soul life —, in this juxtaposition lies that from which, in a certain sense, the most important problems of human life arise, even before anthroposophical research. It is an inward consolidation, an inward strengthening of oneself in that which one grasps as one's own spiritual-soul life. One feels as if one has been returned to one's innermost being, one feels completely within oneself by grasping oneself in this one's spiritual-soul reality, apart from the life between birth and death.

And a special shade of the idea that he gets from this view arises for him when he contrasts this idea with the idea of natural death. But then, when man has experienced through higher knowledge this reality consolidated in himself, this strengthened spiritual-soul life, and then immersed again in the physical body, that is, as I have mentioned, the consciousness that gives higher knowledge and the consciousness that is bound to the body, which accompanies us during physical life between birth and death, from waking up to falling asleep.

When these two are juxtaposed, when one penetrates the human being in his ordinary physical existence with what he appears to be, when he beholds his true, higher existence, then – my dear audience – one encounters the riddle of death for the second time, and one encounters it in a way that is not presented in ordinary life and ordinary science. Then one plunges back into the physical organization with that which first emerged from the tool of the body, from the entire physical organization; and one experiences this physical organization in a different way than in ordinary life. One experiences now what it means that we indeed carry within us during our physical life that which falls away from us at death as a corpse, which must move according to completely different physical laws after death than during physical life. And one actually sees that this moment of death stands out as a separate event in human life. You now feel in recognition: You carry within you all the time that which you see in a dead person in physical relationship with the destructive forces before you; you always carry these destructive forces within you. This is a significant realization, my dear audience!

One submerges oneself with one's soul-spiritual existence, which one has glimpsed through higher knowledge, into the physical body and only now does one find out how one actually carries the powers of death within oneself continuously; and how these powers of death are now continually overcome by the life forces, how a continuous struggle takes place in the human organism, the struggle that takes place between the powers of death and the life forces. Only now do we begin to feel what it actually means when waking and sleeping alternate in ordinary life. We feel that the whole human being in sleep leaves the physical body just as the human being with higher knowledge, which I have described, leaves this physical body. But one also feels how, in the ordinary life between birth and death, man relies on the use of his physical body to exercise his logical powers and his powers of thought. For when he is not in his physical body during sleep, he at most brings it to a confused, chaotic dream life, which must immediately vanish when man submerges into the physical body. But through higher knowledge one also learns to see what is continuously at work in the human body, which counteracts the dissolving forces that are in us from birth to death. One learns to recognize that this counteraction is most intense precisely from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up. And one learns to recognize how the waking life with its thoughts is connected to that which manifests itself separately with the corpse. One learns to recognize how one actually always carries within oneself the forces that are active in the corpse as the forces of dying. And through higher knowledge one learns that we initially carry those thoughts through which we permeate and order our existence in ordinary life, and that we actually handle it in the right way, that we cannot carry these thoughts up into higher knowledge. Into this higher knowledge, into this higher reality, we carry, my dear audience, only a part of our emotional and volitional life from our ordinary daily life, and in a higher world we acquire new thoughts. The sphere of thought that is bound to the physical body and one sees: is bound to that in the physical body which is always in us, which are the dying forces, this sphere of thought is grasped with higher knowledge. One also realizes that one had to strengthen thinking, feeling and willing in order to carry the thoughts that our physical body carries in our ordinary life, in order to carry the self.

For this reason, my dear audience, the whole inner soul life and the whole inner spiritual life must be strengthened and strengthened for the sake of higher knowledge. What we can leave to the forces of the body in our ordinary life, we must carry and accomplish ourselves in the spiritual-soul realm in higher knowledge. And we experience this personal contribution. We experience thoughts that are not bound to the outer, physical body, that are world thoughts. We do not experience natural laws, we experience world thoughts! Through higher knowledge, we experience the way in which what is outer world revelation is created and formed out of world thought. And what the ordinary world of thought is, and what the world of thought is that one only enters with higher knowledge, is revealed to this higher consciousness. One now learns to recognize the intimate connection between the forces of dying and death in human nature and the forces that actually express themselves in our thinking, in our ordinary imagination, from the moment we wake until we fall asleep.

We are in a dull state of consciousness that only reaches as far as dreams, which are only brightened up by higher knowledge and thus also become transparent. This state of consciousness also only reaches as far as the world of images in dreams, which is not permeated by thoughts. In order to have thoughts in ordinary consciousness, one must descend into the physical organism, which carries the forces of dying and of death within itself. And if we did not have these dying and these death forces, we would not have a self-contained world of thoughts in ordinary consciousness between birth and death.

We are now learning how the human being must, as it were, harden himself to a physical organization that wrests itself from him, that works in the same way as the physical forces work in death, which can only be overcome by the human being being permeated by his soul and spirit. One learns to recognize these powers of dying and death through the fact that, with higher knowledge, one has a world of thoughts that does not descend into these powers of dying and death. And so spiritual life is placed alongside natural death for this higher knowledge, and so man learns to recognize how precisely the powers of thought – those powers that connect our inner life with the world of the senses, that convey the external world – how these powers of thought are bound to the dissolving, to the dying powers of the human organism. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a significant insight, for it allows us to see the riddle of death in a new light. We see that we have not only the essence of death before us when it appears to us as the final enigmatic link, as the conclusion of physical life, but we perceive death as it continuously works between birth and death in the human being, and we perceive its intimate connection with the ordinary life of thought. But with that – my dear audience – the essence of this thought life also becomes clear to us.

It is precisely because what we carry in our soul in terms of feeling and will must, so to speak, combine with the dying forces in order to be permeated by the world of thought that we need for our ordinary life, our soul life takes on the character that it has developed to its highest flowering in the present age, of which it is most eminently and rightly proud.

Let us try to imagine what this world of thought, which we now know to be bound to the forces of dying and of death in man, is capable of. It is capable of penetrating into what is also outwardly dead nature, and in this respect, more recent knowledge has celebrated its great, justified triumphs. It has spread more and more over the field of dead, inorganic, inanimate nature; it wants to see through this dead, this inanimate nature in such a way that one day — this is its ideal — it will be able to see the emergence of the living within the dead, like a combination of the forces that work within the dead. Today, in a certain respect, it is believed that we are on the way to such an understanding of the organic from the inorganic. But even if such an ideal of scientific knowledge, which is entirely justified in its field, could be fulfilled, we will only recognize that which is dead in the living. Allow me to express this in the following way, ladies and gentlemen.

When I look at a plant, I see a living thing, in which substances revolve and forces are at work. Within that which I have before my eyes in this living thing, the same forces and laws are at work that I explore in physics and chemistry; there is a physicality, a chemistry within it. This physicality, this chemistry, is present within the living thing in a different way than outside of it, but it is only within this living thing that it is inanimate. And it may be possible to see through the particular way in which this non-living manifests itself in the living, but one still remains only with the non-living. And one remains with the non-living even when one studies it up to the point of understanding the human being. The human being carries within himself the forces, the mode of action of dead matter. But precisely because he carries these forces of dead material within him, this means that he always has death and dying within him. Through higher knowledge, one gains insight into the fact that the human being thinks in the ordinary consciousness by carrying this inanimate, this inorganic, this continually equipping him with dying forces. It is significant to see through the fact that man must see that which he recognizes as his highest in physical life as being bound to that which is constantly detaching itself from life, that is, that man can think, that he is constantly detaching the forces of the dead from life.

And that is why it also happens that at the same moment that the life processes increase in the ordinary physical life – let us say in fever or abnormal, morbid conditions – that then the human consciousness also turns into the morbid; that a person can only have a healthy consciousness when the life forces, the effervescent, warm life forces, are kept in check by the forces of death. Thoughts, as we have them in ordinary life, are placed in the powers of mind and will that are bound to the living; they are placed in these by the fact that the powers of death are placed in human life. The conscious powers of thought of physical life are bound to death and dying, are inwardly connected, most intimately, with these powers of death and dying.

And so, through such contemplation, what we encounter in the external knowledge of the inanimate, the inorganic, is put into perspective. If we become acquainted with the world of ideas and concepts in all its human aspects, as it appears in its highest development between birth and death in physical life, then we perceive it as something that is given in its nature, in its essence, to the inanimate, and is also given to external, dead nature. And one discovers the great law of human existence: because in us the powers of thought and knowledge are connected with the powers of death, we can therefore only know the inorganic, the inanimate, in the ordinary way. But when higher spiritual knowledge, such as anthroposophical research strives for, enters into this life, then ordinary thoughts are, as it were, raised into a higher sphere, just as that which is continually dying and decaying in man, that which is a continually active corpse with the destructive forces that dissolve its form, is raised into life. And we have – my dear audience – a self-living process before us in the transition from ordinary knowledge to anthroposophical knowledge.

We recognize the ideas, the concepts of ordinary knowledge as bound to death; we recognize that which anthroposophical knowledge strives for as that which resurrects the ordinary, dead, inanimate concepts and ideas to life. We recognize not only a formal process of knowledge, we recognize a vitalization of our soul life; we recognize a direct presentation of that which has nothing to do with birth and death, which really goes beyond birth and death because it does not partake of the forces of death and dying. We recognize the immortal part of the human being and learn to distinguish it from that which is continually bound to death. In this way, as in higher knowledge, I would say that spiritual life arises from natural death, not just a spiritual, formal knowledge. That is why, my dear audience, this anthroposophical knowledge initially seems strange to people. It is usually taken as a mere continuation of ordinary knowledge. It is that in the full sense of the word, but it is a continuation in such a way that the character, the whole nature of this ordinary knowledge is also changed, that we experience something like a birth of a living being within the thoughts and ideas that are otherwise only useful for the inanimate, within those thoughts that I have called world thoughts. In today's meditation, we are confronted with that into which the human being is first absorbed when he separates as a spiritual soul from his life between birth and death. When his physical self separates through natural death, his body is absorbed into the general natural forces and his form is destroyed. When the spiritual soul is absorbed into the world that the higher knowledge already reaches in a cognitively alive way, then the human being is consolidated. Then the human being is not dissolved into the rest of the world; then he enters the spiritual world with his full individuality – yes, [this higher individuality is strengthened, intensified] – he enters the spiritual world with this world.

In this way, by developing the powers of human consciousness, anthroposophical knowledge seeks to approach the problem of immortality. And you see, my dear audience: for this anthroposophical knowledge, it is important to approach this problem of immortality not just by philosophizing about the immortal, but by researching: Where in the human being is the immortal to be found? It can be found through higher knowledge, when one reaches that which, by returning to the body, objectively beholds death in its perpetual activity in us and therefore knows what alone can succumb to death.

Only that which is already continually in the bosom of this death can succumb to it. By seeing through the continuous dying, the actual moment of death is recognized only as a kind of summary of that which is always there. And while we are constantly saving our life, I might say, from death, by always overcoming the forces of death in the physical life, but overcoming them by the fact that within us there is always that which is only seen by higher knowledge, so in physical death, by this the spiritual soul in us, precisely in physical death, that which in its individual addenda, in its individual elements, must be overcome from moment to moment of life, is overcome – completely overcome, I might say – in physical death. We overcome natural death in every moment through our spiritual life, which has nothing to do with death. And when one acquires such knowledge of the overcoming of mortality through immortality, then the riddle of death also presents itself to the human soul in precisely that renewed form, which I took the liberty of describing to you this evening, my dear audience.

And therein lie the reasons why anthroposophy must not only speak about other things, but also differently than ordinary science. It must derive its concepts and ideas, which are, after all, about spiritual worlds, from what we have in our ordinary minds as concepts and ideas and which can only be applied to the dead because they come from death and dying. And therefore only those can enter into this world of thought that carry the will within themselves to pass over from dead concepts to living concepts; that carry the will within themselves to shape the activity of the soul in such a way that they grasp that which must be grasped in life, and not just grasp in a comfortable way that which can only be grasped in death. Today, we largely form our physiology, our anthropology, by observing human beings after death and then constructing life out of death. Anthroposophy attempts to enliven that in the human being that is bound to death and thus to bring the inner soul world itself, as living spirituality, up to a higher level of knowledge.

You certainly do not have to become a researcher in this field yourself — I have taken the liberty of mentioning this here a few times — to penetrate the justification of the anthroposophical world. Those who become researchers have the spiritual world directly before them, as I have been describing it here for years. They then describe it from what arises for them when they translate what they see into the form of human thought. But in describing it, they appeal not only to their own seeing, but also to the inner human liveliness. And because every human being has this inner life, just as they have their own dying process, they can gradually, even if they do not become researchers in the field of spiritual science and anthroposophy, acquire an understanding of what researchers bring out of the spiritual world. The publication of such writings as my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' indicates how anyone can at least get started on their own research into the spiritual world. But it also indicates that such books are primarily written as they are so that everyone can, so to speak, receive the spiritual researcher's justification for what he actually does. But that which comes before humanity as ideas, as concepts, can be grasped by common sense. For this common sense is that which can rise to living thoughts just as it can remain with dead thoughts. And this understanding is not mere belief, not mere emotional understanding, but it is an understanding that arises out of the free nature of the human being, which simply connects what is in it of world existence with what can be proclaimed through research out of this world existence.

It must always be emphasized that anthroposophy is, so to speak, handed over to the world so that it can be tested by ordinary, healthy human understanding. If one practices this, allows it to be lived out in a comprehensive, not a one-sided way, then one will see how one relates to anthroposophy differently than one still often believes today. We can then look at concepts such as those of Herbert Spencer, which only remain within physical life, as I described in my introduction. On the other hand, we can look at concepts such as those of Vladimir Soloviev, which arise out of the fullness of human life. We shall see in the case of Herbert Spencer why he has to stop at physical life, because everything he expresses comes from a way of thinking that is bound up with the forces of dying and of death. And we shall see in the case of Soloviev that although he uses concepts that are common in the West and that to a great extent contain the conceptual form associated with dying and death, But in the case of Solowjow, we shall see how these concepts remain external to him, but how he dreams up what he actually wants to say out of a mystical darkness and a mystical depth, and thus becomes one-sided on the other side as well.

We will see in anthroposophy how it does not simply take what is dead in the Western world and use it as a means of expression, but how it brings what is dead to life itself, how it leads from the mortal to the immortal by awakening what is dead to life.

It seems to me, honored attendees, that Central Europe, with the special preconditions for its thinking, feeling and willing — these great upswings that have come to light in Goethe and those who, so to speak, can be described as being within Goetheanism — the task of avoiding both one-sidedness by continuing in the direction of these endeavors and in fact of elevating our scientific conceptual world, which fetters us to the earth and can only truly say something about natural death, to a spiritual life that has something to say about immortality.

Many will object: this science, which you describe as anthroposophy, is, as it were, suspended in mid-air; one is not standing on the firm ground of fact. My dear ladies and gentlemen! I have tried to show you today how anthroposophy can only be properly understood if it is considered in the context of the whole process of world evolution and the place of human beings in this process. If we look at what is around us here on earth, we have to say of everything: it needs a foundation on which it stands. If we were to hold an earthly object in the air, it would fall down. That which surrounds us in our immediate environment needs a foundation; that which surrounds us in our immediate knowledge of the life between birth and death, the facts of the external sense world and the combining intellect, needs to have such a foundation in order to exist spiritually. At the same moment when we look out from earthly life into the life of the world, it would be foolish to say that the earth needs a foundation on which it rests in order to exist in the world.

In the world of space, we have already become accustomed to the fact that one cosmic body freely maintains the balance of the other through the forces that unfold such a foundation. As science rises from the mortal to the immortal, it must realize that it must take the same path in the spiritual-soul realm as that which confronts us in the mortal. For knowledge, it needs a basis. That which confronts us in the world of the immortal in the various fields must support itself. And until we are able to grasp this image, we will not understand how anthroposophical spiritual science relates to external science, which it does not deny but fully recognizes. But spiritual science must not only research different things from ordinary science, it must also research differently and speak differently.

That was what I wanted to present to your soul through today's contemplation, based on the essence of this spiritual science, and what I would now like to summarize in a few words, saying: a more intimate contemplation of the position of anthroposophy and the world brings us to a very special view of the relationship between natural death and spiritual life. But we can only gain such an insight if we fulfill what Anthroposophy basically calls out to us from the deeper nature of the world itself, by saying: Human being, if you want to recognize that which lives immortal in the spirit, first enliven your own world of knowledge. If you want to grasp life in the spirit, first enliven your knowledge within you. Understand what it means when it is said not in dead but in living concepts. Rise up from that which, as dead matter, needs a support, to that which, as spiritual, moves freely in the spiritual, in the spiritual worlds, which is not bound to that which lives and weaves in the transitory, which lives in itself and which can be grasped can be grasped by man when he presents the great, significant antitheses before his soul: natural death in itself, the spiritual life that he can grasp when he frees himself from that which is bound to the transitory in earthly life!

Dear attendees! Today's lecture makes no other claim than to be merely an introduction to the considerations that I will be discussing in the next few days, considerations about the relationship between anthroposophy and the various fields of science and life.

One of the most significant facts of recent intellectual life is undoubtedly the coexistence, collaboration and thinking together of Goethe and Schiller, especially in the very early days of their friendship in the last decade of the eighteenth century. And it is extraordinarily significant that during this time, when two of the greatest geniuses of humanity found each other intimately, a burning intellectual question between these personalities was, so to speak, discussed and considered on all sides. Both Goethe and Schiller were artists at heart. But during the period in question, they were deeply concerned with the relationship between art and knowledge, as revealed in scientific observation, on the one hand, and, although somewhat less clearly, the relationship between art and religious feeling and perception in humans, on the other. And if one lets the keynote sink in, which resounds through all Goethe's and Schiller's discussions of the mutual relationship between knowledge, art and religion, then one comes to say: Above all, for these two minds, this question was one of the following: How do the powers of knowledge, art and religion work together in the human being to lead the human being to live out and express his full, harmonious human nature for himself and for the world?

Anyone who enters into this lively treatment of the question will no doubt be most deeply impressed by what has come to light in Schiller's examination of this question in his, unfortunately far too little appreciated, “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” and by what Goethe added to Schiller's reflection in his “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”, which forms the conclusion of the “Conversations of the German People”.

On the one hand, Schiller saw the scientific consideration, to which he was led in a certain sense by what his external position had to become at the time, by his professorship in Jena, and also by the fact that he wanted to enlighten himself about the philosophical foundations of art from Kantian philosophy. But every such question took on a character that led to the general human, to the more comprehensive question: What is the actual essence of man, what contributes most to this essence of man within the development of culture and the mind? And so the question became: How does man attain the possibility of coming onto the path of his destiny, out of knowledge, out of science, out of artistic striving? This question became a burning one for Schiller. He posed this question in the essay he wrote on the aesthetic education of the human race. At this time, Schiller often said to himself that there was something unsatisfactory about scientific observation when one wants to strive for the highest, purest development of the human being. Schiller made some remarkable statements in this regard. For example, when he received a piece of Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister” and read it with the utmost interest, he wrote to Goethe about his feelings about the artistic treatment on Goethe's part in this work, beginning with the sentence: “The artist is, after all, the only true human being, and the best philosopher is, after all, only a caricature next to him.”

What did Schiller mean by such a radical statement? He meant that by engaging in artistic creation or immersing himself in works of art in an appreciative, artistic way, man feels his full humanity to be inwardly active and inwardly alive, and that what he experiences in true works of art is something quite unsatisfactory compared to what he can experience in scientific knowledge. It was out of such feelings that Schiller arrived at the peculiar solution which he gives to this question in his Letters on Aesthetics. He said to himself something like the following: When we, as human beings, are most closely in touch with the highest things here on earth, when we are devoted to the contemplation of the world of ideas, which after all is the goal of all scientific endeavor, then we feel the necessity to be logical; we dare not deviate from the laws of reason, which, as it were, takes possession of our spirit and our soul and prescribes the paths for us. We are not truly free inwardly when we engage in this kind of cognitive activity, and in our inner freedom we can only truly live out our humanity.

In this cognitive activity, Schiller sees, as it were, the one pole of human activity; he sees the other pole in man's surrender to the natural necessity of his own being, to his instincts, his drives, to his capacity for desire, which in ordinary life emerges from his lower organism and his drives. It is out of these impulses that man acts, it is on these that he initially bases his life. But one is surrendered to the natural necessity of one's own being when one is surrendered to one's drives and instincts; one follows, so to speak, one's drives and instincts as much as outer nature follows its natural conditions; one is not free. Between these two states, surrender to the necessity of reason and surrender to the necessity of nature, Schiller seeks that “middle state” in which the human being can find himself, and which he calls the aesthetic state, that state in which man is as an artist or as an artistic enjoyer. How does Schiller now describe this middle state from his experience of art?

He says: When we enjoy a work of art as human beings, we do not feel the rigid, strict rational necessity that must guide us in our understanding, but nor do we feel the mere desire that lives in our urges and instincts; for when we work our way up to the free enjoyment of the beautiful, we must not get stuck in what only our sensual urges give us. The spiritless sensual impulses can never rise to the real understanding of the work of art. But in giving ourselves to the artistic, we do not live in an abstract, spiritually withdrawn, unsensual way, as is the case with scientific knowledge when it advances to the level of ideas; we live, because what appears sensually is also is the artistic, in that middle state of devotion to a sensual thing, but we live in devotion to a sensual thing in such a way that at the same time our own sensual nature is laid aside, that we are not devoted to its necessity, that we have spiritualized it, ensouled it. We have descended from the rigid necessity of reason into sensuality, which is appropriate and congenial to us in the artistic; we have torn ourselves away from the rigid necessity of reason; but on the other hand we have also torn ourselves away from the oppressive necessity of nature. In this intermediate state, we are truly free human beings. When we create art, for example, we do not follow methodical rules like those we have to observe in science; we surrender to the free play of what rules in our own soul. The inner free lawfulness, which at the same time appeals to our sympathy and antipathy, guides us as we create art. We are in a free state of mind.

It is from this background that Schiller dares to speak out so radically in these aesthetic letters. In this activity, which is governed by the senses and yet is spiritual, as spiritual as the necessity of reason without surrendering to this necessity of reason, and as sensual as only life in sensuality can be without losing itself to the necessity of nature, Schiller's gaze is drawn to the free play of the child, who does not yet know a necessity of knowledge, but who has also not yet immersed himself so deeply in his sensuality, as he indulges in his free play, unfolding from his sympathy and antipathy. It was in this mood that Schiller coined the radical sentence: Man is only fully human when he plays, and he only plays in the true sense of the word when he is fully human.

What Schiller expressed here belongs to a higher level of spiritual development. Here the German spirit was trying, so to speak, to enlighten itself about humanity from an extraordinarily high point of view. The German spirit was trying to grasp the whole inner essence of the artistic by asking: What can art be in order to bring man as high as possible in his development through the artistic essence?

Schiller was faced with this question. It was no less pressing for Goethe. Goethe followed with interest all the thoughts and ideas that Schiller developed, as it were, through the question: How is man made free through the content of his spiritual life? But Goethe, by nature, could not get used to the more abstract trains of thought in Schiller's aesthetic letters. For Goethe, who was an artist in a completely different, in a broader sense, than Schiller, the question was not as simple as it was for Schiller. Goethe said to himself: Schiller sees three forces at work in man: the necessity of reason, the necessity of nature, and in between the aesthetic state; from their mutual relationship, he wants to recognize the free human soul in a spiritual way. But it's not that simple, Goethe said to himself. Because this human soul is something endlessly complicated; you can't see through it by just piling up three such abstract forces, no matter how ingeniously you philosophize about it. Goethe couldn't just follow Schiller's philosophy. For him, the answer to the same question took the form of an image, that powerful image with the most diverse sub-images that we encounter in his “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”. I will now pass over all the other figures contained in this fairy tale and describe the actual situation, how the soul wants to reach its goals, its freedom, its experience of its true nature, by different paths.

The paths that the individual characters – there are about twenty of them – take in Goethe's fairy tale are all paths of the soul, not intended allegorically or symbolically, but in the way that Goethe had to speak of these paths of the soul. Anyone who sees allegories or symbols in something like this “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” has not yet penetrated into the real, genuine spiritual life, as it prevails in Goethe, for example. If someone says: In these figures I see only allegorical or symbolic representations of states of mind or the like, then he has no idea how rich Goethe's experiences were on the individual soul paths, and how Goethe could not express what he wanted to reveal about the paths of the soul in any other way than in images that are ambiguous but also promising. But I would just like to point out the target figures: all the different personalities in this fairy tale ultimately move towards the temple of the four kings, towards the temple of the golden king, the silver king, the bronze king and the king who is composed of these three substances in an irregular manner. And we see how Goethe wants to lead the entire plot towards the goal of a certain relationship emerging with the golden king, the silver king and the bronze king, who, in a sense, by acting on another person in the fairy tale – on the beautiful lily – the essence of the world onto the deepest human; and as these three mighty personalities radiate the innermost essence of the world onto humanity, we see how the fourth king, who is chaotically mixed from the substances of the other three, collapses into himself.

If one tries to express in somewhat abstract words what Goethe felt at this encounter between the fair lily and the four kings, one must say: He wanted to show how the human soul, if it wants to come to true humanity, must ultimately arrive at a certain relationship to what the golden king represents: the cognitive, that which leads man to wisdom; how he must arrive at the silver king, who gives man that which is beauty, that which is artistic; and how he must arrive at that which is represented in the brazen king, at the good, at real pious deeds. Thus, for Goethe, man ultimately arrives at knowledge as it lives in science, at the beautiful as it lives in art, and at the good as it exists in the religious. But in that Goethe portrays how, separately, each of the three kings radiates this threefold world-being of wisdom, beauty, and goodness upon man, while at the same time man comes to comes to his true humanity, as that which previously influenced him – the mixed king, who is chaotically mixed together from the three substances – collapses and no longer has any existence. Goethe wants to show how true humanity can only be achieved through a very specific relationship between wisdom, beauty and goodness, or – as one could also say – between science, art and religion, in that these three revelations of the world have an effect on man.

What Goethe means by this should not really be expressed in abstract sentences, because it represents, one might say, the whole sum of Goethean experience in relation to wisdom or science, to art or beauty, to religion as it manifests itself in the kindness of human beings. Goethe had to attempt to depict in individual images what Schiller presented more in abstract, philosophical ideas. That alone is significant. It is significant for the reason that, out of his entire epoch with its characteristic intellectual life, Goethe – like Schiller – came to the question: How must science, art and religion fit into human life? And he found no way to express this other than in a fairy-tale-like way at first. Nevertheless, one can see that for him it was a burning question, just as it was for Schiller. Schiller saw in the merely cognizant a caricature of the true human being. But ever since he had come to a real, awakened consciousness of humanity, Goethe actually always strove to seek the foundations of the artistic essence and artistic creation and the significance of this artistic essence and creation for humanity in the nature of the world itself. And one arrives, I would say, at extraordinarily intense ideas and feelings in the indicated area when one follows how Goethe intensively studies Spinoza's philosophy with Herder, how he reads Spinoza's “Ethics” with Herder, how he wants to gain ideas from this ethics about how divine necessity, in its conformity to law, rules and weaves through the world. In a sense, God in the workings of the world – that is what Goethe wants to bring to life in himself by studying Spinoza. But basically he remains unsatisfied. And how he remains unsatisfied can be seen from the extraordinarily characteristic statements to his friends in the letters he wrote to his Weimar friends from his Italian journey. There, in Italy, he felt that he was in an element that suddenly began to satisfy him when confronted with works of art that gave him an idea of the artistic nature of the Greeks. We read in the letters that he wrote back to Weimar the words: Now, in the face of these Italian works of art, I am getting a feeling for Greek art; I have the suspicion that the Greeks, in creating their works of art, proceeded according to the same laws by which nature itself proceeds, and which I am on the trail of. Goethe believed he recognized: the eternal, iron laws of nature that he wanted to feel from Spinoza's philosophy, but could not find there, but which he felt from his own studies of nature and which he was then able to trace into his art in order to feel science and art in a unity. He could only feel this unity where he believed he was looking at the essence of Greek art. He believed that the Greeks had come to understand the essence of natural necessity, and that they had elevated this understanding and essence in their works of art, but in such a way that the same thing lives in these works of art – but in a transformed form – that otherwise only lives within nature. By feeling this, by feeling the necessity of artistic creation in what he now imagined to be Greek art, Goethe came to the shattering utterance, which he now wrote to his Weimar friends, standing before the works of art that he was able to see at the time: “There is necessity, there is God!”

We can see the path that Goethe took: he sought out necessity, divine conformity to law in the nature of the world, from the philosophy of Spinoza in order to gain knowledge; he stood in front of the works of art that he regarded as the most perfect, and he sensed from them what he strove for with all the fibres of his soul. It was in the presence of these works of art that he experienced what he felt to be a sense of the divine. But we also see from this that Goethe could not simply understand art as a mere optional addition to life, but that he strove to recognize how art is deeply rooted in the roots of the world in its forms. And perhaps a particularly characteristic saying of Goethe's, which, I would like to say, leads very deeply into what Goethe experienced and felt in this area. He once objected to speaking of the “idea of truth”, the “idea of good”, the “idea of beauty”. You can read about this in his “Sayings in Prose”. He said: There is only one idea, and it lives in nothing other than in the perceived all-embracing spirituality, as the form in which it can appear to man. He says of this idea that it can express itself as truth, as beauty, as goodness. In a sense, Goethe wanted to have established in the roots of the world, in the nature of the world, that which he shaped artistically; he wanted what the artist created to have its source not only in free human arbitrariness, but at the same time, as a free artist, the human being should stand within the nature of the world. And so it was that not only the question of true humanity developed for him through the question of art, but also the other question: How does the essence of the world prevail in man when he is truly an artist? How do the laws of the world continue to work in the creative, free artistic human being?

I have only mentioned this because it shows how, in the case of Goethe and Schiller, the full depth of the question of the harmonization of science, art and religion in the nature of man himself emerges in the spiritual life of modern times. I believe that anyone who approaches the minds of Goethe and Schiller with both an open mind and heartfelt devotion must feel this question, the question of the harmonization of science, art and religion. For these two outstanding geniuses of humanity considered it one of the most important questions in their lives to fathom how the world essence is a unified one, what relationship man gains to this world essence when he is cognitively active, when he is artistically active and when he is religiously active. Now, I would like to say that the deepest inspiration for a correct, intensely deep approach to this question can be drawn from Goethe and Schiller. But it cannot be denied that we, in an epoch that is so long after Goethe and Schiller, must also freely confront what they raised as a significant human question. And so it was precisely from a deeper, from a truly — I may say it without being immodest — devoted study of Goethe and Schiller that the human question appeared to me as the question of freedom at the time when I set about writing my 'Philosophy of Freedom'. It could not make sense to me that man is a truly free being only by living in the artistic. What Schiller asserted is certainly the case: that in the cognitive observation of the world of rational necessity, one must, so to speak, follow a spiritual compulsion. But something else is at hand: when one follows this rational necessity, when one devotes oneself to scientific observation in this sense, then one lives in what one experiences of nature, of the world in general, and even if it is the ideas of the laws of nature, in ideas.

One lives with it in images, and one feels that one cannot really fathom anything in nature unless one allows free inner human activity to prevail, and that even if the necessity of nature forces us, it cannot force us to act, but that we must freely take up the activity. One feels the pictorial nature of what nature and the world always are, and then, in knowing, one feels one's own free human nature in a very special way. This is what I wanted to present in my Philosophy of Freedom. When one advances to the real impulses of moral action, and when these impulses of moral action become pure thinking, then man lives again, prompted to action by images. We feel the pictorial nature in our cognition, and when we bring our morality to the same pictorial nature, then we feel ourselves in freedom. This is also what actually made man free in the age in which science emerged in the modern sense.

Only life in that which does not actually immerse itself in nature, and therefore also has its limits in relation to nature, only life in the realm of thought, in the realm of images, frees the human being from the necessities into which he is placed as a natural being, and only then could scientific activity have the possibility of full inner freedom when it really brought people to inner pictorial experience. One cannot be unfree in the face of images. One can be pushed or shoved into action by some other force, physically, emotionally or intellectually. Imagine whether you can be prompted to do anything by a mere image — compare mental images with linguistic images — they are powerless and impotent. And so our images are powerless and impotent in a moral sense. But if we start from mere images, then we are free human beings in moral action. It must therefore be said that man is a truly free being not only in the aesthetic state, but also when he elevates his morality to such heights that he can rule, when he devotes himself to a truly free cognitive activity.

Thus it becomes necessary to seek the inner harmonization of knowledge, art and religion in a new way in the post-Goethean age. And anthroposophy, which does not want to be just any old theoretical, abstracted world view, but which wants to be a spiritual content that has an effect on the whole, on the full human being, because it and flows from the whole, complete human being, anthroposophy must, above all, seek to relate what it can give to knowledge, to artistic creation, and to religious experience. I would like to say that this does not lead to some kind of artificiality of the anthroposophical path, but rather that this anthroposophical path naturally leads to it, and by standing on anthroposophical ground, one can be fully in harmony with the particular way of posing questions in this field, as it arose with Schiller and oethe.

Dear attendees, I have to draw on something that is indeed one of the elements of anthroposophical research, but which I would like to sketch at least in a few lines to show how anthroposophy comes to a harmonization of knowledge, art and religion in a very natural way, and not through some contrived invention.

If one wants to characterize how anthroposophy proceeds, it is of course always necessary to point out how the forces of knowledge that lie dormant in the soul, and are not active in the ordinary life of man and in ordinary science, must be developed through certain intimate soul exercises. And the importance of such soul exercises for human life must also be spoken of in the most varied ways. At this point I would merely like to suggest that these soul exercises consist of meditation and concentration, but in a completely different way than they were once practiced in the Orient. In such meditations and concentrations, where the cultivation of thoughts is undertaken in a very special way, thoughts become more alive and more intense. Through through special exercises, one comes to live, not in mere shadowy thoughts, as in ordinary science, but in such strengthened thoughts, to live as one otherwise only lives in outer sense experience, where one is given over to sense experiences with one's eyes and ears. The essence of meditation is that one is given over to the life of ideas in an intense way, as one never otherwise lives in mere thinking. In this way thoughts come to life. One feels how one gradually frees oneself from the physical conditions of thinking and, as it were, learns to think free of the body. Thinking becomes, without becoming pathological, inwardly fuller, more intense. One arrives at images. What I have called in my writings imaginative cognition occurs. Through this one arrives at the first significant results of the anthroposophical world view.

When one has strengthened one's thinking in this way for a while, so that it has become more intense and alive and no longer needs the body for support, then one no longer experiences one's thoughts as a mere tableau of memories, but rather as an overview of the workings of forces within us that are in us because we are human beings on earth. In our contemplation, we have a tableau before us in which we see how our thought life has become intense and has become related to what works in us as growth forces, what itself works in us as forces of metabolism. We learn to recognize that, in addition to our physical body, which is already in space, there is a time body, a body of formative forces within us, which permeates our physical body and is in perpetual motion. We see through this body of formative forces in a single tableau. And by so elevating ourselves to get to know the first supersensible aspect of the human being in this body of formative forces, we get to know a thinking that is much more alive than ordinary, abstract thinking, so that we also come to experience all those realities where the thoughts of time overflow into organic growth. One sees into the workings of a spiritual body that has permeated us since our birth. By rising up to it, one comes to look very particularly clearly at that epoch in our human development which otherwise always lies outside our consciousness. In ordinary life we remember our earlier childhood back to a certain point. Before this point, up to birth, there is a time that is about as dark to us as the experiences of the soul in the state of sleep.

A kind of sleep state manifests itself to us, looking backwards from the point from which we remember, to birth, in this period of our life. This epoch of our earthly life begins to shine forth in its essence before imaginative knowledge, before this looking into the spiritual world. I would like to say that, alongside what is experienced as knowledge, a spiritual body, a body of formative forces, rules in us. Alongside this, one gets the great, powerful, moving impression of what has ruled in us since we entered the physical world at birth. At that time, the forces that shape our brain so plastically out of the wisdom of the world, so that it can become a tool of wisdom, were most intensely at work; the brain's formative forces shaped the rest of the organism. By elevating ourselves to an understanding of the body of formative forces, we experience what has ruled and woven in the very earliest years of childhood, and how everything that once works in human life, even if it weakens for other epochs, will appear again later. Thus, what is effective in the first years of childhood is most particularly, most intensely effective in shaping the human being during these years; it is also effective later, but then only quietly, while in the first years of childhood it is powerfully, mightily effective. And we learn to look at the forces that prevail in the first years of childhood, when the human being has just overcome infancy and still particularly needs the care of the outer world; we learn to look at how he, emerging from the first earthly dreaming, forming the physical human organism; we learn to look at something that now makes the impression on us that it is artistically greater, more sublime than anything we can develop in the world in terms of art. And by looking at it, we learn to recognize what the essence of artistic imagination and artistic enjoyment actually consists of. Only now do we begin to understand the real connection between later human life and earlier life, to recognize it in artistic creation and artistic enjoyment.

When we look directly at a work by a creative genius, we see that this genius has absorbed more from this first childhood period into later life than any non-artistic person. Likewise, a person who is particularly good at artistic enjoyment has more of these powers radiating into his life than an abstract person, a dullard. Without wishing to be in any way sophisticated, we learn to apply a biblical saying in the following way: Unless you learn to recognize the importance of the first childlike state, you cannot enter the realm of artistic experience. — It simply pours itself into artistic life with its special organic powers. That is why art is felt to be such an invigorating element in the whole human being, because art brings to life in us what was the strongest life at the starting point of our earthly existence.

So I would like to say: the primal forces of artistic activity in man arise quite naturally when we in anthroposophy — purely cognitively — ascend to the first supersensible, to the formative forces body of the human being, to imaginative knowledge. And if we then want to ascend to the next level of knowledge, we must indeed develop it in the following way. We develop the first, imaginative stage by repeatedly placing certain ideas at the center of our thinking in a meditative state of concentration, thereby awakening our powers of thought. However, we must also develop the opposite activity. We must learn to withdraw from our consciousness those images to which we have first directed all our attention, so that they become fixed in our consciousness to a certain extent, and then to create a completely empty consciousness. This creation of an empty consciousness is the second important step on the way to supersensible knowledge.

When we have developed this empty consciousness to such an extent that we know while awake: we have nothing in our consciousness now, neither of external impressions nor of internal memories, we have made the consciousness completely empty, then a spiritual world, hitherto unknown to us, penetrates into this consciousness; we thus make acquaintance with a spiritual world, as we make acquaintance with the ordinary world through our outer senses and through ordinary consciousness. Inspired knowledge then enters and with it the second result of anthroposophical research. We can now also suppress the whole formative forces body, everything that particularly organizes that from which we can ultimately gain an artistic sense, we can suppress it and create an empty consciousness in relation to the formative forces body. But then we have the essence of our spiritual soul before our soul eye, as it was before we descended from a spiritual-soul world into the earthly world through birth or, let us say, through conception with this spiritual soul from a spiritual-soul world, before we took on flesh and blood through our parents. We are now learning to recognize the eternity of the human soul – on the one hand, on the side of the unborn.

But we also learn, when we turn our feelings and perceptions to what arises for us as an insight into the spiritual and eternal being, to recognize now how this human soul lived in a purely spiritual and divine environment before its earthly existence, how, as it were, divine powers radiated through it in its existence, like natural forces in earthly existence. Just as the substances and forces that we absorb in our earthly existence give rise to those forces that in turn live in our organism, so the divine-spiritual rays of light live in our spiritual-soul existence before we penetrate into earthly life. There we are permeated by divine forces, just as we are permeated by natural forces here in physical earthly life.

We can certainly stop at mere anthroposophical spiritual science; then we come to the body of formative forces. But we can also turn our feelings, our heart life, to what the knowledge of this body of formative forces gives us; then we encounter the liveliness of the full human scope of what permeates us in the first years of our existence like a dream-like, like a sleeping life, but what works in the formation of our physical body. Likewise, we can remain purely cognitively and scientifically in the contemplation of the spiritual soul within us, as it was permeated by divine spiritual forces before our earthly existence. But we can turn to this being itself and turn our feelings to it; then we learn to recognize what this soul experienced inwardly at that time. It experienced the urge to embrace earthly existence with the divine spiritual forces that surrounded it.

The reason why the soul has immersed itself in the earthly body is to connect with the physical through the divine spiritual. This reason is none other than that which lives in the shadowy afterimage of earthly existence in religious feeling and religious piety. If we have religious piety, we may not concern ourselves with what this soul-like nature is before it has descended into earthly life. These are the powers of feeling and perception towards which the soul soul strove to live the soul-life into earthly existence, that is, when it strove for physical embodiment; but when we think of these powers in the lingering image of the earth, they live themselves out in religious life. Just as art is a radiance of the forces of the first child life into later life, so religious life is an echo of what the soul went through before descending into physical life.

And so we find that if we stop at the level of knowledge and rise to the idea there, as long as we dwell in mere earthly life, where we have to use our organism for knowledge, we find only knowledge, alongside which stands art, which can at most be considered aesthetically, and alongside which stands religion, which can be considered theologically. But with physical science we do not arrive at a living transition into artistic feeling or religious experience. When we rise to anthroposophical knowledge, we have thoroughly true scientific knowledge, but this rises to imagination. Imagination can remain thoroughly scientific. By remaining so, it does not become artistic. Therefore, no one needs to fear that by creating art they will fall back into allegory and symbolism if they are imbued with anthroposophy; they would do so if they merely stopped at ideas.

But anthroposophy is not like other sciences in that it stops at mere ideas; it continues to penetrate, feeling its way from the contemplation of the body of formative forces to the experience of the laws of that which first shaped us in our earliest childhood and continues to influence our lives, and through which we feel so stimulated in our imagination. This is not to say anything against the elementary nature of imaginative creation; but imagination can be stimulated by advancing in the manner described to epochs of life that would otherwise elude external observation. And by advancing further to the experience of the soul before its descent into earthly existence, one comes to sense what lives here on earth in the afterimage of religious life and experience, when we live in such a way that our life through what God is in us is at the same time something willed by God, so that the mood of doing what is willed by God is the echo of what was an important deed willed by God when God Himself still worked in the soul as a spiritual deed before the soul descended into earthly life.

If we consider the whole of human life with the eternal nature of the human soul, we find that there is a natural transition from science to art, to religion. For that which appears in knowledge appears in art and in religion if we follow it only to the corresponding human spheres. I would like to say that Anthroposophy cannot help but stimulate the human being artistically when it takes hold of him in his capacity for feeling and emotion. And Anthroposophy cannot help but, when it takes hold of the human being in his or her life of will, allow that person to feel an echo of how, in some way, they have committed themselves to the divine world-shaper in their earthly existence, and to do what is willed by God. Then the will is stimulated to religious experience.

Dear attendees! In the ancient mysteries, what later divided into three for the sake of humanity's enrichment, emanated from a unity. In the ancient mysteries, in the wisdom schools of gray antiquity, which are hardly known to external history but which anthroposophy is getting to know, science was so imbued with spirit that, in relation to the human soul, this spirit-imbued striving was also beauty. What a person recognized, he incorporated into matter; he made his wisdom creative and artistic. And by feeling what he learned in his liveliness as the world-ruling divine-wise, the mystery school student offered his act of worship to the divine, so to speak, having re-created sacred art into a cult. Science, art and religion were one. Man could not remain in this unity. For the sake of human wealth, the threefold division into art, science and religion had to arise: into scientific certainty, artistic taste and religious belief.

Today, however, we have once again reached a point where the inner harmonization of science, art and religion has become a question for the most outstanding minds. We have seen this in Goethe and Schiller. Today we must again strive to bring together that which has come to us in outward differentiation. Anthroposophy does not want to contribute to the chaotic mixing of religion, science and art, after they have historically differentiated – and this has its justification; it would thereby fall prey to the fourth king in Goethe's fairy tale. It seeks to develop wisdom, the gift of the golden king, beauty, the gift of the silver king, virtue and religion, the gift of the brazen king, in an ideal separation; then they can radiate together into the human being. When the human being directs his attention to the whole human being, then what lives in him as the whole of life, and which is particularly expressed in the first years of childhood, becomes the source of nourishment and also of the fertilization of art. But what the soul has experienced before descending to earth becomes the source of fertilization of religious life.

Without any chaotic mixing of these three areas, anthroposophy in particular can lead people in a completely natural way to science, art and religion, to truth, beauty and goodness, by allowing each to exist in its own nature, but still allowing it to have an effect on people in such a way that in human experience, what is found as truth may encounter the beautiful, the artistic – and respond to it as directly related, as another expression of the nature of the world – and in turn encounter the good, the religious, and also respond to it as another expression of the nature of the world. Goethe, although not yet standing on the standpoint of Anthroposophy, felt this very strongly. “He who possesses science and art also has religion; he who possesses neither, let him have religion!” — thus spoke Goethe; and thus, in essence, must Anthroposophical spiritual science speak again today, in the world being, forming three interlocking organized links: religion, art and science. And man finds his true humanity only by allowing the essence of each of these world revelations to permeate his soul, while maintaining his full individuality. But in him they find each other in full inner harmonization when he becomes a whole human being through it. And in this harmonization of science, art and religion, man can find his full humanity, his development worthy of a human being through all levels of existence of his being.

Dear attendees! With its scientific character, anthroposophy is not doing well with our contemporaries. The scientists find that this anthroposophy does not have the character of what they call science; and in turn, the people of faith, those who, from a religious point of view, advocate a way for people to find paths to the spiritual world, criticize precisely this scientific character of anthroposophy. Scientists are accustomed to taking what is accessible to sense observation , what can be investigated by experiment, to take it in, to combine it rationally, and then to ascend to certain laws that underlie the natural phenomena that are perceptible to the senses.

Anyone who has familiarized themselves with the investigations in this field with the kind of scientific conscientiousness and serious inner discipline that underlie our newer science has often absorbed the opinion that exact, real, scientific only possible when it relies on external sense perception and on what the intellect can fathom with the judgments it makes about sense perception and with the conclusions it draws from them. This kind of research has a certain certainty, I would even say a certain ground in that which cannot be denied in its existence, because it proves itself in this existence independently of the human being and announces itself to him out of this existence. One may, as is the case with many physiologically or even psychologically minded personalities of modern times, believe that what the senses directly perceive, what is the content of human perception, is conditioned by the peculiarity of the senses, and thus has a certain subjective character. But they are certain that even if what is perceived directly has a subjective character, for external observation there still underlies something objective for the human being, which presents itself to this observation and provides a firm foundation for research. Therefore, such personalities, who are, as it were, schooled in the exact investigation of external natural phenomena, feel insecure at the moment when this field of external sensory phenomena is left behind and they ascend to other fields. They believe that the inner certainty that is guaranteed by observation and experiment and by the mind that is bound to them, ceases the moment one leaves the soil of this sensory world. This is the source of such judgments as that made by du Bois-Reymond in his classic speech “On the Limits of Knowledge of Nature”, that science ends where the supersensible begins. Anyone approaching anthroposophy with this attitude will naturally have to deny its scientific character, and basically it is only this psychological background that rebels in the widest circles today when the scientific character of anthroposophy is mentioned.

On the other hand, there are people of faith. They often do not dispute that Anthroposophy presents what it has to say about the supersensible worlds in the form of ideas and concepts, and also in the form of connections between ideas and concepts that are thoroughly scientific in character, or at least endeavor to emulate the scientific character. But they dispute Anthroposophy's legitimacy precisely because it strives for this scientific character. For they say: Whatever can reveal itself to man from the supersensible worlds must reveal itself to him in the most intimate experiences of his soul; man must, above all things, tend towards what he feels from the supersensible with feeling and inclination of will, and this supersensible must bear a certain mysterious character. It is precisely when one stands before the mystery with one's soul fervently and religiously attuned, before that which does not yield to the transparent idea, to the clear concept, that one can develop within oneself that elevation, that selfless devotion, which is necessary for the human being in relation to the supersensible world.

And so it is that precisely such personalities are of the opinion that anthroposophy, because it wants to bring the supersensible into the comprehensible element of human consciousness, thereby distorts the religious feeling of the human being, their pious devotion. What relates to the religious must – so it is said – bear an irrational character. One even says that religion must have a kind of paradoxical character, that it must not be confined to what is scientifically called the comprehensible.

Anthroposophy is now confronted with these two views. It is quite understandable that, compared to the usual schools of thought of our time, all of which can be more or less categorized into one of the two categories described, the scientific character of anthroposophy is incomprehensible and difficult to understand. For anthroposophy seeks to arrive at the supersensible in a scientific way, by paths other than those usually recognized in science, and it seeks to follow this path into the supersensible with courage — until the goal is reached where this supersensible subtle world yields to human ideas in exactly the same way as external nature yields to human ideas for natural science, and it becomes difficult for anthroposophy to justify its scientific character in the face of the often rigid tendency of the spiritual currents of our time. Now, in order to characterize this scientific character in today's debate from certain points of view, it will be necessary to address the methodology of anthroposophy from a certain point of view.

This anthroposophy feels most at home at its starting point when it can fully stand where our time of scientific thinking and scientific research has led. Dilettantism and laymanship in relation to natural science may perhaps be touched on enthusiastically by anthroposophy; but they will not be able to find the deepest inner satisfaction in it, because anthroposophy will seem to them to work far too much in the sense of scientific thinking. But it must be said that anthroposophy begins where today's recognized science ends. Today's recognized science starts from the externally given, rises from this given to the ideas called natural laws of this given. If we then live within these ideas, so to speak connecting the ideas we have gained from nature with our soul life, then we have an inner view of nature, and this inner view satisfies us because we can clearly survey the transition from one idea to another, because inwardly, so to speak, in the whole field of our natural ideas, we have clearly before us what presents itself to us externally in the details of sensory observation and experiment. And when this natural science has arrived at this experience of natural ideas, then it feels at its end. Anthroposophy, however, seeks to begin precisely at this point. It takes up what has entered into the soul as natural ideas, and looks at the state of mind of the person who has united such natural ideas with his soul. It looks at the way in which the human being has applied his own activity, has brought his soul and spirit into action while exploring nature, how he has arrived at his ideas of nature; it looks at the activity that the human being has carried out during the research, and it then seeks to develop this activity further. In a sense, it seeks to make the beginning with an inner soul development, using what natural science has arrived at as its end. This now seems to lead entirely into the subjective.

Yes, by further developing the ideas gained, by seeking an inner soul life as a continuation of what has been applied in relation to external nature, one believes that one can get into the purely subjective, into the purely personal, for which only assertions of a subjective character may be made.

Now, dear readers, for the first steps in this direction, this is undoubtedly the case. But anyone who follows the details of these inner soul exercises for the further development of human soul abilities in my writings “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science: An Outline”, and so on, will find that this subjective approach is only a transitional stage and that in the end, beyond the subjective, one arrives at an objective, an objective that is indeed inwardly experienced subjectively – like the ideas of nature – but which, in its certainty, in its validity, is as independent of human subjectivity subjectivity, as are, after all, the mathematico-geometric judgments that are worked out subjectively, albeit only formally. These judgments, however, are independent of human subjectivity in their truth character, despite being worked out subjectively. Only through the path taken by anthroposophical research does one not enter into a merely formal realm, as in mathematics, but into a realm in which human spiritual content is created that relates to realities. When we draw a triangle in mathematics and examine its laws, it is initially only an inward subjective experience, and we must then apply it outwardly to something that can be perceived by the senses so that we can speak of objectivity. The anthroposophical method leads to certain insights, just as in mathematics, but at the same time they lead to insights that have their meaning and validity in the truly spiritually existing world. This becomes clear when one describes – from a certain point of view, I can do this today – the methods that the anthroposophical researcher applies to his or her own inner soul life in order to enter the supersensible world. I say: from a certain point of view, I can undertake this, because this anthroposophical path of research is a very complicated one, it has to involve many details of inner soul practice, and with regard to these details, I must refer you to the books mentioned.

But now, with regard to today's topic, which is supposed to deal with the scientific character of anthroposophy, I would like to start from a kind of historical perspective, because from this the scientific character of what is currently trying to incorporate anthroposophy into human civilization will perhaps be most apparent. When we speak today of the methods by which anthroposophy seeks to penetrate the supersensible worlds, many of our contemporaries are reminded of methods that are similar to them, or which they perhaps even consider to be the same as anthroposophy.

Just in the last few weeks, I have had to talk about anthroposophical methods in a wide variety of cities, and again and again I heard the judgment: Europe is not suitable for pointing people to the ancient Asian yoga cult, to the ancient yoga system, where one is to prepare the soul through inner soul exercises in order to see something other than what it is able to see without these exercises in ordinary life and in ordinary science. But people who judge in this way do not realize that there is a radical difference between what I describe as the anthroposophical methods and what was present — albeit going back to a distant gray antiquity — in oriental wisdom schools and oriental spiritual currents as soul exercises for arriving at another world in the manner of those spiritual currents, other than the one ordinary life presents. If we point out what these schools of thought wanted to give to man, we immediately notice that the ancient spiritual and soul character of man in the East was quite different from that of present-day Europeans.

If we are unprejudiced, we must take seriously the idea that we are seeking a progression in human development from one metamorphosis of the soul life to another. Anyone who believes that the human soul was essentially the same in all cultural periods, or at most different in certain primitive, wild tribes, is making a huge mistake. Anyone who is able to immerse themselves in the way in which, for example, the ancient Vedas or other ancient documents of earlier times sought to convey wisdom to the world will find that this way of imparting wisdom relied on a very different receptivity in the human being, in a very different state of mind, and perhaps only anthroposophical research is in a position to provide information about how the human being has changed in this respect in the course of his development. If we immerse ourselves in the ideas that have taken on poetic forms in the Vedas, for example, we find that there is an enormous difference between the way in which the Vedas were absorbed into the soul life and the way in which we feel today that they are appropriate to our soul state. We feel the need today to have strictly defined, sharply contoured ideas, ideas that have a recognizably logical character, that are transparent, that appeal not directly to the feelings but only indirectly. These are only isolated character traits that I can give. But anyone who compares the wisdom handed down to mankind in the Vedas, for example, with what we today call our pursuit of science and wisdom, will find a huge difference. What is the reason for this difference?

Now, what is usually called psychology today is not very capable of entering into the inner workings of the human soul, which is so mobile and carries so many individual, characteristic, essential traits. That is why today we find little that actually resembles the wisdom handed down to us in the Vedas. But some clarity can be gained if we do not compare the content of the Vedas with our sharply contoured, intellectualized concepts, but rather if we consider the following fact.

We imagine a human soul that is in the process of transitioning from a state of sleep to a state of wakefulness. We imagine it is imbued with the content of a dream. This dream content can take on wondrous and beautiful forms, can reveal an inner drama, can have a pictorial character that carries a thoroughly poetic mood. Certainly, this dream content cannot be directly compared with the wonderful wisdom of the Vedas. But there is something to it when Plato senses the poetic reliving of the world's secrets by the human soul as something dream-like. If we follow the soul as it emerges from the state of sleep and has these dream images before it during the transition to the waking state, we follow its path further: the dream images gradually paralyze, the person takes possession of his physical nature, especially of his will nature; because only when he has taken possession of his full will nature does everything dream-like disappear. Then he is able to make use of his senses through his corporeality; then he is aware of his connection with the physical world around him, then he is able to grasp the difference between the world of dreams and the world of reality.

What, then, is actually the essential thing in this transition from the state of sleep to the waking state? We can observe how, as it were, the dream fades more and more as the daytime perceptions emerge; the daytime perceptions dispel the dreamlike. But no one can be in any doubt that it is a real experience of the soul to which we surrender in our dreams, and that that part of us which later takes possession of our physical body lives in these dream images. The dream images escape it by submerging into physicality. With a more refined psychology than is available to our contemporaries, one can follow what I am hinting at here in great detail. Then one will find out how the soul actually emerges from a state that we will leave undefined for the time being, through the dream state, how it is in a state in the dream state of not quite having its body. At the same moment that it has its body, it is no longer dreaming. When anthroposophical research is applied to these facts, the following emerges. Anthroposophical research, as it must be understood today and as it takes account of contemporary civilization, initially aims to develop the human thought life so that thoughts become stronger and more intense than they are in ordinary science and ordinary life. This strengthening of thoughts is achieved through meditation and concentration. One devotes oneself to a particular content of thought, applying all the strength of the soul to it. In this way, the soul strengthens itself in the same way that a muscle strengthens itself when it is used in work. The whole mental life changes. One gradually feels that one no longer lives in abstract, pale thoughts, which can only be stimulated by the external world, but that one lives in thoughts themselves, as in an element that is as lively as otherwise only the experience of the external sense world; and by developing the power of thought further and further, one finally becomes free from one's physical organization in one's thinking. One develops an inner soul activity that, to a certain extent, takes place outside the body. Only now do you begin to realize what it means to have an inner soul activity. At first, through these exercises, they take place in mere thinking. But thinking is independent of all corporeality; one can bring it to such thinking independent of all corporeality. But then, when one has brought it to such inner vividness in thinking, one can distinguish between what occurs in waking life and what is present for the person from falling asleep to waking up in the state of sleep. For now we know through direct observation that when a person is awake and thinking, he must make use of the body for the activity of his thinking. For waking, ordinary thinking, the body is the foundation. The thinking that is peculiar to us in ordinary consciousness cannot, so to speak, illuminate itself to such an extent that it becomes truly conscious through its own power; the body must be its helper. Thought must be thought in the body, so that the thinking that we use in science and in our ordinary lives today is simply thinking with the help of the body. In this respect, anthroposophical research in particular makes people more materialistic than they would otherwise be with regard to ordinary thinking.

But you also learn to recognize something else, namely, the inner state of mind in which you are when you devote yourself to body-free thinking, which has arisen through meditation and concentration, when you have a thinking experience in the soul freed from the body, and you can now compare what you experience with what the state of sleep is like. One now learns to recognize that, with regard to one's body, one is just as independent during the strengthened independent life of thought as one is otherwise independent in sleep; only in sleep, in the independent soul that has left the body, the weakest prevails, which can only with the help of the body inwardly enlighten itself in such a way that it comes to consciousness. Therefore, thinking remains unconscious during sleep; we descend into unconsciousness during sleep. We enter into a very similar state of freedom from the body after meditation and concentration. But now the thinking has become so strong that unconsciousness does not occur, but rather a fullness of consciousness, so that one lives in a state that is radically different from the state of sleep, namely in a soul life independent of the body. Now one gets to know the character of human sleep. One now knows that the human soul leaves the body when it falls asleep, but that in the present state of human development it has only those thoughts that can be inwardly illuminated with the help of the body to the point of awareness; and by has consciously risen to such a state of soul, which is free of the body and is filled with content, one now learns to compare this state with that in which the authors of the Vedas were.

These authors of the Vedas could not make use of the kind of thinking that we have in our present-day civilization, and we are led back to a state of mind from older stages of human development, when man simply did not feel it to be his natural state to convey the secrets of the world through the body in sharply contoured thoughts, but where he could, through a certain instinct, externalize his thoughts, even if they could unfold outside the body. We look back to conditions, not as we have them today, but to dreamlike, dull, but still to conditions in which people developed the most important thing they developed in their soul life, namely the view of the world, outside of their body. One gets a picture of how the development of humanity in relation to the state of the soul was from older times to the present day. It can be said that the last remnants of an earlier state were still present until the middle of the Middle Ages, even until the dawn of modern times. It was only in the age of Galileo and Copernicus, which taught people to see the world in sharp, mathematically modeled terms, that this age progressed to an experience of the soul in thinking through the body ; whereas up to this age one still notices how the last remnants of a soul state free of the body are present in a form of knowledge free of the body, and the further back one goes in older times, the more one finds such knowledge free of the body. This could only express itself in soul formations similar to dreams. In a sense, people passed from the body-free state to the state where they use the body and develop what corresponds to their insight into the spiritual world.

We have to look back to such times if we want to understand what is communicated to us in older literature about the wisdom of the world. We must not criticize this wisdom of the world directly with our conceptual worlds; then we destroy it and cannot recognize it in its truth. But if we can transport ourselves back to these older times, and to that through which these older people wanted to go beyond their ordinary perception, then much will become understandable to us. For these people, it was not our science that was everyday, but rather what they saw in their images, in their instinctive imaginations. They did not need to achieve this through special exercises first. For them, the task of further development had to consist of something different than for us. If we now let ourselves in for this realization with what has been handed down to us, and especially look at the yoga exercises of the Orient, we must say: All these yoga exercises aimed at achieving a way of knowing that goes beyond the body in a body-free state, a way of knowing that uses the body as a tool.

This may sound strange, and yet, to an unbiased observer, it is how it presents itself! The goal of the older humanity was precisely to achieve something that is given to us in everyday life. They did not have the sharply contoured thinking that we apply with such triumph in science; they sought to achieve it through their exercises. Yes, even if you engage in the systematically well-performed yoga breathing exercises, where the personalities devoted to them do not perform the breathing process in the usual way, but in an abnormal but still lawful way, we see that they were designed to enable you to grasp the human body with what you were in a body-free state of mind. One might say: What is given to us as a gift is what these people strove for through their yoga exercises; we see everywhere how they endeavor to think in such a way that the body becomes the tool of thought. Thus, for anyone who fully understands the facts, the ancient yoga exercises that have been preserved to this day have the effect of making them see: These people strove for the state of mind that is, so to speak, partly innate and partly acquired through our upbringing since childhood.

Now, of course, the question may arise: But such a student of yoga has, through his yoga exercises, explored the secrets of the world for his own perception, has settled into wonderful worlds; but when one hears what they describe as the revelations they have heard, one soon gets the idea: what they have experienced is indeed very different from what we can strive for today with our abstract, blown-off thoughts. But here is an important psychological fact that must be considered. What can offer man the highest in a certain relationship in his relationship to the world arises precisely from practice, from striving, from inner work, not from the finished state. The yoga students had to conquer themselves with inner soul conquests to see what is given to us as a finished product, and only during this struggle and through this struggle do we become attuned to the deeper secrets of the world. If what is achieved is innate or acquired, it is taken for granted and presented as the self-evident in the environment; one no longer lives into the secrets of the world, one simply sees through the world according to one's organization in the environment. Therefore, for us, who are on the horizon that the yoga students first had to reach, the contemplation of the deeper secrets of the world, which the yoga students contemplated, has ceased. And today we feel the necessity to continue the practice, to continue it at a different level, to take the starting point where the yoga students left off.

The beginning of the yoga training is dreamlike, instinctively pictorial; but it is precisely to what we today feel is the actual spirit of science that the yoga student sought to develop. Today, because the spirit of science is now the natural state of civilization, we have to start from this state in our soul constitution and develop it further. We can therefore say: the yoga student has developed to our way of thinking, we have to develop further from our way of thinking. The yoga student designed all his exercises to incorporate thinking into his soul activity. Today, when I describe exercises to be practiced for the purpose of attaining higher knowledge, I do say that these exercises must be directed towards strengthening the thinking, elevating it – not just to unconscious imagination, which belongs to antiquity, but to conscious freedom from the body. We must become free from physicality again, whereas the yoga student strove to enter into it; so in a sense we are going in the opposite direction.

But then I must describe this path further, how these exercises must strive to develop a liveliness of soul such as we otherwise have in the experience of external sense perceptions. In our sensory perceptions, we are to a certain extent independent of our physicality. The senses are integrated into our physicality. However, we become relatively independent of our sensory perceptions; it is only in our thinking that we fully take in what is revealed to us from the outside world. Only when we develop further from this thinking, which the yoga student first strove for, does it now become important to suppress this thinking itself at a certain stage and to bring about a state that is similar to sensory perception, which does not merge into thought, but which, so to speak, leaves thought behind in the physical body. The essence of our exercises undertaken for the purpose of anthroposophical research is this: to overcome thinking in turn, to rise to a state that gives the person an experience, so to speak, in a second personality, but in such a way that this second personality now has the intense, the strengthened, the pictorialized thinking, and that the ordinary personality with common sense, with healthy thinking bound to the physical body, remains behind, fully aware.

Thus anyone who, in today's world, seeks to gain direct experience of supersensible knowledge must strive to achieve this twofold division of their personality. Anthroposophy is not to be confused with any kind of pathological condition. In hallucinations and visions, the personality is lost in the hallucinations and in the world of visions; in anthroposophical research, the personality remains and the ordinary, body-bound thinking continues to live. Those personalities who enter the higher worlds live in them with their developed, metamorphosed thinking. Thus the anthroposophical researcher is always in a position to follow up with his ordinary personality what he sees in the higher worlds, and to do so in a strictly critical way.

This training is now an absolute prerequisite for the anthroposophical path of research; and what is in the human personality by virtue of this training, the scientific character of the state of mind, is by no means abandoned. This scientific personality stands there, criticizes, controls - and even narrates - from its scientific concepts that which the other aspect of the personality, the one that has entered the supersensible world, beholds. But then we must say: on the one hand there is the outer sense perception; natural science turns to it, it seeks the laws of nature, it seeks to relive inwardly in the natural ideas, which have the laws of nature as their content, that which appears outwardly to the senses. The anthroposophical researcher finds himself in the state of soul that arises from this. By forming the ideas of nature in nature, we are scientifically satisfied by the character that this world of ideas bears. This scientific conviction is an inner experience! It is not the external world, nature, that tells us what is scientific, but our own methodology. When we give these ideas a content from sense perception with our ordinary thinking, we give them a supersensible content with the higher gaze of our strengthened thinking. There is no other content of thought, no other logic, no other scientific method that prevails in ordinary natural science and that prevails in what is seen supersensibly by the anthroposophical researcher and handed over to the scientific soul disposition for description.

That is the inner connection. The Yoga Training has sought the spirit of science as its ultimate goal. We have trained it in the age of Galileo and Copernicus in the outer world of nature, we are leading it further to conscious inner vision, but we do not deny it. We examine what is seen in the higher sense in the supersensible world, exactly in the same way, through the same ideas, as we examine what can be fathomed through the eyes, ears and other senses in outer experiment. In its development, humanity has striven for science. What science has become has become a human state of soul. This state of soul is cultivated by working one's way up into the supersensible world through anthroposophy.

But developing thoughts is only one part of what is striven for in anthroposophical schooling. In the previous lecture on “The Harmonization of Science, Art and Religion”, I already indicated that by strengthening our thoughts through meditation and concentration, we come to an intuitive perception of the soul and spirit of the human being as it was in a spiritual and soul world before birth or conception. One can rise to the eternal part of the human soul in its prenatal existence by developing the thoughts that are present in ordinary science. But if anthroposophical research is to be complete, exercises of the will must be added to this development of thought. Again, I cannot describe in detail what must be undertaken as exercises of the will for the purpose of anthroposophical research; I must refer to the books already mentioned, but I can again say something in principle.

To train the will, it is above all necessary that we raise the will, insofar as it extends into thinking, to a higher level than it is in ordinary life. A good exercise for this is what I call “reverse imagining”, for example when we look back on our daily life in the evening, preferably in images, so that a different force has to be developed than is contained in the thoughts. When we review our daily life backwards in such a way, allowing it to pass before our mind's eye in great detail, for example when we go down a staircase, we would imagine it in such a way that we start from the bottom step and work our way up to the top; not lose one's whole day to it, but it can be done in a short time if it is practiced correctly; if we get used to thinking about the course of ordinary events, then we have to exert the will to imagine events differently than they usually happen. We can also feel a melody backwards in this way or imagine a drama backwards. In doing so, we develop the will to a greater strength than is usual. We can now help ourselves in such exercises by doing other will exercises. In ordinary life, we proceed – if we consider longer periods of time, we can point out – from metamorphosis to metamorphosis; but it is the circumstances to which we surrender and which then make others out of us. But if you take your own development into your own hands, for example, if you try to break bad habits, if you try to unlearn something that may take years, and make this striving a characteristic of your nature by by taking it up into the will, one tries to take his development into his own hands according to a strictly outlined goal. The will is thereby strengthened, and one attains something in relation to supersensible seeing in a different direction than in the direction of thought. I want to express that through a comparison.

Take the human eye. Because it is transparent and does not bring its own materiality into play, we are able to see through the eye. The moment it brings its own materiality into play through a disease of the eyes, we can no longer see. The eye must be selflessly integrated into the human organism if it is to serve the purpose of seeing. Now I do not want to claim that the human organism is diseased in ordinary life; but for supersensible vision it is just as unsuitable as a strong-sighted eye is for ordinary vision. Through the exercises of the will our organism becomes, as it were, spiritually transparent. Normally the body is spiritually opaque; we carry it with us, we live with our will in its materiality. Through the exercises of the will, it becomes transparent in soul and spirit; it becomes, as it were, a sense organ. Through it, we learn to see spiritually and soulfully, as we see physically through the transparent eye. When we look through our body that has become transparent, we stand – as if through our physical, sensory eye in a physical outer world – in a spiritual world. We have progressed from imagination to inspiration and to the actual experience of being in a spiritual and soul world. We learn to be in the spiritual and soul world with our soul in the same way as we are in the physical world with our organization.

It turns out that we now experience something in the image that we would otherwise experience in death: in death, the body is shed, while the soul and spirit live on. That this is a truth is expressed in the image for this body-free will, that is, for the standing within the spiritual world, in the same way that what applies to our sensory environment is expressed only through a thought. We thus arrive at the other side of human immortality; we add to being unborn, being immortal. The anthroposophical researcher thus ascends to a real vision of immortality.

But when one comes to this vision, one also learns to evaluate other soul states of ordinary life in the right way in a more refined psychology. What is present in the waking state as facts of the soul's life can be recognized through strengthened thinking. That is why I gave the example of the soul waking up through the dream world into the waking state and linked it to the strengthening of strengthened thinking. But when we now do exercises of the will, thereby entering into the spiritual world and also being able to gain an image of our soul after death when we have left the body, then we also get to know the moment of falling asleep more precisely for our ordinary life. At first, we experience falling asleep in such a way that the sharply defined ideas that permeate our soul during waking hours gradually become darker and darker. But now we know that when we pass through the gate of sleep, our consciousness is not killed, but only paralyzed; and by experiencing that we now also live in a strengthened will, we can now also consider the states in which the soul is when it enters the spiritual world after falling asleep. There we experience how the soul becomes more and more immersed in an overall feeling for the world, and when falling asleep, what is seized in a very special way is what is opposed to the pictorial character of dreaming. When we wake up, the soul is more inclined to express in dream images what it has experienced during sleep; when we fall asleep, however, we also enter into a kind of dream, which dampens down our daytime perceptions, but we move towards a general experience of the magnitude of the world. When waking up, thoughts are more likely to be grasped in the form of images, whereas when falling asleep, feelings and especially the devotional will are more likely to be grasped. In short, one now learns to recognize, to recognize psychologically, the transition of the soul as it experiences it when falling asleep, from the experience of one's own self to being devoted to the world in feeling and will.

One learns to recognize what paralyzes thoughts, what dampens them, but on the other hand also what allows the other soul powers to merge into the world, which, when experienced in a kind of state of consciousness while awake – and it can be experienced – represents the state in which the pious soul is, that pious soul that does not want to have its inner soul state clothed in thoughts and ideas, that wants precisely the ideas and thoughts to be subdued in order to give feeling and emotion to the totality, to the majesty of the world, to the divine that permeates the world. In short, through anthroposophical research one gets to know both the state where the human being strives towards thoughts and the state where he strives away from thoughts, and one learns to see through both states at a higher level. One learns to recognize that the human being lives in such a way that he first moves out of the universe to use his body, and then moves back towards the universe when he leaves his body again. The states that are then taken over into consciousness are the states of everyday knowledge and everyday piety; but these states are raised to a higher level in supersensible contemplation, which is achieved through anthroposophical schooling.

Thus it can be said that the scientific character of the soul is not taken away by entering the supersensible worlds through anthroposophical schooling, for what one has gained as a scientific conviction, as the state of mind that goes with it, is carried up when one tries to fathom what the said second personality sees in the supersensible world. On the other hand, however, what the soul selflessly wants to submit to, what it wants to immerse itself in, is woven into the ideas. This does not lose its majesty at all, this does not lose the character of its holiness at all, by being brought out of the mystery and brought to intimate inner vision, by which it makes us look up to it with devotion, with reverence. The way in which anthroposophy brings the mystery into the soul, where it can be grasped, does not take away its sacred character. And so anthroposophy seeks to maintain a scientific approach to knowledge, not only in relation to the objects of ordinary experience, but also to maintain a scientific approach to knowledge of the supersensible. Just as nothing is taken from nature when we know it in the right way, through devotion to its beauty and to its majestic peculiarities, so nothing is taken from what is supersensible when it is brought down into direct human experience in its true form, not in an abstract form.

Thus it is that one cannot convince oneself of the scientific character of anthroposophy through a cursory definition or through cursory logical discussions of the criteria of scientificity, but rather by living oneself into into the course of anthroposophical research. The person who reflects on it must convince himself that here there is real scientificity, and one that certainly does not prevent the supersensible from taking on a religious character again. And so one would like to say: Anthroposophy has the courage to proceed with scientific exactness, with a scientific attitude and scientific method where the ground of the outer sensuality no longer exists. Anyone who objects, saying that there is no ground at all there, is like someone who would say the following: Just as a stone is attracted to the earth and falls until it can rest on it when we live on earth, so all things on earth are attracted to it and must ultimately rest on the earth's surface. This is true as long as we move within the orbit of the [earth] planet. But the moment we ascend from the conditions on our earth to those in our planetary system, we are dealing with something different; there the planets support each other, and they do not need any special ground as a base. Anyone who wanted to say that there must be a special world ground so that the planets do not fall into the depths would be saying something foolish. So it is here too. If we apply the same exactitude of the outer science to the anthroposophical field of research, we find that the two mutually support each other. The totality of supersensible science, the totality of anthroposophy, arises from the mutual support of the individual truths.

Thus, Anthroposophy has the courage to further develop science from the sensory to the supersensory, and it ensures that the scientific character is not lost. But it is not so timid that it believes that mystery must necessarily prevail over what the supersensible world is, so that man may retain his piety. No! Anthroposophy has the courage to affirm that the greatness of something does not only have its greatness for man because it is unknown to him, but it proves its greatness even when it is known; and through the familiarity with what religious content is, religion must not be thought of as diminished.

Thus anthroposophy seeks to justify itself in the face of the two accusations I characterized at the beginning of today's reflection. For it seeks to penetrate into the supersensible world with full respect for science, and it also seeks to develop the courage to bring down the supersensible into the human heart. And this supersensible is great enough to fill the human heart in such a way that this heart can still develop in true devotion even when the secret is revealed!

Dear attendees!

When speaking about the relationship between anthroposophy and human life, it must be pointed out again and again how, on the one hand, this school of thought arrives at its results and how, on the other hand, these results can be absorbed by the human being. Anthroposophy only arrives at its results, however, when the anthroposophical researcher has first undergone intimate inner soul exercises, soul exercises that enable him to move with his soul forces independently of the conditions of the physical body, so that he can truly enter into that state which must be described as 'experiencing the soul outside the human body'. But when, after such preparations by the anthroposophical researcher, the content of the higher worlds has been glimpsed to this or that degree and results are available, then every human being, even the simplest human mind, can grasp these results with common sense and also appropriate them. And today I would like to speak about what Anthroposophy can become for the individual through this appropriation of the meaning of life, which the individual can acquire for himself through the appropriation of anthroposophical insights with the help of common sense.

What the anthroposophical researcher himself has, by penetrating into the supersensible worlds, needs no mention from me. For those who have even just begun to tread the path that leads to these worlds need no further convincing of what they gain from beholding them. But we must go somewhat further than this meditation on the path to the supersensible worlds if we are to understand what a person who appropriates the results with common sense actually gains.

There are essentially three stages of inner soul-searching by which the anthroposophical researcher reaches his goals, and today I will only briefly mention what has already been discussed in the previous lectures I have given here in the last few days. The first stage of these soul exercises consists in strengthening the power of thinking through a certain practice, making it more intense than it is in ordinary life and in ordinary science. Through this strengthening of the power of thinking, the human being then arrives at what I call imaginative thinking, imaginative imagining. One goes beyond the pallor, the abstractness of ordinary thoughts; one arrives at thoughts that are transformed into images, but in which one is just as vividly immersed [with the soul] as one is otherwise immersed in the experience of an external sensory perception. Through such exercises one attains a certain inner mobility of thought and through all this one's thinking is liberated from the physical corporeality of the human being, to which otherwise ordinary thinking is thoroughly bound. When the spiritual researcher has completed these exercises to the degree necessary for his particular disposition, he comes to survey his past life since birth as in a comprehensive tableau.

But this overview is an entirely active inner activity; it is not mere remembering either. This overview is a remembering of that which has been working and strengthening in our organism since our birth. The thoughts have become more intense and more pictorial; in this way they have at the same time become something different from the ordinary abstract thoughts that we carry in our soul. We have connected with thoughts that are indeed forces, and the same forces that our brain, when we are still a very young child, shapes and permeates and empowers until we are a fully grown human being. Thus, we first experience the forces of life in this empowered thinking. Through this, we see ourselves in our inner becoming here as an earthly human being since our birth.

Once you have managed to have the inner image of your earthly life before you in this comprehensive imagination, you can move on to the second stage of the exercises for anthroposophical research, which brings you to what I call inspired knowledge. One must absolutely disregard what these expressions traditionally carry with them; one must not think of anything superstitious or the like when doing so, but only of what I myself characterize here.

This second stage of supersensible knowledge is not attained by strengthening the thinking, but by treating the already strengthened thinking in such a way that one removes from consciousness those ideas that are present in consciousness through the strengthened thinking, and thereby acquires what can be called empty consciousness. If you are able to find yourself in this empty consciousness in your state of mind, which now allows nothing to enter from the external sense world or from the memories that are usually in you, then it is precisely by having first strengthened your thinking and then , to the perception of a real spiritual world, both in our present surroundings and, in particular, to the perception of the spiritual world to which the human soul belonged in its eternal essence before it descended from the spiritual world through birth or conception to take on a physical body here. Within the empty consciousness, one arrives at a real vision of that which is not present in the ordinary consciousness and which may therefore be called the object of an inspired realization, because it flows into our soul from initially unknown worlds, which is thus truly inspired by that which is so accessible to us from the supersensible worlds.

Once we have come to know the immortality of the human soul in this way, we can also come to know the other side of this human immortality by continuing the exercises from the thinking exercises to the will exercises. Again, one would say: on the one hand, the eternity of the human soul expresses itself as unbornness, and on the other hand, in the beyond of death, as immortality. But the further continuation to the third stage of supersensible knowledge then arises from exercises of will.

One trains the will in such a way that it strengthens itself. I have already mentioned that this is achieved by detaching the will itself from the thread of external events, for example, by looking back at the end of the day at the course of one's daily life, by feeling a melody backwards, by imagining a drama backwards [going back from the last scene of the last act to the first scene of the first act] and so on, thus in the opposite direction to the external course. If one tries to control and develop the will in this way, as one sets out to do individually in the way I have described in my books “Occult Science: An Outline of Esoteric Science” or “How to Know Higher Worlds”, and if one succeeds in this way in tearing the will away from its usual course and physical conditions, then one, as a spiritual researcher, enters into a real spiritual world. One gets the picture of death, of the soul leaving the physical body when a person passes through the gate of death; one gets the cognitive picture of the eternal part of the human soul after death.

[My dear audience], these are three stages through which man works his way up into the supersensible world. What he has to say about these supersensible worlds after going through these stages of knowledge can be followed with the ordinary human mind, provided one is unbiased enough. However, it is the case that this human mind must now, of course, take a certain different attitude, I would say, in that it must become somewhat flexible if it is to follow what anthroposophy has to say. So, for example, this common sense must behave in different ways depending on whether it is following what the spiritual researcher has to say from imaginative knowledge or what he has to say from inspired knowledge or from the third level of knowledge that I mentioned and that I call intuitive knowledge. It is really the case that someone who follows the results of spiritual science only through their common sense feels compelled to look differently at what is gained through imagination, differently at what is gained through inspiration, differently at what is gained through intuition.

If we get to know the supersensible world of human existence through imagination, we get to know through inspiration what the human being has gone through before birth or conception. By extending inspiration to intuition, we get to know what the human soul goes through after death. But once you have come to know these two worlds, what man comes to know in the physical world as supersensible and what he comes to know as the supersensible world before birth and after death, then you also have an overview of the relationship between these two worlds and you now come to know something even higher. What presents itself to intuitive knowledge is something still higher, in relation to both the sense and supersensible worlds. One comes to the realization of repeated earthly lives, which certainly once had a beginning and will have an end; but for the intermediate situation of the human soul, it is the case that the person once goes through a life between birth and death and then an existence in a supersensible world between death and a new birth, and that this is repeated by the individual human beings at the most diverse levels. By pursuing what is brought out of the supersensible world in this threefold way with the ordinary human mind, that which can be gained from anthroposophy as the purpose of life develops precisely in this pursuit.

Dear attendees, anthroposophy does not give trivial rules for life, it does not give trivial comfort for this or that situation in life or the like, but it points to what the human being accomplishes by struggling to understand it. And in what one goes through in coming to this understanding through one's own inner work lies what one can work out for oneself as the purpose in life that comes from anthroposophy. Anthroposophy does not impose a specific content on the human being, but rather points to an inner work and may promise only this inner work, that it is able to give the human being a purpose in life, an inner support and inner security through this work.

Let us take the first step: a person tries to use their common sense to work their way through everything that the spiritual researcher has to say from imaginative knowledge, for example about the forces that organize the human being as an organism and work within the human being. Anyone who tries to reflect on what the spiritual researcher has discovered will find that in the process of reworking the material, their thinking itself becomes more inwardly powerful and inwardly active than it is in ordinary life and in ordinary science. Ordinary life and ordinary science do not need this inner activity either, and that is precisely what holds back a great many people from anthroposophy, especially in our time. Today, people are accustomed to passively accepting everything that the outside world presents to them; they actually want to receive everything that comes to them, even in the form of knowledge, only passively, to enjoy it, so to speak. But anthroposophy, by its very nature, must make a different demand on the human being. Man cannot just passively surrender himself in thinking and imagining in order to understand; he must, by virtue of his inner nature, make his thoughts more powerful by setting about to gather the thinking power that reigns within him, to set it in motion and, in a moving thought, to follow what the spiritual researcher sees. But as a result, some people feel repelled by anthroposophy in the presence of it. They do not want to develop this inner strength in their soul; they want everything to be given to them, while they can remain passive. But it is precisely by demanding this kind of understanding that anthroposophy develops in the human soul that which leads to a certain independence of personality.

This, [my dear audience], is probably one of the first life experiences that a person has when he wants to get to know the world through anthroposophy. His personality becomes inwardly more independent, it is, as it were, inwardly condensed in such thinking - which he must practice - and thus he is given the opportunity to behave differently in life to many things than is often the case today.

[Dear attendees], one need only look a little impartially at life to see how passively people today are devoted to life, and especially to spiritual life. If you go to a party meeting today, for example, you can experience all kinds of interesting psychological phenomena. You can see how the audience does not counter the speaker with any inner independence of their own, but rather absorbs what is presented to them as if by suggestion. Catchwords would not have such power, phrases would not play such a role, if people could confront what is offered to them in this way with greater inner independence. And here it is precisely what one can get from anthroposophy: that one's own judgment is strengthened, made denser, that one's full personality is confronted with what comes from the outside world. That is an achievement for life in the first instance.

But what we get from this thinking, with which we pursue imaginative knowledge, goes much deeper into the destinies of human life. If we follow with common sense what the spiritual researcher says about the human being's inner organizing power, when he speaks of what a person thinks and what is more than thinking, what is a sum of inner living forces — we must then adapt this thinking to the inner work that the spiritual researcher himself develops. If he wants to bring his own ideas and thoughts, which are his means of expression, to people from the depths of his soul, he must speak in different thoughts from those borrowed from the external world of the senses. This stimulates the human being to unfold his active life forces; [by contemplating the spiritual researcher, the human being] appeals to his life forces, to his vitality. This causes the human being to bring his thinking down into his life, to bring life into it, so that a certain [freshness, an inner] confidence and strength comes into his thinking. The thinking undergoes a complete transformation, it becomes more powerful internally through the study of anthroposophy. If one continues this for a long time, this invigoration of thinking becomes apparent in what one achieves for one's organism.

[Dearly beloved attendees], there is a great difference in the way — this is just one example to characterize what a person gets from such a study of anthroposophy —, such as remedies that are absolutely correct remedies for certain diseases, acting on one or another human individuality. One can find remedies for these or those illnesses from the best medical methods and will still see that this or that organization remains dull in the face of a completely correct remedy. But by appealing to the deeper forces of his organization, by discerningly following what the spiritual researcher has to say, he calls upon healing powers in his organism. For what I recently called the body of formative forces, which we can see in a large tableau at a certain stage of higher knowledge, contains healing powers. It is not necessary that this strengthened thinking should work as a healing force from the outset; it can do so, but it will only really do so in the rarest of cases. However, anyone who has awakened their thinking through the inner freshness of their thinking power enables themselves to be affected by healing remedies in a more favorable way than someone who has not awakened their thinking power in this way. In this way we can bring about the possibility of being receptive to certain healing powers to which we would otherwise be insensitive. Many more examples could be cited of how directly such an understanding of the human being, which has been strengthened and refreshed in the way described, affects the human organism. We must say without reservation: precisely what is attained in relation to imaginative knowledge not only makes the human being stronger in relation to his thinking than he would otherwise be, but at the same time it invigorates him in relation to his physical being.

Anyone who has approached anthroposophy in this way will also soon notice that thinking becomes something that, like a current permeating it, fills their body more and more, so that they feel something going into their limbs; they become more skillful, actually simply in terms of the physical tasks they perform. People will discover how, by actually doing what I have described, they become much more skilled at the ordinary tasks of life, whatever their occupation. Anthroposophical work offers an extraordinary amount for our practical lives; in this respect, it already provides a purpose in life.

[Dear attendees], if we look at the second stage, which is reached in inspired knowledge, thinking feels stimulated again in a different way when we reflect on what the spiritual researcher in inspired knowledge from the supersensible world about the nature of this supersensible world, whether it underlies the nature that surrounds us or whether it is the supersensible world in which we ourselves are before birth or after death. Then thinking feels so stimulated [in a different way] that certain feelings are awakened in the person, feelings that are refreshed and become powerful. These feelings do not become so fresh and so powerful under any other influence than through the thinking pursuit of what has been explored through inspiration. Above all, you will see that [by training your mind in this way] you are able to penetrate nature with a completely different sense than you were able to before. I would like to say: Whereas before, when you looked at a plant, for example, you saw with your eyes its green leaves, its colorful petals and, to a certain extent, what the flower reflects of the sun, afterwards you penetrate, as it were, into the secrets of the plant itself. You feel, as it were, the sunlight absorbed by the plant pulsating within the plant. One gradually identifies with how the plant grows out of the germ, how leaf comes to leaf, how it drives out the flower; one's soul life goes hand in hand with the inner becoming of the plant itself and thus with every single [natural process]. It is something like a submerging into nature, like developing an elementary sense of nature. The peculiarity of the anthroposophical science that is meant here is that it does not produce a world-unrelated mysticism, but brings people closer to reality, gives them a sense of nature through which they can gradually deepen their understanding of the beauty and grandeur of nature, so that they can grow together again with nature and ultimately feel at one with it.

I am not saying, [dear attendees], that all these things cannot also be present to a certain extent through certain original, elementary, human predispositions. But what I am saying is that even for those who, through their innate abilities, have such qualities to a high degree, these can still be increased by pursuing the results of anthroposophical inspiration. Whether one has little or much of a sense of nature, one can still increase what one has in this way.

And another thing also comes about through the intellectual pursuit of inspired knowledge: one learns to empathize with one's fellow human beings in a different way. If, through the mental reliving of the imagination, one comes to possess one's own independent personality, then through the reliving of inspiration one comes into the inner life of nature, but also, to a certain extent, into the inner life of other people – again something that should be particularly considered in the present.

Let us look at how people today often pass each other by without understanding, or let us see how few people there are today who can really listen to others. Being able to listen to others is part of understanding people. How often do we see today that when someone speaks, if the other person has only a louder voice than the other, they interrupt and say what they want to say, what they know, even though social life could be very different if people were to approach each other with understanding. But [my dear audience], the person who follows the inspired insights with their thinking gradually realizes that what they experience with other people is basically something that belongs to the deepest part of their own soul. Here we have already reached a point where anthroposophy must go into its more precise results in order to be able to present certain things that are present in life in their correct relationships.

In our [sensory and] emotional life, we as human beings reveal what we experience in the outside world, which is the result of impressions from the outside world. But not all of these impressions directly form the content of our feelings, of our entire mind during our waking day-to-day life. Those who are able to study the nightly dream life with its inner drama more closely than is usually the case will already get an inkling of what anthroposophy can then raise to complete certainty: namely, that in the depths of our emotional life sits that which is the result of our intimate relationships [with the people] we come together with in life. Just as our dreams reveal in the most diverse ways what we might not even consider during the day, to which we are not attached with intense feeling, as it appears in the image, so the circumstances in which we find ourselves in our social interactions with people penetrate much deeper into our mental life than the things of which we are aware in our daily lives. There are relationships between people that penetrate deeply into the emotional life. We stand between people and talk to each other because we are involved in life, perhaps always only superficially, but there are many things that play between people at a deeper level. (Even for those who are not spiritual researchers, the dream life reveals many things.

Everything we experience [from person to person] forms the basis of our emotional life, our entire system of feelings. And some of the disharmony that arises from the depths of this emotional life, which arises in such a way that we feel permeated by an inner pain, an inner deprivation or disappointment, often stems from the fact that that relationships have been formed between people [that we have not brought to consciousness], which sit deep down in the mind, plague us and are just waiting for us to fully bring them into consciousness in order to place them in the right way in relation to our own soul life. Sometimes the solution to the mystery of our own mental life is that we know how to bring our experiences into consciousness in the right way.

If we now follow the results of inspired knowledge in our thinking, we acquire a sense of how to listen carefully to other people, for example, but in a broader sense, we also acquire an understanding of our fellow human beings, and it is precisely through this that we develop a social sense in the deeper sense. We develop that in us which makes us particularly suited to find our way into the social order of mankind for our own satisfaction and for the benefit of other people, insofar as this benefit can come from us. A person's life becomes most rich when he influences all good and evil in man by having trained his thinking in the comprehension of inspirational truths. World and human knowledge through this sense of nature and understanding of man is acquired by trying to penetrate the results of inspired knowledge. Again, it is the case here that anthroposophy does not make people unworldly, but rather brings them close to life and to people.

We experience many things in our time that are called social demands. But what is social feeling and perception is — [the unbiased can see it] — less developed in our time. But this is something that our time urgently needs to develop, and in this respect anthroposophy can and may fulfill a kind of task for the time by bringing people closer to each other in the way I have indicated. It is fair to say that it is precisely anthroposophy that can serve through understanding what I have described, through understanding the other person, through genuine, powerful love of neighbor. [And how is all this achieved, ladies and gentlemen? It is achieved by man acquiring a very specific internalized sense of truth by pursuing the inspired truths in the manner indicated.]

In our ordinary lives, we have – if I may call it that – a logical sense of truth. Through our conclusions [and judgments], we come to find one thing to be right and another to be wrong; this has a certain logical character. If we then apply this logical character to the inspired truths, our whole understanding of the world becomes internalized. Our sense of truth itself becomes different. We begin to feel that which proves to be right in the context of the world as something healthy. [This is a great achievement, my dear audience, when we no longer perceive a judgment, a conclusion, merely as logically correct, but truly perceive that which is right as something that heals, preserves and strengthens the soul so that we have a sympathy in looking at what is true]; when error presents itself to us in such a way that we perceive it as something that makes the soul sick, weakens it, and inwardly as an antipathy. As a result, something arises in the soul at a higher level that can be called a “psychic-instinctive life”, something that, precisely because it is instinctive, can guide us safely through life.

We know that animals have a certain security through instinct [in relation to physical life]; they avoid what is harmful to them as food and choose what is beneficial to them. Of course, we cannot compare the life of the soul with the life of physical instinct; but when we see something similar occurring in human life at a higher level [because it occurs at a higher level in the soul], we have to speak of a psychic-instinctive. [One comes to live in the world in such a way that one feels instinctively secure about truth and error, like a color, as an animal feels through its instinct about its food and poisons. It is precisely through this that this soul instinct enters our human organism through the contemplation of inspired truths. It is precisely through this that we enrich our purpose in life quite substantially.

Man gains something, [as inner support], such as life security, by being able to acquire this instinctiveness at a higher level. And precisely because we acquire the ability to perceive something as healthy conclusion or to perceive it as something pathological or destructive, precisely because of this, we are able to develop a sense of nature and understanding of people.

If I may mention another [dear audience], we come deeper into the results of anthroposophy. What is needed above all as preparation to receive the revelations of the supersensible worlds with one's developed knowledge is a certain quick apprehension, a certain presence of mind. I have described how to develop this in the writings “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science: An Outline”. Why do you need presence of mind? Well, at the moment when the real spiritual world appears before you, you are no longer dealing with the same conditions of space and time as before; rather, it is necessary to grasp a spiritual reality at the same moment it appears. For if one is not sufficiently quick-witted to grasp it at the very moment it appears, it is already gone; one cannot grasp it at all. It is a basic requirement for the anthroposophical spiritual researcher to acquire a certain presence of mind for his research. What he gains through inspiration and grasps with presence of mind still has something of the way the thing was found clinging to it when he reflects on it. For when a person reflects on it, he stimulates in himself the qualities that led to the discovery of something like this. (It is therefore a training of presence of mind to follow the inspired truths, if they really are such, in thought.) But in doing so, we make ourselves more capable of dealing with life. For how much some people suffer today when they cannot come to a decision about this or that in life that requires them to make a decision! Becoming decisive is what can be gained particularly from thinking about the inspired truths. And this presence of mind is further enhanced when one becomes consciously aware of how one can now grasp in an instant many things that previously required long chains of thought to understand, because one perceives them directly as healthy truth or as a disease-causing, destructive error, as directly as one otherwise has a taste, smell or tactile experience. It is absolutely the case that one develops the same kind of aliveness in relation to truth and error within oneself as one otherwise has in relation to external sensory perception, but that one develops this aliveness as the experience of a higher, supersensible realm.

[Now, dear attendees], the spiritual researcher then goes on to explore what presents itself to him through intuitive knowledge by further developing and strengthening his will so that this will becomes independent of the physical body and the person is able to place himself in the external spiritual world. He is then able to be in the external spiritual world with his soul and spirit just as he is in the physical world with the help of his senses. But this standing within the external spiritual world is basically nothing other than an experience of one of the noblest human impulses on a higher level of life: it is an experience in love. It is also an experience in freedom, for man becomes unfree only by becoming dependent on his physical body, as I explained in detail in the early 1890s in The Philosophy of Freedom.

, as I explained in detail in the early 1890s in The Philosophy of Freedom. The moment a person rises to have impulses that he grasps through moral intuition, he becomes a free personality [in a moral sense]. But he can also become a free personality in relation to his whole position in relation to the environment, namely to the spiritual, supersensible basis of this environment, to the supersensible basis of his own human being, when this supersensible basis presents itself in the experience before birth and after death and also in the experience of repeated earth lives.

What is contained in an external spiritual world, and also in an external spiritual world of facts, is love on a higher level, the love that, even in the sense world, frees man in a certain sense from what would otherwise be imposed on him by his physicality through his urges and instincts. Karl Julius Schröer once gave a beautiful definition of love, which he explained in more detail in his book about Goethe, saying, “Love is the only passion of man that is free of selfishness.” It cannot be said that love is free of selfishness in its lower stages; but it must be said that as love develops to ever higher and higher stages, allowing itself to be more and more imbued with soul and permeated by spirit, it will make the essence of the human being, in which he merges with his own essence into the other being and submerges with his own essence into the other, more and more free of selfishness. And precisely by making this love a real power of knowledge in intuitive insight, it will also awaken love in this sense in man, in accordance with the intuitive truths that are contemplated.

Dear attendees, I know very well how the present shrinks from speaking of love as a power of knowledge; nor is it at all about ordinary love as a power of knowledge. But when love is elevated through such [serious soul-will exercises] into the experience and experience of the spiritual world, then love becomes a power of knowledge; then, precisely through this loving engagement with spiritual beings and spiritual facts, one attains real objectivity, the penetration of the object in its true form into human knowledge and thereby also into the human overall experience. It is precisely in this development of intuitive knowledge and also in the intellectual pursuit of the results of this intuitive knowledge that one notices how man comes to the experience of his self and also what hinders him from experiencing his self.

For, [my dear audience], anyone who looks into his own heart without prejudice will very well realize how little his own self actually stands before his soul. More or less, what we call our self in ordinary life is only a summary of what is reflected from the outside world as if in a single point. But what the real I, the real self is, is not at all vivid to ordinary consciousness; and if we were to live in such a way that our ordinary consciousness were not interrupted again and again by sleep, we would not experience the human I at all for ordinary consciousness. If we were able to go back to an experience of things in an uninterrupted, uninterrupted course of our consciousness since birth, we would still only find a sum of external images of experience in it, but not the human ego. We become aware of the ego precisely because we withdraw again and again from external experience into a state of sleep – even if we do not develop consciousness in the process. [It is exactly the same when we look back and remember our life.] We actually only ever see what we have experienced during the day, and we always have to see it interrupted [by sleep] during the night. What presents itself through this interruption is, in a person's life, a sum of dark spots in the brightly lit space of memory. If it were not for these dark spots, we would have no resistance to the light that arises from them. We would only experience the outside world, not ourselves!

But the one who ascends through intuitive knowledge to the contemplation of repeated earthly lives, only then gets a view of the true self of man, which goes through repeated earthly lives and can only be recognized in this going through repeated earthly lives. Anyone who has gone through this, as the spiritual researcher has to express himself about the nature of his research into repeated lives on earth, gets a vivid idea of the self of the human being. But he also gets a vivid idea of what knowledge in love is: merging with the external object of the spiritual world. And he gets an insight into the fact that we can only really experience our true self when we become selfless. And love in particular, when it is described in its higher stages as the “only passion that is free of selfishness,” it is at the same time that which allows us to experience the power of our own self in our experience of the external world, in our devotion to the external world.

This is a profound mystery of human nature: that one only experiences one's self when one experiences the outside world, embraces the outside world in love and is able to penetrate [into the secrets of the outside world with love] so that one can immerse oneself in it with one's entire being. This underlies many sayings, such as Goethe's: He first acquires his true self who first loses it in order to gain it. Only when we live ourselves into the world do we thereby live ourselves into our true self; whereas our ordinary self is only [thereby ours] in that it is based on physical corporeality and thereby diverts us from our true self. But by training himself in such a way of thinking about the results of intuitive knowledge, the human being comes to not only think, feel or sense his self, but to bring into a certain [context] that which is most important to him for the earth – that is the human will.

How do we actually stand in relation to the will for ordinary consciousness? When we are awake, we are really only fully awake in our mental life; our feelings are in a state towards our ordinary consciousness that is otherwise like dreams, except that they occur in our soul life differently than dreams; but what will is, has sunk so deeply into the subconscious that it is experienced like the states from falling asleep to waking up. Let us just realize what happens when we carry out the simplest volition, for example when we raise our arm and hand. First we have an idea: the intention to raise our hand and so on. Then what is mysteriously hidden in this intention penetrates down into the depths of the organism, and we know just as little about what is going on down there as we do about what is going on with us from falling asleep to waking up – until we then find ourselves waking up. We also find ourselves again when we look at the raised hand or arm from the outside after the executed volition. [Thus we find the volitional content of our thought.]

In a sense, every single act of the will is a falling asleep and a waking up and an intermediate state of being absorbed in sleep. By developing in oneself the strengthening of willpower and the liberation from the physical body, the whole will becomes like a transparent, holistic sensory organ. Just as we have physical organs, for example our eyes, and through them see the physical world, so at a different level the human being sees into the spiritual world through his or her entire spiritual organization, and thereby also into the essence of his or her will. When a spiritual researcher describes the nature of the will or the nature of the human ego, they must clothe this description in such thought forms that anyone who follows these thoughts with a healthy understanding of human nature will receive something of the reflection of how the will must be spoken of in this particular way, how the human ego is connected to the will [this deeper aspect of human nature]. This human ego is basically as deep down in human nature as the will itself; it must be brought up. But a reflection of this bringing up passes over to him who reflects on the intuitive knowledge of the ego. In this way he develops energy of action in himself, in this way he strengthens his will.

While the reflection of imaginative insights elevates the personality and can make it independent, while the reflection of inspired insights ignites the human mind in the most diverse ways, leading to an understanding of nature and of true human understanding and to an experience of the healthy and the sick in truth and error, the reliving of intuitive knowledge educates the human will. Those who educate themselves in this way will soon notice how their will becomes more active and how they truly begin to love what their destiny imposes on them in the outside world. We learn to fit into our destiny, we become strong in relation to our will in an active and passive way towards life; we become strong also in bearing suffering and pain as well as in experiencing joy. We become strong – not by passing by the suffering and pain of life; no, but through what is aroused [in our mind in the healthy and sick soul life], we become more receptive to the joys and pains of life. We do become more sensitive to things and experiences, but by reliving intuitive insights, the will is strengthened so that we can go through life more uprightly and endure our destiny more surely in both suffering and joy.

And by developing the reliving of intuitive knowledge, we feel connected to the world in a way that itself represents a religious sense of the world, which represents what the deepest divine impulses in the world - through immersion in love in this world - are capable of achieving. The religious and artistic sense is kindled by this immersion in love in the world, to whatever extent it may be present. Those who adhere to anthroposophy in this respect will benefit themselves in terms of the further development of their artistic, [religious] and moral being if they adhere to what has just been indicated in anthroposophy.

So, [my dear attendees], anthroposophy, by wanting to speak of what can become the purpose of life through it, does not approach people with some abstract sermons or admonitions, but in such a way that it tells them: When people experience what can be explored in the spiritual worlds through it, he acquires inner strength for his thinking, which he makes alive, and for his feeling, which he makes more inward and more accessible to world phenomena. He also acquires further development for his will, which he makes stronger and at the same time more capable of suffering, but also more suitable for responding to the joys of life in the right way.

This is what anthroposophy has to say about the purpose of life that a person acquires by immersing themselves in anthroposophy and delving into it [a certainty in life that cannot be gained in any other way]. Anthroposophy has nothing ready to give to a person in this regard as their purpose in life, but only what they can work for themselves, but will possess all the more surely for it.

Life is something that philosophers view in a variety of ways: one views it pessimistically, another optimistically, and yet another more neutrally, and so on. But however one may feel about these various nuances, anyone who looks back on what he himself has been through in life will agree with the maxim: “Only those who have to conquer it daily deserve freedom and life!”

In every sense, life wants to be conquered by people every day. And that is good; because those personalities who would only passively grow into life would also have nothing of life for their own being, because what a person really possesses is what he has to conquer in life. If we remember the truth that only those who must conquer it daily deserve freedom and life, then we may add: Anthroposophy, for its part, wants to bring the means to man through which this daily conquest can be carried out by man!

Berlin, March 12, 1922

Dear attendees! It is admitted from many sides that today, when it is said that there is an urge to find something for the heart, soul and spirit of man that could not come from the previous traditions and also from the present science, it is not just the ideal or the longing of a few that is being expressed. It is admitted that a need of the times is being expressed. Anthroposophy wants to serve this need of the times. That it can even come close to doing so, however, is disputed by many. It is admitted that the need for spiritual deepening and for an uplift of the soul is present today in the most eminent sense. But people behave very strangely when they judge the anthroposophical spiritual movement on the basis of ideas that they often believe were really born out of these needs of the time. Among many others, one judgment is typical, which goes something like this (I will not give the name of the person who had this judgment printed; names are not important, as they often only annoy, but this is a judgment that is asserted from many sides): Anthroposophy is the wrong path after a correctly recognized goal that is necessary for the needs of the time. There must be something extraordinarily remarkable at its basis if it could be said that Anthroposophy could indeed recognize with a certain certainty the right and even necessary goal for the needs of the time, but that it was also, in the fullest sense of the word, a mistake to pursue this goal.

Let us now, at the end of this week's course on anthroposophy, try to understand what might actually underlie such a judgment.

Anyone who makes such a judgment realizes that the scientific way of thinking has educated the souls of people in the civilized world for centuries, has given their search a certain character, and has left a certain imprint on what they call knowledge. He also realizes that what has been instilled into humanity in this way must be taken into account. This has found its way into all minds, even the simplest ones; it has also given these simplest minds the critical standard for everything that approaches them as a world view. Furthermore, the critic recognizes that it is the old traditional creeds and world views that profess to have a certain knowledge of the supernatural and the eternal in human nature, but that the way in which they present this knowledge to humanity is precisely what fails to satisfy the needs of today's humanity, which has been shaped in the way described by the development of recent centuries. And so a judging person sees: There is humanity thirsting for satisfaction in its world view; there are others who are, so to speak, natural leaders, who see this humanity before them, but who do not know how to speak to this humanity – neither from the perspective of modern natural science nor from that of the old traditional creeds and not even from what they knew how to make out of the two — to speak to this humanity in such a way that humanity is able to receive what is said as a proclamation of what it demands from its thus developed needs of the time. And then those who judge see that anthroposophy appears. One may think as one will about the details of what emerges from the anthroposophical method of research, but even they will admit that anthroposophy is trying to take account of these contemporary needs that have just been characterized.

And then the judges say: Yes, a certain intellectualism, a certain rationalism, has developed precisely in scientific thinking. But if one develops the human soul only in the sense of this rationalism and this intellectualism, and if one offers the seeking souls only what can be achieved in this way, then this human soul does not feel satisfied. For its yearning, its urge, arises from something other than mere intellect or than that which can be satisfied by mere rationalism. Therefore, those who sense the need of our time but are unable to enter into anthroposophy speak of the fact that we cannot approach our contemporaries with intellectualism or rationalism; that which is offered as a world view not be clothed in the forms of pale, abstract thoughts; it must not be won by a [rational] path; it must be brought forth from the irrational depths of the human heart, perhaps even from the subconscious depths of the soul. And then perhaps someone will also say: What man recognizes has already become an object; but what he is to revere as his eternal in the soul must not be an object of knowledge. One can also hear that what man thus turns to must be an Unconditional, which penetrates into the human soul somehow, not by the clear path of thought, but by an irrational path. And one can hear similar things.

Something actually presents itself in a remarkable way when one considers reviews of anthroposophical will today. People criticize anthroposophy for wanting to overcome mere intellectualism, mere systems of thought, but for being something rational itself, for working with thoughts. People shy away from mental work, and with some justification, and it is said – again with some justification – that anthroposophy does not fully want to get rid of thoughts; that is why people are somewhat wary of it. It is said that the newer world view has been burned by the thought life, despite it being so cold and pale. One would like to take from the unthought, from the seething of the soul faculties, which are not touched by the thought, that which is to become the content of a satisfying world view and world knowledge. It is then quite natural that, if one shuns the thought, one guards against wanting to express such a world view in thoughts. And so, when one wants to express the content of one's soul, one chooses the thinnest of thoughts. One must have thoughts after all, because mere feelings or impulses of the will or something merely irrational cannot be incorporated into a worldview, nor can they be incorporated into a life that is merely conceptual. One cannot even become aware of it. But if you want to bring what you are already striving for into consciousness as the content of your soul, then you make your thoughts as thin as possible. You make a very small, tiny thought: the irrational, the unconditional, and so on. But you have not escaped the thought, you just want to make the thought so small, so tiny, so easily manageable, so infinitely trivial that you do not realize that you have a thought at the end, in which you want to summarize something else. In contrast to this, anthroposophy seeks to recognize to the fullest extent, in the most comprehensive sense, what fate the life of thought has actually undergone within the human soul in recent times. Anthroposophy knows that with modern science, the life of thought has acquired a certain character, one that allows it to penetrate into the outer world, into the world of the senses, but not into that with which the soul can feel connected in its eternal essence. But Anthroposophy, taking into account all the tremendous spiritual values gained through the more recent development of thought, cannot simply exclude thought. Rather, it says to itself: Humanity has developed once up to thought, to the comprehension of thought in its purity, and in coming to this, thought has indeed become something that initially has only a very limited field. But Anthroposophy knows: this thought, as it was gained, must be regarded as something absolutely valuable, it must be the starting point. It does not shy away from accepting that as a gift of human development, which has brought great results in a certain area of humanity, but which, in order to achieve these great results, has made the sacrifice that the human soul must have in its eternal perspective.

Thus, Anthroposophy first turns to the realm of thought, regarding thought as a germ that, while it cannot be taken directly for the immediacy of worldviews in the way that natural science has carried it on the waves of its development, but can be developed, from which something can be extracted that is not yet revealed by itself – just as the fully grown and flowering plant that is about to bear fruit is not yet present in the germ, but is only hinted at for those who can judge the germ. And so anthroposophy seeks to strengthen thought through meditation and concentration, the means of inner soul development.

Then, when we strengthen it through meditation and concentration, it becomes something different in our inner experience. And I was able to show that by strengthening the thought inwardly, we first see the supersensible aspect of what lives here on earth as a human being: we see the physical body; we see the formative forces body, the time body, that which is thoroughly organized between birth and death as something spiritual, which underlying the physical body as the [creative] spiritual force and which is so constituted that, when the thought strengthens itself, it can condense so strongly that it itself is identical with the sum of those forces that are at the same time growth forces, formative forces of the physical organism. These formative forces, by being born with us into the physical world, become rarified in the human organism; they become powers of thought. Thus we take them up into abstract thought. But when we condense these abstract thoughts again through meditation and concentration, they become inwardly full of sap, vigorous in growth, and become real growing formative forces of the human organism. In this way, we move up in full, living knowledge to that which forms, permeates and supports the human organism between birth and death. And when we are then able to move from imaginative knowledge to inspired knowledge, that is, when we can remove from consciousness these thoughts, the formative forces, that we have attained through meditation and concentration, so that we can create empty consciousness, then we move we advance to the perception of the spiritual in the natural environment, advance above all [to the perception] of the spiritual soul in the environment, as we ourselves were before we descended into the physical world and connected with a physical body. The inspired knowledge thus shows us the spiritual soul according to the side of the unborn.

What do we do when we do such exercises and thereby gain certain insights that satisfy our need for knowledge? What are we seeking within the human power of thought by doing such exercises?

If I want to hint at what one is looking for, then I must say the following. The human soul is a unified whole; but it appears in three different external revelations: as a thinking soul, as a feeling soul, and as a willing soul. But in thinking, there is also willing; and in willing, there is also thinking. One would like to say that the life of thought is only the main thing in the life of thought; it has a hidden life of will in it. When we connect and disconnect thoughts, so that we enter more and more into reality through the disconnecting and connecting, the will works in this connecting and disconnecting of thoughts. But one does not see that; one overlooks this will, as it were, one hides this will. But when we meditate and concentrate, we disregard what the ordinary consciousness has as the content of thought; through meditation and concentration, through resting on a particular content of thought, we suppress, as it were, precisely that content. But what we bring up into consciousness is the will, as it is never otherwise taken into account, which lives in thinking itself. And it is this will that one grasps in order to then grasp with it the formative forces of the body and the eternal part of the soul, as it was before birth, as it was in the spiritual-soul world, in order to enter into a physical body. Thus, in the will, one grasps what can be grasped by the human being on the one side of eternity. The other exercises I have described are exercises of will; they lead to the will becoming independent of the physical body. And what is it that we are seeking when we practise this strengthening of the will? Just as we seek the will in the power of thought through meditation and concentration, so we seek the thought in the will through the exercises of the will. When we develop our will in our ordinary lives, we actually notice nothing of the power of thought in this will. We do start from the idea, as I have already explained these days, that when we bring about a simple development of will, for example, when we just raise an arm or a hand. But then the will penetrates down into the depths of our organization, and we see the result again only in the raised hand, in the raised arm. But anyone who does such exercises of will as I have described will find that, wherever he turns his will, it is permeated and glowing with the power of thought, with a power of thought that goes down into our limbs, a thought-power, the content of which we cannot even describe as human thoughts, but whose content we must describe as world-thoughts, because we stand in them through those thoughts that are not in our consciousness, but which are in our whole being and in our whole development of will. These thoughts, which are not in our consciousness, we discover as world-thoughts, as wisdom, but also when we lay down our body and go through the gate of death. Within our stream of will, we discover our eternal selves through thoughts that are otherwise deeply hidden in the human soul. This is how the picture of knowledge of dying emerges; this is how we come to know what we are when we have passed through the gate of death and moved back into the spiritual world.

Thus one sees that anthroposophy seeks the will in the power of thought and the thoughts in the power of the will. And by taking into account, in this way, I would say for itself, what a person otherwise leaves out of account in life, it comes precisely to that which otherwise remains hidden for the person, namely, to that which passes through birth and death as the eternal part of the human soul; and at the same time it comes to that which underlies all external nature as its spiritual-soul element. Anthroposophy values the thought. In thought-exercises it values thought as the germ from which other soul faculties are developed, and these are unfoldments of the will. But anthroposophy also appreciates thought when it lies hidden beforehand, like a flower in the bud. However, because one knows the thought beforehand from the ordinary consciousness, it is coaxed out as something well known when one experiences the will independently of the body.

Thus, anthroposophy is able to respect the thought and to endure it quietly when it is said that it is rationalistic after all. It is not rationalistic, as the people who say this believe, but it is able to make something else out of the thought at the same time, by appreciating the level of the thought.

Anyone who now goes through these exercises, both intellectually and will-wise, will sense something before actually entering the spiritual world that should not be ignored if anthroposophical research is to be appreciated in the right way. A true rationalist who immerses himself in the world of thought, which is rejected by the needs of the time, does not actually realize how thin an element of soul thought is. But he who does become aware of this will speak something like Friedrich Nietzsche spoke — it is recorded in his posthumous writings — about the tragic philosophical age of the Greeks, where he shows how those pre-Socratic Greek philosophers came to the first reflections, which, although not yet as pale as ours, nevertheless already had enough of a pallor of thought in them. Nietzsche found these concepts of Heraclitus, Parmenides and the others chilling; the human soul literally feels permeated by the icy cold in these thoughts. Nietzsche describes this in a poignant way as a philosophical experience of the most intimate kind.

Anthroposophical research must come to this experience and must know with whom what lives in the soul can be compared. If one can approach this thinness, this paleness and abstractness of thought, and really experiences it, then one does not set oneself above it by simply returning to the full succulence of life, but one surrenders to these thoughts. If one wants to enter the spiritual world, then a certain fear comes over one, a fear of nothingness, the fear that always arises before the void. And this fear must be overcome in such a way that the person is well prepared beforehand by such things as I have also described in the book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” and in the second section of my “Secret Science.” The person must be prepared to go through this fear in the right way, so that when he arrives at the experience of the pale thought, he has the certainty: You have to go through this fearfulness, just as you have to go through the state of sleep for the time from falling asleep to waking up. But just as you may believe that you will awaken from sleep every morning, so you may believe that when you go through this fearfulness, a world will greet you that you will only be able to judge then. Before that, you have only earned the confidence that the spirit permeates the world and that you will find it when you leave this state of fear. The one who wants to prepare the soul to see the spiritual world must undergo many trials.

And when, on the other side, the human being is to arrive at the pictorial experience of death, he experiences something else. The spiritual world appears in the form of objective world thoughts from the currents of the will. But after it has emerged in this way, after we begin to imbibe these thoughts, which are greater than our subjective thoughts, in which we feel that the laws of the world, as living beings, draw themselves into our organism, we then become aware that something is also drawing into our will impulses, drawing into them like an alien feeling that takes hold of us as a certain anger at the merely finite. However paradoxical it may sound, one must experience a certain anger, one must expose oneself to it, at the experience of the eternal in the finite. This anger gives one something by which one can visualize the great distance between the infinite and the finite. For what is to be experienced by man must be cognitively experienced by the spiritual world. It must be grasped in clear thought, but if it were only that, it might be merely rationalized. But it penetrates into the human being as reality, entering into a relationship with human feeling and also with human will impulses, so that it is clearly announced that we are dealing with the unity of a reality, not mere thoughts, in the human being.

Dear attendees, what can now be clearly and distinctly present in the developed soul in this way is, however, present in all human souls, even in those belonging to the most naive minds, it is present in the subconscious state. It is present in the subconscious state when, from the newer spiritual development, man approaches the abstract thoughts, as they occur in natural science, for example, when he approaches them with the intention of creating a world view out of them. Then he experiences subconsciously what the anthroposophical spiritual researcher experiences consciously, he experiences this fear described. He does not bring it to consciousness, does not bring it up into his mind, but he devises logical reasons why what anthroposophy now wants, for example, by looking at thoughts, would be impossible. He reinterprets it to himself in order to avoid the necessity of transforming the thought in a living way and penetrating through the fear, as one penetrates through the night with the confidence that one will wake up again in the morning. And on the other side stands the shyness — that anger that overcomes one — to enter into the reality of the human soul as eternal.

In this final lecture, I will give you only a few characteristics of what the living knowledge of anthroposophy can do for the human being who, as I said in the previous lecture, can use his or her common sense to can relive with his healthy human understanding what is lived in this way by those who are really entering the path into the spiritual world to seek that which the deepest need of our time in this world is sighing and pushing for in the human soul. And in the face of this, people spend all kinds of energy, and certainly rationalistic developments, in order to avoid admitting to themselves that they shy away from that fear, from that patience in the face of anger, which I have described.

Then such people come along and say: Yes, it is right, people's need for time must be satisfied. But we don't want to know anything about anthroposophy, because it wants to take refuge in thought again – we have seen how it wants to do so not in a rationalistic form, but in a completely different form – but we want to seek out of the irrational what can satisfy the human soul. We want to try to analyze what can be in every human soul in order to find out how it can be expressed in the simplest non-rational way. Then such people believe – at least that is how they speak – that they can bypass anthroposophy by reinterpreting what they experience in their subconscious!

And then you can experience some very strange things in the opposition to anthroposophy. For example, it is said: This need of the time already exists, but anthroposophy is a wrong path to the correctly recognized and necessary goal; and those who correctly recognize this need of the time but do not want to go the wrong path of anthroposophy — oh, they would know how to wait for what Anthroposophy offers, but how the need of humanity for time could be satisfied from completely different, irrational human soul foundations.

Now it is very strange when you address such objections individually, in concrete terms. Today, I will avoid mentioning names for good reasons; but one can find out, for example, I am telling facts, that it is said: Oh, what does this anthroposophy want? There are other people today who are trying to gain a relationship in a very elementary way, firstly to the other human soul, which is also spiritual, and then to the spiritual soul of the world. When something like this is said, a name of a personality is mentioned who, with her writing, is held up in contrast to anthroposophy. I then found out these days that a name of a personality had been mentioned — I have to tell this so that the misunderstandings about anthroposophy are not repeated over and over again, and I am allowed to tell it because I am talking about a personality whom I hold in very high regard. This person, who is said to offer something for which there is no need to wait for anthroposophy, met with me about eighteen years ago to talk about anthroposophy. However, because she could not get to anthroposophy, but would not have been against it if she could muster the inner strength to approach it, she then tried the external methods, which were just appreciated by the opponents of anthroposophy in the manner just described. Then a few years passed and I met the same person again in a different place; she was trying again to get to anthroposophy, but she couldn't — perhaps also taking into account what is valued more in the outside world today than anthroposophical research. And during my last lecture tour a few weeks ago, this personality had come to me again, clearly expressing: There must be something that goes beyond what I can do myself, what I can give myself in my books. And this personality literally said: “There is something that seeks paths into the spiritual world not only from thought, from the rational, but from the will, from ethics; that is something that interests me, I would like to know more about it.” This is roughly what this personality said to me. A few days ago, I heard that the personality who would like to connect with anthroposophy in this way had achieved something that anthroposophy has no need of!

Dear attendees, behind the scenes of existence, things often look quite different than they are presented by those who often have very different goals — perhaps unconsciously — than those who are in the words. So, with our present life and its temporal demands standing before us, we need not be surprised if the position of those who would actually be called upon to understand anthroposophy in the light of the demands of the time is often still a grotesque one.

Listen to how I describe the methods of knowledge in anthroposophy: they are purely inward methods of knowledge, such methods by which the soul enters into the spiritual world through inward experience; what is experienced there is experienced as inwardly as only mathematical experience is; truth and certainty are experienced inwardly as only mathematical certainty is is experienced inwardly, only that mathematical certainty is formal and does not go to reality, whereas the knowledge gained by the soul through meditation, concentration and exercises of will and so on is quite real, and its standing in relation to this knowledge is then a standing in the real supersensible when it attains to it. And it is precisely in such books as “Occult Science”, “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Riddles of the Soul” and others that it is described how the anthroposophical researcher arrives at these results; it is described in such a way that anyone who wants to apply these methods to their own soul can come to verify these things at any time. It is only a matter of the one who wants to verify having to apply the methods to his soul. Those who merely want to understand anthroposophy and make it fruitful for their lives in this way, as I discussed in the last lecture here, do not need to apply the spiritual-scientific methods to themselves, but can certainly stop at taking them in through common sense and a healthy sense of soul.

But even if you are not a very important philosopher or scientist in the present day, you must still gain an idea from this description of anthroposophical methods and their results that a real examination of what anthroposophy says about its results can only be done by applying the same methods that he uses, by checking how he arrives at his results — in our soul — that is, in the spiritual world itself, by also checking it in our soul in the spiritual world itself. Instead of understanding things this way, people who call themselves scientists today come along and say: Somebody who comes to anthroposophical conclusions should come to some experimental laboratory and try to verify whether he can really come to such conclusions! But the nonsense inherent in such a demand is no less than that which would be spread in the following way. Someone says: I am a mathematician, I have solved these and those mathematical problems; see if they are correct by acquiring the appropriate mathematical skills and checking them out. But then people will reply: We don't like that; why should we first acquire these mathematical skills? Come to the laboratory, where we will examine your skull through experimental psychology and so on and determine whether your mathematical results are correct! Such absurd demands are trumpeted out into the world today and unfortunately find a believing audience.

This is what must be said first about the path of anthroposophy in relation to the needs of the present time. But what the soul penetrates into and from which it announces the results to humanity in such a way that these results can be grasped by the healthy human mind, if it really wants to, what is that actually?

To characterize what can be given to the world through it, or – if I may express myself more modestly – would like to be given to the world, we must recall how earlier times related to the content of spiritual life. Let us look back to earlier times, from which the traditional world-view beliefs have remained with us. There people spoke as if of spiritual beings. They naturally did so in terms of concepts and ideas. But even though the knowledge and perception of spiritual beings was instinctive in ancient times, people still had an inner certainty about this spiritual world, so that they knew: you do not just have concepts and ideas about the spiritual world, you have the spiritual world itself within you; you are not just speaking of gods and angels, these gods and angels – one could also choose other terms – do not just live in your ideas, but they live as living beings in that with which you are connected with your soul, they are spiritual realities.

This is what the more recent period has brought about, that this direct spiritual experience is no longer there. When the more recent period speaks of spirit, it means thoughts. No one in earlier times would have understood what it means when we say today: ideas are realized through history. But everyone would have understood what is meant: spiritual beings realize themselves through history. The ideas are only the means of expression for the spiritual world behind them, and this lives in every single activity that a person performs. Just as a person feels at home in the sensory world, so he also feels at home in a spiritual world. But people who come from this direct experience of the spiritual world used to have, for example, when they were faced with a bush – I am talking radically now, but perhaps this will help to adequately characterize it – an immediate relationship with it, so that the spiritual immediately confronted them and the natural object was also immediately seen through.

Recently, we have seen this coming to humanity: to look at the details of nature in such a way that we no longer experience them in an elementary spiritual and soulful way, but that the abstract thought that expresses the natural event is there first. We stand before the bush; in our thoughts, we first consider what we can experience about the bush. But this separates us from the spiritual, and so nature has been de-animated by us. Because we were able to penetrate nature with abstract thought in the newer epoch of human development, abstract thought separated us from the actual spiritual world. But what human beings did not have when they saw the elementary spiritual in each individual thing was human freedom. It could only develop in the age when man now experiences abstract thoughts in nature instead of direct spiritual images, so that nature is no longer compelling and no longer has a direct effect on human nature.

The fact that we have lost the spiritual reality in nature and only retained the image of spirituality in abstract thoughts has made our freedom possible. This is described in detail in my Philosophy of Freedom. But this has also brought about the necessity that if we want to come to the spiritual again, we cannot stop at the thoughts that we find today in bushes and trees, in stones and sun, rivers and mountains; there live the abstract thoughts that the human race had to experience in order to become free. Today we have to condense thoughts through meditation and concentration. Then we will look at nature again in such a way that the spirit looks back at us from all the beings of nature. And in the same way, we find the spirit in social human life in the way we as human beings face each other, by developing love for our neighbor and expressing this love through deeds.

Thus, anthroposophy relates to the experience of thought in modern times in such a way that it says: Thought has also become the thinnest in external natural phenomena, has become what one might say is a last memory of the spirit; it must be condensed again, must be strengthened, then it will lead us back to the spirit again. Anthroposophy is not rationalism; it does not stop at the pale thought, but struggles through to this thought — really to this inner coldness of thought, which Nietzsche also describes in such a poignant way; but by the soul coming to such thin thoughts, it is, as it were, thereby enabled to have windows everywhere. For anthroposophy, abstract thoughts are like windows; the environment reveals itself everywhere. And then, by condensing the power of thought, the soul penetrates through the windows that have been opened by the abstractness into the spiritual world. In this way we come to experience not only a world of abstract ideas and ideals, but again to that which humanity once experienced as a reality, but of which only the abstract copy remains in the present worldviews and religions, even if today one believes that one is looking into a spiritual world in the irrational. And then we come back to not just wanting to know about the spirit, not just to represent it in our thoughts, but to experience it.

Our living knowledge is only a detour to bring living spirituality into our lives, so that we live again from morning till night in such a way that we know: every one of our deeds, every one of our feelings, every one of our thoughts is such that the spiritual lives in it. That the human being does not become unfree as a result, but precisely free, is what I sought to show in the “Philosophy of Freedom”. I tried to show that if man can grasp thinking in such a way that he can also grasp it, that he can, for example, ascend through the moral intuitions into the spiritual world in the ethical and moral spheres – if he ascends to pure thinking in this way, then he is in a position to grasp world events at the root. But that is the second thing, quite apart from the path: it is a God-filled, a spirit-filled world that is coming into being. Anthroposophy is not meant to provide a mere world view, but should become the cause for man to have a real experience through which the divine-spiritual draws into the newer development of humanity, because man — for the sake of his freedom — can no longer go the old ways to the spirit and would remain spiritless if he did not seek the way from the thought and from the will, as I have characterized it.

Thus, anthroposophy does not merely strive for spiritual experience, but strives to prepare a field, a dwelling for the spirit that will permeate humanity, to offer this spirit a field and a dwelling so that it can be among us, so that we can think, feel and want everything not only out of a temporally ephemeral humanity, but out of an eternal divine spirituality! Anthroposophy does not want to be just a process of knowledge, it wants to be a real process. And in that it, I would say, prepares the Lord's dwelling here on earth, in that it wants to be a knowledge that is at the same time life and at the same time builds the dwelling for the Lord, the Spirit, it has a relationship of its own accord to the third aspect of our great contemporary needs: to the social aspect.

The social question, and that which it summarizes, has a deep impact on the soul and heart of today's man, insofar as this man has soul and heart at all in the true sense of the word. That is, of course, the fundamental question. But can it actually be understood in the way it is often understood today?

Of course, esteemed attendees, every well-intentioned human perception must be thoroughly appreciated and valued for the moment; but something else is still needed for the good of humanity. Today we hear how millions are starving; we ourselves may have the opportunity to experience the misery that has remained from the terrible war catastrophe in the civilized world. We learn how unemployment is spreading everywhere, how it has affected the victors even more than the defeated countries, and especially the neutral countries. We look at this world that has been so severely tested. Certainly, we have no objection to those people who now say, out of a good heart and also out of a certain knowledge of the world: “The next thing to do is to create bread, bread to satisfy hunger!” Yes, that is so; that must also be considered the next step. But we, as humanity, must move forward again in such a way that such times of hunger and need will no longer be possible, as they have become possible today. For what caused them?

Anyone who looks at the world with an open mind will say: Even if there is a natural disaster, if there is any kind of natural disaster or infertility, it must be compensated for in the world economy if it is managed properly. On the whole, nature gives people what they need from it. If entire groups of people do not have what they should have, it is not because nature is withholding it from them, but because people do not understand how to properly process and deliver what nature provides! Nature provides everything that could feed and clothe all people, everything that could provide the barest necessities for all people; it just needs to be worked in such a way that people can give and take it for people in the right way. Need is not caused by nature, at least not in the main, leaving out the details. Need is caused by the way people have treated nature, by the way people have behaved towards each other. Need has come and comes from the kind of spirituality that prevails among people, and only the kind of spirituality can remedy the need in the long term. We must not only find abstract concepts in human interaction, through which people envision themselves, for my sake also a spiritual one, but we must find a living spirituality through which we also approach work, through which we find the means and ways to work out what our fellow human beings can demand of us in terms of the results of our work. We must find that spirituality through which trust can be restored in those people who can lead the work, so that its results can flow into the human social organisms in the right way. And we must find the God who is able to permeate social life in the right way. But we will only find him for social action if we have first found him in living knowledge, if we have first found him in nature and introduced him into human life as a living spirit, as I have described. We first need a path to the spirit; but we need a striving for the spirit that leads not only to a theoretical knowledge, but to an experience of spirituality, which, in relation to social life, leads not to abstract ideas about the social order, but to concrete ideas, so that through the flow of these ideas, the divine-spiritual itself flows into the social order. As much Leninism, as much Trotskyism, that is, as much materialism as there is in the world, there are as many forces of destruction in the world! The only help is to draw a spirituality back into humanity. It is quite true that much can be criticized about the social life of older times, but that belongs in a different chapter from the one we are discussing today. What needs to be discussed today is that our time demands a spirituality that can only come from the highest development of thought, and only through this path.

But anthroposophy wants to go this way. There may well be individual aspects of anthroposophy that are capable of improvement and in need of it. But humanity, having to live out of the needs of the time, will not be able to avoid seeking its leaders where such paths into the spiritual world are taken as anthroposophy would like to take them. For it is important that we not only escape materialism, but that we escape the dead thoughts that are mere representatives of something real, and that we grasp the real in the thoughts themselves. This cannot be in abstract thoughts, but only in the condensed thoughts that have been further developed in the soul; this can only be by experiencing the world thoughts in the developed will. To many people today, who have settled into the old currents of science, this seems paradoxical to such an extent that they want to test the anthroposophist in the laboratory using laboratory methods, just as one would test a mathematician in the laboratory to see whether an integral is correct or not; one does not want to follow what he presents as his mathematics, but rather wants to examine his personal behavior. But it must be realized that the spirit can only be experienced in the spiritual realm, in that realm which, however, has the indicated windows everywhere for the spiritual soul. There the thoughts, the windows through which the spiritual can enter the human soul, are experienced, and in this way the reality of the spiritual world is experienced as something with which people grow together as spiritual and soul beings.

This, esteemed attendees, describes the way in which anthroposophy believes it can serve the needs of the times. I have endeavored to explain today what the real path of anthroposophical research is. For I do believe that once we take a close look at this real path, we will not be able to say that anthroposophy represents a wrong path after a correctly recognized goal that is even necessary for the times. No! If you examine what people who judge it call a mistake, you will ultimately discover again and again: it is not the anthroposophical path, it is the caricature that people themselves make of this anthroposophical path; it is the bugbear that they themselves make and then criticize, so that their words have absolutely no relation to the true anthroposophical path. This is what one experiences day after day: people criticizing their own spectres of anthroposophy because they do not want to get to know the true anthroposophy.

Those who, in the days of this college course, represented the anthroposophical method of research in the most diverse scientific fields, have honestly stood up against what is prevailing and for what is needed in our time. They wanted to show how this method of research can fertilize the most diverse fields of science, life, art, and social order. They wanted to advocate for the true nature of that which every honest critique wants to take up, but which today often only sees as it caricatures, turns into a bogeyman and then criticizes in the way I have indicated. Therefore, I would not want to fail, for my part, since I am connected with all my heart with this anthroposophical current, to thank you all here at the end, all those who in the last few days have entered from what they have gained through their science, through their life experience and so on, for anthroposophical research, for the anthroposophical worldview. It is to them that I would like to express my heartfelt thanks, in the name of anthroposophical thinking and the anthroposophical ethos. For whatever one's opinion of what anthroposophy has already achieved and produced, it is making a truly conscientious effort to adjust its intentions to the needs of the present day — not because it wishes to serve only the temporal, but Anthroposophy does not direct itself at all to these temporal needs. It speaks out of the eternal depths of the human soul, and actually of the eternal, but its striving coincides with the needs of the present time. For long enough, humanity has been concerned only with the transitory; today, in response to the demands of the times, it desires to get to know the eternal again, to reintroduce it into human feeling and human action. Anthroposophy can serve these demands of the time, this striving of the human soul, because its striving coincides with the needs of the time. It strives in such a way that I would now like to summarize in the following words what it has achieved today, but what it wants, which is perhaps still a long way off, and which is intended to express what the attitude and the will of the anthroposophical is.

This will knows full well how dark, how gloomy human paths of life are if they are not illuminated by a certain light; and today's humanity is coming to realize its contemporary needs, as I have characterized them, by being surrounded by much darkness in life and therefore must strive to attain that light that can illuminate the darkness, the darkness of life. How can this light be found? For this light, the human soul alone is the lamp. But this lamp can only be ignited by the spirit. The human soul becomes the shining light of life when the spirit ignites it! But when the human soul is ignited by the spirit as a light of life, then it also becomes the torch that can properly illuminate human life: the fruitful insights, the life-warming feelings, the active volitional impulses that are necessary for the human being.

Dear attendees, Anthroposophy is misunderstood and often denounced today not only because we have to talk about it differently than about the things that conventional science talks about, but rather because it has to talk not only about different things but also differently, in a different way. That it has to talk about different things than ordinary science, that is basically what anyone who expects anything at all from supersensible research expects. But that it must also be done in a different way, I might say, if the word is taken in a higher sense, in a different form of expression, is something that is not expected. For centuries, a very definite way of thinking and expressing what has been thought and researched has been developed, through natural science, which has achieved such great triumphs. This form of expression appears to people of the present as something so certain, so well-founded, that they cannot tolerate it when a different way of speaking about a field of knowledge that is actually much closer to the human being is required.

Now, however, many of our contemporaries undoubtedly feel that the scientific approach does not even come close to the most important thing for humans, especially when it is applied most faithfully and most conscientiously in its field. And that is why many souls of the present are looking for a way to that which is so close to the human soul in terms of questions and riddles, I would even say, that although they do not impose themselves from the outside through nature, they do impose themselves through the very nature of the human being.

If we want to talk about these latter riddles, characterizing them, then perhaps, my dear audience, we may recall a saying of a spiritual mystic, Meister Eckhart, who once said: What use is it to me – or: What use would it be to me to be a king if I didn't know that I am a king! if I had no idea at all that I am a king?

Now one could even admit that one could perhaps still benefit from being a king even if one did not even know it. But what Meister Eckhart wanted to express applies to something else to a much greater extent than to his comparison. It applies to being truly human.

If we ask ourselves impartially, are we actually human in the full sense of the word if we are not aware of our humanity? If we cannot say to ourselves: What is our actual essence as a human being?

When we thoroughly ask ourselves this question, we are already struck by how little the natural sciences actually tell us about the most important aspect of this question: what we are as human beings.

One could cite many things if one wanted to characterize the full depth and full significance – the depth and significance of the soul – of this question. One could approach this characterization from the most diverse sides. Today, since I have often been able to speak in this city on topics similar to today's, I would like to start from the fact of life, I would like to say which, most intensely from the external world of facts, presents the real soul riddle to man.

Perhaps one can say: This fact presents the real soul riddle to man most selfishly. But this mystery of the soul is presented by this fact – presented in a way that is, I would say, generally self-evident. Let us keep this fact in mind, this fact of death in all its significance. Let us try to present this fact simply and impartially to our souls.

Death, as is sometimes said today by natural scientists, is characterized by the fact that a corpse is present. A trivial fact, certainly, but precisely as a trivial fact, perhaps one of the most harrowing of human physical existence. What can we see when we place the fact of death, the existence of the corpse, before our soul without prejudice? It begins at the moment when the physical body has become a corpse. For this physical human being, a path of development begins for what is within him, outwardly material-physical. This path of development takes a completely different course than it did before the point when the human being had to pass through the gate of death.

We see how that which remains of a person as a corpse – regardless of whether it is consigned to the fire or the earth – unites with the elements of nature, how it is taken over by the elements of nature, and how these elements of nature now assert their being, exercise their dominion over that which is handed over to them by the physical person. The substances and forces in the physical body of man no longer follow the laws that they followed until death, at least initially according to the external visible world; they follow the laws that are imposed on them by external physical nature, which until death the human being has only observed.

So that we can say: It is the outer world into which man dies, not only at the moment of his death, but by the fact that it receives him into its laws as a physical human being, he dies into this outer physical world.

If you look at this fact with an open mind, then, I would say, all kinds of human soul mysteries flow out of this contemplation. And above all, an important question presents itself to a person if he is open-minded enough.

He looks at the various elements that receive his corpse, that is, his outer physical body. He says to himself: These elements into which my physical body is absorbed, basically they have the same effect as they do out there, by absorbing my physical body; after all, they bring the same into me every day during my life. By absorbing food and drink, he absorbs those substances and forces into himself, to which he is handed over at death.

Can we reasonably assume that the laws of the substances and forces to which we are consigned at death as physical beings, that these laws only exist out there in the world? Must we not reasonably assume that what takes us in after death, by entering our physical body as food and drink, unfolds the same laws within us? A lawfulness that is only overcome by the inner being of the human individual?

We see, I would like to say, the way to one side: the surrender of the human physical body to the substances and forces with the same laws that we actually take into our physical body.

Of course, one would have to give many details if one wanted to get to the bottom of this mystery of life, I would say of the soul, which this fact so poignantly presents to our soul, if one wanted to go into it in full detail.

But another question immediately arises: Can external natural science, which is mainly devoted to care, to observation through the senses, to knowledge through experiment – thus again to observation through the senses – and which is devoted to the training of that mind that is bound to this observation and to these experiments, can this external natural science get close to the most essential part of the human being? It can certainly get close to that which, after death, is handed over to the physical elements and their laws. It can certainly also approach that which is incorporated into the physical body every day on the basis of these physical laws; and with its conscientious methods, it can also investigate the laws — which, in the human body, are no different in that they concern the substances and forces of the external world, and are thus life in the external world itself — it can follow the laws of that which is absorbed by the human body every day. But it can also follow the human being with his mental expressions; it can follow what significance that which we take in daily has for the mental life of the human being. And in this respect, natural science has already done an extraordinary amount, and there are very justified ideals in this regard.

What can already be known today about the significance of the brain and nervous system for the imagination, what can be known about certain processes that are connected with correct or incorrect nutrition or correct or incorrect food processing, and which also exert an influence on the soul, all this can be conscientiously pursued by external natural science, and it is doing so today. And anthroposophy would not be able to justify its existence at all in the face of what science has been able to achieve if it did not fully recognize what science has been able to achieve in this direction. Therefore, it is always and repeatedly a misunderstanding of what anthroposophy wants to be when it is brought into any kind of opposition to contemporary science. There is no such opposition. Anthroposophy fully recognizes what science is able to achieve!

But now it will also be readily admitted: Yes, in this physical body, into which the substances and forces of nature, endowed with external laws, are taken up, in this physical body all kinds of things happen; all kinds of things happen, of which the soul initially knows nothing, of which the soul gradually acquires knowledge by pursuing science, physiology, biology and so on. In this physical body, however, regardless of whether the soul knows or does not know what is going on, the causes for the way the soul feels in the individual and how it feels through a certain overall mood nevertheless lie. That which one has no need to know for a long time, what one can call general indispositions, whatever diseases may be present in the organs, that may sound in the soul. It is expressed in the soul as a mood. It does not need to take root in consciousness at all; it expresses itself in the general mood of the soul.

So that one must, I would say, presuppose much that is present in the material processes and effects of the physical organism, and which works in such a way that the soul has a share in it. But inasmuch as the soul has a share in it, it has a share in what already works during life, and in the way those forces work to which the physical body is handed over after death.

We carry within us – honored attendees – the same laws that bring about our destruction as a physical human being. And since these same laws come into us with food and drink, our soul participates not only in what is sprouting and sprouting power within us, but our soul participates in all that ultimately expresses itself by destroying our physical being. As the substances and forces of the external world work in us, the soul participates in our decay even during our lifetime. And when the series of facts that arises when it is presented to the soul without prejudice, then one learns to recognize: Death, which stands before us as a single moment at the end of our physical life, is ultimately only that which, as it were, adds up to what basically rules and reigns in us throughout our entire physical life. I would like to say: parts of death, the smallest parts of death, so to speak the atoms of death, are within us in every moment of our physical life, and our life of soul is partaken of these atoms of death.

This is expressed in the human soul in everything that arises in the mood through which the soul participates in the destructive forces of the world, in the world's forces of destruction. And however complicated the human soul may appear, one thing is true: the most important moods of doubt, of despair, those moods that often arise without any external cause, at least without any noticeable external cause, that often weaken the human being and conjure up the most important riddles of life from the deepest depths of his soul, which trouble him in both health and illness throughout his entire life. These riddles arise from the soul's participation in the world's forces of decline.

When we look deeply into what is working its way up out of the depths of the soul and into consciousness – consciousness does not know what it is, but consciousness has the working within it, has the experience of it in its soul mood – when we are fully aware of this, , then those other riddles of the soul emerge before consciousness, those that point, as it were, in the opposite direction, those riddles that people have always associated with the word that is the opposite of death: the word “immortality”.

The question of immortality is not just a selfish question for humans – arising from our desire not to disappear with death, for example – but the question of immortality is intimately connected with what can be called, in the sense of Meister Eckhart, the example of the king, what can be called: Man is only then fully man when he really knows of his own being.

But, my dear attendees, I would like to say: this knowledge, insofar as we can acquire it through external natural science, this knowledge takes away the fact of death. For everything we can know, even if it is the greatest and most significant thing about a human being, which we can know through experiment and observation, can only relate to the body and must lose its significance for the human being with death, because it relates to something that merges into the non-human, that is, non-natural, being. And man must ask himself the question: Can we look at the dissolution of the physical body in a similar way to which we can look at the inner mysteries that the soul experiences by participating in the destructive forces of the world? Can we look in the same sense at the creative forces of the world, at the sprouting, sprouting forces? And this is the direction in which, out of the same spirit that modern science has adopted and out of the same scientific conscientiousness, anthroposophy wants to point.

But it cannot hint, I would say point, to something that can happen every day, like death, before the eyes of every human being; it can only lead, this anthroposophy, to this – when viewed according to the opposite opposite principle of research into the reality of life — only by pointing to something that does not initially reveal itself as an external fact, nor as an internal fact of the soul's life, something that must first be achieved by the soul.

Death – dear audience – voluntarily places itself before the soul. We must first work for the knowledge of the nature of immortality if we want to recognize it. At least in its innermost essence, no knowledge of it can be bestowed upon us.

Therefore, it must be pointed out again and again that anyone who now wants to knowingly follow the path to the world of the soul, the actual essence of the soul, can only do so through inner activity, through inner work. That is, through what I have often referred to here as soul exercises.

Now, my dear audience, we will be able to form an idea of these soul exercises from the point of view that is necessary for today's topic if we first visualize how human soul life is in fact a unity. We first survey this soul life by looking within ourselves. It surges, I might say, up and down. It expresses itself in images through which we visualize the external world. It expresses itself through feelings, sensations, and will impulses that lead us to our actions and that we, as a member of the social order, allow to appear to us from the soul throughout the world.

That which surges and weaves within man as images, feelings, sensations and impulses of will, that which, with the means of external natural science, is pointed to as that which only can be investigated with the means of external natural science, which is pointed to that which only dies with death. This can be seen today by many people who are only unbiased enough to look at what this soul actually is, how it is quite different from that which is accessible to external sensory observation and experimentation. And then such people turn away from scientific considerations, because they believe that only science can exist for external nature, and they then turn to certain - as it is called - mystical endeavors.

Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, must not be confused with mysticism, which only wants to penetrate into the soul life, as it is said, through self-absorption; because Anthroposophy is real science and knows how to look back into the ordinary, earthly – if I may put it this way – soul life of man in such a way that one can indulge in great illusions and great deceptions.

Anthroposophy is less prone to delusions than its opponents and well-meaning critics might think! It is very often believed that anthroposophy is devoted to those inner forces that lead to illusions, hallucinations, and all kinds of mediumistic phenomena. They do not notice that the whole way in which Anthroposophy characterizes its research methods goes in the opposite direction to anything that could possibly lead to illusion, hallucination, vision and so on. What Anthroposophy is about is, above all, absolute clarity about what presents itself to the human being at first. There, the one who really looks inside without prejudice, who actually, I would say, follows the instructions of the mystic, will see what an uncertain thing this looking inside is, how, for example, memories that point to earlier childhood, how these memories simply arise in later life and how one does not recognize that what arises as a thought is actually only a memory, a reminiscence of something previously experienced. And if these memories were to emerge unchanged, one would soon recognize that one is dealing with mere memories. But in the human interior, the ideas of external experiences are absorbed into the feelings, into the impulses of the will, even into the temperament, into the whole human organization, I might say into the intimate human health and illness. And after decades, transformed into a completely different form, the ideas can arise, which are nothing other than what was ignited by external observation. The person who often believes he is a mystic

looks into his inner self and has such ideas, they appear to him as if they had never been borrowed from the outside world, as if they came from the eternal depths of the human soul, as if he could directly experience from such ideas how the soul in divine-spiritual worlds, [in] the world's reason, in the eternal is connected and the like.

Those who are aware of the metamorphoses and transformations that memories can undergo also know that they cannot rely on such introspection. And so, on the one hand, the results of natural science appear to the unprejudiced, showing how the soul is bound to the physical in earthly life, to that physical which is handed over to the outer forces of nature at death; and on the other hand, what often appears is the nebulous, foggy mysticism, through which one nevertheless comes to nothing other than to bring up from the soul that which one has again received through this outer world, albeit so transformed that one does not recognize it, that one regards it as belonging to a completely different world.

It is precisely when a person has prepared himself sufficiently to recognize how little external natural science and how little mysticism can give him, that he comes to recognize the value and significance of those soul exercises that simply consist in not merely brooding or looking inwardly at our soul life, but in bringing it into inner activity, so that it becomes something other than it is in everyday existence.

Nature takes our body with us at death; it incorporates the substances and forces of this body into its own laws. What anthroposophy aims for as the path to the opposite goal is the surrender of the soul for incorporation into that which is opposed to outer nature, into the spirit. Just as the physical body is surrendered to external nature at the time of the outer physical death, so now, not in a mere formal act of knowledge but as an inner fact of anthroposophical knowledge, the souls are surrendered to the spirit so that they may unite with the spirit.

And just as the fact of human physical destruction confronts us with death, so the immortality of the human being confronts us with the soul, in that we unite soul life with that which, as spiritual life, as spiritual being and spiritual weaving, underlies the whole world.

What anthroposophical knowledge strives for, as an actual inner experience, is the opposite of what the event of death is for the physical human being. And just as the soul participates in the processes that take place down there in the physical body organization, and how these physical processes play into the soul's mood, even when the soul is unaware of its essence, so it is that our soul is united – it is just becoming apparent in the knowledge that I will speak of in a moment – that our soul is united with the spirit on the other side, that it is only through this side that it comes to know its experiences by striving for knowledge as fact, as actual inner experience. And this actual knowledge can be attained by developing one's thinking on the one hand to a greater extent than in ordinary life, through inner activity, and on the other hand developing the will more than in ordinary life.

Between the will and the thinking lies the mind, with the feeling right in the middle. The most precious treasure of human life is this feeling, this mind. But when we develop thinking on the one hand and will on the other, the mind and feeling go along with it and become something different themselves.

In order for us — my dear audience — to be able to communicate with each other about the way in which thinking is developed on the one hand and will on the other, we must realize that the soul is nevertheless a unity — in its surging, weaving life a unity —, despite the fact that it lives on the one hand according to thinking, on the other hand according to will and in the middle according to feeling.

When we look at the natural world around us, for example, we must first engage our senses. But what we perceive through our senses is then processed by our thoughts. If we were to apply our will in this process, we would not be able to obtain a true knowledge of nature. We would not be able to do so if we let the will that permeates us in everyday life, if we let it flow into our thinking about nature. We would receive fantasies instead of natural laws. The conscientious scientific method cannot be involved in this.

It is precisely in those ideas and thoughts that we have to develop in relation to the external world, in our soul life, where the will recedes for the everyday and also the ordinary scientific life and the thought appears in a certain one-sidedness, as a mere image of what is present externally, and we have the actual will on the other side. Let us be honest about the actual will. Let us take a simple volitional impulse: I raise my arm, my hand. First of all, I have the intention that something should be lifted at some point. And then the intention, which is a thought, goes down into subconscious depths, unites in a certain way with the organism. How this is not seen through in everyday life, because what [happens] is first of all an experience again, that becomes clear again; the beginning and end can be clearly seen. What lies in the middle, how the will shoots into the organism, as it were, and brings the intention about, that has plunged so deeply into the subconscious as the life of a person from falling asleep to waking up.

One is tempted to say: in relation to his will, man is indeed asleep even when he is awake. From the intention to raise the hand, the arm, to the observation of the raised hand, the raised arm, the everyday consciousness basically sleeps, falls asleep, while the will impulse shoots into the organism, and only wakes up again when the result is seen. Then the will comes to meet us, not interspersed with thoughts. But this will is, I would say, something so alien to our consciousness as what takes place around us between falling asleep and waking.

Now, one can develop the human soul further in both directions, both in the direction of thought and in the direction of will, than it is in ordinary life and in ordinary science. And what do we have to do in these two directions, in the direction of thought and in the direction of will?

I have already said, my dear audience, that the will takes a back seat to the thought. The thoughts that give us clarity about the world make the will recede completely. And the will impulses that are in everyday life make the thought recede, as I have just explained.

But nevertheless, in thought, and in the most abstract and in the most concrete thoughts, there always lives a remnant of will, it is just not conscious. And in every volitional impulse lives a thought. The thought flows in somewhere and then appears again in the result. If we now seek the will in the thought and the thought in the will, then we exercise the soul in both directions. What does it mean to seek the will in the thought? This is achieved by practising what I have already characterised here several times, by practising meditation and concentration, because that means the soul resting on certain ideas that are presented to it in a completely comprehensible and clear way, like mathematical concepts.

In this often years-long devotion — it takes less time for one person and longer for another, depending on their abilities —, in this devotion to comprehensible ideas, a power of thought is developed, as is what is not present in the ordinary consciousness of the will, as is the will element in thinking, how it intervenes in our organism, and now in our complete organism, one discovers —- while otherwise one always only looks at the thought —, one discovers within the life of thought the otherwise hidden life of will; then the first element of supersensible knowledge enters into human consciousness. For what mingles with our thoughts — I would almost say intrudes — is not, as is usually the case, a pale and abstract thought life. It brings something into our thought life that is as alive and intensely inward as we otherwise experience only in our outer sense perceptions. What we otherwise have as a pale, abstract thought life within us becomes so vivid, so alive, by discovering the will in it, that we have an afterimage of the outer sensory perception in our thought life. And so these processes take place in such a way that complete consciousness — as we develop it in a mathematical problem or as we develop it in a geometrical task — is present in all soul exercises that lead to such, I might say will-veiled pictorial thinking.

Anyone who observes what I have described in detail for these concentration and meditation exercises in my books “Occult Science” and “How to Know Higher Worlds”, and in my book “Puzzles of the Soul” and in other writings, will see how unfounded it is to claim that some kind of dreamy soul life should lead to what has been described as imaginative cognition, as pictorial, cognizant inner life, that all processes are such that we, I might say — if I may use the trivial expression — approach them so soberly and with such sound common sense and finally take possession of this imaginative thinking as we approach and take possession of the solution of a geometrical problem. One would like to say: everything that has to be done to achieve such knowledge is practised in such a way that it can be justified before the most transparent, before mathematical knowledge. And actually one has to say that it is most surprising that it is not precisely mathematicians who sympathize with the innermost essence of anthroposophical research method. For the soul activity that is exercised in anthroposophical research is basically the same as that exercised in mathematics, only that the content is different: in mathematics it is formal, while in what is to be considered an anthroposophical research method it is one that leads into reality, into actuality.

And indeed, we are led into a very definite reality if we allow thinking, through meditation and concentration, to grasp the otherwise neglected element of will. For it is here that the first result of supersensible research, of supersensible knowledge, really comes to us. And that is what I have called in my books the formative forces of the human body.

When we have brought thinking to this stage, to imagination, then we learn to live, not in abstract thinking, but in a kind of thinking that is much more real inwardly than abstract thinking. Now we learn to live into a living thinking, into a thinking that flows into reality and takes in our soul. We live ourselves into a thought organism. And the first result appears before us: it is what stands before us in a large tableau of life, what has been working since our birth, inwardly, permeating our physical body as a supersensible one, precisely the body of formative forces.

This body of which I am speaking here is not spread out in space like the physical body; this body is a time body. Just as the individual organs are related to one another and interact in the physical body of space, so the processes of time from our birth to death are a great unity in this formative body. What the formative forces body experiences from, for example, the age of 45 to 50 is connected to what has been experienced between the ages of 10 and 15 in the same way as, let us say, some part of our brain is connected to the part of our heart or stomach in the physical body. We have a temporal body that is attached to us, but which represents a thinking that has become active, a thinking that at the same time has forces of growth within it, forces that are sprouting and sprouting growth. We now not only feel what we have inwardly lived through since our birth here on earth – like the stream of memory from which one or the other memory emerges – but we feel how these memories are only the abstract upper waves of what surface of ordinary consciousness, what lives in our metabolism, what is in the movement of our hearts, what lives in our activity, our nervous system, but what becomes visible as a spiritual body, as a supersensible, etheric body.

The stages of knowledge of earlier epochs, which could not yet recognize these things as clearly as today's anthroposophy strives to, but which had an inkling from dull clairvoyance, knew that such a formative body exists. Then it was called the ether body or life body. I do not want anything other than what I myself have characterized here to be understood by these expressions! And so, as in a large tableau, we discover what we are as a unity, since we have had a physical body on this earth.

The first supersensible element — dearly beloved attendees — is not yet something that leads us beyond our earthly existence. Anthroposophy must continue to advance conscientiously in stages, but it is the content of our earthly existence, the first supersensible element within us, this body of formative forces, which is organized in time, as our physical body is organized in space, characterized.

But we can move forward. We can carry out a next exercise, which, so to speak, is still linked to thinking, to meditation and concentration, but which at the same time leads beyond them. It consists in the fact that, after we have initially concentrated, we first turn our entire soul attention to an idea in meditation, so that we perceive nothing of the rest of the world, but turn the soul only to this one idea; then we strengthen the soul through this concentration, as we otherwise strengthen the muscle that repeatedly and repeatedly performs a task. So, through this ever-recurring concentration and meditation, we grasp some conceptual complex that is easily manageable, and this strengthens the soul; we ascend to what we have just described – to the apprehension of the will element in thinking – so that imaginative knowledge may arise. Although common sense always remains with this anthroposophical method, we must still say that something like a second personality is added to the person as he usually is, which now experiences what I have described, let us say, for example, in imaginative knowledge.

The difference between anthroposophical experience and experience as a medium is that the person experiencing hallucinations or visions as a medium lives with his whole ego, with his whole personality, in these states, which are definitely connected with his physical development. He loses sight of what he otherwise is; he lives only in what presents itself to his soul in an abnormal way.

The person who immerses himself in imaginative knowledge and also in the higher levels of what I am about to describe, sets a second personality apart from himself, the observer of the supersensible; but he always remains there, controlling and criticizing this observer of the supersensible, with his healthy human understanding, as he is in ordinary life.

Therefore, anthroposophy can be presented to anyone, it can be grasped with common sense, because even in the one who is an anthroposophical researcher, what presents itself to him in supersensible vision must first be checked and criticized with what he has remained alongside, with the bearer of common sense. But it is the case that by first concentrating on certain ideas, by doing so one also maintains the tendency, the inner tendency, to now keep these ideas in the soul, not to let go of these ideas again. It takes more strength than for ordinary forgetting to bring such ideas, which one has first placed in the soul with all one's strength, with the strongest strength of inner attention, out of the soul again.

The second exercise has been achieved, which must develop ideas that one has concentrated on sharply, I would say, that have taken over one completely, in order to get them out again. So that, after one has concentrated, I would say, after one has meditated on them, one can put down what I call empty consciousness.

When you develop this empty consciousness, when you develop the power to create this empty consciousness, you apply it from meditation, concentration, and then this consciousness is not filled with memories or impressions of the external world; it is truly empty.

But then, when this consciousness is empty, it does not remain empty for long, because the outer world penetrates into it, because one has initially created this consciousness oneself, one is awake without any content. But after some time, the content comes – which otherwise comes to us through development and is processed with the ordinary mind – that is the content of a supersensible, a spiritual world. And by having attained this imaginative realization through meditation and concentration, by having established this empty consciousness, one thereby gains insights into the spiritual world, into the supersensible world, which surrounds us just as the sensual world surrounds us. Now one learns: Once one has attained this — I now call it the initiated consciousness —, once one has attained this initiated consciousness: Now you stand inside everywhere in the spiritual world and besides with your common sense, your healthy senses, you have the same insight into the physical-sensual world as you otherwise have as an earth human.

The fact that these things develop side by side is the essential thing; then man will never be able to enter into pathological states when he is engaged in such research methods. But if one has trained oneself to suppress these forces, these images of meditation and concentration, one can create an empty consciousness and can also suppress the tableau of life that our inner being, our body of the power of becoming, has placed before our soul, how it has worked, how it has woven in all of us a supersensible one, since the beginning of our earthly existence. We can now, when we have appropriated these forces to create the empty consciousness, we can eliminate — when we have first brought the formative body into consciousness —, we can eliminate this formative body itself. We gradually achieve such a strong power that we can now also switch off this, our own spiritual world, that we can create an empty consciousness in relation to it. But then – my dear audience – when we create an empty consciousness in relation to this body, then the human soul, the human consciousness, is not merely filled with spiritual-soul content from the environment, as I have just described, but then this consciousness of the human being is filled with the spiritual and soul content that we ourselves were before we descended from the spiritual and soul world and accepted our physical body through the inheritance of matter and forces from our parents and ancestors. That is to say, we arrive at an understanding of what we were before we took on a physical earthly body. That is to say, we arrive at an understanding of our being before birth or before conception. This arises in supersensible knowledge, the second stage in the inspired knowledge that is attained in the way I have just described.

Anthroposophy is not able to conjure up something out of thin air, nor out of lightly-draped mysticism, but rather, anthroposophy must gradually conquer the insights by first drawing on the strength in the human disposition that leads into the supersensible existence. One defames anthroposophy when one merely calls it a philosophy. It is not based on philosophical speculation, but on a vision that is as vivid as any [sensory] vision can be, but which must be achieved by developing the powers that otherwise only slumber in the soul, as I have indicated in principle, and as you can find in the further explanations of it in the books mentioned.

But now, my dear attendees, something very special presents itself to the spiritual researcher. At the moment when he, so to speak, gets to know his humanity, his soul nature, as it was before his descent to earth, at that moment his physical body appears to him like an external object. He now lives, so to speak, with his newly created personality, as it were, transferred back to his existence before his physical body was. He now has this physical body in front of him as something external. And by having this physical body in front of him as something external, he looks at this physical body – that is what must be taken into account. He does not see this physical body merely as it is in ordinary life for physical perception, but he sees this physical body according to its inner organs, although these inner organs are spiritualized.

If you imagine the human heart, the human lungs, the human brain, the various human organs, not in physical terms with physical contours, but as processes, as inner activity, as ascending processes of becoming and growth, as descending processes of destruction and death, interacting with one another, if you think of the inner human organism in this way – but not the human being as a whole, as we usually have him before the physical observation, but also physically, but the physical in spiritual translation, I would say, if you imagine that, then this is what stands before the human being in the same moment when he sees his spiritual-soul existence as it was before he descended to earth.

I do not shrink back, my dear audience, because the things I am talking about are certain results of spiritual scientific research, and since I am simply, of course, unable to give all the intermediate links, which can, however, be found in the books mentioned can be found in the books mentioned, but I want to list the results — to say, at least in some areas, what must nevertheless seem quite paradoxical to today's man, namely to present that which, at the stage I have just characterized, to man, in the following way.

Consider, my dear audience, look into your inner being, you will find memories in your soul, memories that are connected with experiences, and believe that what emerges in the inner life of your soul as a pictorial life of ideas, as perceptions permeated with feeling, is what has been experienced. You can distinguish exactly, I would say the fine, delicate weaving of the soul that you recognize; and you can relate it to the robust outer physical of life, to which it is to be related. But what would happen if the following were to occur? If suddenly something were to emerge in the soul that makes you say to yourself, “Yes, where does that come from? I have never experienced anything like that.” You will not rest until you can relate what has emerged in your soul, which comes across like a memory, to a specific experience, and then you will be calm. And you always relate what is a fine spiritual weaving in your inner being to something robust and material in the outside world, to which you have had a connection.

Now, in the face of inspired knowledge, it is the case that the person is standing before his soul, I would say the entire interior of his organism with all the individual organs, with the forces that compose these organs, lungs, liver, everything is there; the person is looking at it from the inside as a physical being. Only, in recent times, this physicality appears to him to be more spiritually permeated, but it is the physical organization. And that is like having nothing but memories – we can compare it to that – of which we do not know what they refer to. But we can learn what what we encounter in our own organism refers to in the outside world. We learn, namely, by having acquired the empty consciousness, to see the outside world in a new form.

You see, my dear attendees, through our physical vision, also through physical science – astronomy, astrophysics, astrochemistry – we see the physical sun in a more or less precise or imprecise outline. But that is not the whole of the sun, just as what we see with our physical eyes is not the whole of the human being. In the moment when empty consciousness is established, we see, in addition, what presents itself to the outer eye in outer science, so to speak, a solar element that weaves through all of space that is accessible to us and that wafts as a form of power, that physically concentrates there, but that also spreads. We see a solar element in all of the space that is accessible to us.

And this sun-like quality, which is only recognized by the empty consciousness in inspired knowledge as a living being, this sun-like quality, when we meet a person, it combines in a remarkable way with what we recognize of ourselves. We perceive his physical body with our outer senses. Then, in a sense, what his physical body is as an extension is summarized in his soul. We have to imagine the soul as a concentrated form of the spatially extended; when we look at the outer great nature, at the cosmos, the conditions are the opposite. There is, for example, the physical body of the sun, the concentrated form, and the spiritual, which is now the form that is widely extended in space. But we perceive it. Just as we perceive the physical body of the human being with the outer senses as the widely extended, and only grasp it as concentrated in the soul, so we perceive the sun as an external revelation; and we perceive an inner configured life and weaving through the whole space accessible to us, an extending force-end of the sun-like. We observe how it lives into the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, and also into the physical life of man. We now begin to relate something certain in our heart, in our lungs, to the sun-like, which we have only glimpsed through inspired knowledge.

And in the same way, we learn to recognize the spiritual aspect of the moon, the moon-like, and relate it to something else. We learn to recognize the sprouting, sprouting forces in our organism as the solar aspect; we learn to recognize what are the forces of decomposition, what are the forces of destruction, as the moon-like. We learn to relate other things in the great cosmos to the inner being.

Now, what are we learning now? In our ordinary lives, we encounter external events of a robust nature; these are the physical events. They are reflected in our thinking, in our feelings, as it were. We carry the spiritual within us. Externally, there is the robust physical. In relation to that which we perceive from the cosmos as spiritual, this spiritual is out there, and within us are our physical organs. Just as our ideas, our memories, are images of the physical universe that we experience, so our physical organs — as their spiritual translation shows us — are internal images, if I may use the term, physicalized images of that which is spread out in the great cosmos. We learn to relate our organs to the great cosmos, to relate them to the whole cosmos, that is, to the spiritual content of the cosmos. We grow with the riddles of our soul into the riddles of the cosmos, which we learn to look at externally.

Now we come to the thought exercises, and I would like to say that in addition to the transition from the thought exercises to something else – which I have characterized in the empty consciousness – we must add the will exercises.

A simplest will exercise – my dear audience – can still be done with imagining and thinking. It is carried out by doing what I would call backward thinking. Everyone can do these exercises in a simple way by recalling the events of the day backwards in reverse order in the evening, letting them pass before the soul; first what happened before going to bed, then something that happened a little earlier, and so on back to the morning, in as small portions as possible. One can also feel a special interest, one has a special interest from the event, one has a special interest in the processes from the fifth to the first re-experienced [real process]!

What is achieved through such real processes? It is, despite arising from the imagination, an exercise of the will. Otherwise, by imagining, we abandon ourselves to the external sequence of facts. We develop our soul life on the thread of external events, of external facts. Now we resist with our imagination what is there as a consequence of the external facts. We reverse the thought. To do this, a strong force is to be applied, a strong application of force is necessary, a stronger force than we usually apply. The will gradually moves out of our thinking.

We can then strengthen such exercises of will if we gradually break certain habits that we have and transform them into others. If we go even further; for example, if we say to ourselves at a certain age: You now want to get into the habit of something that for you is like a temperament trait, like a very intimate, inner, ingrained habit. It will take years before it becomes something natural in you, but you want to work on yourself daily. If you take yourself in hand, if you really take something that arises from thought and incorporate it into the will, then the will becomes something completely different! And then what happens is — it seems like just a comparison, but it is absolutely a reality, ladies and gentlemen. How is it that our eye is organized in such a way that it can serve to see? It is because the eye's own substance does not assert itself, but is, so to speak, selflessly integrated into our organism. In the moment when the eye asserts its own substantiality, for example in an eye disease, we can no longer see! Seeing – and the same applies to the other senses – perception is only possible because the organ of perception switches off its own materiality, in that it becomes, as it were, selfless.

Now I would never claim — of course not — that our whole organism is somehow diseased in relation to ordinary life or ordinary science. But this ordinary organism that we carry with us in our earthly life is, after all, designed for our external everyday life, for our ordinary, everyday consciousness. It is very healthy for that, but not for higher experiences, not for penetrating into the supersensible world. In this respect, it is like a diseased eye and, on the contrary, I would say it becomes even less transparent when we merely carry out mental exercises. Through these mental exercises, precisely that which is our heart, our lungs, becomes more opaque, like an external object. Through the exercises of the will, this opacity is accompanied by a transparency. We gradually come to perceive what actually happens between the intention to raise the arm and hand and the actual effect. That which, between one thought and the next, is immersed in sleep, that which descends as will into the organism, becomes tangible to perception.

But through this the organism — of course in the spiritual-soul sense, not as with the eye, but in the spiritual-soul sense — the whole organism becomes spiritually-soul transparent. In spiritual and soul terms, the human being becomes a single sensory organ. In this way, I would say, the human being develops opacity in one direction by getting to know his organs and learning to relate them to the cosmos. And on the other hand, by being able to pass arbitrarily from one to the other – that is what matters – he also develops the transparency of his whole organism.

And when he develops the transparency of his organism, then – my dear audience – that which otherwise appears in the physical world is developed to the highest degree in the spiritual-soul sense: the unfolding of love, that love which also underlies all our truly free actions, as I summarized it for the moral world – presented in my “Philosophy of Freedom” already in the early nineties – and which shows that in the spiritual life which is characteristic of ethics, of morality. I have described this special inclination of the will to the activity that unfolds in love from its ethical point of view; now I have to describe it from the point of view of knowledge.

But in this way, man comes to be truly free with his will from his physical organism, as he is free in seeing with his eye. He sees spiritually and soulfully through his physical organism. And he sees into the spiritual and soul world, so that he stands in it as he stands in the physical through his senses in a physical way. He learns to live in intuitive knowledge, which now stands in the reality of the spiritual.

Now, as the next experience, the image appears, the pictorial content of what the person then really experiences by passing through the gate of death. Man first became aware of his spiritual self in this order of realization, as I have described to you, independently of his physical body in relation to his thinking. In this way he gains knowledge of his being as it was before birth, or before conception. Now he becomes free of this body with his will, in that the body becomes transparent spiritually-mentally, in that the human being is in the spiritual-mental world. Now he has the image-knowledge of the real process that takes place at death, when the body not only becomes transparent, but is discarded, given over to the element of earth, and the spiritual-soul connects with the spiritual-soul world.

This has been prepared for through our entire life on earth, that what we behold through meditation, concentration and empty consciousness of the prenatal, or what lies before conception, is interrelated, that it connects with what emerges from the will. We learn to familiarize ourselves with the nature of thought through will, and in the same way we learn to familiarize ourselves with the nature of will through thought. World thoughts open up to us, not subjective thoughts, but thoughts that work out of the world. The world becomes transparent to us in thought when we place ourselves in this world in intuitive knowledge. The event of death appears before us, but it contains the causes for a real knowledge that has been conscientiously developed and that only those can confuse with all that appears today as occultism and the like who do not enter into that which is repeatedly and described as the conscientious method by which man can ascend to a spiritual realization that really allows him to approach the realm where the soul mysteries are experienced, but where also those experiences come up that are in a certain sense actually the answer to these soul mysteries. For in life we do indeed enter into facts.

We had to point out on the one hand the event, the fact of death. Then the soul leaves the body, leaves the body with which it was connected during its earthly existence. Man connects with the physical-sensual world in its conformity to law. And on the other hand, the person develops inwardly that through which the soul unites with the spiritual, as I have described. There the soul unites with the spiritual, and it experiences how, after it has detached itself from the body, it develops further with the spiritual as a unity after death, until it has developed to the point of birth or - we say - conception in the spiritual-soul world. And just as we have processes below that are simply carried over from the external natural laws, which play into the soul during life on earth, effecting its state, its mood, its happiness and unhappiness — as this is announced from within, so those processes are now weaving themselves, where the prenatal and the post-mortal elements interact. Just as we are dependent on our body, so we are dependent on our spiritual. And just as that which remains unconscious in the body remains unconscious for the soul until it is scientifically investigated by it, so that which flows to the soul from the spiritual, giving it mood, state, happiness and unhappiness, remains unconscious for the soul to which the receptive human soul is accessible at all.

That which is unconsciously experienced in the spiritual as an analogue, as the unconscious in the physical, plays as great a role for the soul and its independence as the physical and that which is linked to the physical. After all, something else is also similar to death, but in its similarity it is opposed to death; with our physical body we live in the outer world. By constantly absorbing this outer world through food, by allowing the laws that are in the outer world to continue to work in us, and by living in the spiritual world on the other hand, we absorb the spiritual laws into ourselves. And the spiritual laws touch the physical laws within us.

But what is the case with regard to physical laws? They are life, they are rhythmic life, they are constantly renewing themselves. We have to eat every day. If I may say something very trivial: we cannot be satisfied with having eaten yesterday or the day before or the day before that and remembering it today. This is the case with the external abstract, the knowledge intended for the ordinary consciousness; we do not assume that the memory of eating is enough for us.

What we take up from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is something that, in the spiritual realm, must have the same rhythmic existence for the human being as the physical and bodily processes otherwise do. We cannot remember — and be satisfied with — what we absorb as anthroposophy, as we can do in chemistry or in the external sciences.

Those who have ascended to the highest regions of anthroposophy feel that they must return again and again to what is for them the perception of the higher, supersensible world; otherwise something arises in them like spiritual hunger. This is just as real. Indeed, one cannot be satisfied with ordinary memories. We enter into a reality by seeking out that which shows us how the soul is connected to spiritual life.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what Anthroposophy has to say about the riddle of the soul, at least the beginning, I would say. In the short time available in a lecture, I had to sketch out how anthroposophy delves into the field of soul mysteries, how it actually shows, not just adheres to everyday life, but how it points beyond birth and death, how it points to a supersensible world, to which the soul with its eternal essence belongs as it belongs to the physical-sensory world with its body. By facing the fact of death, the human being learns to see through the reality of anthroposophical knowledge, and thus to achieve something in anthroposophical experiments, or let us say the beginning of a solution to the riddle of the soul, that becomes a truly necessary spiritual nourishment for him again and again.

But this is how knowledge comes into being that is alive. And anthroposophy is the basis for knowledge that is alive, that is not dead knowledge that is valid only for memory. But this is also how something arises from anthroposophy that can be something for life. But I need only point to one area, to the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, founded by Emil Molt and led by me, where teaching is given and education is cultivated entirely in the spirit of such an understanding of the human being, as it can arise from the contemplation of the whole, full human being, even in the child. We do not seek to realize this in the external transmission of a worldview. We do not teach an anthroposophical worldview. It is not suitable for children in the form in which it exists today. But what arises from the anthroposophically oriented worldview for teaching and education is a real engagement with the child's being, a real engagement with the true being of the human being.

What is needed in education today, which will develop humanity? Humanity will have to engage with the great tasks of life in a completely different way than is already the case today. Humanity will have to engage with the ever-increasing tasks of life in education and teaching in a completely different way than people are already capable of today.

And however much one may have against the Dornach building – and this applies to those present – it is shown in the artistic realm that which is otherwise presented in words as a world-view content!

Dear attendees,

I would like to use the following comparison again and again: take a nut and its shell. In the nut shell, in its curves and bends, you have the same laws, the same formations at work as in the nut kernel itself. The anthroposophical world view makes it just as necessary as it is necessary for the nut to form its outer shell according to the nut kernel, to have some corresponding outer framework. It could not have had just an outer shell. It could not have been something that does not have an inner life. No mere architect could possibly have erected a good building; that could not be the case with what we are developing as an anthroposophically oriented worldview.

What is willed by mere life for good seeing, what comes towards us as genuine forms, what comes towards us as genuine artistic forms in the pictorial and sculptural, must, although it remains artistic, contain no single symbol, no single allegory; instead, everything has flowed into the artistic. But it must have the same effect as what is otherwise presented in words at the Goetheanum. What is presented on the stage in Dornach is only a different artistic language for that which lives when it wants to become a word, in order to go out into the world as a word of world-view.

But what leads into spiritual, supersensible worlds, in that it proceeds from clear, methodical thinking and methodical research as never before in any external science, what leads into the supersensible, that not only provides a foundation for a living knowledge, for a living science, not only a creative force for artistic creation and artistic enjoyment.

No matter how much one may have to criticize Dornach and his style – I am my own harshest critic, and some things would not be built the same way again – one only learns through practice. But that is not the point. What matters is the will! What matters is that one can truly strive towards a living artistic style from a living world view, so that the outer shell within the world works according to the same laws as the nutshell according to the nut, and like the nut kernel also has an outwardly corresponding shell. How external some old architectural style would be to a world view that is now being born out of the immediate urges and longings of contemporary humanity! But such a striving must at the same time lead into the deepest foundations of the human being.

What I mention last is not the last, and one might actually think that those who are public representatives of religious denominations would see not some antagonism in anthroposophy, but rather a help. For people today are shaped by popular science, even in the most popular knowledge and in the simplest minds. And that which presents the content of the supersensible must be measured against the education of humanity. Today, even at school, work is done according to the habits and methods of external science. In this way, the connection between the human being and the supersensible world is increasingly being neglected. Religious life would increasingly be allowed to fade away if it did not receive a new foundation, if it did not receive the support of knowledge, of provable knowledge of the supersensible world.

Therefore, the representatives of religious denominations should look to anthroposophy as a helper that wants to support precisely that which they should support most, and to do so in a way that present-day humanity will increasingly want to see. A Christian is truly a fainthearted one who does not realize that his Christianity is only truly supported by Anthroposophy in the present; no longer by that which is traditionally reproduced, but through the living contemplation of the Mystery of Golgotha, which we arrive at when we pass from the solution of the soul riddle, as we have presented it to our souls today, into the depths of religious life.

The third thing that should arise from this world view, which presents itself to the world as Anthroposophy , that does not want to think alone, that wants to become alive inwardly with all the soul forces in man, that wants to make an inner, spiritual man within the outer, bodily man tangible for one's own consciousness.

But that is what makes anthroposophy — however imperfect it still is today —, it is in its infancy, and I am the first to admit its imperfections, but I am also the one who could write all the criticisms that are written today myself. For the one who dares to say such things before the world today, as well as the things that have been said here before you today, also knows what can be objected to them, and he does not need to wait for what comes from this or that side as a judgment, out of an awareness that does not yet want to engage with Anthroposophy. He will not find anything new in the judgments, which mostly arise from a lack of understanding! I want to say this to show that the one who is inside Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, should not be surprised by what is encountered!

Dear attendees! If consciousness that does not engage with anthroposophy were right, then anthroposophy would not be needed. If anthroposophy could easily please everyone today, then it would not need to come forward at all! It does not aspire to be immediately accepted today, for it speaks to forces that lie much deeper in the soul; and yet it knows that even in those who contradict it, these yearning, driving forces for a scientific, artistic and religious deepening are present.

New paths are being sought in all three fields. Anthroposophy is aware of the weaknesses that still afflict the present day. But it would like to be — let me say this at the end, ladies and gentlemen, through its special method of research, through the life it evokes in the soul as a result of this method of research, through the deepening to which it can bring feeling and artistic insight in man —, it would like to be a foundation of a spiritual science. It wants to be that which leads people to the creativity of artistic creation and artistic attitude. And it ultimately wants to be that which inwardly develops a strong, soulful, spirit-filled vehicle for religious life as well.

If it endeavors to work in these three directions, then it may perhaps believe that it is working in the spirit of the most significant demands of today.

Dear attendees, the terrible fire disaster of last December night destroyed an outer shell of anthroposophical endeavor. This event, which is so painful for many who have grown fond of this building – the Goetheanum in Dornach – may perhaps give me cause to address these reflections first to the Goetheanum in Dornach today. I have been privileged to give many reflections of this kind here from this place, and today's reflection, too, is only intended to be given in the same style as the others, and only the connection is to be made to the Goetheanum. This Goetheanum has certainly had many people who, out of an insight into the will that wanted to emanate from this Goetheanum, greatly revered and loved this Goetheanum. But one may say that the vast majority of visitors, the numerous visitors who have been there over the years, could not make anything special out of this Goetheanum. There were many people who were annoyed by the very name Goetheanum. And then there were many who looked at the forms of this overall structure, composed of two domed buildings, and found them to be simply peculiar, perhaps merely the expression of a fantastic aspiration. There were then people who, on one or other of these grounds, believed that all kinds of spookish, perhaps spiritistic, goings-on took place in the Goetheanum, that it had been built to represent some kind of unclear, hazy mysticism, and perhaps even, as some put it, to serve the most blind superstition and so on, and so on.

And yet one might be amazed at how far what is believed in the present day about this or that can be from the actual fact. Because the Goetheanum has certainly not served any of the above. And if there are those today who fight against all these more or less backward or superstitious tendencies, those who want what was really wanted in the sense of building the Goetheanum, they certainly belong to these opponents. But I do not want to speak of the negative today; I want to speak of what the Goetheanum wanted and what Anthroposophy, for which it was intended to be a place, actually wants for present-day humanity.

The fact that the name Goetheanum was chosen over time was basically in line with the heartfelt desire of a number of admirers of the Goetheanum and Anthroposophy. The name of one of the figures in my mystery dramas, Johannes Thomasius (not John the Evangelist, but a character in my mystery dramas) was the first name chosen for this building on the hill at Dornach. It was accordingly named the Johannesbau.

Of course, this in particular gave rise to many misunderstandings, as is easy to understand, and I have therefore had to emphasize again and again that for me this Dornach building is a Goetheanum. Why? I can say that for more than 40 years I have been occupied with that which is based on Goethe's knowledge, art and world view. And anyone who delves into Goethe's striving for knowledge, into Goethe's art, into Goethe's striving for a worldview with an open mind, anyone who immerses themselves in it, will not only be stimulated to look at what Goethe wanted externally, but Goethe works when one really engages with him and with the universality of his striving. One can imbue one's soul with what he wanted, as with a spiritual lifeblood. And from this imbued experience of what one might call Goetheanism, I am convinced that it was wanted by Goethe in accordance with his time for certain parts of human perception, from this experience of what one might call Goetheanism, Anthroposophy has arisen.

Of course, anyone who takes Goethe's world view, Goethe's artistic intention and looks at it from the outside will not be able to extract from Goethe, with any kind of logic or, let us say, with any kind of ordinary artistic taste, what is contained in Anthroposophy. But there is, I would say, a logic of thought, and there is a logic of life. Those who make the logic of life their own can immerse themselves in something like that which Goethe revealed to the world, so that it comes to life in them, and continues to grow and develop. And in this sense of a living logic, I feel how Anthroposophy emerges from Goetheanism without contradiction, however little one admits it today. And because anthroposophy basically owes its origin to Goethe, it was a natural emotional need to call the place where anthroposophy, the descendant of Goethe's world view, so to speak, was cultivated, the Goetheanum.

This is not meant to be a silly claim to represent what Goetheanism is with any kind of perfection, but rather, I would like to say, this Goetheanum wanted to be a kind of place of homage for what Goethe gave to the world. It should not serve to represent Goethe's way of thinking for the sake of prestige, but rather it should be an expression of gratitude for what can be obtained from Goethe's world striving. And those who feel that this naming is in line with the expression of a feeling of gratitude will probably no longer be annoyed by the name.

But if I am to go further – my dear audience – and show you what the Goetheanum was intended for, then I must continue today the reflections that I have often been privileged to make in this hall and say what anthroposophy is intended for. Anthroposophy is indeed intended to find the answer, as far as it can be found by man, to the highest questions of human existence, to those questions that are related to human destiny and human dignity in the highest sense of the word. If a person does not numb their own soul life, then the question of the soul's eternity arises again and again. Then the question arises: Is the human soul a free or a non-free being? Then the question arises: To what extent does the human soul rest and work in that which can be called a divine world order?

Our present-day science, which has achieved such unspeakably great things for the external fields of life, has become rather timid about these questions, which are often called the last questions of existence, because this outer science wants to real, true science only that which can be perceived by the senses, which can be combined by human intellectual activity from sensory perceptions, and it rejects that which goes beyond the sensual. But in doing so, it also rejects any answer to the deeper questions of human existence, as just characterized. For without an entry of knowledge into the supersensible realm, man cannot even dare to attempt to approach a humanly possible answer to this question.

Anthroposophy, however, does not want to give the answers to these questions in a mere doctrine, to the extent that this is possible for man. Nor does anthroposophy want to give the answers to these questions through an unclear mysticism, but anthroposophy wants to penetrate as far as possible into these answers in the same way as today's sciences actually strive. The only thing is that anthroposophy is clear about the fact that what man calls knowledge still has to be grasped in a completely different way than it is often done today, especially by the most authoritative authorities, if one wants to see these questions in the right light at all.

I would like to start from a parable-like observation, but one that is supposed to be more than a mere parable. You see, my dear audience, every soul that contemplates the world, without thinking that it can gain special insights into the answers to the riddles of the world, every soul stands, perhaps only in amazement and admiration, before the images of that muffled world that we call the world of dreams. I start from the world of dreams, certainly not in order to mystically extract something from this world of dreams, but to illustrate how anthroposophy thinks about that which must become knowledge for humanity if the characterized questions are to be approached.

Imagine the manifold, colorful dream world before the sleeping soul. Imagine how, on the one hand, the content of the dream is a reflection of what we know well from the world we live in during the waking hours. But one should also imagine the soul, in which the dream world floats and envelops the soul in a freely moving way, transforming it, becoming more fantastic. And anyone who has an open mind, anyone who has a healthy mind and, above all, a healthy will in the world, will have no choice but to say to themselves: We can never recognize the reality value of the dream world during the dream itself.

We could, I would say, dream our whole life long, then we would simply, as we do in the dream experience, consider the dream content to be our reality. We would believe that the world we dream is the real world. But since we wake up from the dream world through our organization, we gain the perspective in waking life to examine the reality value of the dream world. Only when we are outside the dream, only when our senses and our will are, as it were, switched on to the external world around us, do we have a point of view from which to assess the reality value of the dream world. Of course, no one may judge what is spatial reality from the point of view of a dream. For healthy thinking and healthy willing, only the reverse assessment is possible.

Now, while someone is absorbed not in a dream world, but precisely in the world of daily reality, which, although in a different way from a dream, also provides us with diverse, colorful images, but images whose inner content we only recognize when we penetrate them, when we penetrate them in their interaction with what our mind gives us. As anthroposophy delves into this world of reality, as anthroposophy approaches the world of everyday reality in the same way that a dreamer approaches his dream world, you come to the question: Yes, is it not possible that a second awakening takes place, so to speak, in the human soul life? Just as the natural workings of our organism tear us out of our dreams, as our will is switched on during awakening into the external sensual world of reality, so it could indeed be possible that a further awakening is possible from the world that concerns our everyday consciousness. If that is the case, then it must be said that the reality value of the sensory world can only be assessed from the point of view of the world into which one awakens, the supersensible world, just as the reality value of the dream world can only be assessed from the point of view of the everyday world. I would like to say: Anthroposophy first asks itself the big question: Is such a second awakening possible? It does not want to sink back to recognize the world, into dream-like reality. It wants to go the opposite way; it wants to go the way that man goes from the dream into sensory reality. It wants to go further from sensory reality into supersensible reality. Whether one can do this depends, of course, on how one is able to penetrate the human soul life, in fact the whole human life. I would like to say: one must simply subject the soul and its life to examination to see whether it has the possibility of such a second awakening.

Now, my dear audience, such a second awakening is possible. Above all, it is possible if a person does not give in to intellectual arrogance, by which he says to himself: You were a small child at first, you were not yet equipped with the ability to think, feel or willpower as you have as an adult; you had to develop them with the help of your human environment, with the help of your education, with the help of life, these abilities, to the degree that you now have them. But if, as an adult, you discard intellectual arrogance and ask yourself: Is it possible for the abilities to be further developed from the level at which you have brought them as an adult, just as they have developed from the childlike stage to the stage of everyday life? And you are led on the path of such further development of human abilities when you pay special attention to individual such abilities.

Let us first turn our attention to that faculty of the human soul or, let us say, of the human being that is usually called memory in life, the gift of remembrance. Let us first consider it as memory presents itself in everyday life. Out of the realm of the soul, in the midst of impressions of the present, perhaps evoked by these impressions of the present, thought images emerge, pale thought images of something we may have experienced years ago. And so what emerges from the depths of the soul or is brought up by present-day perceptions is mixed with the all-embracing, transforming power of the imagination, perhaps with some fantasy too. And so, through the power of memory, we have before us images of something that can undoubtedly be said to It is in a fairly realistic way, in the kind of reality that we are accustomed to when we open our eyes and when we hear our surroundings with our ears; it is not present in this reality. We take events into our memory images that simply consist of our having entered into this or that relationship with this or that person, this or that natural event, or something else, years ago.

What took place there is no longer reality today. But we have the ability to present to ourselves from the depths of our soul, in more or less pale or more or less meaningful images, what, in the way we otherwise perceive reality through the senses, is not present reality. This ability to remember can be cultivated. And it is cultivated when a person delves into his or her own thought life in a way that is not usually done in everyday life, particularly today. When people devote themselves to their thoughts today, they are usually thoughts that have been inspired from outside or that arise as memory thoughts in the way I have described. If someone is honest with his soul life, he must say to himself: what the external impressions provide, what arises from the depths of the soul life as memory, is actually what makes up this exterior of the soul life.

But there is something else we can do. We can tear ourselves away from this, I would say passive role that we play in relation to our thinking. We can try to live in our thoughts with an ever-increasing inner activity. You can live in thought in such a way that you simply form thoughts that you can easily grasp; so that you can be sure that if you devote yourself to these thoughts with strong inner activity, you will not fall prey to suggestion or mystical dreams, if you only present thoughts that are easy to grasp to your soul in such a way that you do not let them scurry away like thoughts that are stimulated from outside or inside. Then you realize that in this thinking, which is brought about by your own arbitrariness – in this life, in the activity of thinking, something develops within the soul life that can be compared to what happens when we use a part of our muscles in external physical work, for example. They become stronger, they become more powerful, it is precisely in active application that the muscles become stronger and more powerful. However, we notice this in a different way, in that we repeatedly and repeatedly immerse ourselves in thoughts that we have woven ourselves or even made ourselves or acquired from some spiritual researcher, through our inner will — if I may put it that way. We become inwardly stronger in soul, and we notice when we do such exercises – for some it takes longer, for others shorter, it can take weeks, it can take years – when we continue such exercises, we notice: the inner strength of our soul awakens. And it awakens in such a way that we become acquainted with that which we previously only knew as a memory in a transformed, reshaped form. A new inner ability, I would say an increased ability to remember, but one that does not simply deliver memories to us, we feel them in our soul.

And in the moment when this power has become strong enough, when the thinking that has been repeatedly and repeatedly seized in inner activity – the thinking that is now not only thought but is experienced, so that one feels it as an inner reality – in the moment when this inner thinking has become strong enough, something occurs, it usually occurs piece by piece, something occurs before this human soul that it has not known before. It is not just memory that comes before the human soul, but the direct perception of what the person has experienced since about the first years of childhood within this earthly existence. But what the person experiences is not a collection of laboriously recalled images, but something that suddenly presents itself to the soul like a vast tableau of life, so that one can see one's past life as it is present, as if time had become space. If one is able to do this, then one also feels one's self in a completely different way than is possible in ordinary consciousness, actually no longer in the physical body. One feels connected with one's self with all the experiences one has gone through and which now come up in this enormous memory tableau for the consciousness.

I would like to call that in which one now experiences oneself, as one experiences oneself in physical life in one's earthly life in the arms, the head, in the legs, I would like to call this sum of life images, of which one feels: It is oneself, it is one's self, only extended beyond one's earthly lifetime. I would like to call it the temporal body in contrast to the spatial body, in which one perceives oneself for the ordinary consciousness. It is the first supersensible experience that one has in this way.

But now — and this is the significant thing — one does not experience this tableau, this time body, in such a way that one looks at it externally, but rather, by immersing oneself in thinking again and again with activity, with inner activity, one has acquired the possibility of being immersed in the experiences, of having them as if they were present, of really being one with this temporal body, not just existing in space but moving through time and feeling like a human unit through the time that one moves through. One expands one's existence almost to the point of one's birth as a continuous reality.

That is the result of what I would call transformed memory. While you are in this state, looking at yourself as being immersed in your previous life, you do not have the opportunity to develop the memory in any particular way. In fact, the one who experiences this must experience it again and again, at least in a shadowy way, if he wants to have it before him. The fact that one has turned memory into something else for this supersensible world, into the contemplation of a finer world of time, has the effect at the same time that memory itself is extinguished for the moments when one beholds this higher world. But the one who develops in this way in a healthy way will not, like a mystical dreamer or a somnambulist, involuntarily come to a different way of imagining, but will come to this different way of imagining with full consciousness. This also enables him, I might say, to return again and again to the ordinary consciousness of everyday life. He is able, despite looking first into the first realm of the spiritual world, to stand with both feet in sensual reality in a healthy way and not to become a mystical dreamer and fantasist.

But in this way, man attains true self-knowledge. For it is not what has approached me from the outside that appears in this tableau of life, but precisely how one has intervened in external events. There is a difference between someone making an effort to recall the events they have experienced in their ordinary consciousness and memory, and what I have just described, when one recalls the events one has experienced at one's birth in one's ordinary consciousness and memory. Above all, one is interested in how the world has affected one, how this or that person has approached one, what effect this or that natural event has had on one. When you have this higher spiritual, transformed memory tableau before you, then you actually do not see what another person has done to you, but rather you see how you yourself have behaved towards the other person, how you have behaved towards this or that natural event, this or that fact of life. One sees oneself as acting, as active. In short, my dear audience, one has advanced to a real self-knowledge, to a vivid self-knowledge. This is due, if I may express it so, to the strengthening of thinking to such an extent that one feels one is now living in one's thinking as one otherwise lives in one's blood circulation, in one's breathing.

In ordinary life, thoughts are dull and shadowy. They are not compelling; they are not something in which one lives as one does in one's blood or as one does in one's breathing. By practicing in the way I have described, one senses one's life in thought, as it were, just as one otherwise senses one's life in the physical body. And then one knows that in addition to the physical body that a human being carries, there is this second time body, which is not spatial – it can be drawn spatially, but that is only an illustration – that there is this second time body, which is infinitely finer, if one may use this expression at all, than the physical body. In my writings I have called it the etheric or formative body, because one must have an expression for these things. One need not be offended by expressions. This, alongside the physical body, is the second link in the human being, and it leads up the first stage to the supersensible body in order to penetrate further. For one learns through such contemplation only one's own human being for this earth life.

To penetrate further, it is necessary, so to speak, to develop the opposite strength to that which consists of immersing oneself in thoughts. It is indeed the case that Anyone who is familiar with this immersion in thought knows how it captivates people. Indeed, if you do it the way I describe it in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' or in 'Occult Science: An Outline', you do preserve yourself. You do acquire this world, however, if you do the exercises the way I describe them there, in a completely free way. You are not influenced by what you experience, you stand in it as a free human being in the sensual outer world.

But still, to the same extent that anything in the external world that particularly moves us captivates us, this world, which we experience when we immerse ourselves in thought, captivates us; little by little — it is not even an exaggeration, my dear audience — one has the feeling: you now live in this power of thought, just as you otherwise live in your physical body. And yet, if one wants to progress in supersensible knowledge, it is necessary to overcome precisely this stage. For one must be clear about this: this stage is actually only what I have called an [imaginative] stage in my books. One experiences what the world has implanted in one during one's life on earth, what one has, so to speak, imagined as one's own conception, feeling, will — not in the sense of a fantastic education, but in the sense of really imagining what one has imagined.

But one experiences only what one is in the strictest sense as a human being, one experiences only one's human soul. And one does not yet have the right to say that this human soul, which one experiences as in a time body, that this has a continued existence beyond earthly life. For this, higher exercises are necessary. For this, it is necessary that one can now inwardly put oneself – just as one has placed the thinking before the soul, how one has immersed oneself in the thinking, so that the thinking became a life – to suppress this thinking again at any time in complete inner freedom. But that means something special now.

If you have freed yourself from the physical body in the sense I have just described, if you have settled into the etheric body, then initially suppressing the life of thought does not mean falling back into the physical body, but remaining outside of the physical body. But what one has acquired from outside the physical body is suppressed. And one establishes what one might call an empty consciousness. That is the significant thing, that man develops his inner soul abilities to this level of empty consciousness.

I would like to say: just as a person breathes in ordinary life, how he inhales and then exhales again, how the inhalation contains the air of life and the exhalation the air of death, so too, at this higher level of experiencing the mind through thinking, the person must come to stir thinking within himself, just as he stirs the inhaled air as a physical organism. But he must also be able to bring this thinking experience out of his soul. Then the consciousness becomes empty. But once one has attained this possibility of an empty consciousness, one has penetrated to alternating in the soul between being filled with inner powerful thinking, which proceeds in the images as I have described in the tableau of life; once one has achieved being able to alternate between these images and between having nothing in the soul, then after a while – all these things have to be awaited with patience and energy – the empty consciousness that one has achieved in this way does not remain empty, but external perceptions do not arise either. A spiritual world appears around us. And we acquire the ability to live for a while in what we awaken within as images of our own earthly life, and to change it by suppressing these images, by taking the approach of creating empty consciousness by alternating with being filled with external spiritual world content.

Yes, my dear audience, into this empty consciousness now enters the phenomenon of a spiritual world, which we distinguish from what we know ourselves to be in the time body, just as we distinguish the outer colors and sounds from our physical body when we stand in the world of space, in the physical world. We learn to distinguish between what we perceive externally as the spiritual content of the world, as a world of spiritual beings that is around us just as the physical world of physical facts and physical beings is around us, and we learn to distinguish ourselves from this spiritual world.

If I was able to say that the first step of supersensible knowledge comes to a real kind of self-perception, which is an intensified thinking, then this second step, through which we recognize a real spiritual world, through which we experience that there is a spiritual world around us, like the sensual world. This second ability can be compared to the soul activity that we pour into our physical organism when we speak. Speaking is not just a physical, mechanical expression of the human organism. What the physical organism reveals when a person speaks is poured into what is the soul life, and what flows in the words and sentences is what soul life is. When we learn to suppress amplified thinking as I have described it, we learn something in addition to this suppression of thinking, which I will describe in a few words. It is something that is known, but in this case it is described differently with these words. One does not just learn to suppress thinking, but rather one learns to be inwardly silent in a higher sense than is the case in ordinary life. Yes, when the empty consciousness is established, the inner experience is there: now the soul is silent. I said that I use the word as it is used for not speaking in ordinary life. But the word means something different in this case. This silence after suppressed thinking is now a positive inner experience, so to speak, as we otherwise fill ourselves, say, with joy or pain, with what our speech contains, what our words contain. In the same sense, we now feel ourselves immersed in our supersensible being in the way described: we are filled with silence. And this silence is of a special kind in yet another respect.

I have to use a comparison to express myself clearly. I have to say: let's assume we are in the middle of a big city, with all kinds of noise around us. We move out of the city, the sounds get weaker and weaker because they sound further and further away; it gets quieter and quieter. We go out into the solitude of the forest – it becomes even quieter. Finally, we are surrounded by complete silence. But I would like to say: this silence is only the zero. We can go further. We can diminish even further what silence means simply as something that is not heard – if I may use a very trivial expression – just as we can diminish even further when we have spent our assets down to zero, we can diminish these assets even further by getting into debt, by having even less than zero. This is how we can diminish silence. There is something deeper in the soul after the thinking has been suppressed than there is in silence. There is an inner strength in this intensified silence, and in this intensified silence, this stillness, which goes beyond the stillness of zero, this stillness produces something that is not an external thing but an inner language , a language that does not come from the depths of the soul, but that – one experiences it clearly – comes from the supersensible world, in which one is now in this supersensible being, as I have described it. One now feels compelled to describe what one experiences in the inner silence of the soul. One experiences the spiritual world, and from the spiritual world it is as if it speaks to us through the silence of our soul. It really speaks to us. Only one must not pour this speaking into the words that are otherwise produced with our speech organs, but one must pour it by using the natural phenomena themselves to express that which is revealed there as the spiritual world. That is how it happens. But what happens is that — my dear audience — one wants inner elementary naturalness, as it is the behavior towards the outer sensory world. I perceive something spiritual in the world in the way described. This spiritual makes an impression on me, a very specific impression. This impression stands directly before my silent soul. It is the same as the impression made by the color red, not in the way I saw the red color, but just as when I see in my memory a red color surface completely illuminated, I see not the redness of the color, but the memory of the color, the redness of the color. But it is something completely different. So I now experience the direct presence of a spiritual in the soul. I have to express this direct presence of a spiritual in such a way that I remember, so to speak. This spiritual affects me like the red or blue color. I can compare the spiritual in the red or blue color with this or that sound, although it is not at all meant to be any sound of the external sensory world. In other words, my language in relation to the spiritual world becomes very special. My language in relation to the spiritual world becomes such that I make use of sensory phenomena to characterize and express what is revealed to me in the spiritual world. However, these sensory phenomena belong to the spiritual entities and events just as little as the word thinking ultimately belongs to thinking itself. One describes that which one beholds in the spiritual world, as I have described it, for example, in my “Theosophy”; but it is a language that one uses. One makes use of the colors of the senses, the sounds of the senses, in order to describe that which one has to describe in the spiritual world. It is a language, it is the language of the silent soul.

And when the soul has progressed in this way, then even if the power that suppresses thinking and creates silence in the soul is simply strengthened, the whole tableau of self-introspection can be erased. I can, as it were, extinguish my temporal body. Just as I would otherwise only extinguish individual images or isolated thoughts from my consciousness, I now extinguish everything that I have experienced as an earthly human being since my birth. Once I have learned to establish consciousness with the silence of the soul, not only does the comprehensive spiritual world emerge, as I have just described, but also one's own true being, which the person was before descending into a physical world in a previous existence. Now, through the suppression of what one has experienced as an earthly human being, through the empty, silence-filled consciousness, one gets to know one's pre-earthly existence, thus the soul in the state in which it is eternal, in which it was before it entered physical earthly life through the physical human germ. Now one attains, not through philosophical speculation, but through a real contemplation, the knowledge of the eternity of the human soul.

But with that, one also attains knowledge of the whole connection between this human soul and the human body. For one now learns to look into the world in which one was before one descended to earthly existence. And now one learns to recognize how, in this world, which is a purely spiritual one, in which one was before one descended to earthly existence, now one learns to know how this human being, the one who is before one, is the human being, just as the extra-human on earth is the world. One learns to recognize how the human being had developed his supersensible senses — if I may use this paradoxical expression —, his supersensible senses, before he descended into a physical body, precisely in terms of the nature and essence of the human being, how he then, in his pre-earthly existence, saw through the secrets of man, as he saw through these secrets of man in the spiritual world, while he was in his eternal nature, not clothed in his physical body.

And with that, the realization of it also presents itself, the vivid, not speculated realization of how the human being passes through that which it maintains in its eternal being when the human being passes through the gate of death. Beliefs can be formed about that which lives beyond death. It is not at all intended to say here that these beliefs need to be wrong or inadequate; nothing should be said against their correctness. However, we are already living in an age in which man is directed to penetrate to that which is given to him through knowledge and the content of knowledge, not through the content of faith. Therefore, the path of knowledge should be sought, not the mere path of faith.

One comes to understand how the human soul itself is connected to the physical body, how it lives within the blood circulation, lives in the breathing process, lives in every single bodily function. One therefore learns to recognize how not only an ascending, sprouting, and burgeoning life is present in physical life on earth, but, after getting to know the eternal character of the human soul, one sees how this human soul lives in the physical body. One learns to recognize that the will, the growth force, is bound to the sprouting and sprouting forces, but one also learns to recognize that thinking and a part of feeling are bound to the destructive forces of the human organism.

Yes, my dear audience, when you grasp a thought, an idea, it is not a process of growth that takes place, but a process of decay, a kind of atomistic dying process. We are constantly dying as we think, and the same applies to part of our feeling. As physical human beings on earth, we carry within us that which grows like a plant grows. But we also carry within us that which, within our nervous system, continually withers away like a plant withers. But while the plant, in withering away, only decays, we have, alongside what I would call the crumbling away of dying, the possibility of thinking and part of feeling within us. In this way, we look at human life on earth differently than we would through a mere external physiology. We see how the human being comes to his or her thinking, how thought first takes hold, so to speak, when matter is no longer alive in its growth force or even when the structure of matter is destroyed.

Matter is so little the master of our thinking that matter must give up its own nature in our organism where thought wants to rule. Thought rules in our organism in that its whole structure is not the growth of matter, but in that matter withers away. Matter first makes way for thought. If we learn to know partial death in this way, I would say, we learn to recognize how something always dies in us, precisely in order to make room for our spiritual, then we arrive, especially when we have trained our thinking and inner silence as I have described, then we arrive at being able to really see and recognize the human eternity on the other side, beyond death. But something else is needed for this.

And now, dear audience, I must briefly mention something that will certainly seem extremely paradoxical, but it is nevertheless a reality. There is still a soul power that needs to be specially developed if one is to see through the fact that death is just hinted at. While one is developing this empty consciousness, this inner silence of the soul, one also increasingly acquires the need to further develop a soul force that is otherwise present in us, that plays an extraordinarily important role in human life, such a soul force into the spiritual, into the soul. This is the power of love. Love, the noblest of the soul forces, can also be the lowest in a certain respect. It plays its great role in life. So when a person goes through this stage, first feeling at home in his temporal body, then looking to this much higher body – if I may use this expression – which he wore in his pre-earthly existence, his soul powers are so heightened that he also feels the need to increase his ability to love. That is why I have also indicated in my writing 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds' those exercises that increase the ability to love. If one increases this ability to love in parallel with the other abilities mentioned, then one gradually comes to experience in one's own life on earth that which one has seen as one's own nature in the pre-earthly existence. And now one experiences a third aspect of human nature.

In ordinary life, one has otherwise experienced one's physical body, through the way I have described, one's etheric or formative body, the temporal body. Now one experiences oneself in one's actual supersensible body, in which the soul life takes place. One now recognizes this as the one for whom space must always be created by matter, in that matter destroys its structure so that the actual soul-spiritual can spread throughout our organization. And now we also experience, by first seeing how, as it were, matter falls out of the nervous system, becomes dead, and the soul-thought element asserts itself, now we learn to recognize how the soul passes over into the spiritual world when the whole body falls away in death.

I had to describe to you, my dear audience, while speaking of human immortality – I wanted to characterize this question of the three mentioned today – while telling you this, I had to speak in a different way than is often spoken in a philosophical way. In philosophy, it is assumed that one can stick with ordinary thinking, that one can combine thoughts and that one can thus arrive at insights into the immortality of the soul through judgments and conclusions. But here I had to point out to you, based on anthroposophical striving, how one must first develop the human soul with the suppression of intellectual arrogance in order to arrive at the contemplation of the eternal essence, the soul-spiritual essence in man.

But this, dear attendees, is not a mystical activity in the soul, not a dream; it takes place in the soul with the same inner clarity, yes, I would even say with the same inner sobriety as breathing and thinking. Actually, anyone who engages in anthroposophy in the way I have indicated, as you can read in my books, always feels an obligation to treat their soul powers no differently than a mathematician does, to always give an account of the part of their soul life, step by step. It is the same activity that one performs in anthroposophy as in mathematics, except that mathematics deals with dead spatial and numerical relationships and thus what it inwardly grasps spiritually in its forms, in its geometric, arithmetic and algebraic and so on, is applicable only to the outwardly dead. Anthroposophy, on the other hand, creates in the living. Everything is alive. And therefore, what it has grasped, I would say in a mathematical way, it can apply not only to the living, but also to the spiritually existing dead.

When you are surrounded by his pictures in a room, you are alone with yourself as a human being. The person standing next to you, the other people who may be in the room, have a completely different world. If they are all dreaming, they may dream of different things. With his dream world, man is completely alone, isolated. The moment he wakes up, the moment he turns on his will and his senses into the surrounding sensory world, he is no longer isolated; he experiences a shared external world with the other people. But his inner life, his actual soul life, is something that man has only for himself, even within the sensory world of earthly existence. It is like a dream. We only have this for the sensory world outside; inside, everyone dreams their own soul world. In the moment when we look into the pre-earthly existence or, as I have described it, into the existence that a person enters before passing through the gate of death, in that same moment we also have a spiritual-soul existence with the other person. We live in a spiritual world like all souls. Therefore, anthroposophy does not merely open up the idea of immortality, but a real understanding of it: when you pass through the gate of death, you discard your physical body, you continue to live in the spiritual world in your spiritual and soul nature. But also those earthly relationships you had with other people – those you had with those you loved, were related to, or otherwise cared for, friends, like-minded people, and so on – all that is earthly about them falls away. But what your own soul lives on, you live that in community with those with whom you have entered into relationships, you also live that with those who have preceded you, perhaps or after they have also come to the spiritual world.

The real community relationship after people have gone through the gateway of death comes to the immediate realization of knowledge, which has achieved it — if I may use this expression — to develop inwardly transparently and clearly like mathematics, and on the other hand wants to reach up again to the highest questions of human existence. Anthroposophy honestly strives for such knowledge.

And since humanity has actually become accustomed to gaining clear and transparent insights into what it wants to know through the admirable science of nature, if humanity has not numbed itself, it will not be satisfied in the long run with mere beliefs – which, after all, also only incidentally emerged from ancient knowledge – humanity will have to attain spiritual insight just as it has attained natural insight over the past three, four, five centuries. The human soul would have to numb itself to the highest questions of its existence if it did not strive for such spiritual insight. Call it anthroposophy or whatever you like, but such spiritual insight is a need for most people of the present day, even if this need is still deeply rooted in the subconscious. So much of the weal and woe of present-day humanity stems from this need. If we shed light on what sits unconsciously in the mere perception of today's humanity, which feels unsatisfied, which has become nervous, which has all kinds of disharmony and chaos in the soul and also carries this into the world, then we come to the conclusion that that although these people do not grasp this or understand it, they have a deep need to gain knowledge about the spirit, just as humanity has gained knowledge about nature, which has led to external technology. This knowledge will lead people to an understanding of external experience, but also to a deeper understanding, to a truly inward soul understanding of morality. This too, ladies and gentlemen, is what anthroposophy is meant to achieve.

And the Goetheanum wanted to be the outer shell. Goethe spoke beautifully about art when he first encountered it in Italy. In his own way, he wrote beautiful words to his friends in Weimar: “I have a suspicion that the Greeks proceeded according to the very laws by which nature proceeds and which I am on the trail of.” Goethe was seeking in art a sensual expression, a sensual revelation of that which spiritual knowledge glimpses when Goethe spoke from the depths of his soul the words: “Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that would never be revealed without it” – without art, that is. Goethe was looking at the cognitive aspect of the human being in relation to the spiritual world – not the sensory world – as that which permeates the human being to such an extent that he then, as a sculptor, painter, musician and so on, wants to conquer form out of spirit. So, one could say, for Goethe, knowledge was one expression of human endeavor, artistic creation and artistic enjoyment the other. It is only in the course of human development, in the direction of abstract thought, of the theoretical, in which we have become so immersed today, that art of knowledge has become alien. Goethe, on the other hand, strove to bring knowledge to art and art to knowledge because he knew that nature, namely by creating the human form, creates itself as an artist.

What use is it – dear attendees – to say, however strongly you may want to, that you cannot visualize artistic images if you want to recognize something? If nature itself creates like an artist, then you simply do not learn to recognize nature if you only want to recognize it logically, and you least of all learn to recognize people if you are not able to gradually move from strict logical thinking to an artistic, visualizing comprehension of what lives in the human form, in colors, in everything human. A straight path leads from the cognitive to the artistic.

Now, in this sense, one also wanted to be Goethean in that moment when some friends of that world view, which I have again sketched out for you today with a few strokes, came together in a spirit of sacrifice to create a place in Dornach near Basel. I was commissioned to build this place.

Many people have got into the habit of saying: those who call themselves anthroposophists follow my word, they believe only in my authority. Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, I believe that no one can say that they see their will fulfilled less through their followers than I do. I say this, although it may sound paradoxical: most of the time, what I want does not happen.

I was commissioned to build this very place in a certain way. If such a place had been built for any other worldview, one would have gone to this or that architect; the architect would have built a Gothic, Renaissance or ancient building in this or that style for the cultivation of this worldview or spiritual current. That could not be done for anthroposophy. For Anthroposophy wants to be — you will have recognized this from my description today — something that fits into the spiritual development of humanity as a new impulse. Anthroposophy really wants to lead to a change in knowledge: that the human being can achieve this second awakening, of which I have spoken, which is shown when the attempt is really made in the described way. Then the human being wakes up into the supersensible world. Then he can judge the sensory world here as he can judge the dream world from the sensory world. But that, ladies and gentlemen, is not abstract knowledge, it is not a sum of theories, it is not a thought-up world view, it is something that one must experience. It is not something that merely fills the head, it is something that fills the whole human being and seeks its human center in the heart. Then, however, it cannot be exhausted in a one-sided activity, then it must permeate everything that comes out of human nature. Then a person cannot advocate a worldview within a structure that was built from a completely different worldview. Within a Greek or antique, thus actually a Renaissance or Gothic building, one can advocate that which has emerged from the Greek or Gothic outlook. Anthroposophy needs its own envelope by its very nature. For it is not merely an outlook, it is not merely a theory, it is life and becomes life in man, as blood does in an organism. And just as blood builds up the human body artistically, so does the one who experiences anthroposophy build what he builds as a place for it. I have often used a simple, trivial comparison, but it is meant to be deeper. I have said: look at the nutshell. You cannot imagine that other forces are at work in the nutshell than those within [in the nut itself, which we eat instead of the nutshell]. Out of the same forces, in a similar form to which the nut itself is created, [the nut shell] is completely adapted to the nut; so the building envelope must be that which is not theory, but life, in the grasp of all the life forces of the human being.

And so the Goetheanum had to be such that, for example, when one stood on the podium and spoke, the words one chose to express what was revealed by supersensible vision thought-forms, they had to express what spoke to people's eyes from the forms of the columns and the paintings on the domes. The whole had to be in harmony down to the last sensual form.

And again, when the art of eurythmy was cultivated in Dornach, this art in which the human being comes to a visible language through complicated gestures that are completely drawn from his nature, so that one can express a poem in individual movements as well as through recitation and declamation — when the stage was filled with moving people, who were performing some kind of poetry or music in their movements, not dancing but singing in movement —, what was happening on stage was a continuation of what the forms were that surrounded the audience in the building. When the spectator turned his eye to the columnar forms, to the forms of the cupolas among themselves, when he turned his eye up to the cupola paintings, he had a similar basic feeling as when he looked at the stage and eurythmy was taking place.

Just as the nut can only be in its shell through the laws it has formed itself, so when Anthroposophy was given the opportunity to have its own house, it could only create this shell artistically out of the spiritual realm, out of which it itself experiences its world view, out of which the whole world view that takes hold of people is born. The Goetheanum wanted to be to the eye what Anthroposophy is to the direct apprehension of the soul through the word.

Because Anthroposophy still seems strange to people today and because all sorts of things are made of it by those who do not know it — I have characterized this in the beginning —, therefore what was the outer shell of a new architectural style seemed strange to people, just as the nutshell will seem strange to someone who knows nothing about nuts but believes that something is present in an arbitrary form and shape. Just as the world itself is shaped, so attempts have been made to create out of a spiritual world of impulses, taking hold of the anthroposophical world view, and also artistically, in Dornach.

The Goetheanum wanted to show this in its external forms under construction, entirely in the Goethean style: Art is a revelation of those secret laws of the universe that cannot be revealed without art – just as the Goetheanum speaks in sensual forms where the thought itself expired into sensual forms. There was no symbol, there was no allegory, there was artistic feeling everywhere, where the thought as mere thought is no longer enough, where the thought only becomes complete when it overflows into artistic form. But since the thought is born of the spirit, that into which it pours is also born of the spirit. Art is entirely for contemplation, but it is nevertheless, like everything in the world, born out of the spirit. Therefore, my dear audience, even for those who truly understand anthroposophy in their innermost being, something has been lost at the Goetheanum that is, in a sense, irreplaceable, because the Goetheanum was not intended for thinking up, explaining or describing, but for contemplation, because it was intended to visualize that which comes from the same source, namely anthroposophy. But what Anthroposophy can only give in words, which almost cries out to be poured out into a sensory form — what should be vivid —, that is what the fire has taken away, so to speak. In short, the way Goethe thought in relation to knowledge is what he wanted to be embodied in the Goetheanum. The Goetheanum wanted to reveal what Anthroposophy is meant to express.

Just as the human soul reveals itself as immortal in the mortal body through anthroposophical contemplation, so I may say without sentimentality: the body may fall away, even though all the pains and all the suffering that we know are attached to it. Only when the body falls away do we think of the immortality of the soul. And so today I may well conclude with the words that are only intended to illustrate what I meant not theoretically but humanly, emotionally, and intuitively today in answering the question: “What is anthroposophy and what did the Goetheanum want?” I would like to say — when the question arises: “What did the Goetheanum want?” it must be said: The Goetheanum wanted and needed to express the spirit in external matter, just as the human body is formed in external matter. That which is expressed in external material can be destroyed by the elements; but that which should live in the Goetheanum is itself of a spiritual nature. Anthroposophy does not want to be built and cannot be built out of external material; it can only be formed out of that which reveals itself from the spiritual, supersensible world. But this cannot be destroyed by any element, it is of a duration that may be characterized by saying: Yes, anyone who can look at the human soul impartially today knows that the human soul cannot remain calm for long when it comes to what it can learn today from knowledge about the [sensual]. It demands, even if still unconsciously, a supersensible knowledge. And because humanity will not be able to do without the knowledge of the supersensible in the long run, Anthroposophy may hope that, although it has now lost its home, it will revive all the more when humanity becomes aware that it needs it to grasp true human dignity and to see through true human destiny. spiritual word, that it will come to life even more when humanity becomes aware that it needs it to grasp true human dignity, to see through true human destiny, as the realization of the true spiritual, eternal essence of the human soul.

Dear attendees, I must apologize again today for the cold that I brought with me yesterday and which has not yet been completely overcome, so I do not know how I will manage the lecture with my voice.

Now, dear listeners, when we listen to the most ancient voices that have emerged within the development of humanity with regard to the essence of man himself and the striving for knowledge of this human essence, it is without doubt one of the most significant sayings that we hear resounding from ancient Greece, for example: “Know Thyself”. When this injunction from the ancient seats of wisdom is addressed to man, it certainly does not mean that one should only bring one's bodily inner experiences to a kind of self-knowledge; rather, it means that man should strive to fathom his own being, that which constitutes his dignity as a human being, that which lies at the root of his destiny as a human being. And it can be said that ever since this word first resounded in human history, throughout ancient Greece and the Middle Ages, despite all its aberrations, right up to the present day, this word has become a guiding principle. And a large part of the scope of the human spirit's endeavors, a large part of what has been brought up from the deepest foundations of the soul's life, all of this has culminated in fathoming the human being itself in connection with the world being and with the development of the world.

And precisely in the heyday of natural science, in that period of the nineteenth century in which the greatest achievements of natural science were made, achievements that cannot be overestimated, in that period humanity, especially its most enlightened minds, increasingly came to despair of the possibility of such self-knowledge, such knowledge of the human being. People came to believe that human knowledge could only include that which could be expressed from material, sensual, visible experiences, insofar as one has to acknowledge that something lives and moves in the human being like a soul or spirit. because one thought one saw the limits of knowledge of nature in the right way – one said to oneself: one cannot approach this actual human being, this human consciousness, with real knowledge, which after all can only be knowledge of nature. And so doubt arose more and more about whether we could ever achieve what was set before humanity as the highest demand in the “know thyself!” of the ancient wisdom sites.

It can be said that if it were so, then man would have to renounce the fulfillment of that ancient demand; the possibility would be lost that man has firm ground for his soul life under his feet. It would be lost for man because the knowledge of his dignity and his essence, his destiny, would be lost; it would also be lost for man the possibility to develop a secure sense of purpose and a joyful, joyful, but also energetic desire to work in the world.

It was therefore no wonder that at a time when, on the one hand, science was increasingly drawing attention to the fact that it itself – and it believed that it was the only possible, scientific knowledge – could not arrive at a true knowledge of man , that because people actually cannot live without such self-knowledge in truth, they strove from the deep longing of their soul for such self-knowledge and for an understanding of the connection with the world by other means than the scientific ones.

And so, in modern times, the dissatisfaction with science itself led many people to feel an ever-increasing need to seek out mysticism. When science established its boundaries, the mystic believed that by immersing himself in the inner being of man, he could penetrate to the eternal core of this being, and thus to the point in the human being where man is connected to the divine-spiritual, where man is connected to the moral order of the world, and so on and so on.

It must be said that wonderful descriptions of inner experiences are often the result of this mystical contemplation. The mystics believe that in this way, and in many other ways, they are able to dispense with the clear scientific method of knowledge and to arrive at a satisfactory understanding of the relationship between man and the world only by delving into the inner being of man himself.

Between the two cliffs – the natural science on the one hand, the mystical on the other – the research of the world is placed, of which I was allowed to explain the principles of its search and striving to you yesterday, my dear attendees.

This research into a worldview is neither pure natural science, although – as I emphasized yesterday – it certainly wants to learn its cognitive discipline, its scientific responsibility, from natural science in its most exact form. But this spiritual research is also not mysticism; because precisely when one advances on those paths, which I described yesterday, to a real human self-knowledge, then one simultaneously discovers that what today is almost exclusively called mysticism is basically only a further deepening of the ordinary human memory or ability to remember. Understandably, only the mystics do not see through this more precisely. Whether the mystic draws what is from within from his own inner being or whether it comes from the often very, very dubious channels of mediumistic predisposition through other people, it is nothing other than a raising of that which, at some time or other, even if in the most hidden way, even if it has remained so unconscious , through external observation in ordinary life, has entered the soul and developed in the soul, but then submerged into the physical-bodily organization; so that the mystic fathoms nothing else than how his own memory representations have been transformed by the organic powers of the physical-bodily-etheric human being. The one who honestly engages in true soul and spiritual research in the way described yesterday comes to this conclusion.

If the one described yesterday is pursued further, then on the one hand it comes to grief on the cliff of natural science, but on the other hand also on the cliff of mere mysticism. Natural science rightly tells us from its point of view: There are certain limits that cannot be transgressed by the scientific method, by the combining intellect, by measuring, counting, calculating, by research with the scales. When science asserts these limits from its point of view, one must give it full credit, but only if it sticks to its assertion: With everything that can be found in this way, which respects the usual limits of knowledge of nature, one does not come close to man.

This is the first experience, dear attendees. Natural science introduces us in a wonderful way to the realms of external nature, insofar as they carry the purely natural-law entities within them. Natural science also leads us up to that which man carries within him of external nature, of his organization, which he absorbs from this external nature. Only, this external natural science removes us from man. It does not allow us to approach the true essence of the human being.

My dear audience, only by looking at this matter can we understand why we actually have scientific limits to our knowledge. How is it that we come to certain points that we cannot get beyond with scientific knowledge?

Now, as I said yesterday, probably to give the pure scientists a slight shudder, I pointed out that a force of the human soul can become a power of knowledge if it is developed further and further in the sense that I characterized it yesterday: that is the power of human love. Love can be developed in such a way that it can be connected to scientific research. What is the aim of scientific research? It wants to examine things and processes objectively. It wants man to add nothing of his own imagination or prejudices to the entities of nature, to the processes of nature, but to be able to disregard himself completely and let the things and entities of nature speak for themselves. That is the ideal of natural science.

The next step can no longer be taken theoretically, no longer through observation; the next step can only be seen in an even greater self-denial. One already practices self-denial when one excludes all prejudices, all subjective desires, and everything subjective in general, when researching nature. If you go a step further, you arrive at love as a power of knowledge, where you completely give yourself up and identify with the things and processes you want to explore. Then, by making love the power of knowledge, you take nature research a significant step further into the spiritual.

But this, dear attendees, also leads to the realization that all talk of the boundary still stems from a last remnant of human egoism, perhaps even from a very hidden human egoism. Man does not want to go out of himself. He wants to assert himself. He wants to remain firmly rooted in his ego. Therefore, he sets limits to his knowledge, which he does not want to exceed. When he says, “He wants,” he must go out of himself, must enter into the world, must make love the power of knowledge.

All the talk of limits to knowledge in the course of the nineteenth century was nothing more than the unnoticed emphasis: we as human beings also want to remain cognitively selfish; we do not want to go out of ourselves, we want to set ourselves limits that delimit our [nature], that we do not want to cross, into the nature of things.

Now, my dear attendees, once this knowledge emerges in humanity with the right feeling, in deep feeling and with the necessary will impulses, Talking about the limits of knowledge is the last remnant of human egoism, but it is the assertion of a well-hidden egoism, then the great impulse will actually be there to no longer regard the limits of science as insurmountable in relation to the spiritual. For transcending these limits then means nothing more than throwing off the last unnoticed and thus all the more stubbornly championed human egoistic forces.

I would say that there is a scientific-ethical trend, which on the one hand stands as a shining ideal of spiritual research in the face of the one obstacle – natural science. And I would say that the other obstacle – the mystical one – is tempting and seductive, because it is connected with what man needs to stand in life as an individual.

During his life on earth, the human being needs his memory. This memory must submerge into the physical organism. The memory thoughts make use of the physical organism. There the human being feels himself in his own being. And when he, as a mystic, conjures up the transformed memory image or when he allows himself to be conjured up through a medium, then he associates such inner pleasure, such inner satisfaction with what has been transformed through his own being that he likes to dwell on it and likes to indulge in the illusion: That which satisfies him so voluptuously from the depths of his own being – I would almost say – must also be connected with the most valuable thing in the world, it must point to the place where man is connected to the eternal sources of existence.

You see, dear readers, these are the reasons why spiritual research, as it is meant here and as I have to represent it to you, can neither stop at mere natural science nor fall back on mysticism; but this spiritual research realizes that mere natural science never comes close to man. Mere research into nature investigates the outer, uninhabited, and uninhabited world, and only comes to recognize: in this world of animal, inorganic, plant, animal organization, man is the final point - not a separate being - the most highly developed animal, the final point of extra-human development.

Natural science cannot escape from the world, nor can it lead to man. And mysticism enters into man, but it does not come from man; it does not come from man to the world; just as natural science does not come from the world to man, mysticism does not come from man to the world!

Cultivating knowledge of the world and knowledge of man by wrestling with the limits of science on the one hand, with what one has acquired as soul culture and soul discipline and scientific responsibility, and then immerses, [on the other side] like the true mystic, but now not in a dreamy way into one's own memory, but immerses with clear concepts, to which one surrenders — as I described it yesterday — in a strengthened and activated thinking. In this way one first arrives at a realization of what I described yesterday, not at first at an external knowledge of the world, not at an inner exploration of one's own human nature – insofar as the physical body is involved, as it always is in mysticism – but one arrives at the tableau of one's life, where one, as in a single moment, one sees what has been working in one as one descended from the spiritual world and was clothed with a physical, earthly body; one sees what arises as human self-knowledge, that mighty tableau of life in which one sees how one has found one's way in the course of one's life on earth out of one's inner forces, out of the forces of sympathy and antipathy to this or that person, out of one's way to this or that other event in life. In this tableau of life one feels for the first time lifted out of one's physical body. You grasp the higher human being, not yet the highest, but the higher human being, and you forget the physical organization for the moments of this realization, to which you naturally have to come back again and again.

Now, dear attendees, I explained yesterday, but at the same time, that one is able to ascend to a higher level of knowledge, that one is able to erase this self-knowledge, this tableau of life.

But then one comes to the realization of that which arises from the deep silence of the human soul, where everything has been eradicated, including that which makes up the earthly course of life. But then, when one maintains an alert consciousness with the inner silence of the soul, after one has wiped out not only all remaining ideas, but one's own soul content — as I explained yesterday — then one attains the insight of one's still higher human being: the one one was before one descended from the spiritual-soul world into the physical earth world. One arrives at an understanding of what one was in a purely spiritual-soul world among spiritual-soul beings, among whom one lived before one entered earthly existence, and how one lives here in earthly existence among people and among the other beings of the natural kingdoms.

Now, my dear attendees, such knowledge not only fills the human powers of perception, it not only fills the human mind. Yesterday I indicated how it comes from the whole person. Therefore, it also penetrates to the whole person. It teaches us about the human being in his development; it gives us the basis for guiding the development of the human being in the right way in earthly life. For we look up to that in man which has been drawn into the child, that is, into that which appears to us first in its physical organization, and which has been drawn into this physical organization of the child as a soul-spiritual being that has received from the parents the earthly, physical, bodily garment.

We, as educators, then stand before the developing human being with the awareness that in this developing human being, this spiritual-soul element, which he was before his earthly existence, reveals itself more and more in the physical-sensual from day to day, from week to week, from year to year. In this way, we learn to stand before the developing human being in a new way.

It is truly a wonderful thing to see how the child's features gradually become more and more distinct, how the chaotic movements with which the child enters the world from its innermost being become more and more distinct. Observing the developing child is like confronting the greatest mystery in the world. And this mystery dawns, it gradually dawns when one sees how, in this childlike physical organization, that which has descended from the spiritual and soul worlds permeates more and more the physical, molds it, I would say, as it does with the moral and hygienic. One learns to look at human development in a new way.

What belongs to such a way of looking at human development – if I may express myself in this way, ladies and gentlemen – is above all that inner courage of the soul, which ordinary natural science and also ordinary mysticism do not give, but which one learns to develop when, on the one hand, one unfolds the activated thinking, as I described it yesterday, but on the other hand, one also develops the deep silence of the soul. And finally, love as a power of knowledge. Then one has the courage to judge a person as science judges external natural things. Only something completely different comes out of such a, I might say truly natural, because it goes beyond the limits of ordinary science - if I may use the paradox - scientific spiritual research.

We look at the child and see very clearly how certain life epochs unfold in the child. We see how the child develops up to the significant stage of changing teeth around the age of seven.

Dear attendees! Just think about what a very remarkable thing it is that happens after the first life epoch of the human being when the teeth change. Do not think that the change of teeth is something that concludes with the first phase of a person's life. When a person gets their second teeth, they sprout and release forces from within that come to a conclusion with their second teeth. This is because a person does not undergo another change of teeth. It is a final event of its kind. You just have to look at things in the right way.

On the other hand, we must be clear about one thing: the forces that push and sprout forth in the teeth are rooted in the human organism as a whole. These are forces and impulses that interweave and permeate the whole human being during the first seven years of life. The change of teeth is an external manifestation, a symptom. But the whole human organism, the whole human being, comes to a conclusion with this event of the change of teeth. What is concluded there? From such a knowledge of the world and the human being, as I have described it yesterday and today, one gets the courage to now investigate these things in the right way. One says to oneself the following: Yes, but with this change of teeth, something tremendous also changes in relation to the human soul.

Thus, more and more – this can be seen by anyone who has learned to observe – more and more, as the change of teeth occurs around the seventh year, what can truly be called memory or remembrance arises. Now someone who has become quite clever in modern psychology will immediately come along and say: Yes, but we know that children have memory and recall even before the seventh year, that it is precisely at this time that memory is particularly well developed. That seems to be correct at first. But the person who asserts this is only basing it on things that he does not really understand, because in truth, around the seventh year, something quite different emerges from what we already call memory earlier, and we should only call it memory after the seventh year of life.

For what is it in a child up to the age of seven? It is a habitual performance of the same mental processes that it has practised, that it practises by imitating its environment. The fact that a constant representation occurs again and again in a child has the same reason as that a certain practised hand movement is performed again and again out of habit.

Everything we address as memory up to the seventh year is not actually memory, but soul habits. With the seventh year, these habits, these soul habits, become more refined and what we actually call memory becomes an inner movement through life phenomena, based on ideas. The first thing, which was still completely bound to the organism, functions together with the organism as habits of the soul, detaches itself in the seventh year and becomes first spiritual-soul-like.

You see, my dear audience, this gives us the opportunity to say: Yes, what lived in the child during the first period of life until the change of teeth, when, for example, the child's brain develops most plastically up to the age of seven, — then it is actually already essentially formed according to its inner demands —, what lives down there in the body? That, ladies and gentlemen, lives down in the body, which later emancipates itself from the body and becomes an independent soul-imagination, memory.

In external natural science today, we have the courage to speak of the fact that during certain processes in the body, heat remains hidden – latent heat, we say – because through certain processes this heat is released. We can measure it with a thermometer. We speak of bound and free heat. We cannot measure bound heat with a thermometer; we can measure free heat with a thermometer. The physicist has this courage of exploration for external processes. The spiritual researcher must receive it and make it applicable to practical life.

What we see in the child from the age of seven, from the year we start school, becoming more and more soul-like, more and more independent, was not yet so independent in the first seven years of life. It lived as growth forces within the physical body. It lived as formative, plastic forces within the physical body and ceases to live as a whole in the physical body when the change of teeth occurs.

You see, dear audience, once you become aware of such an important transition, of such a significant metamorphosis in human experience, then you also continue. Then you look at how the child is up to this change of teeth. And then you discover something very strange in this child. You discover that up until this change of teeth, the child is completely given over to the sense organs. The child is completely absorbed in its surroundings!

And if we want to compare it to something that is present in this childlike organization of the first epoch of life, then we must point, for example, to the human eye or the human ear – in short, to a sense organ. The child is entirely eye, entirely ear, in a soul-spiritual way! Just as the eye simply takes in what is around it and imitates it inwardly, so the child takes in every gesture, every word, everything that those around him allow to happen, and takes it in like a whole sense organ, imitating it inwardly. Therefore, everything that lives in the child's environment becomes part of the child's entire physical organization during the first seven years. The child takes everything in spiritually and mentally, and it becomes part of the physical organization.

Let us imagine: a father with a violent temper lives next to the child. Those who can observe these things can see how this father with a violent temper, who lives next to the child, is not only perceived by the child in such a way that the child sees the gesture of violent temper, that it is somehow repulsed by everything that comes out of a fit of anger, but the child feels the moral quality of the anger, what the anger morally carries as a value within itself! The child senses the moral qualities of its environment, with gestures, with what it experiences inwardly and imitates.

This, however, makes us aware of how we have to look at how the child really experiences the moral and intellectual aspects of his environment. We should be clear about the imponderable forces that are unfolding, so that we should not even allow ourselves to have impure or immoral thoughts around the child. For the child perceives precisely that which has an effect, especially in the first seven years, through the subtlest gestures, the twinkle of an eye, the emphasis of a word, and countless details that we, with our coarse adult intellects, cannot even imagine. And it carries this down into its physical organization.

What grows out of the father's violent temper or the mother's negligence does not become just any mental quality in the child; it becomes the density of the vascular walls, the efficiency or inefficiency of the blood circulation, in breathing, in the finest ramifications, in the finest activities. What the child acquires through imitation from its environment in the first seven years of life goes straight into the physical organism, in which even memory is only a habit that is tied to the physical organism. The soul and spirit emancipate themselves with the change of teeth. And when we get the child into school, this whole life of the child, as I have described it, enters into a different metamorphosis.

In the first years of life, the child is entirely a sensory organ. It attentively absorbs what is happening in its environment, whether in gestures or in these or those actions. The child is devoted to the actions of its environment, not only sensually but also morally! But with the change of teeth, the child begins to be more and more devoted to that which is no longer just a gesture or an action, but which reveals itself in the gesture, in the action, in a way that is appropriate to speech.

Dear attendees! Let us not only understand language – although that is the most important language – in terms of what we express externally with words, through phonetics, but let us understand language as everything we do in life – in that what we do becomes an expression of our human character – we understand everything that a person reveals about their own nature, how they reveal it through language, we have to say that the child becomes receptive to this linguistic expression of the other person, especially the educating person, the teacher, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. A child is an imitative being in the sense described until it has changed all its milk teeth; from then until sexual maturity, the child is a being who lives entirely under the self-evident authority of whoever in his environment expresses himself verbally to him.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen! You will not expect the man who wrote “The Philosophy of Freedom” thirty years ago and who is now speaking to you to develop any kind of unjustified reactionary-passive desire for you, or to speak of authority in an unjustified way. But precisely the person who wants to see freedom represented in human life as I have tried to present it in my “Philosophy of Freedom” already in the early nineties, knows that this right feeling of freedom, the right experience of freedom, can only come to people if the self-evident authority of teachers and educators is present in the child between the change of teeth and sexual maturity.

Today we no longer appreciate in the right way what it means for our whole later life to have looked up with deep reverence to what was given to us in the person of an educator in the form of truth, beauty and goodness. Between the ages of seven and fourteen, a person is not organized in such a way that truth, beauty and goodness can appear to him. At this age, the human being is organized in such a way that the true, the beautiful and the good must appear to him through the adult human being!

Later in life, when one has faced an unquestionable authority at this age, one has said, as a matter of course: something is true because this authority recognizes it as true; something is good because this authority recognizes it as good and presents it as such; something is beautiful because this authority finds it beautiful! The world must approach the child through the medium of the human being.

Dear attendees! In this way, one gradually learns to look at the human being in earthly life when one becomes aware, through the research method that I described yesterday – and today could only hint at – of the fact that a spiritual being lived before becoming a human being on earth through conception. We were all spiritual-soul beings among other spiritual-soul entities before we descended into earthly life. If we look at the developing human being in the right way, at what was its prenatal, pre-earthly existence, we also stand, I would like to say, with the right piety, but also with the right reverence for what is revealed and developed and revealed so wonderfully and so mysteriously from day to day, from week to week in the developing human being, in the child.

But then one also looks at what then presents itself as a connection between the spiritual-supernatural life of the human being and the physical-sensory life. One sees the child, how it, devoted to its surroundings, imitates these surroundings. And now we remember that we can only achieve the highest form of spiritual existence, which man can achieve through loving devotion, through the development of love as the power of knowledge, because man, by is in a spiritual-soul world before his earthly existence and after his death, knows how selfish he is here on earth, so he must then be devoted to the other spiritual beings.

When you understand how man is given over to the spiritual and soul world in the supersensible existence, you realize how man brings himself with him into childish existence, before he changes this around at the change of teeth or at sexual maturity, when he becomes more and more selfish and selfish, as he physically relives what he was in his pre-earthly existence. And now we learn to look at the child in the right way: How does the child actually live in the world? Even if it sounds paradoxical, one may say: The child lives completely devoted to its surroundings! But that is the religious feeling. That is to say: the child lives, I would say bodily-religiously; through its nature, through the elementary of its organization, the child is bodily-religiously devoted to its surroundings. This is the case until the second change of teeth; at that point, the child is completely given over to a religious devotion in his physical organization, to a religious devotion to his surroundings. You see, this becomes spiritual-soul in the second age between the change of teeth and sexual maturity.

We must be clear about the fact that what was, I might say, taken for granted – if I may use the paradox – as physical-religious disorganization, we must now, as teachers and educators, bring into the spiritual-soul. We educate this when we ourselves stand as the self-evident authority for truth, beauty, goodness before the child. Then we gradually bring it about that what was first in the body down below in the child, until the teeth change, works its way up into the spiritual and soul life. Then, as the child reaches sexual maturity, it becomes entirely spirit. It comes to us as that which we call religion in social human life.

How do we best establish this religion in social life when we understand human education in this way? We establish it best when we let the child imitate the right thing in the right way from the first years of life until the change of teeth, when we do not want to give it commandments, but when we stand before it in such a way that it can imitate us until the change of teeth, and after the change of teeth until sexual maturity, it can look to us as the model for truth, beauty, and goodness. Then the child develops in full freedom into a religious human being, in that with puberty the spiritual awakens from the soul-like, just as the soul awakens from the physical with the change of teeth. In this way we gradually learn to see how the human being develops, and we also learn to use such human development as an educational principle.

Dear attendees! Spiritual research, as described here, is not a theory; it leaves that to mere natural science, to those who are opponents of spiritual science today for quite understandable reasons, who consider themselves practical people. Their reasons are well known. For the spiritual researcher first familiarizes himself with what the opponents have to say. Only when he has become sufficiently familiar with this does he feel fully responsible for representing what grows out of the soil of spiritual research itself.

Spiritual research aims to be thoroughly practical, to bring a full life into practice. But when it comes to a full life, people who think they are particularly clever in a materialistic sense are about as clueless as a farmer who finds a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron. Someone says to him: “Yes, look, that's a magnet, it attracts another iron, it can be used for all kinds of important things!” “Oh well,” says the farmer, “magnet? I don't see any magnet, I'll shoe my horse with it!” That's how the theoretical materialists seem, who don't want to know anything about spiritual research. They see everything as a horseshoe because they see nothing of the magnet! The supersensible is only hidden for those who only want to see the outwardly materialistic. If one really wants to be practical, if one wants to use the forces of the world in the right way in the progress of culture and civilization, then one must be able to really shine a light into the physical-material in the indicated way.

That is why spiritual research, I would say, did not get stuck in theory because of its destiny. Through the forces that have been developed out of social thinking by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, we were able to found the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, where it is really shown how an educational practice can be developed out of the consciousness of the full, spiritual, moral and religious human nature, which really takes into account the development of the human being as a whole.

This Waldorf school was founded a little over three years ago with about 150 children. Today, it has well over 700 children in six classes, and we have to run most classes in parallel classes. And the teachers, who now number many, are trying to educate the human being from out of the fullness of humanity so that the person can then grow into practical life out of this fullness of humanity.

For the spiritual science that is advocated here – I already spoke about it yesterday – grows out of the full nature of the human being, and therefore it does not want to stop at theoretical descriptions, but wants to flow directly into life, I would say.

Allow me to illustrate this with a particular example in a few concluding sentences. Spiritual science, as it is represented here, has been represented by me for more than two decades. I have been allowed to speak here in Kristiania for many years about the most diverse subjects of this spiritual science.

Now, after a decade of spiritual science, the idea arose in certain individuals who had devoted themselves entirely to the truth of this spiritual science with their common sense. These individuals were approached with the idea of building a structure for this spiritual science. In particular, my mysteries were to be used to express artistically what now flows not in some kind of straw symbolism or allegory, but from a truly artistic source, but from the same source as the idea of spiritual science — that is what I tried to present in my mysteries. At first they had to be performed in ordinary theaters. But this was to change through these personalities, who had devoted themselves to spiritual science in the way described and wanted to make their sacrifices in order to erect a building of their own for it. This building was to be erected for the cultivation of this spiritual science and especially for the performance of my mystery dramas. Destiny brought this building to Dornach near Basel in Switzerland, in the northwestern region of Switzerland: Dornach, near Basel.

Dearly beloved attendees! If any other spiritual movement had been in such a position that it wanted to build a house, a home, for the cultivation of that which it wants to cultivate in the world, it would have gone to some architect and had a building erected in an antique or Renaissance style or Rococo style - in any style, for that matter - and its world view would have been represented in it. This could never happen with anthroposophical spiritual science if one was true to it with one's whole being. Why not?

Well, spiritual science wants to be something that unfolds in ideas only in one direction; but it is not based in theories, it is not based in ideas, it is based in living spiritual life, in that living spiritual contemplation of the world and man, as I have described it yesterday and today.

So, my dear audience, three branches come out of the same source: there comes out the one branch – knowledge – which expresses itself in ideas. There comes out the second branch – art – which expresses itself in forms, in the form of sounds, of colors, of sculpture, in architectural forms. There comes forth the third branch – the religious-ethical, the moral branch.

Anthroposophy as a science does not want to found a sect or establish a religion. But it leads to the source from which religious life also flows, and the artistic flows from the same source. I have often used the following image:

Imagine, dear audience, a nut in a shell. You cannot imagine that the nut is surrounded by a shell that is built around it from the outside; rather, the shell must also be there, formed from the same forces and laws of form as the nut itself. You can see it in the nutshell: it is already formed according to the same laws of form as the nut itself.

This is life, where everything that arises arises from the same impulses, from the same laws of form.

Anthroposophical spiritual science is not abstraction, it is life that lives itself out, as I have described it, in education; that lives itself out in the social; that lives itself out in the religious. In the sense that a house is to be built for it, it is the nut, and the house must be built according to the same formal laws, must have its own style, which is not, for example, an artistically symbolic realization of an idea – that would be mere symbolist nonsense – but it must be a real, genuine artistic creation. The second branch can come from the same sources as anthroposophy comes from for its ideas.

And so, in connection with the fact that I myself gained the basis for my research from Goethe, the Goetheanum was built near Basel — a ten-year project — built in such a way that with every pillar, pillar, in every architrave piece, in every color scheme, in everything that could be seen, one could see the right artistic environment for what was being done from the podium in this building, which was designed for 900 people.

When one stood on the podium and spoke, one felt how the word one had to coin in order to bring spiritual vision before the listeners, one felt how this word is coined as an idea out of the idea, in exactly the same way as — and this may be said by the one who has worked out in wax every single detail in the model worked out in wax everything that has been built in Dornach may say —, how that which has stepped out to meet people outwardly visible in forms and colors; who heard the words from the podium in this Goetheanum itself, who saw the eurythmy artists unfold their art of movement, who heard reciting there, who saw anything else performed there, saw that what was happening and being spoken on stage and podium was just the other form of what the building forms, the architectural, the pictorial forms showed. And when the music sounded from the organ at the other end, the musical tones that filled the room were only a further expression of what was found in the column forms, in that which had found expression in the form and colors of the entire building. In short, this building for the anthroposophical worldview could not be built as an external Renaissance, Rococo, Gothic or classical shell. A new architectural style had to be created because anthroposophy is not a one-sided theory, but is that which can emerge on [the one hand] in all ideas of knowledge, which can emerge as art. And as art, as a performing art, it should now be expressed in one's own home.

It must be emphasized again and again: Anthroposophy does not want to found a new religion, does not want anything sectarian, wants to proceed in the same purely objective, purely legal way as any other scientific direction. But by penetrating with real scientific exactness, but with spiritual-scientific insight, it also penetrates to the source of religiosity.

This led to the desire to place a [nine and a half] meter high wooden group at one of the most prominent points in the Goetheanum, with Christ Jesus himself as the central figure. So now, my dear attendees, a worldview should be given through anthroposophy that recognizes as its ideal the embodiment of the human mystery of Golgotha at one of the most prominent points in its home, through anthroposophy. This is a form of knowledge that has a religious aspect in its objectives, although it does not want to establish itself as a sect or religion, but wants to remain on the ground of the artistic, on the ground of knowledge.

Dear attendees! When I was last able to speak here in Kristiania, I was able to think of the Home for the Spirit of Science in Dornach with different thoughts, because this home was destroyed by fire on New Year's Eve 1922/1923, burnt down to the concrete foundations, and a is now standing on the spot where it once stood, the thing that, in its outer forms, has brought about a revelation for thousands upon thousands of visitors over the years, the thing that could be said from the bottom of one's heart about human eternity, human development on earth, about human being and world being and world knowledge.

It is self-evident that the small insurance sums that we may receive after the legal investigations into the Dornach fire have come to an end will not be sufficient to rebuild this building, the Goetheanum. And we live in different circumstances today than we did before the war, when numerous people who professed to be engaged in anthroposophical spiritual research were truly willing to make deep sacrifices to make it possible to rebuild the Goetheanum. And again and again, such friends have come forward to help. How the Goetheanum can be rebuilt will depend on whether, in the present difficult world situation, the same sacrifices will be possible as were possible before. It must be rebuilt in some form, because it was intended to visibly express what anthroposophical spiritual research wants to say about the deepest longings of contemporary man.

I said it yesterday as well: in the people of the present, in numerous people of the present — for it is a deepest longing, even if they do not know it, even if it only lives in subconscious feelings and sensations — there is the urge to rediscover the spiritual, to reconcile faith with knowledge again. This was to be expressed outwardly through the forms of the Goetheanum.

Now, this is also expressed outwardly in the forms of the human being itself. But that which is physical and sensual - my dear audience - can be grasped by the material flames and thus perish like the Dornach Goetheanum. In the same way, the physical and sensual shells of the human being also perish. But spiritual science shows us how an eternal core of the human being descends from spiritual and soul worlds, only enveloping itself in the physical shell, and passes through the gate of death again in order to live on in the spirit.

What is said about the spiritual being human is expressed in the thoughts of anthroposophy, which also seeks to be spiritual. In the mortal building — whose passing is so painful to us, so melancholy, us who have grown so fond of this building, this structure — that had its mortal outer work, as man himself in relation to his true being in his earthly body has his mortal outer work.

Anthroposophy, however, seeks to speak of the eternal in man, but to speak in such a way that this very eternal can be fully realized in a truly practical way — as I have indicated today for a certain point — in the most diverse areas of life. To fully realize the eternal in the temporal, to be practical in all spirituality, that is what real anthroposophical spiritual knowledge strives for.

It will show that the deepest longings of the human soul can indeed be fulfilled more and more over time. And this spiritual knowledge can wait. It knows that the Copernican system was also first considered foolishness, but later became a matter of course. So Anthroposophy knows that it can well be considered foolishness by many people today. It will also wait and it can wait! It will also become a matter of course. For it speaks of what must be close to the human being when he, truly feeling, wants to turn again to the ancient, I would say sacred demand: “Know thyself!” If this great and mighty word of truth and warning is to be developed in any way in a modern form, then man must come to a knowledge of the world that shows through supersensible vision how the spiritual speaks from all realms of nature, from clouds and stars, from the movements of clouds and stars, how this world, which in truth can only be recognized when it is recognized in spirit, ultimately says: “I have achieved my goals in the human being.” Knowledge of the world is only complete in knowledge of man. And knowledge of man is not seen in mystical confusion and with mystical illusions, but as I have described it yesterday and today, in order to fathom man's being. Thus, by fathoming the human being, one comes to recognize the spiritual and soul nature of the human being, before and after death, when the human being is poured out into the world, despite having a higher self-awareness than here on earth; in true knowledge of the human being, one discovers world beings in the human being. Just as there is no true knowledge of the world without knowledge of man, because the world shows that its goal is man, so there is no true knowledge of man without seeing in man an image of the whole world, without penetrating through knowledge of man to knowledge of the world in the spirit.

This is what is already unconsciously seen today as a scientific, moral, and religious striving at the bottom of many human souls. This is what troubles many human souls today without them knowing it. This is what anthroposophical knowledge of the human being and the world wants to speak about, so that what the human being of the present, but especially the human being of the near future, will really need, will arise: truly genuine knowledge of the human being through true spiritual knowledge of the world, real, genuine knowledge of the world that is suitable for social work and religious feeling, through genuine, true knowledge of the human being that has been grasped in the spirit.

This lecture is also known as The Human Soul and the World of Nature.

It will be clear, I think, from what has been said on earlier occasions that the Spiritual Science cultivated at the Goetheanum has nothing sectarian about it, nor does it set out to found a new religion. It gives full recognition to the progress of natural science in modern times, drawing indeed, in a certain sense, the ultimate necessary consequences of the whole trend and spirit of modern science. This will be particularly evident when we come to consider questions concerning our inner life and our knowledge of the world; and to-day I will ask your attention for one such specific question. It embraces a very wide realm, and all I can do here is to give a few indications towards its solution. I shall try to give these in such a way as to throw light on what we consider to be the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach.

The subject before us is concerned with two ideas that man can never contemplate without on the one hand feeling an intense longing awaken within him, and on the other being brought face to face with deep doubts and riddles. These two ideas are: the inner being of Nature and the inner being of the human soul.

In his knowledge man feels himself outside Nature. What would induce him to undertake the labour of cognition, were it not the hope of penetrating beyond the immediate region within which he stands in ordinary life, of entering more deeply into the Nature that presents herself in her external aspect to his senses and his intellect? It is, after all, a fact of the life of soul, and one that becomes more and more apparent the more seriously we occupy ourselves with questions of knowledge, that man feels separated from the inner being of Nature. And there remains always the question—to which one or another will have a different answer according to his outlook on the world—whether it be possible for men to enter sufficiently deeply into the being of Nature to allow him to gain some degree of satisfaction from his search. We have at the same time the feeling that whatever in the last resort can be known concerning the being of Nature is somehow also connected with what we may call the being of man's soul.

Now this question of the being of the human soul has presented itself to human cognition since very early times. We have only to recall the Apollonian saying: “Know thyself.” This saying sets forth a demand which the conscientious seeker after knowledge will feel is by no means easy of fulfillment.

We shall perhaps be able to come to a clearer idea of the tasks of the present day in this connection if we go back to earlier ages and remind ourselves of conceptions that were intimately bound up, for the men of olden times, on the one hand with the knowledge of the inner being of Nature, on the other with the self-knowledge of man. Let us then look for a little at some of these conceptions, even though they will take us into fields somewhat remote from the ordinary consciousness of to-day.

In olden times, these two aims—knowledge of Nature and knowledge of self—were associated in the mind of man with quite strange, not to say terrifying, conceptions. It was indeed not thought possible for man to continue in his ordinary way of life if he wanted to set out on the path to knowledge; for on that path he would inevitably find himself in the presence of deep uncertainties before he could come to any satisfying conviction. In our day we are not accustomed to think of the path of knowledge as something that leads us away from.the natural order of our life; it leaves us free to go forward in everyday life as before. And one must admit that the knowledge offered to us in our laboratories and observatories and clinics is not such as to throw us “right off the rails,” in the way attributed to the path of knowledge that the pupils of wisdom in early times had to tread.

They beheld a kind of abyss between what man is and can experience in ordinary life, and what he becomes and is confronted with when he penetrates into the depths of world-existence, or into the knowledge of his own being. They described how man feels the ground sink away from under his feet, so that only if he be strong enough not to succumb to giddiness of soul can he go forward at all into the field of ultimate knowledge. To tread this path of knowledge unprepared would involve man in a harder test than he is able to meet. Serious and conscientious preparation was necessary before he dare bridge the abyss. In ordinary life man is unaware of the abyss; he simply does not see it. And that, they said, is for him a blessing. Man is enveloped in a kind of blindness that protects him from being overcome by giddiness and falling headlong into the abyss. They spoke too of how man had to cross a “Threshold” in order to come into the fields of higher knowledge, and of how he must have become able to face without fear the revelations that await him at the Threshold. Again, in ordinary life man is protected from crossing the Threshold. Call it personification or what you will, in those ancient schools of wisdom they were relating real experiences when they spoke of man being protected by the “Guardian of the Threshold,” and of undergoing beyond it a time of darkness and uncertainty before ultimately attaining to a vision of reality, a “standing within” spirit-filled reality.

It is inevitable that in our day all manner of confused and hazy notions should connect themselves with such expressions as “Threshold,” “Guardian of the Threshold.” Let me say at once that mankind is undergoing evolution; nor is it only the outer cultural renditions that change and develop, but man's life of soul is changing all the time, moving onward from state to state; consequently the expressions which in olden times could be used to describe intimate processes in the life of soul, cannot bear the same meaning for present-day mankind. What man meant in olden times when he spoke of the Threshold and the Guardian of the Threshold was something different from the processes that take place in man to-day, when he resolves to go forward from ordinary knowledge to super-sensible knowledge; and it is only with a view to making more comprehensible what I shall have to say regarding these latter that I bring in a comparison with ancient conceptions.

What was it of which the men of olden times were afraid? What was it for which the pupil in the School of Wisdom had to be prepared by means of an exact and thoroughgoing discipline of the will—a discipline that should make the will strong and vigorous, able to stand firm in extremely difficult and perplexing situations in Life? Strange though it may sound, it becomes clear to us if we are able to survey the course of human evolution, that what men feared in those times was actually none other than the condition of soul which mankind in general has reached to-day. They wanted to protect the pupil from coming all unprepared to the condition of mind and soul to which we have been brought by the scientific education of the last three or four centuries. Let me illustrate this for you in a particular case.

We all accept to-day the so-called Copernican view of the universe. This view places the sun in the centre of our planetary system; the planets revolve round the sun, with the earth as a planet among the other planets. Ever since the time of Copernicus, this is the picture men have had. In earlier times, quite another picture of the world lived in the general consciousness of mankind. The earth was seen in the centre, and the sun and stars revolving round the earth. Man had, that is to say, a geocentric picture of the world. Copernicus replaced it with a heliocentric picture of the world. Man has now no longer the feeling of standing on firm ground; he sees himself being hurled through space, together with the earth, at a terrific speed. As for how it all looks to the eye, that, we are told, is a mere illusion, induced by relations of perspective and the like, to which human vision is subject.

Now, this heliocentric picture of the world already existed in earlier ages. Plutarch is a writer from whom we can learn a great deal concerning the men of olden times, and how they thought about the world. Let me read you a passage translated from his writings. Plutarch is speaking of Aristarchus of Samos, and he describes the way in which Aristarchus conceived the world. We are therefore taken back into early Greek times, into an epoch many centuries before the Middle Ages, and before Copernicus. In the opinion of Aristarchus, says Plutarch, the universe is much bigger than it looks; for Aristarchus makes the assumption that the stars and the sun do not move, but that the earth revolves round the sun as centre, while the sphere of the fixed stars, whose centre is also in the sun, is so immense that the circumference of the circle described by the earth is to the distance of the fixed stars as is the centre of a sphere to its entire surface.

We find thus in Greek times the heliocentric conception of the world; we find the very same picture as we have to-day of man's place in the planetary system and his relation to the heaven of the fixed stars. In olden times, however, this heliocentric conception of the world was a secret known only to a few, who had undergone a strict training of the will before such knowledge could be imparted to them.

It is important to grasp the significance of this fact. What is common knowledge to-day, freely spoken of by everyone, was in earlier times a wisdom known to a select few. What such a wisdom-pupil knew, for example, concerning the sun and its relation to the earth was considered a knowledge that lay “beyond the Threshold”; man must needs first cross the Threshold before he can come into those fields where the soul discovers this new relationship to the universe. The very same knowledge that our whole education renders familiar and natural to us to-day, was for them on the other side of a Threshold that must not be crossed without due preparation.

What we have shown with regard to the astronomical conception of the world could quite well be worked out for other spheres of knowledge. We should again and again find evidence of how the whole of mankind has in the course of evolution been pushed across what was for Olden times a Threshold on the path to higher knowledge. The apprehension that was felt in those times about the condition of soul evoked by such knowledge, has shown itself frequently in later centuries in the attitude of the churches, which preserve and tend to perpetuate the traditions of the past. Again and again the churches have rejected knowledge that has been attained in the progress of civilisation; and when, for example, the Roman Church refused to acknowledge the teaching of Copernicus (as it did until the year 1827), the reason was the same as [that which] in ancient times prevented the priests from giving out Mystery knowledge to the masses—namely, that the knowledge would bring man into uncertainty if he were not duly prepared beforehand.

Now it is well-known that no power on earth can withstand for long the march of progress; and we in these days have to think in an entirely new way about what one may call the “Threshold of the Spiritual World.” Spiritual Science is no “warming up” of Gnostic or other ancient teaching, but works absolutely on the principles of modern natural science, as I think will have been evident from the example we have been considering.

How was it that men of olden times feared knowledge which today is the common property of all mankind? In my book Die Ratsel der Philosophie¹, I have described the changes that have come about in man's mind and soul since early Greek times. The Greek had not a self-consciousness that was fully detached from the external world. When he thought about the world, he felt himself, so to speak, “grown together” with it; he was as closely united with it as we are to-day in the act of sense-perception. For him thought was also, in a manner speaking, sense-perception. Red, blue, G, C sharp—these are for us sense-perceptions; but thought we ourselves produce by inner activity. For the Greek this kind of inner activity did not yet exist. Just as we get red, green, G, C sharp from sense-perception, so did he get the thoughts too from the external world. He had not yet the independence that comes from the comprehension of self. Only quite gradually has the perception and understanding of the self developed to what it is to-day. Self-consciousness has grown steadily stronger in the course of time, and man has thereby detached himself from surrounding Nature. He has learned to look into himself, inwardly to comprehend himself as something that acts independently. In doing so he has placed himself over against Nature; he stands outside her, that he may then contemplate her inner being from without. And with this detachment of thought from external objective life is connected also the birth of the feeling of freedom, that sense of freedom which is in reality a product only of the last few centuries.

We have come to regard history more and more in its purely external aspect; but if we were to consider it, as we try to do in spiritual science, in a more inward way, we should discover that the experience we have to-day when we speak of “freedom” was not there for the Greek. Although we translate the corresponding word in their writings with our word “freedom,” the feeling we associate with the word was quite unknown to the Stoic, for example, and other philosophers. A careful and unbiased study of Greek times will not fail to make this clear.

I laid stress in my Philosophie der Freiheit² which was written in the early nineties, on the connection of the experience of freedom with what I called “pure thinking”—that thinking which is completely detached from the inner organic life, and which (if the expression be not misunderstood) becomes, even in ordinary life, cognition on a higher level. For when we permeate pure thinking with moral ideas and impulses—that is, with ideas and impulses that are not associated with desires, or with sympathies and antipathies, but solely with pure, loving devotion to the deed that is to be done—when we do this and allow the impulse to quicken in our soul to action, then the action we perform is truly free.

One cannot really put the question concerning freedom in the way that is frequently done, when it is asked: Is man free or unfree? All one can say is that man is on the way to freedom. By cultivating self-evolution and self-knowledge, by achieving inner liberation from his accustomed attitude of mind and soul, man is treading a path that will enable him to rise to pure thinking; and on this path he becomes increasingly free. It is thus not a matter of “either—or,” but rather of gradual approach, or, shall we say, of both. For we are at once free and unfree; unfree where we are still governed by our desires, by what rises up out of our organism, out of the life of instinct; free, on the other hand, where we have grown independent of the instinctive life, where we are able to awaken within us pure love for the deed that has been envisaged in pure thinking.

The condition of mind that leads to the experience of freedom—the condition, namely, of pure thinking, to which man is able to surrender himself—must necessarily, for present-day man, remain an ideal; an ideal, however, that is indissolubly bound up with his worth and dignity as man.

We are on the way to such an ideal, and it is natural science that has set us upon the path. In all the development of natural science in modern times—and the results of this natural science carry authority in the widest circles and tend more and more to become the groundwork of our whole education and culture—one thing stands out clearly. Study the development of natural science and you will be struck with the growing recognition of the value and importance of the thought—the thought that is elaborated by man himself inwardly. This is true in the realm of the inorganic, from physics up to astronomy, as well as in the realm of the organic, and in spite of the fact that scientists base their results everywhere on observation and experiment. And through the work he does in thinking, man develops an enhanced self-consciousness; which means, that his detachment from the inner being of Nature grows.

We can here take once more the example of Astronomy. What Copernicus did, fundamentally speaking, was to reduce to calculation the results of observation. In this way one arrives at a world system that is completely detached from man. The world systems of ancient times were not so; they were always intimately connected with the human being. Man felt himself within the world; he was part of it. In our time man is, so to speak, incidental. He sees himself hurled through universal space together with the planet Earth, and his picture of the whole structure of the world is completely divorced from himself; that which lives in his own inner being must on no account be allowed to play a part in his conception of the universe. Man becomes filled, that is to say, with a thought-content that is the means of detaching him from himself. True, he thinks his thoughts, and in thinking remains always united with his thoughts; but he thinks them in such a way that they have no sort of connection with what rises up out of his organism, out of his life of instinct. He is under necessity so to think that, although the thought remains united with him, it nevertheless wrests itself free from the human-personal in him, so that in his thoughts he becomes, in effect, completely objective.

And this experience brings man to greater consciousness of self. The strenuous efforts required for finding one's way to clear conceptions in the field of astronomy or physics or chemistry to-day, or even only for following in thought the results of others' work, are bound to lead to a strengthening of the consciousness of self.

In the ancient civilisations—and herein lies the great difference between them and our own—education was not directed to the strengthening of self-consciousness. Rather had it the tendency to make man's thinking correspond with what he saw with his eyes. So arose the Ptolemaic conception of the world, which in all essentials is a reproduction of what we perceive with the external senses. Man was not thrust so far out of himself as he is by the modern scientific outlook; hence his self-consciousness did not grow. He remained more within his body—held there, as it were, by enchantment. Consciousness of self he derived from his instincts, and from the feeling of life and vitality within him. Although in our age we have drifted into materialism, this living in the body has been overcome by the development of thinking; and the consciousness of self has grown correspondingly. The very fact that we have become materialists, and lost our awareness of the spiritual in the objects perceived by the senses, has contributed to the achievements of thought. In olden times it was feared that if a man were brought unprepared to the kind of thinking such as is necessary, for example, to grasp the heliocentric system, he would “faint” in his soul; his consciousness of self would not be strong enough to sustain him.

This accounts for the emphasis on the training of the will; for a strong and vigorous will strengthens also the consciousness of self. The preparation of the pupil in the Wisdom School was therefore directed primarily to the will, in order that he might grow strong enough to endure, beyond the Threshold, that picture of the world for which a highly-developed consciousness of self is required.

We see, then, what it was men feared in olden times for the pupil who was to be guided into the inner being of the things of the world, into the inner being of Nature. They were afraid lest he be hurt in his soul, through falling into a condition of uncertainty and darkness, a condition comparable, in the realm of soul, with physical faintness. This danger they hoped to avoid by a thoroughgoing discipline of the will. In ordinary life, they said, man must remain on this side of the realm where the dangerous knowledge is to be found; a Guardian holds him back from the region for which he is unfit, thus protecting him from being overcome by faintness of soul. And their description of the experiences the pupil had to undergo if he wanted to cross the Threshold and pass the Guardian correspond exactly to inner experiences of the soul.

It was told how, when the pupil draws near the Threshold, he immediately has a feeling of uncertainty. If he has been sufficiently prepared, he is able to stand upright in the realm which would otherwise make him giddy; he passes the Guardian of the Threshold and, by virtue of the powers of his soul, enters into the spiritual world—which the Guardian would otherwise not allow him even to behold. But he must be able also to stay in the spiritual world with full consciousness. For the tremendous experiences that await him there call for strength and not for weakness, and if he were to let go, these experiences would have a shattering effect on his whole organisation; he would suffer grievous harm.

And now the strange thing is that in course of evolution a knowledge that could be attained by pupils of the ancient Wisdom Schools only after most careful preparation has become the common property of all mankind. We stand to-day in our ordinary knowledge beyond what the men of old felt to be a Threshold. The purpose they had in view in the ancient Wisdom Schools was that the pupil, when he looked into his own inner being, should feel himself united there with the inner being of Nature. And believing that if he did so unprepared, he would sink into a kind of spiritual faintness, they would not allow him to attempt this exploration until he had received the right discipline and training. And yet in our age everyone penetrates into this region utterly unprepared!

As a matter of fact man is experiencing to-day precisely what the ancients took such care to avoid. He acquires his knowledge of Nature; and he acquires also a strong consciousness of self that enables him to stand upright amid all the knowledge that is current to-day in astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. He imbibes this knowledge and can remain steadfast without losing his balance. Nevertheless there is a quality in his life of soul that the men of old would deeply deplore. Because in the course of evolution we have acquired thought and the feeling of freedom and a stronger selfconsciousness, therefore we do not lose ourselves when we study the results of natural science; but we do lose something, and the loss is only too manifest to-day in the soul-life of mankind everywhere.

In this matter we labour under great illusion; we dream, and we cling to our dreams, and will not let them go. I have often spoken of how natural science brings conscientious students to a recognition of the boundaries of knowledge, boundaries man cannot pass without taking his power of cognition into forbidden—nay, into impossible—regions. A very distinguished scientist of modern times has spoken of the “Ignorabimus,” reading into the word a confession that however far we go in the knowledge we acquire from sense-observation and the intellect, we never penetrate to the inner being of Nature. I here touch on a subject that at once lands us in conflict, as was felt even at a time when natural science was far less advanced than it is to-day. It was Albrecht von Haller who expressed the “Ignorabimus” in the well-known lines:

To Nature's heart
No living soul can reach.
Thrice happy he
To whom she shows
Even her outer shell.

Goethe, who used constantly to hear these words on the lips of those who shared Haller's attitude towards Nature, labeled such thinkers “Philistine.” For him they are men who do not want to rouse themselves to inner activity of soul; for by dint of inner activity the soul of man can kindle a light within—a light which, shining upon the heart of Nature, shall carry the soul into her innermost being. Goethe proclaims this in forcible and trenchant manner in his poem Allerdings, quoting to begin with the words to Haller:

‘To Nature's heart
No living soul can reach.’
O Philistine,
To me and mine
What use in such a speech?
We think, through every part
We enter into her heart.

Still the cry goes,
‘Thrice happy he
To whom she shows
Even her outer shell.’

For sixty years I have heard that cry;
I curse it, but secretly, silently,
Say to myself a thousand times,
Gladly she gives and she gives us all!
Nature is neither kernel nor shell,
She is both in one; she is one and all.

Look in your own heart, man, and tell
If you yourself are kernel or shell!³

Out of an instinctive feeling that was conscious and yet at the same time unconscious, Goethe rejected utterly the separation of the being of man's soul from the innermost being of Nature. He saw clearly that if the soul becomes conscious, in a healthy manner, of its own real being, then that consciousness brings with it the experience of standing within the innermost heart of Nature.

This conviction it was that kept Goethe from accepting Kant's philosophy. They make a great mistake who assert that at one time of his life Goethe came very near to the philosophy of Kant. In contradistinction to what Kant recognised as the human faculty of cognition, Goethe postulated what he called “perceptive judgment.” This means that in order to form a judgment we do not merely pass in abstract reasoning from concept to concept; rather do we use inwardly for thought the kind of beholding we use outwardly in sense perception. Goethe says he never thought about thinking; what he set himself continually to do was to behold the living element in the thought. And in this beholding of the thoughts he saw a way to unite the human soul with the very being of Nature.

Anthroposophical Spiritual Science would go further on the same path. This perceptive judgment—which, as presented by Goethe, was still in its beginnings—it sets out to develop in the direction indicated in my book How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Faculties of cognition, which in ordinary life, and in the pursuit also of ordinary science, remain latent in man, are led up to “vision,” to a “new beholding.” Just as man perceives around him with the physical eye colours, or light and darkness, so with the eye of the spirit does he now behold the spiritual. By the practice of certain intimate exercises of the soul, he calls forth and develops within him powers that usually remain hidden, and so lifts himself up to a higher kind of knowledge which is able to plunge into the very heart of external Nature. You have frequently heard me speak of the successive stages of this higher knowledge, and I would like here to say a little about their evolution from a particular point of view.

We are accustomed to think of the course of our life as divided between waking and sleeping. These two conditions must, we know, alternate for us if we are to remain healthy in mind and body. How is it with us from the time of awakening to the time of falling asleep? The experiences of the soul are permeated with thoughts; the thoughts receive a certain colouring from the life of feeling; and there is also the life of will, which wells up from dim depths of our being under the guidance of the thoughts, and accomplishes deeds. In the other condition, that of sleep, we lie still; our thoughts sink into darkness; our feelings vanish and our will is inactive. The ordinary normal life of man shows these two alternating conditions. The picture is, however, incomplete; and we shall not arrive at any satisfactory idea of the nature of man if we are content to see the course of his life in this simple manner.

We take it for granted that between waking up and falling asleep we are awake. But the fact is, we are not awake in our whole being. This is overlooked, and consequently we have no true psychology; we come to no right understanding of the soul. If, ridding ourselves of all prejudice, we try to observe inwardly what we experience when we feel, We discover that our feeling life is by no means so illumined with the light of consciousness as is the life of thought and ideation. It is dim, by comparison. For a sense of self, for an experience of self, the life of feeling is undoubtedly every bit as real as—even perhaps in some ways more real than—the life of thought: but clarity, light-filled clarity, is enjoyed by thought alone. There is always something undefined about the life of feeling. Indeed, if we examine the matter carefully, comparing different conditions of soul one with another, we are led finally to the conclusion that the life which pulsates in feeling may be compared with dream life. Study the dream life of man; consider how it surges up from unknown depths of his being; how it manifests in pictures, but in pictures that are vague and indeterminate, so that one does not see all at once exactly how they are connected with external reality. Has not the life of feeling the same quality and character?

Feelings are, of course, something altogether different from dream pictures, but when we compare the degree of consciousness in both, we find it to be very much the same. The life of feeling is a kind of waking dream; the pictures that appear in the dream are here pressed down into the whole organic life. The experience is different in each case, and yet the experience is present in the soul in the same manner in both. So that in reality we are awake only in the life of ideation; in the feeling life we dream even while we are awake.

With the life of the will it is again different. We do not as a rule give much thought to the matter, but is it not so that the impulse of will arises within us without our having any clear consciousness of its origin? We have a thought; and out of the thought springs an impulse of will. Then again we see ourselves acting; and then again we have a thought about the action. But we cannot follow with consciousness what comes between. How a thought becomes an impulse for the will and shoots into my muscle-power; how the nerve registers the movement of the muscles; how, in other words, that which has been sent down into the depths of my being as thought, comes to be carried out in action, afterwards to emerge again when I perceive myself performing the action—all this lives in me in no other way than do the experiences of sleep.

In deep sleep we have in a sense lost our own being; we pass through the experiences of sleep without being aware of them; and it is the same with what comes about through the activity of the will-impulse in man. We dream in our life of feeling, and we are asleep in our willing; dreaming and sleeping are thus perpetually present in waking life. And in these unknown depths of being where the will has its origin, arises also that which we eventually gather up—focus, as it were—in consciousness of self. Man comes to a recognition of his full humanity only when he knows himself as a being that thinks and feels and wills.

Ordinary life, therefore, embraces unconscious conditions. And it is just through the life of ideation becoming separated from the rest of the soul life and lifted up into consciousness, that a way is made for the development of the experience of freedom. Here, in a sense, we divide ourselves up. We are awake in a part of ourselves, in the life of ideation, whilst in relation to another part of us we are as unconscious as we are in relation to the inner being of Nature.

It is at this point that Anthroposophical Spiritual Science steps in with its methods for attaining higher knowledge. This spiritual science is very far removed from any dreamy, obscure mysticism, nor does it support itself, like spiritualism, on external experiment. The foundation for the whole method of spiritual scientific research lies in the inner being of man himself; it can be evolved in full consciousness and will manifest the same clarity as the most exact material conceptions. The world of feeling, which generally, as we have seen, leads a kind of dream life, can become hooded with the same light that permeates thoughts and ideas—which, according to some schools of philosophy, themselves originate in the feelings. By means of exercises described in my book, How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. this lighting up of the world of feeling is brought about, with the result that the region which is usually dreamlike in character now lives in the soul as “imaginative” consciousness. The moment man gives himself up to this imaginative consciousness, something is present for him in consciousness that remains generally beneath the Threshold. He thinks pictures, knowing, however, quite well that he is not dreaming them, but that they correspond to realities.

Spiritual Science then leads on further, to “inspired” consciousness, and here we are taken into the realm of the will. Little by little, we are brought to the point of being able to behold clairvoyantly—please do not misunderstand the expression—how the whole human organisation functions when the will pulsates in it. We see what actually takes place in the muscle when the will is active. Such a knowledge is “inspired” knowledge. Man dives down into his own inner being and acquires a self-knowledge which is generally veiled from him. We come to know more of man than stands before us as “given” between birth and death. Feeling and willing being now also flooded with the light of consciousness, we can know man not only as a created being, perceiving in him that which wakes up every morning and enters again into a body ready-made; we can recognise in him also the creative power which comes down from spiritual worlds at the time of birth or conception, and itself forms and organises the body. In effect, at this further stage man comes to know his own eternal being which lives beyond birth and death; he attains to a direct beholding of the eternal and spiritual in his soul.

As man learns in this way to know himself, not merely as natural man, but as spirit, he finds that he is also now within the inner being of Nature; in the spirit of his own nature he recognises the spirit of the Nature that is all around him. And at this point a fact of deep significance is revealed—namely, that with our modern knowledge of Nature we are already standing on the other side of the Threshold, in the old sense of the word. The men of olden times believed they would lose their self-consciousness if they entered this region unprepared. We do not lose our self-consciousness, but we do lose the world.

The full clarity of thought and idea, to which man owes his consciousness of self, has been achieved by him only in modern times; and now this consciousness of self needs to be carried a step further. The men of old paid particular heed to the training of the will; we have now to press forward, as I emphasised in my “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,” to pure thinking. We must develop our thinking; it must grow into Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. And this will bring us once again to a Threshold, a new Threshold into the spiritual world. We must not remain in the world that offers itself for sense-perception and leaves the inner being of Nature beyond the boundaries of knowledge. We must cross another Threshold, the Threshold that lies before our own inner being.

At this Threshold we shall no longer let our imagination run away with us and conjure up all manner of atoms and molecules to account for the impressions of colour and sound and heat; for when we come consciously to recognise, and be within, our own spirit, then we shall find we are also within the spirit of Nature. We shall learn to know Nature herself as spirit. In the region where to-day we talk of an atomistic world (we are really only postulating behind Nature a second equally material Nature), in the very region where to-day we are losing the world, we shall find the spirit. And then we shall have the right fundamental feeling towards the inner being of Nature and, also, the being of the human soul.

It is, as you see, a different attitude we have to attain from that of olden times. We must be conscious that we are living in conditions the men of old wanted to avoid. This does not mean, however, that we are in danger of losing ourselves; our world of thought has been too strongly developed for that. And if we develop the world of thought still further, then we shall also not lose what we are in danger of losing. The men of olden times were threatened with the loss of self, with a kind of faintness of the soul. We are faced with the danger of losing the world for our ego-consciousness; of being so surrounded and overborne by purely mathematical pictures of the world, purely atomistic conceptions, that we lose all sense of the “whole” world in its infinite variety and richness. In order that we may find the world again—in order, that is, that we may find the spirit in the world—we must cross what constitutes for modern man the Threshold.

We may even put it this way: if the men of olden times feared the Guardian of the Threshold, and needed to be fully prepared before they might pass him, we in our day must desire earnestly to pass the Guardian. We must long to carry knowledge of the spirit into those regions where hitherto we have relied only on external sense-perception in combination with the results of intellectual reasoning and experiment. Knowledge of the spirit must be taken into the laboratory, into the observatory and into the clinic. Wherever research is carried on, knowledge of the spirit must have place.

Otherwise, since all the results that are arrived at in such institutions come from beyond the Threshold, man is thereby cut off from the world in a manner that is dangerous for him. He feels himself in the presence of an inner being of Nature which he can never approach on an external path, which he can approach only by becoming awake in his soul and pressing forward to the immortal part of his own being. As soon, however, as he does this, he is at that moment also within the spirit of Nature. He has stepped across the Threshold that lies in his own being, and finds himself in the presence of the spiritual in Nature.

To point out to man this path is the task of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. It has to give what the other sciences cannot give. And it may rightly claim to be Goethean, for to those who say:

To Nature's heart
No living soul can reach.

Goethe replies:

Nature is neither kernel nor shell,
She is both in one, she is one and all.
Look in your own heart, man, and tell
If you yourself are kernel or shell!

We are “shell” as long as we remain in the life of ideas alone. We sever ourselves from Nature, and all we can do is to talk about her. But the man who penetrates to his own inner “kernel,” and experiences himself in the very centre of his soul—he discovers that he is at the same time in the very innermost of Nature; he is experiencing her inner being.

Such, then, is the kind of impulse that Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is ready to give to the whole of human life, and in particular to the several sciences. These several sciences need not remain the highly specialised fields that they have been hitherto; rather shall each be a contribution to that quest which man must ever follow if he would rise to a consciousness of his true dignity—the quest for the eternal in the human being. All that the individual sciences can teach to-day is still only a knowledge that looks on Nature from without. But if those who are working in them tread, as well as the outer, also the inner path of knowledge, then the knowledge acquired in the different fields can grow into a knowledge of man, a comprehensive knowledge of mankind. We need such a knowledge in our time if we are to guide the social problems of the future into paths where right and healthy solutions can be found—as I have explained in my book, “The Threefold Commonwealth.”

One who carries deeply enough in his heart the development of spiritual science will find himself continually face to face with this question of the connection between the being of man and the inner being of Nature. The specialised sciences cannot help us here; they only spread darkness over the world. The darkness is to be feared, even as the men of olden times feared the region beyond the Threshold. But it is possible for man to kindle a light that shall light up the darkness; and this light is the light that shines in the soul of man when he attains to spiritual knowledge.

• 1. The Riddles of Philosophy
• 2. Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
• 3. English translation from Goethe and Faust; an Interpretation by F. M. Stawell and G. L. Dickinson. G. Bell & Sons, 1928.

First, as in previous lectures here, I must take a moment to ask for apologies, as I cannot give the lecture in the language of this country. Since this is not possible for me, I must make the attempt to be understood in my customary language. Secondly, I beg to apologize as I've arrived here with a cold, and so perhaps there will also be interruptions here and there throughout the lecture.

When one speaks in the present time of the question that has been announced for today's topic, a question that is indeed related to the deepest needs, the deepest yearnings of the human soul, then there emerges out of today's education the objection that questions so bereft of discovery cannot be spoken of scientifically at all, that one must be satisfied to let such questions remain within traditional beliefs, within the same things said about these things as are perception and feeling on the fingers. This is the familiar view nowadays, and therefore everything that is put forward from the point of view of a truly spiritual knowledge will be perceived as somewhat strange. Yet all that is brought forward here, that has arisen from valid points of view, can absolutely stand on the same ground as the accustomed scientific views over the course of the last three or four centuries, when the natural sciences actually climbed and arrived at the point of their highest success. But if one applies only the same methods of knowledge that are allowed by science today, then a way cannot be found into those areas for which answers must be sought, as far as is possible for people regarding such matters as those that we want to deal with today, questions of the soul's eternity, of the eternity of the innermost being of man.

Now the point of view here submitted wants nothing further than to continue within those natural scientific methods set down, but not just to those points from which one can gain a glimpse into the supersensory world, from which alone a possible view into the eternal nature of the inner man can be won. One must initially want to succeed in the acquisition of such knowledge so as to set the sights overall on the expectation of the knowledge itself. One must ask whether the insight, the inner realization, will stop within the ordinary consciousness as we apply it towards the phenomena of nature by measuring, by experiments in balance, through counting, arithmetic and so on, or whether a further glimpse into the supersensory is possible; whether an entirely different cognitive perception ought to be gained or not. So that we understand by such means this different cognitive perception, allow me next to make a comparison. I do not from the start want to prove anything by this comparison, but only to make myself understandable so that what I want to add as more evidence of any nature can be captured in just the right way.

Even in ordinary life we know of two states of consciousness within the human being that are strongly different from one another. We know the state of wakefulness, where we are from morning till night, and we know the state of sleep, in which we are outside of the ordinary circumstances of life, and from which arise colorful iridescent dreams. If we maintain a reasonable point of view, we do not attribute the same perspective of reality to these dreams that we experience in the waking state.

But let us consider: by what means in general do we come to speak of the dreams that arise out of the sleeping state—in general so to speak—so that they often carry, namely, an interesting character, but have a lower reality value, or perhaps in a certain sense they do not quite have the reality value compared to what we experience when awake? We come to an assessment of the dream world only by the fact that we wake up, and by awakening we come to an entirely different state of consciousness. What happens because of this awakening? We switch our will on, especially in our body, in our physical tasks. These depend on the will. After all, what we perceive through the awakened senses is also essentially caused by the awakening of the will in the senses, in the switching on of the sense organs. To a certain extent this goes on in our entire organism, our entire organism is taken hold of; we are able to turn ourselves to the natural world through our organism. And by what we experience because of this activity we are quite capable of assessing the value of the dream's reality. We could never come within the dream to any other insight about the dream than that which the dream itself presents as full reality. So long as we dream we see everything as real, what the dream presents to us in its colorful, dazzling variety.

Let us allow ourselves, once, to take up a certain correct, daring, paradoxical hypothesis. Allowing for this even once we would never awaken throughout our entire earthly life, but would constantly dream. Then we would fill ourselves during our conscious life on earth with all the ideas that we know only from our dreams. And one with such a problem could therefore definitely think that any force of nature—or by my account any spiritual being—could drive us to our actions, and in everything that we do from morning until evening our outer life thus proceeds as it proceeds. We would be accompanied not only with waking concepts, we would be doing something completely different of which we know nothing. However, we would dream our entire lives through, and we would come only to the thoughts that are not true reality. For that which occurs when we grasp things, when we see with the eyes, such as we have in the waking state, would not occur at all.

Thus we know our dream state only from the point of view of the Guardian's judgement. If such a thing is taken seriously, if we do not pass lightly out of habit over the usual events of life, then there arises just opposite the deeper soul questions this hypothetical view: Yes, is it not then perhaps also possible to some extent from a higher point of view to turn from our habitual everyday Guardian and awaken to something new, to a higher state of consciousness? Can we not allow ourselves to think that, if we can wake up out of the dream into everyday reality, we can also awaken out of everyday reality into a higher consciousness? Just as a higher consciousness is given with which we can judge the reality of the everyday world—where we are from morning until evening—can we not also judge the reality value of the dream from the standpoint of wakefulness?

I have put this before you first of all as a question, as an entirely hypothetical question. The same scientific point of view that I have here asserted now shows that it is actually possible for the human being to come to such a second awakening. Just as the shift from sleeping to dreaming in life occurs out of ordinary wakefulness, so this occurrence can increase to another higher level whereby one awakens out of this ordinary everyday life to a higher state and, from this, everyday life likewise appears as though out of dreams.

Now in order to take such a point of view at all, something is necessary that I always call, in this context, intellectual humility. This intellectual humility, however, does not belong to present-day man. Indeed, present-day man says to himself: “Well, when I was a small child, I dreamed in a certain way within life. Then I left childhood, I had to do so, yes, and I came to parenting through becoming older, through life itself. I was then in my entire soul constitution a different person. Each intellectual point of view that I had won for myself I had not brought into the world, for I had first developed it within myself out of the dull, dreamy state of the child's consciousness.” This is indeed the man of today, but here he stops, and then he says: “Well, I have this point of view. What appears to me to be true from this point of view is true; what appears to me to be false from this point of view is false. Through this point of view that I once won for myself, I am the sovereign ruler over truth and falseness, error and accuracy.”

Yes, one should not have this gesture of immodesty if one really wants to ascend to true knowledge of the supersensory world. So care must be taken: just as the human being has evolved out of the dull, dreamy soul-state of the child, so must it be presumed that from the standpoint of the soul—where he has already come once—he can continue to develop himself when he becomes an adult. Now it will be shown whether such a second awakening as I have hypothetically constructed is possible, whether such a development can be produced.

First of all, we naturally use those cognitive and mental powers that are already there when we want to enter into true, exact spiritual research. For there is nothing else the human being can use in relation to his soul constitution than what is already there; this he can try to develop further. Now there is a soul force that the more perceptive philosophers admit to, even in respect to our day, and if one looks at this properly it is already pointing clearly to the eternal essence of man. This suggests, however, that man will not develop even this soul force further; he will merely engage in philosophical speculations about it. That is to say, he wants just enough to stop in ordinary reality, and it is as though he, the dreamer, does not want to wake up, but wants to dream further about the dream in order to give himself an insight about the dream. He does not want to wake up a second time. The soul force I refer to is indeed beyond the power of memory. I do not want to engage in wide-meshed philosophical arguments here—naturally there is no time for it; in other circumstances there could very well be—I want to remain entirely within the popular consciousness. Let us imagine once that this popular consciousness actually works in man just as the power of memory and the power of perception do. Events that we may have gone through decades ago are accordingly brought up from the depths of the soul—or, preferably, we should say out of the depths of the human being so that we do not present a hypothesis about the soul. Out of the depths of the human being thought pictures will be conjured before the human soul that are the same as those that perhaps years ago were experienced in all of their vitality. What is actually occurring here? There lies before us something in memory that is different from what had been perceived in the outer world. In order to perceive the outer world it must be there. When the eye sees, that which is seen must be there. When the ear hears, that which is heard must be there, and so forth. What is experienced by the one perceiving is provided by the perception. With memory we have something in the soul that is not now present. What began as a perception, perhaps a long time ago, but is now no longer there, is conjured up before our souls by the memory.

From these facts intended here to emanate from spiritual science and not from philosophical speculation, connections can now be taken up and developed further through exercises of the soul. The question is this: if we are capable through ordinary memory of having something of the perceptions and the thoughts that are no longer there, but once were there in our earthly life, could we not perhaps also, through further development of such soul exercises, arrive at what refers to something that was never in earthly life, to something that is a more highly developed memory, yet is not actually a memory but an Imagination where the memory is so far advanced that something is presented that was not originally there? This can be achieved the more that we really develop the thought life that is used for ordinary consciousness.

This is not to criticize, but only to show the facts of mental life. Because for natural science and for the ordinary consciousness of the practical human being, only the external impressions of his consciousness are taken into consideration, and it is entirely correct that he surrenders to and passively experiences the thoughts of these external impressions. However, through this second process the higher awakening of which I have spoken can come about, but one must surrender all of the work and activities of thought life, surrender the forces of thought.

There then occurs that which should not be confused with what today is often called clairvoyance, which of course is based upon all possible associations dependent upon human organic functions. That which is acquired here presupposes that each step during practice is completed with as much prudence as the mathematician takes with his arithmetic for the mathematical sciences; so it is known exactly and precisely how to practice every forward step of the soul, just as the mathematician customarily carries out his work. Only the works of the mathematician are in objective forms, while here the work is to bring forward your own soul forces. In this manner you are finally led to remember. You live in an entirely different mental power than previously. Previously the power of thought was just abstract; you could think about something through your thoughts, but now, now you are internally experiencing the power of thought as a real force, just as you experience the pulsation of your blood. Now you experience thinking and action as a reality within you—now you see that the power of memory also lives in thought, only it is a dilution—if I may express myself figuratively—of that which is seen as a much greater power of thought, like the pulse of organic forces. You experience the reality of thought. And you can experience this reality of thought in so far as you really feel something that has not yet been felt. It has been felt in the physical body, and now one begins to feel a second, higher person. And this second, higher person then takes on a very definite shape.

So you have more than life in this time-body, the head is free: you have a human being in the etheric cosmos. That which I now recognize and know only in its importance as the earthly human being—and it actually has the I-sense—this is the human being as earth man, this is only the physical body that evaporates in space.

What we are as human beings as we go around in ordinary life, we are in that we carry a space-body with us, a fleshly space-body. Then we experience what I would call a time-body. One can also call this an etheric or formative forces body, as I have done in my books.

We experience namely that which emerges as a powerful tableau, an overview of our previous life on earth, from the point of time that we have reached, going backwards until the beginning of childhood. As otherwise we experience only a space tableau, now we experience a time tableau that occurs suddenly and is an overview of the entire previous life on earth. This is the first supernatural experience that the human being can have, his own earth lives suddenly appearing before him as a tableau.

Now someone can say: Yes, but perhaps this is only a somewhat complicated picture from memory. Indeed, one could likewise place together in thoughts what has been experienced and then form a continuous stream of memory; yes, one could just receive this picture as a memory picture. And perhaps we are brought to a state only of some self-deception here, to nothing other than such a memory picture from what you describe to us on the basis of your active guidance.

This would assuredly be so if there were no differences in accordance with the content! Indeed, if these things were really faced as though one were a scientist, confronting scientific things in laboratories, in physical cabinets, at the clinic and so forth, and then considering: is this an ordinary memory image? Imagine how people have approached us, how they have done this or that to us, how this or that has touched us with sympathy or antipathy, and so on. This can perhaps also provide us with a memory image that represents how natural phenomena has approached us. But it is always this that comes to us: what the thing mainly is when it is merely recollected.

In this tableau to which I have just drawn attention, it is not that the things draw near to us, but rather that everything comes out of us. This appears chiefly to be like that which we confront out of the inner forces of the soul as natural phenomena and the human being, yet everything appears from within us. This is real self-knowledge, real, concrete self-knowledge, which in fact occurs initially out of the previous earth life. And if we compare what we see overall, then we must say: that which we have produced from our previous life on earth does not behave like an ordinary recollection, but—like a sealing wax impression in a signet—it is the correct reverse image. And whoever simply makes this comparison will know that this is the first step of a new knowledge, of an increased memory that is not just more memory but represents an overall Imagination of a previous earth life. This is the first stage where one feels that he is this higher human being who carries within himself this time-body; this is not just something that the space-body has conjured out of itself, but something that has worked itself into this space-body ever since we have been on earth as human beings. For we recognize that the powers that lie in this space-body are of the same nature as the power of growth, the same kind that, in addition—for instance, when we were children—has wonderfully modeled our first—I want to say—unplastic, amorphous brain to the wonderful form that this brain gradually becomes, and so on.

And in settling into this time-body of the human being, into this first stage of the supernatural experiences of the human being, what must be rejected are all of the narrow-minded notions of the ego that one has, such as that the I is resting inside of the human skin. Now one feels as though he belongs together with the entire cosmos. Now one feels that he really is in his etheric body, in his time-body as a member of the entire cosmos, and he has a concept that is very real: if I cut off a finger of my body then it is no longer a finger; the finger has meaning only in the context of the organism. So by focusing on this time-body, you have a clear awareness: as a human being within this higher being you have the sense of being a member of the entire etheric cosmos, you belong to the etheric cosmos. It is really correct that the I now recognizes itself in its significance as an earthly human being; knows that it is actually owing to the physical space-body that the human being has the I-sensations as earthly man.

However, this is only the first stage of a super-sensible knowledge that can be acquired in order to feel the eternity of the human soul. The following higher stage actually leads, in truth, to a second awakening. For in the first stage we have reached nothing other than the self-knowledge of the earthly human being. The higher level will now be achieved with the same power with which one has initially, through active thinking, concentrated fully on concepts, and, with the same intensity of soul life, now carries away in turn such concepts from consciousness; only one has to come back to them time and again.

In the handling of all of these processes there is nothing suggestive; it proceeds as something with the fullest deliberation, like the course of mathematical procedures. But still, the one who finds himself surrendering such concepts, such thoughts in a strong manner, the one who moves as in the described example into the center of his consciousness, this is the one who at first is wholly devoted to these concepts.

And it is more difficult to get rid of these than the passively acquired ideas of ordinary consciousness. Therefore, in order to forget or carry away something from your consciousness, a stronger force must be applied than would otherwise be applied. But this is good, because through the fact that you apply this stronger force you can reach yet another higher state of consciousness.

You need only think honestly about what occurs in human consciousness when the familiar, passively acquired conceptions stop. Think first of all about stopping these visual concepts and you know that the person will fall asleep—such attempts have indeed also been made in psychological laboratories. This is exactly what now occurs in the human being when he, as a spiritual investigator, has first concentrated all of the powers of his soul on certain conceptions and then clears them away again. There then occurs in him a state which I call the deepest silence of the human soul, empty consciousness. And within this deepest silence of the human soul something very significant is actually said. Thus, the concepts that were first brought into consciousness with all of your strength are again released, and then you have an empty consciousness. This is simply so. You can wait in mere wakefulness for that which the inner life of the soul then reveals, but in that which I can only describe as the deep silence of the soul, something else enters in.

If we can agree on this soul experience, allow me to make the following comparison. Think to yourself: at first we are in one of the big, modern cities, where, if we go out onto the street, such real noise and tumult reign that we cannot understand our own words. Then, removed from the city, five minutes away, it is always silent, and another five minutes away it is even more silent, and more silent. Let us imagine then that we come to the deep, silent solitude of the forest. We can say: all around is silence. With the environment itself in silence our soul comes to silence.—But you see, we have not yet attained that silence which I now speak of as the deep silence of the soul. When one speaks of the silence of the forest over the din of the city, it is said that sounds very gradually cease. At the state of zero—having arrived at the zero state over the loud din—we call this, then, rest. But there is something that goes beyond the zero! Distract yourself, once, with one who has a fortune; he gives continuously of this wealth until he has little, yes, until he has less than nothing.

Nowadays we see that one does not particularly stop when he has nothing, but goes further. How does he do this? He goes below the zero, goes—as the mathematician says—into the negative, into debts that are made against the assets, into that which is negative in respect to zero, which is less than zero. Regarding the silence, think of this: we can go from the loud roar to the rest—zero—yet we can go still further, so that we enter into the regions of silence where the silence is stronger than the mere zero-silence. And the life of the soul enters into such regions, where there is a greater peace within than the mere zero-silence. If this occurs as I have indicated, the complex concepts of the consciousness are first powerfully extinguished; then the soul moves into the growing emptiness toward the inner experiences. There then emerges from the deep silence of the soul, contrary to the opposite sensual world, the objective spiritual world. Thus the spiritual researcher has arrived at the level I have described, and from the deep silence of the soul he meets the spiritual world, and he is gradually within the spiritual world, just as the human being through his eyes, through his ears, is in the physical-sensory world. And in the deep silence of the soul the objective spiritual world is revealed.

And then one can go further in the exercises. Just as one can get rid of a concept, so can one get rid of this entire picture of life that he had at the first stage of his super-sensible cognition, as I have described it, and that was experienced as real self-knowledge. This he can now clear away with all of his strength, clear away this time-person just as when, in the moment of realization when he had come to the time-person, he had already rid himself of the space-person with his strong I-feeling. Now the time-person can be removed. And out of the silence of the soul one is inflamed when one compares his own self-knowledge, the real self-knowledge, to the waking consciousness that has come in the deep silence of the soul. There is now revealed nothing spiritual, but through the outer work of his time-person he enters into the same world where he was before he descended to take on the physical body that had been prepared by his parents and forefathers. And from the deep silence of the soul there is revealed, in addition to the simultaneous spiritual world events, one's own spiritual and soul being, what he was before he descended to this earthly existence. Now he looks into the life that he went through with others before an earthly garment, if I may call it so, was accepted, purely spiritual-soul beings. The existence of the human being prior to birth or prior to conception actually occurs before the soul seeks to connect with others.

It is this that is the point of view represented here. One does not begin to speculate on any viewpoints so as to determine whether or not the soul is immortal. Nothing can be expected from this, because that would be as though one had pulled oneself out of the dreams, out of the dream that had won enlightenment. One must awaken in order to educate himself about the dream. Now one can awaken in the deep silence of the soul to a higher stage and clarify what life on earth is. It is formed from that existence that he had gone through before the step through birth—or rather through conception—and the descent to this earthly existence.

Spiritual science in the sense meant here wants to show the methods by which the vision of the eternal can be acquired by the human soul. This however is the second stage of spiritual knowledge by which we can climb to the secrets of the world, and which can also give us, in addition, the secrets of our own being.

A third stage is scaled through the fact that something is now a power of knowledge, although it is not a power of knowledge in ordinary consciousness, nor is the power of memory an actual power. We remember what we have experienced.

Just as little is another power of the soul a power of cognition. And when I say it is to be a power of cognition, then any scientist who sits here—I can understand quite well, because you have first to think as a scientist about these things, I know very well, and no one should actually speak with full responsibility about the exact spiritual knowledge asserted here who is not fully familiar with the usual scientific methods. So if scientists do not receive from the above the silent "goose bumps," they will at least receive a little if I now also claim that a force which otherwise plays a huge role in ordinary life—but should not be scientifically availed upon in ordinary life—that this will be now be taken as a power of knowledge for the soul to complete: the power of love.

Yes, certainly love plays a huge role in existence, but it is said that she is blind. It may not be taken as some sort of complete power of knowledge. But if one has driven the power of knowledge so far that we have come to the deep silence of the soul, then there occurs above all within this deep silence of the soul what one might call a distinct impression: When you want to see you have first to deprive your sight of the outer sense world.

You must pull it out of your physical body, pull it out even from the time-body. And then it fades so to speak, that coarser part that is bound to the physical body; the I-feeling very strongly goes yet further, as I have described earlier, where you feel that the time-body is already one with the entire cosmic existence.

But if—through the exercises that are described in detail in the books mentioned—you become acquainted with this deprivation, in which there occurs, in a very real sense, deprivation of the physical, deprivation of the time-body—if you look to existence as it was before you descended into physical existence on earth then you will experience something like a deep pain of the soul. And the true higher knowedge is actually born out of this pain.

Do not believe, if you are honest, that you can describe higher knowledge as being born out of desire! It is born out of pain. And you must gradually acquire the endurance to win against this pain.

If one acquires the endurance to win against the pain, then he will learn as a spiritual researcher to turn back repeatedly to physical-sensory existence in a slightly different way. Because he will understand, yes, that he will have what I have described as a higher knowledge—that may be acquired in the characterized example—for only a very short time. It is not about getting caught in a higher world if you are a spiritual researcher, for when you have stepped through the higher world you must return ever and again to the ordinary physical-sensory world.

However, one returns from the moments of higher intuition in which one has first learned, in deepest pain, to do without this physical-sensory world. Then you get a very different stance with respect to this physical-sensory world, since you actually get to know what may be called the feeling of being a victim. One really has this feeling, that remains within, of being a victim, and with full awareness—not only out of instinct but with full awareness—he surrenders himself to other beings or even to other natural processes.

While the instinct of love so acts that the sensation of love is felt to a certain extent in the physical body, then the love can be so developed that it runs in bodily-free activity if it is carried up and formed as a sacrifice to the other, in the spiritual world and also in the physical-sensory world. Then this love itself gradually becomes the power of knowledge. And then you get to know just what you can really only know when love becomes the power of knowledge.

You see, through love we come into a relationship with another being who may at first be foreign to us, and we feel ourselves standing next to the other being if we carry across our own existence into that existence. We need the certainty of the sense of our building a bridge to the unknown being through love. If love—at a higher level, I would like to say—so awakens as I have just indicated, then we obtain our ego again, like a foreign being that—yes—we have lost along the way, as I have described.

But how do we obtain our ego? As the one whom we were in former earth lives, who is as strange to us in this earth life as a different personality, taken to a higher scale by the spiritualized, refined level of love. Our ego is not given back earlier to us, not until we can grasp it in love as entirely foreign. We have not desired to see this ego as it has lived in former lives on earth, and then passed through the time that lies between death and a new birth.

However, we discover our ego where we are able to perceive ourselves out of the deep silence of the soul, before we descended to earth life, and look back to the previous earth life as it was before this purely spiritual-soul life.

But, I want to say—we must first have developed an entirely selfless higher love as a power of knowledge; this then gives us an unsought insight into a former life on earth. Then we know that we had to go through these former lives on earth. And we have so risen that we can see the ego, how it was and how it had a body other than the body that we have now, that has carried us since birth to this point of time in earthly life. Then we have arrived at this moment, to be able to really comprehend ourselves as entirely free of the body—that is, recognizing the moment to live through that we then live through as real when we pass through death. For we have placed the physical body into reality.

In the stage of knowledge that is gained in love, we remove the physical body of knowledge and we experience ourselves in the same elements where we will be with our eternal inner being when we pass through the gate of death into the spiritual world, from which we have descended into physical existence on earth. And so we experience immortality when we—forgive me when I use the term—first recognize the experience of unbornness.

But the eternity of the human soul consists of these two: from unbornness, for which we do not even have a word in our contemporary educated language, and from immortality. Only when one comprehends these two as two sides of the eternity of the human soul can one really approach understanding. In the intellectual conceptions of today, people unfortunately treat these things with a certain egoism. They say to themselves—without having to voice this—more unconsciously they say to themselves: Well, that which has preceded our life on earth does not interest us, for we are here. It interests us that we are here. But we are interested in what happens after death because we do not yet know this.

This is egotism, but the results are not knowledge. Knowledge results only from unegotistical essence. Therefore, no one can gain a real knowledge of the immortality of the soul who does not have the will to achieve knowledge of the soul's unbornness. Because the eternity of the human soul is composed of the soul's unbornness and the soul's immortality.

This also results in the outlook of repeated earth lives, as indicated at the third level of knowledge after full awakening out into the spiritual world; the memory not only extends into premortal existence, it also extends into the stages of existence in the previously-lived earth life.

Thus we know that there really is before us a second awakening of the soul. Out of the dreams we switch our will on in the body. As a result we live in the world of space while the images otherwise proceed, and we accept these passing dream images as realities; we recognize the awakened nature of the image. But by what means are the images images? By the fact that they stand as images. As we awaken, we switch on our bodily functions. I want to say, we see red as red, the same whether we are awake or asleep; we hear tones the same way, whether we are dreaming or awake. But while we are awake, having turned our will on to bodily functions, we go over to some extent to the realities—in crossing over the hard things we are not speaking now of philosophical speculations, but are entirely within the popular consciousness. Thus to a certain extent when we are awake we do not retain the picture in sensory perceptions, but cross broadly over the hard things. We are switched on to the same element that presents to us the things of the world, in the sense of physical existence.

Now we have gradually switched into a new world as a spiritual researcher. Why have we done this?

When you compare the thinking, the feeling, and the will of the human being as they exist in the soul and also in the waking state, they are actually a dream. We actually only wake up with sensory thoughts and ideas together in the outer world, and these are combined as sensory perceptions. As soon as we look within ourselves with ordinary consciousness, we are dreaming. Even our thoughts, when we turn inward, are more or less dream perceptions. This remains so dreamlike, even the will is asleep. For when we have decided upon any action we know how this action that we initially had as an idea continues down into our limbs as an idea, so that we begin to move the limbs. Only through spiritual science can one see what is going on in the muscles, what is going on in the entire organism; usually that which is a voluntary action remains inhibited during sleep. First we have only the idea. Then it all goes down into an unconscious state. Then the idea of the action occurs again. And what the soul by itself can only dream about even in the waking state, we gradually switch on through reinforced thinking, through the deep silence of the soul, through the power of knowledge awakened by love in the spiritual existence of the human being, as we switch on the ordinary awakening of the will in bodily existence.

Thus we learn to judge the eternal in the human being from the point of view of the ordinary physical-sensory life that we absolve between birth and death, as we judge the content of the dream from the point of view of physical-sensory life. We advocate recognizing the eternal in this way!

Again and again I have to say on such an occasion: of course the objection is given that these things only apply to those who want to be a spiritual researcher, who look into these worlds.—No, ladies and gentlemen, the spiritual researcher actually has these things for himself as a human being only slightly, when he brought them down with the usual introduction into ordinary language, into ordinary life. And this can happen as well for everyone who hears these things from the spiritual researcher.

Just as one has grown accustomed to accept the things that the botanist or the astronomer has explored with his difficult methods, so one will gradually have to get used to the things that the spiritual researcher has explored after he gives an account of his method, as I have described today—to accept, to accept more readily, for there is the same relationship between ordinary common sense and these truths as there is between the right aesthetic taste and a beautiful picture.

You have to be a painter to paint a beautiful picture, but you do not have to be a painter to judge the beauty of its image! One needs only to have healthy taste.

One must be a spiritual researcher in order to know the things as they have been portrayed. But just as little as one needs to be a painter in order to judge the beauty of a picture, just as little does one need to be a spiritual researcher in order with complete common sense to be in agreement with what the spiritual researcher says. Apart from this, for people today at a certain level it is possible that each one can be a spiritual researcher. The one who delves into the books I have mentioned, who does the corresponding exercises, can today—no matter in what profession, in what life situation—get as far at the least as to control in a completely satisfactory manner that of which I have spoken this evening, and many other things.

What is this knowledge that leads into the eternal soul? It is a realization that is not only grasped in the head of the human being, it affects the entire person. For that which is the world of color, the eye will grasp. For that which is the world of tone, the ear will grasp. For that which is the law of nature, the human mind will grasp. For that, however, which is the spiritual world—as I have indicated here today—that will be grasped by the entire human being.

Hence, allow me in conclusion to say something personal by way of illustration, although this is not meant to be personal, but is meant rather to be entirely objective.

If you really want to capture that which is disclosed by the spiritual world, you need presence of mind, because it slips so to speak, turns away quickly; it is fleeting. That which is to a certain extent advanced through an improvement in the power of memory imprints itself only with difficulty upon the ordinary memory. One must use all of his strength to bring down what he beholds in the spiritual world, to bring this down to ordinary language, to ordinary memory-thought.

I would not be able to lecture about these things if I did not try by all means to bring down what arises in me of what can be beheld in the spiritual world, especially to really bring these thought-words down into physically audible regions. One cannot comprehend with the mere head, because the entire human being must to a certain extent become a sense organ, but a spiritually developed sense organ. Therefore I attempt every time—it is my custom, another has another one—I attempt every time if something is given to me from the spiritual world, not merely to think it through as I receive it from the spiritual world, but to write it down as well, or to record it with some characteristic stroke, so that the arms and hands are involved as well as the soul organs. So something else other than the mere head, which remains only in abstract ideas, must be involved in these findings: the entire person.

I have in this way entire truckloads of fully-written notebooks that I never again look at, which are only there in order to be descriptions, in order to provide preliminary work in the physical world for that which is from the spiritual world, so that the spiritually beheld world can then really be clothed in words; whereby the thoughts of which memories are usually formed or that usually apply in life can actually be penetrated—Thus one obtains a science that relates to the whole person.

I will have to show you tomorrow how this science provides us with the opportunity not only to understand the cultural development of humanity, but it might also socially promote namely a foundation, a true, real foundation for a true, real education, for a true, genuine pedagogy, for Waldorf education.

These things, how the development of the humanity and the education of humanity in light of this spiritual-scientific world view is excluded, this I will have to describe tomorrow. Today I wanted only to evoke the idea of how this spiritual-scientific point of view, through knowledge, is based to a certain extent on a second awakening, the soul of the human being in its eternity again returning to the full life.

Yes, we have to experience this out of our awareness of time, that scholarship has just spoken of a doctrine of the soul without soul, in a certain sense.—I will have to touch upon this question tomorrow—even of religion without God.

Spiritual science as it is meant here wants in turn to enter into the fullest intensity of the soul of the human being, into the eternity of the soul; it wants religious consciousness, the godly-religious content to enter again into the development of humanity and the education of humanity, precisely so that man can come through awareness to his full dignity. And he, conscious of his dignity which results from his knowledge of the connection of his soul with the eternal, with the ur-eternal powers of the world, realizes that this is part of his true nature, as the physical body, as something that stands in everyday life, is connected with him, is part of his life.

This is that which people themselves have followed as knowledge, and already many, many of them crave the equivalent, if it is not fully conscious to them. That which today torments people, what they feel as the uneasiness of life that makes them basically nervous about what drives them so that they feel undermined in their whole existence, this is the burning question of the eternal forces underlying the temporal forces that we need to develop in normal and in social life. This spiritual science is here so that people who want to have knowledge of these eternal forces—that spiritual science here intends—can find methods to lead others to this realization, so that others can also engage in this knowledge in social life; that they and their fellow man not only see something as it were that is borne by the stream of life on earth, to be born with birth and die with death, but that they learn rather of something that will go through all eternity, guided by the stars and the aims of people through the cosmic goal so that this cosmic goal gives the correct meaning to all earthly goals.

Anthroposophy wants to speak to people of this cosmic sense, the sense of the goals of earth. This is what it would awaken in souls again as feeling and sensation in the relationship of the human soul with all of the forces of eternal life, for people of the present and of the future.

And this, ladies and gentlemen—if you are going on honest advice you will have to admit—is what one needs as a human being at the present time. And what one will need more and more as a human being of the future.