The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It is certainly necessary in every sphere of thought and life to learn to know, in addition to the characteristics of truth, also those of the sources of error; for, without doubt, through a knowledge of error, it is possible for us to guard ourselves from the hindrances which meet the seeker for truth in these sources. In contrast to other spheres of scientific investigation, it is especially in the sphere of spiritual investigation that error lurks in every nook and corner, where it is not even easy to recognise. It often appears in the cloak of truth, in a form difficult to discern, not only to be overcome in the soul of the spiritual investigator, but also in immediate life. In many cases, the spiritual investigator can only push forward to truth, when he really succeeds in meeting error as an enemy. The day before yesterday, it was shown how the man who attempts to travel the paths of spiritual investigation must transform his soul into an instrument, in order to mediate between human knowledge, and the super-sensible worlds. External science employs external instruments, the spiritual investigator, however, employs as means of investigation, what he can develop out of the cognitive forces slumbering in the human soul, in order to penetrate therewith into the super-sensible worlds. In this way the soul first comes to Imaginative cognition, and here already an error lurks, as soon as the soul, feeling herself capable of letting Imaginations arise out of her depths, believes she may grasp this world of Images objectively—as if they were existing outside of herself. Self education must proceed to overcome this error with strong, inner power of WILL and regard these Imaginations merely as mirror-images, shadow-pictures of ones own soul forces, which the soul produces solely out of herself, when she works on herself in the way indicated. The spiritual investigator concerned must exclude this error, and lead back this imaginative world arising, into his own soul again, in order thereby, later on, to find objective super-sensible Beings, standing before him.

The ‘mediumistic’ nature of man at once presents itself as the counterpart of Imaginative cognition. Once attention is drawn to its many questionable elements, and one must not conclude, because they are not mentioned, that they are not considered in spiritual science. Whereas in Imaginative cognition, consciousness is strengthened and forces are drawn out of the soul, if one pursues another path, it is necessary to damp down ordinary consciousness, so that the usual life of thought and feeling ceases. A condition void of ordinary consciousness appears then in the human being known as a ‘medium’. Thereby the forces which are usually contained in the consciousness of man are inserted into the universal existence of the cosmos and the latter works directly into the former, thus being in a position to reveal himself, i.e. spiritual beings can now work objectively-spiritually, into the physical world. Let us first enter into the sources of error in such a mediumistic being. Those who occupy themselves with gaining knowledge from out of those worlds which work down into such persons whose consciousness has been extinguished, as a rule, are averse to such mediumistic personalities taking into their consciousness any ideas or concepts from spiritual science.

And, from their standpoint they are fully justified, because the knowledge of spiritual science, with its concepts and ideas cutting deeply into the soul, makes strong demands on the consciousness, and thereby renders it difficult to silence or extinguish it. Therefore the experience can easily be made that some individuality or another could reveal itself with far greater facility to a medium than after spirit-science has worked into him. Accordingly, one will strive to hold the medium free from all influences of spiritual investigation, as otherwise, these will make themselves felt, instead of objective spiritual forces which can appear through their manifestations in the medium. Also it is not good for the utterances of the medium, if he has a strong phantasy, for this works strongly on the individuality and forces itself into the diminished consciousness. Everything pertaining to an active, strongly-conscious, creative content of consciousness works disturbingly on the revelations of the medium, and so personalities strongly endowed with phantasy and reflexion are mostly bad mediums. If thus, a medium has learnt to know from spiritual science the evolution of the planetary system, then such knowledge mingles with the mediumistic revelations; but if no such knowledge won in this way is present, then, surprising, indeed grotesque pronouncements are obtained concerning world-formations; and if one can get beyond their unusual impression, one will discover, in all these declarations, truths of the cosmos and world-evolution. In all these investigations, knowledge must be obtained as to how subjective pronouncements, as such, can be cognised and excluded from those which the medium himself does not know, although they reveal themselves through him. Thus mediums are chosen for investigations who have nothing concerning the content of these investigations in their day consciousness. If one gets from a medium, therefore, some pronouncement in a speech unknown to the medium, it is to be supposed that something speaks through the medium, unconnected with his own individuality, something arising from an objective world-content. Thus one must seek to regard everywhere the sources of error when one has to do with the consideration of somnambulistic-mediumistic beings, as soon as they are led to pronouncements out of the spiritual world, into which influences peculiar to themselves can mingle. This can easily appear e.g. in a catholic or a protestant. The former feels spiritual beings as he is accustomed to imagine e.g. the angel, which is not the case, as a rule, with a protestant. Thus it is extremely necessary to be absolutely clear about the individualities of persons applied to mediumship. Then we come to many a sphere where sources of error are to be indicated. The sceptic thinks that only those things appear in the medium which he has already taken up into his consciousness. If however one surveys the entirety of mediumistic revelations, then one will also transcend the errors from this source. For the objective observer, in all such revelations, it is less a question of the exact, description of the CONTENTS—but far more—the fact of the experience. And when one can look away from all the content, and heed only the processes in human nature, in their relationship to spiritual world forces, then it is comprehensible that on one occasion the pronouncements are tinged with catholicism, and on another occasion with protestantism. The vesture is accidental: the Truth stands behind it, the same in both, but having passed through another individuality. The existence of spiritual beings is thereby shown as it presses into the personality of the medium, coming to a special form in each. In all these processes it is difficult to say where error ceases and truth begins. Therefore a way must be sought along which one can attain an approach to the truth, and exclude the sources of error. Experiences in this sphere are not always unassailable, and in a declaration of the various accompanying conditions, one can find sources of error. But for the existence of the spiritual world it suffices to show the path along which one can remove error ever more to one side. Thus it does not hold to answer the question ... What is truth, what is error, but to find the path beyond error into the sphere of truth, which one seeks to approach as a far off goal. One will then come more and more to such—let us say in the usual, if not adequate mode of speech—experiments, in which the individual consciousness is purely excluded, and in revelations of world processes in which the mediumistic person employed cannot work disturbingly, he becomes all the more a capable instrument.

I should like to draw attention to one thing, well known to those who occupy themselves with these things with earnest intent. If the medium is placed in this damped down condition, then in the first place one gets in his revelations super-sensible cosmic laws. If now, beings of the super-sensible world are to manifest, then they must take possession of the somnambulistic-mediumistic person, and one must as it were look through him into the spiritual being, in order to recognise the latter. Imaginative cognition is the complete opposite of what has been described. The comparison has been attempted in this outline to-day in order to point to what spiritual science has to say on the somnambulistic-mediumistic nature. It is not its task to cultivate this side of investigation, but the pronouncements of spiritual science should proceed from what the soul as an instrument can cognize in the surrounding spiritual world in clear distinction to visions, hallucinations, and illusory ideas, of all kinds. Let us now ask:—Do not errors lurk for the spiritual investigator? Even before entry into the spiritual world one can have an idea as to how errors can arise. We find in life monism, materialism, positivism, idealism, spiritism, etc, and whoever is not a fanatic in one such philosophical standpoint, can heed each advocate of such streams of thought, whether materialism or spiritualism, objectively, with its logically produced foundations. One may be convinced to a certain degree by what is brought forward in reasonable fashion without making himself a partisan of the philosophy in question. Thus one can produce much that is reasonable and convincing for all standpoints and one will agree with what is thus brought forward really positively. Generally however one meets an extravagance to the point of insufferance, when, by the one-sided emphasis of one standpoint, the others are rejected without anything further. Yet, with adequate experience in this sphere, it is possible to esteem the materialistic as well as the spiritualistic standpoint. I have presented this method of perception here in two lectures already, which I held on the theme:—How does one refute theosophy? and how does one defend theosophy? In both of which I emphasised this positive attitude. If this is possible of two opposite standpoints, this indicates to any man of insight that no single standpoint, held fanatically, contains the Truth. One might conceive then that the truth lies between two opposite opinions, yet this is like sitting between two chairs, instead of on one! Goethe says: “Truth does not lie between two opposite opinions, but this problem—the task which can lead to her.” This is often the case even in the physical-sensible world, and this fact can work shatteringly on entry to the super-sensible world on one who is able to take such knowledge earnestly.

One describes something, e.g. from one standpoint, but this could occur just as well from another standpoint. This can lead to a kind of uncertainty regarding truth, but also to an investigation as to the origin of this difference in human standpoints. If one e.g. has not utterly fallen to materialism, but has preserved for himself the freedom of looking away from his own standpoint, and asking:—how has my soul then, formed itself in life? and no more regards the material than the spiritual side—then in this attitude, one recognises something dependent on the individuality, and comes to see how the whole course of life has led one to judge in the accepted way. Thereby one is just towards another standpoint, recognises its worth, and attempts to see how another soul has come to regard things from another side. Thereby diverse standpoints balance themselves in the world. Different people with just as different standpoints oppose each other generally, becoming ever more fanatical; if however, instead of this the attempt is made to be silent, and then to see how each has come to his standpoint, then less strife would arise; the investigation of the path to ones own opinion would be a self-knowledge; it would furnish opportunity to approach the truth, which would then take position as fact in the middle—between the various starting points. This must occur in greater measure in one who seeks the sources of error in super-sensible spheres. Therefore the spiritual investigator must begin to increase enormously self-knowledge on entering the spiritual world, and not be persuaded by what first appears in his soul. He must say:—What you see in wonderful images, that you are yourself. You have projected them yourself into space. Thus even the first show not merely the possibility but also the necessity of self-knowledge through which man learns to exclude himself from that which holds objectively. There exists no other way of excluding untruth than that of complete self knowledge. One can then exclude it from what is beheld, and what is left is objective. If one will not accomplish this, it is better for him not to approach the super-sensible. Nothing is so difficult as self-knowledge. All possible interests place themselves as hindrances in the way, seeking to deceive us, by presenting themselves in lying form before us, whereas they are only mirror-image of our own self, our own being. That stage by which the spiritual investigator can experience whether he possesses sufficient self-knowledge is designated as the meeting with the Dweller on the Threshold. One can only gradually form for oneself an idea of this. Assuming it is possible at a definite age in life to look back on everything that man has developed as predilections, the way in which one has felt and maintained something sensible and super-sensible, it is important to put such questions by the side of others. The exercises of meditation and concentration themselves, as such, if pursued, develop slumbering forces in the soul through which man is put in the position of facing himself. That shows itself in definite symptoms. One feels changes in the soul, has the uncomfortable feeling of weariness and disgust with himself. But without this, one cannot become a real spiritual investigator. Finally one can regard everything formerly seen as a worthy characteristic, as something changed, external, incidental. One appears empty to oneself, as nothing, compared to what one no longer really is—or at least, to what one no longer so utterly is as formerly. These feelings are so gradually intensified, and experienced in such subtle degrees, that there exists no danger for the person in question. If one will attain a high grade of spiritual investigation, such feelings must appear very strong, making it possible to experience with strong content of feeling THAT outside of one, which formerly was inside one—as if one had stripped off everything, no longer making use of it—as if one stood at an abyss, forsaken by all the ordinary means of help. One will then feel very soon experiences appear in imaginative cognition, in which one learns to know himself anew with all his unsympathetic appearances, with images of other beings alongside, who now perceive and feel all that man is, who lie in wait for him. One then feels his own being as divided up among other beings, as in the image of Dionysus, whose being also was divided.

All training in this direction, as is also presented in my book: How Does one Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?,—is directed to perceiving and judging the world thus. For such experiences and for such a survey, one must be correctly schooled in order not to be utterly confounded. This condition which man does not consider in ordinary life, i.e. that he sits, as it were, in a glass house, and the world-powers see through him completely—is a Fact, and knowledge of the spiritual investigator. Ordinary life prevents man perceiving the Dweller of the Threshold beside him, which would otherwise bring him out of the necessary secure grasp of life, c.f. the Mystery Drama. Der Huter der Schwelle. Now man first learns how everywhere not merely errors of knowledge but Real Error appears, and how necessary it is to behold things in their natural way, even if the difficulty of self-knowledge (which veils it) is still so considerable, until, as spiritual investigator, one comes to see oneself completely, to see oneself, beside oneself, without any limitation. One cannot then say: here is truth, there is error—but, the further one is on this path of seeing oneself, and the less that deceptions coming from self flow into the knowledge of higher worlds, all the truer is ones knowledge. Consciousness must be strengthened and sharpened in this way, in order especially to have concentrated before one what must be excluded in an ignoble personality. Then one sharply draws all this together, one can first really know oneself. If one does not progress thus far in the transformation of his soul, then one easily intermingles the sensible with the super-sensible, and is easily confused. Whoever travels this path to the end, however, i.e. till he attains certainty in his powers of perception, will correctly observe and estimate the qualities and prejudices of his feeling. He will not mingle them with objective cognition, nor bring unrelated images together. For he can exclude now his entire personality, and separate his former self from the super-sensible world. If one has not progressed far enough in the stripping off of his own personality, he comes to definitions of the super-sensible world, in which he mingles his own personal views, thus, without knowing it, falsifying what is seen and presented. In spite of all care, it is hardly possible to attain the ideal of a spiritual investigator since something subjective will always have flowed into ones pronouncements. Nevertheless, in all the various utterances of the spiritual investigator, we shall find the same content, if they are sincerely presented, in so far as one looks away from the images and the scaffolding employed for their presentation, although the seer must exercise the utmost consciousness in their selection. Thus you will have seen that one can look, in the way described, into the spiritual world, if, after careful preparation one has developed oneself as a seer; yet, everyone is in a position to understand what is investigated, once it is expressed in the ideas and concepts of the healthy human understanding. It is just as comprehensible and true that one who can think well and logically, can also correctly judge what he has experienced as a spiritual investigator in the spiritual world, Yet a fool might see ever so much—he will describe it all distortedly. In all sincerity, it is a question of moral qualities. The immoral person will get to know in the spiritual world especially, the hindering and disturbing events and beings, only grasping these in distorted form and describe them correspondingly. The moral person however, with selfless mood of soul, will find the paths in the spiritual world, which shows him things in their right mutual ordering and value. One cannot begin to acquire the right measure of perception there, but one must already possess it in intellectual and especially in moral form. If, e.g. one has prejudged a mood regarding some definite religious belief, he thinks something which could be rightly and truly grasped, yet in a coloured or even incorrect form, and therein lie many sources of error in the preparation for spiritual science and its results. Each one however can be a critic of its investigations, if sufficiently prepared, can follow with understanding, and comprehend its results, without applying its methods to himself, the method which led to these results. Also each person can fully understand the pronouncements of the spiritual investigator, and impart them further. The spheres of spiritual science are of such a nature that the seer cannot coldly face materialistic things; in addition, the followers of the investigator always meet him with definite sympathies and antipathies. This comes strongly into consideration, in the handling on of its communications. Souls often yearn for its information, but are as often as lazy in applying expressly a right meaning and understanding to them, thereby meeting the investigator in the necessary critical mood. Then belief appears in place of objective examination, and takes what is said on authority, until finally a kind of deceptive Authority develops. If the spiritual investigator must always be watchful of himself in his activity, then the listeners also should hold themselves awake, constantly exercising a self-examination, lest they receive the assertions of the spiritual investigator with belief, prejudice, and deluded authority. A suspicious source of error arises if the follower does not school his power of judgment, and instead of these troublesome intellectual efforts, comfortably accepts everything on belief in authority. If the investigator communicates important things, he will easily be able to exercise a harmful influence on his followers, unless above all things he attempts to appeal to their insight. Otherwise, their ordinary healthy human understanding is overpowered and ruined. Whereas the insight of the hearers should be strengthened, the investigator is then easily tempted not to awaken this, but merely to evoke belief. The ideal condition on the contrary would be when the followers make it as difficult as possible for the investigator, laying on him the highest demands, when he imprints the knowledge of spiritual science in the concepts and ideas of the healthy human understanding, thereby making it impossible for any charlatans to appear by his side, as a conscientious and sincere spiritual investigator. For this it is necessary that the listeners carefully hold watch over themselves sharpening more and more their insight and their healthy human understanding, so that they can distinguish the real investigator from the charlatan. The soul-mood of credible followers is not favourable in this and there hardly exists any other remedy here than the existence of conscientious investigators who disdain to procure for themselves a facile audience, and merely pursue the investigation of truth. Otherwise, listeners, lazy or lacking in judgment, throw everything together or else, if they cannot enter sufficiently unprejudiced into the knowledge, cannot distinguish between error and conscientiousness. The faithful often hold the purest charlatanerai for pure truth, and the ignorant, spiritual insufficiencies for results of spiritual investigation. Thus it is necessary above all things for the followers to develop critical judgment instead of belief. This last will already fall away partially when the knowledge spreads that a seer who, as a practical spiritual investigator, can look into the spiritual world need not be any special human being for that reason, just as little as a chemist, botanist, or an artisan; for the worth of a man does not depend on the possession of the results of spiritual knowledge or powers of knowledge, but on his healthy human understanding and his moral qualities. The worth of a man can be decided intellectually and morally before he enters spiritual investigation and according to this is his spiritual knowledge. In this sphere, and in the conquest of false authority, each one must attempt the utmost possible. Thus the attempt is made to show the possibility of error in the discovery and spreading of spiritual truths within a general spiritual civilisation, and to evoke a feeling, by which one can recognise the conscientious investigator. Many opponents are right in their objections but the true investigator can himself make these, in order to exclude some error. In all his efforts however he will have abundant confidence in which those things we have discussed to-day will also resound, that it is a question of the mood existing in the soul for the truth of the ideas transmitted, and above all, the trust that these truths, like those also in other spheres, have a strong force, so that the error which might creep in through false authority can be removed through the self correction of the truth. Belief in authority revenges itself, and a faithful believer, who has not thought out the details, sharply, has often reached the position of being forced to believe on coming to far more important points, and is, as it were, ruined, when a few difficulties present themselves. True and sincere spiritual science may be brought together with charlantaneric, and deception, either by mistake or malice, yet, as has been said, there still remains a confidence for the human soul which longs for truth, even if the truth of the spiritual investigation on its appearance is still more exposed to unkind fate than other scientific discoveries in human evolution.

One need merely recall the heliocentric system of Nicholas Copernicus, the laws of Gravity, the world views of Galileo Galilei, or Franceseo Redi (who put forward the basic statement: Life can only develop out of what is living.) I should also like to draw attention to the view of the Academy of Science in Paris who believed they had to reject under all circumstances the fact of the meteor-showers of which they were notified; also to the opposition on introducing postage stamps, as the largest post offices would be unable to receive all the messages. The truth has often been repelled thus, but from the fact nevertheless it establishes itself, hope, confidence, and trust can be kindled to-day. Even in such a strong and sincere searcher for truth as Schopenhauer, we find this assertion about the power inherent in Truth, when he says:—In every century poor TRUTH has had to blush because she was paradoxical yet it is not her fault. She cannot adopt the form of traditional, general error, and cannot but look with a sigh to the protective God of Time, whose wings beat so slowly together with whom however, she beckons the investigator encouragingly. And if many die without real success, yet finally truth will conquer, even if the sources of error raise themselves ever so much against all that is destined, according to his nature, to flow into the spiritual life of humanity.

Spiritual research, as it is meant here, is aware very well that there are some, also substantial objections against it. I tried to show that in the last winter with two talks that I have also held here How Does One Disprove Spiritual Science? and How Does One Reason Spiritual Science? At that time, I intended to discuss the pros and cons more from the point of view of general scientificity. This time I want to speak about the pros and cons from the point of view of the spiritual researcher in this and the next talk. I will deal less with individual questions than rather with the question how one gets to the truths of spiritual science and which errors confront the spiritual researcher as well as those who want to approach this knowledge and make them a component of their soul lives.

It could seem peculiar from the start that one can speak about numerous causes of error that refer just to the most important questions of human life. These are the questions of the nature and destination of the human being, of the soul experiences after death, of death and immortality, of repeated lives on earth et cetera, which are objects of spiritual research. Hence, it is the more inevitable to speak about the ways of truth and error to illumine these questions.

If it is talk of spiritual research, its truths and errors, I ask you to take into consideration that it concerns only the ways of this spiritual research at first, so attaining the truths of spiritual life. Here one has to consider as a basic requirement that the spiritual researcher has a generally healthy soul life. With it, I do not say that the results or the suggestions of spiritual research could only help a healthy soul. I do not at all claim this. On the contrary, these results have just something recovering, something that not only gets the lost soul, but also an ill soul life on the straight and narrow. This should be clear from the start. If today it should mainly be talk of a healthy soul life as the right requirement for spiritual research, this means that one can get to the truths in spiritual area only with a healthy soul life. What then spiritual science can give can be almost called a remedy for the human soul.

A healthy soul life is the requirement. Why? Because the origins of spiritual research are inside of the human soul because one can look into the concealed spiritual depths of existence only if one changes his own soul into a tool of spiritual research.

Talking not generally, I would immediately like to take something as starting point that I have already mentioned here several times. If the human soul should be transformed into an instrument for beholding into the spiritual world, then it is necessary that the soul forces that are sufficient for the everyday life are strengthened. In the everyday life, the human being is only concerned with that which his senses teach him and which the reason recognises. We already know from a trivial consideration of life that the statements of the outer senses as well as the usual reason are quiet if the human being is sleeping. Our everyday life proceeds between waking and sleeping. We notice that our senses gradually fail and we get to a state of unconsciousness. Now it would go indeed against the usual logical rules if one believed that everything that the human being experiences from morning to evening were extinguished at every evening and originated anew at the next morning. Everything certainly exists from falling asleep up to the awakening. The sleep does not cause that the experiences of the day do not exist at night in our soul life, but the soul forces are not strong enough to experience during sleep. It is easy to realise that everything depends on whether the human being is able to become aware of that which is unconscious during sleep.

Are we able to perceive if our senses are quiet if our brain is not called for its service—is it possible that we have an experience with that which is independent of body in us? Then this experience can already show us whether it is supersensible or not. That means so that the soul can become an instrument to perceive other things than with the instrument of the body, it is necessary to cause a state which is similar to sleep and is, nevertheless, completely different from it. In this respect, one has to extinguish the usual sense perception if the soul should become an instrument of another perception. However, unconsciousness must not happen; that is we have to evoke a state that is similar to sleep and is still dissimilar because full consciousness must exist.

One can cause such a state different. It is the healthiest way to cause it with methods, as I have described them in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and will outline them once again here.

You cause this state with inner soul work, with conceptual efforts that we do not do in the usual life. One calls them concentration of thinking, of imagining, of feeling or also meditation. We immediately want to bring in an example that appears weird at first, but from which we realise at once why it seems so paradoxical. It concerns that we evoke particular images to reach the desired state and relate to these images in a particular way. We imagine facing two glasses; one is half-full with water, the other empty. Now we imagine that we pour some water from the half-full glass into the empty glass, and the first glass would become fuller and not emptier. This is a paradoxical mental picture, isn't that so? Now you may have not only this mental picture and turn it over in your mind, but you have to connect a particular sense with this mental picture, then only it will become a meditation.

We all know one fact that flows through our life everywhere whose depth one can fathom difficultly. This is love in its different forms. Love has the peculiarity that the lover pours as it were his full heart onto the other human being that he does not become poorer with it but richer. This is the secret of love that the soul becomes fuller of contents, the more of it is given away. Love is something complex and deep that we can always grasp some sides of it only; however, its being is unfathomable. However, this one side of love can be symbolised by the image of the two glasses. We do something similar there concerning a moral experience of life that we experience, for example, also in geometry.

We take a round medallion of any substance. If we draw a circle with the help of the medallion we can study everything that refers to a circle, and this applies to that which we have as reality before ourselves. The geometrician forms symbols of reality with his figures. The soul can also create symbols of the everlasting if it gets clear about the fact that these are just symbols.

If we have such a mental picture like that of the two glasses and have the sensation that this picture points to such an important phenomenon as love, then we process this picture in the right sense if we try, by strong effort of will, to eliminate all images which come from the senses. As well all mental pictures disappear while falling asleep, one extinguishes everything arbitrarily that comes from without and everything that the reason can think, and all soul forces are concentrated upon this one picture.

Of course, it is not enough to do this only once, but one has to practise it in patience and perseverance repeatedly, then we strengthen our soul forces gradually. Then it happens that we become aware of such soul experiences by internal experience that a time comes at which we do no longer need to put such symbolic images before our souls, but gradually from deep, concealed depths of our soul life such pictures appear by themselves.

It is better that the human being uses such mental pictures with these exercises which are only symbols, that is they refer to no outer reality. One could also use usual mental pictures, but they do not work so efficiently. If anybody wanted to argue, it is foolish to imagine something that is not there at all, one has to say, this concentration work is not there to copy the outer reality, but it should educate the soul to get forces from it, which are not active, otherwise. This exercise is not there to recognise truths. It concerns education of the soul to get concealed forces from it.

If now the time has come when in the soul the pictures emerge, then you have to set the soul by a regular mental training into a particular mood. If we speak about this mood in which the soul must be if these pictures appear by themselves, there one has to point to the fact that this imagery appears to the layman who knows nothing of the whole matter as that which one regards as visions, as hallucinations and other phenomena of the pathological soul life. Someone who knows something of that which modern borderline sciences, between physiology and psychology, bring forward can think very easily—and this is repeatedly argued—that the spiritual researcher educates himself artificially for something that a pathological soul attains if it has visions, hallucinations, delusions et cetera.

Now, just by the education of the soul that we can only touch today, this soul can make an exact distinction between visions and similar phenomena and the symbolic mental pictures which spiritual science calls the Imaginative world. The spiritual researcher learns to distinguish these two worlds. Since that which is generally necessary to be successful is that one is hostile to all delusions, hallucinations and the like. It belongs to this spiritual training to characterise them distinctly.

There we want to indicate an important difference. Visions, delusions et cetera have something in common: they overpower the soul; they have something that demands the strongest belief for itself. One knows from the everyday life that it is easier to persuade a person who has visions or delusions from any fact of the outer life than from his delusions. He possibly finds the most astute reasons for his illusions. He has an invincible belief in these soul experiences. However, the spiritual researcher has to become free from any belief toward the Imaginative world. Although he has brought up the pictures in his soul and must regard them as worthy, he has to regard them as nothing at all that can give him objective truth. It would be his biggest error if he regarded that which he has attained there as something that refers to an outer reality. He has to educate himself just by strong soul forces and willpower that the soul settles in a world of pictures at first, which do not express any objective reality.

What do they express? They are only the expression of the soul life. One gets to know nothing by this imagery at first but the own soul life. One must not try at all to regard them as something else than that it concerns an outflow of the own soul life. These are the essentials.

If one wants to compare an Imagination to a vision, a hallucination on the way to spiritual research, one has to say, a vision, a hallucination overpowers the human being, it requests an almost invincible belief in the objectivity of this vision; against it the spiritual researcher is aware of the fact that he himself creates the Imagination.

He has to pass this state. He has to get out a rich Imaginative world from his inside to attain the consciousness at the same time that it is only a mirror of his own soul. This consciousness has something rather uneasy, because the world in which one settles down is like a second world, a world full of beauty and greatness, a beatific world. However, persons who settle in such a world get easily angry if one wants that they doubt the objectivity of this world because one lives well in it. However, just one has to overcome this good life. What happens in this world, actually? If I should describe this, we can compare it to a phenomenon of the everyday life.

Imagine that you have all mental pictures at this moment again in your soul that you ever had if all that were now in your soul—you could not live with it at all. The soul wants oblivion. We can bring up the forgotten again in our memory. As well as now in the usual life these images submerge in oblivion, the spiritual researcher must be able by the training of his will to forget his whole Imaginative life, this new world in which he liked to stay. The spiritual researcher has to make this Imaginative world disappear more and more often in the depths of his sub-consciousness about which he knows nothing at first. Then he has to cause moments again, at which the soul is quite empty, thinks nothing, feels nothing, remembers nothing, worries about nothing, has no affects and so on. Then gradually the Imaginations that he has sent down to the unconscious emerge again. The pictures return but quite different. They appear in such a way that one knows that they are not fantasies but expressions of realities. Toward these emerging pictures one has the immediate consciousness that they express something real.

What has one really done, while one has carried out this process? One has strengthened the inside of the soul life so that this soul life has completely developed its formative capacity. What one has produced, one has sacrificed, detached from himself. One receives it again. As well as you put out your hand in the physical world to touch something and thereby get knowledge of that which you have touched, one puts out his soul forces, one sends them away, they combine with the spiritual world, and something returns from the spiritual world.

The objection was mentioned already repeatedly that one could also harbour illusions because one knows that sensitive persons can feel this or that, even if nothing at all is there. Thus, there are, for example, persons who feel the taste of a lemonade if they only remember it. This is right. However, a healthy soul can still distinguish an only imagined lemonade from a real one; you can have the taste, but you cannot quench your thirst with an imagined lemonade. There is such an objection also against the thought of Schopenhauer's philosophy that the world is only our mental picture or idea. However, the trivial objection is right, one can imagine a piece of steel that is 1,000 degrees hot which will not burn your hands. You are able to distinguish imagination, mental picture, and reality in life. You do not have any other proof in the sensory world. The same applies to the spiritual world. If you enter into the spiritual world, then that returns quite different which you have sent down in the area of oblivion and is now expression of those spiritual beings and facts, which are behind the physical sensory world. You obtain mental pictures that you have not given yourself. Since the mental pictures which you have given yourself were there only to practise.

Thus, you get truths from the spiritual world, after the soul has gone through an only imagined mindscape first—not to recognise anything but to develop the soul, so that it becomes strong to perceive what it can only perceive with other forces than those of the usual soul life. Thus, you achieve raised cognitive faculties; the soul life becomes more concentrated, compressed. Then you live, so to speak, only in a world of cognition. All mental pictures of the spiritual beings that you get this way are completely saturated with reality. They are much more active than the impressions of the outer sensory world and still do not claim to be believed just like that. We will recognise immediately, how it behaves.

However, I have to repeat something important before: if the pictures of this Imaginative world that you yourself have created first appear before you have sent this whole symbolic world down to oblivion, they are ambiguous, oracular, and someone is on bad way who believes these ambiguous things just like that who gets involved with them. Even if by all available means of the spiritual-scientific training such pictures are obtained at first, it is impossible to assign any logical value to them. Not before they return and show full clarity, they are expressions of the spiritual world.

People think very frequently that spiritual research is done so airily, and then many objections are raised. One says, for example, how hard has the outer science to work to obtain its results. There these spiritual researchers come and believe to know everything, while they simply submerge with their souls in the spiritual world.—First no true spiritual researcher will claim anything else than that which he has really investigated, and secondly one cannot observe the inner soul work as the work in the laboratories and on the observatories. It is much more intensive than the work performed there. The conscientious spiritual researcher will reply, this is rhetorical-ness; the spiritual-scientific knowledge is attained really not easier than things of the outer science, but laboriously and gradually.

Every person without damage can carry out what I have described within certain limits. Today there are already methods with which one comes slowly and gradually into the spiritual world, so that that which could work frightening with quick coming into the spiritual world does not occur, but that one can enter quiet and calm into the spiritual world. This way is harmless and more reliable than all other ways because consciousness does not decrease. We are not put to sleep, but our soul is always awake. We perform every step that we do with a much stronger consciousness than in the everyday life. If one speaks about dangers of this real spiritual research, one just does it because one knows nothing about the fact that one performs all steps much more consciously than in the everyday life.

It is different if the soul forces are not used to get knowledge but to something else. This may happen. We have seen that the path of knowledge of spiritual research is based on concentration of the soul forces. However, the same forces—unless they are used to get knowledge but if the will and the mood are called—lead to the counter-image of the Imaginative knowledge. This counter-image exists with the medium. There is, actually, no bigger difference between the spiritual-scientific recognising human being who enters with increased consciousness into the spiritual world and the medium.

With the medium, just those forces, which must be conscious with the spiritual researcher, are pushed into the will and mood. The consciousness decreases, and the result is a certain degree of unconsciousness, at least of daze. The person concerned will carry out things as a medium with decreased consciousness to witness the direct influence of the spiritual world. With it, I do not say that with the medium spiritual things cannot appear and can be investigated; I only mean such cases where any dizziness and any charlatanism is excluded.

There already forces become known that lead us into the nature of the soul as far as this soul has no body, for example, after death. However, one has to stress that the spiritual researcher completely has himself under control, while the medium becomes dependent from the surroundings, or more precisely, he/she can be made dependent. Even if now and again right results may arise which are not to be doubted, one has to say that appropriate investigations in this area are only possible if they are carried out with absolute control of all appropriate laws. Since there one gets into dangerous things which an outer science cannot approach and, therefore, stares at them in a dilettantish way. Mediumship is just the counter-image of Imaginative cognition. However, within certain limits it is possible to convince a person of something that one can inform difficultly. Important things can be already revealed there, and one has to acknowledge as something important if anybody ventures on this field. I refer someone who wants to inform himself in detail to the book The Mystery of Man by Ludwig Deinhard (1847-1917, engineer, theosophist) and to the writing The Cardinal Question of Humanity by Max Seiling (1852-1928).

Thus, we realise that the human being attains a more intensive, more active consciousness than in the usual life on the path of higher knowledge at first. However, we also realise that mediumship is the counter-image where the forces directly work into the human being, so that he/she speaks or writes with decreased consciousness after instructions of a spiritual world. Not by some definitions, but by the fact that one describes the things, as they are, as they are experienced, one receives a concept of truth and error concerning spiritual research.

We have now to advance farther than to Imaginative knowledge. One calls the next level Inspirative knowledge. It occurs if the human being has repeatedly sent his Imaginations into the depths of his soul and has already attained knowledge on this first way and thereby his spiritual forces have become stronger and stronger. Then a state occurs in which he perceives something shapeless that does no longer remind of something that one can perceive with the reason in the physical world. The Imaginative world resembles our own soul life, for example, if the mental pictures return which one has sent down, and appear in colours and in similar figures, as one sees them in the outer world. It is hard to distinguish illusion from reality.

However, the Inspirative world has nothing at all that could be a quality of the sensory world. Against it, something appears on this level that you can compare with that process if the human being listens to his own speech. You have this consciousness immediately. You have the consciousness in higher measure than before that you are present with everything, that you only recognise beings and facts of the spiritual world if you submerge in them and witness them, as well as you can only speak your own words, if you use the own organs. About this fact, you must not deceive yourself: you yourself let your consciousness penetrate in everything and its life appears in the other things and facts. Because this is in such a way, the preparation of a true spiritual science is the possibility to regard that which you yourself create in the soul as nothing but what arises from your own arbitrariness.

The human being knows if he speaks that he can form words that he can express himself after his passions, depending on what he likes or dislikes. However, he also knows that there is already in the usual life a possibility to put forward not only that which is pleasant but also to speak about that which is true. Here one has to start. This development of feeling of truth is the most essential for the Inspirative knowledge. You can attain something in this area only, if you eliminate your own opinion, your preferences, everything repeatedly that you would like that it takes place in a way. You can develop these sensations. They only lead to a truthful knowledge in this area. I would like to give an example immediately.

The question of immortality belongs to the most important ones. In which question could the human being be more interested? An old wisdom saying of occult science says, only that can gain real knowledge of immortality who has advanced so far that the idea to be mortal or immortal is indifferent to him. Before, the interest clouds the real knowledge. It is a difficult inner work to regulate your sensations this way.

With the Inspirative knowledge it concerns to get the soul into a certain mood, in particular towards that which it can endure or which it does not like to endure. The human being often imagines that he can endure the one as well as the other thing. There he has repeatedly to go through renewed soul inspections to develop such a mood of calmness gradually, which enables objective knowledge.

If the spiritual researcher has attained Imagination, then he gets a view of beings of the spiritual world that are on par with our soul. However, our soul is connected with a physical body here in the physical world. We have to ignore this if we want to recognise beings that do not have physical bodies. One can reach spiritual beings and facts already on the way of Imagination. On the way of Inspiration, everything must be attained that refers to beings that contribute to the phenomena of nature. Natural sciences if they are aware of their limits know principles and accept forces that work there. However, the spiritual knowledge recognises beings that control the elements as it were and cause the phenomena of nature behind all that which is active in nature. The real creative in the world that produces the outer material things is accessible only to the Inspirative knowledge to which the soul becoming stronger gets gradually because it completely lives in the beings.

Then the level of Intuition follows where the spiritual researcher witnesses the actions of the creative forces that form the basis of the material existence that are of spiritual kind, but can embody themselves in space and time, either in the big nature or as single restricted beings. Our souls are concerned with the usual knowledge only. The soul that is our spiritual goes from earth-life to earth-life. We live a life from birth or conception to death, and then we live between death and a new birth in the wholly spiritual-mental, then again a life between birth and death and so on. There we deal with the soul.

If you develop the Imaginative knowledge sufficiently if you allow yourself plenty of time, until you really have the ability to discriminate that which comes from your soul and which emerges from the subsoil, then you can distinguish that which belongs to this one life and that which comes over from former lives on earth. With advancing Imaginative knowledge, you get to an insight into former lives on earth. This is relatively easy to get. However, this knowledge restricts itself at the own soul which goes from one life to the next. It is much more difficult to know anything about the former lives of another person. Since if one faces anybody, one is concerned with a physical body in which he lives, and you can only recognise the soul in it with Intuition. Hence, you have to ascend to this highest level of knowledge if you want to behold into the repeated earth-lives of another person. This belongs to the most difficult that the seer can attain. The same fact may still arise from something else.

Instead of Imagination, you can take, indeed, another way of self-knowledge to the spiritual world in certain restricted way.

If the human being knows the principle of karma and

If he does not only know but if he experiences in himself that he caused that which happens to him by former earth-lives,

If this self-knowledge is connected with the karma idea and

If he practises repeatedly to reflect on his own strokes of fate and abilities,

Then he may get to a kind of Imagination, but to a subjective, personal one that does not lead to objective truth and cannot be applied to every human being.

However, this way leads us only to knowledge of us. We cut ourselves off in our own soul. We can advance maybe to a certain knowledge of former earth-lives, but much uncertainty remains. However, we can never get to the objective knowledge that refers to another human being.

If you want to have a real concept of the truths of the spiritual world, you have to distinguish reality and truth. You get to know a new world, but getting to know and judging is not the same, it is very different. You can experience many things in the spiritual world, you can be able to tell many things of it; the things that you tell can be real pictures, you may have beheld the picture properly—however, it has not to be true. As paradoxical as it sounds, I have to say that it is something extremely important that someone who wants to enter into this spiritual world brings the judgement from the usual world with him.

Somebody who has learnt to develop common sense in the usual world who does not deceive himself and is not deceived by anything in the usual world will bring common sense with him into the spiritual world and will judge the things that he beholds there correctly. Only by own judgement, reality becomes truth. You cannot develop judgement in the spiritual world; you have to bring it with you. One is allowed to say, someone who thinks logically in the usual world will also find the right and the true in the spiritual world. He who is a fool in the usual world and thinks illogically will think even more brainlessly and illogically if he applies his thinking to the things of the spiritual world. The most necessary if the human being wants to make a decision of truth or error in the spiritual world is the development of a healthy sense of truth and a healthy talent for observing in the physical world. You should not trust in someone who does not note with attention, with healthy talent for observation how the things proceed in the physical world and who proceeds inexactly in the physical world, if he tells anything of the spiritual world. Since the things of the spiritual world become true only if they touch our sense of truth.

A certain moral sense and spiritual condition is also necessary. Someone who enters into the spiritual world with a moral spiritual condition will come into relation with the healthy forces of the spiritual world and get to know its truths. However, someone who enters with immoral forces, in particular not with a meticulous sense of truth beholds everything distorted, caricatured in the spiritual world and, hence, tells it this way.

What I wanted to reach today is to cause a sensation of the truth ways into the spiritual world. Nevertheless, any investigation in the spiritual world is based on the development of certain forces slumbering in the soul, which are connected with the human ego that has sympathies and antipathies, and forces, which can darken the truth. In the outer life, life itself controls and corrects. If we think wrong, the outer reality corrects us. To the spiritual researcher the direction of truth is only given by the direction of the soul. Hence, first one has to develop that truth which is independent from this subjective ego. That means, the soul has to outgrow itself if it has to become a spiritual researcher.

Moreover, the results of spiritual research have to be informed. As well as not everybody in the laboratory or on the observatory can investigate what the outer science investigates, not everybody can attain all results of spiritual research, although in our present everybody can cover a way to a certain restricted aim. But that who does not want or is not able to cover it cannot argue that he has to leave to the spiritual researchers to know something about the spiritual world. There the prejudice can originate about which we still want to speak the day after tomorrow that the spiritual researcher is a particular animal that simply thereby turns out to be a more valuable human being because he can behold into the spiritual world. We shall realise that that does not raise the value of the human being that the value of the human being depends on something quite different. It would be very useful if just this truth would find wide distribution that one has not to consider someone who makes himself a bearer of spiritual-scientific knowledge as an authority or the like. Against it, the true spiritual researcher has the obligation to incorporate what he can investigate into the concepts and ideas of his time.

This is even a difficult task to find an expression of that which one beholds in the spiritual world, so that every unbiased human being can understand the results. Since you must not believe that the spiritual researcher has anything for his own certainty and soul strength from that which he beholds in the spiritual world. It becomes a property of the soul, a soul food first if he expresses the beheld facts in usual concepts and ideas and makes them comprehensible. The destiny of our soul depends only on these concepts and ideas, it depends that we have strength. If the spiritual researcher succeeds in grasping the beheld truths with the laws of common sense and logic, they have the same value for him as for the other human beings. As long as he can only behold into the spiritual world, he has nothing for his soul life. Not before he can tell the things in such a way that the fellow men understand them with their logic, only then he has something from it. Hence, the essential task of the incorporation of spiritual research in our civilisation is not the development of the spiritual researcher, but the possibility to hand over the spiritual-scientific results to the common sense and the civilisation of his time so that every unbiased human being can understand them.

One understands them in a particular way, which we want to bring to mind by a comparison. Let us assume that we have a picture before ourselves. We only look at it, just without understanding. However, we can open ourselves to it, and after some time, after we have become engrossed in the picture, we understand its contents. Of course, we do not need that we ourselves paint the picture. It would be also misplaced if anybody said, you have to look at the picture this or that way, and then I can prove to you that the picture expresses this or that. Someone who wants to make us understand the picture by proofs would drive us to desperation at best, but would not make us understand the picture. Understanding the picture depends on the fact that something originates from the picture and that it is independent from the painter's ability to paint it. That also applies similarly to that which the spiritual researcher investigates in the spiritual world, and to that which he brings forward in the form of ideas and concepts to his fellow men.

You find two books by me on the book table. In one book, How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, I have described the ways how one can develop the soul, so that it ascends into spiritual worlds. In the other book, Occult Science. An Outline, you find results of spiritual science in the first part. As well as I could, I have tried there to formulate the investigated matters in such a way that now every contemporary who looks at them unbiasedly and with common sense can understand them. We face two things in these books: once the path into the spiritual world and secondly, the portrayal of the attained results in form of concepts and ideas that every human being can understand.

I understand very well that people say, nobody can understand this, because it is speculative fiction.—That is possible with those people who do not exactly go into it. However, if anybody goes exactly into it, that can occur which really occurred to me. A very prudent and clever man said that one can understand that which one can read in my books very well, so well that somebody can get on it by mere logic.—Well, you cannot investigate the things with the usual logic, but if they have been investigated, they can be understood with the usual logic. However, that man continued: I can hardly imagine that these things have been taken from the spiritual world, because they make such a plausible impression to me that they can be reached in only logical way without insight into the spiritual world.—I said to him that I would consider that as an advantage of the book and that I would like to hear that my description was successful.

This leads us again to that which the painter must be able to do. The spiritual researcher has to recognise in the spiritual world; if he processes the recognised, and conceptualises it, then it faces us as the picture of the painter faces us. Then the moment comes when that who opens himself to these results of the spiritual world understands the thing immediately, without doing research in the spiritual world. One can probably distinguish whether one dedicates himself to a belief or to the cogency of that which one has put in words.

I shall characterise the paths of truth even more if we get around to considering the almost more important part, the origins of errors of spiritual research, the day after tomorrow. However, that which one has always to consider with spiritual research may be mentioned already today at the end of this talk.

I have said that if the spiritual researcher has finally got to the formulated truth of the supersensible worlds every unbiased human being can open himself to its cogency. Then, however, the sum of spiritual truths is food for the soul, and then we attain something without which our soul cannot live in the end. One can take the spiritual food away from the soul but not the hunger after spiritual food. Even if the human being lives from day to day absent-mindedly and wants to know nothing about the spiritual food, the hunger after it continues, although the human being is not clear in his mind of the reason—namely that he does not want to approach the spiritual world. If this hunger is not satisfied, it destroys the whole soul life; this appears in all possible pathological phenomena of our time.

We get to know by the outer science that we have certain substances in the body that are the same as outdoors in space. We feel by spiritual science that we rest on the whole world. We recognise that that which lives in our soul and is intimately associated with the vicissitudes of life, is one with the spiritual-mental of the whole world that extends in space and time. In our spiritual part, we recognise what is effective outdoors all over the world. Then we feel what such knowledge can give our souls as strength, certainty, and health.

We can summarise this into two remarks. Goethe wanted to show once that the eyes must be created for the light—a thought that also some philosophers pronounced—and that the soul must have something spiritual in itself. He wanted to show this with the nice dictum:

Unless the eye were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own force were in us,
How could delight us the divine?

However, Goethe also added that the human being was once a being without eyes and that the sun had to be there, so that the human being could have eyes that the light created the eyes. It is true that everything would be dark without eyes; the light must have been there to form the eyes. As well as the light forms the eyes, the spirit that penetrates the whole universe forms the human mind. We are allowed to say, you recognise the one-sidedness of a significant truth deeper just by such a thing. It is true that light and spirit must be present in us if we want to perceive light and spirit. It is true that the whole world must be filled with light if an organ of light should be created in a being by this light, and it is true that the whole world has to owe its origin to the spirit if in the human being the spirit should emerge.

However, it is also true if one adds another truth to this deep, but one-sided truth that arises from our consideration:

Unless the world does have the sun,
How could the beings get their eyes?
Unless existence were God's revelation,
How could suffuse us the divine?

Answer to Question

Question: Has one acquired anything of the fourth dimension and of higher ones spiritual-scientifically?

Rudolf Steiner: It is not easy to make you understand this. The human being takes the physical-sensory world as starting point, and there space has three dimensions. The mathematician forms, at least theoretically, mental pictures of the fourth dimension and of higher dimensions, extending the mental pictures of the three-dimensional space analytically with variables. Thereby one can speak of higher manifolds in the mathematical thinking. If anybody is familiar with these things, that means, who puts his heart into it and is familiar with mathematics at the same time, for that many things arise. I would like to point to the works of Oskar Simony (1852-1915, mathematician, physicist) in Vienna.

At first, it is only a mental picture. You get a view of it if you enter into the spiritual world. There the real necessity exists to familiarise yourself immediately with more than three dimensions. Since everything that is imagined pictorially—so still with the characteristic feature of three dimensions—is nothing but a reflection of your soul processes. In the higher worlds are quite different conditions of space and time, if one can even speak about conditions of space and time. Above all, those should take this into considerations who always argue that that which is claimed about the spiritual world is nothing but hallucinations. One does not consider that one works in the area of spiritual research with things that are quite different from hallucinations.

This question gives opportunity to complement what I have said in this talk, to point to the change that the things undergo concerning time and space if they get to the spiritual world. One cannot say everything in one talk, and today it has lasted already very long. If the pictures [of Imagination] return which one has sent as it were down to the underworld, that which returns makes sense generally only if one touches upon it as something multidimensional. This is a given then, as just the three-dimensions are a given in the sensory world. This is why one cannot apply the usual geometry to the things of the spiritual world.

For mathematicians I have to add that then the speculations of the fourth dimension start having real value. However, normally [the higher dimensions] are thought only as generalisation [of the three-dimensional space], not from reality to which these spaces do not completely correspond. One needs, actually, still better mathematics if one possibly wants to count in the things with which the spiritual researcher is concerned.

Nevertheless, I have to answer yes. Correlations to a supersensible world, also mathematical ideas of infinity become real, in particular things of the border area of mathematics. I once experienced, for example, a sudden insight into an exceptionally important quality of the astral space when I was occupied with modern geometry, as one called it at that time, and analytic mechanics many years ago.

The fact that with an infinite straight line the infinite distant point is identical on the left with that on the right that the straight line is a circle in reality and one returns to the starting point from the other side if one runs long enough—one can realise this, but [one should not draw] any conclusion from it. Conclusions lead to nothing in spiritual research. You have to open yourself to the things, this leads to the knowledge of the supersensible world. For generally the mathematical element should not be overestimated if it concerns the supersensible world. Mathematics is useful only formally; it cannot get to reality. However, mathematics can be understood with the forces within the soul, and it can be applied to any other human being. Mathematics has this in common with spiritual science.

Question: How do physical body, astral body, and ego coincide?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, these things become clear completely if one has done spiritual science for years. The things are not so simple, and what one simply states, sounds then, so to speak, like an oracle. The things of spiritual science cannot be taken as dogmas if one wants to understand them one day. I have described the sleep, for example, saying, physical body and etheric body are lying in the bed, and astral body and ego leave them.—How have we to imagine such a thing? At first, we have it to take as a picture. As a picture, it is right. If it may sometimes sound in such a way that a fact forms the basis of this picture, nevertheless, this is only quite one-sided. It is possible that one describes the matter exactly contrariwise, saying, in the wake state, the ego and the astral body are beyond the physical body in a way.

It is not only desirable indeed in every area of thinking and life but also necessary to get to know the sources of error beside those of truth. Since one can only shelter from all obstacles which oppose the quest for truth by the knowledge of the sources of error. However, the knowledge of the sources of error is particularly necessary in the area of spiritual research because there the error lies in wait for you everywhere, so to speak. However, it is disguised in most cases so that you can hardly recognise it. In many cases it is in such a way that one can get to truth only on the paths of spiritual research if you can really defeat the error like an adversary.

I have explained the day before yesterday that the human being has no other means on the path of spiritual research than the human soul that can mediate between the human knowledge and the supersensible worlds. The usual science produces its outer instruments with which it observes its experiments. The spiritual researcher has as an instrument only what he can make of his soul, while he gets out soul forces, which are not necessary for the usual physical life and cognition, but are cognitive forces slumbering there, and enters with these cognitive forces into the supersensible world.

I have also shown that the soul—if it applies the characterised means to itself—advances first to the so-called Imaginative knowledge and how already there an error lies in wait for you against which the spiritual researcher must fight, namely the error to consider this imagery as something objective that exists outside of you in the world.

I have already said that any self-education of the spiritual researcher must tend to a strong willpower so that the pictures emerging in the soul are considered as nothing but reflections of own soul experiences. I have also said that one has to erase this Imaginative world from the soul, has to descend to unfathomable depths, and that only thereby the soul becomes able to feel the supersensible facts and beings objectively.

As a counter-image of the Imaginative knowledge, I have put the mediumship. Of course, it is not possible to repeat everything that I have said the day before yesterday; I want only to remember that I have drawn your attention to some doubtful aspects of mediumship. If I do not mention them today, you must not conclude that these doubtful aspects were not enough taken into consideration. I have already said what mediumship consists of. While with the Imaginative knowledge the inner vitality of the soul is strengthened, the consciousness is more strengthened than, otherwise, in the usual life, the ego; the usual consciousness of the medium is diminished, so that with the medium the usual thinking and feeling stop and an unconscious state takes place. Because the consciousness is expelled from the medium as it were. The forces that exist except the consciousness in the human nature are brought into the universal world being, and this world being with its spiritual subsoil and processes works immediately into the medium. The medium can thereby reveal itself, but not as an individuality, the interplaying forces and processes of the world reveal themselves. The medium becomes the revelator of the spiritual work and actions of beings of the world. Thus, the Imaginative knowledge with the strengthening of consciousness confronts mediumship where the consciousness is extinguished more or less.

Let us go first into the sources of error of mediumship. Those people who like to get knowledge by the revelations of media reject as a rule that the medium takes up some spiritual-scientific teachings, concepts, or ideas in its consciousness. That is, such researchers who want to recognise objective truth by mediumship do not like that the medium has learnt ideas of the spiritual world. From their viewpoint, they are right because the knowledge of spiritual science uses the consciousness strongly, and pushes its way into the human consciousness. Then it is difficult to blank out this consciousness of the medium, to quieten these strong forces really. Then one can experience that the medium instead of making known that which is independent of its own individuality reveals that only which has worked before as spiritual science. The investigators of this field are very much anxious as a rule to keep their media away from the influence of spiritual research.

A strong imagination of the medium is also not appropriate because it can describe various things in the world. Since every strong imagination works substantially on the individuality and pushes its way through if the consciousness is diminished. Thus, one may say, any active and creative content of the consciousness disturbs the manifestations of the medium. Yes, everybody knows who has experience in that field that people with strong imagination are just bad media. If a personality has taken up, for example, that which you can read in my Occult Science about the evolution of the planetary system, and can induce her/him to make manifestations, you will find out that that which the medium has learnt this way is mixed in her/his manifestations, while one can get, otherwise, the strangest results which are grotesque now and again. If one gets over the grotesque expression, it appears just with media of certain kind how cosmic connections of the evolution can be expressed. It is necessary for that who wants to investigate with the help of a medium above all to appropriate a certain experience to distinguish the subjective, individual consciousness contents of the medium from that which the medium cannot know and still manifests itself by it. Hence, for more trivial investigations one has to consider those manifestations of media in particular with which one knows for sure that the medium makes known something that he/she could not at all make known with her/his full consciousness.

I bring in things only which are exactly verified which everybody knows who has experience in this field, as one knows any scientific facts. If one receives a communication from a medium, for example, in a language which the medium has not learnt, then one knows that here something speaks through the medium that cannot be associated with the individuality; one knows that the medium unveils objective world contents.

Thus, everywhere we recognise the source of error by the peculiarity of the medium that the practical person has to avoid in this field. In particular, one has to consider this source of error if one deals with the observation of somnambulistic persons who make known something of the spiritual world by those methods, those manifestations to which they are enabled. There one will always find that something subjective is largely mixed in the manifestation. Someone who has experience in this area knows that a medium that is for example a Protestant receives her/his manifestations quite different from a medium that is a Catholic. One can experience that a Catholic medium whose emotional life is penetrated with Catholic views beholds certain beings in the spiritual world that appear, however, in such a way, as the person concerned imagines it, for instance, as an angel. What can be the case with such a Catholic medium will not be the case with the Protestant one. Hence, it is again urgently necessary, beside the observation of that which makes known itself by the medium to envisage the individuality of the medium exactly. Here we get to an area that can light up the sources of error to a great extent.

That who is a sceptic in this area or regards the whole story as folly will say, there you have it, there that makes known itself by such a person what he/she thinks, what he/she has in his/her consciousness.—Indeed, if one looks above all at that in its totality what the media unveil, then one will almost never escape the errors unscathed. However, the objective beholder of these things considers the contents of the manifestations less and less but it comes more into consideration that even such things can be experienced with diminished consciousness. The experience is considered.

If one appropriates the practice to ignore the contents of the manifestation and observes which processes happen in the human soul as results of this coherence of the human nature with the universal forces, then you realise why it is possible that once the manifestation is coloured Catholic and the other time Protestant. Since the experience of spiritual forces and beings matters that dress only in the described way. The error originates if one considers the sheaths as the essentials. You find truth if you can ignore the disguise and look at the fact that generally such a process takes place—no matter if and how the experience is coloured by the individuality. Since the experience is not an angel or anything else, but these are spiritual forces which you can behold only with careful investigations, but whose existence the medium can prove and express.

One cannot say easily where in the described area error stops and truth begins because really the one changes into the other. One has to characterise the matter rather in such a way that one takes a way where one approaches truth more and more if one acquires the practice to exclude the sources of error, so that probably someone who looks for truth in this area conscientiously can be very misunderstood in our present where one does not like such matters. One believes that that which he wants to tell as experiences is anyhow contestable. However, the conscientious researchers in this area, actually, do not at all mean that; they only mean the description of something that has appeared, and if they are conscientious, they themselves indicate where the sources of error are. However, it is sufficient to be able to show a path to attain knowledge of a spiritual world that is threatened by error, indeed, with every step you do. However, you can thrust aside the error, the further you advance. Hence, it is not a matter of answering the question: what is truth what is error?—but the matter is that there is a way to overcome the error gradually and get to the area of truth, so that truth is as it were like something that you approach as a distant aim. These are the essentials in this field.

Then it depends with the progress on this way whether one gets more and more to such experiments—if we like to call it so—in which the individual of the consciousness is extinguished, and that that which still remains intervenes only in the objective world processes. Thus, it is a question of decreasing the consciousness in mediumship. The more one succeeds in diminishing this consciousness and making the medium only an instrument for supersensible world processes taking place without her/him, the more one attains truth in this area. Besides, I have to call attention to one thing: if you are concerned with such a somnambulistic person who gets either by her/his nature at certain times or by certain, often rather doubtful means to such a state, you get principles of the supersensible world in their manifestations. Principles of the world express themselves; this comes strongly to light in the manifestations of the person concerned. Should beings of the supersensible world reveal themselves this way, they must take possession of the medium first, and one must have the possibility to look through the medium at the real beings that makes known itself. A trained view of such things belongs to it, which you can only acquire on one side by practice, on the other side by insight into that which spiritual science can give generally.

The Imaginative knowledge is the complete counter-image of that which I have just described. Today I tried to point sketchily to that which spiritual science has to say about mediumship, while I do not consider this, otherwise, as my task. However, that which I represent here should come from the counter-image of mediumship, from that which the human soul can explore which has made itself a tool by developing forces that are slumbering in it to behold into the Imaginative world. I have already spoken the day before yesterday, to what extent this Imaginative world is radically different from the pathological, fantastic world of hallucinations, visions, and delusions and so on. Now you may ask, do any errors ambush the esoteric also in this area like adversaries? Are there also sources of error?—This is absolutely the case. You can already receive, even before you enter into the supersensible world, an idea to what extent errors may generally originate if the soul is left to its own resources, as I have described it the day before yesterday, and takes the way into the spiritual worlds.

We have all possible worldviews or viewpoints in the usual world. There one has materialism, positivism, individualism, spiritualism and so on. Try only once to listen objectively to another person who feels pressured into alleging all logical and other reasons for materialism or spiritualism and so on by his whole education, by his whole life. Then you will convince yourself that it is never quite entitled, actually, to feel as an opponent of materialism or spiritualism and so on. You will realise that for all these viewpoints numerous reasonable arguments can be brought forward. You may mostly completely agree—if you are unbiased—with a representative of the concerning viewpoint. Even if you do not stand at all on the materialist viewpoint, you may say if you listen to a reasonable materialist: yes, nevertheless, it is well founded what he brings forward for his viewpoint. The uncomfortable begins where people are committed to any viewpoint unilaterally and attack and reject another viewpoint to the point of intolerability sometimes. It would be very well conceivable that somebody says who has experiences in this area: yes, I can be a materialist rather well, where materialism is entitled, and a spiritualist where spiritualism is entitled and so on. This possibility absolutely exists.

I wanted to give a sample in two talks that I have held here in last winter about the subjects: How Does One Disprove Theosophy? and How Does One Justify Theosophy?—a sample of how one can bring forward something positive for contrary standpoints. Reasonable people have always pointed to the fact that—considered unilaterally—no point of view shows the truth really. People, who get a feeling of this fact, often say, truth is between the contrary points of view in the middle.—However, this statement seems to someone who goes deeper into this matter in such a way, as if anybody said, if I have two chairs, I sit down not on the one or the other, but between them.—Goethe who had good experiences in this area said rightly, truth is not between two contrary opinions but there is the task in between which should lead us only to the facts.—As a rule, truth is to be found neither in the one nor in the other one-sidedness. This already becomes obvious if we have not yet entered into the supersensible world. This fact could work quite stupefying on someone who takes the knowledge seriously to whom knowledge is really a matter of life. Since you can describe everything unilaterally from a viewpoint and bring good reasons forward, and one can prove the same thing with maybe equally good reasons from the other side. This can lead in many cases to a kind of doubt about truth. However, it will not lead that who is strong enough to a doubt about truth but to an investigation about how the human being gets generally to a viewpoint.

If anybody is not committed only to materialism, but has saved so much freedom for himself to refrain from his approach and to exert some self-knowledge, then he can ask himself, how has my present life proceeded, actually? How have my habitual ways of thinking developed, what has induced me, for example, to follow more the material coherences? Thus, a follower of materialism may ask. The follower of a more spiritual view can also do that. There you already find in the usual life that one creates a subjective viewpoint. Thereby one gets to know the logical value of a viewpoint that one knows how one has got it how a certain life direction has induced one to think just in such a way. Not because one looks for truth in the middle between the different viewpoints, but because one recognises how this viewpoint has originated and why one judges in such a way, one becomes fair towards the other, and one gets around to acknowledging the value of the other viewpoint. The different viewpoints compensate each other if the followers of these different viewpoints practise self-knowledge.

Imagine once that some people of contrary viewpoints meet like in a board and quarrel about their different viewpoints. Somebody who has taken part in such a thing knows that, besides, normally nothing results. If people rise after hours-long discussion, everybody is normally still convinced fanatically of his viewpoint as before. If the attempt were done that such a board were quiet one hour and everybody checked during one hour only how he has got to his viewpoint, and if they started talking only then again, they would not start quarrelling. This possibility is imaginable. Since one would find understanding for the other viewpoint by self-knowledge, by investigation of the way which one has done to get to his viewpoint. Already in the usual life, it is obvious that self-knowledge is the way to approach truth gradually, and that then the truth positions itself in the middle that one, however, must not put his opinion between the contrary viewpoints.

This self-knowledge must take place to a much greater extent with that who wants to avoid the sources of error in the supersensible area. Here I have to say that the spiritual researcher can approach truth only if he begins to practise self-knowledge in the area of the supersensible in the extreme. He has enough opportunity if he does not surrender to that which appears as pictures in his soul at first, but if he can say to himself, you yourself are the pictures in your soul; even if they are maybe wonderful—this is no supersensible world; you yourself are all that, projected onto space.

Thus, the first step on the way to spiritual research already gives him the possibility of self-knowledge. Because you become acquainted with yourself this way, you learn only to eliminate yourself from that which can be then considered as objective. There is in the field of spiritual research no other way to avoid errors than to get to the full self-knowledge first, so that you can remove that which you yourself are from that which is left over. Here the spiritual researcher can recognise by a particular step, which he has to do, that he has advanced enough in self-knowledge. If this were not the case, one should not at all venture into the supersensible area. Since it is nothing as difficult for the human being as self-knowledge, because all interests, all inclinations, all sympathies that you have for yourself put themselves in the way and deceive us as it were while they lead us to believe that they are something real, whereas they are only reflections of our being.

One calls the step by which the spiritual researcher can know that he has the necessary self-knowledge “encounter with the guardian of the threshold.” What is this so-called guardian of the threshold? You can get an image of him only gradually. We suppose once that at a certain age we intensely look back at our development, at our favourite opinions, at everything that we have learnt, how we have felt up to now concerning sensory and extrasensory. Even if these things are very difficult—it is important to know that you have to put just such questions to yourself and to consider them as meditations beside the other exercises. This evokes the forces slumbering in the soul of which you can say that you get away by them as it were from your own being that you face yourself.

Single symptoms show this clearly in the Imaginative world at first. If you do such exercises of self-knowledge, you feel a certain change in the soul that is rather awkward at first. It consists of the fact that you grow tired of your own being in many respects. Someone is not yet a right spiritual researcher who has not strongly felt this weariness of the own being. Since strictly speaking you are everything that you have formed up to now as opinions, feelings and sensations, you hardly are something else in your consciousness. That all has now become something external to you. You are estranged from yourself. What you once regarded as your peculiarity becomes anything external to you; you feel empty, as nothing compared to that which you really are and which does no longer appear to you as something valuable as it used to be.

These feelings can be experienced so subtly that your soul life does not at all experience any danger if in so careful way the path is searched to the spiritual world, as I have described it in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?.

With somebody who wants to reach higher levels of spiritual knowledge the described sensations must strongly appear so that his soul is transformed quite considerably and he feels as if he has everything that he had in himself now beside himself, and, hence, feels as if he faces an abyss. What he had up to now appears to him as something that he should no longer use. If you have intensely done such an experience, you feel another experience emerging in the Imaginative knowledge very soon that consists of the fact that you become acquainted with yourself in a new way. You get to know that which you have released as your own being as it were from yourself with all possible, mostly unpleasant qualities. Besides pictures of beings appear, and now they become critics of that which you really are. You see yourself surrounded by nothing but pictures of other beings that stalk you that judge everything that is good or bad in you.

Briefly, you feel your being as it were allocated to other beings. It is really something that is well met with the picture of Dionysus whose being is split and divided. Any training as it is described in How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? aims at the fact that you know how to behave in the right way at the moment when the just described occurs when, so to speak, not the own individuality perceives, but when the world perceives and judges you. However, for this moment you have to be trained first, so that you are not shocked. The fact that the human being does not behold and that he lives, actually, in a glass house and everywhere world forces and beings are there that see through him until his most secret depths would interfere in the usual life everywhere. One denotes the fact that he does not behold them that he is protected against them the encounter with the guardian of the threshold that leads into the supersensible world.

In detailed way, I tried to represent that in my mystery drama The Guardian of the Threshold where I tried to turn the truth described more theoretically into action. Now you get to know when you have experienced this encounter with the guardian of the threshold that everywhere not only the error of knowledge but also the real error lies in wait for you and that you have to take care of yourself everywhere and find the right possibility to look at the things as they are in truth.

Because self-knowledge is difficult, the risk of a substantial error arises that the spiritual researcher does not reach the point where he can place himself, so to speak, beside himself. However, you cannot say, here is truth, here is error, but only that you can wend your way to truth. The more you are able to consider yourself as an objective being, the more you approach truth. While the consciousness of a medium has to be diminished, it has to be strengthened with the spiritual researcher just in such a way that he is not mistaken about himself and about what he has in himself. While entering the spiritual world you have to target the fact as sharply as possible that you face your concentrated own self. Thus, you eliminate everything personal from the supersensible percipience.

Let us assume that a person wends his esoteric way honestly and conscientiously, he can maybe get to a certain point, then he loses his courage or desire, and he does not go further. Of course, you can suppress everything that you have experienced up to now. The spiritual researcher is not always a spiritual researcher but only at certain moments. If he were always in such a soul state, he would appear like a crazy person. That who has already transformed his soul to a certain degree and gives up the thing again can experience that he now mixes that which he has recognised up to now in the spiritual world chaotically with that which the sensory world gives him. The things intermingle, and then you are confused. The ears hear, but also something supersensible interferes, and you are confused. This can happen of course only, if you do not take the instructions into consideration which I have given in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. Wrong application of the methods may appear in any science. That, however, who has got to a certain end of this way will experience the following:

He not only surveys the qualities of his mind, his prejudices et cetera and does not involve them in his objective knowledge, but also never mixes pictures of that which the senses perceive which the physical reason invents in the objective knowledge. Since he will not be able to eliminate his personality. Now here we can get to a kind of definition of error in the supersensible world. This error consists of the fact that one has insufficiently cast off the own subjectivity, and, therefore, always the own individuality intermingles in the pictures of objective reality. It is quite natural on one side if one often says that everybody portrays that somewhat different which the seer perceives, and, hence, one can count on nothing at all. One can concede such a fact, but stressing this is trivial, it is just a self-evident fact. It is natural that the ideal of the spiritual researcher can hardly completely attained and that, hence, everywhere in that which the spiritual researcher describes a subjective, individual element intermingles. He, who can compare, however, will find that if one does not only look at the pictures, but at the experiences they are more or less similar.

Concerning the moral qualities that are necessary for the seer one has to emphasise that he must be conscientious that he must practise all those qualities that I have already mentioned the day before yesterday. It is correct that one can look into the spiritual world, indeed, only by the described processes that, however, the research results of the spiritual world are to be transferred to the concepts of the physical reason. You have to search them in the supersensible world; you can understand them with common sense. It is true that someone who can think well can also properly judge that which he experiences in the spiritual world. Someone who is a fool in the sensory world and cannot think logically describes everything that he beholds wrong and caricatured. That also applies to the moral qualities of the person concerned. Somebody who wants to get with immoral attitude to the spiritual world will just get in the spiritual world to the disturbing and hampering things and beings and he recognises them distorted and caricatured because of his immoral attitude. However, someone who enters with moral attitude finds the beings of the spiritual world that show the things in their right mutual arrangement and weightiness.

Thus, the determinative of truth or error in spiritual research is not anything that you acquire to yourself as a seer only, but something that you have already acquired before in intellectual and moral respects. In particular, moral things are strongly involved in how one interprets the supersensible phenomena. Someone who is prejudiced in a certain belief who has sympathies and prejudices for the fact that something certain should be true, brings this disposition, this prejudice into the supersensible world; he interprets the phenomena after it. Everything that he fathomed and announced of the spiritual world can be an error because it is coloured with his subjective belief.

Here is the area where I have to point—after we have discussed the sources of error of spiritual research—to the sources of error by the dissemination of spiritual science. In a way, the dissemination of spiritual research resembles the dissemination of any other research. As for example not everybody can be a chemist, but everybody can accept and figure that out what the chemists have investigated in the laboratories about the substances, everybody can judge, even if he is not a spiritual researcher, what the spiritual researcher announces, namely not only up to a certain degree but to its full extent. In this respect, the things are similar; in other regard, they are dissimilar. They are dissimilar because chemistry, mathematics, or any other science is something that one can face cool and objectively if researchers announce it, even if with true thirst for knowledge.

This is not the case with spiritual research. Spiritual research touches the most intimate of our hearts, the big questions of life. As the researcher carries his prejudices, his belief, his sympathies and antipathies into the spiritual world and thereby distorts the things and beholds wrong, the audience, the confessors—let me use the term—meet the spiritual researcher with certain beliefs, certain sympathies, or antipathies. Something develops that does not lead to an objective judgement, but that is associated with all possible things which take effect from human being to human being. As strongly as the soul longs for experiencing something about these things, as the human soul is careless now and again to apply the unbiased reason to judge what the spiritual researcher brings forward, although it could be judged completely. Then belief often replaces an unbiased judgement because one likes that which the one or the other says maybe only because he brings it forward emphatically or because one finds him pleasant. The belief replaces the objective, conscientious verification; one accepts the things trusting in authority. The worst is if authority mania interposes itself between the spiritual researcher and his audience. Therefore, as with all things about which we have heard today that the spiritual researcher should follow them he keeps guard as it were beside his own self. The confessor, who listens to the spiritual researcher, should pay attention to his common sense and repeatedly carry out a kind of self-inspection to realise how much belief, prejudice, and sympathy intermingles in the facts that he accepts with the messages of the spiritual researcher.

Since in double respect accepting at mere belief causes big damage is a source of error just with the dissemination of spiritual science. The one is that the confessor does not develop healthy judgement what is the most necessary. Because common sense can be practised best of all if the results of spiritual research are thought through; you deprive yourself of the best opportunity if you accept these results at mere belief. The second one is: because the things are important which the spiritual researcher has to say, he may exercise an incorrect influence over his supporters—if the listener does not constantly keep his common sense in readiness—because one believes him because one takes up that prejudiced what one should check, actually. Thereby the spiritual researcher tries—instead of exercising an entitled influence, while he is convincing and the listeners realise what he says—, to persuade while he overpowers their common sense. Even if this ideal condition cannot yet be reached today, one has to say that if truth should prevail the confessors should make it to the spiritual researcher as difficult as possible to spread his truths and should impose the highest requirements on him if he expresses his knowledge in concepts and ideas of common sense. Then one counteracts what, unfortunately, is a fact and a forever returning source of error with the dissemination of spiritual truths that charlatanism and all possible similar mingles so easily with spiritual research. Unless just common sense is applied permanently, one does no longer know where conscientious spiritual research and where charlatanism and humbug is, and everything is thrown together.

Two oppose soul directions will throw charlatanism and conscientious spiritual research together. One soul direction is that of those who are prejudiced in authority mania, who make themselves confessors of spiritual science light-heartedly because of their sympathies and prejudices. They mingle everything and often accept the one as well as the other. There is for this kind of people who are oriented in such a way no other remedy than that there are conscientious spiritual researchers who position themselves conscientiously on the ground of truth. Only experience can teach us whether this is the case. The different people who may hardly differentiate charlatanism and conscientiousness and jumble everything up are those who do not at all want to go into the matter who judge about the matter cursorily with some concepts they have knocked together, and who—because they often succeed in uncovering fraud—not only label everything with this name, but lump everything together. The direction of the religious confessors often regards the biggest charlatanism as irrefutable highest truth, the other kind of human beings, the biased ones, the non-experts, even regards conscientious spiritual research as charlatanism and error sometimes, and one cannot bear a grudge against them because they do not better understand what they say.

Thus, it will be necessary above all, so that truth and not error can prevail with the dissemination of spiritual research, that in particular with the confessors of spiritual research critical reason, critical judgement, and common sense and not belief in authority develop. This belief in authority will already wither away if a knowledge spreads among those who like and need spiritual research, a knowledge that is not common, unfortunately, among the confessors of spiritual science that a seer is no higher animal because he can behold in the supersensible world. He does not differ from other human beings, just as little as a chemist, a botanist, a machinist, or a tailor. The possession of spiritual knowledge does not really determine the value of the human being but only that he can investigate this area and bring the acquired knowledge to his fellow men. Only his common sense determines the value of the human being, his power of judgement and his moral qualities. Just spiritual research could prove that intellectual and moral qualities of the human being already determine his value, before he enters into the spiritual world, and that if he is inferior there the results of his research will be inferior. It is exceptionally necessary to realise this. Even more than the opponents of spiritual science, its supporters should take stock of themselves in this field.

Thus, I tried today to describe not only the possibilities of error finding spiritual truth, but also the possibility of error with the dissemination of spiritual truths. I tried to evoke a sensation that conscientious spiritual research acknowledges that its opponents can often argue this or that rightly and that conscientious spiritual research can and has to argue in the same way because it is just important in this area to face the error to recognise the truth. For the confessors of spiritual science has that who wants to be conscientious, as a rule, only one consolation: truth has a strong power, and, even if error slips in because of the belief in authority, by the self-correction of truth those are cured who were supporters of this or that for a while at mere belief in authority. In most cases, such a cure takes place because one has to pay the price as it were to have had such a blind belief in authority. Often it just happened that because one did not observe the details sharply, but took one's word for it that then with a radical case it appears how little conscientiously one has gone forward. If then pain and disappointment are the more significant, the cure is just successful.

For those, however, who throw together spiritual research and charlatanism benevolently or malevolently, for those the today's consideration may offer another consolation that people can have always if they generally face truth. The truths of spiritual research if they appear as new are much more exposed to those destinies to which, however, also the other truths are exposed which appear gradually in the evolution of humanity. How, for example, did one accept the Copernican worldview! How did one treat Galilei! How did the whole world defend itself when Francesco Redi spread the truth that earthworms do not originate from river mud and other lifeless matter, but that any life arises from a living zygote! How academic organisations rose when the truth was pronounced that iron stones can fall from the air onto earth—the meteorites! How did people defend themselves against an apparently so unimportant thing like the post stamp. At that time, an authoritative person said, if really the correspondences increased to such an extent, the post-office buildings would no longer be sufficient! - I could bring in numerous other examples that truth when it entered into the world was regarded as paradoxical and was rejected.

The sight of these destinies of truth can give us the consolation and the confidence towards all those who reject spiritual science and throw it together with charlatanism, the consolation which one just had compared with truth generally in all ages and which one can dress in the words of someone who was often mistaken who tried, however, to look for truth. I am allowed to summarise just both talks that dealt with the interrelation of truth and error in spiritual research with words of the vigorous truth seeker Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) who said in his writing The Fundamentals of Moral (1839):

“During all centuries the poor truth had to blush about the fact that she was paradoxical, and, nevertheless, it is not her guilt. She cannot accept the figure of the sitting enthroned general error. There she looks up sighing to her tutelary deity, the time, that shows victory and fame to her, but her wing beats are so big and slow that the individual dies away in the meantime.”

Answer-to-Questions

Question: Some persons get a peculiar feeling sometimes, mostly after long straining thinking, as if they stood beside themselves, with a dreadful emptiness around themselves, and then the body appears as something very strange. Then one must only force himself to feel again as a body, as with E.T.A. Hoffmann. What is to be done there?

Rudolf Steiner: Above all, one has to consider that everything that appears of this kind in the world has different degrees. What I have described in the talk today shows only a more significant degree of the phenomena that can appear in weaker degrees always in the human being. The way to get away from the instrument of the body is just the way of meditation and concentration. If the interrogator says “mostly after long straining thinking”—meditation and concentration is a quite intensive degree of concentrated thinking, feeling, maybe also of willing. Hence, such phenomena are definitely possible which take place in an extraordinary measure with meditation and concentration if the single members of the human nature are in a looser balance—with every human being they are, by the way, in another balance. This was described, for example, belletristically very appropriately. Somebody errs who supposes that with a belletristic portrayal of such things always only imagination forms the basis. The serious artist describes, even if he takes unusual matters as objects, from experience. This applies to E.T.A. Hoffmann (Ernst Theodor Amadeus H., 1776-1822, jurist, poet, and composer) to a great extent. Many people would experience this if they had always observed themselves, but the degree of attention does not always reach the events, and thereby such facts remain often unnoticed. Strictly speaking, spiritual research is not something special, but only an increase of that which also appears in the usual life everywhere and always.

Question: In which regard is the knowledge of higher worlds worthwhile—apart from curiosity—, because it is dependent on common sense?

Rudolf Steiner: For someone who does not long for the answer of the higher questions of existence, spiritual science will be superfluous. However, to someone who longs for the answer of such questions one has to say: as well as the body hungers for food, the soul hungers for the answer of the big questions of life. As I have already said in the talk, you can probably take truth away from the soul, but not the hunger for truth. Its effects will become more prominent that at first the soul experiences all possible states of disorder, even of desperation that a matter of knowledge changes into a question of health. Here I only point to the close coherence of nervousness and indifference to spiritual truths. They are just a necessity of human nature.

You can learn from this question again, what I have already often touched, that people do not listen exactly enough to these things which can be presented so difficultly. If one had listened to that precisely which I have said in the talk, such a question would not have been put. One would have also heard, for example, that the value of the human being depends on the soul condition, on moral and intellectual qualities, and not on the contents of the truths, because one has to find them only by supersensible research. One will find the intellectual in the higher knowledge if one is intellectually minded and the moral if one is morally minded that you have to bring, however, your intellectual and moral abilities with you into the supersensible world.

Question: It is a fact that one can give the functions of the soul another direction by mental work. Where are guarantees, however, of the absolute validity of the immutability of our soul?

Rudolf Steiner: I have said twice in the talks that one cannot say, here truth stops and here error begins—that there is, however, the possibility of entering the ways to truth. Of course, it would be best if one could write all truths on a small piece of paper; one could put it into the vest pocket and look at it if necessary. However, truth is not this way. You have gradually to work your way upward. Is the question generally entitled to demand guarantees that anything is objectively valid?

Question: Is intellectual soul and mind soul the same in theosophy?

Rudolf Steiner: No, but these are two sides of one and the same being, so that one soul member is called intellectual soul once if it turns outwardly and judges the things, and the other time the same being is called mind soul if it experiences its own inside.

Question: Is there any particular moral of the spiritual researcher?

Rudolf Steiner: No other than the generally human moral which can be refined, however, as I have described it in How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. However, as morality does not have double-entry accounting in other ways as well, I have to say that also the spiritual researcher is not allowed to have double-entry moral accounting. However, as I have said, he must practise certain moral qualities more intimately.

Question: Does spiritual science have the right to reveal holy laws?

Rudolf Steiner: These are just the laws of nature.

Dear attendees, first of all, before answering the discussion, some questions have been received, and I would like to answer these questions first. Some of these questions are also related to what was said during the discussion, and so I may summarize some of them in my concluding remarks, which will not take long.

First of all, there is the question: “Isn't it a big mistake for social democracy to deny the spiritual and the soul and to recognize only the body [and the corporeal]?”

Now, it is not so easy to deal with this comprehensive question in just a few words, for the simple reason that what is often described and represented in the vaunted scientific circles as spiritual and soul life is actually not something that is in the process of ascent for the discerning person, but something that is basically undergoing its last phase of development, its full descent. When speaking of the spiritual, one should not speak in general terms of the spiritual, but one should always be clear about the fact that the spiritual is undergoing descending developments, ascending developments. And those who today reject the current, conventional spiritual life, which I also characterized in the lecture, which is a result of the leading class in the last centuries, when this spiritual life, which has become great through the state and economic development, especially of the last centuries, particularly of the nineteenth century, is rejected, then one can understand that this must be rejected. The important thing is to find a real spiritual life, a spiritual life that retains its own reality.

And then I must say that, above all, it is necessary today that the one thing I dared to say in my lecture be fulfilled: that people really learn from events. And then I must say; above all, it is necessary today that the one thing I dared to say in my lecture be fulfilled; that people really learn from events. You see, with reference to some of the things that the various speakers have said, I would like to say the following: One gentleman spoke very beautifully about an eternal word, which he described as a Christian word, and which of course could not be more beautiful in its meaning: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Yes, but esteemed attendees, is it really about simply pronouncing such a word today? (“Very true!”) Is it not also a truth that this word, if we want to acknowledge it as a Christ-word, has been spoken by those who thought they were called for almost 2000 years, and yet we have come into today's circumstances? Do these circumstances prove that the power has been found to really bring this word to life in people? I would like to ask you whether it should not depend on something other than just living in the emphasis of a word, in the hearing of such a word in sermons and the like?

You see, I have often tried to make myself understood in discussions and meetings by pointing out the worthlessness of merely emphasizing a word in the abstract, saying, for example, “Let us suppose there is a stove is here; it is its duty as a stove to warm the room, and I say to it, speaking as the sentence dealing with neighborly love was spoken: Dear stove, it is your real duty as a stove to warm the room! I speak to it warmly, I might say with the most heartfelt tone of preaching – it will never warm the room unless you put wood in it! (Laughter.) But when I heat it up, the room gets warm even if I don't talk to it, but just put wood in it; the room will then get warm. (Lively applause.) I don't want to say anything against the truth of such a word; but the point is to actually put such a word into practice in life, to make it known.

That is precisely the peculiar thing, my dear audience, that within the much-praised civilization, people have found each other who have spoken of love for one's neighbor, of love for God, of brotherhood – spoken, now, from the age of so-called humanity. They spoke very cleverly, very reasonably, often in rooms with mirrored windows, in heated rooms; but the heating was coal-fired, and as inquiries have shown, particularly in the rise of the social movement of recent times, children aged nine to eleven, twelve, thirteen worked in the mining of these coals! Coal that had been mined in mines where naked men stood among half-naked women, where there was truly no reason not to notice even the sense of shame, let alone to stop to consider any other Christian ideas. You really have to bear in mind that it is not just a matter of blurting out such a word. Due to the correctness and importance of the emotional content, one will naturally always make an impression with it. But the point is to find, in a particular age, those things that are as practical as the wood that I have to put in the stove so that it can warm the room, and that may, under certain circumstances, spare us from repeatedly saying the words, “Lord, Lord”! Incidentally, this is also a Christian saying: “You shall not say, ‘Lord, Lord,’ for that end; but to do the will of God, who has sent us heavenward.” You should not always say, “Lord, Lord,” but try somehow to absorb into your mind, into your whole being, what is the inner essence of Christianity.

One has very peculiar experiences in this. I don't think there is anyone in this hall who can surpass me in representing what the true inner essence of Christianity is. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, I have also had my experiences with it. I once gave a lecture on the nature of Christianity, and there were two clergymen present, both Catholic. Since I always speak from the heart, the gentlemen had no real objection to what I said. They approached me after the lecture, and it was even the case that they had to say: There is not much to object to; but – they said – the big difference is this: We, we talk so that all people can understand; you only talk to a few educated people. – So I said to the man who objected to me: Yes, you see, pastor, I will ask you something else: I believe that you believe you speak to all people; every person ultimately imagines that, otherwise he would probably be able to stop talking; but one can also gain experience in this area. It does not matter that you or I imagine that we speak to all people, but we let the experiences speak for themselves, we let the facts speak. And I ask you: Do the facts speak in such a way that they prove you right? Do all people still go to church with you? Yes, you see, you won't be able to tell me that you speak for everyone! And, you see, I speak to those who stay away. - That was when I spoke truly about Christ and Christianity.

Dear attendees, it is not a matter of us repeatedly and repeatedly warming up the old in the field of Christianity, but rather that we can actually hear the signs of the times. And we know that time marches on, and it is not possible to just keep repeating the same thing over and over again; otherwise you end up - I recently heard a Christian speaker in Bern who said something extraordinarily effective; he spoke very humanely; he spoke about the divinity of Christ. But after the words that had earned him the loud applause, I couldn't help thinking: 45 years ago, I read exactly the same words – they had been taken verbatim, in fact – in a Christian Catholic report that the pastor, who is a university professor, I believe, proclaimed to his audience in Bern! I just said to myself: How is it possible not to learn anything from contemporary history in the 45 years since I read those words as a child? And today we have the clearly written, blood-written words of the world war! And people believe that you can only repeat the same thing over and over again!

So, dear attendees, it is better to accept being less understood at first and to present what can serve the new era than to have to repeat the old over and over again. The question must be raised for all those who say: Keep your old religiosity, keep the old belief in God and the like. For all of them, it must be said: Well, you have had almost 2000 years of time after all, and have spent 2000 years trying to achieve something. How much have you actually achieved by opposing that which wants to serve the times? Remember that you would have had enough time! You have been given 2,000 years; now it is necessary that you recognize that something new must break through to mankind, which has been tried and tested and is suffering.

This must be said by someone who stands entirely on the point of view that he alone may cherish the hope, because he stands on the ground of true social thinking, that a new spiritual life will be established through this, a spiritual life that will truly bring people together again with a spiritually alive, not dead, to which the old traditions and the like have already become.

Of course, one can reproach socialism if one wants, for having so far taken little account of intellectual life. But let us wait and see. The intellectual life that can be heard today even from our universities cannot find any particular favor with those people who want something human: the intellectual life that will again give people - all people - the awareness that their [physical] human being is connected with inner necessity to the human being's soul and spirit. Let us wait and see whether it is not precisely the socialist-minded people who will be the next to turn to the actual spiritual life and no longer oppose it without understanding! And if one raises the question: One cannot say that one finds particular favor in today's bourgeois circles when one tries to bring them this school of thought - well, dear attendees, it is extremely difficult to talk about this question, for the reason that it seems necessary to the factually thinking person, and above all to me, to know: Whoever does it, it is essential that the right thing can be done! And when asked how some of the things that could develop out of this world war could be averted, I had to tell some people: It is not at all important to me to think that I am smarter than other people; rather, it is important to me to provide a stimulus for reality!

Do you, dear attendees, notice how what I have said differs from what many others say? People come and want to have programs. They have all kinds of desires, beautiful goals for the future, and the like, and they see these expressed in this or that word. Programs are as cheap as blackberries these days! Societies are founded, programs are written, and so on and so forth. But that is not the point. The important thing is to grasp reality.

I am convinced that if we can say: we must organize ourselves in a healthy social organism – and I see something healthy in the threefold social organism – then people will find what is good for them. I would even say that if they can only find the form, the structure of the social organism in which people can appropriately realize what must come for humanity. That is what I must always say to people. Perhaps no stone of what I have to say today will remain standing; that does not matter; what matters is that if things are approached in the way I mean, then something quite different may come of it, but is a matter of the suggestion to seriously do something in the realm of reality, something that has been thought out of the threefold social organism, out of life experience, not out of some dull theory or out of some selfish prejudice. That is what is important.

That is why my program is the one that calls on people, above all, to have the opportunity to realize this in a certain sense. What I have just expressed differs significantly from the usual programs. And that is why I believe that time will take its course, of course. And basically, what is being said so often today is not so very new. One of those who have inspired the most, Karl Marx, the socialist confessor, spoke the following words in the first half of the nineteenth century, when he was still young: Should all enlightenment and persuasion rebound off the stubbornness of the propertied class, then it is the most sacred duty of the proletariat, the fighters for the highest goods of humanity, to storm the bulwark of capitalism, justified before the court – [gap in the transcript]. So, you see, that is how people spoke in the first half of the 19th century. Marx appealed to the most influential circles for understanding and enlightenment for the propertied classes!

It cannot be said, dear attendees, that much of this has been fulfilled so far. But that is not the issue now. Rather, the issue is that at least the most necessary things must be done for the future. And so I think it is necessary, above all, to spread enlightenment to the widest circles; for it is out of enlightenment, out of social understanding, that something will come about that can never come about through force, whether it comes from above or from below. Through force, you can destroy a lot; but through that which can be brought into the world in a fruitful way, you can build. Therefore, I see something successful only if, within the proletariat in the broadest sense, efforts are made so that the individual, as far as possible, increasingly strives for social understanding. And then he can want to penetrate to the highest philosophical problems of life, strive to climb as many rungs of social conduct as possible: he will then be able to work fruitfully. First and foremost, we must imbue ourselves with social understanding! For it is the lack of social understanding that has brought about the present terrible situation. Therefore, I expect the proletariat, in particular, not to commit the mistake of lack of understanding, not to want to avoid enlightenment in social matters! Even if this or that particular measure should still be necessary, the best and most effective way forward is to continue along the path of enlightenment.

And in answer to the question, “Is it really so easy to put the threefold social order into practice when the hand is offered to do so?” the following should be said:

Dear attendees, I certainly said: You can start at any point – but I don't know what it means to “offer a hand”. Who should offer a hand? I think it is more important that, above all, minds are offered; the mind of each individual. And it is reckoned that now more and more people will be found who will thoroughly immerse themselves in all the consequences, in that which can improve the social structure of the social organism.

Then here is the remark: “The capitalist soul has no feeling for the proletarian soul,” an experience that, well, one can already have plenty of in the present day. Now, various necessary points have been raised today. Above all, because the time is already too far advanced, it is not possible to go into each one individually, and so I would just like to make a few comments on some of the points of view that have been put forward. Above all, it has been said that what I have said contradicts the Social Democratic program.

Ladies and gentlemen, whether or not such contradictions exist is not for me to decide, I believe, on the basis of what I have to say today; that will be decided only by the future.

Thus, I have touched on some of the points that seemed particularly important to me from this discussion.

However, it was also said that “we still lack intelligent people”. I think about the relationship between intelligence and true progress today in the following way. Allow me this historical comparison: Christianity, which has indeed had a great and significant influence on the development of humanity in the form in which it emerged almost 2,000 years ago, spread from Asia through the highly developed Greek world and the highly educated Roman world. There was the peak of intelligence, but it did not take root there! It took root among the people who came down from the north as a result of the mass migration, who were regarded by the Romans as barbarians and by the Greeks as unintelligent people. They had the fresh intelligence; they had the new, then young intelligence. The others had the old, faded, fruitless intelligence.

This is what we recognize again today as the basis of the main movement of contemporary history: we are living, so to speak, in a new mass migration. Those people who are considered intelligent today sometimes say something highly unintelligent. They talk about something that is not at all capable of moving the times forward. We are living in a mass migration of peoples, which is not moving horizontally, but from bottom to top - even if the expressions are meant symbolically, they can still be used for it. It is precisely those people who, with fresh intelligence, emerge from the circles from which the previous civilized outlook has arisen, that they break into. And even if it still has to be said many times today: In these souls there is an underlying understanding of what the future must bring. I believe in this fresh intelligence because it is healthy, not decadent. It is not in a downward spiral like the intelligence of the circles that often lead today.

I see a mass migration in the modern proletarian movement, a mass migration that is only moving in the opposite direction. And it will bring something into the world that will carry humanity upwards again for a long time.

This is what allows one to look into the future, what provides some clues. Even if today there is still inadequacy and unhealthiness everywhere, even in the most hopeful movements, we need not be pessimistic. Rather, it is something that makes one believe that, after all, on the part of those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from those who can feel what the old culture has done, that something will finally be brought from And you may have gathered from my remarks that I have no intention of further dividing people into estates or classes. In older times, a distinction was made between the teaching estate, the nourishing estate, and the military estate. That is not the issue. Precisely that which is separated from the human being in the institutions that we have, I would say, in the threefold social organism: Man is that which unites all three. And he will have his representation in a democratic state, or even stand in it, and he will have to stand in economic life and in spiritual life, and thus stand in the whole threefold social organism – standing out of this threefold nature. Man is that which unites the three separate areas. That is what I meant when I said: to make the human being free. And he will become free when we no longer swear by the abstract unified state.

Interjection: Yes, but there must be laws and courts for all three areas, for example?

Rudolf Steiner: Of course, dear attendees, it must be, but the point is that if anything is to live properly in all three areas, it must be generated in one area. Just as the human head is a part of the whole organism and also needs air, it cannot breathe the air itself; the lungs must breathe the air. And the air is then conveyed to the whole organism.

(Regarding the question of milk for the whole family): The whole family needs milk; but it is not necessary that, if the whole is a unit, that is, that everyone gives milk, but rather the whole family will be properly provided with milk if the three members function properly. What matters is that, if all three areas are to be properly lived in, then the law is created in this one area and is fairly administered. What matters is that the right judgment is to be made. What matters is that economic life is structured in the right way, that legal life and spiritual life are also structured in the right way, in the way I have said.

It is precisely this that consistent, penetrating thinking, in harmony with nature, should finally take hold among people; only then will we be in a position to change anything.

Our old habits of thinking have basically brought us into today's situation. These old habits of thinking have basically brought about what we today perceive as pressure and oppression. What we need is to replace these habits of thinking, to replace the old thoughts with new ones! And I believe, ladies and gentlemen, that people will be found, even if today many are still quite hostile, as we have seen; they will recognize this threefold social organism as practical. And the great lesson will have to be learned from the misery of recent years, that those who thought they were practical were in fact the most impractical of all – that from a completely different direction, practice, true life practice, will have to come. And so I am pleased that I have been able to speak to you, to speak to younger people who have their hearts in the right place. It is something very gratifying when a person not only has a faith but also a certain strength in his heart. For it is from these strengths that unspent intelligence will be able to arise.

I would like to call out to everyone who thinks like many of you: Very well, even if some things may remain incomprehensible to some today – if your hearts are in the right place, the time will most certainly come when you will be able to understand what still had to remain somewhat incomprehensible to you today!

Dear attendees, I will soon be entering my sixth decade, have grown old in the meantime and have seen the social movement come of age for the most part. I know how much still needs to be overcome. But that is also why I have the opportunity to rejoice in what is happening today, especially among young people. And if young people hold fast to what can be expressed in words as “having one's heart in the right place,” then the time will come that must come, because otherwise all of humanity will end up in a terrible situation!

Let us believe in this time; because we must believe in it, because we cannot do otherwise if we really want to live properly, my dear attendees.

And today we can have a certain hope that things will come to pass that have not yet come to pass, simply because so much disaster has been wrought in recent years. Humanity must, if only as atonement, want this, must want to do something to ensure that things that could not be realized before are gradually resolved in a possible way. That is what I wanted to say in conclusion.